Krafft was again silent. Why had the Reichsminister called him here if he simply wanted to accuse him of fraud? If he were to be tried as a conspirator, it wouldn’t be necessary for him to be brought here first. He would simply be executed--after signing a confession of course, saying that he knew of the bomb plot against the Fuhrer through his own traitorous connections. “He is playing with me,” he thought. “He wants to take the superior role. He believes that I may be able to predict future events or else I wouldn’t be here. But in any case, he doesn’t want to acknowledge that such a power would give anyone that much control.” Or maybe he had already made up his mind that Krafft had been part of the bombing conspiracy and--torture having been completely unsuccessful with the man--simply wanted to whittle him down to a nub of information-providing graphite through rhetorical fencing, of which Joseph Goebbels was a master.
After a long pause, “I understand that the Fuhrer believes that I am not a fraud. Otherwise, I would already be dead.” Farash was taking a big risk.
“Hmm.” Goebbels stared into the eyes of his frail adversary. “Are you a fraud, Mr. Krafft?”
“I am not a fraud. And if I might be allowed, I can further prove it.”
“Please continue.” The man leaned back in his chair.
Farash paused, thought, but decided it was worth the risk. He remembered a number of trivial facts from Goebbels’ diary, which had been published piecemeal and in 2023 still didn’t exist as a complete historical document. “Respectfully, Herr Reichsminister, you didn’t start out as an anti-Semite.”
“What is that?”
“You had a Jewish professor that you admired greatly at Heidelberg. You must have learned much from him.”
Goebbels reflected, unfazed. “That is true. Of course, no farmer begins his vocation with a true understanding of the worm’s role in destroying his fields. Once he sees and experiences the problems caused by the parasite, however, his view of the worm changes. These bits of a man’s history can be found out with little effort. Go on.”
Krafft closed his eyes, as if concentrating deeply. He placed the fingers of both hands to his avatar’s forehead. “You vehemently defended the Jews to your lover, Anka . . . or Anda, who wrote to you that Jews were ‘as greedy as pigeons after a crust of bread.’”
“Some of my letters are missing. I believe them to be in the hands of my enemies. Perhaps you know their whereabouts?”
Silence. Farash was trying to dig more out of his stubborn memory.
“Go on.”
Krafft continued. “You were in love with her, but with a clubbed foot, you hesitated to make love to her, thinking she would reject you. In fact, you never made love to her. Respectfully Reichsminister, and I only say this to prove that I am who and what I say I am, you only first made love to a woman just after your 33rd birthday.”
The Reichsminister stared intently at his guest. Farash had taken a big chance. A part of him wondered how such candor would be viewed by such a spinner of self-created truths that were regularly conveyed as genuine facts.
After a time, Goebbels nodded. “Have you read from the works of Nostradamus?”
“Not really.”
“You will.” He took out a book from his desk entitled The Quatrains of Michel de Nostredame. It had been translated into German, its original publication dated 1555. Goebbels turned to a dog-eared page and handed it to him across the desk. “You may find a more far-reaching enlightenment in there.”
Farash flipped through the book of poems, all grouped in lines of four. He read one of the quatrains aloud.
An emperor will be born near Italy,
Who shall cost his empire dearly;
It will be said by those who gather around him,
That he will prove to be less a prince than a butcher.
“One of the Medici?” Farash inquired.
“Mussolini.” Goebbels corrected.
“Are you sure?”
“Does it matter? What matters is how convincing you can be of your own interpretation.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
Goebbels grinned. “It’s not about what it says or even about what it really means. It’s about what you can convince people to think it means. Turn to quatrain five dash twenty-nine.”
Krafft turned to the stanza mentioned and read aloud:
Liberty will not return,
They shall be occupied by a dark, fierce, sinful villain;
As the laws of the people will be overruled
By Hister, and Italy, a fascist republic.
“Hister?”
“Hitler or perhaps Ister—the Latin name for the Danube River, near which the Führer was born. Nostradamus played with names, some believe, to hide the truths of his prophecies from those who would have him burned for witchcraft. He was obsessed with a ruler named ‘Hister.’ Some said that maybe his oracular chickens just pecked at a few of the wrong letters and really meant ‘Hitler.’ Now read quatrain two dash twenty-four.” Farash as Krafft obeyed.
Wild men insane with anger will cross the rivers,
The largest part of the battle will be against Hister;
In steel armor they will make their great attack,
As Germany's child heeds no one.
Krafft looked up from the thick, heavy book and toward the enormous globe. Through the lens of history, he knew that the “wild men insane with anger” could easily be the Russians from the East or the advancing Americans and British from the West—or both. He thought on Hitler’s stubborn refusal to accept defeat until the very end, spending his last days in a Berlin bunker, even while the Red Army approached from only a few kilometers away. Krafft looked at the propaganda minister.
“So. You want me to find out what happens to Germany by reading this? Doesn’t look good, but the words seem pretty elusive. Could be taken to mean anything.”
The Reichsminister looked disappointed. “I want you to find Germany’s victory in that book and publish it. I will distribute what you publish to the masses. It will help the war effort.”
