Jerusalem Commands

TWENTY

MY SHIP is called The Ship of Death and she cannot fly. She drifts upon an infinite river of black mercury, beneath high shadowed arches as in some vast Stamboul cistern. She is crewed by the damned, steered by a blind man, captained by the Turnface. I perform the rituals of the dead. I perform the rituals of submission and remorse. By careful repetition I shall make my way through to that better world where every earthly dream is perpetually fulfilled.

I journey to the place where souls are weighed, where benevolent Anubis weighs our sins, the jackal weighs our sins. The dead have no choices.

I had no choices. They took us to where the darkness was. The darkness had a thick, vital quality, a great, slow intelligence at once malevolent and amused, at once agonised and triumphant; a sublime intelligence gone quite mad with grief and loss; as though it were, in the entire universe, the last of its species, grown selfish and utterly alone, without mercy or concern for any other living thing.

Here was Death personified. Here was pure Evil. Its name was Satan. Its name was Set. A nihilistic essence, it was at its most seductive in the person of its female avatar, the lioness-goddess Sekhmet, the Destroyer. They put a headdress on my little girl, some rosbif’s moth-eaten trophy, a snarling civet, and they called her Sekhmet, the evil one, whom I must vanquish with my magic, my manhood, for they made me a god. First I was Horus, the Hawk, son of Osiris, brother to Anubis the weigher of souls. Then every day I was resurrected as a new god. Every day my girl was freshly vanquished. It was our art, perhaps, but only the night world would ever applaud it. I knew about these films. Most of the time our directors, so long as we obeyed them in all other ways, let us wear our masks. They were contemptuously knowing; they understood that every day the concessions grew fewer and we were descending deeper into their world, became more thoroughly their creatures. I schemed to steal the films. Next they began to ration everything, our food, our drugs. We became disorientated and light-headed. There were naphtha flares fluttering amongst the electrics, the powerful scent of jasmine and roses, long black figures crawling between the columns, a stink of cheap tobacco and sweat. I wished them lingering deaths but we could not eat without their goodwill, we could not sustain ourselves. We could not live. They made us smile for them.

The negress was treated with increasing respect by everyone and it was soon clear that it was she to whom they all, even Sir Ranalf, deferred. She was always a faintly stirring presence in the darkness. Was she perhaps the darkness itself? Its human form? She stank of everything I most feared. With great respect they called her al-Habashiya, but I did not know what it meant. I would be taught only one name for her. The only name I would ever be permitted to utter. But that would come later. For many weeks I performed the rape scene. I became very weary and could not stop weeping. Eventually they took pity on me and let me rest while some of the crew did my work for me. But al-Habashiya insisted I remain present in the scene. ‘It will make for better continuity.’ Sir Ranalf’s eyes now stared all the time from red sockets and he had taken to wearing Seaman’s old wardrobe, most of which fitted very badly.

Occasionally I saw Quelch but he no longer looked at me. He did not seem satisfied with recent events and he had a haunted appearance as if he, too, longed to escape. Once, I recall, al-Habashiya offered to have him whipped and left naked outside the local barracks, a punishment normally reserved for blacks. Min darab el-walad es-saghir? Wahid Rumi nizil min el-Quads. Er-ragil misikni min idu. Fahimtush entu kelami? Ana kayebt gawab . . .

My ship is called The Sun, the source of all life. My ship is Ra, light of the day, brother to the moon. Gold married to silver in that forbidden crucible. My ship is called The Unknown World. Two lions guard her - one is called Yesterday and the other Today. The lioness is their mother, Sekhmet, Mother of Time, fierce Hater of Life. Her chariot is a fiery disc. She flies swiftly above the Nile, destroying all she detects. They say on the radio that Haydn was always jealous of Beethoven. I understand this. So many were jealous of my own genius.

I would not become a Musselman. Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich. Mein Kampf makes me sick. I could never read it. Yet Adolf Hitler was a brilliant man. He inscribed a copy to Clara Bow, hoping she enjoyed reading it as much as he enjoyed writing it. Poor Clara went mad, I heard, on some remote ranch, with a cowboy. I think Mein Kampf contained a truth I dared not face. Facing that truth drove Hitler mad. I did not wish to suffer the same fate. Let sleeping dogs lie, I said. Perhaps I was young. How could I blame myself? Such guilt is useless. It has no purpose. I, after all, was the one betrayed. Eindee haadha - ma eindee shee - haadha dharooree li-amalee . . Wayn shantati - wayn shantati - wayn shantati . . . They would tell me so little, even when I begged. I asked for my luggage, my plans, my books, my personal goods. They said my things were still in Luxor. They had been put in Sir Ranalf s care at the Winter Palace. I dared not mention my only valuables, Yermeloff’s black and silver Georgian pistols, symbols of my Cossack heritage. I prayed they would not find them where I had hidden them in the Gladstone’s bottom, beneath work materials, notes and designs, mayn teatrumsketches, and the details of my Desert Liner! They were, I will admit, by then becoming decreasingly important in my mind for they all existed in the world of the living. Esmé and I now inhabited the world of the dead; ordered to mime the functions of life to earn our sleep, our food, the very drugs enabling us still to perform the rape scene. The drugs relieved some of the pain. It was clear we would never earn enough to pay back our debts. Though I could easily wean myself of any craving, I knew it would be impossible for her. Therefore I saw no point in refusing what was offered until such time as escape was possible. So we became the lady and the butler, the newly-weds, the slave-market, the office couple. We played many parts but with a certain sameness of plot. The more elaborate Sir Ranalf s demands upon us, the closer did al-Habashiya move her couch from the shadows to the set. Every day she watched us with mounting interest. She was a fleshy heavy darkness with burning eyes, gasping weightily, smacking red lips, until soon she was almost within the scene herself, exuding a sense of greedy urgency, then she would fall back and something would be purred in Arabic. Sir Ranalf would suggest a different angle.

They said they needed new backgrounds where we were less likely to be interrupted. They took us to a ruined Coptic chapel in the remote Western Desert. In the shelter of a wind-smoothed crenellated wall, al-Habashiya had pitched her gorgeous tent with all the proud display of a wealthy Bedawi.

The chapel was unknown to archaeologists, Sir Ranalf assured us, because it did not serve a camel route.

