Michael Moorcock: The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

The Archduke has not enjoyed his visit to Rosenstrasse and swears the place is overrated and he will never return. He complains of his entrapment in ‘this provincial town’ and speaks to the fascinated students of the glories of Vienna, Buda-Pest and Paris, of the women of St Petersburg, where he was very briefly an attaché, of the boys of Constantinople, and he hands them their pipes with his eyes on their serge thighs and takes a deep breath to relax himself before inhaling. He lets himself remember his days in the service of the Mexicans; that splendid time of unchecked satisfaction when the air was so full of fear one had merely to wave a sabre to fulfill one’s grossest needs. ‘I can still smell the blood,’ he murmurs. ‘There is nothing like it to enliven any sport, say what you will.’ He takes his pipe as if it were a crop and his eyes, full of pagan Asia, brighten and then cloud. ‘But the Jews have robbed me of my birthright… ’ Alexandra is growing bored. She asks me to take her to ‘some secret place’ and so we, too, head for ‘Chow-Li’s’ for I must grant her everything she asks. Here she will cough on the smoke and complain it has no effect, but later she will ask me about my women and will lick her lips while I describe their charms and become terrifyingly passionate so that my dreams will be of some transfigured Mirenburg, some Mirenburg of the soul, where tawny young lionesses purr above the trembling corpses of handsome baboons. Now, just when I have awakened from a thoroughly restful sleep for the first time in weeks, it seems that Mirenburg is all around me. I can see her austere Gothic spires in the mist of the September morning. She is completely alive again. On the river a line of rowing boats drifts gradually to rest against the Hoffmeister Quay. The smell of baking comes from Nadelgasse, seemingly from every window there drifts the odour of fresh bread, of cakes and pastries. As a child I dreamed frequently of a golden-haired young girl, whom I loved. I had carried her away from harsh parents in an open-boat and we had been captured by Norse pirates, but again I was able to save her. She loved me as wholly as I loved her. I used to think of her more than I thought of any real person, as I lay awake in my room in daylight, trying to sleep, but knowing that the rest of the world was still awake, hearing my sisters’ voices from below. Must we always seek in lovers to satisfy the frustrations we have experienced with parents? An ‘echo’. Unable to ease the cares of those who have given birth to us we attempt to improve the lot of a mistress, a husband or a wife. So many women have tried to make me into their ideal father and in resisting I have frequently lost them. Alexandra would rather I were a demon-lover and this role is almost as difficult, but I play it with more relish, for it entails very different responsibilities. My ideal is fair-skinned and blonde, so why should I sense this ‘echo’ in my little Alexandra, this resonance in the soul which entwines me to her as if we were a single note of music? We speak again of Tangiers. I would take her there now, for fear of her escaping me when she tires of this game, but it is impossible. Instead I acquiesce to every adventure.

She requests instruction. I am inventive. I bring to life every dream. I add all experience to my repertoire, I tell her. I resist nothing. I forget nothing. Sexually I am a chameleon. ‘You have the disposition of a whore,’ she tells me, laughing. I cannot deny it. We visit my old friend, Professor Eckart, who teaches at the University now and continues his experiments. He is obsessed with Count Rudolph Stefanik and the possibilities of heavier-than-air flight. He shows us his own designs. His room is almost bare, save for drawings pinned here and there upon the panelling. The large window looks out onto geometrical gardens, full of evergreens and Mirenburg’s famous roses. He tells us that he has personally entertained Stefanik. Alexandra, who has been bored, asks what the Count is like. ‘The man is a rogue,’ I say. ‘And you are not?’ she asks. I have forgotten my part. ‘But a genius,’ says Professor Eckart, tugging at his sleeve and casting about for the wine he has offered us. Professor Eckart looks like a countryman. He is round and bucolic; he might be a huntsman on some Bavarian estate. ‘Would you care to meet him? I am giving a dinner-party next week.’

‘We should love to,’ says Alexandra. Privately I decide to discover the names of the other guests before I accept. I am suspicious of Alexandra’s curiosity; I have some measure of how far she will go to satisfy it. Papadakis brings me my oatmeal gruel. I breakfast on, champagne and smoked salmon with my Alexandra. Not long ago even the gruel was painful to my palate and would sometimes seem over-flavoured, but now I disdain its blandness. Papadakis suggests he should have the doctor in today. Angrily I resist the idea. ‘I have not felt so well in two years,’ I tell him. He leaves to collect the post from the town. I visited my brother Wolfgang at his place in Saxony about a year before I arrived again in Mirenburg. He had just recovered from tuberculosis. ‘My cure was sudden and miraculous,’ he told me. ‘The disease appeared to be killing me. I was its slave. Then, within a matter of weeks, it had released me. I grew steadily stronger, but as I did so I knew enormous regret for the passing of that warm and permanent eroticism which had attended my illness for over forty months. As I returned to normality I experienced the acutest depression and sense of descent into a world whose familiar delights were no longer pleasurable to me.’ At the time I had scarcely understood him. Now I know very well what he meant. There is a kind of debilitating insanity which a person will cling to desperately for as long as it possesses them. Only when it has given them up will they begin to describe it as an aberration. ‘The world is a dull place now, Ricky,’ my brother had said. He had taken to drinking heavily. If it had not been for the threat of dismissal from the diplomatic service he might easily have become a permanent drunkard. But until he died his face held the look of a man who had once known Heaven. Papadakis returns and helps me to the WC. Today the agony of urinating is not so great and I realise that I had grown to look forward to the pain as preferable to any of the other sensations which my disease offers me. But I hurry back to Mirenburg, urging Papadakis on as if he were a coach-horse and I flying for the coast in fear of my life.

