by Chris Petit
‘Interesting if apostate,’ said Krick. ‘Do you know anything about Carl Jung?’
Morgen gestured reluctantly, unwilling to concede a point in front of his brother.
‘Carl Gustav Jung,’ Theodore recited. ‘Probably one of the finest minds we possess. He took psychoanalysis away from the Jewish influence of Freud, to huge opprobrium.’
Krick said he had attended Jung’s seminars and held discussions with the man when studying in Zurich ten years earlier.
Morgen presumed Krick was implying he was a protégé. Sure enough, with great false modesty, he went on, ‘I was privileged to be presented with a draft of Jung’s 1936 Wotan lecture.’
‘Are you familiar?’ Theodore asked.
Morgen snapped, ‘Not my field of expertise.’
Theodore flashed him a look to ask: What is?
Krick composed himself to look suitably humbled and grave.
‘I quote: “A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather.” Our leader as god of storm, god of secret musings, wind of change, German weather, the soul snatcher who is also seized. It is not an unsympathetic portrait.’
Morgen supposed Krick wished to boast and looked at Theodore, who indicated to be patient. Krick continued to sing the great man’s praises in terms of his work on meaningful significance and the transpersonal unconscious.
Morgen nodded, bored, and only paid attention when Krick said, ‘Last summer one of the Führer’s physicians telephoned Jung in Zurich and asked him to come to Bavaria to make a mental assessment of the Führer.’
‘This summer or the summer of 1942?’ Morgen asked.
‘1942.’
Adolf was a virtual recluse, with speculation on his health and ability to direct the army, but that was recent, with no such rumours the year before. The story sounded interestingly far-fetched, which meant it was probably true.
‘Why?’
‘Concern among high-ranking officers about the Führer’s increasingly erratic behaviour. He was drinking heavily.’
Theodore interrupted. ‘The teetotal, vegetarian image is Goebbels’ manufacture. The man likes nothing more than a bratwurst and beer. Anyway, Jung turned down the offer.’
Krick nodded. Morgen wondered why he was being told.
Krick went on. ‘The fact is, since Stalingrad, Hitler is no longer a prophet. His religion has crumbled. Even the average German is overwhelmed by the symbolic implications of the defeat. Goebbels, who remains fanatically loyal, stated that an entire conception of the universe has been defeated, spiritual forces will be crushed, and the hour of judgement is at hand.’
Morgen wondered who was behind the move to approach Jung. He had been aware at the end of the butchers case of political scenery being shifted: Himmler arranging a secret Jewish ransom train, as a way of opening back channels, with the war turning.
Krick said, ‘It started to go wrong long before Stalingrad. The Führer believed in Hörbiger’s fire and ice theory and wherever he advanced the cold would retreat before him. Hörbigerians claimed they could predict weather months and years in advance, and announced the Russian winter of 1941 would be mild.’
It was all madness, thought Morgen. It was one thing for Frau Hoess to spout on about Hörbiger; quite another to commit an entire military campaign to the man’s theories.
Krick looked mysterious and said his most recent visit to Zurich was as a personal envoy to make Jung reconsider.
Morgen thought it unlikely that an eminent neutral would consort with a tainted leadership.
‘He refused, of course. It was obvious he would.’
‘Then what was the point?’
‘Jung’s assessment would have been damning.’
Krick left it at that. Morgen asked if the overture was bound to be rejected then what was the purpose of the feint.
‘Ha-ha,’ said Krick. ‘Let’s say I was the messenger in the hope Jung would become one too.’
‘To whom?’
‘The Americans.’
One in particular, Krick went on, an extrovert and wealthy woman, named Bancroft, who lived in Zurich and was unusual for the openness of her marriage. She had become part of Jung’s circle and was the lover of the local head of US intelligence, for whom she worked.
Morgen guessed Krick’s mission was to alert Jung to growing discontent surrounding the leadership, hoping he would pass it on to the Bancroft woman and she would tell her lover, and thus the Americans would be secretly appraised.
‘Why tell me?’ Morgen asked.
