The High Place (6 page)

She claimed—and I daresay it was true—that through the centuries while the Cantemirs protected their rich and inacces­sible corner from rival emperors a special relationship had
grown up between them and the powerless. She admitted that their sense of duty was exceptional, but it had been a rare land­lord, she insisted, who was as unimaginative as the State.

Clarity, the precise image of what she wanted to destroy, came to her when the Russians killed her parents. That was in 1940 when they annexed the Bukovina. They told her with quite convincing
politeness and regret, that the death sentence was an economic necessity; they expected that she would sym­pathize when she came to understand their ideals.

Then she escaped to Germany. She didn’t like the Nazis any better, but she had money in Berlin. Her father and his friends, who had been forced to exchange wealth with responsibilities for
still greater wealth with none, had investments from Norway to the Argentine.

‘We blame the aristocrats for all they never thought of doing,’ she said, ‘but at least they were the only true internationalists Europe has ever known.’

Some of them had so loathed the German purpose that they had been ready to give their lives for Europe. They did. She poured scorn on their gallant, indiscreet conspiracy. She didn’t think
that they had deceived the Gestapo for a month.

‘I wanted to die then. Just wanting to is a sort of surrender, Eric, the nearest I ever came to rest. But they never gave me a chance to die. The commandant of the place asked me if it
wasn’t quite easy. He would never be present at interrogations. He lived in a lovely Wagner world of heroism. Really I had to explain to him that they didn’t put naked swords at my
throat. That commandant, my dear, he stands for them all—all the men of decent upbringing and instincts who daren’t disobey.’

She said that the British were just the same. What mattered to them was her record on paper. Our people had smothered her under the softness of if onlys. If only she had been a Jew­ess, they
said; if only she hadn’t been released before their army arrived; if only she had worked with an allied underground; why then, she would be free to go where she liked. Get a certiticate, they
told her, that you were imprisoned and tor­tured. From whom? Who knew? Was she to walk through the ruins from city to city looking for bits of Gestapo? So they were sorry, but from their point
of view she was simply a Nazi sympathizer who had fled to Germany for fear of their dear allies.

On foot, with no interference but hunger, she dragged her­self to a refugee camp in the American zone, where they didn’t insult her by arguing about the past. They didn’t
understand it, anyway, she said; they were as kind as they were self-righteous, and they applied to her the touchstone of the present. When it came to sending her to Russia because her home was now
in Russia, they asked her simply whether or not she believed in democracy.

I don’t know what happened to infuriate her. She was not a woman to have any hesitation in twisting civil or military rules to her advantage. Possibly it was the mild and spectacled
obtuseness of the questioner. Possibly the words were an intolerable challenge to one who had seen too closely the stupidity of elected politicians and its effect upon the world.

‘I told them that no thinking man or woman had any trust at all in democracy,’ she said. ‘I told them I wasn’t such a child as to think the tyranny of a majority any
better than the tyranny of a minority.’

So they put her down as an anarchist, and she accepted the description. She gloried in it. Then and there she saw that it was the only political label which, in the modern world, could be
applied to the once respectable opinions of an eighteenth-century Whig. It wasn’t till after this episode that she found the full and conscious spirit which possessed her.

To her interrogator, however, communists and anarchists were all one. He wasn’t after all paid to know that the most unrelenting enemy of communism was the anarchist. He put her on the
next train for the revolutionary paradise.

‘And then, thank God for him, I met a man who had no duty and no morality!’ she exclaimed. ‘I bribed him to take me off the train and into Turkey as his mistress. He was the
only one of them all who trusted me when he looked into my eyes. He believed what I said—that if I were free I could give him money.’

Her voice was without emotion or self-pity. Only the gather­ing speed of her words revealed the incandescent anger beneath her irony. When she told me of that bitter triumph of her eyes, I
was overcome by so uncontrollable, so helpless a hatred of our world that I could not keep the tears from my cheek.

‘Are those mine?’ she asked.

Her exact words—but my memories of that night colour them with a sentimentality that did not exist. In truth her tone was of interested surprise.

