by Daniel Kraus
Up ahead was the obligatory checkpoint. Von Lüth took an emboldening breath and marched. Four black-helmeted sentries noticed us and began heading our way. No ceremonial sabers here; each soldier double-fisted a rifle five feet in length if you counted the filed bayonet—and I, for one, was inclined to count every inch. Von Lüth halted fifty feet away, turned to me, pulled sharp the wide lapels of my double-breasted overcoat, and tightened my wool tie. I was a mannequin for his own insecurities, and did not mind.
“Himmler speaks limited English.” Von Lüth’s voice was soft but firm. “You are here as my guest, a foreign delegate. There should be no reason for you to speak. Only when appropriate will I reveal what you are. Do you understand?”
An old voice whispered through the grass.
Indicate that you understand.
But this goliath touched me gently, adjusting my trilby to a more deferential angle and giving heartening pats to both of my shoulders. His eyes gleamed with more than trust; it was, I knew, true fondness. Johnny, Church, and John Quincy notwithstanding, fellowship still astonished me. It was all I could do not to bury my cold face in his warm layers of fancified clothing.
I nodded assent.
Von Lüth charged off to meet the guards, and with effusive cordiality confirmed his appointment. We were saluted and directed inside the outer wall toward an entryway, before which waited another sentry. But before we halved the distance, from beneath the curved archway a figure sauntered, clad in black leather and knee-high jackboots that winked in the direct sun. Von Lüth inhaled sharply.
“Wewelsburg will one day be the Reich’s Vatican,” whispered he. “Here comes its future pope.”
X.
LIKE A HORSE GIVEN THE crop, von Lüth shifted from trot to gallop. His arm was already outstretched in a sieg heil, and from the distance at which I’d been left, I saw the Reichsführer-SS acknowledge the jouncing salute with the hand-to-ear gesture of Nazi elite. One second later, von Lüth was pumping the man’s hand as if it might spew well water. Sunlight blazing from the superior’s lenses prevented me from reading his physiognomy, but nevertheless I cringed. Dignity, von Lüth, dignity.
It was surreal to see one of Rigby’s nettlesome photo flashcards transmogrified into living flesh. Even when I fired off the Hitler Hand, Heinrich Himmler did not deign to look at me. Instead he nurtured a squiggly inchworm smile through von Lüth’s adoring assailment. I was grateful, for I required time to reconcile Himmler’s fearsome notoriety with this small, sapless sniveler.
The thick leather coat was further heavied with armbands, sleevebands, cuff titles, chevrons, collar tabs, and shoulderboards, and the triangle gap above the double-buttoned collar betrayed the further weights of braided silver epaulettes, bronze medals, and a red swastika pinned upon a black tie. These garlands emphasized the slightness of the man tucked inside. He wore not spectacles but a pince-nez. His chin melted into his neck, and his brow into a peaked cap. He had a clerk’s doughiness—you could see the channels left behind by a helmet strap as well as the ingrown, infected stubble.
If this man was the rebirth of King Heinrich, I was George Washington.
When emptied of adulation, von Lüth said the words “Zebulon Finch,” and Himmler spilled his beetle eyes all over my body: cold shells, tickling feelers. His mustache, thinner and longer than Hitler’s barber’s whisk, twitched as he extended a limp hand for me to shake. I took it, thrilled to be within claiming distance of Hitler, of Rigby’s pride, of self-destruction, of infamy.
Himmler smiled at von Lüth, a spurious little pout, and gestured for us to follow his duck-waddle into a torch-licked antechamber. Von Lüth mopped his face with a handkerchief the instant he was unobserved, and I could not help but make a derogatory analogy: von Lüth was to Himmler what the squat-kicking monkey was to the band-major Hitler Youth.
We arrived at a round foyer aglow from a high encirclement of windows. I’d entered grander arenas in my day—Dr. Leather’s great hall, the Hazard sisters’ Sweetgum Plantation, Harlem’s Cotton Club, San Simeon’s Hearst Castle, even Bridey Valentine’s mansion. I adored extravagance—I was an American—and yet Schloss Wewelsburg had an undeniable force despite the Spartanism of its painting, sculpture, and banner.
It is my understanding, Reader, that the Reichsführer permitted no photography of the castle interior, and so I doubly regret that I can’t much enrich the historical record with details. But I was distracted by von Lüth—perhaps, like a dog, I’d been trained to mirror my master’s moods. He was distraught at what he saw, and though he adapted a complaisant smile, his eyes pursued the truths hidden in the stonework’s runes, glyphs, and sigils.
