As soon as Clara is asleep I get up carefully and go to the cupboard where I have hidden my bag. I dress and creep from the room. The house rocks and vibrates constantly. It will not be long before there is a direct hit. Half Rosenstrasse bears the marks of Krupp now. There is noise and music from •the salon. No soldiers guard the door. I am out into the cold, into the darkness, shivering and suddenly very cowardly. I think to turn back, but it would be impossible. I move falteringly between the heaps of filthy snow, through the passage and into Papensgasse. There will be no military patrols tonight, I am sure, to enforce the curfew. I look at my watch. It is eleven-forty-five. I will not have long to wait. Soon Alice will be mine alone. Married. I shall be secure with her. She would not dare to betray me. But this will not stop us sharing further adventures—and in Paris! The very prospect warms me and makes me forget how cold I am. Firelight dances on the far river bank. Men are shouting. There is not much terror in their voices now. They are too weary. The guns fire. The guns reply. Love will come back to me. Alice is late. She will be having trouble getting away from Diana. We shall roll again in fresh linen, with great cups of newly-made coffee in the mornings, with delicate lunches in the restaurants of the Champs Elysees, with drives to Versailles, and in the summer we shall go south to Venice, and I will show her North Africa and bring joy to her exotic heart. But it is twelve-thirty. I hear voices whispering in Rosenstrasse. Has she been caught? Eventually I risk peering round into the street; it is too dark to see anything. Then, at last, someone emerges from the archway and I grin to myself, full of the prospect of escape and further adventure. The woman wears a cloak with a cowl covering her head. I know immediately that it is Clara and I am filled with hatred for her. She has guessed! She has interfered. She lifts a hand to silence me. ‘They went hours ago,’ she says. ‘I thought this might be what you were doing. They left before dark, Ricky.’ I fall back against the wall, not fully understanding; not wishing to understand. ‘What?’
‘Diana and our Alice have gone together,’ she says quietly. She takes my hand. ‘You’re very cold. You’d better come back.’
‘No!’ I think it is a trick. I pull free of her. ‘There was an agreement, Clara. You should not be doing this. Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. You’ll freeze to death, if a bullet doesn’t kill you.’
‘Where are they?’
‘They were as secretive with me as with anyone. They could have joined Count Stefanik. It’s my only guess.’
‘Stefanik? His balloon?’
‘A guess.’
‘Where is his balloon?’
‘I have no idea where he kept it. It’s probably destroyed. It was a guess.’
I begin to run up Papensgasse and through the Botanical Gardens. There are fires everywhere. The soldiers ignore me. I get to Pushkinstrasse and I cannot recognise anything. There are no more buildings. I look up into the blazing night sky in the hope of seeing the airship. The Indian Quarter has vanished. The Customs House is a guttering cinder. Within an hour I am standing in the ruins of her church. The Yanokovski Promenade has become a mass of black rubble. I can see St-Maria-and-St-Maria on the hill, twin chimneys of light. Flames course through the cathedral, glowing from every window. She is roaring as if in pain and anger. And the shells continue. Holzhammer must surely have come to relish the destruction for its own sake. We are at his mercy. And he is not merciful. Little Bohemia and the Synagogue are one hellish pyre. I reach down to pick up a piece of masonry. It is a small stone head, part of the motif above the left-hand column framing the central door: the face of a woman. It seems to me that she stares past my shoulder at a memory. The expression on her face is resigned. Has that expression always been there? For the three hundred years of her existence has she always known this would be her fate? There is no snow. The Theatre is an insubstantial outline of dancing red and orange. Everything is melting in the heat. Later I will hear that Prince Badehoff-Krasny had ordered the remains of the city to be fired. (‘This is my Moscow’). Nobody will ever come to understand how Mirenburg fell, any more than they will really know how Magdeburg was destroyed or what led to the extinction of Troy. Man’s greatest monuments, his architecture, never outlast his acts of aggression. At dawn I wade through fields of ash. I cannot find her. Thin sunlight attacks the drifting smoke. Little groups of people wander here and there, each with a bundle, none with any hope. They look at me, some of them, as I pass, but most trudge on with their heads bowed. There are fewer shells, now. They fall on ruins and pulverise them. As I pass it, the Casino collapses in on itself. There is hardly anything left for them to destroy. I cannot find her. Periodically, I inspect the sky. There is no ship there. I would like to think it has borne her up. In my mind’s eye I can see the bright reds and golds of the balloon’s canopy in contrast to the grey, misty luminousness of the morning. Dressed in his Chinese silk shirt and riding breeches, with a gaily-dressed woman on either side of him, the young Bohemian aviator lifts a strong arm to his valves. I can see the balloon rising higher and higher above the flattened wastes of our murdered city, as if Mirenburg’s spirit goes free. I can see her smiling carelessly, merely enjoying the sensation of flight, forgetful of me and of everyone. She kisses the bearded cheek of Stefanik not from any particular affection but from simple, passing gratitude to the person who has given her this, her most recent, pleasure.