“And if it says that Germany will fall. . .”
“It won’t because you won’t let it.”
“Do you believe what this book may actually be saying, that there may be actual truth in here?”
Goebbels again looked disappointed. “It doesn’t matter what it says, only what you can make it say. Do I personally believe that Nostradamus was an accurate predictor of future events? Not really. His words are too nebulous and his images too blurry to be of any real use in that regard. Neither matters. What matters is what you can make others, who are gullible enough to take a side, believe what you want them to believe. Mr. Krafft, I have the tendency to think you an absolute fraud, a dangerous prevaricator, an enemy of Germany and possibly a man with detailed knowledge regarding the highest levels of resistance against National Socialism in this country and maybe even abroad. But you convinced our Fuhrer of your veracity, and thus barely saved your life. I can use a man who can do that. At the same time, your reactions to certain points of our discussion paint you as naive, an innocent and simple-minded man with powers, if he had them, that he couldn’t begin to use to the Reich’s advantage. Thus, I choose not to take a side with you, Mr. Krafft, one way or the other. I only wish for you to work for me here in the Ministry of Propaganda. You will interpret Nostradamus, convincingly, as one who, four hundred years ago, predicted the rise and thousand-year perpetuity of the Third Reich. As you read through this book, what you might think this occult prophet may have actually meant in any particular line is completely immaterial.”
Soon Krafft was led to a small office where he was confirmed in his new role as secretary to the Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Alone, and under constant surveillance, he would work to find in the stanzas of Nostradamus a glowing future for Germany and its Third Reich. His new cell in the old Leopold Palace now had tall windows, a wide desk, and a clean, waxed floor.
CHAPTER 8
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br /> Summer 2023
As if life could continue as before.
Before . . . before was what? What was there before? There was nothing before the game, nothing that Richard could fathom as anything nearly worth obsessing over, aside from an estranged family that did not care to contact him--though he had made his own attempts, in a way.
Fraulein came to his knee and licked it as he sat on the couch; he surfed the cable channels on his giant flat-screen, wondering what sorts of channels he was actually paying for. He remembered that he was on a minimum plan with regard to his cable channels—a term applicable now to pretty much all of life’s required exertions and expenditures, except with regard to the Game.
He patted the dog on the head and switched channels. She gave a low whine. Apparently, she wanted something. He flipped to the local news, always amusing on those rare occasions that he watched it. There would be rain, lots of it, coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. It was still only a tropical storm, but it was sitting in warm water, building strength, had been for a day or so.
Richard's water boiler in the kitchen clicked off, and he got up to make some tea. Grabbing a canister from the kitchen area shelf, he pulled out a packet of generic green tea and opened it, placing the tea bag in a yellowing German bierkrug that he used for pretty much all hot drinks. Another part of him remembered that he hated tea, especially green tea. Tea gave him nausea and bad dreams, particularly if drank it right before bed. It was 3:17 A.M. and he knew he’d be sleeping soon. But didn’t he always drink green tea before bed?
Letting the tea steep in the boiled water, Richard Hayes fed his dog with a mixture of kibbles and dry cat food. Adding cat food was the only way he could get Fraulein to eat right away. Otherwise, the dog food would sit there until extreme hunger brought her to it. He scooped a good portion of the mixture from a lidded 20 lb. trash can into her metal bowl. She trotted immediately to it, sniffed it, and looked up at him, staring as if he had done something wrong. Her left eye was blue. Richard was startled at this and then was instantly startled that he had been startled. When did the eye change color? Hadn't one of her eyes always been blue? No, he would, of course, have remembered. He leaned against the counter, watching her. She eventually walked back to the couch and jumped on it, looking in his direction, as if a remaining glance might get him to change his mind about the food.
He sipped the tea again and winced. A succession of five electronic beeps followed, and he remembered that he had put a frozen dinner in the microwave, though he couldn’t remember what kind. Swedish meatballs, he finally recollected.
Hadn’t one eye always been blue?
The futon brought a welcome sleep, and he awoke the next morning at 10:05 with the realization that today was Saturday. It was October, and Richard heard and felt the wind against the side of his A-frame house. The compression of it made the floor shake lightly. Fraulein looked up from the foot of the futon to sniff the air. She whined briefly and lay her head on the cover, raising one eyebrow and then the other as she looked past Richard and out a small, round window at the top of the wall, just above the beast of an aircon unit.
Now what. Nothing came to mind for Richard this windy Saturday but thoughts of the game. He thought of Savina, safe . . . if the word could apply, healing in a concentration camp on the other side of the world and over three-fourths of a century ago.
Mr. Farash hadn’t seen his wife in weeks. He practically lived at the high school after school hours, and an occasional late night phone call to his classroom would always result in an answer from the man, though one short and laconic. Amala even came to see him a few times, always calling first. He was always alone, and always absorbed in thought. He was doing “research,” the kind requiring a tremendous amount of computing power, something they couldn’t afford in their modest apartment just above a store in town that sold flowers, mums, high school spirit shirts, and various birthday party supplies.
