Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Calling, vocation, metier. What excellent English you speak, by the way."

  "Thank you. In the SS. A cruel little man like so many literary critics. He will make sure that I am put to lavatory cleaning or whatever Jewish intellectuals do in these camps of theirs."

  "I think," I said, "you underestimate the intentions of these people as regards the Jews I understand that there is serious talk in Berlin about the extermination of the entire race."

  "They've talked a lot about that in Vienna too. They always have. Jew-hating is no monopoly of the Nazis. Still, grateful as I am for the trouble you seem to be taking on my behalf, I feel that I must stay here and wait for the worst. But first I shall kill Johannes Braunthal. I've always wanted to do that anyway."

  "He probably knows this. Therefore he will not come himself. Besides, these people usually arrive in the middle of the night. They break in and point guns at your bed."

  "I shall hear them break in. As for sleep, I sleep mostly in the front room in a hard chair, facing the window, my gun cockedis that the word?--and ready."

  "Do they know where you are?"

  "Oh, they will find out. I may even send for them. You would be a very useful ah ah emissary. You see, I'm coming to the end of a piece of work. There too you could be useful. Take it back to the free world."

  "What is it?"

  "A curious thing. Have you heard of a Latin author called Frambosius? No, of course not, very minor like Braunthal. And also Austrian, the name being a Deckname or pseudonym, his true name Wilhelm Fahirot of Klagenfurt. He died in 1427, he wrote in Latin. Oh, here is his book, you may see for yourself." And he handed me, as reverently as the SS man had handed me back my Himmler letter, a little book with rotting brown covers, duodecimo I supposed, the pages spotted as with liver disease, the content a poem of about a thousand lines, Latin hexameters, the title Vindobona.

  "Vindobona?"

  "Means Vienna. I do not know how good your Latin is. Mine has inevitably improved since I started to translate it into German. In rhyming verse. It is a remarkable prophecy. A horde of human-sized rats floods into Austria from the northern lands and sets up its government and culture in the capital. The haute cuisine is garbage and the music is squeaks, the chief pastime is leaping at the gentle or the infirm and tearing out their throats. Their flag is of four legs stylized on a black ground. Those who will grow whiskers and glue on long tails and walk like beasts are accepted into the community of rats. The king rat is called Adolphus."

  "Good God."

  "I have perhaps one hundred lines left to do. I have written already the long introduction. I think I can get it all finished before Braunthal and his ruffians come for me."

  "You can finish it in London. In my study. I think you must make up your mind as to that. I'm not going back without you."

  "Ah." And he smiled. "How will you take me back if I am not willing to go? I have a gun, you I think not. But I'll make a bargain with you. Stay here in the country air and let me finish my work. I have wine in the cellar and whisky in that tantalus over there which is wearing, you see, an old velvet tricorne. The water from my well is like wine. I have a sack of dried beans and a pan of them soaking. There are two hams, one of them from Westphalia. I have learned to make bread, more satisfying than the making of novels. There is a bed for you up that stair there and there are blankets. Three or four days give me. Then we can talk again. But you understand that my heart is set, if that is the right expression, on killing Johannes Braunthal." The narrow world of the writer, the pettiness of his enmities. The Anschluss to Strehler meant little more than a chance to kill a critic. I said, "There are British and American critics I myself should like to kill. But that is a luxury. The necessity, an urgent one, is to get you out of here. I've a sense of responsibility to literature, pretentious as that must sound."

  "And a desire to get poor Heinz off your hands. I cannot blame you altogether. Send him to Christchurch, New Zealand, a dour city which will quieten his exuberance. Go to the kitchen now and make us both some coffee. I have real coffee from a Brazilian admirer. Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining's? Or from Jackson's in Piccadilly? It was buying tea there that I first met Amelia, who became my wife. She was trying to force herself on John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, her compatriot. She taught me all my English. Box of birds--do you know the expression?"

