The Bedbug (2 page)

Stanley’s attention was quickly diverted to the storming of the fortress, on Easter Monday. Drummer Michael Magner
and Private James Bergin won the Victoria Cross for leading a heroic assault, cutting through the brushwood defences with their bayonets and leading the charge on the dispirited defenders. Theodore committed suicide, with one of Queen Victoria’s pistols, rather than endure the humiliation of capture; the victorious troops discovered his liquor store and pretty soon ran riot, looting and pillaging until Napier eventually restored some sort of order.
⁴

Theodore’s fortress contained many religious and imperial treasures, some of which he himself had looted during his conquests. These were auctioned and carried back to Britain. A good few of them ended up in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection – the tangible legacy of a military adventure in which no territory was captured, no other tribute exacted and no trade links established. Theodore’s son and heir, Prince Alemayehu, accompanied the retreating British army, as did his mother until she succumbed to illness and died. Alemayehu was introduced to Queen Victoria at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, tutored by his guardian Captain Tristram Speedy and then given a traditional education for an English gentleman, Rugby public school and Sandhurst military college. He lived in Leeds until he died of pneumonia at the age of eighteen, a sad and disorientated figure. At Queen Victoria’s insistence, he was buried in the crypt beside St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Moritz Hall, his wife and family, including the infant Magdalena, were part of that military procession back to the landing point on the Red Sea. Nobody knew it then, but Magdalena’s destiny dictated that she, too, would become part of an enduring British legacy. Her family settled in Palestine, in the ancient city of Jaffa which now forms part of Tel Aviv in Israel. Her mother Katarina retained her links with Abyssinia, returning in 1902 to become a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Emperor Menilek and a close friend of his wife, Empress Taytu. Magdalena’s brother David became a Counsellor of State to the next Emperor, Haile Selassie.
⁵

Magdalena’s father, Moritz Hall, was born in 1838 in the Polish city of Cracow, then part of a Russian protectorate. Two years later Magdalena’s future husband, Platon Ustinov, or Oustinoff, was born in St Petersburg, the son of an extraordinarily dissolute father and an exceptionally beautiful mother. Their wealth dated back to the last years of the seventeenth century when Adrian Ustinov made a fortune in the Siberian salt trade. He had noble antecedents and a family crest that bore a salt press, an eagle’s wing, a star and a bee buzzing across two blades of wheat.

Adrian’s son, Mikhail, settled in Saratov in southern Russia on the lower reaches of the Volga River. Thanks to an imperial favour he acquired estates covering 240,000 hectares, employing 6,000 serfs. Mikhail in turn had five sons. The fifth, Grigori, installed his beautiful wife Maria in a St Petersburg town house while he set himself up in a separate property in the same street where he could give full rein to his debauched tastes. Breakfast consisted of a banquet of caviar, smoked salmon, suckling pig, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, pickled herrings and salted cucumbers, washed down with vodka and supplemented with a bevy of teenage peasant girls, recruited from his country estates, whom he seduced, singly or several at a time, until lunch. After that he could repair to the Moscow English Club, where only aristocrats were admitted, for an evening of drinking and gambling. Confronted with such licentiousness, his youngest son Platon developed a Puritan streak.

Platon had seemed destined for a career in the Chevalier Guards regiment of cavalry but at the age of twenty-one a fall from his horse left him temporarily paralysed and with lung damage. He travelled to the Mediterranean to convalesce, staying in a Protestant mission hostel in Palestine. There he succumbed to the preaching of a Protestant pastor from Germany, Peter Metzler, and the good looks of his daughter, Maria. He invested money in their mission and then invited Pastor Metzler and his family to return to Russia with him to manage his estates. Displaying a
wilfulness and disregard of the consequences that characterised his life, Platon refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Tsar, on the grounds that he had embraced the Protestant religion and could not simultaneously swear devotion to the Orthodox Church.

