Roxanas and Sandras, Jakes and Garys tossed words like crackers. ‘Fantastic. Greatest ever.’ Beads, mantras, joss-sticks, bizarre coiffures were no access to the Infinite, but I envied freedom from caste, habit, agility. Youth discarded the past, danced on the present, the electric moment, turned backs on all future save the Bomb. I could not risk confessing that I had rejoiced at Hiroshima, as destroying thousands to save millions. Marxism explained, Marc-Henri retorted. Perhaps sincerely, young Londoners feared the limbless cretin and two-headed baby, saw a Japanese girl’s eyes crumble at a touch.
For them, I was conformist, ‘square’, short-haired, my head almost page-boy. Their admission prices were too drastic. They would scream for Vello, as they did for Castro, Guevara, for Sinatra and Joan Baez. They delighted in rumours that the Fourth Man was a spy in the Palace. With sex easy as oil, the perils of beauty exciting, the slave camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta were only the invention of right-wing scribblers. An Estonian was freak of nature, a German had glamour of jackboot and truncheon, even of the New Economic Miracle.
I enjoyed protest songs but was unable to bawl for unearned rights or use the Bomb as an excuse for misbehaviour, or suicide, and was thus debarred. ‘See you morrow-day,’ youngsters said, but I knew I never would.
I was like a hyphen between a lost Paris and hypothetical Londons, was threatened by Rising Tide.
Accident, or apparent accent, tyche, intervened. I chanced on a tiny north London art-house cinema, showing a blurred silent Lubitch movie, The Patriot, Emil Jannings twitching, slobbering, as Tsar Paul, clinging to his murderer, Lewis Stone, who else but Count von der Pahlen. Uniformed conspirators stalked weird palaces, limitless, mirrored corridors ornate with giant guards and dwarfs in immense hats spitting and capering while, outside, His Majesty inspected grenadiers motionless as toys which he imagined they were, while, heads bending towards each other in shuttered rooms, Pahlen and his conspirators planned to save Russia from a madman. Some tick in my blood revived, quivered, restoring me to history.
My Guilford Street lodging-house was surrounded by cheap hotels, Italian restaurants, foreign tourists, my bedroom opposite a nurses’ hostel so that, in theatre, I could watch a live frieze of girls chatting, eating, reading, undressing, stinging me with recollections of Suzie, the pizzicato of foreplay, versatility of hands and mouth, the magnetic pull of thigh and buttock towards flashpoint. Through open windows drifted conversational codes resolutely English: ‘Quite warm at last.’ ‘Yes, very cool.’ ‘Adam’s Apple.’
The Embassy had a play-reading group, a choir affiliated to the Estonian Lutheran Service at Gresham’s Church, a tennis squad, an occasional dance. Also, a note periodically circulated. If Mr Kaplan arrives, he is to be given the arrangement. Latterly, however, this was reversed. Mr Kaplan? The old librarian put finger to his lips, so that I immediately envisaged dull green eyes, emaciated face, B-movie mackintosh crammed with forgeries.
A brief affair, not with a nymphet but with a solid Scottish typist, won me no access to what she termed her Diploma, and she soon departed to the superior Norwegian Embassy, Diploma intact.
Undismayed, remembering Pahlen, I energetically explored Thameside pubs, dank, slimy jetties, empty warehouses still tinged with spices, rank straw and sacking, the coarse vigour of tar and rope, of what had been the busiest port in Europe. Its moonlit waters had guided the Luftwaffe, and, like a hiccup, came temptation to throw into them wallet, visas, identity, renewing myself as a vagrant, stagehand, international courier.
This was lunacy. Rainy pavements, half-lights, uncertain vistas were exhilarating, and I remained eager for plaques, street names, statues to surrender meanings. I remembered Mother’s bewilderment by Dickens’s confession that only in crowds could he rid himself of spectres and that, without streets, he was not happy. No real gentleman, Mother ended, settling everything. London’s high-rise population must seclude other spectres, many who were not happy.
On buses, in pubs, at corners, I strove to understand London, by observing, by listening.
‘The Queen’s not interested in you, Dad.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’
Apathetic to the blare of Haley and Presley, the unction and rhetoric of modish Theatre of Anger, of the Absurd, I saw more poignant drama in unexpected vistas of tree and lawn, the sumptuous squares – Residents Only – an old man in Richmond Park, London’s Umgebung, staring at a vandalized tree like Wilfrid before a Brancusi, a tiny child in a back alley gravely skipping, wordlessly singing, as she might have done in Troy. Off Goodge Street, a row of neat, tinted cottages must be residence of expensive whores, though when I repeated this a year later to a BBC drama producer drama was extended in her terse reply that she lived there.
