Slowly and extremely cheerfully I made my way back to the hotel. I bought a map and changed a little more money into Turkish lira. I hoped to make it last until I left Constantinople, for this was not the best time or place to sell the jewellery I had brought from Russia. In London I could get the proper market price. On the other hand I thought I might give a bracelet or a necklace to the Baroness. She was, when all was said and done, a decent enough woman. I would not want her or Kitty to suffer the fate of other refugees.
In my room I was delighted to discover that my luggage had arrived. I changed immediately into Don Cossack uniform. Now a veteran Colonel, not yet twenty-one, looked out of the full-length mirror, bearing himself with dignity impossible in even the best-cut civilian clothes. The uniform had been earned by my suffering. It redeemed my father, honoured my mother, celebrated my country. However, I knew it was still unwise to wear it in public. Regretfully I removed it, folded it and put on ordinary evening clothes before going downstairs for an aperitif. A number of high-ranking British and French officers were in the bar, mingling with well-to-do men and women of the finest type. I was glad Mrs Cornelius had been able to get us the rooms. Seating myself on a stool beside the stiff but slender back of a British army major I ordered in English a whisky-and-soda. He turned at the sound of my voice and nodded to me. ‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘I am Pyatnitski.’ He seemed surprised at my command of his language. ‘Good evening. I’m Nye.’ He had washed-out blue eyes, abstracted but kindly. His tanned skin was stretched tight on near fleshless features and he had a neat, greying moustache. After a glance around the bar he half reluctantly agreed to take a large gin-and-tonic. When I explained I was a flyer shot down over Odessa while observing Bolshevik positions it obviously eased his mind. As if in apology he said he had just recently arrived from India. ‘In their wisdom, our top brass seem to think my experience of Pathans on the Frontier will be of use in Constantinople!’ He was otherwise vague about his commission. Learning I had only that day stepped ashore and planned to travel on to London, he warmed further. I did not resent his caution. As he said himself, later, one had to be frightfully careful of the people one talked to at the Pera Palas. I knew little of the campaign in Anatolia against Turkish nationalists. Mustafa Kemal’s name meant nothing. Although I gathered a Greek army currently advanced into the Anatolian mainland I was ignorant of the detailed issues. It simply seemed just that Greece should be claiming her due. Major Nye willingly offered to sketch the background but would say nothing, of course, about British policy. He had every admiration for the heroism of our White Army he told me. Russia should be given charge of Constantinople as soon as possible. ‘She knows the Turk best. You must understand, I’m no supporter of Russia’s territorial ambitions elsewhere, not in Afghanistan or the Punjab at any rate.’ He smiled as he sipped his gin. He thought the British should meanwhile administer the city in the name of the Tsar and King Constantine. ‘Until things calm down a bit. The East has to be contained. I have every respect for the Asian mind and naturally I love India. There’s much we can learn. But if Asia ever really adopts the manners and ambitions of the West, masquerading in English pinstripe and spouting German metaphysics, she’ll become a danger to herself and to us.’ He pointed in the general direction of Scutari. ‘The Turks can have Smyrna for their capital, by all means. Let them take the whole of Anatolia. In other words they should stay in Asia. The Greeks can then take Thrace, while the Russian exiles shall have Constantinople, which I agree is theirs by tradition. With British support the Greeks and Russians will then form our strongest barrier against Eastern and Bolshevik expansion. It will mean a proper balance between East and West. Everyone will see the benefit almost immediately. Credit where it’s due, Johnny Turk’s a damned brave little chap. But he shouldn’t be allowed to pretend he’s an Occidental.’
I was tremendously impressed by his grasp of politics, his positive vision, his fair-mindedness. Major Nye was that excellent type of Englishman who wore neither his heart nor his religion on his sleeve, yet who held profound and well-considered moral convictions. I told him how much I agreed with him. Russia had been ruined by her Eastern expansion. Everyone knew Chinese, Moslems and Jews now supplied Lenin’s main initiative. At this the major became enthusiastic. ‘Exactly!’ He was about to elaborate when, noticing a waiter’s signal, he looked at his watch. ‘I’m committed to dining with a chap. We’ll talk more about this, though. What d’you say to later this evening? I owe you a drink anyway.’ With a wave that was almost a formal salute, he disappeared into the adjoining restaurant. He had contributed to my already excellent good spirits. I was soon chatting with a Russian captain attached to British H.Q. at Haidur Pasha. He had overheard some of our conversation. His name was Rakhmatoff. A nephew of the old general. ‘I gather you’re a flyer?’
‘I’ve flown,’ I admitted modestly, ‘in the service of my Emperor. And you?’
