The Laughter of Carthage (77 page)

The Hun is in Vienna; he is in Brussels and Paris; he is in Berne and Baden-Baden. He has reached the gates of Stockholm and Oslo! Did our Christian knights die in their thousands for nothing? Has nobody heard of the standard Communist strategy? When direct attack is blocked, infiltrate. Was Senator McCarthy crying in the wilderness?

They say Adolf Hitler had a dark brain. If that is true then I too have a dark brain. I know the enemy and I am aware of his tactics. For this, they put me in the madhouse? Only last Sunday some English general wrote in the paper that he could not understand why so many Cossacks, Ukrainians and White Russians joined the German Army. I sent a letter. They enlisted to take vengeance on everyone who had betrayed them. Stalin was afraid of patriot and traitor alike. He killed all survivors. A Georgian, we used to say, is only a Turk who has put on a clean coat. My voice is weary from crying out warnings; my body is weak. I am lost in this wilderness of filth and decadence. I am attacked on all sides. I am slandered.
Mother of God! What more must I give? Is there no one to whom I can pass my knowledge? Where are my sons and daughters? One child is all I want. Is it too much? The white light purifies my brain and mercury flows from my eyes. There are angels in the snow and their swords are silver. Little girls in cotton dresses run to me with scraps of paper and I cannot read them. They dazzle me. Carthage is on the horizon. Byzantium blazes like a mirror. It is to be the Final War. And the Knights of Christ are sleeping. Oh, how I envy those confident Jews!

The fog was in my mouth.

The fog was in my mouth. The ship crawled through noisy, invisible water. Every so often she would let out a mournful moan almost immediately muffled and distorted. I shivered in my coat, my hands tight upon my pistols. The deck made fussy little movements beneath my feet. I saw dark shadows come and go on the bridge, but nobody spoke. It seemed the foghorn was sometimes answered, but it could have been an echo. Philosophically I wondered if I might be about to make a symmetrical ending to my life and die on the same day I was born, before I ever caught sight of Constantinople. This amused me. I was fatigued, I suppose, from lust and over-use of cocaine, but I was suddenly certain that I had the symptoms of Hernikof s typhus. I felt tranquil, however, and reconciled. Again the horn, like the Last Trump, made the whole ship vibrate. I moistened my lips with a damp glove. The fog clung like the hands of the dead to our oak and brass. Failing to see anything of either shore, I decided to use more cocaine. I had great faith in the drug’s restorative powers and it would at least sustain me until I had a glimpse of Byzantium. I could not bear to miss what I had often been told was one of the world’s most wondrous sights. If I were to die, I promised myself, it would be looking upon Heaven. I went down the companionway to our deck, opened the door of the cabin, and found Mrs Cornelius unexpectedly awake. ‘Cor,’ she said, ‘wot a night, eh? Believe it or not, I fink I’ll ‘ave some brekker this morning.’ I was reassured by her cheerful normality. ‘Eaten yet, Ive?’

‘Not yet.’

While she rose to wash and dress, I sat down weakly on her bunk. Keeping my back to her as had become our custom I was able to draw a little cocaine into my nostrils. Almost immediately I felt better. She was now wearing her green silk dress with a mink coat thrown over it. ‘Good enough,’ she said of herself.

In the dining saloon she ordered a large breakfast. ‘Bloody fog,’ she said. ‘I was ‘opin’ fer a view. Never seen it from this side, really.’

She noticed with dismay some stains on her frock. ‘Where’d they come from?’ She brushed. ‘We ‘ad a few larst night, didn’t we?’ As if expressing a sense of achievement she crossed her plump silken legs. The boy brought her bacon and eggs which looked revolting. All around us Russians were taking black bread, omelettes and tea. She smacked her lips and shook sugar onto her fried bread, her usual custom. ’Yer never know when yer gonna get yer next proper breakfast,’ she said. ‘It was six bloody years, larst time, fer me.’ She ate rapidly, ordering more bacon and eggs even before she had finished the first plate. ‘An’ yer better bring some toast an’ marmalade,’ she instructed the boy. My own stomach was too weak for this. I told her I needed some air. ‘I’ll see yer on deck,’ she promised.

