by Chris Petit
Schlegel saw clearly how Bormann, as the interpreter of his master’s secret wishes, had decided Herr Wolf wanted her gone but was too indecisive to break off the relationship or give the order. He suspected Bormann had been uncharacteristically hesitant: it was a big decision killing family, after all.
Schlegel’s only miscalculation was in the effect. He had spoken out for Geli’s sake because she deserved to be accounted for and those responsible confronted. But instead of anger or threats, he was being greeted with unmistakable admiration on the part of both men, as though he had established his credentials by exposing their secret. Having shown himself capable of resolving the mystery, when none had, he appeared to be on the brink of being invited over to the other side.
Did he sigh as he reached into his pocket? He wasn’t sure. He said, ‘There’s more.’
He produced a scrappy typed sheet of paper from his pocket and was rewarded with a look of grateful astonishment as Anton Schlegel realised what it was.
Bormann picked it up with a look of ironic amusement and read aloud: ‘ “Sunday, 20 September 1931. Herr Wolf admits the following.” ’ He looked up, eyebrows raised. ‘The first I’ve heard. To whom did he admit?’
‘To Anton Schlegel, I presume,’ said Schlegel.
‘Ah,’ said Bormann. ‘Where?’
Anton answered. ‘At the Berghof. He stayed briefly, after learning of her death.’
‘Ah,’ said Bormann, inscrutable. ‘I suppose that makes sense. While the balance of his mind was disturbed.’
‘The same was said of the niece,’ replied Anton.
‘You’re right. Perhaps none of us was in his right mind,’ Boorman offered in return.
Schlegel sensed an undercurrent between the two men, almost as though the blackest joke was being shared. He could make no sense of it.
Bormann resumed reading aloud:
‘ “It is hard to say whether Herr Wolf assumes blame for his niece’s death, holding himself indirectly responsible, or whether he believes he did in fact kill her. I write this for the record. It is up to others to decide. It was a volatile relationship. Both were mercurial in temperament. Herr Wolf and his niece dined out on the evening of 17 September, returning home late. Unusually for him he drank alcohol. She said it would loosen him up. At first the effect was novel. She spent the evening being provocative. Not until they got home did Herr Wolf realise how overwrought he had become. His niece’s contrary state persisted. Herr Wolf referred to her monthly moods, which badly affected her. With Herr Wolf extremely reserved about physical matters, it was some time before I grasped that he was trying to say his niece was telling him her period was late. She was infatuated with the idea of having a child. He dismissed her claims as a crude attempt at emotional blackmail. There was music on the gramophone: ‘Tristan and Isolde’. The relationship had reached a crisis point. However intent he was on honouring his promise to go away with her, he wanted to delay as he needed time to arrange the future of the Party and decide on a successor.” ’
Bormann, who had sounded sceptical about what he was reading, looked up in surprise at that. ‘Oh, come now. “Go away with her?” You made this stuff up.’
‘It’s what he said. Go on,’ said Anton Schlegel.
Bormann continued, sounding less certain. ‘ “I add the following observations. Guns lay around the house, whips too, contributing to an air of latent violence. Then there was the move from a tiny bedsit to this histrionic, operatic space demanding grand gestures. Herr Wolf then made a terrible miscalculation, by his own admission. Unable to comprehend what she was telling him, he proposed they go back to when she had first come to him aged nineteen and helped around the house. He pointed out she was nearly as good a cook as her mother. Herr Wolf said: ‘I was only trying to suggest we return to the start and make our own secret world.’ Herr Wolf believed his offer would be gratefully received. Instead he had to contend with her throwing it back in his face, saying she wasn’t putting up with any demotion to below stairs. Herr Wolf pleaded poor recollection because of shock and the drink. They were both playing a part, he thought, and would come to their senses. To defuse the situation he took the canary from its cage, to offer as a token of his love. Only when he handed it to her and she screamed did he see that he had squeezed the life out of it. After that he recalled nothing, saying he had blacked out because whatever he had done was too awful to bear. She would never do anything to hurt him, therefore: ‘Only I can be responsible for what happened, after taking leave of my senses.’
