The Traitor Blitz

by Johannes Mario Simmel

  "And what about the others, the democracies?" I asked.

  "Democracy is not an ideology," said Hem, "but here, too, my theory is valid. With one small qualification: when a democracy is very old and firmly established—as in England—then it is hard to destroy, even for the most corrupt. But it can be done. It's only more difficult. Take a look at America's Declaration of Independence. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.' Wonderful, isn't it? GreatI All men are created equal! And what's going on with the blacks in America? To what extent have corruption, power, and crime undermined that democracy? The pursuit of happiness—Who cares a damn about the millions in need in the United States? A few hundred American families own one quarter of the wealth of this earth! The right to live? If you walk through Central Park in New York City, even in the daylight, you stand a chance of being killed. There is no criminal record in the world to equal it. What went wrong with the Kennedys' murders? With the murder of Martin Luther King? All born free and independent. And what about Vietnam? Who is slaughtering the Vietcong over there in a war that's never been declared, slaughtering them like animals, vermin that have to be destroyed, so-called subhuman elements. It's the same thing everywhere, all the time. And always has been!"

  The second movement faltered, the main theme recurred, still full of hope, as opposed to the plaintiveness of the introduction. And there—a merry passage, brushing everything else aside, and as if released, violin and clarinet joined in.

  "Take a look at the programs of our Catholic Party and our Social Democrats," said Hem. "How much difference is there between them? Very little. Because in our time there really can be no other programs than those demanding an improvement of our social structure—health, prosperity, security, a stable currency, and cultural development. Who would dare to say in his program, 'We're not going to give the children a new gym; we don't care if they have potbellies!' Or any party that would say, 'We approve of marijuana!' They'd be booted out of political life! So party programs have lost all meaning. They're never fulfilled. They're nothing but propaganda to keep the various

  groups of cold egocentrics and status-seekers in power. Listen! That's the main theme of the last movement, but it can't get through; the suffering it's trying to replace comes in so much stronger. There... now we're in B Minor, and what follows is like a love dialogue, you could almost write the words. Do you feel it, too? Misery and fear, and now, in the third movement, the love theme from the introduction comes in again."

  Hem listened for a long time to the music of his genius; then he said, as if to himself, ^In the last analysis, only a primitive type can succeed in reaching his goals, a man who isn't intelligent or mature enough to really see through the situation. And this type, once he is in power, immediately says to himself, In order to remain in power, I have to get rid of my political opponents. I have to fill all positions with my people and—there you have it—'compromise, and come to some sort of pseudo-agreement with the enemy, whether it be church, communism, Nazism, hawks or doves, Democrats or Republicans—if I want to stay in power.' And with this primitive procedure, no system will ever represent the interests of the good, the decent, the poor, or the little man. Only the ones in power are served. You understand?"

  I nodded.

  "The primitive man's outcry is. 'I must stay in power!' The party member cries, 'Yes!' The primitive man has all he can do to eliminate and liquidate those who could endanger him and with whom no phony compromise is possible. Your question just now—'What about the Jews?' Hitler and his gangster friends knew that the Jews were smarter, that an older culture lay behind them. Why do I say 'older'? Culture is enough. The Nazis had none. And they also realized that their smartness gave the Jews power. It was therefore understood that the Jews would be Hitler's most formidable enemy and that his aim would have to be to bring the Jews down if he was to survive. So he made the fight against the Jews a part of his program, and once he had the power, he destroyed them. The Catholic Church knew very well that it was threatened by enlightenment, so—away with the forces of enlightenment. Stalin knew that the intellectuals, that anyone with independent socialist ideas, was a menace to him. So—kill and destroy them! The model American democracy feared that its exploitation and corruption would be exposed. The result: the McCarthy witch-hunt. Everyone who was not for the fanatic patriots of the New World, who raised his voice in doubt, had to be persecuted, was a—"

  "A communist," I said.

