Читать книгу The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss - Страница 18

Ermalpa, September 1978

The side street appeared unusually busy. Cream Fiats poured down it like salmon in broken water, bravely plunging into the stream of traffic choking the harbour road. Tyres squealed, brakes whined, a thin blue haze rose from the sun-battered street.

As Herman Fittich, Carlo Morabito, and Thomas Squire emerged from the bar into daylight, they paused to adjust to the noise and glare.

‘It’s the hour for lunch,’ Morabito said. ‘What you are viewing are not automobiles but foil-wrapped empty stomachs.’

There was a lot of shouting in the streets. A fat woman was calling from an upper window. Squire was mildly surprised at the activity; the northern myth that people in hot countries were lazy died hard, though it should have given its death rattle, as far as he was concerned, on his visit to Sao Paulo, the busiest city in the world, where the blazing temperatures, far from acting as a soporific, accelerated the pace of life, as a burning building accelerates the movements of those leaving it.

He glanced up at the gesticulating woman framed in her window. In the hard blue sky above the street, an intense point of light gleamed. It moved to one side, stopped, then suddenly accelerated in an arc and vanished behind the shaggy pediments of the Via Enrico Stabile.

It could have been an aircraft reflecting the sun; in which case, its power of acceleration was unthinkable. Even if it was much nearer the rooftops, it was amazingly silent and fast. And what was it?

‘I think I’ve just seen a flying saucer,’ Squire said, trying to keep his voice calm.

His two companions made a few jokes as he tried to describe what he had seen. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous – I speak in the vein of one who confesses to an idiocy …’

‘Well, it’s always an embarrassing situation to be the sole possessor of a bit of truth,’ said Fittich consolingly. ‘I remember once I saw ball lightning when I was walking in the Tyrol with a friend. We were in our chalet for the night and not drunk, when this globe about the size of a goldfish bowl entered at the open window. It was completely silent, which was eerie.’

‘So was my You-Foe,’ said Squire, glancing upwards again.

‘It did a tour of the room while we sat petrified, and eventually floated out of the window. I jumped from my bed and watched it sail down among the trees. My girl friend said we should tell no one, but I was then young and foolish in the pursuit of truth, and rashly recounted the incident to my scientific colleagues at the university. They of course assured me that ball lightning did not exist because it contravened natural laws. These days, I believe that ball lightning is quite acceptable, like much else that was once regarded as heresy.’

They walked slowly up the street. Morabito said, ‘Italians will believe anything. Sicilians especially are very superstitious people. They can believe in the Virgin Mary, UFOs, witchcraft, Marxism, fascism, and Santa Claus all in one breath.’

‘Why should there not be flying saucers?’ Fittich asked. ‘After all, if there is only one true sighting among thousands which are observation balloons or clouds or passing aircraft, then they exist. It only needs one. One’s the miraculous number. The devil only has to appear once for his existence to be verifiable.’

‘Wishes shape disbeliefs as well as beliefs, Herman. I believe I just saw a machine, a product of super-technology. A couple of centuries ago, I would have believed I saw a flying man, or a witch on a broomstick. We’re too inclined to think of the imagination as an independent function, whereas it is a function like vision, which can be controlled.’

‘You may actually have seen a product of super-technology. Why not? Believe your vision, believe your imagination. Wasn’t it your Professor Haldane who said that the universe is stranger than we imagine or than we can imagine? That’s why I enjoy science fiction as a sideline, because those chaps really try to imagine the unimaginable.’

Squire gave him a questioning look. ‘So you do believe in You-Foes?’

The German gestured. ‘I think maybe I do. But to declare it so publicly would make a further and perhaps lethal dent in my academic reputation. There are as many orthodoxies today as ever there were, and one defies them at one’s peril.’

They fell silent. As they were turning the corner into the Via Milano, Morabito said, ‘All this area by the docks was pounded flat by the British in World War II. It has all been rebuilt rather well, because of massive infusions of American dollars after the war.’

‘I remember we gave it a pounding,’ Squire said. ‘This coast commanded the convoy route to Malta and India. There were German batteries here, and landing fields for Stuka squadrons. We blasted the whole place.’

‘It certainly was a rather lively time, during the career of our mutual friend Adolf,’ Fittich remarked.

He walked at a steady pace, his hands hanging by his sides. Morabito walked rapidly, throwing his shoulders in front of him as his gaze darted from one side to the other. As they came within the shade of the Grand Hotel, he flung a furtive glance upwards.

‘At least whatever you saw did not drop any bombs,’ he said.

On the marble steps which divided the inner part of the foyer from the outer stood Frank Krawstadt, smoking and pacing nervously.

‘There’s my colleague,’ said Fittich. ‘He’s not a bad chap, despite his politics, and I must give a little moral support. He’s our next speaker.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ Squire said. They smiled and nodded at each other.

Jacques d’Exiteuil came up beaming with Selina Ajdini and two of his fellow-countrymen. He clapped Squire on the back. ‘How are you, Tom? You didn’t have lunch? A walk on the sea front? Isn’t everything going so well?’

‘I was just telling Mr Squire how all this area of Ermalpa was pulverized by the British during the war,’ Morabito said.

