Breakfast in the Ruins kg-2

by Michael John Moorcock

  — I don't drink much. A lemonade will do.

  — A glass of wine?

  — All right.

  Karl accepts the glass of red wine. He holds it up to a beam of moonlight.— I wish I could help you, he says.

  — Don't worry about that.

  — If you say so. Karl sits down on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs and sipping his wine.—Do you think I'm unimaginative?

  — I suppose you are. But that's nothing to do with it.

  — Maybe that's why I never made much of a painter.

  — There are lots of different kinds of imagination.

  — Yes. It's a funny thing. Imagination is man's greatest strength and yet it's also his central weakness. Imagination was a survival trait at first, but when it becomes overdeveloped it destroys him, like the tusks of a mammoth growing into its own eyes. Imagination, in my opinion, is being given far too much play, these days.

  — I think you're talking nonsense, says the black man. It is true that he looks paler. Perhaps that is the moonlight too, thinks Karl.

  — Probably, agrees Karl.

  — Imagination can allow man to become anything he wants to be. It gives us everything that is human.

  — And it creates the fears, the bogeymen, the devils which destroy us. Unreasoning terror. What other beast has fears like ours?

  The black man gives him an intense glare. For a moment his eyes seem to shine with a feral gleam. But perhaps that is the moonlight again.

  Karl is seventeen. A dupe of the Duce. Escaped from Berlin and claiming Italian citizenship, he now finds himself drafted into the Army. You can't win in Europe these days. It's bad. There is pain...

  There is heat.

  — Are you afraid, then? asks Karl's friend.

  — Of course. I'm guilty, fearful, unfulfilled...

  — Forget your guilts and your fears and you will be fulfilled.

  — And will I be human?

  — What are you afraid of?

  KARL WAS SEVENTEEN. His mother had gone. His father had gone. His uncle, an Italian citizen, adopted him in 1934. Almost immediately Karl had been conscripted into the Army. He had no work. He had been conscripted under his uncle's new name of Giombini, but they knew he was a Jew really.

  He had guessed he would be going to Ethiopia when all the lads in the barracks had been issued with tropical kit. Almost everyone had been sure that it would be Ethiopia.

  And now, after a considerable amount of sailing and marching, here he was, lying in the dust near a burning mud hut in a town called Adowa with the noise of bombs and artillery all around him and a primitive spear stuck in his stomach, his rifle stolen, his body full of pain and his head full of regrets. His comrades ran about all round him, shooting at people he couldn't see. He didn't bother to call out. He would be punished for losing his rifle to a skinny brown man wearing a white sheet. He hadn't even had a chance to kill somebody.

  He regretted first that he had left Berlin. Things might have quietened down there eventually, after all. He had left only because of his parents' panic after the shop had been smashed. In Rome, he had never been able to get used to the food. He remembered the Berlin restaurants and wished he had had a chance to eat one good meal before going. He regretted, too, that he had not been able to realize his ambitions, once in the Army. A clever lad could rise rapidly to an important rank in wartime, he knew. A bomb fell nearby and the force of it stirred his body a little. Dust began to drift over everything. The -yells and the shots and the sounds of the planes, the whine of the shells and the bombs, became distant. The dust made his throat itch and he used all his strength to stop himself from coughing and so make the pain from his wound worse. But he coughed at last and the spear quivered, a sharp black line against the dust which made everything else look so vague.

  He watched the spear, forcing his eyes to focus on it. It was all he had.

  You were supposed to forget about worldly ambitions when you were dying. But he felt cheated. He had got out of Berlin at the right tune. Really, there was no point in believing otherwise. Friends of his would be in camps now, or deported to some frightful dung heap in North Africa. Italy had been a clever choice. Anti-Semitic feeling had never meant much in Italy. The fools who had gone to America and Britain might find themselves victims of pogroms at any minute. On the other hand the Scandinavian countries had seemed to offer an alternative. Perhaps he should have tried his luck in Sweden, where so many people spoke German and he wouldn't have felt too strange. A spasm of pain shook him. It felt as if his entrails were being stirred around by a big spoon. He had become so conscious of his innards. He could visualize them all—his lungs and his heart and his ruined stomach, the yards and yards of offal curled like so many pink, grey and yellow sausages inside him; then his cock, his balls, the muscles in his strong, naked legs; his fingers, his lips, his eyes, his nose and his ears. The black line faded. He forced it back into focus. His blood, no longer circulating smoothly through his veins and arteries, but pumping out of the openings around the blade of the spear, dribbling into the dust. Nothing would have happened in Germany after the first outbursts. It would have died down, the trouble. Hitler and his friends would have turned their attention to Russia, to the real enemies, the Communists. A funny little flutter started in his groin, below the spear blade. It was as if a moth were trying to get into the air, using his groin as a flying field, hopping about and beating its wings and failing to achieve takeoff. He tried to see, but fell back. He was thirsty. The line of the spear shaft had almost disappeared and he didn't bother to try to focus on it again.

