The Laughter of Carthage

FOUR

THAT NIGHT WHILE overhead the Russians celebrated with threadbare conviviality the eve of their New Year I made love to my Baroness, privately praying she was still healthy. Her servant and daughter had been permitted to stay in the saloon until twelve. She had claimed a headache; I had said I had papers to put in order. Of the passengers, only Mrs Cornelius and I were party to the truth; the others had rumours which, in the manner of desperate people, they ignored or turned into jokes. There was fog in the Bosphorus, Jack Bragg had said, but tomorrow, sooner or later, we should see Byzantium. We steamed past the coast of Bulgaria, holding a slow but steady course, and I plunged in and out of my paramour like a mad rabbit, to squeal my pleasure in the certain knowledge my voice was drowned by a chorus of exiles and the boom of our engines.

At midnight, our exhausted legs took us back to the saloon. All the officers had returned, but Mrs Cornelius was still there. She had linked arms with two drunken Ukrainian matrons in Stenka Razin (which she insisted on pronouncing Stinker Raison - I believe it was the only Russian song she knew). Kitty, sleepy and clutching a toy dog purchased by her mother in Batoum, kissed us both goodnight before her heavy little body was borne off by her nanyana; then we went outside. It had grown warmer. The ship quivered on calm water and I wondered if we had yet entered the mouth of the Strait. We had again sailed into that huge black cavern; there were no stars or moon. There even appeared to be an echo.

Mrs Cornelius, full of rum and good will, joined us. An army cap on the side of her head, she leaned gasping on the rail. ‘’Appy Birfday, Ivan.’

I was touched by her consideration. She swayed forward to kiss me on the cheek, then looked about in surprise. ‘Cor! It’s like bleedin’ pitch art there!’

The Baroness frowned uneasily; she could not understand the Cockney accent. For me Mrs Cornelius’s English was often easier than the purer language of the officers. I had as it were cut my teeth on Cockney. Leda made no attempt to speak English. She said in Russian, ‘I had best see how Kitty is. Marusya Veranovna seemed to have drunk more vodka than usual. Goodnight to you both.’ With some coolness she bowed and made her way back to her cabin. Mrs Cornelius spat into the water. ‘Carn’t seem ter clear me fuckin’ marf. It’s ther rum. Picks yer up mentally but lets yer darn socially, as they say. Woz I bein’ a gooseberry?’

I reassured her. I was glad to have this time alone with her. ‘Have you heard anything more? About the sickness?’

There was no news. But the officers, she said, were not over-worried. With an arm around my shoulder she let me get her back to our cabin. My brain was full of history. I saw the trappings of the Hun ponies, the banners and the spears and armour of hungry Ottoman Turks as they turned hot ebony eyes towards Europe and readied their primitive nomad philosophy for war against Greece. Why must they now claim originality and superiority? If they had been so proud of their culture Turks would not have called their own land Rum or Rome. Such deep hypocrisy. It was passed from generation to generation, strengthened in every century. They were trapped in their own perverse mythology. This is a planet of lies and shadows. Civilised men are ever the prey of envious shepherds. Even so, the truth occasionally glints through, yet I fear my generation was the last to recognise it.

As for these innocent-seeming outriders for the Hun hordes, these Turkish ‘guest-workers’, I know their game. I surprised a group of them a few days ago in the Paddington Arms near the station. They were standing around a shrieking one-armed bandit and arguing. After I ordered my vodka from the bar I said casually, to no one in particular: Rüzgâr kuzey doğudan esiyor. I was amused by their consternation as I walked back to my table. Some of us still understand why such an arrogant people are prepared to do menial tasks in a foreign land. They are all, of course, Fifth Column spies: the saboteurs, the advance-guard. I have given up trying to alert this country. The British will be crushed beneath the weight of their own complacency, an illusory belief in their innate superiority. They will go down, in the words of their Poet Laureate, with Nineveh and Tyre. I have done far more than honour and duty normally demands. I can do no more. Elleserait tombée. Mrs Cornelius told me they would never understand. ‘Yore wastin’ yer breaf, Ivan. Ya orta be lookin’ arter number one.’ But I was always an idealist. It is my Achilles heel. I had so much to give. I sit beside the cash-register in the deep end of my shop, looking out on the Portobello Road. It is like a film. Year by year the white faces grow fewer. The loping West Indians and arrogant Pakistanis, the swaggering Turks and Arabs multiply. It was all white when I first came here. The shops were ordinary and decent: newsagents, grocers, tobacconists, cobblers. Now it is imitation gold bracelets and cheap cotton prints like the poorer bazaars of Constantinople in 1920. And Kensington Market, crammed with kangaroo-skin boots and diamante silks, begins to resemble the Grand Bazaar. People continue to ask why this has happened! They can have no knowledge of the past. No wonder young women grow bored with feeble English loungers who live only to smoke keef and claim the State’s baksheesh. No wonder white girls seek out the spurious vivacity of the grinning Negro, the secure wealth of a fat Asian patriarch. Here again is Byzantium in decline; the last years of a senile civilisation.

