The Laughter of Carthage (76 page)

From the first I was suspicious. The Westway could bring no benefits to us. I had my own ideas for our district: a marvellous North Kensington; a model for the rest of London. Most West Indians and Asians were to be moved to Brixton or back to countries where they would be more comfortable. A greatly reduced population would have assisted the creation of a garden suburb more beautiful than Hampstead. It would have raised the value of property and attracted a better class of person. I sent a detailed plan to the Council. I received a letter back from a Knight of the Realm. My ideas were stimulating and he would bring them to the attention of his colleagues. But the socialists silenced him, for I heard no more. He was not re-elected, which speaks for itself. Mrs Cornelius thought my ideas ‘bloody marvellous’ but she was nervous about an increase in the local taxes. One had to pay for perfection, I said. That was my last attempt to help my adopted country. Throughout the War I made all kinds of offers to the authorities. I described my gigantic bombing aeroplanes, my rocket-propelled bombs, my Violet Ray. In the meantime I saw some of my ideas taken up. But I received no credit. Barnes Wallace, that appalling charlatan, my antagonist from the thirties, claimed my ideas as his own. Anyone who spoke to me in 1940 and later saw
The Dambusters
will know what I mean. This stealing is taken for granted in scientific circles. No wonder Mr Thompson warned me to patent my ideas. Look at that thief Sikorski’s reputation since he left Russia! My plans are all secure at last. Whoever inherits them will benefit and so my memory will eventually be honoured. The British Government is the loser. The Patent Office cannot be trusted. The last letter I had was from someone called Yudkin. I learned my lesson a little too late. I did not learn it in Russia. I had not learned it by the time I reached Constantinople. God knows how many millions of my rightful pounds have gone into other pockets. Then, however, I was not thinking of my own interest. I was still too impressed by the epic nature of my journey. A Russian who visits Constantinople and the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia as a matter of course makes a pilgrimage. Hagia Sophia is at once the greatest symbol of our slavery and our ultimate redemption. Though not very religious in those days I was still a patriot.

The Russians fully appreciated how bravely Britons had fought the Turk. You lost enormous numbers at Gallipoli. You died in Mesopotamian deserts. You rode against Mecca itself under Lawrence of Arabia. We thought you felt as strongly as we did. We thought Constantinople would be safe in your hands until we were ready to take it over. We knew what bonds of brotherhood existed between Greece and England. But that which was powerful idealism in us was, it emerged, only sentimentality in a nation of shopkeepers. We put too much faith in British determination to resist Italian and French ambitions. These Roman Catholics had no wish to see the true centre of Christianity liberated. British blood had won the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus. The British had conquered half Asia, swept back the descendants of the Mongol and the Hun, brought Christianity to the unenlightened, raised up churches in the Himalayas and the jungles of Burma, enforced the Reign of Justice, contained the barbaric spread of the yellow races. Who better to entrust with our birthright? I can understand and forgive them their betrayal. But can God? He only forgives them that confess their sins. With their Empire gone, their economy collapsing, their culture in ruins, they drown in a sea of rotting flotsam, the detritus of Colonial glory. And as their self-satisfied little island sinks do they at last shout ’
Mea Culpa’?
No! They sing
Rule Britannia.
It is a horrifying spectacle.