Himmler did not detect, or did not care, about his guests’ discomfort. He became animated. In a high-pitched, exuberant tone that echoed about and stung the eardrum, he narrated the room’s highlights and sighed at golden, floating dust motes as if they were the spirits of forefathers. The modesty of the foyer extended throughout what areas of the castle inside which we were allowed, including more than a dozen “reading rooms,” oaken chambers so fulgent with wax that they seemed like stomachs still wet from evisceration. I lingered before each. They had a sedate, timeless quality, and I found that I could picture myself recumbent and smug upon their divans. Wasn’t I timeless too?
Even the castle’s centerpiece, a 14,500-square-foot dining hall where SS aristocracy convened, constrained its extravagance to a signature piece: a long table chiseled about the perimeter with runes. This was mated with twelve chairs cushioned with red pig-leather and fastened with twelve silver crests, each engraved with the seat-holder’s name. Twelve, said von Lüth, was the magical number—twelve zodiac signs, twelve apostles, twelve knights of the Round Table.
Here, too, I could picture myself. Oh, Reader, that undersells it! The longing was visceral. I grieved how I’d yet to earn a single monogrammed chair or piece of castle-specific flatware. Von Lüth translated such nectarous words as “trances” and “séances” and I was winged away by the Arthurian spirit of Crusade, the zest of delinquent learning, the fun drunkenness of overblown ceremony. A yearning for blood, developed over a many-course meal that had included Black Hand drubbings, Leather’s meat etiquette, and the U.S. military’s sanctioned killing, thickened to a salt mire in my throat. Can’t you imagine a ritualistic severed head being passed from one SS officer to the next? Taste the blood dribbling from the neck? Hear the splutter of affirmation between mouthfuls?
I took a facsimile of a deep breath and tried to recall Rigby and Meixelsperger.
Himmler concluded polite preliminaries and gestured toward a winding staircase. Von Lüth, though, cowered before them, sensing disaster at the top. He delayed, asking if we might be escorted below to see something called the Obergruppenführersaal, a sacred crypt of sorts, I gathered, built around a pit called the Norbertus Hole. The flatteries with which von Lüth padded the request made it clear that beneath our feet was the unholiest temple of all, a center of unfathomable ritual.
But Himmler was a man experienced at ignoring pleas.
“Nein.” He checked his wristwatch and indicated the stairs.
Backs as broad as von Lüth’s create a spectacle when slumped. Like a child without supper, he was sent up the stairs, and I caught Himmler smirking at his guest’s mjölnir, the pathetic prop, as he saw it, of a presumptuous poseur. Himmler, realized I, had dragged his overeager inferior halfway across Germany for no better reason than to mock him. Von Lüth, true-blue to the last, had no idea, and in his place, I felt the heat of shame.
That heat was scalding by the time we entered the Reichsführer’s office, a space so symptomatic of neurosis that it begged for a wildebeest rout. Stacks of state documents were tidied to points, fountain pens were parallel to memoranda edges, and framed photographs were hung with precision. Himmler placed his leather jacket upon a hanger and his cap onto a rack, revealing a saucer of brown hair attached to the back half of his head. He took a seat upon a hand-carved, honey-colored chair g
raven with runes centered around his own initials. He gestured, and we visitors took less impressive seats.
“May we speak in English for the benefit of Herr Finch?” asked von Lüth.
Himmler shrugged, as if being asked if one might pet his cat.
Von Lüth, the poor dupe, winked at me as if this were progress.
“As you know from my letter, I have completed translations of four ancient texts on the Aryan race that I believe will be of fantastic interest to der Führer. If you might consider—”
“Der Führer,” said Himmler, “is most interested now in practicalities. Mein Lebensborn program, for example.”
His English was far better than I’d been led to expect.
“Of course.” Von Lüth swallowed the rest of his plea. To cover the ensuing silence, he offered a translation. “In Old German, ‘Lebensborn’ means . . . how might you say it? ‘Fountain of Youth’?”
In a grave across the Atlantic, Dr. Leather’s corpse rolled over.
“Lebensborn,” said Himmler, “enrolls thousands of women of the finest racial heritage and prepares their insemination by SS elite. These, our proud brood mothers, will enjoy twelve maternity centers staffed by the greatest minds in medicine. You see, Herr von Lüth? Here is Aryan theory with real results for our people.”
