The Laughter of Carthage (75 page)

After dinner that evening I joined Bragg at his post. He was smoking his pipe and humming a tune to himself as he pointed the little beam this way and that across the black, unpleasant water. The ship’s gloomy foghorn sounded every few minutes. The Baroness had gone to bed early, claiming to have caught a slight chill. I raised my coat collar, for some reason unwilling to return to my cabin. Instead I offered to take a turn at the light, but Bragg refused. ‘I can’t afford to get in the captain’s bad books again!’ Although the yellow beam did not pierce the fog very deeply, we were moving at half-speed in a heavy sea so there was not much danger of us running hard into another vessel or the pack ice which in the past two hours had begun to appear here and there. The inky waves made a horrible hollow sound on our hull. For a while Jack and I smoked and chatted about nothing in particular; then, suddenly, he frowned, his eyes following the beam. ‘Hello! What was that?’

I had seen nothing. He moved the beam back a few feet to reveal a dark outline not a hundred yards away from us. ‘You’d best take the blasted light after all,’ he said. ‘I’ll warn the captain.’

My hands were shaking as I did my best to keep the beam on what was obviously a fairly large vessel. We were passing very close. It seemed our course must inevitably bring us into direct contact with her. Now, as Jack went off to the bridge, I saw little white blotches everywhere and realised to my astonishment that these were human faces, apparently scores of them. When their thin cries gradually became audible across the water, I shouted back in response. They could hear nothing, of course. There were no engine-sounds and it seemed they were stranded. A moment later from the bridge the captain’s amplified voice called out our name, telling them we would try to come in closer. But the sea was beginning to rise even as we approached. I could see the vessel fairly clearly now. She was a little harbour-tug. There must have been two hundred people crammed on every surface of her. I thought I could read her name at one point, the
Anastasia
out of Akermann, but that might have been my imagination. Whoever commanded her was now shouting back, begging for help. They had lost their engines. Their propeller had been tangled in a hawser. Jack joined me again at the searchlight. We were by now both soaked in spray. ‘Poor bastards. They seem to be taking on a lot of water. They’re sinking for certain. She must have been hauling that lighter we saw. When the cable snapped it wrapped itself round their screw. Listen to the wailing! Isn’t it pathetic?’ He told me there was nothing the captain could do. He dare not risk his own people’s lives. He could only radio the nearest British warship and ask them to go to the tug’s assistance. ‘God help them.’ said Jack. ‘They can’t last another hour in these seas.’

Soon the tug with two hundred terrified faces had disappeared in the wild darkness. Our own deck-passengers had scarcely stirred. The sea grew heavier and colder. It was to remain bad for all the time it took us to reach Varna. We never learned if the tug was rescued, but Captain Monier-Williams asked me not to mention her likely fate. He did not want to distress anyone. In our hearts, we knew she had gone down.

At Varna we lay off near the harbour entrance while, to my great pleasure, boats removed over half our passengers. The ship seemed at peace again, though pack-ice still bumped our sides occasionally and there was snow in the air. To me the snow was almost welcome. I was not sure if I would ever be completely happy without it. My Baroness, her daughter and nanyana, stood next to me as the peasants, many of them shivering and blue, apparently seasick, were loaded into the boats. ‘At least the Bulgarians are Slavs.’ Leda was wrapped in her own thick, black fur. We must have resembled a pair of Siberian bears, for we both had black ‘three-eared’ caps pulled down over our heads. ‘But what’s to become of us in Berlin and London, Simka?’ She had taken to using this diminutive quite openly sometimes. ‘Won’t we seem strange, exotic creatures to them?’ She glared miserably at the leaden sea.

I told her I thought she was being a trifle melodramatic. Other nations read our literature as thoroughly as we read theirs. We had music and painting in common. The sciences. ‘We can rise above the differences, Leda, because we are educated. You’ll see. It would be worse for the likes of them,’ I indicated the frightened peasants clambering into the boats. ‘They have only Russia.’

She would not be comforted. ‘Certainly it’s pointless to worry. After all, there’s every chance I’ll be stuck in Constantinople for the rest of my life.’

I refused to be drawn. A wind had grown from the East to obliterate the Westerly. I fancied it still carried imploring voices from the tug. I had been unable to rid my mind of them, just as Hernikof still insisted on haunting me. I sympathised with the captain who had been forced to an unwelcome decision; the only decision possible. For all that, I had a dim sense that I had myself betrayed those little white human faces. In comparison, Leda’s concerns were rather feeble and I found them irritating. ‘I’m sure you’ll survive,’ I said.

