The Vengeance of Rome
- Автор: Муркок Майкл
- Серия: Between The Wars #4
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Vengeance of Rome». Краткое содержание книги:
‘Pyat?’ He was sarcastic. ‘Are you sure your name isn’t Finif?’
I understood him all too well. He held up five fingers and then made the old sign for the Devil.
We are our own country, we, the exiles. Our past and present are held in common, as is our pain, but we hold disparate notions of the future. Some of us expect to return, to pick up the threads of our lives exactly as they were the day we were taken away. Others anticipate their old world improved and cleansed. But I know what it would mean for me once I got back. I dream about it but the dreams are not always pleasant. In the most recent dream Esmé sits naked, reading aloud from the Bible in Hebrew while my mother listens. She is not the old fraud I saw that time but my real mother whom I waved goodbye to from the Kiev train. Finif! I knew that insult. Five. Fiinf.
‘What’ll you give me for half a sawbuck.’ He was grinning, this Yankee shyster. He held up a five-dollar bill. ‘A fin?’
‘A herring for a tin,’ I said. ‘Don’t insult me. Get out of my shop.’
FORTY-ONE
What would make me so lonely, here among friends, where Mrs Cornelius herself sees me almost every day, is always available to me? What makes a man forever alone? What determines his fate? All that is mine, my faith, my memory, my hope, should invigorate me, make me one with the world. Instead, I feel like one who stands in line, shuffling forward every few minutes, to his death. I, who have escaped every transport, every selection, who have escaped death so many times, fear it. As retribution? No, for I shall ascend to heaven, to that divine moment of forgetting when soul and mind take separate turnings and identity dissolves.
What is restored to us in death? It cannot be anything but truth. It can only be the ultimate moment of knowing. Or is it the first moment of not knowing, of the death of self, the end of this witless struggling?
I leave my life and my inventions to anyone who can put them to good use. The rest I leave to Portobello Road and the secondhand trade, for recycling, to comfort strangers and the unborn.
FORTY-TWO
She had just been to see Robert Donut in The Adventures of Tartu. Had I seen it? I reminded her of Donut, she said. The film could have been based on my life. Was I ever in the Blitz? Of course, I said, but the film must have come out when I was away from London. What do you remember most? she asked.
The ash in my nostrils, I said. And how it clogged my throat. It made it very hard to see.
I have never been able to get rid of that smell, that sensation of forever being on the brink of taking my last breath. The ash flows over the world. It flows over Dachau and Treblinka and Auschwitz. It flows over Berlin and Dresden. It flows over London and Coventry, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It fills the streets of Shanghai and Delhi. It will always be that ash. It is impossible to remove from your skin and hair, no matter what soap you wash with. Soap was always in short supply, naturally. Even the soap seemed made of ashes. We are forever breathing in the remains of our ancestors and of our enemies.
‘Tell me, Herr Peters. Are you familiar with the Dachau School?’ asks my master. ‘With Taschner, Spitzweig and so on?’
‘This was a school? I heard it was a munitions factory.’
‘No, no.’ He is amused. ‘They were artists. Very good ones. Your friend Doctor Hanfstaengls father used to sell the prints in his gallery.’
‘Painting is not one of my areas of expertise. I am a scientist.’
‘Of course. Just as am I.’
They called it Vernichtung durch Arbeit. They wanted to make me Uneingeteilt. But there was always too much of me. I was not one of those with unwertes Leben. For me there was always Sonderbehandlung. A disheartening, a disembowelling. They loot me. They take out my organs of creativity. They take out my mind. They brutalise me and in so doing destroy small pieces of me. They sensationalise, making free with my creations. Stealing my images. Stealing my life. Stealing my eyes. Groping my soul. They are greedy for any part of my vitality they can discover. And they call this homage? There are those who pay me back in kind. Who give me stimulus. Who give me respect. Who take a line and tie new knots in it. Who make new stars, new trails, new nations, adding to the seas, refreshing the oceans, making something of themselves, something of myself.
We heard the new Oberführer was Deubel, the Commandant, but we never saw him. Franz Hoffmann was a crook they said. Obersturmführer Ruppert was worse.
What did I do in Tegernsee? What was so wrong?
FORTY-THREE
There was a period, I forget exactly what the date was, when priests kept arriving. There were all kinds, at first from the evangelical religions, but then came many Catholics, after the Pope’s encyclical. He doesn’t seem to make up his mind, they said. Bishops, cardinals and so on came in on the trains. Many were made to work on the Plantage, growing food for the Gestapo and the SS. I learned later they sold it at a profit. They made them wear crowns of barbed wire and carry heavy beams of wood. They got the Jews to spit on them as they went by.
I heard some got away. Some were ‘Auf der Flucht erschossen’, killed while trying to escape.
Es gibt einen Weg zur Freiheit. Seine Meilensteine heissen: Gehorsam. Fleiss. Ehrlichkeit. Ordnung. Sauberkeit. Nüchtemheit. Wahrheit. Opfersinn und Liebe zum Vaterland.
FORTY-FOUR
Nobody wants to know what happened. They wish to learn how many tanks fought at the Battle of the Bulge but not how many died in Belsen. They want to know the names of every general on the German or British side, but couldn’t tell you one name of a concentration camp commandant. Names which were meaningless to us are full of romance and association for them. Names which were of the greatest importance to us are hard for even the historians to recall. What did it matter to Hitler when he knew that at least the war against the Jews had been won? So he thought. What he could not have borne to contemplate is that, like some mad scientist in a movie who passes more and more energy through a monster he is attempting to kill, he only strengthens the monster. Is Hampstead Garden Village full of greater numbers of folkish maypole dancers than it was in 1930? Even the church isn’t used today. More residents of that idealised English village use the synagogue just down the road. It is the same with Hollywood. The place is filled with mock-Tudor mansions and granite keeps. For years I remained disappointed in Sherwood Forest and all the other sites I had first seen in Douglas Fairbanks films, because of course Sherwood Forest was in northern California and most of the Merry Men were from Maine. England seemed a mean, grey place after the movies. Instead of Fairbanks, Coleman or Flynn I found myself in a world of cold proprietary and semi-apologetic politesse, those early Hitchcock movies where almost all the action is played out on one set. Usually a pub. Usually in a mean backstreet. Usually in the rain. And too few Brighton Rock blondes to help you through the worst of it, though I of course had Mrs Cornelius, at least some of the time. Without that woman, I would not exist.
It was useless for me to protest in that place. He thought all Spaniards were Jews.