The fog was thinning, but it was not yet possible to see a shore. The wake of the ship became visible, however. I smoked a papyrussa and rested against the sterncastle rail. The Baroness found me as I began violently to cough. I did my best to stop, but merely shook and spluttered more. ‘You look ill, Simka. Could you have caught whatever it was poor Hernikof had?’

This alarmed me so much that the coughing continued afresh. I could tell her nothing of my fears. It was in nobody’s interest to start a panic on board ship.

‘Have you and your wife found somewhere to stay in Constantinople?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘We must be sure not to lose touch.’

I nodded in agreement. Another fit of coughing consumed me. The Baroness was distant and cool. Perhaps she deliberately prepared herself for separation. To me, however, she seemed offended. I frowned at her. I could not speak.

She took my frown for a question and apologised. ‘I’m not myself today. The anxiety, I suppose. It will be the first time I have been to a country where Russian is not generally spoken.’

My fears for myself were rather more immediate. I determined I would seek out a nurse or a doctor as soon as was discreetly possible.

Jack Bragg strolled up. He pushed pale hair back from a pink face framed in navy blue. ‘Not much of a view, I’m afraid. Frequently you can see both banks by now. But the fog’s clearing nicely.’ Then half to himself, ‘With any luck the whole bloody place has been swallowed up.’ His brother had been a prisoner in Scutari during the War and he had no love for the Turks. ‘Where will you be staying. The Pera?’

I said my wife had made the arrangements. He warned me. ‘Can’t you ask someone you know to put you up? Even the best Turks will rob you if they can. And as for the Armenians . . .’ In the Turkish capital Armenians were regarded much as Jews were in Odessa. A little sun now filtered through the fog. Bragg looked up like a hound catching the wind. ‘Ah!’ He peered forward, then pointed with his pipe. Both the Baroness and myself turned to look. The fog was pouring back now, like a stage curtain, and the ship emerged suddenly into clearer water. I saw a dim grey strip that was a shoreline with what seemed rather ordinary square buildings, a stand or two of trees; certainly nothing of the spectacle I had been promised.

‘Constantinople seems rather drab.’ The Baroness uttered a nervous laugh. ‘Like everywhere else, I suppose. The reality’s always disappointing.’ A few distant horns sounded from hidden ships. A caique with a triangular sail went by to starboard, leaning hard into the freshening breeze. I began to hear many more small, mysterious noises, as if of vigorous activity just out of sight The ship took a turn or two to port. Then the rest of the fog broke away from our bow to stream like torn clothing off the rigging. We were immediately in open sea. Ahead the coast became more sharply defined. On the water’s edge I distinguished large buildings apparently rising directly out of the sea. They seemed to be made of a greyish limestone. A light drizzle fell from clouds like discoloured pearl. Tugs, two or three small steamers, a sternwheel paddle-boat, a scattering of sailing vessels moved busily in the distance. The shipping seemed to span the entire millennium. On my right lay the European shore, on my left the Asian. I glanced from one to the other. I had expected far too much, it seemed, but the mist was heavy on both coasts. We passed little clusters of white houses and flimsy trees, tiny wharves against which single-masted fishing caiques were tied, where dark-faced men in shirt-sleeves rolled barrels, shifted bales and mended nets, like waterfront workers the world over. Most of these, however, wore the red tarboosh of Islam. Still more ships began to crowd around us, rushing this way and that across the water, puffing, creaking, hooting, apparently without any predetermined direction. The caiques sped crazily back and forth like dodgems at a fairground. I felt a sense of excitement at the ordinary commercial bustle around us. It had none of the hushed, nervous, doom-laden quality of recent Russian ports. Yet still I was disappointed. Constantinople was an ordinary, busy seaport, larger than Odessa had been before the War, but not much different. Still, it was cheering to see so much ordinary activity and not have to listen to gunfire.

