After he was re-elected I wrote several times to Lord Churchill, pointing out how I had been libelled and schemed against by communists. I thought he must surely understand. Attlee could not help but be bedazzled by the Reds. He had fought on the Republican side in Johnny Banks’s own brigade. Churchill possessed only contempt for communists. He understood the realities behind their protestations of friendship. He was aware of their greedy cunning. If I had not kept my plans safely hidden, who knows what Stalin would have done with them? But by the time he was able to hear me out Churchill was already finished, his brain little better than a brandy-soaked sponge. The one letter I received from him was brief and incoherent. A great tragedy I think he lacked the discipline of Mussolini, yet I am convinced the two men might have become great friends if Il Duce had allied himself with his natural comrades, the British and Americans, and stood his ground, as was his natural inclination, the way Churchill stood his. In the end Mussolini allowed himself to be influenced by the ‘rouge boys’ he despised and met a fate he did not deserve.
Meanwhile, Maddy Butter and Margherita Sarfatti, who had done nothing to help him in the end, lived out their days in comfort abroad. I saw La Butter on TV quite recently. She has become an expert anti-Fascist and has moved back to Texas where she works for the arch-liberal Lyndon Johnson.
* * * *
FIFTY-NINE
After the British authorities released me from the Isle of Man I worked for a while at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Many US soldiers were treated there. Some had been wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. They had known the German troops and tanks were all around them and had reported this to their intelligence, but intelligence, part of their centralised command structure, had responded that the soldiers were wrong. Tanks or troops could not be there because the German Army was in retreat. I knew how those GIs felt. All my life I tried to warn the world of the real threats. All my life I have been mocked for my pains. Those of us who experienced the German concentration camps knew a similar experience. No one was interested. Even in Palestine and America nobody wanted to know. One denial follows another. Who listens?
While on the Isle of Man I lost touch with Mrs Cornelius and only met her again through St Mary’s in 1945 when the bombing was over. The V-weapons had stopped. I for one was grateful. Those bombs got on your nerves. Two big buildings near St Mary’s were totally destroyed by them while I was in the shelter.
The first I knew of Mrs Cornelius’s presence at St Mary’s was the distinctive sound of her voice coining from the American wing, her familiar rendering of’A Little of What Yer Fancy Does Yer Good’. I thought at first I had gone mad or that I heard a record. She had been employed to entertain the GIs.
Slightly heavier than when last I had seen her but still able to fit into one of her wonderful sequinned evening gowns, she was as lively as always. When she saw me standing there her face flared with pleasure! The wounded men applauded heartily as she brought her number to a conclusion and ran towards me. I knew exactly what she would say:
‘Blimey, Ivan! It’s ther bad penny again! ‘Ow d’yer do it?’ She was delighted. She represented so much for me, but I think I, too, represented something to her. She thought my ability to survive all vicissitudes was miraculous. I, in turn, knew that, for all her humanity and my God-appointed good fortune, she remained my guardian angel.
We embraced to further enthusiastic applause. Those soldiers were a generous audience. She insisted I not leave the hospital until she finished her engagement. When she was ready I took her across the road to my lodgings, apologising for them. She told me her own digs were not much better since she had lost her ‘soldier’ to a German bomb when they blitzed the old Café de Paris. The West End apartment had been in his name, and she had been given notice. ‘Which woz just as eflin’ well. That caught a bomb too abart a month later!’ She laughed heartily at her good luck.
I was living across the road in Paddington Street at that time. Major Nye had helped me find my flat when I was returned to London. Classified as a friendly alien, I still had to go to the Isle of Man for a year where I met the charming Lord and Lady Mosley. Major Nye also obtained my release and found me a job at St Mary’s Hospital as a maintenance engineer.
Johnny Banks became an MP after the war. He, too, had helped me in 1939. For a while I lived with only temporary papers, working for the big Ford garage on the Harrow Road. I never lost my touch for an engine. After hostilities broke out I presented myself at the War Office to offer my services there. My Land Leviathan and Giant Mole, as well as my superairship, had still to be built, and then was the perfect moment to develop them. But they seemed more interested in my nationality than my plans. Again I found myself embarrassed. Because agreeing with them was the easiest way to go, as Johnny Banks explained, I let the British determine that I was a Polish refugee. A ‘free Pole’ as we used to say. I was still officially married to Mrs Cornelius. After we were united she had no objection to my using that advantage, now that I was at last in her country. ‘After all, Ivan, ya did me ther same favour, and one good turn deserves anover.’ Thus we were able to get a council flat, the first we had in Blenheim Crescent. We needed it. I had been badly disappointed.
