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:
We have stopped in the Mountain Grill for a cup of tea and something to eat. George calls a greeting to me from his shrieking, steaming galley at the back. Maria, his wife, calls me a ‘dirty old sod’ and asks me how I am. All affectionate badinage. The chairs are bent chrome and red plastic. The old Brown House style. Two rows of grey formica-topped tables go from front to back with a central aisle. Maria walks up and down the aisle like a wardress, delivering filled plates, picking up empties. She sees to the condiments. She has her favourites. I am one of them. I never go hungry there. Like her husband she wears a stained white overall. They are almost exactly the same height and weight. They come from Cyprus. We get on well. We have similar ideas about the Turks. They would like to see the liberation of Constantinople. Yet they support Queen’s Park and celebrate Christmas. They are not bigots. Everyone comes here, from hippies to police. Black men with impossibly tangled hair openly roll reefers and grin across at the little schoolgirls who have accidentally found this greasy bolthole. Children are in no danger at the Mountain Grill, another of the world’s safe places. The cafe offers greater sanctuary than any church.
Part of George’s front door, bolted open now, has been smashed. ‘Drunks,’ he says, ‘crazies. You know.’
‘Micks was it?’ says Mrs Cornelius. She always blames the Irish. ‘They can’t hold their booze. It’s the same up our way.’
A long time, I tell her, since we had to be afraid of Micks who are all Labour politicians now. She has no base to her prejudice. She merely voices the accepted wisdom of Whitechapel with its deep-rooted secular tradition. Such stereotyping is unworthy of her, I say. I see good and bad among all races. The English are prejudiced against the Irish because they know in their bones Cromwell created many of their ills. Yet the Irish are just as misguided. They blame all their troubles on the English. The plain fact is that the Catholics lost the struggle. What would they have done if Cromwell had not triumphed? Himmler, a Protestant, had no prejudices against Catholics. They were often, he said, the best for special duties. That’s why he preferred, whenever possible, to recruit Austrians.
It is a nonsense to say the Christian Churches turned against Hitler. The Lutherans and the Catholics loved him. They fell over themselves to bless the brave SA boys at their rallies. They got up in their pulpits and told their congregations to vote for him. He was a force for stability, they said. Only the Greek Church stood aloof, which was why Hitler wanted to destroy it. He never had any major disagreement with the Pope.
They were talking on the wireless about the Irish famines in the nineteenth century which the English did so little to alleviate. The survivors all went to America and settled there. Where they lynched Negroes and shot redskins. I once looked at the names of troopers who served in the US frontier regiments and who massacred the natives. The names were all Irish. As they were in India. A naturally belligerent people forced from their bogs and slums by English callousness, they went to America to improve their spirits by shooting unarmed people in remote western valleys. Who is the original victim? Who the aggressor? Many of the Indians expected nothing else. They had dedicated themselves rigorously to the total genocide of rival tribes. Yet tell some American, boasting of his Irish and Cherokee blood, that he survives because his ancestors were successful practitioners of genocide, and feel his fist in your face, his boot in your testicles.
History is no longer a study of the past, but a series of legalistic arguments. A public trial in which academics vie with one another to establish who is the victim, who the aggressor. An American habit. Americans never feel at ease until they establish who is to blame for something. They took this from the Germans, who gave them so much more of their culture than the British.
They say Hitler, too, perverted reality, reinvented history. But unsentimental reality moved the Führer. Let us not mention the Israelis, whose rhetoric is identical to the Nazis in almost every respect. They speak of blood, of living space, of ancient rights. With the help of the unwitting Americans, who name themselves Christians but are really Jews, calling on the Old Testament but rejecting the New, they plan a new Carthaginian Empire across the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
‘Mind your backs, boys!’
Maria brings my usual. One sausage, chips, a slice and tea. On Saturdays I have an egg. Mrs Cornelius has her own usual. A bowl containing two scoops of mashed potato over which thick tomato soup has been poured. A wartime dish, she tells me. It always comforts her.
Through George’s weeping glass I see a sudden ray of sunshine fall on the needlecraft stall across the road. The reels and spools, hanks and balls of bright silks, wools and cottons come to burning life, a magnificent display of jewels. Ornaments sparkle, clothes become more vivid and heads lift almost in surprise. An angel might have paused here.
‘I don’t know what to watch tonight.’ We have finished our meal. It is Mrs Cornelius’s whack. She returns from the counter. ‘Bye-bye, all!’
For a while the drizzle does not persist. Outside the sun continues to shine on windows and puddles. There is a strong pungent odour, almost of the jungle. I know it to be the soup of half-corrupted fruit and vegetables, paper and animal matter, through which we pick our way, fording the amniotic stream so that Mrs Cornelius can get her fags at her newsagent. This material, pushed into heaps or flushed down sewers, is the breeding ground for new species.
Scientists come from all over the world to study Portobello Road. Yesterday some bespectacled student informed me that the area now has its own separate ecological system. Such things happen only in cities. Rural environments lack the necessary biological complexity. Marijuana grown in that mixture is known to be almost fifty times stronger. No wonder everyone seems to be in a trance. These days when they come stumbling into my shop I know exactly what is going on.
When Mrs Cornelius picks up her Embassy Tipped I buy a copy of the Daily Mail, always my favourite British newspaper, as it was Hitler’s. Lord Rothermere was a convinced NSDAP supporter and saw a stronger future in his nation’s close collaboration with Hitler. If they had followed his advice there is no doubt the British Empire would now be greater than ever. She would control vast areas of the world, including China and Arabia. Instead, she cannot effectively rule the Isle of Wight. No wonder the Americans, who have taken over so many old imperial responsibilities, are contemptuous. Americans have deafened themselves. They shout at one another. They shout at me. They shout banalities, destroying thought.
Lately I find it hardly worth buying a paper or turning on the news. Little changes. Who can you trust? That familiar excited babble, confident-sounding analysis, authoritative predicting of trends while everything continues to go round and round in the usual unresolved chaos. Sometimes I come across old newspapers in boxes or as drawer linings. The issues scarcely change. The arguments remain the same. Year in and year out commentators voice the identical views in the same excited tones. Most people are incapable of original thought. They think an original thought is something they haven’t read before. It bowls them over. They repeat it in the pub or, if they are middle class, at dinner parties.
Mrs Cornelius refuses to despair. She says you have to laugh.
‘What a wonderful actor you are, Max.’ Röhm watches the last reel of Buckaroo’s Gold. I wave to the audience from my mechanical horse. It seems I control a rearing mount. I flourish my hat. My smile is gay. My innocent eyes look back at me from a happier age.
He pours champagne. ‘I could swear I’d seen you in something else.’