Are you ready, says God, for your conscience to be weighed? I am not ready, I say. I still have no wish to die. God will be patient. But I will not become a Musselman. The thought of dying before my body dies is obscene. What is more, I have a secret which I doubt my fellow creatures possess—I have previous experience of miraculous salvation. I am not, as yet, completely bereft of hope. God understands this without being irritated. God will leave me with a little delicate thread of hope until it suits Him to take it away. It is part of His scientific method. It is the mark of our century that we have turned everything, including human anguish, into a science. We would joke sometimes about my impending death and what moment God would choose to blow away the last of my hope like a dandelion spore upon the breeze, delicately, perhaps without my even noticing.
God had me dress as a girl and attend Him when He received Sir Ranalf. The little man was breathless and made a weak joke concerning the heat. ‘I think the arrangements are in order at last. These people are quite impossible. He’s with me now. Shall I bring him in?’
You are very informal, Sir Ranalf, said God. Sir Ranalf became embarrassed. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. Those awful camels. I really never can get used to them.’ He had not looked at me at all, perhaps from nervousness but probably because he had not yet noticed my presence.
Have you met my wife? God asked. Sir Ranalf was nonplussed, peered, glanced away. ‘No, indeed, al-Habashiya, I had not. Congratulations, perhaps?’ He was told to kiss my hand.
God found this thoroughly amusing, especially since Sir Ranalf did not begin to recognise me. When God lost interest in the joke, He lost interest in me and I think forgot me. Sir Ranalf was allowed to bring in his visitor, a tall, heavily veiled Bedawi who spoke in gruff Arabic until al-Habashiya, using his high-pitched feminine voice, disclosed a preference for French. Perhaps she had hoped to shame the nomad, whose French was excellent, if a little old-fashioned. There were greetings offered and various goods mentioned, none of interest to me. I was inclined to doze whenever the opportunity was granted. At one point I thought I heard a Russian name, but the accompanying associations were too painful. I turned them away. Mercifully, God eventually leaned sideways so that my head was caught between the pillows and His flesh. After that I heard very little, for I was forbidden to move.
I think God became impatient with them both and dismissed them. He complained. He was monstrously annoyed. Towards evening, before the sun began to drop, He made us all assemble in the tiled courtyard around the fountain. He ordered us to form a mound, climbing one on top of another until we were all groaning with discomfort save for those at the bottom who were still. Laboriously, frequently falling backwards, wheezing and blowing, God began to ascend this hill of miscellaneous limbs, of writhing muscles and organs until He could squat on top, lift His skirts and shit. Time was an enemy I rejected. I do not know how much went by.
One day we returned to the garden. God told me to play with the blind children. He remarked how docile they were. They had all been fitted with artificial eyes of different colours, chiefly blue, which gave the rest of their faces a doll-like quality, especially when they were rouged and mascaraed. All of course had the scarab brand. When God told me to kill one of them, whichever I liked, the choice was mine, I said I had no weapon. He told me to use my hands or my teeth. Pick the smallest, He said, it should be easy. But I could not. And that was God’s signal. I had been tried in His eyes. He was about to whisk away the last of my hope. If you like, He said, I will let you pluck out your own eyes. It has been done before. Or would you rather die? I will give you a day or two to choose.
Blind, I knew I would never escape Him. I cursed myself for my weakness, for the cowardly failure of nerve which had brought about this final assault on my spirit.
I remember that I did not blame God for reducing me to this. I blamed Esmé. I had remained behind in an attempt to save her. She had not even thanked me. I blamed Mucker Hever and Samuel Goldfish, Malcolm Quelch, Wolf Seaman and Sir Ranalf Steeton. I blamed Mrs Cornelius. I blamed the blind boy for not resisting as I tried to squeeze his throat. I blamed myself for a soft-hearted fool. And still I knew I would not choose death.
I begged for paper and to my surprise was granted it, together with a fountain-pen and ink. I was beyond God’s mercy but I hoped to entertain Him, to defer His decision so that I could have a little longer with my sight. I prepared a kind of prospectus. I described my inventions, my experience, my skills. I sang my own praises a little, going hard against the grain, but I was desperate. I told Him I could fly. I could show him the plans of my Desert Liner. I quoted poetry in half-a-dozen languages. I described my experiences in Kiev, Petrograd, and Paris, my meetings with film stars in America. My life with the Ku Klux Klan I did not discuss, being uncertain what sort of interpretation God would put on this episode. I wrote out jokes and summarised articles I had read in magazines. I described my childhood, my youthful adventures, my future. That, I thought, would at least convince Him of my sensibilities and might even open a fresh avenue of pleasure for Him. At last God told me to give Him what I had written. God had me stand before Him in His Temple while He read every page, nodding, smacking His lips, murmuring interest, expressing surprise, approval, disbelief and one by one screwing the pages up and tossing them into a brazier. Whenever one missed the brazier He would tell me to pick it up and throw it on the fire before returning to my place. When He had finished He told me to kneel before Him while He masturbated Himself over my face. When He was satisfied He congratulated me on the novelty of my narrative. It had, indeed, given Him pleasure, though of course it was only possible to experience such pleasure once. He produced a long metal rod with an oddly shaped end and told me to take it to the brazier and push it into the hottest part. That is the instrument which will put out your eyes in the morning, He told me. If you wish to read or write until then, you may do so.
