The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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      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.’

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