The Laughter of Carthage (27 page)

I shall come back to the City of the Golden Dream. I can still smell California with her ocean, her gorgeous crops, her precious metals and floral boulevards. I can smell the promise of Utopia, almost realised. Esmé will think she is dreaming.
Wo sind wir jetzt? Es tut mir heir Weh. Ich weiss nicht was los ist. Es tutsehr Weh! Wir haben drei Jahre gewartet.
We shall return to the citadel. Its substance changes so frequently it can neither be attacked nor destroyed. Barbarians believe they have conquered it but it is they who dwell in illusion.
Der flitshtot vet kumen.
Even if I am in mortal danger, the city will find a means of saving me. I never became a
Musselman.
My mother was swallowed by their red lava. How can I trust Brodmann? He has followed me too long. No one has the right to steal my future! The little black body loses its grip and is flung away, tumbling towards the foothills which now rise from the plain.
Nit shuld! Nit shuld!
They always claim that everyone shares guilt for those great crimes. But I say: We are all innocent! If one is true, then so is the other.
Ikh blaybn lebn
... I shall survive. Carthage shall no longer threaten me with her whips nor shall she push my face into her mud. I am too old and proud to let her grin and point and mock unchallenged.

Outside the night street is deserted; the black rain shines and hisses, mingling with grease from a dozen cheap cafés, with everything a dog or a man can pour from bowels or stomach; and the upstairs lights go off suddenly above the pub. There are sirens, of course, and distant war-cries; the occasional rising note of a curse, a condemnation, a self-advertisement. I think there is something wrong with me. I have eaten nothing, yet the pain starts in my stomach. I turn down my oil lamp (power strikes grow so frequent) and look through the curtain again. Head down, arms limp, shoulders slumped, some happy drunkard tries to piss into the doorway of the Greek take-out. He seems almost as old as me. He wears a stained tweed jacket, grubby grey flannels, a shirt without a collar. He is addressing himself in a furious undertone, accusing himself of some
fartsaytik
crime. How can I condemn any of these? At least I know the enemy and understand what is destroying me. They could not keep me for long. I was always too slippery for them. Tomorrow is early closing. I shall put this
gelekhter
and this
glitshik fantazye
behind me and go south instead of north, into the salubrious parks of their other Kensington. I was truly a
luftmayster,
a lord of the air, long ago when it was heroic. All they want now is long hair and guitars. Well, I disdain their zoot-suits. And I am the one who has to close my window against the stink of their vomit when they have all gone home.
Ikh bin a Luftmayster, N’div auf der Flitstat. Firtmikh tsu ahin, ikh bet aykh. Firt mikh tsu ahin . . .

The DH4 gains height to fly through the wide spaces between the taller peaks. I can see the snow blowing like an eternal tide across their flanks. I am fleeing out of paradise; but it is not true you can never return. We shall cross the plains and the Rockies, Esmé and I; the deserts and the Sierras; and come into our valley again. Here they have no
Schutzhaft, ni Buchenwald,
no Gulag for me, only for the Japanese. The future can be created swiftly here; there are people who devote themselves entirely to engineering problems involved in realising vast dreams. My cities shall begin here. Hollywood shall be my flagship. The old cities of Europe and America are noble and must be honoured, perhaps preserved. The cities of Asia Minor, Africa and the Far East: these, too, have some interest. But if Constantinople cannot rule as Emperor City, then a New Byzantium must be built to resist Carthage. I can make this a fact and do not seek even to be
balebos. Eybik eyberhar? Vos is dos?

They are monumental, these ships. Cities self-sufficient in every respect. They move with tranquil dignity through the upper air. How easily they resist the deceptive gravity of Carthage! Here are the far-flying colossal children of
Mauretania
; the logical resolution of our Western history. They are pure and they blaze like silver in the sun. They are seen in the horizon’s haze, flickering, suddenly golden, then their massive engines thrust forward, upward, and they are gone.

