Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Ветер всегда дует слева (1)

Morrow was just starting to feel like he was free. Standing there on the deck of the White Star Line transatlantic cruiser Olympic, over halfway across the ocean and heading for a new life in the new centre of the world, he felt like he had finally discarded the shabby uniform of old Europe. All around him, the gently slumbering sea stretched out to infinity and a sudden thrill rose from his belly at the prospect of this uncharted future. True, he would still be a journalist, and the rat race was probably not so very different in New York, but at least he’d be free of the Struggle. He was tired of fighting. Is the pen really mightier than the sword? After eighteen years in the newspaper business, he had his doubts.

He turned round to do a spot of observation, his favourite past-time, especially when breathing the fragrant air only available in first class. Every well-heeled passenger projected a different story. Morrow was equally at home in third: people are people, after all. He would write it down in his head as he watched unseen, a fly on the wall….he would extrapolate the mannerisms, be creative….The interest lay in the seemingly insignificant details.

And then he saw her.

Truth is stranger than fiction: of all the people to meet in the middle of the ocean, he would never have counted on bumping into Lily Weisshart, not in a million cubic miles of water.It was definitely her. The scar identified her, a livid blue line running cruelly along the delicate, feminine line of her jaw. Otherwise she seemed much tamed. When he’d talked to her after George Gallacher’s murder – it was Lily who had found the body – she’d been a revolutionary firebrand, a regular Rosa Luxemburg. Now here she was, travelling first class, as bourgeois as you like. And still beautiful. Strangely, his heart thumped on recognition.

She was walking towards him now, dark hair cascading around her shoulders, that perfectly almond-shaped face angled slightly to catch the full benefit of the morning sunshine. Beside her walked a child, holding her hand tightly, probably no more than nine or ten. There was a moment when Morrow could have turned away, but he didn’t. Call it professional curiosity or the habit of a lifetime, he couldn’t help himself.

“Lily Weisshart, is that you?”

The name transfixed her; she stopped dead in her tracks, contorting her pretty face to squint at him in the bright sunlight. It had been ten years since anyone had used this name.

“Sorry, do I know you?” she managed, in a splutter, shielding her eyes to search his face.

london bridge is falling down
falling down
falling down

waiting for him here in the dark waiting for him….

“Robert Morrow, from The Messenger. I interviewed you in 1920, don’t you remember? I recognized you by the….scar on your face…..”

“Oh...Mr Morrow, yes, I remember. How do you do? Isn’t this a….coincidence?” She was polite, but visibly shaken. She needed to buy time. A sea swell of nausea rose inside her, and she let go of the child to steady herself...

london bridge is falling down
my fair lady….

i can connect nothing with nothing

He immediately wanted to put her at ease, to let her know that no sword of Damocles hung above her head.

“It could be fate, Miss Weisshart…”

“Don’t refer to me by that name if you please, Mr Morrow,” she said quietly, looking around her. “My name is Margaret Jameson, Mrs Margaret Jameson, and this is my son, Joe.”

A chain reaction of association flashed through his mind, drawing blood...did he want to remember...did he? It was big news back in 1920; Stearns’s headline was branded across his memory: ‘Murder in Paradise’. A labour activist called George Gallacher was stuck with a German bayonet – his own war trophy - at his lodgings in Paradise Road, Stepney. What a hole that was, full of immigrants and radicals, virtually lawless, where every brick told a story of a grimy struggle to survive. Gallacher was the prominent voice in the refusal of Tilbury dock workers to load a munitions ship, ‘The Jolly George’, bound for the Russo-Polish War, in solidarity with their fellow workers in the Red Army. Everyone was crying foul play. Public opinion was running high and Stearns was in his element. Morrow remembered how the Police needed to close the case quickly and arrested George’s brother Joe as an expedient culprit. Poor bastard! He’d been irreparably damaged by the Great War and had a history of violent outbursts. At the hastily convened trial, Joe was declared to be insane and sent to Bethlehem Hospital – within the year he’d been battered to death by a fellow inmate over a game of cards. A sorry affair all round…..some resolution…..or not, as the case may be. And here was the wreckage, still floating about ten years later, managing to find him even in the middle of the ocean. There were too many ghosts wandering around, victims from those epic stories of war and revolution, and Joe was one of them. Morrow struggled to recover himself, forcing a smile for the child.

