The book could not distract me. I began to pray for the very death I would tomorrow refuse and was babbling some foolish smattering of Old Slavonic to myself when my door was opened. ‘I have several hours, yet,’ I pleaded. ‘It is not morning.’ There was no light behind the figure. He was illuminated entirely by my reading-lamp which cast a warm orange glow over his white linen thob, his cream and white silk zebun and his rich blue wool aba. In such princely nomad finery I guessed him to be God’s executioner. I prayed for him to be only an hallucination conjured by my terror.
Then he had pushed back his headcloth to peer hard into my eyes and grin with delight at my astonishment.
‘Kolya?’ (Perhaps this was a finer form of madness than I had understood possible?)
He knelt. He took me in his arms. For a moment an expression almost of compassion crossed his face. Then he frowned. ‘Ugh! You stink like a Prussian whore. Get to your feet, Dimka my love. We have to try to reach Libya before the British arrive.’
I asked him where God was. Where were the guards? I began to feel this to be another of God’s games. Doubtless He now owned Kolya, too.
But Kolya did not understand my first question. ‘The creature’s guards were bribed. They were growing nervous at their master’s excesses. God? What do you mean? Did you have a vision, Dimka?’
‘Al-Habashiya.’ I summoned enough courage to whisper the forbidden name. If I dreamed, I could not be harmed further.
‘Oh!’ He moved his fingers across his chest and then shrugged. He reached down to pull me upright. ‘God is dead.’
The scarab is unrecognisable, burnt off in the accident. I do not think I could have lived with it on my body. Even the scar is loathsome. I would not speak of those events, not even to Kolya, who had some idea of what had transpired within God’s garden. He had seen the pit, he told me. He had decided to leave it for the authorities to find. They were less likely to pursue al-Habashiya’s murderer for long. I began to record this only after Suez. I felt it my duty. People should understand the influence of Carthage. They should know what it is to exist in a world where perverted negroid Semites enjoy the power of life and death over us. All I can do is warn you. I have sent these accounts to every newspaper and radio programme in the country. Most of them ignore me. Reveille ran a story but they made fun of me. sammy davis jnr secret world ruler says polish mystic was their headline. You can imagine the rest. Some say I disgust them. Certainly it is disgusting, I agree. It happened to me. They think I am not disgusted? I am one of the few who survived with sanity and my speech intact. Without studying evil we cannot resist it and we can so easily be deceived into taking the wrong path.
I told Kolya that God was a darkness to me and that something of myself had grown to love Him. Kolya said that it was always possible to find a little scrap of darkness in one’s own soul, some scrap that longs to join the greater darkness and share in the power of its Prince. It is what we mean by Original Sin. His understanding of religious matters was considerable. He had spent some of his youth at a seminary. He understood the Greek creed far more thoroughly than I ever shall. At that time, however, it was of little comfort to me because I was beyond comfort. I was beyond emotion and sensation. Listlessly, I let my friend hurry us through the gates to the waiting camels, who groaned and complained at being awakened so early. He made me mount a tall, pale doe who got to her feet with all the offended grace of a dowager instructed to remove her chair from the park’s verge. Then he perched himself on his own beast’s hump, tugging on the rather large number of pack animals, goading my animal forward with his long whip and thus propelling us all willy-nilly into the cold night. An oily stink was drifting from the house. It stayed with me for hours. Only as the desert air cleared my lungs did I realise how familiar I had become with the smell of death.
‘I sold her to him,’ I said. ‘She was sold on . . .’
By dawn, out of sight of the house and its surrounding palms, we pressed into the deep dunelands. Kolya said it was our only alternative to capture. The British came and went as they pleased in the Sudan. Beyond Sudan the only place worth going was Kenya, which was also British. Neither of us, he said, would benefit from being interviewed by the British. Besides, he had friends in Libya. He made us pause while he consulted a map and took a compass reading. I, being convinced that this whole episode was a mental escape, some hallucinatory salvation, merely grinned inanely and wondered vaguely when the pain in my eye-sockets would begin to penetrate this glorious madness.
I think that was the point at which I fell from my camel. Next, I was riding across Kolya’s pommel while he steadied me with one arm and guided our team with his free hand. Still half-swooning I stared up into his handsome strength. He might have been one of our legendary Slavic heroes. I thought how much he resembled a refined Valentino, and then came a pang of memory for The Sin of the Sheikh.
Seeing me wake, Kolya directed my attention to the vastness of the pale dunes ahead, the true Sahara, which the Bedawi feared and hated, that most dangerous and unforgiving of oceans, where quicksand could without warning swallow you and everything you owned, sending you to populate the buried city of some forgotten race, to join those who had already marched down the centuries to fill the dead but perfect streets.
‘It’s to be a long journey, Dimka my dear, before we get to where we have friends.’ He sighed. As he stroked my head I became calm, perhaps mesmerised, but the quality of fear was duller. I still believed I was looking upon my executioner, even when he kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them to my lips. ‘Ah, Dimka, Dimka!’ He regarded with mild exasperation the uncountable miles of pale brown sand. ‘So little to say and so much time to say it in!’
We rode without pause until noon, and I still waited for the pain to impinge. It was easy to see how madness could be God’s mercy; how peasants still believe the insane to be blessed. Or was I already in Heaven? I determined to appreciate the moment, never hoping it would continue for long. As we set off again, Kolya pointed to one of the bundles bouncing on a pack camel. ‘Your valise, Dimka, I think. That’s how I first found out you were still here. It was in Steeton’s quarters at the Winter Palace. I thought I’d bring it with me. Any good?’
I giggled at this fancy.
The Western Sahara embraces and threatens us with her infinite waves of sand, shifting with implacable slowness. On this Netherworld Sea suddenly looms a great funeral barge, some vivid beast-headed benevolent at her helm, remorselessly rolling towards us, carrying the stark, clean smell of a desert death. If, by chance, I have been released, blind, into the desert, then I am compensated by the steadily improving quality to my mirages! When we next stop to light our evening fire, I open my Gladstone. Here is everything except the main specifications for my Desert Liner. My books, my pistols, some money and other personal things, my whole identity is returned to me. Yet still I refuse to hope that this is anything more than an illusion clouding over the fact of my unbearable blindness.
I hardly wish to consider an even more terrible alternative - that my oldest and greatest male friend has been commissioned to destroy me, as I was instructed to destroy the blind boy.
My ship was called The Esmé. Pink as the Egyptian dawn, gold as the Egyptian night, soft and gently warm, her perfume was the scent of life itself. She was the loveliest of all my dreams. She would have risen in the morning, so pure and vigorous, and everyone who saw her would have gasped at her virgin beauty.
My ship was called The Stolen Soul and even in her ruined state, everything smashed and scattered and looted, she had an aura of noble vitality; a pure sense that once she had served her people well and with grace.
‘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 i
t 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 ‘Father 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.