The Laughter of Carthage (51 page)

I dined that evening with those generous elders, Roffy and Gilpin, at a restaurant called Jansenn’s, not far from my apartment. The food was unremarkable, but it was wholesome and seemed to the taste of my hosts. They had brought a young woman with them and I thought at first, with some delight, she was to be my companion. Pandora Fairfax was a bright-eyed, dark-haired little thing with a pert, bold manner who reminded me a little of Zoyea, the gypsy girl. To my astonishment I learned she was an aviatrix. She had recently come to Memphis to give flying displays. She was now thinking of settling. She and her husband were both flyers. ‘We’ve been barnstorming all over,’ she said, ‘but we think it’s time to quit.’

Charlie Roffy beamed. ‘Your teeth are bound to get too loose after a while.’ He explained genially: ‘Miss Pandora’s most famous trick is to hang by her teeth from a trapeze fixed to her husband’s plane. She also does wingwalking and parachute jumps.’

I was extremely impressed. Miss Fairfax was attractive and entertaining. She was eager to hear my own flying stories. Where had I flown, in what type of machines? I answered as best I could. She said she envied me the Oertz (‘for all it’s supposed to be a pig’). I was welcome to take up their De Havilland DH4 if I felt like it. Touched by her generosity I said I would clamber into that cockpit in a flash if the opportunity ever came. Gilpin had already told her about the new airport and aircraft I had designed. She wanted to see my plans. ‘You may study them whenever you wish,’ I said. She and her husband were in the process of trying to establish a private airfield, but our plans were complementary. ‘The more of us the merrier at this stage,’ she said. She left early. Shaking hands with me she smiled warmly. ‘I hope we’re able to help each other out, Colonel Peterson.’

When she had gone Dick Gilpin spoke of her admiringly. She was famous all over this part of the country. She had begun adult life as a typist but had learned to fly after only a few days of office work. ‘She proved a natural. Her husband’s a War ace. You might even have met him.’ I said I could recall nobody named Fairfax. ‘A fine man,’ said Charlie Roffy, offering me a large cigar. ‘And with more downright common sense than most of his breed.’

Dick Gilpin told me that, unless I objected, they had arranged for me to be interviewed for the
Commercial Appeal.
The paper was the best in Memphis. It might also wish to run a photograph of me, perhaps in uniform. I readily agreed. Charlie Roffy said it would help their case considerably. He asked if he could call on me at around nine the following morning. I was at his disposal, ‘I am here as your guest,’ I said. ‘And I wish only to do what will best serve our mutual interests.’

My friends dropped me off at the Adler Apartments before going their separate ways. For the first time in many months I went directly to bed and fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed of Memphis rising above the river on a silver cloud and I was the captain, steering a course over the prairies of Kansas and Dakota. Old Shatterhand, the buffalo hunter, was at my side, dressed in deerskins, his long gun crooked in his arm. The prairies will belong to the nomad cities of America again and death shall be abandoned. I could not have seen Brodmann in Memphis and mistaken him for Hernikof. Hernikof was murdered and his body desecrated on the cobbled wharves of Batoum. Why should Brodmann follow me? He was a Jew and a Communist. They would never have allowed him through. The city dips and wheels as I direct her towards the sun. I am blinded by too many reflections. What did I find in the City of Dogs that Brodmann desired so greedily? The horizon re-emerges.
Saat kactir? Jego widzialem, ale ciebie nie widzialem.
The dream shifts always to the West, always just a little out of reach. Surely it must stop at the sea. I am a man of courage. I can pilot the ship. I am in control. But what is this pursuit? I must concentrate. We are falling. I feel sick.
Ich will nicht Soldat werden!
What could Brodmann do to me? They think a piece of metal makes me their slave? I would not become a Mussulman. I am an enemy of the Sultans.
Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt im Abendsonnenschein. Gibt es etwas Neues?
 I shall not go to Berlin.

After breakfast I found myself at the newspaper’s studios. The journalist who interviewed me said the story would be out next day. What did I think of Memphis? And the South? Both were beautiful. I said, and the people were very well-mannered. He asked me where I was from in England. Whitechapel, I told him (I almost believed I knew it, so often had Mrs Cornelius spoken of it). He asked if Whitechapel were anything like Memphis. I said it had quite remarkable similarities. The river, of course, and the numbers of darkies. The reporter wished me to elaborate. It was impossible to tell him much more than our darkies were decently behaved and worked chiefly in the docks and public conveniences, which proliferated everywhere in London: a fact frequently remarked upon by travellers. It was close enough to the truth, after all. My invention has often anticipated the actuality. The interview proved more exhausting than I had guessed and I was glad, that afternoon, to motor out with Pandora Fairfax to meet her husband. He was a tall, aquiline man whose good looks were unharmed by a couple of small scars on the right side of his face. Like many flying veterans he was not much of a talker and had a modest way with him which tended to add to his charm, as well as his authority. We agreed how terrible flying had been during the War. He had flown mainly English planes, as well as one or two French and American machines. He hoped I would stay for supper. That evening I said very little myself but drew Henry Fairfax out, or rather I asked him questions which frequently Pandora would answer on his behalf. He was from Minnesota and liked this part of the world better. The Memphians were very open-minded on the subject of flying. An air base had been sited nearby during the war and the local people had become familiar with all types of planes. He had been an instructor there briefly. I could do worse than to invest in Memphis. They were far more forward looking than was thought.

