The rituals by which we order and contain our terror of death are as varied as they are immutable. Before we ever dare to re-examine and perhaps change them we defend them by herculean efforts of the imagination, sometimes to the very death we most fear. I remarked on this to Kolya. ‘Is there a vicious circle of terror and tyranny which is destined to enslave forever even the most enlightened of us?’ He thought this was a pointlessly pessimistic question brought on by my ordeal. He saw in everyone, no matter how degenerate or immoral, a spark of goodness which would always respond to what he called the ‘reasoning voice of love’. Only rarely did there emerge a truly terrifying intelligence which could take even that spark of goodness and corrupt it.
I was relieved, when he mentioned this idea, that I had been unable to kill the blind boy. I remember an old rabbi telling me that when he was asked, ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ he would say ‘God was there with us, violated and blasphemed. Ask rather - Where was Man in Auschwitz?’ For my own part, I never became a Musselman. I still know exactly what he means.
I told Kolya how Esmé had betrayed me; how I had given up the chance, nevertheless, of escape without her. I still hoped to find who had bought her. He was oddly unsympathetic, but he had not known her as well as I. I was surprised, however, at his next response. ‘I doubt if you will ever realise the extent or the nature of her suffering. I would imagine that, perhaps on a level she dare not admit, her anguish is now nearly unbearable.’
I laughed. I might imagine him to be in love with her himself! But now I think he meant, like Mrs Cornelius, that it might have been better if I had never taken her from her Constantinople whorehouse to offer her a future in Hollywood. She did not possess the character for it. But at least she had more than most girls of her type who are merely promised such things!
This was to be the last rigorous step of our journey into the desert. At night, when it grew chill, tents were pitched for almost a mile along the trail and fluttering fires disappeared into infinity. From everywhere came the aroma of cooking, of hot charcoal, of dung and urine, of spices and perfumes, of animals mid men. I wondered if it had been like this in the Old West, on a wagon train, or perhaps more closely a great cattle-drive such is the brothers Butch and Hopalong ramrodded into Mexico. I saw it on the television. The cowboy films are the only things that have any real morality, these days. Sometimes I hope in all the Hoot Gibsons and W.S. Harts they will turn up one of mine. But those days are too distant for them. Our work is no longer entertainment, it is now a social archive. They want to forget those old lessons, I suppose. Even John Wayne seems happy to play some Falstaffian lawman in mockery of all he ever stood for, so I do not hold out much hope. The Western no doubt descends into sensational bloodshed, substituting violence for technique, like the detective story, the exotic romance and the chiller.
At this time of year the day’s heat was not unbearable; for Russians, used to the most modest summers, we adapted well. We took the precaution of wearing thick headcloths and veils against the glare and dust while we did everything ‘Arab-fashion’. We were sparing with all our supplies, even the cocaine. I was surprised at the quantity and quality that he carried. He was amused. He told me mysteriously that the hump of the camel was the choicest part of the beast. Had he murdered al-Habashiya for his drugs? He laughed. ‘That fat pervert got into a business dispute with someone who had his measure, that’s all. Nobody will mourn him. But yes, I think we are probably both hoping to escape, if that was your implication. I need to be my own man again, Dimka dear. I would like to be free of Stavisky and there could be an opportunity in the offing. I could still be his agent. It depends who is waiting for us at al-Khufra. Meanwhile no one will spend much time searching for us, even if they see our tracks. They will not know who we were. The news will travel through the underworld, as it must, and those who do know us will assume us killed in the dispute. There was, you know, quite a quantity of corpses and general shambles in the end. Poor, silly Sir Ranalf was left holding a somewhat messy baby. But he’s been a lazy beneficiary of al-Habashiya’s bounty for many years. He’ll no doubt be paying a proper price for his pleasures.’
I was thinking of the film. There must have been miles of it. Could its origins be identified? Somewhere in the world, even today, my poor, scarred black and white bottom rises and falls between bruised little legs as I perform the rape scene and few who watch will even think the people on the screen are real, will even want to ask how they came to be there. If they watched it today they would be howling with laughter at our quaintness. It makes me wonder if our increasingly abstract society is not wholly the creation of Mr Kodak and his colleagues.
I told Kolya that I would not feel easy until we were in Europe again and all this far behind us. I pointed out that I no longer had any identity papers. ‘I left your passport behind deliberately,’ he said, ‘and changed my own for something more suitable. That gives us a double opportunity.’ That night in our tent he showed me a variety of passports he had taken from al-Habashiya’s. ‘I was looking for money. But he was too old a dog to keep much there. At least we can take our pick of identities now, Dimka dear. I know a man in Tangier who can work wonders with documents.’ His hope was to get to Tripoli and from there reach Tangier by ship. From Tangier, with new identities, we could go anywhere we wanted.
