The Laughter of Carthage (81 page)

I was tremendously impressed by his grasp of politics, his positive vision, his fair-mindedness. Major Nye was that excellent type of Englishman who wore neither his heart nor his religion on his sleeve, yet who held profound and well-considered moral convictions. I told him how much I agreed with him. Russia had been ruined by her Eastern expansion. Everyone knew Chinese, Moslems and Jews now supplied Lenin’s main initiative. At this the major became enthusiastic. ‘Exactly!’ He was about to elaborate when, noticing a waiter’s signal, he looked at his watch. ‘I’m committed to dining with a chap. We’ll talk more about this, though. What d’you say to later this evening? I owe you a drink anyway.’ With a wave that was almost a formal salute, he disappeared into the adjoining restaurant. He had contributed to my already excellent good spirits. I was soon chatting with a Russian captain attached to British H.Q. at Haidur Pasha. He had overheard some of our conversation. His name was Rakhmatoff. A nephew of the old general. ‘I gather you’re a flyer?’

‘I’ve flown,’ I admitted modestly, ‘in the service of my Emperor. And you?’

‘Just an ordinary infantryman. Major Nye’s one of the few British who properly understands our position. We must all pray that his influence will prevail. I believe he’s here as an advisor of some sort, isn’t he? To do with the uprising in Anatolia?’

I could honestly answer that I did not know. I became a little cautious of Rakhmatoff. With his world-weary, decadent droop of eye and mouth, he was too drunk for so early in the evening. Refusing his invitation to dine I asked the waiter for a table overlooking the courtyard, where I would not be disturbed. I ate sparingly, sampling several Turkish dishes, especially the skewered meats. Much Turkish food is similar to Ukrainian, so it was a relief to be free, for a while at least, from the endless duffs and dumplings of the British. I enjoyed a bottle of St Emilion, the first I had tasted in more than two years, and as I finished my coffee considered the idea of rejoining Major Nye as he had suggested. For the moment, however, the pleasures of Pera remained my most pressing interest. Starved for too long of the excitement of bustling metropolitan streets I was curious to discover what commonplace adventures awaited me at night in the Grande Rue de Pera. I returned to my room, changed my clothes, put on an ordinary top-coat, and sallied forth.

Dance music issued from almost every doorway. Electric signs advertised cabarets and bars. Trams squealed and rattled, sending sparks into the upper air; women of every age, race and colour smiled at me. Girls in sequinned frocks swung their hips along the narrow, cracked pavements; Italian policemen in tri-cornered hats and capes aimlessly blew their whistles and turned their eyes towards invisible stars, unwilling to involve themselves in anything likely to distress them. Kurds, Albanians, Tatars rushed here and there under the weight of huge loads, or stood on corners to scream ritualistically at each other. Shop windows were filled with silk and gold. Mumbling Jews staggered with bales of bright printed cotton into the open air, begging passersby to test the texture between their fingers. The flickering lights of Stamboul were in the distance and a white sea-mist gave the whole city the appearance of a dream, for only her cupolas and minarets were clearly visible above the banks of cypresses and sycamores; everything else was either jet-black silhouette or invisible. While here in Pera one might feel oneself in a jabbering, jostling, desperate Hell, Stamboul remained as tranquil and as remote as Nirvana. Great hooting ships came and went in her harbours; ferries with oil-lamps dancing under their canopies pushed towards a yellow haze that was Scutari. The sea resembled a series of dark mirrors placed at random upon an indistinguishable surface. Dissonant Arabian music wailed and barked then gave way to equally cacophonous jazz. I heard the tango and the fox-trot. I heard balalaika and saxophone and the wild din of a gypsy orchestra. Further along, men in tasselled caps and the white ruffles of Greek soldiers ran suddenly from a Turkish bath-house. They looked both embarrassed and satiated. A dozen cinemas advertised their films in as many languages. It had been so long since I had visited a cinema I hesitated for a moment between
Birth of a Nation
and
Cabiria
before deciding that while London had films, she could not offer Constantinople’s other entertainments. Hoping my Baroness did not wait for me inside, I passed Tokatlian’s, the restaurant she had mentioned as a favourite meeting-place of Russians. Tonight I was in search of younger company. The
Café Rotonde,
with its blue electric sign and eerie green windows, attracted me. I pushed through a rabble of harlots whose heads barely reached my chest, giving my hat and coat to a red-haired witch at the door before following a jaunty dwarfish Syrian waiter to a table. Within seconds I was besieged by half-a-dozen deliciously sleazy girls in cheap satin and bedraggled feathers who begged me to drink and dance with them. I selected two, as had always been my habit, and dismissed the rest. They were both Turkish. They gave their names as Betty and Mercy but spoke scarcely a word of English, had some Russian and slightly more French (chiefly sailor’s argot). Betty was fourteen, Mercy was a little older. That evening and part of the night I spent in their lascivious company, chiefly on the couches of the
Cafe Roto ride’s
back room when the garish lights began to hurt my eyes, the jazz music grew too loud for my ears, and their lewd language became too arousing for my loins to bear the lust any longer. My little girls might have come straight from the Sultan’s training-schools. I was not disappointed in them. They reminded me of Katya, the child-whore, cause of so much trouble between me and my cousin Shura in Odessa, but their skins were darker, their liquid eyes larger, and their arts far more sophisticated. It was no crime to enjoy their flesh. It was fairly paid for, as others had paid. I know these girls. They are naturally depraved. There is a myth about female innocence I have never understood. True, some are also naturally innocent, but others are born with an animal desire to explore all the wanton secrets of their own senses. Nobody forces them to live as they do. I did not invent the games we played that first marvellous night. They are games as old as civilisation, as subtle or as crude as the players themselves. It is a way of life for them, as often a passport into Heaven as it is into Hell. People should not condemn what is alien simply because it frightens them.