Theodore took over. ‘Schlegel’s stepfather would wish that you knew, I suspect.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I didn’t say that. But I presume the arrest of Schlegel’s mother was carried out to keep his stepfather in line, because he is suspected of too many side deals with the Swiss and the Americans. He is ill now, which makes the situation more delicate.’
Morgen could not tell if this was an overture and Krick and his brother were trying to recruit him to their cause.
Schlegel lay chased by fevered hallucinations and shallow dreams. Tanner’s death became part of the great pagan sacrifice; Morgen told him he should admit killing her, and starting the fire, while he was about it. Morgen made him repeat: The radical stance of the regime is that it has done away with the pretence of God, the master in whose name so many atrocities could be committed.
Schlegel was told he must stand responsible for his own actions. He saw Sepp in an MC’s hat, shouting, ‘Step this way!’ Evidence was produced in the shape of a butcher’s hammer with Schlegel’s fingerprints and the commandant interrupted to say he would be taken out and shot by Palitsch, who had requested the job. When Schlegel protested that Palitsch was already under arrest everyone cheered as though he had made the wildest joke. The room with its steep benches could have been an old lecture hall but the atmosphere was more that of a courtroom. The main exhibit was Tanner’s disembowelled body with its open ribcage, and Dr Wirths explained the finer points of his autopsy, including evidence of photographic imprints in her brain showing her final attacker. A blowup of Schlegel, hammer raised above his head, was pinned on the board. Broad stepped forward to denounce him as a Soviet agent.
Then he was standing staring at the wall, lungs pumping like rusty bellows, aware of breathing his last as Palitsch stuck the barrel into the back of his neck and twisted it. But instead of shooting, Palitsch delivered a breathless little monologue into Schlegel’s ear. ‘Fanaticism, and its counterpart lethargy, lacks true awareness. It represents an untrue existence, even though one’s entire strength is used up in the longing for infinite leadership.’ Then he was watching Sybil as she sewed with her back to him. When he called her name, his voice wasn’t his, and her face when she turned wasn’t altogether hers. Some of it belonged to Schulze and the rest to the bruised woman at the commandant’s garden party.
In more coherent moments it still seemed to him that Tanner had been killed as a sacrifice, to distract from the corruption, and, yes, he could see Krick doing it – out of forensic curiosity and an eagerness to know. Without his discovery, Tanner’s body otherwise might have lain unnoticed for days. As it was, it brought them back and deeper into the garden of evil. Then again, all was mirage. Anyone could have done it. Theoretical guilt. Men lined up, like they were waiting outside a brothel, to take a swing at Tanner as though she were a fairground machine. Practically every man in the garrison had murdered or been responsible for murder, facile as it was to say. All were stained with the original sin, in which none believed, all fallen, the crime as movable as the carousel of stolen goods that went round and round. If the detective was as liable as the criminal what justice? How could one serve, except in a self-serving way, without inviting despair? And in the middle of it all, the posturing commandant who, as his world fell apart, saw it only in terms of tragic destiny.
Sybil sat outside, knees clasped. Schlegel was delirious and the place wasn’t as perfect as
it looked. Dead stuff floated in the water.
Sometimes the commandant stank so much of death that his uniform had to be sent to the dry-cleaners and the girl who cleaned his boots did so with a handkerchief over her face.
Sybil went down to the shore and stared at the placid lake: how easy to walk in until it covered her. She stood in the shallows, mud oozing under her feet. Sun starred the water. She moved forward, marking where she thought it would cover her head.
The commandant came home for lunch. Because the radio was on she didn’t hear him enter the room where she was allowed to work alone. She was wearing her hair up. Had he stared at her neck as she sat quietly stitching? He would have seen a thin, dark, watchful women, she supposed, transformed by his masculine gaze into something she no longer considered herself, a creature of desire.
The commandant kissed her, clumsily, tasting of tobacco. She fled and locked herself in the lavatory, and afterwards pretended to be ill, knowing the kiss broke the spell and marked the start of her fall.
