Famous Last Words (10 page)

felt the early tremors of this quake and I’ve always counted him among its early victims. What he cried against before he leapt to his death was the raucous and wilful repudiation of civilization by industrified America. And when he spoke against it down he went, “the enemy of progress”. I always see in my dreams the counter image of Henry Ford, who is seated on my father’s casket, wielding his magic scissors; cutting out miles and miles of paper motorcars—creating, single handed, the United Fabricates of America.

Early in the 1920s Ezra Pound became my surrogate father.

It was on the impetus of his encouragement that I had found my way to China, much as a child will dig through the earth of his parents’ garden to discover if the people are walking upside down. I had begun by then to try my wings outside of verse and called myself a “serious writer”. Shanghai drew me like a motherlode of dreams and I thought I had found the ultimate source, the wellspring of every fiction known to man. It was there in that massive, visible throng that I found my Crowd Invisible, and thus my first success.

This was the age of the Treaty of Versailles when half the countries of Europe disappeared overnight into the gullets of the other half who woke up suffering from indigestion.

In Shanghai I met so many German, Austrian, Bohemian

and White Russian refugees I was able to learn their languages (the White Russians all spoke French). I also made

my living, for a while, teaching their children English.

It was a dreadful time; there was so much dissolution of the past and fear of the future. Nothing to stand on, nothing to reach for. Almost every day there were killings and suicides.

Sometimes parents would murder their children. Others

gave their children away and shot themselves. Other

times, families were slaughtered by the agents of a revolution

taking place far away. It seemed grotesque that anyone should travel halfway round the world to slit a woman’s throat and drown her babies in a bathtub. Not in some hovel out beyond the pale, but always in some embassy or sumptuous hotel.

Even though it was a frightening time nothing could have dragged me away, because I recognized that in this microcosmic hell the age I lived in was being defined, and if I wanted to write then 1 had to force myself to become a witness to these lives and these events and to this place.

Looking back, I think Shanghai was all a dream. Which is why, perhaps, its images return so poignantly at night in sleep.

Wallis was sitting in the lobby waiting, as I was, for someone who was late. In the crush, I could see her figure perched very still on the edge of a chair up against a wall. There was a mirror behind her. Intermittently I could see myself in this mirror, flashing on and off like a nervous white light as strangers passed between us. Out beyond the revolving doors, the sun was shining and I think it must have been teatime—

four or five in the afternoon. Wallis was so composed in the midst of all the commotion that once I’d caught sight of her, I couldn’t stop watching. She was like a child who had run away and was caught in the adult world when the curfew

bell rang. If I sit like this and wear white gloves and /old my hands, I shall pass for at least fifteen.…

She had not yet begun to affect Chinese dress as she later did, and was wearing a very “American” cotton suit. Her hair, pushed back and up, was severe yet elegant—like angel wings. It was covered with a pale blue veil and the veil came down to her chin. Her mouth was very red; her eyes, though blue, had darkened against the intrusion of so much light and her whole face carried, even through the veil, across the fifteen yards or so of lobby like a mask. There was not a trace of emotion written there—only: 1 am here and if you break me you must pay for me.

I was waiting too: for one of my students. Dmitri Karaskavin.

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Dmitri Karaskavin’s parents had engaged me to teach him English. They wanted very much to go into exile in America.

I warned them about this, but they would not be dissuaded.

Everything was contingent now on their passports being

endorsed by the proper authorities. Also on the arrival of two other children, lost somewhere on the journey through Manchuria. It was all very complicated. Masses and masses of money were involved. Everyone who lifted a pencil or carried a rubber stamp had to be bribed.

Sun Yat-Sen was dying of cancer. China was about to burst into flames. There was nationwide political unrest and intrigue, much of it fostered by the Reds in Russia. It was not,

therefore, a good time to be a White Russian in Shanghai.

So many knives were out. So many hands. There was speculation Dmkri Karaskavin’s sisters were being held for ransom.

