The First Secretary was giving us some hopes of Khrushchev as a liberal, good-natured man of the peasants so reverenced by Tolstoy, despite Moscow’s current dispute with Washington over Congo disturbances and Castro denouncing the 1952 Cuban–American Treaty.
An Estonian poet, hulking, affectionate, drunk, lurched into the Embassy and assured me that I possessed ‘Destiny’, though we agreed that Destiny, dark sister, was captious as weather. He then said that Wagner told Baudelaire that, of all worldly gifts, the best were Beauty and Friendship. I had none of the former, little of the latter. Only work gave purpose.
Life was disciplined into sections, footnotes, references, mostly suggested by Mr Tortoise, who wagged delightedly at my own discoveries. The Miscellany was nearing completion, helped by grants from the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, and the European Broadcasting Union. One poem, ‘Sad Carrion’, derived from a girl buried alive by militia, 1898. Another nagged at me for days:
Bright ones were away, golden ones on the wing,
Off by night’s gleam.
Golden ones move by moonlight.
My head in the ages, I felt words, now brilliant as a carillon, now sombre as an undertaker’s parlour, but leaping over frontiers. They hauled me from doubt, Verwirrung, and the sticky cobweb of half-truths, whispers, insinuations, the mannered hypocrisies and gloved elegancies of professional diplomacy, for I was now allowed to attend minor official receptions. At these I heard discreet clucks about Pentagon and Ministry of Defence still employing trusted colleagues of Herr Adolf Eichmann.
As further fillip, the BBC World Service invited me to broadcast, during slack periods, on Baltic affairs. Censorship, no less drastic by being unofficial, forbade mention of Operation Cock-Up, British submarines’ attempt at undercover conveyance of Estonian partisans for training in East Anglia. Throughout, it had been divulged to Moscow, British officers had been amongst the victims.
All embassies must secrete shadow regions, doctored histories, desperate options, careers carefully left ambiguous. One such was Evai Miksa, Police Chief in Nazi-occupied Estonia, now an Icelandic citizen but, in his London Bishop’s Avenue millionaire stockade, entertaining newspaper owners and high-ups of all parties. We had been sent, anonymously, data of a recently dead physician who had punctiliously assisted the elimination of Estonian ‘sub-humans’. He had contrived peacetime employment in an Argentinian clinic, before retiring to Leicester, a dignified gentleman eating cakes in the Kardomah café, regular at church and charity dinners, lifting his hat to old ladies. Included, was his prospectus for culling ‘racially deficient offspring’.
MI6 had requested information of a Nazi fugitive murdered in Prague, the Nobel physicist who had reviled Einstein as a Jewish fraud.
The First Secretary, on my pledge of secrecy, showed me a stolen diagram of bunkers secretly built in nine British cities against atomic attack. A handwritten postscript detailed underground bases in London, Birmingham, Manchester, their concrete two yards thick and with electronically maintained stores, radio communication, hundreds of miles of cable.
True? His Excellency only shrugged while I, as Holmes, as Maigret, as Perry Mason, burrowed for more of the Herr General. Before the war, he owed large sums to the Estonian Treasury; at this, Mr Tortoise gave a tragedian’s sigh. ‘He was blatnoi. A thief who could sometimes be trusted.’
I had to reconsider tales of him commanding Whites in 1919, his contacts with the British Navy and the future Field-Marshal, Harold Alexander, his negotiating with the Reds. Multilingual reports, cuttings, clandestine letters, featured him on a commission supplying them with guns, tractors, grain, his ability to extract British loans, his signature amongst dozens on the Tartu Treaty by which Lenin recognized ‘for Perpetuity’ the independence of the Baltic States. He had been with Bernadotte, Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, helping draft the telegram to the frantic Himmler, that the Allies rejected him as Guarantor of Order in a post-Hitler Reich. A text unenviable to deliver to der Treue Heinrich.
Much was supposition, notably an FBI note of the Herr General’s covert meeting with the Duke of Windsor in Lisbon after the capture of Paris.
Such a man joins no White Rose or July Plot. He flickers in shadow play, a dim hand poised above ciphered missives, to demolish, dispossess, bargain, condemn; a blur, passing in an armoured car with obscure number plates.
Father, rather apologetically, once said that though the Herr General never lied; he enjoyed truth indirect. I myself was to find that, if three say identical words, two are untruthful. Mother reproached him, then, seeing me escaping to bed, murmured in very different voice, ‘Good night, my pet. Sleep with angels.’ Yet it was from the Herr General that I craved denial that the Manor, like all Big Houses, contained a scaffold, explaining business once done in the Rose Room.
