Michael Moorcock: The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

I was not to meet Frau Schmetterling for a long time, after Clara had despaired of my sniffing after Alice’s non-existent trail and had returned to Germany alone. Clara said, as she waited on the platform for her train: ‘I shall always love you, Ricky, for what you are, as well as what you could have become. But I know you are in love with an illusion, and it is a lost illusion at that. What would happen if you found her, if Mirenburg had not been destroyed? What would have happened if she had stayed with you? You have told me yourself. You know, but you refuse to act on your knowledge. And that is madness.’ Now my honest Clara is gone and I am alone with an obsession which has taken up my life and drained from me what was not already drained by the treacherous Alice, who refused to be what I needed her to be. She was myself. The city is gone. She would be fifty-seven years old now. Frau Schmetterling was in Dresden, the proprietress of an ordinary boarding house catering to single middle-class gentlemen. I reminded her gently of our ordeal in Mirenburg. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it was ghastly. Hardly a saucer remained of all that crockery I had collected over twenty years.’

I asked if she had heard anything of my Alice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not unless she was the one who married the Swiss. I think she was killed, wasn’t she? I hope those bastards didn’t rape her.’ Frau Schmetterling had attempted to protect her girls from the troops but she had eventually left Mirenburg with Renee and Trudi and joined Wilke in Brighton. They had gone to America for a little while, but had not been able to stay. Most of her girls had had no means of travelling so the house had rapidly become a common bordello used by the occupying army. The Bulgarians had been brutes. Everything of value had been stolen during the looting. ‘I heard,’ the old madam told me, ‘that at least one of the girls was killed. Remember Dolly? Natalia told me. I met Natalia outside the theatre one evening, in Cologne. She was selling flowers. She dropped the whole basket to hug me!’ Frau Schmetterling had laughed before she became serious again. ‘She was the one who told me about Dolly. Those Bulgars destroyed everything that was delicate. They ruined everything beautiful. They didn’t understand the rocking-horse room, so they simply ripped it apart. They killed the acrobat. That friend of ‘Mister’s’. Laches! He insulted an officer, apparently.’

Natalia had stayed on, she had told Frau Schmetterling, in the hope of filling the madam’s place when things calmed down. Several of the whores had had the same idea. But Holzhammer had given the order to destroy every building left standing. ‘They were lucky, in the end, to escape with the clothes still on their backs. Natalia left with a returning Bulgarian officer. He knocked her about. She got away from him in Buda-Pesht, she told me, while they were changing trains. She was married. She wasn’t on hard times. Her husband had a big flower-business in Cologne. They had two little boys. And Caroline Vacarescu escaped. I don’t know how. She married an American and went to live in Ohio, though I believe she’s now in California. Elvira’s at university, you know, in Munich. She still remembers you carrying her through that sewer.’ Frau Schmetterling had winked at me with a trace of her old good humour. ‘You’d like her. She’s just your type.’ I was able to laugh and tell her that I had lost interest in females under twenty-five when Mirenburg was destroyed. ‘But what about the balloonist, that Czech?’ She thought he had probably tried to get his airship up and had been shot down by Holzhammer’s artillery. Much later I heard a rumour that, under an assumed name, he had been killed on the Eastern Front in 1915, flying a plane of his own design against the Austrians. Someone else said he had died with the Czech Legion in Siberia.

Frau Schmetterling had made me eat a huge dinner and had introduced me to her new dogs, two pugs. When I had left she had kissed me and said that I should look after my health. ‘It is a shame you’ll never make a fool of yourself over a woman again. Your mistake was in refusing to believe that another woman could be a worthy rival. Men will do that.’ I had shaken my head. ‘I respected her insufficiently. And in my efforts to obscure my motives from her I lost her forever.’ But Frau Schmetterling had been impatient with this. ‘Interpret it any way you choose, Ricky. The fact was that you seduced a child and you paid the price for it.’ She had shrugged. ‘And she would always have been a child, probably, with men like you to look after her. She’s a child now, if she married that Swiss. Enjoy youth when it’s given to you. It’s a mistake to try to imprison it, though. It’s too greedy, Ricky. And it never works, my boy.’ She is still in Dresden, I believe. We exchange postcards every couple of years. Prince Badehoff-Krasny lived not twenty miles from me, up the coast, until his death. Von Landoff replaced Holzhammer as Governor, after the assassination. Captain Mencken was killed in Papensgasse, firing a carbine at the Bulgarians as they swept round from the embankment. Had Princess Poliakoff died in Mirenburg? Frau Schmetterling wrote that she might have done. She could not remember if Poliakoff had been with Holzhammer when the Bulgarians took over the brothel, but she remembered the rumour. ‘Personally, I think she died in the bombardment.’

Alice. My Alexandra. My little schoolgirl. Your soft body is no longer warm. Your perfume is faint. I see you in your red and gold balloon as it drifts up towards the silver sunshine. I wish it was my cheek you kiss as you lean over the rim of the gondola and see the spreading ash, the few remaining ruins, saying ‘Look, there’s the Radota Bridge! Isn’t it terrible! And there’s the Cathedral! And there’s Rosenstrasse. Wave, Ricky!’ It is so hard to write. The light is very dim for midday. I must tell Papadakis to turn on the gas. Clara married. She runs a restaurant in Liege and has done well for herself, though they say her husband is a drunk. She loved me. She told me she would always love me, but she had to look after herself. I understood. She had given me too much, I said. She had shaken her head. ‘It would not have been too much if you had wanted it.’ I spent so many cynical years in pursuit of my dream, in revenge on those I blamed for destroying it. And I never found her. She is washed away in that grisly tide. It is ash. She is a ghost. The twin spires glitter in the early afternoon sun. We look down past them towards the white walls. We are having a picnic. Falfnersallee and the Restaurant Schmidt. Waiting for her. I sip absinthe in the sunshine opposite the Radota Bridge. We visit the dress-shops and the jewellers. Deep in the luxury of the brothel. A riding crop rises and falls. A distant, excited scream. Lady Cromach’s smile betrays the betrayer. Clara loved me. That last soft kiss. Alexandra. It was a blow to the groin. I can still feel the bruise. My right hand has started to tremble. Papadakis must bring me some more wine. The sea is too loud. The pain is nothing. I can return to Mirenburg whenever I wish.