At dawn next morning I went on deck to discover the ship completely fog-bound. I could not see as far as the forecastle. As I drew my scarf to my face I noticed an indistinct figure staring over the side. Hearing my footsteps, she turned to reveal a green, rouged face. It was my card-player. She looked more than ever like a bizarre character from a Guignol puppet theatre. I was about to ask her if she needed help when she said in poorly-accented German:
‘Mir ist schlecht. Bitte, bringen Sie mir ein Becken.’
I was shocked. She was unquestionably a Russian but she had all this time taken me for a German, or even a Jew. I went to fetch the basin she wanted but when I returned she was already being helped below by her husband in his usual riding coat and jodhpurs. My impulse was to run after them and let them know I was as Russian as themselves. Instead I contented myself with a feeble shout, which I do not believe they even heard. It was a sign to me, of course, though I could not understand it then. I have been set apart I am taken for an alien even by my own people. No one will claim me. At least in London I can be nothing but a foreigner. It does not matter how much I worship at the Orthodox Church or how frequently I preach the word of Christ. I will always be an outcast. I am a British citizen. I have lived here for half my life. I gave this country better service than many who were born here. What does it mean? Still
fremder,
still
frestl.
Something happened in that awful Ukrainian
shtetl
when I was a captive of the Jews. What Judas saw my mind was weak and injected me with the metallic fragment of inescapable despair? I shall never be able to find out. My father betrayed me. He took a knife to me, his baby son. What demonic command was he obeying? Surely it was not the word of God. I am freezing and I cannot afford their paraffin.

These days I am made to live on scraps; their chips, their pieces of cold fish. The borscht comes in a bottle and is more than I can pay. It is kosher; there is no ham bone in it. The soup is in tins. Good food is no longer within my means. I have dined exquisitely off gold and drunk from crystal. Yet I secretly knew I would some day be here. There is thin carpet beneath my broken chair. I wear gloves on my hands, one to hold the paper, the other to grasp the pen. There is no one to listen, no one to read what I write. It is private. I trusted only Mrs Cornelius and she is dead. I have been made to pay too dearly for my dreams. Drunken black men come into my shop and spit on my jackets. When I complain they bring the Race Relations police. I am too old for arguments. I am without power. The British protect no one. It suits them to believe me a complaining old Jew. And I am the one who tried to warn them! It is like a terrible nightmare. I speak but I am not heard. I am not seen. It is an irony only a Russian truly appreciates. I was recognised before the War. By France, by Italy, Germany, America, Spain. But for that dreadful misunderstanding in Berlin, brought about by the jealousy and malice of small people, I should even now have my place in History.

‘It don’t do to think of the past,’ said the man in the Post Office the other day. Five years ago it cost a mere 3p to send a letter! It seems impossible. They meddled with our currency. At a stroke they robbed us of half its value. What is that but International Finance? And is not International Finance simply a euphemism for World Jewry? They say ‘the past is the past’ as if that somehow excuses everything. But the past might also be the present and the future. In the twenties we believed Time had substance and could be measured, analysed, manipulated like Space. We were more confident then. We spoke of Time ‘repeating’ and ‘feeding back on itself, of having ‘cycles’. We read John Donne’s
Experiments With Time
and went to see the plays of Sir Jack B. Presley. Time became a small, comfortable mystery for a while, an old friend. Not the grinning, bony horseman of the Middle Ages. Then came Nuclear Energy and the Expanding Universe. Time was reclaimed by Einstein’s gloomy moralists, his finger-wagging Jews. We fell again into the power of those pinched-lipped nomad shepherds.

The Jew brings dark confusion to the city. Here he can divide and rule. But he does not understand what he conquers. His rules are at odds with our rules: nomads cannot conceive of individuals with many functions and forms. They think a man who is more than one man is somehow evil, that a God who is Three cannot be. They demand consistency of an environment which to survive must constantly change. Christ was the Prophet of the City. He preached optimism and practical control. In the cities He was heard and accepted. The city is History, for the city is Man: He has created His own environment and rules. He built Sumer. Sumer was only destroyed when it became impossible for her to live by that blind obedience which means survival in the desert and which is suicide in the city.

