The Laughter of Carthage (33 page)

By the end of two weeks my optimism was waning. The British Embassy refused me the most ordinary kinds of information; the Russian émigré organisations could promise me nothing and had no concrete news of Kolya. Paris was awash with Russians, many of whom had credentials even better than my own, and the authorities were sick of us. Esmé, I could tell, began to have doubts about me, particularly when we were forced to move from our pension and take two miserable rooms in a street little better than an alley in Montparnasse. Rue de la Huchette consisted of a number of seedy bars and so-called ‘dancings’; there were cheap fishmongers, butchers and sellers of mouldy fruit and vegetables. Whores infested it. The alley was a rendezvous for every clochard on the Left Bank; at least one of the buildings was completely derelict, taken over by tramps and beggars of the worst sort. Our rooms were nearby, at the top of a crumbling house, scarcely any better than the squalor from which I had, in Galata, removed my Esmé. I was conscious she must be thinking this. The only advantage to our quarters was that they were high above the noise of the street. Esmé at first made the best she could of it, even sweeping and tidying and cleaning, but she quickly became depressed and lassitude set in. She implored me to spend more and more time outside, in the lively company of our new friends, inhabitants of the Montparnasse and Montmartre cafés, who at least were always generous with their wine. I think they meant well, those who swore they could provide Esmé with proper papers. They took photographs; they examined my own Russian documents. They claimed friendships with the highest and lowest: a master forger in St Germain, the secretary to the British Ambassador. But they were useless. I hated to be so dependent on them. There were no easy engineering jobs for me in Paris as there had been in Kiev or Pera. The French Army had disbursed thousands of half-trained jobbing mechanics upon the nation and most of those could find no work. My only hope lay in finding a backer for one of my designs. I knew it had to be an invention to impress the light-minded Parisians, something which would seem sensational to them. So I said I intended to build a great airliner able to fly to America with a hundred passengers in record time.

Esmé begged me to be cautious. ‘You have no plans for such a ship, Maxim! We must not attract the police.’

I reassured her. I laughed loudly. ‘What can the police do? Prove I am not a legitimate inventor? My little dove, if I get a bite - then it will be the work of a few hours to draw up the plans. In fact, if it will improve your state of mind, I’ll start at once.’

I began to mention my invention around the cafés. I spoke of the enterprise’s automatic success, how huge fortunes would be made from it. ‘Indeed, it must be considered as a sound commercial venture and nothing else,’ I would say.

American tourists had virtually taken over Montmartre and the Champs Elysees. The faster they could be brought in, and in the greatest numbers, the better for everyone, I said. Tourism would from now on become one of the main sources of any great city’s revenue.

By pawning my fur coat I paid for new visiting cards advertising
The Franco-American Aerial Navigation Company
and these I judiciously handed out at every sensible opportunity. My reputation slowly infected the Parisian consciousness. Many said they already knew of Professor Pyatnitski, the Russian aircraft expert, the same boy genius who had built Kiev’s Purple Ray and single-handedly held off the Red Cavalry. One of Lalande’s journalist friends interviewed me for his newspaper and in due course a large piece appeared about me. It exaggerated, but in my favour. I was described as ‘Le Quichotte Cossack’, a man of science and a man of action combined, an adventurer to rival Munchausen. I still have the cutting. It is from
Le Review Coucou
for 15th September 1920. This was by no means the only publicity I received. Everywhere toasted me in print.

My chief fear at the time was not that I should fail to survive but that Esmé would become bored and disenchanted. I had, after all, failed miserably to keep my wonderful promises. We were overly dependent on others for our entertainment. Since Rome, she had developed a profound craving for the cinema and the money was not always available to pay for the latest Pickford or Sennett. As my anxieties increased I paradoxically grew plump on the free dinners supplied by bohemian friends. What was worse, Esmé felt ashamed of her clothes. Even Paris’s artists had a certain style and their women looked elegant no matter how eccentric their frocks, and try as she might Esmé could not emulate them. I assured her she looked wonderfully attractive to me, but women never trust their lovers in these matters.

