Farther up the road, where the barracks once stood, black smoke rises to the sky. The Kindergartenhaus, seat of the administration, no longer exists. We try to climb the road to the Berghof. It is pitted with bomb craters.
The Berghof itself is still standing. Its right wing is destroyed, but the main building and the northeast part are still there. The windows are black holes without any glass. The shutters hang crooked from their hinges. The roof of the main building is like a hat tilted at an angle, the roof of the northeast wing hangs untidily down. The great panoramic window, the pride of the master of the house, his way of revealing himself to the outside world and letting it be known that he regarded it as his own special property, is dark and empty as a mouth opened in a toothless scream. The face of the house is the face of a drunken fool, a fool struck dead in the middle of a blustering stage act before he gets the chance to deliver the punch line of the bad joke he is trying to tell.
At the bottom of the steps I see the first survivor. He stands there, arms dangling, looking down into the valley. I recognize Schenk, chief administrator on the Obersalzberg, responsible for carrying out all the measures ordained by Bormann, constructing the buildings, the bunkers. . . . His raincoat is torn, the expression on his face fixed. I abandon my intention of greeting him as one shipwrecked sailor greets another. Look, a human being. Another human being among us.
I shall never see him again. And perhaps he was only a hallucination. But what I am seeing now must be real, although it bears every resemblance to a vision. The graves open and give up their dead, who emerge swaying, blinded, both hands outstretched in the gesture of the sightless, their faces raised and turned to where the sun is still hidden behind a pale red veil, a timeless sunset, apocalyptic as a solar eclipse, a phenomenon casting doubt on the usual course of cosmic events. It is around two-thirty.
They do not seem to see me as they pass me by as if in procession. But I know them. I see the housekeeper and her husband, the kitchen maids, the chauffeurs, Hitler’s secretaries Christa Schroeder and Johanna Wolf, who arrived here from Berlin a few days ago. I see Hertha Schneider carrying the younger of her little girls. She is holding the other little girl’s hand. The children are silent as angels as they emerge into the light of day.
I see that they all resemble the models for their own funerary monuments. I see the mother with her two children. They should, I realize, be carved in stone like that. This is the Platonic ideal of their existence made sculptural.
At the moment when they emerge from the earth they are all turned to pillars of salt. The devastation appears like a divine vision before them, announces itself in all its power and terror. The sight of it strikes them down. It shows them, once and for all, who they are. The defeated.
In this living nightmare where I am both present and able to see myself from the outside, I know that I am one of them.
No one has any chance of escaping. They emerge, and see it. Silent and pale, moving jerkily like marionettes, in slow motion, they walk past me. There are no greetings, no cries of recognition as we meet again. We have become indifferent strangers to one another. We are all set down alone on this new desert planet. There are no words for what we see, there is no understanding of it. The only human sound is the dry coughing that attacks them all as they come out of the gates, breathing deeply, after they have climbed the eighty steps up to the light, and then inhale this mixture of soot and dust and smoke that still makes up the air surrounding us.
Slowly, the human beings become part of the picture of devastation, spread over it without animating it. And slowly I begin to hear voices, a swelling chorus of distress and perplexity dominated by the angry cries of the children, demanding, complaining, protesting forcefully against what they see. Then commands come, uttered in male voices. Signals from the fire engines that cannot reach the fires because of the wrecked roads. Somewhere on the mountain there must still be a working siren, which suddenly howls and howls and howls. There is something of the mindless enthusiasm of the birds in it, something of their resistance to devastation.
I still haven’t seen any of the members of my family.
I ask about them. The passing figures hardly look at me, just shrug their shoulders. Each of them is looking for something as they come up to the light again. A great, confused search has begun. A backward and forward movement, resembling the drifting of the particles of soot in the light spring wind that stirs the fires. Their eyes are still blank. Most of us are still unapproachable.
I, too, am a part of this pointless bustle in which we express our helplessness. If there were any injured victims we might know what to do. But there are only the defeated among us, only those who have not the faintest idea what will happen next.
With several others, I enter Hitler’s house through one of the terrace doors. What we are doing is dangerous, but none of us thinks of the risk of the place falling in. I want to go upstairs and see if Gretl is in her room. Where else could I look for her? I know only the old, well-trodden paths in this new and uncertain world. I make my way over piles of rubble and fallen furniture.
One of the uniformed guards stands at the bottom of the stairs. They are back, too.
You can’t go up there, he says.
At this moment it occurs to me that I have parted from Mikhail. I lost him in the snowstorm of confusion. At the same time I know I am no longer responsible for him. Never again. From now on we are all outlaws, each of us is his own survival system. There are no protected zones, there is no refuge on this mountain now. Our enemies have come. I wished them here without knowing what it would be like when they found us.
Like this. It was to be like this. They have found us. And for the first time I feel relief. I am not liberated yet, oh no, and perhaps I never will be entirely liberated. But I suddenly know that nothing is as it was before, and never will be again, and the thought makes me quite dizzy, I feel light, as if this were no longer my body, as if it had gone through the fire, as if it were nothing but what the fire has left, a white shell, light as paper, drifting over the ground, frail, delicate, scarcely perceptible, perhaps entirely invisible, like the dead with whom we do not collide when they stand in our way.