  The distant noises seemed to combine and establish close rhythms and counter-rhythms coupled with the beating of his heart. He recognized the tune. Some American popular song he had heard in a film. He had hummed the same song for six months after he had seen the film in Berlin. It must have been four years ago. Maybe longer. He wished that he had had a chance to make love to a woman. He had always disdained whores. A decent man didn't need whores. He wished that he had been to a whore and found out what it was like. One had offered last year as he walked to the railway station.

  The film had been called Sweet Music, he remembered. He had never learned all the English words, but had made up words to sound like them.

  There's a tavern in the town, in the town, When atroola setsen dahn, setsen dahn, Und der she sits on a luvaduvadee, Und never, never sinka see. So fairdeewell mein on tooday...

  He had had ambitions to be an opera singer and he had had ambitions to be a great writer.

  The potential had all been there, it was just a question of choosing. He might even have been a great general.

  His possible incarnations marched before him through the dust.

  And then he was dead.

  — You could be anything you wanted to be. His friend kisses his shoulder.

  — Or nothing. Could I be a woman and give birth to five children? Karl bites the black man.

  The black man leaps up. He is a blur. For a moment, in the half-light, Karl thinks that his friend is a woman and white and then an animal of some kind, teeth bared. The black man glowers at him—Don't do that to me!

  And Karl wipes his lips.

  He turns his back on his friend. Okay. You taste funny, anyway.

  What Would You Do? (12)

  You are a priest, devoutly religious, you are made miserable by the very idea of violence. You are, in every sense, a man of peace.

  One morning you are cutting bread in the small hall attached to your church. You hear screams and oaths coming from the church itself. You hurry into the church, the knife still in your hand.

  The soldier of the enemy currently occupying your country is in the act of raping a girl of about thirteen. He has beaten her and torn her clothes. He is just about to enter her. She whimpers. He grunts. You recognize the girl as a member of your parish. Doubtless she came to the church for your help. You shout, but the soldier pays no attention. You implore him to stop to no a
vail.

  If you kill the soldier with your knife it will save the young girl from being hurt any further. It might even save her life. Nobody knows the soldier has entered the church. You could hide the body easily.

  If you merely knock him out—even if that's possible -he will almost certainly take horrible reprisals on you, your church and its congregation. It has happened before, in other towns. Yet you want to save the girl.

  What would you do?

  13

  At The Anschwitz Ball: 1944:

  Strings

  The war in Europe has been won; but the air of Europe smells of blood. Nazis and Fascists have been defeated; but their leaders have not yet been destroyed. It is still touch-and-go even now, whether the surviving Nazis are to have another chance of power, or whether they can be made harmless for ever by their swift arraignment as war criminals. And make no mistake this is not simply a matter for self-evident criminals such as Goering, Rosenberg and those others guilty of outstanding crimes, or responsible for the orders which caused major atrocities.

  I have before me about twenty dossiers from small, unimportant French villages, and some from better-known places. They are unemotional accounts based on the evidence of named witnesses, of events which occurred during the German occupation. The Massacre of Dun Les Plages on June 26, 1944; the destruction of the village of Manlay on July 31, 1944; the treatment and murder in the Gestapo barracks at Cannes—and so it goes on. Sometimes the names of the local Nazis responsible have been discovered and named; often not.

  The full horror of these cold indictments are revealed by the photographs which accompany them. It is difficult to describe them. Two or three of the mildest only are reproduced here. The Nazis took delight in having themselves photographed with their victims while these were in their agony of outrage and torture. It is not a simple crime that is depicted, but a terrible degradation of man. All the most horrible instincts which survive in our subconscious, have come brutally out into the open. It is no relapse into savagery, because no savages ever behaved with such cold, unfeeling, educated brutality and shamelessness.

  These dossiers are French. But the same story is repeated in every country the Germans occupied, and also from those countries which allied themselves with the Nazis. Arrests, deportations, questionings and punishment were all carried out with a deliberate maximum of brutality accompanied by every conceivable carnal license. Like the concentration camps, these methods aimed at the destruction of confidence in democratic values; at inducing a total surrender to the Nazi terror.

  They succeeded for a time—probably more than most people who have never lived under Nazi domination care to believe. That fear and horror of the Nazi bully has not yet been eradicated. The war will not be over until all the outraged millions of once-occupied Europe enjoy full confidence that democratic Governments can protect their rights, and that those who have offended are punished and broken. The Nazis mobilized the Untermensch, the sub-human, into their ranks. The wickedness he worked is a vivid memory, and it must be exorcised before Europe can have peace.

  PICTURE POST, June 23,1945.

  — Don't try that with me, you little white bastard! Karl displays his arms.

  — I'm a black bastard now.

  — We can soon change that.

  — Oh, hell, I'm sorry, says Karl.—It was just an impulse.

  — Well, says his friend grimly, you're certainly losing your inhibitions now, aren't you.

  Karl is eighteen. He is very lucky, along with the other members of the orchestra. His mother told him there was a point to learning, that you never knew when it came in useful, fiddle playing. And it was beautifully warm in the barracks. He hoped they would dance all night.

  — Come back to bed, says Karl.—Please...

  — I thought you were a nice, simple, uncomplicated sort of chap, says the black man.—That's what attracted me to you in the first place. Ah, well—it was my own fault, I suppose.

