The Laughter of Carthage (38 page)

The newspapers featured announcements of our enterprise and illustrated magazines printed fanciful realisations of the great aerial liner which would eventually sail the Atlantic skies; drawings of cocktail parties in the main salon, of bridal suites and billiard rooms (so stable would our craft be). Both Kolya and I were frequently interviewed. We were described as Russian engineers, geniuses who had escaped by aeroplane the horrors of Revolution. This huge file of cuttings I pasted in a special book. Esmé was fascinated by the sight of her own lovely little face in the photographs, sometimes staring at them for hours, as if she did not believe they were real. Our apartment was on two floors, with a regular maid and a cook. We could entertain people from all walks of life and Parisian society became entranced by the romance of my beautiful sister’s history; her separation from me in Kiev as a child, her abduction to Roumania and finally to the Sultan’s Constantinople where she was rescued by me; the daring balloon flight over the Balkans and our arrival in Italy. So frequently did these stories appear in the journals I think she came to accept them as true. Certainly our guests wanted to hear them confirmed. More importantly, so much evidence had accumulated by these means we would have little trouble with passports when we needed them. Very quickly, she was issued with temporary resident’s papers giving her name as Esmé Pyatnitski, born Kiev 1907. People remarked on how alike, how devoted we were. Only Kolya knew the whole truth. These shared secrets added to our pleasure in each other and were never hinted at in any press report. It is the best way of preserving one’s private life, I find. Let them write what they like. The myth protects far more than it harms.

Our huge airship hangar, built almost overnight at St-Denis, was frequently photographed, but reporters were never allowed inside. Industrial espionage is not a present-day phenomenon. Under my personal supervision construction of the aluminium hull began. Meanwhile I discussed with engineers which kind of engines would be most suitable. We had decided to use diesels but were unsure about manufacturing our own or seeking an outside tender. At that time no firm was making exactly the motors needed. Every stage of the planning was crucially important. As soon as the aluminium struts were delivered from the foundry they were weighed to the last gram. Nothing on the ship could be heavier than was absolutely necessary. We had applied to America, the largest manufacturer of helium gas, for quotations. M. de Grion had begun by hoping we might receive additional funds from the French government, but in the end we decided to put shares on the market. Our costs, of course, were astronomical; but we knew the rewards were likely to be even greater. However, finance scarcely concerned me now. When I stood in the middle of a shed almost a thousand feet long, staring up through bars of sunshine streaming from wide glass skylights onto the slowly forming skeleton of my glittering ship I felt myself in the presence of a force both mysterious and awe-inspiring. I am sure the builders of medieval cathedrals were filled with an identical emotion. At long last one on my dearest dreams was to become, as it were, flesh and bone. The first step to the aerial ship the size of a small city, which in the next two decades must surely become reality. Soon there would be great fleets of such monsters, bearing cargo and passengers back and forth across the skies as casually as ferry boats on a lake. Someone else might understandably have felt a terrific sense of egocentric power at this achievement. I, however, experienced only incomprehensible humility.

Work was advancing so rapidly I was forced to devote more of my time to St-Denis and less to Esmé. I took her with me whenever possible, but grew guilty at being unable to give her as much attention as she needed. I begged her to make friends with the wives of our business acquaintances, to continue her visits to the cinema. But she was sometimes miserable. She complained, just occasionally, expressing her fears. ‘I worry that you do not love me any more.’

‘Of course that’s nonsense. You’re everything to me. It is because I love you I am doing all this.’

