By now I was breathless with the shock. But Kolya surely was in Paris, married to an aristocrat?
‘He still travels to Paris, I think. He’s definitely based with the boss in Marseilles now, though.’
‘You are sure it is the same man?’ Pretending to be dizzy from the drug, I rested for a moment against the bulkhead. Only a few steps lay ahead before we ascended to the saloon.
‘Very tall, rather pale. Good-looking in a sort of effeminate way. Excellent tailor. Knew you in Peter? Was in business with you in France?’
It could be no one but Kolya. ‘You say he travels?’ Somewhat falteringly I continued towards the companionway and paused again before I climbed.
‘Yes. He was in Tangier, for instance, only a couple of weeks ago. That was probably politics, too, but he didn’t say. He stayed at the Villa de France.’
‘His wife was with him?’ Almost supernaturally, Esmé had appeared overhead on the deck above, her dress and mood thoroughly changed. Now she was a little Mary Pickford, a Victorian angel - everything I knew her to be deep within herself. ‘No, miss.’ Shura looked up with friendly candour. ‘At least, I wouldn’t have thought so.’
I was delighted to introduce two of my most beloved friends. As we brought ourselves up to stand in formal attention before her at the stairs, she stood there like a queen while I made the proper courtesies. ‘Alexander Semyonovitch Neeva, may I introduce Esmé Bolascovna Loukianoff, my betrothed. Esmé, my cousin Shura.’
Shura kissed Esmé’s tiny hand and murmured some courtesy. Esmé excused herself. She had been on her way to her cabin, she said, and looked forward to joining us later, perhaps at dinner. Our ship was already drawing up her anchor and turning to the open sea. I took Shura into the saloon and found my own bottle beneath the bar. It was Old Beaumont Plantation, the best bourbon in New Orleans. Captain Quelch had a case of it and had presented me with three quarts for myself. Shura was highly appreciative. ‘You get sick of cognac and whisky and the wine here’s dreadful. One longs for the aged golden vodka we used to drink in Esau’s in the Slobodka.’
To be honest, I remembered nothing so wonderful on sale at Esau’s, but I would not have disagreed with my cousin and spoil this reconciliation if he had remembered that the Tsar was a Jew! I drank the bourbon for that very reason, I told him. I described some of my adventures since I had left Odessa on the Rio Cruz, my time in Constantinople, my meeting with Esmé there, our flight to Italy and France, my engineering achievements in Paris and Los Angeles, my film career, which he had already heard about from Captain Quelch. I saw no point in describing the negative parts of my story.
Shura was highly impressed by my success, but for his own part was self-deprecating. Even with one arm, he had been conscripted into various armies before he managed to get first to Varna and from there to Sofiya, where he had, he said, fallen in love for a while. He had gone on to Fiume until D’Annunzio’s antics turned the place into an uninhabitable slum, whereupon he made his way slowly to Marseilles where he had fallen in with our old acquaintance, the dentist’s son Stavisky, now a French citizen. ‘We’re a sort of Old Odessan network,’ said Shura. ‘He even found a job for Boris and Little Grania. She’s in Tangier at this very moment, buying and selling.’
‘And Boris is doing the accounts?’
‘Exactly! Of course, Marseilles isn’t Odessa, though it has certain similarities. I’ve learned to need the heat. I’m not sure I could easily live in Ukraine again.’
