I was innocent. I was afraid.
I journey to a place where souls are weighed, when benevolent Anubis weighs our sins.
Ali Pasha Khamsa shook my hand before he chanced the bouncing plank stretching from our boat to the muddy bank where local porters stood ready to support him if he slipped. ‘Nigra sum sed formosa, filiae Jerusalem,’ he said as he left. I believe it was a mild, and civilised, admonition to me for my initial reaction to him. I accepted this with good humour and told him that I was sure we would meet again. Even now I cannot believe, when I see the television pictures, that this man was the same Sadat who has been so instrumental in betraying his country to Israel. That cold claw struck at my stomach and seized my heart. I had a brother in Odessa. He was a good Jew. Such creatures can exist. I am in too much pain now. But I shall not always suffer. There is a white road down which I ride and the road ends at the sea, at a green cliff, and when I reach the end of the white road my horse lifts easily into the air and we fly towards Byzantium, to be reunited with my Emperor and my God. My plane is called The Dragonfly. It is my own machine. It is delicate. I have made flight ethereal, as beautiful as Man first envisioned it. I have not reduced it to those lumbering metal tubes carrying their human baggage from city to city like so many sacks of grain. My plane was called The Angel. Silver and gold, she sang a low musical note as she progressed through the sky. She would fill the air with her marvellous, shimmering wings. My plane was called The Owl. She would carry wisdom and peace to the world. She would swoop and thrust and hover and at night you would hear only the soft passage of her body through the darkness. They were all in my catalogue. I could make them to special order. Each one would be designed for the individual who would fly her. They would reflect the personality of the aeronaut. They would be a fulfilment, a completion.
In the early pallor of a Nile dawn, with mist still folded about our rigging, when I walked by myself on deck, unable to sleep for Quelch’s peculiar cries describing some unnameable need, I saw what I guessed to be a pelican diving into the deep water ahead, to re-emerge with a silver-dripping beak weighty with fish. That noble bird’s self-sacrifice was so great she fed her young with flesh plucked from her own breast. She had long been a symbol of Christian charity, carried upon the shields and crests of Christian knights, carried, indeed, as far as Jerusalem. At last I understood something of the bird’s symbolism. I watched her soar away to the west followed by the long shadows of the rising sun which gave palms, ruins, villages, fields, a peculiar two-dimensional appearance as if, for an instant, we had caught sight of another reality, another Earth, beyond our own, or perhaps merely a singularly artistic set. I had never in my life witnessed such extraordinary beauty, such depths and grades of colour in a vastly widened spectrum, such intensity of light, a smell of such subtle fecundity I could honestly believe I had arrived at the birthplace of the world. The Nile Valley was all that remained of a lush Sahara. Was this not the site of Paradise itself? I remembered a story from a gypsy when Esmé and I visited that camp in the gorge outside Kiev before the War. She believed that when Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden it withered away for lack of human beings to celebrate it and so became the great Sahara. Paradise, the gypsy woman said, can only exist if people positively want it to exist. I remember her words nowadays, when I encounter caution and lack of imagination at every turn. Can they not realise it requires just a little courage and self-respect to grasp the key to Paradise? I am not the only one who held it out to them in those decades of our world’s collapse when we witnessed the rapid dissolution of the great Christian European Empires. The Road to Paradise, Rasputin told us, lies through the Valley of Sin. Such ideas were common in Petersburg during my student years. I was as infected by them as anyone. We are social, creatures, after all, and enjoy the approval of our peers. Only when we learn true self-respect do we become fully uncaring of disapproval. This is what we learn as Christians; what I understood (but without words in those days) as I watched the pelican climbing away into the blue-grey distance, the quintessential symbol of female purity. My plane was called The Pelican, which is the enemy of the Goat.
‘Why is it,’ asked Professor Quelch, pursuing me later to the upper deck where I sat in a lounger sketching a design I was considering for a new high-speed troop transporter able in days to move regiments through the Suez Canal to the Empire’s key points, ‘that the river always smells of roasting meat at this time in the morning, when we are informed by every bleeding heart that the fellaheen live on a handful of maize?’
I told him I smelled only what I took to be sewage and he admitted, with ill grace, that his own senses were these days blunted a little. ‘But I usually thank God for that.’ He further admitted that perhaps he had caught a whiff of our own little galley. He seemed anxious to keep from even the mildest disagreement and I wondered if there was a motive in this, for I knew him to be habitually and happily contentious. ‘I’m rather glad our friend Khamsa is gone, aren’t you?’
