My friend responded with a brave shrug. He took Uncle Tom’s halter from my hand. ‘The camels are my chief asset. I have to sell them before I can do anything else. Uncle Tom I will try to keep, I swear.’
‘If necessary, you should get the best price for Uncle Tom,’ I assured him. ‘As soon as you reach the next large oasis.’
‘I will find you in Tangier,’ he promised, ‘and give you your share. After all, you helped get us this far.’
‘Perhaps.’ I gripped his shoulder. ‘Meanwhile you should be more sparing, old friend, in your use of drugs. You’ll have none left by the time you get to a city.’
‘Oh, I’ll not run out.’ We had reached the balloon and he reverted to mumbling mode, handing my valise and other luggage into the basket as I climbed in to help Signorina von Bek stow the bags into the lockers.
I reached over the side and, defying Bedouin custom, shook Kolya’s hand, then drew him towards me to kiss him. ‘Farewell, good friend,’ I said in Arabic. ‘May Allah continue to protect thee and bring thee safe to thy destination.’
‘Your slave really isn’t coming?’ Signorina von Bek seemed disappointed.
‘I have given him his freedom,’ I said. ‘He chose to take the camels and travel the lonely road of the Darb al-Haramiya. God goes with him. At least the camels will be well kept. He has a knack with the beasts. They are of great value to him. You see, Signorina von Bek, he is like me, a man of the desert. Unlike his master, however, he cannot imagine being happy in any other world. So it is. We are made as we are made. It is God’s will and God will protect him.’
There was nothing else I could add. My friend had chosen his path and it was no longer right for me to question his decision.
I believe there were tears in my eyes, however, when I waved goodbye to him. He released our last tethering ropes and we rose rapidly, crying ‘godspeed’ and ‘farewell’. I watched him with pounding heart as he turned, beginning the trudge down to what remained of his fortune. Poor Kolya! I had hesitated to tell him that I had transferred some of our load to my own bags, for safety’s sake, long before I had arrived at the oasis. I had three pounds of cocaine, a pound of heroin and four pounds of hashish, all removed from their hiding-place in the pack camel’s humps. This had depleted the cargo quite considerably, since Kolya had already consumed a large part of his share between Khufra and Zazara. On the other hand I had certainly saved him from himself and there was now far less danger of his being robbed for the remaining drugs.
I hold no brief for ‘dope-dealing’ and would never willingly be involved with it, but I had come unwillingly to the trade so it seemed fair to me I should take some profit from it. There would be no difference, in the end, to its use.
Signorina von Bek was leaning away from me, studying the outer canopy, relieved to see that the repair was holding. Her lips parted in a wonderful smile as she took stock of the horizon widening as we rose, with no sensation of thrust, high into the wide blue Saharan sky. ‘You are clearly a man,’ she said, ‘who cuts his own road through this life.’
I appreciated her recognition of my individuality but I remained cautious, determined not to flunk my chosen part. I could not afford to be discovered. ‘With Allah’s guidance,’ I said. ‘And as Allah wills.’ I looked down at the oasis. I could still make out my friend, a perfect homunculus, scrambling towards the tiny pool, his miniature animals.
‘Oh, see!’ Signorina von Bek pointed with excitement towards the east. ‘There they are! How jolly! Those are the Arabs who shot me down! Thank goodness we’re on our way. Will your slave be all right?’
I looked across the dunes of the great Sand Sea. Riding with lordly languor towards Zazara, their elaborately-worked long guns cradled casually in their arms, their cruel eyes only visible from within their veils, came the same Tuareg party we had seen weeks ago near al-Jawf. It was inevitable they would discover Kolya before he could get clear. For a moment I looked towards the Gatling, thinking I might scare them off, but they were hardly in range and I had no idea how the basket would behave in concert with the force of a powerful machine-gun.
They had sighted us now. They raised their rifles to their shoulders, their legs curled tightly around their stuffed leather saddles as they took aim. But their salvo either fell short or missed us and while they reloaded we had gained more than enough height and distance to be safe from their primitive firepower.
Unfortunately for Kolya, however, a few hours of freedom were all God would allow him for the moment. He was about to become a hostage again.
‘What was your man’s name?’ she asked me, busying herself with her lines.
‘Yussef,’ I said.
She came to stand beside me at the rail. ‘And you are Mustafa. I do not think we need to be formal any longer.’
