The Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet

by Michael Moorcock

  And Esmé was as eager as anyone to join the party. Her relish for the good life became alarming. Being young, she needed to go out and about, but of course I could not find the necessary cash. Soon I was forced to sell a valuable patent for a few hundred francs. My ‘agent’ was an Odessan Jew called Rosenblum. It was all I could do to force myself to be civil to him, stop myself automatically drawing back from his slimy hand when he put it, with an assumption of fraternity, upon my arm. He told me where I must go to meet his client.

  It was in Montmartre, in a tourist Bal du Danse, one seedy afternoon while the Angelus bell clanked in the Savoyarde towers of Sacré Coeur. I was fond of this church. It seemed transported from somewhere further East. The usual press of visitors had dispersed. The bandstand was empty, the chairs stacked, the bar closed, yet the place still stank of the cheapest perfume, the youngest wine. I stepped inside. The door was closed and barred by the man I had agreed to meet. He was also Ukrainian, but from Marseilles, where he had lived since 1913. M’sieu Svirsky wore a loud pin-striped suit, a white trilby; his hands were covered in heavy gold rings crudely set with semi-precious stones, mostly crimson. He said he was a broker for important Southern industrial interests with branches in Paris. He was no more than ten years older than me but his face hung with loose skin, like a bloodhound’s, as if the flesh within had wasted away suddenly. This gave him a sad-eyed look. His eyes in actuality were hard brown stones. He asked me about the invention I had for sale. He stared as he listened, his face wrinkling, mouth smiling, as if he felt obliged to pretend intelligent interest in my description. This peculiar, agitated little fellow relaxed immediately when I indicated I had finished. Then he glanced nervously about the bar. Plainly he was uneasy, perhaps wishing to behave correctly but unsure what was expected of him. He reminded me of a half-trained spaniel. Yet he had money in his wallet, together with a piece of paper I must sign: a contract bearing the name of a Marseilles engineering firm. It promised royalties when my safety brake was commercially sold. (This device was attached to the accelerator of a car. It automatically operated when one lifted a foot completely off the pedal.)

  We chatted about Odessa and the good times we had known there. He was familiar with some of my favourite cafés. He recalled ‘Esau the Hairy’, remembering the name of the accordion player who had been a regular for so long. When I mentioned my Uncle Semya he was impressed. Everyone knew Semyon Josefovitch. ‘So you’re his nephew. It’s a small world.’ He grinned, ‘I’d better have another look at this contract. You signed it too readily. Why didn’t you go into the family business?’

  ‘He sent me to technical college instead. He wanted me to be a lawyer, but I had no vocation for it.’

  Svirsky accepted this soberly. ‘Your family doesn’t gravitate naturally to Law.’

  I asked if he knew my cousin. Svirsky said he thought Shura might be in Marseilles. ‘No,’ I said. ‘He was killed. I heard.’

  But Svirsky was certain Shura was alive. ‘He turned up a couple of years ago, asking for a job. I suppose he’d deserted. It would have suited him to let people think he was dead, eh? He switched papers probably, and got on a ship. It’s commonly done.’

  Was all the world being resurrected? I was amused by this thought. It sounded like Shura. I asked Svirsky to tell my cousin to get in touch with me if he felt like it. We had quarrelled over a girl. I regretted falling out. I was sure he did, too. Relatives should stick together in these times. ‘Oh, indeed,’ said Svirsky. ‘The Ukrainians are still very thick in Marseilles. Since the War, of course, the old trade with Odessa has dwindled almost to nothing. It was a great shame. Everyone did well out of it.’ He yawned, far more comfortable now he had my measure. We agreed things could never return to normal in Odessa. The Golden Age had passed. Against a volume of evidence, only Paris attempted the maintenance of her first optimistic flush of 1918. Apocalyptic political ideas threatened every aspect of European life, promising new wars, new regimes. Svirsky still hoped the Bolsheviks ‘would relax a bit’ as soon as they had definitively won the Civil War. ‘They’re bound to open the ports for trade. They’d be mad not to.’ But he had almost no direct experience of that particular form of insanity. I told him I was less optimistic. Those people would destroy whole nations who threatened to give the lie to their lunatic myths. Svirsky insisted ‘things will settle down’. I thanked him for his money and left the Bal du Danse after shaking hands. It would be several years before I should see him again. Then he would freely admit my foresight.

  My automatic brake kept us for more than two weeks. We bought splendid new clothes. We saw Das Kabinett Des Dr Caligari and were horrified at its madness. This modernistic ‘expressionism’ provided every evidence that in defeat Germany had grown deeply neurotic, almost psychopathic. Even more ordinary, less irrational, films reflected an identically morbid obsession with death and mental sickness. Esmé enjoyed Halbblut. One would never have guessed it to be the work of someone who later gave us the magnificent Metropolis, Die Nibelungen and Die Frau im Mond. My preference at the time was for Die Spinnen which was altogether more wholesome. We shared a taste for Charlie Chaplin, however, and visited Easy Street and The Immigrant several times. My own favourite was Mary Pickford, who reminded me in so many ways of Esmé. We saw The Little American, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and M’Liss, which whetted my appetite for the stories of Bret Harte, in turn making California an imaginative reality for me. I think my favourite Mary Pickford film was Daddy Long-Legs. I told Esmé if I were not already in love, Mary Pickford would claim my heart. Esmé said she thought Mary was far too ‘good and sweet’. I laughed. ‘Then she’s an ideal rival for you!’

