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one someone had left a tumbler of gin
on the bedroom floor, and its insistent smell woke him up. He could see in red
neon across the street ‘Fly to Isfahan – for roses and nightingales.’ Some
stray burghers were hammering on the railings which had closed the mouth of
the underground. Three policemen going off duty let their conversation float
upwards: ‘I only ever beat up one old man – for pleasure that is.’ ‘One
must give and take a few blows in the new social war: even a dying empire
must suppress its neo-proletarian element.’ ‘What do you mean, exactly?’ Their voices wandered away down the cold
night streets. He groped over for the gin. It smelt of
tall blue porcelain. It made a cool infrangible column as he drank it. The
leaping figures in the panopticon stopped their capering as the gin called
for order and boldness. ‘Negate my negation’ said a handwritten sign
on the wall – the end of some festive game, he now saw, had filled his room
with merry thoughts. ‘For a General Strike of Generals’, ‘Lions, be sure your
foxes are Earthed.’ It had not been a good party: but if he
became drunk again, he could postpone his hangover – perhaps indefinitely.
The distorted gibber of a century and a half of empire swashed and gurgled
like ethereal waves. He pulled the notices down. He thought of yesterday’s drinking:
swanning through the Strand’s bars like an unruffled old queen –
‘Recessional’ he would call it. A cheesy row of faces, men rearing up against
the rampart of the counter, studying themselves for ever in the mirror behind
the whiskies – the companionship of the bottle waited to be scourged to
death. Then he had lunch in the ‘City of Nets’ – the table pitched like a
roof tossing wine out of the glass and food off the plate. Finally, a drink
at twilight in a pub snug as a sitting room, full of gay metropolitans in
vicuna suits – beautiful unsmudged loungers with vivid laughs. He had admired
the splendid girl who served him – her contempt for him surging freely from a
millennial vindictiveness. She treated the other customers gently and with
humour, but for him she had the face of the ancien régime, forced to keep open
house for conscript revolutionaries. At his party, he had been forced to listen to a friend urging him, for
his own good, to give up a girl who had in fact refused to see him for
months. He felt himself shrinking. A friend said, ‘We opened our old Christmas
pudding – the one reputed to have been sent by Marx: but it couldn’t have
been more than thirty years old, at the most.’ ‘I hear they have an attested specimen in Amsterdam.’ ‘That’s most unlikely.’ ‘He's very witty and he sells dogs.’ ‘We don’t need to smash the unions now – and we’ve such a
technological start ....’ ‘Sure it fell down, but we’d sold it by then.’ Somewhere in Montenegro hay was being sledded out to grateful sheep:
in England, though it was midway to dawn, trucks still bothered the late and
early hares. If only he could find someone who could touch him – not for
nostalgic reasons, to cure an illness, or to reawaken their own youth. But
someone new, to whom his opinions staled by so much swashing around in his
head seemed affronting and delightful. Those washers and jetons from the dark
– perhaps these were really sovereigns? Would some young girl, fresh and
exultant from her struggles with the Lincolnshire squirearchy, love him for
his verbal coinage, as one loves the man in the next cell who taps ‘Comrade’
on the wall? Much more likely his evening (or morning) would be taken up with
considering when to change from beer to doubles, and whether he had been
asleep at the bar. ‘All Englishmen are tired,’ said the
inscription over the staff college gateway – or was it a motto on the wall of
that imperial banting-house where the tired servants of the queen went to
sweat off their colonial surplus? ‘Having lost the empire,’ said another
policeman, ‘can’t we have a bit of leave?’ The gin was over now – but here
was the girl! ‘I’m so sorry, Curzon, I’ve been locked
out, and I’ve no coat. This policeman wants to go home – can I sleep here?’
