Again, next day, I perform the rape scene. I achieve this by turning my terror and hatred into love. It is easier to do than I imagined. I have no time in which to consider spiritual profit and loss. Only the moment becomes important. This is not an uncommon response, I gather.
Perhaps I think of Lif and Lifthrasir hiding in Mimir’s forest, sleeping in peaceful unconsciousness of the world’s destruction, until the time shall come when we can take possession of a regenerated earth? What fundamental wisdoms remain in those ancient stones? What lessons are there to be learned from that land of the waiting dead and old, still vibrant power? The Sahara obscures swiftly, but what it obscures it also preserves! Here is a world of secret magic, which could be brought to life by a random breath of wind; here the worlds of the here-and-now intersect with the worlds of the spirit and the stars. Here lie hidden long-gone ambitions, immortal yearnings that were never fully stilled, great and monumental dreams; here sleeps a living culture of archetypal loves and hatreds, where death is celebrated as the best and richest of all adventures and a host of gods, goddesses and demi-gods greet and welcome one’s new-fleshed soul. It is so easy to become confused between the realities and the imaginings of the ancients. They say there is a lush forest existing below the desert where the souls of the dead wait patiently for judgement. I, who am Osiris, am Yesterday and the kinsman of the Morrow . . . May your knives not impede me; may I not fall into your abattoir. For I know your names. My course upon earth is with Ra and my fair goal is with Osiris. Let not my offerings be in your disfavour upon your altars. I am one who follows the Master. I fly like a Hawk. I cackle like the Goose. I move eternally as Nehebkau. O Sovereign of All Gods, deliver me from that god who liveth upon the damned, whose face is that of a hound, but whose skin is that of a man, devouring shades, digesting human hearts and voiding ordure. One seeth him not. Deliver me from that god who seizeth upon souls, who consumes all filth and corruption in the darkness or in the light. All those who fear him are powerless. This god is Set, who is also Sekhet, the goddess. Sekhet is called ‘the Eye of Ra’ and is the instrument of mankind’s destruction. Deliver me from that god that is both male and female. May I not fall under their knives, may I not sit within their dungeons, may I not come to their places of extermination, may there be done to me none of those things which the gods abominate. It was what Quelch gave me before he abandoned us, that Book of the Dead. ‘It might prove useful to you,’ he had said.
There is more work for me, says Sir Ranalf. I am a star, he says. I am a genius. I am a natural. Who would have suspected such talent? Al-Habashiya, the negress, has instructed him to convey her approval. I know how and why I must earn more. I become weak. I think they are feeding me native food. I cannot hold it in. I continue to perform the rape scene. I rape her anus. I rape her mouth. I have no choice. If I am to rescue her and myself then I can only comply with their demands until the moment comes when we can both escape.
She does not understand.
She thinks I have betrayed her.
* * * *
TWENTY
MY SHIP is called The Ship of Death and she cannot fly. She drifts upon an infinite river of black mercury, beneath high shadowed arches as in some vast Stamboul cistern. She is crewed by the damned, steered by a blind man, captained by the Turnface. I perform the rituals of the dead. I perform the rituals of submission and remorse. By careful repetition I shall make my way through to that better world where every earthly dream is perpetually fulfilled.
I journey to the place where souls are weighed, where benevolent Anubis weighs our sins, the jackal weighs our sins. The dead have no choices.
I had no choices. They took us to where the darkness was. The darkness had a thick, vital quality, a great, slow intelligence at once malevolent and amused, at once agonised and triumphant; a sublime intelligence gone quite mad with grief and loss; as though it were, in the entire universe, the last of its species, grown selfish and utterly alone, without mercy or concern for any other living thing.
