The Laughter of Carthage

SIX

I AM A RATIONALIST. I have always been a rationalist. I believe in the power of the human imagination, in scientific investigation, analysis and description, in the Christian philosophy of humane tolerance and self-discipline. Other more obscure forms of mysticism are to me at once foolish and deeply misanthropic. It is true I have always had a greater capacity to love the world than to love most of the individuals in it; but I am not like these hippies who worship gods from Space and tell you they were Sir William Scott in a previous life; neither will I listen to silly girls who talk of poltergeists, hauntings and psychic perception. Yet I probably possess a greater accumulation of evidence for the belief in reincarnation (or even less likely phenomena) than anyone alive. My experience in Constantinople might have shaken a man with less character and unbalanced him for the rest of his days. Only an overriding, saving sanity, an improving understanding of the meaning and power of prayer, has helped me maintain my reason. It would be self-deceptive, at very least, for me to claim I was always so stable. The shock of a new country and culture, my youth, my realisation that I was both an exile and an unwelcome guest, must all have contributed to my state of mind. I was well-educated. I knew many languages. I had mastered the power of flight; but I was also something of a hothouse plant. I received a diploma from the St Petersburg Institute by the time I was sixteen. I was, at twenty, both a Master of Science and a Colonel in the Volunteer Army. My brain, as we used to say, had grown faster than my soul. They took you, Esmé, in your youth and in your innocence. They took you away from me. They transformed you into a whore and gave you a hard, grinning mask. You became a bandit’s camp-follower, an anarchist, you who had lived only to serve the sick and needy; you became a cynic who saw love as the arch-folly and the past as a stupid illusion. Yet did we not smell the lilacs together in the old parks above Kirilovskaya, as the sonorous bells of St Andrew’s pealed the Easter jubilation? Can you deny we ran bare-legged, hand in hand, through the grassy gorges of Kiev while the sun made all her buildings soft and golden? We sat under autumn oaks, did we not, and let the red leaves cover us? Was all that an illusion, Esmé? Or must it be called one now, because it cannot be reclaimed? Wann werde ich sie wieder sehen? You were fucked so much you had callouses on your cunt. But you came back to me. Perhaps God sent you. You came back disguised as a harlot and were transformed into the tender, loving child who had admired and supported me in my youthful idealism. You were restored, purified, made whole; and it was granted to me that I should be the medium of your salvation. Esmé, my aspiration, my angel! My muse! God grants few of us the opportunity to relive the past, redeem our mistakes, take advantage of a happiness we usually only value when we have lost it. I am not ungrateful, God. I thank You and am repentant that I thought in those days You played a trick on me. I thought You unjust to bestow such a gift, then take it away again, dooming me to a lifetime of miserable disappointment, a hopeless Quest, to change my whole perspective of life. Is it my punishment, to suffer for all of them? Is that my punishment, God? I have wandered the Earth praying for an answer. Wie lange mtissen wir warten? They accused me of so many crimes. They whipped me with their Cossack quirts. They humiliated and tortured me. They imprisoned me. They mocked me. They called me such terrible names. They cannot understand.