I had not thought of that aspect. I, too, had grown used to California and the way that good weather brought out the best in people, as, of course, it had done in Odessa, compared to the rest of the Empire. True to form, Shura was somewhat mocking of my three-piece suit. He said that his own costume was absolutely the latest Paris rage. Americans were so unstylish! I reminded him that I had always found his taste a little flashy. I had been raised in a more old-fashioned tradition. I did not remind him that our branch of the family had always been somewhat more intellectually sophisticated than his own, who were, after all, shopkeepers. I told him instead that I would find myself a good English tailor the moment we docked in Alexandria. I wanted to know what he planned to do in Tripoli. He was looking over, he said, a group of oil-fields being developed there. The ‘firm’ was considering some sort of flotation. Then I understood immediately why Kolya was involved. A wizard who had taken naturally to the mysteries of High Finance, Prince N.F. Petroff had become an eminent member of the Bourse. He would be called to assess the value of the fields and suggest the best way of launching the shares. It was through no fault of his that our Rose of Kiev had rotted in her shed, a victim of Levantine Big Business which wanted our Transatlantic Aerial Navigation Company to fail, which plotted our destruction. I shall never learn the whole of that wretched story. Certainly it was not Kolya’s fault that the burden of the blame for our defeat fell on me and I had been branded a swindler, forced to flee. He, after all, had courageously volunteered to remain behind and fight on. I could only thank heaven that in the end the powers opposing us had chosen not to pursue him. No doubt it was fortunate his wife’s father had been one of the other directors and, anxious to avoid an inter-family scandal, sent him into some sort of exile, but I was rather surprised to hear of Kolya’s sudden change of occupation. Maybe, after all, he had merely grown bored with the routines of the Parisian haut monde. Like me, Prince Nicholai was fundamentally an adventurer, a risk-taker, a restless seeker after fresh experience. This latest news suggested that I might meet him again sooner than I had dared hope. Our paths were sure to cross. I began to nurse the idea of returning to Europe. With my American passport and my credentials as Tom Peters, the moving-picture actor, I was sure I would have little trouble there. After all, the screen confirmed my honest American identity! But I would still avoid France for a while. It would be wonderful, I thought, to see Rome again. I had good friends there. The events of 1922 had heralded the beginning of a great social experiment just being realised to its full potential. Mussolini had brought a wonderful new stability to Italy.
When we had completed our Egyptian picture, I told Shura, I would probably take Esmé on a honeymoon in Europe. My friends da Bazzano, Laura Fischetti and Annibale Santucci must surely still be there, eating fried artichoke and arguing over the future of nations. I would love to see them again. And people told me that Berlin was far more interesting than Paris, these days. We would go over to London, where I still had money awaiting me. I laughed about this. It had seemed such a fortune before I began to earn my own living. But it would be a good excuse to look up Mr Green and Mr Parrot.
‘I heard those two old crooks were doing well for themselves with my dad’s money,’ said Shura cheerfully. We had gone out on deck to enjoy the sunset over the distant city. ‘I doubt if you’ll get what you’re owed, Simka darling. And we’ll never know how much they had. Dad was shot early on. By the Reds, I think. Anyway the pogromchiks changed their name and went out looking for “profiteers”! The results were much the same. You can’t make a Cossack change his hobbies overnight. The female profiteers were mostly raped, the males were butchered along with the children. All in Slobodka. They said Wanda got away.’
I had a soft spot for his sister. ‘I hope so.’ There was no mercy in telling him that she was probably dead.
By the time Esmé rejoined us, and Captain Quelch, Mrs Cornelius and the rest were ready for dinner, Shura and I were sadly the worse for drink. I remember very little of the evening, save for the warmth and security of our nostalgia, and remained in this euphoric state, with the help of Shura’s cocaine and my bourbon, until the ditty-boat took him towards Tripoli. We were on our way to Alexandria almost before I could be sure that I could read the drunkenly traced letters of the hotel, his permanent home in Tangier.
My reunion with my cousin had begun a healing process. Until then I had carried a bloody wound with me for some five years; a wound made when I wrenched myself away from my native land, the land of the St
eppe and wide rivers where my Cossack ancestors established their sechs. I had never planned to leave Odessa or my motherland. I had been forced to go as the Bolsheviks stamped their terrible will on the nation. I was part of an exodus making the Jewish exodus a weekend holiday. All the best that was Russia belonged to that exodus. All the best that survived. Scientists, writers and scholars, engineers and soldiers, so many of us fought to pretend we had no throbbing wounds, no aching longing for our Slavonic home. Since leaving Russia I had lost my way. I had forgotten that necessary pain. With Shura’s stories of old friends and old times, I knew something of the past must survive. The past can never be recreated but on the other hand it need not be lost to us. My scapegrace, charming cousin, before he left the Hope Dempsey, had restored to me a few vital scraps of my past. Like healing tissue, those scraps would knit to form at last a protective scar upon my wounded spirit.
