The Vengeance of Rome

  Yesterday as we came out of the tunnel we found a dead dog lying on the towpath almost in the water, twisted so that its hindquarters were open revealing its genitals, a red erection. Its short black fur had dried into symmetrical muddy spikes. Its eyes and muzzle were half open, releasing the tongue. It stared over the canal with a resigned and melancholy grin.

  ‘Someone’s fallen out with the Mafia.’

  I uttered my first thought. In my circumstances, I am reasonably nervous, never sure if that particular vendetta against me still continues.

  She tells me I am loony. ‘Barkin’,’ she says.

  But I was once threatened in that way, I insist. In Rome. Nineteen thirty-two, I think. You were there when it happened to me. I told you about it on the train to Vienna.

  I now know of course who was actually stalking me. She refuses to believe me. Some people live their whole lives in a permanent state of denial. Half of what I say she dismisses or derides, revealing an unconscious defence mechanism against unpalatable truth. I at least shall not be surprised when Brodmann walks through the door with a gun in one hand and a KGB badge in the other.

  I have noticed how a threatened man or woman will unconsciously try to turn into the creature they most fear rather than be destroyed by it. We are so eager to conspire with our masters. We have few alternatives and almost no choices any longer. So it was in Dachau. I have been stripped of my rank, humiliated and abused. Never once have I complained.

  Of course, in most circumstances complaint meant an immediate and painful death. Even when you have had the science of the method explained to you (in my case by Himmler and Schnauben themselves) it does not make your response any more rational. You know that any escape plans you make are fantasies. Any hope you entertain is a nonsense. I learned that already in Egypt. Those of you who have never experienced this kind of fear have no business judging us. By denying your own vulnerability, you make yourself further vulnerable to whatever threatens you.

  Mrs Cornelius says Brodmann would be eighty at least. She says I live too much in the past. And where else should I live? I ask. How good does the future look to you? And has the future provided you with experience? Why should the present suit you better than the past? Is there something wrong with the past? You can forget. You can. What you must lose is the memory of desire, the sensation of innocence, the inability to tolerate what is disgusting. All these will become virtues enabling you to forget desire, innocence, intolerance, love. You will forget and yet memory will persist as a cold sense of loss, a yearning for something better and sweeter which you have forbidden yourself. For with memory comes loss, with desire comes pain, with hope comes despair. Hell offers an absence of virtue. It offers an eternity when all you yearn for is time.

  I am an old man. My only consolations are my memories. I cultivate my past like a favourite garden; I order it like a beloved library. I go back to the years of my youth and my power when my good looks were favourably compared to Rudolph Valentino’s and Cesar Romero’s and my future was golden. I was a la mode.

  Until you think back you do not understand how much your physical appearance determined your destiny. I hardly realised at the time what I had in common with the early Nazis. More than any other people, Germans celebrated youth as healthy, untainted by the poisons of the past, unburdened with the compromises and struggles of the ‘Men of War’. The Nazis were young. Most of the men who came to run the Third Reich were in their thirties. Their youth, inexperience and idealism were part of their great appeal. Ordinary Germans accepted the Nazis as the vital force to channel that youthful energy back into constructive action. Their idealism united the nation, forming ranks against the common enemy. If their youthful rhetoric was a little fiery, people tolerated it. Watch Things to Come if you want to know how we felt about putting the old ways behind us and building a rational world where technology assured our enduring security. H. G. Wells was not above borrowing the odd idea or two from the despised little corporal!

  Most Germans had known only war, disintegration and violent struggle. Perpetual uncertainty is anathema to that honest, amiable German soul yearning to translate its experience of comradeship into a greater community to include all Germans, rich or poor, noble and commoner. They had been told so many lies for so long, they refused to listen. They equated education with the manipulations of the ruling class. They had lost faith in conventional politics. They wanted not a state in the old sense, but a national community of equals: a mighty German family practising the old German family virtues. These sentiments were repeated over and over again. Jews wanted it, too. Those idealists were not brutes.

