‘I sold her to him,’ I said. ‘She was sold on . . .’
By dawn, out of sight of the house and its surrounding palms, we pressed into the deep dunelands. Kolya said it was our only alternative to capture. The British came and went as they pleased in the Sudan. Beyond Sudan the only place worth going was Kenya, which was also British. Neither of us, he said, would benefit from being interviewed by the British. Besides, he had friends in Libya. He made us pause while he consulted a map and took a compass reading. I, being convinced that this whole episode was a mental escape, some hallucinatory salvation, merely grinned inanely and wondered vaguely when the pain in my eye-sockets would begin to penetrate this glorious madness.
I think that was the point at which I fell from my camel. Next, I was riding across Kolya’s pommel while he steadied me with one arm and guided our team with his free hand. Still half-swooning I stared up into his handsome strength. He might have been one of our legendary Slavic heroes. I thought how much he resembled a refined Valentino, and then came a pang of memory for The Sin of the Sheikh.
Seeing me wake, Kolya directed my attention to the vastness of the pale dunes ahead, the true Sahara, which the Bedawi feared and hated, that most dangerous and unforgiving of oceans, where quicksand could without warning swallow you and everything you owned, sending you to populate the buried city of some forgotten race, to join those who had already marched down the centuries to fill the dead but perfect streets.
‘It’s to be a long journey, Dimka my dear, before we get to where we have friends.’ He sighed. As he stroked my head I became calm, perhaps mesmerised, but the quality of fear was duller. I still believed I was looking upon my executioner, even when he kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them to my lips. ‘Ah, Dimka, Dimka!’ He regarded with mild exasperation the uncountable miles of pale brown sand. ‘So little to say and so much time to say it in!’
We rode without pause until noon, and I still waited for the pain to impinge. It was easy to see how madness could be God’s mercy; how peasants still believe the insane to be blessed. Or was I already in Heaven? I determined to appreciate the moment, never hoping it would continue for long. As we set off again, Kolya pointed to one of the bundles bouncing on a pack camel. ‘Your valise, Dimka, I think. That’s how I first found out you were still here. It was in Steeton’s quarters at the Winter Palace. I thought I’d bring it with me. Any good?’
I giggled at this fancy.
The Western Sahara embraces and threatens us with her infinite waves of sand, shifting with implacable slowness. On this Netherworld Sea suddenly looms a great funeral barge, some vivid beast-headed benevolent at her helm, remorselessly rolling towards us, carrying the stark, clean smell of a desert death. If, by chance, I have been released, blind, into the desert, then I am compensated by the steadily improving quality to my mirages! When we next stop to light our evening fire, I open my Gladstone. Here is everything except the main specifications for my Desert Liner. My books, my pistols, some money and other personal things, my whole identity is returned to me. Yet still I refuse to hope that this is anything more than an illusion clouding over the fact of my unbearable blindness.
I hardly wish to consider an even more terrible alternative - that my oldest and greatest male friend has been commissioned to destroy me, as I was instructed to destroy the blind boy.
My ship was called The Esmé. Pink as the Egyptian dawn, gold as the Egyptian night, soft and gently warm, her perfume was the scent of life itself. She was the loveliest of all my dreams. She would have risen in the morning, so pure and vigorous, and everyone who saw her would have gasped at her virgin beauty.
My ship was called The Stolen Soul and even in her ruined state, everything smashed and scattered and looted, she had an aura of noble vitality; a pure sense that once she had served her people well and with grace.
‘If they ever named an effin’ ship after you, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius, ‘they ort ter corl it Ther Lucky Bastard . . .’
‘Luck, Mrs Cornelius,’ I say, ‘does not exist. What you describe as luck is a combination of stolen opportunity and honest judgement. There is nothing random about it.’
So it was by virtue of my own sublime instincts, and, I would readily agree, some help from an old friend, that I escaped at last from Paradise.
TWENTY-ONE
I HAD PASSED THROUGH the final gate, the gate to eternal death. Anubis was my friend. I had won a kind of immortality. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades, but my future remained uncertain and my terror would not leave me. I possessed a knowledge I had never wanted and of which I never dare speak. I had been in the presence and the power of purest Evil.
There is an old man, a kind of vagrant who walks up and down the Portobello Road on weekdays, when the market is only fruit and veg. He is sometimes mistaken for me. Even Mrs Cornelius mentions it. He is Irischer. I am not insulted. We would call him rorodivni. He is, says Father P., what his own ancestors named da-chearde, a son of two arts; an oracle. Barnum the Jew says he is a nebech-meshiach and gives him a shilling, but I am not sure this is blasphemy. Arabised Berbers of the Tripoli desert might identify him as an achmak ilahiya and perhaps also consider him an oracle. And why should he not be one? He declaims only what we fear to whisper. He quotes the Bible. He speaks of God’s mercy and how it might be earned.
There is no reason to disbelieve him. His logic is soundly based in conventional theology. Perhaps he is actually the medium for God’s voice. And none of us listens. Not even I. But I know when to be silent. In the desert I learned silence and I learned the art of the fool. Otherwise I should not have lived.
He does not seem to care for the Pope. I think they give him something at the Poor Clares across from Mrs Cornelius. He would therefore be a Catholic, perhaps an ex-priest. Those who say God never announces His presence might wish to spend an hour or two with Mr O’Dowd. He speaks not through ritual or parable, but is the direct medium of God’s command. And still we do not listen! I saw him with those new nuns who so resemble social workers, with their sensible stockings and skirts and little heels. They are always Irish; they have that screeching, unnatural laugh that needs whisky to make it melodious. They remind me of the fellaheen women. I think they keep an eye on him. My friend Miss B., who was once so famous as a dancer, was also a Catholic. She went to the big church near me, which was how we met. All her friends are Irish or Polish, from Hammersmith. She herself lives in Sporting Club Square, West Kensington. I used to go and visit her, but Brodmann put a stop to that.
It was a fine evening in February when Brodmann discovered me again, or, more properly, I learned he had picked up my trail. After tea I had left Miss B.’s eccentrically Ludwigian terracotta mansion, deciding not to use the square’s Mandrake Road entrance but to cross the gardens and enjoy the last of the evening light. I had a particular fondness for Sporting Club Square. With her tall wrought-iron railings and surrounding trees, her botanical gardens, the creation of Halifax Begg, offered a sense of sanctuary. By some fluke they had always shut out the busy noise of nearby North End Road and I could easily imagine I sat enjoying the solitude of my own ancestral estate near Kiev. The gardens possess that special sense of well-ordered security one finds so often in Arab courtyards. It was a Monday, at about five o’clock. The sun was setting, a red pulse through the dark branches of the massive oak which sixty years earlier had been the dominant landmark of some Fulham pasture. I smelled grass and evergreens. The pungent fumes of coal-fires seemed to intoxicate two tabby cats chasing each other across the lawns, through ornamental grasses and flowerbeds, laurel hedges and waxy botanical oddities. Maintained by a bequest from Begg himself, the little park was as well-kept and as varied in its flora as Derry and Toms Roof Garden, another favourite retreat for meditation and recollection.