Читать книгу The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss - Страница 16

Ermalpa, September 1978

By pulling back one curtain, the room could be sparingly filled with morning light. Objects were revealed but, casting no shadows, scarcely acquired reality.

He had slept naked. He put on a pair of blue swimming trunks and stood in the middle of the room in tadasana. He breathed slowly, concentrating on the expelled breath, letting the lungs refill automatically, letting air return like a tide, to the abdomen, the ribs, the pectorals; then a pause and a topping-up with still more air. Then a pause and the controlled release.

He went into trikonasana, straightening and locking his legs with, first, his right fingers at his right ankle and his left arm raised, and then, second, his left fingers at his left ankle and his right arm raised, head always turned up towards the lifted thumb, knees locked.

After some while, he went into various sitting poses, concentrating on parvatasana and, to keep his abdominal muscles in trim, navasana. Finally, he went into a recuperative pose, the sarvangasana, with his feet high above his head and toes hanging down. He breathed gently, without strain, staying as he was, hanging in the air, for about fifteen minutes, before relaxing into savasana, eyes closed, brain inactive.

When he returned to the world, he reflected as always with gratitude on the brief refuge of meditation. Nothing could reach him there, neither his own follies nor the follies of other people. The paradox was that he had banished God by discovering him through the disciplines of yoga; what he had come upon was a timeless region at the back of his own skull: a small chamber shaped by countless generations of blood and perception. It had been there awaiting him all the time. It was as close as he would ever get to Eternity.

Putting on yachting shoes and draping a towel round his neck, he went down through the hotel, still empty of guests, and took a slow swim up and down the outdoor pool. Only one other delegate of the conference was there, an Italian whose name Squire did not remember. They nodded to each other and wished each other good morning as Squire did six lengths and a few dives. As he went back to his room, an aroma of coffee reached his senses.

He felt well prepared to face Thursday and the second full day of the conference.

The dining room of the Grand Hotel Marittimo was full of fresh flowers. Sunshine poured in the far end of the chamber, and the fatherly waiters were moving unhurriedly about their business.

Thomas Squire settled himself at a table with d’Exiteuil, who had managed to find himself a copy of Le Monde, the two Frenzas, Cantania, and the Romanian delegate, Geo Camaion. The latter nodded silently at Squire and continued to eat sausages and tomatoes. Gianni and Maria Frenza were chattering happily to each other over plates of fried egg and bacon. Gianni wore a silk sweater; his shaggy black hair, streaked with grey, reached to its collar. His wife looked attractive; she wore a plain brown dress to match the heavy dull gold of her hair. Squire observed that d’Exiteuil frequently gazed at her from behind his newspaper.

Squire ordered continental breakfast from a paternal waiter. He was finishing his orange juice when Geo Camaion, who had reached the toast stage, leaned forward, and remarked in French, ‘I found your speech of yesterday, Mr Squire, charmingly insular, as we expect your countrymen always to be.’

He was a small neat man with good features and a nobly furrowed forehead. He spoke in such a friendly way that only a tapping finger on the cloth revealed his inner tension.

‘In what respect did you find it insular?’ Squire asked.

‘We don’t expect the English to understand that there are other people in the world – other poets, for instance, than Shakespeare, and other film actors than Errol Flynn.’

The croissants were not good, tasting too oily. Squire wiped his fingers on his napkin and said, ‘Surely you fellows haven’t been locked behind your frontiers for so long, Mr Camaion, that you have forgotten that Errol Flynn was Tasmanian, not English? Talking of people being locked in, I hear that your President Ceaucescu has finally allowed Peter Doma to leave his native land. Is that so? Wasn’t Doma persecuted because he complained about the police system in Romania?’

‘Doma! Doma was a client of propaganda hostile to our country!’

‘I see. Won’t there be more hostility to your country now that you have shown how you persecute an individual, and even his dog, if he happens to disagree with the way things are run? Aren’t I right in believing that Doma was even attacked because his wife was Jewish?’

Camaion’s eyes were very round. ‘How dare you? Isn’t anti-Semitism rampant in the United Kingdom?’

‘It may exist, lingeringly, I suppose. It certainly isn’t official policy.’

The Romanian wiped angrily at his face and rose, flinging his napkin at the table. ‘More insular and anti-internationalist remarks, just as one might expect!’ He marched from the room.

