My Master found it amusing, during those first days, to have me coupled with every other creature in his collection. It was, he said, the best way of getting to know people. Sir Ranalf sometimes came and went. I think he was organising the distribution of various commodities, including the films and still photographs. I prayed they would not use our footage with Mrs Cornelius. (I learned later that this had gone with Quelch who, typically, stole the only commercially worthless reels! Al-Habashiya asked me if I didn’t find it a capital joke and we laughed.)
My Master had a whim one day to play the gramophone again. He asked me if I were an aficionado of music. He adored Beethoven but he had particular fondness he said for the English moderns. Did I like Elgar? I had not heard of him. Now I am familiar with them all. I cannot bear them, perhaps because of the associations. Hoist, Delius, Williams, Britten and the rest are all the same. Sentimental mystic bum-boys producing formless rubbish worse even than the French! Make no mistake, I give the same time to Ravel and Debussy. Tchaikovsky was the last great composer. All the rest is nonsense. I wish I could find a copy of Song of the Nile. I advertised for it in the Gazette but the only answers I had were from ‘fans’ full of nostalgia for a non-existent past.
One cold night I am taken to the large courtyard and the building called The Temple. It is decorated in some bastard, chiefly Ptolemaic, style and dedicated to the lioness and the crocodile, the female and male forms of Set. There is an altar shaped like a couch, covered in fabric whose dark designs seem to my untrained eye more alchemical than Egyptian (perhaps the vestments of some Masonic Lodge) and behind this a great, tall throne surmounted by the head of a serpent, which is another form of Set. Thick candles cast fitful light, their tallow impaled upon ornate iron sticks and the thick yellow wax dripping heavily, as if stalagmites form in a cave. Before the altar fumes a red-hot brazier in which is placed a single iron. Al-Habashiya enters and sits carefully down in the throne, arranging fastidious silks as always, but now upon my Master’s head is the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, the wig and false beard of the Pharaoh, and al-Habashiya’s beauty is extraordinarily enhanced, grown vastly alien like the strangest of Akhenaton’s breed, the flesh beneath the silks wrapped in white gauze through which the dark brown fat rolls and ripples as if composed of a thousand other bodies, all struggling to be free. I have been fasted and I am glad of it, for I want to vomit. My terror has come back at the moment I thought I had learned to exist beyond it, separate from it, obedient enough to keep the worst pain at bay. I had not expected the agony to increase.
When the iron was put to my shoulder, the mark of the scarab, it was of little consequence. I was already contemplating an even more terrifying future. Today you can hardly see it. People think it is a birthmark, a tattoo, a scar. I tell them it is something I got at sea.
‘From this time on,’ says the hermaphrodite, ‘you will address me as God. Do you understand me?’ Al-Habashiya uses the English word.
‘Yes, God,’ I reply. Acquiescence is the only defence against inevitable horror. I did not think it blasphemy. In those days I had a more secular bent. In the camps, too, one had to lose such refinements.
God says He is pleased with me. He says I am thoroughly submissive and obedient. It is, He says, the Jew’s natural state. Surely I now feel that certainty of truth, deep in my soul, that resonance telling me I am fulfilling my properly ordained role in life. Yes, God, I am dutiful. I am fulfilled. I do not know if this is true or not. Sekhet is called the Eye of Ra, the Destroyer of Men. A pitiless lioness, she has no mercy. Her cold claws reach into your breast and clutch your heart. She says she is Set. She manifests herself as Set and becomes a male crocodile. That night we explore new depths of fear and humiliation and the snapping fangs seemed to draw back in a great grin but the darkness, though it grows very strong, is now familiar to me. I am almost part of it. Two are injured, a girl and a boy. God explains that He is the only healer and today He chooses to let them die. They are left in the garden to die. They are there for days. The flies become a nuisance.
