Stormfuhrer

by E. R. Everett

  Savina still believes me to be Mauer. She thinks I have a split personality, so I’m going along with it. It will be some time before she really understands. I have her tie me up when I feel “the change” coming on, which for me really means that I’m just dead tired. When I feel myself dozing off, I direct Savina to tie the appropriate knots that will keep Heinrich incapacitated until I come back. Then I sleep.

  There have been some rare occasions that we were both conscious at once—in those few seconds between sleep and waking. When I half-doze after days of being awake, I felt him . . . yes felt him, urging up from within, like some tentacled creature rising up from a black tar-pit, wrapping my head in a cold, numbing embrace. My arms begin to move on their own, my frame becomes heavier. It’s chilling and seems to happen both in the game and in me, in my physical body. But it only lasts for a few seconds until either I wake up and take full control or fall into oblivion.

  She is learning to call me Richard when I’m not Heinrich, the tied down monster of the Schutzstaffel. There have been times after waking, with my helmeted head back against the chair, that I can’t move. That my arms are welded to my sides, my ankles clinging together as if magnetized. Again, lasting only some seconds, and then I’m back in the game, where, of course, my functioning is minimal until Savina unties the ropes, which she does once I tell her something Mauer wouldn't know. What is it about her? Her quickness of wit? The lack of any contrived girly squeamishness on any subject of conversation? She’s young, 25? 30? There's so much else to discuss that age has never come up.

  I woke up several hours ago with my hands around Helmut’s neck. He was yelling. Greta was screaming. Savina was trying to pull me off of him. I recoiled and collapsed on the floor. They both left hastily up the stairs and out of the cellar. They would have locked it but for Savina who followed them, pleading for understanding regarding my “condition,” using her body to keep the little door from shutting until she was able to make her case. She was gone for a long time. She then returned.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That you were ill. Mentally ill since birth. Seizures.”

  “Did they buy it?”

  “Not at first, since you and Helmut had been arguing about the war and it just sounded like an excuse for rude behavior.”

  I was confused. We were discussing the war and were in total agreement. It was clearly Mauer who had taken over at some point.

  Savina continued. “I fell asleep. When I awoke, you were shouting at Helmut, calling him an enemy of the Reich and the Fatherland. You said that Germany would never fall, and that collaborators like Helmut should just turn themselves in. Why were you so upset?”

  “I tell you it wasn’t me. It was Mauer! You’ve gotten used to him not being around very much, but when I sleep, in my home 83 years from now . . . he wakes up in this body. This IS his body.”

  “Explain it to me again.”

  “I am Richard Hayes, an American teacher living in the early 21st century,” I whispered, which was all I could seem to muster.

  She was silent, as she usually was when I tried to explain my actual situation. Then, she looked at me, closely. She searched my eyes. She seemed to know that it wasn’t Mauer and it wasn’t illness. It was a different man from the one that threatened the old man and hurt her those months back. I just looked at her and shook my head. “I’m not Mauer.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Really?”

  “Mauer referred to himself as ‘Schutzstaffel Stürmfuhrer Heinrich Mauer’ to the old man. You don’t ever do that. You've never discussed your rank.“

  “No, I don’t care about rank.“

  “You’re not him.” Before I could respond she kissed me heavily, pressing me back to the ground, holding the back of my neck with one hand, the other on my chest. I was still in ropes. I didn’t believe it myself, but I could feel her touch through the helmet, across my ribs and neck. It was real! I was kissing the most incredible woman I had ever known, and I felt her on my lips, my neck, my chest as I sat at my desk wearing the helmet.

  She untied me. We sat in the cellar and stared at the opposite wall for thirty minutes or so talking about where we'd go from here. Then, “Some part of me always knew you weren’t that bastard.” It must have taken a tremendous amount of faith on her part, considering what she's been through.

  “You know, you do that from time to time.”

  “What?”

  “Lapse into a kind of English. It is English, isn’t it?

  I mean the word order. You sometimes get it wrong, like you're thinking in another language while using German words. Heinrich never did that. He always spoke in perfect German. Your German is full of pauses, and it’s sometimes not quite right. I’ve never been around English people.

  “It’s been over 80 years since this war where I am, physically, right now. You won’t believe how bad the war will be. It has barely touched Germany, but the big cities will be ruins, like Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Munich. It will start with Frankfurt. If we don’t leave Germany, we need to at least get out of what will become the Russian sector.”

  “Russia and Germany will fight?”

  “Yes. Germany will lose. Badly.“ Her lack of even basic historical knowledge regarding the post-war world tells me that she isn't another player playing through an avatar. She is a product of this world, but far more somehow.

  I tried again to explain the situation of my world to her, to give her some notion of my reality—computers, Internet, satellites, nuclear missiles, cold war, Israel. All of it resulting directly from how this war and its aftermath. “Where I am, in the time period when I live, you are long dead. Right now, I’m sitting in a chair wearing a helmet that allows me to see and hear, sometimes even feel, what is happening here.”

  “What do you look like?” she asked.

  “I'm in my late forties, balding, shorter. I wear glasses. You wouldn't be impressed.”

  “I wouldn't care.”

