Eleanor

by RA Williams

  ‘There’s a wireless here?’ Mauss asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Then you know perfectly what is happening?’

  ‘Always the same nonsense. The latest plebiscite. Jews. The big finish and – wait for it – blame everything on the Jews. Again.’

  She stood. Crossing to her phonograph, she took another record from its sleeve and gave the phonograph a wind before dropping the needle. ‘Flat Foot Floogie’ hissed and popped through the speaker.

  ‘Swing,’ she said. ‘The labourers eat it up. This is their favourite one. They have no idea it’s about a prostitute with the floy-floy.’

  He offered a confused look. ‘Floy-floy?’

  ‘A hepcat’s way of saying she’s got the clap.’ Elle sat down and sparked another cigarette. ‘Like I said, no politics.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t see a Putsch or any black-uniformed goons burning books, but, again, it does not mean they are not here,’ Mauss reminded her.

  ‘Not like I sit round the campfire regaling the Reich labour corps with tales of my mother’s rabbi.’

  ‘Trust in me when I say they already know,’ said Mauss. He took a sip of his wine, adding, ‘It’s chilled enough.’

  Elle shrugged, both at the temperature of the wine and at the presence of National Socialists.

  ‘I’m half Jewish, Dr Mauss. And I know it’s just a matter of time before I’m chucked out. But I’m reassured my bank account buys me some security.’

  ‘Ah, the complacency of democracy. Eleanor, you suffer from reckless naiveté. The time comes soon when there is no difference between rich or poor. Only Jews and non-Jews.’

  She couldn’t argue with him. Much as she distracted herself from the realities of Germany with her beloved science, she knew that beyond the tors and trees of the Teutoburg Wald, Jews were having their homes and businesses confiscated. If they were wealthy, they paid for self-deportation. The unlucky ones… she tried to not think about it.

  ‘My foreman, Herr Dietrich, sent out for ice blocks this afternoon. There’s a telephone in the Bürgermeister’s office in Bad Meinberg. I’m pretty sure he tittle-tattled to Berlin.’

  ‘Dietrich didn’t send word to Berlin.’ Mauss chuckled.

  She didn’t see the humour. Another sip from his cup, and he presented it to her for a refill. She topped him up. ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ He drank. ‘Dietrich sent word to me.’

  ‘Why would he do that? He’s a Party member.’

  ‘Everyone who’s anyone in Germany is a Party member. Dietrich is no Nazi. Like you, he’s a believer in science, not politics.’

  ‘I’ll be damned.’

  Taking a long drag, she put her feet up again. The fire crackled. She looked up to the night sky, dense with stars. For the moment, the weight of the world was off her shoulders.

  ‘Have you found it?’ Mauss asked. She looked to him as he lit a cigar. ‘Have you found your Pit of Hel?’

  ‘And the Virgin,’ she replied, lowering her feet before leaning in close. ‘The mine I’ve spent seven months digging up, it isn’t there. It’s at the bottom of Lake Wiembecke.’

  ‘Unfortunate for you.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t need to drain the lake, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I found steps at the bottom of the dig site,’ she said, taking a fresh drag. ‘The steps lead down to a passage. And at the end of the passage, I found runes chiselled into the rock.’

  ‘Sekr?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And where does this passage lead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, disappointed. ‘It’s blocked up. I’ll find a way. If I’m right, on the other side of it is a back door to the Pit of Hel. And the Virgin.’

  ‘All this,’ said Mauss, looking around the extensive encampment. ‘A grandiose expedition in the hope of answers.’

  Perplexed by his obfuscation, she gave him a sour look. ‘If anyone should understand, I expected it would be you.’

  ‘You should not have come, Eleanor,’ he said, voice patient but crystalline. ‘Not now. Jews who can are leaving Germany, not entering.’

  ‘I’m merely half a Jew,’ she replied, put out by his comment. ‘My Austrian Großmutter was Jewish.’

  ‘In the new Germany, nothing is done by half. You either are. Or you are not. Which makes you a second-degree Mischlinge,’ he replied, his kindly eyes piercing. ‘It will not be safe for you here much longer.’