  "I regret I brought nothing except a passport. I mean, I had but one aim in mind. I thought that tomorrow we could be on the flight to Milan, be out of the Reich with all speed. Perhaps even tonight--"

  "No, we must not rush matters." There was, yes, a tinge of the Oceanian in his speech. The voice was harsh and yet had a wienerisch singsong. He occasionally coughed phlegm into his mouth and swallowed it. The eyes were black and bold and devious. The dirty grey hair fanned or rayed. The skin was russet, the nose huge, the mouth full of crooked brown teeth. He had a Sherlock Holmes pipe on his desk and now he lighted it, dribbling. The smell was of a burning herb garden. "Make," he watered, "coffee and ham sandwiches. Let me continue with my work. The king rat Adoiphus is enforcing the teaching of the rat language in human schools. It has a very limited vocabulary."

  CHAPTER 53

  The red light went on, just as in Broadcasting House, Portland Place, W.1, and the pleasant young official from the Propaganda Ministry said, "Welcome to the Third Reich, Mr. Toomey."

  "You make it sound as if it were my first visit."

  "Ah no, of course we know it is not. We know you as an old friend and, in addition, one whose books have been greatly loved by the German people. It is all a great pity, is it not, this misunderstanding that has come about between two great nations."

  "Misunderstanding is always a great pity, especially when it turns into war." The reader will already have divined what happened. I spent the first week of September, both relaxed and stimulated, in the house and garden of Jakob Strehier. The weather was gorgeous and the apples fell. We were quite removed from the outside world of terrible enactments, and I had all I needed except cigarettes from the Burlington Arcade. But Strehler had a pound of blond tobacco for rolling, as well as packets of Pferd papers, and he even showed me the craft of fixing a tube with one hand only. I had previously met only one man, except for film cowboys, expert in this knack, and that had been young Eric Blair at a PEN meeting. He lost it, for some reason, when he became established as George Orwell. Strehler practised the skill distractedly when looking over what he had just written. Like most pipemen he regarded cigarettes as palate cleansers between smokes.

  He was nearly at the end of his translation of Vindobona when the forces of the Nazi State arrived. It was early morning and I was asleep on the sheetless bed in the loft above his study when he came and softly breathed black coffee and ham on me, shaking me gently, saying, "There are men coming through the wood." I was awake at once. He considerately rolled me a pipe opener.

  I said, "For God's sake remember who you are. Do you have the passport in your pocket?"

  "It will not work."

  "It will and must. Two Englishmen staying in the country cottage of Strehier. Strehler's gone. We don't know where he is. It will be easy."

  "These people will know me. Unfortunately Braunthal doesn't seem to be among them. I must demand that Braunthal make the arrest. I have all things, or rather one thing, ready for Braunthal."

  I coughed over my cigarette while I pulled trousers on; I had slept in my shirt and underclothes. I put my feet bare into brogues, coughing: "It will and must work. Let me do the talking. I told you we should have been on that plane days ago."

  "You lost your urgency."

  "You made me lose it. We're both bloody fools. Still, everything's going to be all right." We were at ground level now. We went to the front room and saw through the window six men now crackling over the stubblefield.

  "You see," Strehier said, "no Braunthal. I insist on having Braunthal."

  "Shut up about Braunthal." There wer
e two stocky civilians in trilby hats and raincoats, two revolvered Schupos, and a Wehrmacht Unteroffizier and private, both bearing rifles. "The SS doesn't seem to be represented at all."

  "I think I know that one there, the one with his hands in his pockets. Saw him in the Gestapo place when I was trying to arrange things for poor Heinz. He knows me. Verflucht and Scheiss and so on. I had better open the door. Perhaps they would like coffee." The small company seemed disconcerted when the door was opened and Strehler and I stood before it in the cool morning waiting. It was as though they had been invited to a breakfast and were late. Strehler took his turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket: 7:51 A.M. The uniformed part of the group began to double. They halted and waited till the civilians arrived. "Do come in," Strehler said. It was all German from now on. To my surprise it was myself who was to be arrested. Neither Strehler nor I was aware that Britain and France had declared war on Germany the previous Sunday. Today seemed to be the following Sunday. The war was officially well launched. We learned all this over coffee in the kitchen. The news that an Englishman with a camera was in the vicinity had been slow in getting through to the police in Vienna. But now I was under arrest. So, of course, was Strehler. Both police and military liked the solidity of Strehler's having proved his disloyalty to the Reich by harbouring an enemy alien with a camera. He was also a Jew, of course, and should have long been sent to a work camp, but Jews were for herding into trucks in ghettos, not for picking up on specially made journeys to remote country residences. "I thought," Strehler said, "Braunthal would have been sent to get me."

