by Morris West
“Manipulation? That’s an odd word to use.”
“It is nonetheless accurate. Let me show you something.”
My file was lying on his desk. He opened it, picked out a letter and passed it to me. The notepaper was headed, “Société Vickers et Maxim”. The letter, addressed to Manfred Ysambard, was written in an emphatic, sprawling hand.
Dear Colleague,
I am happy to tell you that, by unanimous decision of our directors, Ysambard Frères have been appointed bankers to La Société Vickers et Maxim and to La Société Française des Torpilles Whitehead. We look forward to a long and profitable association with you and your esteemed brother.
Perhaps we may begin it with a supper party at my house, to which you will invite that very special and beautiful client whom we discussed last week and to whom I now beg to be presented.
A bientôt,
Z.Z.
The signature was a bold double “Z”. Who, I asked, was the writer? Manfred was embarrassed. It was the first time I had ever seen him blush.
“His name is Zaharoff, Basil Zaharoff. He’s in everything – steel, arms, shipping, newspapers, banking.”
“And how did he hear of me?”
“Not from us, I promise you, Madame. Joachim will verify that. It was Zaharoff who mentioned your name to us. We were surprised at the amount of information he possessed about you and your affairs; but that’s the kind of man he is. He deals at the highest level of politics – with kings, emperors, presidents. He has the best private intelligence service in the world.”
“And why should he be interested in me?”
I had expected an evasive answer; but no, Manfred was eager for confession.
“Zaharoff uses women as allies in his affairs. He pays well and willingly for service and information. He has your history at his fingertips. He knows your father’s story as well. He hints at other matters of which we have no knowledge. In short, he has done Ysambard Frères a big service. He asks a modest favour in return – an introduction to you.”
“And if I decline to meet him?”
“He will find another way to arrange the encounter. He is a very determined man.”
“I can be determined, too.”
“Please!” There was a note of desperation in Manfred’s voice. “Let me try to explain this Zaharoff. He deals, on a huge scale, in military armaments. He represents, for example, the British company, Vickers. He would like very much to gain control of our French company, Schneider-Creusot. So what does he do? Very quietly, he starts buying up shares in the Banque de l’Union Parisienne, an institution owned by Schneider-Creusot, which raises finance for them and for other French industries. Already Zaharoff is on the board; nevertheless he brings us big accounts to make us, too, his allies. In the end, mark my words, he will run Schneider-Creusot. If he wants to meet you, he will – one way or another. So, why not do it the graceful way? Let us bring together two of our distinguished clients. Well?”
“What does Joachim think of all this?”
“Ask him yourself at lunch.”
The answer Joachim gave me was as clear as a church bell in frost-time.
“If half the gossip I hear is true, you need a protector. Who better than Zaharoff, the most powerful man in Europe?”
“Why do I need a protector, Joachim?”
“Your age.” Joachim gave me a thin smile. “And a growing tendency to sexual indiscretions.”
“And how would you know about those, dear Joachim?”
“Some of it I hear from my own gossips.”
“And some, no doubt, from this Basil Zaharoff.”
“Correct.”
“What’s he like in bed, Joachim?”
“How should I know?” Joachim was only a little amused. “My guess is that he doesn’t want you in his own bed at all.”
“You make him sound like a pimp.”
“Rumour has it that’s how he started – as a runner for the whore houses in Tatavla.”
“That sounds like the end of the earth.”
“It’s the old Greek quarter of Istanbul.”
“And now this Greek, this Turk, whatever he is, has Joachim Ysambard pimping for him!”
It was a calculated cruelty; but I couldn’t resist it. Joachim digested the insult in silence. His answer was mild, almost apologetic.
“I wish I could tell you bankers have cleaner hands than brothel touts. We don’t. We’re putting up millions for guns and explosives and poison gas. We’re lending money across the map, so, whichever side wins, we can’t lose. I should be ashamed. I find I’m not. I work for money, I married for money. You were one of the few indulgences that cost me money.”
