The Laughter of Carthage (80 page)

Instinctively I took a side street here, a main thoroughfare there. Crossing a little park I entered a shadowy café, ordering a cup of coffee while looking at everything and everyone, absorbing information swiftly and steadily: the little ways people had of using their hands, inflexions of speech, when they adopted passive mannerisms, when they felt able to seem aggressive. I knew I too was the object of their interest, because I was dressed so well, but I did not worry about that. Good spirits are one’s best protection anywhere. An open heart frequently saves you in the most appalling confrontations. In that sense it is always better for a city-dweller to be an innocent rather than to carry a gun. And one must be a good, natural actor: every day in a large metropolis we are called upon to play a variety of subtly different roles. It is nonsense, all this modern talk of what is a ‘real’ identity and what is not. We are the sum of our backgrounds, our experience and our environments; the self we present to the greengrocer is merely a different aspect of the self we present to the police inspector. The more conscious one is of this necessity of city life, the less one is confused, the easier it is to take action when action is called for.

I studied the traffic. I stood in the cemetery of the Petit Champs, beneath poplars and plantains, and looked across the glinting Golden Horn at old Stamboul on her seven, misty hills. I turned to my left and saw the Bosphorus lying between me and Asian Scutari. I marvelled at the volume of shipping. It crowded the waters as densely as any city-street. Yet it was nothing compared to the unguessable vastness of the ancient city. I had never realised any metropolis could sprawl so far in so many directions and in this case on three distinct shores. Russian cities, even St Petersburg, were tiny in comparison, virtually embryonic. Constantinople had no visible limits. She seemed spaceless as well as timeless, inhabiting a universe of her own devising: an infinite island existing outside the planet’s ordinary dimensions, where all races, all ages coincided at once. So strong was this impression that I found myself trembling with pleasure at the notion and became reluctant to leave the gardens until, somewhere beyond a wall, a donkey (or perhaps an imam) began to bray, destroying my mood. I continued up a narrow, shady street cleaner than most, its terraces of apartments apparently occupied entirely by European families. At the end of this street was a parade of shops selling stationery, books, perfume, flowers, sweets and tobacco, reminding me of any decent middle-class part of Kiev. The titles of the books were in every European language, including Russian. I bought a packet of papyrussa and thus changed one of my Imperial roubles, knowing I was cheated on the rate but not caring. I turned back, eventually, into the Grande Rue. From a little boy who squeaked at me in an unidentifiable language I purchased a button-hole; he made strange smacking sounds with his lips. I bought Russian-language newspapers at a kiosk. Sitting at an outside table of a coffee-shop, I drank sherbert and read the papers, amused by their grandiloquent Tsarisms and empty pomposities. I smiled at girls with heavily painted faces and cheap finery who winked at me as they passed by. Every other woman appeared to be a whore and every whore looked beautiful to me. There were also dozens of upper-class ladies in expensively cut Parisian clothes and elaborate hats and even some of these spared me a glance. I loved such an ambience. It is gone completely from modern life.

Tolerantly I waved away street-sellers offering me everything from their brothers’ buttocks to their sisters’ second-hand dolls. I bought some candy for a few
kuruş
, tried a little and handed it to the first child who begged a coin from me. Soon I had a reasonable sense of my location. The high part of town, Pera, was predominantly European, full of embassies and the mansions of the rich, offices of banking houses and shipping companies, better-quality shops. Sprawled below this, its border marked by the Galata Tower built by the original Genoese traders, were the mean, twisting alleys and jerry-built warrens of the poor. Further up the hill, beyond Pera, were suburban villas in spacious gardens, a predominance of lawns and parks. From the waterfront Galata Bridge led across the Horn to Stamboul, dominated here by Yeni Cami, the so-called New Mosque, with its unbelievably slender towers and clustered domes of different sizes. Stamboul was the Turkish city, though it also possessed a Greek quarter whose occupants traced their ancestors to before the time of Christ. Here were most of the older Orthodox Churches; the ancient, vaulted cisterns which were still in use, and the original walls of Byzantium, all productions of a superior culture the Turks might frequently imitate but never better. The most magnificent building of Stamboul remained Hagia Sophia, visible from Pera and distinguished easily by her bright yellow dome. This most beautiful of Christian churches the Ottomans continued to use as a model for their mosques. Although the majority of famous monuments were in Stamboul, making her the true site of Byzantium, perhaps Pera was the real Constantinople. Pera was where the Byzantines had buried their dead (it was still full of vast cemeteries for most races and religions), where the Osmanlis had hidden foreigners necessary to their trade; a city which flourished between dusk and dawn, given over to subtle diplomacy, exotic pleasures, obscure crimes and even more obscure vices, yet during the day the outward appearance of dignity and moral respectability, one of the marks of a typical European capital, was preserved. I was curious, of course, to visit Stamboul, but the pleasures of Pera took priority. I made no effort to restrain myself. I was a child given limitless credit in a sweetshop. I considered some sort of programme. It would not be wise to break immediately with the Baroness, unless her clinging proved inconvenient, neither must I lost contact with Mrs Cornelius. However, there would be no harm in my making fresh acquaintances. The more people I knew the more possibilities for self-improvement could present themselves. I reminded myself of every habit I had developed during the War and the Revolution. I remained wary of acquaintances from my former life, whether they displayed friendship or not. So many refugees filled up Pera I must inevitably run into some who might embarrass me. They would know me under a former name or might have met me when I posed as a Red or a Green. People were untrusting and might easily refuse to believe I had been forced from necessity to play these roles. It did not suit me to become again an object of suspicion. Thus I gave particular attention to Russians, surreptitiously inspecting every face. It would have been difficult if I had bumped into the young women I had known in Petersburg, for instance, or some radical bohemian who believed me a Bolshevik pederast because I had kept company with my dear friend Kolya. I could still see Brodmann, pointing his finger at me, screaming ‘Traitor’. This had been the direct cause of my precipitous flight from Odessa. Nevertheless, I remained confident that in most cases I could bluff out any such confrontation.