I have seen the same effects in a dozen great cities during their ultimate decline. When Christian girls decide to desert the ways of virtue to fornicate with the Pagan, then chivalry is lost forever. It is the same in New York and Paris, in Munich, in Amsterdam. Oriental Africa has once again married brutality to cunning and given birth to Carthage. Burada görülecek ne var? The self-mocking West, dismissing the moral convictions of three thousand years, is ripe for conquest. And of course the one to benefit most will ever be that sly desert herdsman, your Jew.

Constantinople was our greatest single prize of the War. Had we kept her all our sacrifices would have been worthwhile. We should have experienced a tremendous revival of idealistic Christianity; a fresh awakening of the Russian spirit would have swept Bolshevism away. Throughout the War the Allies promised us the return of Tsargrad, our Emperor City, our Byzantium, seat of the Orthodox Church. The British were too weak. Rather than reclaim Constantinople for Christ and risk offending Catholic Europe they meekly returned the city to Mohamet. The Turks themselves were astonished. And in the end, of course, the Jew benefited most. The best possible climate for the speculator is a climate of uncertainty. To produce that climate you attack old, honest ideas, accepted habits of morality and scientific examination. Marx, Freud and Einstein did that much better: they invented new languages and prepared the way for their merchant co-religionists just as British missionaries in China prepared the way for opium-traders. By promiscuous questioning of the eternal verities they make our children seek bewilderedly for fresh intellectual and moral security. While we are confused, their legions fall upon our harvest. I know these Jews. I speak their tongue. They put a piece of metal in my stomach. They robbed me of everything. I blame my father. My mother was too kind. I will have nothing to do with old harpies who pick over my stock like carrion flapping on the body of the lamb. They receive short shrift from me. I would rather give my time to the wandering descendants of those Egyptians who refused shelter to the Virgin and Child. At least the gypsies are Christians now. As for the Turks, I say the same thing: Çok ufak or Çok büyüt and make them go away. I do not want their cash. I am not a Jew. It is a matter of derkenen. I am not a fool. I have made my mistakes. I do not deny it. O wieku, tys wiosna, czlowieka! Na lobie ziarno przyszlosci on sieje, Twoim on ogniem reszte wieku zyje! as the Poles say. I am not afraid of the fremder or the frestl. I live with them. I have lived with them for years. To be familiar with something is not to be the same as it. That is why I get so angry if mistaken for a Jew. Is a health inspector the bacteria he examines? The city-builders must be forever vigilant against the greedy nomad. It is not always wise to build convenient roads through the walls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have frequently been asked this question:

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

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

Until a Christian Emperor takes mass in Hagia Sophia!

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

Fleeing to Australia is not the solution.

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

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

The fog was in my mouth.

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

‘Not yet.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

‘We must be sure not to lose touch.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In comparison Odessa seemed no more than a small provincial town. When Jack Bragg rejoined us for a moment he was sardonic, ‘It’s impressive, but wait till you smell it. We’ll dock near the European Customs House on the quay there. First we have to cross to Haidur Pasha to be cleared.’ He gestured towards Asia. ‘On the Scutari side. At most points this bit of water’s no wider than the Thames. Astonishing what it separates.’

I resented his matter-of-fact voice; it interrupted my reverie, almost amounting to prayer. I had tried to cram, as it were, all the city into my eyes at once. The ship now turned her back on Byzantium and began her approach of the Eastern shore where the tall, official buildings were newer and built further apart, although there were still domes and minarets visible amongst the trees. We sailed towards a row of foreign warships flying the flags of Italy, America, Greece, France and England: the crosses of Christ, the tricolors of Liberty. All that was missing was our Russian flag. We had been pledged for centuries to restore Constantinople to Christ and at the moment of success we turned and destroyed one another in a bloody Civil War.