“And now you’d like to call in the debt?”
“Don’t be vulgar! Besides, I’m doing you a favour. Zaharoff needs a woman to run his salons and cultivate his clients. He’ll set you up like a duchess.”
“And throw me out like a pregnant parlourmaid when the party’s over? No, thanks.”
“As you wish, of course.” Joachim was studiously formal. “Now, as to your financial affairs . . .”
“I’ll take your advice. We’ll sell the property and the bloodstock and invest the proceeds in the United States. What else should be liquidated?”
“Manfred and I will prepare a list. We’ll discuss it before you leave Paris. Where can we get in touch with you?”
“As from tomorrow, at the Crillon. I’ve decided to put myself back into circulation.”
“Please think about Zaharoff.”
“I will, Joachim. Thank you for your care of my interests.”
“Our pleasure always, my dear.”
And that was another chapter closed, another friendship dead and buried. As I walked out into the afternoon bustle of the rue St. Honoré, I felt, once more, ridiculous and ashamed. A man who had been my lover was treating me like a chattel, an object of barter in the market place. Worse still was his bland assumption that I ought to be very happy in the transaction.
What was happening to me? What did others read in my face that I could not see in my own mirror? Why should they assume that I, the most independent of women, was suddenly in need of a protector? And even if I were, how dared they offer me a jumped-up gun peddler from Tatavla?
I didn’t see the humour of it until I was back in my bedroom at the pension. I was paying good money for worse company every night of the week. I was paying, not to be protected, but to be exploited; and, instead of being set up like a duchess, I was a target for every policeman and pimp in the game. I threw myself on the bed and laughed until I cried and cried and cried.
JUNG
Zurich
It is hot today and excessively humid. Dark thunder clouds pile up over the lake. We shall have a storm before midday. I have been working since dawn, collecting stones from the lakeside, piling them beside my model village, sorting them by size and texture. I am stripped to the waist like a labourer. My face and my body are streaked with sweat and dust; but I feel relaxed and content.
Emma and the children are spending the day with friends who have a villa near the peak of the Sonnenberg. Toni has set up a card table under the big apple tree and is writing up her notes. She has made a pitcher of lemonade and has brought out clean towels so that we can bathe before lunch and change in the boathouse.
We do not talk much. There is no need. We are content to be together, each carried forward by the current of a private musing, like two streams in confluence. As I build my toy village, it is as if I am rebuilding my childhood out of the scraps and shards of memory: like the legend of my mother’s father, Pastor Preiswerk, who, every Wednesday, entertained the ghost of his first wife, much to the chagrin of his second, who bore him thirteen children!
My father, too, was a Protestant pastor – an intelligent and kind man hopelessly frustrated by the restrictions of a small country parish and an outmoded theology which he never found the courage to ex amine. So, he took refuge in reminiscence: the good
old days, the romantic student years, the laurels he had won as a graduate in Oriental Languages, which he never read any more! He quarrelled often with my mother, a big, jolly woman, warm as new bread, who loved company and chatter. Later experience leads me to believe that the quarrels had a sexual basis as well. I cannot say where the fault lay. The hypocrisy of the Swiss about sexual matters is sometimes beyond belief. The fact is that my mother lapsed deeper and deeper into depression and was for a long period under hospital care.
I have strangely ambivalent feelings about her. Behind that warm, fat, comfortable persona lurked another, powerful, dark, commanding, who would brook no contradiction. This one, I believed, could look into my eyes and see what was going on inside my skull. My feelings about her have coloured all my later relations with women. For many years, my response to the word “love” was always one of doubt and distrust. My earliest, and in some ways my most profound, dream experience relates to my relationship with my parents and theirs with one another.
