‘If they ever named an effin’ ship after you, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius, ‘they ort ter corl it Ther Lucky Bastard …’
‘Luck, Mrs Cornelius,’ I say, ‘does not exist. What you describe as luck is a combination of stolen opportunity and honest judgement. There is nothing random about it.’
So it was by virtue of my own sublime instincts, and, I would readily agree, some help from an old friend, that I escaped at last from Paradise.
TWENTY-ONE
I HAD PASSED THROUGH the final gate, the gate to eternal death. Anubis was my friend. I had won a kind of immortality. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades, but my future remained uncertain and my terror would not leave me. I possessed a knowledge I had never wanted and of which I never dare speak. I had been in the presence and the power of purest Evil.
There is an old man, a kind of vagrant who walks up and down the Portobello Road on weekdays, when the market is only fruit and veg. He is sometimes mistaken for me. Even Mrs Cornelius mentions it. He is Irischer. I am not insulted. We would call him rorodivni. He is, says Father P., what his own ancestors named da-chearde, a son of two arts; an oracle. Barnum the Jew says he is a nebech-meshiach and gives him a shilling, but I am not sure this is blasphemy. Arabised Berbers of the Tripoli desert might identify him as an achmak ilahiya and perhaps also consider him an oracle. And why should he not be one? He declaims only what we fear to whisper. He quotes the Bible. He speaks of God’s mercy and how it might be earned.
There is no reason to disbelieve him. His logic is soundly based in conventional theology. Perhaps he is actually the medium for God’s voice. And none of us listens. Not even I. But I know when to be silent. In the desert I learned silence and I learned the art of the fool. Otherwise I should not have lived.
He does not seem to care for the Pope. I think they give him something at the Poor Clares across from Mrs Cornelius. He would therefore be a Catholic, perhaps an ex-priest. Those who say God never announces His presence might wish to spend an hour or two with Mr O’Dowd. He speaks not through ritual or parable, but is the direct medium of God’s command. And still we do not listen! I saw him with those new nuns who so resemble social workers, with their sensible stockings and skirts and little heels. They are always Irish; they have that screeching, unnatural laugh that needs whisky to make it melodious. They remind me of the fellaheen women. I think they keep an eye on him. My friend Miss B., who was once so famous as a dancer, was also a Catholic. She went to the big church near me, which was how we met. All her friends are Irish or Polish, from Hammersmith. She herself lives in Sporting Club Square, West Kensington. I used to go and visit her, but Brodmann put a stop to that.
It was a fine evening in February when Brodmann discovered me again, or, more properly, I learned he had picked up my trail. After tea I had left Miss B.’s eccentrically Ludwigian terracotta mansion, deciding not to use the square’s Mandrake Road entrance but to cross the gardens and enjoy the last of the evening light. I had a particular fondness for Sporting Club Square. With her tall wrought-iron railings and surrounding trees, her botanical gardens, the creation of Halifax Begg, offered a sense of sanctuary. By some fluke they had always shut out the busy noise of nearby North End Road and I could easily imagine I sat enjoying the solitude of my own ancestral estate near Kiev. The gardens possess that special sense of well-ordered security one finds so often in Arab courtyards. It was a Monday, at about five o’clock. The sun was setting, a red pulse through the dark branches of the massive oak which sixty years earlier had been the dominant landmark of some Fulham pasture. I smelled grass and evergreens. The pungent fumes of coal-fires seemed to intoxicate two tabby cats chasing each other across the lawns, through ornamental grasses and flowerbeds, laurel hedges and waxy botanical oddities. Maintained by a bequest from Begg himself, the little park was as well-kept and as varied in its flora as Derry and Toms Roof Garden, another favourite retreat for meditation and recollection.
