The goddess of the devil.., p.31
The Goddess Of the Devil : Hitler's Medium, page 31
The solicitor seemed pleased.
“You looked beautiful,” he said. “Unfortunately, I doubt that many young ladies nowadays feel inclined to adorn their beauty with such an old-fashioned object. Yet it can fetch a handsome sum at an auction. If you are interested, I can take care of the sale. Very discreetly, of course.”
Maria’s first impulse was to object – she wanted to keep the tiara to remember Franziska by, even though her own emotions concerning the owner of this valuable object were still undetermined.
But the advice was sound. Where would she go with such a thing, and how could it serve to further the cause of the Vril ladies?
“You must be right,” she said and pushed the box towards Dr Silbermann.
“And – there is another matter, equally discreet,” the solicitor said, accepting the jewel case and returning it to the safe. “It is the question of your child. Yes, I have been fully informed,” he said, before Maria could react. He took a seat opposite her.
“As you are aware, the princely family zu Oettingen-Oettingen and Oettingen-Spielberg are taking care of her somewhat reluctantly.”
“I know,” Maria said bitterly.
The solicitor took off his glasses and began cleaning them with a handkerchief.
“No mother wants to hear ill of her child,” he said, “but you have to understand the situation the family is in. I have visited them often over the years and I have seen the dark side of little Franziska Maria. Even as an infant, she never smiled, never reached out for her mother or sisters. She was just… there… observing everything and everyone silently. First of all we thought she might be retarded, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, to the contrary, quite soon we became aware that she is an extraordinarily talented child. But her wisdom is intellectual, never emotional: she had moved beyond arithmetic and was able to solve mathematical problems at the age of four, but she never learnt to express love or happiness.”
Maria didn’t comment. None of these people knew what it was like to be an outsider. A crow.
“You are aware, that the child exhibits strange psychic powers?” Dr Silbermann asked and Maria nodded quietly.
“It probably wouldn’t discourage you,” the solicitor proceeded, “but I, as a man with no occult powers or experiences whatsoever, can easily become distraught at strange predictions. As have been many who have visited the family.”
“She… has seen into your future?” Maria faltered.
“No-one can blame her for seeing more than us mere mortals,” Dr Silbermann spread his hands in a forgiving gesture. “But by now she should have learnt that some of these visions should be left untold, especially to the subjects of these predictions, and even more so when giving the most morbid ones in such grim detail.”
Maria gulped. “She – she saw your death?”
Dr Silberman bowed in confirmation and took time to put his glasses on again.
“But I am afraid I can’t accept everything she told me,” he dismissed the mood that had taken such a dark turn. “For I may indeed die in ten years’ time, but it is hardly likely that I shall be doing it, pardon my saying so, stark-naked in the company of several equally exposed ladies and gentleman, and as the result of inhaling gas. I haven’t ventured into such exotic gatherings in my youth and I certainly shall not at a venerable age. Besides, I have just moved into a house furnished with electric heating and kitchen, so there’s no possibility of gas poisoning. I intend to die in that house peacefully – and with my clothes on!”
He gave an encouraging laugh.
“Personally, I think Franziska Maria will only benefit from a mother who knows how to control and harness these powers,” he said. “For the princely family, raising such a child is like harbouring a tiger: ignorance leads to fear.”
He placed his hand over Maria’s in a fatherly fashion.
“Don’t worry, my dear. In a couple of weeks the child will be with you. Don’t even think of all the unpleasant things that accompany the proceedings. I hope you will be very happy.”
“I know we shall,” Maria whispered.
“And you’ll have no financial problems,” the solicitor added. “I promise you to get the best price on that tiara. Let it be the countess’s peace offering to you.”
Maria looked up.
“But you mentioned there was something else for me – something personal?” she asked.
“So there is,” Dr Silbermann replied. “It’s a letter. But, I’m afraid, some conditions are imposed.”
“Such as?”
“Such as time,” the man said. “Unfortunately you’ll have to wait for quite a while. The letter is only to be handed to you on the eighteenth birthday of your daughter.”
Maria was astounded and at a loss.
“But that is six years away!” she exclaimed. “Why would she impose such a condition, when all I needed from her were answers?”
“Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do,” the solicitor said kindly but resolutely. “I suggest you put it aside in your mind and rejoice in your future with your child. Isn’t that the most important thing?”
Maria agreed. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for her daughter. There were years to make up for. Whatever sacrifice was required, whatever adversity was to be faced – she would be strong.
And yet, as she stood at the Munich railway station some while later waiting for her daughter to arrive, it was a jarringly unpleasant feeling to read a small footnote in the newspaper, where the princely family zu Oettingen-Oettingen and Oettingen-Spielberg made known the untimely death of their young daughter.
Chapter XXVI: Munich 1931, part I
When Maria had returned from Tibet, she had expected miraculous things to happen to her. However, she very soon realized that she had evidently brought along nothing save a cause for disappointment. Her powers weren’t rekindled; the Aldebaran consciousness still made no contact with her; her state of trance hadn’t become doubly lucid or her received messages any clearer to comprehend.
