The Witches' Book of the Dead

by Christian Day

  And Nägeli absorbs everything in its pathetic, vulgar excess. There is a white porcelain jaguar ready to pounce, as tall as a man. And a modern rug embroidered in nightmarishly garish hues. And a little black cat trying with piteous mewls to induce the door of a grotesquely oversized refrigerator to open by scratching at it.

  Through picture windows one has a view far out onto Berlin. Nägeli suppresses an incredible yawn, attempts to subdue the pounding in his head, only partly looks and listens, examines the ice in his glass, recognizing in the vanishing frosty cubes by turns shamrocks, top hats, tears, the syllables ver-i-tas, as if it were dawning upon him that this frosty, inverted reiteration of the molybdomancy familiar to him from his childhood was in fact, by virtue of how melting liberated the form, the ideal reduction of memory.

  He silently curses his new friends Kracauer and Eisner for having persuaded him to prostitute himself here before this braggart who, on top of everything else, also suffers from being a rich parvenu—the only things still missing are the golden eating utensils. However does he leave here again with his self-respect intact?

  And now Hugenberg, chattering away nonstop, seats himself at the eagle-footed grand piano, flips up some imaginary coattails, and with unsightly enthusiasm plays Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, the frayed cigar hanging from his mouth the whole time, unlit, and, underfoot, his silk socks are tucked into velvet slippers monogrammed in gold, and in the corner the cat is squalling.

  Nägeli feels like a canary in a coal mine, awaiting the poisonous fumes. This is simply the most egregious lack of probity, as if this were all just a game, a circus attraction, a masquerade, as if there were not hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, just play money from a dollhouse, from a toy shop made of paper, this Zampanò Hugenberg, this puppet theater, this operetta, this buffoonery; hanging above him is the painting of a nude odalisque engaged in a staring contest with her friend, a skeleton.

  Nägeli speaks very quietly and guardedly of his filmic plans. He would really prefer that no one heard them. All the while Hugenberg raps on a high key with a forefinger swollen like a stuffed sausage, plink, plink, plink, always the same note.

  He wants to shoot a horror film? And do it all in Japan? Lips are pursed, bristly hair scratched, monocle jammed in eye and twisted out again, Nägeli, expecting to be thrown out immediately, takes a step backward toward the outer office, but Hugenberg raises his hand.

  Stop! Well, well. A bold idea. By all means. He was most favorably impressed by Shanghai Express. And boldness impresses him, too. And for an Asian thriller one absolutely needs boldness by the bucketful. He likes it, he likes it. Has Nägeli already thought of Anna May Wong? But hold on, it simply won’t work at all for Rühmann to act, too. How would that even look, a short blond like him among all those yellow people?

  Nägeli tries to banish all emotions from his face, but he does not need to; the dreadful man has hit on it, all by himself. Everything is of course going to be much, much more expensive, Hugenberg now says, puffing, two hundred thousand dollars won’t even come close to covering it.

  So let’s get around to the screenplay first. He’s heard his fiancée is already in Japan? Well then, she could—assuming she’s blonde (Nägeli nods, smoking, examining his gnawed fingertips)—play the oh-so-chaste girl who must be protected from the depravity of the undead.

  He’s thinking of Bram Stoker and Otranto and Nosferatu and so forth, sulfurous fumes, the young mademoiselle will naturally be bitten on the throat before she can be brought to safety. This is all construed narrowly and simply, there aren’t any grand options here; it needs evil on the one hand, sexually charged of course—Aryan innocence will be corrupted by the Asian beast (naturally it mustn’t be phrased like that to our Japanese friends)—and on the other hand there’s got to be an adversary for the undead antagonist who subjects him to the bright morning light at the end and kills him with, how could it be otherwise? a yew stake through the heart.

  Yes, of course, Nägeli lies, out of his depth, that’s roughly the film he’s envisioning, but Ida, she can’t act at all, and anyway: How can an aesthetic standard be applied to this? What Hugenberg is suggesting, after all, is just parody, or at best homage.