I believe I was weeping a little when Mrs Cornelius, holding to her face a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-cologne, came to stand unsteadily between me and the Baroness. She peered vaguely at the view, her eyes round in her soft, pink features. ‘Cor! It looks a bloody sight better from this side, dunnit?’ She had passed through Constantinople with her Persian lover in 1914. ‘So near and yet so bleedin’ far, eh, Ivan?’

In twos and threes the Russian passengers began to come up on deck. They shared a sense of awe and, I suspect, trepidation. Constantinople was central to our deepest mythology, meaning far more to us than Rome to a Catholic. Mimari Kimdir! Millions had died in recent years profoundly certain their sacrifice would see our Tsar in person ultimately raising the Russian eagle above the Sublime Porte. The posters had clearly told us that a victorious Tsar, sword lifted in triumph, would set his heel upon the neck of a fallen Sultan. Then he would lead his knights to the doors of St Sophia to claim our oldest church, after five hundred years of humiliating thraldom, for Christ again. That was the worst the Bolsheviks stole from the Russian people when they told us to stop killing Turks and destroy one another. My only consolation was a glimpse of the Greek’s blue-cross flag flying close to the Union Jack. When Lenin’s Jewish masters withdrew our forces from the Crusade the Greeks had heroically picked up our Saviour’s banner. But soon the Greeks would be cheated, too.

The Rio Cruz now sounded her whistle, a greeting to the other ships. I wished then that I could step ashore in Don Cossack uniform as a true representative of my nation. But it would have been madness to follow the impulse. I contented myself with a small, private prayer. Three old Russians were already on their knees. Many more sobbed and clasped their hands upon the rail. Hagia Sophia was released from Islam! We thought Christ redeemed. How could we predict his next betrayal? Even as the Rio Cruz stopped engines beside the stone quays of Scutari, Europe’s Jews, secure in their financial fortresses, manipulated the assets of Allied capital. Soon one nation would be pitted against another. A Jew calling himself a Greek and bearing an aristocratic British title would become chief architect of the treachery to follow: Zaharoff the Armaments King already sold weapons to Greeks, Turks and Armenians alike. He ate the bread of Prime Minister Venizelos and accepted scented coffee from that unregenerate Champion of Islam, Mustafa Kemal. He lied to each in turn. He boasted his veins flowed with the blood of St Paul, then delivered up the city of his birth to Mahomet. The betrayal of Constantinople became just another page in the account books of Vickers-Armstrong.

The ship was finally at her moorings. Tall British naval officers stood on the dock chatting easily to khaki-clad Turks in red tarbooshes. They hardly glanced at us. The high shuttered windows of the Customs buildings provided perches for fluttering, eager gulls who seemed far happier to see us. A Crossley staff-car drew up at the gates. From it emerged a Medical Officer and his nurse. Either from excitement, terror or physical weakness I began to tremble. Perhaps I realised for the first time that I was free of Russia. The umbilical was being cut. The Baroness scarcely noticed my condition. She went to attend to her daughter. Amidships Jack Bragg held a megaphone to his lips and told our passengers there would be a delay until necessary checks were made. The Greek priest interpreting for Jack had a face as calm as an ikon; his black arms flapped as he made placatory movements with his hands.

I looked back across the water to shimmering Byzantium. It was from here I supposed the first Hun hordes rested on their pommels, shielded their eyes and licked their lips in greedy anticipation at their prospective prize. The mercantile pivot of the world, Byzantium had been in a state of decadence, even then, for over a thousand years. I could still make out her far off palaces, her green and golden hills. At this distance she seemed unchanged, just as she might have looked in the time of Theodosius or Justinian the Great. For those thousand years moralists had called her decadent and predicted her end, yet no city, even Rome, retained her original character as thoroughly as Constantinople.

Mrs Cornelius glanced at me. ‘You orl right, Ive?’

Still trembling, I shrugged off her concern. I tried to speak, but could not. My throat was too dry. I think my legs gave out, though I did not faint. I remember her saying, ‘Oh, shit. Wot bleedin’ orful luck.’ Through the rail I could see the first officials beginning to come aboard. I tried to stand, but failed. I fell heavily against her legs. Having been granted my vision of Heaven. I felt now I must surely die.