‘Just an ordinary infantryman. Major Nye’s one of the few British who properly understands our position. We must all pray that his influence will prevail. I believe he’s here as an advisor of some sort, isn’t he? To do with the uprising in Anatolia?’
I could honestly answer that I did not know. I became a little cautious of Rakhmatoff. With his world-weary, decadent droop of eye and mouth, he was too drunk for so early in the evening. Refusing his invitation to dine I asked the waiter for a table overlooking the courtyard, where I would not be disturbed. I ate sparingly, sampling several Turkish dishes, especially the skewered meats. Much Turkish food is similar to Ukrainian, so it was a relief to be free, for a while at least, from the endless duffs and dumplings of the British. I enjoyed a bottle of St Emilion, the first I had tasted in more than two years, and as I finished my coffee considered the idea of rejoining Major Nye as he had suggested. For the moment, however, the pleasures of Pera remained my most pressing interest. Starved for too long of the excitement of bustling metropolitan streets I was curious to discover what commonplace adventures awaited me at night in the Grande Rue de Pera. I returned to my room, changed my clothes, put on an ordinary top-coat, and sallied forth.
Dance music issued from almost every doorway. Electric signs advertised cabarets and bars. Trams squealed and rattled, sending sparks into the upper air; women of every age, race and colour smiled at me. Girls in sequinned frocks swung their hips along the narrow, cracked pavements; Italian policemen in tri-cornered hats and capes aimlessly blew their whistles and turned their eyes towards invisible stars, unwilling to involve themselves in anything likely to distress them. Kurds, Albanians, Tatars rushed here and there under the weight of huge loads, or stood on corners to scream ritualistically at each other. Shop windows were filled with silk and gold. Mumbling Jews staggered with bales of bright printed cotton into the open air, begging passersby to test the texture between their fingers. The flickering lights of Stamboul were in the distance and a white sea-mist gave the whole city the appearance of a dream, for only her cupolas and minarets were clearly visible above the banks of cypresses and sycamores; everything else was either jet-black silhouette or invisible. While here in Pera one might feel oneself in a jabbering, jostling, desperate Hell, Stamboul remained as tranquil and as remote as Nirvana. Great hooting ships came and went in her harbours; ferries with oil-lamps dancing under their canopies pushed towards a yellow haze that was Scutari. The sea resembled a series of dark mirrors placed at random upon an indistinguishable surface. Dissonant Arabian music wailed and barked then gave way to equally cacophonous jazz. I heard the tango and the fox-trot. I heard balalaika and saxophone and the wild din of a gypsy orchestra. Further along, men in tasselled caps and the white ruffles of Greek soldiers ran suddenly from a Turkish bath-house. They looked both embarrassed and satiated. A dozen cinemas advertised their films in as many languages. It had been so long since I had visited a cinema I hesitated for a moment between Birth of a Nation and Cabiria before deciding that while London had films, she could not offer Constantinople’s other entertainments. Hoping my Baroness did not wait for me inside, I passed Tokatlian’s, the restaurant she had mentioned as a favourite meeting-place of Russians. Tonight I was in search of younger company. The Café Rotonde, with its blue electric sign and eerie green windows, attracted me. I pushed through a rabble of harlots whose heads barely reached my chest, giving my hat and coat to a red-haired witch at the door before following a jaunty dwarfish Syrian waiter to a table. Within seconds I was besieged by half-a-dozen deliciously sleazy girls in cheap satin and bedraggled feathers who begged me to drink and dance with them. I selected two, as had always been my habit, and dismissed the rest. They were both Turkish. They gave their names as Betty and Mercy but spoke scarcely a word of English, had some Russian and slightly more French (chiefly sailor’s argot). Betty was fourteen, Mercy was a little older. That evening and part of the night I spent in their lascivious company, chiefly on the couches of the Cafe Roto ride’s back room when the garish lights began to hurt my eyes, the jazz music grew too loud for my ears, and their lewd language became too arousing for my loins to bear the lust any longer. My little girls might have come straight from the Sultan’s training-schools. I was not disappointed in them. They reminded me of Katya, the child-whore, cause of so much trouble between me and my cousin Shura in Odessa, but their skins were darker, their liquid eyes larger, and their arts far more sophisticated. It was no crime to enjoy their flesh. It was fairly paid for, as others had paid. I know these girls. They are naturally depraved. There is a myth about female innocence I have never understood. True, some are also naturally innocent, but others are born with an animal desire to explore all the wanton secrets of their own senses. Nobody forces them to live as they do. I did not invent the games we played that first marvellous night. They are games as old as civilisation, as subtle or as crude as the players themselves. It is a way of life for them, as often a passport into Heaven as it is into Hell. People should not condemn what is alien simply because it frightens them.