The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “Karl?” He called. “Karl!” His brother was not there.

  KARL WALKED INTO THE HOUSE MUCH LATER. “You won’t believe what I got for the fall crop.” he told his brother. “Did you handle everything?”

  “What?” Jakub said.

  “Did everything go all right?”

  “After you helped me,” Jakub said.

  “Helped you?”

  “In the field.”

  “I was in town all day.”

  After the war, Monsignor Starska told this story to a beatification board of five Cardinals. He said the corpse on the tracks was a Jew. Only later did the board learn the man was a Russian atheist the Germans had labeled a spy.

  Fifteen

  “This is not something you need be concerned with,” Monsignor Starska said. “Not in the least.”

  “He’s asking for my help,” Jakub said.

  The priest brought his palms over Jakub’s shoulders and moved his hands up and down Jakub’s arms, where the hairs stiffened like little quills.

  “They will look into everything,” Starska whispered. “Everything you’ve ever done. Everything you’ve written or spoken. Every person who says you healed them.”

  “I didn’t promise to heal him,” Jakub said. “I’m not even sure why he came to me.”

  “Because of that man from Zakopane.”

  “I didn’t do anything for him.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The story’s taken on a life of its own.” The priest sighed. “This man Lutz wants you to change what he is, a part of him, like an eye. He wants you to rip it out.”

  “I agreed to talk with him.”

  Jakub turned and walked toward the porch. The priest called after him.

  “You’re going to be a saint someday,” he said. “But you have to play it right.”

  SAINTHOOD MEANT NOTHING TO JAKUB nor did the money he could have received from Karol Lutz, a prosperous publisher whose Vatican testimony on behalf of the candidate proved among the most valuable, for what it suggested about Chelzak’s moral compass. Lutz determined to introduce the decadent capitalist world of F. Scott Fitzgerald to German and Polish readers, partly as a literary swipe at the statism creeping across Europe, but mostly to make money. He was a good businessperson who saw profit in the punch line. He was also homosexual. Scott did not approve.

  “Scott.” Zelda, his wife, drew out the “awe” in the middle of his name and slid her forearms along both sides of her husband’s neck. He was sitting on a balcony overlooking the Wisla drinking scotch, neat and straight.

  “We need the money,” Zelda said. She kissed him.

  “Badly enough to wreck my reputation?”

  “It’s only over here. It’s not like you’re changing publishers back home.”

  “No one but you will see it that way,” Scott said.

  Lutz succeeded in a niche other publishers avoided—bringing contemporary American and western European thought to the darker half of Europe—the East. He also published in India, parts of Asia, and the Soviet Union, where capricious regulations restricted merchants to selling Fitzgerald on Tuesdays, W.E.B. Dubois on Fridays and Dickens in March. Lutz had so mastered the circumnavigation of bureaucratic whims that Soviet regulators approved, for exclusive distribution in Moscow and Stalingrad, Mein Kampf, their mortal enemy’s life story. Lutz had made a deal with Hitler. He became the European publisher of the Führer’s autobiography and so was permitted to operate unmolested in Berlin and other Nazi strongholds.

  These feats in the absurd gymnastics of 20th-century Euro-politics impressed Zelda Fitzgerald. When she and Scott received Lutz’s invitation to visit Poland, they went without much consideration. Scott the ebullient optimist only started hurling words like “queer” and “faggot” after they had round-trip tickets and an innkeeper’s bill marked paid.

  “If you didn’t want Lutz to publish you, why did we accept this trip?” Zelda asked. “You knew about him.”

  “Sober,” Scott said. “I knew about him sober. Now I’m drunk.” He wheeled his face around to hers. “And more than a little pissed.” He threw himself into a plush chair.

  “Stupid,” she said.

  “He published fucking Hitler,” Scott said. “How fucked up is that?”

  “Fucking attention getting,” Zelda said.

  “You’re either fucking naïve or a fucking idealist,” Scott said.

