Jerusalem Commands

TWENTY-SIX

I AM NOT BY NATURE a deceiver. Deception is where women excel and in their hands we men are mere students.

Their witchcraft brings us low and makes us behave in dishonourable and self-destructive ways; theirs are the wiles against which St Paul and Pushkin and Malory all warn us. A Kundry is forever ready to divert our innocent Sir Parsival from his knightly path, to lead him away from Christ. Yet, still, I do not blame them. I do not hate them. I love them. I have always loved women. They are so sweet. Des petites dents sucent la moèlle de mes os. Esmé! Comme le désespoir a du t’endurcir tandis que la fange grisâtre du bolchevisme engloutissait ta vie, ton idéalisme. Mère! Les Teutons t’ont-ils tué là où je fis voler ma première machine? Je n’ai pas voulu te perdre. Ton regard ne reflétait jamais d’amour. Mais tu étais heureuse. . . Rose von Bek was, I suppose, a delicious Kundry to my Parsifal, though at the time I half-believed I had found a Brünnhilde to my Siegfried, especially since, in the time between our first liaison in the balloon and now (the whores and the whips forgotten) my blood had learned again to quicken. My baser senses had returned to confuse me, threatening to lead me from my destiny. Yet it seemed, as our secret became the dominant concern in my life, that she was sharing my vocation, complementing my work, this fellow Erdgeist in female form - everything that a man could desire. Mrs Cornelius is wrong to be so contemptuous and take such a narrow view and refer to a ‘torkin’ mirror’. I continue to insist, in spite of what happened, that Miss von Bek was a person in her own right. Certainly I was enamoured, but this hardly discredits my experience. Mrs Cornelius insists there was never any point in telling me anything in such circumstances. ‘A Frenchman, a woman in love an’ a cat up a tree, there’s nuffink but grief in trying ter ‘elp ‘em, Ivan - art’ yore ther same.’ But I was always open to reason. I remind her it was she who frequently displayed violent jealousy towards my friendships with other women. She cannot reply. She merely becomes incoherent and she is never at her best when she reverts to the language of her Whitechapel youth. Usually, I try to avoid such subjects. It discomfits me to see her behaving so badly.

My ship is called el Risha and she is light and as complex as a snowdrop. My ship is called Jutro and she will carry me into the future. My ship is called Die Schwester and she is myself. My ship is called Das Kind and she is everything I ever dreamed. Meyn schif genannt Di Heym. Meyn shif is called Di Triumf. Jemand ist ertruken. Widerhallen . . . Yehudi? Man sacht das nicht. My ship is called The Hawk. I would not call her Yehudi. Ikh veys nit. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Ikh bin ayn Amerikaner. Vos iz dos? Ya salaam! Ana fi’ardak! Biddi akul. . . Allah akhbar . . . Allah akhbar . . . We worship, I said, the same God, who is the Sum of all the good in us. We worship what is Good. Then why do we perpetuate so much Evil? Like many intellectuals of my generation, like Wagner and Sir Thomas Lipton, I studied the teachings of the other great prophets. I did not close my mind. I do not say that any way is wrong, but I am, by accident of birth or by persuasion, a believer in the great Greek verities, the spirit and the heart combined in the rituals and teachings of the Holy Russian Orthodox Church. Each choice of faith has its disciplined responsibilities, its relinquishing of certain beloved habits or ideals at the demand of the generations’ established wisdom. Sometimes mere sentiment is not enough. Sometimes it is the very enemy of truth. But my Faith is not theirs. My Faith is my own. I worship as I please. I worship as custom and courtesy dictates, in the manner of my hosts. At human sacrifice, of course, I would balk. But one cannot reach out to every hungry hand.

One can only pray, I said, after I had told Mrs Cornelius that Brodmann had found me again. It was the same in Marrakech. What harm had I ever done him? He had chosen Bolshevism. I had not forced him to join the Cheka. I had not made him a Jew. What did he hate me for? For being a victim? For keeping the faith he had himself renounced. Perhaps it was true that he thought he detected in me, as Mrs Persson suggested once, the evil that was actually within himself. Perhaps he had the puritanical zeal of the truly tempted, pursuing some hated innocent rather than confronting the unexamined truth of his own conscience? I reminded him in my note that Heaven redeems only the truly repentant. Mrs Cornelius is impatient with me on this. ‘Wot bloody ‘arm ‘as ‘e done yer in forty years, Ivan?’