‘Someone has to do it for you,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, as if I had made a sober statement of fact. ‘Will you?’

I asked her what she meant.

‘In any partnership one of the two must be breakable,’ she explained.

‘And repairable?’

‘Easily. That is what I mean. It’s usually the woman. But I—am not breakable. I ask your friendship, Eric, for the sake of your lovely power of suffering,’

Friendship? I took up that tentative challenge, and knew that all her body listened. I think that few men had found her curious physique so exquisite that it moved them to the full poetry of
desire.

It is not a matter of which I wish to write. Woman to her man she wanted—well, let it be! I loved and love her like a woman, and I take it that we—if they will permit me for a moment
to be one of them—know a permanency of passion and of misery that to men is rarely given. Yet male I am in this: I had not the anodyne of women, the unquestioning loyalty to the beloved for
as long as it remained beloved.

Was I a humiliation to her? That was a subject which I never dared to approach. Her initial resistance was artistic but per­functory, and thereafter she made little concession to the vanity
of the male. For the sake of her prestige she wouldn’t take a mate among her own companions at Kasr-el-Sittat. Well, I was the best, perhaps the only European alternative; and at times, when
she would lie awake staring at anything but me, she may have put it to herself as crudely as that. A passionate chef d’œvre of amorous sculpture, likely to be awarded the prize of the
year by any session, if such could be, of competent judges—that, I have no doubt, was her warmest, her most ecstatic picture of our affair. O God, I wish I had no doubt.

We spent three days in Damascus, and I can remember every hour of them. Such a period comes only once in a man’s life, when he may love without impediment or afterthought, when the mere
earning of a living is simple and secure, when he has a cause as well as a woman to which he can give his heart.

Little by little Elisa was more explicit. At first I was uneasy as she unfolded to me the objects of Kasr-el-Sittat and its grow­ing power. I shied away from all the implications, and
insisted that the movement was really nothing more than a sort of Civil Liberties organization with teeth in it.

‘Yes, you might call it that,’ she answered. ‘The more aspects there are, the better for us—so long as our own object is clear. Here’s a question for you to think
about when you’re all alone in your little house at Tripoli.’

I told her that the house waited for her and was made for her, but she laughed and insisted that I should listen to her question:

‘On which side was the Vichy Government during the war?’

‘God knows,’ I answered. ‘It was like an amœba. Its shape depended on its environment.’

The illustration delighted her, and moved her to more frank­ness than she had, I think, as yet intended.

‘Then suppose we allow the Americans to put Kasr-el-Sittat under the microscope, what do they find? A bitter anti-communist organization which can prove the existence of a flourishing
underground from Niev to Budapest. And now put it in the Cominform’s solution. They hate it. It hasn’t any shape at all. It looks like nihilism. Still—we are creating
dis­affection and disobedience in the West. Eric, I tell you we can get money from both sides. All of them, East or West, may suspect that for itself the amœba has a shape, but why be
afraid of it when it is so useful? Did the men who financed Hitler look any further than their own intentions?’

‘And what is there at the heart?’ I asked boldly.

‘Clear sight, Eric, and implacable hatred.’

I drove Elisa back to Kasr-el-Sittat, and was put up for the Saturday and Sunday nights in an empty bungalow that had just been whitewashed and reconditioned. The colony was expanding and busy
with its home. We passed a party of local labourers, their black cotton garments powdered with cement and plaster, returning to the villages; and on the paths of the settlement were industrious
colonists carrying ladders and pots of paint.

The dining-room was fuller than I had ever seen it, and there were a number of new faces. As Elisa had not turned up, I sat down with a party of mixed Slavs, who seemed as naïve as
mid-nineteenth-century nihilists. They were all anxious to explain their ideas, and I don’t think they ever gave me a chance to reply. That the disciplined Bolshevik party had driven through
these idealists like a tank through a mist was no wonder. I admitted, however, that, properly handled, they might yet have power to blind the driver.