Here was Death personified. Here was pure Evil. Its name was Satan. Its name was Set. A nihilistic essence, it was at its most seductive in the person of its female avatar, the lioness-goddess Sekhmet, the Destroyer. They put a headdress on my little girl, some rosbif’s moth-eaten trophy, a snarling civet, and they called her Sekhmet, the evil one, whom I must vanquish with my magic, my manhood, for they made me a god. First I was Horus, the Hawk, son of Osiris, brother to Anubis the weigher of souls. Then every day I was resurrected as a new god. Every day my girl was freshly vanquished. It was our art, perhaps, but only the night world would ever applaud it. I knew about these films. Most of the time our directors, so long as we obeyed them in all other ways, let us wear our masks. They were contemptuously knowing; they understood that every day the concessions grew fewer and we were descending deeper into their world, became more thoroughly their creatures. I schemed to steal the films. Next they began to ration everything, our food, our drugs. We became disorientated and light-headed. There were naphtha flares fluttering amongst the electrics, the powerful scent of jasmine and roses, long black figures crawling between the columns, a stink of cheap tobacco and sweat. I wished them lingering deaths but we could not eat without their goodwill, we could not sustain ourselves. We could not live. They made us smile for them.
The negress was treated with increasing respect by everyone and it was soon clear that it was she to whom they all, even Sir Ranalf, deferred. She was always a faintly stirring presence in the darkness. Was she perhaps the darkness itself? Its human form? She stank of everything I most feared. With great respect they called her al-Habashiya, but I did not know what it meant. I would be taught only one name for her. The only name I would ever be permitted to utter. But that would come later. For many weeks I performed the rape scene. I became very weary and could not stop weeping. Eventually they took pity on me and let me rest while some of the crew did my work for me. But al-Habashiya insisted I remain present in the scene. ‘It will make for better continuity.’ Sir Ranalf’s eyes now stared all the time from red sockets and he had taken to wearing Seaman’s old wardrobe, most of which fitted very badly.
Occasionally I saw Quelch but he no longer looked at me. He did not seem satisfied with recent events and he had a haunted appearance as if he, too, longed to escape. Once, I recall, al-Habashiya offered to have him whipped and left naked outside the local barracks, a punishment normally reserved for blacks. Min darab el-walad es-saghir? Wahid Rumi nizil min el-Quads. Er-ragil misikni min idu. Fahimtush entu kelami? Ana kayebt gawab . . .
My ship is called The Sun, the source of all life. My ship is Ra, light of the day, brother to the moon. Gold married to silver in that forbidden crucible. My ship is called The Unknown World. Two lions guard her - one is called Yesterday and the other Today. The lioness is their mother, Sekhmet, Mother of Time, fierce Hater of Life. Her chariot is a fiery disc. She flies swiftly above the Nile, destroying all she detects. They say on the radio that Haydn was always jealous of Beethoven. I understand this. So many were jealous of my own genius.
I would not become a Musselman. Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich. Mein Kampf makes me sick. I could never read it. Yet Adolf Hitler was a brilliant man. He inscribed a copy to Clara Bow, hoping she enjoyed reading it as much as he enjoyed writing it. Poor Clara went mad, I heard, on some remote ranch, with a cowboy. I think Mein Kampf contained a truth I dared not face. Facing that truth drove Hitler mad. I did not wish to suffer the same fate. Let sleeping dogs lie, I said. Perhaps I was young. How could I blame myself? Such guilt is useless. It has no purpose. I, after all, was the one betrayed. Eindee haadha - ma eindee shee - haadha dharooree li-amalee . . Wayn shantati - wayn shantati - wayn shantati . . . They would tell me so little, even when I begged. I asked for my luggage, my plans, my books, my personal goods. They said my things were still in Luxor. They had been put in Sir Ranalf s care at the Winter Palace. I dared not mention my only valuables, Yermeloff’s black and silver Georgian pistols, sy
mbols of my Cossack heritage. I prayed they would not find them where I had hidden them in the Gladstone’s bottom, beneath work materials, notes and designs, mayn teatrumsketches, and the details of my Desert Liner! They were, I will admit, by then becoming decreasingly important in my mind for they all existed in the world of the living. Esmé and I now inhabited the world of the dead; ordered to mime the functions of life to earn our sleep, our food, the very drugs enabling us still to perform the rape scene. The drugs relieved some of the pain. It was clear we would never earn enough to pay back our debts. Though I could easily wean myself of any craving, I knew it would be impossible for her. Therefore I saw no point in refusing what was offered until such time as escape was possible. So we became the lady and the butler, the newly-weds, the slave-market, the office couple. We played many parts but with a certain sameness of plot. The more elaborate Sir Ranalf s demands upon us, the closer did al-Habashiya move her couch from the shadows to the set. Every day she watched us with mounting interest. She was a fleshy heavy darkness with burning eyes, gasping weightily, smacking red lips, until soon she was almost within the scene herself, exuding a sense of greedy urgency, then she would fall back and something would be purred in Arabic. Sir Ranalf would suggest a different angle.