‘ “Signed, Wolf.” ’
*
Schlegel thought the confession read not like any unburdening but an attempt to own the girl’s death for the sake of Herr Wolf’s sentimental tragedy.
Bormann looked to Anton Schlegel, who said, ‘Herr Wolf saw himself as utterly defeated. With so many accusations flying around he frequently said in the hours after, “I may as well have pulled the trigger.” ’ He insisted I write everything down for him to sign. Later that evening, I offered my own spoken “confession”, which I wrote up later, to demonstrate to him that he could not have done it.’
They sat in silence, each contemplating his position, until Schlegel spoke to Anton. ‘One thing I don’t understand is how you knew where the book was. Fräulein Braun told me Herr Bormann had the Berghof extensively remodelled in the years after that.’
‘The archive,’ said Anton as though the answer was obvious. ‘I suggested Rehse have the library photographed for purposes of inventory and insurance, and for the cultural record.’
‘Why not ask him to return the book? It was yours after all.’
‘It was not a matter I wished to share with Rehse.’
‘Why did you hide the confession there in the first place?’
‘Everyone going in and out agreed to be searched for the sake of Herr Wolf’s safety.’
‘Yet you didn’t retrieve it.’
‘I was never invited back.’
‘Even so, how could you know it would still be in the same place?’
‘Because the books were for show. It was not a working library. Contrary to his reputation for being a voracious reader, Herr Wolf, even when I knew him, barely picked up a book.’ He asked Bormann, ‘Isn’t that so?’
Bormann acknowledged as much. Looking at the book on the table between them, he pushed it towards Anton like a croupier advancing chips. Nodding towards Schlegel, he said with grim appreciation, ‘The sorcerer’s apprentice.’ He lit a cigarette, leaned back, looked at them and asked, ‘Are you really telling me they were really planning to run away together, or was that the girl’s fantasy?’
Anton Schlegel said nothing. August Schlegel laughed out loud, thinking the situation was a mirror of Herr Wolf’s totalitarian state, with the guilty being invited to unburden whether culpable or not.
Schlegel watched them, detached: two men of such easy malevolence that their company was almost enjoyable, with none of Fegelein’s neurosis. Shallow men. Anton Schlegel had admitted as much in his letter. Depth didn’t interest him.
As for the pathetic Herr Wolf, Schlegel failed to comprehend the image of the man willing to give up everything for love. Perhaps his head really had been turned, a more frightening prospect almost than him killing Geli. He could see Bormann was too canny to say he hadn’t known, however obviously he was internally processing this new information at a rapid rate. Schlegel wondered if there was another twist left.
*
Anton Schlegel was the only one who knew about their secret plan, almost impossible to imagine now. Unthinkable. Geli was Herr Wolf’s Achilles heel. Career to be abandoned for private bliss. Maybe it had been a fantasy but it was one that was seriously entertained.
Geli had confessed to Anton, one night in the Chinese tower in the English Garden: ‘The things he makes me do.’ This would have been in late July or early August of 1931. Later, Anton would think of everything taking much longer, but it was only a few weeks, more interru
pted than not by Herr Wolf’s hectic schedule. Anton, intrigued by her reticence, because he thought her a forward girl and up for anything, decided to give her a crash course in sexual accommodation and depravity. He showed her his world, mad nights of giddy partying, with her awestruck, asking, ‘Is it possible even to think such things?’ He taught her that doing as the man asked gave her control.
‘Whatever?’ she asked.
‘Compared to what they do here, it’s nothing.’ He had watched the girl grow entranced at the theatrical display of desire, power and control. He could see she was impressionable, willing and generous with her body, eager to share her delight in it. Anton showed her that her uncle’s demands weren’t so unusual and revealed to her much worse in smoky backrooms, in terms of beatings and aggressive penetration. He watched her calculate the odds in terms of outrage and dare and revenge against all the stuffed shirts surrounding her uncle.
