The Vengeance of Rome

  * * * *

  The Vengeance of Rome

  [Between the Wars 04]

  By Michael Moorcock

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  INTRODUCTION

  I have at last completed the final volume of Colonel Pyat’s memoir. His life began in 1900 and ended in 1977, a few years after he had commissioned me to help him write the book he originally intended to call variously ‘The Life of Mrs Cornelius’ or ‘My Adventures with Mrs Cornelius Between the Wars’. He believed that Mrs Cornelius, a well-known local Notting Hill figure during the 1950s and 60s, was world-famous and that the public would pay him handsomely for his reminiscences. Mrs Cornelius had died a year or two earlier, her career as a minor film actress and entertainer completely forgotten. After publication of the first volume, her children almost immediately began litigation to stop me publishing any further work about her. Only in recent years did we reach an understanding. That is one reason why this volume has taken so long to appear. Another reason was the death of my original editor, the extraordinary John Blackwell, who had helped me considerably, both with translations and interpretations and whose loss has been felt by many other authors and publishers.

  When I moved to Texas, and deposited the papers and tapes still in my possession with Texas A&M University, I was able to interview one or two of those friends and acquaintances of Pyat’s who were by then living in the USA, among them Colonel H.W Mix, who saw long service with the CIA before retiring to Florida, and Karl Schnauben, who served a prison sentence for his SS activities but had settled in Wisconsin, where he had family. I also interviewed survivors and relatives of survivors from the 1930s and 40s with whom I could check various accounts of Nazis and ex-Nazis who had known Pyat in Germany, including Kurt Ludecke, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Issolde Krone and the woman who still prefers to be called ‘Catherine Oberhauser’.

  In England I had been fortunate enough to discover Desmond Reid, who had acted in films with Pyat in Germany, and Major John Nye, who had served in British Military Intelligence and had been well acquainted with Mrs Cornelius and Colonel Pyat since the 1920s. Over a hundred, Major Nye retired to Wexford in Ireland and in 2001 died in the care of his eldest daughter, Mrs O’Dowd, formerly Lady Begg.

  The task of turning Pyat’s vast collection of papers and tapes into some kind of coherent narrative has been considerable. Where Colonel Pyat repeated a story, it often varied a little, depending on the context, and I had to choose the account which seemed most credible. Some of the least likely stories, however, have been confirmed by other sources, so I have done my best not to confine his reminiscences only to the mundane. Much material was written in a variety of languages, including a kind of international patois he developed for himself. Chiefly, however, he wrote in English, Russian, French, German, Italian and Yiddish, though here and there I came across pages in Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Most of the languages, with the exception of Yiddish and Russian, were rendered inexpertly and even the Yiddish was not always exact. I have attempted to give some of the original material’s flavour, with its disgressions and sudden switches into other languages. Almost all the tapes I made, for instance, are in English and these form the basis of the narrative. I have, as usual, limited Colonel Pyat’s racialist, homophobic and other diatribes to the minimum, especially in the light of the recent revival of anti-Semitic rhetoric in parts of Europe and America, but his memoir would not be understood, I believe, if I had removed everything I found offensive. This particularly concerns the scenes in which Adolf Hitler appears. That these descriptions and ideas are the antithesis of my own I am sure the reader realises.

  I am extremely grateful, too, to my friends Lord David Holland and Professor Richard Meadley, who supplied me with missing information. My wife Linda Moorcock did an heroic job of reading and editing my manuscript. She also did much of the final typing and had to live with Pyat for some twenty-five years. She will be as relieved as I am that I have at last completed the work as I promised. Others to whom I am grateful for their conversation and ideas on the subject include my late guardian Dr Ernst Jellinek, Peter Ackroyd, my first wife Hilary Bailey, Barrington Bayley, the late Angela Carter, Tom Disch, Jean-Luc Fromental, M. John Harrison, Dr David Harvey, Harvey Jacobs, Richard Klaw, Dr Rafael Medoff, Dr Josef Nesvadba, Stuart Reid, David Shapiro, Iain Sinclair, Lili Stejnes, Emma Tennant, Alan Wall, Claire Walsh, Zoran Zivkovic, my friend and agent Howard Morhaim, my friend and agent Georges Hoffman, and my good friend and father of my god-daughter Oona, Christian, Count von Baudissin, who also looked over the final manuscript and made valuable suggestions, as did Anthony Rudolf, who shares an interest with myself and Sinclair in the Princelet Street synagogue. My other much loved friend who helped me with her insights and encouragement through the whole course of this volume and died too soon to see it completed was Andrea Dworkin to whom I dedicated an earlier volume. She died far too young. She was as close to me as any sister and I miss her terribly.

