Michael Moorcock: The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

In the tall white and brown café on the corner of Kanalstrasse and Kaspergasse, underneath the billboard advertising a brand of Russian tea, sit drinking the Slav nationalists. Many have been up all night and some have just arrived. They argue in fierce but usually inexpert Svitavian or Bohemian. They quote the poetry of Kollar and Celakovsky: Slavia, Slavia! Thou name of sweet sound but of bitter memory; hundred times divided and destroyed, but yet more honoured than ever. They refuse to speak German or French. They wear peasant blouses under their frock-coats. They affect boots rather than shoes and rather than cigars they smoke the yellow cigarettes of the peasant. Though most of them have been educated at the universities of Prague and Heidelberg, even Paris, they reject this learning. They speak instead of ‘blood’ and ‘instinct’, of lost glories and stolen pride. Alexandra tells me her brother was for a while of their number and it is the chief reason her parents decided to take him to Rome. I tell her I am grateful to her brother for his radicalism. Her little stomach is so soft. I touch it lightly with my fingertips. I move my hand towards her pubis. She jumps and gently takes hold of my wrist. What yesterday had been of peripheral interest to me today becomes central, abiding, almost an obsession. I take as keen a delight in the contents of jewellery shop windows, the couturiers, the fashion magazines as I once took in watching a horse-race or reading about exotic lands. This change has not been gradual, it seems to have occurred overnight, as if I cannot remember any other life. Alexandra has me. My blood quickens. Now I am remembering the detail of the pleasure. I wave Papadakis away. I cling to the sensation. It becomes more than memory. I experience it again. What have I invented? Is she my creation or is she creating me? Commonplace events are of no consequence. The room darkens. A background of red velvet and roses. Her passivity; her weakness. Her sudden, fierce passion and her sharp, white teeth. She becomes strong, but she remains so soft. The cathedral bells are chiming. We are playing a game. She understands the rules better than I. I break away from her and stand upright. I go to the window and part the curtains. She is laughing from the twisted sheets. I turn towards her again:

‘You are hopeless.’

Papadakis is at my shoulder, asking for instructions. I tell him to light my lamp. She pushes her head under the pillow. Her feet and calves are hidden by the linen; her bottom curves in the brown gloom and her vertebrae are gleaming. She comes to the surface, her dark curls damp with sweat, and I return to her, forcing her down on her face and laying my penis in the cleft of her rear, denying myself the heat of her vagina: I have never known such heat, before or since, in a woman’s sex. She bites at my hand. Traffic is noisy in the square today; a political demonstration of some kind, Papadakis says: he is contemptuous. ‘Communists.’ We hire a carriage and driver to take us east to Staromest, the hilly semi-rural suburb of Mirenburg where proud-eyed little girls watch over goats and chickens and shoo off strangers as if they were foxes. Here, amid the old cottages and windmills, we shall stop at an inn and either lunch there or ask them for a picnic. One or two fashionable ‘Resting Houses’ have been built in Staromest. They are frequented by invalids and the elderly and are staffed by nuns. Thus the peace of the hills is somewhat artificially preserved from the natural encroachment of the city. The apartment blocks stand below, silent besiegers who must inevitably conquer. We pass a small convoy of vivid gypsy wagons. Alexandra points at a brown and white pony as if I could buy it for her. The earth roads are still dry. From the dust the plodding gypsies do not look at us as we pass. We stop to gaze on the rooftops.

I point out, in the curve of the river, the old dock known as Suicide Bay. By some trick of the current most of those who fling themselves off the Radota Bridge are washed in to this dock. We can also see the distant race-track, dark masses of horses and spectators, bright silks and flags against the green turf. Closer to us is the cupola of the great Concert Hall where tonight one can hear Smetana and Dvorak on the same programme as Wagner, Strauss and Debussy. Mirenburg is more liberal in her tastes than Vienna. Not far from the Concert Hall is a gilded sign, by Mucha, for the Cabaret Roberto, which offers popular singers, comedians, dancers and trained animals in a single evening’s entertainment. Alexandra wishes to attend Roberto’s. I promise her we shall go, even though I know she is as likely as I am to change her mind in the next half-hour. She touches my cheek with warm lips. I am enraptured by the city’s beauty. I watch a green and gold tramcar, drawn by two chestnut horses, as it moves towards Little Bohemia, the Jewish Quarter, where from Monday to Thursday a market flourishes.

The tramcar reaches its terminus, near the market. The core of the market is in Gansplatz but nowadays it has spread through surrounding streets and each street has come to be identified by its stalls. In Baverninstrasse is second-hand clothing, linen, lace and tapestries; in Fahnestrasse antiques and sporting-guns; in Hangengasse books, stationery, prints; and in Messingstrasse fruit and vegetables, meat and fish; while the main market has a little of everything, including Italian organ-grinders, gypsy fiddlers, mimes and puppeteers. Stallholders and their customers haggle beneath bright stripes of the awnings, all in the shadow of the Great Synagogue, said to be the largest in Europe. Her rabbis are amongst the world’s most famous and influential.

Dignified men, dark and learned, come and go on steps where gingerbread sellers rest their trays, where little boys sell cigarettes out of inverted drums and their sisters, in pretty tinsel, perform simple dances to attract attention to their cakes and sweets.

The stalls are crowded with toys, tools, jams and sausages, musical instruments and domestic wares. Vendors shout their bargains, and sardonic hausfraus challenge them above the noise of guitars, accordions, violins and hurdy-gurdies.

At the far end of Hangengasse a large crimson automobile, imported from France, bucks and rumbles on its springs, its driver seated high above his passengers and wearing the cap, goggles and overcoat of his calling so he resembles a comical lemur in his profound sobriety. The chaffeur’s gloved fingers squeeze a horn: a tin trumpet blown by a mouse announces the progress of Juggernaut. The crowd divides, from curiosity rather than fear, and the crimson machine is on its way to more fashionable parts, to Falfnersallee, the Champs Elysees of Mirenburg, and the Restaurant Schmidt, all silver, mirrors and pale yellow. Here the nouveaux riches display themselves, to the chagrin of waiters who until a year or two ago served only Mirenburg’s aristocracy. The upper classes, they say, have been driven out by the vulgar owners of steamships and mechanical looms, whose wives wear the pearls of ancient impoverished families about red throats and speak a kind of German hitherto only heard in the Moravian district, the industrial suburb on the far side of the river.

This class has come to be known as ‘les sauvages’ or ‘die Unbebaut’, the subject of cartoons in the illustrated papers and mockery in cabarets which these days all but fill Kodaly Square, yet its money allows the journals and entertainments to flourish while its trade, especially with Berlin, increases Waldenstein’s prosperity.

At a large round table near the window, looking out upon the trees, the kiosks and the traffic of Falfnersallee, sits in corpulent well-being, in English tweed and French linen, Pasitch the Press King, a loyal supporter of the government of Prince Badehoff-Krasny and believer in stronger ties with Germany. His newspapers persistently emphasise the Austro-Hungarian threat and pillory an opposition favouring the views of Count Holzhammer currently exiled to Vienna, where he is courted by those who believe firmly in a ‘union’ between Bohemia and Waldenstein.