The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea by Durrell Lawrence

Author:Durrell, Lawrence [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571267231
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2012-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Berlin was also in the grip of snow, but here the sullen goaded helplessness of the Russias was replaced by a malignant euphoria hardly less dispiriting. The air was tonic with gloom and uncertainty. In the grey-green lamplight of the Embassy he listened thoughtfully to the latest evaluations of the new Attila, and a valuable summary of the measured predictions which for months past had blackened the marbled minute-papers of German Department, and the columns of the P.E. printings — political evaluations. Was it really by now so obvious that this nation-wide exercise in political diabolism would end by plunging Europe into bloodshed? The case seemed overwhelming. But there was one hope — that Attila might turn eastwards and leave the cowering west to moulder away in peace. If the two dark angels which hovered over the European subconscious could only fight and destroy each other…. There was some real hope of this. ‘The only hope, sir’ said the young attaché quietly, and not without a certain relish, so pleasing to a part of the mind is the prospect of total destruction, as the only cure for the classical ennui of modern man. ‘The only hope’ he repeated. Extreme views, thought Mountolive, frowning. He had been taught to avoid them. It had become second nature to remain uncommitted in his mind.

That night he was dined somewhat extravagantly by the youthful Chargé d’Affaires, as the Ambassador was absent on duty, and after dinner was taken to the fashionable Tanzfest for the cabaret. The network of candle-lit cellars, whose walls were lined with blue damask, was filled with the glow of a hundred cigarettes, twinkling away like fireflies outside the radius of white lights where a huge hermaphrodite with the face of a narwhal conducted the measures of the ‘Fox Macabre Totentanz’. Bathed in the pearly sweat of the nigger saxophonists the refrain ran on with its hysterical coda:

Berlin, dein Tanzer ist der Tod!

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