Case white, p.20
Case White, page 20
The Vatican.
There are many Catholic parallels to Wewelsburg. Himmler is Jesuitical. But the theme has been twisted. It is antipapal. One of the models that had to be studied for Wewelsburg was the octagonal Castel de Monte in Sicily. The Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, himself a Templar mystic struck down by the Church, built it according to a sacred numerology to be the seat of his New Empire. A man of considerable genius and legendary occult powers, Frederick II prized the Spear of Longinus above all things and sought the esoteric knowledge of the Grail in order to become Emperor of the world. Ah, Himmler, so ambitious, so dutiful to the past, so … so devout! But who is his God?
Krantz turns his flashlight off. Thunder rumbles and rain thrums at the top of the ventilation shaft, but nothing can be felt through the four-meter thickness of the north tower’s walls. He has used this chamber before to sort out what is happening to him. Lutka, Mehring Damm 26, the castle, the haunting eyes of starving prisoners he wishes he had never seen – a place to meditate. It seems fitting, because directly above him is another chamber with bizarre implications.
Overhead, is the colossal meditation room for SS retreats, some five hundred meters square, and level with that, in its own vaulted setting, lies the black marble alter of the Holy Grail struck with its silver double rune: the twin lightning bolts of the SS. Runes are another area of research necessary to Wewelsburg. The Grail is supposedly inscribed with runes from the White Isle – Thule. This is why the Cathars could never decipher it. Even before the Church effectively destroyed runic artifacts as Satan’s writing, Hyperborean symbols were lost except as sources for the Greek and Latin alphabets.
Krantz doesn’t believe in a literal Grail, of course. Despite what Fritz says and the Reich believes, no chalice, emerald or tablets will be found. Symbolic, yes, he can accept that. The Gospel according to Krantz is in agreement: the stone (or emerald), which supposedly dropped from Lucifer’s forehead at the time of the Fall, merely symbolizes ultimate knowledge.
Much easier to swallow something vaguely consistent with his Christian upbringing – Man’s knowledge lost through sin.
In metaphysics, the stone has become an organ of knowledge and magical power – the ‘third eye’ – which Man lost in the Fall. Krantz has trouble following this because he has little interest in life sciences. But he understands that discovery of the pineal gland, apparently a vestigial organ in the brain, was quite naturally a plus for third eye enthusiasts. Moreover, there actually is a primitive lizard, still surviving as a species, called the Tuatara which the Führer is deeply interested in because it has a third eye in the center of its head. The eye is functionless and imbedded in the skin. But since lizards are the ancestors of mammals, Hitler believes that the third eye is evolving in the Tuatara and that its remnant pineal gland in modern man represents its decline.
Somewhere along the line, the emerald from Lucifer’s forehead was dreamed into a 144-facet chalice, and priests, from whatever cultures, no doubt kept the cup manufacturers busy. So, if there was a civilization at Thule, maybe some sacrificial blood did get collected in a cup, as Plato said, and that became a symbol of pure racial heritage and ultimate knowledge.
The cup got passed, so to speak, and everyone jumped into the act. At the crucifixion, the modern era of the Grail began with the cup collecting the blood of Christ. It is also the cup from the Last Supper. Same symbolism. The Church washed the legends to get the pagan stains out, of course, and that made things confusing for all kinds of surviving traditions.
The Reich’s account is rather comprehensive. Krantz spent days studying its many aspects and gained a respect for Himmler’s dogmatic energy, if not his philosophy. As much as anyone, Krantz understands the intention of the Reichsführer-SS to found a Teutonic Order here at Wewelsburg with himself as grand master.
Amid these reflections, the young architect dozes off. When he awakens, the rain has stopped. At first he thinks it is this change that disturbed him, but lyrical laughter and a contrasting male voice reach him from the adjacent chamber. Rising stiffly, he gropes to the tower doorway.
In the moonlight beyond is a pair of officers and two women. The women are coiffed and gowned, obviously not village fare. The officers are strangers to him but high-ranking SS. They would have to be high ranking to get past the gate. He thinks he makes out Brigadeführer insignia on one, but the light through the narrow windows only flickers over them as they move. They have wine glasses and at least one bottle.