  I realize I will never really be with her, not in the way men and women are meant to be together. This cyber existence I play like a curator in a museum fantasizing about living in one of his treasured, ancient paintings. I am a horologist, a clock-builder, wanting only to turn the hands backward. We're like two disembodied souls sharing a single sphere of space outside the time that separates our forsaken bodies. But I'm no fool. One day I'll wake up and the string that connects us will be cut, the bridge burned. I will then walk alone amongst powdery bones of memory, pining for a woman long dead in every reality but that which I alone possess, in my mind.

  Karen's avatar was dead. She had risked her life keeping a pregnant Lithuanian woman from being “euthanized.” She had stabbed a guard with the serum meant for the woman, and ran to hide in an empty closet. She had been found and shot.

  The problem was, she wouldn’t die, at least not completely. She continued to play her avatar, waiting for a similar one to emerge, that never came. She moved amongst the camp guards and prisoners with no one ever seeing her or knowing of her presence. Her avatar was now, for all purposes, a ghost.

  One afternoon after volleyball practice Karen opened the browser, hoping for a new character. She had a key to Mr. Hayes’ room--many students did. Almost instantly, she was there in Dachau, that cold early morning. She saw the couple vanish past the crematorium at the back of the compound. She followed them. She knew Richard for who he was, a school teacher slash SS officer in the Dachau camp where she had been a medical officer. She watched the couple make their way through the trees; he was carrying her. Karen followed them until they had reached a barn. They ducked inside where a motorcycle with a sidecar sat near some abandoned machinery. Mauer, Mr. Hayes, had tried to start the motorcycle. It did finally start, and they were allowed past the main gate with the girl buried in the blankets of the sidecar.

  Karen had followed them and watched. It was a real thrill to watch Mr. Hayes, the teacher who brought all this into the school, as he played
his own game, using his own avatar. Then again, what else could she do? She found she could keep up with the motorcycle as it sped through the snowy Bavarian roads, over hills and wildly curving lanes. Her avatar flew just above the ground. Of course, she attributed this new power to the apparition that she had now become.

  Eventually, following the tracks of the motorcycle, she came to an embankment of thick brush. She moved between the brush and the trees and found an abandoned cottage. She watched the couple from a nearby room that the two had only entered once. They seemed content to stay near the fireplace in the living area of the cottage. The girl seemed passive and slept often.

  Karen decided to stay in the cottage and watch the couple. She thought he might need help, and she wanted to talk with him more about the game, in the game, particularly about the possibility of gaining a new avatar for herself. She hesitated, however, as she was playing on a computer in his classroom while he was obviously playing at home. So rather than risk a scandal involving the seniors possessing keys to a teacher’s classroom, Karen thought she might simply follow the instructor’s avatar. It had developed into a very interesting scenario.

  How Karen had found out about Mr. Hayes’ avatar went way back to an event that occurred a number of months ago near the “commissary,” as it was called, where mostly articles of clothing, glasses, and shoes were stored for distribution--after being taken from the newest inmates of the camp. She had been in the process of recovering cloth to be disinfected and used for bandaging. She heard him say his own real name in an attempt to bring this character into his confidences.

  At one point, as Karen watched from a back room of the cottage, the Mauer avatar yelled. Mr. Hayes’ character began to choke the girl he had called “Savina.” She remained unconscious. Karen had knelt by the rock fireplace, attempting to wrest his hands from her throat. Unsuccessful, Karen then grabbed the poker from near the fireplace and smashed it into his right ear. Both now lay unconscious, and Karen retreated to the back room and continued her unseen vigil.

  April 1940

  The sun shone down on the courtyard and on the statue of Leopold II. Linden and Maple trees were increasing in foliage, shading the paths amongst the statues lining the sides of the Ministry courtyard. Farash entered the avatar of Karl Ernst Krafft who thus awoke on his cot from a troubled sleep and glanced at the thick curtains shielding his eyes from the approaching dawn. Barely a ray of light could be seen through the two tall windows of his pitifully small office.

  Folding his cot and gray woolen blanket, he packed these with a loose pillow into the wardrobe across from his desk and asked the SS guard standing outside his office for his morning coffee and perhaps a warm bun with butter. Since his stay here began, he had had no access to a newspaper, a radio, or a single visitor. “He is the astrologer,” Goebbels had remarked to one member of the inner cabinet, "His stars can give him news of the world." Actually, Farash preferred this isolation, which would make his predictions and their outcomes all the more incredible in the eyes of his superiors since it seemingly left him nothing more than his own inner oracle to guide him.

  Throwing back the heavy curtains and cracking opening a window slightly to allow in a bit of the early morning chill, Farash regarded the Berlin dawn. It was clear and crisp without a single cloud lingering in the sky.

  After a few hours of work with the Nostradamus text, pouring over a quatrain he had marked as intriguing for perhaps the dozenth time, Farash leaned back and stared at the high ceiling with its intricate white squares set deep into their framed edges. He closed his eyes.