  The Reds and liberals were mostly men of the older generation. They had amply demonstrated their ineptitude in government, their inability to keep their promises. Yet people still yearned for that promised breaking down of class tensions which shackled Germany. They wanted stability first and foremost. Hitler promised a just and ordered future. Nationalism and socialism had failed, but perhaps national-socialism would balance the best of both philosophies. Ordinary Germans had seen Russia collapse into a civil war almost touching their borders, engulfing Poland and Finland, Romania and Ukraine. Germany could well be next. Their hatred of extremists led the German people to vote NSDAP.

  Only the Brown Tide could resist the Red. Röhm was convinced of that. He was dedicated to the elimination of Communism and Big Business Capitalism. But he was no fanatic. He was just as dedicated to his pleasures. It had been a long time, he said, since he felt so truly in love. There was something, he said, about my skin. And those dark Mediterranean eyes. He used to joke about my looking too Jewish for my own good. He was by his own admission completely besotted with me. ‘I am a childish and romantic man of a wicked disposition.’ He believed he had his own measure. I, however, found him generous and sensitive, loyal to his friends, faithful to his duty. His modesty would be his undoing. I suppose I loved him, too, a little. I was definitely flattered by his attention. Röhm was even more famous than Hitler in many circles. A light would burn in that oddly vulnerable, horribly scarred face when he tried to explain his feeling for me. ‘There is a quality in you, Max, that I recognise and need.’

  I was at once charmed and compromised. I had important business to complete in Rome. For me this interlude was no more than a holiday. I said nothing of Mussolini to Röhm but reminded him how I was not entirely a free agent, that I worked for the Italian aircraft industry.

  Röhm had no problem with this. He was, however, deeply interested in my South Russian battle experiences, assuming that, as an American flyer, I had longed for action. He himself had considered joining the Air Corps if only to get out of the trenches, but he was already too old. I had to describe for him in detail the period I spent fighting beside the Cossacks during that ruthless war between Red and White. He was trying to guess what might happen to his Germany in the event of a civil war. He listened with deep sympathy to my stories of capture and torture.

  Once or twice Röhm was moved to tears. And the Jews, he said, did this to your manhood? I explained how it had been necessary later to become a Mussulman when I rode with the Tuareg. I was terrified in that synagogue. They were going to set lire to us. They put a piece of metal in my womb. They tore off my Christian flesh. I can still feel the thing. It has six sharp points like a star. Röhm makes fun of me. ‘Are you sure you’re not Jewish?’

  I have to lean against the tunnel’s rotten brick. Overhead there is a constant rumble, like tumbrils. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

  ‘It’s your appendix, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘You ought to ‘ave it out.’

  My appendix is the last thing that should be removed. I have to avoid the doctors at St Charles. They will loot my corpse soon enough. Those Pakistanische butchers will dig the gold from my teeth. Who knows how much precious metal is in me? I am weighed down already. ‘I beg you, Mrs Cornelius — if I die first do not let them melt me for scrap. They’ll try to get me into the crematorium because that i
s where they steal the metal. Let me be returned to the earth with all my treasures.’

  ‘I’m not burym’ ya with all them old bits and pieces!’ She is outraged. ‘An indoor junkyard!’

  She has always spoken disparagingly of my machine parts. Where else can I keep them but my flat? Has she seen the price of lockups?

  ‘I was not referring to my engines but to my bones.’

  She deliberately misunderstands me. She stands there grinning. The dog is behind her. Its sad, reflective eye contemplates the threatening surface of the canal. Anubis is dead. The grey warehouses and useless factories form a background whose symmetry recalls Dachau.

  ‘You blokes ‘ave such ‘igh opinions of yourselves.’ She looks back at the dog. ‘You’ll be lucky if the council drags yer off in a plastic bag. We’re just bodies, you an’ me, Ivan. We don’t get no fuckin’ obituaries in ther Times. Wot you so worried about? Immortality? It beats me ‘ow people take you wankers seriously. It’s bad for yer. ‘Errnann lost ‘is grip in an ‘urry. But that ‘Itler was creepy. Clammy.’