Wailing their earthbound despair, the conquered and the conquering, victims both, look up for an instant. If it were permitted them to think at all, they would think they had glimpsed heaven.
Es war nicht meine Schuld.
They move sluggishly, like chilled reptiles, desperate for the sun. Their wasted limbs are ensnared in filthy wreckage. They are
opfal,
say the Lords of Carthage. They gave their loyalty to the past, so they must die.
Wie viele? Ich klayb pakistanish shmate. Ikh veys nit.
They turn back to their sluggish battles, these slaves of the Sultan, these
musselmanisch
, these
lagerflugen. Ikh varshtey nit.

In the clear upper air, a mile above, the world’s great nations sail. They are invisible, optimistic and vital. These cities are the ultimate expression of human imagination. If they are attacked they could launch from their towers a million silver knights, like militant angels. Let Carthage do what she wishes with her muddy conquests. We are free.

I shall dismiss the past. It is no longer of use. Its hands snare my rigging. I go now to live in the future with my destined bride, my Esmé, my sister and my rose. I shall bear her back from the East to the ultimate city of the West, to dwell in eternal harmony with our peers, within that noblest of all dreams:
der Heim.
A golden city of hope, purified and restored: my own inviolable Hollywood.

Ven vet men umkern mayn kindhayt?

Wie lange wir es dauern?

TEN

THE ETERNAL CITY had seduced us both. Hand in hand we walked everywhere, entranced. Amidst the casual accumulation of three millennia, the conventional symbols of an antique greatness, her ruins, her churches and her modern monuments, Rome’s citizens conducted a routine life reminiscent of my own salad days in Odessa. Romans struck matches against Caligula’s columns and strung washing from balconies where Michelangelo or Raphael might have leaned to improve their view of St Peter’s. Motor-cars, trams, buses and trains buzzed and crashed around the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, cheerfully unimpressed by this weighty glory. The natives were if anything amused by foreign pilgrims who piously gasped at their pagan and their papal shrines. Rome herself was looking forward, was more consciously a modern city than ever before.

In the little bars, dance halls and night clubs around the Via Catalana we would soon find convivial company. Here intellectuals and bohemians gathered; futurists clashed swords with socialists, d’Annunzio was toasted and Giolitti, the Prime Minister, slandered. Plans were made to build a new Empire whose legions would advance by rail and in tanks, pausing to establish factories rather than forts wherever they went. Yellow sandstone and pink marble walls were covered with every persuasion of political poster, indiscriminately mixed with advertisements for sports cars, air races, cinema films; all these equally of consuming interest to the Romans.

They were attracted to the romance of technology, by the thrill of the great, simple deed. They were simply entertained or irritated by the petty bickerings of corrupt liberals and apoplectic anarchists. In this tolerant humanity they were again like Odessans. They lived in warm, friendly sunshine, in their cafés; in their restaurants they ate and drank with gusto; in the streets they laughed and danced to the music of little brass bands and accordions; they even dressed with the gay flamboyance of pre-war Odessa. If they expressed admiration for Bolsheviks it was both dismissive and ironic, acknowledging the Reds as successful criminals, not with a pursing of the lips but with a sardonic laugh. Lenin was ‘that noble successor to Ivan the Terrible’ or ‘the greatest Byzantine monarch since Julian the Apostate’, while Trotski was either Joshua or Attila. Artists of Mayakovski’s bent were ‘the glorious children of Marinetti’ whose canvases were whole cities, whose materials were dynamite, gunpowder and ruptured flesh: Poets of a New Apocalypse opposed to all that was old, devoted to everything that was new, born into a world where electricity, the internal combustion engine and powered flight were commonplace, ‘to use, not to examine’.

