SIXTEEN
I SAW THE GOAT. I saw Him first in Odessa. I saw Him again in Oregon where the dead live in caves hidden amongst the mountains. I saw the Goat. He tempted me. He put a piece of metal in my stomach. Die iron strudel. It was His joke. He showed me my sister Esmé and told me she was my daughter. He said He would make her my wife. He promised power over them all. The Power of the Untrammelled Beast. Where He was not recognised was where He was best employed. The Devil was tired. He had worked long for this day. I met the Goat in Aswan, upon the ruins of a conquered Christianity. The Cow and the Ram came to witness my humiliation and my grief. What justice condemned me to their cruel control? If I could not believe God directed the world, I could only pray Christ remained to guide us. Satan reaches us through our most vulnerable and tenuous idealism; our faith in the future. That is how He conquered Russia and brought down His capering triumphant hooves upon the ruins of Berlin, upon the fallen bastions of our beliefs. Hitler turned his back on Christ, just as Napoleon had done before him. And so Satan, weary and sated as He was, came to sit upon the piled thrones of Europe and watch with grim ambivalence the destruction of what He had once most desired. Those modern Parsifals who took sword against Bolshevism are all dead now. Not one was killed in honest combat. All were betrayed from within. I was betrayed from within. There is a piece of metal in my stomach. Sometimes it feels like an iron Star of David. Was it in the bread the Jew made me swallow? What did I pay him? A Jew will never give you something for nothing. What did he want from me? He saved my life in Odessa, in Arcadia. What did I pay for this service? His hands were gentle. I loved him. Stadt der schlafenden Ziegen; Stadt des Verbrechens; Stadt der meckernden Krähen; die gerissenen Kunden liegen in den Gassen auf der Lauer die kleinen Võgel seinen trügerische Lieder. Die Synagogen brennen. O, Rosie, mi siostra! Zu är meyn zeitmädchen, meyn vor . . . Im der Vatican He lolls in an attitude of bored familiarity while His subjects queue to kiss His gloved paw. This affords Him no further amusement. Must He corrupt and destroy everything in order to escape the fact of His own agonised sundering from Grace? His is the worst torment of all, for He has already known a state of oneness with God. That state is now denied Him, as it is denied no other. We can only guess at the enormity of that loss. Is it any surprise that this fallen Immortal prefers to distract Himself from this unimaginable anguish by devising fresh trials and defeats for mankind? What would any of us do in His place? I thought I had left Him behind me in Odessa, in the bloody streets of Slobodka, where bloated dogs pant, replete, amongst the corpses of slaughtered Jews. There seemed no justice in His pursuit of me. I did not know then that I had been chosen by God to bring a particular gospel to this Age of Science.
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?’