The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

1 Mirenburg

I am at last able to move my right hand for extended periods of time. My left hand, although still subject to sudden weakness and trembling, is satisfactory. Old Papadakis continues to feed me and I have ceased to be filled with the panic of prospective abandonment. The suffering is now no worse than anything I knew as a small boy in the family sickroom. In fact minor discomforts, like an irritated groin, I welcome as wonderful aids to memory, while I continue to be astonished at my difficulty in recalling that overwhelming emotional anguish I experienced in my youth. My present tantrums and fits of despair cannot bear comparison: the impotence of sickness or old age at least reconciles one to the knowledge there is nothing one can do to improve one’s own condition. Those old wounds seem thoroughly healed, yet here I am about to tear them open again, so possibly I shall discover if I have learned anything; or shall find out why I should have suffered at all.

Mirenburg is the most beautiful of cities. Great architects and builders have displayed their best talents here since the tenth century. Every tenement or hovel, warehouse or workshop, would elsewhere be envied and admired as art. On a September morning, shortly before dawn, little paddle-steamers begin to sound their horns in the grey mist. Only the twin Gothic spires of the Cathedral of St-Maria-and-St-Maria are visible at this time, rising out of the mist as symmetrical sea-carved rocks might thrust above a sluggish silver tide.

I was completely alive in Mirenburg. Ironically, during the days of the Siege, I feared death far more than I fear it now when death exhibits itself in every limb, in every organ; an unavoidable reality. Life was never to be experienced so fully. For years I yearned for the dark, lifting sensuality, that all-embracing atmosphere of sexual ecstasy I had known in Mirenburg. To have maintained that ambience, even if it had been in my power, would have led to inevitable self-destruction, so I have not entirely regretted living past the Mirenburg days. I have made I think the best of my life. Since I retired to Italy it has been simpler of course and I have been forced to review many habits I had not much questioned. Friends visit; we have memories. We relive our best times and usually joke about the worst. Changing events have not greatly disturbed us. But there is no-one who shared the Mirenburg period and few believe me if I speak of all that happened. There was so much. Alexandra. My Alice. She is still sixteen. She lies surrounded by green velvet and she is naked. I have arranged blossoms upon her skin, pink and pale yellow against her tawny flesh; flowers from a Venetian hothouse to warm her in our early autumn days, while in the ballroom below we hear the zither, the Café Mozart Waltz, and I smell my sex mingling with her scent, with honey and roses. Her eyes are heated, her smile is languid yet brilliant in the dark curls which surround it. She spreads her little arms. Alexandra. She called herself Alex. Later it will be Alice. I am enchanted; I am captured by Romance. Beyond the window the spires and roofs of Mirenburg glitter like a mirage. I am about to be betrayed by my own imagination. Those huge eyes, the colour of ancient oak, seem to give me all their attention and I am flattered, overwhelmed. My Alexandra. Her head moves to one side, her shoulder goes up, she speaks my name:

‘Ricky?’

I am tempted to put down my pen and push myself higher in

my pillows to try to peer over the top of the writing-board and look to see if I really did hear her; but I continue to write, glad to touch just a little of that ambience again.

As a child, when I played with my toy soldiers, arranging battalions, positioning cavalry and artillery, I would sometimes receive an unexpected thrill of intense sexual pleasure, to the point of achieving not only an erection but often an orgasm. Even now, when I see a display of toy soldiers in a shop, I may be touched by that same sensation, almost as poignantly as when I was twelve or thirteen. Why I experienced it then and why I continued to experience it I do not know. Perhaps it had something to do with my complete power over those little men which, in turn, released in me all the power of my sex, full and unchecked by convention or upbringing. Certainly I had very little power as a boy. My brothers and sisters being so much older than I, I had a relatively solitary childhood. My mother was never mentioned. I was to discover she was in disgrace, somewhere in Roumania, with a Dutchman.

Shortly before her death, I met her briefly, by accident, in a fashionable restaurant off the Avenue Victor Hugo and recognised her from her photograph. She was small and serene and was very polite to me when I pointed out our relationship. Both she and her Dutchman were dressed in black. My father’s interest was in politics. He served the government and was close to Bismarck. At our estates in Bek I had been brought up chiefly by Scottish governesses, doted on by pretty housemaids who, when the time came, had been more than willing to educate me sexually. I have been in the power of women, it seems, all my life.

Dawn comes and Mirenburg begins to rattle like a beggar’s cup: the first horses and trams are abroad. The shutters are being raised, windows are being opened. The sun is pale brass upon the mist which thins to reveal a sky of milky blue. White and grey stone shimmers. She speaks the affected ‘English’-accented German of fashionable Vienna; she pronounces R as

She is captivating, artificial, an object to treasure. From some secluded tree-lined square comes the tolling of a Catholic bell. At certain heights it is possible to see most of Mirenburg’s antique turrets and gables, her twisting chimneys, her picturesque steeples and balconies, her bridges built by old kings, her walls and canals. The modern apartment-houses, hotels and stores, as noble and inspiring as the palaces and churches which surround them, are monumentally designed by Sommaragu and Niermans and Kammerer. She is a symphony of broad paved avenues and cobbled alleys, glinting spires and domes and stained glass. She lies staring up into my face, her small breasts held fast against my slow penis. It is warm in the room. The sun cuts between the heavy curtains and falls, a single slab of light, upon the bed, across my back. Our faces and our legs are in deep shadow; the white sperm strikes at her throat and she cries out in unison with me; my Alice. I roll to my side and I am laughing with pleasure. She lights me a cigarette. I feel like a demigod. I smoke. Every action is heroic. And she is a spirit, an erdgeist out of Wedekind become my very own reality. We joke. She smiles. It is dawn in Mirenburg. We shall sleep later and at about noon I will rise to wrap myself in my black and white silk robe and stand on the balcony looking out at the exquisite view which, to my mind, cannot be matched, even by Venice. I glance at the table and the dark blue leather notebook in which I shall try to write a poem for her; the book was a present from my middle sister and has my name in gold stamped on the front: Rickhardt von Bek. I am the youngest son; the prodigal of the family, and in this part I am tolerated by almost everyone. The senile trees rustle in a light East wind. I smell mint and garlic. Papadakis brings me fresh materials and a little morphine. I can feel myself trembling again, but not from pain or infirmity; I am trembling as I trembled then, with every sense at almost unbearable intensity. I touch the skin of an unripe peach. Down the wide Mladota Steps, also known as the Tilly Steps, carefully descends a single student, still drunk from a party, still in his light blue uniform except that instead of his cap he wears a Homburg hat at least three sizes too large for him. It covers his ears and his eyes. His immature lips are pursed to whistle some misremembered Mozart. He is trying to make his way back to the Old Quarter where he lodges. Two working girls, pink-faced and blonde in shawls and long dark smocks, pass him as they ascend, giggling and trying to flirt with him, but he is oblivious to them, for all the sharp clack of their clogs. He reaches the bottom of the steps and casts himself off across the roadway. The embankment on both sides is planted with firs and cypresses; immediately opposite him are the wrought-iron gates and carved granite pillars of the Botanical Gardens.

These mansions on the very fringe of the Old Quarter were once the residences of the ruling class but are today primarily public buildings and museums. They retain their grounds and their imported trees and shrubs. The largest house which the student, now clinging to the railings, would be able to see if he lifted his hat, was the summer place of the Graf Gunther von Baudessin who said he loved the city more than his own Bavarian estates. He was for a while special ambassador for his homeland and did much to help Mirenburg retain her independence during the expansionist wars of the mid-eighteenth century when three enemies (Russia, Saxony and Austria) converged on Waldenstein’s borders, then failed to agree who should own the province.

From the Gardens come a thousand scents: autumn flowers and shrubs; the small, scarlet deeply-perfumed rose for which Mirenburg is famous blooms late and sometimes lasts until December. There is still dew on the grass. The student steadies himself and continues, turning back up the broad avenue of Pushkinstrasse. He is alerted momentarily by the cry of some exotic beast awakening in the nearby Zoo. A milkman’s cart, decorated in blue, red and green, passes him, its cans jingling, its boney horse rolling her old eyes in the shade of her blinkers as she takes her familiar course. He reaches the Lugnerhoff at last, where the Protestant martyrs were burned in 1497. Here the houses are suddenly close-packed, leaning one upon the other like a crowd of old men around a game of bowls. In the centre of the cobbled court is a baroque fountain: the defiant Hussites about to mount their pyre. The student crosses

Lugnerhoff to reach the narrow entrance to Korkziehiergasse and sunlight touches a green copper roof. Only the upper floors on the right-hand side of the alley are so far warmed by the sun; all the rest remain in deep shadow. The student opens a door into a courtyard and disappears. His feet can still be heard climbing the iron staircase to the room over what was once a stable now used by Jewish street-traders to store their goods.