  In Paris America came to mean far more to me than ever before, thanks to D. W. Griffith, who brought his country vividly to life for me in the greatest film ever made. For a while we were both obsessed with Birth of a Nation. We saw it at least twenty times. As a direct consequence I began to realise what potential for social and scientific progress there was in the United States. If I had made a film, it should have been that one. Griffith alone showed the world that his country was not comprised merely of pilgrims, savages and gangsters. His ideals were uncannily close to mine! I promised myself that as soon as my airship company was successful, I should go at once to the USA and personally thank him. I would suggest he turn his attention to the problems of Russia. One film, showing the horrors of Bolshevism as graphically as Griffith had shown the evils of the scallawags and carpetbaggers, who incited the negro as cynically as Lenin incited the Mongol, and the whole world would rush to my country’s rescue. (Ironically, the Bolsheviks themselves realised this. With almost admirable cunning they employed the plagiarist Eisenstein to present their own distorted case. With the clever imitative skills of the Jew he looted Griffith’s work, fashioning a paean of praise to his bloodthirsty masters, presenting them in a ludicrously heroic light: a fanfare of histrionics which made the mob, so loathed by Griffith, seem somehow noble! This revealed that techniques are never good just for their own sake. It depends who manipulates them. That is why an inventor, too, must always be careful. These days I keep my inventions to myself. Too many people, over the past fifty years, have abused them.)

  Paris continued to dance. Every street maintained its nightclubs, whorehouses, bars. Jaded people poured in from all over the world, eager to join the party. Americans could be found everywhere. They had money to spend, though typically they always claimed poverty. In my favourite Left Bank cafés I began to meet international journalists, painters, poets. I asked those from the USA if they knew Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish, but they could give me less information than I could find for myself in the film magazines. Some of them (mostly New Yorkers) did not even know who Douglas Fairbanks was! It would be like a Russian not having heard of Stenka Razin or Tsar Saltan. I pitied them their deep ignorance. They had come to Paris frantically anxious to prove themselves ‘high-brows’, reading impossible French novels by Gide, Ouida and Mauriac, salivating
over the filth Willy-Colette issued in the guise of literature. At the same time they spoke grandly of the ‘popular taste’ and flung their limbs about in imitation of black cottonpickers experiencing the last throes of some lethal palsy. They laughed at me, I knew; yet I was far more in touch with the pulse of the age than ever they could be. They did not know it, but they actually represented the past. I was a true Man of my Time. They were merely trying to relive a nostalgic, nonexistent fin-de-siècle fantasy. Nonetheless some of them condescendingly bought the shares I issued for my Aerial Navigation Company. It was on this money, carefully accounted for in a notebook, that we lived. Esmé again began developing headaches; a lassitude similar to the condition which had overwhelmed her on Kazakian’s boat. At first I would stay with her, working at our only table, drawing up my plans, writing to anyone who could help us get to England. Gradually it became necessary to go out more, to leave her with an oil lamp and the second-hand novels I bought for her on the nearby quays. Money had to be gathered somehow and it was not always easy to pay for our necessities. The price of cocaine alone in Paris was exorbitant. It was suddenly a fashionable drug amongst the demi-mondaine; waiters openly sold it in nightclubs and restaurants. I became panic-stricken, certain Esmé must soon decide to leave me, for she was not meant for poverty or drudgery. London was set aside. I had no choice but to spend more time than I liked seeking a main financier for my great airship. People were increasingly wary of anyone wanting their money, no matter how sound the scheme. Parisians were concentrating on taking it from others. I grew at once horribly obsessed and miserably over-tired, following one wild goose after another. All the while Esmé withdrew deeper into herself until even the cocaine was of no help.

  I prayed I should find Kolya. I left messages everywhere. I pinned them on notice-boards in émigré hostels; I left scraps of paper with strangers. I took advertisements in the Russian language press. Meanwhile I wrote to Mrs Cornelius, to Major Nye, to Mr Green, begging them to send us the fare to England and to use their influence with the English authorities both there and in Paris. I was making myself a laughing-stock with the Russians. They would mockingly ask me ‘Has your Prince come yet?’ or ‘Is the airship flying today?’ It was hideous. At last, just to avoid this sort of cruelty, I began to deny I was Russian.

