'He means that you ignore it,' I said. 'Trade we are interested in,' Herr Gesing said. 'Trade. And culture. Politics, no.'
'Out of your own mouth.' Mister Bowles nodded his head in solemn triumph.
'Was meinen Sie?'
'You keep them separate, those two? Politics and trade.'
'Natürlich.' Herr Gesing looked round the table, spreading his hands. 'They are separate things, nicht wahr?'
'That is the big difference between our two countries,' Mister Bowles said. 'Our policy, British policy, is shaped by ideals. We protested at the Armenian massacres, for instance. We lost trade as a result, of course. Germany said nothing. In fact, at the height of the atrocities, your Kaiser sent the Sultan an intimate birthday present, a signed photograph of himself.'
I wonder how you felt on receiving that, Excellency? Typical piece of narcissism. Still it is true that since then Germany has lined her pockets in the Near East. You will have noticed that Mister Bowles, just as earlier in his comment about motherhood, had taken up a strongly moral position. However, he seemed sincere enough. It was difficult not to admire his saeva indignatio.
'As a result, Germany got the Baghdad Railway concession,' he said.
Herr Gesing was smiling. 'Ideals?' he said. 'It was not about the massacres the English were protesting. It was the loss of the eight per cent from the Ottoman Loan Company.'
'Nonsense,' Mister Bowles said. He was looking flushed.
'Listen to me. You must these moral categories transcend. We are moving towards the coming age. Like a great music. Like a symphony. You must hear all the music together. If not, you have only discords.'
'Children bayoneted,' Mister Bowles said heatedly.
'That is a discord.'
'Women and girls raped and mutilated.'
'On discord you are dwelling.'
'Men with their testicles cut off and stuffed into their mouths.'
'Discord, discord,' Herr Gesing said.
I allowed my attention to drift somewhat. I felt comfortably replete. We were half-way through the third bottle of wine now – the lambent, amber wine of the island. However, in spite of this well-being, my mind began to fill slowly with thoughts of the bayoneted children, disembowelled before they could walk; the clubbed Armenians bleeding their lives away into gutters. All the rapes and mutilations and multilingual agonies of your possessions, Excellency. Together with the gratification they afford to the inflictors. Accents of pain and brutal jubilation, mingling and arising in one great vaporous exhalation. The world steams with it… In Herr Gesing's discourse the wolf lies down with the sheep: Nietzsche red in tooth and claw, bedded with gentle Spinoza. Passing discord, ultimate harmony. 'The knowledge of evil is an inadequate knowledge.' God has no knowledge of evil. Those pleading in vain, the dispossessed, the violated… Even the crucified man with his half-open eyes and lolling discoloured tongue. His misfortune is not that of the universe as a whole… But it is, it is, Excellency. Harmonies are not composed in that way. Old friend Spinoza, why do I find your views, that have comforted me so long, so suddenly and so totally unacceptable? Can you not see the steam, Excellency, can you not see it from the windows of your palace? Perhaps not, perhaps you cannot see through your windows… The steam condenses into blood.
'You are absolutely right. A country's foreign policy is the expression of its moral nature.'
Lydia, saying things she does not really believe, in order to support Mister Bowles. With a kind of despair, remembered rather than felt, almost impersonal, like a summation of all my experience of loss, the rancidness of the detached observer, I take in the rich pallor of her face again, its severity mitigated, made strangely ambiguous by the heavy-lidded eyes, the curving smile. Her shoulders square, slight, under the clinging material of the dress, with its fashionable high neck. I summon to mind once again, with the patience of the habitual fantasist, her thirty-five-year-old body, naked as I have never seen it, luminous, lovingly supple. A body often petted and caressed, and the more precious for it, the more valuable for all that cherishing} those ardent traceries of hands and lips… For some reason, that smooth marble head in Mister Bowles's luggage comes into my mind.
'The values of that country registered in action. Like a work of art. A sculpture, for example.'
It is all for him. The turns of her head, the movements of her arms, from which the wide sleeves fall away to reveal slender, pale-haired forearms. All for him. Gesing, I think, saw something of this: perhaps it was what had made him so inclined to argue. Mister Bowles himself appeared to notice nothing.
'Morality, religion, pah!' Herr Gesing said. He hit the table lightly with his fist. 'Towards the realities we must look, and the future age,' he said.
'Future age, eh?' Mister Bowles seemed somewhat dashed by this burst of rhetoric. He remained silent for some time. I heard Lydia ask the German what he meant by future age and I heard his reply, delivered with confident promptitude: 'The coming age on nationalism will be founded. Nationalism, military organisation, the competition of trade.'
A good deal of discord there, by the sound of it. No mention of culture, either. Presumably Herr Gesing will divest himself of that in the lobby of the coming age. Lydia and Herr Gesing went on talking. I was about to break in to voice my horror, when Mister Bowles turned to me and in low tones once again spoke of the possibility of my acting as interpreter for him. But again in the vaguest terms.
'I am at your service,' I said.
There was silence for a few moments. We all looked at Herr Gesing, who sat very upright in his chair, hands curled into loose fists resting on the table. Then Mister Bowles leaned forward and in tones of great seriousness, said, 'If Germany puts self-interest before morality, she is heading straight for disaster, old man. No state can last long on that basis.'
Herr Gesing regarded him in silence for a moment. His thin, scrupulously shaved lips formed slowly into a sort of pout, which managed to look judicious and derisive at the same time. 'Every state behaves so,' he said.
No one replied, and in the silence Herr Gesing stood up and took his leave, bowing first to Lydia and then, with an identical bow, to us. He made his way out of the verandah. He walks with strutting steps, holding his head well back on the short neck. There is something both absurd and impressive about Herr Gesing.
I myself left shortly afterwards, weaving my portly and decorous way out, braving the glances from other tables. It was nearing midnight and I had my report to think of. I left the two of them there together.
It seems to me still, as it did at the time, that what Herr Gesing said about the behaviour of states is true. Take only this matter of the treatment of Christian minorities in the Empire. Germany refrains from condemning the Porte, indeed she behaves as a friend, and so gains lucrative concessions in Asia Minor and permission to send German officers to train your army. All the other European powers condemn us, but none of them can agree to act because they are divided among themselves. Russia, still smarting from San Stefano, demands as a condition that the Straits should be opened to her ships of war. As neither Britain nor France will entertain this, Russia does nothing. France does nothing either, because she remembers 1870, and is unwilling to offend Germany. Moreover, she too seeks trade concessions in Anatolia. Britain will not act alone, preferring public expressions of outrage. (They call you 'The Red Sultan', Excellency.) However, her main motive is not concern for the minorities, but fear of Russian influence in the Balkans. And her professions result in more suffering than would otherwise take place, since they encourage uprisings which have no hope of success, and which are put down with barbarous brutality by Your Excellency's accomplished Cossacks.
In the web that holds all these powers together, morality is merely one strand, and that a weak one; at every intersection there is a deal of some sort, provisional and largely dishonest; gumming it all together a collective salivation of ambition and self-interest. (Some sentiment too, to make it sticky.) A very precarious web, Excellency. One shade the more, one ray the less, and the whole thing falls apart.