Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  I put together a little book called A Heroine of Our Time, which stated who Concetta was (I did not blow the secret that Domenico had blurted that night in the Garden of Allah), what she did, and how she died. My publishers on both sides of the Atlantic demurred when the typescript and its accompanying photographs were presented to them. What the hell was I, a popular novelist and playwright, playing at? I had already brought out a heavy book on religion, and now here I was with a piece of hagiography which would please few and anger many. Germany was a friendly nation, none of the allegations presented could be proved, the photographs (which could be trick ones anyway and, anyway, could not be shown to be of the provenance stated) were obscene and unpublishable. It was not, you will remember, till the outbreak of war that the British Government had the guts to publish, through His Majesty's Stationery Office, its white paper on the Nazi treatment of German nationals. By then it was considered too late to bring out my book on Concetta, paper not being available anyway, it all having been commandeered to print death certificates for the entire British nation, soon to be destroyed, except presumably for its bureaucrats, by the Luftwaffe. I had fifty or so copies of A Heroine of Our Time printed at my own expense by a firm in Loughborough. It is now, as you may know, a collector's item.

  That theological book, by the way, caused little stir and sold little. It was reviewed equally scathingly by the Tablet and the Church Times and was publicly burned as Godless in the town of Branchville, South Carolina. But non importa, Carlo said: the seed had been sown, nobody in the future would be able to say that the Christian world had not been warned. He made the message of salvation seem strangely ominous.

  CHAPTER 49

  I got there late, but I got there. A boy called Heini was giving out tracts (title in closeup: Hunger und Not in Sowjetrussland). Cut to a cafe with a young Communist, walleyed, reading the latest issue of Vorwarts. Cut to a street: Communists, including walleyed one, have grabbed Heini's tracts and are throwing them into a canal. Cut to another street with Communists clawing down Nazi posters. Now begin chase sequence. Heini is chased by Communists, including walleyed one in the lead. He takes refuge in fairground resounding with calliope music. He looks for hiding place, finds it behind throbbing generator truck. Communists find him and Nazistically kick and beat him to death while trivial music continues in the background. Walleyed one delivers booted coup de grace. Before Heini dies he murmurs the opening line of the "Marsch der Hitlerjugend": a heavenly choir takes it up, crescendo. Closing montage of marching Nazis, swastika banners, snarling Hitler, song continuing:

  Unsre Fahne flattert uns voran

  In die Zukunft zieh'n wir Mann fur Mann.

  Wir marschieren fur Hitler durch Nacht und durch Rot,

  Mit der Fahne der Jugend fur Freiheit und Brot...

  I got out schnell as ENDE came up and the audience started cheering. Tripe, filthy, tendentious, sickening. Thugs against thugs. I very badly needed a drink.

  Just round the corner of Windmuhlenstrasse, on, I seem to remember, Korngoldstrasse, there was a red-lighted cabaret sign: Die Rote Gans. A red neon goose goose-stepped endlessly on wheeled feet. I went down the steps toward stuffiness and Germanic jazz, Weillian, somehow already crammed with Heimweh. A sad elderly waiter showed me to a table and I ordered blond beer and schnapps. The place had not yet begun to fill up. A little man not unlike Goebbels was singing "Wenn die Elisabeth nicht so schone Beine hatt..." As I drank a few men in uniform came in, rank-and-file SS in black, perhaps fellow auditors of that damnable film. The management turned on the revolving kaleidoscopic lights and we were all fantasised into a Fritz Lang dream, though colored. I thought of Concetta and worried. When she had come that morning out of my bathroom, spent, a rind, tottering, she would not let me telephone the hotel doctor, arrange an ambulance, anything. A large tot of cognac and then she would go. I could ring for a taxi. But where was she staying? This surely I had to know. But she would not tell me. Brutally I said, "Someone will have to know sometime where you are. Someone will have to take you away." She still would not tell me: it was as if she had things so arranged that there would, when the time came, be no problem in locating her. I didn't like this. Nor, to be frank, did I wish to be involved. I had already been too much involved with the Campanati family. I had my own life to live, books to write. I looked troubled at the small dance floor. The band was playing "Eine kleine Reise im Fruhling." Three couples were stiffly fox-trotting. The SS men were calling for Willi. "Willi, Willi," they called.