‘Ah, the British were doing brave things then, while France was under a cloud of shame,’ d’Exiteuil remarked cheerfully, shaking his copper-coloured head. ‘You were all Churchills then, Tom, isn’t it? I still see a bit of Churchill in you, for instance when you tried to cut short our Russian friend this morning. And at breakfast with poor Camaion – who by the way has much of interest to impart about new restlessness among intellectuals in Bucharest.’

Ajdini said brightly, ‘Churchill embodies – in his body, I mean – much that we think of as positive British virtues. Sturdy independence, good vowel sounds, etcetera, etcetera.’

She looked very trim; d’Exiteuil was keeping close to her. The blue spectacles had been removed, so that her blue eyes were unimpeded; at their corners were lines Squire had not noticed earlier. She gazed at Squire in a friendly yet impudent way, as the astute mind behind them speculated on the world. That enquiring look, the uncluttered countenance, the thinly smiling lips, gave a meaning to the ritual of the conference.

‘Did you enjoy Comrade Kchevov’s talk this morning, Miss Ajdini?’ Squire asked, moving fractionally closer to her and clutching his lapels so that his knuckles almost grazed the front of her blouse.

She nodded, and the heavy shoulder bag swung in Squire’s direction. ‘There was a positive contribution of Marxist science against the philosophizing of Sigmund Freud and his followers. I happen to agree entirely that we are incomplete and cannot make any contribution to society, even a political one, without imagination. Granting that, the miraculous can occur. Of course, it was formulated in a rather unorthodox way. I was reminded of Gurdjieff, both in the mixture of practicality and foxy divination and in “the objective of producing an interesting and beautiful object”.’

He marvelled. Even whilst distressing him by her appreciation of the rubbish Kchevov had talked, she was quoting a statement by Gurdjieff which he had appended as motto to his book and used in his speech.

‘The miraculous does occur,’ he said. ‘Nor need we go in search of it. Sometimes it comes in search of us. As an example which springs readily to mind, I have just seen a You-Foe over Ermalpa.’

The Frenchmen laughed heartily. One said, ‘I do not think that Sir Winston Churchill would commend himself to such miracles.’

Ajdini was also laughing, perhaps merely at the unexpectedness of his remark. ‘You must say we are officially in search here of the miraculous. What we want is a sign, like the early Christians. And it has been – what is that biblical word? – vouchsafed to you.’

Again subtle flattery, not unmixed with subtle mockery? He said, ‘Perhaps we can discuss the religious implications when we meet tonight for dinner, if you still remember our arrangement. I’d prefer the miraculous in some other guise.’

In his room, he opened up the slats of his jalousie, allowing a little light to stripe the gloom. He intended to do some yoga, but the beer in the café had made him drowsy. Stripping down to his underpants, he sat on the side of the bed and began to make a few notes. Presently, he lay back and fell asleep.

The afternoon session began only five minutes behind time. Gianni Frenza introduced Krawstadt briefly and Krawstadt rose, looking nervous. The female voice of the interpreter on Channel Three delivered her version of his paper, which was entitled ‘Pinball Machines: Sublimated Coin Warfare’.

‘So far at this date, the SPA organization and also Intergraphic Studies magazine have shown severe neglect of a glaring and coloured example of a commercial form of machine-and-art in a combination. It is a pinball table, familiar to all of us. A cult of functionality. Its object is to transfix with emotion a person who will then surrender money for no reward at all. Thus the pintable makes an epitome of capitalist economy in its late stage and will be valued to future students when they come to study this aspect of Americanized and so-called cosmopolitan culture from the early angers of the twentieth century.’

Here Krawstadt cleared his throat and looked furtively about at the audience, as if to check that it had not disappeared. From a distance, he resembled a healthy young man, his slender figure lending strength to the illusion. Closer inspection revealed that his slenderness was the gauntness of ageing. There was a strong frosting of grey among the yellow hairs of his beard, a bald pate gave his head an eroded appearance; even the red of his cheeks was no sign of health but the pitting and inflammation of a long-term psoriasis.

‘… I am a professor in residence of popular culture. I have some various degrees. Thus I am curator of the newly established Pinball Research Museum at Gottingzell University in Western Germany. There we have an investiture of over five hundred machines – which are being got in working arrangement by mechanics – representing battery-operated and presolenoid models even as far back as 1930 to the present day. Here we see a principle often operative, where an artifact purely of commerce becomes through such market factors as scarcity into a realm of connoisseurship, that is the province of the art historian and exponent of the lives of the people.

‘Only during the slump, which is a feature of capitalist economy in gearing the society towards mass-military enterprises, can this little gaudy trap developed from the French bagatelle be born.

‘One way of saying it is that this pinball table is an article of commercial exploitation which nowadays contains two elements in bright colours, namely the what we call the Playfield and the Backflash. Usually, the Backflash will have on it a moving score where often vast figures without meaning are available – obtainable to the participant. The Playfield may have such devices as Thumper Bumpers, Roll-About Buttons, Flippers, etc., all brought into action by a plunger which will propel balls precipitated by the insertion of a coin.’

This could go on for ever. Perhaps there is a law about rubbish going on for ever.

It’s up to me to behave myself. It was stupid to speak to Camaion as I did at breakfast. Everyone’s perfectly friendly and agreeable.