Meanwhile I persisted in my enquiries about Kolya. I was discovering Paris to be a city of people who cannot bear to say they do not know something. So many pretended to have heard of him; a dozen Russian exiles claimed to have met him in some nearby thoroughfare or to have dined with him only a night or two earlier, but most of these turned out to be rogues, only interested in getting money from me. Possibly because our Russian nobility had always looked to France for its manners and its language, Paris seemed to have almost as many émigrés as Constantinople. Russian restaurants were in vogue. Russian artists gave exhibitions of their garish paintings. Russian dancers shocked a sophisticated world with bizarre choreography and costumes, with hideous music. Those very elements of decadence which ushered the triumph of Lenin were now, like dangerous spoors, infecting France. As a result - and who could blame them? - Parisians became wary of us. I had made an initial mistake in admitting my nationality. I should have been better off if I had claimed to be a Jew or an Egyptian! Either I was besieged by bluestockings telling me soberly how much they ‘sympathised with your country’s terrible plight’ or I and my fellows were regarded as members of some gigantic circus come to town merely for the purpose of entertaining bored sensation-seekers.

Paris will seize on any passing fashion. I heard only recently that her latest craze is American comic-strips. The Minister of Culture awards prizes to the illustrator of
Little Orphan Annie
while Paris’s municipal authorities renamed the Avenue Roosevelt. Now it is Boulevard du Batman. So thoroughly do these modern French make nonsense of any claim to cultural superiority! They imitate the worst American and English pop music, the worst cheap fiction, the worst films. They presumably identify this trash with a vitality they themselves lost over half a century ago. I had hoped De Gaulle would pull his country together (though he seemed a pompous dullard when I met him in 1943). His reign is marked by student riots and an increase in violent pornography. He failed to subdue Algeria as he failed to put his harlot capital in her place. (More sinister rumours concerning his race and real loyalties I discount for lack of evidence. It is significant, however, that he proved inept at reducing Moslem power abroad yet thinks nothing of welcoming the Arab and the Turk to his capital! As a rational man I refuse credence to the conspiracy theories so prevalent these days amongst Western Reds. The truth is that the real conspiracy has been hatching for centuries, so perverting the Christian world it is nowadays barely recognised!)

Our material circumstances grew worse and worse. Esmé wept at the grey sheets, the filthy windows. She said we should never have left Rome. Italians were certainly more generous than the French. The news from Russia was appalling. Our loyalist armies, pushed back at every turn, received scant help from the Allies, now involved with the Turkish question. Newcomers from Southern Russia, questioned by me for news of my mother, my friends, had nothing to offer. The poor souls were still dazed, still ‘within the nightmare’. It seemed as dangerous to try suddenly to wake them as it was to wake a somnambulist. There were plenty of Russian language newspapers of all political colours, from rabidly monarchist to violently nihilist, reporting opinion rather than fact. Russian publishing companies and Russian information centres, together with certain cafés operated and patronised entirely by Russians, dealt chiefly in gossip and blind hope. These exiles and their Berlin counterparts were the lucky refugees. Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands were crushed into civilian concentration camps, dying of disease or sheer despair. Even amongst these pathetic refugees Lenin and Trotski had their supporters. Though the appalling consequences were visible everywhere, French socialists plotted a similar fate for their own nation! Perhaps resistance to all this would have been stronger if our newspapers had not published true stories of atrocities so ghastly the average Parisian could not accept them, dismissing them as partisan lies. I insisted they were true, for I had seen such things with my own eyes. I had suffered at the hands of Red irregulars, barely escaping with my life! But I soon learned to say nothing. During that everlasting, frenetic post-War party, people hated you if you spoke of death and terror (or even less dramatic realities). All they wanted was the latest American jazz, the newest dances, the most outrageous fashions. The heroes of the War were already forgotten. Sweating Negro banjo players were hailed in their place. And when the cost of these fresh sensations proved too high, they demanded money from an exhausted Germany! (In due course Germans grew tired of such demands. They marched back into the city, whereupon Parisians merely shrugged, doubled the price of drinks to German soldiers, and danced on.)

