The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers

by Anton Piatigorsky

  Adi is grinding his teeth together and clenching his fists as he moves along the dirt path. If he could make the world’s laws, he would outlaw that demonic profession entirely. Perhaps even outlaw the physical act itself, whenever it’s divorced from true love, because it degrades the flame of life, reduces all that’s holy into a smouldering and acrid garbage fire. Men slipping their thick and hardening slugs into whorish bodies. Penises covered with sores, dripping yellow pus. Lacerated skin, head-bobbing palsies, shuffling lunatics with frothing lips. All that insatiable lust. And the women, those unforgivable women. Nature intended them to be chaste and pure, but instead they harbour beneath their stockings and obscenely stilted dresses wet and rank cunts, filthy holes, red and infected. Those dark women with dark skin and dark hair. What’s the source of this pestilence? Adi doesn’t know.

  He tries to picture a prostitute’s room, her secret lair, the mess of clothes on the floor of her closet, the used dishes in a makeshift kitchen, the food stuck to the plates. Red lights in every lampshade to better cover the grime. Nicks in the wall and hopping lice. Filth from a parade of men’s shoes tracking in manure from the street. Sheets stained with muck and shit. The word scheisse lingers in his head, satisfying, succinct. He sees a naked gentleman in this room, lying on his back, his quivering voice asking for the whore to squat above him. He watches her do as he requests, stand above him, naked as a child, facing the wall across the bed, her buttocks hovering above his face, one foot on either side of his torso. She is squatting low, just as he requested—yes, just that, and lower, lower, please. It’s more than a request—it’s a plea, a desperate plea. His face is mere inches away, and his eyes are like cameras clicking. He is watching, waiting, anticipating, as she grunts and pushes and digs her fingers into her flesh and spreads her cheeks and, as he requested, as he pleaded for her to do, shits on his face.

  Adi gags and heaves in the grass. The disgusting things that men demand. What kind of a diseased city in what kind of a diseased state produces such terrible desires in men? Bent over a pine sapling with his hands on his knees, he’s waiting for the nausea to pass.

  He stands and walks briskly, kicking the grass with each step, moving towards the bridge that will end this life of suffering. That maddeningly sweet odour grows stronger and more familiar, ever more intense. He stops and squints in the darkness, searching for its origin. Spiky purple wildflowers grow in the field, along the path, and down by the shore. He can’t identify them. He’s ignorant when it comes to nature, has no idea what anything’s named in Latin or in German, but he does know that those flowers, those spiky purple flowers, are the source of the powerful smell. His salivary glands are squirting. His mouth is wet. He recalls a syrupy texture on his tongue—sticky, viscous, sweet—with a hint of that floral odour. Yes, the old jars of his father’s honey.

  Now he’s frozen in place. Now his nose is raised. Adi is squinting and curling his lip, transfixed, standing by the north shore of the Danube. He’s immersed. The bugs have halted in mid-air, the wind they’ve been riding on is frozen, the spinning of the earth has stopped. He’s walked right into this and can’t take another step. He’s imprisoned, caught in a loop, and he can’t move. The honeyed odour thickens his throat, makes him feel as if he can’t swallow. The particular smell of his father’s flower honey.

  He recalls Leonding, seven years earlier, how his father, recently retired, donned his customs jacket each morning as the sun was rising, even though he’d nothing to do in those days but walk along the dirt road to the field of purple flowers where he kept his beehives. Father sitting on his three-legged stool, smoking his thousand pipes, puttering with bees in that field near the woods where nine-year-old Adi played with his friends. Adi recalls the endless war he waged, with mud on his cheeks, knees scuffed, heart pounding, holding his favourite long stick, cut from a pine tree and stripped of needles, that stick he used for a gun. He is still running through that forest with his stick, his surrogate gun. He leaps into the stream bed, rattling machine-gun fire with puffed cheeks, leading his platoon of Boers forward into battle. He shoots three Englishmen, and two of them fall abruptly in the water, convulsing and dying while Adi watches. The third remains standing until Adi throws his gun down, screams frantically, and waves his fists. I shot you! I got you! You’re dead, so lie down! He persuades his terrified companion to fall into the mud and die.

  “Adolf,” calls his father.

