Moorcock, Michael - SS - The Romanian Question.pdf - Michael Moorcock - przemosta

The Romanian

Question

Michael Moorcock

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

DREAMS TO REMEMBER

All that day the train travelled at high speed westwards,

through Roumania. It did not stop, but slackened speed

slightly as it passed through the larger towns en route. Only

the higher officials of the Roumanian main railway line knew of

the passage of the special, heavily-screened train, its

destination or its passengers. Towards midnight, the

Yugoslav frontier lay only a few miles ahead. As the lights of

Timisoara, capital city of Banat, the rich wheat province of

Western Roumania, began to glow through the darkness, the

driver sounded the engine whistle to warn the station of his

approach. The train slowed down to pass through. Just as it

left the station platform and was again gathering speed, sharp

flashes and the staccato cracks of rifle fire burst from the

thick undergrowth of the steep embankments by the side of

the railway track. Bullets spattered sharply against the steel

framework of the carriages and crackled against the

reinforced glass of the windows. The driver quickly

accelerated and the train shot forward at full speed towards

Yugoslavia - and safety. The would-be assas-sins, it was

discovered later, were members of the Iron Guard, the

Fascist terrorists of Roumania who, at the behest of Adolf

Hitler, had brought about the downfall of King Carol, brought

his realm to ruin and degraded it to the level of a province of

Nazi Germany.

King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu,

A.L. Easterman, 1942

MOURNING THE EXCESSIVE fantasies of an unhappy celibacy, Jerry

Cornelius split with some feeling from the Car-pathian convent where, for

the past few years, he had been holing up. Life looked to him as if it might

just be worth living again. Eastern Europe was perking with a vengeance.

Though it had to be said, some people were already waving goodbye to

their first flush of Ruritanian innocence.

“My view of the matter, Mr C, is that we should’ve nuked the bastards

where it hurts.” In middle age Shakey Mo Collier was growing to resemble

the more disturbed aspects of Enoch Powell. His pedantry had a tenancy to

increase as his enthu-siasm faded, and Mo, Jerry thought, was nothing

without his enthusiasms. He blew Mo a kiss for old time’s sake and climbed

into his coat-of-many-colours, his leather check. It still had the smell of a

hundred ancient battles, most of them lost. “Down these mean malls a man

must shop.” He checked his credit the way he had once checked his heat.

These were proving easy times for him. But he missed the resistance. Who

had given him all this unearned power whilst he slept?

It was then that he realised he had dozed out a class war in which the

class he had opposed, his adoptive own, had won back everything it had

seemed to lose and now had no further ambition but to maintain its

privileges with greater vigilance than last time. He was the unwilling

beneficiary of this victory. He became confused, too sick to spend. He felt

his old foxy instincts stirring. He grew wary. He grew shifty. He stepped

back.

* * * *

I’M STILL LEAVING YOU

What Jessica Douglas-Home observed as she touted the

polling booths with her interpreter and driver was that only

members of the Salvation Front were represented at the

polling stations. Opposition members had everywhere been

prevented from turning up. Opposition workers reported

posters torn down and offices ransacked, even by the police.

Opposition newspapers were mislaid or destroyed and

despite a decree that campaign-ing must stop two days

before the election, there was the last-minute distribution of a

free newspaper publishing photographs of all the official

candidates. “Every one from the Ceausescu era,” says

Jessica sadly. “Simply a game of musical chairs.”

Sunday Telegraph, 27 May 1990

THE TIME MACHINE was a sphere of milky fluid attached to the front

lamp-holder of a Raleigh ‘Royal Albert’ Police Bicycle of the old, sturdy

type, before all the corruption had been made public. Jerry hated the look

and feel of the thing, but he needed to take a quick refresher in 1956, to

see if some of the associations made sense. At the moment, as he wiped

the Bucharest dust from his handle-bars and checked his watches, he was

down-right terrified.

Was it just the threat of liberty which alarmed him, or was the world

actually on the brink of unimaginable horror as, in his bones, he feared? He

shuddered. Whatever they might say, he had never relished the worst.

Especially when the best seemed so much more within his grasp.

Yet this was the dangerous time. It always was. “As power-holders lay

down their arms, those who have known little power are quick to seek

advantages.” Prinz Lobkowitz bent to pump up the front tyre, his wispy grey

hair falling over eyes in which humour sought to disguise the concern he

felt. “And there is nothing to say they won’t abuse that power as thorough-ly

as their predecessors down the centuries. It’s the same in the Middle East.

Most of these people have never experienced anything like the familiar

democracy of the West. They have no faith in it. They have been supplied

with myths which prove how degenerate and immoral it was. These are

deeply conservative people. They worship their ignorance since that was all

of their religion that was left to them. They defend their ignor-ance as others

might defend a principle.”