A misty stillness filled the whole square with that timeless calm one often used to find in London until her streets filled up with yelling immigrants, middle-class colonists and the antisocial family saloon. In those days during the afternoons only the centre had crowds of people. Most of the square’s flats were occupied by middle-aged people who had moved here at a time when the rents were reasonable. Today it is a landmark. All taxi-drivers know it. Tourist buses bring visitors on their way to Earls Court. Each of the mansion blocks is in a different style, many of them daring when raised, but the place is now I believe in a book and up for development. It was just as I approached the ornate north gate, with its cast-iron Imperial Eagles imitated from St Petersburg, that I saw Brodmann. He must have been following me. Perhaps he already knew of my association with Miss B? Or perhaps Miss B. had betrayed me? It was even possible that they had been shadowing her and accidentally found me. It no longer mattered, of course. The inescapable fact was that Brodmann had picked up my trail again. This was just after the War when I was praying he had either been recalled or, better still, killed in the Blitz. I believe he thought I had not recognised him. I took my single advantage and pretended bafflement. He was disguised as a tramp but nothing could hide his leering triumph! My warm reverie was utterly destroyed. My peace of mind was exploded. I felt my hard-won harmony fragmenting into a vacuum. Now, at any moment of his choosing, Brodmann could report me and have me forcibly returned to my homeland. Like those other Cossacks the British lords sent back to Stalin, I faced inevitable torture. This is why I can never reveal certain names, including my own. Those few of us who have survived into natural old age are mutually responsible for one another. To call us Nazis, I said to Brodmann in a note, was the grossest simplification of our political ideals. He never replied. I had hoped to flush him out. Brodmann of course was the real Nazi. He was not the first Nazi Jew I ever met. They are all the same, these communists.
I was never again to enjoy the botanical tranquillity of Sporting Club Square. I caught the 28 from The Seven Stars and looked back to make sure he was not following me. I got off at the Odeon, Westbourne Grove and, rather than risk leading him to my home, I went to the pictures. They were playing a cowboy film in which some ludicrous Billy the Kid saves a town from every kind of villainy. There is a scene in the desert which I recognised as Death Valley, although the buttes and mesas of that landscape have the same sort of confusing similarity one finds in parts of the Libyan Sahara, where one peak can look very much like another. I remember very little of the ride from Bi’r Tefawi to the oasis where we joined a small camel caravan with which, Kolya said, we would journey to Ouenat and from there to al-Khufra where he expected to meet old friends. Al-Khufra was some four hundred miles due west across the Sahara. He advised me to relax as best I could and enjoy the journey. This would be the easiest part.
‘But what is Khufra?’ I had never heard of such a city.
‘A great oasis, a junction for the large caravans out of Africa and India. She’s six hundred uncrossable miles of desert south-west of Cairo. Nine hundred miles of dunes due west to Ghat and a thousand miles of wasteland and mountains north-west to Tripoli. In short, Dimka dear, Khufra is in the middle of nowhere—and yet you shall see there sights no Christian has witnessed in centuries! Be patient, dear, for at present you are riding first-class. After Khufra the real journey begins.’ I asked him what lay after Khufra but all he would say was that he hoped we did not have to go to Ghat.
The others on the caravan called me al bagl which means ‘the mule’, but I did not mind. I was safe from God at last but I retained the habits He had instilled in me. Intellectually I knew this; He could no longer punish me, but my nerves would not accept this. Somehow I had become addicted to others’ approval and would serve happily anyone who commanded me. I could not sleep until I knew I had the general goodwill of the whole caravan. Only their cheerful condescension made me feel at ease. Their mockery and their contempt, their affectionate insults, warmed me. In Arabic they sometimes called me ‘F
ather of Fools’ but in Tebu their names were usually more cryptic. The Goran tribesmen also had filthier epithets. These haughty blacks chose to assume me Kolya’s catamite. Kolya, with his talent for languages, had let it be known that he was an anti-French Syrian sharif on the run from the authorities. He even had a blurred newspaper cutting as proof of his credentials. The cutting was from the Parisian yellow press, a gossip column. Since few of them could read in any language, it served to give authority to his claim that he was considered an enemy by the Rumi. Why else would they print his picture? Everyone agreed on this logic.
