The Laughter of Carthage (60 page)

With a glance back to make sure I was ready, Sinclair tilted the ship even more radically, driving it down like a monstrous artillery shell at the shacks ahead. The light was fading so rapidly I was afraid I would be unable to see to aim our anchor. ‘Get a tree!’ Sinclair shouted. ‘Or a hedge. A fence is no good!’

He reduced speed, holding the ship almost stationary against the blustering wind which still caused the gondola to sway horribly. Twice, as I squinted through the gloom, I missed the chance to hook a stunted tree. By now it was twilight. Finally, in desperation, I hurled the thing at random into a field. It stuck into something but we continued to drag for yards until, to my enormous relief, the machine halted with a jerk. Major Sinclair switched off the engine, steadying the craft as best he could. We peered into the semi-darkness below. We were less than fifty feet from the swampy ground. Sinclair reached behind him and pulled back the cover from the little winch. We each took a handle and, by careful calculation, gradually got
The Knight Hawk
down.

Our good spirits recovered, we grinned like fools at each other. The winch was secured. Major Sinclair shouted to me to put my rope ladder over the side and get down to check that the anchor was firmly planted. The wind was still high; our gasbag boomed and rippled; the hawsers creaked. I was still cheerful as I climbed down the swaying ladder and, after about ten feet, felt my flying boots sink into mud. I followed the grappling line to where it had dug itself behind a rock, called up for some slack, then wound the rope around a small oak. Our machine was safe for the night.

We should now, of course, have to wait until morning before continuing our journey. This was normal practice in those days when bad weather would bring any kind of aircraft to an unexpected stop. That was why aviation experts like myself were struggling to produce machines unaffected by sudden storms, which would be able to fly at night. My own ideas were far in advance of Sinclair’s ship, which was of a type first built in 1914, but design had not altered much in eight years. Airships were more costly to develop and maintain than small aeroplanes.

Although inconvenienced, neither of us was surprised by this turn of events. A flyer tended to congratulate himself if he completed a journey without coming down at least once. By the time Major Sinclair stood beside me in the field, it was very dark. He shook his head and shrugged. He had been over-optimistic, he said. He had expected the north-easter to subside. We now had no choice but to request hospitality from the nearby buildings. I asked if it was prudent to leave the ship unguarded. He laughed, taking me by the arm. ‘You think some nigger’ll steal her! Let’s go, colonel. We’ll see if we can get a bite of hot food.’

We struggled through the mud towards the dim, yellowish lights of oil lamps. Overhead, clouds moved swiftly in the sky. From time to time the moon revealed buildings ahead: rough, unpainted shacks repaired with patches of rusting metal and miscellaneous lengths of timber. As we approached, a figure appeared in the light of an entrance, staring out of its lean-to for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, the door was slammed. In another unglazed window several small black faces observed us from cover. I began to feel uncomfortable. Major Sinclair chuckled. ‘They’re just nigger shacks, colonel. There should be something else further on.’ We made our way through this decrepit
shtetl,
hearing the clucking of chickens, strange, stealthy sounds, the creak of a shutter, until at last we reached a dirt road. A little further on we found a group of houses on either side of the road. These were in almost as bad condition as the others. However, Major Sinclair seemed confident we should do better there. Advising me to imitate him, he removed his helmet and goggles. ‘Folks here are a little wary and more than a mite superstitious. We don’t want some fool taking a shot at us because he thinks we’re robbers or spooks.’ While I waited at a broken-down gate, he selected one of the nearby houses and walked up the yard calling out, ‘Hi, there! Is anybody home?’ He knocked at the frame of a ragged screen door. I saw a candle flicker on the other side. Major Sinclair began to tell someone we did not need to speak to the man of the house. We were passing through and wanted a place to stay for the night. ‘Thank you kindly, ma’am.’ he said. He returned to me, shaking his head and smiling. ‘They aren’t much brighter than the niggers. None of the men are back from the fields yet and she won’t open her door to strangers. There’s a preacher down the road about half a mile. Let’s hope he’s more helpful.’