Now, would-be Londoner, pamphleteer, editor, with newcomer’s zest, I was a counter-Marat, an anti-McCarthy, exposing crimes, denouncing the unclean, in territory without barriers, where the dead stalked the living. With sudden optimism, I judged that my pamphlets, and the lyrics and sub-epics of the Miscellany, would fortify the Forest Brothers.
Easily indictable was Alexander Seroff, of Soviet State Security, Moscow’s henchman in destroying the last of the Estonian intelligentsia, responsible to Khrushchev.
My mail swelled, mostly supportive, though one scrawl complained that I was a lackey of General Motors, another that, as a gentile, I would never see God, a third denouncing me as a police spy.
I was permitted a broadcast on Independent Estonia, Mr Tortoise supplying notes on Nationel no Trudovay, National Unity Society, dissolved by the Pact. Many survivors joined the Forest Brothers, though several were communists, their loyalties equivocal.
A few sentences tapped from Estonia revealed that a former National Unity member, Georgi Okolovitch, fleeing to West Germany, had been trailed by Nikolai Khokhloff of SMERSH, the Bloodhound. At Frankfurt, confronting each other, they made friends, recklessly held press conference, then vanished.
Other reports were less highly coloured, more like muffled bleats from a submerged and wrecked submarine. A twilit scenario of dubious allegiances, currency fraud, pornography, bugged rooms and telephones, supra-national linkages. A known KGB officer sat in the Bonn government, another was a UNESCO prominente. Yet another, protégé of U. Thant, UN Secretary-General, spoke regularly on Radio Free World. CIA was tussling with KGB, to finance aspects of the World Council of Churches and the Congress of Cultural Freedom. CIA money was said to underpin Mr Spender’s influential monthly. Moscow maintained that mafiosi had secured the recent election of the young, vivid JFK, who then shared a girl with a Midwest godfather.
A Himalayan guru, revered and overpaid by Western youth, to reduce fears of the Bomb, denied the existence of Existence.
Mr Tortoise found me a photostat of a 1940 Foreign Office map of Brazil, some provinces coloured, denoting Nazi plans for occupation, in another forgery, to induce US entry into the war. Eesti Hääl accepted an appeal from Manifeste des 121 to French soldiers to desert rather than use torture in Algeria, where Estonians served as Foreign Legionaries. We designed a European chart, reducing hallowed cities to strokes, circles, initials, synonyms of pharmaceutical laboratories, armament and toxic gas fortresses, airfields disguised as colleges, real estate offices, undeveloped areas. Italicized dots co-ordinated a Belfast rifle club, Amsterdam bookshop, Milan Masonic lodge, Marseilles insurance company.
Tiny incidents I remembered from Paris were now magnified, loaded with meaning. The soft-spoken philanthropist enquiring whether Wilfrid travelled by air, a royalist’s anxiety to discover Malraux’s telephone number. Next week, ‘for kicks’, wealthy teenagers had placed a plastic bomb near his flat. ‘I can offer you perfect style,’ an elderly German had promised, ‘also, absolute protection’, mistaking my importance.
Such massed information was fatiguing, but the Miscellany revived me, presenting friendship with the unseen, some alive, others
dead. Maria Under, the poet, Bernard Kangro, authority on Estonian folk traditions, sent me new work. With Mr Tortoise, I persuaded UNESCO to publish Karl Bistikvi’s Hohenstaufen Trilogy. From Oslo exile, Ivar Günthal sent extracts from his polemical journal Mana. We edited translations from Gerd Hetbemäe’s periodicals. Estonian humour became more understandable, akin to its landscapes, often bleak and sunless, then revealing subtleties: it had the sardonic slyness of the subjected, the dumb-insolence grin of Good Soldier Svejk. A moving resistance story, ‘Partisans’, arrived from Arved Viirlaid, of Toronto.
A character in a play that London had frenziedly applauded, brayed that no good causes were left. The Miscellany was now sent to the author, though without response.
Under the heavens we know, Gods still richly bestowing, Move as in former years.
Would Rilke have discerned gods in managerial England, of planning, City and parliamentary scandals, vomiting drunks and television aristocracy? But, this morning, a new Estonian poem shone like light compressed to a jewel, flashing golds and blues against London greys and vernal greens. From stories I regained old kitchen talk of learned birds, miraculous wells, trees inventing speech, the village ‘Shrewd One’ stating that no animal save the occasional bear possessed souls. For illiterates, like detectives and partisans, a bridge, footprint, low whistle had significance outside stories.
Not a poet, I planted myself in poems, with delight almost sexual chancing on Bernard Kangro’s verses.
I have been prone here for millennia,
My face – crumbling stone
Yet my heart beats eternally, my soul
Is the roar and groan of forests.