What had, however, altered were her dreams. Now each one of them was like a miniature séance, held privately for herself. The moment she fell asleep, she seemed to step onto a spiritual highway leading to infinity and back. She had the feeling that, in her sleep, she often travelled down a freeway having no speed limitations; that she visited incredible places in the future and in the past and returned to the only reality she knew only reluctantly. Sadly – as was the case with her professional trances – once she awakened, everything was lost but a vague memory of a sensation caused by something that had been at her very fingertips, never to be grasped.
No actual memories of her lost year had emerged. Maria kept on reading books on similar subjects, trying to learn from the experiences of people who had been taken to the other side of reality and returned with no recollection of their journey. She took solace in finding out that often a person would emerge with a hidden gift that would blossom quite suddenly at a later stage. It also became known to her that the reappearance of the people who had been ‘taken’ triggered a certain chain reaction of events which inescapably led towards the moment when their dormant powers manifested themselves in their full capacity.
Maria had been disappointed at her lack of revived abilities first, but soon noticed that she hadn’t returned quite as empty-handed as she had thought: the cuneiform writing of her early messages as well as the runic symbols of her Berchtesgaden séance appeared to hold a new meaning to her, as if she had studied these symbols in a far-away past and forgotten all about them during her conscious life.
She contacted Professors Schumann, Schrödinger and Heisenberg with a wish to review her own interpretations of the formulas she had received during her ‘scientific’ trance before her trip to the East. All of these men had risen to the vanguard of German science, with Heisenberg who had been nominated for a Nobel Prize thanks to his ‘Uncertainty principle’, for which he gave credit to Maria and her vision, as the star of the team. Ida, who had joined the rank of professors, had meanwhile married a well-known chemist whereas Traute kept on investigating the possibilities of the levitator drive as a member of Schumann’s team. Everyone seemed to be convinced that were it not for the lack of the new alternative power source, discovery of which was so eagerly awaited, these experiments might have produced significant results.
The scientific branch of Vril had greeted Maria’s return with enthusiasm. She went over her earlier transcripts, which no longer appeared utterly unfamiliar to her: she recognized method and symmetry in the symbols that she had never perceived before. She made another attempt at meditating, but was forced to disappoint herself and the scientists who were eager for a revelation: however close she was to the secret hidden in the arrangement of the symbols, she lacked the knowledge to explain it in words.
“I can’t help the feeling that I have written down the blueprint to the power of Vril,” she said, as she awoke from one of her trances. “It is all so clear to me on some emotional plane; yet to try to explain it, it would be pointless.”
“But try, Maria,” Ida encouraged her. “Why don’t you try again to describe your feelings? Remember what happened last time when you did so, reluctantly? You said that you were unable to obtain anything because even by trying to observe the particles around you, you affected their behaviour – and Werner came up with his Uncertainty Principle!”
Maria shook her head.
“It would be as far from anything real and useful as a blind man’s attempt to describe the colour of the sunlight that warms him,” she said. “Or trying to interpret the working principles of a generator after having felt an electric shock. My sensations can never be dressed in words. At least…not yet.”
Often Maria summoned Ida and Traute to her apartment and they tried to achieve a collective trance, during which Maria’s emotional knowledge could be transmitted to the women who might have been able to understand the messages better due to their scientific backgrounds. These attempts, however, never produced any of the anticipated results. Maria had been, and was, the only one to whom the alien spirit had spoken.
She was on constant lookout for anything that could be interpreted as the starting-point of the chain reaction of events, some pre-destined moves on a chess board, which would promote her - the pawn - to a queen. Her mind kept track of everything taking place around her; she frantically endeavoured to process the happenings of a passing day as she lay in her bed at night, in order not to miss a move that perhaps she was expected to respond to with another.
Her meeting with Hanussen had definitely proved to be one such event. It had also proven that sometimes unorthodox steps were required as shortcuts on her way to face the inevitable: had she not allowed herself to act in a blatantly shameless manner, she would never have been rewarded with the moment of truth. Had Princess Franziska not met her death, Maria might never have met her child. And meeting her child – that was the key that unlocked not merely some hidden doors which took her further into the depths of a labyrinth, but also to a main gate behind which a highway was waiting for her, for them, to take them wherever they wanted to go. That was what she believed.
From the first – the only, so far – contact that had occurred between Maria and her daughter, it was clear that they were like two chemical elements which were designed to react in order to produce another, more powerful element. From that day on, Maria found herself seeing and perceiving things with much greater clarity. She began to discern lie from truth as soon as it was told to her or thought with intensity. She also discovered that occasionally she was able to remember things for other people; things they had not consciously taken notice of. How it worked or when exactly this new power had first manifested itself, Maria was uncertain. But there had been a couple of incidents which followed each other like some cosmic knocks on the door she needed to open; the reminders of something approaching that she was not to ignore.
