by Lavie Tidhar
– The Wolf man.
– Working for the fucking Russians, can you believe it? Tigerman roars with laughter. Of all people, he says. Oblivion shrugs. So what’s the difference, he seems to be implying. What is he doing for them? he says. Tigerman says, Same as he always did. Hunting Übermenschen. Only difference, he’s got a different paymaster now. He has a whole new gang working for him. A couple of old comrades from the war, the ones who didn’t die or go on the ratline to Argentina or were— Tigerman stops, looks, if that’s even possible, a little sheepish.
– Were not picked up in Operation Paperclip by your own government, you mean?
Tigerman shrugs it off. The rest are all locals, he says, Vietnamese, Lao, some Chinese.
– So what’s the problem? Oblivion says. Why the interest?
– He’s stopped taking orders from Moscow, Tigerman says. Shrugs. I don’t know how he ended up with them. Somehow they’d pulled the wolf man out of the war. They saved him: but that meant he was theirs, for good.
– The Russians want him dead? Oblivion says.
– Once he stopped taking orders there was only one thing they could do, Tigerman says. And that’s to try and get rid of him.
– So let the Russians do it, Oblivion says.
Tigerman grins at him and lights up a joint.
What, Tigerman says. And miss out on all the fun?
98. LAOS 1967
Chop, chop, chop, chop, the helicopter rises over crags and narrow dirt tracks, terraced rice fields, their yellow is startling to the eyes, chop, chop, the rotor blades swish through the air, down below Oblivion can see a boy leading goats, women with wide-brimmed hats sheltering their faces from the sun, chop, chop the helicopter rises, higher, higher, these mountains seem immense to Oblivion, what is he doing here?
– Kill that motherfucker, Tigerman says, Oblivion feels odd, Tigerman’s eyes are like two yellow moons in a dark sky, rising. What did he do the night before? Tigerman is smoking a joint, it’s an enormous thing, a tapering cone, the smell fills the inside of the helicopter, Tigerman passes it to Oblivion who takes a drag – how many now, he thinks. And can’t remember.
‘The Age of Aquarius’ plays full blast inside the helicopter. Oblivion starts to giggle, what do the people below them make of it, I’m a hero! he screams. I’m a fucking hero! Tigerman growls, his eyes are enormous, that smell of weed, seductive and sweet, fills the mind, You had some opium last night, didn’t you, Tigerman says, and Oblivion, as though it’s the funniest question in the world, laughs so hard as memory suddenly returns. Man I had the craziest dream! he says.
The helicopter drops suddenly, the landscape changes as they come around a bend in the mountain, the fog lies over the distant land, clouds below them, could Fogg shape clouds, Oblivion wonders, the laughter leaves his body like alcohol leaving a drunk’s. The fog clears in snatches and a bright red shines below, as far as the eye can see the slopes are covered in deep-red flowers, and Tigerman sobers up, too, The poppies, man, he says. The fucking poppies!
The helicopter descends, out of the clouds there rises a village of low-lying huts built against the side of the mountain, men appear behind a rock outcrop, they’re carrying guns, someone fires, into the air, Tigerman swears, the pilot, all this while, cool. Not much of a talker, maybe as stoned as they are, Bill, Oblivion thinks, was his name Bill, or Tom, something like that, anyway. Lands the helicopter right there on the slope, turns, There you go, sirs! he shouts. Oblivion and Tigerman climb out, the pilot gives them a thumbs-up, in moments they’re surrounded by men with guns, all around them are poppies, red as blood, a river of blood flowing down the mountainside. Oblivion hears footsteps, the men, silently, part. A short figure, stocky, muscled, the material of his costume tight over his chest—
– You? Oblivion says.
– Me, the Red Sickle says.
99. LAOS 1967
Crates and crates and crates inside a bamboo hut, the men, Hmong, carrying them up to the helicopter. No one pays Oblivion any attention. He opens one of the boxes and things fall into place at last.
The opium bars are stacked up tight inside the box, the processed opium packed and sealed in bags. Its smell still tingles Oblivion’s nose, that musk, that sweet or sour scent. The smell of dreams.