Further up Korkziehiergasse, ascending the steep grey serpentine slope which leads from here to Cutovskiplatz, her knuckles blue as her fingers grasp inch by inch the metal bannister, the old candy-woman is a threadbare silhouette in the morning light. This hunched, exhausted and vulnerable little creature was once the darling of the Schoen Theatre: ‘a spark of true life-force surrounded by the putrescent glow of simulated vitality’, as Snarewitz described her fifty years ago. Marya Zamarovski lived for love in those days and gave herself up to the moment thoroughly and generously. Her men, while they continued to be attractive to her, had everything they desired. With every lover, she discarded houses, jewels, furniture and money, until almost simultaneously her wealth became exhausted together with her beauty and her public success. She opened a chocolate shop, but was cheated out of it by the last man she loved. Now she sells her sweets from the heavy tray about her neck. She will stand in Cutovskiplatz until evening, not far from the theatre where she used to perform (it continues to put on popular melodramas and farces). I buy candied violets from her for Alexandra who nibbles at one and offers it to me. I bite. The scented sweet mingles its strong perfume with her subtle cologne and I resist the urge to draw her to me. There is a noise from the river. On the quays the coal-heavers carry sacks to the little steamers. The docks of Mirenburg are sometimes as busy as any seaport. In winter the merchants, wrapped in overlarge fur coats which will give them the appearance of so many sober fledgelings standing in concourse, will supervise their cargoes. It is now seven o’clock in the morning and the express from Berlin is steaming into the station. The workman’s cafés, bristling with newspapers in German, Czech and Svitavian, fill with smoking red sausages and dark coffee, purple arms and blue overalls, the smell of strong cigarettes, the sound of cutlery and argument. Waiters and waitresses, their big enamel trays held above their heads, move rapidly amongst the crowded marble-topped tables. We hear a bellow from the Berlin train.

On the balconies of the hotels above Cutovskiplatz a few early risers are breakfasting. One can locate a hotel at this hour by the distinctive aura of café-au-lait and croissants. Soon the English tourists in their Burberrys and Ulsters will emerge and make for Mladota where they will disdain the little funicular car running up beside it and insist on trudging all one hundred and twenty steps, irrespective of the weather; then they will head for the Cathedral of St-Maria-and-St-Maria, or go to the Radota Bridge which spans the Ratt. The balustrades of this bridge are supported on both sides by Romanesque pillars representing the famous line of Svitavian kings whose power was broken in 1370 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV who, by diplomacy and threat, set his own candidate upon the throne and insisted Svitavia be called by its German name of Waldenstein and Mirov-Cesny become Mirenburg, with the effect that Svitavian is now only spoken fluently in the rural districts.

The Ratt is a fast-flowing river. Upstream is the Oder and downstream the Danube. She is loved by barge-men as a good, safe river, spine of the most sophisticated canal system in the world. The Ratt is the chief contributor to Waldenstein’s prosperity. Several hundred yards from the Radota Bridge, beside older cobbled quays, are cramped coffee-houses and restaurants, covered in hand-written advertisements and posters so that it is almost impossible to see through windows where weathered barge-captains and pale shipping clerks drink thick Rattdampfen soup from Dresden crockery and wipe their lips on Brno linen. The conversation is nothing but lists of goods and prices in a dozen currencies. Steam from tureens behind the counters threatens to peel placards from the glass and on a misty evening one can go outside and scarcely notice any difference in visibility from the interior.

In the tall white and brown café on the corner of Kanalstrasse and Kaspergasse, underneath the billboard advertising a brand of Russian tea, sit drinking the Slav nationalists. Many have been up all night and some have just arrived. They argue in fierce but usually inexpert Svitavian or Bohemian. They quote the poetry of Kollar and Celakovsky: Slavia, Slavia! Thou name of sweet sound but of bitter memory; hundred times divided and destroyed, but yet more honoured than ever. They refuse to speak German or French. They wear peasant blouses under their frock-coats. They affect boots rather than shoes and rather than cigars they smoke the yellow cigarettes of the peasant. Though most of them have been educated at the universities of Prague and Heidelberg, even Paris, they reject this learning. They speak instead of ‘blood’ and ‘instinct’, of lost glories and stolen pride. Alexandra tells me her brother was for a while of their number and it is the chief reason her parents decided to take him to Rome. I tell her I am grateful to her brother for his radicalism. Her little stomach is so soft. I touch it lightly with my fingertips. I move my hand towards her pubis. She jumps and gently takes hold of my wrist. What yesterday had been of peripheral interest to me today becomes central, abiding, almost an obsession. I take as keen a delight in the contents of jewellery shop windows, the couturiers, the fashion magazines as I once took in watching a horse-race or reading about exotic lands. This change has not been gradual, it seems to have occurred overnight, as if I cannot remember any other life. Alexandra has me. My blood quickens. Now I am remembering the detail of the pleasure. I wave Papadakis away. I cling to the sensation. It becomes more than memory. I experience it again. What have I invented? Is she my creation or is she creating me? Commonplace events are of no consequence. The room darkens. A background of red velvet and roses. Her passivity; her weakness. Her sudden, fierce passion and her sharp, white teeth. She becomes strong, but she remains so soft. The cathedral bells are chiming. We are playing a game. She understands the rules better than I. I break away from her and stand upright. I go to the window and part the curtains. She is laughing from the twisted sheets. I turn towards her again:

‘You are hopeless.’

Papadakis is at my shoulder, asking for instructions. I tell him to light my lamp. She pushes her head under the pillow. Her feet and calves are hidden by the linen; her bottom curves in the brown gloom and her vertebrae are gleaming. She comes to the surface, her dark curls damp with sweat, and I return to her, forcing her down on her face and laying my penis in the cleft of her rear, denying myself the heat of her vagina: I have never known such heat, before or since, in a woman’s sex. She bites at my hand. Traffic is noisy in the square today; a political demonstration of some kind, Papadakis says: he is contemptuous. ‘Communists.’ We hire a carriage and driver to take us east to Staromest, the hilly semi-rural suburb of Mirenburg where proud-eyed little girls watch over goats and chickens and shoo off strangers as if they were foxes. Here, amid the old cottages and windmills, we shall stop at an inn and either lunch there or ask them for a picnic. One or two fashionable ‘Resting Houses’ have been built in Staromest. They are frequented by invalids and the elderly and are staffed by nuns. Thus the peace of the hills is somewhat artificially preserved from the natural encroachment of the city. The apartment blocks stand below, silent besiegers who must inevitably conquer. We pass a small convoy of vivid gypsy wagons. Alexandra points at a brown and white pony as if I could buy it for her. The earth roads are still dry. From the dust the plodding gypsies do not look at us as we pass. We stop to gaze on the rooftops.

I point out, in the curve of the river, the old dock known as Suicide Bay. By some trick of the current most of those who fling themselves off the Radota Bridge are washed in to this dock. We can also see the distant race-track, dark masses of horses and spectators, bright silks and flags against the green turf. Closer to us is the cupola of the great Concert Hall where tonight one can hear Smetana and Dvorak on the same programme as Wagner, Strauss and Debussy. Mirenburg is more liberal in her tastes than Vienna. Not far from the Concert Hall is a gilded sign, by Mucha, for the Cabaret Roberto, which offers popular singers, comedians, dancers and trained animals in a single evening’s entertainment. Alexandra wishes to attend Roberto’s. I promise her we shall go, even though I know she is as likely as I am to change her mind in the next half-hour. She touches my cheek with warm lips. I am enraptured by the city’s beauty. I watch a green and gold tramcar, drawn by two chestnut horses, as it moves towards Little Bohemia, the Jewish Quarter, where from Monday to Thursday a market flourishes.

The tramcar reaches its terminus, near the market. The core of the market is in Gansplatz but nowadays it has spread through surrounding streets and each street has come to be identified by its stalls. In Baverninstrasse is second-hand clothing, linen, lace and tapestries; in Fahnestrasse antiques and sporting-guns; in Hangengasse books, stationery, prints; and in Messingstrasse fruit and vegetables, meat and fish; while the main market has a little of everything, including Italian organ-grinders, gypsy fiddlers, mimes and puppeteers. Stallholders and their customers haggle beneath bright stripes of the awnings, all in the shadow of the Great Synagogue, said to be the largest in Europe. Her rabbis are amongst the world’s most famous and influential.

Dignified men, dark and learned, come and go on steps where gingerbread sellers rest their trays, where little boys sell cigarettes out of inverted drums and their sisters, in pretty tinsel, perform simple dances to attract attention to their cakes and sweets.

The stalls are crowded with toys, tools, jams and sausages, musical instruments and domestic wares. Vendors shout their bargains, and sardonic hausfraus challenge them above the noise of guitars, accordions, violins and hurdy-gurdies.

At the far end of Hangengasse a large crimson automobile, imported from France, bucks and rumbles on its springs, its driver seated high above his passengers and wearing the cap, goggles and overcoat of his calling so he resembles a comical lemur in his profound sobriety. The chaffeur’s gloved fingers squeeze a horn: a tin trumpet blown by a mouse announces the progress of Juggernaut. The crowd divides, from curiosity rather than fear, and the crimson machine is on its way to more fashionable parts, to Falfnersallee, the Champs Elysees of Mirenburg, and the Restaurant Schmidt, all silver, mirrors and pale yellow. Here the nouveaux riches display themselves, to the chagrin of waiters who until a year or two ago served only Mirenburg’s aristocracy. The upper classes, they say, have been driven out by the vulgar owners of steamships and mechanical looms, whose wives wear the pearls of ancient impoverished families about red throats and speak a kind of German hitherto only heard in the Moravian district, the industrial suburb on the far side of the river.