In this dream I discovered, in a meadow behind our house, the entrance to an underground passage. I went in. I found myself in a vast chamber in which there was a royal throne. On the throne stood a phallus as big as a tree. Its single blind eye stared at the ceiling. I heard my mother’s voice calling, “Look at it! That’s the man eater!” The dream repeated itself night after night. I was too terrified to go to bed and that caused arguments with my father to whom I dared not communicate what I had seen.
The dream, as any analyst will tell you, is open to a whole gamut of interpretations, and I have continued every year to find new meanings to it. But recalling it now in this summer garden, I am moved, not to terror, but to desire for the beautiful creature who sits only a hand’s reach away.
I go to her. She pours me lemonade and holds the glass to my lips. Then she dries the sweat from my face and my body. The touch of her hands is like a charge of electricity – and like Galvani’s frog, I jump to it. I plead with her: “I want you.” She tells me: “I want you, too.” Then – a gift from the elder gods! – the first raindrops fall and the first lightning crackles across the ridges. Toni gathers up her notebooks and we rush to the shelter of the boathouse.
There is no pleading now, no protest. While Toni undresses, I make a bed out of the cushions and sails from my boat. We tumble into it as the storm bursts into full fury outside, with lightning and thunder and hailstones as big as bullets slamming against the roof. It rages for an hour and more, up and down the lake. No one can intrude on us. Emma will not leave the Sonnenberg until the storm is over. Our servants are penned inside the house. Toni and I are free and happy as children. Our love making is wilder and more passionate than we have ever before enjoyed. When all our passion is spent, we lie breast to breast, wrapped in the white sails, listening to the whine of the wind and the drumming of the rain, and the creak of the apple tree bowed under its load of young fruit.
Then, as always, the slow sadness of the aftermath envelops us. Toni clings to me desperately and murmurs the old refrain:
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be like this all the time? Wouldn’t it be beautiful not to have to take precautions? I hate to be the one who gets up and goes home. Why didn’t we meet before Emma came along? Don’t you wish we could be married?”
I dare not tell her that a wedding ring changes everything; that there is no better recipe for boredom than year-round sex with a legal wife; that half the excitement we share comes from the risks of discovery. Still less can I explain to her how swiftly the dream symbols transmute themselves for me: how the womb cavern where the phallus reigns, erect and triumphant, becomes a burial chamber where an ugly white worm is the only vestige of life.
Toni, herself, is magically transfigured in this misty post-coital country. One moment she is Salome, sister, wife, lover and protector. The next instant, she is the servant girl who kept house for my father and me while my mother was in hospital. She has the same lustrous black hair, the same matt skin, the same woman smell, and she, too, giggles when I tickle her ears with my tongue.
When the rain stops, the magic stops, too. Toni leaps up and dresses hurriedly. She asks all the usual questions: “Is my hair tidy? My lips aren’t bruised, are they? Is my hemline straight?” I button her blouse, give her one last kiss and send her back to work in the house. She will be there when Emma comes home with the children. I stuff the sails back into their canvas bags, pile the cushions tidily, lock the boatshed and resume my mason’s work on the model village.
Among the pebbles I found this morning is a curious, conical fragment of crystal. It will make a splendid spire for the church. The church makes me think of God, the Trinity, Jesus Christ and my father, their official representative. My father conducted funerals. The dead were screwed into black boxes, carried on the shoulders of men in black frockcoats and black boots, then buried in holes in the ground. Father would say at the service, “God has taken them to himself. Jesus, the Saviour, has welcomed them into his Kingdom.”
So, to my childish mind, Jesus Christ became a black and menacing figure whose kingdom was the dark underworld, home of blind moles and chirping crickets and one-eyed monsters.
Of course, the one-eyed monster can turn up anywhere. For instance, this house, quite near the church which I am building, is for me a sinister place. The man who used to live here was a friend of my father’s and a friend of mine, too. He used to lend me books. He nurtured my childhood passion for painting and sketching. He took me fishing and swimming. He taught me the rudiments of archaeology. He gave me my first look at the erotic symbols of the Greeks and the Romans and the courtly scholars of the Renaissance. Then, one summer’s day, while we were bathing in a secluded corner of the lake, he tried first to seduce me to have oral sex with him. When I drew back in fear and disgust, he seized me, thrust my face against a tree trunk and raped me.