And as I see that we are looking through one another, that we all move as if we were alone, only slightly irritated to find others around and then unerringly pursuing our own way, continuing that aimless search sustained by no reasonable hope, I am suddenly no longer sure whether we are still alive or whether that emergence from the earth was nothing but the arrival of the dead in the realm of death, the colorless, ruined, distorted counterworld in which we find ourselves. And something of this lightness of nonbeing will remain with me, this sense of not being physically present where I actually am but invisible as the dead, weightless and endowed with the gift of passing through walls. A wonderful and entirely new kind of protection.
Perhaps Mikhail is invisible in the same way and similarly protected. At any rate, I spend no more time thinking about him. From now on he has disappeared, and will not reappear. He is good at disappearing, I know. I shall see him just once more. In another place.
You can’t go up there, says the uniformed guard.
His uniform, his hair, and his face are gray.
I’m looking for my family, I say.
Go away, he says. No entry anywhere here.
In the great hall I see people carrying out pictures, lamps, candelabra, vases . . . I am surprised that some kind of authority is active so soon and getting things in order. So far I have no experience of the other forces generated by chaos, and how quickly they set to work. Consequently I cannot understand the indignation of Hitler’s two secretaries as they watch.
Do you know where my family is? I ask them. I discover that my relations stayed behind in the bunker because they feared Gretl might go into premature labor.
For the time being it is enough to know they are still alive. Now I want to find out whether the Tea House is still standing.
A LATE AFTERNOON IN APRIL 1999. Dirty remnants of snow. The road to the Kehlstein house is not clear yet. The meadows are still brown. The beech trees have not broken into leaf, and not even the anemones and liverwort are in flower. It is too early. Nature is still holding back, but a few warm days and the fields will be full of flowers. Until then April will be the grayest of all months up here. A month full of the past, full of mourning, full of rage. Full of memory.
I look for a path where there is none now. I try to find my way through the trunks of young beech, larch, and fir trees. I keep looking around at the Zum Türken hotel to take my bearings, imagining the now nonexistent Berghof to the right of it.
The ground is uneven and sometimes muddy. Under the waste-land of grass the melt water is trickling down to the valley, collecting in small hollows that I must avoid. It is not an easy walk for an old woman.
Nor is it meant to be. I recognize the place where Bormann’s house stood. A level surface, no more. Not a stone, not a suggestion of any foundations. Nothing except that the mountain itself seems to be hushing something up, a trace of the impact of humanity thousands of years old and now reverted entirely to nature, less obvious to the eye than a Celtic oppidum or ring wall that has long ago become a part of the natural topography. And yet there was something to sense after all. Something that this terracelike surface must have pushed back into the hill. But perhaps I am wrong.
If this is really the place where Bormann’s house stood, then I must bear farther left. But the ground is too steep for me there. I am afraid of falling. I know that the fear of falling afflicts old women, and I am aware that until a few years ago I was entirely free of it. But if my body is so clearly telling me what it fears, why not listen to what it has to say?
I make my way back to the paved road and try again, farther down this time. Soon I find myself below a slope, among tall gorse bushes and last year’s ferns, and I know I am on the right track, although it has not been a track for a long time. I see the top of the Mooslahner Kopf in front of me and make for it. The Tea House should be over to the right. I no longer fear falling. I am twenty years old and I know this path, even if a matted thicket that is new to me and in which I scratch my face and hands looms in my way. Birds fly up uttering warning cries which announce that I am intruding where no one ought to intrude.
Suddenly I find myself in undergrowth. Sloes, hawthorn, firs several years old. I am caught in it. I can go neither forward nor back, and I cannot see where backward and forward are either. Birds perch somewhere over my head, twittering angrily. I stop and try to peer through the bushes and make out where I am. The branches surrounding me are covered with fat, swollen buds, still closed, so that I can see past them.
Looking out across the valley, I see the outline of the Untersberg on the other side. Far below, the ribbon of the Ache winds its way through the valley. I can make out the roofs of isolated farms looking as if they had been scattered about the scene, the world as viewed from Hitler’s tea salon, his idyllic toy-town world. I realize that I am where his Tea House stood. Now I can see the rocky outcrop on which it was built. I see that I am only a few centimeters from its precipitous edge, and that nothing is left of the Tea House. They have blown it up, like the Berghof and the remains of Göring’s and Bormann’s houses. Birds nest there now.
Tweet, tweet, sings a blackbird. Twilight is falling. It will soon be dark.
I KNOW THAT THERE ARE CANDLES somewhere in the place. There has been no electricity on the Berg since our annihilation. For the first time I feel uncomfortable in the Tea House. I do not want darkness to take me by surprise, but I can’t find the candles in either the anteroom or the kitchen. All I can find on the mantelpiece is a box of matches.
Of course I am relieved that I still have a roof over my head. The Tea House was slightly outside the periphery of the target area. I have been lucky.
