The injustice of this did not outrage me for long. I came to understand that I had entered a dream-time I must endure until I could wake and return to the reality and security I had known before. It was my only alternative to death. I came to appreciate Goethe’s notions of joyful revelation through pain, hardship and humiliation. I am, moreover, not of a suicidal disposition. Indeed, I am by nature an optimist. Is this Jewish?
The Future is Order, Security, Strength. On this we all agreed. But the Future is Beauty, Tolerance, Liberty, also, I said. Those will come later, they told me. That was when I lost my faith in the Nazis.
I was ‘too much of an idealist’. They still say so. Mrs Cornelius tried to convince me of this, on the Berlin tram, shortly before my arrest. She sent me clotted cream from Cornwall. By then I was on the Isle of Man. When I received it it was rancid. After that the rationing got worse. I was back in London in time for the Blitz. ‘They didn’t wan’cha ter miss nuffink, Ivan,’ yelled Mrs Cornelius on that first weekend together as we huddled outside a crowded makeshift air-raid shelter while the world turned to howling, heaving red and black and from above and all sides of us came the drone of engines, the banging of guns. Britain had expected to lose, you see, like Poland or Czechoslovakia or France. She had prepared London for siege, not for victory. They say Churchill was the last to accept that we survived the Battle of Britain. Even he was infected by that new, corrosive defeatism which comes from only one insidious source!
Even in those days Mrs Cornelius was coughing badly. Her cough was almost terrifying when I first heard it. It brought back the sound of my mother’s coughing, her retching and heaving over the washstand, as I waited patiently for Mrs Cornelius to come out of her bathroom. The rhythm and volume of their coughing fits was identical.
There are some memories which accompany such associations - bad ones, which I will not allow to emerge, because to dwell on them is pointless - and sweet ones, of summer gardens and happy outings, of the flowery fields around Kiev, the distinctive lavender scent of my mother’s best coat; the gorges, the woods, the old yellow streets and sturdy timber houses under gentle trees, of the busy Kreshchatik Boulevard with its scintillating store displays, its window-boxes and decorative baskets, the rich smell of the cafes and the chandlers’ shops; all the nooks and crannies of a true city, long in the building, making little shadowy places, safe places, caves and hollows and enclosures and sharp corners and mysteries in every sidestreet, grown naturally over centuries like a vast, wonderful shrub, thoroughly-rooted and profoundly implanted with the pattern of the past, for the memory of Kiev is the memory of the Slavic people, those warriors of the Eastern marches, the bastion of Christ against the ferocious and envying Mongol. This is why we understand so well what is happening today. Yet still you refuse to listen. You think you have a kind of peace? A pact with Carthage? Believe me, you have the Slav to thank for that. When he falls, as he must eventually fall, unless Christ sends a miracle, then it is an end to the old world. I would not wish to live in the mongrel, unruly new. Has Chaos already conquered? My ship is called Novaya Kieva, Novaya Mira, she is the Tsargrad, the citadel of our race and our faith! They tried to make me a Jew, a Musselman, their dog, but I deceived them. I was only acting. I performed the rape scene.
They took us step by step into the Land of the Dead. We licked our lips; then we rolled our eyes; then we grinned at the camera; and then we did everything again. As Sin of the Sheikh reached artistic unity the noble gods of Egypt, in crude replica, peered in alien distaste from alcoves once honouring saints. Step by step they coaxed and threatened us into the Land of the Dead, where in grotesque pantomime of the living, we endlessly performed our rape scene, where al-Habashiya, Queen of the Damned, would laugh and clap as a proud parent applauds her children. And one day she makes us come to her in her perfumed inner pavilion where eunuchs and hermaphrodites wait on all her needs. Would you now become a Musselman? No, I would not become a Musselman. Then you must be a Jew. Sweet little darling Jew-puppy. Soft little Yiddy-widdy dinkums. This was how He rationalised His rape of me. That tide of black fat was never still, it flowed over me, it threatened to suffocate me, and yet there was a terrible hardness in it, as if at some point the tension would burst to reveal razor-sharp steel gashing through bloody flesh, the spring of its overwound energy, to destroy me. To cut me into nameless strips of meat. That fat black tide dragged me into a darkness worse than any pain. Little greasy Jewboy whore, momma’s darling, sweet darling arse. Obedient little cocksucking Jewboy filth garbage muck fuck English Jewboy whore bitch. She said was I a Moslem or a Jew? I said, a Christian. No, she said, a Moslem or a Jew? She told me what a Moslem must eat. She told me what a Jew could eat. A Jew, I said. I will be a Jew. There was a piece of metal in my womb.
They say the icecaps are heating up because of our industry. What an irony should Stephenson’s engine prove the direct linear cause of Alexandria drowning forever beneath the Mediterranean! The science of our Enlightenment drowning all that was ever of value to us. Is this any destiny I should be party to? How much more must I answer ‘guilty’? I am guilty of nothing. Unless I am guilty of wanting to improve the world! This is a crime?
They were offered my new Jerusalem, my new Rome, my new Byzantium, my flying cities of silver filigreed with gold, my glorious towers, my Eden, my independence of thought and movement, the ultimate democracies. But what did they settle for? Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Ho Chi Minh and the Beatles!
Yet in spite of every vicissitude I refuse to forget my true destiny. If I am the light and inspiration of Europe, I am also the secret protector of our civilisation, the scribe of our victories and our honour. I am Thoth. I am Anubis, recorder and guide in these days of our dying. Jane Austen does not impress me since she agreed to the role of a slut in that film called after some Dutchman’s surname. I saw it again last week. As Cleopatra she could have ruled my heart forever. But I am a stupid, chivalrous old Slav of a forgotten era. Anything I say is misinterpreted by that filthy-minded scum. I merely held her, after all, as I explained. I said nothing bad. My intentions were perfectly loving. Ach, Esmé, mein liebschen, mayn naches! What could I do to harm you? I was your brother, your father, your husband, your lover, even your mother! I was all these things. I cared for you when you were sick. Only I was all these things. Why would God take you from me? I still blame myself a little for that, but ironically this is not the guilt they would have me bear. They would rather blame me for the genocide! For all those millions of Slavs and Gypsies and Celts and Jews? I think not. If they had listened to me I could have saved every single soul of them.
But they traded with the Bolsheviks, they placated them, they made a friend of Uncle Joe. What did they expect next? That a mad dog should suddenly become a loyal old pal? That you could sleep beside him and not be amazed if your throat was not torn out by morning? I would have brought Light and Peace to our starving darkness. Hitler would have ruled a world of simple decency and benign opportunity, where natural selection would ultimately produce a perfect citizen living in a city worthy of the Nazi dream. But their Final Solution weakened their authority in many eyes. I am the first to admit it. I have seen Alexander’s body in its secret tomb. God showed me where it was hidden. God said Alexander belonged to Him now. That mighty Greek, the great evangelist for Christ, came to Egypt and established the first truly civilised city, which became the greatest in the world. The Greeks took the best from Egypt and Assyria, discarding the cruel barbaric decadence of those first noble Semites whom heartless ambition brought low. It is the fate of the Jew to fall victim to his own marvellous invention. Some call that city the birthplace of our Church, where St Mark converted the first Jew to Christianity in ad 45. Volvitur vota, as Quelch might have said.