She looked back at the shore, already far off, the water still only up to her waist. She heard the lazy drone of an aeroplane. The noise persisted. She saw nothing. The sky stayed empty, everything frozen. The great orb of the sun hurt her eyes. She stared, fixated by a dark blemish in its halo that became the plane, flying at her, the whine of its engine drowning everything as it dipped low to skim the surface. She ducked and leaned back to let the water cover her, feeling the shadow pass over.
With everything tranquil again she returned to the shore.
Schlegel seemed not to make the connection that they were now conducting air searches. Later she heard the plane’s buzzing, always far away.
Apart from the beetroot and green leaves, they had eaten and drunk nothing. Water everywhere, which they dared not risk for fear of pollution. Sybil was warned off by the sight of three dead floating toads. She made forays into the reeds. The canoe had a hole. She stood on the jetty, staring at the scummy water, trying to put foolish thoughts from her head. A long waving tendril she thought a plant unfurled into a water snake. The aeroplane droned in the distance.
She studied the shoreline growth. Red berries she dismissed as too risky. The bullrushes looked harmless and she supposed their stems might provide sustenance; likewise a form of seaweed. She braved the water and disturbed a shoal of eels, fast and slick, coming out of the reeds. It took all her resolve to gather her meagre crop.
They chewed the stems of the rushes, harsh tasting, as was the seaweed.
Schlegel, still fragile, became more lucid. He spoke of his mother’s failing memory and his stepfather’s sickness. It would make more sense if the illnesses were the other way round: his mother had never been known to tax herself mentally and his stepfather had always seemed physically at ease. He saw Sybil wasn’t listening and stopped but she asked him to go on. It reassured her to hear a voice talking normally.
She said she was like his mother; her past was lost too. She had trouble remembering what anyone looked like.
She got up wordlessly and lay down in the shelter. Schlegel sat thinking about their crushed world and the impossible gulf between them.
He went and lay next to her. Her hand was by her side. He touched her fingertips and she didn’t respond. He held her hand and she didn’t respond, though he was certain she was awake. He spoke and she didn’t answer. He woke to find his hand empty and Sybil with her back to him. He lay listening to her breathing.
Morgen found it galling to be offered the prospect of an explanation by one so irritating as his brother. The mine was about half an hour away. The rain persisted. Theodore dispensed with his driver, saying he would take the wheel. Morgen dreaded the prospect.
Theodore said, ‘There are things we must talk about.’
‘Let me drive then.’
‘You are a worse driver than I.’
They squabbled, tossed a coin.
‘Gives you more time to think,’ Morgen said condescendingly.
No traffic other than the occasional horse and cart. Everything dirt-poor. Morgen asked about the mine.
It wasn’t much of one, Theodore said. Of course they were tunnelling.
‘We’re a nation of mad tunnellers, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Morgen had. Kammler’s mobile squads had created an elaborate secret network under the castle. Kammler had proudly shown him, a virtual city of passageways, going deeper and deeper. Madness.
Theodore said, ‘Someone obviously talked up the mine to Heini and it is being done off the books. What Heini doesn’t know is nothing of value is produced.’
That was a surprise. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘The seams are flawed. Someone is pulling the wool over his eyes.’
Morgen supposed Frau Hoess must be pretending Canada’s jade was the product of the mine, which made it as useless an enterprise as all the rest.
Morgen asked Theodore if he knew the place.
‘Yes. I was curious to see for myself.’
‘What did you find?’
‘Thirty prisoners transferred from Silesian coal pits and crucifixion as a form of punishment.’
‘What?’
‘The guard is bored, stuck in the middle of nowhere. They got tired of stringing up prisoners by their arms behind their backs. It tends to dislocate the shoulders, meaning they can’t work, so they rope them to a beam. The prisoner must use his arms to force himself up to breathe. It results in agonising contractions.’
Morgen looked at his brother and said, ‘I thought you lived in an ivory tower.’
‘Scholarship doesn’t preclude knowledge of cruelty,’ Theodore replied enigmatically.
‘What is the point of the mine in terms of its symbolic purpose?’