One should never attempt to possess a beautiful whore, or hold on to the soul of a child, nor assault an idea as fragile as Mirenburg. Alice. I shall never fully understand why you fled from me. I wish you had been able to tell me the truth. But, if I were ever to confront you, you would reply: ‘You must have known.’ and dismiss all responsibility for your deception. ‘You must have known.’ But when you deny my suspicions that is a deeper lie still. ‘You must have known, that I deceived you. It is your fault for not admitting it.’ Yet did I really ever guess? Was I not always too afraid of the true answer? They will build a new city along the fresh course of the river. It will be called Svitenburg as a sop to the nationalists who are soon, of course, to become Austrian subjects in all but name. It is still little more than an industrial village. Its most impressive buildings are its warehouses. Did Alexandra live to marry a well-to-do Swiss and give him little babies in Geneva? She could banish all the old shadows, the memories of a ‘wicked past’, and have forgotten a lifetime in a matter of hours. And Waldenstein will become Svitavia again, a province of Bohemia, then a department of Czecho-Slovakia; forty years later that is what she remains, looking to Prague, such a poor imitation of Mirenburg, for her directions. Here in the yellow heat and ease I have spent the past eighteen years peering out at the world I came to fear. The Germans rise again and recover their wealth through patriotism, mysticism and a fascination with steel, as they will always do; the French continue to squabble and refer to past glories as solutions for the future; the English see their society collapsing all around them and find a panacea in American jazz; the Russians stir and dream again of Empire, having revived the methods and ambitions of Ivan the Terrible. And the Italians have conquered poverty, although they had to go to Abyssinia to do it. Waldenstein, settled in the arms of her new Slavic mother, is left, at least, in peace. When I return to Rosenstrasse, Captain Kolovrat has galloped off about some other importance. The brothel is now almost the only whole building in the street. Captain Mencken commands the two or three soldiers left. He has no orders and he is drunk. The smoked glasses fall down on his nose as he looks at me and offers a bottle. I shake my head. Therese and Renee, all lace and dark stockings, sit together on a couch singing a little song together. ‘Your wife,’ he says, ‘is upstairs I believe.’ He is perfectly grave. ‘Do you speak,’ he drinks again, ‘Bulgarian by any chance?’ He laughs. He appears to have fled into that familiar, self-protective dramatisation which is only one step away from hysteria. I am in no hurry to see Clara. I accept the offer of his bottle. ‘We can abandon ourselves to War quite as readily as we can abandon ourselves to lust,’ says Mencken, making an effort to hand up the bottle to me. ‘And War’s so much easier and less mystifying than sex, is it not?’ He grins at me. ‘I’m serious.’ I do not doubt it. He lets his eye drift towards the ladies who are as drunk as he is and are giggling together. ‘War doesn’t whisper. It doesn’t have shades of meaning. It demands courage, of course, and decisive action. It offers glory and threatens death. But lust offers pain and threatens us with life, eh?’ He is pleased with this turn of phrase.