The muddy track took us between broken fences, collections of unidentifiable detritus, thin, bare trees, hen coops and pig pens. We passed the occasional silent, wide-eyed unhealthy child or ragged, thin-faced woman. Nobody spoke to us. In the moonlight the whole miserable settlement was eery and menacing, stinking of hopeless poverty. I had never expected to experience again those weeks when I had the misfortune in, 1919, to be stranded on the Ukrainian steppe. Yet here, in America were everyone was supposed to be so much richer, people of European descent plainly endured the same burden of unspoken, habitual despair; villagers so starved of food or mental stimulus they lived out their entire lives in a helpless trance. I could not tell if their general appearance of idiocy was a result of circumstance or interbreeding, but I had seen the same expressions in Russia, in the slums of Constantinople. I was glad to reach the clapboard church with the preacher’s shabby house beside it, a collection of youngsters, scarcely any more articulate or better fed than the rest, playing in the yard. A woman in a cheap print dress came out to the porch door. She grunted a question. She had light grey eyes, a cancerous skin and was not more than forty, though her hands had the stained, blotchy look of the very old. Returning a cautious, tired smile in answer to Sinclair’s courteous question, she said her husband was over at the other church holding the Wednesday prayer meeting. He would be back around nine. Major Sinclair explained our problem. The preacher’s wife said we should go back down the road a piece, to Miss Bedlow’s. She rented rooms. My friend saluted and said we were much obliged. Again I was reminded of the wretched
shtetl
synagogues, the ramshackle churches of Ukrainian peasants, their priests often as ignorant as the communities they served. I said nothing of this to Sinclair, however, for in a dim way I thought I might offend him.

Eventually we made out a sign we had missed on the way to the church. Miss Bedlow’s house had once been painted green. Someone had attempted to cultivate the front yard and the porch seemed in reasonable repair. Major Sinclair advanced up the few wooden steps. Again he knocked. This time I could clearly see the man who answered, for the light was brighter. He was fat. He had red, weather-beaten features, a bullet head, pale hair, almost no eyebrows. He wore a pink undershirt and overalls which he had loosened at the top. Something he was chewing stained the corners of his mouth. Though he did not seem greatly suspicious he made no attempt to disguise his curiosity, staring from me to Major Sinclair and back again. My friend explained our predicament. The fat man slowly became impressed until he almost stopped chewing altogether. ‘You boys flyers?’ I could hardly understand him. The words had actually sounded to my ears like ‘Y’baahs flahars’ but with extra vowels. I am famous for my quick ear and ability to reproduce accents and vocabularies. This came close to defeating me. The man went back into the house, calling for Miss Bedlow who emerged, a well scrubbed colourless woman in an old-fashioned woollen dress. She had one room she could rent us, she said, but we would have to share a bed. The charge was a dollar each, plus twenty-five cents apiece if we wanted breakfast. She could fix us supper now. Pork and greens would be another thirty cents. Gravely Major Sinclair told her the terms were reasonable (I think the woman was asking the most she dared) and she relaxed, inviting us in. The house smelled of mould and boiled food. The fabric of furniture, curtains and carpets was threadbare but clean and save for some differences of decoration was what one might find in the home of a Ukrainian moujik in similar circumstances. This was my first real experience of the American peasant and it depressed me. I had expected more, I suppose, of the United States. We went up the creaking staircase to our room, stripped off our flying gear, washed in the basin provided and went down again to be introduced to the other guests. Two elderly widows, the fat man, a grim farmhand and a young half-wit all showed comical astonishment at my accent. When Major Sinclair told them I was from England it created no specific change in their expressions.

The fat man spoke first. He had served in France for over a year. He had heard England was pretty. Was it anything like France? In some ways, I said. In others it was more like Maryland. He had never been to Maryland. He heard it was pretty there, too. He frowned for a while, then offered his view that France could also be mighty pretty, though it was a terrible thing what those Boshees had done to her. Shrugging, he added: ‘But I reckon she’s more cleaned up now than she was.’ I said her wounds were healing.

Seeing the difficulty we were both under Major Sinclair took over the bulk of the conversations, since I could follow them scarcely any easier than they could me. He explained where we were bound, why we had come down. He also managed to say a little about the Ku Klux Klan, the problems of whites undercut by black labour. The fat man said they never had trouble with their niggers, except once some buck got drunk on moonshine and the Sheriff over in Carthage had to come out.

‘Did you say Carthage?’ I thought I had misheard.

‘Sure did,’ said the fat man, wondering at my obvious curiosity. He waited politely for me to say more.

‘There’s Carthages all over,’ Sinclair said with a smile. ‘And Londons and Parises and St Petersburgs.’ He returned his attention to the fat man. ‘Then we’re not too far off course.’ He unfolded our map. ‘Here’s Pine Bluff. And this here’s Little Rock. Yes, now I see.’ He was pleased. ‘We’ll be there by tomorrow noon for sure,’ he said to me.