London crowds, slangy, tolerant, joking, incurious, were less concerned with a Europe of Common Market, show trials, one-party despotism than with shallow war movies, the recriminations of retired generals, royal occasions, scandal. Mr Tortoise lamented that Britain was fatigued, embarrassed by past grandeurs, rebuffment at Yalta, supplication for US aid, the Suez farce. Self-mockery had replaced stoicism and purpose. He added that, in 1940, with Europe toppling, ravaged by military defeat and corruption, the British deftly convinced themselves that defeat was victory and, Blitz and invasion looming, had laughed, glad to be rid of futile Continental allies.
We stood with the Ambassador at the November Cenotaph rites, annual cohesion of monarch, arms, politics, the populace: plumes and metal, horse-hair head-dresses, flowers, sacred emblems, incantations, sacrificial solemnity. ‘But’ – Mr Tortoise was ambiguous – ‘don’t be misled.’
Sundays closed on London like a lid, darkening a fierce spirit once fanned by a rasping voice and a large cigar. Oh, to pull down the sky, wrap my head, become intoxicated with thought, free of the mournful silence, closed cafés, ill-tempered tourists. Spires threatened, passages echoed, shops were empty barracks. Yet surely, from behind corner or monument, must appear Baldur or Iduna, givers of happiness, who need no ticket, to whom managers defer, police touch caps, doors open without hands, wolves slink away.
These occur, literature emblazons them, but waiting is all, deliberate search is useless.
Any lustrous redeemer was buried in sterile winter. A wounded sun was reflected in icy puddles, flowerbeds were black. In days still short and dark, Mr Kaplan might be prowling a shadowy tunnel, a shabby tobacconist be front for conspiracy. In silly bravado, I dared myself to stand defenceless under a Kentish Town railway arch frequented by gangs. Behind drab curtains, a genius, bitter and vengeful, might be fingering codes for wholesale destruction. Baldur might prove a charming strangler, SMERSH stalker, imitation cowboy desperate for a name, Iduna a besmirching ogress or resentful ex-star.
In Hyde Park, nuclear disarmers held placards like riot shields, watched by a woman, furred, pearled, indignant. She had been very tenderly feeding robins and now straightened, glowering at me. ‘Why isn’t everything cleaned up? Abroad …’ she looked wistful, almost attractive, ‘they were allowed, well … gas.’
Becoming ethnically mixed as ancient Rome or Antioch, the capital remained unknowable, often alarming. I felt panic in a subterranean car park on brooding, thinly lit levels, familiar from gangster movies, when a sudden footfall seemed gunshot; also when an inscrutable van halted alongside me, my head within range. A fruit barrow stationed near the Embassy might hide explosives, like the single boot beneath a Clapham bench. The furtive was rival government. Our shelves had catalogues of lethal inks, poisoned washing powder and vests, hollow canes, diagrams of crossed wires and inconspicuous knobs. New versions of the Hidden Hand, World Plotters, Wise Men of Zion, the Four Just Men, Professor Moriarty, once sold on railway platforms.
In this London, doorstep salesmen were suspect. In a surreptitious leaflet a turbaned head was captioned, ‘I Want Your Job, Your Woman, Your Boys.’ Strangers’ eyes could be clues in the plot: screwed hard, they menaced.
Aerosol Man sprayed silen
t chorus, signatures of terror. Kill for Peace, Kaffirs Out, Jewful of Greed, Fuck Work: dark passwords, though scarcely Lenin in October. How many realized danger from an Oxfordshire house where insufficient evidence protected a woman who had placed a Russian spy as a secretary within the British atomic arms organization?
4
Early spring. Another London uncovering itself, graceful stages of seduction. Light broadened, trees were clotted with green, feet quickened. Madame Katrina, Earl’s Court clairvoyant, foresaw that Midsummer would give me a momentous encounter. Pending this, a thick-bearded Indian in the gardens accosted me. ‘Great Britain!’ Moist brown eyes protruded, stiffened, ‘Queen, Duke. Top Grade? No.’ Then clapped hands and disappeared. Not a miraculous saviour from golden air, nevertheless, green leaf, red blossom in patrician, electronically protected Belgravia, daffodils flaunting in the Embassy garden, all signalled good fortune. Not so the sirens floating around me, always intent on someone else. Sallow girls in the tube, dark girls on grass, girls with thrilling bottoms and Arletty eyes, laughing Italians and discreet Spaniards, Bengalis gliding in saris, glistening athletic Swedes, festive American girls high on repartee, all with escorts, making for tennis, swimming or palais de dance, to jitter like crazed marmosets.