They said they needed new backgrounds where we were less likely to be interrupted. They took us to a ruined Coptic chapel in the remote Western Desert. In the shelter of a wind-smoothed crenellated wall, al-Habashiya had pitched her gorgeous tent with all the proud display of a wealthy Bedawi.
The chapel was unknown to archaeologists, Sir Ranalf assured us, because it did not serve a camel route.
There was however a well where two etiolated palm trees stretched high into the arching clarity of the sky. In the distance the desert was broken by a ridge of muddy slate. We sat silently together, Esmé and I, while al-Habashiya shared a glass of sherbet with Quelch and Sir Ranalf. They stretched on couches arranged to enjoy the sunset better. We sat at their feet on the carpeted sand. ‘In Bi’r Tefawi,’ murmured al-Habashiya, ‘I have a villa and a garden. It is more peaceful there. I live in seclusion these days, though once, Professor Quelch, as you know, I ruled Cairo - or at least the Wasa’a and its environs. But then they arrested me.’ She drew lusciously upon her hukah. ‘I was put, eventually, into jail. It was not unpleasant. I was lucky enough to have friends there. But Russell Pasha himself had made up his mind to set an example. I was arrested again. They tried to confiscate my business interests. Russell Pasha was not then prepared to come to any sort of agreement, so I was forced to die in prison. I had no trouble arranging it. But I am used to a city. Exiled to the provinces one grows easily bored. It is very hard to kill so many hours.’
In the first months of my captivity this was one of the longest speeches al-Habashiya was ever to make in my presence.
I recalled Quelch’s stories of a creature who had sat unmoving all day on a bench in the Shari Abd-el-Khaliq, yet had controlled rigidly every aspect of Cairo’s vice. I remembered too that he was a transvestite negro of enormous size, who always dressed as a woman and veiled himself in white and would stretch jewelled fingers to be kissed by some passing servitor. Every Arab of the quarter was owned in some way by that grotesque. A silent, ebony idol, Quelch had said, more powerful than the king himself. Cairo’s most successful brothel-keeper, pimp, drug-dealer and white-slaver, a major partner behind half the ‘theatrical booking agencies’ in the East. And yet beautiful, Quelch told me. Once he had seen the negro’s face. Everyone who knew him agreed he was, despite his bulk, the loveliest transvestite they had ever seen.
For us all, however, al-Habashiya, if it were the same creature, remained veiled, mysteriously feminine. Those were the early days of our serfdom, when it seemed we must soon be released. They never raised their voices. They always spoke humorously. They merely offered us choices. Certain choices were good ones and we were praised for making them. Certain choices were bad and we were punished.
The injustice of this did not outrage me for long. I came to understand that I had entered a dream-time I must endure until I could wake and return to the reality and security I had known before. It was my only alternative to death. I came to appreciate Goethe’s notions of joyful revelation through pain, hardship and humiliation. I am, moreover, not of a suicidal disposition. Indeed, I am by nature an optimist. Is this Jewish?
The Future is Order, Security, Strength. On this we all agreed. But the Future is Beauty, Tolerance, Liberty, also, I said. Those will come later, they told me. That was when I lost my faith in the Nazis.
I was ‘too much of an idealist’. They still say so. Mrs Cornelius tried to convince me of this, on the Berlin tram, shortly before my arrest. She sent me clotted cream from Cornwall. By then I was on the Isle of Man. When I received it it was rancid. After that the rationing got worse. I was back in London in time for the Blitz. ‘They didn’t wan’cha ter miss nuffink, Ivan,’ yelled Mrs Cornelius on that first weekend together as we huddled outside a crowded makeshift air-raid shelter while the world turned to howling, heaving red and black and from above and all sides of us came the drone of engines, the banging of guns. Britain had expected to lose, you see, like Poland or Czechoslovakia or France. She had prepared London for siege, not for victory. They say Churchill was the last to accept that we survived the Battle of Britain. Even he was infected by that new, corrosive defeatism which comes from only one insidious source!
