Kilims . . . . . . 60,000
Dosemealtis . . . . 10,000
Hamadans . . . . . 1,500
Kolyais . . . . . .10 x 1,000
And at the bottom of the page, also in her handwriting:
Total payment to Macclesfield
so far . . . . . . £14,976,000
Lubyanka
Between parades
Emm, listen up!
Last night I put my head on your tummy and distinctly heard the sea. Had I been drinking? Had you? Answer: no, just dreaming on my solitary pallet. You cannot imagine the soothing effect of a friendly navel in one's ear, and the sound of distant water at the same time. Do you know—have you the wit to imagine—what it is like to be alert in every whisker for sheer unadulterated, frustrated love of Emm? Probably not. Too thick. But work on it and I'll be back tonight, which come to think of it is twelve hours before this letter will arrive, but that's just another symptom of my ludicrous, divine, insane love for you.
Please make an extra
effort to love and worship
your
Larry
and accept no substitutes.
PS. Seminar in half an hour. Marcia will weep if I insult her and weep if I don't. Talbot—who on earth christens these wretched children?—will mount his infant throne and I shall vomit.
PPS. Post boring-'em tristis. I very nearly strangled Talbot. Sometimes I think it's the entire middle English mindset of Thatcher's children that I'm at war with.
PPPPPPPS. Marcia brought me a ccccake!
The letter, being Larry's, is undated.
Emm! Concerning Timbo.
Timbo is the box I came in. Timbo is reinsurance made perfect. He's the only man I know who can go forwards and backwards at the same time and make it look like progress or retrenchment, depending where your fancy lies.
Timbo is also fireproof, since the man who believes in nothing, and therefore has space for everything, has a terrible advantage over us. What passes for a kindly tolerance in him is in reality a craven acceptance of the world's worst crimes. He's an immobilist, an apathist, and a militant passivist with a big V. And of course he's a dear sweet man. Unfortunately, it's dear sweet men who screw up the earth. Timbo's a spectator. We're doers. And wow do we do!
L.
PS. I am deep inside you and propose to remain there until we meet—when I shall be deep inside you...
Emm,
Nietzsche said something frightfully stern about humour being an escape from serious thought, so I'll bow to N and give you serious thought. I love you. The heart, the laughs, the shoulder-to-shoulder, the pluck, the silences, every dimple and inlet, tuft, mole, freckle, nipple, and peerless plane. I love you until it comes out of my eyes. In the trees, the sky, the grass, and in Vladikavkaz on the river Terek, where the Caucasus takes us into its sanctuary and shields us from Moscow and the Christian maw. Or should do, if the bloody Ossetians weren't sitting in it.
One day you'll taste it, then you'll understand. I have Negley Farson on my knee as I write. Listen to his comfortable words. "Strange as it may seem for they are among the wildest mountains on earth, the one thing you feel about the lonely places of the Caucasus is a deep personal tenderness, a brotherhood: and the aching wish, vain as you know it to be, that you could guard their rare beauty. They possess you. Once you have felt the spell of the Caucasus you will never get over it." Confirmed and reconfirmed by my trip last Christmas. God, I love you. The Arts Subcommittee meets in one hour. How typical of the Lubyanka that even the Arts Committee should be sub. You are my Caucasus. Ich bin ein Ingush.
Yours in Allah,
L.
Emm,
Question from Thatcherchild Talbot, who has decided to grow a beard: Please, Larry, why did the West fall for Shevardnadze?
Answer, dear Talbot, because Shevers has a sad, bungey face and looks like everybody's daddy, when actually he's a KGB dinosaur with a background of deals with the CIA and a disgraceful record of repressing dissidents.
Question from Thatcherchild Marcia: Why did the West refuse recognition to Gamsakhurdia after he was fairly elected? Then, as soon as Shevardnadze was put in as Moscow's puppet, not only recognise the little twerp but turn a blind eye to his genocide of the Abkhaz, the Mingrelians, the you-name-them?
Answer, dear Thatcherchild Marcia, thank you for your ccccake and please come to bbbbed with me, it's the Good Old Boys getting together on both sides of the Atlantic and agreeing that minority rights can seriously threaten world health... .
I love you to despair and back. When you hear me coming up the hill, please be lying pensively on one elbow, naked and dreaming of the hills
L.
My fingers had gone black.
Snakes were tickling my ankles.
I was standing arms outstretched in crucifixion, drawing the typewriter tape from its cassette, passing it across the light and letting it pile up round my feet. At first I could understand nothing. Then I realised I had broken in upon Larry the letter writer again, this time in his more familiar guise of academic terrorist:
Your article entitled "Forcing Reason on the Caucasus" is an abomination. Its greatest offence is its attempt to justify the prolonged persecution of proud and fiercely independent peoples. For three hundred years Imperial and Soviet Russians have pillaged, murdered, and dispersed the mountaineers of N. Caucasus in an effort to destroy their culture, religion, and way of life. Where confiscation, slavery, enforced conversion, and the creation of deliberately divisive land borders failed to do the trick, the Russian oppressors resorted to wholesale deportation, torture, and genocide. Had the West taken the smallest interest in understanding the Caucasus during the dying days of Soviet power, instead of listening openmouthed to those with vested interests—of whom your writer is a flagrant example—the awful conflicts that have recently disfigured the region would have been avoided. So might those that are shortly to engulf us.
L. Pettifer
A broadside directed against yet another of Larry's enemies was incomplete:
... which is why the Ossetians today are Moscow's dependable henchmen as they were under the Communists and before them the Tsars. In the south, it is true, the Ossetians have lost out to those other ethnic cleansers, the Georgians. But in the north, in their war of attrition against the Ingush, in which they have been shamelessly assisted by regular units of highly equipped Russian troops, they emerge the absolute winners....
Typed by Emma three days before I nearly killed the author. For which his unnamed enemy was no doubt duly grateful.
* * *
"My darling."
Larry in his steady hand: the one he used for writing his State of the Universe letters to me. I already loathed his sonorous, elder-brother tone of structured egocentricity.
There is something I have to say to you as we get deeper into this, so see this as my ur-letter at the crossroads, offering you a last chance to turn back.
It happens to be the Ingush, and I needn't tell you that I incline to people who have no voice in the world and not a prayer about how to operate in the media marketplace.... The Ingush right to survive is my right and your right and the right of any good, free soul not to conform with the vile forces of uniformisation: whether imposed by Corns, Market Pigs, or the emetic Partyspeak of Political Correctitude.
It happens to be the Ingush because I love their love of freedom, because they never had a feudal system or an aristocracy, no serfs, no slaves, no social superiors or inferiors; because they love forests and climb mountains and do a lot of things with their lives that the rest of us should do in preference to studying Global Security and listening to Pettifer talk platitudes.