This class has come to be known as ‘les sauvages’ or ‘die Unbebaut’, the subject of cartoons in the illustrated papers and mockery in cabarets which these days all but fill Kodaly Square, yet its money allows the journals and entertainments to flourish while its trade, especially with Berlin, increases Waldenstein’s prosperity.

At a large round table near the window, looking out upon the trees, the kiosks and the traffic of Falfnersallee, sits in corpulent well-being, in English tweed and French linen, Pasitch the Press King, a loyal supporter of the government of Prince Badehoff-Krasny and believer in stronger ties with Germany. His newspapers persistently emphasise the Austro-Hungarian threat and pillory an opposition favouring the views of Count Holzhammer currently exiled to Vienna, where he is courted by those who believe firmly in a ‘union’ between Bohemia and Waldenstein.

Herr Pasitch eats his Kalbsaxe and discusses international politics with his uncritical sons and daughters. They are expecting a guest. My first memories of Mirenburg are of the Restaurant Schmidt. Father had taken me to the city for a reason. I had spent some part of the summer at a private academy before being sent on to school in Heidelberg. I recall skiffs and tea-gardens. Mirenburg had seemed a haven of peace and stability in Europe. I am inclined to resent any politics here. Mirenburg is a retreat; I escape to her. I always expected to find an Alexandra in Mirenburg so I scarcely question my fortune. We drive into the early afternoon.

Herr Pasitch’s guest has arrived, seating himself with a flourish and drawing the full attention of the Pasitch daughters. He is Herbert Block, the popular song-writer; selfish, humorous and charming. Without favouritism he has looted the romantic lyrics of antecedents and contemporaries to considerable profit. Few of the victims complain. His charm is such that, although he is now nearing forty, people still regard him as a schoolboy whose pranks do no real harm, and, while he remains witty and vain, he will always have tolerant friends, especially amongst women. His dark eyes are professionally active. His dark hair might now be dyed. He leans back in his chair and flashes an expert smile. Herr Pasitch explains the strategies of Bismarck. Herr Block turns the conversation to the exploits of Count Rudolph Stefanik, the famous Czech balloon adventurer, who was recently forced to leave Zurich under scandalous conditions and narrowly missed having his vessel seized and burned by outraged citizens. They had welcomed him as a hero and he had thoroughly abused their hospitality. ‘Caught in the basket!’ says Herr Block. ‘He is a dear friend of mine. But, O!’ This episode, involving a young lady of previously good reputation, was not dissimilar to many others in the Count’s history. ‘His adventures have spanned five continents.’ Getting some wind of the composer’s drift, Herr Pasitch firmly steers the topic back to Bismarck. Herr Block smiles at the women as if in defeat. He suggests that they might like to repair later to the Straus Tea Gardens, to the south of Mirenburg, on the river. ‘To catch the last of the summer.’

From these gardens, some five miles away, one can watch the trains crossing the long viaduct which spans the valley where the Ratt widens. It has thirty-two arches and was completed in 1874 by engineers from the Rhineland.

According to legend a man lost his life for every arch completed and some of the victims are said to lie beneath the plinths, their ghosts occasionally appearing on the track at night, causing drivers to apply their brakes and bring trains to an alarming halt. Usually these ghosts are discovered to be baffled deer or wolves which have strayed on to the bridge and are unable to escape.

Five minutes from the Restaurant Schmidt, in Edelstrasse, a narrow street running parallel to Falfnersallee, is the Restaurant Anglais. Socialists gather here, followers of Kropotkin, Proudhon and Karl Marx, to debate how much support they have in Parliament and how soon the workers in the Moravia will grow tired of their lot and rise against their masters. They wear grey frock-coats and high collars but only a few have the soft felt hats and loose ties of the conventional radical. In the same street, at the Hotel Dresden, are members of the League of St Ignatz, a little older, on average, but otherwise very similar to the clientele at the Restaurant Anglais. These strong conservatives are almost as suspicious of the socialists as they are of the Jews, the Jesuits and the Freemasons, whom they term the ‘super-national powers’, deliberate fomentors of war and rebellion. It is early afternoon. Socialists and conservatives begin to return to offices where they will mingle and conduct the business of Mirenburg with exactly the same degree of zeal shown by their non-political colleagues.

A squadron of cavalry, its bright blues and golds softened by the September sun, rides past one end of Edelstrasse, on its way to guard the Kasimirsky Palace, where Parliament meets (today it debates a new Armaments Bill); and in the other direction goes a closed carriage bearing the arms of Hungarian Archduke Otto Budenya-Graetz, exiled from his own country by relatives who pay him to stay abroad. His reputation is so villainous not even the lion-hunting ladies of the Regenstrasse invite him to their salons. It is said he always has a small revolver with him. So many attempts have been made on his life by jealous lovers or their husbands, he carries the weapon for self-defence. The carriage turns down toward the river, passing the neo-classical Customs House, and heading inevitably for Rosenstrasse. Alexandra’s teeth touch the pale flesh of chicken and I raise my champagne glass to her. The shadows already begin to lengthen. I recall my second visit to Mirenburg, the lilacs against a bright blue sky which deepened to violet at sunset; then I had spent considerable time and most of my money at the Casino. I had a passion for roulette and the Circus. Both Casino and Circus still exist, but I have so far visited neither.

Our landau takes us back to our hotel. We smell crisp Leckerli gingerbread in the hands of schoolchildren who file out of the bakeshops on their way home. I tell Alexandra of the summer in the cottage when I was a boy, of my father coming to visit us. I had the impression almost everything was white and yellow, and even now when I recall the cornflowers I am astonished at this sudden infusion of brilliant blue into my memory. I can, I tell her, with effort also re-experience the red-orange of the poppies, but I suspect this might be a false recollection, or at least one from a later period.

The smell of those poppies, however, is almost always with me, whenever I think of them. I am under the impression I am losing Alexandra’s attention, but we shall soon be back at the hotel and I know how to recapture her quickly enough. I begin the story of the consumptive twins and their dog, even before we have left the carriage, although my mind is still obsessed with that scent of poppies and I wonder why I should associate it so strongly with sexual passion. Perhaps both are capable of absorbing one’s total attention. Yet I could not have been more than seven when we paid our last visit to the country. Papadakis wishes to retire. He asks if he can douse my lamp. I shake my head and tell him to go. I remember, as I escort Alexandra through the lobby, the first woman I became infatuated with. She was married and her husband was abroad in some small German colony. ‘You are a sympathetic friend,’ she had said to me. ‘And sometimes that is the last thing one seeks in a lover.’ She had laughed. ‘That is the job of the husband.’ She taught me an excellent lesson. Once again, as I prepare to bathe, I consider the relationship between passion and power, between sexuality and spiritual fulfillment, the realisation of the Self. I complete the story of the twins. Alexandra begins to laugh and becomes helpless.

Her arms grip my back, her legs encircle my thighs; I begin the slow injection. ‘Never stop loving me,’ she says. ‘Promise me.’ I promise. ‘And I will never stop loving you,’ she says. But I am a fiction. My reality could destroy me. She is a dream and I shall never stop loving her. We are silent now. I move further into that tiny flame, the gateway to a universe of pleasure; beyond her vagina is infinity, immortality, marvellous escape. She is yelling. Her nails stab into my buttocks and my cries join hers. She lies with her curls against my neck and shoulder. I stroke her arm in the long twilight. ‘Shall we go to Roberto’s?’

‘I am too tired,’ she says, ‘for the moment. Let us have an early supper here and then see.’

In Zwergengasse, once the home of a famous eighteenth-century Italian circus troupe, a knife-grinder pushes his cart over the cobbles. The street is barely wide enough for him and not much more than thirty yards long. It runs up to the old wall of the city. Its lower floors are large and vacant, occupied only by a tribe of beggars who will, when winter comes, move on to warmer quarters near the quaysides; they squat amongst the remains of the circus—painted tin and rotting velvet—discussing their adventures in loud voices while Pan Sladek reaches his premises at last, lowers the handles of his cart and unlocks the doors of his workshop, suspicious as always of the beggars (who would be far too timid to rob him). His grey face shines like a hatchet as he sweats to manipulate his grinding equipment into the shop. His nose is blue and pointed. He has had a hard day. He locks up and enters the doorway next to the shed, climbing the stairs slowly, but two at a time on his spidery legs until he reaches a door painted a fresh and startling yellow. He opens it. The smell of frying comes from the kitchen. Today is schnitzel day. When Pan Sladek remembers this he brightens. He goes into the kitchen and kisses Pani Sladek as he always kisses her. She smiles to herself. Below, as Zwergengasse grows dim, more beggars flit back, rooks to a rookery, their hands full of sour wine and loaves of yesterday’s bread. Somewhere close by, students of the Academy and the Polytechnic are fighting again, shouting obscure private battle-cries from street to street and lying in ambush for one another in alleys and shop doorways, brandishing stolen colours, caps and scarves, which they nail to the walls and beams of the beerhalls, their headquarters. Willi’s in Morgenstrasse and Leopold’s in Grunegasse are respectively strongholds of the Academy and the Polytechnic. Near Leopold’s is The Amoral Jew, a cabaret populated entirely by proponents of the New Art, young Russians and Germans with bizarre notions of perspective.

