The Brothel in Rosenstrasse vb-2 Read online

  I deny all reality in order to maintain it; I am even prepared, Iknow, to relinquish lust, to ignore affection, normal companionship. I feel contempt for the ordinary yet I know this state of mind is self-destructive. Such desire is incapable of ever being satisfied. I believe I have aroused the same terrible energies in Alexandra. With it comes a fierce carelessness which considers no-one: be it myself or the object of my desire. There is only the present, here in Mirenburg. I erase the past; I refuse the future. I tear off my robe and stretch my naked body against hers, turning her towards me and kissing her startled, still sleeping mouth. I remember being sent on a ludicrous errand by my sister who wished her brother-in-law to put an end to an unsuitable courtship. He had received me in his study. He was not defiant, yet his attention had hardly been on me at all. He was a good-looking man of the conventional, military sort. 'I see her three times a week,' he had told me. 'She gives me no more and no less. My life is ruled by this routine. I let nothing interfere with it. I live in terror that it will be broken. I will go to any lengths to sustain it. She has a husband, you see. He is °ld but she feels affection for him. Her consideration of his sensitivities drives her to elaborate strategies in her deception °f him, even though he acquiesces and even encourages her in her affair with me, whom he has never met. This consideration somehow gives dignity to a life which on the surface is sordid enough. He offers her security. In return she allows him to live in the ambience of her wonderful sensuality. It seems enough for both. She will not, naturally, permit me to possess her completely, but she is equally considerate of me. She rarely fails to keep an appointment. When she does I am in agony until she communicates with me. She will never leave him. So long as she acknowledges his feelings and thinks of his well-being he is content. She is a wonderful creature. She would not harm either of us.

  'And you can stand this stasis?' I had asked.

  'It is the best I can hope for,' he had said. A bell had rung then. He had risen. 'If you wish to call on Friday, I shall be able to see you again.' He walked sadly with me to the landing and watched as I descended the stairs. 'Please give my warmest regards to your sister and tell her how much I appreciate her thoughtfulness.'

  There is an evening service at the Cathedral. I leave a note for Alexandra and walk the long cobbled way, up the hill, to listen to the music. I cannot argue with Alexandra. She robs me of logic. When last in Mirenburg I had described to a young lady, with whom I had been having an affair, my state of mind. How, amongst, other things, I had been confused for several years, since my wife had left me for a ship's officer in Friedrickshaven only three months after we were married, about whether or not I should marry again. The young lady had smiled: 'You do not think I wish to marry you?' I said that I had wondered. 'But I assure you....' She had begun to laugh. She had pretended that her laughter was uncontrollable. I had waited until she had finished. 'There is no question,' she had said.

  'Excellent.' I had stood up, wondering at that time why she should have denied what had evidently passed through her mind and why I had not the courage to make a direct proposal, for I had been in the mood to do it. That evening, having disappointed myself so thoroughly, I had taken a cab to Frau Schmetterling's and requested a room and a girl - my habit, twice a week, for nearly a year. This, however, had been a third visit in the week and caused Frau Schmetterling some amusement. As I had taken the key from her hand I marvelled at my ability, without intention, to make women laugh. I had seen no reason to suspect that I was held in contempt by them or even that I was unpopular with them, yet I could not fathom how I aroused their humour.

