I had suggested we use the crippled cinema for a factory, hoping my reels were still there, but I was presented instead with a great shed on the city’s outskirts. It had been originally an experimental palmery but was abandoned due to some dispute between El Hadj T’hami’s cousin, who was the managing director, and the French interest, who made some complaint about the lack of trained staff. The staff, naturally, were all relatives or clients of the ruler. I had as yet no materials with which to begin my work and spent a good deal of my day at my drawing-board, producing the very latest in catalogues. This, eventually, was sent to a printer in Tangier, whereupon there came a further long delay, during which time I was, of course, supported in luxury but received no salary. The similarities with Hollywood became clearer by the day. My hours passed in clouds of kif and cocaine smoke. I learned to leave my ‘plane factory’ in charge of a servant and repair, after a long siesta, to the Djema al Fna’a. The great public square of Marrakech is surrounded by shops and cafes and little streets leading into a maze of souks where everything, including arak, is readily for sale. The square is called The Congress of the Dead and there are several legends to explain its name, the most likely being that here the rotting bodies of rebels were habitually displayed. Here, preserved by Jews whose ghetto in the Maghrib was always called mellah (salt), the heads of the Pasha’s enemies would, before French protection, stare across the square to where the leisured classes, the great merchants and worthies of Marrakech, sipped their mint tea and discussed the price of pomegranates, gravely clear about the price of dissent. Here, towards sunset, everyone would gather to gossip, to trade and to be entertained. The leaping snake-charmers and squatting story-tellers, the gypsy fortune-tellers and Berber drummers, the sword-swallowers and sinuous fire-eaters, the tumblers and grotesques would come pouring into the Square of the Dead with their yells and whoops and wild ululations, their strutting and their boasting, their capering, their tall tales, their display of skills, of lazily curling snakes and monkeys and exotic birds, of lizards on strings and locust lanterns. In the orange warmth of the dying sun, in and out of the long shadows, the braziers sent up the smell of roasting nuts and skewers of lamb, of cooking fruit and couscous, of those delicious little sausages and breads for which there are a thousand names, of saffron rice and thick vegetable stews, the tajins and the pastillas of pigeon and almonds which all Southerners love to eat, for Marrakech is the Paris of the Maghrib, with the finest food cooked before your eyes on the little kerosene stoves and charcoal fires of the street-traders, gathering around the edges of the Djema al Fna’a, their lamps beginning to glow warmly in the gathering dusk. Meanwhile the huge crimson orb shudders as she falls deeper and deeper through a sky turning the colour of coral and cooling steel behind the sharp teeth of the Atlas; smells of jasmine and lavender waft by as the veiled women go about their mysterious tasks, buying the food for their husband’s evening meal, visiting relatives or the mosque. The tasselled carriages, pulled by brightly harnessed horses so much healthier than those of Egyptian cities, trot slowly in and out of the square between entertainers, singers, zealots and fakirs. Every Berber and Arab in the region seems to arrive at once in the square. Nobody hurries. They swarm about the vast arena while from the balconies, and from beneath the awnings of the cafes, yelling men and women communicate to each other the latest news of relatives and friends or read important pieces from the newspapers to those who cannot read anything but Classical Arabic or the few who cannot read at all. Here men trust only the Holy Q’ran and the spoken word.
I would make my way through the wailing beggars and yelling street sellers to my favourite table outside the Hotel Atlas and join my cronies, several of whom were colleagues and friends of the Pasha, employees like Mr Weeks, or miscellaneous European visitors who arrived almost daily at the invitation of the Glaoui. Some were commercial people come to see what business could be done with the potentate. This meant, of course, that few of us were ever required to pay for our own pleasure and we were often in amused receipt of envelopes containing banknotes which we pocketed, though we had no special influence. As a result however I was soon able to open an account with the Société Marseillaise de Crédit under the name of Peters; while a more discreet account was opened in the name of Miguel Juan Gallibasta (the name on the passport I still owned) upon the Bank of British West Africa, for, though I received a little direct salary from El Glaoui, I came to understand that in common with his other officials I must make personal arrangements for myself where day-to-day cash was concerned. Mr Weeks assured me that it was quite in order. ‘One must adapt, Mr Peters. When in Rome, you know.’ He had a marvellous manner when some Yankee sewing-machine broker, for instance, who was attempting to sell a hundred machines to the harem at special rates, wanted to know if he could help. He would invariably tell the man that he was prepared to bribe the appropriate people and would, of course, simply pocket the money. When challenged, he would make a significant gesture and would explain the lack of action away as a perfect example of Arab perfidy, for which his victim was of course fully prepared, and accepted fatalistically. The ritual might even begin again.