There was however a well where two etiolated palm trees stretched high into the arching clarity of the sky. In the distance the desert was broken by a ridge of muddy slate. We sat silently together, Esmé and I, while al-Habashiya shared a glass of sherbet with Quelch and Sir Ranalf. They stretched on couches arranged to enjoy the sunset better. We sat at their feet on the carpeted sand. ‘In Bi’r Tefawi,’ murmured al-Habashiya, ‘I have a villa and a garden. It is more peaceful there. I live in seclusion these days, though once, Professor Quelch, as you know, I ruled Cairo - or at least the Wasa’a and its environs. But then they arrested me.’ She drew lusciously upon her hukah. ‘I was put, eventually, into jail. It was not unpleasant. I was lucky enough to have friends there. But Russell Pasha himself had made up his mind to set an example. I was arrested again. They tried to confiscate my business interests. Russell Pasha was not then prepared to come to any sort of agreement, so I was forced to die in prison. I had no trouble arranging it. But I am used to a city. Exiled to the provinces one grows easily bored. It is very hard to kill so many hours.’

In the first months of my captivity this was one of the longest speeches al-Habashiya was ever to make in my presence.

I recalled Quelch’s stories of a creature who had sat unmoving all day on a bench in the Shari Abd-el-Khaliq, yet had controlled rigidly every aspect of Cairo’s vice. I remembered too that he was a transvestite negro of enormous size, who always dressed as a woman and veiled himself in white and would stretch jewelled fingers to be kissed by some passing servitor. Every Arab of the quarter was owned in some way by that grotesque. A silent, ebony idol, Quelch had said, more powerful than the king himself. Cairo’s most successful brothel-keeper, pimp, drug-dealer and white-slaver, a major partner behind half the ‘theatrical booking agencies’ in the East. And yet beautiful, Quelch told me. Once he had seen the negro’s face. Everyone who knew him agreed he was, despite his bulk, the loveliest transvestite they had ever seen.

For us all, however, al-Habashiya, if it were the same creature, remained veiled, mysteriously feminine. Those were the early days of our serfdom, when it seemed we must soon be released. They never raised their voices. They always spoke humorously. They merely offered us choices. Certain choices were good ones and we were praised for making them. Certain choices were bad and we were punished.

The injustice of this did not outrage me for long. I came to understand that I had entered a dream-time I must endure until I could wake and return to the reality and security I had known before. It was my only alternative to death. I came to appreciate Goethe’s notions of joyful revelation through pain, hardship and humiliation. I am, moreover, not of a suicidal disposition. Indeed, I am by nature an optimist. Is this Jewish?

The Future is Order, Security, Strength. On this we all agreed. But the Future is Beauty, Tolerance, Liberty, also, I said. Those will come later, they told me. That was when I lost my faith in the Nazis.

I was ‘too much of an idealist’. They still say so. Mrs Cornelius tried to convince me of this, on the Berlin tram, shortly before my arrest. She sent me clotted cream from Cornwall. By then I was on the Isle of Man. When I received it it was rancid. After that the rationing got worse. I was back in London in time for the Blitz. ‘They didn’t wan’cha ter miss nuffink, Ivan,’ yelled Mrs Cornelius on that first weekend together as we huddled outside a crowded makeshift air-raid shelter while the world turned to howling, heaving red and black and from above and all sides of us came the drone of engines, the banging of guns. Britain had expected to lose, you see, like Poland or Czechoslovakia or France. She had prepared London for siege, not for victory. They say Churchill was the last to accept that we survived the Battle of Britain. Even he was infected by that new, corrosive defeatism which comes from only one insidious source!

Even in those days Mrs Cornelius was coughing badly. Her cough was almost terrifying when I first heard it. It brought back the sound of my mother’s coughing, her retching and heaving over the washstand, as I waited patiently for Mrs Cornelius to come out of her bathroom. The rhythm and volume of their coughing fits was identical.

There are some memories which accompany such associations - bad ones, which I will not allow to emerge, because to dwell on them is pointless - and sweet ones, of summer gardens and happy outings, of the flowery fields around Kiev, the distinctive lavender scent of my mother’s best coat; the gorges, the woods, the old yellow streets and sturdy timber houses under gentle trees, of the busy Kreshchatik Boulevard with its scintillating store displays, its window-boxes and decorative baskets, the rich smell of the cafes and the chandlers’ shops; all the nooks and crannies of a true city, long in the building, making little shadowy places, safe places, caves and hollows and enclosures and sharp corners and mysteries in every sidestreet, grown naturally over centuries like a vast, wonderful shrub, thoroughly-rooted and profoundly implanted with the pattern of the past, for the memory of Kiev is the memory of the Slavic people, those warriors of the Eastern marches, the bastion of Christ against the ferocious and envying Mongol. This is why we understand so well what is happening today. Yet still you refuse to listen. You think you have a kind of peace? A pact with Carthage? Believe me, you have the Slav to thank for that. When he falls, as he must eventually fall, unless Christ sends a miracle, then it is an end to the old world. I would not wish to live in the mongrel, unruly new. Has Chaos already conquered? My ship is called Novaya Kieva, Novaya Mira, she is the Tsargrad, the citadel of our race and our faith! They tried to make me a Jew, a Musselman, their dog, but I deceived them. I was only acting. I performed the rape scene.

They took us step by step into the Land of the Dead. We licked our lips; then we rolled our eyes; then we grinned at the camera; and then we did everything again. As Sin of the Sheikh reached artistic unity the noble gods of Egypt, in crude replica, peered in alien distaste from alcoves once honouring saints. Step by step they coaxed and threatened us into the Land of the Dead, where in grotesque pantomime of the living, we endlessly performed our rape scene, where al-Habashiya, Queen of the Damned, would laugh and clap as a proud parent applauds her children. And one day she makes us come to her in her perfumed inner pavilion where eunuchs and hermaphrodites wait on all her needs. Would you now become a Musselman? No, I would not become a Musselman. Then you must be a Jew. Sweet little darling Jew-puppy. Soft little Yiddy-widdy dinkums. This was how He rationalised His rape of me. That tide of black fat was never still, it flowed over me, it threatened to suffocate me, and yet there was a terrible hardness in it, as if at some point the tension would burst to reveal razor-sharp steel gashing through bloody flesh, the spring of its overwound energy, to destroy me. To cut me into nameless strips of meat. That fat black tide dragged me into a darkness worse than any pain. Little greasy Jewboy whore, momma’s darling, sweet darling arse. Obedient little cocksucking Jewboy filth garbage muck fuck English Jewboy whore bitch. She said was I a Moslem or a Jew? I said, a Christian. No, she said, a Moslem or a Jew? She told me what a Moslem must eat. She told me what a Jew could eat. A Jew, I said. I will be a Jew. There was a piece of metal in my womb.

They say the icecaps are heating up because of our industry. What an irony should Stephenson’s engine prove the direct linear cause of Alexandria drowning forever beneath the Mediterranean! The science of our Enlightenment drowning all that was ever of value to us. Is this any destiny I should be party to? How much more must I answer ‘guilty’? I am guilty of nothing. Unless I am guilty of wanting to improve the world! This is a crime?

