One morning, when the soldier came with a breakfast, she noticed a splash of blood over the left shoulder of his uniform. He refused to look her in the face, but it was clear that something out of the ordinary had happened.
Whispering, she asked him what it was. He said nothing back, only gave an expression of deliberate vagueness. His pride had been hurt, that was obvious. She cautiously examined the flecks of blood, which formed a line like an archipelago of islands across a map. Then she saw that his nose had been recently cleaned up and he had bruising beneath his eye too.
‘Did someone hit you?’ she asked. Such a direct question would go one of two ways. He’d either turn angry or relent like a child.
‘The General hit me with his pistol,’ the SA boy admitted. It was the first ever time he’d said anything about himself.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Does it hurt.’
‘Not really. I just can’t get rid of this headache.’
‘What’s his name, your General?’
‘Hessen. He’s a monster. I don’t like him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s in charge of the Berlin SA.’
The boy wiped his sleeve under his nose and sniffed. Monika thought he was going to cry, but with a deep intake of breath, he stood tall and composed himself. Just then, footsteps along the corridor alerted their attention to an oncoming figure.
‘It’s him,’ the soldier whispered.
‘Who?’
‘Hessen.’
‘Go,’ Monika said.
The approaching figure called out something inaudible. Immediately, the young soldier marched in the opposite direction, once or twice breaking into a skip to quicken his step.
The man drew closer. As he came into view, he introduced himself. ‘General Hessen. But you may call me Heinrich. Or Count. Whichever you prefer.’
Monika said nothing. She looked up at the General. He was tall, smart, and had a small scar in the middle of his forehead.
Hessen lifted his hand and gripped Monika’s chin between his thumb and fingers. ‘So you’re my little prize, are you? I wonder how much you’ll be worth to me in the end?’
Monika shook her head loose from the clasp of his fingers.
‘I’m not worth anything,’ she protested.
‘Come, come, where’s your smile?’ Hessen said. ‘There must be one in there somewhere. Let me see if I can restore it again. I’m told you tried to escape? That tells me you have a home to go to and a doting family waiting for you. Not a bad thing at all. You want to be back with them as soon as you can, don’t you? Well, don’t worry my little Jew, you will. When the time is right. Just prey your family does the right thing by you.’
The Nazi gazed down on Monika. His face was lean and he had sunken cheeks.
She swallowed. Her throat was dry and scratchy.
‘I suppose,’ Hessen went on in a tone of resignation, ‘that being locked up in here is bound to make anyone miserable.’
‘What am I doing here?’ she said.
‘Rising your own price. The longer you stay, the more valuable you become.’
Monika was speechless. The man stood in front of her had the coldest manner she had ever known.
‘Now, what if I told you you could have whatever meal you like tonight? Your choice. Whatever your heart desires. What will it be?’
Monika said nothing.
The General laughed. ‘It’s not a trick! I don’t want you starving to death. That’s not what I want at all!’
Monika shrugged her shoulders.
‘Any meal you want. We’re having a party tonight. There’s no reason why you should miss out. Now, doesn’t that get a smile?’
Monika forced her lips to part. She been feeling hungry for days.
‘There. I told you I could restore it, didn’t I? Tell the guard. We’ll get you whatever you want.’
Hessen left her, humming a tune to himself. Later, Monika ate a lamb and bean stew with dumplings, just as she requested. She ate more in that meal than she had in the last four days put together.
That night, as she lay there in the dark, she could hear the muffled sounds of the party in some distant part of the building. There was music and singing, clapping and cheering, a menagerie of sounds that lasted deep into the night.
Then, at some untold hour, she heard the lock to her door turn and saw the silhouette of a man stood in the frame.
PART III – ARNO
19
My name is Arno Hiller. I was near to the city of Mönchengladbach. My father was a factory clerk born into a German family. My mother had mixed Dutch and German parentage. My uncle on my mother’s side was a successful art dealer in Hanover. My family moved to the outskirts of Berlin where I attended the local gymnasium until the age of seventeen. Whilst there, I specialised in the natural sciences and the history of art.