“Sometimes you don’t sound a lot different from the party hacks.”

Jerry gave the front wheel an experimental bounce. “That’s a lot better.

Thanks.”

Prinz Lobkowitz fitted the pump back on the frame. “They are all

shades, I suppose.”

Jerry got the bike into the proper rhythm and was gone before he

could say goodbye. The pearly grey mist opened before him. It was good

to be on the move again. He only hoped no-one had changed the old

megaflow routes.

This would not be the best moment to be Lost in Time, though God

knew, it looked as if the whole of England was now in that situation. He had

never imagined a future as miserable as this. He had thought the Sex

Pistols had meant something more than a trend in T-shirts. They had all

been bought over by lifestyle magazines.

He gazed wonderingly back at this unbearable future and found

himself suddenly in a coffee-bar in Soho talking to some-one called Max,

who waxed his moustache and wore a pointed beard, about Blind Jesse

Fuller and Woody Guthrie. These were the years of private obsession, of

small groups of enthusiasts never acknowledged by the common media,

not even Melody Maker which was full of Duke Ellington and referred to

Elvis only on the cartoon page. “This was before your enthusiasm became

the common currency of the sixties,” said a Shade, “and you thought you

had achieved a better world. Then you sold it back to them for shares in

Biba, Mary Quant and Ann Summers, just as they merged with the City.”

“Humbug!” Jerry desperately attempted to disengage from a morality

he thought he’d discarded years before. “I don’t want any of this. Where’s

my mother?” She would understand. He had missed total immersion. When

he was this aware of actuality, he tended to retreat in every complex way he

knew. Time experienced at such relentlessly close quarters gave him the

heeby-jeebies. He shivered. 1956 had been bad enough without this as

well.

It was time to split again.

* * * *

I AIN’T DRUNK

In the case of Roumania and King Carol, Goebbels had a

superb opportunity to demonstrate his perverted talents. Ten

years’ experience as Hitler’s supreme disseminator of

calumny and hatred had made him master of every trick and

twist of this iniquitous profession. Since he had made the

science of Jew-baiting with the poison pen his specialty, he

found no difficulty in applying his evil genius to the peculiar

conditions prevailing in Roumania where, for many decades,

the ‘problem’ of the Jews had been raised to a front rank

political issue.

King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu

BUT THE SIXTIES and seventies made him cry. He couldn’t stand the

sense of loss. How had they all been persuaded to hand their keys back to

their jailors?

Was freedom really so frightening?

Evidently a lot of Romanians thought so.

* * * *

BORN IN GEORGIA

President Ion Iliescu pledged yesterday to keep Romania on

the road to democracy and to end what he called the

country’s moral decay.

Reuter/Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1990

“DON’T TELL ME!” Jerry smiled at the air-stewardess as she laid her towel

at the edge of the pool. He leaned his arms beside it and tried to drag his

pale body higher from the water of Tooting Bee Baths. “You’re psychic

too!” Her answering sneer would have sunk the Bismarck. “I knew it!” Jerry

was in a fairly insensitive mood that afternoon. “I like your taste in

boob-tubes,” got him reported to the life-guard and, “Come fly with me,”

thrown out of the pool area.

As he slouched off across Tooting Common, whistling to his horrible

dog, he wondered if his grandma was home from work and maybe good for

half-a-crown, or at least a bag of toffees (she did half-time at Rowntree’s).

He jumped further backward until he was comfortably unaware of his free

movement through Time and was able to turn his attention from the

stewardess, still baffled by his sixties’ slang, to the toy-soldier shop back

near St Leonard’s Church in Streatham Hill, a few minutes walk up the main

road and down towards the Common. He wanted to make sure his naval

gun-team was still there. He’d given the man 9d a week for it and he was

only another l/6d away; but he couldn’t be sure of anything any more. Was

he creator or the created? This unlikely thought made him pop in to the

quiet of the church and glare with some respect at the stained glass

prophets whom he now completely confused with God. For him, God had

become a plurality of saints and angels. He’d had Rudolf Steiner to thank

for that. Jerry - or someone like him - grinned into the dusty shadows of the

Anglican sacristy. There was nothing left to steal.

Jerry tipped his hat to the new generation and turned back to his toys.

Two more weeks and he could land a team on Forbidden Island. His

sailors almost within his grasp and the summer sun melting the sweet tar of

Streatham, he sauntered down towards Norbury and Jennings’ second

hand book shop where he planned to trade his wholesome volume of The

Captain for a novel called Monsieur Zenith by Anthony Skene, his current

literary favourite and inventor of Zenith the Albino, the smoothest crook that

Moorcock, Michael - SS - The Romanian Question.pdf

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