  When he awoke, he was being half-dragged up a flight of stairs to a large office in the rear of the building. Two tall SS men had hold of his upper arms, and a gag had been placed over his mouth. Farash quickly moved his left hand in several turning gestures and was thus given the freedom to walk up the stairs the rest of the way. The guards, silently and now gently, led him into the wide office of the Reichsminister. Goebbels was looking out a window, his hands behind his back. Farash, his hair in disarray, had just enough time to remove the gag when the Reichsminister turned around to greet him.

  “Another attack of epilepsy?”

  “Yes. Well, I think so.” He was still breathing hard.

  “You say interesting things when you aren’t . . . yourself.”

  “Doctors call it split-personality, schizophrenia.”

  “Indeed. Let’s get to business, if you’re up to it.”

  “I’m feeling better, thanks.”

  Goebbels frowned. “Your prognostications, so far, have been exact.” He waited for a response from Krafft. Krafft, Farash, was silent.

  “Norway and Denmark were a significant addition to Greater Germany. The raw materials will continue to resupply the war effort. “

  “And Britain? France?”

  “The usual rhetorical saber-rattling. Nothing significant. No troop movements. Some attempts at bolstering Norway. It won’t last.”

  “I was accurate on the exact date and on the events of the campaign.” Krafft narrowed his eyes. It was a statement, not a question. Farash was learning to show complete confidence in his own predictions though he knew now that history was at least somewhat malleable. It wasn’t a stagnant sequence of events that could not be altered; otherwise, even the conversations that Krafft and Goebbels were having could have never taken place, could not be taking place.

  Still, the greater events that depended on variables well outside the effects of his own tiny manipulations of history might be well beyond the reach of these the smaller causes--what type of shirt he put on that day, how his occasional “amnesia” affected the SS guards, the birds that scattered as he walked with Goebbels in the courtyard. The greater events were far more difficult to change, if they could be changed at all, which made them predictable. That was a good thing. Farash would occasionally consult more detailed histories on the era via the Internet at work and in a few books he had at home, but otherwise, he knew the basics regarding troop movements, invasions, broken treaties, and now knew he could rely on them.

  “The charts don’t lie but they can fluctuate,” Farash offered.

  “Odd. I never see you with charts of any kind. Perhaps if I saw these charts of yours, it would make the whole process more credible. You could even teach me your methods. I’m a quick study.” Goebbels knew that the man used no charts.

  “The charts are in my head. They fluctuate,” Krafft added hastily, “so if I taught you the matrix one day, it would be worthless days later, even minutes later. Some things cannot be taught and must therefore die with the knower, Herr Reichsminister.” In a way this was true. There was no method to learn, only a knowledge of the events in a causal stream as they unfolded in the mid-20th century. Also, the fact that there was no method that he could possibly “teach” the Reichsminister had the added benefit of requiring that his seer remain alive for further prognostications to be “revealed.”

  Goebbels was silent, disappointed. But after some moments he smiled and walked over to his desk. On his desk was a small bust of the Fuhrer’s head being used as a paperweight. He picked it up and sat on his desk’s edge, as he frequently did, staring into it as if it were a crystal skull, a tool of necromancy.

  “I want you to stop work on the Nostradamus quatrains.”

  Krafft felt immediate relief.

  “Instead, tell me everything you know about the future of the Reich.”

  Krafft, standing several feet away, listened to the Reichsminister but appeared to be distracted, looking at the corners where the high walls met the white ceilings. There were dusty webs forming. Finally, he nodded. “I can do that. It comes in pieces, but perhaps I can put together the complete puzzle in a sitting or two.”

  He knew, however, how tricky that would be. Everything happening in Europe and the world was historically correct up to this point, as far as he could tell. The Norway/Denmark conquest, accurately predicted for the exact day, was additional proof that events m
ust be flowing according to historical fact. Were anything seriously amiss in this virtual world, significantly different from what was known in the early 21st century, even his lack of newspapers and radio would not keep it from him.

  However, this was 1940. This was the year Hitler’s biggest tactical mistakes would, in essence, begin. Hitler would consider an invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Lion, and then postpone it dozens of times. He would finally take it off the table, preferring to position three million troops, the bulk of the Wehrmacht, his regular army, in the East for a June 1941 attack on Russia, creating a second front that would only see disaster, particularly once the US got involved starting in December of that year. He would be surrounded by enemies that in several years would close both fronts and ultimately meet one another in Germany. They would then break the country into four different sectors of control.

  Up to this point, Hitler’s successes might have rendered anyone invincible in his own thinking. There was the Fuhrer’s taking of the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway and Denmark, all without meeting any serious resistance. Britain and France, regardless of their harsh language and war declarations, showed no real ability to significantly aid any of these countries directly, so far, and could only do so at the expense of weakening their own defenses. Russia showed no interest in attacking Germany and wouldn’t, so long as they weren’t attacked. They had plenty to snack on with Poland, Finland, and a host of other Eastern European delicacies for potential conquest. The United States currently showed no interest in aiding Britain as they themselves had not yet been attacked by Japan and weren’t as yet war-ready, not yet having been dragged into the war and having little confidence in Britain's ability to do its share in a potential joint campaign. No, Hitler was as successful up to this point as he ever could possibly be. Soon, his successes would give him the temerity to back-stab the Russians, despite the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939.