It would have been foolish to tell him I had nothing save my talent to invest. If Memphians thought I had come to put money into their city it would only make for improved relations. The Fairfaxes asked how long I had known Messrs Gilpin and Roffy. I mentioned that we had met in Washington the previous year. Henry Fairfax was curious about my friends. Mr Roffy had contacted them only recently. He wanted their support for the proposed airport. Some thought it could be based on Mud Island which lay out beyond the wharves. I knew nothing of this but was dubious. ‘I wonder if the island will be big enough. It makes the possibility of future expansion almost impossible.’ They agreed. ‘But land isn’t particularly cheap in Memphis,’ said Pandora. ‘There are plans for several big hotels and other buildings. You’ve probably seen some of them going up. Everyone’s saying Memphis will boom. So everyone’s speculating.’

‘We’re speculating ourselves in a way,’ said her husband.

She laughed. ‘I’d call that just taking a chance.’

Their little wooden house, on the outskirts of the Memphis suburbs, had an almost rural quality. They normally had electricity but the cable was down so they lit their rooms with oil lamps. It was a comfortable sensation to feel oneself back in the past, talking wonderfully about the future. After supper an acquaintance of theirs, another flyer, dropped by. His name was Major Alexander Sinclair. For all his honest, matter of fact manner, he was a little mysterious about the reasons for his visit. He had recently come from Atlanta. I asked him if he knew Tom Cadwallader. ‘Only by repute,’ he said. He was rather withdrawn, though evidently doing his best to be sociable. Later, after a tot of fairly good ‘moonshine’, he warmed to me. He was interested to learn I was a French airman. He was obviously relieved when the subject turned to the Catholic church and I expressed my view that the Pope had much to answer for. Only a very strong man, taking an anticlerical stand, could save Italy. He mentioned some of his own experiences in Europe and asked if I knew any of his surviving comrades. I told him the truth, that I had flown principally on the Eastern Front. I had been with the Allied Expeditionary force during the Russian Civil War. By now he had become deeply interested in my opinion of both Bolsheviks and Jews. I gave him my honest views at some length, apologising that he had ‘woken up the bee in my bonnet’. But he was enthusiastic. ‘You don’t have to hold back with me, colonel. You’re a man after my own heart.’ Had I ever thought of addressing a public meeting on the dangers of Catholicism and Bolshevism? I told him any warning I ever gave the American people would be heartfelt and based on solid experience. ‘But I am really a man of action more than a man of words. Major Sinclair.’ It was very late and I could see my hosts growing tired. He insisted on driving me back into Memphis, even though he was staying with the Fairfaxes, and I rather selfishly accepted his offer. We had taken to each other in that way people sometimes do, though culturally we had almost nothing in common. We were both, however, intellectuals who believed in ‘doing’ rather than ‘moaning’, as he put it. He dropped me off outside the Adler Apartments at two in the morning, noted my address and said he looked forward to seeing me again.

This time when I prepared myself for bed I was in far better spirits. I had received an excellent impression of my new friends, particularly Major Sinclair. Here were people with whom I could most comfortably work: clear-eyed young Americans who were prepared to face the dangers of the modern world and at the same time take advantage of the great opportunities opening up to them. Thereafter I was again to find myself something of a social lion. During the coming days I would be introduced to other Memphians, young and old, who were deeply concerned for their city’s future - and for the future of the whole Christian world. Any impression I had received in the North that the Delta region was old-fashioned and slow was proven wholly false. Dixielanders might set great store by their historic traditions but they had no lack of faith in modern technology or new ideas. All they had lacked until now was finance, for since the Civil War Northern industrialists had systematically milked the South. The North, with its nerve centre in New York, had up until now totally controlled the American economy. Plantation owners, encouraged to grow enormous quantities of cotton, were then told in their best years that their price was too high. Thus New York and Chicago bought themselves artificially cheap raw materials. But I knew as well as anyone that what a defeated nation sometimes lacks in material wealth is frequently compensated for in a deeper spirituality and punctilious pride. These qualities might seem abstract to the scallawags and carpet-baggers so accurately drawn by Mr Griffith, but in the end they always prove far more valuable than any number of sweatshops and spinning jennies. They are qualities which provide men with the will to bide their time. This singular obstinacy allows them to choose their own terms, their own moment, their own form of action. I began to realise how true this was of modern Memphis. Without relinquishing the principles for which her people had fought a great war, she now prepared for a carefully engineered forward movement on all fronts. I could not help but be reminded by a similar determination I had witnessed in Italy, for so long impoverished by Papal tyranny, and now ready to move with relentless, measured step into the second quarter of the twentieth century.

