Yet in spite of every vicissitude I refuse to forget my true destiny. If I am the light and inspiration of Europe, I am also the secret protector of our civilisation, the scribe of our victories and our honour. I am Thoth. I am Anubis, recorder and guide in these days of our dying. Jane Austen does not impress me since she agreed to the role of a slut in that film called after some Dutchman’s surname. I saw it again last week. As Cleopatra she could have ruled my heart forever. But I am a stupid, chivalrous old Slav of a forgotten era. Anything I say is misinterpreted by that filthy-minded scum. I merely held her, after all, as I explained. I said nothing bad. My intentions were perfectly loving. Ach, Esmé, mein liebschen, mayn naches! What could I do to harm you? I was your brother, your father, your husband, your lover, even your mother! I was all these things. I cared for you when you were sick. Only I was all these things. Why would God take you from me? I still blame myself a little for that, but ironically this is not the guilt they would have me bear. They would rather blame me for the genocide! For all those millions of Slavs and Gypsies and Celts and Jews? I think not. If they had listened to me I could have saved every single soul of them.
But they traded with the Bolsheviks, they placated them, they made a friend of Uncle Joe. What did they expect next? That a mad dog should suddenly become a loyal old pal? That you could sleep beside him and not be amazed if your throat was not torn out by morning? I would have brought Light and Peace to our starving darkness. Hitler would have ruled a world of simple decency and benign opportunity, where natural selection would ultimately produce a perfect citizen living in a city worthy of the Nazi dream. But their Final Solution weakened their authority in many eyes. I am the first to admit it. I have seen Alexander’s body in its secret tomb. God showed me where it was hidden. God said Alexander belonged to Him now. That mighty Greek, the great evangelist for Christ, came to Egypt and established the first truly civilised city, which became the greatest in the world. The Greeks took the best from Egypt and Assyria, discarding the cruel barbaric decadence of those first noble Semites whom heartless ambition brought low. It is the fate of the Jew to fall victim to his own marvellous invention. Some call that city the birthplace of our Church, where St Mark converted the first Jew to Christianity in ad 45. Volvitur vota, as Quelch might have said.
I begged the Englishman to get a message to Goldfish. He said it was more than his life was worth. He gave me a dark red volume, a Book of the Dead. I was bitter. I said he had sold me into slavery. He avoided the accusation. ‘You people must be used to that sort of thing by now,’ he said. It was a meaningless remark. He pointed to the low hills. ‘There’s a railway line about a day’s walk that way. You could almost certainly reach it if you went on your own.’ Of course, he knew I would not leave Esmé, that she was still my responsibility. He was taunting me, he was delighting in my downfall. That evening I was whipped. I said I was a Jew. And Esmé was a whore, my sister, my rose. There was metal in my womb. I called an androgynous nigger musselman my mother and I asked it to forgive me. I told my mother that Esmé was a whore, a bad girl. It was one of the games she made us play. Anyway, what would you do if offered a choice between humiliating death and humiliating life? Life or death? Which would you choose? Some in those camps chose death. They wanted it to be over. But that is not my nature. I am more of an optimist. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away our child. You sold our little girl. Did you care that you hurt me? When kunte, Esmé? When kunte? Muta-assef jiddan. Bar’d shadeed. That false place of death. What did it matter if I admitted my sins? It was all false; nothing was as it had seemed. Quelch’s pronouncements on Egypt were proven. The world was false, a second-rate fantasy, a faded dream. Dust lay everywhere. We had arrived at dust. Yet the blood in our bodies still circulated. The limbs of our bodies still performed. Al-Habashiya still applauded and praised us and made me lay my head on his thigh while he fondled Esmé and played ecstatic Cairene hymns on his ornate gramophone. He promised he would find some Mozart for us. It was the same in Sachsenhausen. Mozart was supposed to make up for everything. I wore a black triangle, then. I was an engineer, I said. It was a concession, we said. Al-Habashiya stroked my head and cooed. Vögel füllen mayn Brust. Vögel picken innen singen für die Freiheit. Mein Imperium, eine Seele. Vögel sterben in mir. Einer nach dem anderen. Mayn gutten yung yusen. He stroked my head and called me his good little orphan, his sweet little Jewboy. It was better to obey than to endure that prolonged pain or agonising death. Esmé understood this better than I. It is how she too survived.