At night Mirenburg is both peaceful and mysterious: a perfect mistress. Her shadows do not seem dangerous and her lights do not reveal any ugliness; her desperate aspects are contained; she is tranquil. She is an intelligent city, willing to accept novelty. She is secure and self-possessed. The secret police of three empires conspire in her, observe each other, play peculiar games of intrigue, and she permits it, a tolerant stepmother; the political exiles make their speeches, publish their broadsheets; she does not discourage them so long as her own peace is not disturbed. In the white and brown café on the corner of Kanalstrasse and Kaspergasse, The Café Slavia, the young nationalists have a guest. He is Rakanaspya, an anarchist of uncertain origin; a friend of Kropotkin and Bakunin.

Many believe him to be well-connected in aristocratic circles. Tonight he speaks passionately against privilege, against nationalism, and debates with the youths the virtues of internationalism, mutuality and self-reliance, while in other parts of the café two spies, in the employ of Austria-Hungary and Russia respectively, take surreptitious notes. They are commissioned to report on all agitators. Rakanaspya wears a greatcoat with a fur collar, a bearskin cap; one hand rests on a silver cane. The other hand lifts glasses of brandy to his lips. His voice is unusually thick and husky and is not natural; it was obtained in a duel when his palate was shot away. His imperial hides most of the scar on the left side of his face. He chain-smokes papyrussi so that his fingers, moustache and teeth are stained as yellow as the abandoned tubes which litter his surroundings wherever he stops for more than half-an-nour. They are made for him by an old Russian woman who works for the British Tobacco Company at No. 11 Kanalstrasse. His thin face is pinched and drawn, he has keen, unquiet eyes behind large round glasses and his emaciated, nervous frame speaks of despairing poverty assuaged by fanaticism, perhaps an inheritance from his days in Siberia. Yet when he smiles his tace becomes suddenly innocent; it is sympathetic. He speaks several languages fluently and is well read in every European literature. As a go-between for the émigrés and the Waldenstein authorities he has become almost an official representative. He manages to conciliate both sides (who trust him). He keeps even the fiercest Bohemian or Russian expatriate from expulsion, in spite of constant pressure on the authorities. Austria in particular would welcome any excuse to go to war with Waldenstein; but she will not risk war with Russia, Germany or both. Waldenstein lies balanced between the spheres of these empires, as a small planet might be supported by the opposing gravitation of larger ones, and it is thought to be in nobody’s interest to disturb that balance. Rakanaspya has momentarily forgotten his politics. Someone has mentioned Odessa, his home. ‘I sometimes feel,’ he says, ‘as if I am the emissary from one magic city to another.’ As he becomes drunk Rakanaspya begins to talk of the sea, catching bullheads off the Odessa rocks as a boy, sailing in flat-bottomed boats around the lighthouse, of the foreign vessels lying at anchor on a turquoise ocean, the sailors in the harbour taverns. Many by now know Rakanaspya himself has never been, and probably never will go, to sea; he is fascinated and comforted by the romance of it. His face becomes completely human only when the conversation is turned to salt-water. He never claims experience of sailing, yet believes himself an authority on naval matters and the ways of the world’s great ports. The spies are puzzled by this turn in the conversation, wondering at the significance of it. Rakanaspya describes Odessa for his listeners, the smell of the spices in the harbours, the little tramp steamers which ply the Black Sea, the great military ships. Alexandra, wrapped in a coat which hides the extravagant gown I bought her this afternoon, whispers that she finds Rakanaspya intriguing and boring at the same time. ‘Are all men so full of talk? Such general stuff?’ We slip away from The Café Slavia. She seems angry Rakanaspya did not notice her. We walk beside the river. Men in donkey-jackets stand and smoke their pipes, talking in small groups, glancing at us as we pass. Two Customs officials stroll by. They wear dark blue uniforms, their coats belted at the waist and supporting swords; both have large, carefully-grown moustaches and their caps are at identical angles on their round heads. Papadakis frets over me. He believes I am feverish. He is becoming too insistent. I indicate the paper. ‘I am writing again,’ I tell him. ‘Is that not a sign of my spiritual and physical recovery?’ He goes mumbling from the room. He must forever be simplifying experience. He irritates me. I run my thumbnail down the flesh of her back. She gasps and clutches at bedding but insists I do not stop. I suppose men can learn from women that capacity to make a positive virtue of pain and despair. Women frequently through self-deception and lack of power believe that pain and desperation have meaning in themselves. I tell her she should always seek pleasure and optimism; to seek pain as a form of salvation is to destroy oneself. When we suffer the pain of solitude (as I have done in prison, for instance, or in exile) we are fools if we regard this state as preferable to the ordinary vicissitudes of the world, though we can make of solitude a habit of self-reliance which when needed can stand us in good stead. Pain offers us certain kinds of knowledge which enable us to live in greater harmony with our complex world. An animal which seeks out pain, however, is a mad animal, just as a hermit, who will avoid it, is a mad animal. She is asleep. I rise and go to the window and part the curtains. The square is quiet. I regret, as I smoke a cigarette, I shall not be able to attend the reception being given tomorrow at the Palace.