She was a fast learner and duly reported back that her wolf man was willing to give it all up for her and sexual enthralment. Anton supposed it was the first time in Herr Wolf’s life since his mother that a woman had treated him with generosity.
Geli’s easy spirit extended to giving her body to Anton Schlegel, one balmy night on the banks of the Isar, telling him, ‘I owe you and am going to give you the ride of your life,’ which she duly did, leaving Anton thinking she was wasted on the emotionally clammy Herr Wolf.
In all subsequent versions of their story, the one fact agreed on was her disgust and horror at Herr Wolf’s requests. Only Anton knew otherwise, summoned to the apartment to be told about their secret plan. ‘And why shouldn’t you?’ wondered Anton, seeing nothing of the old, blazing Herr Wolf, just a content little man who had discovered the sweet jar for the first time. Herr Wolf was of course extra-susceptible to ‘falling in love’ as a man who never had, and being so scarred by loneliness. She whispered to Anton that they had become a magic couple.
Herr Wolf was secretly transformed.
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said to Anton, not telling, a man with visions of angels.
He took Anton aside and instructed him. ‘No one must know. In fact, they must believe the opposite. I am making you responsible for them all thinking we are not getting on.’
And so everyone came to subscribe to the fairy tale gone sour, in which the evil uncle became a controlling Bluebeard. Where others parroted the gossip put about by Anton, he suspected the lovebirds had entered a sexual playground of dare and childish delight, like two kids pretending to be doctors and nurses. Any shitting and pissing business was ‘play’. As there is a pleasure to plain pissing, it wasn’t hard to see the practice remaining almost innocent, even in a sexual context. Compared to the realm of pain Anton was witness to, it was, truth to tell, pretty pathetic, light rather than heavy. She told Anton she had been flattered to have her cunt drawn, giggling at how hard he had tried to get it right and how frustrated he got.
Herr Wolf clearly regarded sex as ‘adult’, therefore difficult. Only much later, when reminded of how childlike Geli remained, did Anton Schlegel see the actual equation: that the ‘child’ is seen, and sees herself, as a way of returning sex to an innocent, wondrous state. It never could have lasted because the situation was corrupting, involving secrecy as it did, and no one knew that better than Anton, on the one hand tasked with protecting what she called ‘the flame of their secret love’ while poisoning the well, just as no one knew better than he that the story ever since had been about a succession of dirty secrets.
He supposed in the end Herr Wolf found himself riding two horses, deluding himself into thinking he was prepared to sacrifice his career and run off with her, until on that last night they were together he snapped and hit her.
*
Bormann looked at Anton Schlegel, thinking: and then fucking Emil Maurice botched the job. Afterwards, Bormann alone had gone into the room to find the girl lying there to all intents dead, until she blinked. He put it down to a last involuntary reaction, until she blinked again. By then the press office had released its statement that she was dead and there she lay instead suspended in a twilight limbo, apparently brain dead but the heart still fluttering.
Bormann now saw the span of the last thirteen years as the tale of two botched jobs: the fake Führer who didn’t die when he should have been blown up and the niece who blinked when she should have been dead.
Fucking Emil Maurice.
*
The rummy doctor was an easy buy, having been bought off before, in exchange for settlement of gambling debts. The false certificate was provided. Bormann, with vehicles at his disposal as head of the Party’s automobile association, fetched one and he and Anton Schlegel covered the girl’s head and carried her down the back stairs, and drove her to an abortion clinic that did Party business. Registered as ‘unknown female’, she was shoved in an out-of-the-way room.
Bormann, having failed to have her killed, suffered a rare loss of nerve, and hoped she would die on them. But she didn’t, being of strong peasant stock. The ‘body’ meanwhile was smuggled overnight to Vienna, to keep the press hounds at bay. The girl was both dead and not dead. Only Bormann and Anton Schlegel knew that. Bormann admitted to himself later that he had lost his head when the girl blinked, which was why he called Anton Schlegel.