Slowly but surely, and often by my own efforts, I began to put together a team of boat-builders from Agadir and Mogador, local carpenters and metal-workers who had the skills and intelligence required to turn them into aeroplane-makers. They were all masters of improvisation and set to with a will creating the beautiful shapes I had visualised. My lovely designs - art nouveau in practical machinery - were formed with bent woods and heavy silk, coaxed into reality by loving Moorish craftsmen until the great shed came alive with a dozen gigantic, brilliant dragonflies. All this of course quickened my blood, yet to my growing frustration we had not yet received instructions for engines. I explained to the Pasha that if we were to make our own engines we would need a number of subsidiary factories. He said he did not want more factories so had decided, after much thought, to purchase complete Portuguese engines through a firm in Casablanca. However the Casablanca people soon proved to be having ‘problems with customs’ (obstruction from the Sultan) and so further delays resulted until, from sheer impatience, I took matters into my own hands. I had heard of a machine found by Tuareg herders out on the jol towards Taroudant. Clearly it had landed safely enough, for its undercarriage was only slightly damaged, but the pilot was never found. The machine was an old French Bleriot monoplane and could well have been sitting in the desert since before the War. Lieutenant Fromental failed to trace it from any reports and concluded that the plane had probably belonged to a gentleman flyer who merely abandoned it when its engine, which was even then no doubt clogged, jammed up. The flyer might well have joined a camel-train to Marrakech and from there returned to his own country. Or, even more likely, some Tuaregs caught him and sold him in-country. I never discovered the truth of it, but at least I now possessed one good, if antique, engine. Once I had worked on it for a few days, glad to get back to the practical business of spanners and plugs and cylinders, it functioned perfectly. It was a heavy old Martinez Blanco, of a type which had not been thought particularly suitable even in 1912, but it was all I had, and very soon I was able to instruct my people how carefully to fit it into my own favourite machine, the slender Sakhr el-Drugh, my Hawk of the Peak. And now I had a working aeroplane! Within a week or two I would be airborne again. I could then (I secretly thought) please myself as to whether I remained with the Pasha or went on my way to Rome with Rosie von Bek. I did not intend to betray my employer, but I felt considerably happier that I now had a working machine, a means of escape. I looked forward to testing her. She had an unusually long wing-span of some fifty feet and a slender body covered in scintillating multi-coloured silk. She resembled a magnificent insect. Her body rose on thin hydraulic rods which supported an axle for her wheels. The heavy dark engine looked a little out of place, but I improved the plane’s performance by adding a longer than usual propeller which it was possible to fit thanks to the taller undercarria
ge, but this increased the insect-like appearance. Sent by El Glaoui to film this fantastic nativity, the production of our new Moroccan air-works, Mr Mix was the first to see her. He said she looked marvellous, like something Douglas Fairbanks might have thought up. I was flattered. Fairbanks remained my film hero for many years, even after it was revealed that the perfect marriage between himself and Mary was a sham and that he was a Hälbjuden. I can’t say I was greatly surprised. She was never suited to adult roles. I had taken the liberty of painting the slogan ‘Ace of Aces’ on both sides of the plane, behind the wings, since I thought this would appeal to possible American buyers while our Arabic recognition symbols exhorted the glory of God and the Glaoui. My workers were forever amazed by every tiny development, by every fresh marvel I had them create. I think they were as proud of our first bird as I. They could foresee a time when, perhaps led by Ace Peters himself, their veiled cavalry would take to the air, to fight with the same valiant cunning they had displayed for centuries on horseback. For my part I saw, somewhat selfishly, and more prosaically, an advertisement for my own genius which was bound to be noted in Italy. I now had, through my patron’s intervention, a fresh passport in my American name as well as my Spanish passport and Moroccan papers. I could travel without fear anywhere in the world. I remembered how I laughed at Shura’s ‘two names are better than one, Dimka, and three are better than two’. Now I realised the wisdom of the maxim! - not for reasons of criminal expansion, but for ordinary insurance in uncertain times. Perek Rachman was a friend of mine. He was much maligned. He said most people were like cattle, neither good nor evil. But they had no imagination. They are shocked by a boy who pays a penny too little for his tram ticket. To them, one’s ordinary precautions for survival are absolute proof of evil. To those of us who have been forced, stateless, from a nation upon which Satan Himself squats - feeding off human blood and souls, His mad red eyes rolling back in His bestial head, His claws reaching for fresh bodies to devour - it merely displays a prudent nature. It is the same with people who claim they have never known a whore, but they talk to one at the bus-stop and think what decent, right-thinking human beings they are, as Mrs Cornelius says, ‘an’ never fuckin’ guessin’ they’re suckin’ cocks fer a livin’.’ Judge not lest ye be judged is something we should all remember.