  "Right. A communist. He had to be locked up, he shouldn't be allowed to work, he had to be eliminated. And in one way or another, every crime on this earth arises out of this stupidity, this narrow-mindedness, this inferior thinking. Ignorance is our misfortune, not any basic evil in mankind."

  Through the open window, above the sound of the music, I could hear the laughter and cries of children playing in the park. "That's the way it is," said Hem. "That's the way it was and that's the way it always will be. Individuals or groups will abuse a correct teaching—there are so few anyway, at best the great religions, not those who preach them ... I don't count them —and use a correct teaching to further the development of their power. And the opposition movements all over the world today, who say all the things I just said, proceed blindly, pour out the baby with the bath water, and destroy the last remnants of order that are still worth anything. Inexperienced in the actualities of our condition, unthinking and revolutionary, the new prophets strike out indiscriminately at left and right, and smash everything that still manages somehow to hold the world together "

  Freedom. Hopeless. At least in the intermezzo. The violin sang blissfully; the woodwinds were joyous, too.

  Hem said, "Why am I saying all this? Why do I have to think about it all the time? Because you and I are faced with this phenomenon every day."

  "With Blitz?"

  "With Blitz" he said sadly. "There was a time, at the beginning, a time without ideologies and maxims and computers "

  "A good time," I said. Hem nodded and puffed on his pipe. "Because we had no ideologies," he said, 'no scheme, no dogmas. Today we can choose the best and cleanest theme—the minute we set it in this format of word and picture, it is corrupted. Look at your triumph! What is there to be said A eally against a serious series on sex?"

  "Nothing," I said.

  'Nothing. In our present age of communication, the theme of sex education should be welcome if—and here we go again—if the whole enterprise weren't organized so that Herr Herford and his mama might earn themselves silly...."

  "And I earn myself silly."

  "You and I and all of us," said Hem. "In the Bible Herf ord likes

  to read, it says, 'Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish/" He shook his head. "We are not going to repent. No one on this earth is going to repent. Not the little man, not the big man. And all of us will perish."

  The full orchestra tuned in once more, the violin quivered in tragic protest, then faded away—

  After all that had happened, I was able to talk to Fraulein Louise just as Pastor Demel had been able to. She had learned to trust me and knew that I meant no harm. That is why she could speak clearly with me about her friends.

  "There is one thing I don't understand," I said to Fraulein Louise during one of my visits.

  "Yes?" She smiled at me. Her hair was snow-white now; her face, as kindly as ever, as usual wore a slightly ecstatic expression.

  "You went to visit your friends on the moor at midnight on November twelfth?"

  "Yes. So?"

  "But already that afternoon, hours before your friends promised to help you, the French antique dealer, Andre Garnot, and the superintendent, Stanislav Kubitzky, were telling the police that they had witnessed a brutal murder attempt on our correspondent, Conrad Manners."

  "Yes—so?"

  "You've told me that Kubitzky and Garnot a
re your French and Polish friends, returned to life in the bodies of the two living men."

  "Yes. That's right. Why? I spoke to them both later."

  "That's just what I'm driving at," I said.

  "What are you driving at, Herr Roland?"

  "If Garnot and Kubitzky are really your two dead friends, then they must have gone into action many hours before you spoke to them. Long before they promised to help you. Now do you understand what I'm driving at? That afternoon your friends

  didn't know anything about your plan. How do you explain this time discrepancy?"

  "Time, he says." Fraulein Louise shook her head. "Herr Roland still talks about time after I have told him so much about infinity and eternity. Look here, Herr Roland, in that other world there is no such thing as time. Time is a wholly earthly concept. And why not? How could there possibly be time in eternity and and infinity? Would you mind telling me how long a few hours are there?"

  ««T *l "

  I can t.

  "You can't. And why can't you? Because if you could, there would be no infinity or eternity. Then we would be able to measure them as we measure time down here."