In 1947 Johnny Banks and Major Nye’s friend in social services at Westminster Council were instrumental in helping us soon after Labour came to power. Nye agreed the British public had turned its back on Churchill. I was still not then naturalised, so I could not vote. I did, however, understand why things went the way they did. Americans still ask me, ‘How could the British set themselves against the man and the party who got them through the war? Who had defeated Hitler? What on earth was the cause of the Labour landslide?’ I find it hard to explain, myself. We trusted Churchill in war, I say, but not in peace. Even the King and Queen were not so popular in those days. Many knew they had planned to flee to Canada during our ‘darkest hour’. Certainly the royal couple had tried to make peace with Hitler through Lord Halifax, whom Roosevelt favoured as prime minister over Churchill. Halifax was a well-known and committed appeaser. The puritanical Americans liked him because he didn’t drink. Nobody except the public thought Churchill could lead us to victory in 1940, and nobody except the public thought Attlee could make the best of the peace. Attlee gave us the National Health Service, rationalised transportation, school meals and the Old Age Pension. When he did not bring the Golden Age, Churchill was voted back, but by then he was too old. I had the pleasure of meeting him once at the Polish Club. Even when I addressed him in the friendliest of words he was too drunk to speak.
I eventually moved across the road in Blenheim Crescent when Mrs Cornelius’s children were returned to her. After her marriage was annulled she got the larger flat at number 77. Then I lost my place and had to take the present one. Jerry, Frank and Catherine all believed I only married her to be eligible for accommodation. When Catherine decided I was actually their father, I think they understood. Rackman was my landlord for a while in Ladbroke Grove. He was Polish, but a genuine gentleman. Rackman never raised my rent, which was cheap enough, so by 1960 it made no sense to move anywhere else. Chelsea became impossible, as did Paddington and Pimlico. All those places have been gentrified now. I refuse to pay thirty shillings a week for a tiny furnished room and kitchenette!
I tell these young people how it used to be, but they have no desire to learn. They hate the past. It conflicts with their identities. They want everything to be romantic, even the worst of it. The past’s only function is as escape, to comfort them, to confirm their ambitions, their greed. Anything or anyone who contradicts their invented fictions is rejected, through anger, through mockery, through contempt. I try to help them see how it was; how a situation was complicated or hard to define or hard to foresee, and they insist on educating me in their versions of events. Even the camps. They watch TV or go to the pictures and know exactly how it was. They ask me why we did not resist, why we did not notice, why we ‘denied’ the truth.
‘A
nd you are so different?’ I say.
But the past, like minorities, exists only so that they might feel superior.
‘Don’t listen to the effing Pole,’ I hear them say in the pub. ‘There he goes, sounding off again, the old fart.’ You bring them urgent messages. You try to help them. And they laugh at you, or worse.
* * * *
SIXTY
Some people will exploit the few who possess a genuine desire to connect with their own history. As clairvoyants prey on the bereaved, these cynics prey on lonely men and women. They assume the authority of the dead. Even I have been deceived, and I am the least gullible of people. I am always sympathetic to those who suffer. My life has been one experience of betrayal after another. Yet perhaps the worst occasion was only a few years ago. Not something of which I speak often, just as we do not speak of the camps. Nobody wants to know. Mrs Cornelius herself has never been told the whole story. ‘Not now, Ivan,’ she tells me with a shudder. ‘It puts yer off yer tea.’ Or else it spoils her mood or comes at a wrong moment.
I can give you the perfect example of this kind of self-delusion. Rather shocking, it made me see myself in a thoroughly different light. One should always review one’s own responses and ideas from time to time, for the sake of intellectual clarity as well as one’s moral well-being. One should constantly challenge one’s own presumptions. Die Götter der Finsternis haben ihre Streitmacht gesammelt. Sie reiten auf dem Wind, der nach Western jagt. Die Briten sind schuld. Sie lassen alles Böse herein. Sie dulden den Osten im eigenen Land. Man betrachte die Portobello Road. Eine Kultur kann Licht und Dunkel nicht ewig im Gleichgewicht halten. Persien wusste das. Was haben die Briten aus ihrem Weltreich gemacht? Einen leeren Namen. Und Karthago bleibt bestehen. Der Moloch wird seinen Feuerschlund öffnen: und die Briten werden hineinmarschieren, einen ihrer Songs auf den Lippen. Weg mit ihnen, sie haben es verdient! Es waren schwarz gekleidete Männer und Frauen; wahrscheinlich hatten wir Samstag. ‘Sind sie Jude?’ fragte ein junger Mann auf Russisch. Nennt mich Judas. Oder Petrus. Ich wollte es nicht bestätigen.
A few years ago a letter was sent to me at my shop. This event was in itself a rarity! Usually any correspondence comes to Portobello Road in buff-coloured envelopes and fails to spell my name correctly. But this was addressed in an educated Continental hand on a pale blue, square envelope of the best quality. Basildon Bond or something better.
The real surprise, however, lay within the envelope, for the majority of the letter was in Cyrillic, a fine, feminine Russian script so shockingly familiar that I raced through the closely written pages to the signature. The hand was that of Esmé Vallir, nee Loukianoff, my childhood sweetheart, my ideal. She spoke nostalgically of Kiev and South Russia, referring to events only she could know about. She had good news. My mother had also survived both Stalin and Hitler and was here in London staying in a hotel near the house of a family friend in Princelet Street, Spitalfields.
I am not sure if anyone could imagine the intensity of my response. Because of events in Kiev since I’d left, I had been forced to conclude that my mother was probably dead. Naturally I had made considerable efforts to contact her from time to time, especially through my cousin Shura. Eventually I despaired of restoring those links and privately mourned her. Indeed, I mourned her every day.