Between Bi’r Tefawi and the first oasis I discovered a thoroughly useful talent. I had a natural skill with camels and, after only a few days, amazed Kolya with my easy seat, my deft control. Was there a part of me that sensed in those landscapes some ancestral homeland? Again I wondered about lost Atlantis. Could the Caucasian Berbers be the remnants of that legendary people? Both spoke a language that was the root of many others. There was no explanation as to how they had come to occupy the Sahara. Had they actually been my Atlantean forebears? Few Berbers were nomads by vocation. They would tell you how they had once lived in magnificent cities, ruling a world. At first I took that to be a reference to their Empire, which had included the Spanish peninsula until the Christian conquests, but later I began to realise they referred to a civilisation more ancient even than Egypt, with whom they also shared their language. The Berbers of our party were inclined to keep themselves apart from Arabs. Did their blood recall a time when these same people were their slaves? And was it common blood that bore in it a knowledge of the years before the oceans drowned Atlantis, before the rise of Carthage in all its luscious and extravagant barbarism? Before Sumer; before Babylon and Assyria and those other neurotic, brooding Semitic Empires whom greedy introspection brought so low? We came to Ouenat, a valley of red rock in a range of eroded mountains, a collection of sun-yellowed scrub and a few miserable saplings growing where rainwater had gathered in brackish pools. Our party had no intention of staying long. The place was thought to shelter afrits and djinns of testy disposition. Now the walls of the valley were steeper, masses of weather-smoothed granite boulders which could dislodge and roll down on us at any moment. Eventually we camped at the base of a cliff and a pool more palatable than most and settled to wait for the main caravan from Furawia and French Equatorial Africa. We waited a week, grumbling and fretting until bit by bit the other caravans began to come in. Yet we still could not set off until we had debated our relative positions in the train and all demands and honour had been properly respected. This involved the offering of daifa—the special hospitality of the desert—and the consequent feastings and ceremonies attending the offerings. These were followed by friendly debate between the various elders of the caravans, when they smoked and chatted and, after it seemed we must drink Ouenat dry, they rose, shaking hands, slapping shoulders and laughing to expose their few white fangs in the weathered leather of their faces.
At last we were ready to take the road to al-Khufra, leaving the mountains behind and crossing a plain which glittered with cornelian, flint, mica, agate and obsidian worn by the hooves and sandals of all the animals and men who had passed this way for three thousand years or more. The splintered peaks were below the horizon and the desert widening under the evening sky before Kolya grew at once more light-hearted and more cautious. ‘Soon, Dimka, you will understand the real temptations of the desert.’ But he refused to expand on this.
Each caravan has its own rhythm, pace and character. Our party now consisted of a miscellaneous collection of Bedouin merchants, Tebu camel-breeders, Sudanese slavers, pilgrims returning from the Haj, and the camp-followers who served us in various ways. Kolya assured me it was nothing compared to the great oasis at Khufra.
In those days, before the half-track conquered all, a caravan was exactly like a train, with connections at various oases for other caravans following a variety of fixed routes. You waited for the next party going in the direction you desired. It was Stavisky’s people, he eventually admitted, who were supposed to meet Kolya at al-Khufra, near the Toom road. He would turn over our pack camels to them in exchange for cash. Then, he hoped, we could head for Tripoli. I remarked gloomily that the camels couldn’t be worth very much but this only amused him. ‘Enough to get us a room and breakfast at Bagnold’s, never fear!’
At night our trail across the golden dunes turned to gleaming silver and remained easy to follow. We were rarely far from water. With a good caravan it was a route as uneventful to travel as the railway from Delhi to Bombay. Gradually the desert became what the Bedouin called sarira, hard sand, flat, all but featureless and spread with a thin layer of gravel. Later I would come to know the gruelling boredom of caravan life which would teach me the habit of patience. But then my head was filled with an understanding my body still refused to accept. I was free! I had escaped God’s punishment. God, Kolya assured me, was slain. It was as if I had passed every test I had tried to learn from my book. I had answered all the questions, made the proper statements of repentance, all the time believing I would still at any moment be struck down, further humiliated and weakened. But I had gone safely through the First Gate and Anubis was my friend. Why should I still be afraid? No rationality would release me from the fear that at any moment God might stand again before me, telling me that I had merely drifted for a short while into a dream. Yet if I dreamed, then I experienced a nightmare within the dream. I was yet to be blinded. I remained terrified of a future which could only be horrific, grotesque and disgusting. I had seen the boy turning in circles with his own living eyes clutched in his bloody fists while al-Habashiya had chuckled softly. I had seen the mutilated girls. So still I capered and giggled, the compliant object of all their foul-mouthed speculation. I even suffered their gross sexual advances. (I have often thought that the reason the British and the Arabs have such a love affair is because each race is as sexually repressed as the other.) Sex, my enemy, continued her tyranny.