She said my airship seemed an excuse to leave her just as I had abandoned the Baroness. I denied all this passionately (including the suggestion that my jealous, scheming mistress had been abandoned by me!). She, Esmé, was my sister, my daughter, my bride. She must trust me now more than ever. Could she not imagine our reception when the vessel arrived in New York? She was already enjoying the benefits of fame. Soon she would have the chance to be a world celebrity and enjoy riches as well. But Esmé would not always allow herself to be cheered by this. ‘It hasn’t happened,’ she would say. She lacked the imagination to visualise my finished ship. ‘It takes too long,’ she complained. ‘There must be a faster way of making it.’ I laughed spontaneously at her naïveté. We were working at almost unbelievable speed. The cost of materials rose virtually every day, so it was in our interest to complete the ship as soon as possible. Secondly, we were hearing several rumours of both British and German plans for big commercial airliners. The Germans were officially banned from making Zeppelins under their treaties with the Allies, so I dismissed those stories. The ships they had already built had been requisitioned by the British and Americans and renamed. There was, however, talk of Zeppelin engineers being invited to America to work and that could have more substance (my own guess would be that the Americans were our most dangerous rivals). The Zeppelin firm itself was making aluminium pots and pans in Germany. It would be years before they received permission to build. (When that time finally came, they made unconscionable use of every innovation I developed in France, claiming my ideas as original! I was always the first to acknowledge Count Zeppelin’s tremendous influence on airship design. His successor Eckener, however, had no original ideas. Any reputation that lackey achieved was a direct result of his old association with Count Zeppelin. But there is nothing to be gained from reminding myself of his infamy, nor the unscrupulous treacheries of his Jewish masters.)

By Christmas 1920, I believed my moment come at last. Little more than a year after fleeing from the Bolshevik fury, convinced that all was lost, I stood sipping good-quality champagne side by side with my dearest friend Kolya and my reborn sister Esmé, watching visored riveters in blue overalls and huge gauntlets hang high overhead in cradles and hammer red hot bolts, joining together the main sections of my first liner. Isambard Kingdom Brunei, as he watched the
Great Eastern
taking shape, must have known the joy I felt, the warmth in the groin, the silver light in the mind, the certainty of immortality.

‘What are you going to call her?’ Kolya raised his glass towards the half constructed rounded framework of the nose section.

I had a dozen ideas, but one dominated all those others. I put my fur-clad arm about Esmé’s yielding little shoulders and looked tenderly down at her. There were tears in my eyes, I know. I was not ashamed.

‘I shall call her
La Rose de Kieff.’

* * * *

TWELVE

I ATTAINED MY majority on the day snow fell heavily to smother the shed of my
Rose of Kiev
and I received at last a letter from Mrs Cornelius. She had re-occupied her old house in Sidney Street, Whitechapel. I would not believe how good it was to be in Blighty. She continued to do everything she could to help me come there. What was more Major Nye had promised to look into my case. He now had a permanent position at the War Office. Between them, she was sure, they could get me to England by spring at the latest. In the meantime ‘good old London’ was ‘holding up nicely’ and she was ‘pleased as Punch’ to be back. She had been to lots of shows. She herself now had a job on stage again, though it was only the chorus, with a chance of a better part later, if she played her cards right. I was delighted she had been able to resume her career and while there was no immediate need for me to visit London, I saw little point in her discontinuing her efforts. I sent her one of my clippings as proof I, too, was ‘getting on’ in the world. ‘Soon,’ I wrote, ‘I shall be able to offer you an engagement entertaining passengers aboard my first aerial liner’.

The black shed, a mountainous square slab rising from the pure snow, was empty of people that day. I had ridden in my new 3½-litre Hotchkiss Tourer out to St-Denis mainly to have the driver show it off to Esmé. She thought it the most beautiful car she had ever seen. I suspected, tolerantly, she was chiefly impressed because its blue paintwork matched her eyes. Wrapped in white ermine, her breath like fine powder, she was almost invisible. As usual, I wore my bearskin overcoat, with the Cossack pistols, which I identified as my luck pieces, still in the pockets. Christmas and the New Year had been a heady progress from party to party. We had met everyone then fashionable in Paris, including the strange negress Janet Baker, whose mannish hauteur seemed so perverse to me. I was surprised when she went on to star in Opera, though I suppose a form lending itself so readily to extravagance and grandiosity readily accepts any new sensation. We became great friends with M. Delimier, one of France’s leading ministers, a private shareholder in the Company and an enthusiast for a French government commercial airship line. He was interested in my origins. He said he had a number of good friends in the Russian community. At the same party I met the pseudo-intellectual Communist Jew Léon Blum, who led France so decisively to her doom in the 1930s. In those days it became impossible to avoid Jews in any sphere, be it business, the arts, or politics. They were busy cultivating scapegoats and dupes to blame if their schemes went wrong.