I began to feel secure for the first time since we had ridden out of Egypt. I felt that the true God was once again my guide.
I go every Easter to Ennismore Gardens, to the Cathedral, for the Vigil. It is the most beautiful service, the Service of the Resurrection sung in Church Slavonic, and there is no more intimate contact with God while it is taking place. I used to watch those little girls singing the Kyrie eleison. Such an optimistic experience. And yet they make some story up in the newspapers and suddenly I am a dirty old man. No one could feel more sentimental than I - who have been brought low by a love of children, after all, and yet still feel no bitterness towards them, they sing so sweetly. I shall magnify Thee with everlasting love. Such spiritual beauty! What harm could I ever bring myself to perform against that beauty, that innocence? But they say I am guilty and bind me over. It was in The Evening Star and nobody locally blamed me. They all said she was a little trollop. Mis Cornelius said her mother had been on the game in Talbot Road since 1958. But nobody cares how they damage the honour of an ‘old Pole’. I tell them I am Ukrainian. They think it is still a province of Poland. Anyway, they call everything over there ‘Russia’. I despair of the ignorance of youth.
I stopped Mr Mix one evening as he came towards me across the guest courtyard. He seemed embarrassed for a moment, as if I had caught him in some private act, such as picking his nose. He offered me the largest smile I had seen for some time and said he heard I was going to test The Hawk of the Peak next week. I asked if he would like to come up with me and he surprised me by saying that he might. ‘I wouldn’t have to fear a plane crash if you were with me, Max.’ But he said he thought his first duty was to keep his feet on the ground and film the event. ‘I am the Lord High Grand Recorder, you know. What?’ Whenever he talked of his duties or his titles he adopted a chortling English stage accent which I never found becoming or dignified.
He assured me he would join me in my second flight, to film the city from the air. He had found a new cache of stock, abandoned two or three years ago by a French film company which had gone bust shooting Salammbô. Some of it might still be good. It was a matter of luck that the sprockets almost matched, he said. I applauded his work. He was creating an archive, I said, which posterity would treasure. He was filming, I thought, a vanishing world. When I discovered that this world was not vanishing at all but was in fact growing and expanding, I did not feel quite the same elegiac sweetness, the same nostalgia for a lost age. Now my nostalgia has found more immediate subjects and I live in fear that my own way of life, not theirs, will suddenly be stolen from me. Big business in its kasbahs, the rest of us in souks and slums. It is not much to ask, to live out one’s days with a little comfort, cultivating a little garden, making enough to live on, talking to neighbours, perhaps occasionally giving someone a helping hand, but no, you are not allowed even that when these people get into power. They take everything. They eat everything up. Their God is a God of Locusts. Their God is a God of Deserts. I know this. I prayed with them but I refused to become one of them. It was impossible. Unlike Christ, says Mrs Cornelius, I was never a joiner. I did not become a Musselman but by then I had learned the Oriental trick of instant submission, for by this means you may survive for the time it takes to escape. Ikh hob nicht moyre! Der flits htot vets kumen. Wie lang wird es dauern? Biddema natla’ila barra! Kef biddi a’mal?
Mr Mix left me, saying he might join me later at the Atlas. I again reflected what pleasure I took in our camaraderie, a pleasure difficult to explain, since we were so different in temperament and intellect, yet his company gave me a sense of secure warmth and I experienced a pang of loss whenever he seemed cool towards me.