Maria Frenza said – in Italian, but Squire understood the remark – ‘Fortunately the foreign gentleman had finished his meal before walking off.’

An uncomfortable silence fell at the table. Squire poured himself another cup of coffee.

D’Exiteuil said, with forced brightness, ‘We shan’t have a conference left if we start an international slanging match.’

‘He made an error,’ Squire said. ‘Two in fact. Flynn was one. And I don’t believe I mentioned Shakespeare in my speech. The Russian did that.’

‘Well, you know, Tom, he’s after all only an unimportant critic in a small department in the university in Bucharest, he doesn’t carry much weight. You don’t have to eat him.’

‘Your complaint is mine, Jacques. He’s only an unimportant critic in a small department in Bucharest University. Had he been Arthur Koestler, let’s say, I would have deferred to him. But Koestler would not have spoken as this man did.’

‘All the same, you mustn’t exactly blame him, you know, for the sins of his government. We’d really all be in the soup if that—’

‘Jacques, old chum, pass me over the rolls, will you, and let me enjoy my breakfast. I had no intention of upsetting your apple-cart, and actually I am sorry I broke out as I did.’

Not wishing anyone to see how upset he was by this episode, he retired to his bedroom until it was time to go down to the first session of the day at nine o’clock. He felt to blame over the Camaion affair. He knew that Camaion – a little man, as d’Exiteuil said – was personally piqued because Squire had ignored him at the opening ceremony, or had seemed to ignore him. As Squire now recollected, too late, he had encountered Camaion only a few months earlier at a seminar in Paris. He had forgotten the man’s face. His bad memory was at fault. In fact, during the Paris occasion, Camaion had made complimentary remarks in public concerning Squire’s work.

At the recollection, a rare blush of shame crept to his cheeks. Some people, and by no means the most contemptible, feel slights very keenly.

From what Squire had been told, in words that now came back clearly, Geo Camaion was quite a brave man. Moreover, Squire had said insulting things about Romania. No matter that they were true. Romania was one of the most authoritarian regimes in the Eastern bloc, yet Squire admired President Ceaucescu’s independent stand against Soviet domination. Even at an unimportant conference like this, for Romania to suffer any disgrace could always be seized on in some way by her enemies, of which she had many; or Camaion himself could find his position undermined, and perhaps a worse man set in his place.

A few minutes of thought persuaded Squire that he should apologize to the Romanian as soon as possible.

When he went downstairs, the foyer was already filling with delegates, many of them indulging in a last smoke before entering the conference hall. By covert glances, by gazes hurriedly switched elsewhere as they encountered his, Squire saw that news of the exchange at the breakfast table was spreading, had spread.

Herman Fittich, a rolled newspaper under his arm, came up cheerfully and said, ‘I learn that you have been putting some of our socialist friends to rights this morning. I can’t say I found that titbit of news entirely depressing.’ He made it plain by his manner that he did not intend to refer to the photograph of Pippet Hall he had produced the previous evening.

Squire smiled uneasily. ‘The Romanian called me insular. As one who lives on an island, I’m bound to resent the remark, just as liars hate being called liars.’

‘Or communists communists. I wouldn’t have said people practised living on islands, the way other people practise lying or practise communism. You can live on an island and do other things, whereas if you are a liar or a communist, it’s pretty well a full-time occupation.’

Squire smiled again, this time with real humour. ‘Then again, if you live on an island, you can stop it just by catching a plane.’

‘That’s because we have yet to invent airlines which will fly you from moral turpitude.’ They both began to laugh, walking together into the conference hall. ‘Moral Turpitude – sounds like rather a nice little place, perhaps a desert island in the New Hebrides, named after Sir Harry Turpitude of His Majesty’s Navy.’

Slowly, the delegates took their allotted places. Some paused to scrutinize themselves in the tall gilded mirrors, perhaps on the watch for falsehood. Squire sat and chatted to Rugorsky, his neighbour on his left. To his right, d’Exiteuil and Frenza talked together with their heads close, breathing cigarette smoke at each other. Frenza now wore a jacket over his silk sweater. The Ermalpan delegates settled along the left-hand side of the conference room, as neat as a row of starlings perching on a fence. Carlo Morabito was among them.