Arching his nose for more gin, Curzon left his sea-swollen bed and unslept
dreams, setting out for a brisk five hours on the run in London. ‘Yes, naturally: do sleep here. It’s no
trouble.’ He sat for a while on the stone step of
the pub Tom Mann had kept: a jungular mist was rolling in from the suburbs, and at times obscured notices to visiting
Americans telling them how to elect their president. ‘Got no work?’ asked a street cleaner. ‘If I had, I’d not be doing it yet. It’s
only five o’clock.’ ‘I’ve crossed the river twice this morning
already. Some people always win—’ ‘I’m a teacher anyway, so whoever loses, I
win.’ ‘I’ve always wanted to teach.’ ‘Perhaps you will, one day.’ ‘I doubt it.’ ‘I wouldn’t know how to start cleaning a
street.’ The other’s whimsy turned easily back to
contempt. ‘Better move then, squire: the rubbish you’re perched on belongs to
my council.’ Suddenly, he was riding a midden – no, in
fact just a heap of whitish earth. It was rushing backwards, pressing him
clumsily against a wired wall. A hard edge of moon came in sight, occluded in
the lower horn by a small photograph of Ravachol. A long way away someone was
shouting, ‘Get on out of there … Get the hell out of there!’ His stomach went dead and he thought: ‘I
think I must be going to be nothing.’ If he stayed quiet, he would soon
outpace the man who was shouting – no doubt that had been a Chagall refugee,
prowling in urban lanes after lovers and chickens. Bump bump went Curzon’s
body as it thrashed about on the earth bank. In his head was a crude
gyroscope, undoubtedly manipulated from outside, which looked like two large
dice. Even as he watched, the Ravachol face flipped over, and on the fresh
face, he counted eight spots; eight sides? No, for the next face was blank,
and he had forgotten to allow for Ravachol. The next blow of the dice turned
him hazardously on to his back. ‘Get him out of my garden.’ But there really was no one there. The
next throw of the dice produced a brochure. ‘The only way to approach is from
the North. Or you might try, as we did, the over-ice route from October to
May.’ ‘If only I could get back to Ravachol.’ ‘Here, this bloke’ll take him. Careful
now, don’t spill him.’ The taxi left him in his flat. Someone had
broken in to leave there some broken chairs and a firestick. He tried to find
some coins for the firestick, but the door had been bolted on the inside, and
if he were not careful he would be unable to find his way back. The bed
seemed very full of other people. A guslar began to sing softly outside. Only
Curzon slept untroubled as the governments of friendly and unfriendly states
began to unload new groups of citizens at the abattoirs, or to intern them. When he woke up, the girl – Elizabeth,
wasn’t it – she said: ‘I sent the police away. They wanted to know about the
chairs. This used to be a proconsular suite, you know.’ ‘Let’s go to Isfahan when I’m well again.
Roses. Nightingales. Whatever can a firestick be? I was convinced I had one
in here. How odd to get so ill when there’s no need – I’ve to be in Tienen
today.’ He considered how every journey requires a
theory of aesthetics, how every journey should
constitute a dislocation of conventional perceptions of historical continuity
… Could mere travel revive his flat, his two-dimensional fortunes? Sliding –
half drunk – from continent to century, until some concern caught at him,
stopped his slither— ‘We’ll follow our noses across Europe—’ ‘And in Tienen, what?’ ‘If you come, Elizabeth? I know you so slightly, I don’t think we’d be unhappy, out of very
terror. Let’s pack some sets of dice, to play for drinks. Tiny monarchical
worlds of hazard – offering false chances where only the tequila is not
random but darts to the gut like a tiger. In Tienen we will perhaps find a
tedious man, an acquaintance: he is to give a lecture tomorrow.’ ‘?’ ‘Imagine the written part of Marx – the
plans not only of a universal city, but the plans for an architecture, a
drastically restructured personality to inhabit this projected civilisation,
plans in fact of present and future. Marx himself doing some building and from
these efforts extrapolating more plans – even building on the basis of
meticulously scaled and detailed plans themselves derived from the general
plan. In Belgium we can start looking for this general plan – it may be
Marx’s, or another’s or indeed a plan of a kind no one has seen before. We
