The Vengeance of Rome (64 page)

For the first week or two that she and her family were back in the market Zoyea was quietly self-contained. Her smiles were artificial, entirely for the audience. In repose her face became rather serious and thoughtful.

Platonically I longed for her. Indeed, I longed for any feminine company. I could not feel complete without some sort of woman friend. I do not speak of lust but of my humanity, my need to be a whole man. Moreover, I could not afford to pay a whore. I had just enough for my basic needs. Even if I was careful, my store of
sneg
would be gone by the middle of January. Röhm could not be relied upon. He was still in Berlin more than he was in Munich. If he wasn't in Berlin he was at a rally in Hamburg or a political meeting in Cologne.

Not only was I growing starved of intellectual company, I was sure someone had followed me to Munich, perhaps one of my enemies. Röhm constantly reassured me that Hitler was not on to me. Yet it seemed he would soon see Röhm as the link between himself and the creature who had brought him to catharsis that night. Could Röhm be followed without his knowledge? My only consolation was that Hitler's men would be looking for a girl. Yet might they consider me the link between the girl and Röhm? Twice von Schirach passed on information. Someone had been enquiring for me in the beer cellars and cabarets. I begged him to remain discreet.

Forced to avoid all public places, I longed for music as much as I longed for conversation and eventually found an old radio down in the offices, which I requisitioned. But the set only received a local station, which was provincial and dull and rather too full of Hitler and Co. It would sometimes broadcast operettas. Jazz was forbidden. The music I heard coming from Munich's few basement cabarets was largely made by accordions and can be imagined. I complained to Röhm, but he was too busy to listen with any great attention. Or so I thought.

One morning I was woken up by a loud banging on the door. Alarmed, I dragged on a dressing gown and, keeping my door on its chain, looked to see who it was. A hard-faced brown-uniformed monster wearing a swastika armband stood there. It was Karl Weber, one of Hitler's ‘old fighters', an SA lieutenant who sometimes called at Corneliusstrasse on party business, and who had been friendly enough in the past. He stooped, picking up in both hands a large wooden cabinet on top of which was a cardboard box. ‘The Stabschef told me to bring this round to you, Prof. Where do you want it?' He put it on my table, an expensive portable phonograph with a box full of black, brittle discs. I had music!

‘That's so kind! Where on earth did you find it?'

Weber laughed. ‘Not that far from here. One of our lads liberated it from some Bolshy Jewboy they were evicting on behalf of his landlord. They'd been told to keep a lookout for something like this. So here you are. Everyone benefits!' He raised his arm in the familiar
Ben-Hur
salute and was on his way.

As my coffee was brewing I greedily inspected the records, which were mostly familiar German labels like Parlophon, Ultraphon and Homocord. Some were American, Electrola and Victrola. A few of the records had familiar songs and performers. Most seemed to be songs from current Berlin shows. I wound up the machine, took an Al Jolson record from its cardboard sleeve, placed it on the turntable, started the phonograph and carefully lowered the amplifier arm on to the spinning disc.

Not only was the machine excellent, the records had been well kept. Soon my mornings were spent to the tune of ‘Sonny Boy' and ‘Mammy' or the harsh, catchy cabaret songs of Berlin. ‘Die Muschel von Margate' was a biting attack on the oil business. I also enjoyed the haunting ‘Surabaya Johnny' or the catchy ‘Tango Angele'. Germany was full of such clever, sardonic music in those Weimar years. Most of it disappeared, of course, under the floods of jazz, which Hitler and his Nazis did their absolute best to curb. Not for nothing were the worst juvenile delinquents of the Nazi period called ‘jazz-kiddies'.

So powerful an influence was this Negro music that juvenile delinquency actually rose to near epidemic proportions under the Third Reich. No matter how much authority was exerted, the music continued to be played. Eventually, the Nazis gave up and allowed their own jazz bands to broadcast. These wartime songs could often be picked up in England and were often witty, such as
Onward Conscript Army /
Marching off to war / To fight for Jewish bosses / And die for Jewish whores /
Dressed by Monty Burton /
Fed on Lyons' Pies / Fight for Marks and Spencer's / Die for Jewish lies!
All sung to the tune of Sir Arthur Sullivan's rousing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers'! and done as an upbeat jazz number.