  ‘My predicament left me few options, Dr Mauss. Nobody in the States is funding digs on this scale. Not so soon after the Depression.’

  ‘So you burnished your career with Boche austerity?’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ said Elle.

  ‘The Germans do all things on a grand scale these days. First, in Austria. Now, they occupy Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘I left the States in the midst of a depression. Families didn’t have roofs over their heads, let alone money to send their children to posh private schools. St Dunstan’s didn’t have enough students to fill their classrooms, or enough money from tuition to pay its teaching staff. Professors were dismissed. I was dismissed. Unemployed. Unemployable. I wouldn’t even have been appointed to a school or museum as a janitor, thanks to my esoteric theories.’

  He nodded. ‘You got a rum deal, Eleanor.’

  ‘What was I meant to do? Before Hitler became chancellor, there were a handful of ethnology professorships in Germany. Now there are hundreds.’

  ‘All of them tasked with bolstering the claptrap of Teutonic superiority through the most cloying and disingenuous methods,’ added Mauss.

  Elle smiled. She had once described her own methods the very same way. ‘But not on my dig.’

  ‘No.’ It was Mauss’s turn to smile. ‘On your dig, you depend upon feminine intuition.’ It appeared that he remembered their conversation back in 1929 as well as she did.

  ‘That was then,’ she said. ‘This is now. A time when everyone’s bankrupt.’

  ‘Yet Germany is flush.’

  ‘And I’m fully funded,’ she said.

  ‘Where do you think your funding comes from, Eleanor?’

  She shrugged. ‘From the Institut für Archäologie.’

  ‘Correct. And from where do they get it?’

  ‘Where all museums get funding: from the generosity of benefactors,’ answered Elle.

  Face wooden, he replied, ‘The Ahnenerbe.’

  ‘No,’ she muttered in disbelief.

  ‘Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte‚ Deutsches Ahnenerbe,’ he continued.

  ‘I know what it means,’ she said, shaking her head at her own stupidity. ‘Study of the heritage and spiritual history of the German people. It’s a load of old shit as well. An ersatz think tank, formulated four years ago to promote bullshit Aryan doctrine espoused by Hitler.’

  ‘Shall I explain how the Ahnenerbe gathers its funding?’

  She could have guessed, but said nothing.

  ‘Himmler. Head of the SS.’

  ‘I also know who he is,’ Elle replied.

  ‘Then you know of his fascination with Teutonic paganism and the occult. He’s the Ahnenerbe’s patron. You needed funding; he tapped into his private piggy bank.’

  ‘Jews?’

  Mauss nodded. ‘Jews.’

  She stood. Examining the dirt on her hands, she frowned incredulously, realising with horror that she had Jewish blood on them as well.

  ‘All this time, and I never realised the funding was being stolen from my own people.’ She felt her face grow hot. ‘I deracinated myself from everything I had accomplished. And for what? For Chrissake, I’m working for Nazis.’

  Across the encampment, the labourers were returning from their ablutions, marching in rows of two to the cookhouse for late supper. The Externsteine thrust up beyond like a ruined wall built by giants.

  ‘There is something magnetic about this place,’ she said, staring up at the tors. ‘I wasted time scrounging around
the passages and chambers like all the others. I think the altar chamber above was a ploy to keep us away from looking at what lies beneath.’

  Mauss pulled an unconvinced face. ‘The Anasazi Indians had similar chambers, high on the cliff faces in Arizona. They were not a ploy. They were for resistance.’ Finishing his wine, he put down the empty cup. ‘Of course, there is another possibility to consider.’

  She turned away from the Externsteine, facing Mauss. Before she could ask, he replied.

  ‘What you have uncovered is no mine.’ He said it as a statement of fact, not supposition.

  ‘You base this theory on…?’

  ‘Agisterstein.’

  ‘Gesundheit,’ she replied sarcastically, perplexed by Mauss’s cryptic comment.

  ‘Very amusing. Agisterstein, from the most ancient of Saxon writings of this place, means…’

  ‘Stone with the dragon cave,’ she interrupted, as she began to realise what it meant.

  He nodded. ‘You learned well. “Stone”, meaning?’

  ‘ℑungfräu?’

  He nodded. ‘“Dragon cave”?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You got me.’