Alexandra likes The Amoral Jew and I have acquaintances there. We arrive at about nine o’clock to watch the negro orchestra which delighted her on our last visit. She is overdressed and heavily painted for this cabaret but so beautiful that nobody cares. Kulacharsky, barrel-chested and ferociously bearded, in a peasant blouse and clogs, fondles the ostrich feathers in her diamond aigrette and says something wicked to her in Russian which pleases her, though she does not understand a word. It is dark and noisy in The Amoral Jew and Rosenblum himself presides, his goatee twitching as he strolls amongst the tables and glances secretly here and there from mysterious eyes which could be drugged. There are murals on the walls, in gaudy primaries. Were it not for the strange manner of their execution they would be thought indelicate. They were painted by a Spaniard who passed through. Alexandra accepts a glass of absinthe, still the drink of the bohemian from St Petersburg to Paris. Voorman, sweating in his heavy jacket and tweed shooting breeches, begins to talk about his telescope; he is considering giving up painting for astronomy. ‘Science is today the proper province of the artist.’ Alexandra laughs, but because she finds him attractive not because she understands him. Bodies press around us like mourners at a wake. Alexandra enjoys the attention of the avant-garde. In the old barracks a few streets away, built into the walls of Mirenburg, privates at an off-duty card game drink surreptitiously from illicit jugs while avuncular sergeants turn blind eyes. In the upper storeys of the garrison captains and lieutenants passionately discuss the Armaments Bill which, if implemented, will mean a stronger Waldenstein. ‘Everyone is arming. If we wish to keep our freedom, so should we. We are the prize of Europe, never forget that. We are coveted by all: three empires flank us and the only security we have is that one empire will not risk warring upon another in order to win us. Remember Bismarck’s words: Waldenstein is the most beautiful bride the masculine nations have ever courted: a virgin whose dowry opens the gateway to power over the entire continent. Whoever wins her shall win the world. The Prince thinks our neutrality is all the security we need. But we must be prepared to defend ourselves from within. There are those who would sell the virgin to the highest bidder.’ So says Captain Thomas Vladoroff, a distant cousin of mine, as his batman clears away the cheese. Vladoroff has the pale and misleadingly vacant good looks of his family. ‘We must be alert for the agent provocateur in our midst. There are many, in the army and out of it, who support Count Holzhammer.’ His friends smile at his zeal. He loosens the collar of his dress tunic. Someone tells him that there could never be a civil war in Waldenstein. ‘We are too sensible, too united, too fond of comfort.’ Alexandra dislikes my cousin. He is bloodless, she says, and more interested in machines than in his fellow men. He is leaving now, to visit his mistress in Regenstrasse, the widow of an officer killed some twenty years ago as a volunteer on the russian side during their last war with the French. Her name is Katerina von Elfenberg and she was seventeen when her husband died. She told my cousin he could be a reincarnation of that dashing Hussar, who was blown to pieces by a huge UPP gun he was attempting to recapture. Her other lover is a baron, a chief of the Stock Exchange, and her advice is making my cousin moderately rich, although he becomes concerned about the nature of the speculation, for it seems to him to anticipate strife. There is a small party tonight. I have been invited but I could not take Alexandra for fear of meeting members of her family. As it is, her servants have had to be heavily bribed to tell callers she is out and to bring messages in secret to our hotel so that she can reply and thus preserve the pretence of being in residence. Her parents write regularly from Rome and she dutifully replies with news of friends and relatives, the weather, expeditions with her friends to museums and the more suitable tea-gardens. She is expected, next year, to go to be finished in Switzerland, but she plans instead, she tells me, to meet me in Berlin. From there we shall discuss the possibilities of Paris, Marseilles and Tangiers, for of course she is below the age of consent.

My cousin is introduced to the members of the Mirenburg Royal Ballet Company, some of the finest dancers in the world. The women offer him controlled hands to be kissed. He will tell me later how he feels uncomfortable, as if corralled with a squadron of ceremonial horses, all of which can pick up their feet and none of which can charge. I look toward the little stage, my arm about Alexandra. She loves the comedy, borrowed from Debureau, she says. Pierrot pursues Columbine and is defeated by Harlequin. A large silk moon ripples in the draught from the door and Pierrot plucks his guitar, singing in French. I am told it is Laforgue. Projected against the backdrop are silhouettes of balloons, trains and automobiles, of factories and iron ships. The song is in praise, I gather, of the machine, for Pierrot’s accent is so gutteral I can scarcely understand one word in three. Then on come the novelty dancers; some little ballet of primitive lust and discordant fiddles. In the morning, as soon as there is sunlight a lark will begin to sing from our roof. We touch glasses and sip the heady wormwood. There is no time. I am adrift. I lean towards my ink. I have no pain now. I am full of delight. In Mirenburg’s gaslight I call for a cab. Around us is ancient beauty, delicate lacework-stone silent under the deep sky. I resist the temptation to brave Katerina von Elfenberg’s salon and we drive instead to the Yanokovski Promenade to marvel at its electrical lights and to listen to the music from the bandstand. I am an old man now and my white suits have become yellowed by the sun; but there is a bandstand in the town, where Italians play selections from Verdi and Rossini. A pleasure boat goes past in the jewelled water. Excited girls and boys of Alexandra’s age play innocent games amongst the deck-chairs and the hatch-covers. A flotilla of grim barges passes in the darkness on the other side; a steam-whistle hoots. The pleasure boat disappears beneath the Radota. Mirenburg is the merriest of cities at night. Her citizens belong spiritually to more Southern regions of the continent. In Bachenstrasse, which winds down to the Promenade, Carl-Maria Saratov, his heart broken and his mind desperate for diversion, wanders into the unlit alleys known as the Indian Quarter, perhaps because there was once a cheap waxwork show here with its main tableaux representing the Wild West. Carl-Maria Saratov has come all the way from Falfnersallee where he saw his sweetheart entering the Café Wilhelm with his oldest friend, another student at the university. He has heard that opium is to be found in the Indian Quarter and so it is. The den would be unlikely to welcome him. It is typical of its kind, but unlike the one Carl-Maria has heard about from a friend. Mirenburg’s best opium-den is not the sordid hovel one finds in Hamburg or London. Even the Chinese attendants at ‘Chow-Li’s’ are not really Chinese, but Magyars dressed in elaborate robes. The place is awash with blue silk and golden brocade. The couches are deep and thickly padded and the owner is British, an exile, James Mackenzie, the Scots military engineer, who committed some crime in the Malay Archipelago and dare not enter any country of the British Empire, yet runs his den with all the tact, discretion and lavish decoration of a fashionable restauranteur. Archduke Otto Budenya-Graetz is there tonight, with two young friends from the military school. Mackenzie will not refuse him entrance, but makes sure he is sent to a remote room and that the pipes are paid for before they are smoked.

The Archduke has not enjoyed his visit to Rosenstrasse and swears the place is overrated and he will never return. He complains of his entrapment in ‘this provincial town’ and speaks to the fascinated students of the glories of Vienna, Buda-Pest and Paris, of the women of St Petersburg, where he was very briefly an attaché, of the boys of Constantinople, and he hands them their pipes with his eyes on their serge thighs and takes a deep breath to relax himself before inhaling. He lets himself remember his days in the service of the Mexicans; that splendid time of unchecked satisfaction when the air was so full of fear one had merely to wave a sabre to fulfill one’s grossest needs. ‘I can still smell the blood,’ he murmurs. ‘There is nothing like it to enliven any sport, say what you will.’ He takes his pipe as if it were a crop and his eyes, full of pagan Asia, brighten and then cloud. ‘But the Jews have robbed me of my birthright… ’ Alexandra is growing bored. She asks me to take her to ‘some secret place’ and so we, too, head for ‘Chow-Li’s’ for I must grant her everything she asks. Here she will cough on the smoke and complain it has no effect, but later she will ask me about my women and will lick her lips while I describe their charms and become terrifyingly passionate so that my dreams will be of some transfigured Mirenburg, some Mirenburg of the soul, where tawny young lionesses purr above the trembling corpses of handsome baboons. Now, just when I have awakened from a thoroughly restful sleep for the first time in weeks, it seems that Mirenburg is all around me. I can see her austere Gothic spires in the mist of the September morning. She is completely alive again. On the river a line of rowing boats drifts gradually to rest against the Hoffmeister Quay. The smell of baking comes from Nadelgasse, seemingly from every window there drifts the odour of fresh bread, of cakes and pastries. As a child I dreamed frequently of a golden-haired young girl, whom I loved. I had carried her away from harsh parents in an open-boat and we had been captured by Norse pirates, but again I was able to save her. She loved me as wholly as I loved her. I used to think of her more than I thought of any real person, as I lay awake in my room in daylight, trying to sleep, but knowing that the rest of the world was still awake, hearing my sisters’ voices from below. Must we always seek in lovers to satisfy the frustrations we have experienced with parents? An ‘echo’. Unable to ease the cares of those who have given birth to us we attempt to improve the lot of a mistress, a husband or a wife. So many women have tried to make me into their ideal father and in resisting I have frequently lost them. Alexandra would rather I were a demon-lover and this role is almost as difficult, but I play it with more relish, for it entails very different responsibilities. My ideal is fair-skinned and blonde, so why should I sense this ‘echo’ in my little Alexandra, this resonance in the soul which entwines me to her as if we were a single note of music? We speak again of Tangiers. I would take her there now, for fear of her escaping me when she tires of this game, but it is impossible. Instead I acquiesce to every adventure.