It was a painful and humiliating experience, the more so because, mixed up with my sense of moral outrage, was the conviction that I had somehow failed the friend who had turned to me for comfort. The element of pleasure in the copulation confused me still further. I had come to climax, I had ejaculated, and the older man was quick to use these pleasant sensations to justify his invasion of me and my enforced cooperation in the sodomy.
Even now, in my middle years, brief minutes after my passionate union with Toni, the memory of that other encounter still haunts and confuses me. It colours my whole situation with Freud, for whom I have entertained a great affection, the sentiment of a son for his father, of a pupil for a beloved master. But the situation has always been more complex than that – very Greek, very Platonic. I am the comrade-in-arms, who has shared his blanket on bivouac and who now deserts him to fight under another banner, for a different cause.
Still, I must say that, for all his finical Viennese manners and his Hebraic subtlety, there is in Freud, too, a touch of the bully – just as there is in me a touch of the female who desires to be dominated and in Toni the latent male who desires to dominate me.
There is a pattern in all this which I begin slowly to understand and which I am trying to codify. The problem is that I lack the vocabulary. When I was younger, I used to complain loudly that philosophers and theologians created great gob-stopping words for the most elementary propositions. Now I understand why. The bigger the word, the more magic it holds, the better cover it makes for human ignorance. But once you establish it in the ritual, the magical word becomes the sacred word. To challenge it is heresy and, worse still, blasphemy!
I put the capstone on the steeple of my toy church and step back to admire the effect. I ask aloud, a question of the dead:
“What do you think, Father? Will your God like the house I have built for him?”
My question is a challenge to my dear parent, whose formulae of faith are no longer valid for me. It is also a deliberate recall of a boyhood dream. In the dream I saw God the Father, ancient and powerful, enthroned in the blue sky, exactly above the spire of our cathedral.
As I watched awe-struck, God gave a thunderous fart and a big, divine turd fell – plop! – on the roof and flattened the cathedral to the ground.
It was for me a dream of liberation – God rejecting man’s attempt to enclose him in systems and rituals. Yet here am I in my own garden, rebuilding my childhood prison-house. Why? My father cannot tell me. He is locked in his black box far under the earth where everything is different.
In the secret kingdom of the unconscious, nothing is quite what it seems to be. The dead talk and the living are dumb. The phallus is a cannibal god gorged with blood. The moist womb solicits the rapist. The rapist violates for a love he cannot experience. Janus, the two-faced guardian at the gate, sees the past and the future, but is blind to the present and unconscious of the eternity which includes them all.
Suddenly, Elijah and Salome are present to me. I show them my village. I tell them the memories it evokes. I ask them:
“Does any of that make sense to you, Elijah? To you, Salome, my sister, my love?”
For the first time I am aware that Salome is blind and that, now, there is a third personage with them: a big black snake with eyes that shine like obsidian. The snake draws close to me and twines its body round my leg. He is clearly a friendly creature, but I am afraid. Salome reaches out a hand to reassure me. I withdraw from her touch. Elijah smiles in his slow, wise fashion and teases me.
“You are more afraid of Salome than of the serpent.”
I admit that I am; because today she reminds me of my mother in her sombre moods when she seemed to look right into my head. I sense that Salome’s blind eyes see more than the eyes of the serpent. Then, as suddenly as they have come, they are gone. The only other living creature in the garden is a brown thrush pecking for worms in the damp earth.
MAGDA
Paris
At: ten o’clock this morning, while I was taking breakfast in my old suite at the Crillon, a page brought me a note. He told me that a uniformed chauffeur was waiting downstairs for an answer. The note was from Basil Zaharoff.
