Jerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3

  My ship is called el Risha and she is light and as complex as a snowdrop. My ship is called Jutro and she will carry me into the future. My ship is called Die Schwester and she is myself. My ship is called Das Kind and she is everything I ever dreamed. Meyn schif genannt Di Heym. Meyn shif is called Di Triumf. Jemand ist ertruken. Widerhallen . . . Yehudi? Man sacht das nicht. My ship is called The Hawk. I would not call her Yehudi. Ikh veys nit. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Ikh bin ayn Amerikaner. Vos iz dos? Ya salaam! Ana fi’ardak! Biddi akul. . . Allah akhbar . . . Allah akhbar . . . We worship, I said, the same God, who is the Sum of all the good in us. We worship what is Good. Then why do we perpetuate so much Evil? Like many intellectuals of my generation, like Wagner and Sir Thomas Lipton, I studied the teachings of the other great prophets. I did not close my mind. I do not say that any way is wrong, but I am, by accident of birth or by persuasion, a believer in the great Greek verities, the spirit and the heart combined in the rituals and teachings of the Holy Russian Orthodox Church. Each choice of faith has its disciplined responsibilities, its relinquishing of certain beloved habits or ideals at the demand of the generations’ established wisdom. Sometimes mere sentiment is not enough. Sometimes it is the very enemy of truth. But my Faith is not theirs. My Faith is my own. I worship as I please. I worship as custom and courtesy dictates, in the manner of my hosts. At human sacrifice, of course, I would balk. But one cannot reach out to every hungry hand.

  One can only pray, I said, after I had told Mrs Cornelius that Brodmann had found me again. It was the same in Marrakech. What harm had I ever done him? He had chosen Bolshevism. I had not forced him to join the Cheka. I had not made him a Jew. What did he hate me for? For being a victim? For keeping the faith he had himself renounced. Perhaps it was true that he thought he detected in me, as Mrs Persson suggested once, the evil that was actually within himself. Perhaps he had the puritanical zeal of the truly tempted, pursuing some hated innocent rather than confronting the unexamined truth of his own conscience? I reminded him in my note that Heaven redeems only the truly repentant. Mrs Cornelius is impatient with me on this. ‘Wot bloody ‘arm ‘as ‘e done yer in forty years, Ivan?’

  What harm? This is amusing, I say. He has played with me, cat and mouse, ever since I left Odessa - even before! He delights in secret information, in what he witnessed at Hrihorieff’s camp! He gloats. That is why he wants to keep me alive as long as possible. Do not be surprised, I tell her, if one morning my shop is not open, and suddenly the world has never heard of me. I keep a diary, but they could always find it. It was the same in 1984. Peter Ustinov lost four stone to play that part. He was never better. ‘Ten years ter go, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Wot price Big Bruwer nar?’ I say nothing. I would rather she was happy. Is this truly The Country of the Blind?

  This is why they call me ‘Shylock’, those stupid boys. Shylock was a noble Jew. Should I be insulted? I regularly went to see Wolfit, the finest of all English actors. Beside him Sir Laurence ‘Olivier’-Cohen was anaemic. Wolfit’s voice was like some great Russian tenor’s, reverberating through the Old Vic’s tawdry music-hall plush and tarnished gilt to turn all that was vulgar into unique vibrant beauty. He was the last of the Edwardian giants. His Lear roared and wept and challenged Fate; his Hamlet looked upon the gloomy evidence of human folly and spoke only of the Pit; his Macbeth proclaimed in dark horror and thunderous warning the fate of those who would overthrow God’s established order, while his Titus preached the deeper danger of linking one’s fate to the fate of kings. Wolfit took his Shakespeare casually and with confidence; he took it with enormous, old-fashioned respect for the immediate substance of the story and his voice was the last voice of insouciant individualism in England. By the time it was stilled, the BBC had imposed upon the country Respectable Mediocrity and the Home Service and instilled its bland decencies in every middle-class child. And so, as the British shudder through a sea-change whenever they must choose to spread their scones with margarine or butter, the rest of the world writhes in the grip of Red Carthage, screaming for help, for a miracle which only the British Empire and its allies could have provided.