  Fraulein Louise shook her head and leaned forward a little. "You say 1 met my friends around midnight on November twelfth and they promised to help me," she said. "That's putting it in an earthly way. That's too simple. That's the way we dumb living creatures express ourselves. Pardon me, please. I didn't mean 'dumb' personally; you know that. Actually, I could have met my friends a thousand years ago or a thousand years from now—it would have come to the same thing. Because since there is no time in the beyond, time has no meaning. According to our stupid conception of time, my friends can move backwards and forwards in it, and can do something long before they have promised to do it... or much later. I'll say it again—there is no such thing as time in the beyond, and that is why the Frenchman and the Pole could be in Hamburg in the bodies of two living men before I talked to them."

  "So your friends acted before they received the impetus for their actions from you."

  "Expressed in earthly terms—yes. But expressed in the language of the beyond, they of course acted only after they had received an impetus. Because there is nothing illogical in the universe. Do you understand now? At least a little?"

  "A little," I said hesitantly, and thought of what Hem had told me that night in the booth at the Hamburg station.

  "When you think about it, in our life it's not so very different."

  "How do you mean that?"

  "Well... that we feel the effect of something before it has happened. Just think about it. Have you never felt sad and didn't know why?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Well, there you are! You were sad about something that hadn't happened yet, something that still had to happen. But your connection with the beyond—everybody has a connection with the beyond, a very fine one—let you sense what was going to happen, and that's why you were so sad. It was a moment in which you could see ahead. Where was time then? You see! In that moment you may even have known what was going to happen to you, but you didn't want to face it, so you thought it away. Only the sadness remained. If we poor living creatures can occasionally move between past, present, and future, you can imagine how well my friends can do it. For them there is no space and no yesterday or today—for them there is always only a tomorrow."

  "Yes. Now I think I know what you mean."

  "Well, at last! It's perfectly clear, isn't it?" And she laughed. "And please write all about it, about time and eternity—yes? And all about me, so that people can understand everything that happened. You have my permission. In writing."

  Yes, I had her permission in writing, and Fraulein Louise had accepted the money. But in court her release wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on. But then, Fraulein Louise and I were never going to have to face an earthly court together.

  "What did you do after you had talked this over with your friends?" I asked Fraulein Louise.

  "I acted right away," she replied.

  "Right away?"

  "I didn't have to go back to the camp. I had my bag with me, and my identification papers and money."

  "How much money?"

  "A little over four thousand marks."

  "What?"

  "Well, yes. The two thousand you gave me. and my savings. I never spent anything at the camp, had everything I needed, didn't I? So I had my salary, except for what I gave away." 206

  "Did you give a lot away?"

  She laughed happily and said, "With so much poverty around me, Herr Roland? Not that I did anything extravagant, but there were the children, poor things—"

  "But that you went off with four thousand marks in cash Wasn't that a bit risky?"

  "If I'd left the money at the camp, that would have been risky. Even if I'd hidden it. And why? Because they spy on me all the time—the women do—and in the end they'd have found it and stolen it."

  "You hid your savings?"

  "Yes. And in a very good spot. But then I thought, Who knows... perhaps they'll find it after all."

  "Why didn't you ever put your savings in a bank?"

  "Go away with your banks!" cried Fraulein Louise. "I've never trusted them, never! I can still remember in 1929, or after 1945—what people had put in the banks was gone! That's how easy the banks made it for themselves."

  "The money was worthless for those who kept it at home, too."

  "Is that so? Anyway, I didn't have any savings until after 1945. But if I'd had any, I'd never have put the money in the bank. I simply don't trust them."

  She was quiet for a while, then she changed the subject. "Of course I asked Pastor Demel, casually, with whom Irina had spoken on the phone; with this Herr Bilka, he told me, and that he had answered the phone, but then she hadn't been able to reach him any more. I wrote down the address of this man Bilka. And the telephone number. 2-2068-54. Right?"