  Oh, patience. And above all intuition. He’ll figure it all out on his own, don’t worry. One has to listen to one’s inner voice, it’d be enough if he dipped his fingertips into the ocean of consciousness. Horror stories are universal, they’re all very much alike, it’s just a matter of variations on a theme. But what is he saying! Nägeli is the genius, after all, he’s the one who enjoys his fullest confidence, isn’t that so?

  All right, brass tacks: a half a million dollars are available to him, even Fritz Lang wouldn’t drum up that much these days after the Metropolis fiasco, Nägeli shouldn’t mull it over all too long because tomorrow the war chest might be shut again or, rather, might be opened elsewhere. Off the record: one portion’s from the Cinecittà and has to go back there, but what’s gone isn’t so easy to return, so this isn’t theft per se, but might instead be called relocation—Mysteries of the Economy, Nägeli, right?

  So, do they have an agreement? The fallboard of the piano is clapped shut to no applause, the masticated cigar laid not inelegantly on the edge of the instrument, the assistant barked in, she sails up among fluttering stacks of paper, a signature here, there, there, and here, and one more down there, no, at the very bottom right, please.

  Why don’t we add more to the bargain: Eight hundred thousand should suffice, no? And quite entre nous: Those Semites Kracauer and Eisner, they aren’t really part of his circle of friends, one does need to stick together a little more among Nordic types, doesn’t one? Exclusion is the magic word! Beware! And now: Champagne! And then: Time to leave, there’s the exit! He has four other appointments this evening.

  And while Nägeli totters out of the building after an elevator ride that lasts forever (but where, lonely, dying father, is he supposed to focus his imawashii gaze?), sinks down into the seats of the waiting limousine, and vows to himself never to drink alcohol again in this lifetime (in the car, the residual exhalations from the chauffeur’s hurriedly trodden-out cigarette smell terribly unappetizing), Hugenberg is standing upstairs at his picture window, legs astraddle, bellowing at his secretary that he will certainly not be sending a German director to those perverts in Japan, however unimportant he may be—that’ll be the day—they’re just going to have to make do with this Swiss dullard, have fun with him, and close the door if you would.

  And then he gazes out for a long while at the darkening metropolis below, and he sees before him that bizarre film, that documentation of death mailed to him from Japan, a flick that made him feel both pathos and arousal, and he cocks his head slightly, running his fingers through his bristly hair, and grins like the nasty swine he is.

  28.

  In the late afternoon Lotte and Siegfried board the night train to Paris from Lehrter Bahnhof with two or three suitcases in tow, in them the two little rolled-up Kandinskys, a few books, the long linen nightgown that belonged to Kracauer’s grandmother, some dried flowers, cigarettes, toothbrushes. A bundle of dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band is tucked into Lotte’s stockings.

  In the darkening club car they bid farewell to their Germany and drink sweet cider and do not speak of memory tattering before them. Whoever has not left his homeland in grief and fear cannot know how they feel and how sorry they are, not ever.

  At the French border in the dwindling light of early summer, they are waved through without further ado while other passengers are brusquely ordered into a wooden shed beside the tracks for further examination. No, their passports are in order, they needn’t produce their suitcases, the border patrol salutes them with two fingers to the uniform cap, then everyone is boarding again, a solitary whistle, hissing wheelworks, onward.

  Now, suddenly, sitting at the opposite table, across the aisle, is Fritz Lang, likewise en route to Parisian exile with a copy of The Testament o
f Dr. Mabuse in his luggage, as if a weary demiurge had devised this to be just so—and thus Lang is sitting on the same train in a yellow scarf, in the same club car even, and at this act of providence all seems like a new beginning.

  They take seats together straightaway, huddling up, smoking, calling for two bottles of red wine, for salty snacks, cocktail pickles, pearl onions, should they have any on board. My goodness, he really must finally tell of the debacle. Sure, gladly. Well, so, Thea of course stayed in Berlin, she made her choice, for Burgundy, as she put it, and Fritz was welcome to defect to Etzel’s dread encampment; and Lang, who rarely mixes art with life—but just this one time does—told her softly that she ought to know then who sets themselves on fire at the end.