  For this dismissal of reality they paid the price of the Second World War. What on this globe can these islanders actually turn their backs upon? Europe? China? America? Arabia? So they throw up a scrim around the whole dreaming nation and on it project from within visions of their glorious past, reminders of their contributions to the arts and the sciences, their establishment of institutions and language around the Earth. By this means they see only vaguely the cruel and painful pageant of the world beyond their screens. This sense of distance is in all their films. It is in their radio and most of their television. It is why they pretend to despise the American programmes they love so much. They became terrified of their own vulgarity, their own capacity to kill and to destroy, to be brutes. I saw it happen during the 1950s. The Old, free-wheeling, careless stage-shows of the thirties, where every aspect of life was addressed, gave way to American cosmetics and Technicolor. I went to see London Town. It was impossible. Even Petula Clarke had lost her earlier charisma, though she was never Shirley Temple. The Americans have triumphed. Only the foreign culture is remembered by the young. Alice Faye, Fred Astaire and Howard Keel, certainly; but what of Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews, who brought a sexuality to the screen that no Hollywood process could contain? That is why Miss Matthews returned to England and went mad. Only when I heard that the poor creature had, like Clara Bow, died insane did I begin to interpret the conundrum of Mrs Dale’s Diary. None of them know what you mean, these days. This nation got its fortunes from piracy for so long she has forgotten how to make an honest living. She has instead learned to become the good little sidekick to Uncle Sam. Auntie Samantha is busy these days with her own exercises in self-hypnosis. She is learning the arts of graceful submission. And she says she has nothing in common with Arabia!

  If I had continued my acting career, I should have modelled it on Wolfit. As it was, my life had taken on some of the aspects of one of those farces they so enjoy in Belgium. Our liaisons became increasingly elaborate and secretive and I began to suspect, too late, that much of Rosie von Bek’s lust was fired by an insatiable thirst for danger and novelty. I began to wonder how safe our balloon trip had actually been. Per miracolo, we survived. Per miracolo, I suspect we went undetected not through any care on our own part but through the carelessness of the Pasha himself, who no doubt would not believe anyone capable of my folly. I also wondered later if he did not merely turn a blind eye to our liaison, as these people do to the bribery system they themselves encourage: until such time as it is politic to ‘discover’ a crime in a no longer useful employee? Whenever I see some potentate’s outraged dismay reported at his ‘discovery of corruption’, I remind myself of my own experience. The Bolsheviks are not the only ones to learn the usefulness of making everything uncertain and nothing completely legal. It is through unpredictability and sudden changes of mood that the successful tyrant rules. But he is not always the tyrant who rules longest, unless he devotes himself to institutionalising his tyrannies and finding some way of turning them into ideals which all his people can support. This, of course, was Churchill’s great skill. He and El Hadj T’hami were close friends on the golf course and elsewhere. Both were inferior painters but masters in reconciling contradictions. Now it is fashionable to be contemptuous of qualities of leadership, but in my day we looked up to great leaders. Do we steer a better course in our years of lazy democracy? You are making me laugh, I say to the Cornelius girl, who wants to burn her underwear, and it was me who pinned her nappies. She says the world is yearning for equality. It’s nonsense, I say. Look around you. Listen! This country is yearning for a tyrant. If she is to base so much of her life on Faith, I said, I could offer her a better alternative than her friend Miss Brunner. She never listens. It is as if I am speaking a foreign language.