shall be moving with one foot in sociocultural time, and one in sociocultural
space. You’ll soon learn to hobble along the like the rest of us. We won’t be
sticking to one century or one social system. People will glide in and out –
pacemakers, laggards – indeed, poets and peasants, peasant poets, poets
exploiting their peasants and peasants conscripted to gun down their poets. I
promise you that the fantasy will be the fantasy of the real world, and that
however much the people jigger about like parboiled ninnies, they’ll be
cast-iron real.’ ‘I think you’re looking for a universal
theory of misery and disappointment. I certainly shan’t come.’ He wanted her to come with him. One does not mind writing in only two dimensions,
and watching these flat concepts sidling about from page to page and flowing
on to the tablecloth. Perhaps conjurers are adventurers in the fourth
dimension, their tricks the everyday life of the booming well-rounded
fourth-dimensional bullies who plod and trample around us. But by acting in
the few dimensions we have, we override the limitations of our own
two-dimensional scribbles. He hoped that, just as the problem of the
firestick was subsiding, the problem of Elizabeth might grow to overshadow
his isolation – and, who knows, on the top branch a (probably mechanical)
nightingale? ‘I want you to come with me. Why not be the problem to overshadow my isolation? Don’t you fancy
an adventure in the dialectic? Let me at least run through a reel or two: I
won’t spoil the ending – and do feel free to improvise!’ ‘I am deeply drawn to your mind: I even
like the silence it makes when it is not working.’ ‘That seems very coy, though, I suppose, flattering.
Watch you don’t become just a figment of what you admire. When we go off to
the mountains to synthesise our concept once more, you may find you’ve been
dematerialised.’ Curzon believed so deeply himself in the
value of mental interconnections and was accordingly so ineffective in
managing the physical and factual ones – especially with girls like this –
that he found it easy to expand his consciousness without the attrition or
erosion involved with other people. They arrived in Tienen after some pleasant
enough arguments over the hospitality offered by some gothic old sports in
the ship’s bar. Rolling the dice for rounds of Chartreuse, timing the waves
with their stopwatches, the sports had been a breath of old England straight
from the gated roads of the stone-blind midlands. Curzon thought that he would obtain useful
proprietorial skills by steering Elizabeth round the system factors and
brokers of the West – ingratiating himself in a manner not wholly amatory,
but still the interesting side of busybodying. Calculated practice – with the
child’s self-mazing self-conceit – and self-deceit – so that perhaps he would
let himself fall for real. At the Iron Gates, possibly, hearing them
clank shut as he and Elizabeth scuttled deeper into the warm heart of
socialism. ‘What I like about Belgium is that the
Whitbread frontier stretches nearly into Germany. I owe Whitbread’s more
enthusiasm and patriotism than any other British institution – except
possibly Worthington.’ ‘These people in the bar were sweet. One
cried when you told him a sailor had been snapped in half by a hawser as we
sailed.’ ‘Muddied oaf. That was a lie. He’d already
said he could have beaten their strike, so I threw that in to make him
ashamed. No credit to him, it made him maudlin. I was only concerned lest a
small error I made should have swamped the boat. The washroom had a saltwater
tap which I turned on and couldn’t extinguish. It seemed we were lower in the
water when we docked.’ There were several phalanxes of fascists
in the square at Tienen. They wore carnival heads or fibre helmets, painted
to resemble iron, to avoid recognition by the police. Chattering through the
chubby heads of baby-bland festive politicians, through the long snouts of
cool-eyed carnivores, to their comrades-in-arms, the iron-headed
crocus-shoots, they seemed to welcome the violence their absurdity
encouraged. The police practised the slash and the lunge with their long
truncheons, happy enough to have heads of a new consistency to pound away at
on an afternoon of political excitement. ‘Ours is the other group,’ said Curzon,
‘the party of the angels. Over there – on the other side of the dialectic.’