What harm? This is amusing, I say. He has played with me, cat and mouse, ever since I left Odessa - even before! He delights in secret information, in what he witnessed at Hrihorieff’s camp! He gloats. That is why he wants to keep me alive as long as possible. Do not be surprised, I tell her, if one morning my shop is not open, and suddenly the world has never heard of me. I keep a diary, but they could always find it. It was the same in 1984. Peter Ustinov lost four stone to play that part. He was never better. ‘Ten years ter go, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Wot price Big Bruwer nar?’ I say nothing. I would rather she was happy. Is this truly The Country of the Blind?

This is why they call me ‘Shylock’, those stupid boys. Shylock was a noble Jew. Should I be insulted? I regularly went to see Wolfit, the finest of all English actors. Beside him Sir Laurence ‘Olivier’-Cohen was anaemic. Wolfit’s voice was like some great Russian tenor’s, reverberating through the Old Vic’s tawdry music-hall plush and tarnished gilt to turn all that was vulgar into unique vibrant beauty. He was the last of the Edwardian giants. His Lear roared and wept and challenged Fate; his Hamlet looked upon the gloomy evidence of human folly and spoke only of the Pit; his Macbeth proclaimed in dark horror and thunderous warning the fate of those who would overthrow God’s established order, while his Titus preached the deeper danger of linking one’s fate to the fate of kings. Wolfit took his Shakespeare casually and with confidence; he took it with enormous, old-fashioned respect for the immediate substance of the story and his voice was the last voice of insouciant individualism in England. By the time it was stilled, the BBC had imposed upon the country Respectable Mediocrity and the Home Service and instilled its bland decencies in every middle-class child. And so, as the British shudder through a sea-change whenever they must choose to spread their scones with margarine or butter, the rest of the world writhes in the grip of Red Carthage, screaming for help, for a miracle which only the British Empire and its allies could have provided.

For this dismissal of reality they paid the price of the Second World War. What on this globe can these islanders actually turn their backs upon? Europe? China? America? Arabia? So they throw up a scrim around the whole dreaming nation and on it project from within visions of their glorious past, reminders of their contributions to the arts and the sciences, their establishment of institutions and language around the Earth. By this means they see only vaguely the cruel and painful pageant of the world beyond their screens. This sense of distance is in all their films. It is in their radio and most of their television. It is why they pretend to despise the American programmes they love so much. They became terrified of their own vulgarity, their own capacity to kill and to destroy, to be brutes. I saw it happen during the 1950s. The Old, free-wheeling, careless stage-shows of the thirties, where every aspect of life was addressed, gave way to American cosmetics and Technicolor. I went to see London Town. It was impossible. Even Petula Clarke had lost her earlier charisma, though she was never Shirley Temple. The Americans have triumphed. Only the foreign culture is remembered by the young. Alice Faye, Fred Astaire and Howard Keel, certainly; but what of Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews, who brought a sexuality to the screen that no Hollywood process could contain? That is why Miss Matthews returned to England and went mad. Only when I heard that the poor creature had, like Clara Bow, died insane did I begin to interpret the conundrum of Mrs Dale’s Diary. None of them know what you mean, these days. This nation got its fortunes from piracy for so long she has forgotten how to make an honest living. She has instead learned to become the good little sidekick to Uncle Sam. Auntie Samantha is busy these days with her own exercises in self-hypnosis. She is learning the arts of graceful submission. And she says she has nothing in common with Arabia!