‘You’ll help me if you can, Simka?’ It was almost an order.

I sighed, forcing myself to smile. ‘Yes, Leda Nicolayevna. I’ll help if I can.’

The fog was too thick for us to see anything much of Varna. I have heard it is an unremarkable town. I was surprised so many disembarked there. I said as much to Mr Thompson shortly after we had left the harbour’s sea-roads and were heading with some speed towards the mouth of the Bosphorus. He frowned. ‘Can’t you guess, Mr Pyatnitski? We’ve put every suspected case ashore. And that’s two-thirds of the people we had on board. We’ve been lucky, I think. Larkin’s guess is that Hernikof was suffering from it, though of course it’s unlikely he gave it to anyone since he’d recovered by the time we reached Batoum. It’s impossible to say now. We can just hope we’re all right. It’s typhus, old man.’

So Hernikof had managed to infect a large number of honest Christians before he had been killed. I was thankful my suspicions about him had been accurate.

‘But none of the crew has it?’ I asked.

‘Not so far. Of course, the pity is we’ll probably be under quarantine when we get to Constantinople.’

At that moment I believed I would never be free of the
Rio Cruz.
It was January 13th, 1920. The next day was my birthday.
Hallan, amshi ma’uh
... I have spoken the words that must be spoken and Anubis is my friend.

* * * *

FOUR

THAT NIGHT WHILE overhead the Russians celebrated with threadbare conviviality the eve of their New Year I made love to my Baroness, privately praying she was still healthy. Her servant and daughter had been permitted to stay in the saloon until twelve. She had claimed a headache; I had said I had papers to put in order. Of the passengers, only Mrs Cornelius and I were party to the truth; the others had rumours which, in the manner of desperate people, they ignored or turned into jokes. There was fog in the Bosphorus, Jack Bragg had said, but tomorrow, sooner or later, we should see Byzantium. We steamed past the coast of Bulgaria, holding a slow but steady course, and I plunged in and out of my paramour like a mad rabbit, to squeal my pleasure in the certain knowledge my voice was drowned by a chorus of exiles and the boom of our engines.

At midnight, our exhausted legs took us back to the saloon. All the officers had returned, but Mrs Cornelius was still there. She had linked arms with two drunken Ukrainian matrons in
Stenka Razin
(which she insisted on pronouncing
Stinker Raison
- I believe it was the only Russian song she knew). Kitty, sleepy and clutching a toy dog purchased by her mother in Batoum, kissed us both goodnight before her heavy little body was borne off by her nanyana; then we went outside. It had grown warmer. The ship quivered on calm water and I wondered if we had yet entered the mouth of the Strait. We had again sailed into that huge black cavern; there were no stars or moon. There even appeared to be an echo.

Mrs Cornelius, full of rum and good will, joined us. An army cap on the side of her head, she leaned gasping on the rail. ‘’Appy Birfday, Ivan.’

I was touched by her consideration. She swayed forward to kiss me on the cheek, then looked about in surprise. ‘Cor! It’s like bleedin’ pitch art there!’

The Baroness frowned uneasily; she could not understand the Cockney accent. For me Mrs Cornelius’s English was often easier than the purer language of the officers. I had as it were cut my teeth on Cockney. Leda made no attempt to speak English. She said in Russian, ‘I had best see how Kitty is. Marusya Veranovna seemed to have drunk more vodka than usual. Goodnight to you both.’ With some coolness she bowed and made her way back to her cabin. Mrs Cornelius spat into the water. ‘Carn’t seem ter clear me fuckin’ marf. It’s ther rum. Picks yer up mentally but lets yer darn socially, as they say. Woz I bein’ a gooseberry?’

I reassured her. I was glad to have this time alone with her. ‘Have you heard anything more? About the sickness?’

There was no news. But the officers, she said, were not over-worried. With an arm around my shoulder she let me get her back to our cabin. My brain was full of history. I saw the trappings of the Hun ponies, the banners and the spears and armour of hungry Ottoman Turks as they turned hot ebony eyes towards Europe and readied their primitive nomad philosophy for war against Greece. Why must they now claim originality and superiority? If they had been so proud of their culture Turks would not have called their own land Rum or Rome. Such deep hypocrisy. It was passed from generation to generation, strengthened in every century. They were trapped in their own perverse mythology. This is a planet of lies and shadows. Civilised men are ever the prey of envious shepherds. Even so, the truth occasionally glints through, yet I fear my generation was the last to recognise it.