Glances at the chopper. So Air America is shipping opium, he realises. Tigerman materialises by his side, smoking a cigar. So you found out our little secret, he says, his teeth bite into the leaf in his mouth. You wouldn’t tell on us now, would you? Oblivion.
– What do you do with it? Oblivion says, Tigerman shrugs: Funding the war effort, he says. From here to Wattay Airport or Long Chen, from there onwards – I don’t know.
Oblivion thinks of men in white smocks in secret labs, beakers in hand. A special kind of science. Turning opium into what the Germans, when Bayer first marketed it in eighteen ninety-five, called Heroin – from the word for hero.
– So this is why the CIA want the wolf man dead? he says.
– He’s burning down the poppy fields, Tigerman says, and shakes his head like he just can’t believe it. He has a Vietnamese comrade working for him, Mr Van, a fire starter. They’re costing the CIA millions in lost revenue.
– That’s why he has to go?
– That’s why he has to go.
– And you’re teaming up with the Russians. With the Red Sickle.
Tigerman smiles, almost wistfully. Remember Cecilienhof? The Potsdam Conference. He used to sit with Stalin and the rest of the Russian team.
– I remember, Oblivion says. Remember Berlin in forty-six. Thinks of Fogg, who was always scared of the wolf man. Everybody has a bogeyman.
– So you’re going to come along? Tigerman says.
Oblivion thinks of Fogg. He should be thinking of Tank in Auschwitz, of the botched Paris operation or bloody Transylvania, but all he can think about is Fogg.
– I’ll do it, he says.
100. LAOS–VIETNAM BORDER 1967
They walk through dirt trails across the mountains, their guides with machetes, Oblivion can hear furtive sounds in the forests, bears and wolves still live here, clouds hide the world down below.
Besides Oblivion, Tigerman has transformed. He stalks ahead in animal form, and there is that smell, a wild musk coming off him. Almost as if for him, it is sexual, Oblivion thinks uneasily.
Three days on the trail … somewhere on the Lao border, a no-man’s-land. At some point even the guides left. There are only the three of them, Oblivion, Tigerman, the Red Sickle. A mini-United Nations of Übermenschen. Poppy fields give way to rice paddies, give way to wild, primal forests. They are alone, the heat is unbearable, mosquitoes savage their skin, Oblivion waves his hand desperately, erasing them, but more and more of them come. We don’t age, the Red Sickle says, and grins. But we can die.
Tigerman stalks ahead, the human form abandoned. The night before he left them to make camp and disappeared into the trees, at night they heard growls, the scream of an animal, in the morning there was fresh, bloodied meat waiting for them. He won’t change back to human form, has gone feral. Crazy Yank, the Red Sickle says, the blood around his mouth as he eats is a darker shade of his uniform. He still wears the crossed-sickle-and-fist legend of the Russian Sverhlyudi. Oblivion thinks of a slender woman with haunted dark eyes and eternally wet, long black hair, a blue uniform with that same legend on. How is Rusalka? he says, the Red Sickle scowls, Siberia, he says, and says no more.
On the third day they reach the camp.
Oblivion is alone in the forest. Tigerman is prowling, the Red Sickle is in his own vantage point. They have triangulated the camp, gone into deep cover. Oblivion thinks longingly of hot showers, soap, food. The stench of his own body startles him.
The first one he kills is a boy. Oblivion is by a brook and the boy comes with bottles to be filled. He does not even feel Oblivion approaching behind him, Oblivion lays his hand on the boy’s head like a benediction. He rips a trough of nothingness through
the boy’s skull and holds him, gently, as he falls. Later he buries the remains as best he can. It’s easier than trying to erase the entire body.
In the night he hears a growl in the distance and a scream, cut short.
The next day no one comes out alone from the camp. They come out in groups, armed men and Übermenschen. Their talents are odd, startling. Oblivion hides. In the distance he hears shouts, and gunfire, the Red Sickle laughing, the sound of sharp metal tearing into human flesh, screams, then silence again.
The third night no one comes out of the camp.
We can’t touch the wolf man, Oblivion says.
