Stormfuhrer

by E. R. Everett

  “Too bad about that nurse orderly. I heard that she did a good job in the ward, for a Polish Jew, of course. Did you know her?” Hayes asked.

  “Who?”

  “The dark-haired girl that tried to escape through the fence.” He didn’t want to appear to show too much interest in revealing that he knew her name.

  “Oh, you're referring to Savina. Yes, she has lost a lot of blood, but she should recover. The bullet wound in her leg became infected, you know.”

  Richard was shaken. He asked as nonchalantly as he could, “She’s alive?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Why’d she do it? Wasn’t she treated okay, compared to some of the others? Where is she now?”

  “Why do any of them do it? Sometimes I wonder why we don’t.”

  “Don't? Don’t do what?”

  The doctor was hesitant. Then he whispered, “Kill ourselves in this gottverdammten death factory.”

  He thinks that she tried to commit suicide, Richard thought, and wondered why he hadn’t himself come to that conclusion. Wasn’t it obvious? She had run at an electrified fence, slowed only by meters of ditch and a wide mesh of barbed wire. She had had no chance of escape. This was indeed a death camp, and she was a prisoner wanting release. And she was being abused, perhaps regularly, by this bastard Heinrich Mauer. It certainly happened once--she had accused him of it, and it was clear that the man would have had other opportunities to attack her physically, despite losing his consciousness during the increasingly lengthy periods when Richard took control of the character’s . . . no, the man’s . . .body and mind. But it couldn’t have been an attempt at suicide. She was too strong; her will was far too resilient--he knew that just from their brief instances of contact. This is why the idea of suicide hadn't come to him. Perhaps she just wanted to end up here, in the camp’s infirmary.

  She hated him as Heinrich; She didn’t know him as simply Richard Hayes. He hadn’t had the chance to really explain it to her, though he had made the one frail attempt. Of course, she would think it nonsense if he tried again, as his attempt had perhaps revealed, especially coming from someone who appeared on the surface to be one of the worst of what the enemy could be.

  Savina was alive. He would have to stay here as long as he could and await her recovery. He couldn’t be discharged from his current role now, not until he’d had a final chance to talk with her. Sure she wouldn’t believe it. But maybe as surreal as this place was, as incoherent as any of this chaotic veneer of order--or more appropriately, a framework of order for the sake of invoking chaos--actually was, just about anything could be believed, and the truth would certainly fall under the category of “just about anything.”

  The doctor motioned Richard to his office, which was only a room away from the examining room. He brought the green files with him. He wanted to show Mauer pictures of normal brains and those with tumors that had resulted in acute amnesia. Richard sat on the doctor’s desk as if it were his office, trying to recreate something of an arrogant demeanor in an attempt to get into character. He lit another cigarette and offered one to the doctor who declined. Hayes flipped through pictures.

  He questioned the Nazi doctor, trying to stay as hypothetical as possible. “Ever think about it, Doctor? Killing yourself?” The doctor didn’t look up from his reading. He wanted to show Mauer a page from a psychological journal that would help make more sense of the photographed images he was flipping through. “I think about it all the time,” Richard threw in, so as to make the conversation about him, his illness, and thus lead the doctor away from the idea that this SS officer was asking about the health of a Jewish girl from Poland, a non-person in the eyes of the Reich. The doctor seemed guarded and picked up a random file, appearing to look through it.

  Richard had a thought that had come to him during the flow of conversation. He really cared about Savina. Even if she wasn’t real, in the sense of flesh and blood, she was more real than any woman whom Richard Hayes had met. He loved her in the only bizarre, terrible way that he could, which didn’t make any more sense than the camp itself or this game, or anything. He hadn’t fully realized it until he heard that she was still alive. He thought for sure that she had died, but there had been a faint whisper in his mind that perhaps she hadn’t died, an inkling of a thought of which Richard himself hadn’t been fully aware, keeping him from surrendering to a feeling that would have been akin to the words of a prosecutor pronouncing his own death sentence.

  Now that she was alive again, as if willed to life by his own self-sustaining need, his role in the game had to change. He hated the options before him, but there was really only one choice to make, now that his feelings for her were clear. If he got near her again, alone, what then? The Internet connection could suddenly fail, as it had done on occasion, and there she would be, alone with the demon, Mauer. He had to get Mauer as far from her as possible. If he had to never see her again to spare her from the hands of a monster like Heinrich Mauer, then that was the final word. But his life without her in it was a glass completely empty.

  Finally, the tall, thin, middle-aged doctor dragged the stool close to where Richard was sitting on the doctor’s desk. “You care for this girl,” he said, frowning, shaking his head. “I see that. It wouldn’t be the first time. I saw it at Buchenwald. So, you want me to fix her so that you can again hurt this girl you care for, correct? Or should I say, in the parlance of the Party, that she is non-human, like the rest, and ask you why you care so much for this . . . animal?”

  Hayes had no idea that his questions had revealed so much. He certainly didn’t think of her as non-human, though as a computer player she was certainly that. But Mauer did. A thought occurred to him once again . . . could she really be an avatar?

  “She has use,” he replied.