  Out of the forest and into the flowers. Standing inside that field of flowers before his pot-bellied, pipe-smoking father, hives of bees flanked on either side of him, he is unable to move. Father picks up the stool, gathers his jars of honey, and puts them in his rucksack, the smoke pouring from his pipe like a chimney—no, a dragon. “I want you home in twenty minutes for your school work before supper.”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  The boys are gone now, have been gone for quite some time. His father is gone too. Adi is alone. Now he’s Old Shatterhand, the greenhorn, hero of his favourite Karl May novel, cutting through the field to save Winnetou, an ambushed Apache prince. Adi swishes through tall flowers, spots the attacking thieves, and shoots two through the heart. He runs to Winnetou. The Apache prince holds his sister’s head, tears streaming down his face, and he’s muttering that she’s dying, dying, dying. Nsho-tshi, the beautiful Apache princess, sees Old Shatterhand, the only paleface she’s ever trusted. Revenge me, she says, before she closes her eyes forever. “I will revenge you,” says Adi to the corpse. “I will never forget.”

  It’s too dark to see anything. Evening has crossed the threshold into night. Revenge will have to wait until morning. He leaves his rifle-stick by a burnt tree, as he always does, and hops through the field, past the hives, towards the dirt road. It’s a five-minute walk to the cemetery wall and their house across the street, but it takes him two if he runs. The front door is open. He skips across the threshold, plotting tomorrow’s adventures.

  Alois stands waiting in the living room, sucking his pipe, smoke slipping out from either side of his mouth. The Alsatian stands beside him with its ears erect, aware of this situation’s severity and wanting to be a part of it. Alois holds the birch stick, rubbing its bark between two fingertips. “I asked you to come an hour ago,” he says, without anger in his voice, not even a hint. “Do you think your superior in the civil service will tolerate you arriving even ten seconds late, let alone a full hour?”

  “I’m not going into the civil service,” says Adi flatly.

  Alois frowns, all jowls and brow, holding the rod and smoking.

  “I’m not,” repeats Adi, his big blue eyes on his father.

  “Uncle,” whispers Klara to her husband, the meekest of protests. She hunches by the fireplace, picking at her fingernails, almost entirely hidden in shadow. Little Edward, who’ll be dead in just over a year, with bubbles of snot protruding from his raw and red nose, clutches his mother’s apron with both hands.

  Alois couldn’t be calmer. He’s a big man. A strong man. He knows how to wield a stick. It comes down hard on Adi’s shoulder. The boy winces and curls away. The stick falls hard on Adi’s back and he falls to his knees, his teeth clenched, his curled back exposing a hump between his shoulder blades. Alois imagines a target. The stick comes down again and again. The Alsatian grunts and longs to woof, but knowing the stick himself, he resists the temptation. The thwack of birch hits meat. Adi’s face is tucked into his hands, but his little body’s a thudding, muffled drum. He emits a few short squeals in high pitch. The birch is mechanical, powered by a smoking engine, regular in strength and speed and direction. Its motion is precisely vertical. Blows connect every two point three seconds. This beating could be plotted, graphed, and analyzed as a simple statement, a grammar in gesture rather than words. A sentence designed to communicate one simple fact—the good boy is not late—a statement lacking malice. The odour of lavender honey, on his father’s hands, arrives in a wave with each blow. Say, does thou breathe the incense sweet of flowe
rs? sings Lohengrin to Elsa. Alois’s bulldog eyes are blank. He’s calm and easy with this work. Adi’s battered skin numbs between the shoulder blades. Half his brain settles into the musical rhythm of the factory’s drone or the metronome—yes, like crude Czech music. A regular polka, one thwack to commence each bar.

  Lavender flower. French honey. Father’s favourite flavour.

  “Uncle,” whispers Klara, too softly for her husband to hear.

  A folk song played on a child. He lives inside that song, as united with its rhythm as any accordion or drum. Gustl has told him that Stefanie likes to dance. There’s a cellist in the Linz symphony who is friends with Stefanie’s brother, and Gustl asked him, on Adi’s behalf, and the brother said as much. She loves to dance. So, very well, then. Let her dance to this. Let her hold some fancy lieutenant’s hands, and twirl and dance to this.