If Meixelsperger had been there, her Mother’s Cross would have been at Himmler’s pimpled throat.
“Remarkable,” said von Lüth. “Still, if I may, wouldn’t a truer understanding of our pagan progenitors only enrich such enterprises? My studies into the Irminen—the earliest Aryans, Herr Finch—have led me to solicit authorization for a new dig at the Externsteine rock formations, which I believe will confirm evidence that—”
“Ja, ja, the Externsteine. Last May, I traveled there with Wiligut. It did our hearts good. But Wiligut assures me, Herr von Lüth, that no further relics will be uncovered there.”
Von Lüth had gone white.
“Wiligut? But . . . he has retired, has he not?”
Himmler’s inchworm smile came creeping.
“A man of Wiligut’s wisdom never really retires. He is more confident than ever that the Irminsul at Externsteine could be the Yggdrasil.”
“Nein! Wiligut is mistaken!”
Von Lüth’s vehemence was shocking.
Not, however, as shocking as my interjection.
“Yggdrasil,” said I. “What is that?”
Von Lüth goggled at me in horror, and Himmler squinted through his pince-nez as if trying to identify a stain. A weight of dread dropped like a hanged man. What in Gød’s bad name had made me break my vow of silence? Perhaps I’d heard the word in a lecture from the Barker or in a smidgen of mystical falderal from Leather? Von Lüth grimaced; his difficult job now was to fill the thunderous quiet I’d created.
“Yggdrasil, Herr Finch, is the Tree of Life. Its branches extend to heaven, its roots to every plane of existence. To climb it would be to exist in all worlds at once. It is what you might call a birth canal, but one with infinite openings.”
Perhaps the visions I’d had of myself in the Wewelsburg reading rooms, or at the twelve-seat table, or in the cabalistic crypt, had been prophetic. I was here for a reason. The definition of “Lebensborn” as “the Fountain of Youth” I’d disregarded as a coincidental link to Leather’s endeavors to find such a fountain inside me. But that the Yggdrasil was, in essence, the Uterus of Time, that swirling channel of life and death through which la silenziosità led me, was too much to ignore. I’d discounted similarly wild ideas from von Lüth, but the tangibility of Wewelsburg—a place that, by every right, ought to be mythical—made me believe, suddenly and surprisingly, in the equally mythical Yggdrasil. What if the secret to my existence was not a mystery to be unlocked but rather a location to which I might pilgrimage? The idea was thrillingly physical. I could climb the tree. Find the branch, the in-between world, that felt like home. Reenter the uterus, wedge open the cervix, and claw my way back into an egg.
Von Lüth, dismayed at my rapture, turned to Himmler.
“Forgive me, Herr Reichsführer, but Yggdrasil is a fable. Wiligut is mistaken if he—”
“Mein Lieber Herr von Lüth.” Himmler’s inchworm swelled to snake size. “You argue with the same vigor as your fair Otto, don’t you? It is darling to observe.”
If my protector had been pale before, he now went blue. Rigby had prepared me for neither a “Wiligut” nor an “Otto,” but the mention of the latter set von Lüth’s lips quivering. Caught as I was in Yggdrasil’s branches, the disgrace I might have felt on his behalf a minute earlier did not enflame. Von Lüth’s voice slipped back into German and broke into stammers of denial. Himmler, though, was finished. He suppressed a yawn, stood, penguined around the desk, and extended his hand.
Von Lüth considered the palm as if it were cradling one of Rigby’s cyanide L-pills. In fact, it was suicide not to shake it, and so he did. When Himmler began to retract his flipper, however, von Lüth held it tight and began to yammer while gesturing to me. Ah, here came the disgrace. What von Lüth had intended to be a point-by-point presentation of my fantastic truths tumbled out like a child’s discreditable whoppers.
Nazis, though, were unerring in manners. Himmler, having salvaged his hand, offered it to me. A Death’s-Head Ring, an SS honorific of skull and crossbones, rested upon one finger like a swollen knuckle. It was exquisite; I took his hand as if it were made of diamond. He gave my palm a feeble squeeze, the black dots of his eyes magnifying behind pince-nez as they toured points of interest, from the grappling-hook slot not quite concealed by my collar, to the general mottling of my flesh. His eyes traced distances brow to chin, temple to temple, and nostril to nose tip, the same measurements von Lüth had made upon first meeting me.