Signor Frau's barrel organ, meanwhile, was not as healthy as my new phonograph. While it had earlier shown signs of problems, playing wrong notes, dropping others, wheezing somewhat in certain chords, the machine was what Signor Frau called ‘missing'. He would turn the handle but the machinery would not do what it was supposed to do. The notes the organ did play were often wrong, and it was developing a positively ugly sound, as likely to drive away customers as attract them. Some regular passers-by were beginning to laugh or even jeer.

There was nothing that a little intelligence and mechanical skill could not fix. Surely the instrument would not be expensive to repair? I had myself tinkered with a couple of mechanical fairground organs when I worked for the Armenian in Kiev. I mentioned this to Signor Frau. He said any repairs would absorb most of his profit, but with Christmas coming up, he would have to get a specialist to restore it. He was depressed. The thing had already been overhauled once at the beginning of the year.

Familiar with the
Strassenorgel
's mechanics, I asked if I might have a look. He let down the back on hinges and showed me the interior. The straightforward device consisted of a large bellows, a number of pipes of various gauges, a spiked cylinder rather like a player-piano's, over which passed a series of punched cards, triggering or stopping the appropriate pipes. A bellows supplied the air for the simple system. A borrowed screwdriver, a bicycle repair kit, a can of fine oil, a pair of jeweller's pliers and some wire, and I soon had the
Leierkasten
working at full capacity, its voice issuing strong and melodic from the diaphragm at the front. Signor Frau could not thank me enough. He was genuinely delighted. I had made the difference between good times and bad for his little family.

Sitting on a wooden stool one of the traders had lent us, I replaced the casing of the barrel organ feeling that for the first time in months I had done something useful with myself. As I turned to speak to the boy, who had held the tools for me, I saw Zoyea come up to me like a vision. A peck on the cheek, a curtsy and she said very earnestly: ‘You are a friend of our family, Herr Peters, and we thank you for your kindness.'

Thereafter, not only did I have a friend, I had employment. My engineering genius, applied to the primitive mechanism of the barrel organ, was in great demand. Those Italians thought me a wonder! And so I began to earn a few marks from other Italians in the same fraternity. Some still spoke
habitually in Italian and were delighted that I could converse with them. I was
Il Professore
again, and my meals were also assured. Every evening I was welcome in the homes of families, most of whom were also admirers of Mussolini. I found myself in warm and sympathetic company.

They all lived on the other side of the River Isar in the area of old rundown wooden houses known as Glockenbach-Viertel, built on both sides of a muddy stream running into Munich's chief river. I had grown up in just such a neighbourhood. The buildings had had floors added at random over the past hundred years or so. They had no common design and little sense of order. The houses leaned one against another, forming a kind of organic whole. If one key beam or wall were removed, all the others, so densely packed together and full of humanity, might collapse like cards. Damp rotted much of the woodwork and added to the prevailing smell. Some buildings had been repaired so often with such poor materials they resembled wrecked ships or ramshackle piles of timber. The unmade streets were twisting alleys beneath overhanging balconies and galleries, with blind oiled paper windows and dark, irregular openings running at all angles, and reminded me of the nightmare that was
Doctor Caligari
. Only slowly did it become clear that there were people living within.

I spent happy hours in the district they called the Stables, an old brick mews belonging to a carriage business in the previous century, now housing machinery as well as animals. Here, many of the street sellers stored their stalls, street organs and so on. There was an entire gypsy-style wagon and others in differing stages of repair. There was a show wagon which broke down into a shooting gallery. The game's parts, the rifles and targets, had long since disappeared, but it was still a handsome vehicle. It belonged to the Frau family. He had had some idea about putting it all back together and taking it around the county, but the Reds, of course, had brought in all kinds of petty gambling laws, and he had neither time nor money to obtain the appropriate permits.

I have noticed how the Germans and the Americans get a satisfaction from making laws against human nature. No wonder their prisons are full to bursting. Such laws make you an outlaw simply by being a person.