As for these innocent-seeming outriders for the Hun hordes, these Turkish ‘guest-workers’, I know their game. I surprised a group of them a few days ago in the
Paddington Arms
near the station. They were standing around a shrieking one-armed bandit and arguing. After I ordered my vodka from the bar I said casually, to no one in particular:
Rüzgâr kuzey doğudan esiyor.
I was amused by their consternation as I walked back to my table. Some of us still understand why such an arrogant people are prepared to do menial tasks in a foreign land. They are all, of course, Fifth Column spies: the saboteurs, the advance-guard. I have given up trying to alert this country. The British will be crushed beneath the weight of their own complacency, an illusory belief in their innate superiority. They will go down, in the words of their Poet Laureate, with Nineveh and Tyre. I have done far more than honour and duty normally demands. I can do no more.
Elleserait tombée.
Mrs Cornelius told me they would never understand. ‘Yore wastin’ yer breaf, Ivan. Ya orta be lookin’ arter number one.’ But I was always an idealist. It is my Achilles heel. I had so much to give. I sit beside the cash-register in the deep end of my shop, looking out on the Portobello Road. It is like a film. Year by year the white faces grow fewer. The loping West Indians and arrogant Pakistanis, the swaggering Turks and Arabs multiply. It was all white when I first came here. The shops were ordinary and decent: newsagents, grocers, tobacconists, cobblers. Now it is imitation gold bracelets and cheap cotton prints like the poorer bazaars of Constantinople in 1920. And Kensington Market, crammed with kangaroo-skin boots and diamante silks, begins to resemble the Grand Bazaar. People continue to ask why this has happened! They can have no knowledge of the past. No wonder young women grow bored with feeble English loungers who live only to smoke keef and claim the State’s baksheesh. No wonder white girls seek out the spurious vivacity of the grinning Negro, the secure wealth of a fat Asian patriarch. Here again is Byzantium in decline; the last years of a senile civilisation.

I have seen the same effects in a dozen great cities during their ultimate decline. When Christian girls decide to desert the ways of virtue to fornicate with the Pagan, then chivalry is lost forever. It is the same in New York and Paris, in Munich, in Amsterdam. Oriental Africa has once again married brutality to cunning and given birth to Carthage.
Burada görülecek ne var?
The self-mocking West, dismissing the moral convictions of three thousand years, is ripe for conquest. And of course the one to benefit most will ever be that sly desert herdsman, your Jew.

Constantinople was our greatest single prize of the War. Had we kept her all our sacrifices would have been worthwhile. We should have experienced a tremendous revival of idealistic Christianity; a fresh awakening of the Russian spirit would have swept Bolshevism away. Throughout the War the Allies promised us the return of Tsargrad, our Emperor City, our Byzantium, seat of the Orthodox Church. The British were too weak. Rather than reclaim Constantinople for Christ and risk offending Catholic Europe they meekly returned the city to Mohamet. The Turks themselves were astonished. And in the end, of course, the Jew benefited most. The best possible climate for the speculator is a climate of uncertainty. To produce that climate you attack old, honest ideas, accepted habits of morality and scientific examination. Marx, Freud and Einstein did that much better: they invented new languages and prepared the way for their merchant co-religionists just as British missionaries in China prepared the way for opium-traders. By promiscuous questioning of the eternal verities they make our children seek bewilderedly for fresh intellectual and moral security. While we are confused, their legions fall upon our harvest. I know these Jews. I speak their tongue. They put a piece of metal in my stomach. They robbed me of everything. I blame my father. My mother was too kind. I will have nothing to do with old harpies who pick over my stock like carrion flapping on the body of the lamb. They receive short shrift from me. I would rather give my time to the wandering descendants of those Egyptians who refused shelter to the Virgin and Child. At least the gypsies are Christians now. As for the Turks, I say the same thing:
Çok ufak
or
Çok büyüt
and make them go away. I do not want their cash. I am not a Jew. It is a matter of
derkenen.
I am not a fool. I have made my mistakes. I do not deny it.
O wieku, tys wiosna, czlowieka! Na lobie ziarno przyszlosci on sieje, Twoim on ogniem reszte wieku zyje!
as the Poles say. I am not afraid of the
fremder
or the
frestl.
I live with them. I have lived with them for years. To be familiar with something is not to be the same as it. That is why I get so angry if mistaken for a Jew. Is a health inspector the bacteria he examines? The city-builders must be forever vigilant against the greedy nomad. It is not always wise to build convenient roads through the walls.