I could not answer. In those days no one believed what hideousness was yet to come. Many went back, during the so-called New Economic Policy period. Most were dead before 1930. I will not pretend that as the years passed I looked for hope of welcome, or at least recognition, in my homeland. I would not be alive today if I too had clutched at the straws offered by the Reds in the middle-twenties.
When Mr Thompson returned to his duties I was melancholy again. Against my usual habit, I sought the company of Mrs Cornelius. As usual she was enjoying herself in the dining-saloon with some of the officers. Jack Bragg was there, singing the choruses of Knock ‘Em In The Old Kent Road and Two Lovely Black Eyes. I think he flushed when he saw me, confirming my suspicion of his amorous feelings towards my companion. He could not know how sympathetic I felt. Mrs Cornelius wore her yellow and black dress (she called it her ‘tango frock’) and was performing the traditional English dance known as the Knees Up. I took a glass of rum and sang along with the others, imitating every one of Mrs Cornelius’s inflections and gestures. It was how my rather formal English, inherited from Pearson’s Magazine and various novelists, began to gain that neat touch of colloquialism which would often confound native Britons and enable me to move gracefully in all walks of life.
Mrs Cornelius winked at me, as she usually did, and persuaded me to sing one of the songs she had taught me. I willingly displayed my mastery with a rendering of Wot A Marf, Wot a Marf, Wot a Norf An’ Sarf. This has always remained one of my favourites. It was greeted with huge applause. Those Russians who had remained at the far end of the saloon, nearest the doors, were completely baffled. Mrs Cornelius gestured kindly for them to join us, but they displayed either embarrassment or downright surliness and disapproval. I too called they should ‘let their hair down’ and then, to my sudden horror, saw Brodmann, who had been huddled in a shawl and hidden by a fat dowager, rise from his seat. I could barely contain myself. It was a tribute to my iron will that I did not cry out. I forced myself to continue smiling and held my hand to the figure who hesitantly approached us. The smile turned to what was probably an inane grin of relief as I realised this creature was not, after all, my enemy. In response to me, he began to beam all over his red, greasy face, stumbling forward, singing some popular ditty familiar to me from my early days in Odessa. I would never normally have shown such welcome to a Jew, but now it was too late. ‘I am so glad,’ he said, when he had finished the first verse. ‘I have been ill, you know. Afraid they would turn me off the ship. Measles or something, but I am completely recovered. I have seen you once or twice, have I not? At night when I was getting some air?’ Before I could extricate myself, Mrs Cornelius put one plump, pink arm around his shoulders and the other around mine and was soon kicking up her legs in a kind of can-can. I had no choice but to make the best of it. By the time Mrs Cornelius broke away to dance with Jack Bragg I was left with the drunken, sickly Jew whose name, he said, was Hernikof. In his expensive, gaudy suit, with his gold watch-chain and huge diamond rings, he looked grotesque. He sweated a great deal, mopped his head and neck and insisted over and over again that he was ‘perfectly recovered’. He began to tell me how terrible it had been for him in Odessa; how his family had died in a pogrom, how his mother had been crucified by White Cossacks: all the familiar exaggerations of his race. When a short time later he leered at me and asked me if I, too, were going on to Berlin ‘with the attractive Baroness’ it was all I could do to hold back my temper. Yet, of course, I remained relieved that the ghost had been laid. At last I managed to return to the table where Mrs Cornelius sat panting. I squeezed in between her and Bragg, refilled my glass and made a great show of concentrating on the words of O, What A Happy Land Is England. It was bad enough having to travel in close proximity to the likes of Hernikof, but it was far more hateful when they assumed an intimacy and similarity of ambition and character. True, I had left Odessa considerably richer than I had arrived, and with military promotion into the bargain, but these fat brokers, wailing for sympathy, had had nothing of the real experiences, had seen nothing of the true horror. They had neither been imprisoned by anarchists or Bolsheviks nor had they known what it was to give up any hope of living. They had not seen men and women kneeling in the snow beside the railway tracks waiting to be shot in the head. They had not been forced to keep company with corpses and crows, with louse-ridden Cossacks who might kill you casually from mere boredom. They had heard of a few arrests, the occasional execution, seen some Jews being pursued through the streets, but their indignation was chiefly aroused by lost bills-of-lading, requisitioned houses, stock purchased with useless money.
That night I felt as if I had been driven back into my former mental condition; ‘within the nightmare’ as Russians say: that perpetual dreamlike state of frequently unadmitted terror I had known for over two years. My life and sanity had been attacked, my whole existence thrown upside-down by the cruel madness of Revolution and Civil War; my brain and body had throbbed, night and day, with fear. The terror becomes manifest. The dry mouth opens. Any words will come out of it. Anything which might save it. When the danger passes it is impossible to remember exactly what that frightened mouth has said. Neither does it matter, because you are still alive. Yet people look at you in contempt and call you a liar! They are lies, of course. I am not a fool. I will not deny it. My survival depends on self-knowledge. But are they like the lies Hernikof doubtless gave the British simply to gain sympathy and a passport to the rich pickings of Berlin? Such slimy untruths would not work on me. While not proud of everything I have done, I scarcely feel guilty; because I survived. What did it matter if the Jews tried to ingratiate themselves with me? What if those jumped-up kulaks snubbed me? The condemnation of the privileged is meaningless. Besides, I was admired by the British. I was loved by a woman of noble blood. I was watched over by another who was both mother and sister to me. The Jew was somehow shaken off and I found myself swaying between Mrs Cornelius and Lt Bragg, singing one of the sad Cossack songs I had learned when a prisoner of the Reds. Jack Bragg was plainly moved. He would have remained to hear the rest of the verses but he had to go on duty. I was halfway through and had reached the part where the second pony has died, giving up its life for the heroine, when Mrs Cornelius fell with a gargling noise backwards into my lap and looking up at me through her large, candid eyes said slowly, ‘I fink ya’d better put me ter bed, Ive.’
I helped her back to our cabin. This time she controlled her stomach until we were both undressed and then, as I reached to pull the blankets over her, she was sick on my only nightshirt. By the time I had washed it out in the ship’s toilet (the cabin had no running water or individual heating) she had gone to sleep. I stood supporting myself with a hand on the bunk looking at her in the yellow light from a hurricane lamp Jack Bragg had managed to find for us. The throbbing of the ship became indistinguishable from the throbbing of my own loins. Once you become used to lust being satisfied it is much harder to control. I longed for her to want me, to open her arms to me. I leaned down to stroke her hair. She murmured gratefully and smiled. ‘Thass loverly . . .’I touched her neck. ’Oo,’ she said, ‘you wicked fing,’ and she wriggled in the bed. I sat down on the edge. I kissed her ear. Her eyes opened and her smile changed to an expression of shocked surprise. ‘Ivan! Yer littel bleeder. I fort you woz . . .’ It was evident she had forgotten the name of her Frenchman.