Shura would never know how, almost in the nick of time, he had brought me the healing gift of tranquil recollection.
* * * *
TEN
THEY TELL US THAT WITCHCRAFT is banished to Africa. They assure you it is dead and forgotten in Surrey and all the civilised counties of England. They tell you this on the wireless, when it is the BBC that broadcasts the worst heresies and blasphemies, night and day, while herbalists and homeopaths are forever recommending their rubbish to the listening millions! What else is this but witchcraft? Jimmy Young and Woman’s Hour are nothing but a medium through which the Satanic creeds of Alchemy and Black Magic are transmitted to eager converts. What if the TV people offer us Stars on Sunday or a Final Programme or that we hear a priest, or more often than not these days a rabbi, for a few minutes a day on the Home Service - it scarcely matters, when twenty-three of every twenty-four hours broadcasting is given up to the propagation of Communism, Occultism, Judaism and rampant Buggery, where the ‘pagan spirit’ is the informing genius of the BBC Plays and Talks departments, and not improved, I would add, by replacing a godless Presbyterian with a crypto-Catholic. ‘But this is England,’ you will tell me, with your usual smug condescension. ‘There is no changing it. We have always been a pagan nation. It is the secret of our success. What do you think the Reformation was all about? Not to mention Cromwell. We made a God of our own sublime vices and set about proving to the world that He was the superior of all others.’ Yes! You are surprised that I know these arguments? Young people are fools. They think we have always been old and powerless. Why will they not observe and learn? Yes, I have seen witchcraft and feudalism in the flesh, under my nose, and if that does not make you value our rationalist and enlightened universe, very little will. They say those who come back from the colonies have the ideas of a hundred years ago. That is because they come from a world still having the experience of a hundred years ago or, in some cases, a thousand or a million. We should not despise the experience of people less civilised than ourselves. We should help them gently along the path of progress, teach them to write and read in their own language, but we should also listen to what they can teach us. Sometimes this method has excellent results, as in the case of Hawaii, but the case of Egypt, for instance, is the saddest of all. It is not the first time she has refused the helping hand of a nobler power and slipped instead into yet another pit of corrupt barbarism, an easy prey to Turk and Bedouin alike, those jackals who will feast on any civilisation but only when it is thoroughly rotten, when the stink of its carcass permeates the planet. And the British wonder why today the mongrels of the world are suddenly attracted to their little island! Sugar is sweet, but putrefaction is sweeter, as we used to say in Odessa. There was witchcraft there, too, but we knew it for what it was.
Mrs Cornelius tells me I am an alarmist. ‘There’s nuffink wrong wiv a few ol’ biddies putting a bit o’ comfrey in their tea, Ivan.’
‘It is not the comfrey, my dear friend. It is the implication of the comfrey. The comfrey is a symbol of what has gone wrong.’
‘Usually indigestion’d be my guess.’ Sometimes Mrs Cornelius can be overly down-to-earth. Perhaps this is why we are attracted to one another, for I have the sensitive, romantic kind of imagination while she, eternal female, has the less intellectual, earthier, instinctive qualities men value in women. These feminists who want to turn Titania into Oberon have no conception of the true, deep meaning of equality, that union of opposites which can be the most beautiful and transporting experience of all.
In that Mrs Cornelius would concur, and she is, after all, very much a woman, even now, when time has faded her beauty and stolen her health but nonetheless left her great heart beating stronger.
She remains too generous, my friend; incapable of detecting sin, for the most part, or of judging her fellow creatures too harshly. She was the first to drink with the Bishop, for instance, upon his release (though grave-robbery, even in London, is still frowned upon by some). For some years she earned a small living as a child-minder. It never mattered to her, she said, if they were little micks or little piccaninnies; they all shit their pants just before their mums came to pick them up.
‘It’s just a fad, orl this black magic stuff,’ she tells me. ‘The kids was inter it a few years back. Voodoo dolls an’ pentawotsits an’ ‘exes an’ orl that. It’s them ‘orror pictures, Ivan. On ther telly. Rosemary’s Baby an’ Frankenstein Meets the Wolf man.’
