The Best of Michael Moorcock

by Michael Moorcock

  “I’m feeling it, Sam,” he says.

  Thanks to Garth Brooks, Doug Kershaw, all the artists on Swallow Records, Ville Platte, LA; and friends in Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, West Point MS, Hattiesburg MS, Oxford MS and Oxford U.K., where this was written. Special thanks to Ed Kramer, Mustafa al-Bayoumi and Brother Willie Love . . .

  My Experiences in the Third World War (1979/’80)

  The following sequence comprises three of the four stories written by Moorcock that are set in (and around the run-up to) a third World War.

  “Crossing into Cambodia,” the most acclaimed of these, was first to be written but actually forms the last part in the series. It was originally published in 1979, in an anthology, Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (New English Library), edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

  “Going to Canada,” and “Leaving Pasadena” formed prequels to “Crossing . . .” and were originally published in My Experiences in the Third World War (Savoy Books) in 1980.

  A further prequel, “Casablanca,” written some years later, does not appear here but was originally published in Casablanca (Gollancz) in 1989. The full quartet has since been known collectively as Some Reminiscences of the Third World War.

  I was ordered to Canada; that pie-dish of privilege and broken promises: to Toronto. My chief was uncomprehending when I showed disappointment. “Canada! Everybody wants to go there.”

  “I have stayed in Toronto before,” I told him.

  He knew. He became suspicious, so I said that I had been joking. I chuckled to confirm this. His old, Great Russian face, moulded by the imposition of a dozen conflicting tyrannies, made a little mad smile. “You are to look up Belko, an émigré. He is the only Belko in the phone book.”

  “Very well, Victor Andreyevitch.” I accepted the colourful paper wallet of tickets and money. This supply was an unusual one. My “front” normally allowed me to be self-supporting. I work as an antique-dealer in the Portobello Road.

  “Belko knows why you are meeting him. He will tell you what you have to know. It concerns some American planes, I gather.”

  I shook hands and descended the green-carpeted stairs into the rain of East London.

  During our Civil War many pretended to be Bolsheviks in order to terrorise local communities. After the war these people had continued as commissars. It had been their class which had gradually ousted most of the original Marxists. Stalin became their leader and exemplar. My father had been a member of that embryonic aristocracy.

  Like the order it had replaced, our aristocracy had been founded on banditry and maintained by orthodox piety. I was a younger son without much of a patrimony. Previously I might have gone into the priesthood or the army. I went into the modern combination of both, the KGB. The KGB was a far more conventional and congenial profession than most Westerners imagine. There I enjoyed myself first as a minor bureaucrat in a Moscow department, later as a special officer on one of our passenger ships plying between Leningrad and New York, Odessa and Sydney. Later still I became a plant in London where until recently I lived for twelve relatively uneventful years. I flattered myself that my background and character suited me to the rôle of a seedy near-alcoholic dealer in old furniture and over-priced bric-a-brac. It was believed that I was a Polish expatriate and indeed I had taken the name and British passport of just such an émigré; he had returned voluntarily to Poland on a whim and had sold his old identity to us in a perfectly amiable arrangement. We eased his way with the Cracow authorities who granted him new papers and found him a flat and a job.

  In spite of changing régimes my own life had remained relatively untroubled. My name in London was Tomas Dubrowski. For my private amusement I preferred the name of Tom Conrad. It was this name, in ’30s “modern” lettering, which adorned my shop. I paid taxes, VAT, and owned a TV licence. Although I had no particular desire to maintain my part for ever, I enjoyed it for its complete lack of anxiety and the corresponding sense of security it gave me. Now that I was to return briefly to the real world, I should have to seek a fresh context.

  A Russian citizen requires a context, because his conditioning makes him a permanent child. Anything will do. Therefore the context is often simple slavery. Even I, of Jewish Ukrainian extraction (through my grandmother), need that sense of boundaries. It is probably no coincidence that Kropotkin, founder of modern anarchism, was a Russian: his defiant views are directly opposed to our needs, which are on the whole of an authoritarian nature.

