The Vengeance of Rome

FORTY

You say there is nothing to fear from the East? I say you are searching in the wrong places. Look to Australia or China or South-East Asia, not to Russia or her empire, who will always be European, for it is Christendom herself that Russia defends, just as her free Cossacks ensured her boundaries for centuries. For it is written that the borders were drawn upon the world by God’s own finger tracing them as He traced the mosaics of our history.

For a while I forgot these things. I forgot them in Odessa.

Things I had forgotten in Odessa: I had forgotten so much in Odessa. I gave up the memory of my simple, lustful wanton life, my Golden Age. This was not what I had planned. But in my despair I began to remember again. I have no memory, no memory of that other. Routines are performed, but I forget their origins. My rituals sustain me. I breathed the roses of forgetfulness in that ancient isle, the sweet isle of sanctuary. Believe me, I am not compromising you. Have you ever heard me complain? Nobody wants to know what happened. That’s show business, says Brady the child-killer. Is there some primitive sense they have that by killing us they empower themselves? There are more terrible ideas than this, I suppose. But they behave like film stars, these secret service interrogators, these prison guards. Salachti. I read what I could in the camps but most of what they gave me was not exactly designed to stimulate the mind but rather to reduce it. There are teachers who take great joy in passing on wisdom. But we must not forget the other kind of teacher, who loves to repress knowledge, to leave us more ignorant and brutal than themselves. Guilty or not, few deserved to be the props for the showmanship of illiterates or sadists.

‘Pyat?’ He was sarcastic. ‘Are you sure your name isn’t Finif?’

I understood him all too well. He held up five fingers and then made the old sign for the Devil.

We are our own country, we, the exiles. Our past and present are held in common, as is our pain, but we hold disparate notions of the future. Some of us expect to return, to pick up the threads of our lives exactly as they were the day we were taken away. Others anticipate their old world improved and cleansed. But I know what it would mean for me once I got back. I dream about it but the dreams are not always pleasant. In the most recent dream Esmé sits naked, reading aloud from the Bible in Hebrew while my mother listens. She is not the old fraud I saw that time but my real mother whom I waved goodbye to from the Kiev train. Finif! I knew that insult. Five. Fiinf.

‘What’ll you give me for half a sawbuck.’ He was grinning, this Yankee shyster. He held up a five-dollar bill. ‘A fin?’

‘A herring for a tin,’ I said. ‘Don’t insult me. Get out of my shop.’