The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ from hooks at the rear of the shop, labelled ‘Jews’, ‘Gypsies’, ‘Finns’, ‘Serbs’, ‘Indians’, and so on. Blue-and-white striped aprons hang by the door, which sports the name of the firm, ‘The Big Three, Pork Butchers and Slaughterers, Potsdam.’

      Winston Churchill sits on the left of the picture. He is depicted as a grotesque drunken baby, his eyes small and pig-like, a filthy cigar shaped like a factory chimney causing smoke to pour from his mouth and ears. The cigar is labelled ‘British Miners’. The ashen countenances of miners are visible in the wreaths of smoke which coil above Churchill’s cap.

      The British warlord wears an absurd ill-fitting uniform which bulges over his massive belly. His posterior is covered by a great baby-napkin, made from Union Jacks, and bulging with excreta, some of which, labelled ‘Dominions’, oozes from the folds of the napkin to the floor. The boots on his feet are tanks. His face is red and mottled with greed as he stretches over the table to grasp at a portion of Signora Frenza.

      The signora is firmly within the grasp of the great Russian bear. The bear is massive and hairy, and dominates the whole right-hand side of the cartoon. It has Stalin’s features: his stiff upstanding scalp hair, his full moustache, his heavy features and brown eyes, his foul pipe. Blood drips from the pipe, while from its pungent smoke, coiling above the head of the animal generalissimo, emerge wan faces of his victims, labelled ‘Intellectuals’, ‘Peasants’, ‘Engineers’, ‘Soldiers’, and so on. He does not sit on a throne, like Churchill, but on a model of the Kremlin, from the windows of which Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Bucharin, and others peer hopelessly.

      The bear wears on its upper portions a white tunic, buttoned to the throat and decorated with many medals. Covering its lower portions are military trousers, the flies of which have burst open to reveal – thrusting from amid black fur – a penis of terrifying proportions, the head of which is an ICBM. The bear is about to plunge this weapon into the vagina of Maria Frenza, which has opened in a silent scream. Hence the title of the print, appended in Gillray’s rapid lettering below the picture, ‘Love and Peace Prevail again in Europe, 1946’.

      Maria Frenza is labelled ‘The Eastern Territories’. Dragged across the table towards the terrible embrace, skirts in disarray, she creates a diagonal across the picture. Various parts of her anatomy, tastily displayed, are labelled from north to south. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, forming her three breasts, burst from an iron corsage. Poland forms her shoulders and arms, Czechoslovakia her trunk, Hungary her hips, Romania her lower abdomen, the protruding delta of the Danube forming the pudendum threatened by the bear’s weaponry, and Bulgaria her plump legs and knees.

      Pouncing to rescue her across the table – on which carcasses of a revolting feast remain – Churchill has grasped a plump portion of the woman’s anatomy exposed by the disorder of her shift, her left buttock, labelled ‘Yugoslavia’. Under his grasp, it has broken away from the rest of the body. Trieste is revealed as a rosy anus.

      Other extraordinary figures are present in the butcher’s shop. The emaciated corpse of Adolf Hitler lies under the table, where a cur labelled ‘History’ is gnawing its ribs. A little Emperor Hirohito, with an admiral’s hat and a monkey’s face, swings from a billowing red velvet curtain. Behind Churchill, wearing a lounge suit from the pockets of which money leaks, crowned by an oversize version of the hat named after him, is a cadaverous Anthony Eden. Behind Stalin, green of face, wearing pince-nez, is an enormous Beria, carrying an axe-and-sickle; next to him, slant-eyed, small, with the hindquarters of a jackal, Molotov fawns about his master’s chair.

      More shadowy figures lurk at the sides of the print. A ragged and unshaven Italy holds out its paw in a beggarly gesture. General de Gaulle sticks his enormous nose through a potted aspidistra to watch the proceedings unobserved. Franco looks on, chuckling. Various generals surge from behind the plush curtain: Marshal Zhukov, General Eisenhower, and General Montgomery are particularly prominent, all rattling weapons at each other.

      But the most outstanding figure is the one holding the middle of the stage and standing behind the table between Churchill and Stalin. Although it wears two-tone shoes, a polka-dot bow tie, and a jaunty cap, it is a robot. Its eyes whirl and glaze, steam issues from its nostrils, in its mighty lower jaw stainless steel teeth champ. Its body is formed from turbo-generators, cooling pipes, and printed circuitry. Round its neck is a label reading ‘President Truman, Made in Missouri, USA’. Secretary of State Byrnes, evidently carved out of wood and clad only in the American flag, squats on the robot’s right shoulder.

      Truman is saying: ‘We Won the War! To perdition with these Little Countries! We’ll rid the world of the spectre of British Imperialism and then we’ll put the Old World to rights with our Yankee Ingenuity. Stalin’s an honest man, let him have his fun and then we’ll get him when he’s exhausted!’

      Stalin is saying: ‘We Won the War! Now to Win the Peace! These two hyenas, Churchill and Truman, secretly love me (and so I can deceive them) because I have complete power while they have to be elected. One’s senile, one’s bloodless – I keep young with bloodbaths every night!’

      Churchill says: ‘We Won the War! Stalin is such a Nice Man and I hope he likes me, but these Yankees don’t see that we have to stamp out Communism now or else we shall all have to bend to that dreadful Weapon. I wish Adolf was alive and on my side. Adolf knew What was What!’

      The Eastern Territories cry: ‘Oh my Goodness! Oh No, oh Yes! What’s a poor girl to do? As if the Huns weren’t randy enough! We planted the seeds of Socialism long ago – now they’re coming to Coition!’

      Zhukov is saying: ‘Go on, Joe, give her a stiff bit of Dialectic!’

      Montgomery is saying: ‘If only Eisenhower and Patton had seen sense, Prague, Berlin, and Vienna would have been completely in our hands and the Russians nowhere.’

      Eisenhower is saying: ‘Pity the Limeys would not take orders. Now the war has unfortunately finished, we’ll have to teach them to toe the line through trade. I hope they make me President.’

      Byrnes is saying: ‘If only the robot would make some more atomic bombs, we could teach the Bear a few manners. After all, this is a Thanksgiving dinner!’

      Eden is saying: ‘If this drunken old fool Winston plays his cards right, Russia and America will go to War with each other, and the World will be safe for the British Upper Classes again!’

      Mussolini (hanging upside down from one of the butcher’s pegs with his throat cut) is saying: ‘I’m glad I’m out of it! Things are just beginning to get rough!’

      Two little girls, daintily dressed in white muslin, both wearing white gloves and clutching parasols, are examining the Gillray cartoon. One of them, perhaps an elder sister, is explaining the meaning of the allegory to the smaller child.

      The smaller child, looking up trustingly with a sweet smile, says, ‘I see, so the three nasty men are changing the Course of History, is that right?’

      ‘That is correct, dear,’ says the older child, smiling in her turn. ‘Which proves incidentally that the load of obsolete rubbish sometimes referred to by brainwashed imbeciles of the Left as “Marxist Science” is no more of a science than astrology, because they pretend that individuals cannot influence the tide of history.’

      ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid that I am such a silly,’ sighs the smaller child, prettily. ‘Cos I thought that astrology was a science. Perhaps I’m guilty of Left Wing sympathies. Anyhow, I think I understand the picture quite well now. Only—’

      ‘Well, dear? Only what?’

      ‘Why СКАЧАТЬ