It was important to preserve the reputation of a man of breeding and education and continue to move amongst the better classes. The British were prepared to take me on my own terms. I was a brilliant engineer with a good War record, forced out of Russia by the Reds. If broadcast, the unimportant details, while they did not touch on the essential truth, could conceivably make life difficult for me. So anyone who called me ‘Dimka’ would be ignored (unless I had known them really well). I would grow a moustache at the earliest opportunity. Strolling on downhill, into the little, miserable back streets of the Galata quarter, I deliberately absorbed impressions of poverty as well as wealth. I had not expected to find so many tall wooden buildings. Little remained of the original Genoan architecture. Here and there was an old house mounted on pilasters but the most substantial building was now Galata Tower raised to commemorate Italian soldiers who had fallen in battle, called originally the Tower of Christ. The rickety wooden apartments rose five or six storeys high, leaning at all angles, like a German expressionist film set. If a single one of these were demolished, I thought, a thousand more might collapse as a result. Perhaps such bizarre structural tensions (makeshift, workable, incapable of logical analysis) closely reflected the city’s social tensions. Constantinople survived then as Calcutta is said to survive today: superficially in conflict, everyone depended crucially upon everyone else.

Fez, turban, top-hat, military pith, panama bobbed in those agitated human currents. I walked back towards Pera. The short side streets running between Rue des Petits Champs and Grande Rue de Pera were full of little bars and brothels crammed, in turn, with men and women of every racial type and class. Hybrid girls and youths touted for trade in doorways not a stone’s throw from great foreign embassies, dominated in turn by the monstrous stone palace of our Russian Consulate. From basements and upper windows jazz poured into alleys. Whores hung over baroque balconies, gossiping with friends on the other side of the street, occasionally pausing to yell at a potential customer. It was like a city of Classical antiquity. Had Constantinople remained unchanged since the Greek colonists founded her six hundred years before Christ? Had Tyre been like this? Or Carthage herself? I was entranced. Here was the heady lure of Oriental fantasy. I daydreamed of beautiful houris, the languorous seraglios, unbelievable luxury, fantastic delights. Constantinople offered still richer variety than she had presented under the most decadent of Sultans, for now her inhabitants experienced unusual freedom as well as uncertain thraldom. No longer did the Lords of Islam administer absolute power from the Yildiz Kiosk but even in Pera the muezzin still called thousands to prayer. The tyranny of Islam could not be abolished overnight. To clear Byzantium of such alien authority might take years, or never be wholly accomplished, but today such authority was held in question by people who previously had never dared allow themselves such thoughts. The fierce, mad puritanical Faith, therefore, had suddenly lost much of its sway. As a consequence those freed from it were presently possessed of a lust to sample all that had previously been forbidden. To this was added a fresh element of corruption - desperate refugees eager for the slightest opportunity to make a few lira. In some of those wooden tenements aristocratic Russian families lived ten to a tiny room. Greeks and Jews had taken advantage of the Ottoman defeat to turn the tables on old Turkish rivals; Armenians occupied the palaces of Abdul Hamid’s disgraced officials or the villas of Arab merchants who had been ruined by their support for the Sultan’s cause. The Turks, so far as it can ever be said of Turks, were momentarily demoralised. In two years they had seen their vast Empire, built through centuries of conquest, reduced to that pathetic ‘Anatolian homeland’ from which, in the thirteenth century, Osman their founder had sprung in all his ambitious ferocity, to sink his teeth into the throat of Europe. Now few believed Constantinople would remain even nominally Turkish for much longer. Already into this uncertain ambience the greedy carpetbaggers of Western Jewry had arrived to pick at unearned spoils. For me and millions like me the war against Turkey had been a Crusade. But as with so many other Crusades this one had rapidly degenerated to a mere squabble over treasure and power. I realised none of this at first, I must admit. I saw only a superabundance of potential experience, an exotic blend of human types, infinite possibilities of fulfilling not only my wildest desires but of discovering tastes as yet uncultivated. That afternoon, at a bar serving only the best class of Europeans, I sipped cognac presented to me on a silver salver by a Russian Tartar in Moldavian shirt and White Army breeches. I could not possibly guess how radically my destiny would be influenced by this city.