All those human bodies ploughed like bloody chaff into the furrows of barren fields. Was Esmé among them? I have a boy, she said. He’s a soldier. Did they ever understand what they took? Soulless themselves, they did not even recognise what they had stolen. They threw it away. They ploughed it under. But Russians know the truth. Every inch of Russian soil is nurtured by the souls of martyred millions who, down the centuries, defended their homeland. I spoke of this to Dr Jay in the hospital after they had examined my head. What makes the Jews so special, I asked. He agreed with me. He said he could find nothing physically wrong with me. Four days later I was free on the streets of Streatham. But I could no longer fly.
Kites rise from the mountains, from the Totenbergen, and red dust clogs my throat. You must get away from here, Maxim, she said. The people here are not sympatica. I think Brodmann had come to Luxor. I think I had seen him standing below the great clock in the railway station. He said he was English and that his name was Penny, but I guessed it was Brodmann. I was obsessed with Kolya. I was still looking for him. Al-Habashiya gave me some pyjamas. ‘Some stripes for you,’ she said. They were black and white. I saw Brodmann in Sachsenhausen. I recognised him and shouted at him. He answered with a hesitantly raised hand. What a superb actor that monster was! Binit an-san! But should I blame him? This century demands we join in a charade; it decrees the parts we play. It is only acting, I tell her. It is not really us. The pyjamas make my eyes shudder. The stripes stretch before me, merge and swirl and break open, like fragments of some vast psychic map.
I would not become a Musselman. Negra y bianco, noire et blanc. I lost you in the desert, Esmé. What brute makes use of you? Mrs Cornelius says she doubtless landed on her feet. ‘She was lucky enough for a while, Ivan. She never ‘ad no talent. Still, neiver did I, reelly.’
She was a great actress, I told her. ‘Your talent is recorded for posterity.’ This amused her. ‘Wot? In an ol’ can in a closed-down fleapit somewhere artside Darjeeling? Come orf it, Ive! Not exac’ly wot I corl immortality. I’ll take me chances m ‘eaven, rahver.’ She was too tactful to mention our Egyptian adventure.
My friend pretended to a kind of primitive pantheism, hut she was a Christian at heart. In 1969, moved no doubt by a profound piety she did her best to hide, she took up a position as caretaker in St Andrews, round the corner. But she found that cleaning on a Monday got her down. ‘Pews! Ya c’n tell why they was corled pews, orl right. Some o’ them worshippers must never wipe their arses!’
What do they do to me with their instruments? Those spikes! Those pyramids! My stripes! That golden ship comes to me out of a sky the colour of blue silver. Tomorrow the hawk will fly, I tell her. Oh, this filthy tide flows over me. There is a black sun warming me. Deprived of sleep, I dream most of the time. I dream of a future. They would murder you, Rosie. You are too intelligent for them. Mr Mix always insisted you were too good even for me. But I was better than Franco, you said, though he never took up much of your time. It was the same, you said, with Mussolini. As for Hitler, you kept silent. It was your ambition to sleep with every dictator in Europe, but you were not sure if you had fucked Stalin or just an understudy. ‘They are always so busy with details.’ You were fascinated with their power. You studied it as others study volcanos, moving further and further towards the rim until directly confronting the destructive heart. You slept with Franco by mistake. At that time he was only a colonel in an obscure garrison. We flew together, Rosie.
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I performed the rape scene. I was tired, I said. I needed more cocaine. It was not good for me, she said. Separate the Jewboy’s legs. And she would descend, like a warm blanket of flesh, to enfold my body. Only later would there be much pain and the terrible smells. I recall her schoolgirl giggling at my antics to get free. There! You are not tired at all, she said.