If I had continued my acting career, I should have modelled it on Wolfit. As it was, my life had taken on some of the aspects of one of those farces they so enjoy in Belgium. Our liaisons became increasingly elaborate and secretive and I began to suspect, too late, that much of Rosie von Bek’s lust was fired by an insatiable thirst for danger and novelty. I began to wonder how safe our balloon trip had actually been. Per miracolo, we survived. Per miracolo, I suspect we went undetected not through any care on our own part but through the carelessness of the Pasha himself, who no doubt would not believe anyone capable of my folly. I also wondered later if he did not merely turn a blind eye to our liaison, as these people do to the bribery system they themselves encourage: until such time as it is politic to ‘discover’ a crime in a no longer useful employee? Whenever I see some potentate’s outraged dismay reported at his ‘discovery of corruption’, I remind myself of my own experience. The Bolsheviks are not the only ones to learn the usefulness of making everything uncertain and nothing completely legal. It is through unpredictability and sudden changes of mood that the successful tyrant rules. But he is not always the tyrant who rules longest, unless he devotes himself to institutionalising his tyrannies and finding some way of turning them into ideals which all his people can support. This, of course, was Churchill’s great skill. He and El Hadj T’hami were close friends on the golf course and elsewhere. Both were inferior painters but masters in reconciling contradictions. Now it is fashionable to be contemptuous of qualities of leadership, but in my day we looked up to great leaders. Do we steer a better course in our years of lazy democracy? You are making me laugh, I say to the Cornelius girl, who wants to burn her underwear, and it was me who pinned her nappies. She says the world is yearning for equality. It’s nonsense, I say. Look around you. Listen! This country is yearning for a tyrant. If she is to base so much of her life on Faith, I said, I could offer her a better alternative than her friend Miss Brunner. She never listens. It is as if I am speaking a foreign language.

Even the ones who say they are ‘re-born’, these bloodless hippies who mince into my shop playing tunes, which even a Nubian would find distasteful, on flutes imported from India at enormous profit to some immigrant entrepreneur, talk of Jesus as if he were a lisping nancy-boy. Even a C. of E. Protestant could not stomach it! It is worse than blasphemy! They are embracing only the 19th-century sugar with which the missionaries coated the gospel pill. This is not enlightenment. It is comforting darkness. Such grinning followers of Christ have no will to go forward. Are they the best of our army? Is Christendom so drained of authority, so forgetful of her own vitality, so careless of the salvation even now at their disposal? Is God dead and His Son staggering in confused retreat from Satan? Can this be nothing less than the great struggle at the end of the world. Is this Armageddon? Is this Gotterdammerung? Is it Christendom’s Last Fight? Or was the battle already lost on the day the Winter Palace was stormed? Has everything since been a last guard falling back, fighting for every inch of moral ground, as Satan, a giant of scarlet steel with sickle in one claw and hammer in the other, comes drooling poisoned venom to stand in certain triumph upon the ruins of our last retreat? And they say Wagner was not a prophet! What would they rather play? A Hero’s Life by Richard Strauss? I did not say I apologise for the Nazis. Their failures and follies are nowadays all too clear. But in those days it seemed we had only a limited choice and those of us opposed to Bolshevism were sometimes drawn willy-nilly into alliances with strangers. I am not the only voice of truth. I remember the Bishop in the pub, three weeks ago, telling anyone who cared to hear that he would stand by his admiration of Hitler as an intellectual no matter what his followers had done. He said the same of Enoch Powell. The pub was full, as usual, of West Indians, Irish, Greeks and so on, yet not one of them turned to protest. And this was the villain we were told would live forever in the world’s nightmares? He is today as harmless, as vaguely comforting in his familiarity, as Charlie Chaplin. Heil Hitler! It has become part of the schoolboy’s giggling repertory. Even the Jews do not know what a Jew is, in Notting Hill at least. No wonder Mosley got less than a hundred and fifty votes. It was too late for Notting Hill. He should have stood for Surbiton or Shirley where people still value their way of life and keep their morals as carefully as they keep their lawns.