  Thea was still cursing after him in the stairwell, and then she was standing on the balcony of their large flat at the corner of Ku’damm, her slender arms wrenched aloft, the taxi had already driven up, and she shrieked down a shrill cry of rage and horror about how he was actually making it come true, but Lang wasn’t listening anymore. She could keep slavishly kneeling before Hugenberg for all he cared.

  Lotte drains her glass in one approving gulp and tells Lang, who of course was lying a bit, about Emil Nägeli, who through some chicanery has been shipped off to Japan, and Lang, who regards Die Windmühle as one of the most important films of all time and Nägeli as a gigantic talent in a Switzerland not exactly amply endowed with great artists, does not quite understand what the plan was exactly, except that UFA has been cheated, which of course suits him quite nicely.

  Will Nägeli ever return, though? He’s neutral by birth, says Siegfried, which is why those imminent sinister upheavals in Germany won’t have any bearing on him, although on the other hand, Switzerland, at least the German-speaking part, will also be drawn into the new power brokers’ sphere of influence by personages like that unsavory Gustloff.

  Oh, luckily Paris is completely safe, my friends, smiles Lang, and Kracauer, who is already a great deal more inebriated than is good for him, replies that he’s so very much looking forward to exile, and it’s really quite splendid that they’ll be living in the cradle of civilization from now on, in the contrat social, and not in that ghastly, bloody Berlin morphologically characterized by meat (and in particular: by sausage).

  Besides, he didn’t even bother to give notice for the flat on Tauentzienstrasse, just tossed the key into the mailbox. The furniture matters to him not a whit, the landlord can keep it or sell it as he likes; even so, he’s just the very tiniest bit sorry about the Biedermeier secretaire, whereas the books can all be replaced.

  Outside the train windows, French hamlets bathed in yellow light whizz by like beehives tended at night, pollinated only by the rushing of the railroad as it races past.

  And forests! How differently, Lotte laughs, French trees do breathe, how those oaks outside, blurred by the speed of the night train, are free from that Teutonic blather about their German soil beyond the border just crossed, German soil that murmurs so magically, that squeezes allegedly Druidic energy up into their branches, that once even showed the Caesars how the heathen, chthonic principle of the Stag King expresses victorious strength, that could vanquish Latin decadence with the mossy strength of Germania’s primeval forests of oak. Mon Dieu!

  Here’s to that, says Lang, taking a sip of the club car wine and, soliloquizing and amused at himself, yanking his monocle out: I am now no longer Fritz Lang, I have crossed the border into exile and am Victor Hugo! Give me the Parthenon, the Alhambra, Notre-Dame, the Great Pyramid, the Uffizi Gallery, the porcelain towers of Esfahān; give me the Hagia Sophia, Borobudur, the Kremlin, El Escorial; give me cathedrals, mosques, pagodas; give me Phidias and Bashō, Dante and Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Lucretius, the Mahabharata and Job and Thoreau; give me the forests of France, the beaches of Indochina, the vast red plains of Ethiopia, the verdant hills of Connemara; give me a swarm of butterflies, the sea eagles over Alaska, the Sahara with its scorpions, Paris with its people; give me the Andes, the Pacific Ocean, a man, a woman, a graybeard, a child, the blue sky, the dark night, the timid minuteness of the hummingbird, the immensity of the constellations; it is all good; I like it all; I have no preference in ideal nor in infinitude. But don’t give me any more of this Heidelberg and Bach!

  During this drunken philippic, Lotte and Siegfried squirm about in their seats; it is almost insufferable. They have no inkling that Lang will shuttle back and forth between Paris and Berlin for an entire year afterward, carefully balancing out whether maybe something might perhaps be worked out with UFA after all.

  And so they smile bravely and sympathetically at Lang; God knows there are worse things than a temporary mental breakdown owing to their hurried getaway. The club car waiter has ducked out of sight so there is no more wine, and after a spell of further banter—during which certainly not a word is spoken about opportunism—they jerkily reach the first bleak suburbs of Paris, three Germans without their Germany.

  29.

  Many, many years, indeed, half an eternity later, a hulking giant dressed in black trudges across the snow-covered courtyard of his prison and clenches his frosty paws together. Underneath the wooden outhouse he has just exited, the urine he passed has long since frozen into a little yellow crystalline stalagmite. It is too cold for the birds, it is too cold to breathe, it is minus thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit in Iroquois Falls, Ontario.