  "And you still remember it?" I said, astounded.

  "Oh, I have a wonderful memory." She laughed again. "No. Not really. I was just showing off. Look, here's my litde notebook. At the time I wrote down everything in it." She showed me the notebook, imitation leather, the kind stores give away at the end of the year. Jens Fedrup, Grocery, was printed on the spine.

  "You were sure that I was taking Irina to Hamburg?"

  "Of course! You'd disappeared. Irina had disappeared. She wanted to get to her fianc6. You were a reporter. I'm not stupid, Herr Roland."

  "I know you're not, Fr&ulein Louise."

  "But how to get there in the middle of the night—that was a

  problem. First I walked back a ways. I thought I'd go to the Skull and Crossbones. There are often people there late. Such a silly name! It's a quiet little inn. Just one room. Only cold cuts to eat, but you can drink what you like. The innkeeper makes money on the drinks, and howl And all thanks to our camp." She nodded. "There are a few pictures of naked girls on-the walls, cut out of Playboy.'* (She pronounced the English word correctly.) "And a big juke box. The innkeeper bought it to get people in the right mood... terribly loud... Well, so I left the moor and walked back to the village and then—I thought I'd die—he came tearing around the curve, toward me..."

  The truck came silently, without lights. The driver had been in the Skull and Crossbones Tavern only three minutes before and had played one last dice game with camp driver Kuschke, taking his time about it. Only a few motorists and natives had been in the bar, and Kuschke talked for hours about the dramatic and bloody events at the camp that afternoon. His audience drank and shot craps and listened, duly indignant about it all. It had been Kuschke who had suggested they break it up. "It's time I got back," he'd said. He was pretty drunk as he started to go homel

  The driver was not drunk, just slightly tipsy. He got into his truck, started the motor, shifted into gear, and was off, too. The moon was shining brightly, which was why he didn't notice that he was driving with no lights. He only realized it when he turned a corner an
d suddenly saw a shadow ahead of him and then felt he had touched some solid object lightly with his right fender, and could see the shadow being flung to one side. This startled him so that he stalled the truck and it stopped abruptly. He got out, knees shaking, and walked around the truck to a ditch that ran alongside the road. Then he saw what the shadow had been—a little old woman, and she was lying motionless in the rushes.

  The driver said hoarsely, "Jezis Maria, doufdm ze se start pani nic nestalo!" With which he had reached Fraulein Louise. 208

  The fender had sideswiped her; she had fallen on soft ground and was now staring at the driver wide-eyed. Her hat was tilted to one side over her white hair, and she was clutching her bag with both hands.

  "What happened?" cried the driver, wide-awake suddenly and cold sober from the shock.

  Fr&ulein Louise just looked at him and said nothing.

  "Well?" said the driver.

  Fraulein Louise's eyelids fluttered and her lips parted in a smile.

  "So what is it?"

  Fraulein Louise asked in Czech, "Did you just say, *J esus Maria, I hope the old lady's all right?'"

  Delighted, the driver answered, also in Czech, "That's what I said, compatriot." Since she had addressed him with the familiar Du, he did the same. "So... are you hurt?"

  "Not in the least," said Fraulein Louise.

  He helped her to her feet. She brushed the dust off her coat, raised her arms, twisted her neck, and stretched. "Anyway, I don't think I'm hurt."

  They went on speaking in Czech. "It was my fault. I didn't have my lights on. I was in the tavern, and then, when I drove off-"

  "Yes," said Fraulein Louise, "you forgot to turn on your headlights." She put her face up to his and sniffed. "Compatriot, you've been drinking," she said.

  "Only three beers."

  "Don't lie to me—I can smell schnapps, too."

  "Well...a few...."

  "Don't you know that's a criminal offense, compatriot?"

  The wind from the moor was getting stronger. That was why Fraulein Louise hadn't heard the truck coming. "Were you at the tavern a long time?"