"Von Beck - 02 -The Brothel In Rosenstrasse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

CHAPTER ONE
Mirenburg

I am at last able to move my right hand for extended periods of time. My
left hand,
although still subject to sudden weakness and trembling, is satisfactory. Old
Papadakis
continues to feed me and I have ceased to be filled with the panic of
prospective
abandonment. The suffering is now no worse than anything I knew as a small boy
in the
family sickroom. In fact minor discomforts, like an irritated groin, I welcome
as wonderful
aids to memory, while I continue to be astonished at my difficulty in recalling
that
overwhelming emotional anguish I experienced in my youth. My present tantrums
and fits
of despair cannot bear comparison: the impotence of sickness or old age at least
reconciles one to the knowledge there is nothing one can do to improve one's own
condition. Those old wounds seem thoroughly healed, yet here I am about to tear
them
open again, so possibly I shall discover if I have learned anything; or shall
find out why I
should have suffered at all.
Mirenburg is the most beautiful of cities. Great architects and builders
have
displayed their best talents here since the tenth century. Every tenement or
hovel,
warehouse or workshop, would elsewhere be envied and admired as art. On a
September
morning, shortly before dawn, little paddle-steamers begin to sound their horns
in the grey
mist. Only the twin Gothic spires of the Cathedral of St-Maria-and-St-Maria are
visible at
this time, rising out of the mist as symmetrical sea-carved rocks might thrust
above a
sluggish silver tide.
I was completely alive in Mirenburg. Ironically, during the days of the
Siege, I feared
death far more than I fear it now when death exhibits itself in every limb, in
every organ; an
unavoidable reality. Life was never to be experienced so fully. For years I
yearned for the
dark, lifting sensuality, that all-embracing atmosphere of sexual ecstasy I had
known in
Mirenburg. To have maintained that ambience, even if it had been in my power,
would
have led to inevitable self-destruction, so I have not entirely regretted living
past the