  Ernst Putzi Hanfstaengl, interned in Camp Q (Monteith) in the rather inhospitable part of northern Canada, yanks open the wooden door to the shelter with worn, good-for-nothing leather gloves, slams it shut behind him with a bang, shattering icicles, takes a seat right next to the pathetically small woodstove, and writes a long letter to James Bryant Conant, president of his alma mater, Harvard, wherein he complains about the conditions of his imprisonment and requests to be sent, when convenient, a pair of heavy black oxfords, size 15D.

  Conant, who has been a vehement detractor of the new German regime since the early thirties, crumples up the letter unread, not even especially incensed about it—at most, irritated about Hanfstaengl’s chutzpah at writing him, of all people, from the camp.

  In any event, Putzi writes a great deal of letters, some to England, to Argentina, to his friend Charles Chaplin, and to the chairman of the Hasty Pudding Club, the solicitant, almost mendicant contents of which (he needs a piano more than anything) are reviewed by the Canadian military censor, blacked out in a few places, and then properly forwarded on. Mostly he reports for work duty in the nearby forest.

  A Viennese inmate with whom he has become friends gives him a red-and-black plaid Mackinaw jacket of heavy wool, which is supposed not only to keep him warm, but also to help him stand out while felling trees, because of its high color contrast, and not be shot inadvertently by trappers. Putzi is thankful to the extent that this is possible for him. During his internment he has cried at night only once.

  Amid the silent solitude of hard labor at the tree trunks, he is told the wolves will be coming down farther south than usual this winter, and after sunset at three or three thirty, he is frightened to hear them howling on the other side of the frozen lake.

  He is friends with the guards, as much as one can be; they sometimes slip him chocolate, once even a dried sausage, but Putzi has lost forty or fifty pounds, his chubby cheeks have grown taut, and from time to time, in the evening, he lays his last pair of black silk socks neatly beside one another on his humble bed, next to the stained, dog-eared score of the Goldberg Variations, and he gently strokes them flat.

  Perhaps he ought to try to escape, he must certainly still have friends on the West Coast, and from Vancouver he could either head down toward California and then to Mexico, or just stay on Victoria Island in that forlorn wooden cabin in Dollarton, with the Lowrys, whom he still knows from London—but how to traverse this immense continent unrecognized and without being followed? He will have to wait for summer, or at least until May.

  One evening around six o’clock�
��it is still the miserably cold month of March and snowing exorbitant flakes outside again—after the few warmer days of a false spring have deceived him with their hopeful mirth, he pulls off the boots and socks he has been trying to jury-rig with newspaper insulation the whole winter long, inspects his malodorous feet (three of his toenails have already fallen off), and discovers on the side of his right big toe the inflamed beginnings of frost-induced gangrene.

  He swears aloud in fear, slips back on his boots, which have essentially never deserved that name, and clomps out into the prison courtyard. The camp physician is only there two days a week; Putzi has long forgotten whether today is Tuesday or Thursday.

  Light is still shining from the barracks of the infirmary, and music is playing on the radio. An armed guard greets him in passing; he raps on the wooden doors with his knuckles and enters without waiting for a response.

  Dr. Lyle Bland lowers his newspaper and sighs, gazing up at Putzi with eyebrows raised, resignedly expecting another of Putzi’s innumerable suadas, but this Putzi merely wordlessly sheds the heavy wool jacket and then the right boot, clonks his gigantic naked dirty foot onto the stool, and points at his toe, there, at the spot that has grown hard and dark and feels numb.

  So you’ve come to me because of this measly thing, Dr. Bland says calmly, and Putzi, who has always gone rather meek when someone behaves with quiet authority and confidence, shrinks down a few millimeters to a more bearable level of boastfulness.

  The camp doctor examines the toe, bending it back and forth, tickles the shaded spot by gently rolling along its side his pale-violet pencil, and then on a loose slip of beige paper notes down with the same writing utensil that Putzi is exempted from forest labor until the spring and until that time is to receive double the wood ration for his stove. If it were to get worse, we’d need to operate, but for now we don’t.