I performed the rape scene. I was tired, I said. I needed more cocaine. It was not good for me, she said. Separate the Jewboy’s legs. And she would descend, like a warm blanket of flesh, to enfold my body. Only later would there be much pain and the terrible smells. I recall her schoolgirl giggling at my antics to get free. There! You are not tired at all, she said.
Sekhet comes with a knife in her hand for she is the Eye of Ra and her task is to destroy mankind. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away my little girl. I lost something in that shtetl. I am still not sure what it was. Bedauernswerte arme Teufel, diese Jude. Ich fing an zu frösteln. Meine Selbstkontrolle liess nach. Ich brachte Kokain. Ich kämpfe unter uberhaupt keiner Fahne! Ich stehe für mich allein ein. I had a similar experience in Prague. Who wants such charity? Höher und höher stieg ich uber der Schlucht, bis ich ganz Kiew unter mirsehen könnte, dahinter den Dnjepr, der sich der Steppe entgegenwand und auf seinem Weg zum Ocean den Saporoschijischen Fällen entgegenströmte. Ich könnte Wälder, Dörfer und Berge sehen. Und als ich wieder nach unten sank, sah ich Esmé, rot und weiss, die mich … I flew, Esmé. Above the Babi Gorge. I loved you. You were my daughter, my friend, my wife. You were my childhood and my hope.
I performed the rape scene. He showed me how to make her scream so that on film it would look as if she were beside herself with passion, whereupon I was subjected to the same infamies while a second reel was shot. They were things a man should never suffer. He made me both a Jew and a woman. Whenever I could I reminded myself, through all the torment and the abuse, that I was neither. I was a true Cossack, a Lord of the Earth. I was Kiev. I was the sound of cavalry through the Podol. I was power, I had ultimate control over my own destiny. I was a scientist, an engineer. I could control the world and I could set the world free! I am a Jew, I said. Yes, I am Jewboy scum, but though my lips sounded the word my heart said ‘Cossack’, my soul said ‘Engineer’.
There was humour in those places, even between tormented and tormentor. We all shared amusement at our antics to stay alive. We connived at those appalling experiments in human cruelty not because we were any of us evil but because it was the only diversion available to us. To relieve our fear we told one another jokes about our own imminent deaths and dismemberment. We participated in horror for its own sake. But I do not believe many of us were to blame. Our needs had not been for death, but for hope and for life. We nave power to men who had unequivocally promised us those things. If we wondered at their promises we did not challenge them with any great passion or suspicion. We had offered up in trust to them everything we valued, everything that was good. They were not simply collecting second-hand clothes. They wanted everything we possessed so that they could prove it was worthless. They were so greedy, those few. Yet great empires do not grow through greed, I said. They grow through need, gradually and through historical necessity. Those who would forge an empire in a few years are always thwarted. They always die, dishonoured by their own nations. Great empires do not flourish on war but on industry, trade and curiosity. Enlightenment follows such empires. Whatever inequalities they exploit, eventually they develop the idea of equality, of institutional democracy. Captain Quelch was that kind of old-fashioned imperialist. We met again on the Isle of Man, in 1940. He had suffered a great deal and had changed his name. His first words to me were ‘Hello, old man. How’s your sex-life?’ He had roared and embraced me, his face glowing with pleasure. I thought Seryozha was there, too, but sometimes I get the camps mixed up.
My main complaint against the Jews was their vulgarity. Ironically this loud, garish, uncontrollable, expansive race when brought to heel, and those wild, restless brains restrained, becomes even more overheated. In the frustration of their restrictions they become completely mad. This explains the outpourings of Marx and Freud, for instance. If left alone, I told Hitler, they merely quarrel amongst themselves and offer no threat to anyone. To me isolation seemed the best strategy. Hitler called me a Jew-lover. I thought he was joking. Two days afterwards I was discreetly arrested. Goering himself admitted it was a mistake. Later my engineering expertise, my natural wits and a certain amount of good fortune, earned me my freedom. We did not all die in those camps!
I have known passion and joy, the love of men and women. I have known success and I have seen a good deal of the world. I have known them all again, since 1926. So was my choice not the best possible choice? I am alive, nicht wahr?