‘There is a difference between the two.’ I grow tired of this perpetual round. ‘When you and I were in Hollywood we knew who was Evil and who was Good. That was the difference. Our pictures pointed a firm moral - and not always the conventional sentiment. Now it is all up in the air. Is it surprising the children are confused?’
What is the point of turning on that television? The Cornelius children inform me I should buy a colour set. Why should I bother, I say, I know where I am with black and white. The wireless gets worse and worse, full of childish smut and self-congratulatory panel games featuring the same people responsible for the smut. If Tony Hancock is a comedian, then so is Harold Wilson. Both seem to blame the rest of the world for their misfortunes. They should face it. The public does not want what they offer. It is the same with the plays and books these young men produce. Is it art? If self-pity has become an art, then it is no surprise, I say, that all Jews are now artists. If self-congratulation is an art, then every Briton is an artist!
I try to recollect the beauty of the world. Before my legs grew so numb I used to go for walks to Kensington Gardens and then, as the whole of Hyde Park gradually became a playground for a disgusting cosmopolitan lower class, to Holland Park, where the foreign trees and shrubs grow in profusion but the hybrid is a short-lived rarity. How I love this London in springtime, still, with the scent of early lilac and daffodils, the carpets of wallflowers, tulips, forget-me-nots, those fields of lemon and scarlet, the great chestnuts coming to leaf, the blossoming cherries. I would walk up to the top of Ladbroke Grove, where all the substantial gardens were, and then stroll slowly down to Holland Park Avenue, smelling the shrubs and the flowers, the honeysuckle, the sweet plane trees, remembering my boyhood in Kiev. Then I would wander to the Kreshchatik on one of those days we know so well in Russia, when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, winter is gone and spring has arrived. Kiev’s warm yellow brick would begin to absorb the sun again and all the parks and avenues and cleared spaces, all the little suburbs like our own Kurenvskaya, explode with varied colour, while the bright shopfronts fling open winter shutters to reveal their new treasures and even the trams become glittering carriages of light floating on sunbeams, bearing us through the hills and valleys of paradise. A city built on hills always has a singular spirit. London, built where the river was shallow and fordable, has all the additional fortification necessary to a valley city. A hill is a natural defence and those who live upon hills naturally feel more secure. Londoners are always sounding the reassuring trumpet of their own superiority, as if they know how vulnerable they are. It is the same with Berlin. Yet there remains nothing like a London spring, fresh wi
th rain and silvery sunshine, with as many shades of green as a forest of jade and alive with tulips, with violets and daffodils. The British, unable to express affection for each other, lavish their love on flowers and animals. They flourish pictures of roses where others display crucifixes. Even their weeds and vegetables are national symbols. There is no city on earth more full of contented dogs, cats and herbaceous borders. It is, if not Blake’s Paradise, at least a Jerusalem for the Jack Russell, the Oriental shorthair, the African Grey, the British Queen or the Rhode Island Red. Even their polecats are domesticated!
What would otherwise seem deplorable, this lust to give affection to animals or plants, is more understandable when you consider the average representative of the English hoi polloi. He is as fatuously self-inflated, as belligerently stupid, as ill-mannered, ill-smelling and ill-contented as any creature upon the whole round world. One grudgingly admires those who still try to save him, when the only use for him, the only use the tribe ever produced him for, is to serve in some horrible overseas army. Without the colonies, the British have nowhere to send him. Their posturing becomes an empty charade, bereft of substance, plot or meaning. Is it any wonder that the annual entertainment for these people, the only living show they are ever prepared to attend in a theatre, is the Christmas Harlequinade in which down-and-out comedians regale a fresh crop of proto-louts with the full weight of their inheritance of prejudice and filth? These cattle have learned to praise themselves for their own vulgarity. What better Lumpenproletariat than one which makes virtues of the very things which keep it from aspiring to some better state? The Sun is their Bible. It is a Bible of Pride bereft of dignity or spirit. If this is the salt of the earth, this chanting army, then I will take my food with a little less flavouring. They are the same louts who brought disrepute to the Nazi party and who seized control of the Duma in 1917.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 18