Even in those days Mrs Cornelius was coughing badly. Her cough was almost terrifying when I first heard it. It brought back the sound of my mother’s coughing, her retching and heaving over the washstand, as I waited patiently for Mrs Cornelius to come out of her bathroom. The rhythm and volume of their coughing fits was identical.
There are some memories which accompany such associations - bad ones, which I will not allow to emerge, because to dwell on them is pointless - and sweet ones, of summer gardens and happy outings, of the flowery fields around Kiev, the distinctive lavender scent of my mother’s best coat; the gorges, the woods, the old yellow streets and sturdy timber houses under gentle trees, of the busy Kreshchatik Boulevard with its scintillating store displays, its window-boxes and decorative baskets, the rich smell of the cafes and the chandlers’ shops; all the nooks and crannies of a true city, long in the building, making little shadowy places, safe places, caves and hollows and enclosures and sharp corners and mysteries in every sidestreet, grown naturally over centuries like a vast, wonderful shrub, thoroughly-rooted and profoundly implanted with the pattern of the past, for the memory of Kiev is the memory of the Slavic people, those warriors of the Eastern marches, the bastion of Christ against the ferocious and envying Mongol. This is why we understand so well what is happening today. Yet still you refuse to listen. You think you have a kind of peace? A pact with Carthage? Believe me, you have the Slav to thank for that. When he falls, as he must eventually fall, unless Christ sends a miracle, then it is an end to the old world. I would not wish to live in the mongrel, unruly new. Has Chaos already conquered? My ship is called Novaya Kieva, Novaya Mira, she is the Tsargrad, the citadel of our race and our faith! They tried to make me a Jew, a Musselman, their dog, but I deceived them. I was only acting. I performed the rape scene.
They took us step by step into the Land of the Dead. We licked our lips; then we rolled our eyes; then we grinned at the camera; and then we did everything again. As Sin of the Sheikh reached artistic unity the noble gods of Egypt, in crude replica, peered in alien distaste from alcoves once honouring saints. Step by step they coaxed and threatened us into the Land of the Dead, where in grotesque pantomime of the living, we endlessly performed our rape scene, where al-Habashiya, Queen of the Damned, would laugh and clap as a proud parent applauds her children. And one day she makes us come to her in her perfumed inner pavilion where eunuchs and hermaphrodites wait on all her needs. Would you now become a Musselman? No, I would not become a Musselman. Then you must be a Jew. Sweet little darling Jew-puppy. Soft little Yiddy-
widdy dinkums. This was how He rationalised His rape of me. That tide of black fat was never still, it flowed over me, it threatened to suffocate me, and yet there was a terrible hardness in it, as if at some point the tension would burst to reveal razor-sharp steel gashing through bloody flesh, the spring of its overwound energy, to destroy me. To cut me into nameless strips of meat. That fat black tide dragged me into a darkness worse than any pain. Little greasy Jewboy whore, momma’s darling, sweet darling arse. Obedient little cocksucking Jewboy filth garbage muck fuck English Jewboy whore bitch. She said was I a Moslem or a Jew? I said, a Christian. No, she said, a Moslem or a Jew? She told me what a Moslem must eat. She told me what a Jew could eat. A Jew, I said. I will be a Jew. There was a piece of metal in my womb.
They say the icecaps are heating up because of our industry. What an irony should Stephenson’s engine prove the direct linear cause of Alexandria drowning forever beneath the Mediterranean! The science of our Enlightenment drowning all that was ever of value to us. Is this any destiny I should be party to? How much more must I answer ‘guilty’? I am guilty of nothing. Unless I am guilty of wanting to improve the world! This is a crime?
They were offered my new Jerusalem, my new Rome, my new Byzantium, my flying cities of silver filigreed with gold, my glorious towers, my Eden, my independence of thought and movement, the ultimate democracies. But what did they settle for? Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Ho Chi Minh and the Beatles!