In 1930, I attended my first meeting of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. I joined the party in September of that same year, volunteering my time to distribute leaflets and manage rallies.
Presently I live alone in Berlin, having recently worked for the engineering company Orenstein & Koppel as a factory worker, manufacturing railway vehicles. I am currently employed by my uncle as a clerk in the Berlin branch of his art dealership. I am twenty-three years old.
Arno sat down on his attic-room bed and read the single sheet of paper contained inside the folder. The words of the man who delivered it rang in his ears. Don’t be late!
He passed his eyes over the typed words on the page and realised he was reading the details of his own life mirrored back to him. He was perplexed by the content. It was his own life story, and yet distorted by the wrong facts. It was like a portrait that didn’t quite capture the sitter, a strange concoction of truth and fiction that was uncanny and also mistaken. Yes, he was born in a village near Mönchengladbach, and yes, his parents hailed from Germany and the Netherlands. He’d also worked at the Orenstein & Koppel factory for a short time. But he’d never joined the Nazi Party, not officially anyway. Nor did he know a single thing about the history of art. These were the details of his own life – and yet given a twist, as if describing an invisible twin who had lived a different life alongside him.
He turned the letter over and realised there was something attached to the back. It was a ticket for something. A lecture taking place in a hall on Alexander Platz.
The ticket gave the title of the lecture: Public Discourse on the Elixir of Life. The stated start time was seven o’clock that evening. The hour had been twice underlined in green ink. He looked at his wristwatch. He had forty minutes to get there. Don’t be late, he heard the man’s voice ring in his ears again.
He dressed and shaved. He had no time to think. For supper, he ate two boiled eggs which, in his rush, were woefully undercooked, so much so that he ended up slurping the jelly-like white from the shell. He took the letter and ticket and folded them into his pocket, then dashed down the five flights of stairs into the cool air of the open street.
He made it to the lecture hall on Alexander Platz with only seconds to spare. He was tired and hot from running, and at that moment, had no interest in spending his evening in a dusty lecture hall listening to some dusty professor make a speech on the Elixir of Life – whatever that was supposed to mean.
There was a small queue ahead of him, so he waited at the back and caught his breath. He noticed the man ahead of him had only one leg and was perched up on crutches. As the queue shuffled forward, so the man lifted his crutches and swung himself a step onward.
Years ago, you’d see plenty of men like that, some on crutches and some in wheelchairs, some with an arm missing and some with no arms at all, their shirtsleeves pinned back at the shoulders. Arno was especially drawn to the men with eye-patches, since to him they seemed to bear an inexplicable nobility. There was something about the black triangle on their faces that made him think of honour and virtue.
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Finally, he reached the entrance and handed over his ticket to a man wearing a bright green tie. As Arno went inside, he glanced quickly at the poster pasted onto the wall: The Secrets of Never-Ending Life.
What am I doing here? he thought to himself.
The hall was long and narrow. It had a low ceiling that was curved like a barrel and was lit by strings of electric bulbs in half-moon crescent shapes that reminded him of beads on a necklace. The hall was almost full. There were only a few empty chairs dotted about, mostly in the middle of the rows. Along the outer aisles, more people stood, unable or unwilling to reach a last stranded chair.
Arno eased along a row. He wanted to sit down, maybe fall asleep if the lecture encouraged it. He was still sleepy from his lunch with his sister. People stood up for him to let him through. Eventually, he reached a chair and took a moment to rest. Then he watched as the man in the green tie, the same fresh-faced man who had checked his ticket at the door, walked all the way along the central aisle to the stage: he was, in fact, the speaker everyone had come to see.
