* * *
Half-asleep in the infirmary, Shomer listens to the sounds of Jews gossiping.
‘I heard he can’t get it up.’
Laughter.
The same speaker: ‘Not in the … usual way.’
‘What does that mean.’
‘I heard …’ the man lowers his voice. ‘I heard he likes to be … whipped.’
A shocked indrawn breath. ‘Whipped?’
‘Spanked. Like a child.’
‘Feh!’
‘I heard he only has one ball.’
‘One ball! Can you imagine such a thing?’
Shomer stirs. Around him there is temporary merriment. In the infirmary no one has to work, there is nothing to do, and nothing to wield but words.
And he thinks of him. And pictures him humiliated, gagged, dominated, abused.
‘I heard he has a thing for young shikses. The blonde, zaftig ones. Good Aryan types.’
‘What I wouldn’t give to shtup one.’
Laughter.
‘I heard he’s fucking that film director.’
‘Who, Fritz Lang?’
Laughter.
‘No, Leni Riefenstahl.’
‘Her? I heard they’re thick as thieves.’
‘I’d slip her the sausage!’
‘What sausage? You mean your toothpick?’
‘Screw you!’
‘I thought she was good in The Blue Light,’ someone says.
‘She’s a Nazi!’
‘So nu? They’re all Nazis.’
A lull. Shomer turns, blinks. Thinks of him, in bed: does he ever think of them, in the camp? Does he imagine what they feel, what they miss, how they die? Does he know them at all, beyond the numbers on their arms? And he pictures a book of accounts, filled with rows and rows of endless numbers, a book as large as a world.
‘I heard he likes them to …’
‘To what?’
‘No, no.’
‘What?’
‘No, no …’
‘Go on!’
‘I heard he likes them to, to piss on him!’
‘Feh!’
‘Are you meshuggeh? Who does such a thing?’
‘A wilde chaye, a wild beast!’
‘I have a bucket here for him, a bucket of piss!’
Laughter.
Then silence, as each man withdraws into his own private cell of the mind. Shomer tosses and turns, restless. From below: ‘And what do you think, luftmensch?’
Shomer almost smiles. It’s what they’d taken to calling him: a dreamer, a man with his head in the clouds.
‘What I think, boychiks?’ he says. He pauses to consider. Says, ‘I think what I think doesn’t mean a God damn.’
‘Putz!’
‘After the war I’m only going to buy German-made pens,’ someone says. Waits expectantly.
‘Why?’
‘The ink won’t come off!’
Groans all around, then a silence.
‘May he die a thousand deaths,’ someone says, but quietly.
Wolf’s Diary, 7th November 1939 – contd.
It was a glorious dream. ‘Bernie will take you wherever you want,’ Virgil had said. The car moved soft and smooth like a young woman; the whole city glittered that night, its lights burned clean and clear; the very air was warm, enchanted. To be old and in love with an impossible dream is the bitterest thing.
‘Where to, sir?’
‘Just drive.’
As the docks receded behind us, the dream lost tangibility, the air became colder and thinner, and I felt as though I were waking up.
A dream. It was just a dream.
And I was cursed with greatness, or had been once. I knew when I was being sold a falsehood. Shit wrapped in roses smells no less like shit.
Oh, I had no doubt this man who called himself Virgil was, in his own mercenary way, sincere. And for a moment I had let myself be dazzled by the promise: the grand warship, the airplanes, the guns, the men. For a moment longer I was seduced by the American dream.
Then reality set in.
One ship, two rickety airplanes and a handful of men with guns.
Did Virgil propose to take over Germany with that? It would have been laughable if it weren’t so heartbreakingly sad. Once I had held all of Germany in the palm of my hand. I had men beyond count, the army on my side. What Virgil was offering me was a group of mercenaries who would not get farther than a Hamburg suburb before they were slaughtered and fed to the local farmers’ pigs. What was I saying – that bunch of American cowboys wouldn’t have made it as far as fucking Glückstadt.
‘God damn you!’ I said, with feeling. ‘Scheisse!’
‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘Just drive!’
He must have been told to humour me, for he obliged without a murmur.
Which led me back to my first question, the one I had asked Virgil, and then again: the one he would not answer.
What if I turned down his offer?
Virgil wanted a regime change in Germany. What he needed was a symbol, a figurehead to reunite the remnants of Nazism into a resistance force.
I knew better. The communists had put what was left of the Party in prisons and camps, and brutally oppressed any and all dissent. National Socialism was done, finished, its practitioners dead or scattered. My old comrades who had managed to escape were now homeless émigrés, and small-time gangsters in all but name …
But the Americans were mad enough to try. Maybe. Not too mad as to provide more than a handful of mercenaries, though. Working without official sanction, maintaining deniability.
If not me, I thought: then who?
And somehow answering that was important: more important than I could say.
Who could replace me?
Göring was a good comrade, now. He was fat but he was smart: he would sell his own mother if it benefited him and he would have sold the Yanks down the river without a blink. But Göring had gone over to the communists, was no doubt flourishing in the new Germany.
So Göring was out.