  ‘You are too cynical, Mrs C. Is it a crime to demand a little recognition? We were trying to save the world. And that makes us wankers?’

  She takes me by the arm, and we move towards the next set of arches. Her tone softens. ‘I wasn’t just talkin’ about you.’

  ‘Well,’ I admit, ‘I can’t defend Hitler in that respect.’

  Hitler in truth was a walking pharmacy. That was why his skin was so cold. He had pills and injections for everything. After 1931, when political success was at last a real likelihood, his stomach began to bother him. Even before that he was given to long periods of detachment. The more successful he became, the more he withdrew into himself. He was fundamentally shy.

  Röhm said Hitler’s instinct was to keep all his balls in the air. He was a feckless Austrian at heart and hated reaching decisions. Decisions were usually made for him by events. Schlamperei, in Röhm’s view. His friend ‘Alf had become addicted to a cycle of longing, of repressed desire, violent fulfilment, then guilty retreat and denial. ‘Just like his sex life.’

  Röhm knew far more than he could say publicly but was often loose-tongued when drunk. Like so many Germans of his generation, Hitler discovered sex in the trenches and knew only extremes. Röhm was by nature a bluff Bavarian, ’open heart and open mouth’, as they say. He hated intrigue as much as he hated secrets. Only on the subject of his friend was he at all reticent. He never revealed the name of the young lieutenant who had opened Hitler’s sexual floodgates. The seducer was in civilian life a well-known painter who had taken an interest in Hitler’s architectural drawings. In turn one night the lieutenant had shown Hitler some of his special etchings. Confusion. Repulsion. Attraction. Yet it had still been rape in the end. Hitler responded with horror. He retreated into denial fearing he would not be able to control such lusts and emotions. Control, even then, was hugely important to him.

  ‘That’s what made him such a good dispatch runner.’ Röhm and I were relaxing one evening in his hot pool. Röhm drank Bollinger from the bottle and smiled with affectionate reminiscence. ‘He was afraid at any minute he’d again feel Lieutenant Feistfucher’s throbbing bongo up his scrawny jacksie. He fairly flew along those trenches. He was more terrified of his own desires than he was of death. And believe me, Max, he’s pretty fucking scared of death! Fascinated, too. Always running back and forth from the edge. He knows what makes him afraid and therefore knows what works on other people. You could call it the common touch. They love him for it.’

  Röhm massages my shoulders, thighs and buttocks. The action is painful to him. He has hard, expectant fingers. He is terrified they will turn into claws. He plays the piano to exercise them. ‘We used to call him “Alfy-run-and-fetch” in the mess. You’re never sure of soldiers like that. But now I respect his talents. He’s special. We’re still a perfect couple, him and me. Sides of the same coin. Yin and yang. Male and female. Talk and action . . .’

  Röhm obviously carried, as the Americans say, a torch for Hitler. Almost everything he did was because of those powerful feelings. His obsession with me was strong, but it was of a different quality. ‘Alf and ‘Ernstie’ had parted a few years earlier, ostensibly for political reasons. Röhm had not desired the separation but had accepted the reasoning. I speak of an age when it still meant something to give up personal desire in favour of a higher principle. Those old fighters were bound together by far more than cooling affection.

  ‘Doctor Diamond finks ‘Itler ‘ad thyroid trouble.’ Mrs Cornelius grows thoughtful. ‘It makes yer eyes bulge.’

  ‘He didn’t start out looking like that,’ I remind her. ‘He wound up bulging, I agree. Everything changed after ‘31.’

  That was before I met him, but his colleagues still complained how distant he was to his old friends, how close to Big Business, the men he had always described as vampires. Had they already bought him? Would they now determine his political direction?