  At the end of the fox-trot Willi appeared to applause. It was the little man not unlike Goebbels, now dressed as a nun. He went into a dirty routine in falsetto Berlin dialect, apparently holding off a dirty priest, he/she mincing about its being Blutschande or incest since he/she was a sister and he a father. Finally he sang "Auf Wiedersehn":

  Und wenn du einsam bist,

  Einsam und alleine,

  O susse denk' an mich,

  Dass ich auch einsam bin und weine...

  And then he turned his back to the audience, disclosing a nun's habit split down the middle and protruding his bare arse at which time the trombone farted. Blackout and SS rapture. I now knew whom I had to get in touch with. But I would leave it till tomorrow morning, everybody at Melzo now surely being in bed.

  I awoke fairly well and ordered coffee and boiled eggs, which appeared poured in a glass. My eyes shut I staggered with this obscenity to the toilet and flushed it down. The flushing down of the copy of Der Sturmer which had been sent up with an attached note from the editorial office (Dritte Seite!) took rather longer. On the third page was a foul cartoon showing Hollywood Jews trying to drag a Parsifalian King Arthur away from a vision of the Holy Grail and make him go to bed with an evidently syphilitic Jewish whore. Underneath my words about the decadence of the American film industry were cited in Gothic script. I breathed deeply for several minutes and then initiated the process of speaking to Suor Umilta, or Luigia Campanati, now madre superiore at the convent in Melzo. I knew there was a telephone there but did not have the number. It was a matter of speaking to an underling in the office of the Archbishop of Milan, who took a long time going through the holy local elenco telefonico but at length came up with a numero. Then I had the very tedious job of getting through to it. At length I found myself speaking to Sister Humility. She did not at first know who I was. Then she descended from the plane of conventual administration with incidental holiness and listened and interjected pious expletives.

  "So," I said, "I think you must come and at once. And I think it would be wise to come in, how would you put it, vestiti laici." With Willi's performance still in my mind I had a notion that as a nun she might be defiled by this Godless regime, slit up the back with scissors.

  "But she is where?"

  "That I do not know, but I have a feeling that very soon we shall be in no doubt as to where she is and that arrangements will have to be made to transport her back to Italy."

  "You mean," she said, "not alive."

  "I mean very much not alive. If there is a problem of money for the journey--"

  "There will be no problem. The problem is getting permission."

  "Your own mother damn it your own mother."

  "If you can arrange for hotel accommodation--"

  "You will stay here at the Adlon. Take down that name. I will at once see to a room."

  "I shall come," she said firmly, "as I am. I will not pretend to be what I am not. But it may be two or three days before I am able to leave."

  "So long as you come. You're the only one of the family I can call on." And then, after reciprocal God's blessings, we ended our talk. I think it was in Italian.

  I had no doubt that Concetta had some stratagem in mind to disrupt the premiere of the Horst Wessel film at the Capitole cinema. A bomb? She had warned me to keep away but had made this a very general caution, more moral than physical. Abominations, leave the stinking country. She evidently did not want my own martyrdom, since she had entru
sted me with the materials of her testimony against the Hitlerian order. Therefore, probably no bomb. But no bomb anyway, since, with the announced attendance of many top Nazis (not Hitler, who would doubtless be watching Mutiny on the Bounty with creamcakes and tea in his eyrie, or else, with and in the same, The Hound of the Baskervilles), there would be profound security and the place swept clean. What then? The faint shouting of a ridiculous old lady's slogans of enmity? A fire? Jews with guns? I saw that I would have to attend the, her word though she had not seen it, abomination. It was bound to be an abomination.

  There had already been, in 1933, an Urflim on Horst Wessel which, a week after a premiere attended by Goering, Wilhelm Furtwangler, members of the Sturmabteilung and much of the diplomatic corps, had been interdicted as both ambiguous and ideologically inadequate. Ambiguous, apparently, in that the communist enemy, when it had the jackboot in its teeth, excited a measure of sympathy. Ideologically inadequate in that the hero was dark-haired and of only medium height. There had been suspicions that the film would not really serve when it came to the editing phase, and the name of the hero had been changed to Hans Westmar, thus raising no real problems of postsynchronization. But everybody assumed, seeing the film, that Horst Wessel was meant, hence the ban. Three weeks after this ban a note in the Hannoverische Volkszeitung, probably written by Goebbels himself, asserted that the film could do no harm if it were clearly understood that Hans Westmar was not Horst Wessel but a quite different man named Hans Westmar. Still, the film was recognized as an inferior product and Goebbels had set his heart on the sponsoring of a masterwork of commemoration of the author of the official Nazi hymn. And here it was. No dubiety this time. The film was entitled Horst Wessel.

