Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  On this particular Sunday, however, neither his pajamas nor the beetle jar suited his mind; he was uncharacteristically fixated on the thought that, somewhere too far away, his nephew’s face had ceased to move, to murmur, and would remain still as a tortoise shell until the end of time. A million years of fixity, of deadness, he could not conceive of that, or of its mathematical equivalent, which was that in a billion billion trillion chances (what was the American word for an unstateable number?) there wasn’t a fraction of a shadow that any human being would ever come back to life. Each would lie cold and unstirred, at least by reprieve, through successive ages of ice, even until and actually into the incineration of the planet by its sun: just so much fodder, tinder, trash, which was why he insisted to the point of boring even himself on the role of the German nation as a survivor, as a framework in which interminable death did not matter so much.

  “Damn it, Motte,” he said quietly, as a couple of beetles flew sideways away when the mare, always the soul of discretion, approached the fence, “because I know a lot I’m supposed to know everything; because I manufacture secrets I’m supposed to crack the riddles of the universe. Whereas, of course, as this miserable day teaches me, I cannot even manage my own indignation, just another man with a reservoir of tears, a few dress uniforms in the closet to make me feel invulnerable, a whole network of spies from Hong Kong to Mecca to persuade me that I am in charge of things. Wars exist to distract us from our own deaths: We inflict on strangers the very thing we fear for ourselves, so that, as millions fall, we can keep on saying Not I, not we, it will never be us; but it never works out that way.

  “Here I am, for better or worse, a man with special task forces at his command, which are nothing but Gestapo butchers on temporary loan to combat what’s blithely called activity harmful to the nation, in particular espionage, treason, sabotage, propaganda, and subversion, all in the theater of operations. What they do is ferret people out, behind the lines, and hand them over to the SS for execution. I go along. My nephew has his brains blown out. I go along. What do you think about that, Motte? I wash my pajamas, I free my beetles. I behave quite automatically, somehow mustering an adequate front so long as I am clean-shaven, short-haired. I go along, I sweat into my pajamas, I tip new beetles into the jar. Then someone else gets his brains blown out, and I don’t feel like telling my field police to stop arresting people. I am a specialist in displaced retaliation but what I do not know, will never know, is why I began, before I had any grievances at all. For what was I getting my own back at the start? For having to eat, to breathe, to work? For having been born at all, like a New Year’s gift? As if, before leaving the womb, or being conceived, I should have had a preview tour with the archangel Gabriel showing me around like a salesman: ‘What do you think, fetus? Can you take seventy years of this? Or would you like to go back forever?’ And, when you have to leave it, when your time’s up, you go out squealing with pain, writhing like a frogspawn pancake.

  “Father died of a stroke while taking the waters at Bad Nauheim, cut down at fifty-two, just because he was glued together wrong to begin with, and I have outlived him by six years. I am already six years older than my father ever will be, and I am living the rest of his life for him, like the tenant farmer of his undischarged ambition, yet far too small, too inward, too nervous, too mixed-up, to be living a life of any kind, even my own, still less that of the man who was dead set against my joining the navy in the first place. His going freed me, that is clear, but my doing well (if well it’s been) is broken glass and ordure on his grave.”

  Checking the sit of his necktie, and shooting upward at the summer sky a look of mutinous bittersweet deviousness that implied he wasn’t responsible for anything today, he strode a dozen paces past the apple tree, paused to flick a few beetles off a cluster of irises, and began again, resting one hand on one splintery fence post, gesticulating a bit with the other toward Motte to ensure he had her attention.

  “It has begun to happen again, I knew it would, the matrix is never still, the dead have started to die again, it is all Hitler’s fault, it all began when the message came in ‘Grandma’s dead’ on the afternoon of August 31, only two weeks ago. It feels like years of stone. Naujocks attacked Gleiwitz radio station and Hellwig’s troops pretended to attack the German border, and Trummler’s fired back at the so-called invaders. That was it: a charade, the put-up job of put-up jobs, and there we sat in my office, listening to his awful voice telling us there had already been fourteen border incidents and that was fourteen too many, a sleeping giant cannot stay asleep that long. Then Piekenbrock said, ‘So now we know why we had to get hold of those Polish uniforms!’ and I didn’t even answer him, I who had known all along, from the first. What was done was done. And that was only the first day.