“You can’t see them,” the blond woman complains, looking out. “I want to see the unicorns. You promised we’d see unicorns!”
“Karl, you didn’t!” scolds the Brigadeführer. “Karl is such a liar when he’s drunk.”
“I thought I said satyrs,” the other man replies. “Which would you rather not see, satyrs or unicorns?”
“Unicorns.” The blond tosses her head.
“Oh, there!” the second woman exclaims, jumping up on her toes. “There’s the airfield. I see our plane.”
“Impossible.” The Brigadeführer drapes himself over her at the window. “It must be a unicorn.”
Krantz is on the verge of coughing politely, but instead he quite recklessly settles down beside the slightly opened door in the presence of a toast to unicorns.
The intrigue moves predictably to brash talk, the men making bolder caresses and intimations, the fraüleins feigning shock and pretending to be drunker than they are.
“Where’s the powder room? I want to go to the powder room,” says the blond, moving close enough to the north tower for Krantz to smell lavender and alcohol.
The man called Karl groans. “There are no powder rooms in castles. Why do you think they build them near forests?”
“Karl!” she says disapprovingly. “Where is it?”
“Come with me, Magda.” The dark haired woman disengages from the Brigadeführer, and in spite of protests they clatter off to the staircase.
“Whoever designed the female bladder ought to be shot,” Karl grunts, pouring himself another drink.
“Why can’t a woman go to the toilet alone?” The Brigadeführer lights a cigarette, coughs, moves to the unglazed window. “So this is Himmler’s castle.”
Karl stoops and raps his knuckles on the floor. “Oak, I’ll warrant. The tally’s running toward fourteen million. Have you ever known Himmler to spend marks like that?”
“Never. He darns his own socks.”
“It’s worthy of Göring.”
“Not his style.” The Brigadeführer draws on his cigarette. “Göring would make better use of all this space, you can be sure of that. An orchestra in every room, Greek statues doing what Greeks do best, and unapologetic art on every wall. Have you seen his new table?”
“Oh, yes. The one with the cocks holding up the top? Women’s breasts for testicles?”
The Brigadeführer laughs silently, attested by ribbons of smoke from his nostrils. “Twenty thousand marks, they say. Twenty thousand to have it carved.”
“The Führer will have a fit if he sees the bill.”
“After what he spends on entertainment?” The Brigadeführer holds his cigarette at arm’s length and flicks the ash. “I hear stories of what goes on up at Berchtesgaden.”
“You mean the blue movies they shoot right there?”
“And other things … really filthy stuff.”
“Quite a heavy guard around here,” Karl says after a moment, crossing his legs on the floor. “You’d think the Grail was already here.”
His companion takes another long draw. “Is Otto Rahn still looking for it in that tangle at Montségur?”
“For a fact. In the Grotto of Sabarthez to be precise. But it’s Standartenführer Rahn now – they finally forgave him for publishing Crusade Against the Grail after his first expedition.”
Again smoke plumes out the Brigadeführer’s nostrils. “If he does find it, the Führer will never permit it to be brought here first. Mengele will get it, if the biological cells are intact. After the cells are safely removed, then the Grail will come to Wewelsburg.”
Karl draws his legs under himself. “Should we be talking about this?”
“Why not? We’re in the castle, aren’t we? Our oaths aren’t binding here; Wewelsburg is being built for contemplation of such mysteries.”
Karl gets up and dusts the back of his thigh.
“Yes, Mengele will get it first, if the Thule cells are there. After he successfully extracts them, no doubt Himmler will get his chalice.”
The Brigadeführer flicks his cigarette out the window. “What do you think Mengele’s chances of restoring them are?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. None of it makes sense to me. You take parts of two cells and put them together. It works with carrots and frogs. That’s all I know. I don’t suppose Mengele himself has much of an idea what to expect. I believe what I swore to uphold – that the Aryan race will be restored to supremacy.”