The
Rio Cruz
slowed to quarter-speed, slipping gradually to starboard, urgently sounding her siren as she was narrowly missed by a side-paddle steamer full of impassive Levantines which drove directly across her bow. Thirty swarthy heads turned without much interest to watch us: a collection of greasy turbans, fezzes, bur-nooses and cloth-caps. The paddle-boat was painted bright streaky red. She carried a silver Islamic crescent on her smoke-stained funnel and clattered like a sewing-machine as she made her painful way towards the Asian shore while our own ship grumbled, an ill-tempered old lady discommoded by rowdies.

Human voices now emerged amidst the noises of the harbour traffic. I smelled smoke, burnt oil and sweet spices. My suspected typhus forgotten, I grew more animated as the Baroness for some reason became increasingly withdrawn. Polyglot shouts rose and fell with the movement and slap of the waves. As the drizzle was dissipated by the sunshine Jack Bragg returned to supervise his sailors making themselves busy with ropes and rigging; then the ship’s engines changed to a violent, slow thud, shaking our entire hull every few seconds. On the bridge the captain’s clear, commanding English was absorbed in a general babble from the port as we drew steadily closer to the European shore. I could distinguish individuals now, little cafés with balconies stuck out over the water, full of arguing, coffee-drinking Turks who ignored us completely. There were dense rows of evergreens, innumerable tracks leading inland from the clustered buildings, the boxes, barrels and bales heaped upon the wharves.

Then at last the sun broke through with full force so that the misty barrier was completely scattered and revealed the view. I was startled by it, for I had been unaware that so much had remained unseen.

Suddenly Constantinople was dramatically illuminated. Speech became impossible. I believe even the Baroness gaped. My senses ceased to register ships, voices or any ordinary details of dockside life.

Through massive, darkling clouds the sun sent a mile-wide golden fan of rays directly above the twin cities of Stamboul and Pera which lay upon hilly banks on both sides of the Golden Horn. In moments the mist vanished utterly and buildings glared and shimmered in a cool, delicate light. Old Byzantium was on my left with her crenellated turrets and fortresses, and commercial Galata on my right, a mass of newer buildings seeming to lean one against the other all around her harbour. Like Rome the old city was built on seven hills and each hill was rich with languid poplars, green parks and geometrical gardens, slender towers, massive domes. Directly from the waterfront Constantinople ascended tier upon breathtaking tier, a unique alchemy of history and geography; the accumulated architecture of two thousand years. Winter sun gleamed on marble roofs and gilded minarets, warmed the soft green cypresses. Everywhere were mosques, churches and palaces. Our ship, the harbour itself, was dwarfed by the enormous weight and variety of monumental stone. Merchantmen, destroyers, frigates, tugs, swarmed at her feet like midges on a pond. I had expected nothing so huge, so much like an Oriental fantasy. Even the industrial smoke rising in thin pillars from a dozen different points could as easily have poured from an exotic Arabian pyre. I half expected the smoke to form itself into the shape of gigantic genii or flying horses. At that moment I might have been Haroun-al-Raschid himself or wandering Odysseus first glimpsing the grandeur of Troy. This was a vision almost painful in its variety and beauty: our Emperor City.

The
Rio Cruz
began to steam in close to the low bridge stretching between Stamboul and Galata, its structure almost completely hidden by a multitude of ships and boats moored to it. Near either end of the bridge stood a huge domed mosque flanked by tall, delicate towers of the purest marble. The last of the clouds fell back towards the horizon and remained there, white and huge beneath glittering blue, and still more of the two cities was revealed: minaret upon minaret, dome upon dome, palace upon palace, into the distance above our heads. Here was the glory of Byzantium repeated a thousand times by the envious successors of Suleiman who believed themselves custodians of Constantine’s tradition, even though they imposed their alien religion upon his city. Their mosques had all been built in imitation of Hagia Sophia, itself now a mosque, the noblest cathedral ever raised to the glory of Christ. Glowing green, gold and white in the soft sunlight the city was so much larger and more complex, so much older than anything I had previously known that I was momentarily overcome by a sense of terror. How easily one might be swallowed by Constantinople; to be lost, forgotten, unnoticed in the warrens of her complicated bazaars.