  “Or fucking a naïve idealist,” Zelda said.

  “Or fucking an ideal naïve,” Scott said.

  Zelda slithered onto her husband’s lap and curled her head around to his ear.

  “That’s ‘knave,’” she whispered.

  Scott looked her in the eyes. “Traitor,” he said. Then he looked over her, through the bay doors toward the river. “Be fag, be queer—but don’t be-tray.” He sipped his scotch. “I won’t be sullied by a turncoat.”

  “What’s traitorous about publishing Hitler?” Zelda asked. “He’s just another nut with a book.”

  “Oh. And is that what I am, Miss Zeldy? Just another kook with a book?” He grinned and licked her nose. She bit his lip. He pushed her off and stood.

  “Goofo.” She took his hand and took his drink away. “I said ‘nut.’ You’re a terrible cook.”

  He grabbed for the drink, but she held it at bay. “Sober up. He’s bringing the galleys by.”

  “How is it you know these things before I do?”

  “Clairvoyance,” Zelda said.

  “Witchcraft.”

  “He knows you don’t like him—now, after everything’s paid for,” Zelda said. She set his drink on an end table. “Why do you have to be so obvious?”

  “Bitchcraft.” Scott picked up his glass, licked the rim, aimed unsteadily, and hurled it at a tree off the balcony. It hit the ground intact.

  “You throw like a girl, Goofo,” Zelda said.

  “Good. I have something in common with the queers.”

  “You should pity them,” Zelda said. “They have a sickness.”

  “Then they can be cured,” Scott pronounced. “They can be healed.”

  YEARS LATER, KAROL LUTZ SAT WITH JAKUB CHELZAK on his porch.

  “You speak to me as though you are not sure you can help me,” Lutz said.

  “Maybe you need a priest,” Jakub said.

  “I have nothing to confess,” Lutz said.

  “You’ve lived with this all your life?”

  “Yes,” Lutz said.

  Jakub considered. “You don’t look sick to me.”

  “I’ll be clear with you, Mr. Chelzak,” Lutz said. “My life is in danger if I continue to live this way.”

  “I don’t see how I can help you.” Jakub stood. “I don’t think you’re sick.”

  “I can pay you handsomely, if that’s an issue,” Lutz said. “Very handsomely.”

  “My family always needs money,” Jakub said. “But for honest work.”

  “So leave me to the beast,” Lutz said. “It’s what I deserve, right?”

  Jakub stepped from the porch and Lutz grabbed his arm.

  “I am compelled, Mr. Chelzak. Compelled. Do you understand me?”

  Jakub took away Lutz’s hand. “You’re not sick,” Jakub said. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Lutz looked across the field. He heard a train in the distance. “Maybe not according to you.”

  “Do you have family?”

  “Not here,” Lutz said. “I cleaned him, you know—after he threw up,” Lutz said. “Their Führer. At a party.” He looked toward the waning daylight and shaded his eyes. “Puked all over himself,” he said. “If you’re not going to help me, I really need to be going. It’s getting dark.”

  Lutz walked down the little road past Monsignor Starska’s walking stick, leaning against the thick oak where he had forgotten it a day or two before. The glare obscured the walking man but Jakub saw his shadow until it became the shadow of the tree.

  KAROL LUTZ LEFT THE CONTINENT A FEW MONTHS LATER. He lived
in London for nine months and moved to Florida. From 1945 to 1950 he republished and revived the literary legacy of a writer he had long admired but who had died failed, broke and alone, consigned to obscurity by a flurry of sordid and belittling obituaries. By 1960, Lutz had secured F. Scott Fitzgerald a lasting place among the giants of literary fiction.

  Mein Kampf, in the meantime, fell out of print and Lutz sent his own copy, by request, to General George Patton, who read it and passed it around to his other generals. Avidly literate, Patton returned the favor by providing Lutz the book jacket quote that would cement Fitzgerald’s posthumous reputation.