When we had nearly finished, Elisa swept in, accompanied by Osterling and two strangers. One was nothing but moustache and dark glasses; the other was a tall man of splendidly wiry physique,
dressed dashingly and purposefully in jacket, boots and breeches. He had a bony, Baltic head, and I put him down—correctly—as a Pole. Elisa was smouldering with annoyance, and looked
it. I was selfish enough to adore that touch of humanity. A fit of the sulks upon my coolly radiant goddess had hitherto been unthinkable.

Osterling jumped up as I passed their table, and asked me to wait for them at my bungalow. They would all come round, he said, and crack a bottle. He had the irresponsible cheerfulness of an
accomplished diplomat, and I was far from guessing his real intent. He sounded as eager and innocent as if he were suggesting that I should lay on a champagne supper for the two of us and a couple
of Viennese cabaret stars.

I strolled back through the delicious June night, and waited for Elisa and her party outside the door. The scattered houses between my own and the rest of the colony were not yet ready for
occupation, and the network of paths was deserted. Starlight and faint voices reminded me of loneliness in some hut above a mountain village.

Elisa, when she arrived, still seemed embarrassed and inacces­sible, but Osterling was most genial. He introduced the Pole as Mr. Gisorius and the man in the dark glasses by some temporary
name I have forgotten. He then produced a syphon and bottle of whisky. The rule of consuming only local drinks did not, he said, apply to respectable ex-statesmen in their hungry sixties.

As soon as we had settled down, Osterling remarked, with his delightful smile, that Elisa had been telling them about my amœba. I disclaimed any copyright in the metaphor.

‘But the trouble is,’ he said, ‘that she seems to have shown it to you in too many typical environments.’

I became aware that I was alone, facing Elisa and the three men. Our seating had, accidentally but too plainly changed to that of the accused before his judges. Osterling at once moved with
complete naturalness to an easy chair more or less by my side.

‘Have a cigar?’ he offered.

Elisa began to prowl about under the window with tightly-clenched fists. I thanked him, and lit up an exquisite Havana.

‘I expect,’ I said, ‘that you all have the same respect for Elisa Cantemir’s judgment that I have.’

I met Gisorius’ analytical eye. It was not wholly hostile; it held indeed the grim humour of a man entirely confident in himself and his sense of justice. His head was ridged and faceted
as an animal’s skull.

‘A profound respect,’ he answered, ‘for her judgment in cold blood.’

Elisa smothered the opening syllables of something that sounded as if it would be perilously near abuse. I kept quiet, for Osterling had already started to deal with Gisorius.

‘My experience of human beings,’ he said gracefully, ‘per­suades me that their judgment is more affected by what they want than by what they have. And in any case
Elisa’s instinct is that of the immortals, neither cold nor hot nor logical, but invariably right. No, no, I shouldn’t dream of questioning it. Our problem, Amberson, is not whether
Elisa is right, but whether
we
can afford to be wrong. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Perfectly,’ I replied. ‘On the other hand, she said you needed me. I don’t know why. But obviously you have to take a risk with someone. And you had better ensure, as
she did, that he’s in full sympathy.’

‘In full sympathy?’ asked Gisorius. ‘An ordinary business man?’

His tone was matter-of-fact rather than offensive, but he had touched a sensitive spot. I told him—and I must have sounded sincere, though too excited—that his remark was typical of
a political pedant, that the millions compelled into commerce had among them as many subtle and fine intelligences as the whole body of professional master-minds, and that one of the major causes
of strain and impatience in the world was that the damned economists wouldn’t grant to the trader any higher ambition than the making of money.

The man in the dark glasses took them off. He had looked like a somewhat blank and massive Rudyard Kipling, but now I knew that I had seen his face before. Little wrinkles that seemed due to
intensity of effort rather than humour radiated from the corners of his eyes, and beneath were heavy pouches; but the orbs were clear and magnificent.

‘The higher ambitions of the trader,’ he repeated. ‘Interesting how quickly the pendulum swings! Now I should have thought that you, in England especially, had had quite enough
trouble with the higher ambitions of the trader.’