Hess? But Hess was in London and comfortable with his émigré club and his principles lost. Hess could have been second only to me, but he had always been weaker, softer: and he corrupted.
Not Hess.
Then who? Goebbels? Himmler?
Whereabouts unknown.
Streicher? Dead.
Bormann? He had been Hess’s deputy but I could not underestimate him. He liked to work behind the scenes.
Last seen in a communist concentration camp, though.
Alfred Rosenberg? My ideologue, a man who knew his higher and lower races, and his conversation on the World Ice Theory, the Welteislehre, has always been fascinating and erudite.
Dead by firing squad, though.
Albert Speer? A gifted architect. Escaped to South America, or so I had last heard.
Reinhard Heydrich? Wonderful musician, fine Olympic-class fencer, a dedicated Jew-hater. Ruthless. He would be a good choice. I did not know what had happened to him after the Fall. Suspected he survived. He was the sort to survive.
But that same list of – and what were they, suddenly? Suspects? That same list could lead me to the man behind the white slavery ring. The man who controlled Hess, the one who was perhaps behind Judith Rubinstein’s disappearance, too. One of my former comrades, my associates, my …
The men who had once served under my absolute command.
‘Sir? Charing Cross Station, sir.’
‘Did I ask you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then shut the fuck up, Bernie.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Drive up Charing Cross Road.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want to buy a book.’
‘Yes, sir.’
I made the young American drop me off outside Marks & Co.
‘Goodnight, sir.’
‘You take care of that car, young man. That’s German engineering you’re handling, not o
ne of your Buicks or Fords.’
‘You a fan of automobiles, sir?’
‘I admire workmanship.’
‘You should come visit us, sir. In the States, I mean, sir. I think you will like the cars.’
I felt old just talking to him.
‘Where are you from, soldier?’
‘Los Angeles, sir. It’s a beautiful country. All the sun and sea in the world.’
‘And the movies, eh?’ I said.
‘Sir?’
‘Have you heard of Leni Riefenstahl?’
‘Who?’
‘A great actress and a personal friend of mine,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, sir. We don’t get much German cinema back home. You know how it is.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’
‘Goodnight, sir.’
‘Drive carefully, soldier.’
The night sky was clearing as I watched him drive away. Moonlight came down through an opening in the clouds and for a moment the world was tinged silver. I went inside the shop. Marks & Co. was a wonderful shop for all that it was owned by Jews.
I was able to spend a pleasant thirty minutes or so just browsing indoors. In the back of the shop, in a section devoted to bargain books, I found a small octavo of Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis. It was the English edition, showing a sort of mechanical woman against the background of a Bauhaus city. A Jewish form of architecture, and I loathed it both as an artist and as a man.
‘The book sensation of Europe’, said the front jacket.
‘The great romance of the century,’ said the back jacket.
‘Prune-faced bitch,’ I said out loud. ‘And a talentless hack.’ I held the book in my hand. The future of Germany stared back at me from its cover, a nightmare land of automaton workers and their Jewish masters. I was not in a good mood. I wondered how much von Harbou had made from the sale of her English-language rights. I had been paid £350 from my British publisher, Hurst & Blackett, but I was in the concentration camp by then. I needed to talk to my literary agent. I had been working on a sequel to My Struggle on and off since before my exile, but my creative juices refused to flow. Nevertheless, I determined to get in touch with them, at least to demand a royalty statement.
I replaced the book on the shelf and eventually found a copy of Max und Moritz. What charming illustrations! What beautiful rhyme. I found myself laughing quietly as the two fell into a vat of dough while trying to steal pretzels from the baker. How they rolled in the dough! Then the baker came back and baked them in his oven. I was laughing so hard my ribs were hurting.
‘Sir? Sir? Are you all right?’
But I couldn’t stop laughing. Everything hurt and I couldn’t stop, and I stood there, holding the book, helplessly, laughing and laughing and trying to stop until they helped me out of the shop and closed the door on me, softly, with a final clang of the bell.
In another time and place Shomer lies sleeping; and he is neither too hungry nor too cold; and in the large block of the infirmary there is a relative quiet: nothing to do but lie there and try to sleep amongst the other sick or dying men; and try not to think in all that quiet, try not to think at all, of what has been, and what there is no more.
* * *
By the time Wolf reached Berwick Street the hysterical laughter had drained out of him and left in its stead a cold burning fury. It was never buried deep, never too far beneath the surface; it motivated him, it drove him on; anger and hate were the beats of a great primitive drum, of the sort the Germanic tribes had played before marching into battle; they were the beats of the drum to which he, too, marched; always.
There was a car parked outside the Jew’s bakery, a white Crossley Sports Saloon with no one inside. Wolf unlocked the side door by the bakery and climbed up the stairs and when he reached the corridor he saw that the door to his office was open.
He went cautiously; he was afraid, perhaps, of another attack.
She was standing in the middle of the room surveying its destruction. Her dress hugged her figure. A slit down the side exposed a flash of long white leg. She was biting her lower lip.
‘Did Daddy do this?’ she said.
‘Get out.’
‘He can be so mean.’
‘I said, get out!’
