I begged the Englishman to get a message to Goldfish. He said it was more than his life was worth. He gave me a dark red volume, a Book of the Dead. I was bitter. I said he had sold me into slavery. He avoided the accusation. ‘You people must be used to that sort of thing by now,’ he said. It was a meaningless remark. He pointed to the low hills. ‘There’s a railway line about a day’s walk that way. You could almost certainly reach it if you went on your own.’ Of course, he knew I would not leave Esmé, that she was still my responsibility. He was taunting me, he was delighting in my downfall. That evening I was whipped. I said I was a Jew. And Esmé was a whore, my sister, my rose. There was metal in my womb. I called an androgynous nigger musselman my mother and I asked it to forgive me. I told my mother that Esmé was a whore, a bad girl. It was one of the games she made us play. Anyway, what would you do if offered a choice between humiliating death and humiliating life? Life or death? Which would you choose? Some in those camps chose death. They wanted it to be over. But that is not my nature. I am more of an optimist. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away our child. You sold our little girl. Did you care that you hurt me? When kunte, Esmé? When kunte? Muta-assef jiddan. Bar’d shadeed. That false place of death. What did it matter if I admitted my sins? It was all false; nothing was as it had seemed. Quelch’s pronouncements on Egypt were proven. The world was false, a second-rate fantasy, a faded dream. Dust lay everywhere. We had arrived at dust. Yet the blood in our bodies still circulated. The limbs of our bodies still performed. Al-Habashiya still applauded and praised us and made me lay my head on his thigh while he fondled Esmé and played ecstatic Cairene hymns on his ornate gramophone. He promised he would find some Mozart for us. It was the same in Sachsenhausen. Mozart was supposed to make up for everything. I wore a black triangle, then. I was an engineer, I said. It was a concession, we said. Al-Habashiya stroked my head and cooed. Vögel füllen mayn Brust. Vögel picken innen singen für die Freiheit. Mein Imperium, eine Seele. Vögel sterben in mir. Einer nach dem anderen. Mayn gutten yung yusen. He stroked my head and called me his good little orphan, his sweet little Jewboy. It was better to obey than to endure that prolonged pain or agonising death. Esmé understood this better than I. It is how she too survived.
All those human bodies ploughed like bloody chaff into the furrows of barren fields. Was Esmé among them? I have a boy, she said. He’s a soldier. Did they ever understand what they took? Soulless themselves, they did not even recognise what they had stolen. They threw it away. They ploughed it under. But Russians know the truth. Every inch of Russian soil is nurtured by the souls of martyred millions who, down the centuries, defended their homeland. I spoke of this to Dr Jay in the hospital after they had examined my head. What makes the Jews so special, I asked. He agreed with me. He said he could find nothing physically wrong with me. Four days later I was free on the streets of Streatham. But I could no longer fly.
Kites rise from the mountains, from the Totenbergen, and red dust clogs my throat. You must get away from here, Maxim, she said. The people here are not sympatica. I think Brodmann had come to Luxor. I think I had seen him standing below the great clock in the railway station. He said he was English and that his name was Penny, but I guessed it was Brodmann. I was obsessed with Kolya. I was still looking for him. Al-Habashiya gave me some pyjamas. ‘Some stripes for you,’ she said. They were black and white. I saw Brodmann in Sachsenhausen. I recognised him and shouted at him. He answered with a hesitantly raised hand. What a superb actor that monster was! Binit an-san! But should I blame him? This century demands we join in a charade; it decrees the parts we play. It is only acting, I tell her. It is not really us. The pyjamas make my eyes shudder. The stripes stretch before me, merge and swirl and break open, like fragments of some vast psychic map.
I would not become a Musselman. Negra y bianco, noire et blanc. I lost you in the desert, Esmé. What brute makes use of you? Mrs Cornelius says she doubtless landed on her feet. ‘She was lucky enough for a while, Ivan. She never ‘ad no talent. Still, neiver did I, reelly.’
She was a great actress, I told her. ‘Your talent is recorded for posterity.’ This amused her. ‘Wot? In an ol’ can in a closed-down fleapit somewhere artside Darjeeling? Come orf it, Ive! Not exac’ly wot I corl immortality. I’ll take me chances m ‘eaven, rahver.’ She was too tactful to mention our Egyptian adventure.
My friend pretended to a kind of primitive pantheism, hut she was a Christian at heart. In 1969, moved no doubt by a profound piety she did her best to hide, she took up a position as caretaker in St Andrews, round the corner. But she found that cleaning on a Monday got her down. ‘Pews! Ya c’n tell why they was corled pews, orl right. Some o’ them worshippers must never wipe their arses!’
What do they do to me with their instruments? Those spikes! Those pyramids! My stripes! That golden ship comes to me out of a sky the colour of blue silver. Tomorrow the hawk will fly, I tell her. Oh, this filthy tide flows over me. There is a black sun warming me. Deprived of sleep, I dream most of the time. I dream of a future. They would murder you, Rosie. You are too intelligent for them. Mr Mix always insisted you were too good even for me. But I was better than Franco, you said, though he never took up much of your time. It was the same, you said, with Mussolini. As for Hitler, you kept silent. It was your ambition to sleep with every dictator in Europe, but you were not sure if you had fucked Stalin or just an understudy. ‘They are always so busy with details.’ You were fascinated with their power. You studied it as others study volcanos, moving further and further towards the rim until directly confronting the destructive heart. You slept with Franco by mistake. At that time he was only a colonel in an obscure garrison. We flew together, Rosie.
I performed the rape scene. I was tired, I said. I needed more cocaine. It was not good for me, she said. Separate the Jewboy’s legs. And she would descend, like a warm blanket of flesh, to enfold my body. Only later would there be much pain and the terrible smells. I recall her schoolgirl giggling at my antics to get free. There! You are not tired at all, she said.
Sekhet comes with a knife in her hand for she is the Eye of Ra and her task is to destroy mankind. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away my little girl. I lost something in that shtetl. I am still not sure what it was. Bedauernswerte arme Teufel, diese Jude. Ich fing an zu frösteln. Meine Selbstkontrolle liess nach. Ich brachte Kokain. Ich kämpfe unter uberhaupt keiner Fahne! Ich stehe für mich allein ein. I had a similar experience in Prague. Who wants such charity? Höher und höher stieg ich uber der Schlucht, bis ich ganz Kiew unter mirsehen könnte, dahinter den Dnjepr, der sich der Steppe entgegenwand und auf seinem Weg zum Ocean den Saporoschijischen Fällen entgegenströmte. Ich könnte Wälder, Dörfer und Berge sehen. Und als ich wieder nach unten sank, sah ich Esmé, rot und weiss, die mich ... I flew, Esmé. Above the Babi Gorge. I loved you. You were my daughter, my friend, my wife. You were my childhood and my hope.