Michael Moorcock - The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

‘Diana and our Alice have gone together,’ she says quietly. She takes my hand. ‘You’re very cold. You’d better come back.’

‘No!’ I think it is a trick. I pull free of her. ‘There was an agreement, Clara. You should not be doing this. Where are they?’

‘I don’t know. You’ll freeze to death, if a bullet doesn’t kill you.’

‘Where are they?’

‘They were as secretive with me as with anyone. They could have joined Count Stefanik. It’s my only guess.’

‘Stefanik? His balloon?’

‘A guess.’

‘Where is his balloon?’

‘I have no idea where he kept it. It’s probably destroyed. It was a guess.’

I begin to run up Papensgasse and through the Botanical Gardens. There are fires everywhere. The soldiers ignore me. I get to Pushkinstrasse and I cannot recognise anything. There are no more buildings. I look up into the blazing night sky in the hope of seeing the airship. The Indian Quarter has vanished. The Customs House is a guttering cinder. Within an hour I am standing in the ruins of her church. The Yanokovski Promenade has become a mass of black rubble. I can see St-Maria-and-St-Maria on the hill, twin chimneys of light. Flames course through the cathedral, glowing from every window. She is roaring as if in pain and anger. And the shells continue. Holzhammer must surely have come to relish the destruction for its own sake. We are at his mercy. And he is not merciful. Little Bohemia and the Synagogue are one hellish pyre. I reach down to pick up a piece of masonry. It is a small stone head, part of the motif above the left-hand column framing the central door: the face of a woman. It seems to me that she stares past my shoulder at a memory. The expression on her face is resigned. Has that expression always been there? For the three hundred years of her existence has she always known this would be her fate? There is no snow. The Theatre is an insubstantial outline of dancing red and orange. Everything is melting in the heat. Later I will hear that Prince Badehoff-Krasny had ordered the remains of the city to be fired. (‘This is my Moscow’). Nobody will ever come to understand how Mirenburg fell, any more than they will really know how Magdeburg was destroyed or what led to the extinction of Troy. Man’s greatest monuments, his architecture, never outlast his acts of aggression. At dawn I wade through fields of ash. I cannot find her. Thin sunlight attacks the drifting smoke. Little groups of people wander here and there, each with a bundle, none with any hope. They look at me, some of them, as I pass, but most trudge on with their heads bowed. There are fewer shells, now. They fall on ruins and pulverise them. As I pass it, the Casino collapses in on itself. There is hardly anything left for them to destroy. I cannot find her. Periodically, I inspect the sky. There is no ship there. I would like to think it has borne her up. In my mind’s eye I can see the bright reds and golds of the balloon’s canopy in contrast to the grey, misty luminousness of the morning. Dressed in his Chinese silk shirt and riding breeches, with a gaily-dressed woman on either side of him, the young Bohemian aviator lifts a strong arm to his valves. I can see the balloon rising higher and higher above the flattened wastes of our murdered city, as if Mirenburg’s spirit goes free. I can see her smiling carelessly, merely enjoying the sensation of flight, forgetful of me and of everyone. She kisses the bearded cheek of Stefanik not from any particular affection but from simple, passing gratitude to the person who has given her this, her most recent, pleasure.

One should never attempt to possess a beautiful whore, or hold on to the soul of a child, nor assault an idea as fragile as Mirenburg. Alice. I shall never fully understand why you fled from me. I wish you had been able to tell me the truth. But, if I were ever to confront you, you would reply: ‘You must have known.’ and dismiss all responsibility for your deception. ‘You must have known.’ But when you deny my suspicions that is a deeper lie still. ‘You must have known, that I deceived you. It is your fault for not admitting it.’ Yet did I really ever guess? Was I not always too afraid of the true answer? They will build a new city along the fresh course of the river. It will be called Svitenburg as a sop to the nationalists who are soon, of course, to become Austrian subjects in all but name. It is still little more than an industrial village. Its most impressive buildings are its warehouses. Did Alexandra live to marry a well-to-do Swiss and give him little babies in Geneva? She could banish all the old shadows, the memories of a ‘wicked past’, and have forgotten a lifetime in a matter of hours. And Waldenstein will become Svitavia again, a province of Bohemia, then a department of Czecho-Slovakia; forty years later that is what she remains, looking to Prague, such a poor imitation of Mirenburg, for her directions. Here in the yellow heat and ease I have spent the past eighteen years peering out at the world I came to fear. The Germans rise again and recover their wealth through patriotism, mysticism and a fascination with steel, as they will always do; the French continue to squabble and refer to past glories as solutions for the future; the English see their society collapsing all around them and find a panacea in American jazz; the Russians stir and dream again of Empire, having revived the methods and ambitions of Ivan the Terrible. And the Italians have conquered poverty, although they had to go to Abyssinia to do it. Waldenstein, settled in the arms of her new Slavic mother, is left, at least, in peace. When I return to Rosenstrasse, Captain Kolovrat has galloped off about some other importance. The brothel is now almost the only whole building in the street. Captain Mencken commands the two or three soldiers left. He has no orders and he is drunk. The smoked glasses fall down on his nose as he looks at me and offers a bottle. I shake my head. Therese and Renee, all lace and dark stockings, sit together on a couch singing a little song together. ‘Your wife,’ he says, ‘is upstairs I believe.’ He is perfectly grave. ‘Do you speak,’ he drinks again, ‘Bulgarian by any chance?’ He laughs. He appears to have fled into that familiar, self-protective dramatisation which is only one step away from hysteria. I am in no hurry to see Clara. I accept the offer of his bottle. ‘We can abandon ourselves to War quite as readily as we can abandon ourselves to lust,’ says Mencken, making an effort to hand up the bottle to me. ‘And War’s so much easier and less mystifying than sex, is it not?’ He grins at me. ‘I’m serious.’ I do not doubt it. He lets his eye drift towards the ladies who are as drunk as he is and are giggling together. ‘War doesn’t whisper. It doesn’t have shades of meaning. It demands courage, of course, and decisive action. It offers glory and threatens death. But lust offers pain and threatens us with life, eh?’ He is pleased with this turn of phrase.

The sunlight begins to shine through the shattered boards and glass. I put the bottle back into his hands and with a sigh climb up to Clara and a reckoning. Holzhammer will become Governor Regent of Waldenstein under the Austrians and will be blown to pieces by an Anarchist bomb in 1904. Clara is asleep. There is no confrontation. I feel vague disappointment. I leave her and return to my room, hoping to find a clue. My anger with Lady Cromach is growing. She has deceived me treacherously. And yet my actions were no less treacherous. It is different, I tell myself, but I know it is not. I cannot feel the same anger towards Alice. The room is strewn with all her abandoned finery, with half-packed trunks and bags. I pick up a pair of pale blue silk drawers. They still stink of her. There are no notes. But in a cupboard I find some crumpled sheets of violet notepaper with scraps of Alice’s handwriting on them and little pictures of the sort a schoolgirl might draw when bored. I spread them on top of the Chinese dresser. There is a quotation from something: It’s a fine day. Let’s go fishing said the