Old Fittich producing that photograph of Tess as he did has upset me. When he took the shot, I must have been in retreat in the Travellers’ Club. Matilda Rowlinson was looking after the house. What was Tess doing there that day? And with that little bugger Jarvis. I could kill him.

When I get back to London next week, I’ll have to do something decisive; everything is going downhill fast. In the old days I’d have taken up my gun and settled the problems that way.

Churchill … Do they think they’re flattering me? At least the old man had plenty of guts and the ability to take decisions. They weren’t always the wrong decisions, either.

‘Backflash and Playfield are united in a theme. Like a bright-coloured flower seeking to attract insects, the manufacturers create many scenes of pop art, drawing for subject-matter upon all types of the decadence of their culture. Most manufacturers are Jewish and based in Chicago. Such scenes may be of rock and roll music, negro musicians, hillbillies, teenage sexuality, railroads, space antics, or many science-fantasy scenes such as time-travel, robots, and future warfare. Also gambling, the turf, pool, baseball, or film stars and of course the exploitation of female figures (as in Gottlieb’s Majorettes), and funny animals, children of a Walt Disney style, and all other races, in heavy ethnic humour of a Judaic kind.

‘Whatever degrades, it will do.

‘Also some mythology of an auto-mechanistic kind, designed to attract perhaps those sectors of the populace believing in astrology. An example is from the firm of Bally, called Fireball, where a demonic figure in red encourages extravagance, and such imaginary old gods as Wotan and Odin may be released to flash up giant scores via mushroom bumpers, which signify a mushroom nuclear attack of favourite militaristic thinking. This table has a big reputation, and may once be regarded as a classic masterpiece of the 1970s comparable with, say, a landscape by Maxfield Parrish.

‘Internally, these machines are elaborate. Its circuits and subassemblies are very elaborate, resembling the kind of thing in a Saturn rocket. This technology is a different sort of war game, aimed at nothing less than enslavement of the masses when they escape from their work of the day. We appreciate their beauty as of that of the deadly pitcher plant or rafflesia. They are worthy of a serious study as metafiction or socio-economic artform.’

Krawstadt continued. Manufacturers’ names punctuated his talk like a roll call of the illustrious dead. Burrows Automatics, Hardings, Rock-Ola, Gottlieb, Genco, Bally, Williams, Chicago Coin. The Hall was silent, the delegates slumped back in their chairs or sprawled forward over the green baize. Some smoked cigarettes, taking a long while over the gestures of flipping the box, tamping the tobacco, flicking the lighter into action, performing the first inhalation; others doodled with frowning concentration. Some stared at the speaker, some at the ceiling, some into a mysterious beyond.

The paper concluded with Krawstadt pointing out that growing political awareness would perceive that pinball machines were analogues of the capitalist system in decline. Beneath a bright veneer of religion or mythology or sex was merely a cold solenoid-operated system set up by cosmopolitan forces against which no one could win, designed to keep the working classes enslaved.

When Frenza called for questions, Albert Russell Cantania stood up. This representative of the USA was still in his twenties; his book Form Behind Formula had already made him powerful in academic circles. He was compactly built, with a lock of hair that drooped over his tanned face. He brushed the hair from his forehead as he started to speak.

‘I guess our colleague Krawstadt who has just spoken knows his subject pretty well. Maybe he even has a connoisseur’s love of pinball. But I wondered during the time he was talking if he ever got round to slipping a quarter into one of those machines and playing, just for the hell of it. Maybe his politics wouldn’t let him, the way puritan morality stops a lot of other killjoys from playing.’

There was a stir in the conference chamber. Those sprawling tended to sit up, those sitting up to sprawl.

‘In my time, I’ve played a lot of pinball, the way I’ve played a lot of poker. I must have dropped a whole lot of dollars on pinball, like I have on poker. More on poker. But there is one factor our colleague neglected to mention. You play voluntarily, because you want to play. There’s no state or federal law saying a man has to play pinball; no one sticks a gun in your back. Another factor, okay, you put a coin in, but you get enjoyment in return. Why not mention enjoyment? Enjoyment is what you get out of pinball machines.

‘Pinball machines need skill, they need a quick eye. Exercise of skill and speed yields enjoyment. There’s no law against enjoyment either, not where I come from.

‘All this talk of exploitation is crazy. You want something, you pay for it; you don’t want it, you don’t pay. That principle is so basic, and goes back so far beyond the Neolithic revolution in agriculture, that it has nothing to do with politics or morals. I’d say it was a law of nature, human nature. You want a stalk of corn to grow, you plant a seed. No seed, no corn. Everyone ought to get that clear in their heads.

‘I mentioned the pinball-table industry in my book, Form Behind Formula. I said then and I’ll say it again now that pinballs obey the law of supply and demand which drives a vast entertainment industry. Look, pinballs are like a pop song or a paperback novel or a movie or a TV programme – anything to which the general public has easy access. Nobody will ever subsidize them the way opera is subsidized, so they depend purely on popular appeal. That’s the basic fact of life – satisfy the public. Happily, in a democracy, there’s a big diverse public which gives a lot of artists a living. Some are better than others, some more limited in appeal, some succeed by fulfilling formulas, some by subtly breaking them.