They were offered my new Jerusalem, my new Rome, my new Byzantium, my flying cities of silver filigreed with gold, my glorious towers, my Eden, my independence of thought and movement, the ultimate democracies. But what did they settle for? Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Ho Chi Minh and the Beatles!

Yet in spite of every vicissitude I refuse to forget my true destiny. If I am the light and inspiration of Europe, I am also the secret protector of our civilisation, the scribe of our victories and our honour. I am Thoth. I am Anubis, recorder and guide in these days of our dying. Jane Austen does not impress me since she agreed to the role of a slut in that film called after some Dutchman’s surname. I saw it again last week. As Cleopatra she could have ruled my heart forever. But I am a stupid, chivalrous old Slav of a forgotten era. Anything I say is misinterpreted by that filthy-minded scum. I merely held her, after all, as I explained. I said nothing bad. My intentions were perfectly loving. Ach, Esmé, mein liebschen, mayn naches! What could I do to harm you? I was your brother, your father, your husband, your lover, even your mother! I was all these things. I cared for you when you were sick. Only I was all these things. Why would God take you from me? I still blame myself a little for that, but ironically this is not the guilt they would have me bear. They would rather blame me for the genocide! For all those millions of Slavs and Gypsies and Celts and Jews? I think not. If they had listened to me I could have saved every single soul of them.

But they traded with the Bolsheviks, they placated them, they made a friend of Uncle Joe. What did they expect next? That a mad dog should suddenly become a loyal old pal? That you could sleep beside him and not be amazed if your throat was not torn out by morning? I would have brought Light and Peace to our starving darkness. Hitler would have ruled a world of simple decency and benign opportunity, where natural selection would ultimately produce a perfect citizen living in a city worthy of the Nazi dream. But their Final Solution weakened their authority in many eyes. I am the first to admit it. I have seen Alexander’s body in its secret tomb. God showed me where it was hidden. God said Alexander belonged to Him now. That mighty Greek, the great evangelist for Christ, came to Egypt and established the first truly civilised city, which became the greatest in the world. The Greeks took the best from Egypt and Assyria, discarding the cruel barbaric decadence of those first noble Semites whom heartless ambition brought low. It is the fate of the Jew to fall victim to his own marvellous invention. Some call that city the birthplace of our Church, where St Mark converted the first Jew to Christianity in ad 45. Volvitur vota, as Quelch might have said.

I begged the Englishman to get a message to Goldfish. He said it was more than his life was worth. He gave me a dark red volume, a Book of the Dead. I was bitter. I said he had sold me into slavery. He avoided the accusation. ‘You people must be used to that sort of thing by now,’ he said. It was a meaningless remark. He pointed to the low hills. ‘There’s a railway line about a day’s walk that way. You could almost certainly reach it if you went on your own.’ Of course, he knew I would not leave Esmé, that she was still my responsibility. He was taunting me, he was delighting in my downfall. That evening I was whipped. I said I was a Jew. And Esmé was a whore, my sister, my rose. There was metal in my womb. I called an androgynous nigger musselman my mother and I asked it to forgive me. I told my mother that Esmé was a whore, a bad girl. It was one of the games she made us play. Anyway, what would you do if offered a choice between humiliating death and humiliating life? Life or death? Which would you choose? Some in those camps chose death. They wanted it to be over. But that is not my nature. I am more of an optimist. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away our child. You sold our little girl. Did you care that you hurt me? When kunte, Esmé? When kunte? Muta-assef jiddan. Bar’d shadeed. That false place of death. What did it matter if I admitted my sins? It was all false; nothing was as it had seemed. Quelch’s pronouncements on Egypt were proven. The world was false, a second-rate fantasy, a faded dream. Dust lay everywhere. We had arrived at dust. Yet the blood in our bodies still circulated. The limbs of our bodies still performed. Al-Habashiya still applauded and praised us and made me lay my head on his thigh while he fondled Esmé and played ecstatic Cairene hymns on his ornate gramophone. He promised he would find some Mozart for us. It was the same in Sachsenhausen. Mozart was supposed to make up for everything. I wore a black triangle, then. I was an engineer, I said. It was a concession, we said. Al-Habashiya stroked my head and cooed. Vögel füllen mayn Brust. Vögel picken innen singen für die Freiheit. Mein Imperium, eine Seele. Vögel sterben in mir. Einer nach dem anderen. Mayn gutten yung yusen. He stroked my head and called me his good little orphan, his sweet little Jewboy. It was better to obey than to endure that prolonged pain or agonising death. Esmé understood this better than I. It is how she too survived.

All those human bodies ploughed like bloody chaff into the furrows of barren fields. Was Esmé among them? I have a boy, she said. He’s a soldier. Did they ever understand what they took? Soulless themselves, they did not even recognise what they had stolen. They threw it away. They ploughed it under. But Russians know the truth. Every inch of Russian soil is nurtured by the souls of martyred millions who, down the centuries, defended their homeland. I spoke of this to Dr Jay in the hospital after they had examined my head. What makes the Jews so special, I asked. He agreed with me. He said he could find nothing physically wrong with me. Four days later I was free on the streets of Streatham. But I could no longer fly.

Kites rise from the mountains, from the Totenbergen, and red dust clogs my throat. You must get away from here, Maxim, she said. The people here are not sympatica. I think Brodmann had come to Luxor. I think I had seen him standing below the great clock in the railway station. He said he was English and that his name was Penny, but I guessed it was Brodmann. I was obsessed with Kolya. I was still looking for him. Al-Habashiya gave me some pyjamas. ‘Some stripes for you,’ she said. They were black and white. I saw Brodmann in Sachsenhausen. I recognised him and shouted at him. He answered with a hesitantly raised hand. What a superb actor that monster was! Binit an-san! But should I blame him? This century demands we join in a charade; it decrees the parts we play. It is only acting, I tell her. It is not really us. The pyjamas make my eyes shudder. The stripes stretch before me, merge and swirl and break open, like fragments of some vast psychic map.

I would not become a Musselman. Negra y bianco, noire et blanc. I lost you in the desert, Esmé. What brute makes use of you? Mrs Cornelius says she doubtless landed on her feet. ‘She was lucky enough for a while, Ivan. She never ‘ad no talent. Still, neiver did I, reelly.’

She was a great actress, I told her. ‘Your talent is recorded for posterity.’ This amused her. ‘Wot? In an ol’ can in a closed-down fleapit somewhere artside Darjeeling? Come orf it, Ive! Not exac’ly wot I corl immortality. I’ll take me chances m ‘eaven, rahver.’ She was too tactful to mention our Egyptian adventure.