In Shepperton the scrim rises higher and higher, displaying fantasies of egalitarian prosperity for all where, in actuality, grey high-rises lurk towards infinity. The Ministry of Truth smiles upon its favourite, its most successful, advertisement. Here are the English orators safely confined, carried unseeing through antiseptic tubes to the BBC, the very epitome of the Future and the Moral Authority of Empire, to address a people whose experience they never share, to sound upon the airwaves their self-congratulatory celebration of their national myths, still certain that their language is universal. But is there perhaps an underground? Some samizdat crawling around the very roots of their illusion - some Blake from Barnes or Staines - even some Thornton Heath Thackeray to tease their dreaming noses? Is there no one to sound the horn, to begin the alarm? Will they gaze upon the walls of their cocoon and never hear the Last Trump when it is sounded? Do they dream themselves to everlasting death, like the ancient Egyptians whose culture they pretend to find so alien? Can they actually prefer this to everlasting life? I went down there for a while, to accompany Miss B. on her visits, but in the end I had to give it up. Those tranquil suburbs are actually full of high-walled lunatic asylums. Any Londoner who has had the misfortune to be branded mentally ill by some misbegotten authority knows what I mean. They are never visible. There are always plenty of trees. They are never in the centre of the city. They say it is so we can have peace. It is so that they can feel themselves secure from an audience. But of course it is a marvellous way of discrediting us. At a stroke we are robbed of our immediate dignity and our future authority. Well, I had no use for their power. I was only rarely comfortable when it was invested in me. All I longed for was the respect of my peers, for recognition of my authority as a visionary engineer. This is what was stolen from me that I value. Nobody seems to understand me. The pain, I tell them, is in my soul. My poor, Russian soul. How can we pretend to understand one another’s values when we cannot even speak one another’s languages? And yet I refuse to despair. Even now I still see a glimmer of hope for the world. But the world must learn to recognise its vices as well as its virtues. And, as Christ teaches us, self-knowledge must come first. That is the message of the resurrection.

They put the reverberating metal in my womb. There is a dissonance always present now. It robs me of my harmony with God. These Jews? What do they envy in me so thoroughly that they must seek me out to destroy it? Vos hot irgezogt? Iber morgn? Iber morgn? Ikh farshtey nit. Why not mitogsayt? At noon the ships will rise from their berths, never again to be bound by the mud of Earth, and those who are not on them are doomed to decadence, brutal war and the death of their very planet. At noon we shall rise into the sun, that most reassuring of God’s signs, and our skins shall glow golden and silver, our eyes shall burn like brass and our teeth shall be glittering ivory; and still we shall be human, not yet of the angels, but rising inexorably to that holy state of grace. Why should they be jealous, these Arabs and these Jews? We have offered them the helping hand of Christ and they have spurned it. They have made a choice and I respect it, but let us not mourn for them in their self-established suffering!