  “The closest thing we have or may ever have to the Great American Novel,” Patton wrote of The Great Gatsby. “What American doesn’t now understand the tragedy of a man whose reach so vastly exceeds his grasp?”

  Rumors of Lutz’s homosexuality dogged him until the gay lifestyle became vogue. Long at peace with himself, Lutz nonetheless broke his lifetime silence only after reading a New York Times story about the Vatican’s efforts to identify Holocaust saints. Chelzak’s prominent mention prompted a flood of memories that moved Lutz to tears. He wrote the Vatican, requesting an audience with Church lawyers. Jakub’s steadfast refusal to regard him as either sick or sinner, despite the chance to profit from a man weakened by fear and stress, singularly encouraged him to flee the insanity of the Nazi occupation, he testified, leaving everything and everyone he knew and loved behind.

  Karol Lutz died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1988, at the age of 82, after a profitable affair of whispers and innuendo involving the writer Truman Capote. Capote may have been the first to gossip that Zelda Fitzgerald had ghostwritten a number of her husband’s stories, which had the effect of selling more books, paying the rent, and enhancing the Fitzgerald mystique Lutz had cultivated.

  Sixteen

  Corporal Stadt and Corporal Kessler, both nineteen and recently promoted to SS-Rottenführer, arrived on a train that passed Marienburg and the fields before it reached the Stutthof camp. They smiled and waved from the train at girls with baskets of produce and flowers in their hair. At the camp, they checked in with the other enlisted men. The officer on duty—harried with unfinished assignments—screwed-up their orders and in the chaos of too many men with nothing to do, released the two corporals on a weekend pass. They were both from small Bavarian towns populated by a few rich merchants who worked the markets and many poor families who worked the land. Stadt’s father raised dairy animals—goats and cows, and chickens after milk prices plunged in the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

  “Hitler rescued milk,” Stadt’s father told him. “He has my vote.”

  Kessler’s mother, a widow, worked for a textile merchant who sold expensive Bavarian wool in America and the Orient. She lost her job when Hitler ordered Jews out of businesses and her employer fled the country to join family in Manhattan. Jews taught her how to read in a town of mostly illiterates, and she made another job reading crop reports and war news to farmers, storekeepers, and landowners for a fee. She charged extra to read German re-tellings of the exploits of Al Capone, John Dillinger, and other American gangsters.

  “Hitler is a fool who will fuck us all,” she told her son. “He’s nothing but a gangster who robbed a very big bank.” At least the Americans, she said, did not allow their country to be taken over by thieves and murderers. “Look at them—Goering and Himmler. They look like child molesters.” She also taught her son to read.

  Stadt leaned against the wall of a shop in Marienburg, looking at contraband—a copy of Der Stuermer, a pulp magazine he picked up from a bench at the camp.

  “What does this say?” he asked Kessler and pointed.

  Kessler slapped him playfully on the side of his head. “Stupid baby can’t read.”

  Marienburg was a pocket of wealth in a tapestry of depression. The young women who wandered past wore perfumes that smelled exotic and dresses unlike anything Stadt or Kessler had ever seen. They looked at the reflection of their own uniforms in the shop windows.

  “We look good,” Kessler said. “We could have any of them.”

  Stadt nudged Kessler and pointed at Karl Chelzak emerging from a shop with a bag and a bouquet. “You have any money?” Stadt asked.

  Kessler shook his head. Stadt strolled across the street toward Karl. “Pretty flowers,” he called out. “Are those for your girl?”

  Karl ignored the boy soldiers who hung around in corners and crevices, eyeing the girls, picking fights, and trying to be noticed. Stadt came right up to him and stood.

  “I’m speaking to you,” Stadt said.

  “So what.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Fuck off,” Karl said.

  He was a much larger man but Stadt kneed him in the balls. Karl bent over and dropped his flowers.

  “Fucking Pole-lock,” Stadt said.

  Kessler watched and stood. Men walked out of shops toward Karl and Stadt.

  “Hey—what are you doing there?” a man said. Stadt looked at him. “You!” the man pointed.