My birthday drive through the snow to St-Denis remains one of my clearest memories of that time. Everything was perfect. I had acceptance, fame, fulfilment and friends. Few young men have celebrated their twenty-first year with such achievements. Straight, bare trees, like saluting soldiers, marched on either side of the avenue; clouds of dark birds cried their applause; a few flakes of snow fell from the branches and hissed on the pulsing bonnet of my car; Esmé clung close to me as the driver operated the controls. Children sprang from doorways of cottages to wave their caps and yell their enthusiasm; church bells sang and even the sheep lifted their heads to bleat a huzzah as we went by. I raised my respectable hat to a family group in a gig drawn by a pair of prancing greys; I reached and squeezed my horn as a peasant and his family made their way across the road from field to field. I shouted with delight, pointing into the steel sky at a flight of geese rising above the great shed and climbing until they disappeared. ‘An omen!’ I told the driver to stop the car and made Esmé get out. The watchman on duty at the gate knew me. He let us through as we tramped across the crisp snow to the shed, entering by a small door set into the main one. The skylights were frosted and magical. Ice had formed in the chilly blue air so struts and scaffolding gleamed like silver. ‘It’s fairyland!’ She advanced into pale light. There was rime in her furs; little stars.

‘It’s fairyland come true.’ The smell of the frost was so good to me. As I spoke snow stirred the echoes. ‘Wait until we’re flying above the clouds together, you and I, sipping cocktails, listening to an orchestra, on our way to America.’

‘You must invite Douglas Fairbanks to make the maiden flight.’ She was directly beneath the massive hull. ‘He’d love the adventure!’

I said I would write to him that very evening.

On the way home Esmé complained the snow was blinding her. She had a dreadful headache. By the afternoon she was in bed, unable to visit the de Grion’s that evening. She insisted I must remain in their good graces and go alone. I left her, sipping tea, with an ice pack on her head, a tiny, touching figure amongst the lace and linen of our bed. I felt I was failing her. Perhaps the transition from the Galata slums to Parisian high society had been too sudden? She frequently became self-conscious in the company of older, more sophisticated people who of course assumed she was from their class. She would be at a loss for words, though all praised her shy charm. As my sister she was courted by handsome young men. I did not blame them for their attentions. I was in no way upset. Esmé’s childlike attachment to me was never in question. I had already made it clear I was content to let her accept their invitations to drive in the park or even to have lunch, though I warned her their intentions would not always be honourable. She should guard against those who invited her to music halls or private suppers. She trustingly accepted my advice without objection. I knew so much more of the world, she said, than did she. In such matters I was her infallible guide, a true brother to her. Sometimes it seemed she had accepted the whole deception as truth. Often she would call me ‘brother’ in private. When we made love, which was rare enough for a whole variety of reasons at that time, she said it gave the occasion a delicious tinge of wickedness, of incest. She remained my fresh, beautiful, unspoiled rose, beyond any real vice; in spirit my virgin girl with the world before her. I myself was at last an adult, so I knew there was plenty of time for her to grow. There was no need for haste. Her girlhood should be enjoyed while she had it. My own youth had been stolen from me by War and Revolution. I envied those who could experience the careless days of adolescence. If I had children I would ensure their absolute security, a long and well planned education. Nothing is gained by early exposure to the world. I felt as if I had a full lifetime behind me, but not one I would wish upon anyone else.