My master said the English called her a pervert, did I know the word? I did. Was a pervert, she asked, worse than a Jew? No, Master, I said, a Jew is worse than a pervert. Was a Jew worse than a nigger? Yes, Master, a Jew is worse than a nigger. This was one of our jokes. And what are you, she said. I am worse than a Jew, I said. No matter, she played with my ears, I still love you. Then we would laugh together. Call me momma, al-Habashiya would say, reaching for one of her instruments, call me momma, dirty little Jewboy sweetheart. Momma! Momma! I was a Jew and Esmé was a whore. She still belongs to you, al-Habashiya was smiling. She is still yours. I hope so, I said. Oh, yes, she is still yours. Why, if you wanted to you could trade her with the Bedawi and become very rich. You could do it whenever you wished. Esmé smiled at her. We both smiled. We all smiled. She was my sister, my rose; but her innocence was gone. O, Esmé, how I wish you had not betrayed me. I did everything for you. I would have travelled wherever you desired. I would have made you my Queen. But perhaps you are no more to blame than I. We all have our moments of weakness. It did not change my love for you. I had no choice. I thought I would free us both. My Master says she must be worth, well, at least your drugs bill. You could sell her to me. I could pay your bill for you. Then we would be square on the matter. My Master’s beautiful lips are encouraging. Perhaps I could get to the police in Luxor? I do not care what happens to us so long as we get free of al-Habashiya. I do the best I can for us both. I agree to sell her to al-Habashiya. She now belongs to you, I say. I watch while she puts the sign of life on her inner thigh, branding the scarab on her. They all have it, if they are mine, she says.
I have discharged my debt. Now let me go to Cairo.
No, she says, we are going to Aswan. I have a large house and a beautiful garden. I am a respectable Egyptian dowager. Everyone knows me. If you are well-behaved, perhaps I will tell them you are my adopted son.
I am free of the debt. Let me go! Please, Master, let me go. But you are not yet out of debt, she says. You remain my property until you pay off your living expenses, your ongoing supplies of drugs, et cetera. I am, I think, generous in these matters of unpaid bills, at least while you remain in my charge.
I had not thought it possible for my despair to increase. We took the boat up to Aswan. Sir Ranalf was aboard but Quelch was no longer with us. Sir Ranalf was greatly irritated by this, doubtless missing civilised company since he and I were no longer allowed to communicate except when the camera was running. We spent the voyage, the three of us, in the viewing-room and watched while, over and over again, I performed the rape scene. The next night (here was just myself and al-Habashiya. At length I dared ask where Esmé was. Al-Habashiya was casual. She had been ‘sold on’, she said. She would doubtless fetch a handsome profit for someone in the Far East trade. Then my Master used me in my mouth while in black and white the rape scene flickered over us like the bleak lights of Hell.
I have never forgotten how cold and grey it was on the Isle of Man. I think there can be few camps as gloomy.
When I met Captain Quelch again he was a frail man, bent by scoliosis, but he retained his sense of humour. It was Quelch who told me of his younger brother’s fate and mentioned that he was sure he had seen Esmé on one of his runs along the coast near Shanghai. He was interned because he had been captured aboard a Japanese destroyer. There had scarcely been, he told me, any point in getting on the wrong side of them. ‘What the Japs do to the Chinks is no concern of mine. I don’t think the chaps in Whitehall believe I’m a traitor. Yes, I saw that little girl of yours—I would swear it was h
er, though the hair was a bit brighter and the make-up a bit thicker, and I think she recognised me. Anyway, it was in a bar in Macao, just before Pearl Harbor. Esmé wasn’t her name. She had some sort of nickname, I think. Coasters often get called by a nickname. Everyone seems to prefer it.’
When I asked he told me a coaster was a girl who lived by her wits up and down the West China coast. She had not, he assured me, seemed to be doing that badly. ‘She was showing a few signs of wear and tear, you know.’ But I will never be sure it was Esmé. Which Esmé had he seen? It was pleasant to think, however, that no great harm was done.
The high walls of the house near Bi’r Tefawi, some miles from Aswan, were heavily but discreetly guarded. The gardens were beautiful, watered by a special system all the way from the oasis and shaded just enough so that the sun did not destroy them. As in most Arab gardens of this quality there were tiled fountains, though al-Habashiya had a preference, she said, for English flowers. There were poppies and roses, geraniums and hibiscus, most of them maintained by expensive fertilisers. The walls were white, trimmed in royal blue. Through the great part of the day I remained in the deepest chambers. Here I discovered I was not the only foreigner in al-Habashiya’s collection. They were all, however, male, female or neuter, completely addicted to morphine. I pitied them, knowing I could never succumb to a narcotic as they had. It is not in my metabolism. I must admit I found most of them despicable, even when I discovered how the younger ones had all been blinded or had been subjected to disgusting surgery. This increased my alarm and I determined to escape at my first opportunity, even though I was now beyond the edge of any kind of civilisation. Indeed, all my fellow-prisoners were quick to tell me how I was beyond any form of salvation. Most of the horizon seen from the roof of the house was Nubia.