I had nothing but false hope now. I became obsessed with the small Book of the Dead Quelch had given me. I began desperately to learn all the words and responses needed to make a successful journey to the other world. God understood the nature of my torment as thoroughly as Paganini understood his violin. By convincing myself of this afterlife’s reality, I might find the courage to choose death. I could not sleep. My eyes, refusing to understand that these were their final functioning hours, began to blur and close. My last moments of sight would also be my last moments alone. Tomorrow I would join the others in the pit to be tended by the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites until I was healed or became incurably infected and my face rotted, covered in black flies like a calf’s head in a market. I had seen such creatures, still living, in God’s garden.
Behold me. I am come to you, void of wrong, without fraud, a harmless one; let me not be declared guilty; let not the issue be against me. I feed upon Righteousness and drink of an Uprightness of Heart. I have done that which man prescribeth and that which pleaseth the gods. I am one whose mouth is pure and whose hands are pure to whom there is said ‘Come in peace’ by those who look upon him. I am one who glorifieth the gods and who knoweth the things which concern them. I am come and am awaiting that inquisition made of Rightfulness, when the Balance be set upon its stand within the bower of amaranth. I have made myself pure. My front parts are washed, my back parts are pure and my organs steeped in the Tank of Righteousness. There is not a limb in me which is void of Righteousness. I execrate, I execrate. I do not eat it. That which I execrate is dirt. I eat it not, that I may appease my Genius. Let it not enter my stomach, let it not approach to my hands, let me not tread upon it with my sandals. Let me not drink lye, let me not advance blindly into the Netherworld …
The effect of this reading was to give me at least a dim understanding of what God had meant when He told me that one day I would long for death as helplessly as He Himself yearned for it. For I am the God of Death and I am not allowed to die. I knew without any doubt that His prediction would come true and that soon I would yearn for deat
h as once I had yearned for a bride. Was this Egypt’s whole secret? Was she still a nation for whom the pleasures of life were merely a prefiguring of the pleasures of death? By making death preferable to life, Islam allows every barbarism to flourish. What is this but a deep perversion of the old Egyptian creed?
The book could not distract me. I began to pray for the very death I would tomorrow refuse and was babbling some foolish smattering of Old Slavonic to myself when my door was opened. ‘I have several hours, yet,’ I pleaded. ‘It is not morning.’ There was no light behind the figure. He was illuminated entirely by my reading-lamp which cast a warm orange glow over his white linen thob, his cream and white silk zebun and his rich blue wool aba. In such princely nomad finery I guessed him to be God’s executioner. I prayed for him to be only an hallucination conjured by my terror.
Then he had pushed back his headcloth to peer hard into my eyes and grin with delight at my astonishment.
‘Kolya? ‘ (Perhaps this was a finer form of madness than I had understood possible?)
He knelt. He took me in his arms. For a moment an expression almost of compassion crossed his face. Then he frowned. ‘Ugh! You stink like a Prussian whore. Get to your feet, Dimka my love. We have to try to reach Libya before the British arrive.’
I asked him where God was. Where were the guards? I began to feel this to be another of God’s games. Doubtless He now owned Kolya, too.
But Kolya did not understand my first question. ‘The creature’s guards were bribed. They were growing nervous at their master’s excesses. God? What do you mean? Did you have a vision, Dimka?’
‘Al-Habashiya.’ I summoned enough courage to whisper the forbidden name. If I dreamed, I could not be harmed further.
‘Oh!’ He moved his fingers across his chest and then shrugged. He reached down to pull me upright. ‘God is dead.’
The scarab is unrecognisable, burnt off in the accident. I do not think I could have lived with it on my body. Even the scar is loathsome. I would not speak of those events, not even to Kolya, who had some idea of what had transpired within God’s garden. He had seen the pit, he told me. He had decided to leave it for the authorities to find. They were less likely to pursue al-Habashiya’s murderer for long. I began to record this only after Suez. I felt it my duty. People should understand the influence of Carthage. They should know what it is to exist in a world where perverted negroid Semites enjoy the power of life and death over us. All I can do is warn you. I have sent these accounts to every newspaper and radio programme in the country. Most of them ignore me. Reveille ran a story but they made fun of me. SAMMY DAVIS JNR SECRET WORLD RULER SAYS POLISH MYSTIC was their headline. You can imagine the rest. Some say I disgust them. Certainly it is disgusting, I agree. It happened to me. They think I am not disgusted? I am one of the few who survived with sanity and my speech intact. Without studying evil we cannot resist it and we can so easily be deceived into taking the wrong path.