‘Same with pinball machines. Let me ask Mr Krawstadt why he thinks Bally and Chicago Coin and the others go on turning out so many models if the whole operation is just a big con foisted on the public? Why isn’t there just one standard model which goes on for ever, or maybe gives you an extract from one of Lenin’s longer speeches if you put your quarter in?

‘The answer, the simple answer, is that people like playing pinball, they enjoy it, and they demand variety. They like their playtables and backflashes big and bright and brassy. They play while consuming a beer, and in a capitalist society they generally have a spare dollar in their pocket they can lay out on entertainment.

‘One further point before I sit down. As I understand it, we are here to further the objectives of the Society for Popular Aesthetics – with which I heartily concur, by the way – in raising the cultural estimation of mass art, or future culture, or whatever you want to call it. The sort of attitude we are fighting against is the elitist one which declares that a best-selling paperback is ipso facto lousy, a song millions sing is ipso facto lousy, a movie that turns a profit is ipso facto lousy. The corollary of that attitude says that the novel scarcely anyone reads, the song nobody wants to sing, the movie people stay away from in droves, has to have something special which makes it real art. We fight such pernicious attitudes.

‘How is it any different for Krawstadt or whoever to point to all these enjoyable things and say they are merely market devices to put the boot in on the proletariat? All this Leftist crap we’re getting handed is just as damned much an enemy of enjoyment as the old structure of aesthetics we’re trying to kick out. For God’s sake, leave politics out of this and get to proper scholarship, proper appreciation. Else we’ll make ourselves a laughing stock.’

He sat down.

Gianni Frenza, who had been conferring in whispers with d’Exiteuil, leant towards the microphone and was interpreted as saying, ‘Well, there we have from Dr Cantania an enjoyable expression of typical hard-hitting. Who will like to reply to him?’

Carlo Morabito immediately rose, folding his arms tightly across his chest.

‘I will speak in my English and can be translated. I like just to make complaint about the racialist streak in the paper of Dr Krawstadt. When he speaks of cosmopolitanism, he is speaking secretly of the Jews. The whole paper is of course a veiled attack on Jews, against which communist nations have always been hostile, with the honourable exception of maybe Yugoslavia. Delegates should be aware when they are getting poison.’

He sat down again.

‘Perhaps Herr Krawstadt would care to amplify after such remarks,’ Frenza’s interpreter said.

Krawstadt rose, scratching his chin and lower lip.

‘These interjections are to cause a confusion in the advisement I need from other delegates. This is a new field, and, as with popular arts, sociology is combined with it. I hear in my ear the familiar cry of the Right that their political beliefs are not political at all but a part of nature. But if I look at a privileged gentlemen’s park in America or England or my own country, what’s there is for me not just vegetables but I see the exploitive system of privilege behind it. Viewpoints are entirely different.

‘With the pinball, the same applies. How is it like a paperback or an LP? It waits brightly painted for when a man is a bit drunk to take his money, like a prostitute. Is prostitution also part of American “entertainments industry” also? At least in the socialist countries prostitution and exploitation of women is abolished, and the sport and games is free of betting and gambling. Pinball is gambling without sport.

‘One thing I agree with the other speaker. Let’s leave out the politics and get proper scholarship.’

He sat down, to nods of approval round the table.

Squire rose.

‘Just a point of fact. Two points. First, prostitution may be ruthlessly repressed, like so much else in socialist countries, yet it still exists. I have been solicited by prostitutes myself in the heart of Moscow. To that I have little or no objection; I’m a big boy; my objection is to being told afterwards that I was not solicited. It is that sort of barefaced lie, among other things, which gives communism such a bad name. The end justifies the means always, doesn’t it?

‘Then that bit about sport. Directly Moscow was chosen as the site of the Olympic Games in 1980, all residential and what we in the West would call private building was halted. The whole ramshackle building industry was forced to work on the stadia and accommodation for the Olympics.

‘If you were having a dacha built – no matter in whatsoever state of completion you were left, the builders walked off one morning and left you standing there. Thus the rulers of the country drop the Muscovites in a condition of discomfort or misery to suit their political ends. Don’t tell me there are no politics in sport or art except what is introduced by the Right. It’s another totalitarian lie.’

He sat down. From the seat next to him, d’Exiteuil rose, smiling down on Squire as he said in English, ‘Well, a display of Churchillian fireworks from Tom Squire, as we might expect, and the oratory of his usual high standard – the voice of the man who made “Frankenstein Among the Arts”. It is a pleasure on which we can congratulate ourselves that our associations and this conference in particular can accommodate such extreme conservatism as Squire’s and Professor Cantania’s along with more sociologically oriented items. However, the Olympic Games have little to do with pintables, on which subject Herr Krawstadt contributed much to our enlightenment, and so I suggest we move on to the next paper.

‘We must not exercise our prejudices, we must conquer them. I believe with the philosopher Mary Warnock that imagination is important here, and must be applied to our field of study. If we could come to a greater understanding of imagination – which may as likely come through pintables as through anything else – then we should understand a great deal more than we do about prejudice, perception, and such values as aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps we’ll invite contributions on the subject of imagination to Intergraphic Studies. Thank you.’