  Even the ones who say they are ‘re-born’, these bloodless hippies
who mince into my shop playing tunes, which even a Nubian would find distasteful, on flutes imported from India at enormous profit to some immigrant entrepreneur, talk of Jesus as if he were a lisping nancy-boy. Even a C. of E. Protestant could not stomach it! It is worse than blasphemy! They are embracing only the 19th-century sugar with which the missionaries coated the gospel pill. This is not enlightenment. It is comforting darkness. Such grinning followers of Christ have no will to go forward. Are they the best of our army? Is Christendom so drained of authority, so forgetful of her own vitality, so careless of the salvation even now at their disposal? Is God dead and His Son staggering in confused retreat from Satan? Can this be nothing less than the great struggle at the end of the world. Is this Armageddon? Is this Gotterdammerung? Is it Christendom’s Last Fight? Or was the battle already lost on the day the Winter Palace was stormed? Has everything since been a last guard falling back, fighting for every inch of moral ground, as Satan, a giant of scarlet steel with sickle in one claw and hammer in the other, comes drooling poisoned venom to stand in certain triumph upon the ruins of our last retreat? And they say Wagner was not a prophet! What would they rather play? A Hero’s Life by Richard Strauss? I did not say I apologise for the Nazis. Their failures and follies are nowadays all too clear. But in those days it seemed we had only a limited choice and those of us opposed to Bolshevism were sometimes drawn willy-nilly into alliances with strangers. I am not the only voice of truth. I remember the Bishop in the pub, three weeks ago, telling anyone who cared to hear that he would stand by his admiration of Hitler as an intellectual no matter what his followers had done. He said the same of Enoch Powell. The pub was full, as usual, of West Indians, Irish, Greeks and so on, yet not one of them turned to protest. And this was the villain we were told would live forever in the world’s nightmares? He is today as harmless, as vaguely comforting in his familiarity, as Charlie Chaplin. Heil Hitler! It has become part of the schoolboy’s giggling repertory. Even the Jews do not know what a Jew is, in Notting Hill at least. No wonder Mosley got less than a hundred and fifty votes. It was too late for Notting Hill. He should have stood for Surbiton or Shirley where people still value their way of life and keep their morals as carefully as they keep their lawns.

  In Shepperton the scrim rises higher and higher, displaying fantasies of egalitarian prosperity for all where, in actuality, grey high-rises lurk towards infinity. The Ministry of Truth smiles upon its favourite, its most successful, advertisement. Here are the English orators safely confined, carried unseeing through antiseptic tubes to the BBC, the very epitome of the Future and the Moral Authority of Empire, to address a people whose experience they never share, to sound upon the airwaves their self-congratulatory celebration of their national myths, still certain that their language is universal. But is there perhaps an underground? Some samizdat crawling around the very roots of their illusion - some Blake from Barnes or Staines - even some Thornton Heath Thackeray to tease their dreaming noses? Is there no one to sound the horn, to begin the alarm? Will they gaze upon the walls of their cocoon and never hear the Last Trump when it is sounded? Do they dream themselves to everlasting death, like the ancient Egyptians whose culture they pretend to find so alien? Can they actually prefer this to everlasting life? I went down there for a while, to accompany Miss B. on her visits, but in the end I had to give it up. Those tranquil suburbs are actually full of high-walled lunatic asylums. Any Londoner who has had the misfortune to be branded mentally ill by some misbegotten authority knows what I mean. They are never visible. There are always plenty of trees. They are never in the centre of the city. They say it is so we can have peace. It is so that they can feel themselves secure from an audience. But of course it is a marvellous way of discrediting us. At a stroke we are robbed of our immediate dignity and our future authority. Well, I had no use for their power. I was only rarely comfortable when it was invested in me. All I longed for was the respect of my peers, for recognition of my authority as a visionary engineer. This is what was stolen from me that I value. Nobody seems to understand me. The pain, I tell them, is in my soul. My poor, Russian soul. How can we pretend to understand one another’s values when we cannot even speak one another’s languages? And yet I refuse to despair. Even now I still see a glimmer of hope for the world. But the world must learn to recognise its vices as well as its virtues. And, as Christ teaches us, self-knowledge must come first. That is the message of the resurrection.

  They put the reverberating metal in my womb. There is a dissonance always present now. It robs me of my harmony with God. These Jews? What do they envy in me so thoroughly that they must seek me out to destroy it? Vos hot irgezogt? Iber morgn? Iber morgn? Ikh farshtey nit. Why not mitogsayt? At noon the ships will rise from their berths, never again to be bound by the mud of Earth, and those who are not on them are doomed to decadence, brutal war and the death of their very planet. At noon we shall rise into the sun, that most reassuring of God’s signs, and our skins shall glow golden and silver, our eyes shall burn like brass and our teeth shall be glittering ivory; and still we shall be human, not yet of the angels, but rising inexorably to that holy state of grace. Why should they be jealous, these Arabs and these Jews? We have offered them the helping hand of Christ and they have spurned it. They have made a choice and I respect it, but let us not mourn for them in their self-established suffering!