“Hello Joe. I’m pleased to meet you.”

He offered his hand to the boy but it was suspicious, glaring at him from behind its mother’s skirts. Morrow saw something in its distrusting eyes…a trace of…Gallacher.

“You’ll be pleased to know that I don’t actually work for anyone at the moment, Mrs Jameson. I’m starting a new life myself, at the New York Herald, in a couple of months’ time.”

“A new life demands a break with the past, Mr Morrow….I should know.” She paused awkwardly. “I am travelling with my husband who knows nothing of my past, and I want to keep it that way.”

She looked at him searchingly….calculating his threat, but now she’d been recognized, especially by him, he realized that she had to talk to him.

he’ll be here soon….breathing short shallow….think think what you are doing…every breath charges me….greasy hands…..

build it up with bricks and stones
bricks and stones
bricks and stones

“I will send word through the steward when I am ready to see you. Now, if you’ll excuse us.” She smiled, knocking him sideways; she was still a dangerous woman, a cool customer indeed. Her English was impeccable now; her east European-Jewish accent had vanished without a trace. Back then, he’d been so wet behind the ears. She’d told him nothing that was new. Stearns, his editor, had soon disabused him, laughed at him for being such a clot …what’s the story, man…what’s her angle? But they never found out, because shortly after Morrow talked to her, she vanished.

Что мы можем сделать? (2)

The day before their arrival, Morrow received a written note informing him that Mrs Jameson would be ‘taking the air’ at seven thirty that evening. He’d been thinking long and hard about Lily Weisshart. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or not, but when the time came, he felt his heart leap with that consuming passion just to know, to complete one of those thousands of unfinished stories that he’d covered, and to see her again. As he waited for her, fingers of dark cloud stretched out from the west to gather in the setting sun as the forlorn cries of wheeling gulls announced their proximity to the new world.

He thought about Edward Perryman Stearns, his mentor, an old hand in the newspaper business. Stearns had been literally hopping with glee when he heard about Gallacher’s murder; it was just what he needed in his ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign. The wily old dog had picked up on the zeitgeist….the wind of change was blowing from the left, sweeping away the old world….people were tired of war, and tired of tugging their forelocks….and the whole world was thirsty for news of glorious revolution. Stearns knew what he was doing: the sales figures spoke for themselves.

“It’s all about following the story, Morrow! Look at the bigger picture, examine how it is constructed. What is there that we can use? See how history twists and turns. It’s down to us to translate it, Morrow, for the people!” Stearns’s larger-than-life voice still rolled around his head like summer thunder.

“Good evening, Mr Morrow.”

my heart pounds…those are his heavy footsteps falling crushing dirty snow drawing him to me…

build it up with bricks and stones
my fair lady…..

Lily took possession of him again. He turned to offer his hand but she ignored the gesture and leaned on the polished handrail next to him, taking in the swell of the sea with a sweep of her dark, unfathomable eyes. She was a very beautiful woman. He could feel her presence invading him and defensively, he reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Now it was his turn to buy time, to recover...

“A very beautiful evening, Mrs Jameson. Thank you for seeing me.”

She looked at him keenly: “We do not have time for small talk, Mr Morrow. I have your word that this conversation will not be repeated? Will you swear it?”

i am his death let him come to me in good faith so that i may send him on his way into the infinite moment...yes talk talk…fingers tighten round the handle...no turning back now...