She requests instruction. I am inventive. I bring to life every dream. I add all experience to my repertoire, I tell her. I resist nothing. I forget nothing. Sexually I am a chameleon. ‘You have the disposition of a whore,’ she tells me, laughing. I cannot deny it. We visit my old friend, Professor Eckart, who teaches at the University now and continues his experiments. He is obsessed with Count Rudolph Stefanik and the possibilities of heavier-than-air flight. He shows us his own designs. His room is almost bare, save for drawings pinned here and there upon the panelling. The large window looks out onto geometrical gardens, full of evergreens and Mirenburg’s famous roses. He tells us that he has personally entertained Stefanik. Alexandra, who has been bored, asks what the Count is like. ‘The man is a rogue,’ I say. ‘And you are not?’ she asks. I have forgotten my part. ‘But a genius,’ says Professor Eckart, tugging at his sleeve and casting about for the wine he has offered us. Professor Eckart looks like a countryman. He is round and bucolic; he might be a huntsman on some Bavarian estate. ‘Would you care to meet him? I am giving a dinner-party next week.’

‘We should love to,’ says Alexandra. Privately I decide to discover the names of the other guests before I accept. I am suspicious of Alexandra’s curiosity; I have some measure of how far she will go to satisfy it. Papadakis brings me my oatmeal gruel. I breakfast on, champagne and smoked salmon with my Alexandra. Not long ago even the gruel was painful to my palate and would sometimes seem over-flavoured, but now I disdain its blandness. Papadakis suggests he should have the doctor in today. Angrily I resist the idea. ‘I have not felt so well in two years,’ I tell him. He leaves to collect the post from the town. I visited my brother Wolfgang at his place in Saxony about a year before I arrived again in Mirenburg. He had just recovered from tuberculosis. ‘My cure was sudden and miraculous,’ he told me. ‘The disease appeared to be killing me. I was its slave. Then, within a matter of weeks, it had released me. I grew steadily stronger, but as I did so I knew enormous regret for the passing of that warm and permanent eroticism which had attended my illness for over forty months. As I returned to normality I experienced the acutest depression and sense of descent into a world whose familiar delights were no longer pleasurable to me.’ At the time I had scarcely understood him. Now I know very well what he meant. There is a kind of debilitating insanity which a person will cling to desperately for as long as it possesses them. Only when it has given them up will they begin to describe it as an aberration. ‘The world is a dull place now, Ricky,’ my brother had said. He had taken to drinking heavily. If it had not been for the threat of dismissal from the diplomatic service he might easily have become a permanent drunkard. But until he died his face held the look of a man who had once known Heaven. Papadakis returns and helps me to the WC. Today the agony of urinating is not so great and I realise that I had grown to look forward to the pain as preferable to any of the other sensations which my disease offers me. But I hurry back to Mirenburg, urging Papadakis on as if he were a coach-horse and I flying for the coast in fear of my life.

At night Mirenburg is both peaceful and mysterious: a perfect mistress. Her shadows do not seem dangerous and her lights do not reveal any ugliness; her desperate aspects are contained; she is tranquil. She is an intelligent city, willing to accept novelty. She is secure and self-possessed. The secret police of three empires conspire in her, observe each other, play peculiar games of intrigue, and she permits it, a tolerant stepmother; the political exiles make their speeches, publish their broadsheets; she does not discourage them so long as her own peace is not disturbed. In the white and brown café on the corner of Kanalstrasse and Kaspergasse, The Café Slavia, the young nationalists have a guest. He is Rakanaspya, an anarchist of uncertain origin; a friend of Kropotkin and Bakunin.

Many believe him to be well-connected in aristocratic circles. Tonight he speaks passionately against privilege, against nationalism, and debates with the youths the virtues of internationalism, mutuality and self-reliance, while in other parts of the café two spies, in the employ of Austria-Hungary and Russia respectively, take surreptitious notes. They are commissioned to report on all agitators. Rakanaspya wears a greatcoat with a fur collar, a bearskin cap; one hand rests on a silver cane. The other hand lifts glasses of brandy to his lips. His voice is unusually thick and husky and is not natural; it was obtained in a duel when his palate was shot away. His imperial hides most of the scar on the left side of his face. He chain-smokes papyrussi so that his fingers, moustache and teeth are stained as yellow as the abandoned tubes which litter his surroundings wherever he stops for more than half-an-nour. They are made for him by an old Russian woman who works for the British Tobacco Company at No. 11 Kanalstrasse. His thin face is pinched and drawn, he has keen, unquiet eyes behind large round glasses and his emaciated, nervous frame speaks of despairing poverty assuaged by fanaticism, perhaps an inheritance from his days in Siberia. Yet when he smiles his tace becomes suddenly innocent; it is sympathetic. He speaks several languages fluently and is well read in every European literature. As a go-between for the émigrés and the Waldenstein authorities he has become almost an official representative. He manages to conciliate both sides (who trust him). He keeps even the fiercest Bohemian or Russian expatriate from expulsion, in spite of constant pressure on the authorities. Austria in particular would welcome any excuse to go to war with Waldenstein; but she will not risk war with Russia, Germany or both. Waldenstein lies balanced between the spheres of these empires, as a small planet might be supported by the opposing gravitation of larger ones, and it is thought to be in nobody’s interest to disturb that balance. Rakanaspya has momentarily forgotten his politics. Someone has mentioned Odessa, his home. ‘I sometimes feel,’ he says, ‘as if I am the emissary from one magic city to another.’ As he becomes drunk Rakanaspya begins to talk of the sea, catching bullheads off the Odessa rocks as a boy, sailing in flat-bottomed boats around the lighthouse, of the foreign vessels lying at anchor on a turquoise ocean, the sailors in the harbour taverns. Many by now know Rakanaspya himself has never been, and probably never will go, to sea; he is fascinated and comforted by the romance of it. His face becomes completely human only when the conversation is turned to salt-water. He never claims experience of sailing, yet believes himself an authority on naval matters and the ways of the world’s great ports. The spies are puzzled by this turn in the conversation, wondering at the significance of it. Rakanaspya describes Odessa for his listeners, the smell of the spices in the harbours, the little tramp steamers which ply the Black Sea, the great military ships. Alexandra, wrapped in a coat which hides the extravagant gown I bought her this afternoon, whispers that she finds Rakanaspya intriguing and boring at the same time. ‘Are all men so full of talk? Such general stuff?’ We slip away from The Café Slavia. She seems angry Rakanaspya did not notice her. We walk beside the river. Men in donkey-jackets stand and smoke their pipes, talking in small groups, glancing at us as we pass. Two Customs officials stroll by. They wear dark blue uniforms, their coats belted at the waist and supporting swords; both have large, carefully-grown moustaches and their caps are at identical angles on their round heads. Papadakis frets over me. He believes I am feverish. He is becoming too insistent. I indicate the paper. ‘I am writing again,’ I tell him. ‘Is that not a sign of my spiritual and physical recovery?’ He goes mumbling from the room. He must forever be simplifying experience. He irritates me. I run my thumbnail down the flesh of her back. She gasps and clutches at bedding but insists I do not stop. I suppose men can learn from women that capacity to make a positive virtue of pain and despair. Women frequently through self-deception and lack of power believe that pain and desperation have meaning in themselves. I tell her she should always seek pleasure and optimism; to seek pain as a form of salvation is to destroy oneself. When we suffer the pain of solitude (as I have done in prison, for instance, or in exile) we are fools if we regard this state as preferable to the ordinary vicissitudes of the world, though we can make of solitude a habit of self-reliance which when needed can stand us in good stead. Pain offers us certain kinds of knowledge which enable us to live in greater harmony with our complex world. An animal which seeks out pain, however, is a mad animal, just as a hermit, who will avoid it, is a mad animal. She is asleep. I rise and go to the window and part the curtains. The square is quiet. I regret, as I smoke a cigarette, I shall not be able to attend the reception being given tomorrow at the Palace.