This was frequently the subject of the sermons I attended on the Isle of Man during the years of my captivity. The minister was Presbyterian, a carrot-nosed Scot with lips, as my bunk-mate Vos put it, like an old maid’s cunt and a head of hair which might have been the fires of hell gushing from his tortured skull. He knew that we had been put upon the earth with the ability to choose between right and wrong and that if we chose wrong, we had only ourselves to blame for our plight. We have enough trouble playing shepherd to the faithful, he told me one evening, let alone the faithless. He had a supply of Irish dairy products from a cousin in Dublin and had taken a liking to me. He saw me as some future apostle to the Slavs. We would sit and eat illicitly buttered goiteycakes while he described the coming of Christ to the island, Man’s long history as an outpost of light in the years of darkness. Is this how God reveals Himself? As a single flash of sunlight during the boiling torment of a storm? Does He offer no other sign of hope? These were our topics as we sat around the minister’s grey stone fire gorging ourselves on his Celtic plenty. I grew fond of the Presbyterian creed during those long days of my wrongful incarceration. Nazi? Such a Fifth Columnist, I told the commander. He agreed that it was stupid. The minister was a kindly man, though unsympathetic in manner, glad to convey his religious enthusiasm and so much better company than the careerist Anglican preaching tolerance and unnatural piety while the very hordes of Hell convene upon the doorstep of his vicarage. To his kind the Twilight of the Gods means nothing worse than an interruption in the cricket season, an irritating drop in the quality of the local ale. I used to think the British had courage. Now I realise all they have is an arrogant lack of imagination. This British phlegm is the Frenchman’s catarrh. He coughs it up and spits it out and pays no further attention to it. The stiff upper lip is a lip that for too long kissed the cold cup of ignorance and careless cruelty. I said as much to Major Nye, when we used to meet at Victoria, just after Suez. He said he could not follow me. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you mean you dare not follow me, for where I go, why, there is the road to truth!’ He preferred, he said, to call me a good chap and buy me a vodka. Kind-hearted as he was, he was the exemplar of everything I warned him against, so why should I expect him to listen? He had been brought up in a world whose realities had almost entirely eroded. The new realities simply did not exist for him. He continued to think and act as he had been trained to think and act: as a chivalrous servant of a just and honest Empire. He had none of these modern doubts. It was what made his company so refreshing to me, even when we did not agree. Most people cannot understand, for instance, the burning humiliation of a person like myself whose word and experience are today deemed unworthy of the slightest attention. Major Nye respected all men and respected them most when they pulled themselves together and worked out their own problems. ‘Meanwhile,’ the Major assured me, ‘they are perfectly happy to use our toilet facilities.’ In this, he expressed the same attitudes as Mr Weeks, who no longer sought my company as he had during those early days. Count Schmaltz went on to East Africa. Other whites came and left. I signed many autographs for American dowagers who promised to go and see Ace Among Aces as soon as they got home. Increasingly Lieutenant Fromental was called away to deal with skirmishes and local uprisings with those of Abd el-Krim’s last harka who felt their master had betrayed them and who refused to accept the treaty he had signed. They sought alliances now with the Southern Berbers, especially the blue Tuareg and the desert warriors who challenged the power of the Glaoui. They resented new law coming to their ancient trading-places. New law always, in their experience, brought higher profits for the Arabs of the cities. Fromental confided to me he could see no point in French soldiers settling ancient tribal disputes. He feared Morocco would never be free of the Lyautey policy which encouraged the conquest of an unfriendly tribe by a tribe already friendly (or which could be courted), so using the country’s own resources to pacify itself. This saved the French taxpayer money, one of the paramount concerns of French Imperial Policy since the time of Napoleon. Now, however, the political changes, the rise of ‘nationalists’ similar to those in Egypt and elsewhere, make the Quai d’Orsay sensitive and mistrustful of native rulers. So Fromental must ride to the fringes of the protectorate and urge his soldiers on, to extend further the benefits of their protection. Fromental disapproved. This was not protection, he said, but intervention in old squabbles. He wanted the French to withdraw to the Atlas and be content.

Such moderation however was no longer in keeping with the expansionist ideas of the French to which, of course, the Italians and Spanish must then respond. It was oil. But we were not told that at that time.

Under the influence of Islam, moderation, in any European sense, tends to disappear and one’s perspectives change, as they change in the desert. Rosie von Bek’s lovemaking grew in intensity as it diminished in duration - our pleasure, heightened by ‘the white maiden’, became so tuned to the few moments we could discover together during the day or night that it became like nothing I had experienced before. I lived each twenty-three hours and forty minutes for perhaps twenty minutes of the most exquisite passion. I began to demand more and more secrets of her adventures with El Hadj T’hami, of his harems full of slaves, more than fifty per cent of them French or Spanish, and two of them English or Irish, she was not sure. She described orgies and profound singularities of feeling, of subtle and irresistible cruelties. This further heightened my sensibilities, restored my masculinity, and made me forget the cold touch of God and Her deadly pleasures, deflected the cool breath of Death upon the back of my neck, even though I had every reason to be terrified of discovery. Perhaps I, too, could only feel my power at times of crisis. But it is preposterous to link such pleasures with the humiliation performed upon me by Grishenko and witnessed by Brodmann. I never felt the flagellant’s call to piety. The thought of the Pasha’s punishments brought no delicious quickening of the senses to me, merely appalled dismay.