I said that I had been enjoying our conversation. I was always glad to hear another viewpoint.
‘Even when most of it is a blatant lie?’ Professor Quelch gave up trying to repress his natural aggressiveness. ‘All khamsa means is that he is one of the Inner Five of the Moslem Brotherhood.’
At this, I folded up my pad and laughed openly. ‘Really, old chap! He’s a convinced agnostic. You heard him say so.’
‘I heard him lie, certainly. Believe me, Peters; that man has sworn on the Koran and a revolver to uphold the honour of Islam against all who attack or humiliate her. It is the most influential Secret Society in the East, which abounds with such societies. They are said to be responsible for the majority of important political killings.’
I suggested this was unfounded speculation on his part. My impression of Ali Pasha Khamsa was of having shared the company of a gentleman.
‘That is indeed what is so dangerous about him, Peters, old man.’
Wolf Seaman came labouring up the staircase in his running costume and, with a faltering wave, took a last turn around our deck before leaning, with some high, indistinguishable noise, against the bar. ‘Good morning,’ he managed, after a pause.
We approached him. ‘Good morning, old chap.’ Quelch looked him over carefully. ‘Venienti occurrite morbo, eh?’
‘I lack your Latin, professor. But yes, it is so. I believe a truly fit man is never sick. You are up, both of you, unusually early.’ He paused to take another great gasp, but there was a resentful, proprietorial air to the remark as if he had not only the lease of the deck for his own personal use but also of this particular hour. Although common in Swedes I have noticed this trait chiefly in Germans, who travel these days in large numbers and always complain of the crowds. Is there in this habit some secret to the rest of their behaviour? Perhaps it is a dichotomy, perhaps a paradox? I am not sure.
The sun was above the horizon and her dramatic shadows had shrunk so that surrounding land and patient river resumed a more familiar perspective. Our director drew a brave breath and expanded himself proudly for a while.
‘We were discussing the passenger who recently departed.’ Quelch yawned. ‘I expressed an opinion which seemed to shock young Peters.’
I had not wanted to pursue the issue. ‘Surprised me,’ I said. ‘Only, after all, there is no evidence.’
‘Of what?’ enquired Seaman with a rush of expelled air.
‘That he’s involved in politics.’
‘The Moslem Brotherhood, actually,’ added Quelch, and I gave up any attempt to steer the conversation to a pleasanter and less spectacular subject.
‘I’d remind you,’ Seaman rubbed importantly at a muscle in his leg, ‘that the gentleman is a very close friend of our new “angel”, Sir Ranalf Steeton.’
‘Then,’ said Quelch, ‘Sir Ranalf must be warned. I assure you, I recognised him. A couple of days were enough to be certain who he was.’
‘Don’t be an ass.’ Seaman found him prepost
erous. ‘Sir Ranalf’s all right. He’s accepted by them. They trust him. That’s how we get so much co-operation.’ He was contending now with his cramps and spoke with a certain harshness.
Quelch laughed through his nose; a cold, demeaning sound. ‘Sir Ranalf is not a traitor, Mr Seaman.’
‘Of course he isn’t!’ Seaman lowered his foot to the deck and straightened his back with a sigh. ‘He’s a businessman. National Security isn’t involved.’ He had assumed the soothing tone he normally reserved for a temperamental star.
‘In all the years of our association, he has never hinted . . .’ Quelch shook a baffled head.
‘He’s not exactly one of them, Professor Quelch. But he is party to some of their secrets. I suspect Sir Ranalf Steeton to be a very brave man. I need say no more, eh?’
The clever Swede had found the perfect means of silencing an Englishman: a call upon his patriotic discretion. There was nothing of which an Englishman was prouder than in saying nothing about something about which he knew nothing. Here was a most satisfying illusion of favoured status, of power. And it was not confined to the men. During the War British women throve on it. They frequently had nothing else, but it was enough for them. I remember their efficient, confident voices. All a man had to do to finish a love affair was to murmur the words ‘Top Secret’. They were born to this service. It is no wonder the typical British mouth is thin and capable of little movement.
To their delight, men have discovered that the less they say the more attractive they are. Indeed, Mrs Cornelius used to declare that she didn’t mind blokes so long as they kept their bullshit to themselves. But in the end, she said, she had given up hoping. ‘No bullshit - complete silence.’