The Führer was duly informed she had shot herself, in accordance with the official version.
*
Anton returned from the Berghof on the evening of Sunday, 20 September, when Hoffmann turned up to take Herr Wolf to a safe house, following rumours that the press knew of his whereabouts. In the dead of night, he had had the girl taken by private ambulance to Nussbaumstrasse: Room 202, checked in under his name. Anton undid the head bandage and cut her hair off and shaved her skull then bandaged her up again. Why he did this he had no idea; a ritual perhaps, a way of claiming her. She remained clinging on to life. Anton was reminded of the Neumann woman lying in her bed and all the religious nonsense around her.
Then the revelation: looking at Geli and thinking of Neumann, Anton Schlegel realised that Herr Wolf could be initiated. She was the perfect necrophile trophy.
Herr Wolf’s face shone with cracked ecstasy when he was told.
‘Can it be possible she has been returned?’
He agreed there was no question of announcing her comeback from the dead because she would be turned into a ghouls’ shrine.
‘A miracle indeed.’
The fact that the woman was a vegetable seemed not to bother him.
‘Who knows?’ Herr Wolf asked.
‘Me, Bormann. Now you.’
‘Keep it that way. Tell Bubi to pay, whatever it costs. Absolute discretion.’
‘She is registered under my name.’
Herr Wolf grasped Anton Schlegel’s arm with both hands and said, ‘Take me to her.’
So on the night when Hoffmann claimed the Führer paid a secret visit to his niece’s graveside in Vienna, which became equated with the legend of his political rebirth, Herr Wolf was in fact dressed more like a tramp, recalling his downand-out Vienna days, for an incognito visit to his ‘sleeping princess’. Anton Schlegel, waiting discreetly outside, listened to the man’s frenzied weeping. Upon seeing her he had thrown himself on his knees, howling, and clasped her hand.
The sobbing stopped and for a long time the room was silent while Anton stood in the corridor, wondered inappropriately whether the sexual nature of their relationship would continue, a thought that shocked even him. Herr Wolf emerged with a look of quiet triumph, as if to say: Now she is mine and mine alone.
Later, she was moved to the clinic in Berlin, which was why Herr Wolf insisted on going there in the summer of 1944. The intended face surgery – to allow him to vanish into the hoped for life of tranquil, anonymous obscurity – never happened, thwarted by the failure of the bomb to do its job, necessitating his return.
The clinic was also where Anton Schlegel had undergone his transformation, ten years earlier, with
the surgeon describing the case as a first, in that such surgery was invariably done to make appearances more attractive, not less so. The operation left Anton horrified by the results but at least unrecognisable, a process that was continued by a fatty diet resulting in the previously slim Anton almost doubling his weight and completing his metamorphosis.
Anton visited the niece a few times as it was near where he had once lived all those years ago. He went past the house from time to time to remind himself of what he had walked away from.
Once, while passing by, he had left his old Munich guidebook in the garage when the doors were open and the cars were out, as a relic of who he once was and what he had become; he wondered if anyone would find it. He returned later with the Mein Kampf, with the intention of it being a possible summons for his son. By then Anton was starting to consider Bormann and building bridges, which was when he first contemplated using the boy, perhaps he saw now for vain and sentimental reasons, to see if the son was a chip off the old block.
In the clinic, hidden behind her steel door, the girl lay in her bed, looking angelic, connected to all the latest gadgetry whose tangle of wires reminded Anton of the mythical spaghetti lunch she was supposed to have shared with her uncle on that last afternoon of her life.
There was nothing to age her in whatever cocoon she now inhabited.
The only difference was her hair had grown back quite white.
His white angel.
*
Bormann folded the confession, as if to say the matter was done. A coveted document even if it was rubbish. ‘Power, Bubi,’ the Führer had once said, ‘is about knowing or guessing others’ secrets.’