  I knew I would not be able to stomach the entire masterwork, so I turned up as late as I decently could to the Capitole, which was patrolled like a fortress by armed Schutzpolizei and Schutzstaffel, Schutz, which sounds like shoots, meaning protection. There were some harmless people around clearly awaiting the egress of the great, but Concetta was not among them. I was dressed in drab street clothes since I had been told by Toni Quadflieg that it was, as it were, a fighting film and evening dress would not be appropriate. The top brass would be in uniform: Dr. Goebbels had suggested that perhaps I myself might like the loan of a uniform and afterwards be photographed in it. Ah no. Ah no and again no. Ah most certainly bloody well not. No bloody uniform. Drab street clothes. I showed my card at the entrance, went in, and was kindly made room for at the back by a little man who offered me a pepperment. Danke sehr. Bitte sehr. When the screen erupted into sunlit street violence I could see a plain decent face with pince-nez on and SS uniform beneath. He smiled diffidently at me. Noch ein Stuck Pfefferminze? Danke, nein.

  The film seemed to be a kind of purged adult version of Hitlerjunge Quex. Purged, that is, in the sense that there was no dangerous dubiety: all the Germans were tall, fair and chivalrous, and all the Communists small, dark and violent. Horst Wessel, most brutally beaten up by the filthy swine, lies in a hospital bed. Cut to Communist Party HQ, where it is smally and darkly proposed to go to hospital and violently finish Horst Wessel off. Cut to SA HQ, where warning letter is received. Cut to hospital, with dark and small Communists breaking in and tall fair Nazis waiting for them. Nazis chivalrously do in Communists. Two SA keep guard outside the door of the sleeping Horst. His mother sits proudly sad by his bed. Horst opens his eyes and says: "The moment is coming." SA come in, prematurely one would think, with flowers. Later, alone with his mother, the hero dies. His last word is "Deutschland!" Not the end. Silent procession of weeping comrades in the hospital corridor. Funeral cortege with Nazi flag on coffin. The police protest (the year, after all, is 1929): "Diese Fahne ist verboten!" The flag stays where it is. Funeral ceremony, police and crowd violence. Funeral oration: "Lift up your flags! For the German Reich!" Horst Wessel is seen against dark cloudscape duly lifting his own flag. Night, torch procession. The "Internationale" sounds loud then faint, overborne by "Horst Wessel Lied":

  Zum letzten Mal wird nun Appell geblasen,

  Zum Kampfe steh'n wir alle schon bereit.

  Bald flattern Hitler fahnen uber allen Strassen.

  Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!

  Workers raise clenched fists but, by miracle induced by Horst Wessel, now in heaven, they open them and stretch their arms in the Nazi salute. The stepfather of Horst's fiancee, Agnes, who bears strong resemblance to Stalin, also stretches arm in Nazi salute. Great cheering crowd. End. The man next to me offered another peppermint. Danke sehr, nein.