  One day I was standing outside the Cirque d’Hiver, near the hotel in Rue du Temple where we had originally stayed, waiting for the artistes to emerge from their afternoon rehearsals (for I had heard that many Russians were now performing as equestrians), when I definitely saw Brodmann, dressed to the nines in black homburg and overcoat, striding rapidly towards Place de la République. He hailed a cab with his umbrella and got in, waving to another man to join him. The man was more casually clothed, in brown cords, evidently a French intellectual. He carried a bundle of newspapers under his arm. It was obvious to me he was a radical. Smiling and laughing Brodmann gave no attention to the outside world. He was plainly doing well for himself, as that sort will. Doubtless he had made himself out to be a revolutionary hero. Almost certainly he was a Chekist bent on infiltrating some non-Bolshevik organisation. Shivering, I immediately hurried home. Esmé was pale, eating little, mouthing her way through something by Gautier. I could say nothing to her. I was terrified of distressing her further. But I stayed in for the rest of the evening. Next morning I left my face unshaven with the intention of growing a beard.

  I caught a tram for the Montparnasse Cemetery. There was a theatre near it and a café, called something like the Pepe Napa, which had once been a favourite of Italian actors but was now the haunt of Russian anarchists. I had sunk so low I now rubbed shoulders with scum. It was for Esmé’s sake. I would do anything to escape our present squalor. Descending from the footplate of the tram I crossed the street to the café, the railings of the cemetery at my back. Sunshine was pale in the cool autumn air. The café had only just opened for business. Inside waiters were still taking chairs off tables. The only customers were grouped at the bar drinking little cups of coffee and sharing out their cigarettes. Some spoke a dialect familiar to me - the country speech, part Russian, part Ukrainian, of the Katerynoslav gubernia. I knew enough of this dialect - at least its inflections - to greet them. Nonetheless they regarded me with surly suspicion. They had probably been in Paris for several months and they still had something of the wolfish look I associated with their kind. Most wore ordinary cheap working-class clothes, though a few still had the vestiges of uniforms - a cap, a pair of trousers or boots. They were unimpressed when I told them I was from Kiev. They warmed a little upon learning that I had ridden with Nestor Makhno. The little batko was still their greatest hero. A tall, thin faced man with a pronounced limp, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, asked a couple of questions plainly designed to test me. He was satisfied by my answers. ‘What were you?’ he asked. ‘A Green? Or one of those city anarchists who tried to tell us how to fight the Reds?’

  Instinctively I decided to tell them the truth. ‘Neither,’ I told him. ‘My sister was a nurse with Makhno’s army. Maybe you knew her? Esmé Loukianoff?’

  ‘The name’s familiar,’ said the tall man. ‘Pretty little blonde?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘So what were you doing?’

  ‘I’m a teacher. And an engineer. I was with the education train until the Whites captured me. They locked us up in a synagogue to die. Then some Australians came through and took us to Odessa. Hearing that the Whites had overrun the whole place and that Reds were shooting anarchists, I got on a refugee ship.’

  They did not wish to hear tales of heroism, these men. Many were themselves the defeated remnants of so-called Hulyai-Polye Cossacks. They had no call to point the finger at another escapee.

  The wounded one was called Chelanak, evidently a German ‘colonist’ in origin, with a Jewish tinge to him which made me mistrust him. He said he had been left for dead after a Bolshevik ambush at Holta in September 1919. ‘We were winning, too, then.’ He paused and stepped back from me a pace of two, as if inspecting a painting. Then he continued. ‘I crawled to some woods where a troop of Greek infantry mistook me for a White officer on account of what was left of my jacket. I was sent to Odessa, put on a hospital ship. For Bulgaria, I think. But I got off in some little fishing village which we stopped at for no good reason. I tried to get back - it was near the border. I was captured by renegades who were overcome by Reds before I could be shot. I got away again, first into Poland, then down into Vienna and eventually into France.’ He frowned, his voice trailing off. ‘But I know you, I’m sure.’

  I had never seen him before.

  The café was beginning to fill with veterans. He leaned against the bar and sipped his coffee. His next statement had no particular relevance to what he had just said. He spoke significantly, however. ‘I was with Makhno when we executed Hrihorieff in full view of his own army. Remember that? Chubenko fired the first shot, Makhno the second, I the last. We did it because of the pogroms, I think. I do know you! You were one of the Barotbist liaison people we found with Hrihorieff. Brodmann!’

  This was the most dreadful thing he could have said. I felt instantly sick. I tried to smile. He put down the journal he held and snapped his fingers. ‘Brodmann. Someone said you were in Paris.’ He looked about him.

  I was near screaming. ‘I am not Brodmann! For God’s sake, man! My name is Cornelius! It’s true I was captured by Yermeloff, but I got away. I was Hrihorieff s prisoner for a few days, that’s all! Then I rejoined my sister in Hulyai-Polye. I swear it’s true.’ I was appalled. I had seen Brodmann only a day before. That in itself had been nerve-racking. But to be mistaken for the dreadful, treacherous Jew by ex-bandits was worse. ‘I met someone of that name. He was a Bolshevik, though he posed as a Barotbist for a while.’ I regretted even this admission as soon as it came out of me.

  ‘Brodmann’s comrade, then? I know your face. I know it.’ He was not particularly unfriendly. It was as if he did not personally carry any
hatred for his old enemies.