His parents, of course, were frantic. But pragmatic also, to the degree that while they waited for the past to catch up to them, possibly even to murder them, they went on planning for. an American future in which Dmitri Karaskavin

would be their interpreter. I was to provide him with the language.

We met in various places, including the lobbies and gardens of other hotels and even in the ante-rooms of brothels. Sometimes our lessons took place on foot as we tramped around the city or climbed the nearby hills to stare at the Yellow River and wonder where the ships were going and

had been. And on more than one occasion, Dmitri Karaskavin hired a motorcar and we drove out into the country.

I had been in Shanghai for more than three months by the time this scene took place in the lobby of the old Imperial Hotel: long enough to have written one whole draft of Crowd Invisible; long enough to have fallen in love with Dmitri Karaskavin. Long enough to have begun to know who I was—

independent of my father and of E/.ra. I had even begun to wear white suits.

I was standing. Wallis was seated.

The whole world passed between us. shuffling and pushing over the famous tiles (long since, I fear. destroyed) replete with their fiery dragons, winged messengers and monkeys.

The lacquered chair on which she sat had an inlay of motherof-pearl chrysanthemums. Time, as it does in dreams, went

by without the hands of clocks. Hours, days, years. I was alarmed. Dmitri Karaskavin was a wild boy, accident-prone and capable of gross misjudgement. He might have stopped on the street somewhere, caught up in his passionate concern for other people, listening to some conniver’s story. Always in the back of my mind there was fear that one of these would harm him: trap him and blow him out of my life. So much political intrigue lay in wait to swallow him. He was only eighteen and had spent the whole of his early life in a world of inviolate privilege and then, all at once, was a fugitive from men whose murderous hatred he was incapable of understanding. He wanted just to be in the world, in all of it—but he’d never been able to grasp that more than half the world was his enemy.

I was just about to give him up that afternoon when I saw him pushing through the lower part of the lobby. It was quite impossible not to see his hair, blond and windblown as the hair of a child and cut too long for a boy; it even touched the nape of his neck. I began to step forward, thinking how I should admonish him for being so late—eager to bless him for being alive and unharmed. I had never told him how I felt—I never would—but I ached for his presence. He knew he didn’t have a better friend in the world than me. He was always happy to see me. Sometimes, bursting with Russian enthusiasm, he would take my hand or embrace me, even

laying his lips along my cheeks. One of his greatest pleasures was to sit among the whores at Madame Liu’s, whose company he introduced me to, and incite them to riots of laughter with his imitations of Charlie Chaplin.

As 1 walked towards him, pushing through the people, 1

began to raise my arm in greeting. But in this dream my arms are always frozen and 1 cannot move them—knowing

what will happen next. All my movements lock. I am weighted to the floor. The riotous storm of people increases.

Dmitri Karaskavin doesn’t even see me. His hand is lifted, too. to wave—but not at me. He is striding—weightless—

pushing his way past boatloads of people setting off for

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America, waving their Stars and Stripes, singing their anthems as obscene limericks. Wilfully ignoring where he walks, Dmitri walks across the faces of the monkeys and the winged messengers oblivious of everything except his destination.

Wallis sits in her lacquered chair. In the dream there is silence—slowly broken open by the moaning of a long black wave of curling water pouring down the steps and over the moment of their greeting.

Wallis extends both hands in Dmitri’s direction. He kisses them. One, its white glove shining, rests for a moment on his cheek and leaves its mark indelible forever. She was then a woman of twentyeight. He was a boy of eighteen. I cannot tell what really happened, having no access to the dreams beyond the doors they closed. My jealousy had access there, but not my eyes. 1 only know her power to move him to his manhood was embodied in the way she greeted him that

afternoon: seated; veiled; her white hands extended; her feet implanted in a dragon’s mouth; her eyes upon his gesture, not his person. Vigilant. Wary. Refusing to rise until he had made his obeisance and kissed her hands.