I was conditioned to please them. I had earned my life through pleasing them. I had very little capacity for logic at that time. I was at any fellaheen’s mercy whenever I was caught alone relieving myself behind a rock or running to fetch a wandering goat on the far side of a dune. But then some of them took to calling me casually, for their own perverse amusement, al Yehudi, and I began intellectually, as well as instinctively, to fear for my life again. Then Kolya issued some subtle decree to my tormentors (which I do not think was an appeal to their better natures, but a suggestion they discontinue handling his property). I was grateful for Kolya’s intercession, but might have hoped for a more dignified appeal. He did his best, he said. He had, after all, to behave thoroughly like a desert Arab. Anything else would arouse suspicion. I assured myself that I need have no more rational fear of them. Anubis was my friend. If, by God’s command, I was already dead, I had nothing at all to lose. Any sensation of life would be a gain. There remained, however, the knowledge that anyone whom the Arab intended to murder was always first cursed with the name of ‘Jew’ and so the crime became legitimate. It was the same, of course, in parts of Germany, as I discovered to my cost.
God continued to haunt me; her smothering flesh, her organs still threatened my soul. My bowels would knot in agony for the loss of Esmé, my muse; the little goddess who had betrayed me so badly. I had not wanted any of this. I had done everything I could for her.
Within caravans, disputes and quarrels are rarely allowed to blossom into full-blown affairs. A people whose law is the blood feud and who are in constant conflict with the elements cannot afford extra antagonisms. Kolya’s words were heeded. My days became happier. What if I had gone from being a Cossack’s pet Jew to an Arab’s pet Nazrini? I now stood every chance of reclaiming all I had lost. I still had a small fortune in my California bank. In the fullness of time, Kolya would get us to a town with civilised conveniences and I would wire Goldfish with a brief account of the truth. Calling upon our funds, I co
uld return to Los Angeles before the year’s end and start my career again without encumbrances. I would look back on these months of inhaling sand and living off brackish water and miscellaneous beans and, no doubt, even I would romanticise it, softening the details, embroidering certain facts until it was suitably similar to The Desert Song for the civilised world’s demanding sensibilities.
Even the most persistent of my persecutors lost interest in me as we neared al-Khufra which, we were warned, now had a large Italian garrison on the look-out for slavers and gun-runners. The Wormeater’s incapacity to distinguish a gunrunner from a blind mule was a source of wild amusement amongst those Arabs who had already experienced Italian occupation. They of course were equally unable to tell an Italian musketeer from a Norwegian matron. One fierce rumour had it that the soldiers had been ordered to erect a Christian church on the site of the oasis’s chief mosque. In the mythology of these people Christians were forever hatching complicated (usually extremely petty) plots and spending considerable resources merely to bring insult to the Moslems. It had reminded me of Kentucky, whose people credited the Pope with similar ambitions against their dissenting congregations. As I said to Kolya: Considering the army of crazed zealots which between them the Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Bishop of Constantinople can rally, it’s surprising they have not thought of combining resources before now!
Such racialist paranoia is disgusting. It only clouds the issues and makes us lose sight of the real enemy. ‘These Moslems are bound to be touchy,’ said Kolya, lapsing into Russian as the bulk of the caravan fell away to our left. ‘What would you think if you suddenly realised, in your heart of hearts, that you and your ancestors had backed the wrong religious horse—and were still insisting the useless nag could win the Petersburg Straight? Yet when you listen, in Cairo for instance, to their political ideas, you wonder which came first, the self-destructive religion or the average Arab, who would always rather shoot himself in the foot than not shoot at all!’
Jerusalem Commands Page 42