I know these hippies. They go to the country to look for God as soon as it is Summer. But God is the City. The City is Time. The City is our true Salvation. We adapt it and are adapted by it. Science alone can help us return to God. I have lost the battle, but surely somewhere the War continues. The nomad cannot have won everything
There shall be War in Heaven
, as the great Henry Williams said. They must listen. The English are conservative and condescending. They acknowledge only those of their own blood. If they had listened to me they could have had the laser, the jet engine and nuclear reactors long before the Americans. Arrogant in the twenties, Lloyd George planned further Imperial expansion. He should have consolidated, held the line. Others would have come to help. They decided to proceed alone, as deluded as the very Turks they had defeated, and followed in their complacency the crumbling road of Abdul Hamit, last true Ottoman Sultan. Mrs Cornelius listened to me with real attention. She had vision. In 1920 I thought her a typical representative of a generation of keen-eyed British people. I was wrong. She represented the past. ‘Ther British are ther most open-minded people in ther world,’ she would say. ‘Look at orl ther fuckin’ foreigners we let in.’

Time after time I tried to warn you. You were being destroyed from within. Even your scientific journals ignored me.
The New Scientist
is controlled by Communists. It has yet to print one of my letters. Party-line science is not true science; it is no better than magic; it is worse than alchemy. If the scientific ideal is perverted for political expediency you soon find yourself controlled by a Lysenko or Hoyle: dancing bears who will caper to any tune. They provide whatever their masters need. Mrs Cornelius was my comfort. Only she appreciated how profound my dedication was, but she feared neither for my sanity nor my soul. She knew the world’s praise would come, perhaps after we were both dead. All I wanted was knowledge. I stood the brunt of every insult, spiritual, moral, physical. I am a little steppe-rooted tree which bends in the wind and is never blown over. Put me in the Portobello Road, surround me with blacks and Asians, feed me Jewish Wimpys and Cornish Pasties, and still I survive. Some of the older people in Finch’s and
The Princess Alexandra
listen to me. I am too miserable to go to
The Elgin
now Mrs Cornelius is dead. Her friends understood suffering. They remembered the thirties and two Wars. But only the old Greek knows what 1453 really means. He sells fish and chips across the road from my shop. He stinks of grease and vinegar. His clothes are stained and his flesh splashed with patches of brown. They show him no more respect than they show me.

When the last Emperor of Byzantium died on his own battlements, his sword in his hand, the Turk wore chain mail and gilded helmets. He bore the banners of Islam and he cried the name of Allah. He came with his scimitars and his slaves, his eunuchs and his seraglios, his mosques and his imams, and he established himself in Constantinople. But now the Turk disguises himself. He laughs at Buster Keaton in the National Film Theatre, he attends lectures at the London School of Economics, he drinks beer in pubs and sleeps with Surrey virgins. He becomes a stage-star or a dentist. He smiles agreeably and his voice is soft. Yet behind the facade it is always 1453. His ambitions have not changed in a thousand years. They are the same as when his Hun ancestors first rode towards the West, when Bayezid the Strangler led his troops upon Constantinople and was repulsed. His is the spawn of Attila and brother to Tamburlane. From Jews he learned how to bribe the corrupt, to buy the desperate, to assassinate the strong. Arabs believe themselves free of his Empire, yet continue unconsciously to do his work. The old Greek knows the Turk (‘he has a sword behind his back, a begging bowl stretching towards you’) but because he is a Greek does nothing about the problem. He only talks. He smiles and offers me his day’s leavings, his limp haddocks, his cooling scraps of cod. ‘You are a good Christian,’ I tell him. He and I both know kindness and meekness are self-destructive. But what is the alternative? It is the paradox we must all live with. It is the core of the Christian mystery.

I have frequently been asked this question:

For how many more millennia must we of the generous, gentle West suffer the avarice of the cunning East?

The answer is simple. I wish I had known it in 1920 as the
Rio Cruz
steered into the Bosphorus. I reply now:

Until a Christian Emperor takes mass in Hagia Sophia!

With his Cross and his Sword of Light he will come out of the West to redeem us! He will trample the dark descendants of Carthage beneath the silver hoofs of a pure white horse! Carthage knows no ideal save conquest, no joy save cruelty, no comradeship save that of the sword. Hers are the children of Cain, infected by an ancient evil. They must perish. The Lamb must stand astride Constantinople, two feet in Europe, two in Asia!

Fleeing to Australia is not the solution.