“You needn’t sound so patriotic, Karl. I’m not testing you. We have a right to talk about such things. Even the Führer talks about them. Hasn’t he said creation isn’t finished yet and that we’re in metamorphosis? I heard him myself describe the forthcoming new species as infinitely greater than ourselves –”
“I think I hear the ladies.”
The women return and the banter resumes – they have missed the unicorn, they are told – and then the four of them are petting and undressing. The Brigadeführer mounts his conquest on one of the rolled tapestries; Karl spreads his tunic on the wood floor and inserts himself into Magda.
To the voyeur at the foot of a doorway in the north tower there is nothing erotic about it. Once again Krantz is overwhelmed by a sense of dislocation, something utterly irrational. How can you feel erotic when you have just learned that you are sitting in a medieval castle you helped build to house the magic weapons of a civilization returning from extinction?
8
“Push,” the midwife says.
Pardon me while I scream.
“She’s tiring,” Father Ledochowski whispers from outside the circle of lamplight.
On the other side of the bed Aunt Zofia’s puckered lips seem to be chewing. “Typical first labor,” she coos.
First labor? Oh, no. Dear God, no. Last labor! Twice-widowed, once-married Lutka is not going to do this again. Consider it a sacred oath. I shall find me a walnut and hold it between my knees forever.
“Don’t stop!” says the midwife.
She stops.
It’s my baby, and I’ll have it when I’m ready, thank you…I’m ready.
“This time,” Aunt Zofia says. “Breathe deep, build your strength.”
Lutka takes deep, exhausted breaths.
She could have been in a cold, Berlin hospital now, surrounded by Nazi doctors.
“Pss-t, Doctor, this woman is a Slav.”
“What! A Slav?”
“Yes. Right here below the navel. It says Slav. See?”
“Call Hitler, nurse.”
“Oh,” pleads Lutka, “don’t call Hitler. The father is Aryan. Half a good-little-German is better than none.”
“Even half a Slav is unacceptable.”
“But I’m a famous Slav. Helen of Troy on stage. And I invented the famous wise old Polish saying: It is easier to become a widow than a wife.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, we’re not really married, but back in my hometown I’m considered his widow –”
“Call Hitler, nurse.”
“Push,” says the midwife.
Instinct challenges pain a final time, and the baby’s head emerges.
Lutka, in her own bed in Niski Kosciol, the bed she lost her virginity on, appropriately gives birth to her first child from a joining with that first lover. Nothing between those two events matters now. The link is forged in the image of a human being, and it is Zofia who whispers in delight: “It’s a girl. Now you don’t have to name it after Henryk.”
Halfway across Europe the rebirth of Schloss Wewelsburg is underway, and the father of a baby girl in Niski Kosciol has less than paternal feelings at the moment. For as he passes alone from the north tower upper chamber, where a Round Table sits surrounded by twelve chairs bearing silver nameplates of SS elite, into the bedroom of thousand year old Emperor Heinrich I – reincarnated now as Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS – his gaze is arrested by a newly placed object on the desk. And as he continues to stare at it, he remembers:
Mehring Damm 26 … a cold, malodorous draft … obscene phantoms emanating from the vagina of a nude peasant … dead voices … quaking fear, dense as ice … himself opening the door … the whole scene vanishing.
He wanted to believe it was an illusion then, that when Helmut Dürer hypnotized him it was somehow suggested. Dürer had indeed suggested something. He had given him the illusion that when he opened the door, the room would be empty, when it wasn’t! And through all those years Krantz has caught flashes of what could not be suppressed, the feeling of evil, the sense of dislocation.
Now that he sees the object on the desk he believes for a certainty that Mehring Damm 26 really happened and that everything visible through the keyhole was actually there when he opened the door – the faces, the table, the object. Because he has seen the thing on the desk before. That night. In Mehring Damm. And the suppressed memory of it now links up with the reality on the desk: Himmler’s replica of the Spear of Longinus.
EAGLE’S EYRIE
1
1938
You don’t need a messenger to the next door neighbor’s house if you’re going to knock down the wall anyway. That’s what Mika thinks when he hears that Franz von Papen, Reich Minister to Austria, has been recalled.