A clear eye glittered like a key, perfume lingered after she had gone, frustration smudged the wet dream. Copulations must be seething throughout April, Bacchic seizures of life, but I had to attempt solace from scents of a box hedge, at once transporting me to Mother’s rose garden, or from a disused north London railway line vanishing into tunnels, woods, into stories. Anticipating summer harlequinades, a park band restored the Europe of Strauss and Lehar, Auber and Offenbach. I was always helpless against tunes, lulling, reclining, jaunty, teasing, thumping. An old, once loved Austrian song caught my breath:
Only one Emperor’s City,
Only one Wien.
Prayers get answered, usually ironically, stamping the month like a thumb print. I needed what the English called Fun, but, in a mischievous English way, received only answer to prayer.
On broken pavement, desolate, yet within sight of St Paul’s, I found a bomb site, a jagged turmoil of bricks, rubble, rusted metal, smashed glass, befouled tins, dark filth amongst the saplings, nettles, foxgloves – puzzling nursery name – barely natural sunflowers, swollen and garish after centuries of oblivion, now lolling over slabs of stucco. The ruin must have been preserved by City speculators, though Poles or Germans could have cleared it in a fortnight. Flowers were scentless as blisters. From them rose an apparition, not slender but thin, female, in blotched jeans, hair in Medusa tangles, eyes, circled by mascara, fixed as a lip-reader’s but cat-like with spite. The face, ill or defiant, tightened. Young but not youthful, she must see a foreigner, thus more willing to pay, and finally she touched her crotch.
‘You want it, Mr Continent? To wake it up?’ A country accent, words, as it were, out of balance, scarcely comprehensible. A wraith, exhalation of another London mood, from wreckage, with sores and worse. ‘It’s safe.’ She was not urgent, merely stating, like an indifferent tourist guide. ‘I don’t scream.’
Her attempted laugh, mirthless, was yet warmer, showing teeth clean and regular as a drill squad, uncanny on the dirty face. ‘I come here with Wendy. A lush. Petal. No kids. Her tubes …’ She nodded towards a lair scooped from bricks and twigs, but did not move, as if trying to sell Wendy. ‘But the bandages on her wrists … Overdosed three times. Thrice, as they say. Got a cig? I’m strapped.’
The face minutely thickened, the eyes sickened. ‘She let the blood run into the sink, said it was Sue’s scratches, but I threw that. In the toilet, red and white. It’d scare you rotten. By all rights she’d hate me, though I can say nice things. I can say, Lampedusa. Joe Tom Lampshade. Her friend Max burnt down the Wandsworth.’
My need for flight was obstructed by scraps of ingrained courtesy. Father would have lifted his hat, Mother be grandly solicitous, opening her purse, the Herr General stand his ground, as if in a museum of objects curious but inessential.
‘Did you know, whoever you are, that the lone attacker scarcely ever threatens the underaged? That most crimes are at home? Patriarchal or otherwise.’ She lingered over this with queer pride. ‘I’d want to help, but can be insincere, wanting jam with the loaf. Bread’s something else. Sometimes I need six of the best. What are you thinking?’ I was still thinking of headlong escape, possible pursuit. Her smile ceased midway, leaving only a stare empty as a parrot’s.
As if repeating a lesson imperfectly understood, she said, ‘It’s all doubling the greengage. So he says. He likes calling it syndrome.’
A fear rippled through me, seeking the bone. Despite the undernourishment, she was wiry as gristle, a graveyard creature from German UFA movies. Speechless, I felt my head shaking, she did not shrink, merely sink back to the grit, tins, over-bright plants.
Later, in some shame, I knew that war, deaths, Meinnenberg had not left me compassionate. Possibly, my Germanic strain made me impatient of waste, the crippled, deranged, lost. I sought a forgetting and for some days muffled disquiet, even shame, in cinemas, needing Bogart’s glinty eye, Cagney’s swagger, Astaire’s electric feet and supernatural cane. Childhood fantasies, Forest Uncle, cruel but beloved, dainty swan-dancers, transmuted to Marlene’s blue, languid stare. Rita’s swirling skirt, Orson’s hauteur, Laughton’s ogreish satisfaction, spitfire women and beefsteak men careening in honky-tonk Dodge City or on the Santa Fé trail.