Sekhet comes with a knife in her hand for she is the Eye of Ra and her task is to destroy mankind. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away my little girl. I lost something in that shtetl. I am still not sure what it was. Bedauernswerte arme Teufel, diese Jude. Ich fing an zu frösteln. Meine Selbstkontrolle liess nach. Ich brachte Kokain. Ich kämpfe unter uberhaupt keiner Fahne! Ich stehe für mich allein ein. I had a similar experience in Prague. Who wants such charity? Höher und höher stieg ich uber der Schlucht, bis ich ganz Kiew unter mirsehen könnte, dahinter den Dnjepr, der sich der Steppe entgegenwand und auf seinem Weg zum Ocean den Saporoschijischen Fällen entgegenströmte. Ich könnte Wälder, Dörfer und Berge sehen. Und als ich wieder nach unten sank, sah ich Esmé, rot und weiss, die mich ... I flew, Esmé. Above the Babi Gorge. I loved you. You were my daughter, my friend, my wife. You were my childhood and my hope.
I performed the rape scene. He showed me how to make her scream so that on film it would look as if she were beside herself with passion, whereupon I was subjected to the same infamies while a second reel was shot. They were things a man should never suffer. He made me both a Jew and a woman. Whenever I could I reminded myself, through all the torment and the abuse, that I was neither. I was a true Cossack, a Lord of the Earth. I was Kiev. I was the sound of cavalry through the Podol. I was power, I had ultimate control over my own destiny. I was a scientist, an engineer. I could control the world and I could set the world free! I am a Jew, I said. Yes, I am Jewboy scum, but though my lips sounded the word my heart said ‘Cossack’, my soul said ‘Engineer’.
There was humour in those places, even between tormented and tormentor. We all shared amusement at our antics to stay alive. We connived at those appalling experiments in human cruelty not because we were any of us evil but because it was the only diversion available to us. To relieve our fear we told one another jokes about our own imminent deaths mid dismemberment. We participated in horror for its own sake. But I do not believe many of us were to blame. Our needs had not been for death, but for hope and for life. We nave power to men who had unequivocally promised us those things. If we wondered at their promises we did not challenge them with any great passion or suspicion. We had offered up in trust to them everything we valued, everything that was good. They were not simply collecting second-hand clothes. They wanted everything we possessed so that they could prove it was worthless. They were so greedy, those few. Yet great empires do not grow through greed, I said. They grow through need, gradually and through historical necessity. Those who would forge an empire in a few years are always thwarted. They always die, dishonoured by their own nations. Great empires do not flourish on war but on industry, trade and curiosity. Enlightenment follows such empires. Whatever inequalities they exploit, eventually they develop the idea of equality, of institutional democracy. Captain Quelch was that kind of old-fashioned imperialist. We met again on the Isle of Man, in 1940. He had suffered a great deal and had changed his name. His first words to me were ‘Hello, old man. How’s your sex-life?’ He had roared and embraced me, his face glowing with pleasure. I thought Seryozha was there, too, but sometimes I get the camps mixed up.
My main complaint against the Jews was their vulgarity. Ironically this loud, garish, uncontrollable, expansive race when brought to heel, and those wild, restless brains restrained, becomes even more overheated. In the frustration of their restrictions they become completely mad. This explains the outpourings of Marx and Freud, for instance. If left alone, I told Hitler, they merely quarrel amongst themselves and offer no threat to anyone. To me isolation seemed the best strategy. Hitler called me a Jew-lover. I thought he was joking. Two days afterwards I was discreetly arrested. Goering himself admitted it was a mistake. Later my engineering expertise, my natural wits and a certain amount of good fortune, earned me my freedom. We did not all die in those camps!
I have known passion and joy, the love of men and women. I have known success and I have seen a good deal of the world. I have known them all again, since 1926. So was my choice not the best possible choice? I am alive, nicht wahr?
My master said the English called her a pervert, did I know the word? I did. Was a pervert, she asked, worse than a Jew? No, Master, I said, a Jew is worse than a pervert. Was a Jew worse than a nigger? Yes, Master, a Jew is worse than a nigger. This was one of our jokes. And what are you, she said. I am worse than a Jew, I said. No matter, she played with my ears, I still love you. Then we would laugh together. Call me momma, al-Habashiya would say, reaching for one of her instruments, call me momma, dirty little Jewboy sweetheart. Momma! Momma! I was a Jew and Esmé was a whore. She still belongs to you, al-Habashiya was smiling. She is still yours. I hope so, I said. Oh, yes, she is still yours. Why, if you wanted to you could trade her with the Bedawi and become very rich. You could do it whenever you wished. Esmé smiled at her. We both smiled. We all smiled. She was my sister, my rose; but her innocence was gone. O, Esmé, how I wish you had not betrayed me. I did everything for you. I would have travelled wherever you desired. I would have made you my Queen. But perhaps you are no more to blame than I. We all have our moments of weakness. It did not change my love for you. I had no choice. I thought I would free us both. My Master says she must be worth, well, at least your drugs bill. You could sell her to me. I could pay your bill for you. Then we would be square on the matter. My Master’s beautiful hps are encouraging. Perhaps I could get to the police in Luxor? I do not care what happens to us so long as we get free of al-Habashiya. I do the best I can for us both. I agree to sell her to al-Habashiya. She now belongs to you, I say. I watch while she puts the sign of life on her inner thigh, branding the scarab on her. They all have it, if they are mine, she says.