“Anschluss,” he says to himself, sitting in his Berlin basement room. Annexation.
Of course, it isn’t that simple. Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg will offer nearly any appeasement in order to keep German jackboots off the Heldenplatz. So Mika isn’t surprised when fellow Guard member Magnus comes to him with the rumor.
Magnus the ear. Gimpy. Slender as Sneltz was. A marvel of infiltrative ability. Magnus the magnificent. One of the roller bearings that keep the Temple Guard going.
The rumor is from Vienna. Coffeehouses there are buzzing with gossip about a secret meeting between Hitler and Schuschnigg. There, above the border town of Berchtesgaden, in Hitler’s Obersalzberg mountain lair, the Berghof, the Führer reportedly browbeat gentle Schuschnigg to his metaphorical knees. Shaken by threats and melodramatic tactics, Schuschnigg finally signed an “agreement” that placed Austrian Nazis in charge of everything but virginity (though that too, in a sense). The police, the defense and the interior ministry will all be headed by National Socialists. The Nazi assassins who shot the previous chancellor (Dollfus) in the throat are to be freed from prison.
The agreement has not yet been announced – except in the coffeehouses of Vienna, as witnessed by the flood of Jews trying to emigrate. Schilling notes are leaving Austria so fast that her securities take a dive in London and Switzerland.
“Anschluss,” Mika repeats to himself.
At the border, the 2nd Panzer Division of Germany executes maneuvers. And then Hitler’s voice is hurled across Austria by radio from the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag has temporary headquarters. “Sieg heil!” responds the muddy trickle of Brownshirts on Vienna’s streets, and a swastika is raised over the town hall in Graz.
Four days later Schuschnigg broadcasts his own impassioned speech.
“Rot-Weiss-Rot! Bis in den Todd!” (Red-white-Red until death!) roar Austrian patriots.
“I’m going to Vienna,” Mika tells Klaus, the baker under whose shop he lives. “The annexation is coming, and I want to be in Vienna when Hitler arrives.”
Klaus looks at him through muzzy old eyes. “No Jew will be safe in Vienna,” he says, breath shrieking through gaps in his teeth.
“I should stay in Berlin maybe, where Jews are coddled?”
“At least you know where to hide in Berlin.”
Klaus has learned to move slowly and not to gesture, so as to minimize the aura of flour that puffs out of his pores and makes him look ghostly. His first wife left him for being a ghost.
“Klaus, you have absolutely no need for the living,” she said.
But he has his causes. He took in Mika, didn’t he? And allowed him to turn the cellar into an archive of anti-Nazism.
When he talks, Klaus leans slightly toward the listener. Mika imitates this, the two of them like a pair of yellowed ivory tusks bowed together. Mika is grateful to God for letting him find a companion along the way to wherever he is going.
Once, a long time ago, he imagined he was going to the Promised Land. Not an extravagant piece of real estate, mind you, just some place safe for he and Katya. But now he stands like David before an immense Goliath, looking for an opening, hoping that the opportunity will arise to do some crushing thing, if only he can keep abreast of the occult motives behind the Reich.
“How do you know Hitler will go to Vienna?” Klaus poses, sprinkling water with a baptismal motion on a lump of dough.
“I know.”
“The files?”
“The files.”
To Klaus, the files in the cellar have acquired comprehensiveness beyond their parts. Want to know if Hitler farts? Ask Mika and he will show you a page of anecdotes about Hitler’s uncontrolled stomach problems and flatulence. Or you can read the fact that the Führer hates Christmas decorations, or has nightmares, or about his water phobia, or his vegetarianism.
Any of these things could be learned by chance, but Mika has thought about them, interpreted them. Take the vegetarianism. Mika will tell you it could be just fear of cancer, or the repugnance for eating dead flesh Hitler often cites, or because vegetarianism is one of Wagner’s themes, or as a consequence of Geli Raubal’s death, or – he will speculate reluctantly – part of the Cathar doctrine of purification.