She joined us downstairs in the boat’s little restaurant. I had pushed back our window’s lace curtains to see some ducks squabbling in the nearby reeds and now watched while Professor Quelch instructed one of our Nubian boys as to the exact, and somewhat large, portions he required of ham, eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried potatoes, kedgeree, kippers and fried bread, all of which, he confided to me, as the boy carefully piled the food upon two plates before him, were a bit substandard if one had enjoyed the real thing in England. ‘Here, the cuisine goes through what I call a river-change. It frequently looks or even smells right, but there is a difference of taste. I suspect it is the use of oil rather than good Home-Counties butter.’
For my own part I contented myself with a small rack of dry, crumbling toast and some almost liquid marmalade.
I told Mrs Cornelius how I had risen early that morning thinking we had crossed into another dimension of the world, perhaps into the netherworld. She shook her tolerant head at me while Professor Quelch declared sardonically: ‘The world hath turned the man mad, this good man mad, as Wheldrake has it in his Martin Azuratt, the Alchemist of Leeds. Now there’s a fine play you might consider filming, Mr Seaman.’
Seaman just at that moment had filled his mouth with a buttered roll and could only grunt.
‘You’ll play the leading role, Peters. You’d be perfect in it. And Esmé - Miss Gay - could be the mayor’s beautiful daughter, a victim of unthinking male rivalry. It is a marvellously uplifting story. We must ask Sir Ranalf to consider it as an early subject for our new company.’
Seaman was not much pleased at Quelch’s assuming he was on our permanent strength, but the Swede was still struggling to speak. He began to turn red. I was reaching to bang him on the back when Esmé, in a scented billow of blue and white, entered and he swallowed suddenly. The gentlemen got to their feet. Esmé curtseyed and smiled. Her glance to me was full of shared secrets. Sitting down with her back to the window she dipped dainty fingers towards the bread basket.
‘It is so pretty out there. I saw some lovely birds.’
I asked if she had seen a pelican, but she shook her head. ‘Just a few little birds, you know. And those wonderful palms. Isn’t the weather warm? Who would think it was March?’
‘So it is!’ Mrs Cornelius was delighted. ‘It’s Wolfy’s birfday, soon. We’ll ‘ave ter ‘ave a Easter party! It might resurrect yer, yer pore barstard.’ She guffawed.
Quelch asked the day. It was, by the British calendar, March 14. We were due to arrive in Luxor in three more days. ‘That will be perfect,’ he said.
‘And shall it be a masque?’ asked Esmé. ‘A fancy-dress?’
Seaman shrugged. He was deeply embarrassed, burning scarlet. ‘I’m not sure that Grace will allow our properties to be used . . .’
‘It’s easy enough to dress up as Arabs,’ Mrs Cornelius escalated her enthusiasm. ‘We’ve orl got sheets on our beds, 1 ‘ope. We’ll make the most o’ wot’s arahnd.’
I was captured by their enthusiasm, though I suspected some of it had to do with the element of boredom which so often overtakes shipboard life, leading to childish pranks and unsuitable couplings. It had been some while since I had properly celebrated Easter, so I began to look forward to the party. Indeed, anticipation helped relieve the slightly morbid sense of dread gathering at the farther corners of my mind. It was impossible to tell the origins of this dread, though the iconography of the landscape forever reminded me of Hades. I was not reconciled, in those days, to the Fact of Death. I was impatient to make my mark in this world. I would leave it to the priests to worry about the afterlife. Old age brings either wisdom or defeat, I am not sure which.
Esmé and I now found plenty of time together, since Mrs Cornelius had made Professor Quelch and, occasionally, Wolf Seaman, into card-players, together with Radonic and Chief Sri Harold. We had all by now become active at night and saw the dawn as a preliminary to sleeping until lunch-time, when we would all gradually congregate in the restaurant as if we had not seen a soul since dinner the night before. Something in the dry Egyptian air combined with our cocaine to bring Esmé and me unimagined sensations and delights. We became obsessed with exploring them. Only when the intensity began to drop did I turn to less energetic pleasures rather than, as so many tyros do, attempt somehow to boost sensation with sordid games and pornographic postcards. For me, to patronise these Sex Shops would be a sign of failure.