“What will you have me swear by? The Talmud? I don’t have any angles here, Mrs Jameson. Meeting you again is just chance. The Gallacher brothers are dead, and so is the proletarian dream, at least in England. I don’t believe it’s happening in the Soviet Union either. It’s all down to the moment, and the moment has passed. I’m not sure it will ever happen, and in any case, I’m tired of it. That’s why I’ve left it behind.”

head spinning fear panic rising...stop your ears the walls are bending... the handle turning… seize the day now…

“Yes,” she said, “I’m tired of it too. The Struggle is too demanding for little people like you and me. The story eats us up. After George was killed, I was frightened….I had to disappear. Did you go to his funeral?”

“The Messenger made a substantial contribution. He was buried very quickly. Pollitt, Bevin and company all turned up with a troop of dock-workers with banners, union apparatchiks and soldiers in uniform. It made the headlines. But Joe wasn’t so lucky. Stearns was wrapped up in greater things after Lloyd George capitulated on sending troops to help Pilsudski out. Joe was of no use to him dead or alive then.”

“The authorities needed the situation to blow over quickly. Your editor made considerable political capital out of George, and I have no doubt it was good news for the sales figures.”

poised with bayonet steps into the moment of death waiting for him…you should see yourself...strike now...seize this moment... seize the day……

She was still as sharp as a stiletto. She turned to look at him and her expression suddenly betrayed the sort of sadness that is beyond words.

“And you’re right, poor Joe was unlucky. He was really the victim of it all. George became an animal, always seeking to control. The more power he sought, the more he lost control of himself. His vision of empires falling consumed him, consumed us all. Seize the day! That was his war-cry….and all the while, poor Joe just lived an infinite nightmare of war.”

NOW STRIKE NOW…..there….lightning strike….. like a shovel driven hard into wet sand…..so powerful that i am immortalized….he cries out stuck…as I push home with every sinew both hands all my might….he staggers back clutching at his chest...reels dancing a drunken jig like chaplin…flickering in a dying scene……have i done enough….

Morrow was older and wiser, and had not expected to hear the truth that evening. He spoke softly now. “You disappeared, Lily. You abandoned him.”

“I did as much for Joe as it was possible to do in the circumstances, Mister Morrow.”

She re-emphasized the distance between them, reminding him of his place. “And besides, when George was killed, I had someone else to think about….”

hands protest clutching at the steel red blooms his mighty heaving chest his breath caught in an ecstasy of gasping disbelief…wait is that laughing....his eyes open up so wide the moment of his own mortality his mouth a grimace of surprised agony staggers back as the essence of him drains away …..collapses like a felled tree a heap of so much flesh and bone….he’s only human after all…..

“You mean your son? And George was the father?”

She fell silent, locked into some inner torment that flickered across her face like a shadow. At length, she sighed, as if suddenly resigned to something.

“I don’t know, Mr. Morrow, which of the two of them is the father of my child, but he has Joe’s name because Joe was the most human, the most real…. George was an animal. He raped me…..sodomized me….reduced me to nothing. I was his slave, nothing more. He was a beast beneath the political superman. I loved him, hated him with a passion, and was glad when someone done for him at last. He deserved it.”

This sudden lapse, the colour of Stepney, stained her perfectly poised language, leapt out at Morrow, formed a question that burned in his mind but which he dare not articulate.

If he could just complete one story, without other stories taking over, incomplete, chaotic, twisted and turned inside out by fate. This moment was very close at hand. He held his breath, hoping she would unfold it for him. The vibrating drone of the ship’s engines cut through the sound of the sea, seeming to focus both their minds on a point in the past which had haunted them both.

thrashes on the floor feet fighting for a purchase kicking…struggling from the cradle to the grave…. blood ebbs blood flows down from the river to the sea…

“I’m convinced the British government was behind George’s death,” she said with certainty, holding his eye in an unwavering gaze. “He was a rising star, a man of destiny. His power amongst ordinary men was….significant. He was decorated for bravery in the horrors of France, Mr Morrow; he willed his survival. He saw Trotsky at the gates of Warsaw, saw the momentum building, and believed the moment was coming. We all did. A tide of red washing across Poland, Germany, France and perhaps even that little island of yours that has been responsible for so much. People were ready; all it needed was a trigger. We’d stopped the guns going to Pilsudski; we stood up in the Struggle and were counted. They feared him greatly.”