There are many Catholic parallels to Wewelsburg. Himmler is Jesuitical. But the theme has been twisted. It is antipapal. One of the models that had to be studied for Wewelsburg was the octagonal Castel de Monte in Sicily. The Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, himself a Templar mystic struck down by the Church, built it according to a sacred numerology to be the seat of his New Empire. A man of considerable genius and legendary occult powers, Frederick II prized the Spear of Longinus above all things and sought the esoteric knowledge of the Grail in order to become Emperor of the world. Ah, Himmler, so ambitious, so dutiful to the past, so … so devout! But who is his God?
Krantz turns his flashlight off. Thunder rumbles and rain thrums at the top of the ventilation shaft, but nothing can be felt through the four-meter thickness of the north tower’s walls. He has used this chamber before to sort out what is happening to him. Lutka, Mehring Damm 26, the castle, the haunting eyes of starving prisoners he wishes he had never seen – a place to meditate. It seems fitting, because directly above him is another chamber with bizarre implications.
Overhead, is the colossal meditation room for SS retreats, some five hundred meters square, and level with that, in its own vaulted setting, lies the black marble alter of the Holy Grail struck with its silver double rune: the twin lightning bolts of the SS. Runes are another area of research necessary to Wewelsburg. The Grail is supposedly inscribed with runes from the White Isle – Thule. This is why the Cathars could never decipher it. Even before the Church effectively destroyed runic artifacts as Satan’s writing, Hyperborean symbols were lost except as sources for the Greek and Latin alphabets.
Krantz doesn’t believe in a literal Grail, of course. Despite what Fritz says and the Reich believes, no chalice, emerald or tablets will be found. Symbolic, yes, he can accept that. The Gospel according to Krantz is in agreement: the stone (or emerald), which supposedly dropped from Lucifer’s forehead at the time of the Fall, merely symbolizes ultimate knowledge.
Much easier to swallow something vaguely consistent with his Christian upbringing – Man’s knowledge lost through sin.
In metaphysics, the stone has become an organ of knowledge and magical power – the ‘third eye’ – which Man lost in the Fall. Krantz has trouble following this because he has little interest in life sciences. But he understands that discovery of the pineal gland, apparently a vestigial organ in the brain, was quite naturally a plus for third eye enthusiasts. Moreover, there actually is a primitive lizard, still surviving as a species, called the Tuatara which the Führer is deeply interested in because it has a third eye in the center of its head. The eye is functionless and imbedded in the skin. But since lizards are the ancestors of mammals, Hitler believes that the third eye is evolving in the Tuatara and that its remnant pineal gland in modern man represents its decline.
Somewhere along the line, the emerald from Lucifer’s forehead was dreamed into a 144-facet chalice, and priests, from whatever cultures, no doubt kept the cup manufacturers busy. So, if there was a civilization at Thule, maybe some sacrificial blood did get collected in a cup, as Plato said, and that became a symbol of pure racial heritage and ultimate knowledge.
The cup got passed, so to speak, and everyone jumped into the act. At the crucifixion, the modern era of the Grail began with the cup collecting the blood of Christ. It is also the cup from the Last Supper. Same symbolism. The Church washed the legends to get the pagan stains out, of course, and that made things confusing for all kinds of surviving traditions.
The Reich’s account is rather comprehensive. Krantz spent days studying its many aspects and gained a respect for Himmler’s dogmatic energy, if not his philosophy. As much as anyone, Krantz understands the intention of the Reichsführer-SS to found a Teutonic Order here at Wewelsburg with himself as grand master.
Amid these reflections, the young architect dozes off. When he awakens, the rain has stopped. At first he thinks it is this change that disturbed him, but lyrical laughter and a contrasting male voice reach him from the adjacent chamber. Rising stiffly, he gropes to the tower doorway.
In the moonlight beyond is a pair of officers and two women. The women are coiffed and gowned, obviously not village fare. The officers are strangers to him but high-ranking SS. They would have to be high ranking to get past the gate. He thinks he makes out Brigadeführer insignia on one, but the light through the narrow windows only flickers over them as they move. They have wine glasses and at least one bottle.