As her landlady was one day desperately searching for her little dog that seemed to have run away, Maria suddenly knew - or rather saw through the eyes of the woman - that she had absent-mindedly locked the poor creature in the basement after it had followed her there. The old woman hailed her psychic powers, and even though Maria tried to explain to her that this information probably wasn’t sent by the spirits, promised to secure her new clients with the speed of word-of-mouth.
Another event, with an ending not so universally agreeable, took place on the evening before Maria was to meet the child, who was to be taken to Munich from the zu Oettingen family estate not far North from Grafing. Maria had struggled for days to keep calm and not betray her extreme anxiety, and as far as she could tell it had gone unnoticed by even her closest friends. But some of them seemed to have agendas of their own.
Maria had spent an evening at Trude’s apartment with Sigrun and Elke. For a week, she had divulged the information about a possible forthcoming adoption in careful dosages. The ladies were thrilled by the subject but not universally convinced Maria should take that huge step – to become a foster-mother to a strange child. Maria had decided to give the impression that her mind wasn’t altogether made up and even if she should take the child in, she could as easily send her away to an orphanage if things didn’t appear to be working out between them. Her own lies were painful for her, as her senses were now opposing everything that was deliberately bending the truth.
As the evening was about to end and the ladies prepared to leave, Sigrun, who had recently moved to a larger apartment in the Neuhausen district, telephoned for a taxi. While she was waiting for the car to arrive, checking her purse for change, she suddenly became very worried.
“I seem to have lost my key,” she muttered, rummaging in her handbag. “If I could only remember where I saw it last…”
Maria observed her nervous movements.
“Was it tied to a red silk ribbon?” she asked carefully.
“Yes, precisely – to be always visible!” Sigrun confirmed. Suddenly her movements paused.
“How can you possibly know that?” she asked.
“I had a feeling I was you for a second,” Maria explained slowly. “I saw myself searching for my lipstick, in a hurry, as if in great need to look my best, standing in front of a bathroom mirror… there was my rouge, and my perfume, and the key, which I had laid on the glass shelf, next to the toothbrushes and… and a razor.”
Sigrun sat looking stupefied, as did the other ladies.
“How stupid of me,” she muttered. “Yes, that must have been it.”
Elke looked puzzled.
“Why would you need a razor?” she asked.
“You stupid girl,” Traute laughed. “She doesn’t. But she obviously spent the night with someone who does!”
Elke gasped in horror and admiration.
“Sigrun! You were with a man?”
Traute lit a cigarette with wicked satisfaction:
“I have the feeling she is planning to repeat that experience tonight.”
What should have been an instigator of frivolous girl-talk was however cut short by Sigrun’s apparent aversion to elaborating on her adventure. She left hurriedly, almost as if in shame, barely lifting her eyes to say goodbye.
“I wonder what was the matter with her,” Traute shrugged her shoulders.
Maria didn’t have to ponder on that. When searching for the lost key in Sigrun’s subconscious mind, she had immediately recognized the razor, bearing Lothar’s initials. She knew that Sigrun was aware that she had.
Not that any of it really mattered any longer.
But if these were the effects of a single tug at the sleeve, an encounter that had lasted for only a minute, what forces could be activated when she was finally reunited with her child? The thought fascinated and frightened her equally.
The princesses’ tragic and suspiciously convenient death was a piece in the puzzle which kept demanding closer observation. It would have been too expedient to write it off as an act of poetic justice – to see her death as a punishment for twelve years of lies, culminating in redemption as, through it, the stolen child was reunited with her mother.
Had Franziska died before Maria had found out the secret that automatically erased the memory of their friendship, she doubtless would have attended the princess’s funeral. The child would equally certainly have been there, as well. What would Maria have done, had a strange child approached her and called her mother? Had the princess not composed a letter to her niece, naming Maria as the mother of the child, the woman would have taken the girl away and Maria would probably have considered the episode as nothing more than a disturbing incident.
But the princess had composed the letter, as she had composed another letter to the family solicitor. Had she really foreseen her accident - had she taken precautions against taking her secrets to her grave?
Or was there another, a more realistic factor – in the person of Hanussen? The man traversed the chessboard castling forth and back, weaving an intricate web of deceptions, betrayals and alliances, connecting the dots that mapped his global escape routes from all situations and consequences. It was impossible to imagine that he hadn’t conveyed his vision about Maria’s child to Hitler. It was equally impossible to imagine Hitler’s reaction to this news. And however Maria tried, it was impossible not to connect Hanussen and Hitler to the death of Princess Franziska.
During these months when Maria waited for zu Oettingen family to arrange the legal ‘death’ of their daughter according to the scenario by Doctor Silbermann, she had felt the watchful eye of Hanussen on her. There arrived letters which sounded flirtatiously enamoured, in which Hanussen expressed his wish to meet Maria again so they could ‘pick things up’ from where these were interrupted; to embark on further mutual meditations and thus provide more answers to the questions he believed tormented Maria. The child was never directly mentioned but it was clear that the letters weren’t about Hanussen or Maria – they were about the child.