The lecturer cleared his throat and the hubbub of the audience dimmed. Now stood before a lectern, he prepared his papers before the eyes of perhaps five-hundred spectators. He took a sip, then a second sip, from a glass of water, before delivering his opening lines, which he tried to do with as much gravity as possible:
‘My intention today is to disclose how anyone of us might live beyond the usual terrestrial span. Many have dreamed of never-ending life, but up until now, it has seemed like an impossible fantasy. Today, I intend to rid you of that disbelief.’
His voice was loud and slow. He left great spaces of silence between each word and held onto syllables with protracted emphasis. As he spoke, he began thumbing through the stack of papers in front of him and changing their order, bringing some of those at the rear to the front.
The audience watched on in purest expectation. Most of all, it was the speaker’s principle declaration, to know the secret of ‘surviving to untold ages’, that gave the whole room its sharp mood of anticipation.
‘The very fact of death is utterly regretful. For is it not true that we must learn how every life comes to an end? A force within us enables us to grow, and yet it is this very force that leads us into decline. Thus, strength gives way to weakness, and life gives way to death.’
Everywhere, heads nodded in agreement, the hush of sober recognition.
Beside him, Arno noticed an elderly gentleman, who wore a red silk scarf around his throat, squirming in his seat as a mood of expectancy swept through the room. The old man turned and gave an awkward pouting smile, as if to discharge a quantity of pent-up impatience.
And so, on it went. The lecturer moved through his discourse by careful degrees, couching his argument in claim and counterclaim. The ideas grew more technical and came in a flow that was not always easy to follow. Yet steadily the crux of the argument emerged, summed up in the following passage:
‘Through my research, it has become apparent to me that as human beings age, their sexual potency at first increases and then wanes. One only needs to study the sexual differences between children and the elderly to see that they are in fact minimal. We will all regress to a near-infantile sexual state as we age. Our laboratory work, then, has been based upon reversing this process. And with that reversal, reviving the sexual vivacity of individuals to awaken the elixir of life that lies deep within us all.
‘My team and I have performed a series of experiments on laboratory rats and have successfully rejuvenated senile male rats through bilateral vasectomy. Within a few weeks of the operation, the previously lethargic, under-weight and almost lifeless rats were once again active, had developed glossy new furs and gained additional weight. Their sexual interest was also renewed. And in case you are wondering, females too are applicable to this procedure. Despite the difference in reproductive systems, we have found that the same remarkable effects can be achieved by a destruction of the germinal cells of the ovary by low-dose radiation.’
So there it was. The crowd fell silent.
‘We look forward to the renewal of the entire German people through this procedure,’ the lecturer concluded with a flourish.
Members of the audience, who had listened ardently throughout, began stirring. There was a distinct air of unease in the room. Universal vasectomy was not the secret to eternal life they were hoping for.
A short time later, with his discourse fully unravelled, the speaker invited questions from the floor. But it was obvious now that the audience’s position had changed. They wanted the cup of life, not a scalpel blade to their private parts. The speaker stood uncomfortably at the podium, his hands moving back and forth along the rim of the lectern. Perhaps he was more used to an audience of doctors and academics, not this assorted crowd of wishful thinkers.
The man next to Arno turned on his seat and presented a churlish sort of grimace, indicating that he was mightily unimpressed with the argument. Others in the audience murmured words of disgruntlement.
‘What a waste of time,’ one voice shouted.
Another at the front called out, ‘Rubbish!’
Rows of the audience began to boo.
Now the lecturer turned to one of the event organisers. After a moment of discussion, he dismounted his small podium and hastily disappeared behind a curtain. The scheduled question and answer session was abandoned, and the audience, growing more animated, was left to make up its own mind.
Arno’s neighbour gave his summing up without reserve. ‘Frankly, I wished I hadn’t come,’ he said.
Another man turned around and spoke, as if in response, ‘I travelled all the way from Leipzig to see this charlatan.’