At ten minutes past nine, d’Exiteuil rose. Smiling and gesticulating, he made a few general announcements before handing over to Frenza. Frenza removed his heavy spectacles and looked round the room, his face set as if he had something unpleasant to announce. Instead, he made a semi-private joke about the drinking habits of the hotel manager, and the delegates laughed and relaxed, twitching at ties and pens. Frenza then introduced the first speaker of the morning’s session, Professor Georgi Kchevov. Frenza said that perhaps the most remarkable feature of this, the First International Congress of Intergraphic Criticism, was the way in which it had been possible to receive contributions from both the West and the East. He felt that this represented a genuine drawing together in the brotherhood of nations, and that here in this congress they could symbolize, among their other important business, a growing unity and understanding and unionism worldwide. He was more than pleased to introduce Professor Georgi Kchevov to address them.

Fittich shot Squire a look across the table while this speech was in progress. It was usual for the chairman to introduce each speaker with a brief listing of their credentials, their institution, their previous contributions, their specialization. Kchevov evidently had no credentials of this kind.

Whilst Frenza talked, Kchevov polished his gold-rimmed spectacles. He rose now, putting them rather awkwardly in place, and then picked up his papers. He smiled at everyone and began to address the assembly in resonant Russian. Squire took note of this; on more than one occasion outside the conference hall, he had overheard Kchevov talking perfectly fluent Italian. But presumably it was politic that Russian should be heard officially at the conference. It seemed to present the interpreters with some problems. A full minute after Kchevov had begun his oration, the female voice of the interpreter came over the headphones, speaking with a hesitancy which in no way matched what Kchevov was saying.

‘Yes, accordingly, on the present problems before us – facing us, I should say – I can bear in mind the remark of Delegate Thomas Squire that we in fact explore the familiar, so to say. That’s the hope to come up to – with a different picture than the one that we had before.

‘We must look ahead concisely, and without being merciful. It’s enough to know that many things will not be, where for instance people are exploited with bare bread. They stand in rows now. We can’t decide. We have decided. Only the collapse awaits. Leading countries are condemned.

‘Many new things will be born. We must decide. We must deal with optimism and only with optimism. I could criticize what has gone previously in this respect, but want only to shed light on the matter, and so refrain in a rather brotherly or fraternal spirit, like a blow on the right place. Shoulder.

‘We must not, we should not accuse the pessimism piled in literature whose function is in respect of human problems conveyed in past times, since we now understand better. For instance, I must state in the sociology and political sphere were economics. From all these comes the evolvement of new literature and tokens beyond the word printed. Even to the personality of affairs. Such we may presume to call nowadays in a sense scientific.

‘People who are among us and live with us influence the course of events, of course, which is not far in the future. We must not go to bed with them tonight. Orthodoxy of the state can guide us. So we’re not able to take a bus to anywhere which is not painted on a card. Sorry, printed in the map. I’m sorry, but that means to concern all of us. The chairs in this hall are, in a sense, filled right up with all human beings.

‘Nor should we be very overturned. If experiments of this kind or type, I should say, confirm to literature, if we will have experiments made purely for the sakes of experiments, then we will have no result. There has to be inspiration to confirm, an example being the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who has a remarkable development which can be seen. It touches men and women alike, not always from behind. We can so be concerned with something fresh coming.’

As Kchevov paused and took a swallow of mineral water from his glass, Squire ran his gaze round the table, looking in particular at the other English-speaking delegates, the Americans, Canadians, and Australians. All appeared perfectly serious.

‘In such circumstances, I must add,’ said Kchevov, reading from his papers again, ‘that we should not take misleading impressions which without optimism makes this huge thing seem not to be real, especially for those of us who had the news in the past, or sometimes a flavour. You don’t understand this.

‘Only and only if this will certainly give results, confirming to the organic in political spheres can we go to a head. I have nerves about such evaluations when values are discussed on roles of revelation, knowing a musician with a violin, for example, cannot play the drum, when critics speak only of one commitment or something of this work.’

The interpreter’s voice ran on in this vein for some while.

Squire scribbled a note to d’Exiteuil complaining that the translation was incomprehensible. D’Exiteuil leant sideways and whispered, ‘It must be vexing, but follow the general drift – prescriptive stuff but deeply perceptive.’

‘Good.’ He concentrated again on what the female voice was saying in his ear.

‘… according to his word. It is a move forward, declaredly, one we can take without a trip. Why bow to a single person? In a marriage of disciplines, science is not good and bad but neutral.