  Outside in the vestibule I saw, I suppose, nearly everybody who counted in the Nazi Party. Goebbels was showered with congratulations, but the director of the film was nowhere to be seen. Hess, Heydrich, Streicher. Fat Goering. The actor, Paul Hsrbiger, who had played Horst Wessel, quite clearly to me homosexual: impulses flashed between us in the garish swastikaflagged eaudecolognesprayed entrance hall. How did you like our film? asked the peppermint man with pince-nez. Technically of high standard, as Englishman I cannot feel for content as you gentlemen do. How well you speak our language. It have I from reading the novels of Strehler gelearnt. Him know I not. He is Jewish. Ah then, him know I not but him should I know already. We were moving out to the open air. Shining limousines waited in line. There was to be a good rough party meal served in an upper room of the Friedrich Schiller Hotel, nothing elaborate, mind, plenty to drink though. Crowds held back by SS and Schupos (Weisst du was ein Schupo ist? Ein Schupo ist ein Polizist? A children's rhyme somewhere in Strehier) cheered and heilhitlered the emerging dignitaries. The moon shone on them as once on Charlie Chaplin, but floodlights outbraved her wan dignity. Then I saw Concetta Campanati as little, harmless, very sick and hence heroic being here to honor country's leaders old lady in front rank to my right, framed by two bulky SS bodies. She was carrying her satchel and she raised her satchel to breast height and from the mouth of her satchel protruded the nozzle of a pistol too big for her with which she aimed at the genial shy short peppermint chewing man whose eyes behind pince-nez were on the greeting crowd to his left and mine. "Achtung!" I cried and pushed him. Father forgive them for they know not what they do. He went flop into the back of little Goebbels who, in his turn, flopped into the back of Goering, too heavy to go down like a domino. Goering turned to bark, Goebbels to yap. The bullet, if bullet there was, hit nothing or nobody. I am damned sure there was no bullet. But I would never know whether there was a bullet or not. Explosion, yes, like a firework. The little old lady smiling, sheered away from by the rest of the crowd crying, like a Schoenberg chorus, in Sprechgesang, pointed her gun at Schupos and SS, making a spraying motion as, most pathetically, with a machine gun. A brave SS boy who could have been her grandson drew his Mauser and shot her down. There was a bullet there, no doubt of that, and then another and another, all very noisy. There was smoke and the reek of frying Speck. She went down more or less smiling. I kept away from her body, I had nothing to do with that body, that body was now for the SS morgue. Heinrich Himmier, the peppermintsucker, slowly began to see that he owed his life to somebody, not a uniformed comrade but a visiting Englishman in a drab street suit. The body of Concetta Campanati was carried away by one SS man only in an easy fireman's lift, no staggering. Another took off her satchel. Passports would be found in there issued by two governments, both friendly. There would be two embassies to contact. For Suor Umilta too. I would do no more. I would leave. The Reichsfilmkammer would not, surely, be so base after such service to the state as to demand reimbursement. The cancer, I thought, seeing the body carried to a Police wagon, would still be blandly eating away, though puzzled by its own progressive loss of appetite and a change in the quality of the nutriment. I felt very sick. "Wie kann ich," Heinrich Himmler was saying, hands on my elbows, hogo of peppermint breathed in blessing upon me, "meine Dankbarkeit aussprechen?" Or something like that: I recall only the shunting of the infinitive to the end. Kenneth M. Toomey, British novelist and savi
our of ReichsfYhrer Heinrich Himmier. I would somehow have to get them to keep that quiet.

  CHAPTER 50

  The town of Moneta is in Lombardy, not far from either the Swiss or the Tridentine border. It looks north to the Rhaetian Alps: St. Moritz is only a brief train ride away. It had, in the prewar year of my visit, a population of about seventy thousand, some engaged in the marketing of agricultural and viticultural produce, others in light industries such as the making of surgical corsets. There was also ironwork and ceramics. The bulk of the town lies west of the Torrente Melaro, stoutly bridged at three points in the names of Garibaldi, Cavour and Cesare Battisti, the bridges touching east of the river the fine Viale Milano and Via de Guicciardi, with the Piazzale Mottalini between them. There is a noble Prefettura and the best Ospedale Civile in the region. There is only one firstclass restaurant, the Oca d'Oro, but admirable trattorie abound, the regional cuisine there presented being at its most characteristic in the winter, when excruciating winds knife down from the Rhaetians: thick bean soup, tripe stew with gnocchi, fat sausages from the grill, the black wine that is Moneta's pride. It is an episcopal seat, and the Duomo and the bishop's palace lie between the Via Trieste and the Via Trento, both of which are exactly set on geographical lines of latitude. The Duomo had its foundations laid in 1397, the style Gothic, but various interruptions such as civil war, invasion, famine and plague delayed completion of the work till about 1530. Jacopo della Quercia was bribed or blackmailed into coming from Siena and decorating the central portal with a Saint Ambrose presenting to the world with the open arms of a master of ceremonies Christ's final agony. The pillars of the door are embossed with basreliefs of the history of the faith from Adam and Eve up to Ambrose's conversion of Augustine. Within are frescoes by Giovanni da Modena (Saint Lawrence grilled) and (the Virgin giving suck) Lorenzo Costa. The bishop's palace is Renaissance work and cold in winter. I dined there with Carlo in early spring, when the cold was abating. He was, of course, Bishop of Moneta.