She introduced me to nothing new. She told me he had made her call him by an Arab word. I asked her to use the word. It was familiar to me. She complained that he spent much time upon the feet. They were used, she supposed, to rather more calluses, even on their youngest girls. Some nights, she said, she had gone completely numb above the knees but was in an agony of unfulfilled sensuality below. It made her, she said, feel sick. The balance was too peculiar. She had not found the pierced girls strange, she said. They were rather beautiful and proud of their ornament, even those with the locks. She described, I said to her, the commonplace diversions of any barbarian king. Did she still find them stimulating?

‘In less boring company,’ she replied. Her flattery was delicious. She proclaimed my superiority over the master whose power I shared, for whom I spoke. She had become convinced of my fame as an actor and I was again of infinite interest to her. Yet she did not commiserate with me over my problems with The Hawk. In her first test-flight I had managed to pull the plane off the makeshift runway barely high enough to miss the single-storey houses of suburban Marrakech and, clearing the majority of the trees in the adjoining palmery, tried to ease her up towards the distant peaks of the Atlas. But the stick was useless. She wheeled and came about, almost under her own volition, dragged by a heavy engine towards the cars and pavilions of the Pasha and his entourage, barely passing over the contracting heads of his drivers and his horsemen and landing nose-first in a clump of soft red earth. The propeller snapped and flew off, one piece upon the heels of the other, towards the scattering onlookers, cut guy ropes and brought the Pasha’s pavilion collapsing to the ground before shearing through the windshield of his Rolls Royce and burying themselves in the upholstery of the passenger seats; my wheels snapped off their axles and spun through groves of young palms, huts and sun-frames. They came to rest in a canal which, blocked, began to overflow, the water pouring along unseasonal courses to make marshy the Pasha’s camp-ground so that the Glaoui and all his favourites, trapped beneath the heavy soaking wool of the Berber tents, floundered now in mud, while the engine, detached from its struts, turned over and over, still pouring black smoke until it burst into flames about a yard from the Pasha’s surviving Mercedes and blew it to pieces just as I flung myself from wreckage flooded with gasoline, and stumbled into the Pasha. We bent against the sudden heat as The Hawk began to blaze and he stared with some incredulity upon the ruins of his favourite cars, his flagships. I understood his dismay. I reached out a friendly hand to him, in equal comradeship, to share this misfortune, as we people of the desert do. But he was unusually cool to me. He drew away, clearing his throat loudly.

Thereafter, I was forced to address my employer through Hadj Idder or some other third party, and it was clear I was at least for a while in disfavour. I believed he was debating the justice of blaming me for the catastrophe. He must eventually remember how I had warned him of the potential consequences of using an unsuitable engine in so finely-tuned a machine as mine and I had also, he would recall as his temper subsided, taken the risk of flying the plane myself and only by a fluke not been killed. I watched the film. Mr Mix had recorded the whole event and was happy to let me watch it, although the Pasha had forbidden anyone but himself and his chosen guests access to the projector. I told him it was very useful. From it the Pasha would learn how the old engine, not my design, had created the problem. Once the new engines came through from Casablanca, then we could begin to fly in earnest. After all, The Hawk had proven herself an elegant machine. It was only the borrowed second-hand engine that had failed. I heard with some dismay through Rosie von Bek that El Glaoui’s only ungrowled reference to me was a joke that I had been nicknamed not ‘The Hawk’ by the Bedouin, but ‘The Parrot’. This was the Pasha at his most childish. Yuhattit, yuqallim, yehudim, as the poem went. It is not as simple as that. So he thought I was better at squawking than flying. For some reason this information goaded me to even more intense sexual demands, much to her glazed relish. But when she had gone, I felt wounded. I had served the Pasha loyally. He had delighted in my catalogue, with its coloured pictures. He had boasted of our factory. No visitor to Marrakech had left the city without at least one prospectus for the new aviation company. I had not shamed him with this minor set-back. It was hardly a failure, but an experiment. We had merely been impatient. I had, I admitted to myself, been unduly optimistic in my eagerness to provide myself with a means of escaping the Pasha’s employ. Thus, in one of my letters to him, I explained how we would be praised by history for our efforts, how our early frustrations would be likened to the struggle of the great prophets or the problems overcome by Wilbur and Orville Wright before their Flyer ever found the skies above Kitty Hawk. I took comfort in the fact that I still had my house and servants. Even a car, albeit a rather battered Peugeot, was still at my disposal. It was clear that my employer had not yet determined how to treat me. I consoled myself that, if he let me go, I had enough cash to live in Rome for some good while without undue anxiety. Only the still unmentioned movie reels kept me here. Rosie, I knew, would go with me. I had spent my time in Marrakech profitably.