A negator, Tigerman says. Shrugs. We wait, he says, and the Red Sickle grunts assent beside him. We wait for the wolf man to come to us.
On the fourth night Oblivion is woken up to the stench of smoke and the crackle of fire. He makes his way through the trees cautiously to a rise, looking down. A short man, dressed in pressed khakis, stands before the wolf man’s camp, a wall of fire rising before him, spreading rapidly away from the camp. Oblivion curses. That must be the famous Mr Van, the Red Sickle says, materialising beside him. The fire roars below. No, Oblivion realises. Not the fire. Engines. Jeeps burst out of the camp, men with machine guns, he seems to recognise one of them, a tall blond Scandinavian, another Nazi Übermensch escaped from that other war. But no sign of the wolf man.
The jeeps split up. They’re hunting, the Red Sickle says. Laughs. Tiger hunting! he says. The fire rages below, spreading towards them. Oblivion looks to the Red Sickle. So what do we do now? he says.
– Now? the Red Sickle says. Now we go hunting back. And with that his giant sickle appears in his hand, and he grins, and the metal flashes. The Red Sickle takes to the air, the way Oblivion had seen him, all those years before, in the sky above Leningrad. He is left alone. He can hear the sigh of the fire, the crackling of trees, the hunting call of a tiger in the distance. Oblivion sighs. Cracks his knuckles. Then makes his way into the trees, into the oncoming fire, his hand outstretched before him, erasing fire, trees and earth as he goes.
101. LAOS–VIETNAM BORDER 1967
Dawn spreads over the place late, the sun having to rise over the peaks to at last be seen. When it appears it casts its light over a scorched land of desolation. The air smells of burnt organic matter, of bark and leaf and human flesh and small animals caught in the fire. It had rained in the night and the ground is wet, it has a smell like an unwashed dog. An upturned jeep lies half buried in the mud. Mr Van, the Vietnamese fire starter, lies awkwardly next to it, his skull cleaved cleanly in half.
Oblivion stumbles into the clearing before the camp. He is covered in mud and blood, his heart beats fast in his chest, exhaustion rising inside him like damp.
– So you made it, he says, as a figure materialises by his side. The Red Sickle, left eye shut and bruised black, his costume ripped, a wound on his right arm clumsily tied with a hastily made tourniquet now soaked in blood.
The Red Sickle shrugs. Übermenschen are hard to kill, he says. To their left, lying in the mud, is the big Scandinavian, his body savagely torn, teeth marks on his chest and arms. Oblivion can’t, for the life of him, remember the man’s name. From Oblivion’s other side comes the sound of soft pattering feet and a tiger hovers into view. It stops and sniffs the air and sneezes. The prodigal returns, the Red Sickle says, drily. The tiger turns its head and blinks. Then it slowly shifts, sheds its fur, rises, and then Tigerman is standing beside them, looking grim and somewhat bedraggled.
– Hard night? Oblivion says.
– Just couldn’t sleep, Tigerman says.
The three of them stand, facing the silent camp. Oblivion, flanked by the Red Sickle and Tigerman.
They wait.
Silence creeps over the ruined forest. The sun rises over the mountains, slowly, already it is growing uncomfortably hot. They wait in silence, the weight of the sub-machine gun is comforting in Oblivion’s hands, beside him Tigerman checks his own weapon, only the Red Sickle is still. Their strange talents will be of no use against the wolf man, but a gun’s a gun.
Then he comes. Oblivion senses movement before he sees it. The man who approaches them is wearing plain khakis and his hair is grey like a wolf’s. He is a man of medium height. Not at all the monstrous figure of one’s imagination. Oblivion remembers Minsk, Paris, tries to think of Tank in the concentration camps. But the truth is he feels very little. To the Old Man he was the mind on the other side of a chessboard. Only to Fogg he was the bogeyman, a thing out of nightmare. Now, in the light of day, in the silent clearing, all Oblivion sees is another ageless, tired man.
The wolf man approaches the three of them in silence, then halts. They range before him in a semi-circle, guns at the ready. An execution squad. The wolf man smiles.
