I had a soft spot for his sister. ‘I hope so.’ There was no mercy in telling him that she was probably dead.
By the time Esmé rejoined us, and Captain Quelch, Mrs Cornelius and the rest were ready for dinner, Shura and I were sadly the worse for drink. I remember very little of the evening, save for the warmth and security of our nostalgia, and remained in this euphoric state, with the help of Shura’s cocaine and my bourbon, until the ditty-boat took him towards Tripoli. We were on our way to Alexandria almost before I could be sure that I could read the drunkenly traced letters of the hotel, his permanent home in Tangier.
My reunion with my cousin had begun a healing process. Until then I had carried a bloody wound with me for some five years; a wound made when I wrenched myself away from my native land, the land of the Steppe and wide rivers where my Cossack ancestors established their sechs. I had never planned to leave Odessa or my motherland. I had been forced to go as the Bolsheviks stamped their terrible will on the nation. I was part of an exodus making the Jewish exodus a weekend holiday. All the best that was Russia belonged to that exodus. All the best that survived. Scientists, writers and scholars, engineers and soldiers, so many of us fought to pretend we had no throbbing wounds, no aching longing for our Slavonic home. Since leaving Russia I had lost my way. I had forgotten that necessary pain. With Shura’s stories of old friends and old times, I knew something of the past must survive. The past can never be recreated but on the other hand it need not be lost to us. My scapegrace, charming cousin, before he left the Hope Dempsey, had restored to me a few vital scraps of my past. Like healing tissue, those scraps would knit to form at last a protective scar upon my wounded spirit.
Shura would never know how, almost in the nick of time, he had brought me the healing gift of tranquil recollection.
TEN
THEY TELL US THAT WITCHCRAFT is banished to Africa. They assure you it is dead and forgotten in Surrey and all the civilised counties of England. They tell you this on the wireless, when it is the BBC that broadcasts the worst heresies and blasphemies, night and day, while herbalists and homeopaths are forever recommending their rubbish to the listening millions! What else is this but witchcraft? Jimmy Young and Woman’s Hour are nothing but a medium through which the Satanic creeds of Alchemy and Black Magic are transmitted to eager converts. What if the TV people offer us Stars on Sunday or a Final Programme or that we hear a priest, or more often than not these days a rabbi, for a few minutes a day on the Home Service - it scarcely matters, when twenty-three of every twenty-four hours broadcasting is given up to the propagation of Communism, Occultism, Judaism and rampant Buggery, where the ‘pagan spirit’ is the informing genius of the BBC Plays and Talks departments, and not improved, I would add, by replacing a godless Presbyterian with a crypto-Catholic. ‘But this is England,’ you will tell me, with your usual smug condescension. ‘There is no changing it. We have always been a pagan nation. It is the secret of our success. What do you think the Reformation was all about? Not to mention Cromwell. We made a God of our own sublime vices and set about proving to the world that He was the superior of all others.’ Yes! You are surprised that I know these arguments? Young people are fools. They think we have always been old and powerless. Why will they not observe and learn? Yes, I have seen witchcraft and feudalism in the flesh, under my nose, and if that does not make you value our rationalist and enlightened universe, very little will. They say those who come back from the colonies have the ideas of a hundred years ago. That is because they come from a world still having the experience of a hundred years ago or, in some cases, a thousand or a million. We should not despise the experience of people less civilised than ourselves. We should help them gently along the path of progress, teach them to write and read in their own language, but we should also listen to what they can teach us. Sometimes this method has excellent results, as in the case of Hawaii, but the case of Egypt, for instance, is the saddest of all. It is not the first time she has refused the helping hand of a nobler power and slipped instead into yet another pit of corrupt barbarism, an easy prey to Turk and Bedouin alike, those jackals who will feast on any civilisation but only when it is thoroughly rotten, when the stink of its carcass permeates the planet. And the British wonder why today the mongrels of the world are suddenly attracted to their little island! Sugar is sweet, but putrefaction is sweeter, as we used to say in Odessa. There was witchcraft there, too, but we knew it for what it was.
Mrs Cornelius tells me I am an alarmist. ‘There’s nuffink wrong wiv a few ol’ biddies putting a bit o’ comfrey in their tea, Ivan.’
‘It is not the comfrey, my dear friend. It is the implication of the comfrey. The comfrey is a symbol of what has gone wrong.’
‘Usually indigestion’d be my guess.’ Sometimes Mrs Cornelius can be overly down-to-earth. Perhaps this is why we are attracted to one another, for I have the sensitive, romantic kind of imagination while she, eternal female, has the less intellectual, earthier, instinctive qualities men value in women. These feminists who want to turn Titania into Oberon have no conception of the true, deep meaning of equality, that union of opposites which can be the most beautiful and transporting experience of all.
In that Mrs Cornelius would concur, and she is, after all, very much a woman, even now, when time has faded her beauty and stolen her health but nonetheless left her great heart beating stronger.
She remains too generous, my friend; incapable of detecting sin, for the most part, or of judging her fellow creatures too harshly. She was the first to drink with the Bishop, for instance, upon his release (though grave-robbery, even in London, is still frowned upon by some). For some years she earned a small living as a child-minder. It never mattered to her, she said, if they were little micks or little piccaninnies; they all shit their pants just before their mums came to pick them up.
‘It’s just a fad, orl this black magic stuff,’ she tells me. ‘The kids was inter it a few years back. Voodoo dolls an’ pentawotsits an’ ‘exes an’ orl that. It’s them ‘orror pictures, Ivan. On ther telly. Rosemary’s Baby an’ Frankenstein Meets the Wolf man.’
‘There is a difference between the two.’ I grow tired of this perpetual round. ‘When you and I were in Hollywood we knew who was Evil and who was Good. That was the difference. Our pictures pointed a firm moral - and not always the conventional sentiment. Now it is all up in the air. Is it surprising the children are confused?’
What is the point of turning on that television? The Cornelius children inform me I should buy a colour set. Why should I bother, I say, I know where I am with black and white. The wireless gets worse and worse, full of childish smut and self-congratulatory panel games featuring the same people responsible for the smut. If Tony Hancock is a comedian, then so is Harold Wilson. Both seem to blame the rest of the world for their misfortunes. They should face it. The public does not want what they offer. It is the same with the plays and books these young men produce. Is it art? If self-pity has become an art, then it is no surprise, I say, that all Jews are now artists. If self-congratulation is an art, then every Briton is an artist!