  Why do women seem to triumph so often in men's misery, even when they love them? Again I find myself considering the nature of power and of love. Only a few weeks after my failure to propose to the young lady I had occasion to inform another that I no longer wished to see her. 'But I love you,' she had said, 'with all my heart and soul. I will love you forever. I wish to be yours, whatever you want me to be. I want to help you in any way that I can.' And within a week (I think it was six days) she had fallen in love with an official in the Revenue Service to whom she was, by all accounts, a loyal and faithful companion. The trees thicken as one nears the Cathedral. It is almost rural. There are wild flowers amongst the grass. In the spring and summer cherry- and apple-trees blossom here. I mount the uneven pavements. The spires of the Cathedral are high above my head. The choir is singing from within: Gospodt pomiluj ny -Lord have mercy upon us. I turn and go back. There is other music to be heard, from the cafes, from the street performers. I pause on the corner of Falfnersallee. The last No. 15 tram is on its way to the terminus in Radoskya. I have known Mirenburg in all her seasons, but this is the one I have always favoured. I pass by the statues of Waldenstein's great men and women. I find myself craving the famous bortsch to be found in the Mladota district. It is made with beets and ham-bones, in the traditional way, but to it is added a dash of a particular Tokay which for some reason affects the palate and makes lt sing. I remember Alexandra telling me it even makes her ears tingle. It is delicious: a drug. I decide to return to the hotel, to rouse her and ask if she will join me in a plate. As I turn into Mirozhny Square a group of beggars comes by. I give them all the coppers I have. They are returning to the Schlaff estate, to the old fever hospital and desolate graveyards. Only the railway track brings any kind of life to that area. It is a goods line. Not even local trains to the northern suburbs and outlying villages take passengers through. This estate is all that is left of the Schlaff family lands. The family has lived exclusively in Paris and Berlin for three generations but refuses to lease the estate to anyone who would make use of it. Thus houses, mills, churches and workshops are occupied only by the homeless and the lawless. Orphans and old men climb amongst the ruins and the neglected graves and more respectable citizens pay to have their garbage and other embarrassments they wish to discard transported there. Strange fires burn in this contradictory wasteland; the flames are unhealthy in colour and mysterious in shape. It is Mirenburg's shame. 'Only a little shame, compared to most,' an ex-Mayor of Mirenburg will later insist to me. I will be bound to agree with him. In daytime even the Schlaff estate looks picturesque, overgrown as it is with wild flowers, but at night it must be sought to be seen. It is almost dawn. I hurry back to Alexandra, suddenly afraid she will awake and leave because I am not there to help her maintain our dream.