“You can’t see them,” the blond woman complains, looking out. “I want to see the unicorns. You promised we’d see unicorns!”
“Karl, you didn’t!” scolds the Brigadeführer. “Karl is such a liar when he’s drunk.”
“I thought I said satyrs,” the other man replies. “Which would you rather not see, satyrs or unicorns?”
“Unicorns.” The blond tosses her head.
“Oh, there!” the second woman exclaims, jumping up on her toes. “There’s the airfield. I see our plane.”
“Impossible.” The Brigadeführer drapes himself over her at the window. “It must be a unicorn.”
Krantz is on the verge of coughing politely, but instead he quite recklessly settles down beside the slightly opened door in the presence of a toast to unicorns.
The intrigue moves predictably to brash talk, the men making bolder caresses and intimations, the fraüleins feigning shock and pretending to be drunker than they are.
“Where’s the powder room? I want to go to the powder room,” says the blond, moving close enough to the north tower for Krantz to smell lavender and alcohol.
The man called Karl groans. “There are no powder rooms in castles. Why do you think they build them near forests?”
“Karl!” she says disapprovingly. “Where is it?”
“Come with me, Magda.” The dark haired woman disengages from the Brigadeführer, and in spite of protests they clatter off to the staircase.
“Whoever designed the female bladder ought to be shot,” Karl grunts, pouring himself another drink.
“Why can’t a woman go to the toilet alone?” The Brigadeführer lights a cigarette, coughs, moves to the unglazed window. “So this is Himmler’s castle.”
Karl stoops and raps his knuckles on the floor. “Oak, I’ll warrant. The tally’s running toward fourteen million. Have you ever known Himmler to spend marks like that?”
“Never. He darns his own socks.”
“It’s worthy of Göring.”
“Not his style.” The Brigadeführer draws on his cigarette. “Göring would make better use of all this space, you can be sure of that. An orchestra in every room, Greek statues doing what Greeks do best, and unapologetic art on every wall. Have you seen his new table?”
“Oh, yes. The one with the cocks holding up the top? Women’s breasts for testicles?”
The Brigadeführer laughs silently, attested by ribbons of smoke from his nostrils. “Twenty thousand marks, they say. Twenty thousand to have it carved.”
“The Führer will have a fit if he sees the bill.”
“After what he spends on entertainment?” The Brigadeführer holds his cigarette at arm’s length and flicks the ash. “I hear stories of what goes on up at Berchtesgaden.”
“You mean the blue movies they shoot right there?”
“And other things … really filthy stuff.”
“Quite a heavy guard around here,” Karl says after a moment, crossing his legs on the floor. “You’d think the Grail was already here.”
His companion takes another long draw. “Is Otto Rahn still looking for it in that tangle at Montségur?”
“For a fact. In the Grotto of Sabarthez to be precise. But it’s Standartenführer Rahn now – they finally forgave him for publishing Crusade Against the Grail after his first expedition.”
Again smoke plumes out the Brigadeführer’s nostrils. “If he does find it, the Führer will never permit it to be brought here first. Mengele will get it, if the biological cells are intact. After the cells are safely removed, then the Grail will come to Wewelsburg.”
Karl draws his legs under himself. “Should we be talking about this?”
“Why not? We’re in the castle, aren’t we? Our oaths aren’t binding here; Wewelsburg is being built for contemplation of such mysteries.”
Karl gets up and dusts the back of his thigh.
“Yes, Mengele will get it first, if the Thule cells are there. After he successfully extracts them, no doubt Himmler will get his chalice.”
The Brigadeführer flicks his cigarette out the window. “What do you think Mengele’s chances of restoring them are?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. None of it makes sense to me. You take parts of two cells and put them together. It works with carrots and frogs. That’s all I know. I don’t suppose Mengele himself has much of an idea what to expect. I believe what I swore to uphold – that the Aryan race will be restored to supremacy.”