My Master found it amusing, during those first days, to have me coupled with every other creature in his collection. It was, he said, the best way of getting to know people. Sir Ranalf sometimes came and went. I think he was organising the distribution of various commodities, including the films and still photographs. I prayed they would not use our footage with Mrs Cornelius. (I learned later that this had gone with Quelch who, typically, stole the only commercially worthless reels! Al-Habashiya asked me if I didn’t find it a capital joke and we laughed.)
My Master had a whim one day to play the gramophone again. He asked me if I were an aficionado of music. He adored Beethoven but he had particular fondness he said for the English moderns. Did I like Elgar? I had not heard of him. Now I am familiar with them all. I cannot bear them, perhaps because of the associations. Holst, Delius, Williams, Britten and the rest are all the same. Sentimental mystic bum-boys producing formless rubbish worse even than the French! Make no mistake, I give the same time to Ravel and Debussy. Tchaikovsky was the last great composer. All the rest is nonsense. I wish I could find a copy of Song of the Nile. I advertised for it in the Gazette but the only answers I had were from ‘fans’ full of nostalgia for a non-existent past.
One cold night I am taken to the large courtyard and the building called The Temple. It is decorated in some bastard, chiefly Ptolemaic, style and dedicated to the lioness and the crocodile, the female and male forms of Set. There is an altar shaped like a couch, covered in fabric whose dark designs seem to my untrained eye more alchemical than Egyptian (perhaps the vestments of some Masonic Lodge) and behind this a great, tall throne surmounted by the head of a serpent, which is another form of Set. Thick candles cast fitful light, their tallow impaled upon ornate iron sticks and the thick yellow wax dripping heavily, as if stalagmites form in a cave. Before the altar fumes a red-hot brazier in which is placed a single iron. Al-Habashiya enters and sits carefully down in the throne, arranging fastidious silks as always, but now upon my Master’s head is the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, the wig and false beard of the Pharaoh, and al-Habashiya’s beauty is extraordinarily enhanced, grown vastly alien like the strangest of Akhenaton’s breed, the flesh beneath the silks wrapped in white gauze through which the dark brown fat rolls and ripples as if composed of a thousand other bodies, all struggling to be free. I have been fasted and I am glad of it, for I want to vomit. My terror has come back at the moment I thought I had learned to exist beyond it, separate from it, obedient enough to keep the worst pain at bay. I had not expected the agony to increase.
When the iron was put to my shoulder, the mark of the scarab, it was of little consequence. I was already contemplating an even more terrifying future. Today you can hardly see it. People think it is a birthmark, a tattoo, a scar. I tell them it is something I got at sea.
‘From this time on,’ says the hermaphrodite, ‘you will address me as God. Do you understand me?’ Al-Habashiya uses the English word.
‘Yes, God,’ I reply. Acquiescence is the only defence against inevitable horror. I did not think it blasphemy. In those days I had a more secular bent. In the camps, too, one had to lose such refinements.
God says He is pleased with me. He says I am thoroughly submissive and obedient. It is, He says, the Jew’s natural state. Surely I now feel that certainty of truth, deep in my soul, that resonance telling me I am fulfilling my properly ordained rôle in life. Yes, God, I am dutiful. I am fulfilled. I do not know if this is true or not. Sekhet is called the Eye of Ra, the Destroyer of Men. A pitiless lioness, she has no mercy. Her cold claws reach into your breast and clutch your heart. She says she is Set. She manifests herself as Set and becomes a male crocodile. That night we explore new depths of fear and humiliation and the snapping fangs seemed to draw back in a great grin but the darkness, though it grows very strong, is now familiar to me. I am almost part of it. Two are injured, a girl and a boy. God explains that He is the only healer and today He chooses to let them die. They are left in the garden to die. They are there for days. The flies become a nuisance.