Field, meadow, paddock, village,
The tall ancient birch at the gate-way,
Are flickering, fugitive glints,
Long thoughts, looming, waiting.
My breast has weathered tempest,
Hail has brutally lashed my eyelids.
Very tactfully, Mr Tortoise reminded me that the word soul had been the death of many poets.
6
In parodies of a heroic career, I was building a grandiose self: Malraux’s confidante, Trilling’s assistant, Spender’s intimate and rival editor, BBC reliable, almost a new being like Soviet Man, American Youth.
The facts dowsed such mish-mash. Midsummer was approaching, but Destiny refused an appearance. I would receive no curtain calls from posterity, was no more than prey to exile’s disease: irrational hopes and fears. Alarm at a posse of ambulances ranked opposite the Embassy, vanishing as soundlessly as it arrived. Late-night trains rushing unscheduled through post-midnight London allegedly loaded with nuclear waste. Morbid expectations dripped into dreams, telescoping the years. Rats fled Stalingrad, as, forewarned, at fire, earthquake, the voles and martens abandoned Helice, the island crushed by the sea, two millennia ago. My Midsummer Baldur, saviour and friend, princely, what Dutch called deftig, was as unlikely as Her Majesty tattooing on her thigh ‘Ban the Bomb’.
Summer offered flimsy treats: butterflies scattered above delphiniums, streets flashing with bare legs, children light-footed, perhaps light-fingered, ‘Got a fag?’ as if demanding protection money. A small coloured boy, serious, trusting, thrust at me with a leaf. ‘Is this Nature?’ A Barbados squad gaily collecting for Battle of Britain widows.
My landlady, herself a dumpling war widow, recommended the Midsummer Neighbourhood Festival. ‘It’ll do you good. Saturday. You’ll mix with the Right People.’
Possible, though with its transient population the neighbour-hood lacked neighbours.
Saturday was missal blue and green, my mood a kite, aloft yet tied to the earth of sparkling cafés and bandstands. In Paris, A Midsummer Night’s Dream had made me crave baroque transformations, passionate illusions. An English summer day could exorcize the glance over the shoulder, dangerous staircases, a warning to keep close to the wall. Morning and afternoon, merged in a pageant of calm Regency terraces, mellow gardens, sedate churches, the England of privacy, lordly strength reserved but powerful. Blemish stared down only towards evening, from a poster of a trollish riding-master, black-jacketed, peak-capped, with metallic face and belt, striding the future on huge letters, He Is Coming.
By now, the sky over the Museum was tinged red, and, beyond Bedford Square, in Coram Fields, dusk was filling with tinny, carnival percussion. Uneasy, but obedient to the landlady, I joined the crowds under coloured lights and garish advertisements: Toothpaste Cures, Have Another Pint, Flowers for All. Children’s playgrounds were ashine with stalls, kiosks, strippers’ tents, hot dog and ice cream tables, booths of Madame Katrinas, cosmic tricksters waiting behind zodiacal emblems, shuffling promises like counterfeit florins. A steamy, floodlit oval was ribboned off for tombola, small figures bouncing as if scalded for the waiters’ race and coronation of Miss Bloomsbury. Urchins smeared with chocolate and fudge capered wildly, as drums and guitars surged in swollen, electric rhythms and, ahead, dancers stamped, twisted, in fluid whirligig, swept by ever-changing lights, scarlet, violet, banana yellow, though with little exuberance. They were professional, mechanical; even the children seemed more scheming than carefree. Under a gilded canopy, youths in singlets marked Peace, Arsenal, were throwing darts into the enlarged, dark-eyed face of Anne Frank. A dim, impervious line of police stretched along Mecklenburg Square.
I hastened to a makeshift bar, drinking myself into other illusions. I was the Secret Agent, Hidden Hand, inconspicuous, negligent but, alone, armed against the underswell of crowds: favours withdrawn without warning, the guillotine at the end of the avenue. The rock beat, dodgem cars, mauve and amber flash-boards, the invitation in the latrine, assignations behind canvas, the cannabis whiff and warm, sex-ridden flesh, were all in some unconscious magnetic current, swirling towards an unseen goal, in a glare that made children’s games incongruous, the motionless police explicit and deadly.