  It was during a particularly drunken expedition to the Schlaff that I had met Caroline Vacarescu, the Hungarian adventuress, who also currently stays at the Hotel Liverpool and whom I pass in the lobby as I make my hasty ascent to our suite. If Alexandra wakes, realises her predicament and decides to go I shall be unable to reclaim her. She might, of course, have similar fears, but if so she does not exhibit them. Caroline Vacarescu smiles at me. She is doubtless keeping an appointment with Count Mueller, her lover. A wonderful mixture of Magyar beauty and English delicacy, her furs and silks exotically scented, she is the illegitimate daughter of an English duke and a Hungarian aristocrat, born in Pesht. Her father was attached to the Foreign Office, her mother, until her pregnancy, was a lady-in-waiting to the Princess. She received a superb education in Vienna, England and Switzerland and at the age of eighteen married Christoff Beraud, the financier. When Beraud crashed as a result of the Zimmerman scandal of he shot himself, leaving his wife penniless and having to seek the protection of the man who was already her lover, Hans von Arnim, the successful pianist. Unable to be seen with von Arnim in public, Madame Vacarescu grew bored and eventually left Berlin for Danzig with Count Mueller, who describes his occupation as 'freelance diplomat' but who is known as'the Messenger Boy of Europe', a spy, an arms-dealer and a blackmailer. Mueller will die this year and it will be rumoured that Caroline Vacarescu has rid herself of a man who had in a dozen ways compromised and humiliated her. She is a warm-hearted, rather detached woman; a very cold lover with me. Alexandra is awake and my terrors vanish; she complains breakfast is late. Perhaps it is my o
wn lack of resolve I mistakenly bestow upon her. The breakfast comes and goes. As we make love I have an intense vision of that massive stone Cathedral; her flesh contrasts with the carved granite; such opposites and yet so similar in their effect upon the hand and eye. It occurs to me that there may be fewer better pleasures than to make love in the St-Maria-and-St-Maria with the light from the stained glass falling on our bodies as I pass my fingers from youthful flesh to ancient stone while the organ plays some favourite piece of music. And would it be blasphemy? Most would see it as that. But I would thank God for all His gifts and pray more joyfully than anyone had ever prayed before. The violence of Alexandra's passion had almost frightened me at first; now it becomes exhilarating, infectious and I respond in kind. Sometimes, inexplicably, she becomes nervous of me. I ignore her fear, and press ahead until she has again forgotten everything but her lust. But I must be forever controlling, guarding against depressions, against commonalities which threaten our idyll. I do not always reckon with the power of Alexandra's determination. When they decided to go to Rome her parents had left her in the charge of her aunt, who in turn Put her in the care of an old housekeeper. She had already begun to dream, to prepare herself for adventures which, Aspired by the reading of certain French novels, she had Vearned to experience for several years. I still do not know whether she sought me out for her instruction or whether she instructs me. I was unable, in spite of sane reservations, to master my lust. I swiftly gave myself up to her. I do not know how long it has been, but I know that I did not believe for more than a few days that I was fully in control of her as I began that process of subtle debauchery she so deeply desired and which, of course, she also feared, as the laudanum-taker fears the drug which is friend and enemy in one. That she will eventually resist any dependency upon me and break my heart will be a tribute to her determination and a confirmation, finally, of my judgement that I had not only met my match but been beaten at a game I had played half-consciously for years. Alexandra grunts and pants; her eyes are burnished copper. I am familiar, as are most men, with the woman who will translate her own will to power through a male medium, but Alexandra is either more subtle or more naive in her attempts to affect her world. This is partly what fascinates me. It has been several years since any woman obsessed me; now I am surely caught. Eros usurps Bacchus. I rise on that dark euphoria which appears to bring objectivity but in fact produces nothing save confusion, uncontrollable misery and eventual collapse. Papadakis steps out of the shadows with a rattling tray. I can only admit now that I gave myself up to Eros deliberately, in the belief it does a man or woman good to make such fools of themselves occasionally; there are few risks much wilder and few which make us so much wiser, should we survive them. Papadakis stretches out his emaciated arms. I smell boiled fish. 'It will do you good,' he says in his half-humorous, half-insinuating voice; a voice once calculated during his own, brief, Golden Age to rob the weak of any volition they might possess; but it had been the single weapon in his arsenal; he had used up all his emotional capital by the time he was forty. He speaks of the past as if it were a personal God which came to betray him. 'They ruined me,' he sometimes says. In his more egocentric moments he claims deliberately to have ruined himself. Even as we fall into the abyss, we men must explain how the descent was predicted and calculated. When the world refuses to be handled by us, we turn to women. And women, for purposes of their own, usually temporary, help us pretend to a power permitted, in reality, only to the securest of tyrants. Papadakis has become a wizened satyr, a monument to mis-spent juices, keeping me alive from motives of dimly-perceived self-interest. I tell him to leave the tray, to bring me white wine. He refuses. He tells me it is not good for me. He is scowling. Perhaps he senses he no longer has any power over me. Alexandra begins to ask me lascivious questions about my other women. I tell her romantically there are none but her and she seems disappointed.

  The heat of her saliva is on my penis; the soft lips close, the teeth touch the skin; her head moves slowly up and down and the future is once more successfully banished. Death does not exist. Playing with her clitoris and wiping sperm from her cheek she asks me again about other women. I am anxious to keep her curiosity. I begin to invent stories for her. I tell her of adventures involving several ladies at a time. She says unexpectedly: 'Would you like me to do that for you?' I am interrupted. 'What?'

  'Sleep with other women,' she says. 'With you?' I hesitate. 'Have you slept with girls before?' She smiles. 'With school-friends, certainly. We have all done it. Most of us. I love female bodies. They are so beautiful. Beautiful in a different way.' She touches my penis which is erect again. I laugh. 'Where,' she says, 'can we find another lady?' I have the solution. Papadakis is crooning to himself in the corner near the wardrobe. He is doing something with a screwdriver. He is not in good temper. 'Have you taken your pills?' I ask, mocking him. He becomes furious. 'You should see the doctor,' he tells me. 'I cannot be responsible.'

