Oliver Benjamin
usually the province of harmless schizophrenics and astrologers. But
Bidden was too powerful to be harmless.
“Pushkin,” Roy said. “The Russian poet. Listen, Morris, what’s
up? Why am I here?”
“Why are any of us here? That was one of Pushkin’s greatest
themes,” he replied dramatically, “Alexander Pushkin was the
greatest poet Russia ever knew. He published his first poem at fifteen
and was a literary sensation before he was twenty. He actually
sparked the whole Russian literary tradition. If not for him there
would have been no Tolstoy, no Gogol, no Dostoyevski! Not bad,
considering.” He paused to take a long suck from his tureen of
Henessey.
“Considering what?” Roy responded wearily.
“Considering that he was black,” he said, “Not that blacks can’t
write poetry, but this was 18th century Russia, you know. No Maya
Angelous running around making angels in the snow.”
“Okay. A Black Russian. I get it. What’s the point?”
“Not only was he black,” Morris went on, “but he was Ethiopian.
You might find this interesting. His great-grandfather was an
Abyssinian prince, a ward of Peter the Great.
“Stolen from his homeland, of course.”
“Perhaps. Though apparently, while you can take the man out of
Ethiopia, you can’t take the Ethiopian out of the man. You know
about Rimbaud and Baudelaire and how wild their lives were. Well,
Pushkin made them look like pussies.” Bidden grew suddenly
pensive. He asked, “Tell, me, Roy, what is it about these unhinged
poets and Africa? Rimbaud ran off to Ethiopia, and Baudelaire’s
long-suffering mistress, the subject of many of his rants, was a
mulatto whore. Then there’s the philandering half-breed Dumas, oh,
and I’m willing to bet there was a little of Kurtz in Conrad as well.
Could it be that there’s something wild, something primeval,
something that drives sensitive men crazy when the spirit of Africa
gets in their blood?”
This was taking a turn for the worse. Bidden was cutting it close
to the bone. Roy demanded to know what this was all about. No
sooner had he stood up than, with a gesture from Bidden, he was
pushed back down onto the sofa by the bodyguards. Roy experienced
a sudden dread as his composure and confidence begin to move
around like tectonic plates. He was falling further than the sofa
allowed him to. This was all very personal. He was only beginning to
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