Volk

by David Nickle

  “‘Why do you say this now?’ I ask. I am thinking all of a sudden about Nosferatu—the moving picture. I had watched it not even a year earlier. The blood-drinking cadaver, who arrives in town on a ship of rats.

  “Rats . . . blood type . . .

  “‘You can tell about a fellow from his blood type,’ he says. ‘Type O . . . I think you are Type O.’

  “‘I don’t know what type I am,’ I say. ‘What type are you?’

  “‘I am Type AB.’ he says. ‘I can take any transfusion . . . most of the time.’

  “‘Most of the time? Have you done this often—taken blood?’

  “‘No. Hardly at all.’

  “‘What does your blood type say about you?’

  “‘It says . . .’ he starts to answer, but seems to consider. He pulls me closer again, and takes my wrist, and pulls it over to his penis. It is hard again already. I tug at the foreskin with my thumb, and begin to caress it.

  “‘I can travel anywhere,’ he says, ‘speak with anyone, although I am never truly of anyone. I can see the truth of matters, when others are blind to it. As I saw the truth of you.’

  “I ask him what that means.

  “‘You think that there is greatness in you—you have thought this since you were very small. But it is hard to discover, yes? You followed the Kaiser into war and thought there might be greatness there. But there was nothing but mud, and blood, and death. You write lies in a book that you hope others will read one day. Perhaps they will venerate you. Perhaps, through words bound together in a cloth cover, your greatness will be assured. But you know that words in a book won’t carry you any further than deeds in the War did. Not so long as the only words you write are lies.’

  “‘I have a confession,’ I say, and I kiss his throat, insinuating myself closer. ‘I am not writing a novel.’

  “‘Ah,’ he says. ‘The truth of you. As I sensed. Thank you for that.’

  “And now he takes my face in his hand and draws me nearer, and kisses me on the mouth. . . .

  “And . . .

  “Oh.

  “Light!

  “Light has filled the room—another bulb in the ceiling, switched on. There are three men. They wear brown shirts and ties. One has a stick, like a walking stick.

  “One says: ‘What is this here?’

  “Another: ‘My God—look there. A pair of deviants!’

  “The third says nothing, but reaches down and grabs my shoulder, pulls me half to my feet. He has short hair, almost no hair . . . he is not much taller than I—but bigger around the middle. He has a wide moustache.

  “‘Look at this,’ he says, and pushes me to the ground. ‘Bare-bottomed, hey? You a man or a woman?’

  “I try to get to my feet. The walking stick hits me. I fall.

  “‘We need to get them out of here,’ says one. ‘Tonight of all nights.’

  “‘Teach them a lesson.’ The one with the stick. He strikes me again. In the chest this time. I feel a boot in my stomach. Another in my ribs. Someone laughs. I’m rolled over onto my stomach. The stick slaps my backside. I cry out—but not loud enough for anyone to hear.

  “This has happened before, yes. In Stuttgart. Before the War. Then, it was a whipping. I am recalling it. How I was made to scream. Manfred and I! Manfred!

  “I will not scream at this. No. No screams. Tears—nothing to do for that. But no screaming. Not from me.

  “But there are screams.

  “Two gunshots, first. Like little barks from a dog, a room away. Maybe from upstairs. In the beer hall. Men screaming upstairs—the scraping of chairs on the floor above us . . . something is happening upstairs.

  “Then . . . a moment of quiet. But barely that before . . .

  “There are screams everywhere.”

  Gottlieb’s eyes were wide and he sat upright. Was he still entranced? Or had the recollection of the events in the cellar—the admixture of the beating in Stuttgart—pushed him back to consciousness, perhaps into a mania?

  “Herr Gottlieb,” the doctor said. “Markus. It is necessary that you breathe.”

  Gottlieb drew a deep gulp of air, taken as though he were preparing to dive beneath the river.

  “Let the breath out slowly,” said the doctor. “Slowly. And with it, let the memories of Stuttgart go too.”

