In Odessa the black smoke drifts and the goats sprawl sleeping in the streets, possessed of a power they hardly understand and for which they feel no responsibility, while against the riot of the hellish sky the great black He-goat rears up, frothing and glaring, his voice a victorious bray, and brings his pointed hooves of brass down upon the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, smashing the gold and white dome like an egg. I took the tram from the Greek Bazaar and was for a while in Arcadia. My life was saved but they had put some metal in me while I was trapped in their shtetl. The metal is still there. Much of the time I do not feel it, then comes a little stabbing, then a sharper, harder pain, then some sort of convulsion. It has poisoned my blood. The doctors will not prescribe or operate. Only the cocaine controls it and of course that is so expensive, these days, I cannot always afford it. These silly little boys. They think it is strange an old man likes a drug they believe they invented! They do not even know what the pure thing is. Cocaine was always the king of drugs. Even their progenitor Freud admitted that. The rest is rubbish. I control the pain, but there is anxiety, too, and a certain numbness. I have explained all this to Doctor Diamond and he says that it will heal in time. I have more than once suggested an exploratory X-ray or investigative surgery. He says it would be too expensive and they might not find anything. He is an idiot, a Donald Duck. Give me a magnet, I tell him, I’ll find it for you. It has sharp points. Sometimes I think it is in the form of a star. It brings nausea, often at night, when I wake up suddenly. The good Jew in Arcadia was just a little too late.
He was a journalist. He worked for the newspapers in Odessa. He had a wife, but she was already in France. He knew what they had done, I think, and felt guilty on their behalf. But he was not to blame. I loved him. Should I trust my emotions so completely? He was so gentle. Sometimes I wonder if it was not he in fact who did this to me, while I slept. Was I seduced by Lucifer? But I will not judge a man just because he is a Jew. It is not in my nature. I love all humanity. I should not suspect the journalist. It would spoil too much.
Oddly, these thoughts were often with me after Shura had gone. I felt depressed and lost and even the smooth, blue waters of the Sunny Med could not improve my mood.
‘Alexandria is like no other Levantine port,’ Captain Quelch told us as we went down to quarter-speed. He and I stood in shirt-sleeves on the main deck enjoying the evening heat. We would not see the city of Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Lord Cromer until the morning, and there would be no Colossus, as in ancient times, to signal the port’s position. We had crawled all day along the Egyptian coast, occasionally meeting customs launches and bum-boats, so as to steam in early next day when, Captain Quelch said, we should not have to sit outside at anchor all evening waiting for the pilot to come aboard in the morning and we would also have the first choice of docking berths. ‘And yet, she is all of them combined.’ He laughed at this contradiction. Wolf Seaman and Mrs Cornelius were with us in the stern, drinking some new cocktail Shura had invented while aboard. ‘At first sight you’d think you’d arrived in Yarmouth. The facade is that of a prosperous English resort disguising a particularly disgusting version of the Naples slums. We British are masters at disguising wretchedness not with grandeur and pomp, like the French or the Russians, but with respectability. The very dullness of the buildings suggests they have nothing to hide. Look at London. The most impressive building in St Pancras is a Gothic railway station. It is all the visitor remembers.’
Since the rest of us had never visited Alexandria and only Mrs Cornelius knew London, we had no means of judging the measure of Quelch’s descriptions, although I was inclined to trust them. He did not hate the Middle East, but he did not idealise it either.
That evening I was feeling somewhat gloomy at the prospect of parting from my new friend when I had only recently been forced to lose an old one. Since Tripoli I had been especially glad of Mrs Cornelius’s company but inevitably this made Esmé jealous. Once more, she was taking her meals in her cabin, though the sea-sickness was no longer a problem. Thanks to her, however, Wolf Seaman had recovered his humour, such as it was. He had been nervous, I think, afraid his master Goldfish would learn of our unofficial passenger and decide to recall the expedition. With Shura safely in Tripoli, he became merely surly, no longer quick to start an argument. What was more, for all Mrs Cornelius’s declaration that my Esmé was as useful as a roast ham at a synagogue outing, my little girl overcame her natural shyness, devoting her time to placating Seaman. I reminded Mrs Cornelius how Esmé had become a useful peacemaker. Mrs Cornelius tartly suggested the word I wanted was pirsumchick and I decided to hold my tongue on the subject. Women can be baffling at such times and I suppose I should be grateful they did not come to active war on board the Hope Dempsey. I saw nothing wrong with Esmé’s wish to win the approval of a man who might be useful to her but it was hard for me to understand why Mrs Cornelius, who was not above such strategies herself, could be so critical of a child who would never be her match in the art of ‘vampirism’. I am being complimentary. I have been too long in the world to judge the way anyone - man or woman - makes their living. And for women I agree it is harder, these days. Men are no longer bound by religion and conscience to protect them. Women have more to lose and they must take greater risks. That courage was what I admired in Mrs Cornelius. Why should she despise the same qualities in another woman? Is the competition so fierce? Are the losses so great? Ikh farshtey nit. Because I cannot bear to see two women whom I love at odds, this is somehow a sign that I am insensitive? Here, too, I have also learned to keep my mouth shut. If Catherine Cornelius asks, believe me, I am a feminist. Besides, I have never been against another person’s sexual preferences. Love, I always argued, is the only really important thing. Love, even now, could save us from the pit, from the suffering God puts upon the earth to warn us what Hell is like. It was love which saved me from the camp, in the end. ‘We must learn to understand one another. It is our only chance. To succeed in that will make the rest of this worthwhile.’ With tears in his eyes, Herman Goering himself spoke these words to me. He could not bear to hurt a fly. He had become a vegetarian. I suppose I should think myself lucky that because I try to tell them about the whole man I have merely been accused of fascism. They hounded Goering, after all, to his death. I wept for him when I heard the news, but I was not allowed to speak. I remained silent, like Peter, and I am ashamed. For it was Herman Goering who saved my life. Yet still the world refuses to let me honour him. Society has become too simplified for me. Paradox and contradiction are now the sole province of TV futurists and pop surrealists. They were allowed to make it their own. They became a commercial monopoly. Thus the very qualities distinguishing humanity from the beasts were isolated and turned into a show, something speculators could invest in and which spectators would pay to look at. Fantasy and invention, vision and speculation, all were placed in their own ghettos during the Great Simplification. The human race warred on the very elements which made it distinct. It warred on the Twentieth Century. It devoured and destroyed its own Time. It fought complexity. It fought variety. It fought individuality. And slowly, like Stalin, it began to win. It stifled those elements to death first by putting them into special categories, then by eliminating them entirely from the consensual consciousness, making them something alien and perverse.