He pointed to it – a cable for the television crews. Elizabeth realised that
he must have divided his time on the boat between her and the tourist bar,
and the first class bar upstairs. Softly, sweetly, gently, they strolled
through the kite-strings of troupes of children in smocks. Street musicians
with pottery tambours, dyudyuks and dragon-headed lutes, scrambled among the
kites and the cables, sneering and spitting. ‘Shades of the charnel house,’
said Curzon, noticing the slivers of goose and turkey membranes used to pluck
and patch the instruments. Far over the fields flew a scarlet
balloon, carrying the president of an association of anarchist – or at least anarchisant
– civil servants. They could see him waving and hugely laughing as he neared
the town, but local warm air wafted him away – racked with glee, nearly
tumbling from the gondola. Elizabeth and Curzon joined their procession – a
genius of sublation had allotted banners each with a single word – which read
sensible from front, or rear, of the procession – but which was its own
walking, singing, chanting negation. ‘Red or black, it’s all the same to me,’
said a woman in front of them. ‘They’ll none of them stop the cows giving
milk.’ She said this with such satisfaction that
Curzon asked, ‘What’s all the same?’ but Elizabeth hurried him along. At the
head of the procession a motorcycle policeman was weeping, but he put on his
goggles and outstared the stare. In Brussels a television producer gave the
word to his crew, and the processions began. Curzon galloped forward with his
advance guard towards the fascists, but mobile police separated them. ‘Why
did I do that?’ wondered Curzon. Under the tall candles of sticky scented
trees, the children played with their kites. The balloon rolled back and
nestled down among them. The popular front procession was in full flight,
gloomily negating itself as the bearers turned tail, gradually shedding
concepts and sense, as the longer words were thrown away to assist the
retreat, and the shorter words prodded into police and nationalists. ‘Quick, into the gondola!’ ‘Christ, he’s gone mad,’ thought Elizabeth,
who did not put all she saw into as many sets of words and synonyms as
Curzon, and had in any case not noticed that the balloon, snared by a fish
kite, had drifted into the square. As they rose above Tienen, they could see
fighting in the streets. The television cameras burst like glass furnaces.
The friendly fringe of suburban streets was filling with men from artisan
tenements, the fires of the factories had been scattered over the shop
floors. Harrows were dragged over the mosaic floors of the town hall. ‘We
shall win because we are the stronger’ floated up to them, but they could not
tell from which side. The first heavy camions and the hard black noses of
tanks were ploughing through the fields towards Tienen. ‘Since we are clearly not to have the chance
of hearing my friend talk on the future of future, or whatever, I shall have
to deliver the address myself,’ said Curzon. ‘Quick, then,’ said the anarchist.
‘Believe me, I’d not miss this for green smoke. But
those kids in the square sew razor blades in the kites’ tails to rip what
they may. I thought if I laughed they’d reel their machines in – but they
didn’t. Red as little foxes, I hope?’ he asked them. The collapse and destruction of social
harmony in Tienen, which had as its first victim some sociologists on
fieldwork, martyrs to the trade, carried on below them. Feathers of burnt
paper quivered up towards them. ‘I have been trying these many years,’
Curzon began, ‘these many necks of these many woods, to run my time
backwards. Living a clean and decent faustian life, but in my mind
unravelling time as you ravel it. Let’s put it another way: ideas are simple.
