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
worm to the man. And another scrap: He is not what I imagined him to be. I am beginning to shake. 'You are a fool!' I say. 'Foryou could have become what I imagined you to be. You have ruined any possibility of that now. What a woman you might have been.' It is my failure. I feel it as a painter might experience a failure of creativity. It is as if half my own flesh has been torn from me, half my mind stolen. The guns batter my past into the dust and my future has run away into the ruins. I am so horribly betrayed. And it is my own doing. My anger comes on me suddenly and I begin to rip at her dresses, her underwear, her aigrettes, stamping on her little shoes, flinging silk and lace and feathers into the air until my tiredness causes me to collapse, sucking at a hand I have somehow cut, in the middle of the debris. I have tried to destroy everything which reminds me of her, which hurts me. I poured so much of myself into that valueless vessel. As I squat there, weeping and shaking, Clara enters the room. She is wearing a patterned tea-gown over her nightclothes. She moves here and there, replacing ornaments, clearing up broken china and glass. 'She's taken every piece of jewellery,' she says. I moan at her to go away. She stands looking down on me. 'Have you hurt yourself badly?'
'No.'
She closes the door behind her.
When, at length, I return to Clara's room she is asleep again with the sheets drawn over her head. I take off my jacket and my waistcoat and go to sit in the armchair near the window. I cannot sleep. Every time I close my eyes I am filled with bitter images, with a yearning for the recent past and all the happiness I have lost. Mirenburg is gone. Papadakis grumbles at me as he brings back the clean chamber pot. 'You've pissed in the bed again,' he says. 'I know it. I can smell it.'
He has made me stand, leaning on the table and trembling, while he gathers up the soiled linen. 'I'm going to bring the doctor in the morning.' Now the bed is clean. Through the open window comes the smell of hyacinths and the sea. Mirenburg no longer lives; she is a grey memory. She has been biding her time, hiding in a neurasthenic slumber while she waited for the best which would be offered to her: a kind of hibernation because she did not want to accept my offer but was afraid to refuse it, afraid to take any action. What had Diana promised? I doubt if it was anything than a more glamorous, if less realistic, plan of escape. Stefanik's balloon? I get out of the chair. My legs are weak. Clara turns, casting off her covering to hold out tolerant arms. Her face is full of controlled sympathy. How can she forgive me? Why do women do this to us? I begin to weep again. 'We are going away this evening,' she says. 'It is all arranged with Frau Schmetterling. We will take Elvira. Wilke will be with us. How did you plan to escape from the city?' Still snivelling, I tell her about the underground river and the sewers.' She pats my shoulder. 'Not bad. It could work.' Eventually I go to sleep. I am awakened by an explosion. From somewhere within the house I hear voices shouting and the crash of falling plaster. It is dark in the room. I lie on the bed and wait for the next shell. Instead the door opens and Clara stands there, an oil-lamp raised in her hand. Frau Schmetterling is with her. The madam holds something in her hands. It is a bloody, palpitating chow-dog. 'They have killed Pouf-Pouf,' she says flatly. 'And this poor little one is dying, too.'
Clara is already in her outdoor clothes: a black and grey tailor-made. Over this she draws a plain cloak of the sort peasant women wear. She points to a bundle at her feet. 'Here are some of 'Mister's' clothes. They should fit you. You'll have to leave your wardrobe behind, my dear.'
I have become pliable and obedient. The dog begins to groan. Frau Schmetterling whispers something to Clara and then returns downstairs. I receive a strange feeling of satisfaction as I pull on the rough garments; it is almost as if I shall wear sackcloth in mourning for Mirenburg and my slain imagination. 'I want reality so badly,' I tell Clara. 'She was won over by nothing more than a fantastic promise.'
'Very likely.' Clara helps me button the coat. 'Do you still have the map?'
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br /> I give it to her. 'We'll put Wilke in charge, I think,' she says. 'At least for the moment. Are you feeling any better?'
'I want reality,' I tell her.
