In Shepperton the scrim rises higher and higher, displaying fantasies of egalitarian prosperity for all where, in actuality, grey high-rises lurk towards infinity. The Ministry of Truth smiles upon its favourite, its most successful, advertisement. Here are the English orators safely confined, carried unseeing through antiseptic tubes to the BBC, the very epitome of the Future and the Moral Authority of Empire, to address a people whose experience they never share, to sound upon the airwaves their self-congratulatory celebration of their national myths, still certain that their language is universal. But is there perhaps an underground? Some samizdat crawling around the very roots of their illusion - some Blake from Barnes or Staines - even some Thornton Heath Thackeray to tease their dreaming noses? Is there no one to sound the horn, to begin the alarm? Will they gaze upon the walls of their cocoon and never hear the Last Trump when it is sounded? Do they dream themselves to everlasting death, like the ancient Egyptians whose culture they pretend to find so alien? Can they actually prefer this to everlasting life? I went down there for a while, to accompany Miss B. on her visits, but in the end I had to give it up. Those tranquil suburbs are actually full of high-walled lunatic asylums. Any Londoner who has had the misfortune to be branded mentally ill by some misbegotten authority knows what I mean. They are never visible. There are always plenty of trees. They are never in the centre of the city. They say it is so we can have peace. It is so that they can feel themselves secure from an audience. But of course it is a marvellous way of discrediting us. At a stroke we are robbed of our immediate dignity and our future authority. Well, I had no use for their power. I was only rarely comfortable when it was invested in me. All I longed for was the respect of my peers, for recognition of my authority as a visionary engineer. This is what was stolen from me that I value. Nobody seems to understand me. The pain, I tell them, is in my soul. My poor, Russian soul. How can we pretend to understand one another’s values when we cannot even speak one another’s languages? And yet I refuse to despair. Even now I still see a glimmer of hope for the world. But the world must learn to recognise its vices as well as its virtues. And, as Christ teaches us, self-knowledge must come first. That is the message of the resurrection.
They put the reverberating metal in my womb. There is a dissonance always present now. It robs me of my harmony with God. These Jews? What do they envy in me so thoroughly that they must seek me out to destroy it? Vos hot irgezogt? Iber morgn? Iber morgn? Ikh farshtey nit. Why not mitogsayt? At noon the ships will rise from their berths, never again to be bound by the mud of Earth, and those who are not on them are doomed to decadence, brutal war and the death of their very planet. At noon we shall rise into the sun, that most reassuring of God’s signs, and our skins shall glow golden and silver, our eyes shall burn like brass and our teeth shall be glittering ivory; and still we shall be human, not yet of the angels, but rising inexorably to that holy state of grace. Why should they be jealous, these Arabs and these Jews? We have offered them the helping hand of Christ and they have spurned it. They have made a choice and I respect it, but let us not mourn for them in their self-established suffering!
This was frequently the subject of the sermons I attended on the Isle of Man during the years of my captivity. The minister was Presbyterian, a carrot-nosed Scot with lips, as my bunk-mate Vos put it, like an old maid’s cunt and a head of hair which might have been the fires of hell gushing from his tortured skull. He knew that we had been put upon the earth with the ability to choose between right and wrong and that if we chose wrong, we had only ourselves to blame for our plight. We have enough trouble playing shepherd to the faithful, he told me one evening, let alone the faithless. He had a supply of Irish dairy products from a cousin in Dublin and had taken a liking to me. He saw me as some future apostle to the Slavs. We would sit and eat illicitly buttered goiteycakes while he described the coming of Christ to the island, Man’s long history as an outpost of light in the years of darkness. Is this how God reveals Himself? As a single flash of sunlight during the boiling torment of a storm? Does He offer no other sign of hope? These were our topics as we sat around the minister’s grey stone fire gorging ourselves on his Celtic plenty. I grew fond of the Presbyterian creed during those long days of my wrongful incarceration. Nazi? Such a Fifth Columnist, I told the commander. He agreed that it was stupid. The minister was a kindly man, though unsympathetic in manner, glad to convey his religious enthusiasm and so much better company than the careerist Anglican preaching tolerance and unnatural piety while the very hordes of Hell convene upon the doorstep of his vicarage. To his kind the Twilight of the Gods means nothing worse than an interruption in the cricket season, an irritating drop in the quality of the local ale. I used to think the British had courage. Now I realise all they have is an arrogant lack of imagination. This British phlegm is the Frenchman’s catarrh. He coughs it up and spits it out and pays no further attention to it. The stiff upper lip is a lip that for too long kissed the cold cup of ignorance and careless cruelty. I said as much to Major Nye, when we used to meet at Victoria, just after Suez. He said he could not follow me. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you mean you dare not follow me, for where I go, why, there is the road to truth!’ He preferred, he said, to call me a good chap and buy me a vodka. Kind-hearted as he was, he was the exemplar of everything I warned him against, so why should I expect him to listen? He had been brought up in a world whose realities had almost entirely eroded. The new realities simply did not exist for him. He continued to think and act as he had been trained to think and act: as a chivalrous servant of a just and honest Empire. He had none of these modern doubts. It was what made his company so refreshing to me, even when we did not agree. Most people cannot understand, for instance, the burning humiliation of a person like myself whose word and experience are today deemed unworthy of the slightest attention. Major Nye respected all men and respected them most when they pulled themselves together and worked out their own problems. ‘Meanwhile,’ the Major assured me, ‘they are perfectly happy to use our toilet facilities.’ In this, he expressed the same attitudes as Mr Weeks, who no longer sought my company as he had during those early days. Count Schmaltz went on to East Africa. Other whites came and left. I signed many autographs for American dowagers who promised to go and see Ace Among Aces as soon as they got home. Increasingly Lieutenant Fromental was called away to deal with skirmishes and local uprisings with those of Abd el-Krim’s last harka who felt their master had betrayed them and who refused to accept the treaty he had signed. They sought alliances now with the Southern Berbers, especially the blue Tuareg and the desert warriors who challenged the power of the Glaoui. They resented new law coming to their ancient trading-places. New law always, in their experience, brought higher profits for the Arabs of the cities. Fromental confided to me he could see no point in French soldiers settling ancient tribal disputes. He feared Morocco would never be free of the Lyautey policy which encouraged the conquest of an unfriendly tribe by a tribe already friendly (or which could be courted), so using the country’s own resources to pacify itself. This saved the French taxpayer money, one of the paramount concerns of French Imperial Policy since the time of Napoleon. Now, however, the political changes, the rise of ‘nationalists’ similar to those in Egypt and elsewhere, make the Quai d’Orsay sensitive and mistrustful of native rulers. So Fromental must ride to the fringes of the protectorate and urge his soldiers on, to extend further the benefits of their protection. Fromental disapproved. This was not protection, he said, but intervention in old squabbles. He wanted the French to withdraw to the Atlas and be content.