Byzantium Endures полностью

Lyova, the painter, came back with a handful of drinks and lowered them to the table. His dark hair fell over his eyes and he pushed it back. ‘That’s what they said about Carthage. They were probably going about saying “Carthage is indestructible. It’s one of the oldest civilisations in the world.” Then look what happened. The Romans destroyed the whole thing overnight. And why? Because of a failure of imagination. They simply couldn’t conceive of their fate. If they’d been able to do so, they’d have been here today.’

‘They are here,’ said Boris the Accountant, tapping his round spectacles. ‘Why do you think there are so many Semites in Odessa? The New Carthage.’

‘The New Gomorrha, more likely,’ said Shura, turning back and draining his tea-glass. ‘Let’s have some vodka.’ He seemed gloomy. He wouldn’t look at me. I thought he must be upset at the prospect of our parting.

‘Nonsense,’ said Nikita. He sneered. ‘Russians and Jews are all too innocent. They are still serfs at base. We behave like kids, we’re cruel to one another, because we are kids. We treat our own children badly ...’

Grania, the curly-haired dancer with the heart-shaped face, would not have this. She made a disapproving sound. ‘Nobody loves children more than Russians!’

Boris said feelingly, ‘Cossacks aren’t too finickety about Jewish children...’

‘Careful what you say, Benya,’ Lyova warned him with a smile. ‘We have a Cossack hetman in our company.’ We all enjoyed this.

‘We are children,’ insisted Nikita. ‘We love our “Little Fathers”, our “Batkos”. And it’s why we’re such materialists. Because we are poor, most of us, as children are poor. We have no power, no wealth, no justice save the justice of the autocrat. We are always quarrelling about possessions. We must be the only race in the whole world to equate sentimental lyricism with emotional maturity. Our literature’s full of trees and naive protagonists. There are more trees in Russian novels than it took to make the paper they’re printed on.’

I do not think any of us followed Nikita’s wild arguments too clearly. It was the first time he had expressed them. He was to become a journalist on a Bolshevik newspaper and disappear in the mid-30s (I met his sister briefly in Berlin). Boris the Accountant seemed to agree with Nikita, however. ‘We are in the power of mad children,’ he said. ‘Russians will do anything to resist growing up. Thus they are easily ruled.’

‘And that’s why we could lose the war,’ said Shura, giving Boris his talented attention and evidently making the Accountant feel as if he had something profound to say. Boris merely developed the same theme:

‘It’s a vast, infantile nation. Its notion of maturity is a romantic youth’s notion that he’s mature when he becomes sentimental about general ideas like Love, Death and Nature.’

We laughed as only sentimental youths, who had not really lost such ideas, can laugh.

I report these conversations, as I remember them, not because I believe they had any special profundity, but to give a flavour of the ideas current in Odessa in those days.

‘It’s the reason Tolstoi is so popular with the young and passionate,’ said Boris. ‘Natasha is Russia. Even the oldest, noblest greybeard is a kid. How else could they embrace Marxism so easily?’

At this mention of politics I was automatically on my feet. Most Jews like Boris were radicals and had to be avoided. Marxists, Kropotkinists, Proudhonists, they were all the same to me. They displayed a disease of the brain which could be highly contagious, for it was transmitted, as I once said of hypochondria, by word of mouth. Also I was still afraid of ‘So-So’. Talk of that devil might cause him to reappear. I decided to see if Katya’s customer had left yet. As I got up, she came in. She dashed forward to throw her arms round me, kissing me in a way I found uncharacteristic. The bombardment had caused many of us to have second thoughts about our lives and, perhaps, put a slightly higher value on our relationships.

Shura remained in his strange mood. He was far from friendly to Katya and took a brooding interest in the singer, who had continued to pipe her peculiar Yiddish songs above the noise of our conversation. More vodka arrived. We all drank. We toasted the singer. Boris lost interest in politics when his fat girl-friend arrived to let him know their parents had met and decided they should marry. He became quite pale and began to make calculations in the margins of his anarchist newspaper.

That was the day the Cossacks rode through Moldovanka and every Jew in the city shook in his shoes. The girl singer had stopped her wailing and we had grown rather stupefied. Katya had gone home, to prepare for her evening’s business, but it was not yet dark. The sound of cavalry in a city is very peculiar to one who has not heard it before. At first we thought we were to be bombarded again, because the noise was unfamiliar, and that is why we fell silent.