by Chris Petit
‘White.’ Schlegel felt emboldened to ask, ‘Why am I here?’
The man showed his teeth, as if to say such abductions were entirely normal in his world. Schlegel suspected he could afford to be casual because he dealt in a particularly tight form of control. He remembered Rösti’s suggestion of some kind of mastermind and wondered if he was looking at him.
‘I am told you are after something. The seeker shall be shown,’ the man announced enigmatically.
Schlegel, still shivering from his drenching, experienced a flash of trepidation: he felt as though he was sitting on top of a slide with everything about to move very fast, and he needed to have his wits about him.
‘The Hitler confession?’ he ventured.
The man moved towards a safe that stood under a table and worked the combination lock. ‘My little black museum.’
He gave Schlegel a sly look as he produced a large box file and put it on the table. Schlegel watched as the lid was slowly opened and the contents arranged lovingly on the table. They consisted of a document pressed in Plexiglas; what looked like a child’s exercise book; and a dark green leather folder with a clasp lock.
‘All fascinating in their way,’ the man said, pushing the Plexiglas in Schlegel’s direction. It showed a handwritten sheet, with the same scratchy writing that was on the postcard Rehse had shown him. Cheap paper and brown ink. Schlegel read:
My darling child
At first it was just the sound of laughter filling the room and gay singing as you go about your business, and he realises how little real laughter there has been in his life. Then it becomes your laughter, your singing. It took time to realise it was all about you, the adorable child. He missed you when he wasn’t there and counted the days until his return, and his heart lifts on seeing you again. No harm must come to you. Absolutely not! You must be kept safe and not bruised or sullied by the filthy lusts of men. He is assailed by dread visions of what others will do, with their marbled bodies and unleashed cocks. He sees you tied down, straining against your bonds, begging and screaming for mercy, exposing your raised buttocks in offering, despite yourself, because the power of the man cannot be denied, forcing his way into that dark, forbidden hole. Out! Out! Other terrible sights besiege him. Men on their knees, begging you to defile them, to reveal their worthlessness by shitting on them, how can such things be? These men are craven, bandy-legged Jews, he knows, inviting punishment, asking to be kicked and beaten as their only path to satisfaction. And worse! In one ghastly apparition the beautiful child, no longer submissive but a wilful seductress – your magnificent naked bosom caressed lasciviously by you – stands legs spread over the prostrate Jew, who rants incoherently, twitching and frantically fingering himself as you shrug down your drawers and squat to spray a long, thin and thrilling stream of liquid gold into the man’s babbling, eternally grateful mouth.
Schlegel found what he’d just read almost laughable in its crass use of surrogates; as with the account of the Jewish intruder who was supposed to have attacked the niece.
‘And the point of showing me?’ Schlegel asked, wondering if Herr Wolf, with his claims to be above temptations of the flesh, could have had such a dirty mind to produce such stuff. It read more like the work of a cheap pornographer.
‘Context,’ said the man.
‘And the other items?’
The man picked up the leather folder. ‘Said to be Fredi Huber’s secret text. The key to the lock is missing.’
‘And no one has opened it?’ asked Schlegel in surprise. The lock wouldn’t prove much of an obstacle.
‘Some things are better for being preserved, like a fine wine not for immediate opening.’
‘But it may turn out to be nothing.’
The man nodded. Schlegel suspected he was familiar with its contents and deliberate mystery was part of his game.
‘And the exercise book?’ Schlegel asked.
‘The niece’s private diary.’ He pushed it in Schlegel’s direction. ‘What do you think?’
Schlegel looked at what seemed to consist of accounts of shopping and boyfriends and love affairs, written in a sloppy romantic style. He noted Jewish names. A single entry underscored three times: ‘I can’t get enough of him!’ A note of her shooting target practice scores. A late entry declaring:
‘I am beside myself with worry. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Your conclusion?’ asked the man.
‘It’s not exactly tell-all,’ said Schlegel.