I still needed to share. Tortured by isolation, God must have invented the Devil. Loneliness was more fearful than the Kaplans and Miracles. Hungrily watching the noisy, bewitched young, I remembered Spender’s line, I longed to forgive them, but they never smiled.
In simplicity of genius, Stefan George began, She came alone from far away.With Suzie, I had shared Fun. Meinnenberg had permitted brief, disconcerting, impulsive comradeships, even with Greg and Trudi I had been intimate with coarse, frostbitten pasture, windy harvests, the silence of north German night. I could now only await the soothsayer’s promise.
5
A giant red balloon, soundless, motionless, a touch sinister, was suspended above Kensington, from one angle a question mark, from another a missile. It was appropriate to Cold War anxiety, also to my workaday routine, harshly won against emotional odds like a Viking raid, then finding solace in mystery.
Lust could not sizzle unremittingly. Prolonged labours dampened it. My monkish cell was filling with documents stale yet engrossing, letters useless but curious. So little reliable, so much obsolete information, like the Embassy itself with its creaking typewriters, inability to afford electronic dials and flashes. Even Mr Tortoise, tireless in help, in chores, admitted we were a hoax perpetrated on a complacent, indulgent kingdom. I envied Spender, reported addressing seventeen conferences in four continents within six weeks, then imagined him in an army, mildly raising his cap instead of saluting.
Nevertheless, my position did not abate my need for recognition and satisfaction with work. Unexpected discoveries restored the future. From an overlooked cache we learnt that Himmler’s behaviour could be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, that Stalin, 1938, agreed to join Britain and France against Hitler in return for regaining the Baltic States. Halifax, devout nobleman, friend of Gandhi, had allegedly refused to sacrifice democratic Christians to atheist dictatorship, Ambassador Thoma inviting us to consider whether the sacrifice of seven million Balts to prevent world war and holocaust was a worthwhile moral question.
My self-importance was enhanced by handling packages and microfilms marked ‘Strictly Confidential’. Increasingly, came names from long ago. Father’s uncle, fettered with barbed wire and thrown down a mineshaft, an Estonian minister deported to the Urals, on suspicion of reading Herzen. Echo of that victim of Jacobin Terror, guillotined for suspicion of being suspect.
Another name surfaced like a snout. A 1946 Soviet memo, leaked to General Oliver Lynne, Military Governor
of the British Zone, Berlin, described how, with the Reich ablaze, four SS seniors prised themselves free of Reichsführer Himmler, seeking help from the Swede, Count Bernadotte, later assassinated by Israelis. He was unofficially conferring with an old friend, the Herr General. Captured Abwehr archives also disclosed the Herr General’s connections with Swedish, Swiss, Anglo-American and Argentinian dummy companies selling the Nazis contraband lorries, oceanic maps, spare parts, fuses, electrical components, fed through conduits of such global complexes as I.G. Farben, the chemico-industrial monopoly, refining fats, lime, nitric acid and manufacturing synthetic rubber in one section of Auschwitz, place of bodies rotting for strange purpose. Farben specialists had provided very original analysis of blood, bone, hair, skin.
An uncoded letter was a précis of the Herr General’s correspondence with Helmuth Poensgen, Ruhr tycoon, subsequently accused of wartime deals with Wall Street and London banks. In one file many pages had been ripped out, but the Herr General must still be surmised as Soviet prisoner, executed or starved in a permacold camp, a fate more convincing than being strung from a Plötenzee meat-hook for complicity in the July Plot. Or, such were the conditions of War, Pact, Peaceful Co-Existence, just possibly residing on Long Island, courted by long-sighted undesirables.
More sharply edged was Mr George Blake, accused of betraying an Anglo-American tunnel dug beneath East Berlin, a project sufficiently plausible to make me halt on the Embankment and wonder whether the road-menders spoke English.
The French, whom their president had proclaimed as guardians of European culture, of civilization itself, having acquired forty boxes of gold from wartime Hungarian Jews, were refusing to release them. Today’s Times claimed that Soviet minders of the future Cambridge spies had, following the Pact, been summoned to Moscow. They handed over Maginot Line secrets, then were shot.
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