One sign of my disfavour was the withdrawing of the Jews from my table. Only my young fan, M. Josef, dared the Pasha’s disapproval. Passionately he warned me to make good my losses and leave the city. This was typical greedy pessimism and caution. The aeroplane company was still a more than viable concern and I knew the Pasha to be a man of vision. He would recover from his disappointment in due course and continue the project. How could our master possibly advertise an air force and then not provide one, I asked. These are large decisions, the Jew said. Thereafter he became a little more cautious of me. Later he refused even to nod at me in the street. I realise now how the Jews were already plotting against me with my old nemesis. Mr Mix, sharing my anxieties no doubt, became more friendly, but he also showed too little faith in my abilities and instincts. He proposed we discreetly purchase tickets from the military authorities at the railway depot. We should make for Tangier and leave Morocco while we were ahead. It felt a little churlish to point out that I was scarcely ahead! I would be ahead when a new Hawk sprang into our city’s perfect sky. I would be ahead when the world’s newsreels and papers bannered my name, when Sikorski, Sopwith and Grumman were relegated to explanatory footnotes in the History of Aviation. I would be ahead when Il Duce welcomed me back to Rome, birthplace and capital of the New European Order, and showed me the factories he had built to manufacture my planes.

How could I have anticipated the small-mindedness of the Berber? His willingness to bend his ear to any whispered calumny? I might have made T’hami the most honoured leader in Muslim Africa, respected by every European power, by America and the Orient. His Maghrib would have formed a true and lasting bastion against Bolshevism. His legions would have flown to battle as they had ridden all those centuries before in the service of the Moorish Emirs. Yet now their eyes would be directed not upon the Peninsula Christians but upon the waiting world of their fellow Muslims: men desperate for a sense of purpose, for noble leadership. Europe would not have demanded they be Christian, merely that they be Muslim gentlemen, like Saladin in The Talisman. When chivalry recognises chivalry there is rarely anything but agreement.

To a degree this anxiety did heighten my sense of danger and I longed to break the bonds of my indiscretion. Yet through missing the occasional appointment, through being on the knife-point of discovery several times, we only provided further piquancy to her lusts and, consequently, I was drawn into fascinated compliance with her insatiable and unsentimental sexual adventurings.

The suburban world sees the world of the sexual voyager as one of unrelenting sweats and groans, of bodies forever pumping and wriggling, of oddly marked buttocks, of mouths agape and eyes rolled back, of miscellaneous objets sportifs, but they imagine the world of pornography, not our world of erotic exploration. Our world provided as much conversation and irony, as much self-knowledge, as much concerned kindness and good humour as any human intercourse, for without it our couplings would be no more than congress between beast and beast. There would be no interest in it, no frisson. There would be only confirmation of previous experience and no true experiment. Sex is not merely a series of techniques whereby the woman learns to please her man. There is sharing. There is love. Even in Hell.

There is the sharing of power. And this is heaven. There is the equality of forces, the mutual education of the senses. The other condition is called in Prague and elsewhere ‘erotomania’, when even food and security are forgotten by those caught in its grip. The madness has driven many a man and woman to their death, especially in such circumstances as ours. Loti himself recounts the tale of how he stole a woman from the Sultan’s harem and how she paid, nonetheless, the ultimate price for her perfidy.

In France they recognise this disease, just as they recognise schizophrenia or megalomania, and of course it most often arises in divorce and murder cases, where it is sympathetically taken into account. This is one difference between the Q’ranic and the Napoleonic Codes especially puzzling to a cuckolded Musselman. As a believer in rationalism I continued to place faith in the Pasha’s fundamental sense of fair play. I believed he awaited only the arrival of the aero-engines before sending for me.