(I had passed through ruins, slums, festering heaps of offal, yet I saw a new Byzantium rising on both sides of the Golden Horn. She would be the capital of a World Government, founding city of a future Utopian State. Peace would surely follow the crisis. The only question remaining was how this peace must be maintained, who should most fairly rule. What I did not know was that already Kemalists, financiers, Bolsheviks, schemed division and destruction. The formulae for Utopia in my document-case were available to everyone. Is it my fault the world refused its redemption?)

Slowly and extremely cheerfully I made my way back to the hotel. I bought a map and changed a little more money into Turkish lira. I hoped to make it last until I left Constantinople, for this was not the best time or place to sell the jewellery I had brought from Russia. In London I could get the proper market price. On the other hand I thought I might give a bracelet or a necklace to the Baroness. She was, when all was said and done, a decent enough woman. I would not want her or Kitty to suffer the fate of other refugees.

In my room I was delighted to discover that my luggage had arrived. I changed immediately into Don Cossack uniform. Now a veteran Colonel, not yet twenty-one, looked out of the full-length mirror, bearing himself with dignity impossible in even the best-cut civilian clothes. The uniform had been earned by my suffering. It redeemed my father, honoured my mother, celebrated my country. However, I knew it was still unwise to wear it in public. Regretfully I removed it, folded it and put on ordinary evening clothes before going downstairs for an aperitif. A number of high-ranking British and French officers were in the bar, mingling with well-to-do men and women of the finest type. I was glad Mrs Cornelius had been able to get us the rooms. Seating myself on a stool beside the stiff but slender back of a British army major I ordered in English a whisky-and-soda. He turned at the sound of my voice and nodded to me. ‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘I am Pyatnitski.’ He seemed surprised at my command of his language. ‘Good evening. I’m Nye.’ He had washed-out blue eyes, abstracted but kindly. His tanned skin was stretched tight on near fleshless features and he had a neat, greying moustache. After a glance around the bar he half reluctantly agreed to take a large gin-and-tonic. When I explained I was a flyer shot down over Odessa while observing Bolshevik positions it obviously eased his mind. As if in apology he said he had just recently arrived from India. ‘In their wisdom, our top brass seem to think my experience of Pathans on the Frontier will be of use in Constantinople!’ He was otherwise vague about his commission. Learning I had only that day stepped ashore and planned to travel on to London, he warmed further. I did not resent his caution. As he said himself, later, one had to be frightfully careful of the people one talked to at the
Pera Palas.
I knew little of the campaign in Anatolia against Turkish nationalists. Mustafa Kemal’s name meant nothing. Although I gathered a Greek army currently advanced into the Anatolian mainland I was ignorant of the detailed issues. It simply seemed just that Greece should be claiming her due. Major Nye willingly offered to sketch the background but would say nothing, of course, about British policy. He had every admiration for the heroism of our White Army he told me. Russia should be given charge of Constantinople as soon as possible. ‘She knows the Turk best. You must understand, I’m no supporter of Russia’s territorial ambitions elsewhere, not in Afghanistan or the Punjab at any rate.’ He smiled as he sipped his gin. He thought the British should meanwhile administer the city in the name of the Tsar and King Constantine. ‘Until things calm down a bit. The East has to be contained. I have every respect for the Asian mind and naturally I love India. There’s much we can learn. But if Asia ever really adopts the manners and ambitions of the West, masquerading in English pinstripe and spouting German metaphysics, she’ll become a danger to herself and to us.’ He pointed in the general direction of Scutari. ‘The Turks can have Smyrna for their capital, by all means. Let them take the whole of Anatolia. In other words they should stay in Asia. The Greeks can then take Thrace, while the Russian exiles shall have Constantinople, which I agree is theirs by tradition. With British support the Greeks and Russians will then form our strongest barrier against Eastern and Bolshevik expansion. It will mean a proper balance between East and West. Everyone will see the benefit almost immediately. Credit where it’s due, Johnny Turk’s a damned brave little chap. But he shouldn’t be allowed to pretend he’s an Occidental.’