An explosion of crimson, rush and good particles. In the manic hues, faces were dried, genderless, unfinished, emitting dull cheers for a giant, dazzling gin bottle, ‘Spinster’s Revenge’, above a piebald tower. Girls with bright-red grins hovered behind planks, selling balloons, toy bears, cakes, cosmetics. The music crashed, heavy air drooped, a flame waved like a sash beside a black, spring-heeled juggler jittering on a huge phallic cone frilled with blue bulbs, performing to a canned, Dionysiac scream, ‘Lovin’ you …’ All was muddled, congealing into a stew of teddy bears, candyfloss Queens and Mountbattens, a dwarf on crutches, a blow-up of Anthony Eden and Nasser fisting in boxer’s shorts. And then. Leaflets fluttered from the tower like shot gulls, someone stooped, picked one up, and, relay runner, slipped it to me. Europe for the Europeans. On cue, voices harsh as crowbars dragged across concrete acclaimed the unfurling of Union Jacks, distribution of The European, headlining, ‘One Free People, One Free Britain, One Free Europe’, some women yelling polecat against ‘Hordes’.
Trapped in hallucination, yet with rear-gunner attention, I glimpsed a Suzie twirling through kaleidoscopic rays clasping a blonde hippie, heard hoarse babble about the Age of Aquarius. ‘Dynamic Change Is Looming. Pisces Decadents Vanquish Hierarchical Powers of Europa and Albion.’
A chilly wind had begun, clouds sagged, dense with rain. A boy scowled, ‘She won’t go the whole hog.’ Leathered Freikorps in square black glasses barged past, whistling at a crude pennant, telegrams of hate, depicting Khrushchev as an ogling pudding, then more, Union Jacks, glaring birds from a diseased tropic and, in searchlight strength, a screen was covered with a bearded, fur-capped ape bayoneting a map of Europe.
7
‘More words to the square breath. To ditch the international punt-about, political anarchy, we must scrap potty nation-states, what Buchan called shoddy little countries. If I knew how to spit I’d do it now, at Northern Ireland and the promise of independent Scotland, let alone talkative Wales. Who in cock-robin needs Maltas, Luxemburgs, a Basque land, with UN votes outnumbering their betters? The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein is
as obsolete as stout Cortez. Petty loyalties corrode like bad ink. To weep for Lithuania is tinker-bell sentimentality. I haven’t much time to explain, though see that it’s necessary.’
The speaker, Alex Brassey, youngish, controversialist, with red, coarse, jumbled hair, more rust than rich tawny. He was covered, rather than dressed, in dark-blue cord jacket and baggy greys and, unlike those ranged behind him on the platform, was tieless. He inspected us, tolerant but slightly reproachful auctioneer. ‘I’m not’, he assured everybody, including his fellow speakers, ‘ridiculing patriotism. Probably I’m alone amongst you down there who can understand, indeed spell, escutcheon. But my patriotism is personal as a toothbrush. Not place but atmosphere. England doesn’t mean green fields and holiday camps. But …’ he hesitated, as if risking a joke unlikely to elicit laughter, ‘values, civilized give-and-take.’
A few did laugh, jeeringly: his own chuckle was barman’s assent, in this college debate about the feasibility of a Britain independent of Europe and the USA. In the arc behind him, backed by flamboyant posters – Federate for Peace, USE, Elvis Rules – were a Tory politician who had lost his seat for opposing Suez, a Girton don advocating total British integration with Europe, a composer once gaoled for refusing conscription and, tireless bemoaner of Britain’s lost opportunities, jowled and piggy-eyed, a CND vice-president, novelist, the Modern Dickens. He had grumbling mouth, possibly discontented by Brassey’s assumptions about escutcheon. I remembered that he had once, though not recently, asserted that the genius of humanity was Soviet Literature. Upholder of traditional English decency, he had lately been divorced, in discreditable circumstances.
Brassey was flowing like tap water. ‘Blast Latvia and Belgium, archaic as Assyrian bas-reliefs or airport coffee.’ His grin, around yellow, irregular teeth, was craftily confidential. ‘But each to his own.’ A throat-cutting gesture induced more rowdy laughter and indulgent nods from behind, save from the Modern Dickens. ‘But yes. Atmosphere. We can forget King Arthur, the Golden Years of Elizabeth, Palmerston’s handy gunboats. Of course, whether you like it or not, probably not, we’ll be shoved into Europe. That’s not the real issue. Understand this …’ – the chin jutting from the narrow, too conspicuous head was blotched as a pub table, as if disturbed in mid-shave; I listened only fitfully, to a mixture of arrogant contradictions and puzzling allusions – ‘nationalism isn’t patriotism, as, except in your cafeteria, chalk isn’t cheese. I’m not against provincialism. A society in which provincial is pejorative is lopsided. But nor am I parochial. I loathe flags, morally, politically, aesthetically. Pre-war nations were mostly huge, unpleasant, tinny dictatorships or midget fire-bombs, all like Sweden and Switzerland profiteering on neighbours’ blood and pickled in self-righteousness. The solution …’
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