  One last note: I was able to verify much of what Pyat wrote about his time in Italy, Germany and elsewhere by interviewing survivors or reading texts like Ludecke’s. It became plain to me in this process, as I searched through hundreds of books, newspapers, magazines and documents, that only those who did not wish to know about the Nazi concentration camps and treatment of Jews from 1933 onwards, did not know, and that the American and British governments of the day by no means did everything they could and, in my view, should have done to resist Hitler and his policies. For further information about this shameful episode in Anglo-American foreign policy, I refer you to the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (of which I am a member) at their website: www. Wymanlnstitute.org

  Michael Moorcock,

  The Old Circle Squared,

  Port Sabatini, Texas

  May 2005

  * * * *

  ONE

  My achievements are a matter of history. A record. I am the voice and the conscience of civilised Europe. I am one of the great inventors of my age. I am a child of the century and as old as the century. Unlike Göring and Goebbels and those lickspittles of the SA and SS, I was never afraid to be judged by my actions. No court in the civilised world would countenance such allegations. They are absolutely insubstantial. Yet still that Turk, whose filthy fried-meat shop remains a nightmare for those of us forced to live in its ambience, insists I am a Jew he knew in Pera! I would have been five years old! What could he remember? I suspect a familiar hand in this but am allowed to say nothing. These days, even a casual mention of Comrade Brodmann means Mrs Cornelius will mock me until we have a row. My heart is not strong enough. I console myself. At my age I fear only God’s disapproval and there can be precious little of that in store for one who has devoted so much of his life to the service of Christ!

  I was always of an evangelical disposition and had meditated a great deal on matters of religion while in service to El Glaoui, so my conversation more readily turned to spiritual matters which was why Mr Mix sometimes likened me to an Old Testament prophet. We had discovered that our cattle truck was not going directly to Casablanca and my normally genial darkie had grown disconsolate. I reassured him that at least our train was bearing us away from the medieval dangers of Marrakech and the sinister whimsicality of her Caïd, and to pass the time I attempted to instil a sense of our Greek faith into my loyal companion. At length the usually easygoing black insisted that Baptist was good enough for him; he always felt uneasy around incense and chanting. ‘That voodoo stuff gives me the willies.’ Had I seen Ben-Hur? Or was he thinking of Intolerance? Confining my answer to the murmured remark that the early Church was scarcely the same as Babylonian paganism, I was content to avoid controver
sy while we travelled in intimate discomfort and as a result fell into the pleasant habit we had developed in the USA of discussing favourite films. We were both great ‘buffs’.

  * * * *

  TWO

  Oh, the boy. That boy. Her boy. How I loved him. He was going to be my son. I was teaching him everything. At first he listened. Then he became restless. The most important information is that which you don’t wish to hear. He lied to me. He lied to me. He was the first one, that erstwhile son of hers! What was I? Some Abraham? Fear thou not Jacob, my servant. Though thou make a nest as high as the eagle and though thou set it among the stars, I will bring thee down from hence. He lied to me. Elijah lied to me. I know. You do not believe it. Nobody can believe it. He lied. He lied. There was no precedent for this. This was the worst of all captivities and it had not been predicted. It taught us that not every lesson is, after all, a big lesson. Big lessons are made up of many small lessons, said the Jew in Arcadia. He wanted me to escape with something. I forget what.