  ‘He’s a performer, that’s his drawback as well as his advantage,’ Röhm said. ‘Typical actor. Can’t resist an audience. And it loves him. It probably doesn’t matter about the colour of the politics with him as long as the crowd responds. He says the crowd is like a woman. He flatters it, frightens it, fucks it.’ To the end Röhm was inclined to make excuses for Hitler. ‘Besides, Strasser can afford to be snotty. He takes his money from Farben. And he has his own thriving business. We can’t do what we have to do on a few pfennigs in the hat. We have to keep the Nazi balloon up. Hitler has to get his “eggs” from somewhere! At least until we’re ready to strike.’

  Röhm believed in the Nazi slogans. No longer a monarchist, he wanted common ownership and what he called ‘a clear battlefield’. He was convinced that Germany’s ills could only be corrected by a violent revolution and an absorption of the regular army into his SA. His classless people’s militia would uphold all the old Spartan values. Meanwhile, if a few foolish tycoons thought their interest lay with the Nazis, the Stabschef didn’t care. He had massive secret stockpiles of weapons and ordnance all over Germany.

  I think he rather yearned for the past before he had gone to Bolivia. He spoke warmly of the good times they had all had in the early days. They had been more light-hearted then. ‘Hitler was a great comedian. Professionally, Max, you would have appreciated his talents. On those long drives, he used to keep us in stitches.’

  ‘I never saw that side of ‘im,’ Mrs Cornelius admits. Hitler of course had tried to court her. He was always attracted to actresses, especially English ones. He couldn’t get enough of Jessie Matthews.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl, himself a keen fan of the cinema and also something of an amateur comedian, agreed that Hitler was a first-class mimic. Putzi’s main job in the 1920s was to console Hitler at the piano with selections of favourite musical numbers.

  ‘He could imitate anyone — voices, mannerisms, attitudes, everything. Peasants, politicians, Junkers. But nowadays he relies on me to cheer him up. Me and those endless romantic comedies and cartoons he watches.’

  He needs to relax, I said. It is the same for me. Mindless, silly entertainment is what you need when you have such heavy responsibilities.

  But Putzi was unconvinced. Left to himself, Putzi insisted, Hitler would do nothing but watch his screens and eat cream cakes. ’Some men are by nature voyeurs. It’s bad for them to have their dreams come true.’

  Putzi was a little anxious about the coming revolution. Röhm condescended to Hanfstaengl in a way he did not to me. ‘I think you, too, Putzi, are not ecstatic at the prospect of your prayers being answered.’ There was in Röhm a bit of the jovial sadist.

  Privately Putzi told me he wanted to be in movies. If not as an actor, then as a director or producer. A musical arranger even. He had always lived in his dreams. He preferred them to reality. He sought me out whenever he had the chance and pumped me on my Hollywood life.

  One day Röhm came back with a French-language version of Bu
ckaroo’s Code, and we watched it together. He was impressed.

  ‘You have a vocation I think, Max, just as do I,’ Röhm decided. ‘What a pity you gave it up. You remind me a little of Alf.’

  His opinion, of course, was coloured by his affection for me.

  We mount the steps to the street. Slowly, arm in arm, we turn for home. Friday afternoon in Golborne Road and the lifeless rain falls a little heavier on this decaying tail of the Portobello Market. They sell fake antiques up at the south section now. Tourists shriek with delight at their discoveries of reconstituted scrimshaw and reproduction Brummagen jugs. Here at the north end they find only irreparable fan heaters and profoundly stained kettles. The secondhand tools and yellowing paperbacks are all that’s left of dead old men’s work and dreams. I used to sort through bombed houses which contained better junk. The perpetual rain rusts everything not protected by that mixture of grease blended with nicotine which forms the local varnish. Nothing gets it off. In fire you watch it melt with the metal.

  The assembly of stallholders and their listless consumers has the unhappy permanence of a displaced persons camp. Refugees from bleaker interiors, they huddle under sacks, plastic bags, old coats. Rain soaks the grey burlap and tarpaulins over the stalls. It seeps into the shops, streaking the floors with a kind of mucus. Toothless women gape in the cheerless doorways of chip shops. You cannot tell that they were ever anything but hags.