  “Indeed. Perhaps more than her duties in the infirmary suggest? Perhaps she can do more than clean bedpans and ladle soup to your . . . kapos . . . when they come in with strange infections from the brothel at the corner barrack.”

  “I’m not liking your tone, doctor.” Hayes was pretending anger. “Rewarding kapos with such privileges keeps them from thinking too much of what it is that they’re made to do here. They are betrayers of their kind, but to keep them useful we can’t let them dwell on it. We must supply diversions. And we can’t run this camp with just the SS. There aren’t nearly enough of us.”

  “I don’t judge, Herr Mauer. I only see my role here as . . . ironic.” Hayes completely understood the doctor’s meaning. Here was a man expected to heal those soon to be gassed anyway or worked to death. Here was one of the men whose job it was to make the quick decisions upon each detainee’s arrival whether he or she was healthy enough for hard labor. The others were gassed or sent to another camp where they would be gassed. Those in the first category would likely die in a few months anyway. The life expectancy for the average prisoner was only a few months.

  Was the doctor one of the “good Nazis”? Did he really care about his patients? Hayes ventured a statement that he knew could cost him the game. “They are like us as much as we say they aren’t. Killing them or just letting them die--both are murder. Not just Savina. All of them have value. They’re all human, Doctor. I think we both know that.”

  The doctor looked casually into Mauer’s eyes. It was clear he didn’t trust Mauer to say what Mauer really thought. He was a manipulator. He didn’t even seem shocked, though he might have if he had thought Mauer was being candid. “Then you are a murderer.”

  “As are you Doctor.”

  The doctor nodded imperceptibly.

  They sat silently in the room for several minutes, each clearly wanting to trust the other with their truest sentiments regarding the war, the Jews, the Leader. Hayes broke the silence first. “Clearly neither of us likes what we are doing here.”

  “Clearly.”

  “How do we make it stop?”

  The doctor shook his head, looking at the floor. The wispy gray hair only partially covere
d his otherwise spotted pinkish-white scalp.

  “I’m getting out of this,” Richard whispered. “I want to be able to trust you when the time comes.”

  The doctor looked at his hands. “I know what kind of man you are. You would say or do anything that served you for the moment.”

  Hayes felt a slight sting from the comment but understood. “I’m not that man.”

  The doctor looked at him and smiled. “Even if you weren’t, I couldn’t help you any more than you could help yourself by simply walking out the front gate. Driving would be more practical though.”

  “What if we took over this camp? We could let everyone go and get ourselves out of here, to Switzerland, maybe. Let them scatter in all directions while we simply vanished! We'd make them think we were tracking down prisoners, giving us plenty of time to get hundreds of kilometers away.”

  “If you tried, I would take sides against you,” the doctor replied, firmly.

  “So you enjoy being a murderer?”

  “I enjoy the idea of my wife and children staying alive. They would be murdered by the Gestapo if I were to participate in such an insane plan.”

  Hayes had finally crossed the line. His position in the game, his avatar's career, his implicit “score,” was no longer important.

  “Living isn’t the same thing as just existing, Doctor!” Hayes exclaimed as he jumped up from his chair and ran into the examination room. He had seen a large syringe filled with a clear liquid, residing in an ominously open box. Instinctively, he knew its purpose. He reached across the metal table and grabbed the syringe. He stabbed his own chest with it one time, deeply, leaving the needle nestled well between two left ribs. By now the doctor had entered the room and lunged at him, trying to keep him from pressing the piston into the liquid. Mauer's own blood began to swirl into the now pink liquid of the syringe as the doctor wrestled feebly with it. The syringe stuck out horizontally from Richard’s chest, empty, lodged there and suspended by the thick needle.

  “You stupid man!” The doctor was breathless and leaned against the table.

  In moments, the tiled floor met the side of Heinrich’s face. Richard’s head jerked inside the helmet as it filled with darkness and cold silence, save the rhythm of his own quick breathing. He sat there, wondering whether outside the helmet there was daylight or night or something in between. Ultimately it didn’t matter. That was the end of Heinrich Mauer.

  January 1940

  A pale, emaciated, but fully-formed death mask stared blindly from the wall and past the Reichsminister’s bony left shoulder. Just below it, a huge globe of the World sat in a wooden frame of semicircles, like ribs meeting around the dead amber heart of a giant.

  The face that met Farash was equally thin, the eyes set back in the skull of its owner, dark in their recesses but bright with ideas. The man’s brown, double-breasted suit jacket enclosed a long torso below a wondrously thin neck. His nose was sharp, angular above a thin and lipless mouth.

  Here was one of the most powerful men in Germany standing before Farhat Farash’s avatar, Karl Ernst Krafft. Smiling, this short and skinny man who couldn’t have weighed more than two sacks of Indian grain was convincing a nation that the Jew, making up only two percent of the population, was Germany’s biggest threat. Farash didn’t linger much on that. He was out to not just survive the game but to become the Fuhrer himself, the next fuhrer. It had to be possible. To do this, he would prove to the Fuhrer through this thin man how winnable the war was for Germany. Farash had the hindsight of history and could frame his exceptional foreknowledge as a supernatural thing. He wasn’t a man from the future but a mystic in whom Hitler would trust completely. Ultimately to become Fuhrer must be the point of the game, the ultimate win--to gain the trust of the most evil man in history, to prove his merit in a political battle that would so gain the trust of the man that he would name him his second. THAT was his method of winning. It was the only method of winning that Farash could see. To win the game he would have to become Hitler’s Deputy Führer, his second in command, his heir. Then, he would kill Adolf Hitler.

