Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

The train moved into wide, horizonless steppe-land. Filth gave way to the purity of late snow. It would begin to melt quite soon. The conflict might be settled by spring. Hrihorieff’s and the Bolsheviks’ advances were rapid. Soon there would probably be a decisive battle. My only fear was that it would occur in Odessa before I could get Mother and Esmé to safety. Hrihorieff’s progress seemed relentless and inevitable. If Makhno joined us, Whites and Allies might well be wiped out. I was praying for dissension amongst the different leftist groups. There is nothing like socialism to divide men up into smaller units. Those flags were the colour of the roses I gave to Mrs Cornelius: the deepest, blood-red lustre. The colour of my own blood. Pricked on thorns, my blood mingled with the petals: she was my sister, my mother, my friend. Roses. I would not look back. I have no nostalgia. I have been cheated. This is the world. God’s purpose will be revealed in Heaven. I had no Faith. All God’s gifts were taken from me. I am selling the same fur coats (though cleaner) I was in those days forced to wear. The young men strut up and down like comic-opera Chekists. There is one who wears the badge of Anarchy. What can he know of Anarchy? He speaks a little Russian. I say to him: ‘What is this?’ The badge. He says A is for Anarchy. I say why not wear a badge from A to Z to make the Z for Zionism, it is the same thing. He finds me amusing. He is a fool. All these murders and kidnappings. The Anarchists were tools and still are fools. They rejected power and yet accepted responsibility for their terrorism. What did they gain? What did the world gain? Anarchy? No government? It gained more, worse government. Chaos. The universe expands. The universe grows cold. Soon there will be snow everywhere.

The snow will harden and squeeze the Earth. All will be ice. The ice will contract to vanishing point. Then there will be nothing. It is a law of physics. It is entropy. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is the Heat Death of the Universe. It is the end. This echo-theory they have discovered: what is that but Hope? And what is Hope but Faith? They have their ‘echo-theory’: nothing in the universe vanishes, nothing dies. They have done no more than rediscover God! That is the state of science today. It wastes its resources and the public’s money finding out what the world has known from the beginning of Time and will know until the end of Time: God loves the world. This is not science as I was taught it. Mine was a world of machines and engines, not theoretical gobbledegook. Everyone wants to be an Einstein. Einstein had the grace to credit his source. He was a godly fool. What Russians call an ‘enchanted one’. For all that he was a Jew and a Zionist. But perhaps I do him too much credit. How those two Jews confused the world between them! They introduced more superstition into the twentieth century than all our scientists had banished from the nineteenth. Sex? Freud confused sex with affection; the need for love. Physics? They have become poetry. Everyone says so. They build huge laboratories to test poetic theories. Where is the old pragmatism?