The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04]

by Michael Moorcock

  Familiar with the Strassenorgel’s mechanics, I asked if I might have a look. He let down the back on hinges and showed me the interior. The straightforward device consisted of a large bellows, a number of pipes of various gauges, a spiked cylinder rather like a player-piano’s, over which passed a series of punched cards, triggering or stopping the appropriate pipes. A bellows supplied the air for the simple system. A borrowed screwdriver, a bicycle repair kit, a can of fine oil, a pair of jeweller’s pliers and some wire, and I soon had the Leierkasten working at full capacity, its voice issuing strong and melodic from the diaphragm at the front. Signor Frau could not thank me enough. He was genuinely delighted. I had made the difference between good times and bad for his little family.

  Sitting on a wooden stool one of the traders had lent us, I replaced the casing of the barrel organ feeling that for the first time in months I had done something useful with myself. As I turned to speak to the boy, who had held the tools for me, I saw Zoyea come up to me like a vision. A peck on the cheek, a curtsy and she said very earnestly: ‘You are a friend of our family, Herr Peters, and we thank you for your kindness.’

  Thereafter, not only did I have a friend, I had employment. My engineering genius, applied to the primitive mechanism of the barrel organ, was in great demand. Those Italians thought me a wonder! And so I began to earn a few marks from other Italians in the same fraternity. Some still spoke habitually in Italian and were delighted that I could converse with them. I was Il Professore again, and my meals were also assured. Every evening I was welcome in the homes of families, most of whom were also admirers of Mussolini. I found myself in warm and sympathetic company.

  They all lived on the other side of the River Isar in the area of old run-down wooden houses known as Glockenbach-Viertel, built on both sides of a muddy stream running into Munich’s chief river. I had grown up in just such a neighbourhood. The buildings had had floors added at random over the past hundred years or so. They had no common design and little sense of order. The houses leaned one against another, forming a kind of organic whole. If one key beam or wall were removed, all the others, so densely packed together and full of humanity, might collapse like cards. Damp rotted much of the woodwork and added to the prevailing smell. Some buildings had been repaired so often with such poor materials they resembled wrecked ships or ramshackle piles of timber. The unmade streets were twisting alleys beneath overhanging balconies and galleries, with blind oiled paper windows and dark, irregular openings running at all angles, and reminded me of the nightmare that was Doctor Caligari. Only slowly did it become clear that there were people living within.

  I spent happy hours in the district they called the Stables, an old brick mews belonging to a carriage business in the previous century, now housing machinery as well as animals. Here, many of the street sellers stored their stalls, street organs and so on. There was an entire gypsy-style wagon and others in differing stages of repair. There was a show wagon which broke down into a shooting gallery. The game’s parts, the rifles and targets, had long since disappeared, but it was still a handsome vehicle. It belonged to the Frau family. He had had some idea about putting it all back together and taking it around the county, but the Reds, of course, had brought in all kinds of petty gambling laws, and he had neither time nor money to obtain the appropriate permits.

  I have noticed how the Germans and the Americans get a satisfaction from making laws against human nature. No wonder their prisons are full to bursting. Such laws make you an outlaw simply by being a person.

  The Fraus did not use the van because of the cost of re-equipping it. The other vans were more easily adapted for living but were less sturdy. In the crooked building which ran along the whole back wall of the mews was a busy aviary, which I understood to be a secret. Judging by the quality of the ornamental ironwork, the whole thing had been stolen from some Wittelbachian fantasy. Birds from macaws to finches were kept here, and a boy was employed to play a big barrel organ when their screeches became too obvious.

  I was never sure if the ranks and ranks of caged birds were for sale, to eat or for company. Neither did I know for certain if it was illegal to keep them. Such age-old practices are usually the first things the Reds outlaw! For instance, in the courtyard one afternoon I witnessed a cockfight. I was privileged to attend as a friend of Heinrich Frau. They were proud of their birds. English fighting cocks, they said, with all the aggression of that tiny island nation. The best blood on earth. Smuggled in from Ireland. The spurs were not elaborate, simply little pieces of leather tied on to the bird’s leg through which had been poked a finely sharpened nail, the fighting spur. The sport was a bloody business. Once a bit of glinting feathered flesh struck me in the mouth, but in my excitement, I hardly noticed.