This, however, had been the longest time that he had been gone. Weekday mornings he woke up, showered in the locker room near the gym, got dressed from the clothes hanging in a locked metal cabinet in his room, taught for the day, and then when the workday was over, he would sneak into one of Hayes’ completely enclosed cardboard cubicles and return to the Game.
There was a time when he had to look out for his colleague, as Hayes himself would sometimes spend a night in his classroom. Lately, though, Richard Hayes had been staying away from his classroom outside of school hours. He no longer came on weekends. In fact, he’d even started to use his sick days regularly, once or twice a week. Mr. Farash was thus nearly free to play the game just about whenever he wanted. He had even obtained a copy of the master key from a coach down the hall. Hayes wouldn’t care. Farash figured that Richard was just as addicted to the game as he was—probably more. If he happened to find Farash in his room, he’d understand. Farash would make him understand.
Finally, Farash had decided to “borrow” a computer from Hayes’ classroom, rather than continue his clandestine visits under the cover of late hours. Farash had timed visits to Richard’s classroom during different periods of the school day in effort to determine which computers weren't being used. He rarely complained about his students anymore. They were merely . . . friendly visits involving occasional questions regarding the vertical alignment strategies that the Social Studies department had set up for the year. In this way, Farash had determined that a few of the computers against the outer wall remained unused throughout the day. They were extras. None of Hayes’ classes contained more than twenty-two students. Farash could remove a computer from a desk console and the loss would remain unnoticed unless someone tried to turn the thing on. That would only happen if one of the other computers malfunctioned somehow. But these computers were tanks. Aside from one catching fire some time back--which was the fault of the storm, not the unit itself--they never seemed to need repairs, as far as Farhat Farash could tell. It was no more than a matter of removing four screws from the metal plate in the back; detaching the relevant cables and wires; sliding out the gray brick of wires, fans, cable ports, and processors; then replacing the plate and screws. He also grabbed a pair of studded interactive gloves and an extra helmet from the back cabinet, bringing all back to his apartment in a cardboard box that once held reams of paper.
He set the gray brick in a shoebox upon a small desk, stacked with books in the corner of the second bedroom. It was referred to as the “junk room,” though Mrs. Farash certainly didn’t like the term, filled with boxes of clothes and nicknacks, most piled onto a twin bed. It was where the baby would sleep, were one ever to materialize. Farash made a small nook by piling up the boxes and books into two makeshift walls, hiding himself and his precious boon in the corner, away from the incurious eyes of his beloved wife. This was now his sacred “place of meditation.” Namaste.
February 1940
“Well?” Goebbels seemed more friendly than usual during their morning walk amongst the snow-laden trees around the former Leopold Palace courtyard. A statue of General Leopold stood in the center while SS men could be found at nearly every building corner and on every rooftop in the vicinity. Only designated officials were allowed near the Ministry building.
“I have several quatrains that may interest you. This one foreshadows the Fuhrer’s successful takeover of Britain.” Farash as Krafft began:
The grand empire will quickly be reduced
To a tiny area, which shall soon after expand;
An unsavory place in a small country,
In the middle he will come to lay down his scepter.
The Reichsminister walked quietly, thinking, looking into the surrounding Linden trees that, undisturbed, might continue to grow for centuries. “I see,” he remarked. “Britain is the 'grand empire,' which shall be 'quickly reduced' by the armies of the Third Reich. But what I don’t understand is what makes the 'small country' unsavory? And, in what way will our Fuhrer lay down his scepter? Isn’t that more an image of def
eat?”
Farash was silent. Both kept walking. The snow crunched beneath their boots as they slowly strolled along the edge of the courtyard. “As you say, a man can paint a place as savory or unsavory, meager or powerful. ‘A mind is its own place, and can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.’” Farash was quoting Satan from John Milton's Paradise Lost. The irony was apparently lost on Goebbels.
“And how would you do this?”
“England will be reduced by our bombing campaign. When we have destroyed it and made it ‘unsavory,’ we shall then expand its potential by making it our jumping off point for an invasion of the western hemisphere. The scepter will be laid down by the Fuhrer--perhaps a giant statue of a man holding a burning scepter on the westernmost point of England, showing that we have taken all of Europe and will soon shine the light of National Socialism across the Atlantic.”
“That could work,” Goebbels remarked. “Or it could be interpreted as our creating a historical prognostication after the fact.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing? I . . .”
“No. Your job is to look into the quatrains for events that are occurring now and could not possibly have happened as a consequence of conscious interference, of merely creating events to coincide with Nostradamus’ four-hundred year old predictions.”
The two were silent. His remaining ideas involving the quatrains surrounded just that--events that could be created to seem as if they coincided with Nostradamus’ esoteric words, not events that were currently in play--or even would be.
The clouds over this section of Berlin were growing especially dark. In his corner of the junk room Farash could feel in his blanketed corner the chilling stillness of the morning air—though late night surrounded him in his apartment. Farash himself took snatches of sleep only when he knew he would pass out otherwise though he had always needed very little sleep, even as a child.
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