  Karl is eighteen and playing Johann Strauss. How beautiful. How his mother would have loved it. There are tears in his eyes. He hoped they would dance forever! The Oswiecim Waltz!

  — Well, I'm not at my best says Karl.—I wasn't when you met me. That's why I was in the Roof Garden.

  — It's true, says his friend, that we hardly know each other yet.

  KARL WAS EIGHTEEN. His mother had been given an injection some time ago and she had died. His father had probably been killed in Spain. Karl sat behind the screen with the other members of the orchestra and he played the violin.

  That was his job in Auschwitz. It was the plum job and he had been lucky to get it. Others were doing much less pleasant work and it was so cold outside. The big barrack hall was well-heated for the Christmas Dance and all the guards and non-commissioned officers, their sweethearts and wives, were enjoying themselves thoroughly, in spite of rations being so short.

  Karl could see them through a gap in the screen as he and the others played The Blue Danube for the umpteenth time that evening. Round and round went the brown and grey uniforms; round and round went the skirts and the dresses. Boots stamped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall. Beer flowed. Everyone laughed and joked and sang and enjoyed themselves. And behind the leather upholstered screen borrowed for the occasion the band played on.

  Karl had two pullovers and a pair of thick corduroy trousers, but he hardly needed the second pullover, it was so warm. He was much better off than when he had first come to the camp with his mother. Not that he had actually seen his mother at the camp, because they had been segregated earlier on. It had been awful at first, seeing the faces of the older inmates, feeling that you were bound to become like them, losing all dignity. He had suffered the humiliation while he summed up the angles and, while a rather poor violinist, had registered himself as a professional. It had done the trick. He had lost a lot of weight, of course, which was only to be expected. Nobody, after all, was doing very well, this winter. But he had kept his dignity and his life and there was no reason why he shouldn't go on for a long while as he was. The guards liked his playing. They were not very hot on Bach and Mozart and luckily neither was he. He had always preferred the lighter gayer melodies.

  He shut his eyes, smiling as he enjoyed his own playing.

  When he opened his eyes, the others were not smiling. They were all looking at him. He shut his eyes again.

  — Would you say you were a winner? asks Karl's friend.

  — No. Everything considered, I'd say I was a loser. Aren't we all?

  — Are we? With the proper encouragement you could be a winner. With my encouragement.

  — Oh, I don't know. I'm something of a depressive, as you may have noticed.

  — That's my point. You've never had the encouragement, I love you, Karl.

  — For myself?

  — Of course. I have a lot of influence. I could get your work sold for good prices. You could be rich.

  — I suppose I'd like that.

  — If I got you a lot of money, what would you do?

  — I don't know. Give it back to you?

  — I don't mean my money. I mean if your work sold well.

  — I'd buy a yacht, I think. Go round the world. It's something I've always wanted to do. I went to Paris when I was younger.

  — Did you like it?

  — It wasn't bad.

  What Would You Do? (13)

  You own a dog. It is a dog you inherited from a friend some years ago. The friend asked you to look after it for a short while and never returned.

  Now the dog is getting old. You have never cared much for it, but you feel sympathetic towards it. It has become long in the tooth, it makes peculiar retching noises, it has difficulty eating and sometimes its legs are so stiff you have to carry it up and down stairs.

  The dog is rather cur-like in its general demeanor. It has never had what you would call a noble character. It is nervous, cowardly and given to hysterical barking.

  Because of the stiffness in it
s legs you take it to the veterinary clinic.

  The dog has lived several years beyond its expected life-span. Its eyes are failing and it is rather deaf.

  You have the opportunity to ask the veterinary to destroy the dog. And yet the dog is in no pain or any particular discomfort most of the time. The vet says that it will go on quite happily for another year or so. You hate the idea of witnessing the dog's last agonies when its time does come to die. You have only a faint degree of affection for it. It would really be better if the vet got it over with now.

  What would you say to the vet?

  14

  The Road to Tel-Aviv: 1947

  Traps

  ATIYAH: I have three comments to make. First, concerning what Reid said about Palestine having belonged to the Turks. Under Turkish suzerainty the Arabs were not a subject people, but partners with the Turks in the empire. Second, on what I considered was the false analogy—when Crossman said the Jews were unlucky in that they were, as he put it, the last comers into the fields of overseas settlement. He mentioned Australia. I would point out that the Arabs in Palestine do not belong to the same category as the aborigines of Australia. They belong to what was once a highly-civilized community, and before what you call overseas settlement in Palestine by the Jews was begun, the Arabs were reawakening into a tremendous intellectual and spiritual activity after a period of decadence, so there can be no comparison between the two cases.

  CROSSMAN: Tom, what do you think were the real mistakes of British policy which led up to what we all agree is an intolerable situation?

  REID: The British Government during the first World War had induced the Arabs, who were in revolt against the Turks, to come in and fight on the Allied side. We made them a promise in the McMahon Declaration and then, without their knowledge, invited the Jews to come in and establish a national home. That was unwise and wicked. As I understand it, the idea of the British Government was that the Jews should come in and gradually become a majority. That was a secret understanding and was doubly wicked.