He assured me he would join me in my second flight, to film the city from the air. He had found a new cache of stock, abandoned two or three years ago by a French film company which had gone bust shooting Salammbô. Some of it might still be good. It was a matter of luck that the sprockets almost matched, he said. I applauded his work. He was creating an archive, I said, which posterity would treasure. He was filming, I thought, a vanishing world. When I discovered that this world was not vanishing at all but was in fact growing and expanding, I did not feel quite the same elegiac sweetness, the same nostalgia for a lost age. Now my nostalgia has found more immediate subjects and I live in fear that my own way of life, not theirs, will suddenly be stolen from me. Big business in its kasbahs, the rest of us in souks and slums. It is not much to ask, to live out one’s days with a little comfort, cultivating a little garden, making enough to live on, talking to neighbours, perhaps occasionally giving someone a helping hand, but no, you are not allowed even that when these people get into power. They take everything. They eat everything up. Their God is a God of Locusts. Their God is a God of Deserts. I know this. I prayed with them but I refused to become one of them. It was impossible. Unlike Christ, says Mrs Cornelius, I was never a joiner. I did not become a Musselman but by then I had learned the Oriental trick of instant submission, for by this means you may survive for the time it takes to escape. Ikh hob nicht moyre! Der flits htot vets kumen. Wie lang wird es dauern? Biddema natla’ila barra! Kef biddi a’mal?
Mr Mix left me, saying he might join me later at the Atlas. I again reflected what pleasure I took in our camaraderie, a pleasure difficult to explain, since we were so different in temperament and intellect, yet his company gave me a sense of secure warmth and I experienced a pang of loss whenever he seemed cool towards me.
Rounding the corner of the guest-wing I next came upon Miss von Bek, who darted me a curious searching look. She seemed dishevelled and yet not in any particular hurry. She stood beside a palm drawing in deep breaths beside a blue pool crossed by an ornamental gilded bridge. She asked how my aeroplane works was progressing and I told her we had our first model ready to fly. I asked her if she would come to see it. The polite question emerged quite innocently from my mouth and yet she responded with alacrity. ‘Down there?’ she said. ‘At the sheds? Good thinking.’ And she blew me a kiss as she disappeared, a sylph in dark green and gold.
My stunned shock gave way to a thrilling sense of foreboding! I realised that inadvertently I had embarked upon a liaison which, if discovered, could very well end in dreadful consequences for us both. Ikh veys nit. . .
I had written to my Californian bank asking them to send me a chequebook and to let me know how they could make my funds available to me. But mail between those two notoriously tardy postal departments would take months. Even Fromental’s exchange of wires (using, against specific military orders, the official telegraph) met with nothing but a vague insistence upon ‘hand-written applications’. Meanwhile, I was dependent upon my local credit (which for the famous Max Peters was considerable) and the Pasha’s good graces (notoriously whimsical). I did not realise then how, in those languorous months, I had become a slave to Oriental self-indulgence, capable of giving myself up to passing temptation like any schoolboy and moved not by lust but by pride, a kind of arrogant sloth, a profound boredom. How is it possible to be taught such unmistakable lessons as Griffith taught us in masterpieces like Intolerance and Birth of a Nation and still not learn to live by them? I, who had worshipped the work and the man, who had based much of my life and philosophy on his, had begun to act like some Victorian prodigal. Yet I could not bear to leave without my confiscated movies. El Glaoui had forgotten them. The projector from Casablanca had still not arrived. I was as they say ‘double bound’. But I have made mistakes in my life and been betrayed. I am the first to admit there is no deceit worse than self-deceit.
That is what the jackal tells us. Anubis, mein Freund.
TWENTY-SIX
I AM NOT BY NATURE a deceiver. Deception is where women excel and in their hands we men are mere students.
Their witchcraft brings us low and makes us behave in dishonourable and self-destructive ways; theirs are the wiles against which St Paul and Pushkin and Malory all warn us. A Kundry is forever ready to divert our innocent Sir Parsival from his knightly path, to lead him away from Christ. Yet, still, I do not blame them. I do not hate them. I love them. I have always loved women. They are so sweet. Des petites dents sucent la moèlle de mes os. Esmé! Comme le désespoir a du t’endurcir tandis que la fange grisâtre du bolchevisme engloutissait ta vie, ton idéalisme. Mère! Les Teutons t’ont-ils tué là où je fis voler ma première machine? Je n’ai pas voulu te perdre. Ton regard ne reflétait jamais d’amour. Mais tu étais heureuse. . . Rose von Bek was, I suppose, a delicious Kundry to my Parsifal, though at the time I half-believed I had found a Brünnhilde to my Siegfried, especially since, in the time between our first liaison in the balloon and now (the whores and the whips forgotten) my blood had learned again to quicken. My baser senses had returned to confuse me, threatening to lead me from my destiny. Yet it seemed, as our secret became the dominant concern in my life, that she was sharing my vocation, complementing my work, this fellow Erdgeist in female form - everything that a man could desire. Mrs Cornelius is wrong to be so contemptuous and take such a narrow view and refer to a ‘torkin’ mirror’. I continue to insist, in spite of what happened, that Miss von Bek was a person in her own right. Certainly I was enamoured, but this hardly discredits my experience. Mrs Cornelius insists there was never any point in telling me anything in such circumstances. ‘A Frenchman, a woman in love an’ a cat up a tree, there’s nuffink but grief in trying ter ‘elp ‘em, Ivan - art’ yore ther same.’ But I was always open to reason. I remind her it was she who frequently displayed violent jealousy towards my friendships with other women. She cannot reply. She merely becomes incoherent and she is never at her best when she reverts to the language of her Whitechapel youth. Usually, I try to avoid such subjects. It discomfits me to see her behaving so badly.
My ship is called el Risha and she is light and as complex as a snowdrop. My ship is called Jutro and she will carry me into the future. My ship is called Die Schwester and she is myself. My ship is called Das Kind and she is everything I ever dreamed. Meyn schif genannt Di Heym. Meyn shif is called Di Triumf. Jemand ist ertruken. Widerhallen . . . Yehudi? Man sacht das nicht. My ship is called The Hawk. I would not call her Yehudi. Ikh veys nit. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Ikh bin ayn Amerikaner. Vos iz dos? Ya salaam! Ana fi’ardak! Biddi akul. . . Allah akhbar . . . Allah akhbar . . . We worship, I said, the same God, who is the Sum of all the good in us. We worship what is Good. Then why do we perpetuate so much Evil? Like many intellectuals of my generation, like Wagner and Sir Thomas Lipton, I studied the teachings of the other great prophets. I did not close my mind. I do not say that any way is wrong, but I am, by accident of birth or by persuasion, a believer in the great Greek verities, the spirit and the heart combined in the rituals and teachings of the Holy Russian Orthodox Church. Each choice of faith has its disciplined responsibilities, its relinquishing of certain beloved habits or ideals at the demand of the generations’ established wisdom. Sometimes mere sentiment is not enough. Sometimes it is the very enemy of truth. But my Faith is not theirs. My Faith is my own. I worship as I please. I worship as custom and courtesy dictates, in the manner of my hosts. At human sacrifice, of course, I would balk. But one cannot reach out to every hungry hand.