Not for Memphis the hellish factory towns of the North, the urban poverty, the miserable conditions which, as in Russian cities, created a breeding ground of anarchy and unrest. Memphis was about to march from cotton and mules into engineering and services. Here small work forces could exist in ideal environments while producing something for which the whole world would willingly pay! I enjoyed the confidences of the city’s most influential leaders. My opinions were sought by ‘Boss’ Crump, whom everyone recognised as the strongest force in the city: the charismatic possessor of enormous political energy and brilliant insight, his only mistake would be to turn his back on those who most wished to help him. But for a single mistake of judgment he might have become the South’s own Mussolini. Crump’s sophisticated opinions on the Negro Question were illuminating. They expanded my horizons considerably. His plans for Southern self-sufficiency were years ahead of their time. Another far-sighted individual was then a leading businessman in Memphis, the inventor of modern supermarkets in his famous Piggly Wiggly grocery chain. He was building himself a magnificent house of pig-coloured marble near Overton Park and one afternoon treated me to an individual tour of his half built palace. Jewish interests ruined him before he could occupy his own mansion; his name, of course, was Clarence Saunders. I remember him being particularly interested in my ideas for an electrically operated automatic self-service market. I believe that towards the end of his life, still battling bravely against the combined might of Carthage, which by then had all but crushed the entire country, he attempted to make my dream a reality. He was dragged down in the end, however, by the Great Depression. People seemed to think this some sort of natural force, like a drought or an earthquake. Ask any Ukrainian if Stalin was an earthquake.

But these were golden days for me, and the burden of my heartache at being separated from Esmé was considerably lifted. It was wonderful to share a vision in common with so many others. I had never experienced this before. I had always felt isolated, a lone prophet with only a few good friends who, like Kolya, offered their loyalty without fully understanding my dream. We were striving to build an enlarged, more beautiful, more efficient Memphis, epicentre of the South’s cultural and financial renaissance. She would be a city where railroad and automobile were totally outmoded; a city of the electronic plane and the dirigible, with moving walkways, multi-levelled shopping arcades, art galleries in which were displayed the world’s finest works. A city where crime and poverty were abolished, where the black race was no longer required. All manual work would be accomplished by machines. We were not prepared to abandon the negroes. They would have a township to themselves where they could grow at their own pace, with their own schools, churches and theatres. The Southerner feels his duty to the negro most strongly (that he is a heartless tyrant is another misconception encouraged by the North). On principle I always made it clear that while I willingly provided my services, I had no intention of settling permanently in the United States. It suited my idealism, at that time, to link my fortunes, however temporarily, with Tennessee’s leading city. The Fairfaxes were by now firm friends. They, too, were ‘outsiders’ who had been fully accepted by the hospitable South. Though I never actually flew their DH4 I was taken up by Pandora Fairfax twice and profited both intellectually and spiritually from the experience. From the air it is a unique sight, giving one a fresh understanding of the size and nature of the vast Delta flatlands and the broad shallow river twisting into what seems the infinite distance, arriving eventually at New Orleans. I was all the more impressed by the people who had first negotiated this river, who had fought their way across such enormous distances so their children might cultivate and civilise the land; by the rivermen who sailed flatboats back and forth with furs and cotton and gold to make St Louis and New Orleans two of the richest and most vital cities of their age. Sometimes I could wish that my father, in all his revolutionary nonsense, had been one of those who emigrated to America. Then, at least, I might have had a chance to grow without fear, without the perpetual threat of being drawn back into the nightmare. As a native American I could have done so much more for my country and in turn I would have received a fair reward.
Mein Vater kam bis an die Grenze. Wohin gehen wir jetzt?
Who knows? The same forces which destroyed Clarence Saunders might equally have destroyed me. At least I remain alive to remind others of a time when there was genuine hope and optimism in the world and men and women were still able to recognise the enemy. What does it matter today? The enemy is so strong he laughs at me. Even those who listen to me in the pub think I am joking.