I met the amiable Prince Damian von Badehoff-Krasny only once, three years ago at a concert given in Munich by his cousin Otto, an old friend from my early years at the Academy. The Badehoff-Krasny family are of Slavonic as well as Teutonic ancestry and came originally from the Ukraine. The Province of Waldenstein was an inheritance, achieved through marriage, and in the seventeenth century, when the family had fallen on hard times and everything else was sold or stolen from them by a variety of warring monarchs, the people asked the Prince’s ancestor, who was still an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, to become their ruler. The family maintained its independence of Germany, Russia and the Hapsburg Empire partly by chance and partly through clever diplomacy, by playing one faction against another and by continuing to marry well. Their intellectual and artistic interests had made them at some time patrons to almost every famous painter, composer and writer in Europe. They had in their possession a thousand mementos of the scholars and actors who had sampled their hospitality. Indeed, my own little Alexandra is a cousin twice removed of the present Prince. I believe her interest in me was aroused when I mentioned at our first meeting, during the dinner-party given by Count Freddy Eulenberg just after my arrival in the city, that I had published one or two small volumes of verse and reminiscence. There is a traditional rivalry in her family for the patronage of any academic or artistic lion, however small and provincial, and I think even Alexandra saw me as something of a kitten, but as the only catch of the season not wholly demeaning. This is not, of course, the chief quality which makes me attractive in her eyes. I have been the subject of gossip both in Mirenburg and in Munich and have acquired that sort of exaggerated reputation which so fascinates young women and so greatly facilitates their seduction. Alexandra speaks of her uncle with considerable affection and some impatience (plainly imitated from her elders), telling me that he lives with his head in the clouds, refusing to be alarmed either by Bismarckian ambition or Austro-Hungarian arrogance, convinced that the likes of Holzhammer mean no great harm and are as content as himself merely to play at politics. I know that soon there must be a scandal; our deception can last only a few more days, but I refuse to confront the problem, as does she. Papadakis hovers at my shoulder. Alexandra breathes deeply. I tell Papadakis to leave me alone. The door closes. The inkwell is crystal. It reflects the light from the window. It is quieter today. The political meeting has dissipated everyone’s energy.

Is Waldenstein, I wonder, too complacent as my cousin Thomas suggests? Should she not defend herself better? I think about that mixture of sentimentality, romance and self-deception which sustains a nation in its myths and which enables it to act in its own immediate self-interest. We are most of us a characteristic segment of the nations from which we spring and it can almost be said we measure our individuality by the degree to which we free ourselves from our inherited prejudices. Many of us talk about it; but talk, I think, is not enough. Words and actions must coincide. Waldenstein’s myth is that because she has for so long been free she can never be enslaved. I turn to look at my Alexandra, who has captured me so thoroughly. I have been swayed by lust before. I have taken considerable risks to fulfill it. But now I am not sure that I am any longer moved by simple lust. It is desire which moves me and I do not understand the origin or the nature of that desire, even though I am obsessed by it.

I deny all reality in order to maintain it; I am even prepared, I know, to relinquish lust, to ignore affection, normal companionship. I feel contempt for the ordinary yet I know this state of mind is self-destructive. Such desire is incapable of ever being satisfied. I believe I have aroused the same terrible energies in Alexandra. With it comes a fierce carelessness which considers no-one: be it myself or the object of my desire. There is only the present, here in Mirenburg. I erase the past; I refuse the future. I tear off my robe and stretch my naked body against hers, turning her towards me and kissing her startled, still sleeping mouth. I remember being sent on a ludicrous errand by my sister who wished her brother-in-law to put an end to an unsuitable courtship. He had received me in his study. He was not defiant, yet his attention had hardly been on me at all. He was a good-looking man of the conventional, military sort. ‘I see her three times a week,’ he had told me. ‘She gives me no more and no less. My life is ruled by this routine. I let nothing interfere with it. I live in terror that it will be broken. I will go to any lengths to sustain it. She has a husband, you see. He is old but she feels affection for him. Her consideration of his sensitivities drives her to elaborate strategies in her deception of him, even though he acquiesces and even encourages her in her affair with me, whom he has never met. This consideration somehow gives dignity to a life which on the surface is sordid enough. He offers her security. In return she allows him to live in the ambience of her wonderful sensuality. It seems enough for both. She will not, naturally, permit me to possess her completely, but she is equally considerate of me. She rarely fails to keep an appointment. When she does I am in agony until she communicates with me. She will never leave him. So long as she acknowledges his feelings and thinks of his well-being he is content. She is a wonderful creature. She would not harm either of us.

‘And you can stand this stasis?’ I had asked.

‘It is the best I can hope for,’ he had said. A bell had rung then. He had risen. ‘If you wish to call on Friday, I shall be able to see you again.’ He walked sadly with me to the landing and watched as I descended the stairs. ‘Please give my warmest regards to your sister and tell her how much I appreciate her thoughtfulness.’

There is an evening service at the Cathedral. I leave a note for Alexandra and walk the long cobbled way, up the hill, to listen to the music. I cannot argue with Alexandra. She robs me of logic. When last in Mirenburg I had described to a young lady, with whom I had been having an affair, my state of mind. How, amongst, other things, I had been confused for several years, since my wife had left me for a ship’s officer in Friedrickshaven only three months after we were married, about whether or not I should marry again. The young lady had smiled: ‘You do not think I wish to marry you?’ I said that I had wondered. ‘But I assure you....’ She had begun to laugh. She had pretended that her laughter was uncontrollable. I had waited until she had finished. ‘There is no question,’ she had said.

‘Excellent.’ I had stood up, wondering at that time why she should have denied what had evidently passed through her mind and why I had not the courage to make a direct proposal, for I had been in the mood to do it. That evening, having disappointed myself so thoroughly, I had taken a cab to Frau Schmetterling’s and requested a room and a girl—my habit, twice a week, for nearly a year. This, however, had been a third visit in the week and caused Frau Schmetterling some amusement. As I had taken the key from her hand I marvelled at my ability, without intention, to make women laugh. I had seen no reason to suspect that I was held in contempt by them or even that I was unpopular with them, yet I could not fathom how I aroused their humour.

Why do women seem to triumph so often in men’s misery, even when they love them? Again I find myself considering the nature of power and of love. Only a few weeks after my failure to propose to the young lady I had occasion to inform another that I no longer wished to see her. ‘But I love you,’ she had said, ‘with all my heart and soul. I will love you forever. I wish to be yours, whatever you want me to be. I want to help you in any way that I can.’ And within a week (I think it was six days) she had fallen in love with an official in the Revenue Service to whom she was, by all accounts, a loyal and faithful companion. The trees thicken as one nears the Cathedral. It is almost rural. There are wild flowers amongst the grass. In the spring and summer cherry- and apple-trees blossom here. I mount the uneven pavements. The spires of the Cathedral are high above my head. The choir is singing from within: Gospodt pomiluj ny—Lord have mercy upon us. I turn and go back. There is other music to be heard, from the cafés, from the street performers. I pause on the corner of Falfnersallee. The last No. 15 tram is on its way to the terminus in Radoskya. I have known Mirenburg in all her seasons, but this is the one I have always favoured. I pass by the statues of Waldenstein’s great men and women. I find myself craving the famous bortsch to be found in the Mladota district. It is made with beets and ham-bones, in the traditional way, but to it is added a dash of a particular Tokay which for some reason affects the palate and makes it sing. I remember Alexandra telling me it even makes her ears tingle. It is delicious: a drug. I decide to return to the hotel, to rouse her and ask if she will join me in a plate. As I turn into Mirozhny Square a group of beggars comes by. I give them all the coppers I have. They are returning to the Schlaff estate, to the old fever hospital and desolate graveyards. Only the railway track brings any kind of life to that area. It is a goods line. Not even local trains to the northern suburbs and outlying villages take passengers through. This estate is all that is left of the Schlaff family lands. The family has lived exclusively in Paris and Berlin for three generations but refuses to lease the estate to anyone who would make use of it. Thus houses, mills, churches and workshops are occupied only by the homeless and the lawless. Orphans and old men climb amongst the ruins and the neglected graves and more respectable citizens pay to have their garbage and other embarrassments they wish to discard transported there. Strange fires burn in this contradictory wasteland; the flames are unhealthy in colour and mysterious in shape. It is Mirenburg’s shame. ‘Only a little shame, compared to most,’ an ex-Mayor of Mirenburg will later insist to me. I will be bound to agree with him. In daytime even the Schlaff estate looks picturesque, overgrown as it is with wild flowers, but at night it must be sought to be seen. It is almost dawn. I hurry back to Alexandra, suddenly afraid she will awake and leave because I am not there to help her maintain our dream.