The next paper, on the typography of cartography, passed peacefully, although there was a marked increase in small activities during it, both among the delegates round the table and in the spectators sitting in the gallery at the far end. Indeed, the gallery gradually became crowded, as if by some magical form of communication ordinary passers-by in the street had heard that a political argument was brewing and had come in to see for themselves what was happening. After sitting restlessly for a while, some of them departed, finding that the subject under discussion was totally innocuous; yet still the gallery filled as others took their place. Most visitors looked like students. Among them were some attractive young girls, who regarded the spectacle provided with complete assurance. Many of them gazed at Selina Ajdini thoughtfully for a while.

Ajdini was one of the stillest delegates, although she smoked continuously throughout the meeting. The other delegates shuffled in their places, made eye-signals, took notes, tapped at their headphones, drank mineral water, at a greater rate than was usual.

When the afternoon session was over, Squire rose to go, only to be detained by Vasili Rugorsky, who placed a hand on his arm.

‘Mr Squire, I have great interest in what you say. Like you, I felt no patience with the dogmatic stance of the man from the Bundesrepublik. Can we have a brief chat, do you think?’

‘Of course. Can I buy you a coffee?’

‘That would be kind.’ The massive head nodded. ‘In my country, I would buy you a coffee, but you know that when we travel abroad we have to go penniless for the good of our souls.’ He smiled his sidelong smile at Squire. As they walked through the passage, Cantania came up and slapped Squire on the shoulder.

‘Not that I needed support, but thanks anyway for providing additional firepower.’

‘I wasn’t going to let your objection stand alone. All the same, I wish I’d kept my trap shut. It’s not the first time I have been out of step today.’

‘Keep it that way. What have you to fear? Except now Rugorsky’s going to tell you one more time they stopped prostitution in Moscow. Was she any beauty, by the way, the one who tried to pick you up?’

When Cantania had gone, Rugorsky said quietly, ‘I was not going to give you a lecture on prostitution.’

He fell into a frowning silence which Squire did not interrupt. The Russian had intensity of bearing which, coupled with the effort it afforded him to speak English, lent weight even to his silences. He moved through the crowds in the corridors with an impassive step, never impolitely, but never allowing himself to be deflected. Squire walked beside him without feeling it necessary to speak.

‘You see, the papers are quite entertaining if you listen properly,’ said Rugorsky at last. ‘Even when they are of themselves boring or trivial or totally mistaken. In a way, you see, they are what Hamlet said of the players, they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of our time. We must use them as we may.’

‘As you say, we get out of it what we can. Corporately, these men have a deal of power in academic life; by what is decided here, they can make or ruin reputations. The interest behind the boredom is that we are each of us on trial. The other apposite remark Hamlet made about the players was that it’s better to have a bad epitaph after you’re dead than their ill report while you live.’

Rugorsky said ‘Excuse, please,’ to one of the slender Italians who came forward with a beaming smile and ploughed by him in the direction of the bar. He took no notice of what Squire had just said. Either he had not fully heard and understood, or he was pursuing his own line of thought.

‘Let us return to the subject of prostitution,’ he said suddenly, applying a sly grin over his shoulder at Squire. ‘You see, you were not in such a perfect socialist state as China, which the West thinks so very well of just now.

‘Maybe you don’t need a lecture on why we in Russia feel it necessary to pretend we have vanquished such long-standing social problems. It is a genuine dilemma that we are a new post-revolutionary society and we feel ourselves vulnerable to both the bad examples and the warlike ambitions of the West. To admit that there is a prostitution problem is to open the door to a whole range of evils to which we do not yet feel ourselves strong enough to confess. Do you understand?’

‘I’m quite sympathetic to that argument, which I’ve heard before. But isn’t it more the case that there is no one secure enough, no one with enough moral standing, who can even admit that prostitution exists?’

Rugorsky frowned. He removed an aged brown handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose vigorously. ‘Perhaps we should try not to talk morals to each other. You see, frankly, though I see much to admire in the West, in the way of outspokenness, for instance, which we in Russia cannot yet achieve, nevertheless I see what a moral mess you live in. You no doubt see it too.

‘I think that Russian society is superior. Not in its rulers, absolutely not – I think worse of them than you do because I have the peculiar advantage of having known them all my life – but in the people.’

‘Isn’t belief in the morality of “the people”, whoever they are, always sentimental at bottom?’

Still pressing forward, Rugorsky ignored the comment.

‘You see, these pinball tables – well, we can easily classify and even appreciate to some extent their garish colours, much like the products of fairgrounds and circus, but the truth is that they are wretched traps to make the already miserable more miserable, and their wives also. They are the products of a society in poor health. Krawstadt spoiled truth by doctrinaire phraseology.’

The bar was crowded with thirsty delegates, but Squire and Rugorsky managed to push through to a table for two at the back of the room. In no time, one of the efficient waiters was by their side, and two cappuccinos were ordered.

‘I don’t wish to talk about pinball tables. It is trivia.’

‘Possibly so. Yet everyone round the conference table, you included, has been stirred up by them. Maybe they are important. The SPA should consider the matter.’