The Fraus did not use the van because of the cost of re-equipping it. The other vans were more easily adapted for living but were less sturdy. In the crooked building which ran along the whole back wall of the mews was a busy aviary, which I understood to be a secret. Judging by the quality of the ornamental ironwork, the whole thing had been stolen from some Wittelbachian fantasy. Birds from macaws to finches were kept here, and a
boy was employed to play a big barrel organ when their screeches became too obvious.

I was never sure if the ranks and ranks of caged birds were for sale, to eat or for company. Neither did I know for certain if it was illegal to keep them. Such age-old practices are usually the first things the Reds outlaw! For instance, in the courtyard one afternoon I witnessed a cockfight. I was privileged to attend as a friend of Heinrich Frau. They were proud of their birds. English fighting cocks, they said, with all the aggression of that tiny island nation. The best blood on earth. Smuggled in from Ireland. The spurs were not elaborate, simply little pieces of leather tied on to the bird's leg through which had been poked a finely sharpened nail, the fighting spur. The sport was a bloody business. Once a bit of glinting feathered flesh struck me in the mouth, but in my excitement, I hardly noticed.

Every night you had to be in the mews by a certain time. A great grille was drawn across the entrance and was not opened again until morning. All was overseen by a horrible old Turkish woman they called the Gatekeeper, which in their argot was also a term for the anal sphincter. She ruled the place while working for an absent owner, Klosterheim, who never appeared and was known only as the Major. Everyone paid their rent to the Gatekeeper, and it was to her they complained. They were convinced she never passed anything but their money on to the Major, rumoured to be a member of the Wittelbach family which had only recently ceased to rule Bavaria.

Sometimes when I worked in the mews repairing the barrel organs and other engines the Italian community used, old Father Bernhardt would pay us a visit. He spoke good Italian and made it his mission to serve the local community, all devout Catholics who worshipped at his church. I took great pleasure in my meetings with a man of refined intellect in that place, and we had some good talks, especially about the Pope and Il Duce. He was a monkey in a cassock, all mouth and no chin, flamboyant gesticulation and brilliant moving eyes, with crimson lips, which in Kiev would have made us call him a ‘borscht-fiend' in fun. I think he drank. He certainly gambled, because I saw him slipping his bet to one of the boys who acted as a courier for a famous local gang. ‘I long only for the cross and crown,' he used to say, usually after a bad day's gambling. The rumour was he sold church artefacts to pay for his habit, but nobody judged him. He was well liked in the Stables.

Despite its poverty the Glockenbach-Viertel area felt very much like home. What streets were paved at all were cobbled, but some were still nothing but packed earth. Here and there could be seen patches of tarred road,
like the hardening scabs of some disease. The gutters were filthy. Some of the houses reeked of sewage. Thin dogs ran everywhere. Ragged, often dirty, children played among the piles of garbage. The river, though useful, was not always pleasant to smell. Yet the people living there were hospitable and generous with what little they had. I found it a considerable relief to join a circle of acquaintances who had nothing to do with the NSDAP or, indeed, the Fascist Party. Politics was meaningless to most of them. They thought in terms of patrons, if they thought of such things at all. They paid a couple of grubby German lawyers when they got into trouble, but mostly they kept their noses out of things. They saw little difference between the Sozis and the Nazis still viciously fighting in nearby streets and wanted none of it. Who could blame them?

While I was nominally a member of both groups, I had never felt at all comfortable in uniform. Now I knew it was not always possible to trust one's party comrades, whereas here, among the
Leierkasten
, the other
Strassenhändler
, their friends and relatives, I enjoyed the easygoing acceptance I had experienced earlier in Odessa, where to be part of one family was to be part of many.

These Italians were, of course, not all street organists! Some sold religious plaster figurines from barrows; others sold ice cream in the summer and hot chestnuts in the winter. Some played the accordion or mandolin and sang. Some even worked at steady jobs in Munich. As in Moldavanka, their lives were neither easy nor lavish, yet they knew the security of their extended family, the knowledge that no one would ever starve. The food was not entirely familiar to me but had much of the quality I knew in Odessa. On those clear autumn evenings, we sat on the banks of the Glockenbach watching distant boats and listening to the sound of a band drifting from the faraway English gardens.