While his father Grigori’s personal and private immorality was no bar to his social standing, Platon’s public rejection of one of the pillars of the Russian state provoked a scandal. Exile and disgrace beckoned. He sold his share of the family estates and moved to the Germanic kingdom of Württemburg, which was an astute move. In 1846 King Karl V had married the Tsar’s daughter, Olga. Queen Olly, as she liked to be known, welcomed Platon and granted him citizenship. So, when Württemburg joined the confederation of states that formed the German Empire, in 1870, Platon became an accidental German.

Not that he spent much time in the Fatherland that had adopted him. He married the pastor’s daughter, Maria Metzler, and made the most distressing discovery, on his wedding night, that he was not her first lover. Most husbands of the time would have been scandalised by such a revelation; it was beyond forgiveness as far as the puritanical Platon was concerned. He disowned her immediately but for many years refused a divorce. In his outrage and shame he gravitated back to the Holy Land and created his own little Garden of Eden in Jaffa.
⁶

Baron Platon von Ustinov still had considerable wealth, both in money and possessions, from the sale of his Russian estates. Not trusting banks, he carried it all with him wherever he went. He had a disdain for everyday transactions, washing his cash before handling it. But once settled in Jaffa he invested in property, in the form of a mansion in the German colony, a district dominated by the Temple Society, an evangelical Protestant denomination. Around his new home he created a botanical garden with 170 different kinds of flowers and a miniature zoo which became a haven of peace for tourists and settlers alike. He donated money to found a hospital, hospice and girls’ school.

Moritz Hall had settled in the same neighbourhood and the two men became friends. Two of Hall’s sons opened a hotel in the Baron’s house. The Hotel du Parc soon became a recommended venue in Baedeker’s and contemporary guide books. In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and the Empress Augusta stayed there during a visit to Palestine. The Kaiser is recorded as having especially enjoyed the pure air of the garden at night and the view of the moon reflected on the Mediterranean.
⁷

Platon took no part in the running of the hotel, preferring to shut himself in his private study with his books. He became expert in ancient languages, such as Amharic, Greek, Hebrew, and became a philanthropist, too. He allowed the congregation of the newly formed Immanuel Evangelical Church, among them Moritz Hall, to use a room in the Hotel du Parc and helped finance the building of the church which still stands in Beer Hofman Street. A fellow church benefactor, the German banker Johannes Frutiger, became a close friend. He had known Platon during his first visit to Jaffa from 1862 to 1867 and renewed their friendship when he returned to Palestine ten years later. His wife Maria and their children, Hermann, Adolf, Cornelia, Frederike and Bernhard spent holidays at the Hotel du Parc.

Platon had finally divorced Maria after discovering that she and her new lover were plotting to kill him so that they might remarry and start a new life in Australia. They had tampered with Platon’s revolver, which he kept to deter burglars, with the intention that it should blow up in his face the next time he fired it.
⁸
New love, and marriage to Magdalena came late in life.

The stern, bearded, patriarchal figure made an incongruous picture alongside his dark, young, serious-looking new bride, who shared his deep religious convictions. At first they were not blessed with children. There were a series of miscarriages before Jona von Ustinov became Platon’s first born son, on 2 December 1892. The father was fifty-six. Jona was born two months premature and weighing only two pounds, Platon fed him milk through the dropper of a Waterman’s fountain pen.

Jona was named for the Biblical character who had been swallowed by a whale after setting out, against the Lord’s bidding, on a ship sailing from Jaffa – where the Ustinovs now resided. The boy hated the name, and in later life was happy to be known by the nickname Klop bestowed on him by his Russian wife, Nadia Benois.

Childhood photographs give no clue to the man. His parents kept Jona’s fair hair girlishly long. His pale green eyes are innocently wide; by his teens, though, they have a knowing intensity. He grew thoroughly spoilt, even though four siblings followed, indulged by a father who veered between strict insistence on completing all homework set by the German colony school to providing the Arab pony on which Jona galloped wildly along the sands, terrorising his neighbours.