Rugorsky regarded him steadily. ‘You see, you are quite a clever man. Also, I think, an honest one as far as you can be. But you have had things too much your own way. You do not know real adversity. Maybe you know nothing about the way society operates. When I come to the West, I feel genuine envy and genuine pity, both at once. That’s what I felt for you when I first met you, in front of “Hugh Gaitskell”, with your delightful wife in her expensive dress. But you don’t know where to look for truth. You’re a good man lost, Tom.

‘Don’t get angry. I don’t mean offence. Only the truth. If you’re angry, reflect that the poor old dog before you drinks coffee he could not afford, and in any case will go back to his terrible communist country soon.

‘I mean to tell you another difference between us. I greatly care that the West and particularly your country, the country of Shakespeare and liberal thought, is suffering such ills. You do not care what my country suffers. You are hostile to it. Yes. There is your real resemblance to Winston Churchill, as d’Exiteuil said. You gloat secretly that we suffer because our leaders are bad, because we are communists. That’s what you fear, communism, as your ancestors probably feared the Inquisition.

‘You spoke of the difficulties with building in Moscow for the Olympic Games. Well, you have a grasp on such a little bit of truth that it turns to lies in your mouth. Why do we have to have these confounded Olympic Games in the first place, do you think? It’s to show our progressiveness to our own people, so that they are not discouraged. It’s to show the capitalist world that we also can stage-manage the big events, because we are perpetually on the defensive against you. There is no other way in which we can manage except by concentrating all our building potential. The potential is so small that we must as usual make sacrifices – and you’re glad. When all’s said, we’re still a poor country and life for most is hard – and you’re glad.’ His thick eyelashes came down as he stared at the table.

The coffee arrived.

Looking down at his cup, Squire said, ‘My dear Rugorsky, how can I answer all the arguments you put forward? Perhaps the fundamental error you make – forgive me if I speak out as you encourage me to – lies in making such great distinction between your rulers and your ruled. One hopelessly bad, one hopelessly good. That’s unreal – and isn’t it a very Russian error of thought? Are not your rulers of the people, and have people not conspired to be badly ruled? You threw out the Romanovs, if I remember rightly.

‘Every country gets the rulers it deserves. I say that knowing how England has a mediocre team at present. But our system which communists and persons of ill-will seek constantly to undermine, at least allows a chance of changing the team peaceably. Your system is designed to give the people no such chance. So you have a self-perpetuating autarchy, which condones and often perpetuates the crimes of Stalin and his henchmen.

‘And if you are a poor country after half a century of Marxism, then it’s Marxism and the system it has created which is to blame. Quite simple.’

‘No, you see, reality is not so simple.’ Rugorsky lifted his cup and placed it to his thick lips, whilst fixing Squire with glittering eyes. ‘To give an instance, I did not put forward so many arguments when I spoke; you only say I did. Then you grasped the point of major antagonism, building up explosively the area I tried to defuse, trying to imply I am a member of a criminal nation. You long for a confrontation, I believe. You are fierce.’

Squire said impatiently, ‘No, I’m only too bloody polite. Quite honestly, if the USSR’s as poor as you say, it is because of the barbarous killing off of the kulaks, and the miserable consequences of the enforced collectivization of agriculture. I listen patiently, but really – a system so criminal and repressive can earn nothing but poverty.’

The Russian inclined his head in a submissive gesture.

‘Perhaps you think of my country as one big lock-up, as Solzhenitsyn wants you to do. But I must tell you, you meet many good fellows in a prison, you know. Some may even become your friends and spiritual leaders. So I take the liberty to tell you once more, whilst all the while drinking your coffee, that I care much more about your country than you do about mine. I love England, you see – that’s my weakness.

‘If you really wish to help people in Russia who work for happier times, then you must do so quietly. You must not make inflammatory speeches, even when idiots like Krawstadt open their mouths so widely.’

The coffee was good. Squire drained his cup and sighed.

‘So far, I have kept silent in public. But most of the speakers give vent to a Marxist bias. I was provoked, let’s say. How does my keeping quiet further the cause of enlightenment in the Soviet Union?’

‘Because …’ Rugorsky tapped a plump finger on the table top. ‘Because it is important that these international gatherings take place. Otherwise, we all get locked up in our own countries. If it is reported that there is political dissension, or if the political system of my country is insulted in public, then we shall not be allowed to leave home again. This is what d’Exiteuil understands. I believe he’s a sensible man.

‘There’s also the personal aspect. If I and Kchevov are involved in trouble, it will be interpreted at home as loss of face. We shall not be allowed again in the West, or maybe even in other socialist countries. I can only live, I tell you frankly, by breathing decadent capitalist oxygen at least once in the year. Perhaps you do understand these things a little, I think. You also travel.’

Looking him in the eye, Squire said, ‘You’re a charmer, Rugorsky, but I know and you know that you are trying to have it both ways. You admit or pretend you find your own country unbearable, yet you lecture me on the faults of mine.’

‘Why not?’ The Russian finished his coffee and regarded the bottom of the cup with an amused expression of regret. ‘If you can’t stand your own wife any more, it doesn’t stop you seeing faults in other men’s wives. Well … perhaps it does. That’s not a good analogy I chose.’ They laughed together.