God takes me to the garden where, on green lawns, little daisies and wild flowers blossom, a summer meadow where the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites and the blind girls and boys play. ‘What kind of religion dismisses the natural world in all her beauty and variety to praise an invisible world which it claims to be better than this?’ God has developed a habit of discoursing on comparative religions and on occasion His tone becomes somewhat hectoring, defending the Moslem faith while ascribing to Himself a pagan divinity. ‘What could be better than the world I have created here?’ He adds. He is massive in green and blue silks, a monstrous scarlet turban. ‘What is more like paradise than a tranquil English country garden in the glory of summer? What better can one do for oneself than provide some little sanctuary like this. Lie back for a moment against those roses.’ And while my back grows bloody from the thorns He uses me casually amongst His flowers, crushing me down amongst the nasturtiums, lilies and sunflowers—red, blue and yellow—green and blazing orange in the poppies—while the tranquil water plays—while the eunuchs and hermaphrodites whisper like the last of the summer’s wheat and the blind boys and girls smile into a blank future. And yet because there is hope in all beauty I remember that perfume, I recall those crushed leaves with all the pleasure of childhood nostalgia, the broken stems and scattered petals spreading across the tiles like wedding confetti (and our audience the ululating guests) while the damp, red earth, the old, almost lifeless earth, sustained only by Man’s constant nurturing, that dank mould clings to our bodies and enters our mouths as it entered the mouths of thousands before us, and clings to our flesh as it clung to the flesh of the dead, so many dead. And my body is bent over shrubbery of subtle greens and pinks and dark yellows, of white flowers with little scatterings of brown-red and myriad shades and shapes of green against the blue of a cloudless African sky. And you would condemn me if now I understand no other reality? What else can I know? I am the property of a god in some forgotten corner of Paradise where only He determines what should be called pleasure and what should count as pain, on what deserves to exist and what should be wiped out. I tell Him I am in anguish. He tells me I am not. I have no
choice but to accept this and eventually grow as mad as God. I become a complement to God’s utterly lonely pursuits as bleakly He vanquishes boredom sometimes for hours, sometimes only for minutes when my pleasure or my pain is at its most intense. I can no longer distinguish these things, for my mind has left my body. I begin to suspect that God, too, feels little contact with His gigantic bulk and knows we are joined in a pact not to curb this condition but rather to maintain it. He hates His own flesh. This condition becomes our principal addiction, our mutual escape, and I begin to forget entirely the cause of my pain or my desire to escape. We grow together. My only reason for God’s permitting me to exist is that I am inventive in finding ways to relieve God’s ennui. There is a state of terror so absolute that it becomes an unconscious way of life. One exists in that state just as one might exist in a hostile geographical environment, on familiar terms with it, but never free of it. One performs the functions necessary to one’s survival but thought, as it is generally understood, disappears completely. One becomes a rapid instinctive reactor to familiar stimuli and, when unfamiliar, one adapts very quickly to learn what one must do to remain alive. I have known this high terror only a few times, in Russia, in America, in Egypt and in Germany. It would be obscene to pass moral judgement on anyone who was ever exposed to it. It amused God to explain how the subject (myself, for instance) was taught obedience by providing him or her with a series of narrowing choices. This, of course, was the scientific principle by which discipline and order in the camps was maintained. After my first arrest I witnessed it personally. God had one of the blind girls killed. He said it was a punishment and we must all watch her through the hours of her dying, but I think He was demonstrating something else, perhaps for me. I think I understood what I must do, but God would not tell me. This is another means by which you are controlled, He said. By uncertainty. From time to time, therefore, He changed the rules. We had to learn the new ones very quickly. I was terrified He would grow bored with me, as He had grown, He implied, with the blind girl. She was useless, He said. He asked me if I could guess why He felt secure enough to tell me these things, to discuss the nature of His power over me and the nature of my will to serve Him. It is because You are God, I said. But I was wrong. He slapped my face impatiently and grew angry because I could not weep. There are no tears left in you. You are drying up, little Jew-angel. We must make you more interesting. Under the surgery you will begin to guess why I feel so secure. I am so glad you are intelligent. Most of these creatures, they hardly understand a word I say. I might as well talk to myself. But then you are part of myself, aren’t you, sweet, filthy Jewshit? And I must whisper that I love Her, that I love my mother, my goddess, Sekhet, who yearns with such bitter longing for Her own death and the death of the world. Yet still I am not ready to serve Her in the next world, She says. I have yet to yearn for death as She yearns for it, to want it more than life. God promises me the time will inevitably come to me as it comes to all Her creatures. It had come to the blind girl, God said. She had wanted to die. At any rate, towards the end. As we laugh at this I realise my own time has become finite.
Jerusalem Commands Page 40