It was during a particularly drunken expedition to the Schlaff that I had met Caroline Vacarescu, the Hungarian adventuress, who also currently stays at the Hotel Liverpool and whom I pass in the lobby as I make my hasty ascent to our suite. If Alexandra wakes, realises her predicament and decides to go I shall be unable to reclaim her. She might, of course, have similar fears, but if so she does not exhibit them. Caroline Vacarescu smiles at me. She is doubtless keeping an appointment with Count Mueller, her lover. A wonderful mixture of Magyar beauty and English delicacy, her furs and silks exotically scented, she is the illegitimate daughter of an English duke and a Hungarian aristocrat, born in Pesht. Her father was attached to the Foreign Office, her mother, until her pregnancy, was a lady-in-waiting to the Princess. She received a superb education in Vienna, England and Switzerland and at the age of eighteen married Christoff Beraud, the financier. When Beraud crashed as a result of the Zimmerman scandal of he shot himself, leaving his wife penniless and having to seek the protection of the man who was already her lover, Hans von Arnim, the successful pianist. Unable to be seen with von Arnim in public, Madame Vacarescu grew bored and eventually left Berlin for Danzig with Count Mueller, who describes his occupation as ‘freelance diplomat’ but who is known as ‘the Messenger Boy of Europe’, a spy, an arms-dealer and a blackmailer. Mueller will die this year and it will be rumoured that Caroline Vacarescu has rid herself of a man who had in a dozen ways compromised and humiliated her. She is a warm-hearted, rather detached woman; a very cold lover with me. Alexandra is awake and my terrors vanish; she complains breakfast is late. Perhaps it is my own lack of resolve I mistakenly bestow upon her. The breakfast comes and goes. As we make love I have an intense vision of that massive stone Cathedral; her flesh contrasts with the carved granite; such opposites and yet so similar in their effect upon the hand and eye. It occurs to me that there may be fewer better pleasures than to make love in the St-Maria-and-St-Maria with the light from the stained glass falling on our bodies as I pass my fingers from youthful flesh to ancient stone while the organ plays some favourite piece of music. And would it be blasphemy? Most would see it as that. But I would thank God for all His gifts and pray more joyfully than anyone had ever prayed before. The violence of Alexandra’s passion had almost frightened me at first; now it becomes exhilarating, infectious and I respond in kind. Sometimes, inexplicably, she becomes nervous of me. I ignore her fear, and press ahead until she has again forgotten everything but her lust. But I must be forever controlling, guarding against depressions, against commonalities which threaten our idyll. I do not always reckon with the power of Alexandra’s determination. When they decided to go to Rome her parents had left her in the charge of her aunt, who in turn Put her in the care of an old housekeeper. She had already begun to dream, to prepare herself for adventures which, Aspired by the reading of certain French novels, she had Vearned to experience for several years. I still do not know whether she sought me out for her instruction or whether she instructs me. I was unable, in spite of sane reservations, to master my lust. I swiftly gave myself up to her. I do not know how long it has been, but I know that I did not believe for more than a few days that I was fully in control of her as I began that process of subtle debauchery she so deeply desired and which, of course, she also feared, as the laudanum-taker fears the drug which is friend and enemy in one. That she will eventually resist any dependency upon me and break my heart will be a tribute to her determination and a confirmation, finally, of my judgement that I had not only met my match but been beaten at a game I had played half-consciously for years. Alexandra grunts and pants; her eyes are burnished copper. I am familiar, as are most men, with the woman who will translate her own will to power through a male medium, but Alexandra is either more subtle or more naive in her attempts to affect her world. This is partly what fascinates me. It has been several years since any woman obsessed me; now I am surely caught. Eros usurps Bacchus. I rise on that dark euphoria which appears to bring objectivity but in fact produces nothing save confusion, uncontrollable misery and eventual collapse. Papadakis steps out of the shadows with a rattling tray. I can only admit now that I gave myself up to Eros deliberately, in the belief it does a man or woman good to make such fools of themselves occasionally; there are few risks much wilder and few which make us so much wiser, should we survive them. Papadakis stretches out his emaciated arms. I smell boiled fish. ‘It will do you good,’ he says in his half-humorous, half-insinuating voice; a voice once calculated during his own, brief, Golden Age to rob the weak of any volition they might possess; but it had been the single weapon in his arsenal; he had used up all his emotional capital by the time he was forty. He speaks of the past as if it were a personal God which came to betray him. ‘They ruined me,’ he sometimes says. In his more egocentric moments he claims deliberately to have ruined himself. Even as we fall into the abyss, we men must explain how the descent was predicted and calculated. When the world refuses to be handled by us, we turn to women. And women, for purposes of their own, usually temporary, help us pretend to a power permitted, in reality, only to the securest of tyrants. Papadakis has become a wizened satyr, a monument to mis-spent juices, keeping me alive from motives of dimly-perceived self-interest. I tell him to leave the tray, to bring me white wine. He refuses. He tells me it is not good for me. He is scowling. Perhaps he senses he no longer has any power over me. Alexandra begins to ask me lascivious questions about my other women. I tell her romantically there are none but her and she seems disappointed.

The heat of her saliva is on my penis; the soft lips close, the teeth touch the skin; her head moves slowly up and down and the future is once more successfully banished. Death does not exist. Playing with her clitoris and wiping sperm from her cheek she asks me again about other women. I am anxious to keep her curiosity. I begin to invent stories for her. I tell her of adventures involving several ladies at a time. She says unexpectedly: ‘Would you like me to do that for you?’ I am interrupted. ‘What?’

‘Sleep with other women,’ she says. ‘With you?’ I hesitate. ‘Have you slept with girls before?’ She smiles. ‘With school-friends, certainly. We have all done it. Most of us. I love female bodies. They are so beautiful. Beautiful in a different way.’ She touches my penis which is erect again. I laugh. ‘Where,’ she says, ‘can we find another lady?’ I have the solution. Papadakis is crooning to himself in the corner near the wardrobe. He is doing something with a screwdriver. He is not in good temper. ‘Have you taken your pills?’ I ask, mocking him. He becomes furious. ‘You should see the doctor,’ he tells me. ‘I cannot be responsible.’

Caroline Vacarescu boasted to me once that she had slept with five reigning monarchs and thirteen heirs apparent, four them women. The Age of Kings appears to have ended in an orgy of royal lust. The Dictators, according to established Pattern, seem extraordinarily celibate in comparison, perhaps because they are not so casually acquainted with power. But with Caroline it was a question of service, not pleasure. She was adding to Count Mueller’s secret fortune. We are looking for some cigars for me. Walking up Koenigstrasse in bright sunlight we see an old woman leaning against a shop window full of soap and popular potions. She has a half-eaten cake in one hand and seems drunk. Her clothing is predominantly dark brown. It does not fit her properly. Her left foot is bandaged to just above the ankle. She tugs up her skirt and pees on the paving stones. Her collection of bundles lies to one side of her and the urine spreads slowly towards it. Nearby a street sweeper brushes at the gutter with polite patience, as if waiting to clean the pavement as soon as she has finished. People pass her without stopping, without looking, although they do not appear to be disgusted or afraid. ‘There is nothing we can do,’ says Alexandra, pulling at me. The sun shines on white roofs and is reflected in elegant windows.

There is a great deal of traffic in Koenigstrasse today; carriages and carts of all sorts. The street smells like a farm. Papadakis refuses to tell me when he will return. He closes the door with unusual force. I am content. A procession of swaggering lancers, jangling metal and bobbing gold braid, trots by on the other side. ‘There are so many soldiers about,’ says Alexandra. ‘Do you know why?’ I do not. ‘It could be something to do with the Armaments Bill,’ I tell her. The Bill has passed through Parliament. The Prince is expected to sign it today. Alexandra takes a cab for Nussbaumhof to see if her parents have written to say when they are returning from Rome. My earlier fears of losing her have disappeared because we are about to embark on another intrigue; she has set her mind on it. How much of her am I destroying, or allowing her to destroy of herself? I relax with a glass of Alsatian beer and some Cambozola at an outside table of the Café Internationale on the corner of Falfnersallee facing the Radota Bridge and the river. The air is unusually warm: everywhere I look I see beauty, reassurance. If Vienna is gay, then Mirenburg IS happy; a sane city whose character may be infinitely explored, and yet she has no real secrets; even her vices are admitted and the subject of common knowledge.

Bismarck says Mirenburg is a feminine city and a natural bride for masculine Berlin. He once said that a marriage with Vienna would be a perversion of everything that was natural. My brother knew Bismarck quite well. Apparently the great Chancellor had a habit of describing nations in terms of their sexual characteristics; he loved France, for instance: ‘She challenges us expecting to be conquered, then complains she is a victim, that we have robbed her of her honour. What other country would give herself up so completely to a Corsican adventurer, offering him her liberty, her lifeblood, her fortune again and again, and then continue to love him, even when he has so patently abused and ruined her?’ Now Bismarck is dying, caustic and sometimes bitter when he considers the actions of his successors or the policies of his Austrian counterpart, the Graf Kazimierz Badeni, who possesses much of Bismarck’s ruthlessness and little of his intelligence. The balance of power is threatened. A detachment of flying artillery makes the bridge noisy with its showy hooves and iron-shod wheels. The sun bursts upon the bouncing metal of the new Skoda field-guns: perhaps this is another deliberate display.

I am resentful of their intrusion into my peace of mind. At the next table a German tourist laughs and points towards the artillery as it turns into Kanalstrasse. His wife looks blank. ‘See,’ he says, ‘the Waldenstein army!’ He glances at me for appreciation. I smile and ask the waiter for a Mirenburg Zeitung. He brings me the newspaper and I give him fifty pfennigs, telling him to keep the change. The editorial sings of the greater prosperity the Armaments Bill will bring to the country. There is news of Count Holzhammer. He seems to have made some progress with his Austrian allies. There is a discussion of preparations being made for next year’s large Exhibition, which will represent every nation in the civilized world; again, prosperity is the leitmotif. I seek out the stock Market reports and am reassured. There is an article by a military correspondent on the relative merits of buying arms from foreign sources or of setting up factories at home. I am astonished by prices given for the Krupp cannon and its ammunition: a hint of the significance of the new Bill, which could involve a considerable amount of taxation. Walden-stein’s landowners cannot be pleased at the prospect. Yet the only alternative appears to be in treaties, ‘closer union’ with one of the Great Powers and a consequent loss of independence. The British have uprisings in India. I fold the newspaper and put it under my beer glass. Alexandra joins me. She is flushed. She is smiling. She has changed her clothes again. ‘They will not be back for ages. I’ve written. And no one suspects anything. I was full of Marya and our punting expeditions!’