  "Look," I said in German to Strehler, "I'm terribly sorry about all this. You won't have time to finish that damned poem now."

  The two Gestapo men sat on the edge of the kitchen table sipping good Brazilian coffee. The Unteroffizier and the private had their rifles trained on Strehler and myself. The Schupos stood at ease, their holsters still buttoned. The senior Gestapo man, the one whom Strehler knew and who knew Strehler, tried to work himself up into a righteous lather of philosophical patriotism by snarling, coffee safely finished, "Jewish shit, the only bastards in the Reich able to get real coffee while the rest of us have to drink muck made out of acorns."

  "That," Strehler said gently, "is because you want guns instead. You can't have both guns and real coffee, apparently. Now I don't want guns, so I'm entitled to real coffee. You should by rights stick your fingers down your gorges and vomit it up as unpatriotic poison."

  "Filthy Jewish shit," the senior man said, "shut your filthy gob before we shut it for you." He was a very ordinary looking man, shiny like a glazed bun; an unusually early shave in probably bad light had left him dotted with dried bloodclots. His companion was grey-faced, probably ulcerous; the hot coffee had made him wince, but he had finished it to the last drop. Both kept their hats on.

  I said, "What do you suppose is going to happen to me?"

  "You'll get shot as a spy and this Jewish bastard will be shot too. And another thing, it's not right for an English swine to talk good German like you do."

  "He's got to speak good German if he's a spy," the other one said.

  "I learned my German," I said, "through reading the work of Herr Doktor Strehier here, the finest living novelist. I'm not a spy, by the way. I came here on a vacation and lost track of time. How is this war going, if there really is a war?"

  "London's been bombed into a load of catshit. There's a war on all right, as you'll soon find out. The FYhrer will be in Piccadilly Platz before Christmas. Come on, time we were moving."

  "I demand," Strehler said, "to see my old enemy Braunthal. If I can't kill him I can at least spit in his ugly face." He used the phrase from Faust, Part One: shreckliches Gesicht.

  "Shut that filthy hole," the second Gestapo man cried in dyspeptic pain. "You're the one who'll get spat on and worse."

  "It's a Circus," I said, "not a Platz." And it dawned on me that I might never see Piccadilly again.

  I was permitted, under a military rifle and a Schupo pistol, to dress properly and pack my bag. Strehier was allowed to use the toilet, though with the door open. He sat there a long time reading one of the old copies of Punch he kept there in piles to beguile his costive waiting. The Gestapo snarled at him and went on about Jewish shit, but he said in a courtly manner that that was precisely what he could not conjure. Then he winked at me and I knew he was secreting the British passport inside the issue of June 20, 1934: at least that would not enter into the charge or charges of either of us. We were marched across fields and through the wood, with a soldier, Schupo and Gestapo man each, the seniors of all three arms being reserved to me, but Strehler's party well ahead. I was very lighthearted. This is often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence nor just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has. That Strehier's heart was light I could tell from his trolling of the old song of the archpoet--Mihi est propositum--which came from the nationless Middle Ages when Germany was the Holy Roman Empire. I was seeing the last of him; he had produced great work which would outlast the Nazis; he had every right to be content, despite the proddings and the execrations. He even had Vindobona in his case, but I doubted if he would be allowed to finish its translation. For me, I had used what talent I had in the service of popular diversion; I had eaten and drunk well; I had attempted a worthy act even if I had botched it. If I were shot there might be a statue erected for me in some London square, as for Edith Cavell.