Rounding the corner of the guest-wing I next came upon Miss von Bek, who darted me a curious searching look. She seemed dishevelled and yet not in any particular hurry. She stood beside a palm drawing in deep breaths beside a blue pool crossed by an ornamental gilded bridge. She asked how my aeroplane works was progressing and I told her we had our first model ready to fly. I asked her if she would come to see it. The polite question emerged quite innocently from my mouth and yet she responded with alacrity. ‘Down there?’ she said. ‘At the sheds? Good thinking.’ And she blew me a kiss as she disappeared, a sylph in dark green and gold.
My stunned shock gave way to a thrilling sense of foreboding! I realised that inadvertently I had embarked upon a liaison which, if discovered, could very well end in dreadful consequences for us both. Ikh veys nit. . .
I had written to my Californian bank asking them to send me a chequebook and to let me know how they could make my funds available to me. But mail between those two notoriously tardy postal departments would take months. Even Fromental’s exchange of wires (using, against specific military orders, the official telegraph) met with nothing but a vague insistence upon ‘hand-written applications’. Meanwhile, I was dependent upon my local credit (which for the famous Max Peters was considerable) and the Pasha’s good graces (notoriously whimsical). I did not realise then how, in those languorous months, I had become a slave to Oriental self-indulgence, capable of giving myself up to passing temptation like any schoolboy and moved not by lust but by pride, a kind of arrogant sloth, a profound boredom. How is it possible to be taught such unmistakable lessons as Griffith taught us in masterpieces like Intolerance and Birth of a Nation and still not learn to live by them? I, who had worshipped the work and the man, who had based much of my life and philosophy on his, had begun to act like some Victorian prodigal. Yet I could not bear to leave without my confiscated movies. El Glaoui had forgotten them. The projector from Casablanca had still not arrived. I was as they say ‘double bound’. But I have made mistakes i
n my life and been betrayed. I am the first to admit there is no deceit worse than self-deceit.
That is what the jackal tells us. Anubis, mein Freund.
* * * *
TWENTY-SIX
I AM NOT BY NATURE a deceiver. Deception is where women excel and in their hands we men are mere students.
Their witchcraft brings us low and makes us behave in dishonourable and self-destructive ways; theirs are the wiles against which St Paul and Pushkin and Malory all warn us. A Kundry is forever ready to divert our innocent Sir Parsival from his knightly path, to lead him away from Christ. Yet, still, I do not blame them. I do not hate them. I love them. I have always loved women. They are so sweet. Des petites dents sucent la moèlle de mes os. Esmé! Comme le désespoir a du t’endurcir tandis que la fange grisâtre du bolchevisme engloutissait ta vie, ton idéalisme. Mère! Les Teutons t’ont-ils tué là où je fis voler ma première machine? Je n’ai pas voulu te perdre. Ton regard ne reflétait jamais d’amour. Mais tu étais heureuse. . . Rose von Bek was, I suppose, a delicious Kundry to my Parsifal, though at the time I half-believed I had found a Brünnhilde to my Siegfried, especially since, in the time between our first liaison in the balloon and now (the whores and the whips forgotten) my blood had learned again to quicken. My baser senses had returned to confuse me, threatening to lead me from my destiny. Yet it seemed, as our secret became the dominant concern in my life, that she was sharing my vocation, complementing my work, this fellow Erdgeist in female form - everything that a man could desire. Mrs Cornelius is wrong to be so contemptuous and take such a narrow view and refer to a ‘torkin’ mirror’. I continue to insist, in spite of what happened, that Miss von Bek was a person in her own right. Certainly I was enamoured, but this hardly discredits my experience. Mrs Cornelius insists there was never any point in telling me anything in such circumstances. ‘A Frenchman, a woman in love an’ a cat up a tree, there’s nuffink but grief in trying ter ‘elp ‘em, Ivan - art’ yore ther same.’ But I was always open to reason. I remind her it was she who frequently displayed violent jealousy towards my friendships with other women. She cannot reply. She merely becomes incoherent and she is never at her best when she reverts to the language of her Whitechapel youth. Usually, I try to avoid such subjects. It discomfits me to see her behaving so badly.