  Every night you had to be in the mews by a certain time. A great grille was drawn across the entrance and was not opened again until morning. All was overseen by a horrible old Turkish woman they called the Gatekeeper, which in their argot was also a term for the anal sphincter. She ruled the place while working for an absent owner, Klosterheim, who never appeared and was known only as the Major. Everyone paid their rent to the Gatekeeper, and it was to her they complained. They were convinced she never passed anything but their money on to the Major, rumoured to be a member of the Wittelbach family which had only recently ceased to rule Bavaria.

  Sometimes when I worked in the mews repairing the barrel organs and other engines the Italian community used, old Father Bernhardt would pay us a visit. He spoke good Italian and made it his mission to serve the local community, all devout Catholics who worshipped at his church. I took great pleasure in my meetings with a man of refined intellect in that place, and we had some good talks, especially about the Pope and Il Duce. He was a monkey in a cassock, all mouth and no chin, flamboyant gesticulation and brilliant moving eyes, with crimson lips, which in Kiev would have made us call him a ‘borscht-fiend’ in fun. I think he drank. He certainly gambled, because I saw him slipping his bet to one of the boys who acted as a courier for a famous local gang. ‘I long only for the cross and crown,’ he used to say, usually after a bad day’s gambling. The rumour was he sold church artefacts to pay for his habit, but nobody judged him. He was well liked in the Stables.

  Despite its poverty the Glockenbach-Viertel area felt very much like home. What streets were paved at all were cobbled, but some were still nothing but packed earth. Here and there could be seen patches of tarred road, like the hardening scabs of some disease. The gutters were filthy. Some of the houses reeked of sewage. Thin dogs ran everywhere. Ragged, often dirty, children played among the piles of garbage. The river, though useful, was not always pleasant to smell. Yet the people living there were hospitable and generous with what little they had. I found it a considerable relief to join a circle of acquaintances who had nothing to do with the NSDAP or, indeed, the Fascist Party. Politics was meaningless to most of them. They thought in terms of patrons, if they thought of such things at all. They paid a couple of grubby German lawyers when they got into trouble, but mostly they kept their noses out of things. They saw little difference between the Sozis and the Nazis still viciously fighting in nearby streets and wanted none of it. Who could blame them?

  While I was nominally a member of both groups, I had never felt at all comfortable in uniform. Now I knew it was not always possible to trust one’s party comrades, whereas here, among the Leierkasten, the other Strassenhändler, their friends and relatives, I enjoyed the easygoing acceptance I had experienced earlier in Odessa, where to be part of one family was to be part of many.

  These Italians were, of course, not all street organists! Some sold religious plaster figurines from barrows; others sold ice cream in the summer and hot chestnuts in the winter. Some played the accordion or mandolin and sang. Some even worked at steady jobs in Munich. As in Moldavanka, their lives were neither easy nor lavish, yet they knew the security of their extended family, the knowledge that no one would ever starve. The food was not
entirely familiar to me but had much of the quality I knew in Odessa. On those clear autumn evenings, we sat on the banks of the Glockenbach watching distant boats and listening to the sound of a band drifting from the faraway English gardens.

  Now to Heckie, my Zoyea, I was no longer Herr Peters, but ‘Uncle Mac’, and our mutual enthusiasm was for the Kino. Only too delighted to discover a young lady with the same relish as myself, I proposed to her father very properly that I take Heckie with me on my next cinema visit. We could go after she had completed her performances in the market. Old Frau was delighted. I was now a brother, he declared, part of the family. His little princess deserved a break. He and the boy could cope. She could go with me at least once a week. When I consulted her, Heckie declared joyfully that she was glad to see whatever films I chose, but her personal taste was for historical epics and adventure films, preferably with cowboys. She shared every German child’s fascination for the ‘Wild West’. These films were generally cheaper and more plentiful than the serious films and musical comedies I personally favoured.