‘What is the way of transposing the over-human values that we have? Sorry, superman. How can everyone unite with us? Doesn’t all political science suggest a role? There is a necessity in history which you may all be aware, with the overwhelming rational aspect. That’s a question of control when we’re talking about science and technology. I don’t have to hold this rat in my hand. It’s exaggerated in any case because we recently had in our country recent developmental problems now solved, which is a mistaken aspect some took deliberately without to speak their names, since it applies to this century only and after all many others follow it, in what order we shall see presently, with glimpses already if you get out of bed at dawn and dare to look stark. The past will prove less utopian, the future more so. The belief is not a religious one, so to speak, though confused. Some fish we can eat.

‘It is not an obsolete thing to speak about the miracle. The individual cannot be completed and put away without any fantasies of hope. I don’t qualify for being put away. What I mean here is combining the elements of subconsciousness with political geology to make a reinforcement such is unknown. If the comparison is fair, we could complete it according to the schema existing today, rational for not rational, till someone gets the prize for their body.’

At this there was a murmur of general agreement from the delegates. Kchevov looked up from his papers – rather in astonishment, Squire thought. As the man got going again, Squire wrote a note to Frenza stating that Comrade Kchevov had now been speaking for half-an-hour and should be interrupted, since it was the turn of the next delegate to speak. He pushed it across d’Exiteuil’s space to the secretary.

Frenza stared at it, pushed it back interrogatively to d’Exiteuil. The two men started whispering together. Finally, Frenza rose furtively from his seat, came round d’Exiteuil’s seat and put his arm around Squire’s shoulder in a fraternal embrace. He spoke rapidly in Italian.

‘He says that it’s agreed that we should never interrupt a delegate if he is obviously delivering something of major importance,’ translated d’Exiteuil. ‘Particularly in this case where he is clearly building on much of your own work, under the keynote of exploring the familiar.’

‘His half-hour is up. You must interrupt him according to the rules, whatever he is saying. Ring your little bell and warn him that he has two minutes left. You’ve been to these sessions before. You know what to do.’

Looking genuinely anguished when this was translated to him, Frenza began a fresh speech, whispering urgently, his eyes close to Squire’s. D’Exiteuil translated, saying, ‘What the secretary says is that we must make not only scholarly allowances, etcetera, etcetera, but also diplomatic allowances in the present case. If we interrupted now, the Soviet delegations would be offended and see it as a political move.’

‘They can’t possibly be offended, they know the rules. What’s political about it?’

‘Then why did you suggest it?’ d’Exiteuil asked. ‘It must be political. You get us all into trouble. By the way, Tom, you upset our Romanian friend at breakfast.’

At that moment, another note was passed along. D’Exiteuil snatched it before Frenza could reach, and spread it out. It was in French, and suggested simply that, since the Soviet delegate had exceeded his time limit, he should be asked to sit down. It was signed with a flourish: Carlo Morabito.

D’Exiteuil and Frenza had another hurried confabulation, at the end of which d’Exiteuil signed with two fingers to Squire. ‘We give him two minutes more, okay?’

Frenza rang his bell and conveyed to Kchevov the news that he had five more minutes.

Squire listened to the exchange over the headphones. Kchevov apparently said that he was sorry for the interruption and would wind things up immediately.

He spoke on for some while. Frenza sat with his hand on the bell, but had become immobile, staring ahead, perhaps into the political future, like something on Easter Island. He stirred from his daze and invited questions only when Kchevov finally sat down.

A young Italian, one of Ermalpa’s smart set and an under-professor in the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation, rose and remarked, according to the translation, that he proposed there was now only the continuous present. History had expanded into everyday life as a strategy for fiction. Fiction was fulfilling its destiny and becoming generally all-pervasive. While the Pope died of laughing, the brows of intellectuals were lined with fatigue.

Good-natured laughter and smart smiling followed these remarks.

D’Exiteuil intervened to say that he accepted Kchevov’s interesting talk in the true spirit, although he was fortunate in speaking from a position where the traditional union of church and state versus the people had been alleviated. Nevertheless, he felt that utopianism should now be regarded with a rather large set of reservations in view of its limited temporal applications, though he did see that it had compatibility with their general subject for discussion in certain clearly designated areas. Squire wrote that bit down on his notepad.