My friend pretended to a kind of primitive pantheism, hut she was a Christian at heart. In 1969, moved no doubt by a profound piety she did her best to hide, she took up a position as caretaker in St Andrews, round the corner. But she found that cleaning on a Monday got her down. ‘Pews! Ya c’n tell why they was corled pews, orl right. Some o’ them worshippers must never wipe their arses!’

What do they do to me with their instruments? Those spikes! Those pyramids! My stripes! That golden ship comes to me out of a sky the colour of blue silver. Tomorrow the hawk will fly, I tell her. Oh, this filthy tide flows over me. There is a black sun warming me. Deprived of sleep, I dream most of the time. I dream of a future. They would murder you, Rosie. You are too intelligent for them. Mr Mix always insisted you were too good even for me. But I was better than Franco, you said, though he never took up much of your time. It was the same, you said, with Mussolini. As for Hitler, you kept silent. It was your ambition to sleep with every dictator in Europe, but you were not sure if you had fucked Stalin or just an understudy. ‘They are always so busy with details.’ You were fascinated with their power. You studied it as others study volcanos, moving further and further towards the rim until directly confronting the destructive heart. You slept with Franco by mistake. At that time he was only a colonel in an obscure garrison. We flew together, Rosie.

I performed the rape scene. I was tired, I said. I needed more cocaine. It was not good for me, she said. Separate the Jewboy’s legs. And she would descend, like a warm blanket of flesh, to enfold my body. Only later would there be much pain and the terrible smells. I recall her schoolgirl giggling at my antics to get free. There! You are not tired at all, she said.

Sekhet comes with a knife in her hand for she is the Eye of Ra and her task is to destroy mankind. You betrayed me, Esmé. You gave away my little girl. I lost something in that shtetl. I am still not sure what it was. Bedauernswerte arme Teufel, diese Jude. Ich fing an zu frösteln. Meine Selbstkontrolle liess nach. Ich brachte Kokain. Ich kämpfe unter uberhaupt keiner Fahne! Ich stehe für mich allein ein. I had a similar experience in Prague. Who wants such charity? Höher und höher stieg ich uber der Schlucht, bis ich ganz Kiew unter mirsehen könnte, dahinter den Dnjepr, der sich der Steppe entgegenwand und auf seinem Weg zum Ocean den Saporoschijischen Fällen entgegenströmte. Ich könnte Wälder, Dörfer und Berge sehen. Und als ich wieder nach unten sank, sah ich Esmé, rot und weiss, die mich ... I flew, Esmé. Above the Babi Gorge. I loved you. You were my daughter, my friend, my wife. You were my childhood and my hope.

I performed the rape scene. He showed me how to make her scream so that on film it would look as if she were beside herself with passion, whereupon I was subjected to the same infamies while a second reel was shot. They were things a man should never suffer. He made me both a Jew and a woman. Whenever I could I reminded myself, through all the torment and the abuse, that I was neither. I was a true Cossack, a Lord of the Earth. I was Kiev. I was the sound of cavalry through the Podol. I was power, I had ultimate control over my own destiny. I was a scientist, an engineer. I could control the world and I could set the world free! I am a Jew, I said. Yes, I am Jewboy scum, but though my lips sounded the word my heart said ‘Cossack’, my soul said ‘Engineer’.

There was humour in those places, even between tormented and tormentor. We all shared amusement at our antics to stay alive. We connived at those appalling experiments in human cruelty not because we were any of us evil but because it was the only diversion available to us. To relieve our fear we told one another jokes about our own imminent deaths mid dismemberment. We participated in horror for its own sake. But I do not believe many of us were to blame. Our needs had not been for death, but for hope and for life. We nave power to men who had unequivocally promised us those things. If we wondered at their promises we did not challenge them with any great passion or suspicion. We had offered up in trust to them everything we valued, everything that was good. They were not simply collecting second-hand clothes. They wanted everything we possessed so that they could prove it was worthless. They were so greedy, those few. Yet great empires do not grow through greed, I said. They grow through need, gradually and through historical necessity. Those who would forge an empire in a few years are always thwarted. They always die, dishonoured by their own nations. Great empires do not flourish on war but on industry, trade and curiosity. Enlightenment follows such empires. Whatever inequalities they exploit, eventually they develop the idea of equality, of institutional democracy. Captain Quelch was that kind of old-fashioned imperialist. We met again on the Isle of Man, in 1940. He had suffered a great deal and had changed his name. His first words to me were ‘Hello, old man. How’s your sex-life?’ He had roared and embraced me, his face glowing with pleasure. I thought Seryozha was there, too, but sometimes I get the camps mixed up.

My main complaint against the Jews was their vulgarity. Ironically this loud, garish, uncontrollable, expansive race when brought to heel, and those wild, restless brains restrained, becomes even more overheated. In the frustration of their restrictions they become completely mad. This explains the outpourings of Marx and Freud, for instance. If left alone, I told Hitler, they merely quarrel amongst themselves and offer no threat to anyone. To me isolation seemed the best strategy. Hitler called me a Jew-lover. I thought he was joking. Two days afterwards I was discreetly arrested. Goering himself admitted it was a mistake. Later my engineering expertise, my natural wits and a certain amount of good fortune, earned me my freedom. We did not all die in those camps!

I have known passion and joy, the love of men and women. I have known success and I have seen a good deal of the world. I have known them all again, since 1926. So was my choice not the best possible choice? I am alive, nicht wahr?

My master said the English called her a pervert, did I know the word? I did. Was a pervert, she asked, worse than a Jew? No, Master, I said, a Jew is worse than a pervert. Was a Jew worse than a nigger? Yes, Master, a Jew is worse than a nigger. This was one of our jokes. And what are you, she said. I am worse than a Jew, I said. No matter, she played with my ears, I still love you. Then we would laugh together. Call me momma, al-Habashiya would say, reaching for one of her instruments, call me momma, dirty little Jewboy sweetheart. Momma! Momma! I was a Jew and Esmé was a whore. She still belongs to you, al-Habashiya was smiling. She is still yours. I hope so, I said. Oh, yes, she is still yours. Why, if you wanted to you could trade her with the Bedawi and become very rich. You could do it whenever you wished. Esmé smiled at her. We both smiled. We all smiled. She was my sister, my rose; but her innocence was gone. O, Esmé, how I wish you had not betrayed me. I did everything for you. I would have travelled wherever you desired. I would have made you my Queen. But perhaps you are no more to blame than I. We all have our moments of weakness. It did not change my love for you. I had no choice. I thought I would free us both. My Master says she must be worth, well, at least your drugs bill. You could sell her to me. I could pay your bill for you. Then we would be square on the matter. My Master’s beautiful hps are encouraging. Perhaps I could get to the police in Luxor? I do not care what happens to us so long as we get free of al-Habashiya. I do the best I can for us both. I agree to sell her to al-Habashiya. She now belongs to you, I say. I watch while she puts the sign of life on her inner thigh, branding the scarab on her. They all have it, if they are mine, she says.