  I had not until then realised how the Masked Buckaroo was still a familiar favourite with the movie-starved Munichers. With considerable surprise and some trepidation I found myself and Heckie watching, at a cinema which had not yet gone over to sound, an episode of Buckaroo’s Bride, with its outstanding train sequences. By chance the film was one of the few where my face was unmasked in most scenes, largely because of the romance between myself and ‘Gloria Cornish’ as Mrs Cornelius was known professionally. It was based on the original Warwick Colvin Jr novel, A Buckaroo’s Courtship.

  Thereafter, I became my little Zoyea’s absolute hero. Her reserve vanished completely. She became warm, vibrant, full of innocent affection. Who would not have fallen in love with the child! She insisted on our going several times to the same programme until it changed. We had to be sure, she said, to see the remaining two episodes. She spent any spare time looking through old film magazines for pictures of Max Peters, the Masked Buckaroo. Someone gave her a couple of German translations of the Colvin novels, which she read quickly, but said she found disappointing. Zoyea was also a keen fan of Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, though she assured me kindly that her favourite remained the Masked Buckaroo.

  Half an Italian in the house is worse than none, as the Germans say, but those Italians provided my lifeline back to some kind of normality. Much of the time I could forget that terrible night with Hitler, I could forget Brodmann’s relentless pursuit of me, I could even forget my relationship with Röhm, as it became increasingly tense.

  That Christmas, however, thanks to a chance meeting with Baldur’s gracious sister, Rosalind von Schirach, who heard that I had no plans for the holidays, I spent with the Hanfstaengl family. They were determined to forget the cares of Berlin and enjoy the season no matter what. Putzi and his wife had a strong sense of family and valued their private life above politics, a preference which would get them in trouble later when Hitler had absolute power. They took over a hotel in Nuremberg so we could all visit ‘the Capital of Christmas’ and experience the wonder of the Christkindlmarkt, its lights glistening in the falling snow, as the bells of the city declared Peace on Earth to All and Good Will to the World, while happy citizens carried their cakes and geese and trees and candles home to their firesides where they prayed that tranquillity would come again to Germany and the blight of war would be banished for ever.

  Our hotel faced out on to the great square and the market and a city where huge brands in brackets illuminated the ancient walls of castles and churches. Rich shadows moved like ghostly gods against the big old stones. The stalls were heaped with Christmas toys, with boxes of model soldiers for which Nuremberg was famous, with golden angels and musical caskets, tin drums and trumpets, flags and play swords. Everywhere were piles of pastries and candies, treasures of dazzling colour and harmony. A brass band and a small orchestra played carols and other Christmas music. We were distracted by puppet shows and toy theatres, clowns and St Nicholas and a huge nativity scene. Few were not in good humour in spite of the relative poverty. Nuremberg, without doubt, was at her very best, and I could imagine no finer place to spend Christmas. Something about that ancient walled city found echoes in every European soul. The streets wound around the hill like a chord of music creating a magnificent medieval fantasy, maintained and extended by successive generations. The hotel, with its black beams and dark panelling, festooned with glass decorations and greenery, had erected a tall Christmas tree in the ballroom around which were heaped presents for everyone staying there.

  All the Hanfstaengls’ party thought for themselves, and no unhealthy Führer-worship was found here. Indeed, they often spoke irreverently not only of Hitler but also of colleagues such as Goebbels, Göring, Rosenberg, Himmler and others. Relaxing company indeed! Christmas Eve would be the celebratory feast before, in more contemplative spirit, we recalled the birth of the Saviour on the following day. Hanfstaengl, a Catholic, took us off to the midnight mass, a full service in all its sonorous grandeur, with the organ sending massive vibrations through my legs and groin. The cathedral was a symphony of blazing light, crowded with lifted voices celebrating in one joyous chorus the birth of the Prince of Peace. We prayed that 1932 would bring Germany peace and stability again and shared the sentiments of the presiding priest, who asked that leadership and direction quickly be restored to the nation.