One of the Americans, Larry Clayton, rose to say that there was a concealed dilemma in what had been discussed so far during the morning, which was man’s inability to mature at a rate compatible with technological progress. There were small and large realisms and he believed that while what his Soviet colleague had had to say was revealing and significant, and a major contribution to the debate, it nevertheless fell under the category of a minor realism.

At the risk of achieving a fascist posture, he believed that his own country, the USA, should pursue a projectory of high technology to the limit of productive capacity. Before the oil ran out – though that was and remained a hypothetical parameter entirely based on relative cost-accounting – it was a priority to establish space colonies on the Moon and on synthetic planets in equivalent orbits, where a whole new nul-g vacuum technology could be developed, using limitless solar energy and maybe demolished superfluous gas planets such as Jupiter, which would provide more power than mankind had so far managed to consume in its total history. Such objectives achieved essentiality.

Concurrently with this admittedly somewhat lyrical scenario, he proposed that all aid to undeveloped countries be embargoed and even that the US become isolationist in intention and trade, the more effectively to gear itself outward to the universe in a receptivity attitude.

If all this sounded like a new version of economic extortion and the Monro doctrine, he would remind delegates that even Karl Marx had admitted that there had always existed a struggle between city and countryside, and that that struggle had proved a fruitful one. Indeed, it was in many of its phases the history of man himself. Now that urbanization was practically global, and the realization of Doxiadis’s Ecumenopolis fast approaching, a massive US advancement into neighbouring space would restore that fruitful dichotomy. The urbanization of vacuum was a top priority target.

Clayton admitted to a personal reservation to all this. He knew, none better, how desperately his country needed a new form of government, the present elite being entirely discredited, but he feared that access to new power areas would merely entrench the present elite, even in an altered environment, since those grabbed power who were nearest power. Almost all popular forms of entertainment, including TV and news media and present-day literatures like sci-fi – witness Asimov – were downright reactionary; the texts showed how greatly the masses were held in contempt, and he could not understand how the masses still ate up this stuff and made fortunes for those who so obviously despised them.

Of course, education had been withheld them. They needed a government of the people in an energy-surplus requirement environment, and then maybe mankind would mature along the utopianist lines outlined by his Russian colleague.

Frenza thanked everyone and called for the next paper.

Dr Dwight G. Dobell of San Andreas Baptist University read a well-researched and innocuous paper on ‘Abba, Pop Musicals, and Youth Say-So’. The Sicilian morning went by.

When the delegates moved out of the smoke-filled conference hall for lunch, only ten minutes behind timetable, Squire found Herman Fittich waiting for him in the marble gallery.

‘Well, that was all very instructive,’ the German said mildly. ‘Would you care just to take a stroll outside in the fresh air before lunch? I am keen to establish which you think was dottier, the Russian or the American.’

Squire had seen Selina Ajdini in the crowd ahead, and agreed rather reluctantly to accompany the German into the sunshine.

Outside, Fittich said, ‘As a matter of fact there is a little modest restaurant round the next corner where we could have a beer. Would you care for that?’

‘For a beer, yes. For two beers, even more.’

As they moved rapidly away from the front of the hotel, a voice called Squire’s name. He looked round.

The animal behaviourist, Carlo Morabito, was waving a rolled newspaper to attract his attention. As the two men paused, Morabito hurried up.

‘Gentlemen, excuse, please, you look like two men possibly going in search of a drink. May I join you in it?’ Sensing their hesitation, he added, ‘If it is not an intrusion – as another sufferer from all that hot talk.’

‘What didn’t you enjoy about it, may I ask?’ Fittich enquired.

‘I did not enjoy anything,’ said Morabito. ‘Most of all I did not enjoy having red wool pulled over my eyes by the first speaker.’

Fittich took his arm. ‘Come along, my dear fellow. You do need a beer.’

The restaurant was little more than a bar. It was narrow and extremely high, and tiled from floor to ceiling in tiles of a sickly green. Gigantic wine barrels stood at the back. A radio played, a Sicilian family ate at a bare clean table, talking animatedly, the adults jocularly lecturing the children, as if they had been placed there deliberately by the padrone to advertise the homely virtues of his establishment.

As soon as the three men entered, the patron emerged from behind the bar and showed them to a seat. He took their order for beer, and then asked them in German if they would like something to eat. He had some good fish, just delivered. He promised it would be delicious.