‘It’s a poor fake, probably by Russian intelligence produced after the girl’s death.’
‘The reason being?’
‘To discredit her to the detriment of her uncle, showing her as a promiscuous Jew lover.’
‘And the man’s confession that everyone is so interested in, do you have that?’
‘Shall we say it is in play.’
‘In play?’
‘Active.’
‘And the other “confession”, the one by Anton Schlegel?’ Also in play.’
‘What are the stakes?’
‘High. In the meantime my purpose is to demonstrate that your world just got a little smaller.’
‘And your role in this?’
‘Discretionary. Let us say we are aware of those familiar to you. Let us say they operate within our orbit. Your old friend the art dealer Christoph, the homosexual, hanging on by the grace of others. Your stepfather, current whereabouts unknown, and your colleague Morgen’s old adversary, Fegelein. We are aware of Anna Huber.’
‘How do you know about her?’ Schlegel asked, shocked.
The man spread his hands and said, ‘She told us.’
Schlegel experienced a stab of anger, thinking Huber must have set him up all along.
The man looked apologetic. ‘None of this is so extraordinary in a world of informers and secret files. The point is you will be given safe passage.’
‘To where?’ Schlegel asked, still shocked.
‘You have been selected.’
Schlegel didn’t bother to ask, selected for what?
The man went on, ‘You are the only one in a position to deliver certain documentation in person to Party Secretary Bormann in Berlin.’
‘I have no access to the man.’
‘I heard you met him.’
‘Did Fegelein tell you that?’
The other man shrugged. ‘Bormann will see you when he learns your name.’
Schlegel saw his chance and said, ‘Then give me the document, put me on the night train to Berlin and I will gladly see the back of this place.’
‘The station is being watched.’
The two thugs, Schlegel supposed.
‘The airport too?’
‘We can’t take that risk. We have another route out via the big race meeting tomorrow afternoon. You will be taken there and put on one of the charabancs taking racegoers back to Nuremberg. From there you can take a train to Berlin.’
‘And the documentation?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘You are safe here until then.’
As in Budapest, Schlegel had the feeling of life going on around him which he knew nothing about. With the talk now of race meetings, he wondered if his being there was not to do with his father at all but his stepfather, given his stepfather’s racing connections. It led him to ask, ‘Does any of this have to do with Anton Schlegel?’
The man shook his head. ‘Long gone.’
‘And you are?’
‘Bormann’s is the only name you need to know and he yours. Safer if you don’t know mine.’
‘And when Bormann asks on whose behalf I am acting?’
‘He won’t. He will know.’
The other man was sweating. Schlegel wondered if physical grotesqueness was a condition of this netherworld these strange creatures inhabited. He decided the man standing before him was actually nervous for all his air of command. Perhaps the stakes were that high. As he had been
chosen to execute the delivery, Schlegel wondered if he perhaps had more of an upper hand than he’d thought.
He said, ‘I want a favour in return.’
The man looked surprised by the demand.
Schlegel went on. ‘Rehse said the archive has Anton Schlegel’s papers.’ He pointed to the objects on the table and said, ‘If you are willing to share these then surely you can show me those belonging to someone described by Rehse as being of no consequence.’
‘Did he say that?’ the man asked sharply. He grew impatient and demanded, ‘How much do you really want to know?’
‘I know next to nothing. I only care that I was lied to. I am bound to wonder if these papers contain some sort of pathetic excuse.’
‘The truth isn’t always polite,’ the man announced ponderously.
Schlegel sighed. ‘Enough games. I have come a long way.’
‘Like a good pilgrim,’ the man said with sudden sarcasm.
Schlegel was thrown by the change of tone. The man had been almost friendly until then.
‘Do you really want to know what your father was?’ he insisted.
What, not who, Schlegel thought; was there a difference?
The man paused. ‘Anton Schlegel was not a nice man at all.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Before my time, only by reputation.’