Next morning, profoundly relaxed, I decided to breakfast in my room, congratulating myself that my luck had turned at last. My cocaine protected me from most venereal dangers and Mercy had told me where I might obtain fresh supplies. Neither child was a stranger to the drug. They had, moreover, information where to sell gold at top prices, where to buy a cripple if I should ever desire one, what the best private lodgings were. A friendly whore is one’s best source of knowledge in any large town. She moves in a wide social sphere and hears everything. True she has a penchant for sensational gossip, mystery, conspiracy and romantic mysticism, but that can be discounted. In a single night I learned of bordellos staffed entirely by young Circassian boys, of women who made and sold absinthe, of ‘dealers’ from Trieste and Marseilles who continued an age-old white slave trade to markets in Syria, Egypt and Anatolia. I now knew of an Athenian who would sell me a modern revolver and ammunition. If I left the hotel and walked for three minutes towards Galata I should find someone to prepare me a fresh passport in another name. Had I needed to live on my wits, as in Kiev and Odessa, it would have taken me two days to make all the appropriate contacts. The Pera bohemians prided themselves on their city’s reputation, just as my old Moldavanka friends spoke warmly of local gang leaders and madames as others spoke of film stars. In refusing to judge such people I was quite unconsciously following the edicts of Nietzsche and formulating my own morality which, in time, would be stronger than anything I could have learned in a comfortable and conventional life. Without that background, it is unlikely I should have survived at all.

Lifting myself on my sweet-smelling pillows, I pressed the bell beside my bed. A waiter answered almost at once and I ordered the small breakfast, an English newspaper, some hot water. He returned with my tray and a note from Leda Nicolayevna. Jack Bragg had told her where I was staying. She suggested lunch at Tokatlian’s. She would arrive at twelve-thirty and would wait until two. Sentimentally, full of languid love for the world at large, I decided to keep the appointment. My evening was already planned (I would spend it with Mercy and two of her friends. Betty had a previous engagement), but it would be unwise to snub the Baroness altogether. There was nothing to be gained by hurting her feelings. Moreover I was now in a position to help her get to Venice, should she wish to go. Betty had told me of a man who earned his living illegally ferrying refugees to Italy. The fare was very high, of course. I would offer to pay it.