Signorina von Bek put her hand firmly into mine. ‘You must call me Rosie,’ she insisted. ‘I’m so relieved to have the protection of a genuine Bedouin prince. As a matter of fact you do look rather like Rudolf Valentino. Though more refined.’
The Tuareg and Zazara and all our troubles were behind us. As our balloon sailed gracefully into the bloody light of the setting sun I embraced my Rose.
* * * *
TWENTY-THREE
THE ESCAPE of sexual fantasy was no longer open to me. Instead I found more cerebral diversions. E si risuelgo da quel sogno di sangue, con ispavento, con rimorso, e insieme con una specie di gioia . . . Those stripes were white and the bars were black. Ripe stars teased my lips. Yusawit! Yuh’attit! Yuh’attit! Yukhallim. Yehudim. Yukhallim. Ana ‘atsha’an. Bitte, ein Glas Wasser. They refused to understand me. I never became ein Musselman. Dawsat. Walwala. I heard him. It was not me. I heard him betray us. Yermeluff. Yehudim! Yehudim! Gassala. Meyne pas. Meine peitsche. Meyn streifener. Meine Herzenslust. . .
Sometimes, in the desert, I had prayed for Faith. How I had envied my fellow-worshippers. Yet how many of them were also praying merely for social reasons?
I flew. I lived. The world below was washed by a golden tide. Atlantis emerged from the vibrant dust. My stripes were silver. They were ebony. They could not hold me in their cattle-truck. I refused to be identified. He was no Volksgenosse of mine. I said so. My eyes had never known such beauty; my soul had never experienced such tranquil security. We drifted on that desert wind; days and nights of wonder. And she brought me back to the Land of Life and restored my future.
‘You are familiar with Manzoni!’ she declared. I did not admit it was only in the Russian translation. . . . di non aver fatto altro che immaginare ... Be nice, he said, be nice. Be sweet, he said, be sweet. Oh, Dios! Oh, Jesus! Que me occurre? Sperato di diventare famoso. Qualcosa non va? ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that you have given me a privileged insight into the Arab mind.’ Gracefully, I accepted her compliment.
In the mornings and the evenings we sailed high above the pink and ochre Sand Sea, free from concern, but at noon, when we drifted to our lowest point, we had to be alert. The temperature could rise to 140°. More than ever, the landscape below us might have been that of the Red Planet. I imagined gigantic guns buried beneath the sand, ready to hurl their capsules to the sweet air of Earth: the deadly air of Earth. Here, in the desert, all death was honourable, all life was celebrated. Eroded mountain ranges and seas of constantly agitated sand, soft as silk, deadly as cyanide, fell away below us, mile upon mile, glittering lakes of salt, rivers of obsidian. The dreaming desert awaited a miracle that would restore it, tree by tree, animal by animal, river upon river, field upon field, city upon city, to its gorgeous past. Yet, I wondered, what hybrid might arise? How long had these wastes been nourished with Carthage’s blood? A quei tempi c’eramo oceani di luce e citta nei cieli e selvagge bestie volanti di bronzo . . . Por que lo nice? Du bist mein Simplicissimus, she said. But that was much later. Now as we drifted over those timeless landscapes beneath unchanging skies, I became her master and her teacher, her most intimate friend; yet had no desire to penetrate her. We lay entwined while
a hard wind drummed against the great canopy and set the ropes and basket to a bass thrumming. An extraordinary noise, it filled the desert like the heartbeat of Arabia. We had no sense of danger as we continued to drift towards the west, towards Algeria and Spanish Morocco. If we did not come down on the mainland, she said, we might have to put down in the Canaries, which were also Spanish. We would be welcomed by the Spaniards. ‘I have several friends in the colonial service. But the Riffians are all over the place since Abd el-Krim capitulated. Some of the outlaw gangs have a thorough hatred of Europeans. Even you, Sheikh Mustafa, would be unable to protect me.’
I reminded her that I had seen her handling the mitrailleuse and did not think she would require much protection! This remark was not received as flattery. Rosie von Bek helped me solve no mysteries of womankind. Rather she presented me with fresh ones.
I came to my senses beneath the bright stare of heaven, in the arms of the one Kolya had called the destroyer and whom I called Rosa. My rose. War’di War’di, ana nafsi. Sarira siri’ya. D’ruba D’ruba. She wondered at my stripes, my whiteness, and I made some mention of prison and the Turkish heel. ‘You have not always known power, sidhi?’ She was sympathetic.
‘A truly faithful man accepts the will of Allah. I am glad to say I have walked the path of humility.’