  My father had been a naval petty officer. Later he became “commissar” of a small town in Belorussia. He had eleven other deserting sailors with him when he had arrived in early 1918. They represented themselves as Bolsheviks. He had worn a leather jacket with two Mauser pistols in his belt and he had rarely taken off his sailor’s peaked cap. Somehow the civil war did not touch the town much, so the gang made the most of its time.

  My father took five young girls from the local gymnasium for himself and gave the rest to his men. He instructed the girls in every debauchery. When the civil war ended and it became obvious who had won, my father did not do away with the girls (as he might well have—it was common practice) but made them read to him from the works of Marx and Engels, from Lenin’s writings, Pravda and Izvestia until he and they were all familiar with the new dogma. Then he formed his thugs into the nucleus of the local Party, sent four of the girls (now fully fledged Komsomol leaders) back to the gymnasium as teachers and married Vera Vladimirovna, my mother.

  In time he was praised for his example to the community and was awarded a medal by the State. During the famines of the next few years he and my mother were never hungry. During the purges they never seemed to be in danger. They had two children, a boy and a girl.

  In 1936 my father went off on Party business and in 1938 I was born. The young writer who begat me was subsequently sent to a camp and died. I had long considered myself the secret guardian of his blood. My father was in most respects a realist. He preferred to accept me as his own rather than risk the scandal of his name being associated with that of the writer. My older sister was killed in the War. My older brother became a hero during the Siege of Stalingrad. He ran a large power-plant near Smolensk on the Dnieper. He was a self-satisfied, right-thinking man.

  “A little pain,” my mother used to say to her friends, “makes good girls of us all.”

  My father trained his girls to kiss his feet, his legs, his private parts, his arse. My mother was more wholehearted at this than her rivals, which is how he came to pick her as his wife. Again, she behaved in a Russian way. She was dutiful in all things, but, when his authority was absent, she became irresponsible. The Russian soul is a masochist’s wounds. It is a frightening, self-indulgent, monumentally sentimental relinquishing of individual responsibility: it is schizophrenic. More than elsewhere, personal suffering is equated with virtue.

  My grandmother was apparently raped by a young Jew and my mother was the result. The Jew was killed shortly afterwards, in a general pogrom resulting from the affair. That was in Ekaterinaslav province in the last years of the nineteenth century. My grandmother never would say for certain that it had been rape. I remember her winking at me when the word was mentioned. My great-uncle, the surviving brother of the dead man, told me that after the Revolution some Red Cossacks came to his shtetl. He was mortally afraid, of course, and would have done anything to stay alive. A Cossack named Konkoff billeted himself in my great-uncle’s house. My great-uncle was mindless with terror, grovelling before the Cossack, ready to lick the soles off his boots at the first demand. Instead, Konkoff had laughed at him, offered him some rations, pulled him upright, patted him on the back and called him “comrade.” My great-uncle realised that the Revolution had actually changed things. He was no longer a detested animal. He had become a Cossack’s pet Jew.

  In Russia, in those days before the present war, there had been a resurgence of Nationalism, encouraged by the State. Because of the absence of real democratic power, many had turned (as the
y did under Tsarism) to Pan-Slavism. A direct consequence of this movement was anti-Semitism, also blessed unofficially by the State, and a spirit amongst our élite which, while not so unequivocally anti-Semitic, was reminiscent of the Black Hundreds or the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the early twentieth-century pogromists. It was obvious that the State equated radicalism with intellectual Jewish trouble-makers. The State therefore encouraged—through the simple prejudices of its cunning but not considerably intelligent leaders—a movement in no way dissimilar to that which had followed the troubles of 1905, when Jewish socialists had been scapegoats for everything. Stalin had eliminated virtually the entire Jewish element of the Party, of course, by 1935.