They had both been aware that a tide of people was carrying Jacques d’Exiteuil towards their corner. The ever-active conference chairman was talking to two other candidates, patting another on the back, squeezing Maria Frenza’s hand, and grinning at Rugorsky and Squire as he approached. His coppery hair and thin features reminded Squire – not for the first time – of a Beerbohm cartoon of the poet Swinburne.

‘We will talk more, Thomas,’ Rugorsky said quickly, heaving his shoulders forward, so that he leaned across the table almost as if to embrace Squire. ‘But not in front of Frenchmen, who are too subtle for simple Russian and English men.’

D’Exiteuil put his arm round Maria Frenza’s narrow shoulders and pushed her forward so that she and he together blocked away the table at which Squire and Rugorsky sat from the rest of the crowd. His smile was even broader than before.

‘Well, well, well, here in Ermalpa we have really a united nations! After the heat round the conference table, here is Winston Churchill sitting down with—’ D’Exiteuil paused for a moment, almost as if he had been going to make an unfortunate comparison. Then he added, ‘The Russian bear.’

Rugorsky fixed his glittering eyes on Signora Frenza and reached for her hand. ‘Is Madame Frenza also pleased with me because I am being good and not squeezing people to death?’

The question was translated into Italian, and Maria Frenza replied that she understood the hug of the bear to be very enjoyable if one was a lady bear.

This made Rugorsky laugh. He threw his head downwards rather than upwards to laugh, so that his mirth was directed towards the empty coffee cup. Then, with a dextrous movement surprising in one so heavy, he grasped Maria Frenza round the waist and had her sitting on his knee the next moment. He buried his snout in her crop of dark tawny hair.

‘You see, I promote you to be a lady bear, with full territorial privileges!’

She laughed politely, making the best of it.

D’Exiteuil dithered a bit, nodding his head from side to side and playing his fingers on the table top. ‘I’m sorry I have no lady to offer you,’ he said to Squire.

‘I’m content, though I’d also enjoy getting my arm round that slinky waist. Perhaps I see politics in everything these days, Jacques, but here before our eyes is a lampoon on statesmanship in the manner of Gillray. You will have to stand in for, say, Harry Truman. Rugorsky and I are Stalin and Churchill, at the conference table at Potsdam. Maria is Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany. You have allowed the bear to grab Maria. See how warmly it embraces her – and how she cannot help responding because she was born that way …’ James Gillray’s pen depicts a crowded cartoon scene. Bright colours and fountains of words issuing from every mouth add to the congestion.

Four principal characters are grouped about a table, which has been laid for a feast and is partly covered by maps and bodies. The scene is a butcher’s shop. Carcasses hang from hooks at the rear of the shop, labelled ‘Jews’, ‘Gypsies’, ‘Finns’, ‘Serbs’, ‘Indians’, and so on. Blue-and-white striped aprons hang by the door, which sports the name of the firm, ‘The Big Three, Pork Butchers and Slaughterers, Potsdam.’

Winston Churchill sits on the left of the picture. He is depicted as a grotesque drunken baby, his eyes small and pig-like, a filthy cigar shaped like a factory chimney causing smoke to pour from his mouth and ears. The cigar is labelled ‘British Miners’. The ashen countenances of miners are visible in the wreaths of smoke which coil above Churchill’s cap.

The British warlord wears an absurd ill-fitting uniform which bulges over his massive belly. His posterior is covered by a great baby-napkin, made from Union Jacks, and bulging with excreta, some of which, labelled ‘Dominions’, oozes from the folds of the napkin to the floor. The boots on his feet are tanks. His face is red and mottled with greed as he stretches over the table to grasp at a portion of Signora Frenza.

The signora is firmly within the grasp of the great Russian bear. The bear is massive and hairy, and dominates the whole right-hand side of the cartoon. It has Stalin’s features: his stiff upstanding scalp hair, his full moustache, his heavy features and brown eyes, his foul pipe. Blood drips from the pipe, while from its pungent smoke, coiling above the head of the animal generalissimo, emerge wan faces of his victims, labelled ‘Intellectuals’, ‘Peasants’, ‘Engineers’, ‘Soldiers’, and so on. He does not sit on a throne, like Churchill, but on a model of the Kremlin, from the windows of which Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Bucharin, and others peer hopelessly.

The bear wears on its upper portions a white tunic, buttoned to the throat and decorated with many medals. Covering its lower portions are military trousers, the flies of which have burst open to reveal – thrusting from amid black fur – a penis of terrifying proportions, the head of which is an ICBM. The bear is about to plunge this weapon into the vagina of Maria Frenza, which has opened in a silent scream. Hence the title of the print, appended in Gillray’s rapid lettering below the picture, ‘Love and Peace Prevail again in Europe, 1946’.

Maria Frenza is labelled ‘The Eastern Territories’. Dragged across the table towards the terrible embrace, skirts in disarray, she creates a diagonal across the picture. Various parts of her anatomy, tastily displayed, are labelled from north to south. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, forming her three breasts, burst from an iron corsage. Poland forms her shoulders and arms, Czechoslovakia her trunk, Hungary her hips, Romania her lower abdomen, the protruding delta of the Danube forming the pudendum threatened by the bear’s weaponry, and Bulgaria her plump legs and knees.