Theodore sighed. ‘Heini’s big interest is with the three great sciences of the Middle Ages – mysticism, astrology and alchemy. It makes him susceptible to the wiles of crackpots and charlatans, possibly even myself included.’
Morgen stared at his brother. Had he made a joke?
Theodore ignored him and went on. ‘Heini’s jade obsession stems from an equally silly one for a Welsh mystic writer named Machen, because of his tenuous connection to another of Heini’s great infatuations, the Holy Grail.’
‘Does the man really believe any of this?’ Morgen asked.
‘Enough to take himself off on a secret wartime mission to an abbey near Barcelona, where he believed he would find the very pot Christ used to consecrate the Last Supper.’
‘Thinking it would win us the war?’
‘Heini isn’t alone in believing Christ is descended from Aryan stock.’
Himmler’s attraction to Machen was his birthplace, believed to have been the seat of King Arthur’s court, from which the knights departed to seek the grail.
‘Machen was an initiate too, a member of the society of the Golden Dawn,’ Theodore explained. ‘When the commandant’s wife raised the question of a defunct jade mine, Himmler was stirred to say, “For those with eyes to see, coincidences are clad in shining light.” ’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Walls have ears. It gets worse. The basis of giving her the go-ahead was because Machen once wrote a book called Ornaments in Jade.’
Morgen stopped and turned the car around.
‘I’ve had enough of perdition,’ he said, reduced to slack-jawed disbelief at Heini’s vanity.
‘It is a pointless exercise,’ said Theodore. ‘No need to bother, I agree.’
He paused. ‘There is something you should know.’
Theodore’s silence filled the car. Morgen asked if he had added the pregnant pause to his repertoire.
Theodore tutted. ‘This is serious. Our leader is not a well man.’
‘Heini?’
‘Adolf.’
‘How ill?’
‘Some form of palsy. There is a race on to cure him. Bormann is using Fegelein to liaise with doctors in the place where you have just been.’
&n
bsp; ‘He more or less admitted as much.’
‘Adolf is in the hands of quacks. Did Fegelein tell you he serves more than one master?’
‘Bormann and Heini too?’
Theodore nodded. ‘Given his craze for soothsayers and the occult, Heini is using Fegelein in necromancy and magic practices to cure the Führer, perhaps even involving the sacrifice of animals and children . . .’
So the man was accountable after all, and not only of the crime Morgen had thought him guilty.
The lake no longer looked so threatening or inviting. Sybil risked bathing in one of the cleaner creeks but still dared not drink the water.
She made a longer solitary foray because she now considered the reeds her friend. She was surprised she had any imagination left to create a fantasy out of the place. Her confusion over Schlegel holding her hand had abated. No motive beyond reassurance, she told herself, and how often in the past months had she craved that.
At the edge of the reeds open land stretched ahead, and, beckoning like a shimmering mirage, or miracle, a squat water tower and a field of cabbage. The surroundings lay empty, the way clear. Fortune favoured the brave, she told herself, and in platitude lay hope. She was almost happy. Food. Water. The place to herself. She scuffed the dirt with her toes, remembered fallen leaves. She watched her feet, not because she had to as one did in the camp, where the first lesson was never look up, but because she wanted to.
The plane came out of nowhere, from behind, so close that Sybil glimpsed the goggled pilot’s gaze. A singing and whistling in her ears was followed by the report of the shot; no mistaking that. Someone was firing at her. There, on the horizon, blurred by the heat haze, she saw the line of riders starting forward.
She ran back and tore blind through the reeds, lungs bursting, panic leaping, trusting instinct. She passed the canoe and the jetty.
She paused long enough to grab Schlegel and drag him away, ignoring his grunts of pain.
She worked their way deeper into the channels. When the land gave up she splashed on, hoping the water was shallow enough to wade. They ran themselves to a standstill and stood bent double, hands on knees, sucking air. Schlegel caught his breath enough to say the plane flew over so low it had seemed about to crash. He didn’t add that he had stood paralysed at the thought of them being picked off separately, certain only that he did not want to die alone.