  * * * *

  THREE

  The Jew in Arcadia predicted I would lose what I most valued in the ruins of what I least knew I valued. He called me meshumad. They said he was a tsaddik, eyn maskil. He thought I was slow. He thought he confused me with his riddles. I was not slow and I was not confused by him. I followed his arguments but I could not agree with them, that was all. He was the slow one. I was too quick for his old-fashioned parlour games. Mutti! Mutti! Wer ist das? They believe they are so sophisticated in their provincial professionalism. But it would be rude to challenge them. It would be stupid to make enemies. I can smell the yellow blossoms, the green and yellow stalks in the red mud turned up by the ploughman’s skill. The fog rolls across the fields. The smoke drifts through the market. I can smell the market, the plotki, the cooking zrazy, the tubs of lokshen; brass and copper wink among the iron, the enamelled trays, the glittering bowls of dumpling soup. I can smell the golden stones of my old Kiev, the Hero City of the Russ. Oh, Russia, my homeland. Oh, Ukraine, my home. Golden grass blooms in Babi Yar. Golden grass still blooms in my Babi Yar. Mia madre! O, Esmé, how we rose towards the stars that day over the old gorge. And what if only these memories remain? Is there any crime forgetting pain? Is a meek man of any more or less worth than a proud man? We are rarely given the example. Our prophet celebrated the meek. Our society continues to celebrate the violent. I know all this. I followed it through the 1950s. They were saying it on the radio and TV. But gradually we forgot. The meek hero disappeared.

  City of sleeping cats. City of goats. City of Greeks. We lived in that world, the Jew and I. We lived in the deep history of it, so deep that no enemy could find us. Our only fear was that a friend should betray us. It was the life of a very fortunate intellectual rat but it was life. That’s show business, says Brady, the child-killer. Is there some primitive sense they have that by killing us they empower themselves? They eat our brains. There are more terrible ideas than this, I suppose. But they behave like film stars, these secret service interrogators, these prison guards. I read what I could in the camps. For a while they let me use the library, but first all you were allowed was Mein Kampf or Völkischer Beobachter. They were not exactly designed to stimulate the mind but rather to reduce it. There are teachers who take great joy in passing on wisdom. But we must not forget the other kind of teacher who loves to repress knowledge and leave us more ignorant and brutal than themselves. Believe me, I am not complaining. I had it easy compared to most. But, of course, my imprisonment was completely unjust. I had done nothing to deserve those camps. There were a number of others, like myself. Guilty or not, few deserved to be props for the showmanship of illiterates or sadists. In the camps my old friends turned into terrifying enemies. Jude, mach Mores! Jude, verrecke! Hep! Hep! Even in Dachau they had their Judengasse. Zionismus ist ein überwundener Standpunkt!

  I came out of Egypt. I came out of Libya and Abyssinia. I came out of the land of the Moors and the land of Sefarad, Zarefat and all the lands of Edom or Ishmael. I came out of Zarefat and Rome and Carthage. I came out of Troy and Athens, Constantinople and London. Out of New York and Los Angeles. Captive and conqueror both. I came out of Atlanta and Memphis and Cairo. I will come out of the world. My cities shall fly.

  * * * *

  FOUR

  1648, you say? As if this somehow makes up for 1492. Everyone is talking in that dingy distance. A no man’s land of howls, imploring shrieks. And then they are talking again. And you say there is nothing to fear from the East? I say you are looking in the wrong places. Look to Australia or China or Siam, not to Russia or her empire, who will always be European, for it is Christendom herself she defends. It is her free Cossacks who will ensure Christendom’s boundaries. For it is written that the borders were drawn upon the world by God’s own finger tracing them as He traced the mosaics of our history.

  Abraham, der ah erster seiner eigenen Menschlichkeit ein Opfer brachte: Wo traf dein Messer deinen vertrauensvollen Sohn?