I have discharged my debt. Now let me go to Cairo.
No, she says, we are going to Aswan. I have a large house and a beautiful garden. I am a respectable Egyptian dowager. Everyone knows me. If you are well-behaved, perhaps I will tell them you are my adopted son.
I am free of the debt. Let me go! Please, Master, let me go. But you are not yet out of debt, she says. You remain my property until you pay off your living expenses, your ongoing supplies of drugs, et cetera. I am, I think, generous in these matters of unpaid bills, at least while you remain in my charge.
I had not thought it possible for my despair to increase. We took the boat up to Aswan. Sir Ranalf was aboard but Quelch was no longer with us. Sir Ranalf was greatly irritated by this, doubtless missing civilised company since he and I were no longer allowed to communicate except when the camera was running. We spent the voyage, the three of us, in the viewing-room and watched while, over and over again, I performed the rape scene. The next night (here was just myself and al-Habashiya. At length I dared ask where Esmé was. Al-Habashiya was casual. She had been ‘sold on’, she said. She would doubtless fetch a handsome profit for someone in the Far East trade. Then my Master used me in my mouth while in black and white the rape scene flickered over us like the bleak lights of Hell.
I have never forgotten how cold and grey it was on the Isle of Man. I think there can be few camps as gloomy.
When I met Captain Quelch again he was a frail man, bent by scoliosis, but he retained his sense of humour. It was Quelch who told me of his younger brother’s fate and mentioned that he was sure he had seen Esmé on one of his runs along the coast near Shanghai. He was interned because he had been captured aboard a Japanese destroyer. There had scarcely been, he told me, any point in getting on the wrong side of them. ‘What the Japs do to the Chinks is no concern of mine. I don’t think the chaps in Whitehall believe I’m a traitor. Yes, I saw that little girl of yours - I would swear it was her
, though the hair was a bit brighter and the make-up a bit thicker, and I think she recognised me. Anyway, it was in a bar in Macao, just before Pearl Harbor. Esmé wasn’t her name. She had some sort of nickname, I think. Coasters often get called by a nickname. Everyone seems to prefer it.’
When I asked he told me a coaster was a girl who lived by her wits up and down the West China coast. She had not, he assured me, seemed to be doing that badly. ‘She was showing a few signs of wear and tear, you know.’ But I will never be sure it was Esmé. Which Esmé had he seen? It was pleasant to think, however, that no great harm was done.
The high walls of the house near Bi’r Tefawi, some miles from Aswan, were heavily but discreetly guarded. The gardens were beautiful, watered by a special system all the way from the oasis and shaded just enough so that the sun did not destroy them. As in most Arab gardens of this quality there were tiled fountains, though al-Habashiya had a preference, she said, for English flowers. There were poppies and roses, geraniums and hibiscus, most of them maintained by expensive fertilisers. The walls were white, trimmed in royal blue. Through the great part of the day I remained in the deepest chambers. Here I discovered I was not the only foreigner in al-Habashiya’s collection. They were all, however, male, female or neuter, completely addicted to morphine. I pitied them, knowing I could never succumb to a narcotic as they had. It is not in my metabolism. I must admit I found most of them despicable, even when I discovered how the younger ones had all been blinded or had been subjected to disgusting surgery. This increased my alarm and I determined to escape at my first opportunity, even though I was now beyond the edge of any kind of civilisation. Indeed, all my fellow-prisoners were quick to tell me how I was beyond any form of salvation. Most of the horizon seen from the roof of the house was Nubia.