  Kessler saw other townsfolk and ran to Stadt and took his shoulder. “We should go,” Kessler said.

  “He needs to stand and look me in the eye and tell me to fuck off again,” Stadt said. Stadt bent down and picked up Karl’s flowers, but one of the locals ran up and whacked him across the ear with a stick and he stumbled. The other men grabbed him and Kessler, and dragged them toward the side of a building.

  “Take your clothes off,” one of the men said. He had a gun and he raised it to Stadt’s face.

  “You’ll die for this old man,” Stadt said.

  “You’re a disgrace to your uniform. Take it off!”

  “What do you know about my uniform?”

  “Defense of the Fatherland. Strip!”

  Kessler and Stadt took off their coats, shirts and pants.

  “Now underwear,” the man said.

  “You’re crazy,” Kessler said.

  “Schnell!” The man with the gun fired into the air. “Streifen!”

  The young soldiers took off their underwear and stood naked.

  “Now march,” the man with the gun said. “Back to your company.”

  “You’re crazy,” Stadt screamed. Kessler was crying.

  “March or I shoot you both.”

  They marched and the men hurled rocks and sticks. They marched into the street and other townspeople picked up anything they could find and threw it at them. The soldiers started to run, but the gun fired again.

  “Slow down,” one of the men yelled. “March only.”

  Other people jeered and screamed and followed them, throwing stones and sand. When the two soldiers were far enough from the edge of town, the people turned back.

  “They’re going to get the fucking wrath of God for this,” Stadt said.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Kessler cried. “Why the fuck did you have to do that?”

  Stadt turned when he felt something hit his back. His uniform lay at his feet. Karl threw his shoes and belt and Kessler’s uniform too. The three men stood alone on a dirt road that ran past the castle. Kessler bent down to pick up his shirt but Stadt grabbed him.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled to Karl. “Are you trying to humiliate us?”

  Karl turned with his flowers and walked toward the town.

  “We won’t be humiliated. You hear me? No fucking Pole lock is going to humiliate us!”

  Kessler pushed Stadt away and gathered his uniform.

  “Fuck you,” Stadt screamed at Karl. “Just fuck you!”

  Kessler put on his uniform under a tree. Stadt gathered his uniform and walked with it under his arms, naked in the sun.

  MIA CHELZAK CAST FEED TO THE CHICKENS from a weathered wicker basket. An autumn wind swept through the poplars that lined the road. She looked toward the trees and saw Jakub, standing in the leaves.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “I ache all over.”
<
br />   “You taking what the doctor gave you?”

  “Yes, but I still feel useless.”

  Mia took her son. “You’re not useless,” she said.

  “You and Karl are working all the time. What am I doing?”

  “You help people,” Mia said. “They leave us food and other things. It’s what the Lord wants for now.”

  They heard a train that looked like a snake weaving through brown winter grass.

  “Did Karl tell you what happened?”

  “What? No.”

  “Good—I told him I would.”

  “Well?”

  “There was a body on the tracks.”

  “A body? A dog?”

  “A man,” Jakub said.

  “That’s terrible,” Mia said. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “Karl told Monsignor.”

  “But no one told me,” Mia said. “Just like your father. Never talk. Keep everything inside.” She spread more seed and set the basket down. “Do you remember where you saw it?”

  “We burned it.”

  “You burned it? Who burned it?”

  “Karl. Me. But Karl wasn’t there. He was in town all day.”

  “You’re not making sense.” Mia moved away. “Show me. I want to see.”

  They walked into the fields. A few meters from the rail, Mia gasped. “It’s burned,” she said. Jakub walked to the charred ground. He saw pieces of cloth and leather. “There’s blood,” Mia said. She took her son. “What was it doing here?”

  “He fell off the train,” Jakub said.

  “How?” Mia said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “He jumped. Ask Karl. People try to get off these trains.”

  “Why?” Mia said. “Where on Earth are they going?”