Michael Moorcock - Breakfast in the Ruins

The distant noises seemed to combine and establish close rhythms and counter-rhythms coupled with the beating of his heart. He recognized the tune. Some American popular song he had heard in a film. He had hummed the same song for six months after he had seen the film in Berlin. It must have been four years ago. Maybe longer. He wished that he had had a chance to make love to a woman. He had always disdained whores. A decent man didn't need whores. He wished that he had been to a whore and found out what it was like. One had offered last year as he walked to the railway station.

The film had been called Sweet Music, he remembered. He had never learned all the English words, but had made up words to sound like them.

There's a tavern in the town, in the town, When atroola setsen dahn, setsen dahn, Und der she sits on a luvaduvadee, Und never, never sinka see. So fairdeewell mein on tooday...

He had had ambitions to be an opera singer and he had had ambitions to be a great writer.

The potential had all been there, it was just a question of choosing. He might even have been a great general.

His possible incarnations marched before him through the dust.

And then he was dead.

— You could be anything you wanted to be. His friend kisses his shoulder.

— Or nothing. Could I be a woman and give birth to five children? Karl bites the black man.

The black man leaps up. He is a blur. For a moment, in the half-light, Karl thinks that his friend is a woman and white and then an animal of some kind, teeth bared. The black man glowers at him—Don't do that to me!

And Karl wipes his lips.

He turns his back on his friend. Okay. You taste funny, anyway.

You are a priest, devoutly religious, you are made miserable by the very idea of violence. You are, in every sense, a man of peace.

One morning you are cutting bread in the small hall attached to your church. You hear screams and oaths coming from the church itself. You hurry into the church, the knife still in your hand.

The soldier of the enemy currently occupying your country is in the act of raping a girl of about thirteen. He has beaten her and torn her clothes. He is just about to enter her. She whimpers. He grunts. You recognize the girl as a member of your parish. Doubtless she came to the church for your help. You shout, but the soldier pays no attention. You implore him to stop to no avail.

If you kill the soldier with your knife it will save the young girl from being hurt any further. It might even save her life. Nobody knows the soldier has entered the church. You could hide the body easily.

If you merely knock him out—even if that's possible -he will almost certainly take horrible reprisals on you, your church and its congregation. It has happened before, in other towns. Yet you want to save the girl.

What would you do?

— Don't try that with me, you little white bastard! Karl displays his arms.

— I'm a black bastard now.

— We can soon change that.

— Oh, hell, I'm sorry, says Karl.—It was just an impulse.

— Well, says his friend grimly, you're certainly losing your inhibitions now, aren't you.

Karl is eighteen. He is very lucky, along with the other members of the orchestra. His mother told him there was a point to learning, that you never knew when it came in useful, fiddle playing. And it was beautifully warm in the barracks. He hoped they would dance all night.

— Come back to bed, says Karl.—Please...

— I thought you were a nice, simple, uncomplicated sort of chap, says the black man.—That's what attracted me to you in the first place. Ah, well—it was my own fault, I suppose.

Karl is eighteen and playing Johann Strauss. How beautiful. How his mother would have loved it. There are tears in his eyes. He hoped they would dance forever! The Oswiecim Waltz!

— Well, I'm not at my best says Karl.—I wasn't when you met me. That's why I was in the Roof Garden.

— It's true, says his friend, that we hardly know each other yet.

KARL WAS EIGHTEEN. His mother had been given an injection some time ago and she had died. His father had probably been killed in Spain. Karl sat behind the screen with the other members of the orchestra and he played the violin.

That was his job in Auschwitz. It was the plum job and he had been lucky to get it. Others were doing much less pleasant work and it was so cold outside. The big barrack hall was well-heated for the Christmas Dance and all the guards and non-commissioned officers, their sweethearts and wives, were enjoying themselves thoroughly, in spite of rations being so short.

Karl could see them through a gap in the screen as he and the others played The Blue Danube for the umpteenth time that evening. Round and round went the brown and grey uniforms; round and round went the skirts and the dresses. Boots stamped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall. Beer flowed. Everyone laughed and joked and sang and enjoyed themselves. And behind the leather upholstered screen borrowed for the occasion the band played on.