‘You’ll help me if you can, Simka?’ It was almost an order.
I sighed, forcing myself to smile. ‘Yes, Leda Nicolayevna. I’ll help if I can.’
The fog was too thick for us to see anything much of Varna. I have heard it is an unremarkable town. I was surprised so many disembarked there. I said as much to Mr Thompson shortly after we had left the harbour’s sea-roads and were heading with some speed towards the mouth of the Bosphorus. He frowned. ‘Can’t you guess, Mr Pyatnitski? We’ve put every suspected case ashore. And that’s two-thirds of the people we had on board. We’ve been lucky, I think. Larkin’s guess is that Hernikof was suffering from it, though of course it’s unlikely he gave it to anyone since he’d recovered by the time we reached Batoum. It’s impossible to say now. We can just hope we’re all right. It’s typhus, old man.’
So Hernikof had managed to infect a large number of honest Christians before he had been killed. I was thankful my suspicions about him had been accurate.
‘But none of the crew has it?’ I asked.
‘Not so far. Of course, the pity is we’ll probably be under quarantine when we get to Constantinople.’
At that moment I believed I would never be free of the Rio Cruz. It was January 13th, 1920. The next day was my birthday. Hallan, amshi ma’uh ... I have spoken the words that must be spoken and Anubis is my friend.
FOUR
THAT NIGHT WHILE overhead the Russians celebrated with threadbare conviviality the eve of their New Year I made love to my Baroness, privately praying she was still healthy. Her servant and daughter had been permitted to stay in the saloon until twelve. She had claimed a headache; I had said I had papers to put in order. Of the passengers, only Mrs Cornelius and I were party to the truth; the others had rumours which, in the manner of desperate people, they ignored or turned into jokes. There was fog in the Bosphorus, Jack Bragg had said, but tomorrow, sooner or later, we should see Byzantium. We steamed past the coast of Bulgaria, holding a slow but steady course, and I plunged in and out of my paramour like a mad rabbit, to squeal my pleasure in the certain knowledge my voice was drowned by a chorus of exiles and the boom of our engines.
At midnight, our exhausted legs took us back to the saloon. All the officers had returned, but Mrs Cornelius was still there. She had linked arms with two drunken Ukrainian matrons in Stenka Razin (which she insisted on pronouncing Stinker Raison - I believe it was the only Russian song she knew). Kitty, sleepy and clutching a toy dog purchased by her mother in Batoum, kissed us both goodnight before her heavy little body was borne off by her nanyana; then we went outside. It had grown warmer. The ship quivered on calm water and I wondered if we had yet entered the mouth of the Strait. We had again sailed into that huge black cavern; there were no stars or moon. There even appeared to be an echo.
Mrs Cornelius, full of rum and good will, joined us. An army cap on the side of her head, she leaned gasping on the rail. ‘’Appy Birfday, Ivan.’
I was touched by her consideration. She swayed forward to kiss me on the cheek, then looked about in surprise. ‘Cor! It’s like bleedin’ pitch art there!’
The Baroness frowned uneasily; she could not understand the Cockney accent. For me Mrs Cornelius’s English was often easier than the purer language of the officers. I had as it were cut my teeth on Cockney. Leda made no attempt to speak English. She said in Russian, ‘I had best see how Kitty is. Marusya Veranovna seemed to have drunk more vodka than usual. Goodnight to you both.’ With some coolness she bowed and made her way back to her cabin. Mrs Cornelius spat into the water. ‘Carn’t seem ter clear me fuckin’ marf. It’s ther rum. Picks yer up mentally but lets yer darn socially, as they say. Woz I bein’ a gooseberry?’
I reassured her. I was glad to have this time alone with her. ‘Have you heard anything more? About the sickness?’
There was no news. But the officers, she said, were not over-worried. With an arm around my shoulder she let me get her back to our cabin. My brain was full of history. I saw the trappings of the Hun ponies, the banners and the spears and armour of hungry Ottoman Turks as they turned hot ebony eyes towards Europe and readied their primitive nomad philosophy for war against Greece. Why must they now claim originality and superiority? If they had been so proud of their culture Turks would not have called their own land Rum or Rome. Such deep hypocrisy. It was passed from generation to generation, strengthened in every century. They were trapped in their own perverse mythology. This is a planet of lies and shadows. Civilised men are ever the prey of envious shepherds. Even so, the truth occasionally glints through, yet I fear my generation was the last to recognise it.
As for these innocent-seeming outriders for the Hun hordes, these Turkish ‘guest-workers’, I know their game. I surprised a group of them a few days ago in the Paddington Arms near the station. They were standing around a shrieking one-armed bandit and arguing. After I ordered my vodka from the bar I said casually, to no one in particular: Rüzgâr kuzey doğudan esiyor. I was amused by their consternation as I walked back to my table. Some of us still understand why such an arrogant people are prepared to do menial tasks in a foreign land. They are all, of course, Fifth Column spies: the saboteurs, the advance-guard. I have given up trying to alert this country. The British will be crushed beneath the weight of their own complacency, an illusory belief in their innate superiority. They will go down, in the words of their Poet Laureate, with Nineveh and Tyre. I have done far more than honour and duty normally demands. I can do no more. Elleserait tombée. Mrs Cornelius told me they would never understand. ‘Yore wastin’ yer breaf, Ivan. Ya orta be lookin’ arter number one.’ But I was always an idealist. It is my Achilles heel. I had so much to give. I sit beside the cash-register in the deep end of my shop, looking out on the Portobello Road. It is like a film. Year by year the white faces grow fewer. The loping West Indians and arrogant Pakistanis, the swaggering Turks and Arabs multiply. It was all white when I first came here. The shops were ordinary and decent: newsagents, grocers, tobacconists, cobblers. Now it is imitation gold bracelets and cheap cotton prints like the poorer bazaars of Constantinople in 1920. And Kensington Market, crammed with kangaroo-skin boots and diamante silks, begins to resemble the Grand Bazaar. People continue to ask why this has happened! They can have no knowledge of the past. No wonder young women grow bored with feeble English loungers who live only to smoke keef and claim the State’s baksheesh. No wonder white girls seek out the spurious vivacity of the grinning Negro, the secure wealth of a fat Asian patriarch. Here again is Byzantium in decline; the last years of a senile civilisation.
I have seen the same effects in a dozen great cities during their ultimate decline. When Christian girls decide to desert the ways of virtue to fornicate with the Pagan, then chivalry is lost forever. It is the same in New York and Paris, in Munich, in Amsterdam. Oriental Africa has once again married brutality to cunning and given birth to Carthage. Burada görülecek ne var? The self-mocking West, dismissing the moral convictions of three thousand years, is ripe for conquest. And of course the one to benefit most will ever be that sly desert herdsman, your Jew.