  The doctor knew about Stuttgart already. They had discussed this shortly after Gottlieb arrived here at the estates. Surrender your garments first, then your story. And oh, Gottlieb may have been shy about those garments, but he told his story easily—how his father and uncle had found him and his cousin Manfred in an act of sodomy. Manfred denounced Gottlieb, and Gottlieb believed that because of that, the flogging had gone harder for him than Manfred. In fact, claimed Gottlieb, it had been Manfred who had instigated the encounter. Gottlieb was not blameless—yet nor was he guilty.

  The doctor frankly did not care, one way or another.

  “Leave Stuttgart,” he commanded. “Return to the cellar. That is where we are.”

  Gottlieb drew another breath, lowered himself back to the couch, and although his eyes did not close, they refocused on the ceiling.

  “The screaming,” he said as the metronome ticked, “is everywhere.”

  “He has pulled one of the men to the ground, tripping him between his legs first, then grabbing his belt, then hauling him closer and grasping his head, by both ears. He holds it like an accordion, squeezing in. The man shouts. He twists. The man’s legs twitch madly. It happens very quickly—so quickly the other two barely see what is happening before their friend is dead. This is a difficult thing to do, it is nearly impossible . . . to kill a man by twisting his neck. But he is very strong, stronger than anyone.

  “The one with the stick swings at him now. But he catches the stick in one hand and twists it out of the man’s grip. Then he stands, spins it in a blur, high enough to strike and shatter the light bulb hanging over us. It is darker again.

  “And . . . crack! The stick strikes bone. A second man falls, nearly in my lap. Yes. I am turned over now, coughing, watching the third man—the one who took hold of me, I think—running between the pillars, shouting ‘Help!’ He runs after that one, very fast. They don’t get far. He leaps on him, straddling him from behind as he draws the stick around the front of his throat, and kills him.

  “I get to my feet. I find my trousers. The one who hit me with the stick might still live. I do not look to see. I do not care.

  “I am not blameless. But I am not guilty either. He, after all, was the one who struck me.

  “My . . . my lover, that is what he is, isn’t he? He returns and bids me help him drag the third man back to the shadows.

  “‘The Frauen rarely come back here,’ he says. ‘It is filled with spiders and rats. We can leave these men for a time.’

  “He gathers his clothing, does up his trousers. ‘But we should be tidy,’ he tells me, and I ask him what he means, and he shows me.

  “He takes the man he just killed and hefts him into the crook of barrels, where we had just been. He takes the second man, and lays him next to him. The third man—the one who hit me—he we stack on top of the other two. As you would stack wood for the winter.

  “‘We ought to take our leave,’ he tells me. ‘It has been some time. Do you think your friends are still drinking?’

  “‘I don’t want to drink with them.’

  “‘Better to do so,’ he tells me. ‘Unless they have chosen to leave.’

  “We do not get to the beer hall—not right away,” said Gottlieb.

  “No,” said the doctor. “That would have been difficult.”

  “We leave the way we came: back to the beer garden. But now . . . there are more men outside. They are dressed in the same coloured shirts as the men we left below. They are standing in a row near the gate to the street. Seeing them like this makes sense. They are S.A.”

  “Stormtroopers.”

  “Stormtroopers. One of them steps forward. He is v
ery tall. He demands to know where we came from.

  “We tell him that we were pissing. ‘In the cellar?’ he asks, and I shrug, drunkenly enough to convince him. But he is not finished with us, this one.

  “‘There is a revolution taking place,’ he says. ‘Inside, we have Herr Kahr. He is even now acceding to our Fuhrer’s demands. The government will change. Things will improve for some. Others will get what is coming to them. You had better be ready for that. Now: Who are you for?’

  “‘Germany,’ I say.

  “‘Clever answer. That can mean anything.’ He stands close enough to smell us. ‘All right, clever fellows. Tell us your names.’

  The doctor leaned forward. He wanted to prompt Gottlieb: What does his mysterious lover say? But he knew better—drawing a sliver hastily simply embedded it more deeply.