I have discharged my debt. Now let me go to Cairo.

No, she says, we are going to Aswan. I have a large house and a beautiful garden. I am a respectable Egyptian dowager. Everyone knows me. If you are well-behaved, perhaps I will tell them you are my adopted son.

I am free of the debt. Let me go! Please, Master, let me go. But you are not yet out of debt, she says. You remain my property until you pay off your living expenses, your ongoing supplies of drugs, et cetera. I am, I think, generous in these matters of unpaid bills, at least while you remain in my charge.

I had not thought it possible for my despair to increase. We took the boat up to Aswan. Sir Ranalf was aboard but Quelch was no longer with us. Sir Ranalf was greatly irritated by this, doubtless missing civilised company since he and I were no longer allowed to communicate except when the camera was running. We spent the voyage, the three of us, in the viewing-room and watched while, over and over again, I performed the rape scene. The next night (here was just myself and al-Habashiya. At length I dared ask where Esmé was. Al-Habashiya was casual. She had been ‘sold on’, she said. She would doubtless fetch a handsome profit for someone in the Far East trade. Then my Master used me in my mouth while in black and white the rape scene flickered over us like the bleak lights of Hell.

I have never forgotten how cold and grey it was on the Isle of Man. I think there can be few camps as gloomy.

When I met Captain Quelch again he was a frail man, bent by scoliosis, but he retained his sense of humour. It was Quelch who told me of his younger brother’s fate and mentioned that he was sure he had seen Esmé on one of his runs along the coast near Shanghai. He was interned because he had been captured aboard a Japanese destroyer. There had scarcely been, he told me, any point in getting on the wrong side of them. ‘What the Japs do to the Chinks is no concern of mine. I don’t think the chaps in Whitehall believe I’m a traitor. Yes, I saw that little girl of yours - I would swear it was her, though the hair was a bit brighter and the make-up a bit thicker, and I think she recognised me. Anyway, it was in a bar in Macao, just before Pearl Harbor. Esmé wasn’t her name. She had some sort of nickname, I think. Coasters often get called by a nickname. Everyone seems to prefer it.’

When I asked he told me a coaster was a girl who lived by her wits up and down the West China coast. She had not, he assured me, seemed to be doing that badly. ‘She was showing a few signs of wear and tear, you know.’ But I will never be sure it was Esmé. Which Esmé had he seen? It was pleasant to think, however, that no great harm was done.

The high walls of the house near Bi’r Tefawi, some miles from Aswan, were heavily but discreetly guarded. The gardens were beautiful, watered by a special system all the way from the oasis and shaded just enough so that the sun did not destroy them. As in most Arab gardens of this quality there were tiled fountains, though al-Habashiya had a preference, she said, for English flowers. There were poppies and roses, geraniums and hibiscus, most of them maintained by expensive fertilisers. The walls were white, trimmed in royal blue. Through the great part of the day I remained in the deepest chambers. Here I discovered I was not the only foreigner in al-Habashiya’s collection. They were all, however, male, female or neuter, completely addicted to morphine. I pitied them, knowing I could never succumb to a narcotic as they had. It is not in my metabolism. I must admit I found most of them despicable, even when I discovered how the younger ones had all been blinded or had been subjected to disgusting surgery. This increased my alarm and I determined to escape at my first opportunity, even though I was now beyond the edge of any kind of civilisation. Indeed, all my fellow-prisoners were quick to tell me how I was beyond any form of salvation. Most of the horizon seen from the roof of the house was Nubia.

My Master found it amusing, during those first days, to have me coupled with every other creature in his collection. It was, he said, the best way of getting to know people. Sir Ranalf sometimes came and went. I think he was organising the distribution of various commodities, including the films and still photographs. I prayed they would not use our footage with Mrs Cornelius. (I learned later that this had gone with Quelch who, typically, stole the only commercially worthless reels! Al-Habashiya asked me if I didn’t find it a capital joke and we laughed.)

My Master had a whim one day to play the gramophone again. He asked me if I were an aficionado of music. He adored Beethoven but he had particular fondness he said for the English moderns. Did I like Elgar? I had not heard of him. Now I am familiar with them all. I cannot bear them, perhaps because of the associations. Hoist, Delius, Williams, Britten and the rest are all the same. Sentimental mystic bum-boys producing formless rubbish worse even than the French! Make no mistake, I give the same time to Ravel and Debussy. Tchaikovsky was the last great composer. All the rest is nonsense. I wish I could find a copy of Song of the Nile. I advertised for it in the Gazette but the only answers I had were from ‘fans’ full of nostalgia for a non-existent past.

One cold night I am taken to the large courtyard and the building called The Temple. It is decorated in some bastard, chiefly Ptolemaic, style and dedicated to the lioness and the crocodile, the female and male forms of Set. There is an altar shaped like a couch, covered in fabric whose dark designs seem to my untrained eye more alchemical than Egyptian (perhaps the vestments of some Masonic Lodge) and behind this a great, tall throne surmounted by the head of a serpent, which is another form of Set. Thick candles cast fitful light, their tallow impaled upon ornate iron sticks and the thick yellow wax dripping heavily, as if stalagmites form in a cave. Before the altar fumes a red-hot brazier in which is placed a single iron. Al-Habashiya enters and sits carefully down in the throne, arranging fastidious silks as always, but now upon my Master’s head is the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, the wig and false beard of the Pharaoh, and al-Habashiya’s beauty is extraordinarily enhanced, grown vastly alien like the strangest of Akhenaton’s breed, the flesh beneath the silks wrapped in white gauze through which the dark brown fat rolls and ripples as if composed of a thousand other bodies, all struggling to be free. I have been fasted and I am glad of it, for I want to vomit. My terror has come back at the moment I thought I had learned to exist beyond it, separate from it, obedient enough to keep the worst pain at bay. I had not expected the agony to increase.

When the iron was put to my shoulder, the mark of the scarab, it was of little consequence. I was already contemplating an even more terrifying future. Today you can hardly see it. People think it is a birthmark, a tattoo, a scar. I tell them it is something I got at sea.

‘From this time on,’ says the hermaphrodite, ‘you will address me as God. Do you understand me?’ Al-Habashiya uses the English word.

‘Yes, God,’ I reply. Acquiescence is the only defence against inevitable horror. I did not think it blasphemy. In those days I had a more secular bent. In the camps, too, one had to lose such refinements.