Dressed in my dark green Irish twill I arrived at Tokatlian’s by one. The restaurant occupied the lower part of a private hotel (Mercy had spoke of its doubtful reputation) and had recently been modernised in the Persian style, with a preponderance of green, yellow and red mosaics. I never discovered if an Armenian called Tokatlian still owned the place. The manager was Dutch. Mr Olmejer had committed some crime, or offended some institution, in the East Indies and could not return to Holland. The restaurant’s huge plate-glass windows revealed a crowd of Levantine businessmen, Allied service officers, diplomats, journalists, many apparently well-to-do Russian émigrés. A tango orchestra played softly on the far side behind potted palms. I would be reminded later of those elaborate cinema foyers we used to have, when films were worth watching, told the truth and were therefore still popular. A tail-coated head waiter bowed and asked if I had made a reservation. I was meeting the Baroness von Ruckstühl I murmured, peering through the ferns and palms to glimpse her at a table in the second gallery, overhead. The waiter bowed again, offered to lead me to her, but I thanked him and made my own way through the restaurant. Her magnificent head tilted back as she talked to the tall man dressed formally in frock-coat and dark trousers who stood smiling beside her chair. He had conventional good looks and was obviously army-trained. I was almost glad to feel a pang of jealousy. It made me realise I retained feeling for her. The meeting would not therefore be as difficult as I had feared. Her brown velvet luncheon frock and a torque of pheasant feathers gave her a pleasantly pastoral look; an eighteenth-century aristocratic shepherdess. As I mounted the half-spiral of the stairs she saw me and waved a gloved, animated hand. She introduced me to her companion. Count Siniutkin seemed a shade embarrassed. I suspected he had wanted to leave before I arrived. ‘But perhaps you already know each other?’ she said. ‘From Moscow?’ I said I had never visited Moscow, but he seemed slightly familiar, and I, he said, to him. His expression was pleasant and open, unspoiled by a scar running from the right-hand corner of his lip to his jawbone. Indeed, the scar enhanced what would otherwise have been unremarkable good looks. His manner was self-effacing, his voice soft and a little sad. I found him attractive. My jealousy disappeared. I apologised to the Baroness for failing to contact her the previous evening. (‘A meeting with some British military people.’) I invited the Count to join us. He hesitated. ‘Oh, for a few minutes, you must!’ The Baroness spoke from generous good manners. Plainly she preferred to be alone with me.

So the three of us sat in a semi-circle round the marble table and ordered complicated American cocktails. We were all very mystified by the odd names and bizarre combinations. Then the young Count suddenly smiled, then said hesitantly, ‘I believe we met at
Agnia’s
once. In Petrograd.’ This placed him as one of Kerenski’s young liberal supporters. He had doubtless been acquainted with my friend Kolya. ‘Of course you knew Petroff?’ I was always happy to speak of Kolya.

‘Very well indeed. We served together in the same department.’ He became animated. ‘When Lenin started taking over, Kolya advised me to leave Petrograd. He could read the signs so well.’

‘He and I shared an interest in the future,’ I said. ‘Did you by any chance hear how he died?’

Siniutkin was surprised. ‘Who on earth told you he was dead?’

‘His cousin Alexei. We flew together. He was very bitter about it.’

‘After the October counter-coup, Kolya went to ground. He hid with me in Stryelna for a couple of months. Then his sisters joined him and they all got to Sweden by boat. I had a letter from him not much more than a month ago. He’s alive, Mr Pyatnitski.’

For an instance I honestly believed this whole episode, the city, its pleasures, my Baroness, was part of an elaborate fever-fantasy, surely I was actually still aboard the
Rio Cruz!
Then I became almost hysterical with joyful disbelief. I had mourned Prince Nicholai Feodorovitch Petroff since his cousin had drunkenly crashed us in the sea off Arcadia. Had I not been in a state of shock at the news of Kolya’s death, I should probably never have boarded the plane at all. Slowly the reality impinged on me. My beloved friend was safe. Somewhere he still made his usual ironic jokes and enjoyed life as he had always done. ‘That’s wonderful! Do you know where he is now?’

‘He was in Berlin, but he talked about going to Paris or perhaps New York. The idea of a “government in exile” was an over-familiar farce. He wrote that he had played in one too many such farces. Perhaps it was a joke, but he said he planned to emigrate. To teach Russian to Jewish radicals in America.’