I celebrate sexuality with women on their own terms, and I have willingly explored those terms to the fullest extent. That is why they trusted me. Today there are no ways of knowing how to trust a man. These Maydays and Pentaxes promise too much and fulfil no one; creating a hunger for a non-existent food which, if it did indeed exist, would anyway be a coarse and inferior alternative to food already available. If we are patient, giving, willing to learn, willing to be malleable sometimes and to be masterful at others, so we shall taste the food of the gods, the food of quintessential human love. This, in those noisy nights, is what I taught Esmé, and the nights became tranquil again. There is an exquisite and particular harmony in savouring the past and predicating the future. Much of this, I admit, I learned from my Baroness and from other dear comrades whom a friend would not name in the current climate. By the middle of the 30s we had learned discretion and lost our innocence. By the 40s we had discovered the delicate pleasures of restraint and sacrifice, of brevity. By the 50s these things had become mere habits and everyone had forgotten the reason for their creation; they were rejected in the 60s as being of no value whatsoever and everything was sudden Licence. Their newspapers are the work of mad spiders, of psychopathic sex criminals, of irresponsible hooligans, of repressed middle-class children whose fathers and uncles and older brothers are daily bread to the specialist prostitutes of Colville Terrace and Talbot Road. Sometimes they run into one another, the Portobello hippy indulging some infected North African narcotic and publicly groping his bewildered PreRaphaelite concubine, and his father, just popping out from Madame Lash’s Chamber of Desire. They tell me there is a difference. I cannot see it. One by one they surrender to the Power of the Beast. Do they see virtue in infecting the public with their own filthy ikons, their shameful desires and social diseases? These papers hold up every form of torture and
humiliation as an extension of human sexuality. And you say the Goat does not stretch His hairy body across Portobello’s rotting slates and look down on that agitated human flux which might have spilled from some Islamic slum, and laugh through His pain? Achieve even, perhaps, a modicum of pleasure? Can this be what all great civilisations come to? A people which brought the Pax Britannica to half the globe and won the right to plant the flag of Christendom in the very heart of Arabia, carrying it into Mecca itself and destroying the very roots of our present disease. Instead, horribly, Britain fell in love with Arabia as she fell in love with the Jews. She loved all Semites. And then she was torn between two rivals. Which to choose? She did what every femme fatale has done since the time of Eve: she compromised; she vacillated. She should have turned her back on them both and recovered her matronly self-respect. Everyone thought she would. Especially the Germans, who would otherwise never have gone to war. And when the British socialist parliament stated quite clearly where their new loyalties lay, what choice had she but to make a treaty with the Bolsheviks? The date of their shame is May 23, 1939, when they made an independent state of Palestine. That some Jews attacked this declaration, as well as Arabs, is an indication that there are sane people even amongst our opponents. Britain had become a Jew’s whore, servicing the Arab trade. Hitler saw it as his duty to save the British Empire. But he reckoned without her new Uncle, Sam, who now clutched the purse-strings of more than one nation. How could he know so many Christian lands had already fallen to the strutting carrion released from their old restraints by the violence of War and Revolution? How could he know that he was to be betrayed by everyone he had counted on, even Mussolini? I am no apologist for Hitler. I do not condone his excesses or, indeed, many of his methods; but neither do I blame him alone for the entire collapse of the world into thinly-disguised barbarism. He was badly served. He trusted too many of the wrong people. Churchill shared my views. He confided as much to Mrs Cornelius on that night she still refers to as when ‘me an’ littel Winny ‘ad a bit o’ fun tergever’, some time during 1944, if that was when we began to get the V1 rockets. It was that same week I saw Brodmann coming out of Downing Street and standing beside the sandbags to strike an illegal match for his cigarette. He was dressed as an ARP Warden, with the white webbing and lamp. It was twilight, the trees were black, like cracks in grey glass. Just as I started across Whitehall to buttonhole him, the siren went off and we were rushed to the evil-smelling shelters. I think that if I were to murder anyone, it would be Brodmann. How he mocks me with his knowledge. He is the only living witness to my shame. I can come to terms with the shame. I have learned I should not blame myself. But I always hated recalling that Brodmann, a renegade Jew, the worst example of his race, had seen what he saw in the Cossack camp before I was given Yermeloff’s pistols. It is no worse, I admit, than what Quelch observed later - what little he observed - but Quelch is dead. The Palmach did not keep hostages beyond their usefulness. It is all blood down the gutter now, as we used to say in Slobodka. I cannot speak of any of this, however, without shivering. My whole body cries out for me to stop. It is self-torture. My hands refuse to hold the pen. My head refuses language.
Jerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3 Page 30