I had only so much to do to our own adapted Buick tourer. Chiefly my duties consisted of overseeing the mechanics. There were three of them, all excellent, and an apprentice. Having exchanged petroleum tanks for compressed-gas cylinders we were experimenting with means of feeding the gas to the engine. I studied several types of steam car, including the excellent Stanley, which had ceased production in 1920. What we learned from these, we attempted to apply to our own prototype. I was lucky in my team of enthusiastic young men; my band of brothers, sworn to secrecy. Sometimes, when a particularly difficult problem arose, we would all work through the night. Again I had that life-giving powder to thank for her benevolent help. With such wages, I could afford it. Es ken nisht shatn. Thus the gas car gradually took shape. I continued to experience that thrill of anticipation, for the day when Esmé would place her dainty feet upon the soil of America.
With no photographs of my little girl, I had to make do with many of Lillian (and sometimes Dorothy) Gish. How much more wholesome they were than the likes of Clara Bow or Gloria Swanson. Somewhere in those few years we lost ‘the Nation’s Sweetheart’ and were given instead ‘the Hottest Jazz-Baby in Town’. I prayed my little shvester, mayn meydl, mavn metsie, would not have been coarsened or otherwise changed by her hardships. Her letters suggested she was the same delightful Mädchen of my dreams, my incorruptible daughter; sweet mistress of my mazl. Yet she had lived for long in the Vatican’s shade. I knew the Jesuit tricks. They would introduce sin into Eden if H. G. Wells would tell them how to build his zeygermashin. God help us if they become engineers. Then we shall see also their zindmashin! Maybe she was cynical. Who would not be after saving so long only to have the money snatched away at the very moment it is needed? I know some of these feelings. Yet I had fought cynicism, maintained my idealism against all odds. I was sure my sister, so much my alter ego, had protected her innocence equally well. Soon, together, we should be able to embark again upon that zukhn, that holy quest for the purity we had known in Kiev, for the tranquillity that once filled our hearts, for the zilber of clear thought. Iber morgn du vest kumen. I was confident, but I was not wholly confident, as they say. That is, I yearned for confirmation. Here were the sunshine years of my life, in California. I, who had always loved silver, learned the value of gold. There is a clarity in sunlight I never understood until Los Angeles. Though I know Carthage, terrified of silver, lurks in gold, I refuse to condemn the metal itself. I lusted for our union: my purity of intellect, her purity of flesh. The days began to manifest themselves as well-defined units.
When happy I always work best. What little pressure I had exerted on Mucker Hever was completely justified. We had an excellent design. The engine began to prove well. It would greatly increase Hever’s already monstrous fortune and by this means he would find his judgment confirmed. He and Mrs Cornelius occasionally visited the workshop, but were so involved with one another my descriptions were meaningless to them. This did not distress me. I prefer to work without supervision. Mrs Cornelius would never know I helped tip the balance in her favour, founding her assurances from Hever in something much more solid than momentary infatuation; she was to embark on her movie career very soon. I blamed myself for nothing. Wer hat gewennen? Das Spiel war unent schieden. Nobody was unhappy.
Und nun ist der Traum Wirklichkeit. Es ist höcliste Zeit, dass ich auf main Schiff zurükhehre. Karthago wird von einem glühenden Hass auf die Weissen verzehrt, die er als Wurzel alien Übels in der Welt betrachtet - obwohl ich andereseits wieder gehört habe, dass sinige weisse Wissenschaftler in seinen Diensten stehen. Seine Mittel wachsen folglich ständig. Gelt. . . Golden cupolas rising in Atlanta, in Odessa, and in Sparta. These domes rise in Jackson and Jubilee; copper and pewter, as any in Kiev, they rise in St Petersburg Fla and Alabama’s redbrick metropoli; no longer the domes of Christ Arisen, these are the domes of Civil dignity and Law, just democracy. A clock chimes where the sun’s orb blazed; red, white and blue flapping on a polished staff where for my sense of congruity should be a Russian crucifix. And these sappherine skies, are they never silver? In Arcadia alligators crusted with antiquity wallow in metal tanks. Their heavy jaws clack shut on asymmetrical teeth; they haul themselves over each others’ backs, refusing even the notion of death, they have existed so long. Small cousins to the mile-deep Atlantic monsters, blind representatives of a Carthaginian future, they are now bred by men to make handbags for Beverly Hills housewives, boots for singing cowboys and belts to decorate the trousers of millionaire dentists. The Jew showed me kindness in Arcadia. Wir steigen unter leichtem Schaukeln vom Bodenauf, wobei der Motor sin kaum varnehmbares Schnurren von sich gab. In Arcadia I came unsuspectingly upon those old reptiles. They could not know they were bred for profit. The Jew gave me warmth and his food. With his hands he fed me; with his dry sardonic lips he offered realistic prophecy. Maybe I was wrong to trust him. Der blut, der toyt, der kamf, der blitz, der synemmen, der oyfgeheybung!
Der oyfegebrakhtkayt! Ich haben das Opferbereit, meine Glaube, meine Schöpferdrang, meine Arbeit, mein Genie, meine Jugden, mein Kamerad, mein Kampf, meine Mission, mein Engel, mein Schicksal. I am strong in this. Karthago nicht viel von der Art der Leute wusste. Das Geheimnis seiner Kraft? Der shtof! When they took that from me, I was for a while weaker. But there is such a thing as resurrection. It is what they refuse to understand. The Jew looked at me with kindness, offering security. In this other Arcadia I hear sluggish liquid churn; claws rattle on steel floors. Those alligators smell of old Carthage’s enduring evil. I look over the fence and they are grinning back, their snouts dilating. He was gentle. The better kind of Jew. Der shtof was never der Mayster. Ikh bin abn meditsin-mayster. He said he was going to find a job on a newspaper in Odessa. He was prepared to accommodate the Bolsheviks when they arrived. Maybe he was already one of them. I took the tram along the shore. I never saw him again.
Der Engelsfestung eybik iz. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Vos iz dos? La Cité de. . . The City of the Angels is eternal and must become the New Byzantium. Carthage she absorbs, utilises, rejects what she does not want. The holy wood is where Parsifal discovered the Grail. Here all shall find salvation, on the final coast. We have travelled so long. Carthage cannot conquer here, though she will always threaten. So, at least, I am inclined to believe. It could be I grew euphoric and lazy under the benevolent Southern Californian sun; they say that happens to many. It could be I was seduced by her luxury, her golden charm, her aristocracy. Yet the attraction, I would swear, was positive.
So swiftly did my car assume reality I had soon some leisure time and this frequently was spent with friends, visiting the homes of their peers. For the most part these N’divim, these modern princes, possessed a grace and wit usually lacking in their European counterparts. Their world was vital and constantly expanding, through art, industry and intellect. They had every reason to carry themselves with dignity, to build their palaces amongst the wooded hills and feel superior. They had no use for the petty moralities with which a bourgeois rationalises his shortcomings. Yet they never denied or derided their European heritage; indeed, they imported it in such quantities it sometimes seemed there could be nothing left of the Old World; it had been entirely reassembled in the New. Renaissance tapestries, Jacobean tables and Louis Quinze chandeliers, all of them genuine, were common to the homes I visited. Yet in almost every great mansion one found acknowledgement of native America.