I told Kolya that God was a darkness to me and that something of myself had grown to love Him. Kolya said that it was always possible to find a little scrap of darkness in one’s own soul, some scrap that longs to join the greater darkness and share in the power of its Prince. It is what we mean by Original Sin. His understanding of religious matters was considerable. He had spent some of his youth at a seminary. He understood the Greek creed far more thoroughly than I ever shall. At that time, however, it was of little comfort to me because I was beyond comfort. I was beyond emotion and sensation. Listlessly, I let my friend hurry us through the gates to the waiting camels, who groaned and complained at being awakened so early. He made me mount a tall, pale doe who got to her feet with all the offended grace of a dowager instructed to remove her chair from the park’s verge. Then he perched himself on his own beast’s hump, tugging on the rather large number of pack animals, goading my animal forward with his long whip and thus propelling us all willy-nilly into the cold night. An oily stink was drifting from the house. It stayed with me for hours. Only as the desert air cleared my lungs did I realise how familiar I had become with the smell of death.
‘I sold her to him,’ I said. ‘She was sold on …’
By dawn, out of sight of the house and its surrounding palms, we pressed into the deep dunelands. Kolya said it was our only alternative to capture. The British came and went as they pleased in the Sudan. Beyond Sudan the only place worth going was Kenya, which was also British. Neither of us, he said, would benefit from being interviewed by the British. Besides, he had friends in Libya. He made us pause while he consulted a map and took a compass reading. I, being convinced that this whole episode was a mental escape, some hallucinatory salvation, merely grinned inanely and wondered vaguely when the pain in my eye-sockets would begin to penetrate this glorious madness.
I think that was the point at which I fell from my camel. Next, I was riding across Kolya’s pommel while he steadied me with one arm and guided our team with his free hand. Still half-swooning I stared up into his handsome strength. He might have been one of our legendary Slavic heroes. I thought how much he resembled a refined Valentino, and then came a pang of memory for The Sin of the Sheikh.
Seeing me wake, Kolya directed my attention to the vastness of the pale dunes ahead, the true Sahara, which the Bedawi feared and hated, that most dangerous and unforgiving of oceans, where quicksand could without warning swallow you and everything you owned, sending you to populate the buried city of some forgotten race, to join those who had already marched down the centuries to fill the dead but perfect streets.
‘It’s to be a long journey, Dimka my dear, before we get to where we have friends.’ He sighed. As he stroked my head I became calm, perhaps mesmerised, but the quality of fear was duller. I still believed I was looking upon my executioner, even when he kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them to my lips. ‘Ah, Dimka, Dimka!’ He regarded with mild exasperation the uncountable miles of pale brown sand. ‘So little to say and so much time to say it in!’
We rode without pause until noon, and I still waited for the pain to impinge. It was easy to see how madness could be God’s mercy; how peasants still believe the insane to be blessed. Or was I already in Heaven? I determined to appreciate the moment, never hoping it would continue for long. As we set off again, Kolya pointed to one of the bundles bouncing on a pack camel. ‘Your valise, Dimka, I think. That’s how I first found out you were still here. It was in Steeton’s quarters at the Winter Palace. I thought I’d bring it with me. Any good?’
I giggled at this fancy.
The Western Sahara embraces and threatens us with her infinite waves of sand, shifting with implacable slowness. On this Netherworld Sea suddenly looms a great funeral barge, some vivid beast-headed benevolent at her helm, remorselessly rolling towards us, carrying the stark, clean smell of a desert death. If, by chance, I have been released, blind, into the desert, then I am compensated by the steadily improving quality to my mirages! When we next stop to light our evening fire, I open my Gladstone. Here is everything except the main specifications for my Desert Liner. My books, my pistols, some money and other personal things, my whole identity is returned to me. Yet still I refuse to hope that this is anything more than an illusion clouding over the fact of my unbearable blindness.
I hardly wish to consider an even more terrible alternative—that my oldest and greatest male friend has been commissioned to destroy me, as I was instructed to destroy the blind boy.
My ship was called The Esmé. Pink as the Egyptian dawn, gold as the Egyptian night, soft and gently warm, her perfume was the scent of life itself. She was the loveliest of all my dreams. She would have risen in the morning, so pure and vigorous, and everyone who saw her would have gasped at her virgin beauty.
My ship was called The Stolen Soul and even in her ruined state, everything smashed and scattered and looted, she had an aura of noble vitality; a pure sense that once she had served her people well and with grace.
Jerusalem Commands Page 41