Let’s have a war, thinks the general manicuring his big proud horse, that should give the workers something to think
about. But he doesn’t need to have the idea of Lancer Mroszek sitting in a
field full of fever and sloughed limbs eating rye bead in the tenth year of
hostilities. ‘If only we could have ideas as involved and fantastic as real
conditions, we fantasists would have to carry less criticism. No one says
that it is absurd to have had the First World War – or that it is absurd to
think that another war will break out. Yet if our idea of the First World War
covers what happened to some real – or imaginary – people or places or things
for four years, or our idea of the next war includes a projected index of
Austrian industrial production, one is accounted a fool. Why is this?’ The President thought rapidly as they
drifted towards the ground in some country, ‘Why do they put anarchists in
prison? To confirm their faith? How pleasant if every state decided it did
not want its anarchists, and would give them an island, pineapples at the
heart of every bush, a lemur hooked on every branch, where they could
renounce he rewards of citizen obligations and discover whether they were an
historical moment or a society out of time. ‘In my last prison, there were no rats. So
we used to feed the warders, call them pet names, be sad when they went away
or died. You could say in fact that we socialised them. Angry at first, they
let themselves come to depend on our largesse – we could not love each other,
so we loved them. Up to a point. The point where we were let out. No one
wants to walk back into the world with a pocketful of prison rats. ‘Unlucky Tienen. Sad to see two groups who
are deprived, fighting each other. However incongruous an alliance between
them, better inconsistency of this kind than to shout to the first tank from
Brussels, “Liberate me!” and receive the 80 mm shell in your throat. ‘I feel like an early barbarian showing
later folk-waves the best places to loot, those women who are not rather
jaded by the whole business of conquest, saying, “Of course, don’t make too
much mess. We’ve all got to live here, and it is more comfortable if you
leave the roofs on the buildings and the grain in the granaries. And please
don’t throw anything unpleasant in the wells.” ‘But of course, off they strut, to poison
all the water. It is satisfactory enough to see them lying about a week later,
faces shrunken and sneaky like mink and fox in their shrouds. But by that
time one is alongside them oneself. If I could only construct a Bokhara of
the mind – a militia waving gladioli, peasants in green hats carrying
scarecrows in national costume out to the fields. Wooden walls to keep out
the wolves, naturally, and some teams of camels to help out with the road
work. Tall birds among the reeds, cows in the rice fields, half submerged in
deep summer. Mausolea full of dried grass and pinks – the rose mosque
bursting through with foliage at the top, like a neglected onion. And I shall
live there, and no one will talk to me, nor I to
them, since I shall have invented for this city a language which only I
understand. I need only leave there when I’m hungry or cold. ‘And then someone else will have to fuss
round me and do what I tell them.’ ‘We are still living in the folds of your
literary outer garments,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Listen to what this man has to say,’ said
Curzon, as they recovered from the shock of the casual destruction of Tienen. ‘I drove a truck in the Soviet Union for
two years. Up the mountain and down the mountain ten times a day. Little fox
faces hoping for twenty hungry miles that I’d miss a corner. In the evenings,
cards, drink, talking of the sweet future with our
faces the faces of the damned. One of us came from Kronstadt – and he used to
have nightmares of the troops coming towards him across the ice in their
white parkas, great squares of rotten ice cracking and rearing, short, calling
shells throwing spouts of yellow and grey water into the air. He’d such a
torment from the double aspect of things that he used to sit all night on a
huge rock, awaiting who knows what comeuppance. ‘There was a man too who had been in the
defence of Madrid – a Mexican – who had left his post out of fear, or boredom
or whatever. It had seemed so easy, he said, just to walk away: and there
were in any case so many people anxious to take over his machine gun that he
did not consider that he was giving up what he later referred to as “his
historic role”. ‘“How can I get it back,” he would ask,
“when I’ve missed it all?” ‘And
I would tell him the role he played was historic all right – he had just
helped along the losing of a war – and that was history.’ Try again, thought Curzon. Fasten the
memories together and you invent a new causal chain. Invent a new memory and
you gain something on the unknown. Try another drink, another country … and
yet this is all wrong. Playing endlessly by the stream in Silesia,
waiting for the field grey or the white parkas, depending on the season and
the direction of the wind: crying ‘Momma, is that the fire brigade?’ As they
come with hoses that can pour fire, and momma is skeetering up the road
thinking, ‘They’ll get him, anyway.’ Even the squirrels, who expect to avoid
this sort of thing and even to keep a few caches of nuts through the
campaign, realise that it is better to pull out. Loading the drunks into
police wagons in Boston of a weekend – now, instead, the broken pieces are in
Tienen. |
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