I forget what I did that afternoon. It was not till sometime later—weeks—that Dmitri introduced “my teacher to my

lady”. I did not (how could I?) like her at all. I had to presume she was a courtesan: how else could someone “old”

attract someone so young and hold him for so long? I had noted, too, that since their liaison began, her appearance had improved. Which is to say, her wardrobe. Dmitri’s family had money. Much of it. Now I presumed it was clothing this woman.

Maybe six and maybe seven times the three of us were

together. Once, we drove above the city so far back into the hills we had to spend the night in a stone hotel. We had strayed into that pastoral China seen on plates where the willows bend and the bridges disappear into the mist.

Sometimes we laughed. It would not have been possible

to live in Dmitri’s presence never laughing, never smiling.

He played Charlie Chaplin for Wallis, Mary Pickford for me.

He would play whole scenes with flowers and teacups.

Sometimes, he brought a Victrola with him and we danced

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She looked away.

I should not have said grotesque.

There was a long, long silence—somehow held in her

hands—and when she opened them, it was to confess her

marriage to Spencer, of which I had been unaware.

Then, looking off into the crowd around us. she also confessed her virginity. I sat immobilized, alarmed. Women—

certainly none that I had known—did not “confess” their virginity. They proclaimed it.

“It isn’t fair,” she said, “Mister Mauberley. All my life there have been such fine beginnings. And such rotten endings.

Everyone 1 love is swept away downstream. What is

a person meant to do?”

She withdrew her hands into the territory of the teacups, touching them very lightly on the way as if to mark their whereabouts.

She did not speak again until she had regained complete control of her poise—and then she said: “it seems to me, Mister Mauberley, this world is nothing more than someone’s revenge. We are led into the light and shown such

marvels as one cannot tell…” I watched her staring off towards some view to which I was not privy. “And then…they turn out all the lights and hit you with a baseball bat.”

Now she withdrew her hand into her lap. and fumbled

for her handkerchief. “Well,” she said, blowing her nose and beginning to repair the damage of her tears, “we have to fight back. Don’t you agree? We have an obligation to fight back.” Smiling. “Even if it means we have to pick up baseball bats of our own… .”

Her fingers, I noticed, however much they shook, were

brisk as they made their repairs. It is only now—after twenty years—that I see her face as-lacquered; only now that I realize she has never lived without the application of a mask. There is a mole you would never see, for instance, down by the corner of her mouth, which I saw that day for the first and last time. As she worked—she was an expert: her mouth, her eyes, her hair were masterpieces of illusion—she went on speaking through her teeth; her voice as sibilant as something from behind a screen. “That boy we loved is dead,”

she said. “You wanted him; I wanted him; Now—” she drew a thin red line along her upper lip “—what we have is each other.”

She snapped her compact shut, giving off a punctuation

mark of pale pink dust, and said; “I like you, Mister Mauberley.

I will be frank. You are not Dmitri. You are not my

beau ideal. But then—in your eyes—I am not Dmitri, either.”

I smiled.

“Very well. We can be friends.”

I nodded.

She dropped the compact back into her purse. Done.

“Then,” she said, “there are practicalities. Mister Mauberley.

If I am to have my life, I must find some means of

sustaining it. The same, I assume, applies to you.”

I agreed. All I had was my tutor’s fees, and few enough of those.

“One thing I had from Dmitri was an entree to that other world where money floats more freely than it does down

here. I do not mean that was the basis of our…relationship.

Only one of its side-effects. But one I shall sorely miss… .”

She toyed with her gloves. “And the same might be said for you. Am I right?”

It was true—though not so great a concern for me, being a man, as it was for her, a woman and alone.

“We shall strike a bargain, then,” she said, assuming my assent, “by which we can both achieve the goals we have in mind. You will have a woman—let us say ‘of mystery’—

on your arm.” A smile. ‘“Mister Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

and Mrs. Winfield Spencer were together again last night!’

And we both know how gossip of that kind works in this

society. Why they will positively fly to your side to know what I’m about. That is, the ladies will. While the gentlemen will sort of ambie over in my direction, mumbling into their shirts it’s a wonder they never laid eyes on me before and where have I been hiding myself?” She laughed. “And it