It was important to preserve the reputation of a man of breeding and education and continue to move amongst the better classes. The British were prepared to take me on my own terms. I was a brilliant engineer with a good War record, forced out of Russia by the Reds. If broadcast, the unimportant details, while they did not touch on the essential truth, could conceivably make life difficult for me. So anyone who called me ‘Dimka’ would be ignored (unless I had known them really well). I would grow a moustache at the earliest opportunity. Strolling on downhill, into the little, miserable back streets of the Galata quarter, I deliberately absorbed impressions of poverty as well as wealth. I had not expected to find so many tall wooden buildings. Little remained of the original Genoan architecture. Here and there was an old house mounted on pilasters but the most substantial building was now Galata Tower raised to commemorate Italian soldiers who had fallen in battle, called originally the Tower of Christ. The rickety wooden apartments rose five or six storeys high, leaning at all angles, like a German expressionist film set. If a single one of these were demolished, I thought, a thousand more might collapse as a result. Perhaps such bizarre structural tensions (makeshift, workable, incapable of logical analysis) closely reflected the city’s social tensions. Constantinople survived then as Calcutta is said to survive today: superficially in conflict, everyone depended crucially upon everyone else.
Fez, turban, top-hat, military pith, panama bobbed in those agitated human currents. I walked back towards Pera. The short side streets running between Rue des Petits Champs and Grande Rue de Pera were full of little bars and brothels crammed, in turn, with men and women of every racial type and class. Hybrid girls and youths touted for trade in doorways not a stone’s throw from great foreign embassies, dominated in turn by the monstrous stone palace of our Russian Consulate. From basements and upper windows jazz poured into alleys. Whores hung over baroque balconies, gossiping with friends on the other side of the street, occasionally pausing to yell at a potential customer. It was like a city of Classical antiquity. Had Constantinople remained unchanged since the Greek colonists founded her six hundred years before Christ? Had Tyre been like this? Or Carthage herself? I was entranced. Here was the heady lure of Oriental fantasy. I daydreamed of beautiful houris, the languorous seraglios, unbelievable luxury, fantastic delights. Constantinople offered still richer variety than she had presented under the most decadent of Sultans, for now her inhabitants experienced unusual freedom as well as uncertain thraldom. No longer did the Lords of Islam administer absolute power from the Yildiz Kiosk but even in Pera the muezzin still called thousands to prayer. The tyranny of Islam could not be abolished overnight. To clear Byzantium of such alien authority might take years, or never be wholly accomplished, but today such authority was held in question by people who previously had never dared allow themselves such thoughts. The fierce, mad puritanical Faith, therefore, had suddenly lost much of its sway. As a consequence those freed from it were presently possessed of a lust to sample all that had previously been forbidden. To this was added a fresh element of corruption - desperate refugees eager for the slightest opportunity to make a few lira. In some of those wooden tenements aristocratic Russian families lived ten to a tiny room. Greeks and Jews had taken advantage of the Ottoman defeat to turn the tables on old Turkish rivals; Armenians occupied the palaces of Abdul Hamid’s disgraced officials or the villas of Arab merchants who had been ruined by their support for the Sultan’s cause. The Turks, so far as it can ever be said of Turks, were momentarily demoralised. In two years they had seen their vast Empire, built through centuries of conquest, reduced to that pathetic ‘Anatolian homeland’ from which, in the thirteenth century, Osman their founder had sprung in all his ambitious ferocity, to sink his teeth into the throat of Europe. Now few believed Constantinople would remain even nominally Turkish for much longer. Already into this uncertain ambience the greedy carpetbaggers of Western Jewry had arrived to pick at unearned spoils. For me and millions like me the war against Turkey had been a Crusade. But as with so many other Crusades this one had rapidly degenerated to a mere squabble over treasure and power. I realised none of this at first, I must admit. I saw only a superabundance of potential experience, an exotic blend of human types, infinite possibilities of fulfilling not only my wildest desires but of discovering tastes as yet uncultivated. That afternoon, at a bar serving only the best class of Europeans, I sipped cognac presented to me on a silver salver by a Russian Tartar in Moldavian shirt and White Army breeches. I could not possibly guess how radically my destiny would be influenced by this city.
(I had passed through ruins, slums, festering heaps of offal, yet I saw a new Byzantium rising on both sides of the Golden Horn. She would be the capital of a World Government, founding city of a future Utopian State. Peace would surely follow the crisis. The only question remaining was how this peace must be maintained, who should most fairly rule. What I did not know was that already Kemalists, financiers, Bolsheviks, schemed division and destruction. The formulae for Utopia in my document-case were available to everyone. Is it my fault the world refused its redemption?)