By 1969 when I received Esmé’s letter, I had become a successful businessman. No longer did I get oil under my fingernails. No longer was I reduced to repairing motorbikes and lawnmowers for Carpenters’, the big hardware store in Portobello Road. Some years earlier, with the help of Mrs Cornelius, I had opened my own premises just a few doors down from Carpenters’ themselves. In those days you had no trouble getting a lease. The rent was reasonable, and my goods were popular. Tourists came from all over the world. I was selling fine-quality furs and second-hand evening wear, also Guards’ and Marines’ dress uniforms which I bought very cheaply through the War Ministry. The collapse of the old empire, I must admit, put many fine costumes my way. Frank Cornelius’s idea was to call the place ‘The Spirit of St Petersburg’. That romantic and misleading epic Doctor Zhivago was soon to make Russian nostalgia very commercial.
From the beginning I specialised in furs. Foxes, stoles, bolero jackets, winter coats, hats. Thanks to television serials the girls were rediscovering the elegance of the previous century. I expanded as the fashion demanded. I sold not used clothes, but historic apparel. Heaven forbid I should end my days as an old-clothes man! This was a business requiring taste and a keen sense of the past. Film and TV companies came to rent from me. I did not buy every piece of tat which came my way. I attended auctions. I went to theatres which were closing down. To film studios. In my shop I was soon able to offer costumes from The Wicked Lady and Beau Brummell, from The Four Feathers, The Drum and Great Expectations. I continue to do good business with the music community.
Reading Esmé’s letter surrounded by so much history was a powerful sensation. At that time I even had some Cossack and Hussar uniforms, though they too were theatrical, part of a consignment from a touring production of The Merry Widow which ran out of money in Swindon. The manager had appealed for help to Mrs Cornelius, then playing one of the matrons, and I had stepped in with an unrefusable offer that paid for the cast’s bus back to London. The uniforms and gowns were of very good quality and needed only a little modification to give them a thoroughly authentic appearance. The majority of them sold within a week. They provided the holiday I took with Mrs Cornelius to Hastings that year.
We stayed in some style at the Grand Hotel. By sheer luck I was able to make yet another ‘killing’ with some costumes from an ambitious pantomime which had not done as well as expected the previous Christmas. The ‘big heads’ were genuine Victorian, great vividly painted grinning things. I sold many of the Pierrot, Colombine and Harlequin costumes on to the Rambert Company who were still active in Notting Hill Gate. Several found their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum. Those were very good years for business and the arts, if not for science. But all that changed with decimalisation of the currency, a confidence trick on us all.
Esmé spent several pages explaining what had happened to her since we had last met in Makhno’s camp during the Civil War. (I was fucked so much I had calluses on my cunt.) Reading her beautiful writing, I began to experience genuine shame for judging her so harshly. What a puritanical fellow I had been! I had been young, deeply in love with her and highly idealistic. But in my disgust, I had been insensitive. She had seemed so hard and cynical. Of course, she had been trying to disguise her shame and outrage. What I had mistaken for aggression was nothing but a protective shell. The letter made all that so clear. Esmé spent only a few sentences explaining how she had escaped the anarchists and returned eventually to Kiev where she had become a schoolteacher. She had seen several of our old friends regularly. Her father had died during the first siege of Kiev, and poor Herr and Frau Lustgarten had been shot as alleged German collaborators during Hrihorieff’s brief occupation of the city. My mother continued to work as a laundress and a seamstress, Esmé said. They met about once a week. I, of course, was always their preferred subject of conversation. They were convinced I had escaped to England or America and made a great success as a scientist. ‘Never once did your mama believe you to be anything but alive and flourishing.’
I had written to my mother a number of times since leaving Odessa, but the letters had never been answered. Eventually I came to accept that she was dead, no doubt a victim of Stalin’s planned famines. Esmé herself had lost touch with my mother when she became the representative for a Georgian wine company in Odessa during the period of the New Economic Policy. Soon after Lenin’s death she realised things were not going to improve in Russia and while in the Middle East met and married a Palestinian Christian, Edouard Vallir, himself a successful wine merchant. Esmé had never gone home. She and her husband established themselves in Haifa and were very successful. Only after the State of Israel was declared did they find it necessa
ry to move, first to Tunisia and later to Marseilles. Monsieur Vallir died a year after they received their French citizenship.
In 1955 Esmé Vallir sold the business and retired, but she continued to travel. During a visit to Jaffa she spilled some coffee on her blouse and ran into my mother working at a nearby dry-cleaner’s! ‘I knew her at once. She has hardly changed. Her face is as sweet and noble as it always was and she is still strong as an ox. She, of course, didn’t like to tell me her age, but I knew you had been born when she was seventeen, when that wicked father of yours ran off.’ Understandably, this was more than my mother had ever told me! In those days one did not speak of such things in front of one’s own children. My mother always sought to protect me from the cruelties of the world. Though she had hinted at it, my father’s relationship to a famous noble family would still have constituted a death warrant in those days.