  “At 9:15 on the morning after, I called the staff into my office and tried to cheer them up, invoking my own thirty-four years in the service of Germany, the relative poorness of private life, and our obligation to be loyal. Since there was no going back, we had to go forward with the mob; no one else was going to hire us, and we knew too much to be allowed to go our own way with a few favorite books and a sleeping bag under our arm. Not only that: When you are familiarly called ‘chef’ (and try to ignore the French overtones of the term), you are literally the head man, in charge of everything, and that calls for a certain amount at home, while responsible abroad for entire Abwehr units, often far ahead of our invading armies. I had to have hourly accounts of what was happening, which may surprise you—you who never think farther ahead than the next fresh-hay meal, if you think of that—but when you have men out on a limb, supposed to seize this rail junction or that coal mine, you have to be on top of things, especially when your telephone rings all day with demands for such things as a special strike force to wreck the three main railroads from Romania to Poland. All this is hacking at the map, a hard-nosed resolve to change the map in the act of staring at it, melting and reshaping while the silly, shiny thing sits there on its table as if it had a right to life, and you tell yourself, There are people there, right under the steel points of the compasses, but their faces do not shine out, the smell of their breath or their clothes does not leak through the pores in the canvas backing. No: The message of maps is that humanity is unmanageable without some degree of formal symbolism.

  “Always, when I could, I let the others voice sentiments that, coming from me, might have seemed compulsory, and false (which, at times, by necessity, they were), just because I’d uttered them; and, if my staff seemed muddled at times, then it was better for them to seem so to me than I to seem so to them.

  “Motte, you old sprechpferd, are you listening? Britain and France declared war on us, of course, but an invader will always have enemies, even if only on paper. It was only in Poland itself, however, that anyone got a true, physical sense of how well Rundstedt’s armies were doing. You should have been there, Motte, at Army Group South’s headquarters, near Zloty Stok, on September 3. You would have been well cared for, and, back home again on the fifth, you’d have relished the memory of that whiff of smoke, the map constantly changing like molten wax, the thunder of bombers overhead—the overall sense of single-minded mobilization. After that first visit to the rear of the front, it became clear that we would have to foster the malcontent among the Ukrainians, the Caucasians, the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots. Persia, India, and British-run Iraq were ripe for shaking, and it was high time to get good old King Amanullah of Afghanistan back on the throne simply by staging an anti-British revolt among the mountain tribes on the Indian-Afghan border. For the first time in decades, the sun’s rays were hitting the field of the cloth of gold, and that field was in my head, where ideas sprouted and flew at
all hours of the day and night. Imagine: We could turn the Tibetans against the British and provoke some kind of uproar in Thailand! There was nothing we could not do. At our bidding, all foxes would run backward, all clouds would come down to sea level and moor themselves there like barrage balloons, all armies would surrender as soon as their politicians declared war, and a deputation of the world’s admirals would arrive to pay homage to the smallest admiral known.

  “Of course you, my dear Motte, with your poor grasp of Latin (although your speech is lucid enough when you want it to be), you will not be as attuned as I to the admirable component in the word admiral, but it is there; an admiral is to be wondered at, marveled at, quite simply to be admired, and to that he’s entitled without doing anything further! Is the word perhaps even a relative of the title Emir? Can one be an emir of a navy? I sometimes think that, no matter how shoddy what a man has to do in the exact performance of his duty, a decent-sounding title helps him through, whereas Mister or even Doctor fortifies him precious little. I envision the day when the dawn has come up like oil poured into a flaming brazier, on which a man such as I can go quite beyond himself, and his being short and having a lisp don’t count at all, not in the glorious final sum of his deeds while his golden name surrounds him like a vapor. Fame is the spur, but greatness is the horse.”

  That seemed to clinch it, verbally at least, and the Admiral fell silent, having received no answer; Motte knew how to listen as well as how to obey, and was accustomed to these long crescendo voluntaries, coming usually during an early-morning saunter in the Grünewald. What the Admiral needed was an audience, not an interlocutor, and at this moment more than ever, queerly conscious as he today was of death and maiming all around him, he felt like a lightning conductor for trouble. It was not only his nephew: Young men called to the colors had about one chance in three of surviving, and losses in Poland had been light overall. Grief had begun, and grief would go on, but grief in this instance came on top of something else, about which the Admiral and his wife rarely spoke even in private. She went her way in cultivated society, fixing on Heydrich’s talent as a violinist and playing duets with him while her husband, who had no ear for music, disappeared into the kitchen,where he donned his chef’s hat and prepared the meal, most often saddle of wild boar cooked in a crust made from red wine and crumbled black bread, served with his special Abwehr salad in which the secret ingredient was a fleck or two of Abwehr paper. He refused to divulge the source of its unique flavor. Secrets were the salt in the national soup, and, after all, they were his stock-in-trade.