God says He is pleased with me. He says I am thoroughly submissive and obedient. It is, He says, the Jew’s natural state. Surely I now feel that certainty of truth, deep in my soul, that resonance telling me I am fulfilling my properly ordained role in life. Yes, God, I am dutiful. I am fulfilled. I do not know if this is true or not. Sekhet is called the Eye of Ra, the Destroyer of Men. A pitiless lioness, she has no mercy. Her cold claws reach into your breast and clutch your heart. She says she is Set. She manifests herself as Set and becomes a male crocodile. That night we explore new depths of fear and humiliation and the snapping fangs seemed to draw back in a great grin but the darkness, though it grows very strong, is now familiar to me. I am almost part of it. Two are injured, a girl and a boy. God explains that He is the only healer and today He chooses to let them die. They are left in the garden to die. They are there for days. The flies become a nuisance.

God takes me to the garden where, on green lawns, little daisies and wild flowers blossom, a summer meadow where the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites and the blind girls and boys play. ‘What kind of religion dismisses the natural world in all her beauty and variety to praise an invisible world which it claims to be better than this?’ God has developed a habit of discoursing on comparative religions and on occasion His tone becomes somewhat hectoring, defending the Moslem faith while ascribing to Himself a pagan divinity. ‘What could be better than the world I have created here?’ He adds. He is massive in green and blue silks, a monstrous scarlet turban. ‘What is more like paradise than a tranquil English country garden in the glory of summer? What better can one do for oneself than provide some little sanctuary like this. Lie back for a moment against those roses.’ And while my back grows bloody from the thorns He uses me casually amongst His flowers, crushing me down amongst the nasturtiums, lilies and sunflowers - red, blue and yellow - green and blazing orange in the poppies - while the tranquil water plays - while the eunuchs and hermaphrodites whisper like the last of the summer’s wheat and the blind boys and girls smile into a blank future. And yet because there is hope in all beauty I remember that perfume, I recall those crushed leaves with all the pleasure of childhood nostalgia, the broken stems and scattered petals spreading across the tiles like wedding confetti (and our audience the ululating guests) while the damp, red earth, the old, almost lifeless earth, sustained only by Man’s constant nurturing, that dank mould clings to our bodies and enters our mouths as it entered the mouths of thousands before us, and clings to our flesh as it clung to the flesh of the dead, so many dead. And my body is bent over shrubbery of subtle greens and pinks and dark yellows, of white flowers with little scatterings of brown-red and myriad shades and shapes of green against the blue of a cloudless African sky. And you would condemn me if now I understand no other reality? What else can I know? I am the property of a god in some forgotten corner of Paradise where only He determines what should be called pleasure and what should count as pain, on what deserves to exist and what should be wiped out. I tell Him I am in anguish. He tells me I am not. I have no choice but to accept this and eventually grow as mad as God. I become a complement to God’s utterly lonely pursuits as bleakly He vanquishes boredom sometimes for hours, sometimes only for minutes when my pleasure or my pain is at its most intense. I can no longer distinguish these things, for my mind has left my body. I begin to suspect that God, too, feels little contact with His gigantic bulk and knows we are joined in a pact not to curb this condition but rather to maintain it. He hates His own flesh. This condition becomes our principal addiction, our mutual escape, and I begin to forget entirely the cause of my pain or my desire to escape. We grow together. My only reason for God’s permitting me to exist is that I am inventive in finding ways to relieve God’s ennui. There is a state of terror so absolute that it becomes an unconscious way of life. One exists in that state just as one might exist in a hostile geographical environment, on familiar terms with it, but never free of it. One performs the functions necessary to one’s survival but thought, as it is generally understood, disappears completely. One becomes a rapid instinctive reactor to familiar stimuli and, when unfamiliar, one adapts very quickly to learn what one must do to remain alive. I have known this high terror only a few times, in Russia, in America, in Egypt and in Germany. It would be obscene to pass moral judgement on anyone who was ever exposed to it. It amused God to explain how the subject (myself, for instance) was taught obedience by providing him or her with a series of narrowing choices. This, of course, was the scientific principle by which discipline and order in the camps was maintained. After my first arrest I witnessed it personally. God had one of the blind girls killed. He said it was a punishment and we must all watch her through the hours of her dying, but I think He was demonstrating something else, perhaps for me. I think I understood what I must do, but God would not tell me. This is another means by which you are controlled, He said. By uncertainty. From time to time, therefore, He changed the rules. We had to learn the new ones very quickly. I was terrified He would grow bored with me, as He had grown, He implied, with the blind girl. She was useless, He said. He asked me if I could guess why He felt secure enough to tell me these things, to discuss the nature of His power over me and the nature of my will to serve Him. It is because You are God, I said. But I was wrong. He slapped my face impatiently and grew angry because I could not weep. There are no tears left in you. You are drying up, little Jew-angel. We must make you more interesting. Under the surgery you will begin to guess why I feel so secure. I am so glad you are intelligent. Most of these creatures, they hardly understand a word I say. I might as well talk to myself. But then you are part of myself, aren’t you, sweet, filthy Jewshit? And I must whisper that I love Her, that I love my mother, my goddess, Sekhet, who yearns with such bitter longing for Her own death and the death of the world. Yet still I am not ready to serve Her in the next world, She says. I have yet to yearn for death as She yearns for it, to want it more than life. God promises me the time will inevitably come to me as it comes to all Her creatures. It had come to the blind girl, God said. She had wanted to die. At any rate, towards the end. As we laugh at this I realise my own time has become finite.

Are you ready, says God, for your conscience to be weighed? I am not ready, I say. I still have no wish to die. God will be patient. But I will not become a Musselman. The thought of dying before my body dies is obscene. What is more, I have a secret which I doubt my fellow creatures possess - I have previous experience of miraculous salvation. I am not, as yet, completely bereft of hope. God understands this without being irritated. God will leave me with a little delicate thread of hope until it suits Him to take it away. It is part of His scientific method. It is the mark of our century that we have turned everything, including human anguish, into a science. We would joke sometimes about my impending death and what moment God would choose to blow away the last of my hope like a dandelion spore upon the breeze, delicately, perhaps without my even noticing.

God had me dress as a girl and attend Him when He received Sir Ranalf. The little man was breathless and made a weak joke concerning the heat. ‘I think the arrangements are in order at last. These people are quite impossible. He’s with me now. Shall I bring him in?’

You are very informal, Sir Ranalf, said God. Sir Ranalf became embarrassed. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. Those awful camels. I really never can get used to them.’ He had not looked at me at all, perhaps from nervousness but probably because he had not yet noticed my presence.

Have you met my wife? God asked. Sir Ranalf was nonplussed, peered, glanced away. ‘No, indeed, al-Habashiya, I had not. Congratulations, perhaps?’ He was told to kiss my hand.