I had already written a number of apologies and explanations to my employer via Hadj Idder. These had cost me rather more in gratuities to the vizier than I was any longer receiving from my own petitioners. I was greatly surprised, long after my vigil had begun, to find Mr Mix also offering the vizier ‘message envelopes’ and expressing gushing interest in his fellow negro’s goodwill. Mr Mix no longer had his film camera. He had been shooting, he said, a special-interest scene over in the dungeons - a kind of artistic light and shade study, old and new Marrakech, he said. He had not meant any harm, but the Pasha’s Special Guard had come upon him and grown suspicious. They had confiscated his equipment and impounded most of his films. He was now in the process, like myself, of attempting to restore himself in the Pasha’s good offices. Thereafter we spent many hours together in the ante-room, yet I found him strangely unforthcoming about his own problems.

‘I ain’t complaining, Max, except the bastard has me in a double-bind. I can’t pay off my debt without that camera! We got to catch that train, Max. You can get us out. After all, I made you famous.’ He seemed more than a little alarmed when I told him I was not leaving without my films, but appeared reconciled to this profound, if unpalatable, justice, only adding darkly, ‘Remember, Max. Every day you wait on him makes T’hami more aware of his power over you. Every day gets you in deeper.’

How he had come by the fine modern camera and the elegant suits he had worn upon his arrival at the Pasha’s court (and still wore) he would not say. I guessed that he had won the heart of some Westernised Moroccan heiress or of some equally wealthy sheikh from whom his camera had been a parting gift. But Mix would not be drawn. He had that deceptively innocent and flattering habit of asking you always about yourself, always diverting attention from his own activities and thoughts. I think he was genuinely interested in what I had to teach him, but my efforts to learn from him, perhaps, were not equally encouraged.

Amiable as he was, any former intimacy that had existed between us was only occasionally evident. I have since known other naïf’s with a similar uncalled-for defeatism, a lack of faith in their own outstanding abilities. Sometimes I thought no amount of encouraging back-patting, of reassurances as to the many opportunities open in the race world to a negro of his intelligence and natural breeding, would cheer him up.

About his film-making he had an honest sense of vocation. He had undoubted gifts in that direction. I tried to reassure him. I spoke once more of the lucrative market in America and this time he listened more thoughtfully. He told me he would consider my idea. We used English. All the other petitioners in the ante-rooms used French, Arabic or Berber, yet while we shared their uncertainties and enjoyed a common misery, they showed all that friendliness, and a generosity of spirit which is one of the great wonders of the Moroccan soul. I had never felt closer to these people. It is another trait, of course, they share with the British, this approval of failure as conferring some kind of moral superiority upon the failed.

Meanwhile, Rosie von Bek had begun to show signs of nervousness and her sexual demands, though quite as urgent, had a rather ritualistic quality at times. More than once she told me how T’hami would not let her leave, that he had insisted on guards going with her to Tangier, that her passport had been held by means of a bureaucratic error which the Pasha insisted he was doing everything to correct. Everything was impounded. Moreover she had begun to object to certain sexual ideas which, she had already told him, had not found any great popularity in the West since the days of Caligula. She said this admonition had stopped him temporarily until he had made her explain who Caligula had been, whereupon the Thane of Tafouelt had grinned and told her that he could see the similarity but, Allah be praised, he had no discontented Praetorians to cut short God’s purpose for him. As a result, he now had some nervous homosexual in his library, translating Gibbon into French while another limp-wristed half-caste found an innovative means of making some sense of the lives of the Caesars in the local dialect. She was not entirely joking when she told me El Glaoui was looking speculatively at his favourite horse these days. ‘I pity,’ she said, ‘his closer relatives.’ She thanked God that she had had the sense to keep quiet about the Decameron. So far she had been able to dissuade him from The Thousand and One Days of Sodom by assuring him that de Sade had not been a real Marquis.

Again it was impressed upon me how potent, perhaps especially to absolute monarchs, is the power of myth.