TWO
Oh, the boy. That boy. Her boy. How I loved him. He was going to be my son. I was teaching him everything. At first he listened. Then he became restless. The most important information is that which you don’t wish to hear. He lied to me. He lied to me. He was the first one, that erstwhile son of hers! What was I? Some Abraham? Fear thou not Jacob, my servant. Though thou make a nest as high as the eagle and though thou set it among the stars, I will bring thee down from hence. He lied to me. Elijah lied to me. I know. You do not believe it. Nobody can believe it. He lied. He lied. There was no precedent for this. This was the worst of all captivities and it had not been predicted. It taught us that not every lesson is, after all, a big lesson. Big lessons are made up of many small lessons, said the Jew in Arcadia. He wanted me to escape with something. I forget what.
THREE
The Jew in Arcadia predicted I would lose what I most valued in the ruins of what I least knew I valued. He called me meshumad. They said he was a tsaddik, eyn maskil. He thought I was slow. He thought he confused me with his riddles. I was not slow and I was not confused by him. I followed his arguments but I could not agree with them, that was all. He was the slow one. I was too quick for his old-fashioned parlour games. Mutti! Mutti! Wer ist das? They believe they are so sophisticated in their provincial professionalism. But it would be rude to challenge them. It would be stupid to make enemies. I can smell the yellow blossoms, the green and yellow stalks in the red mud turned up by the ploughman’s skill. The fog rolls across the fields. The smoke drifts through the market. I can smell the market, the plotki, the cooking zrazy, the tubs of lokshen; brass and copper wink among the iron, the enamelled trays, the glittering bowls of dumpling soup. I can smell the golden stones of my old Kiev, the Hero City of the Russ. Oh, Russia, my homeland. Oh, Ukraine, my home. Golden grass blooms in Babi Yar. Golden grass still blooms in my Babi Yar. Mia madre! O, Esmé, how we rose towards the stars that day over the old gorge. And what if only these memories remain? Is there any crime forgetting pain? Is a meek man of any more or less worth than a proud man? We are rarely given the example. Our prophet celebrated the meek. Our society continues to celebrate the violent. I know all this. I followed it through the 1950s. They were saying it on the radio and TV. But gradually we forgot. The meek hero disappeared.
City of sleeping cats. City of goats. City of Greeks. We lived in that world, the Jew and I. We lived in the deep history of it, so deep that no enemy could find us. Our only fear was that a friend should betray us. It was the life of a very fortunate intellectual rat but it was life. That’s show business, says Brady, the child-killer. Is there some primitive sense they have that by killing us they empower themselves? They eat our brains. There are more terrible ideas than this, I suppose. But they behave like film stars, these secret service interrogators, these prison guards. I read what I could in the camps. For a while they let me use the library, but first all you were allowed was Mein Kampf or Völkischer Beobachter. They were not exactly designed to stimulate the mind but rather to reduce it. There are teachers who take great joy in passing on wisdom. But we must not forget the other kind of teacher who loves to repress knowledge and leave us more ignorant and brutal than themselves. Believe me, I am not complaining. I had it easy compared to most. But, of course, my imprisonment was completely unjust. I had done nothing to deserve those camps. There were a number of others, like myself. Guilty or not, few deserved to be props for the showmanship of illiterates or sadists. In the camps my old friends turned into terrifying enemies. Jude, mach Mores! Jude, verrecke! Hep! Hep! Even in Dachau they had their Judengasse. Zionismus ist ein überwundener Standpunkt!
I came out of Egypt. I came out of Libya and Abyssinia. I came out of the land of the Moors and the land of Sefarad, Zarefat and all the lands of Edom or Ishmael. I came out of Zarefat and Rome and Carthage. I came out of Troy and Athens, Constantinople and London. Out of New York and Los Angeles. Captive and conqueror both. I came out of Atlanta and Memphis and Cairo. I will come out of the world. My cities shall fly.
FOUR
1648, you say? As if this somehow makes up for 1492. Everyone is talking in that dingy distance. A no man’s land of howls, imploring shrieks. And then they are talking again. And you say there is nothing to fear from the East? I say you are looking in the wrong places. Look to Australia or China or Siam, not to Russia or her empire, who will always be European, for it is Christendom herself she defends. It is her free Cossacks who will ensure Christendom’s boundaries. For it is written that the borders were drawn upon the world by God’s own finger tracing them as He traced the mosaics of our history.
Abraham, der ah erster seiner eigenen Menschlichkeit ein Opfer brachte: Wo traf dein Messer deinen vertrauensvollen Sohn?
Those decent horsemen riding into Ur, their eyes bright with the significance of a new idea. Such expressions were worn by the men who saw the wheel invented and the women who learned to card wool. By Norsemen who carried the banner of Christ. By Easterners who bore their own flags. Sooner or later, as many predicted, East and West would meet, either at war or having learned a way of peace. On one side the gold, white, red, black, green and blue of Christendom. On the other side the dark emerald of Islam, the scarlet crescent and whatever colours of convenience thrown up by criminals, kulaks and cowboys of modern Zion. Who would be a Jew?
FIVE
Days passed. We drank what water we could collect but rarely dared emerge from our truck while the train was standing, in case we should fail to get back on or attract the eye of some zealot in blue and red serge who would make it his mission to place us under arrest. I could not afford to be investigated by the French, especially since their diplomacy at that time favoured my ex-master, El Glaoui. If any description of us had been published I would be instantly recognised. Few Europeans travelled about Morocco wearing native costume, accompanied by a huge American Negro servant. For this reason, even when at night we ventured a few feet from our truck as it rested in a siding, we kept our heads covered with our djellaba hoods.
We had expected to arrive in Casablanca in less than a day. Of course our train, fuelled more by red tape than coal, went everywhere but Casablanca. The military bureaucrats in Paris sent it first to Meknes, then to Rabat, then to Fez, then back to Meknes and from there to Tangier, loading and unloading nothing, but in Rabat adding two private horseboxes, presumably at the request of the Sultan. Our three central cattle cars remained unused at every stage, but the smell of horse manure was added to that of cow dung and the boiled-egg smell of steam. Though tempted by glimpses of towns, we were reluctant to disembark at an inland station, especially since Mr Mix had left Meknes under a cloud and was well known in the area, but early one morning we at last glimpsed the familiar blue waters of the Mediterranean, the green palms, white tenements and pink towers of a seaport which could only be Tangier.