And Esmé was as eager as anyone to join the party. Her relish for the good life became alarming. Being young, she needed to go out and about, but of course I could not find the necessary cash. Soon I was forced to sell a valuable patent for a few hundred francs. My ‘agent’ was an Odessan Jew called Rosenblum. It was all I could do to force myself to be civil to him, stop myself automatically drawing back from his slimy hand when he put it, with an assumption of fraternity, upon my arm. He told me where I must go to meet his client.

It was in Montmartre, in a tourist Bal du Danse, one seedy afternoon while the Angelus bell clanked in the Savoyarde towers of Sacré Coeur. I was fond of this church. It seemed transported from somewhere further East. The usual press of visitors had dispersed. The bandstand was empty, the chairs stacked, the bar closed, yet the place still stank of the cheapest perfume, the youngest wine. I stepped inside. The door was closed and barred by the man I had agreed to meet. He was also Ukrainian, but from Marseilles, where he had lived since 1913. M’sieu Svirsky wore a loud pin-striped suit, a white trilby; his hands were covered in heavy gold rings crudely set with semi-precious stones, mostly crimson. He said he was a broker for important Southern industrial interests with branches in Paris. He was no more than ten years older than me but his face hung with loose skin, like a bloodhound’s, as if the flesh within had wasted away suddenly. This gave him a sad-eyed look. His eyes in actuality were hard brown stones. He asked me about the invention I had for sale. He stared as he listened, his face wrinkling, mouth smiling, as if he felt obliged to pretend intelligent interest in my description. This peculiar, agitated little fellow relaxed immediately when I indicated I had finished. Then he glanced nervously about the bar. Plainly he was uneasy, perhaps wishing to behave correctly but unsure what was expected of him. He reminded me of a half-trained spaniel. Yet he had money in his wallet, together with a piece of paper I must sign: a contract bearing the name of a Marseilles engineering firm. It promised royalties when my safety brake was commercially sold. (This device was attached to the accelerator of a car. It automatically operated when one lifted a foot completely off the pedal.)

We chatted about Odessa and the good times we had known there. He was familiar with some of my favourite cafés. He recalled ‘Esau the Hairy’, remembering the name of the accordion player who had been a regular for so long. When I mentioned my Uncle Semya he was impressed. Everyone knew Semyon Josefovitch. ‘So you’re his nephew. It’s a small world.’ He grinned, ‘I’d better have another look at this contract. You signed it too readily. Why didn’t you go into the family business?’

‘He sent me to technical college instead. He wanted me to be a lawyer, but I had no vocation for it.’

Svirsky accepted this soberly. ‘Your family doesn’t gravitate naturally to Law.’

I asked if he knew my cousin. Svirsky said he thought Shura might be in Marseilles. ‘No,’ I said. ‘He was killed. I heard.’

But Svirsky was certain Shura was alive. ‘He turned up a couple of years ago, asking for a job. I suppose he’d deserted. It would have suited him to let people think he was dead, eh? He switched papers probably, and got on a ship. It’s commonly done.’

Was all the world being resurrected? I was amused by this thought. It sounded like Shura. I asked Svirsky to tell my cousin to get in touch with me if he felt like it. We had quarrelled over a girl. I regretted falling out. I was sure he did, too. Relatives should stick together in these times. ‘Oh, indeed,’ said Svirsky. ‘The Ukrainians are still very thick in Marseilles. Since the War, of course, the old trade with Odessa has dwindled almost to nothing. It was a great shame. Everyone did well out of it.’ He yawned, far more comfortable now he had my measure. We agreed things could never return to normal in Odessa. The Golden Age had passed. Against a volume of evidence, only Paris attempted the maintenance of her first optimistic flush of 1918. Apocalyptic political ideas threatened every aspect of European life, promising new wars, new regimes. Svirsky still hoped the Bolsheviks ‘would relax a bit’ as soon as they had definitively won the Civil War. ‘They’re bound to open the ports for trade. They’d be mad not to.’ But he had almost no direct experience of that particular form of insanity. I told him I was less optimistic. Those people would destroy whole nations who threatened to give the lie to their lunatic myths. Svirsky insisted ‘things will settle down’. I thanked him for his money and left the Bal du Danse after shaking hands. It would be several years before I should see him again. Then he would freely admit my foresight.