  When I was young it had been fashionable to scoff at the trappings of Nationalism—at folk costumes, at peasant blouses and so on. Outside of cultural exhibitions and performances these things were a sign of old-fashioned romanticism. They were not considered progressive. When I returned to Russia briefly in 1980 young people were walking the streets looking as if they had stepped out of a performance of Prince Igor. Even some of the younger leaders would on occasions be photographed in Cossack costume. Anti-Semitic books and paintings, even songs, received official patronage. The authoritarian republic had at last, in sixty years, managed to resemble in detail the autocracy it had replaced. Soon there would be no clear differences save that poverty and sickness had been abolished in the Slavic regions of the Union.

  These benefits had been gained by relinquishing dignity and liberty, and the nobler forms of idealism which had given the early Revolution its rhetoric and its impetus. There were no longer any private arts. Everything had been sacrificed to formalised ceremonies similar to Church ritual or other primitive affirmations of superstition. The Soviet Union had codified and sanctified this terrifying impulse of human beings to shout reassuring lies to one another while standing with eyes tight shut on the brink of a chasm of reality. The State pretended that it was impossible (or at very least immoral) for such a chasm to exist. Soviet bureaucracy, too, formalised human failing and gave it shape and respectability; it did not merely accept this failing: it exalted it. I was as conditioned as anyone to believe that our lobotomising methods of ordering the human condition were the most sensible. I had found all these aspects of Soviet life comforting and reassuring. I did not have the character necessary for the enjoyment of personal freedom.

  Like the Celts, Russians have no ethical system as such, merely a philosophy of life based firmly on the dignity of pain, on fear of the unknown and suspicion of anything we cannot at once recognise. That is why Bolshevism was so attractive an ideology to many peasants who identified it with a benevolently modified Church and Monarchy and for a time believed that Lenin intended to restore the Tsar to his throne; it is why it was so quickly adapted to Russian needs and Russian methods. I do not disapprove of the government of the Soviet Union. I accept it as a necessity. In 1930, as a result of the bourgeois Revolution headed by Kerenski, and the Revolution initiated by the bourgeois Lenin, women and children were starving to death all over Russia. Stalin was at heart an Orthodox peasant. He and other Orthodox peasants saved Russia from the monster released upon the nation by foolish, middle-class idealists. In doing so he punished the Communists who had brought about the disaster; the intellectuals and fanatics who were truly to blame for our misfortunes.

  Stalin took on the great burden and responsibilities of a Tsar and all his ministers. Stalin knew that History would revile him and that his followers would become cynical and cruel. He countered their cynicism and cruelty with the only weapon he was able to use: terror. He became mad. He was himself not a cynic. He made factories efficient. He gave us our industry, our education, our health service. He made homes clean and sanitary. He killed millions for the sake of all those other millions who would otherwise have perished. He made it possible for us to round, eventually, on Hitler and drive him back to Germany. He returned to us the security of our Empire. And when he died we destroyed his memory. He knew that we would and I believe that he understood that this would have to happen. He was a realist; but he possessed an Orthodox conscience and his conscience made him mad. I am a realist happily born of an age which countered and adapted Christianity and that is doubtless what continues to make me such a good and reliable employee of the Russian State.

  Because of the increasingly strict controls applied to those who wished to travel to and from Canada, it was necessary for me to go to my doctor for a medical certificate. I used a fashionable private doctor in South Kensington who was quick to prescribe the drugs I required. In his waiting-room I found three young women wearing the elaborate and violent make-up and costume then favoured by the British demimonde. They were whispering together in a peculiar way common only to whores and nuns, full of sudden shifts of volume and tone and oblique reference, glances and gestures, so I only heard snatches of their conversation.

  “I was doing this job, you know—straight . . . At the club. He said he wanted me to work for him—you know—so I said I wouldn’t—he said to go out with him—but I wouldn’t—he was a funny guy, you know—he gave me this—” A bandaged arm was held up. It was a soft arm in a soft dress. “He had a bottle, you know—they called the cops—they’re prosecuting—his lawyer phoned me and offered me thirty thousand to settle out of court . . .”