‘I came to Munich being told he was alive.’
‘I can assure you he is dead. Sorry to disappoint.’
The news was almost a relief, thought Schlegel. Now he could get on with the rest of his life.
The man replaced the objects on the table back in their box and returned them to the safe, shut the door and was about to lock it when he asked, ‘Are you sure you want to know?’
Schlegel didn’t say no and the man opened the safe again, removed an item from another folder, and laid it on the desk.
After the man was gone, locking the door behind him, Schlegel went to the desk and looked at what had been left. It was Anton Schlegel’s unsent letter, addressed to him.
42
To my son:
I write in the expectation of you never reading this, my dear August, as we shall probably never meet and it shan’t be sent, and, besides, I am using it as an excuse to address myself, at a remove.
It is 1931, a rainy evening in late October and a momentous time of late.
I am mostly homosexual by nature though not exclusively as I married and produced you. I did not serve in the 1914 war, being in Shanghai where I acquired an English bride who was boyish and flatchested, well-connected and a crashing snob, which I didn’t mind as I still take a detached interest in society’s foibles. Colonial life was more European than Europe, the meticulous recreation of a halfremembered dream, delineated by the tyranny of distance. Our house looked like it could have been in any European stockbroker belt, but especially English, with the addition of craven but untrustworthy Chinese servants.
I had gone to Shanghai to avoid the 1914 war because I possessed enough foresight to anticipate the bloodbath. I was not a patriot. I was familiar with my homosexuality, having practiced it and been fiddled with from an early age, including a mutual liaison with a school teacher, a man with gentle hands. The disadvantage of Shanghai was lack of opportunity for significant extracurricular activity. Chinese boys didn’t appeal. Some British public schoolboys kept their hand in but tended to be pink and flabby, with parts to match. So I packed up my family and returned to Germany, to throw myself into Berlin’s emerging single-sex nightlife, with its hard-up young men willing to sell themselves in lively, easygoing ways. My dear wife was otherwise engaged learning her excellent German and cultivating her own affairs. We came to a broad understanding and although sexual relations were maintained – but no little sister produced – we both knew our private interests lay elsewhere.
As for my subsequent disappearance, a scandal would make most sense – being caught with my pants down, buggering in the boardroom – but the reasons are boredom, dear boy, and insider trading, plus extensive borrowing at a time of hyperinflation, creating a fortune, hedged via accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg. I soon created a platform that allowed me to do as I wished . . . The child bored me. I have to remind myself by that I mean you – it is too late not to be honest. You must be twelve now. I am afraid I had no aptitude for, or interest in, being a father. An insecure and clingy brat, not that our schedules coincided to any extent. Your mother showed as little concern and sometimes I wondered why we bothered with such a cumbersome asset.
I was curious about Argentina and told my wife I was thinking of scouting it out in terms of a move.
Your beloved mother was not convinced. Having worked hard to master her German, she wasn’t sure she wanted or needed to add Spanish. My reason was pursuit of a young diplomat from the Argentinian embassy who was being posted home, with whom I was smitten, or so I told myself. I was quite steadfast about making the trip until I fell in with a young visitor from Munich – a military lad and brownshirt, of easy passage and exquisite orgasms.
I decided to follow him to Munich, for what I thought would be a short stopover before departing for Buenos Aires. I had already decided Munich was sufficiently diverting to dally when I received news from my Argentinian paramour that he had decided to marry, making any continued liaison difficult while not out of the question. I in turn decided I wasn’t willing to play second fiddle.
I rented a house out in Feldafing where I entertained a succession of young men, for a week or two at most until I tired of them.
In many ways, I am an unassuming man of good grace and manners, possessing excellent taste, in clothes, in shoes, in the furniture I choose, the paintings I buy, and with my afternoons free I soon found myself entertained in the salons of Munich’s haut-bourgeois matrons. I could talk persuasively on most subjects and only very occasionally was found out. It was an idle, pleasant and indulgent life. I enjoyed its shallowness. Depth doesn’t interest me. I indulged in fashionable drugs and drank moderately, so was in no danger of going off the rails, but I knew I was already thinking of the next adventure.