  I must admit that most of the spiritual message passed me by because, to my initial astonishment, Katerina von Ruckstühl was one of the Hanfstaengls’ other guests. She sought me out. Now she leaned her vibrant little form against me to make it evident that her mind was not entirely engaged with the sublime eternals. I was both pleased and disturbed to see her, though fearing at first that her demon-mother was with her; but Mama, I learned, had decided to visit friends in England. Katerina was quick to tell me that she was on my side in the matter, that her mother could be ‘something of a bitch’, and that Alfred, her half-brother, was certainly not my child.

  Kitty stayed with me after the service. Slender and quick as a cat, narrow-shouldered, long-legged, with an almost triangular little face framed by her short, dark red hair, she had wide-set blue-green eyes, a broad, sensual mouth and a sleepy, mocking manner which was sexually provocative but which I pretended not to notice. She wore near-transparent pastel silk dresses, preferring green and rust, with flesh-coloured silk stockings and patent-leather high heels that shone as brightly as her lacquered head.

  Kitty had been abandoned, she told me later as we toasted one another preparatory to retiring. Her mother was in England because she had a new ‘flame’, someone in the diplomatic corps.

  ‘She still hates you!’ Kitty whispered just before we parted. ‘I’d love to know exactly why.’

  The next day she insisted we take a tour of the old city, which seemed even more of an insane fantasy than Ludwig’s famous palace. Everything was of the same red stone tending to a grotesque heaviness when not adulterated by ordinary shops and the market. The Nurembergers had a way of decorating their city to give it a liveable scale. During the Middle Ages their castle meant security and power, but now it was merely grim. The museums, with their many edged weapons and martial paintings, added to this peculiar mixture of attractive romanticism and brute threat.

  When we returned to our party that afternoon Putzi was entertaining his guests. The man who came to be known as ‘Hitler’s clown’ was a great pianist and singer of comic songs, as he was pleased to demonstrate. He had always cheered the Führer up during those melancholy days of exile and struggle. At the drop of a hat the gentle ‘Smokestack’, as Kitty nicknamed him, would sit down at the hotel piano, a cigarette between his smiling lips, and pound out some rather Teutonic Gershwin. He took boyish pride in our pleasure.

  Hanfstaengl had also been involved in the Fräulein Raubal business and was very concerned for his Chief. When we were alone later, he confided in me. He was planning a big event for Hitler’s birthday,
still some months off. While in London, he had fallen in love with Gilbert and Sullivan all over again, and he was seeking volunteers with good operetta-quality voices, planning to surprise Hitler with a performance of The Mikado. His other idea was to put on some sort of minstrel show, but he did not think the Führer would be familiar enough with the conventions of the Cakewalk and the coon dance.

  I agreed he should do something in the European tradition. America’s chief contribution to world culture was to cheapen the air with Negro jazz noise and chattering Jews in banal talkies.

  Hanfstaengl became defensive. He was proud of his American blood. But in the end his huge head nodded in reluctant agreement, confiding that he had returned to Munich and the family print business because it was impossible to love both art and politics in America. Sales were at last beginning to improve, especially now he had an exclusive contract with the party. I had been to his shop with Röhm. It now sold mostly good-quality posters representing the Nazi hierarchy. Röhm had wanted me to see him larger than life-size, I think! Both Hoffmann, Hitler’s exclusive photographer, and Hanfstaengl were making fortunes from their leader’s rise to fame. Hitler trusted few Berliners and liked to have Bavarians and Austrians about him whenever possible.

  Though the Führer got a royalty, Hanfstaengl was doing so well from his posters that he felt he owed Hitler something. He was having the costumes specially made in London and sent over. They were identical to those worn by the D’Oyly Carte Theatre Company. Like many Americans, Hanfstaengl was more appreciative of the Savoy Balladeers than the English, who tend to dismiss their greatest creative artists and keep them, as a matter of course, from any sort of real advancement.