I congratulate her on the cleverness of her deception. Papadakis has returned. I hear him pushing furniture about in the next room. With a rustle of that seductive costume she seats herself beside me and whispering asks me if I have made arrangements to visit Rosenstrasse. I have sent a note to Frau Schmetterling. We shall be expected. In his famous Pamety—his memoirs—Benes Milovsky recalls a stream running the length of Rosenstrasse. It had its source in the hills beyond the walls and it fed into the Ratt. This stream became subterranean by the middle of the century. It forms the basis for a sophisticated modern sewage system and can still be heard running beneath the Rosenstrasse cobbles.

In the afternoon we visit the Museum of Antiquities, the concrete traces of fifteen hundred years of history. A diorama represents Waldenstein’s primitive settlers, the Svitavian tribesmen who built their camps in the great valley of the Ratt, between four ranges of mountains, fighting off the Teutonic invaders when they swept in during the ninth and tenth centuries. No Roman ever set foot in any settlement along the Upper Ratt. The diorama gives a lie to the sentimental nationalists. The present descendants of those tribes are no more ‘true Slavs’ than they are ‘true Aryans’; the blood has mingled thoroughly to produce the Waldensteiner. But blood these days has become another word for ambition, a justification of greed, a rationalisation of those frustrated in their political needs, an excuse for terrible murder, a counterbalance to the Christianity we all profess to cherish and which certainly checks us in any honest, pagan rapacity we still possess. Men need myths to set against myths, it seems. They need the precedent of ‘blood’ or their consciences could tell them they are ineffectual, ruthless, wicked, and thus deny them what they want. A woman rarely seeks such complicated excuses; the means by which she disguises her desires usually take quite a different form. They say women substitute sentimentality for principle, that a woman’s logic is entirely based upon her own immediate physical and emotional needs; yet men display similar logic, couched in terms of the highest ideals, and trap themselves quite as thoroughly when their actions diverge significantly from their words. Alexandra speaks softly of the wonderful past. She leans on my arm. Her body seems to wish to become absorbed in mine. Antiquity is a thing of broken statues and rusty iron. I am quickly bored with it. We descend the wide steps of the Museum and look across the city at the magnificent Greek church. Although primarily a Protestant city, Mirenburg represents many other religions within her walls; one would not be surprised to see a mosque here. I go with relief to the nearby Municipal Art Gallery. Here are paintings by all the masters, by new painters who take such an optimistic delight in form and light for its own sake. I am soon restored and my spirits lift. Alexandra examines paintings of women, showing me the figures she finds attractive and those which do not please her, and I know she is deliberately setting the scene for this evening. I continue to be astonished by her, by the violence of her determination to experience every fantasy she has imagined. It is almost inconceivable she will not have destroyed herself, or at very least her capacity for sensation and emotion, by the time she is twenty. And yet I still cannot determine which of us exploits the other, though I know of course what the world would decide. As we drive back to the hotel through the haze of twilight I see the notices advertising evening newspapers. Count Holzhammer, apparently, has returned to Waldenstein. The importance of this news escapes me. Papadakis enters the room. I dismiss him impatiently. In the hotel we begin to prepare ourselves for sophisticated debauchery. My body has never felt more thoroughly alive. I almost gasp as the silk of my shirt touches my skin. Both of us seem to glow with power as we leave the Hotel Liverpool in a cab and drive towards the West Bank. Rosenstrasse is near the river across from the Moravian Precinct, on the very fringe of the respectable Jewish Quarter near the Botanical Gardens, and only a couple of streets up from the Niersteiner Quay with its trees and awnings and little cafés, between two streets which lead down to the quay, Rauchgasse and Papensgasse. In Papensgasse an archway is the only means of reaching Rosenstrasse, once a private street owned by a religious order. The monastery still occupies a site here. From Rauchgasse one enters through a narrow gap between two tall, seventeenth-century houses. There is a single gas-lamp at either end of Rosenstrasse’s cobbled surface. The plane trees and flowering chestnuts give an air of isolation, of seclusion to what is an ideal setting for Frau Schmetterling’s brothel. It is in some ways more like a country courtyard, even a garden, than an ordinary city street. The high houses make it seem even narrower than it is. These are primarily eighteenth-century terraces, apparently the residences of moderately well-to-do tradespeople. On the eastern side is the oldest building, single-storeyed, roofed in red slate, with no outward-facing windows at all and to one side massive double doors set in a Gothic arch. The doors are black wood bound in dark iron; they open directly into the cloisters of the disused monastery. Ivy grows over the roof and up the walls of the terraces from the unseen garden. Opposite the monastery is a short row of shops: a bookbinder’s, an artists’ colourman, a seller of prints and old books. Dominating these is a mansion, No. 10 Rosenstrasse. It is well-kept, impressive; the town-house of a wealthy family until the middle years of the century. The windows at the front are always covered from the inside by heavy curtains or from the outside by green wooden shutters. It is a big, square, solid building, as reassuring as the street itself. Opposite there is a terrace, some more small shops and the entrance to a large apartment house occupied mostly by students. As the sun sets Rosenstrasse fills out with soft shadows. The lamplighter comes through the archway from Papensgasse and ignites the gas, then continues on his business down Rauchgasse towards the river. In the warm September night Mirenburg grows drowsy.

At No. 10 Rosenstrasse shutters are being opened and curtains are being closed, as if the house prepares for guests. Gentle voices can be heard and some laughter. To many travellers Mirenburg is a synonym for Europe’s most famous brothel, whose customers speak of it with unqualified affection and respect. Gentlemen will make a diversion of hundreds of miles to spend an evening here. There are women too who will do the same and the friendship they feel for Frau Schmetterling is apparently reciprocated by the madam whose discretion and tact are a byword, as is the range and breadth of her services. The brothel has been described as Mirenburg’s greatest treasure. It has become an institution. Those who live near it are almost proud to be associated with it and the few complaints Frau Schmetterling receives are dealt with intelligently and with considerable charm. Her place threatens only those who are patently prone to such threats. It is protected by every authority and tolerated by the Church; important political assignations frequently occur here: one can only enter the doors if one is armed with the most impressive bona-fides. Papadakis tidies the sheets. ‘You are too thin,’ he says. ‘You are wasting yourself.’ I ignore him. Alexandra and I step out of the cab in Rauchgasse and pass between the tall white houses into Rosenstrasse. A soft, sultry wind blows through Mirenburg’s baroque facades; she seems singularly quiescent. Alexandra’s breast rises and falls and her little hand tightens on my arm. We mount the steps of No. 10. Her eyes have a distant, drowsy look, inturned; at once innocent and secretive. At the end of my bed Papadakis coughs and makes some banal remark. I think he is trying to joke. I shout at him to leave. I hit my arm and ring the bell of Frau Schmetterling’s door. It opens. I press Alexandra through and pause, taking a grip on myself. My legs are trembling slightly. The door closes behind us. Trudi, a pretty young woman, perhaps an idiot, with blonde hair and vacant blue eyes, takes our street clothes from us. She curtseys. She is wearing peasant costume. There is distant music. The small lobby is furnished in discreet crystal, with hangings of heavy wine-coloured velvet, some flowering plants on polished wood, a mirror in a modern ‘Liberty’ frame, and several paintings, chiefly portraits of the last French emperor. The air is heavy with the scent of roses and hyacinths.

Now Alexandra holds back a little, a wary cat. I smile down at her as we wait to be received. She smiles in response, wetting her lips with the tip of her red tongue. Mirenburg has begun to sleep a deeper than usual sleep. Even her bells, when they mark off the hours, seem muffled and distant. A moon rises to touch the purity of her architecture so that it gleams like bone. The waters of the river hardly move. Alexandra makes a small sound in her throat, then looks at me with the adoring expression of a schoolgirl about to have her deepest dreams fulfilled. I steady myself against her violence and find myself, in turn, hesitating. I have a momentary desire to wrench open the door and flee Rosenstrasse, leave Mirenburg behind me, return to the bland formality of Berlin. But then Frau Schmetterling, that dignified matriarch, appears in the lobby and I bow, extending a hand towards her even as a small, swiftly-disguised frown crosses her face. Perhaps she has noticed my hand shaking. She looks towards Alexandra.

‘Dear Ricky,’ she says, and takes a key from her delicate pocket. ‘Everything you desire is ready for you. You know the blue door, of course.’ She puts the key into my hand. ‘Good evening,’ she says to Alexandra.

We climb the dark red stairs, our fingers on the bannister’s gilded wood. ‘She doesn’t like me,’ whispers Alexandra. ‘She doesn’t know you,’ I reply. We reach the empty landing and walk on soft carpet towards the blue door. The pen is heavy in my hand; suddenly the paper hurts me when I touch it.

Papadakis comes back to busy himself with pillows and I do not resist him. He puts a glass to my lips. I swallow. Mirenburg enjoys her last tranquil night; she fades. For the moment I let her leave me.