As it happened, I had already been acquainted with that new adventure for several weeks without realising; what my afternoon matrons called ‘that delightful, funny little man’. One of my boys had dragged me along to what he called a political evening – a gathering of the great unwashed in a fifth-rate beer hall, getting drunk and disorderly until a small man with a greasy forelock walked in surrounded by brownshirt thugs, who winked suggestively at my lad. Scuffles broke out. Clubs were wielded, heads cracked. It seemed almost to be a reflex action of the herd.
I at once understood the attraction of terror. Fear costs nothing. Brutality is always respected. The realisation marked the start of a personal recklessness. My boy let me take him in a toilet cubicle to the accompaniment of shouts and screams and the sharp reports of bone on bone.
By the time we returned, order is restored.
The strange man smooths his hair into a parted fringe and before speaking spends a long time searching the audience, which grows suspenseful and expectant. He starts slowly, almost too quiet to be heard, in great rolling sentences – despondency, anger, betrayal, hope. Word for word it doesn’t add up to much but the effect is transformative, in a guttural way. The voice cranks up a register, cracks with emotion. Sharp chopping gestures to emphasise a point. If he speaks with notes he seems not to refer to them. It is as though the man is the vessel of the voice, which twitches him this way and that, like a storm-tossed cork, as the response grows more tumultuous. It is the bark of the underdog, the unheard, the voice of riot; that much is blindingly obvious to everyone in the room, which roars back its approval. Huge crescendo, the man flaying his vocal chords chasing a rapturous, barnstorming climax, showers of spittle as the rage grows uncontainable and the promise of delivery is screamed out to foot-stomping applause. It was as though a heavy artillery bombardment – which many of those in the room would have
been familiar with – had found its way into words. The audience reeled shellshocked.
Afterwards he looked like someone had switched him off. His clothes were soaked and he repeated the hair smoothing gesture.
The eyes were quite gone.
There was no getting near him with his bodyguard wrapped around him like a cloak. He appeared so spent and insignificant I doubted I would recognise him if he walked past in the street.
*
I became friendly with Ernst Röhm, who called himself the head queer in town. We were bound to meet, given my liking for his hard boys. Ernst sniffed out my Feldafing home and approved. Well-appointed, not too comfortable. He said it looked like I was capable of walking out at a moment’s notice.
That initial meeting with Ernst was in November 1923. Herr Wolf, as he liked to call himself, I didn’t encounter until later, because of the failed Party uprising and his trial and imprisonment. After his release at the end of 1924 Herr Wolf was, in effect, voiceless, being banned from public speaking. A strange first meeting in the January of the following year, organised by Ernst bringing him to Feldafing, revealed a tongue-tied man of few social graces, gormless in repose, but with a feral whiff and a marked air – the fancied runner with the longest odds.
To what extent Herr Wolf defined me or the other
way round is impossible to say. He will no doubt fulfil his political destiny regardless, but there was perhaps a brief period when my influence held sway – as an arbiter of etiquette and taste. I said, ‘I can teach you all the boring things you will need to get on with the boring people. However much you despise them they will be your backbone.’ I saw neediness and greed in his eyes.
Your affectionate father, A. S.
In the early stages of their friendship, Herr Wolf told Anton Schlegel that he found him like clear water over which he could skim his pebbles and watch in admiration as they skipped away.
People generally found Anton receptive, even when he wasn’t that interested in them. They seemed to want to tell him their stories and he seemed to satisfy some primitive urge whereby those confessing went away with a better understanding, even though he, Anton, like a fashionable shrink, contributed nothing and, unlike a shrink, didn’t charge. He decided his talent lay in the art of saying nothing or not very much.