They consented. It would be better than facing their colleagues in the dining room of the Grand Hotel Marittimo.

On the tiles of the table before him, Morabito set a copy of Frankenstein a ‘la Bella Scuola’ which he had been carrying under his arm.

‘Perhaps you would be so kind to sign your work for me?’

As he scribbled his name on the title page, Squire said, ‘I like the title of the Italian translation. It has a literary reference that the English title lacks. This is still the land of Dante.’

Morabito gestured. ‘And also of Mussolini. It’s a reminder that the arts in my country still exist in a limbo.’

‘We’d say the same in the UK. Even people who regard themselves as reasonably cultivated pride themselves on disliking contemporary music or art or fiction, or all three.’

‘You say only “dislike”,’ Fittich exclaimed. ‘But let me assure you that the attitude to the arts in the Bundesrepublik is positively phobic. Arts get in the way of decent things like money-making.’ He gave them his mischievous smile. ‘It’s no good chaps from countries like Italy and Great Britain telling a German about the bad state of art. You remember, I suppose, that Hermann Goering summed up the typical German attitude to that little matter – “When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver.” Little has changed since dear Hermann’s day, believe me; nowadays we reach for our pocket calculators instead.’

The beer arrived. They sighed heavily, raised their glasses, smiled, nodded at each other, drank.

‘Gentlemen,’ Fittich said, ‘I’m glad of your company. Sometimes I feel I am the only man not believing all the lies such as our Russian friend Kchevov spoke. I’m humiliated by my silence so often. Yet if I speak, I’m kicked out. Better to hang on like a rat.’

‘“I don’t have to hold this rat in my hand,”’ Squire quoted. They all laughed.

‘You see, a curtain comes down on these matters,’ Morabito said. ‘I guess there are many delegates like me who think that the talk of that crook Kchevov was an insult, yet they will say nothing. So we conspire with the evil forces loose in the world to silence truth.’

‘Agreed,’ Squire said. ‘It’s as though an infection spreads, softening our defences. The power centred in the East paralyses people and year by year evil gains. But why are you immune, Signor Morabito?’

‘Do you want I should tell you? Because I have Jewish blood. So simple. My mother was Venetian Jewish. Italy is beset with many, many ills, not least all various kinds of silences because there are deep divisions still among our society since the war. Here in Sicily, still you hear no one speak a bad word against Mussolini. There are many fascists about. Also communists, of course. In my country, I tell you, you can be fascist, communist, Catholic, all in one person. Myself, I tell you simply, I hate them all and I fear for my country. Now is very bad times for Italy. But I talk too much.’

He bit his lips, smiled, gestured at the unavailingness of the word, drank from his glass.

Squire regarded his notepad. ‘This chap Kchevov talked about historical necessity and all that. What did you two make of d’Exiteuil’s reply? I copied part of it down. He said that utopianism should now be regarded with a rather large set of reservations because – if I understood him rightly – it had shown itself of limited historical applicability. Was he referring to Marxism and attempting, in an oblique way, to put Kchevov down? Or was he trying to say nothing as learnedly as possible?’

‘He answered to a specific point made by our Soviet colleague, I believe,’ said Fittich. ‘It was a passage about imposing superhuman values through the intervention of the state, with a hint about conquering the rest of the world, or something similarly charming, I thought.’

Morabito became excited. He had seated himself opposite Fittich and Squire, and now pointed his fingers at them almost as if about to fire six-guns. ‘No, no, such ambitions of conquest are I think out-of-date among Soviet thinking, except maybe on their Right wing. The possibility of a war with the United States is now really excluded. The West will anyhow fall of itself, as did Byzantium, in effect. China is the great enemy for the Soviets.

‘Although we could not say that Marxism-Leninism had ever a conscience, it was at least a system. But, in effect, nobody now espouses such beliefs in any country of the Eastern bloc because, as a Polish friend of mine said to me, “Nobody can remain in a communist country and be communist.” So this dead doctrine now has power only in the West, on the youth, in effect.’

The patron arrived with the first intimations of fish: cutlery, paper napkins, salt and pepper, a plate of sliced lemon. Morabito fell silent, snatching up his knife and fork as if to defend himself. He spoke again as soon as the patron turned his back.