‘It’s those two boys of his,’ she said, not paying him any heed. ‘They do indulge him so. He always wanted a boy, you know.’ She turned to Wolf and gave him a quizzical smile. ‘After Judith I guess he gave up trying. Instead he tried to make her into the boy he never had but she did what boys always do and left him.’
‘Get—’
‘Out, I know.’ She sighed. ‘I have just the decorator in mind. You’d love him. Sydney. He’s a genius.’ She walked up to Wolf. She was a little taller than he. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand and he flinched. ‘Your face,’ she said.
‘My face? My face?’ For the first time Wolf’s face twisted in open fury. The anger and hate had been building up inside, the fury that in the past drove men to madness and murder. Once he had commanded men not unlike those Jew thugs of her father’s, men who obeyed orders without question, who beat and maimed and tortured and killed at his command. ‘My face?’ He pushed her roughly against the wall. She bumped against it gracefully and stayed there regarding him with that same quizzical smile. Wolf fumbled with his belt buckle. The sound of the belt slithering out of its hooks whistled through the air and Isabella Rubinstein bit her lower lip again. The belt hit the floor. Wolf unbuttoned his trousers and with the same hurried gesture pulled his mutilated penis free. It was half erect, and painful. ‘My fucking face?’ He advanced on her, his penis in his hand.
‘He did this to you?’ If she was afraid she didn’t show it.
‘You fucking whore!’ He was screaming, up in her face, strings of spittle falling from his lips. His cock was pressed against her now, this Jewish woman, the source of his humiliation, his pain.
She slapped him.
The sound resounded in the room. For a moment he couldn’t believe it. His cheek stung. She had slapped him with force; there was heft in her action. ‘Listen to me, you fucking little worm,’ she said. Her hand reached down and grasped his penis, painfully hard, and he almost screamed. It was the second time in a week that a Rubinstein was holding Wolf by the balls. So to speak.
Isabella leaned close until her face was almost touching Wolf’s. ‘You think I don’t know what you are? Who you are?’ She gave his cock a painful squeeze, making him yelp in pain. ‘You think I don’t know what you want?’
‘Let me go, you bitch—’
She slapped him again. Released his cock and pushed him with both hands splayed open against his chest. He staggered and fell back. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him, nor did he know why he felt so weak at that moment. His penis was fully erect now, the unhealed wound burning.
Isabella advanced on him. She knelt, for just a moment, and rose with Wolf’s belt in her hand. ‘I used to watch you,’ she said. ‘Watch you on the newsreel when I was a girl. It was only a few years ago to you, a lifetime to me. How we all hated you! Hated and feared you.’ Her free hand came down her body, as if it had its own will. She stroked her flat stomach, slowly, and came down lower, at last, to the triangle between her legs. It was pronounced, now. Her fingers grasped, pushing against the material, in between her thighs, as she touched herself. A small moan escaped from her lips, the sound suspended like ice crystals in the cold air of the room. ‘You’re a monster,’ she said, whispered, ‘or you were, once. You’re a nobody now.’
‘Yes,’ Wolf said. Isabella whipped the belt through the air. It made a whistling sound and hit Wolf on the chest, the metal buckle nicking his skin. ‘Yes. Yes.’
Isabella stared at Wolf’s erect penis as though hypnotised. Her eyes were feverishly bright. ‘Lie down.’
‘What are you—’
She whipped him again. ‘Lie down! On your back.’
He fell back. Lay down, h
is eyes on the ceiling, his head on a pile of books about the superiority of the Aryan race. His penis stood erect, at attention like an SS-Sturmführer. Isabella stood and watched him, her chest rising and falling with her breath. Slowly, making sure he watched, she began to lift up her dress.
‘I used to sit in the cinema and watch you,’ she said, dreamily. Wolf’s eyes were fixed on the slowly rising dress. ‘Giving speeches, your fist raised in the air. You had that funny little moustache, like Charlie Chaplin.’ She laughed. Her thighs were bare. Her dark triangle of pubic hair was wet. ‘We all used to hate you so.’
Holding the dress above her waist, she approached him and stood over him. He looked up, staring at her. ‘I know men,’ Isabella Rubinstein said, softly. She stood over him, one leg on either side of Wolf, affording him a view straight up her engorged commodity.
Slowly, she lowered herself down. She squatted over him until the lips of her cunny were inches away from Wolf’s face. He could smell her, could inspect every fold of this most intimate aspect of hers. It had been this way with Geli. Slowly Isabella Rubinstein rocked back and forth on Wolf’s face, rubbing herself against him. She rubbed against his nose, his lips, his reluctant tongue, lowering herself, positioning herself at last so that her anus was over Wolf’s nose, her vagina over his mouth. The smell and warmth of her threatened to suffocate him. He tried to struggle but she reached and took hold of his manhood and held him still. Pain shot up his body, but he liked it. She tugged on his newly circumcised penis, not harshly, this time, but not gently either. ‘Deutschland über alles,’ she murmured, rocking back and forth, back and forth, forcing herself on him. ‘Deutschland über alles!’
A Man Lies Dreaming Page 14