Pouncing to rescue her across the table – on which carcasses of a revolting feast remain – Churchill has grasped a plump portion of the woman’s anatomy exposed by the disorder of her shift, her left buttock, labelled ‘Yugoslavia’. Under his grasp, it has broken away from the rest of the body. Trieste is revealed as a rosy anus.

Other extraordinary figures are present in the butcher’s shop. The emaciated corpse of Adolf Hitler lies under the table, where a cur labelled ‘History’ is gnawing its ribs. A little Emperor Hirohito, with an admiral’s hat and a monkey’s face, swings from a billowing red velvet curtain. Behind Churchill, wearing a lounge suit from the pockets of which money leaks, crowned by an oversize version of the hat named after him, is a cadaverous Anthony Eden. Behind Stalin, green of face, wearing pince-nez, is an enormous Beria, carrying an axe-and-sickle; next to him, slant-eyed, small, with the hindquarters of a jackal, Molotov fawns about his master’s chair.

More shadowy figures lurk at the sides of the print. A ragged and unshaven Italy holds out its paw in a beggarly gesture. General de Gaulle sticks his enormous nose through a potted aspidistra to watch the proceedings unobserved. Franco looks on, chuckling. Various generals surge from behind the plush curtain: Marshal Zhukov, General Eisenhower, and General Montgomery are particularly prominent, all rattling weapons at each other.

But the most outstanding figure is the one holding the middle of the stage and standing behind the table between Churchill and Stalin. Although it wears two-tone shoes, a polka-dot bow tie, and a jaunty cap, it is a robot. Its eyes whirl and glaze, steam issues from its nostrils, in its mighty lower jaw stainless steel teeth champ. Its body is formed from turbo-generators, cooling pipes, and printed circuitry. Round its neck is a label reading ‘President Truman, Made in Missouri, USA’. Secretary of State Byrnes, evidently carved out of wood and clad only in the American flag, squats on the robot’s right shoulder.

Truman is saying: ‘We Won the War! To perdition with these Little Countries! We’ll rid the world of the spectre of British Imperialism and then we’ll put the Old World to rights with our Yankee Ingenuity. Stalin’s an honest man, let him have his fun and then we’ll get him when he’s exhausted!’

Stalin is saying: ‘We Won the War! Now to Win the Peace! These two hyenas, Churchill and Truman, secretly love me (and so I can deceive them) because I have complete power while they have to be elected. One’s senile, one’s bloodless – I keep young with bloodbaths every night!’

Churchill says: ‘We Won the War! Stalin is such a Nice Man and I hope he likes me, but these Yankees don’t see that we have to stamp out Communism now or else we shall all have to bend to that dreadful Weapon. I wish Adolf was alive and on my side. Adolf knew What was What!’

The Eastern Territories cry: ‘Oh my Goodness! Oh No, oh Yes! What’s a poor girl to do? As if the Huns weren’t randy enough! We planted the seeds of Socialism long ago – now they’re coming to Coition!’

Zhukov is saying: ‘Go on, Joe, give her a stiff bit of Dialectic!’

Montgomery is saying: ‘If only Eisenhower and Patton had seen sense, Prague, Berlin, and Vienna would have been completely in our hands and the Russians nowhere.’

Eisenhower is saying: ‘Pity the Limeys would not take orders. Now the war has unfortunately finished, we’ll have to teach them to toe the line through trade. I hope they make me President.’

Byrnes is saying: ‘If only the robot would make some more atomic bombs, we could teach the Bear a few manners. After all, this is a Thanksgiving dinner!’

Eden is saying: ‘If this drunken old fool Winston plays his cards right, Russia and America will go to War with each other, and the World will be safe for the British Upper Classes again!’

Mussolini (hanging upside down from one of the butcher’s pegs with his throat cut) is saying: ‘I’m glad I’m out of it! Things are just beginning to get rough!’

Two little girls, daintily dressed in white muslin, both wearing white gloves and clutching parasols, are examining the Gillray cartoon. One of them, perhaps an elder sister, is explaining the meaning of the allegory to the smaller child.

The smaller child, looking up trustingly with a sweet smile, says, ‘I see, so the three nasty men are changing the Course of History, is that right?’

‘That is correct, dear,’ says the older child, smiling in her turn. ‘Which proves incidentally that the load of obsolete rubbish sometimes referred to by brainwashed imbeciles of the Left as “Marxist Science” is no more of a science than astrology, because they pretend that individuals cannot influence the tide of history.’

‘Oh dear, I’m afraid that I am such a silly,’ sighs the smaller child, prettily. ‘Cos I thought that astrology was a science. Perhaps I’m guilty of Left Wing sympathies. Anyhow, I think I understand the picture quite well now. Only—’

‘Well, dear? Only what?’

‘Why does it all have to be so nasty?’ She opens her eyes wide in a winning way, causing dimples to form in her cheeks.

‘It’s about bloody power, isn’t it? And power is nasty, isn’t it? Cos someone always gets hurt, don’t they?’ She reinforces the lesson by swinging her parasol savagely against the younger child’s head, until the muslin is stained red and the little smiling face no longer recognizable. Blood covers children and cartoon alike.