  ‘A Crimen hollow.’

  ‘They’re here?’ she muttered.

  He nodded.

  ‘Now?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘How could I have missed it?’

  It was Mauss’s turn to shrug. ‘When we stare too long at a tree, we forget about the rest of the forest. You look without seeing.’

  Taking a breath before replying, she finally said, ‘Twenty-seven years has got behind me.’ Whispering now, she added, ‘Not a day passes without thought of Balthasar.’ She looked at Mauss. ‘But I can’t remember his face any more,’ she said, sounding uncharacteristically sentimental.

  Without meaning to, she suddenly found a tear in her eye. Lowering her baseball cap, she tried to hide it behind the brim.

  ‘I’ll never forget the darkness of his eyes though. In them. Deep in the black of them. There I saw flecks of melancholy.’

  She took another deep breath. The scent of forest at dusk.

  ‘I’ll never stop,’ she said. ‘Never. Not until I find Balthasar and get to the bottom of everything I saw that night. And I’m so close. So very close.’

  ‘You said that, here, there is only science.’

  ‘I did say that.’

  ‘Science will never define love.’

  She smiled. It wasn’t a smile of happiness, only consolation. ‘I half expected you to understand.’

  ‘We share experience with a wild sign only.’

  ‘Balthasar Toule and I had a connection. He pulled me out of a flooding hold and saved me from drowning. And as he carried me out of harm’s way, he told me: “You’ve a long road ahead of you.” After everything that’s happened; the ruin of my career, of my reputation, I feel for the first time I’m near the end of the road.’

  ‘Possibly, you have taken the wrong road, Eleanor.’

  ‘What other road can there be?’

  Mauss sighed, almost as if he were disappointed with her.

  ‘Surely you have not forsaken the most elementary tenet of “The Gift”?’

  She stared at him for the longest time while the cogs in her head turned. Then a dark understanding arose not from her mind, but from the pit of her stomach. ‘Angebinde.’

  ‘Angebinde,’ he repeated. ‘Binds created through gifting.’

  ‘And gifts are seldom free,’ she admitted, unhappily now.

  ‘Hardly, if ever.’

  ‘I’m bound to the Ahnenerbe?’

  ‘It is worse than that,’ he said. ‘You’re bound to the Nazis.’

  She nodded solemnly, so much suddenly becoming clear to her. ‘They gave me a gift.’

  ‘Angebinde. The Nazis do nothing without compensation.’

  She cursed quietly to herself. ‘What a fool I am.’

  They sat in silence for a time.

  ‘Something terrible happened here a long time ago, Eleanor.’ Mauss spoke up, looking to the tors, lit by a new moon. ‘Something best left undisturbed.’

  Elle awoke, elbow on the arm of her campaign chair, palm of her hand resting on the side of her face, propping up her chin. In the small hours of the night, the unattended fire had reduced to hot embers and was now giving off a sallow glow. Neck stiff, she stretched out.

  Dr Mauss slumbered on her bunk, shoes still on. It was warm that night, and she hadn’t minded sleeping outside. A flash lit the sky beyond the dark forest and a second backlit the Externsteine, the tors jutting up like a dragon’s spine. Heat lightning. Gaining her feet, she opened the lid of the water butt and dipped a tin cup into the ice water. She drank, the cold liquid soothing her parched throat.

  Another silent flash of lightning came, before she heard something. Something she’d not heard for a long time. It frightened her. Returning the cup to the barrel, careful not to make a sound as she closed the lid, she moved away from the fire’s glow, and strained her eyes into the darkness. Again she heard it. A faint harmony, far off. Taking up an iron fire poker for defence, she looked about the clearing.

  The closest tent was Dietrich’s. It was dark, with the flap down. A parked-up Kübelwagen sat beside it, the heavy morning dew covering the bonnet.

  She stood stock-still. No light came from the nearby labourer encampment, the night watch nowhere to be seen. The camp strays, to whom the men fed their scraps, barked in the distance. Two steps more from the glow of the fire and a cloak of darkness enveloped her. The low morning mist obscured the terrain ahead.