God found this thoroughly amusing, especially since Sir Ranalf did not begin to recognise me. When God lost interest in the joke, He lost interest in me and I think forgot me. Sir Ranalf was allowed to bring in his visitor, a tall, heavily-veiled Bedawi who spoke in gruff Arabic until al-Habashiya, using his high-pitched feminine voice, disclosed a preference for French. Perhaps she had hoped to shame the nomad, whose French was excellent, if a little old-fashioned. There were greetings offered and various goods mentioned, none of interest to me. I was inclined to doze whenever the opportunity was granted. At one point I thought I heard a Russian name, but the accompanying associations were too painful. I turned them away. Mercifully, God eventually leaned sideways so that my head was caught between the pillows and His flesh. After that I heard very little, for I was forbidden to move.

I think God became impatient with them both and dismissed them. He complained. He was monstrously annoyed. Towards evening, before the sun began to drop, He made us all assemble in the tiled courtyard around the fountain. He ordered us to form a mound, climbing one on top of another until we were all groaning with discomfort save for those at the bottom who were still. Laboriously, frequently falling backwards, wheezing and blowing, God began to ascend this hill of miscellaneous limbs, of writhing muscles and organs until He could squat on top, lift His skirts and shit. Time was an enemy I rejected. I do not know how much went by.

One day we returned to the garden. God told me to play with the blind children. He remarked how docile they were. They had all been fitted with artificial eyes of different colours, chiefly blue, which gave the rest of their faces a doll-like quality, especially when they were rouged and mascaraed. All of course had the scarab brand. When God told me to kill one of them, whichever I liked, the choice was mine, I said I had no weapon. He told me to use my hands or my teeth. Pick the smallest, He said, it should be easy. But I could not. And that was God’s signal. I had been tried in His eyes. He was about to whisk away the last of my hope. If you like, He said, I will let you pluck out your own eyes. It has been done before. Or would you rather die? I will give you a day or two to choose.

Blind, I knew I would never escape Him. I cursed myself for my weakness, for the cowardly failure of nerve which had brought about this final assault on my spirit.

I remember that I did not blame God for reducing me to this. I blamed Esmé. I had remained behind in an attempt to save her. She had not even thanked me. I blamed Mucker Hever and Samuel Goldfish, Malcolm Quelch, Wolf Seaman and Sir Ranalf Steeton. I blamed Mrs Cornelius. I blamed the blind boy for not resisting as I tried to squeeze his throat. I blamed myself for a soft-hearted fool. And still I knew I would not choose death.

I begged for paper and to my surprise was granted it, together with a fountain-pen and ink. I was beyond God’s mercy but I hoped to entertain Him, to defer His decision so that I could have a little longer with my sight. I prepared a kind of prospectus. I described my inventions, my experience, my skills. I sang my own praises a little, going hard against the grain, but I was desperate. I told Him I could fly. I could show him the plans of my Desert Liner. I quoted poetry in half-a-dozen languages. I described my experiences in Kiev, Petrograd, and Paris, my meetings with film stars in America. My life with the Ku Klux Klan I did not discuss, being uncertain what sort of interpretation God would put on this episode. I wrote out jokes and summarised articles I had read in magazines. I described my childhood, my youthful adventures, my future. That, I thought, would at least convince Him of my sensibilities and might even open a fresh avenue of pleasure for Him. At last God told me to give Him what I had written. God had me stand before Him in His Temple while He read every page, nodding, smacking His lips, murmuring interest, expressing surprise, approval, disbelief and one by one screwing the pages up and tossing them into a brazier. Whenever one missed the brazier He would tell me to pick it up and throw it on the fire before returning to my place. When He had finished He told me to kneel before Him while He masturbated Himself over my face. When He was satisfied He congratulated me on the novelty of my narrative. It had, indeed, given Him pleasure, though of course it was only possible to experience such pleasure once. He produced a long metal rod with an oddly-shaped end and told me to take it to the brazier and push it into the hottest part. That is the instrument which will put out your eyes in the morning, He told me. If you wish to read or write until then, you may do so.

I had nothing but false hope now. I became obsessed with the small Book of the Dead Quelch had given me. I began desperately to learn all the words and responses needed to make a successful journey to the other world. God understood the nature of my torment as thoroughly as Paganini understood his violin. By convincing myself of this afterlife’s reality, I might find the courage to choose death. I could not sleep. My eyes, refusing to understand that these were their final functioning hours, began to blur and close. My last moments of sight would also be my last moments alone. Tomorrow I would join the others in the pit to be tended by the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites until I was healed or became incurably infected and my face rotted, covered in black flies like a calf s head in a market. I had seen such creatures, still living, in God’s garden.

Behold me. I am come to you, void of wrong, without fraud, a harmless one; let me not be declared guilty; let not the issue be against me. I feed upon Righteousness and drink of an Uprightness of Heart. I have done that which man prescribeth and that which pleaseth the gods. I am one whose mouth is pure and whose hands are pure to whom there is said ‘Come in peace’ by those who look upon him. I am one who glorifieth the gods and who knoweth the things which concern them. I am come and am awaiting that inquisition made of Rightfulness, when the Balance be set upon its stand within the bower of amaranth. I have made myself pure. My front parts are washed, my back parts are pure and my organs steeped in the Tank of Righteousness. There is not a limb in me which is void of Righteousness. I execrate, I execrate. I do not eat it. That which I execrate is dirt. I eat it not, that I may appease my Genius. Let it not enter my stomach, let it not approach to my hands, let me not tread upon it with my sandals. Let me not drink lye, let me not advance blindly into the Netherworld . . .

The effect of this reading was to give me at least a dim understanding of what God had meant when He told me that one day I would long for death as helplessly as He Himself yearned for it. For I am the God of Death and I am not allowed to die. I knew without any doubt that His prediction would come true and that soon I would yearn for death as once I had yearned for a bride. Was this Egypt’s whole secret? Was she still a nation for whom the pleasures of life were merely a prefiguring of the pleasures of death? By making death preferable to life, Islam allows every barbarism to flourish. What is this but a deep perversion of the old Egyptian creed?

The book could not distract me. I began to pray for the very death I would tomorrow refuse and was babbling some foolish smattering of Old Slavonic to myself when my door was opened. ‘I have several hours, yet,’ I pleaded. ‘It is not morning.’ There was no light behind the figure. He was illuminated entirely by my reading-lamp which cast a warm orange glow over his white linen thob, his cream and white silk zebun and his rich blue wool aba. In such princely nomad finery I guessed him to be God’s executioner. I prayed for him to be only an hallucination conjured by my terror.