She murmured that humility did not seem to be my most obvious trait. I smiled at this as I toyed with my full, black beard. ‘You must know our saying - the doe shall always kneel to the stag. Such things are also determined.’
Through her desire I found my manhood again. I found my power. I was restored. She gave herself up to her imagination, free from any restraint, certain she should have no witness save the vultures, the eagles and myself, whom she called her Hawk - al Sakhr. But her escape was denied me; my pleasure came purely from the thrill of my recaptured sense of power, of self. She gave me back my world of dreams, my cities and my soul. This is the gift that Woman offers Man. Only a churlish oaf refuses her. Here is a true union of flesh and spirit, such as St Paul spoke of. And yet I was for her a figure from romance; she saw nothing of the real Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, of Ace Peters, conqueror of Hollywood. Instead she saw in her image of me an altar on which she might sacrifice her selfhood, to be reborn, the Eternal Feminine. I was, in that sense, immaterial.
Often, when she spoke of her childhood and youth in Albania, Italy and Spain (where she attended convent schools), it was as if she mused aloud, content that while I failed to understand some of her words, I would never fully grasp her meaning. In this she was right, for she spoke sometimes in Albanian, sometimes Italian and frequently in English. I was only fluent in English, although I had picked up some Italian during my stay in Rome with Esmé, before we went to Paris. She spoke fondly of a certain Bon-bon. After a time I came to realise that Bon-bon was the present Dictator of Italy. Clearly she still had affection for him, but equally clearly there had been some kind of falling-out. The threat of a public scandal and pressure from close family members had interfered to destroy their idyll. She also believed he had taken an interest in an American heiress, ‘one of the Macraineys’, and was incapable of sustaining a passion for more than one mistress at a time. ‘But then his feelings about women are very clear.’ Turning to me she asked, ‘You have read the novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress?’
I admitted that I had not. I had little time for sensation tales, I said.
‘It is by Mussolini himself,’ she said. ‘I read it before I ever met him. He already displayed in that work everything Italy needed to restore herself to her old pre-eminence. He is a romantic with a strong sense of discipline.’
Save for Fiorelli, I hesitated to speak of friends in Rome. Several had been early converts to the Fascist cause. But I would have to explain too much. I had become fascinated with the character she and I between us had created for me, to our mutual benefit. Kara ben Nesi was my model, I suppose, the great German scholar-adventurer of Karl May’s Durch die Wüste. I had read these as a child, in Kiev, in about 1912. May was one of the few novelists my teacher, Herr Lustgarten, approved. He was properly philosophisch, he said.
Lasst hoch die Fahne des Propheten wehn;
versammelt euch zum heil’gen Derwischtanze!
Zu Narren soil man nur in Maske gehn;
die wahre Klugheit lebt vom Mummenschanze.
The irony only became clear years later. The British claim everything for themselves. They claim universal myths as their personal experience. Is it any wonder Europe became impatient with them? One can accept so much self-proclaimed piety.
To my astonishment, Rosie von Bek had no experience of the benefits and enjoyments of cocaine and I had the privilege of introducing her to this wonderful fruit of nature. She was astonished - Simply flabbergasted! - as she put it, by the way the drug amplified her imagination while it sharpened her senses. Now the subtlety of our intimacies became deeply intricate; we created arabesques of sensation and emotion, of peculiar and intellectual invention, almost abstract. While I gasped in Goethe’s German, she breathed the earth of Florentine Italy, of barbarous peaks moulding the fierce beliefs and desires of Albanian brigand chieftains, warmed me with the flame of limitless passion, driven to greater spiritual and sometimes physical risks by the coolness of my own responses. At least I did not fear flesh any longer. In our different ways we both experienced the same extraordinary spiritual union. We were a single, all-destroying creature - heat and cold, male and female, good and evil. New Homo sapiens, androgynous, omnipotent, eternal.
It was an impossible union and yet a natural one. Bismarck had known the beauty of such equilibrium, the balancing of masculine against feminine. Adolf Hitler, representing proud masculinity, and Benito Mussolini, representing the spiritual, feminine side of the fascist discipline. Left alone, I think they would have made perfection: German practicality married to Italian flair. Had they not been set, one upon the other, by petty rivalries the great dream would have flourished. There were certain personality problems between the two charismatic leaders, I will admit. But this is true of all brilliant marriages. They were on the move - too busy to make virtues of their differences. I think, perhaps, it was the same with me and Rosie von Bek. We were almost too strong for one another. In nature, such forces, such grand and noble opposites, sometimes need only a whisker’s touch to send both spinning helplessly from their orbits. While we remained aloft, without responsibilities or fears, we had our perfect universe. But eventually, the dreamer must look to the commonplace for his sustenance. If he resists his conscience’s demands he resists experience; he resists reality. He loses his grip. I was determined that this would never happen to me. Of course, I blame the Jews. It is in their interests to involve the world in abstractions.