– Jury, judge and executioner, he says. But which of you is which?
– Hans von Wolkenstein, Tigerman says, solemnly, you are under arrest for the war crimes of—
The Red Sickle says, Nazi.
Oblivion says nothing.
Von Wolkenstein turns his gaze on the Red Sickle. Ah, the drunk, he says.
– I no longer drink.
– No? A shame.
There is a gun in a holster on the wolf man’s hip. An old gun, Oblivion notes: a German Luger. The wolf man’s hand is on the butt of the gun. Tigerman says, take the gun out slowly and throw it on the ground.
– Really, the wolf man says, this charade is unnecessary.
– Do it!
The wolf man’s eyes are cold and grey as the sea. It’s what Oblivion remembers later, that and his face without the smile, a tired face, and the silence in the trees. The wolf man slowly lifts the gun up. Then, before they can react, he calmly turns it on himself, puts the muzzle of the gun in his mouth like a pacifier and pulls the trigger.
TWELVE:
RED POPPIES
BERLIN–AFGHANISTAN–NEW YORK
1976–2001
MAN LANDS ON MOON
July 21, 1969
* * *
FLORIDA Mankind has made history today with the landing of the first manned mission on the moon. Mission Commander Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface and into the pages of the history books. His first words on an alien world were, ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’
Armstrong was followed onto the lunar surface by astronaut Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin.
The historic Apollo 11 mission, the pinnacle achievement of an American space programme, began with a military rocket programme that later became NASA – the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Apollo 11 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 16, using a Saturn V rocket. Director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Dr Wernher von Braun, who headed the team developing the Saturn V, was on hand to watch the launch. Originally from Germany, Dr von Braun is now a naturalised American citizen.
In a historic telephone call to the moon from the White House, President Nixon said, ‘Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth.’
CONSTRUCTION BEGINS ON BERLIN WALL
August 13, 1961
* * *
BERLIN At midnight last night, Soviet authorities closed down the border between East and West Berlin. Over eight thousand East Germans had travelled to West Berlin in the immediate lead up to the closure, and are now unable to travel back. East German troops have begun to dig up streets on the boundary to prevent the passing of vehicles, and installed barbed-wire fences. Armed guards patrol the border. Unauthorised travel between East and West Berlin is no longer possible. Construction is set to begin on a massive, 140 kilometres-long separation wall.
102. VIENNA, AUSTRIA 1976
The Brezhnev years.
We assemble this piecemeal, from broken transcripts, classified intel, old men’s recollect
ions. Vienna, in seventy-six. A year that is important to us, for our own selfish reasons. But this is not our story.
Nineteen seventy-six:
Earlier in the year the Israelis swooped on Entebbe, in Uganda, where a hijacked plane with one hundred hostages was kept under guard by Idi Amin. We remember – we watched this – the Sabra, brought back from retirement, leading the troops, his thorns protruding, his feet shaking the ground with each massive jump and subsequent landing, he was wounded in the shooting, his blood ran green and red on that parched African earth. They say when he died, his last words were, It is good to die for one’s country. A legend, a myth, like the story about the wolf man not dying in Vietnam, there had been sightings of him later, elsewhere, in Argentina, in China and Tibet, in Mozambique.
How does it start? It begins, we think, in Vienna, a few months after Entebbe, nine years after Oblivion’s sojourn to Vietnam, and it concerns the Red Sickle, again.
Imagine an old woman. Not one of the changed. She would have been in her twenties during the war. Perhaps she’d been at Leningrad. We are not sure. Old now, stooped, the years have not been kind. Could be worse, though. She is alive. Her name is Galina Feldman and she is a mathematician, attending an international conference in this beautiful city.
A conference that Spit, for whatever reason, is attending.
Not as a mathematician, of course. Let us say, an interested observer.
For this is what they are, what they do, at the Bureau for Superannuated Affairs. They observe. Like sharks circling in the water around a juicy prize. And what’s juicier than Russian scientists let out to play outside? No matter the heavy escort, there to ensure they don’t misbehave. The scent alone is tantalising. It’s the scent of blood.