We had arrived on the morning of a mass march through central Rome. Traffic crawled. Men in overalls waved mysterious banners and women in red shawls shook their fists and shouted, stepping in time to the music of rough-and-ready bands which played loudly and in conflict. When I came to ring the service bell in our room I found that it was the manager’s wife who answered it. She apologised. The restaurant waiters had gone on strike and the hotel staff had joined them. She said she could bring us sandwiches and mineral water, that she was hoping to prepare a meal of some kind in the evening. She advised us, however, to look for family-owned restaurants which would still, with luck, be open. Strikes were so frequent that people took them for granted. Normally I would have been furious at the inconvenience, but I was deeply glad to be in a Western city. I found myself shrugging and smiling, whereupon she began to cackle and made several jokes in Italian which I could not follow but at which I laughed anyway.

Thus Esmé and I spent our first day in Rome looking for somewhere to eat. That was how we discovered Via Catalana where many restaurants did, in fact, remain open. We were delighted with the novelty of everything and would probably not have noticed if we were starving. We marvelled at the sights and sounds of that civilised, ancient city; even the political rhetoric, so alarming in Russia, was here merely part of the vibrant air. Esmé breathed it in and became more wonderfully alive than ever. Rome in the summer of her most chaotic year, with workers occupying factories and ultimately D’Annunzio being expelled from Fiume, was a haven of sanity and order compared to what we had put behind us. For this was, if nothing else, the capital of a free nation. The debate was not whether one should live to see the next morning, or how one might escape the brutality of self-appointed militiamen, or what movements had arisen overnight radically to change our fate, but what kind of elected government could best rule. The old artistic and intellectual vitality of St Petersburg, before Kerenski ruined everything, was here reproduced in even more vivid colours. People discussed ideas with an easy gaiety which suggested all politics was fantasy, worthless unless it was outrageous enough to entertain the population for at least one Roman evening.

Esmé, when we went to bed that night, was astonishingly passionate, making sexual demands on me which I found at first surprising, for I had no idea she harboured such secret desires. Nonetheless I flung myself into this new experience with a will and all but exhausted our remaining cocaine in the process. Next morning, aching but utterly relaxed, having slept hardly at all, I told her we would start having to make friends rapidly, if I was to discover fresh supplies of our drug. She pinched my cheeks and told me that I was too prone to ‘stewing’: everything was bound to turn out for the best. She lived for the moment, my Esmé. She was the eternal present and that was possibly the reason I loved her so much.

I have always been a man of many worlds, able to move easily from one social ambience to another. Remembering the bohemian character of the district near the Tiber’s left bank more or less between the Capitol and Isola Tiberina, a stone’s throw from the Orsini Palace, I returned there with Esmé that same afternoon. We were in such a pleasant state of euphoria we soon selected a café, sitting outside under its red and white awning, swatting at mosquitoes, and drinking
citrons presses
from trumpet-shaped glasses. Half an hour later we were in conversation with a dark and attractively ugly little man who mistook us at first for English. Learning we were Russians, he became extravagantly delighted. He hardly needed to tell us he was an artist, with his wide-brimmed slouch hat and his scarlet silky cloak. He introduced himself as Fiorello da Bazzanno, painter. His monstrously wide mouth, full of yellow uneven teeth, made him grotesque; half-man half-horse in the head alone. His puny, underfed body, which twitched perpetually, completely contradicted the animalistic, pagan quality of his face. Yet the combination was magnetic. Moreover he revealed a facility for language which matched my own. To us he spoke a bizarre patois of Russian, German, Italian, French and English. He had been born in Trieste where most of those cultures meet. He insisted we drink a bottle of Tuscan wine with him. After an hour or so he had revealed he had been a petty thief, a street arab. Then in the trenches he had met his hero, the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and discovered broader horizons. I told him of my own life in Petersburg, my engineering achievements, my flying exploits. He was quick to see similarities in our lives. Drawing a great, gold watch from within his rather dirty white shirt he told us we were to be his guests for supper. He paid the bill at the café and led us down the street towards Mendoza’s Café in the Via Catalana, which was distinguished by its black and yellow striped umbrellas, and thus known locally as ‘The Wasp’.

‘You’ll have the fried artichoke to begin.’ Fiorello was grave for a moment, ‘It’s Mendoza’s speciality and creates more spiritual uplift than a dozen Papal audiences.’