'This is reality enough for anyone.' She is humorous. 'But I'm sure you'll find a way out of it. I trust your instincts for that. Lead the way, your lordship.'
We leave, the four of us, in the night. In Rosenstrasse we have to pass two soldiers who are still alive, though their bodies are dreadfully mutilated. They call out to us for help. 'I'll deal with them,' says Frau Schmetterling, hurrying us forward.
Wilke and I raise the cover of the manhole. He goes first, swinging the lamp we have brought with us. Our shadows slide this way and that on the moist stones of the shaft. The metal ladder leads us down into the old watercourse. Elvira is too small to keep her head above the water, so I raise her on my shoulders. Throughout this journey I will find a kind of delicate consolation in being allowed to tend to the child's needs and will catch myself occasionally using the same kind of words and gestures used by 'Mister' in his conversation with her. We wade through shit and corpses to some sort of liberty, emerging on the fringes of the Moravian inferno and joining lines of refugees stumbling towards the cleaner air of a countryside stripped of all its wealth. We walk steadily for two more days until we cross the Bohemian border and are able, with the gold Frau Schmetterling has given us, to get a train to Prague where we separate. Wilke will take Elvira to England. I still have no volition and allow Clara to make every decision. We go first by train to Berlin and the hospitality of my brother Wolfgang, who congratulates me on the charm and the breeding of my English fiancee. Within days, of course, we are taken up by Society. Everyone must hear of our experiences. I recover myself sufficiently to present at least an acceptable facade and I speak with authority of the suffering and destruction I have witnessed. I am asked to write the articles which become that silly book The 100 Day Siege: A Personal Record of the Last Months of Mirenburg. I mention nothing of any real importance to me, but for a while I become a hero.
Holzhammer's villainy is the subject of a thousand editorials. He is called the Butcher of Mirenburg and the perfidy of Austria-Hungary has shocked, we read, the entire civilised world. But Holzhammer rules and Badehoff-Krasny is exiled and the diplomats gradually do their seedy work so that the Peace of Europe is maintained for a few more years. And Mirenburg is gone. I hear many rumours, but there is no news of Alice. I will talk to anyone who has a grain of gossip. It is still hard for me to accept that so much beauty has vanished as a result of trivial political decisions. There will never be a brothel like Frau Schmetterling's in Rosenstrasse, for there will never be another Mirenburg, with its history and its charm. And psycho-analysis has made us too self-conscious. This is an age of great remedies; they seem to believe there is a cure for human greed. There is not. But neither should the greedy be condemned. They should merely be guarded against. Greed is not evil. What is evil is the manipulation of others in order to satisfy it; the quest for power. That is the crime. Do you hear me, Papadakis? He is still shuffling about in the shadows.
Will you read this, Alice, in your Geneva home? Or did you die with the others in Mirenburg? I could not find you. In London and Dublin we thought to discover news of Lady Cromach, but she had not returned. Someone said she had changed her name 'because of certain scandals' and might be living in Paris. But she was not in Paris. And as for Princess Poliakoff, all we heard of her was that she could have gone to India. They said that on Sunday, 19th December 1897, when Holzhammer's troops arrived at Rosenstrasse, Poliakoff had sat in her old lover's carriage and directed the mercenaries into the brothel. I can imagine with what pleasure the Bulgarians took our ladies ('All they found later was a pile of bloody lace'). Baby is crying, Lady Cromach used to say. Baby is angry. Rakanaspya was killed, probably by the Austrians. Count Belozerski was wounded but managed to return to Kiev where I believe he still lives, writing about factories. Baby is crying. We are lost. Deserted. That which comforts us grows old and dies. We long to recapture it; the security of childhood, the attention of others. Clara was familiar with Lady Cromach's remarks. But she was not so tolerant of Baby. 'Sooner or later,' she said to me,'that baby's crying becomes an irritant to our adult ears. It is then we have the right to turn upon the weak and with all due ruthlessness squeeze the life from a silly, mindless creature. If we are to survive, Baby must be destroyed.'
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.'
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