  The birch stick rises and suspends in the air. Alois holds back, wipes his brow, lowers his arms, and rests the stick against a chair. With his squat forefinger and thumb, he tames his windswept whiskers. The Alsatian barks, no longer able to resist, and for the first time this evening Alois shows his teeth. His foot kicks out to the side, striking the dog in the ribs and pushing him off balance. Wordless, he clears his throat and goes, although Adi can’t see where. It could be into another room, or out into the road, in the darkness, ambling towards the inn for a pint or two. Klara descends, scoops the boy into the rickety wooden chair, and curls him on her lap, although he’s too big for such babying now and his gangly limbs can’t be contained. Adi’s blue eyes open and close in regular rhythm, every two point three seconds. Edward’s terrified shrieks fill the otherwise tranquil room.

  His mother whimpers as if hit herself, so meek it’s unbearable. She gingerly touches her son’s wounded back. Adi’s cotton shirt, already muddy from the river, now reddens in a couple of places.

  He’s blinking and blinking, a rhythm lodged deep, as he stands in a field of flowers. The spirit of victory has been torn from his ticket, flogged, and shredded. He removes the ticket from his pocket, rips it up, and tosses the bits of useless paper to the ground. His body is meat. After it’s been dredged from the Danube, someone could slice and roast and tenderize it, crack the bones and eat the flesh. The wind picks up across the river, sweeps across sleepy Linz, across the empty Hauptplatz, all the way here, to the wild riverbank in Urfahr, where it rustles the lavender around him, unleashing that irritating and incensing smell. Insects revive, the earth spins. Adi, in his despair, steps towards the iron bridge.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many books were used in the making of this one. Although I won’t name them all, I am particularly indebted to several biographies, including The Ghosts of Kampala: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin by George Ivan Smith, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator by Robert D. Crassweller, and Hitler: 1889-1936 by Ian Kershaw. I also used the speculative psychohistories The Psychopathic God Adolph Hitler by Robert G.L. Waite, The Mind of Stalin by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, and Mao Tse-Tung: The Man in the Leader by Lucien W. Pye. Other helpful sources were The Young Hitler I Knew by August Kubizek, Cambodia by David J. Steinberg, Marriage Laws and Customs of China by Dr. Vermier Y. Chiu, Prologue to the Chinese Revolution by Charlton M. Lewis, Stalin by Robert Service, and Lugbara Religion by John Middleton, as well as the documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, directed by Barbet Schroeder.

  I’m also indebted to many flesh and blood people. I am particularly thankful for the insight and support of Ava Roth, Martha Magor Webb, and my editor at Goose Lane, Bethany Gibson.

  The story of the red ants in Burma was adapted from a similar tale told by John Nunneley in Tales From The King’s African Rifles.

  The poem by Raphael Eristavi, “The Land of The Khevsuris,” is taken from An Anthology of Georgian Verse, translated by Venera Urushadze.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  The Iron Bridge by Anton Piatigorsky

  1. Are Piatigorsky’s imagined early lives for these infamous figures believable?

  2. How might Idi’s mother, the soldiers, and the major have influenced Idi’s decision to become a leader? How might their influence have been a corrupting as well as a motivating force?

  3. Sâr’s struggle between desire and shame persists throughout his story; even at the end, his apparent certainty is laced with doubt. Do you think he will return to the dancers’ house and let his desire win, or will his shame prevent him from repeating the mistake?

  4. Is Tse-tung’s struggle with his father merely a display of his internal character? How may it also help to shape him into the figure that he eventually becomes as both a great leader and a devastating dictator?

  5. Why does Tse-tung fail or refuse to engage in yuan fang, in other words, to consummate the marriage?

  6. Soso sees himself as powerful and superior to the other seminarians despite his physical and financial limitations. Do you see this self-assessment as accurate, or is it misleading?

  7. In what ways does Rafael use the omens of his superstitions to make events happen in the way he expects them to happen? Does he ultimately believe in them, or does he merely use them to explain his actions?

  8. In what ways do secondary characters such as Gustl and Iremashvili provide support for their friends the main characters? Do they also hinder them?

  9. Do nicknames like Adi and Soso make it easier to sympathize with the characters? If so, in what ways does this help or hinder the reader’s interpretation of the stories?

  10. There are numerous differences between the lives of these future dictators. Are there any similarities between some or all of them? If so, do these similarities prepare them for their positions of rule?

  11. Do the actions and decisions of these dictators in their early years occur as a result of their character or do they form their character? Might they also show some redemptive traits?

  12. How do determination and leadership manifest themselves in the main character of each story?

  13. Are the characters defined more in their moments of weakness or their moments of strength? Which of those are their strongest traits, according to Piatigorsky’s writing?