“That was Stearns’s angle, but it’s too convenient for me, I’m afraid.” Morrow was disappointed. What did he want?

“I don’t know who did it, Mr Morrow, but I was frightened. I thought I might be next. I never believed it was Joe. As hard as I tried, he was beyond anyone’s reach, but I don’t think he killed his brother.”

quiet now he looks at me…whispering something cursing mouth stained red…..licks his bloody lips like a wolf caught in a trap looks into the eyes of the hunter….knows me, his executioner, his Judas……

london bridge is falling down
falling down
falling down…..

Morrow suddenly felt acutely aware of the tenuous nature of his grasp upon the thread of this story. The truth was here, he could smell it, but it was slipping away from him.

“There was talk that maybe someone in the Labour movement did it,” he said. “Some power-struggle or other. Gallacher had dealings with a lot of unsavoury types, including the criminal gangs who ran the docking business. Someone didn’t like him, that’s for sure.”

“He was an uncompromising man, Mr Morrow. His demands were titanic.”

pissed himself, a dark stain spreading, mixing with red……the blade still heaving his chest still draining….coughing moaning whimpering like a dog…..

“Stearns even suggested you did it, that you were part of a pan-European Jewish-Communist conspiracy….”

There. He’d cast his line, but would she bite? He waited for an indignant denial but Lily was as calm and expressionless as a surgeon making a critical incision.

taking a long time to die……..bubbling coughing drowning in his own blood still whispering afraid now in spite of all those brave words he’s woven….rests his head…crying….crying because he’s frightened….because he’s alone….because his moment has come and he’s all alone now…..

london bridge is falling down
my fair lady

“No, Mr. Morrow. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. Don’t invoke those ridiculous anti-semitic protocols!” She was hard now, as hard as nails, and sharper. “Your Mr. Stearns was an old fool, a capitalist lackey delivering reactionary propaganda, and you wrote it for him. He wasn’t interested in the truth, but only in history, the history which he manipulated, motivated like all the rest by profit. His editorials were laughable bourgeois drivel. And what is truth anyway? It’s all relative in the great scheme of things. I have given more than most to the Struggle, and now I just want to live to see my grandchildren. Life is the only truth. Let others make the history; is this too much to ask?”

not moving anymore so much blood do those staring eyes still see….his bloody tongue is moving those purple lips still whispering…what is he whispering…….

Morrow knew that she was right of course. The irresistible ocean of history had swallowed the Gallachers just as it had swallowed so many others great and small. Nobody could tell fact from fiction: truth was a human idea, flawed and imperfect. It didn’t matter who killed George Gallacher, just as it didn’t matter why Lenin had died so soon, because their moments had all passed. There could be no resolution. He reached out to touch her scar without knowing why, just that it was tangible, the mark of a brush with history.

“George cut me,” she said quietly, remembering, “to see if I would bleed.”
She looked at him, searching for her reflection in his eyes, letting his finger tips trace the line of the scar.

“My husband thinks I had a motor accident. Goodbye Mr. Morrow. A new life means a break with the past. It is better, in the end, to let sleeping dogs lie.”

what are you whispering….

As she walked away, Morrow turned and looked out across the darkening expanse of ocean, thinking of all those ghosts still wandering around in Europe, all those unresolved stories.

lily….lily

нельзя сделать омлета не разбив яйцаю(3)

(1) “The wind always blows from the left”: A slogan by Lenin
(2) “What is To Be Done?”: The title of a book outlining proletarian revolution written by Lenin in 1908.
(3) “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”: One of Lenin’s more famous slogans. Lenin was highly conscious of the power of a word.