  “Settle,” advised one of the other girls.

  “I would,” said the second.

  “But my lawyer says we can get fifty.”

  “Settle for thirty.”

  “He gave me seventeen stitches.” All this was relayed in a neutral, almost self-satisfied tone. “What you doing here, anyway?”

  “I just came with her,” said the prettiest. “It’s about her pills.”

  “I came to get my slimming pills changed. Those others make me feel really sick, you know.”

  “What! Durophets?”

  “Yeah. They make me feel terrible.”

  “What you going to ask him for? Terranin?”

  “They’re what I use,” said her friend.

  “They’re much better,” agreed the wounded whore. “You’re looking different,” she told the girl’s friend. “I wouldn’t have recognised you. You’re looking terrible.”

  They all laughed.

  “Did you know what happened to Mary?” She put her mouth close to the girl’s ear and began to whisper rapidly.

  The doctor’s receptionist opened the door. “You can go in now, Miss Williams.”

  “...all over the bed,” finished Miss Williams, rising and following the receptionist.

  When she had gone the other two began to discuss her in a disinterested fashion, as if they followed some unconscious habit. Neither, it emerged, believed that thirty thousand pounds had been offered. “More like three,” said one. They, too, were not at all outraged by the event. Most whores are frightened of any demonstration of passion, which is why they choose masters who treat them coldly. I had for a short while been in charge of a whore-house in Greece and had learned how to deal with the girls who were conditioned to confuse love with fear. If they were afraid of their master they thought they loved him. Because they were not afraid of their clients they could not love them and in the main felt contempt for them. But it was self-contempt they actually felt. I remembered with some dismay the single-mindedness of such girls who pursued persecution and exploitation as an anodyne, as their customers often pursued sexual sensation; who learned to purchase the favours of their employers with the very money they received from the hire of their own bodies. My spell as a whore-master had been the only time I had tasted direct power and it had taken every ounce of self-discipline to administer; it was a relief to become what I now was.

  Miss Williams rejoined her friends. “I’m going to have it photographed this afternoon,” she told them, pulling down her sleeve.

  The two girls went in to the doctor. They came out. All three left together.

  I was next in the surgery. The doctor
smiled at me. “More trouble?”

  I shook my head.

  “The penicillin worked?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s funny, that. Acts like a shot on you, won’t touch me. Well, what’s the trouble?” He spoke rapidly in a high-pitched voice. He was a Jew.

  “None. I just need a certificate to say I’m not suffering from anything a Canadian’s likely to catch.”

  He laughed. “That depends on you, doesn’t it?” He was already reaching for his pad of forms. “Canada, eh? Lucky you.”

  He filled in the form swiftly and handed it to me. “Going for long?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Business?”

  “Believe it or not, we’re buying our antiques from North America these days.” It was true.

  “No! Really?” He was amused. He stood up as I stood up. He leaned across his desk to shake hands. “Well, good luck. Enjoy yourself.”

  “I will.”

  I left his surgery and began to walk up Kensington Church Street, passing the three girls who were waiting on the kerb for a taxi. One of them looked very much like the girl who had given me the disease. I wondered if she would recognise me as I went by. But she was too deep in conversation to notice, even though I walked to within an inch or two of her shoulder, close enough to identify her heavy perfume.

  The morning of the day I was due to take the overnight plane from Gatwick (it was a budget flight) I read the news of a border clash between China and India, but I did not give it too much attention. The Russo-Indian Pact had been signed the previous year, in Simla, and I believed that the Chinese would take the pact seriously. By the afternoon the radio news reported Moscow’s warnings to Peking. When I left for Gatwick on the train from Victoria, I bought an evening paper. I had begun to consider the possibility of war between Russia and China. The evening news was vague and told me no more than had the radio news. On the plane, which took off on schedule, I watched a Walt Disney film about two teenage girls who seemed to be twins.