“Herr von Lüth is right. Your features are excellent. Are they matched, I wonder, by the Nine Virtues of the SS? The first is loyalty. Do you have it?”
If it might bring me to the Yggdrasil, thought I, oh yes, I could be loyal.
“I believe so. Yes.”
Himmler’s smile daggered through pulpous flesh. I sensed a betrayed bristling from von Lüth, but I was transfixed, unreachable.
“Very good. Obedience?”
“Yes.”
That word again, when all my life and death, I’d proudly chanted its opposite. What was happening?
“Bravery?”
“Yes.”
“Truthfulness?”
“Yes.”
“Honesty?”
“Yes.”
“Comradeship?”
“Yes.”
“Readiness?”
“Yes.”
“Diligence?”
“Yes.”
“Avoidance of alcohol?”
“Yes.”
He abnegated our handshake, his fingertips caressing my palm so that he might luxuriate in the chill.
“Right now, the most racially gifted of Dutchmen and Belgians are being Germanized. Perhaps der Führer, if caught in a good mood, might permit me to Germanize an American. What do you think?”
The Norbertus Hole. Flames slinking across SS leather. A cold corpse warmed.
“Yes,” breathed I—a bad word used one more time.
Himmler’s final question, voiced over von Lüth’s asthmatic gasp, moved me the most.
“Your name again?”
I told him with gusto.
“Zebulon Finch,” repeated he. He gnashed the words between jaws. “Whether one succeeds or fails, choosing to petition the Schutzstaffel has consequences. You will think about it? You will let me know what you decide?”
A cobalt fire engulfed my brain, and the smoke reeked of Rigby’s cigarette-smog cellar and Meixelsperger’s diesel-exhaust bunker. Operation Weeping Willow was all that tied me to America and, by extension, Merle, Church, and everyone else I’d wronged. My gut, however—that truss of flesh crocheted by cosmetic surgeons—remained my gut, and when a gut senses glistening foods spread upon a table
at which waits a name-plated seat, that gut, every time, will growl.
XI.
ON THE NIGHT TRAIN BACK to Berlin, the play-act of sleep provided good pretext for sulking. We disembarked at dawn and trudged through mouse-colored rain to von Lüth’s building. Once inside, he did not change into dry clothes or pull from a gift basket a piece of breakfast, but rather unfolded the ceiling door and continued to the roof. Hateful of precipitation as ever, I scrounged about the disheveled apartment for the umbrella before making the ascent.
The first things I saw were the jellyfish carcasses of clothing discarded in the mud. It followed, then, that the second thing I saw was von Lüth naked but for his underpants, 250 pounds balanced upon a single leg atop a gentle hill, his opposite calf bent perpendicular behind, both arms held forth at a forty-five-degree angle, and his eyes shut. He held this peculiar pose as raindrops exploded across his putty skin.
The rain tasted of Berlin; that is to say, it tasted of ash.
Von Lüth spoke a single word—Mannaz—and shifted to a second pose, standing tall with elbows high and wrists crossed behind his head. By the third pose—Jera—I recognized the names of runes; the postures appeared to be a sort of runic yoga. I huddled beneath a tree to wait out the absurd routine. When I leaned against the tree, however, it began to yaw. I hopped back to watch its thick brown roots rip from two feet of black soil. Far too shallow, realized I, to sustain any living thing for long.
In fact, the entire rooftop thicket I’d once considered a wellspring of life was revealed by the gutting rain to be closer to Leather’s putrefying People Garden. Every tree pitched at an irregular angle. Bushes, gusted free, flaunted their mud-clotted roots at Gød. The creek, ersatz to begin with, had flooded and eroded to betray its plastic lining. The bloated remains of books and notes were being dragged away by water-beaded vermin—not the “diligent little squirrels” or “friendly badgers” of von Lüth’s fancy but rather long, sleek rats.
It was, in sum, a shitty place to be, and a fitting metaphor for von Lüth himself—the fertile soil of scholarship rinsed away to reveal a cracked foundation. Von Lüth completed his yoga with an impressive Uruz, indulged in several minutes of uniform breathing, and then, as if by magic, plucked from the mud a boggy book by his idol Jörg Lanz. He opened it to a random page, wrung it of dirty water, and in a pellucid tone read aloud over the pounding rain.