  Those decent horsemen riding into Ur, their eyes bright with the significance of a new idea. Such expressions were worn by the men who saw the wheel invented and the women who learned to card wool. By Norsemen who carried the banner of Christ. By Easterners who bore their own flags. Sooner or later, as many predicted, East and West would meet, either at war or having learned a way of peace. On one side the gold, white, red, black, green and blue of Christendom. On the other side the dark emerald of Islam, the scarlet crescent and whatever colours of convenience thrown up by criminals, kulaks and cowboys of modern Zion. Who would be a Jew?

  * * * *

  FIVE

  Days passed. We drank what water we could collect but rarely dared emerge from our truck while the train was standing, in case we should fail to get back on or attract the eye of some zealot in blue and red serge who would make it his mission to place us under arrest. I could not afford to be investigated by the French, especially since their diplomacy at that time favoured my ex-master, El Glaoui. If any description of us had been published I would be instantly recognised. Few Europeans travelled about Morocco wearing native costume, accompanied by a huge American Negro servant. For this reason, even when at night we ventured a few feet from our truck as it rested in a siding, we kept our heads covered with our djellaba hoods.

  We had expected to arrive in Casablanca in less than a day. Of course our train, fuelled more by red tape than coal, went everywhere but Casablanca. The military bureaucrats in Paris sent it first to Meknes, then to Rabat, then to Fez, then back to Meknes and from there to Tangier, loading and unloading nothing, but in Rabat adding two private horseboxes, presumably at the request of the Sultan. Our three central cattle cars remained unused at every stage, but the smell of horse manure was added to that of cow dung and the boiled-egg smell of steam. Though tempted by glimpses of towns, we were reluctant to disembark at an inland station, especially since Mr Mix had left Meknes under a cloud and was well known in the area, but early one morning we at last glimpsed the familiar blue waters of the Mediterranean, the green palms, white tenements and pink towers of a seaport which could only be Tangier.

  No sooner had we realised our destination than we understood our danger. Our only choice was to disembark. Already the train was shunting along the military quay to the waiting ships. The docks were thick with French soldiers, with Negro Zouaves. Our only hope was that they lacked the sense to recognise us. Mr Mix and I took familiar positions on both sides of the doors, slid them back and prepared to jump. As we had guessed, the soldiers assumed us to be workers. They paid us no attention. I was to go first. The quay moved slowly past. A gap appeared in the Zouave ranks. I threw my carpet bag and sack of films on to a pile of mail and with triumphant elation made to leap after them, but my celebration was short-lived, as at the very moment I began to jump, I found myself staring directly down into the seedy features of that treacherous little turncoat Bolsover, late of the Hope Dempsey. By providence or bribery the snivelling cockney hophead had esc
aped Egyptian justice, weaselled his way into a job with the French as a civilian clerk, and arrived at the free port just in time to recognise me! The worst possible luck!

  I had no time to shout a warning to Mr Mix. Like me he was already jumping. Bolsover meanwhile became a maniac, tugging at the sleeves of every uniformed Negro nearby, screaming in English that a dangerous criminal was among us. As Mr Mix began to run, his hood blew back from his head revealing those magnificent, unmistakable features. We had no chance of making a discreet exit or of talking ourselves out of danger. The black had given us away! I saw his huge head snap up as he vaulted a barrier then ran through the yards towards the passenger station, a pair of baffled Zouaves in pursuit. He would have made a magnificent athlete.

  Bolsover, a mass of excited duff, had poor success in attracting any further help. All attention was now on the boxes where a French officer, concerned that the animals should not injure themselves, struggled to command his unruly men and calm the horses.

  My emotional resources were already very low. Rather than waste time remonstrating, I shouted for Mr Mix to keep running while my own strategy was to point to his fleeing back, crying in Arabic: ‘There he goes!’ and, with my hood over my head, my sack over my back and my bag in my hand, mingle with the gathering crowd of dock workers attracted by the double commotion. I heard Bolsover’s grating French: ’He’s a famous Parisian crook! He’s wanted for fraud and manslaughter!’The man had developed some bizarre grudge against me. He was obsessed. Who else would give credence to that Parisian airship business? Forced to leave for New York before I could prove my case to the Sûreté, which with its usual lazy prejudice had fixed on me as an easy scapegoat, I had been unable to defend myself.