  To do this, he had to show up Goebbels, to put the Reichsminister of Propaganda, and others, in bad graces with the Führer, to have Goebbels disgraced by mere comparison to the brilliant strategies proposed by Farash through the supernatural knowledge of his avatar, Karl Krafft. Getting close to Goebbels in this way, and so quickly, couldn’t have been a coincidence—it must be an element of the Game. This would have been all but impossible in the reality. But Farash had one power over the propagandist that would put him at an infinitely greater advantage. He had history. He knew, as any high school world history teacher would, of the blunders that took the German Fuhrer from the world stage, premature with regard to his arrogant and mistaken designs.

  The Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had stood up from his studded maroon leather chair. He didn’t even pretend to be busy doing something else when Farash, in the form of Krafft, the Swiss astrologer, was led in by an SS guard. The thin man in the double-breasted suit met Krafft in front of his desk. In some ways they were remarkably similar--both about the same height with dark hair combed straight back, oiled. Only Krafft was slightly taller and much better looking than the man with the cavernous eyes.

  “Mister Krafft, I am Joseph Goebbels.” They shook hands. The thin man was very friendly, steating himself casually at the front edge of his own desk. “Please.” He pointed to a chair in front of the desk where Krafft was to sit. The man then sat back down behind his desk.

  Farash directed his character to sit, smiling, making consistent but deferential eye contact with the speaker. He was nervous. It was a game, but he was unaccountably nervous.

  “I hear you saved our Fuhrer’s life.” It sounded more like a statement than a question.

  “He saved his own life, Herr Reichsminister, by believing in the truth of my note.”

  “Yes . . .Yes. So what powers do you have? I understand you are an astrologer.” The thin man’s elbows were on his desk, his long fingers folded together under his narrow chin.

  “I can predict things. Things that matter.”

  “Predict something,” responded the Reichsminister, obviously amused, “something that can be easily verified, like what I will say next.”

  Farash had almost responded, “As I said, I predict things that matter,” but that would have been a clear insult. He must mount the horse before spurring it, he thought. Instead, he said, “Events are chain reactions, and there are two theories with regard to future events. Either the future is set in stone and we cannot change it no matter what we do, or the future changes with each action taken that is divergent from its current path.”

  “Which means?”

  “If I predict something and it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t going to happen the moment I predicted it.”

  “Ah. So you are of the second school of thought, that the future is changeable. That is very convenient for a soothsayer, isn’t it?” Goebbels leaned back in his chair, smiling, comfortably repositioning himself but without taking his eyes off Krafft.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Well, if you say that lightning will strike that pole outside in sixty seconds and it doesn’t, well now, that’s okay because perhaps an uncertain event occurring between the prediction and the event kept it from happening, like a crow or something might to fly into the cloud, causing the lightning to re-target itself. Perhaps the wind shifts ever so slightly because of the crow’s flight. That wind stirs up the static molecules in the dark cloud that would have produced the lightning, but it doesn’t. That sort of thing.”

  “I suppose so, though it isn’t likely a crow could alter the path of a lightning strike.”

  “Indeed. Then what makes this crow so out of the ordinary?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “In other words, why did not the crow figure into the original prediction of lightning striking the pol
e? What made it a thing outside of your original prediction? Certainly, it should have been figured into the equation by the one doing the predicting and thus no prediction concerning the lightning and the pole could have been made, assuming the prediction were accurate and the soothsayer not a pretending fool.”

  Farash was silent. If the Reichsminister and Farash had been playing a game of chess, Farash would have already lost his queen.

  “So is it true,” the Propaganda Minister continued, “that some predictions are truer than others in your expert astrological opinion? That some predictions take into account more variables leading to the occurrence, making them more accurate?” Goebbels was giving him a pass, probably the last he would receive.

  “That is it exactly. One prediction can be assumed superior to another if it takes in the greatest percentage of accurate factors.”

  “Perhaps, then,” the man behind the desk went on, seemingly impressed with his own deductive capabilities, “the prediction made closest in time to the event would prove most accurate, having the least number of variables that could interfere with the chain of events leading to the predicted event.”

  “Yes. That’s also true.” Farash knew better than to give in too easily, but he didn’t seem to have a choice.

  “Yes.” The speaker paused, one finger touched his nose and then pointed to the ceiling. “Yes. Of course, there is the other possibility. The first school of thought that you had mentioned. The one that states that the future is unchangeable, predetermined by the first cause, that all factors should already have been taken into account by a legitimate soothsayer as they are unchangeable, and that those who say otherwise to hedge their predictions as resting on possibly uncertain or merely intervening variables . . . are . . . mere frauds?”