God takes me to the garden where, on green lawns, little daisies and wild flowers blossom, a summer meadow where the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites and the blind girls and boys play. ‘What kind of religion dismisses the natural world in all her beauty and variety to praise an invisible world which it claims to be better than this?’ God has developed a habit of discoursing on comparative religions and on occasion His tone becomes somewhat hectoring, defending the Moslem faith while ascribing to Himself a pagan divinity. ‘What could be better than the world I have created here?’ He adds. He is massive in green and blue silks, a monstrous scarlet turban. ‘What is more like paradise than a tranquil English country garden in the glory of summer? What better can one do for oneself than provide some little sanctuary like this. Lie back for a moment against those roses.’ And while my back grows bloody from the thorns He uses me casually amongst His flowers, crushing me down amongst the nasturtiums, lilies and sunflowers - red, blue and yellow - green and blazing orange in the poppies - while the tranquil water plays - while the eunuchs and hermaphrodites whisper like the last of the summer’s wheat and the blind boys and girls smile into a blank future. And yet because there is hope in all beauty I remember that perfume, I recall those crushed leaves with all the pleasure of childhood nostalgia, the broken stems and scattered petals spreading across the tiles like wedding confetti (and our audience the ululating guests) while the damp, red earth, the old, almost lifeless earth, sustained only by Man’s constant nurturing, that dank mould clings to our bodies and enters our mouths as it entered the mouths of thousands before us, and clings to our flesh as it clung to the flesh of the dead, so many dead. And my body is bent over shrubbery of subtle greens and pinks and dark yellows, of white flowers with little scatterings of brown-red and myriad shades and shapes of green against the blue of a cloudless African sky. And you would condemn me if now I understand no other reality? What else can I know? I am the property of a god in some forgotten corner of Paradise where only He determines what should be called pleasure and what should count as pain, on what deserves to exist and what should be wiped out. I tell Him I am in anguish. He tells me I am not. I have no choice but to accept this and eventually grow as mad as God. I become a complement to God’s utterly lonely pursuits as bleakly He vanquishes boredom sometimes for hours, sometimes only for minutes when my pleasure or my pain is at its most intense. I can no longer distinguish these things, for my mind has left my body. I begin to suspect that God, too, feels little contact with His gigantic bulk and knows we are joined in a pact not to curb this condition but rather to maintain it. He hates His own flesh. This condition becomes our principal addiction, our mutual escape, and I begin to forget entirely the cause of my pain or my desire to escape. We grow together. My only reason for God’s permitting me to exist is that I am inventive in finding ways to relieve God’s ennui. There is a state of terror so absolute that it becomes an unconscious way of life. One exists in that state just as one might exist in a hostile geographical environment, on familiar terms with it, but never free of it. One performs the functions necessary to one’s survival but thought, as it is generally understood, disappears completely. One becomes a rapid instinctive reactor to familiar stimuli and, when unfamiliar, one adapts very quickly to learn what one must do to remain alive. I have known this high terror only a few times, in Russia, in America, in Egypt and in Germany. It would be obscene to pass moral judgement on anyone who was ever exposed to it. It amused God to explain how the subject (myself, for instance) was taught obedience by providing him or her with a series of narrowing choices. This, of course, was the scientific principle by which discipline and order in the camps was maintained. After my first arrest I witnessed it personally. God had one of the blind girls killed. He said it was a punishment and we must all watch her through the hours of her dying, but I think He was demonstrating something else, perhaps for me. I think I understood what I must do, but God would not tell me
. This is another means by which you are controlled, He said. By uncertainty. From time to time, therefore, He changed the rules. We had to learn the new ones very quickly. I was terrified He would grow bored with me, as He had grown, He implied, with the blind girl. She was useless, He said. He asked me if I could guess why He felt secure enough to tell me these things, to discuss the nature of His power over me and the nature of my will to serve Him. It is because You are God, I said. But I was wrong. He slapped my face impatiently and grew angry because I could not weep. There are no tears left in you. You are drying up, little Jew-angel. We must make you more interesting. Under the surgery you will begin to guess why I feel so secure. I am so glad you are intelligent. Most of these creatures, they hardly understand a word I say. I might as well talk to myself. But then you are part of myself, aren’t you, sweet, filthy Jewshit? And I must whisper that I love Her, that I love my mother, my goddess, Sekhet, who yearns with such bitter longing for Her own death and the death of the world. Yet still I am not ready to serve Her in the next world, She says. I have yet to yearn for death as She yearns for it, to want it more than life. God promises me the time will inevitably come to me as it comes to all Her creatures. It had come to the blind girl, God said. She had wanted to die. At any rate, towards the end. As we laugh at this I realise my own time has become finite.
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 death 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?