The pile of passports disturbed me, recalling a dozen ghoulish images, but I said nothing. Indeed, I still had little urge to speak, even after five weeks in the desert, and publicly contented myself with the grinning gesticulation which so pleased the other travellers. Alone with Kolya, I mostly sat and wept. Frequently, with superb tact, my friend would leave our tent and stroll about in the desert, sometimes for hours at a time, respecting my grief.
The stink and constant bustle of the caravan became a familiar comfort. There was always an incident, usually domestic, always gossip and banter to while away the patient hours, and the five prayers gave a welcome structure to the day as we proceeded at a camel’s walk across the hostile waste of sandstone, dust and biting winds, of unwholesome heat and wells gone dry, of yielding dunes and barren wadis on a trek that was for some of us the first stage of a journey the equivalent of a walk from New York to Los Angeles - three thousand miles of desert, of sudden death and infinite boredom. Those extremes created the Arab’s unique soul and made him such a frustrating enemy, forever changing sides on a whim; for an Arab is a fatalistic and practical creature used to thousands of years of unchallenged despotism. He is encouraged by his religion to submit, encouraged by his traditions to aspire to power through a cruel despotism, for shame and pride are his poles, and his society demands of him at least a well-advertised display of violence. The Israelis have learned his language. They have given up trying to speak to him in the reasoning vocabularies of America and Germany.
I see parallels all around me. I am not the only one to argue that we ourselves socially are barely out of the Middle Ages, judging by the broad ideas of the hoi polloi. Our philosophy - from Aristotle to the present - which has made us so great is meaningless to the man in the street, who benefits, incidentally, from it. Left to his own devices, he would cheerfully drink his beer, whistle his little tunes, study his pools, while his priceless institutions, for which so many sacrificed themselves, his very security as an individual, crumble noisily about his ears. Indeed, I could easily prove that the average Wahabi, for all his obnoxious piety, would be able to debate the Greek and French schools more fluently than any modern middle-class Briton!
As the familiarity and sense of security grew, as it became less and less likely that our disguises would be discovered (I had even heard some Hadjizin claiming to have fought beside my ‘sharif’ at some wadi famous only in their own annals) I grew to appreciate my position. My life in Hollywood, almost certainly in ruins, could be restored; I had escaped an appalling fate with my health and mind intact and I was reunited with my best and oldest friend. I needed time for my mental wounds to heal, for all my nightma
res to be banished and my usual cheerful optimism to return in full. By assuming the role of a simpleton I found for myself the least demanding persona. When I at last reached Tangier in a couple of months or so I would be fully able to resume my place in the civilised world. My California money could be touched by nobody save myself. Yet I had grown used to the caravan’s pace. I had made pleasant acquaintances, including several young women who trusted an idiot far more than any fully-sensed youth. Sometimes I could hardly conceive of any other life, or of wanting any other life. I had come in particular to appreciate the beauty of the camel and to enjoy the subtle meaning of a sunset sky and to take pleasure, as my colloquial Arabic improved, in the story-tellers who moved among us (sometimes with a single laden camel), earning their place with a mixture of traditional tales - including most of Aesop’s - misreported world news, snatches of doggerel, prejudice. Ignorant and with a relish for sensation, particularly sexual sensation and local sport, they were, in effect, complete walking tabloid newspapers. For those who preferred more highbrow fare there were a few other sharifs ready to debate matters of Koranic law, recite verses from much-loved books, even from the Holy Book itself. Our train grew longer as smaller trains joined us, until it stretched out of sight across the red-gold dunes and valleys of the wide Sahara. Its general mood resembled more closely the mood of an Odessa public holiday in August, of good-humoured determination to make the most of all the hours God granted. As a result they could be the most tolerant and in the main the most honest of people. It was necessary to cultivate these virtues. There was nothing worse, all agreed, than a mood of ill-feeling or mistrust on a caravan which might be together for months. Such a mood could, what was more, be highly dangerous for all.