  On the road there were an Opel Medium Truck Type S and a Porsche KYbel and a few interested villagers were being kept off by three or four soldiers under a Feldwebel. All this struck me as wasteful, but probably they knew best. I, being a dangerous English spy, was encircled by riflemen in the open truck, while Strehler was thrust into the back of the Kubel. The Gestapo as well as the two Schupos were traveling by courtesy of the army: there was a fluidity, or reduplication, of authority in the Nazi system which I have never well understood. Strehler and I waved goodbye to each other, and that was the last of him. He joined, I presumed, that anonymous Jewish force which was to be exploited to the brutal limit and then, in a cleansed Germany, to fertilise those large white asparagus which are still on sale in May in both the Berlins. But Strehler is alive, like Heine and Mendelssohn, and the Nazis are merely the stuff of television movies.

  Strehler neglected on parting to mention poor Heinz, from now on to be both fatherless and fosterless. I did not mention him either, and yet he was much in my mind as the cause of my present trouble. Indeed, I was surrounded by a group of Heinzes on top of the Opel Medium Truck Type 5, all with foreskins and fixed bayonets, their postures of military alertness no mockery, however.

  To be quick about it, a combination of various authorities in Vienna was efficient to establish that I was no spy. My roll of film was developed and found blank except for a portrait of a bad-toothed innkeeper and his wife. Abwehr and SS and a rather charming chain-smoking professorial man in a doublebreasted tunic of dovegray whom all deferred to got my situation typed out and indexed and sped on the wire to Berlin. I was Kenneth M. Toomey, distinguished British novelist who, believing there would be no war, had innocently come to rural Austria for a vacation and had been staying in all innocence with another even more distinguished novelist whose criminal Jewishness had somehow failed to register as it had failed to register with the Swedish Academy. No harm done. Regretfully I had to be sent off to an eventual camp for hapless enemy aliens of similar innocence; meanwhile I was to dwell under guard in what had formerly been a small nursing home for epileptics on the Stromstrasse.

  My fellow internees included two Poles who, having learned something of the Nazi doctrine on the expendability of Slays, feared for their lives in bad German. There was also a French newsreel team, their camera confiscated, who had been picked up entire in the Zillertaler Alpen. They snarled a good deal at myself as one of an untrustworthy nation that had dragged France into a useless war. Their deprived camer
aman was muscular and aggressive. There was no one of my own nation to support me except an ancient Lancastrian toymaker who had worked all his life in Graz and wrongly assumed that he was a naturalised Austrian. "Bloody Frenchies," he said. "Couldn't rely on't' buggers in't' last lot and it'll be't' same in this. Only good Frenchie's a dead 'un." After two weeks I was told loudly by one of the guards that I had to pack in readiness to be moved off. This was a rainy morning in the dayroom, the French quarrelling loudly over a poker game. They jeered and made throat-cutting gestures at me. "Bloody frogs," said the toymaker. "You watch yourself, mate. Don't stand no nonsense."

  I was taken to the Viennese headquarters of the Reichspropagandaministerium and, in a beeswaxed office with swastikas and a portrait of the Fuhrer as Parsifal, was introduced to Doktor Franz Eggenberger. He was a small swarthy man with hair on the hacks of his hands like a sketch of fur gloves and he spoke excellent English whose rhythms had been arrested at the prep-school level. He had been educated, he told me, at a place named Hyderabad House near Bridport in Dorset, his father having been a great believer in the British ruling class educational system, cold baths and spare diet and Latin. "So here we are, old chap," he said, passing me a box of Stolz cigarettes. "Read one or two of your things. Rather liked them. Just had the great Joe Goebbels on the line."

  "Ah."

  "Seems to think the world of you. I think you'll be able to guess what he's after. A two-minute radio interview. In English, of course, since it's meant for British listeners. Nothing treasonable, from your angle I mean. Nothing too nasty from ours. A bargain, call it."

  "You mean you're letting me go?"

  "The idea is everybody suddenly turns their backs. A special exit permit to a neutral country. Plane to Milan was suggested, and then you're on your own. It seems a very civilised idea to me."

  "We're not supposed to bargain with the enemy, are we?"

  "Nobody's forcing you, of course."