Platon, short and broad with long flowing locks and full beard, led an austere lifestyle, largely vegetarian, often dressing from head to toe in white (except on the beach where he strode around stark naked). He eschewed medicine but would drink a whole bottle of champagne as a cure for flu.

He instructed his children in the ways of the world by reading aloud to them from his newspaper at the breakfast table. In this deeply religious household, Jona, who had inherited his father’s gift for languages, first learned English from Moody and Sankey, publishers of a popular hymnbook. The children grew up with Russian nannies, Arab servants and guests who spoke French, German and English.
⁹

He attended a high school in Jerusalem but when he reached the age of thirteen it was decided to send him away to the Gymnasium in Düsseldorf to take his
abitur
, the German equivalent of the International Baccalaureate. His younger brother Peter followed in his footsteps. Lodgings were obtained for Klop in the home of a retired
Hauptmann
(army captain) and his wife. According to Jona’s later account, the captain was committed to an asylum after chasing him round the house brandishing a sabre, convinced that
his young lodger was an incarnation of Mephistopheles. Given the boy’s reputation for childish devilment it is possible there was some provocation. Platon had maintained his connections with Germany. Jona’s godmother was Gräfin (Countess) von dem Bussche-Ippenburg, a member of one of the country’s oldest aristocratic families, and as a young man he visited her on her estates near Osnabrück. School in Düsseldorf was followed by a spell at Yverdon in Switzerland, improving his French, and then Grenoble University.

Sexual awakening began early. We have only his word for this, surprisingly recorded in faithful and uncritical detail by his wife Nadia, whom he regaled with his many liaisons, youthful and adult. These stories seem neither confessional nor boastful; they are gleeful accounts of exploits to be savoured, entertainment almost.

She recounts how, as a boy, he peeped through neighbours’ windows to watch girls undress. Returning by ship from school to Jaffa he would practise his flirtation techniques with girls on board and learned to appreciate the varying charms of their different nationalities. He was particularly taken with a Scottish redhead whom he pursued while she was attending finishing school in Yverdon, eventually keeping a tryst with her by scaling a high wall topped with glass and emerging bloody, with trousers torn, but triumphant. It was typical of Klop the storyteller that he should claim to have encountered the woman twenty-five years later, still beautiful and unmarried, at a society dinner in London. Such coincidences were not uncommon in Klop’s retrospective accounts of his amorous adventures.

What he lacked in height he compensated for by close attendance to his appearance. The young man had groomed and pomaded hair, manicured nails, elegantly tailored clothes and a monocle – quite the dandy. And it worked. In Grenoble he pursued his fellow female students as well as the daughter of a wealthy chateau owner, Geneviève de la Motte. He seduced his landlady’s daughter – a passionate year-long affair that only ended when the
girl fell for an Italian count. Next came a Bulgarian student and Klop would claim that many years later he was introduced to a Bulgarian diplomat who turned out to be her son.

Yet, according to Nadia, he was cautious and suspicious of women, building a protective wall around his emotions and avoiding serious commitment. She wrote:

He said that, in his opinion, far too much importance is attributed to sentiment in love. He believed in physical enjoyment garnished with light-hearted banter and sprinkled with touches of romance.
¹⁰

Much later Jona’s son Peter, who was offended by what he regarded as his father’s humiliation of his mother, offered what was, under the circumstances, a generous assessment that his father was not really a womaniser but was thrilled by the unpredictable, fleeting moments of flirtation. He lacked the secretive nature required for a serious affair. He was: ‘a flitter from flower to flower, a grazer of bottoms rather than a pincher.’
¹¹

In Grenoble, aside from the female distractions, Klop had to turn his mind to earning a living. He already had the taste for travel, for socialising with colourful and interesting people and being at the centre of events. A diplomatic career beckoned and he took himself off to Berlin, intending to study law.