“You needn’t sound so patriotic, Karl. I’m not testing you. We have a right to talk about such things. Even the Führer talks about them. Hasn’t he said creation isn’t finished yet and that we’re in metamorphosis? I heard him myself describe the forthcoming new species as infinitely greater than ourselves –”
“I think I hear the ladies.”
The women return and the banter resumes – they have missed the unicorn, they are told – and then the four of them are petting and undressing. The Brigadeführer mounts his conquest on one of the rolled tapestries; Karl spreads his tunic on the wood floor and inserts himself into Magda.
To the voyeur at the foot of a doorway in the north tower there is nothing erotic about it. Once again Krantz is overwhelmed by a sense of dislocation, something utterly irrational. How can you feel erotic when you have just learned that you are sitting in a medieval castle you helped build to house the magic weapons of a civilization returning from extinction?
8
“Push,” the midwife says.
Pardon me while I scream.
“She’s tiring,” Father Ledochowski whispers from outside the circle of lamplight.
On the other side of the bed Aunt Zofia’s puckered lips seem to be chewing. “Typical first labor,” she coos.
First labor? Oh, no. Dear God, no. Last labor! Twice-widowed, once-married Lutka is not going to do this again. Consider it a sacred oath. I shall find me a walnut and hold it between my knees forever.
“Don’t stop!” says the midwife.
She stops.
It’s my baby, and I’ll have it when I’m ready, thank you…I’m ready.
“This time,” Aunt Zofia says. “Breathe deep, build your strength.”
Lutka takes deep, exhausted breaths.
She could have been in a cold, Berlin hospital now, surrounded by Nazi doctors.
“Pss-t, Doctor, this woman is a Slav.”
“What! A Slav?”
“Yes. Right here below the navel. It says Slav. See?”
“Call Hitler, nurse.”
“Oh,” pleads Lutka, “don’t call Hitler. The father is Aryan. Half a good-little-German is better than none.”
“Even half a Slav is unacceptable.”
“But I’m a famous Slav. Helen of Troy on stage. And I invented the famous wise old Polish saying: It is easier to become a widow than a wife.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, we’re not really married, but back in my hometown I’m considered his widow –”
“Call Hitler, nurse.”
“Push,” says the midwife.
Instinct challenges pain a final time, and the baby’s head emerges.
Lutka, in her own bed in Niski Kosciol, the bed she lost her virginity on, appropriately gives birth to her first child from a joining with that first lover. Nothing between those two events matters now. The link is forged in the image of a human being, and it is Zofia who whispers in delight: “It’s a girl. Now you don’t have to name it after Henryk.”
Halfway across Europe the rebirth of Schloss Wewelsburg is underway, and the father of a baby girl in Niski Kosciol has less than paternal feelings at the moment. For as he passes alone from the north tower upper chamber, where a Round Table sits surrounded by twelve chairs bearing silver nameplates of SS elite, into the bedroom of thousand year old Emperor Heinrich I – reincarnated now as Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS – his gaze is arrested by a newly placed object on the desk. And as he continues to stare at it, he remembers:
Mehring Damm 26 … a cold, malodorous draft … obscene phantoms emanating from the vagina of a nude peasant … dead voices … quaking fear, dense as ice … himself opening the door … the whole scene vanishing.
He wanted to believe it was an illusion then, that when Helmut Dürer hypnotized him it was somehow suggested. Dürer had indeed suggested something. He had given him the illusion that when he opened the door, the room would be empty, when it wasn’t! And through all those years Krantz has caught flashes of what could not be suppressed, the feeling of evil, the sense of dislocation.
Now that he sees the object on the desk he believes for a certainty that Mehring Damm 26 really happened and that everything visible through the keyhole was actually there when he opened the door – the faces, the table, the object. Because he has seen the thing on the desk before. That night. In Mehring Damm. And the suppressed memory of it now links up with the reality on the desk: Himmler’s replica of the Spear of Longinus.
EAGLE’S EYRIE
1
1938
You don’t need a messenger to the next door neighbor’s house if you’re going to knock down the wall anyway. That’s what Mika thinks when he hears that Franz von Papen, Reich Minister to Austria, has been recalled.