Most of the windowpanes are broken, of course, but otherwise the place is just as I left it that morning. My notebooks on the desk, the remains of my breakfast on the kitchen table, the full ashtrays in the hall where my guards were positioned.
Yet something has changed. The house is different, forbidding, gloomy. Dirty. As if someone abandoned it years ago and never came back. It is probably to do with the dark gray precipitation that has been settling since morning on everything here, as elsewhere. With the acrid, burning smell of it, which conveys a message of pitiless destruction, pain, and violence. The message suddenly reaches me so clearly that I feel the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Only then do I hear footsteps and voices. I am not alone in the house.
What’s she after here? I hear them say.
They are women. But my sense of relief is premature and misplaced. They must have clambered into the house through one of the broken kitchen windows while I was in the tea salon. One of them seems familiar to me. But in the gathering darkness I can’t make out if she is really one of the cleaning women.
Go away, I say, please go away!
Shut up, says one of the women.
You clear out of here, and look sharp about it, says the other. She is already wearing one of my jackets.
I discover another world that day. A new and surprising world. I never guessed at it. I am learning, learning, learning. I understand that this is the reverse of the coin, but I’m not ready to reconcile myself to it just like that.
What are you doing here? I ask. You have no right to be here.
Asking for trouble, are you? says a third woman, coming out of the kitchen. You can have it if you don’t clear off.
Three are enough to surround me suddenly. I feel the blow in my stomach before I see the fist delivering it. My surprise is greater than my pain. No one has ever hit me in all my life before. I discover how inexorably the learning process sets in, like a reflex. A new way of seeing. A new reality. At the same time I am aware that I am weeping. I can’t help it.
I see that there is no mercy on the reverse of the coin, in this brand-new world where I find myself. Here, what will happen happens, just like that. Terrible crimes. Miraculous rescues. What is done is done for no reason, without justification, without hesitation, without even amounting to a memory. The women are in earnest. I realize that. No jokes, no mockery, no irony exist in this other world. But it is a lightweight earnestness that can be diverted: fickle, inconstant. At that moment I hear Hugh Carleton Greene’s voice from my bedroom. The power is back on again.
Hitler’s Alpine fortress has been destroyed, he says, the last hiding place of the Nazis . . .
A radio! the women exclaim, and I seize my chance and run for it. Mr. Greene has saved me. In the end he was the only person I could rely on. The one and only person.
I shall never set foot in Hitler’s Tea House again.
Like everyone else still on the mountain, I seek refuge in the bunkers. We live there, discovering the luxury to which we are accustomed. We lack for nothing. Our provisions are stored there, and we luxuriate in tiled bathrooms. We sleep between silk sheets. I re-clothe myself from Eva’s bunker wardrobe. We ourselves are rather like the looters of a vanished world, our own. All we lack is daylight. And any idea of where we are to go now. An answer to the question of who we are. Who we were. And whom we shall become. We are nobody now. There is nowhere left for us in the world from which we hide down here.
When I come up now and then I see the fires. It is not only the ruins that still burn; these are the pyres of our inheritance.
Hitler’s adjutant Schaub has arrived from Berlin. He does not talk to anyone, although he is besieged by questions about Hitler. Is he coming? When will he arrive? Schaub does not reply. He keeps burning things on the Berghof terrace, the stuff he and his batman carry out of the house, files, cartons full of books and letters, the entire contents of the safes.
As soon as anyone tries to approach the fire Schaub pours petrol on the flames from a canister that seems magically inexhaustible. That keeps everyone away, including the SS
men, of whom there are fewer and fewer to be seen on the Berg now.
They, too, have begun destroying anything that could incriminate them, anything left on the day of our destruction. For days and days I see them incinerating the end products of vast administrative diligence. They are destroying all those papers as overzealously as they once wrote them. No one thinks it funny. No one thinks it worth despair. Nowhere do I hear the curses, fiendish laughter, and sarcastic remarks that ought to accompany all this.
We drink. We all drink far too much. I don’t have a strong head and never did, and I was much too young to tolerate alcohol at the time. But my memory of the days I spent in the Berghof bunkers, or rather of the constant, unbroken night that reigned down there, is as fragmentary and befuddled as only the memories of a drunk can be. It consists of scenes of bright Goya-like radiance surrounded by gloom, framed in oblivion, unrelated, without any context. Scenes from a nightmare that even to this day has not yet been dreamed to the end.
THERE SEEMS TO BE nobody down below anymore. The air is musty and damp, the floor wet. The much-vaunted technology of the Obersalzberg air-raid shelters has failed. Water has got in, and part of the ventilation system is out of order. The used air we breathe still holds the aroma of the mortal fear we were sweating here not long ago. A nauseating, strong smell that serves to drive away superior adversaries. A desperate emergency weapon of Nature.
Hitler’s artificial cavern, his elegant living room under the mountain, looks as if a party has been held there. Empty bottles, broken glasses, cigarette holes burned in the red-velour covers of the armchairs, which are copies of the chairs in the great hall. Stains and burned patches on the oriental rugs. I don’t yet know that this is only the beginning of the place’s return to the wild.
Eva's Cousin Page 31