  Caroline Vacarescu boasted to me once that she had slept with five reigning monarchs and thirteen heirs apparent, four them women. The Age of Kings appears to have ended in an orgy of royal lust. The Dictators, according to established Pattern, seem extraordinarily celibate in comparison, perhaps ecause they are not so casually acquainted with power. But with Caroline it was a question of service, not pleasure. She was adding to Count Mueller's secret fortune. We are looking for some cigars for me. Walking up Koenigstrasse in bright sunlight we see an old woman leaning against a shop window full of soap and popular potions. She has a half-eaten cake in one hand and seems drunk. Her clothing is predominantly dark brown. It does not fit her properly. Her left foot is bandaged to just above the ankle. She tugs up her skirt and pees on the paving stones. Her collection of bundles lies to one side of her and the urine spreads slowly towards it. Nearby a street sweeper brushes at the gutter with polite patience, as if waiting to clean the pavement as soon as she has finished. People pass her without stopping, without looking, although they do not appear to be disgusted or afraid. 'There is nothing we can do,' says Alexandra, pulling at me. The sun shines on white roofs and is reflected in elegant windows.

  There is a great deal of traffic in Koenigstrasse today; carriages and carts of all sorts. The street smells like a farm. Papadakis refuses to tell me when he will return. He closes the door with unusual force. I am content. A procession of swaggering lancers, jangling metal and bobbing gold braid, trots by on the other side. 'There are so many soldiers about,' says Alexandra. 'Do you know why?' I do not. 'It could be something to do with the Armaments Bill,' I tell her. The Bill has passed through Parliament. The Prince is expected to sign it today. Alexandra takes a cab for Nussbaumhof to see if her parents have written to say when they are returning from Rome. My earlier fears of losing her have disappeared because we are about to embark on another intrigue; she has set her mind on it. How much of her am I destroying, or allowing her to destroy of herself? I relax with a glass of Alsatian beer and some Cambozola at an outside table of the Cafe Internationale on the corner of Falfnersallee facing the Radota Bridge and the river. The air is unusually warm: everywhere I look I see beauty, reassurance. If Vienna is gay, then Mirenburg IS happy; a sane city whose character may be infinitely explored, and yet she has no real secrets; even her vices are admitted and the subject of common knowledge.

  Bismarck says Mirenburg is a feminine city and a natural bride for masculine Berlin. He once said that a marriage with Vienna would be a perversion of everything that was natural. My brother knew Bismarck quite well. Apparently the great Chancellor had a habit of describing nations in terms of their sexual characteristics; he loved France, for instance: 'She challenges us expecting to be conquered, then complains she is a victim, that we have robbed her of her honour. What other country would give herself up so completely to a Corsican adventurer, offering him her liberty, her lifeblood, her fortune again and again, and then continue to love him, even when he has so patently abused and ruined her?' Now Bismarck is dying, ca
ustic and sometimes bitter when he considers the actions of his successors or the policies of his Austrian counterpart, the Graf Kazimierz Badeni, who possesses much of Bismarck's ruthlessness and little of his intelligence. The balance of power is threatened. A detachment of flying artillery makes the bridge noisy with its showy hooves and iron-shod wheels. The sun bursts upon the bouncing metal of the new Skoda field-guns: perhaps this is another deliberate display.

  I am resentful of their intrusion into my peace of mind. At the next table a German tourist laughs and points towards the artillery as it turns into Kanalstrasse. His wife looks blank. 'See,' he says,'the Waldenstein army!' He glances at me for appreciation. I smile and ask the waiter for a Mirenburg Zeitung. He brings me the newspaper and I give him fifty pfennigs, telling him to keep the change. The editorial sings of the greater prosperity the Armaments Bill will bring to the country. There is news of Count Holzhammer. He seems to have made some progress with his Austrian allies. There is a discussion of preparations being made for next year's large Exhibition, which will represent every nation in the civilized world; again, prosperity is the leitmotif. I seek out the stock Market reports and am reassured. There is an article by a ftьhtary correspondent on the relative merits of buying arms r°m foreign sources or of setting up factories at home. I am astonished by prices given for the Krupp cannon and its ammunition: a hint of the significance of the new Bill, which could involve a considerable amount of taxation. Walden-stein's landowners cannot be pleased at the prospect. Yet the only alternative appears to be in treaties, 'closer union' with one of the Great Powers and a consequent loss of independence. The British have uprisings in India. I fold the newspaper and put it under my beer glass. Alexandra joins me. She is flushed. She is smiling. She has changed her clothes again. 'They will not be back for ages. I've written. And no one suspects anything. I was full of Marya and our punting expeditions!'