‘Do you gentlemen know of the hatred and bigotry in the Soviet upper echelons? Can you plumb the depths? America is insane, Europe a harlot – that they believe and say. They believe that Bolshevism unites with Russian Orthodoxy to save the world against – you see I must hesitate before I must speak it – the satanic forces of World Zionism.

‘That is the new religion that will fill the empty shell of communism – a new anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism was official policy under the Czars, and soon the calendar will go back and again the Nazi Right wing will proclaim a crusade against the Jewish menace and the builders of the Judaeo-Masonic pyramid in the West. These same neo-Nazis easily combine such racism with a hatred of the Chinese, no problem.’

He tapped hard on the table with an index finger.

‘More bad things are in store for the world than ever before. At present, such things are in effect not possible while there is Brezhnev, for he can hold together the Soviet establishment and operate the bureaucracy between managerial and military pressures. When he’s gone, we see Stalinism come back – yet even Stalin was not always officially against Jews, though whenever he said the word “cosmopolitanism”, then he meant Jews.

‘In the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, “Anti-Zionism” was one excuse. Now more evil propaganda is said in the Soviets against the Jews than ever before. Hitler was only an actor, a – what’s the English word? – a strolling player in hatred against the Jewish people; soon you will see the performance lived.’

The fish was brought, and again Morabito fell silent, watching with glittering eyes as the patron heaped potatoes on his plate. As soon as the man was gone, he burst out again.

‘Do you know the name of Valery Nikolayevich Yemelyanov? Do you? A well-known lecturer to the Party on ideological matters? His claim is that the Gentile world was saved by Stalin’s purges from a Jewish putsch to take over the world. Now another conspiracy is being staged. Yemelyanov proposes a new front to stamp out every evidence of Jewish culture everywhere. The class struggle is to be replaced by a more deadly and deep one, the struggle against ethnic classes. Of course, it will give the Soviet Nazis the opportunity they need to eradicate anything or anyone opposing them. It will begin when Brezhnev goes. That will be the history of the twenty-first century, friends – a Final Solution against which Hitler is less than this piece of fish!’

He fell savagely upon the white flesh before him, as if it were the last meal he would ever eat.

The other two ate in uneasy silence, perhaps feeling that Morabito was too dramatic.

Fittich said, ‘Well, the heavens are certainly full of portents these days. Nobody can say we haven’t been warned when Chaos comes again.’

When it was clear Squire was going to make no answer, Morabito said to him challengingly, ‘Do you believe what I am telling you? Because it’s true. Here in Italy, we know – the nerves are bare too long. Much worse things are to come, believe me.’

Removing a bone from between his teeth, Squire said, ‘Let me tell you the truth, and hope you will not be insulted. I think I can believe what you say concerning Soviet policy, though counter-forces in the Kremlin of which we are unaware may see to it that anti-Semitism does not emerge as you assume at present.

‘But I can’t quite believe – though in my darker moments I perversely wish to – that things in general are getting worse. By and large the human condition – at least in Europe – is improving, particularly if you take the calamitous fourteenth century as your base-line. Or the seventeenth, come to that.’

‘You’re mincing words,’ Morabito said impatiently, thumping his signed copy of Squire’s book.

‘Well, I’m trying not to. But you are talking politically and I am forced to talk … spiritually. Spiritually, I so often feel despite everything that all is well. I don’t believe in God, and perhaps it is simply the biological organism telling me that today it is in good balance, that Ego and Self are in counterpoise – or something like that. Whatever it is, I can’t help listening to it. It’s the closest voice to me. Can you see my difficulty, Morabito? Though worried, I feel content. No offence. It’s a character limitation. Even on the day when my wife walks out and leaves me and I am truly miserable, something inside is chirruping to me, “All’s well, all’s well, and this is the best of all possible worlds.” Believe me, many and many a time – for instance when I listen to you – I feel ashamed of that idiot within.’

Tess, perhaps it’s that damned complacency in me you can’t bear. It’s attractive at a distance. It attracts women, or the sort of woman who likes contented men. Close at hand, you may find it intolerable. I’ve expected you to be content with me, my love, because I was more or less content with myself.

It’ll betray me. It has already betrayed me. I believe I’ve got – God, or whatever it is, tucked in the back of my skull. Maybe that’s what betrayed the Jews in Nazi Germany; they couldn’t credit for the life of them that the Nazis hadn’t also got God in their thick skulls …

Truth kills …?