  This was frequently the subject of the sermons I attended on the Isle of Man during the years of my captivity. The minister was Presbyterian, a carrot-nosed Scot with lips, as my bunk-mate Vos put it, like an old maid’s cunt and a head of hair which might have been the fires of hell gushing from his tortured skull. He knew that we had been put upon the earth with the ability to choose between right and wrong and that if we chose wrong, we had only ourselves to blame for our plight. We have enough trouble playing shepherd to the faithful, he told me one evening, let alone the faithless. He had a supply of Irish dairy products from a cousin in Dublin and had taken a liking to me. He saw me as some future apostle to the Slavs. We would sit and eat illicitly buttered goiteycakes while he described the coming of Christ to the island, Man’s long history as an outpost of light in the years of darkness. Is this how God reveals Himself? As a single flash of sunlight during the boiling torment of a storm? Does He offer no other sign of hope? These were our topics as we sat around the minister’s grey stone fire gorging ourselves on his Celtic plenty. I grew fond of the Presbyterian creed during those long days of my wrongful incarceration. Nazi? Such a Fifth Columnist, I told the commander. He agreed that it was stupid. The minister was a kindly man, though unsympathetic in manner, glad to convey his religious enthusiasm and so much better company than the careerist Anglican preaching tolerance and unnatural piety while the very hordes of Hell convene upon the doorstep of his vicarage. To his kind the Twilight of the Gods means nothing worse than an interruption in the cricket season, an irritating drop in the quality of the local ale. I used to think the British had courage. Now I realise all they have is an arrogant lack of imagination. This British phlegm is the Frenchman’s catarrh. He coughs it up and spits it out and pays no further attention to it. The stiff upper lip is a lip that for too long kissed the cold cup of ignorance and careless cruelty. I said as much to Major Nye, when we used to meet at Victoria, just after Suez. He said he could not follow me. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you mean you dare not follow me, for where I go, why, there is the road to truth!’ He preferred, he said, to call me a good chap and buy me a vodka. Kind-hearted as he was, he was the exemplar of everything I warned him against, so why should I expect him to listen? He had been brought up in a world whose realities had almost entirely eroded. The new realities simply did not exist for him. He continued to think and act as he had been trained to think and act: as a chivalrous servant of a just and honest Empire. He had none of these modern doubts. It was what made his company so refreshing to me, even when we did not agree. Most people cannot understand, for instance, the burning humiliation of a person like myself whose
word and experience are today deemed unworthy of the slightest attention. Major Nye respected all men and respected them most when they pulled themselves together and worked out their own problems. ‘Meanwhile,’ the Major assured me, ‘they are perfectly happy to use our toilet facilities.’ In this, he expressed the same attitudes as Mr Weeks, who no longer sought my company as he had during those early days. Count Schmaltz went on to East Africa. Other whites came and left. I signed many autographs for American dowagers who promised to go and see Ace Among Aces as soon as they got home. Increasingly Lieutenant Fromental was called away to deal with skirmishes and local uprisings with those of Abd el-Krim’s last harka who felt their master had betrayed them and who refused to accept the treaty he had signed. They sought alliances now with the Southern Berbers, especially the blue Tuareg and the desert warriors who challenged the power of the Glaoui. They resented new law coming to their ancient trading-places. New law always, in their experience, brought higher profits for the Arabs of the cities. Fromental confided to me he could see no point in French soldiers settling ancient tribal disputes. He feared Morocco would never be free of the Lyautey policy which encouraged the conquest of an unfriendly tribe by a tribe already friendly (or which could be courted), so using the country’s own resources to pacify itself. This saved the French taxpayer money, one of the paramount concerns of French Imperial Policy since the time of Napoleon. Now, however, the political changes, the rise of ‘nationalists’ similar to those in Egypt and elsewhere, make the Quai d’Orsay sensitive and mistrustful of native rulers. So Fromental must ride to the fringes of the protectorate and urge his soldiers on, to extend further the benefits of their protection. Fromental disapproved. This was not protection, he said, but intervention in old squabbles. He wanted the French to withdraw to the Atlas and be content.