Arno’s neighbour continued his vague exchange with nobody in particular. ‘I’m embarrassed to admit how much I have pinned my hopes on this lecture,’ he went on. ‘Is it ironic that I feel too old to understand the hypothesis?’
A gradual tide of ill-feeling was gaining momentum
‘Of course, that lecturer is in trouble now,’ the old man said, addressing Arno directly. ‘They won’t like it.’
‘Who won’t?’
‘The organisers. They don’t like it when things go astray.’
‘Who are the organisers?’
‘The party. The National Socialists. They’re running the whole thing.’
‘This is a Nazi event?’
‘Oh yes. Most people here are party members. Aren’t you?’
Arno shook his head, then remembered the letter in his pocket. ‘As a matter of fact, I joined last year.’
At this point, there was activity at the front of the room. Chairs were being rearranged and people began to crowd into one corner.
Arno stretched himself on his chair. ‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s a big-wig from the party. We are privileged today. Hermann Göring no less.’
Arno knew the name, of course. One of Hitler’s men-of-action, a key player in the Munich Putsch, someone who’d risen through the ranks all the way to the top.
‘He was a war hero, wasn’t he?’ Arno said, sensing the atmosphere in the room change.
‘One of the Luftstreitkräfte’s best pilots. He once landed a baron onto a frozen lake in a snow-storm. A real dare devil. Now he runs the entire SA.’
Arno looked around. He hadn’t been aware of them before, but scattered through the hall were perhaps two-dozen men, mostly young, all in the same khaki-brown uniform, each with a red band on his arm emblazoned with the swastika symbol. Some of them held clubs; others had short batons pushed under their belts. They seemed relaxed, smiling to each other, undoubtedly a touch excited about the presence of Göring.
‘A right bunch of bully boys if you ask me,’ the old man said. ‘Thugs, most of them. They’re here to make sure the whole event goes smoothly. You’d better not be a Communist. Or that poor lecturer, for that matter.’
Arno got to his feet as the activity around Göring grew. He made
his way to the front of the hall and wriggled through a huddle of bodies so he could see better.
He recognised Göring’s face from photographs but had never seen him in person before. He was shorter than Arno expected and carried more weight around his belly than his press photos let show. He had a wide face and a high forehead. And there was that unmistakable smile, one that slivered into place at a moment’s notice, seeming to pull the rest of his face towards it like a drawstring. In all, he reminded Arno of an overweight hand-puppet.
As the honoured guest of the occasion, Göring was presented with a gift, wrapped in brown paper. He tore back the paper and held up a painting in a gold frame which he then clutched to his chest in an expression of thanks. The audience around him applauded and called enthusiastically for a speech.
Arno continued to push his way forward. He noticed the old gent trailing behind, struggling to keep pace. Arno allowed him to catch up. ‘Thank you,’ the old man said, and as he did, held out a hand for Arno to hold. It was an abnormally large hand, with thick whitish fingers that tapered at the end like parsnips. Arno gingerly accepted the hand, and like a boy leading his grandfather, began to escort the old man through the crowd.
Göring had by now succumbed to pleas for a few words and was speaking in noble airs about the importance of science for the future of the German people. He allowed himself a moment of political speculation too: ‘The key to our climb to power will be the removing from office of the Communists and Catholics who currently reside there. I hope you will join me in this overdue cleansing.’
When his short speech was over and more applause granted, the old gent by Arno’s side proceeded to push himself forward further still until he was on the stage himself. After another moment, he was more or less stood beside Göring.
It was only then that Arno realised that the two men knew each other. He was astonished to see Göring turn and embrace the old man, and with rather overdone enthusiasm, kiss him on the forehead as if he was embracing his own child. From there, Göring took hold of the painting he’d just been presented and showed the image to the old man, who himself made a great show of admiring the object, running his fingers lightly over the painting and pointing out areas of interest within it.
Vanished in Berlin: Kidnap suspense mystery set in 1930s Berlin (Berlin Tales Book 2) Page 10