Yet that blissful episode remains forever exquisite.
Many women have loved me. I have made love to many more. But there are only three women who are to me what my organs and my flesh are to me. What my own heart is to me. The first is Esmé, the innocent, wondering Esmé, my sweet sister, my little girl; the second is Mrs Cornelius, whom I loved for her sanity and her deep relish for ordinary life; the third is Rosie von Bek.
The light fell through the bars of the cattle-truck and made a pattern of black and white against the walls which stank of disinfectant. I am not the only human being alive today who cannot smell disinfectant without immediately fearing for his mortal existence.
Others flinch at the aeroplane’s whine or the car’s backfire. For me it is a public toilet at five in the morning. These stripes pursued me. Even in the basket they fell through ropes and guidelines to form bars across the yellow weave and trace Zion’s stars upon the Moorish carpets she had heaped there; a lattice of portent, it began to seem to me. Sometimes during the long, drifting days, I sat and read her Sexton Blake stories. These taught me about the politics of the Middle East as well as English domestic life. They introduced me to imperial complexities and gave me a quiet respect for those citizens of the
Empire who shouldered their moral burdens. Here were the new Knights of the Round Table bringing enlightenment and Christian ethics to the dark places of the world. Rosie also had some old Italian film magazines, one of which showed myself and Gloria Cornish in Ace Among Aces and, in the same issue, advertised The Lost Buckaroo, but of course it was not then in my interest to point the films out. Sometimes I put down my Case of the Roumanian Envoy and merely stared at the patterns made by the sun through a net of lines and basket-work. Sometimes she and I would discuss their meaning. She insisted that I introduce her to the more doubtful pleasures of hashish and morphine. Happily, she did not respond well to the morphine and indulged only occasionally in the hashish, usually with tobacco after a meal. It was extraordinary to lean against the gondola’s brass rail with the sky and the desert at my back, to watch that beautiful woman, softly naked, cooking a delicious Albanian snack over the muttering engine, careless of any danger. I had never known a woman like her. Neither Esmé nor Mrs Cornelius were as careless of their comfort. I can close my eyes and smell the desert now. There is no comparison for that smell; almost sweet, almost alive. The heat of the African beast, the patient monster. I can smell her perfumed sweat, rose and cunt and garlic on her mouth, and I can smell my own cool manhood. I regained my skills and they were now informed with a subtler knowledge. I handled her as a musician his instrument, to celebrate its beauty and its sensual potentiality. Here I became again what I had always been but which I had been made to forget at Bi’r Tefawi. I was Ace Peters, star of the screen; Maxim Pyatnitski, inventor of the Dynamite Automobile, the Flying Wing, the Television. And I was al Sakhr, the Hawk of the Sahara. I was whatever I would wish to be or had ever desired to be. My vision and my future were restored. I saw again my cities, gold and silver, white and ebony, thrusting into the blue pallor of a Saharan evening. I saw an orderly future, where justice and equality were the common expectation. I saw escape from the grey ruins of my Russian homeland, from the squalor of the Constantinople alleys, from the wretched poverty of an Alabama shanty-town or a Cairene slum. I described some of my ideas to Rose and she responded with enthusiasm. I must certainly come back with her to Italy. Her absolute faith was invested in Il Duce. He was a man of the people, a great-hearted poet-politician like his friend D’Annunzio, who had put his own army at the Leader’s disposal. He was also a sensitive, moved only by a hatred of poverty and misery. But he was finally a great realist. He understood that the Italians would never improve on their own initiative. They needed strong, but humane, leadership. She told me of an Italy encouraging the arts and sciences. ‘II Duce calls us all to the service of his noble social experiment - everyone! The greatest writers, engineers, scientists and painters of our day are shoulder to shoulder in modern Rome.’ This was very like the opinion of the only clear-sighted American I ever met. When I knew him he was a journalist, then got a reputation as a poet. I understood nothing of that world. His championing of his fellow-poets was enough to put him in prison. I myself enjoyed the horrors of the Isle of Man. It does no good to speak for fairness and proper credit in this world.