  A distant flash lit the sky again, momentarily illuminating her surroundings. She stood at the edge of the Lager, the high trees of the forest towering over her, August crickets gone quiet. The sound came again, from deep in the forest. An adolescent note from a boys’ choir. It brought with it a sudden shudder. A memory of when she first heard it. Below decks on Titanic. In a blood-smeared cabin.

  Curiosity propelled her forward. She had no control over her feet. Already fifty paces from her tent, the blackness of the forest pulled her into its limbs. Straining her ears, desperate to pick out the direction of the curious sound, she heard nothing now but the distant barking of the dogs.

  Suddenly, the dogs went quiet. Then it came again. Closer. Different. The sweet refrain of a boys’ choir replaced by a desperate gull’s trill. Something lurked in shadow. She squinted. There was movement at the edge of her vision. Then she saw them: faint circles aglow in the distant embers of her fire.

  A pair of eyes. Wild signs.

  The single set of eyes became many, as a flash of lightning lit the treeline. Her heart froze, feet turned to cement, body rigid. The trees looked to be alive – lithe beasts, naked, skin porcelain, fluttered among the high limbs of the beech trees. A lovely little thing crept along a branch towards her. It stopped, caressing its taut breasts as it looked down upon her. Another moved in close, shaft distended, taking the fiend from behind. It shuddered, mouth agape. Elle’s body had an involuntary, almost primal, hedonic reaction to the beast’s brutal copulation.

  Another flash of lightning and the beasts turned hideous, faces elongating, noses burst, exposing knotted inner leaves while stickleback spines parted, sprouting membranous wings.

  They took flight, swooping down from the beech trees towards her. Elle tried to scream, but her voice abandoned her. She turned to run. Hot breath prickled the back of her neck. An unholy banshee howl before she was struck.

  She cried out as she launched upright in her campaign chair.

  ‘Dr Annenberg?’

  Her eyes focused. Dietrich was before her, a steadying hand on her shoulder. It was dawn, the heavy morning mist lingering, and distant hums of conversation could be heard from the labourers as they gathered at the long benches for breakfast.

  ‘You are all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She felt rough. Looking to the forest behind her tent, she saw nothing out of the ordinary and
heard only birdsong welcoming the new day. ‘I need a coffee.’

  ‘Dr Annenberg has had night terrors,’ said a dishevelled Dr Mauss, emerging from Elle’s tent, pulling the arms of his wire-rimmed glasses over his ears.

  ‘Dr Mauss. You are here?’

  ‘Oui, Herr Dietrich. I received your telegram and came at once.’ Pinching the bridge of his nose, he squinted at the morning sun. ‘And if I could have a cup of tea to relieve this mal aux cheveux,’ he said, showing Dietrich the empty wine bottle upside down in Elle’s water butt, ‘I would be most grateful.’

  Dietrich nodded. ‘We have breakfast prepared. I will arrange for an additional guest, Herr Doktor.’

  ‘Dietrich,’ said Elle, shaking off her all-too-real nightmare. ‘The gelignite?’

  ‘All is prepared. But I think you should reconsider.’

  They stood in the narrow passage. Five gelignite charges hung from the massive slab of stone barring the way. Battery-operated lights replaced the oil lamps: open flames and explosives a happy ending did not make.

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ muttered Dr Mauss.

  ‘What is sealed behind it must be important, to emplace such a massive blocking stone,’ said Dietrich.

  ‘They sure didn’t want anyone getting in,’ Elle remarked.

  Dr Mauss moved closer to the stone, hands touching the inscriptions. ‘Or getting out.’

  Reaching into her trousers, Elle fished out the old compass Corky O’Shea had given her years ago.

  ‘What d’you want to bet this passage leads due south-west, right under the Externsteine?’

  Unsnapping its worn leather case, she looked at the compass. ‘That’s a helluva thing,’ she said, showing it to Dr Mauss. The dial was spinning like a whirling dervish.

  He looked up at her. ‘This is not a way into a mine.’

  ‘What then?’ asked Dietrich.

  ‘You know what this is,’ said Elle.

  ‘Oui,’ Mauss replied, hand tracing the disembowelled human form chiselled into the stone, the death’s head eliciting a warning familiar to them both.