“Anschluss,” he says to himself, sitting in his Berlin basement room. Annexation.
Of course, it isn’t that simple. Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg will offer nearly any appeasement in order to keep German jackboots off the Heldenplatz. So Mika isn’t surprised when fellow Guard member Magnus comes to him with the rumor.
Magnus the ear. Gimpy. Slender as Sneltz was. A marvel of infiltrative ability. Magnus the magnificent. One of the roller bearings that keep the Temple Guard going.
The rumor is from Vienna. Coffeehouses there are buzzing with gossip about a secret meeting between Hitler and Schuschnigg. There, above the border town of Berchtesgaden, in Hitler’s Obersalzberg mountain lair, the Berghof, the Führer reportedly browbeat gentle Schuschnigg to his metaphorical knees. Shaken by threats and melodramatic tactics, Schuschnigg finally signed an “agreement” that placed Austrian Nazis in charge of everything but virginity (though that too, in a sense). The police, the defense and the interior ministry will all be headed by National Socialists. The Nazi assassins who shot the previous chancellor (Dollfus) in the throat are to be freed from prison.
The agreement has not yet been announced – except in the coffeehouses of Vienna, as witnessed by the flood of Jews trying to emigrate. Schilling notes are leaving Austria so fast that her securities take a dive in London and Switzerland.
“Anschluss,” Mika repeats to himself.
At the border, the 2nd Panzer Division of Germany executes maneuvers. And then Hitler’s voice is hurled across Austria by radio from the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag has temporary headquarters. “Sieg heil!” responds the muddy trickle of Brownshirts on Vienna’s streets, and a swastika is raised over the town hall in Graz.
Four days later Schuschnigg broadcasts his own impassioned speech.
“Rot-Weiss-Rot! Bis in den Todd!” (Red-white-Red until death!) roar Austrian patriots.
“I’m going to Vienna,” Mika tells Klaus, the baker under whose shop he lives. “The annexation is coming, and I want to be in Vienna when Hitler arrives.”
Klaus looks at him through muzzy old eyes. “No Jew will be safe in Vienna,” he says, breath shrieking through gaps in his teeth.
“I should stay in Berlin maybe, where Jews are coddled?”
“At least you know where to hide in Berlin.”
Klaus has learned to move slowly and not to gesture, so as to minimize the aura of flour that puffs out of his pores and makes him look ghostly. His first wife left him for being a ghost.
“Klaus, you have absolutely no need for the living,” she said.
But he has his causes. He took in Mika, didn’t he? And allowed him to turn the cellar into an archive of anti-Nazism.
When he talks, Klaus leans slightly toward the listener. Mika imitates this, the two of them like a pair of yellowed ivory tusks bowed together. Mika is grateful to God for letting him find a companion along the way to wherever he is going.
Once, a long time ago, he imagined he was going to the Promised Land. Not an extravagant piece of real estate, mind you, just some place safe for he and Katya. But now he stands like David before an immense Goliath, looking for an opening, hoping that the opportunity will arise to do some crushing thing, if only he can keep abreast of the occult motives behind the Reich.
“How do you know Hitler will go to Vienna?” Klaus poses, sprinkling water with a baptismal motion on a lump of dough.
“I know.”
“The files?”
“The files.”
To Klaus, the files in the cellar have acquired comprehensiveness beyond their parts. Want to know if Hitler farts? Ask Mika and he will show you a page of anecdotes about Hitler’s uncontrolled stomach problems and flatulence. Or you can read the fact that the Führer hates Christmas decorations, or has nightmares, or about his water phobia, or his vegetarianism.
Any of these things could be learned by chance, but Mika has thought about them, interpreted them. Take the vegetarianism. Mika will tell you it could be just fear of cancer, or the repugnance for eating dead flesh Hitler often cites, or because vegetarianism is one of Wagner’s themes, or as a consequence of Geli Raubal’s death, or – he will speculate reluctantly – part of the Cathar doctrine of purification.