  Everyone had little secrets that did no harm. Who more than he had the right to a couple of shady whorls of truth here and there, so long as the national security went unscathed? If the master of national secrets couldn’t rise to a fib or two, or do a little private business on the side, then he’d find another polity to serve. Savvy colleagues in the outstations often kept a dog in reserve for his visits; if things weren’t going well, out it came to be fondled. Now that was a minor secret, but he didn’t mind, except when the dog was less than friendly. British agents monitoring radio traffic had been baffled by constant references to an agent called Axel, who in fact was a dog assigned to agent Caesar (not the Admiral, of course). The next two transmissions were “Watch out for Axel. He bites.” and “Caesar is in hospital. Axel bit him.” All this diverted the Admiral, reminding him of life’s crosshatched complexity, into which, without even an apology to himself, he gladly introduced—for his favorites—Spanish strawberries flown in from Aranjuez by courier planes code-named “Strawberry Swansuit”; diamond-studded tobacco jars all supposed to have belonged once upon many times to Napoleon; rugs and paintings and miniature perfumed dogs. The Bulgarian outstation was the most corrupt, he knew, but the one in Munich was close behind. Racketeers were part of reality too, he reassured himself; so long as the main job got done, none of this black-market stuff mattered a fig. He even knew that the British knew so much about the Abwehr, its corruptness and inefficiency, that they went to enormous lengths to make it stay that way. Two sets of eyes dreamed the day when the Führer finally awoke to what was going on in his famous intelligence service and brought the entire house of cards tumbling down: the Admiral’s, and those of the British Intelligence Service. Both sets watched and, repledging themselves to the need for a touch of badness in all things, looked the other way.

  So there was all the more reason, the Admiral persuaded himself, to get out into the field and lay his traps, retrieve his rabbits, bury his gold, riding the confidential rainbow to its end, before heads began to fall. The very thought of going off to another country excited the Admiral more than he could credit. I still thrill to it, hemused, the foray, the confrontation, the bargain struck, the wires pulled to make the marionettes work an ocean’s width away. I am not nothing. I make the truth curve. I run contraband to hell and back. In the end they all come to me, begging or boasting, and I suffer them all. I’ll go in uniform, of course; it adds to the pageantry.

  For this Admiral, pill-popping introvert that I am, with a lisp, who hates people who have small ears or who are tall, who lives mainly in a boyhood world of invisible inks and uncatchable spies, I come from the dimension of wizardry, a freak, a hyperbole, a hybrid right out of Hans Christian Andersen. Yet I control the fates of millions, deviously interfering and undermining by means of a staff deployed throughout the civilized world. A tip here, an overture there, and someone either dies at the frontier or comes sailing through it in disguise, and most of my relatives work for me as well. Master of fair-weather machination, I am a man not only worth cultivating, but worth priming and sweetening as well; I, the ghost of intrigue past and of subterfuge to come, when the entire world runs according to bits of cardboard (fake, of course) stamped with hieroglyphs entitling you to grass, a roof, the right to breathe last outside a jail.

  If only Poland’s smoke and rubble could have been removed by trucks to Russia; I have been close to tears, yearning for old-style naval engagements, with cruisers slogging it out over the mild meniscus of the open main. Burning horses and sundered houses are not my idea of war at all. One bright spot, though: When you reduce a country to rubble, you can count at least on not having to eat its dreadful food. One day, when things have been cleaned up, the kitchens of Poland will fill, at last, with delectable aromas—and I will come into my own again. This Admiral will sail.

  The Likenesses

  Paul Hoover

  MADE TO RESEMBLE

  a match is like a shard

  the shard is like a sword

  a sword is like a word

  the house of water folds

  the past is like a bowl

  the future’s like a rope

  a rake is like resemblance

  don’t step on one oh no

  mimesis is like mimesis

  a tree is like a weed

  a lie is like a fiction

  a fiction’s like a deed

  a shoe is like a shape note

  an eye is like an island

  the goose is like the gander

  the sandman’s like the sand

  a ribbon’s like a stipend

  the bend is like the road

  the cross is like a crisis

  hope is like a bone

  the season’s like a threshold

  the forest is like a door

  rats are like the righteous

  the green are like the gold

  life is like a sentence

  a bird is like the world

  reason is like erosion

  names are like tin bells

  to seek i
s to be looked for

  to leap is like to fall

  to think is to be distant

  a soft spot’s like a blow

  a river’s like a wellspring

  the dead are like the soil

  a chair is like a grandstand

  the sky is like a dome

  the sailor’s like the wave

  the night is like the day

  the bride is like the groom