Compromises were sought first in every sphere of their lives, from trading to surviving - even to war. From this mixture of Bedouin grain merchants, Sudanese traders and Berber camel-buyers, of tribes and races as unique and as far apart in culture and experience as people from Birmingham and Bratislava, in all their clannish specificity of costume and courtesy, was developed a level of social stability, a sense of the individual’s responsibility to the common good, that any Western democracy would envy. This was a world acknowledging few kings or governments, a natural democracy, almost an anarchist ideal. Sadly, though, such perfection is probably only possible in a desert or a vacuum. Why do we in the West believe we have the right to determine what is progress and what is not? We have created the power to destroy the very star around which we whirl. We, surely, are crazy? That, at least, was what I came to believe as I capered and shrieked for the entertainment of grinning Wahabi and chuckling Sudanese. As we moved deeper into Italian Tripolitania we were joined by a small band of blue-veiled Berber Hadjim returning from Mecca, their skin stained deathly grey by the indigo from their robes, so that they might have been a gathering of the dead on the walls of some kingly tomb. They had green or blue eyes, most of them, and the same fine swaggering control of their camels which a Cossack exerts upon his half-wild horse. Their long rifles and spears were slung over their backs; their bandoliers and belts were festooned with knives and the very latest in German automatics and English revolvers. These were the famous Tuareg, regarding themselves as the natural overlords of the Maghribi Sahara, the Land of the West. On their way back to their hidden cities they rode apart from the Arabs and the other Berbers, their cream and golden camels reined in silver and brass, the blue leather decorated with tassels of scarlet and white, the embroidered blankets carefully matching the rest of their costume in a display of magnificent challenge. The weapons, the vivid colour, the workmanship of their harness and clothing, were all a cautionary display of power. This display had its desired effect on their Semitic co-religionists whose chief prayer was that the veiled ones would not take against them or demand tribute for the privilege of their aristocratic company. I threw myself more enthusiastically into my rôle. Western newspapers had frequently reported cases of Europeans slaughtered by these unrulable desert warriors whose women, the Arabs said, went unveiled and worshipped equally with their men. Women even held power in the Tuareg councils and, in certain tribes, rode with their men to war.
But the blue warriors left the caravan as swiftly and as suddenly as they had joined it, disappearing back into the desert long before our camels began to sniff the water of al-Khufra. After they had gone, a prune-skinned handsome old man in a huge white turban considered old-fashioned even by his contemporaries, Achmet al-Imteyas, began to speak of a Tuareg, al-Khadbani, the raging one, who for years was the terror of the Sahara from Fezzan to Timbuktu and only in old age was revealed to be a woman, the mother, she boasted, of five sons, the ‘husband’ of a considerable number of wives and concubines. It was her sons who claimed the Sahara in her name and whose secret city lay somewhere within the Takalakouzet Massif in French West Africa. The Tuareg figured largely in al-Imteyas’s tales, usually in some fabulous way and frequently as the personification of supernatural evil, to be feared, avoided and, very occasionally, tricked into releasing some legendary wise-guy (the same Ali Baba who had for instance managed to get a rabbi in Benghazi to pay for a new mosque).
I was doubtless the only one to appreciate al-Imteyas’s sole critic, a pale Kurdish deserter from the Imperial Army in Astrakhan who, with a miscellaneous bunch of self-elected outriders, made himself useful to the caravan. Not one of them had a horse worthy of the name. The Kurd spoke mostly in Arabic. Sometimes, when moved to strong emotion and believing everyone but himself ignorant of the language, he would curse or disagree in Russian. ‘The Tuareg,’ he said in that language, ‘like the Turk, controls his empire thanks to the Arab’s own profound suspicion of change.’
I wish it had been safe to speak. I would have suggested his scepticism and resentment made him a suitable candidate for the Red Army. I would have suggested he return at once to his homeland, where his fellow-cynics would welcome him! Given his sympathies it was hard to understand why he had left his country to join the hundreds and thousands of Russian subjects scattered across Europe, Asia and America, even down into Africa, even to Australia, in a diaspora of previously unimagined scale. Kurds were always dissatisfied grumblers, like Armenians, but it was pleasant to listen to my native tongue, no matter how barbarously pronounced, and it helped me find further inner peace. Kolya, at this stage, insisted, in his role of Syrian renegade, on speaking only French and Arabic. It was important to convince, he said, the Italians.
The greatest comfort of my almost timeless existence was a developing appreciation of our camels, especially Kolya’s lovely pale gold doe. Sadly, my affection was never reciprocated. For some reason no camel in the world will ever do anything more than tolerate me. Most hate me on sight. Twice, when wandering in the vicinity of one of the herds, I would be warned by a shout from the drivers and turn to see a beast, its neck stretched out before it, its great yellow teeth bared, its nostrils flaring and eyes glaring, galloping down on me, enraged and infuriated by the very fact of my existence.
As I picked up my ragged gelabea and dashed over the rocky ground towards the main party I would see them whooping and ululating, some cheering for me, some for the camel, providing them with enough amusement to keep them in gales of laughter for days. To them my discomfort was almost as funny as the old woman, one of those miscellaneous creatures providing us all with general services, who caught fire and could not be doused. The inept antics of those like myself, who made some attempt to help her, were the chief source of their merriment. Yet they were good-hearted in their own way and one of the Russian deserter’s comrades was given a few coins to despatch the hag with a bullet from his Martini. They would have done the same for any creature without hope of survival in the desert. They valued life as readily as men of the civilised world, but the desert has no room for sentimentalists, nor for morbid introspection.