Then he had pushed back his headcloth to peer hard into my eyes and grin with delight at my astonishment.

‘Kolya?’ (Perhaps this was a finer form of madness than I had understood possible?)

He knelt. He took me in his arms. For a moment an expression almost of compassion crossed his face. Then he frowned. ‘Ugh! You stink like a Prussian whore. Get to your feet, Dimka my love. We have to try to reach Libya before the British arrive.’

I asked him where God was. Where were the guards? I began to feel this to be another of God’s games. Doubtless He now owned Kolya, too.

But Kolya did not understand my first question. ‘The creature’s guards were bribed. They were growing nervous at their master’s excesses. God? What do you mean? Did you have a vision, Dimka?’

‘Al-Habashiya.’ I summoned enough courage to whisper the forbidden name. If I dreamed, I could not be harmed further.

‘Oh!’ He moved his fingers across his chest and then shrugged. He reached down to pull me upright. ‘God is dead.’

The scarab is unrecognisable, burnt off in the accident. I do not think I could have lived with it on my body. Even the scar is loathsome. I would not speak of those events, not even to Kolya, who had some idea of what had transpired within God’s garden. He had seen the pit, he told me. He had decided to leave it for the authorities to find. They were less likely to pursue al-Habashiya’s murderer for long. I began to record this only after Suez. I felt it my duty. People should understand the influence of Carthage. They should know what it is to exist in a world where perverted negroid Semites enjoy the power of life and death over us. All I can do is warn you. I have sent these accounts to every newspaper and radio programme in the country. Most of them ignore me. Reveille ran a story but they made fun of me. sammy davis jnr secret world ruler says polish mystic was their headline. You can imagine the rest. Some say I disgust them. Certainly it is disgusting, I agree. It happened to me. They think I am not disgusted? I am one of the few who survived with sanity and my speech intact. Without studying evil we cannot resist it and we can so easily be deceived into taking the wrong path.

I told Kolya that God was a darkness to me and that something of myself had grown to love Him. Kolya said that it was always possible to find a little scrap of darkness in one’s own soul, some scrap that longs to join the greater darkness and share in the power of its Prince. It is what we mean by Original Sin. His understanding of religious matters was considerable. He had spent some of his youth at a seminary. He understood the Greek creed far more thoroughly than I ever shall. At that time, however, it was of little comfort to me because I was beyond comfort. I was beyond emotion and sensation. Listlessly, I let my friend hurry us through the gates to the waiting camels, who groaned and complained at being awakened so early. He made me mount a tall, pale doe who got to her feet with all the offended grace of a dowager instructed to remove her chair from the park’s verge. Then he perched himself on his own beast’s hump, tugging on the rather large number of pack animals, goading my animal forward with his long whip and thus propelling us all willy-nilly into the cold night. An oily stink was drifting from the house. It stayed with me for hours. Only as the desert air cleared my lungs did I realise how familiar I had become with the smell of death.

‘I sold her to him,’ I said. ‘She was sold on . . .’

By dawn, out of sight of the house and its surrounding palms, we pressed into the deep dunelands. Kolya said it was our only alternative to capture. The British came and went as they pleased in the Sudan. Beyond Sudan the only place worth going was Kenya, which was also British. Neither of us, he said, would benefit from being interviewed by the British. Besides, he had friends in Libya. He made us pause while he consulted a map and took a compass reading. I, being convinced that this whole episode was a mental escape, some hallucinatory salvation, merely grinned inanely and wondered vaguely when the pain in my eye-sockets would begin to penetrate this glorious madness.

I think that was the point at which I fell from my camel. Next, I was riding across Kolya’s pommel while he steadied me with one arm and guided our team with his free hand. Still half-swooning I stared up into his handsome strength. He might have been one of our legendary Slavic heroes. I thought how much he resembled a refined Valentino, and then came a pang of memory for The Sin of the Sheikh.

Seeing me wake, Kolya directed my attention to the vastness of the pale dunes ahead, the true Sahara, which the Bedawi feared and hated, that most dangerous and unforgiving of oceans, where quicksand could without warning swallow you and everything you owned, sending you to populate the buried city of some forgotten race, to join those who had already marched down the centuries to fill the dead but perfect streets.

‘It’s to be a long journey, Dimka my dear, before we get to where we have friends.’ He sighed. As he stroked my head I became calm, perhaps mesmerised, but the quality of fear was duller. I still believed I was looking upon my executioner, even when he kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them to my lips. ‘Ah, Dimka, Dimka!’ He regarded with mild exasperation the uncountable miles of pale brown sand. ‘So little to say and so much time to say it in!’

We rode without pause until noon, and I still waited for the pain to impinge. It was easy to see how madness could be God’s mercy; how peasants still believe the insane to be blessed. Or was I already in Heaven? I determined to appreciate the moment, never hoping it would continue for long. As we set off again, Kolya pointed to one of the bundles bouncing on a pack camel. ‘Your valise, Dimka, I think. That’s how I first found out you were still here. It was in Steeton’s quarters at the Winter Palace. I thought I’d bring it with me. Any good?’

I giggled at this fancy.

The Western Sahara embraces and threatens us with her infinite waves of sand, shifting with implacable slowness. On this Netherworld Sea suddenly looms a great funeral barge, some vivid beast-headed benevolent at her helm, remorselessly rolling towards us, carrying the stark, clean smell of a desert death. If, by chance, I have been released, blind, into the desert, then I am compensated by the steadily improving quality to my mirages! When we next stop to light our evening fire, I open my Gladstone. Here is everything except the main specifications for my Desert Liner. My books, my pistols, some money and other personal things, my whole identity is returned to me. Yet still I refuse to hope that this is anything more than an illusion clouding over the fact of my unbearable blindness.

I hardly wish to consider an even more terrible alternative - that my oldest and greatest male friend has been commissioned to destroy me, as I was instructed to destroy the blind boy.

My ship was called The Esmé. Pink as the Egyptian dawn, gold as the Egyptian night, soft and gently warm, her perfume was the scent of life itself. She was the loveliest of all my dreams. She would have risen in the morning, so pure and vigorous, and everyone who saw her would have gasped at her virgin beauty.

My ship was called The Stolen Soul and even in her ruined state, everything smashed and scattered and looted, she had an aura of noble vitality; a pure sense that once she had served her people well and with grace.

‘If they ever named an effin’ ship after you, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius, ‘they ort ter corl it Ther Lucky Bastard . . .’

‘Luck, Mrs Cornelius,’ I say, ‘does not exist. What you describe as luck is a combination of stolen opportunity and honest judgement. There is nothing random about it.’

So it was by virtue of my own sublime instincts, and, I would readily agree, some help from an old friend, that I escaped at last from Paradise.