Like me, Major Sinclair ate sparingly of the abominable mess of grease and pulped vegetable served us. Then there was nothing else to do but say goodnight and return to our room where we slept uncomfortably, back to back in our clothes, until dawn. When I looked out of the narrow window at bare trees and broken rooftops, I was relieved to see the wind had dropped. The grey cloud had lifted; an early morning sun rose into a sky full of heavy cumulus promising dry weather.

After a breakfast of bacon and grits we paid Miss Bedlow. She told us who she thought would be able to help us with our ship. Two or three houses back down the dirt road, in a yard full of old tyre rims and rusting metal, we approached two wiry young men who lounged outside on a porch so rotten half the boards had fallen in completely. These were Bobby and Jackie Joe Dally. Major Sinclair quickly struck a bargain with them and the four of us set off to where we had moored the ship. By now word had evidently spread throughout the settlement. We were the centre of attention. First the white children, then the women, then the old people fell in behind us. By the time we could see
The Knight Hawk’s
swaying gasbag we had come to the negro section. Scores of blacks, keeping their distance from the whites, crept in a staring mass at the rear as our procession entered the field.

I was becoming alarmed by their numbers and by their silence, which seemed to have a sinister quality to it. Those hungry, unhealthy features might have belonged to cannibals. They made me feel sick. Black or white, there seemed little difference to me. They pressed around us in their torn, patched rags, with thin ungainly limbs, rolling, vacant eyes, red mouths, stinking of sweat. I could feel my hysteria building. I longed for some cocaine to steady my nerves but that was still in my luggage. Major Sinclair seemed unperturbed. I said nothing of my fears, yet I became convinced these people would never allow us to leave the ground, that they would jump us at any second, strip us of all we owned, tear the very flesh from our bones, and feast off it. I sensed a tremor in my legs as more and more of those ill-fed bodies touched mine. Sinclair was smiling. He was joking with them. Could he not see what I saw? This was Carthage indeed! The degenerate dregs of humanity greedy for everything I had worked for; the ignorant, hopeless, unconscious enemies of civilisation, as unable to imagine or create a better world as the wretches I had left behind in Kiev, as the Jews I escaped in Alexandrovskaya villages or the subhuman tribespeople of the Anatolian hinterland. Only by a massive effort of will could I make myself move forward. My mouth grew dry, my knees weak; my heart beat at terrifying speed. Sinclair would have thought me utterly irrational; this poverty did not for a moment threaten him. But I knew if we did not reach the ship as soon as possible we could be submerged by this mob. It wanted what we carried in our ship. It hated us for what the ship represented. It was jealous because I had managed to make something of myself. It loathed all that was different. Innovation threatened change, threatened the hideous familiarity of their lives. They would protect this familiarity at all costs. The metal shifted in my stomach. I was dizzy. I could not run.
Desidero un antisettico!
They stank of disease. The mass swelled, the pressure increased. I could not breathe. They were skeletons with huge, yearning eyes, reaching out their ragged claws for something they could not even name. I refused to join them in the camps, though they said I was a brother. That is how they recruit you. I never became a Mussulman. Seductive Carthage was resisted. I fought against her with wits and courage. I know her tricks. I know her ingratiating whine, her beggar’s pretence at poverty, her pleading attempts to win sympathy, her cajoling murmur. They would do anything to drag me back. They call you the same, but you are not. An accident with a knife and they say you are one of them! A misguided decision of my father and I am denied my fame. My future is stolen, together with my true place in the world. Carthage crowds in like poison gas. Brodmann leered out of the cloud. My stomach churned. I could hardly climb the ladder into the cockpit. I stared down at those awful eyes. The blacks yelled wordless exclamations and began to caper. Some of the children tittered. Others wept. Major Sinclair was speaking to me as he slid his body into the forward compartment but I could not hear him. My breathing was erratic. They could still drag us down into that yellow mud. I put my goggles over my eyes so they should not see my tears. Major Sinclair waved. He was confident and relaxed. The wretches had our ropes and were towing us across the field. The whole crowd had begun to run. They cried out: strange, bestial ululations. Major Sinclair was shouting at me. ‘Winch in the mooring line, man!’ I needed water. I could not reply. Still shaking, I obeyed. I could see those voracious mouths twisting to display rotting teeth, those greedy hands clutching at my very substance. I owe nothing to Carthage. I am a true Slav. I was not of their blood. I had no debt of pity or charity or brotherhood. Poverty stank on their breath. They were my enemies. It reeked in their rags, in the food they ate, in their huts and their fields. I screamed down at them to release me, to let go of the rope. They were running like a single wave escaped from a dam; a flood of human flotsam. Scarecrow boys still swung on the mooring line, refusing to relinquish it. Their shrieking voices filled my head.