  A smile twitches across Gottlieb’s face—oddly shaped, almost tentative, yet one of the few he’d spared the doctor since arriving.

  “I tell him: ‘I am Hutter. This is my friend Orlok. We are just here for a drink.’”

  The doctor finished Gottlieb’s session without the metronome—but the Dictaphone continued to spin. Gottlieb had laughed so hard at his own joke that the trance was broken for the day.

  They spoke about the session, and the doctor allowed Gottlieb to talk about the things he believed he had learned from it, thereby generating his own theories. This filled the remainder of the cylinder. Gottlieb spoke at some length about the nature of his homosexual proclivities, and although it irritated the doctor, he held his annoyance in check. So far as Gottlieb was concerned, his homosexuality was a symptom of a disease of the mind, for which he sought cure here. And the doctor had given Gottlieb no indication that matters stood any other way.

  So Gottlieb theorized that his homosexual attractions were a manifestation of the violence in his life, and finally concluded: “Had my father and uncle not beaten me so, I might have forgotten the sweet curve of Manfred’s arse. And then . . . well there was the War . . . and that night at Munich, where we killed the six stormtroopers! It has cemented my erotic fixation, yes?”

  “You said three,” said the doctor. “Three stormtroopers.”

  “Three? Oh yes, of course.”

  “Were there others that night?”

  Gottlieb shook his head firmly. “I meant to say three,” he said.

  “And you know that those three were stormtroopers how precisely?”

  Gottlieb shrugged. “They wore the same coloured clothing. And stormtroopers surrounded the beer hall that night, while Herr Hitler riled up the crowd within.”

  “What did you think of Hitler?”

  “Hitler? I’d seen him speak before. That night . . . he was very loud. Almost shrill. Ugly little man. Hard to look away from, though.”

  “And your friend? What was his name?”

  “Oh, he never cared for Hitler. He thought Hitler was a liar. One night, after things had settled down and they’d put Hitler and his Nazis behind bars . . . he told me that he would like to fuck the lies out of Hitler, and would if he got the chance.”

  “Like he fucked the lies out of you?” asked the doctor.

  Gottlieb appeared to study his hand, frowning at the slight webbing between his fingers as he held it to the light of the window.

  “He never properly fucked those out of me, doctor. He went off long before that could happen.”

  “And you do not know where he went?”

  “It was a sudden departure.”

  “Of course.”

  The doctor cleared his throat, and tried one last time. He put it to Gottlieb, directly.

  “You know,” he said, “it is interesting that for such an impression that this man left upon you, you cannot summon his name to your lips. Can you tell me his name, please?”

  Gottlieb’s fingers bent, then closed into a fist, casting a shadow across his face.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” he said.

  Daylight lingered over the grounds of the estate for some hours after Herr Gottlieb left the doctor’s rooms. The doctor himself did not linger there long after. It was a beautiful summer’s day in the valley where the estate stood, and the doctor thought to himself that he would not waste it, brooding over this troublesome patient.

  He splashed water on his chest, beneath his arms, closed up his lavatory and then shut his office, and crossed the hall to the front steps. The outside air was cool, but welcome after the oppressiveness of the office, of his session with poor, broken Gottlieb.

  As he walked, he passed Anna, her long blonde hair tied in braids that fell halfway down her naked back. She waved as he passed.

  “Where is Heidi?” he asked, and she shrugged.

  “I will meet up with her at supper,” she lisped. “Will we see you at dinner, Herr Doctor Bergstrom?”

  He patted his bare stomach. “I must watch my belly. But I will be there if you are.”

  She smiled—then glanced below his belly, and looked away from what she saw there. Now the doctor shrugged. Anna was a very healthy girl, despite her speech impediment, and she would soon become accustomed to all that her beauty inspired.

  “We will see each other later, then, doctor,” she said and hurried off.

  As he watched her retreating backside, the doctor wondered whether Gottlieb would ever consider that one the way he contemplated Manfred’s boyish rump. That was certainly Gottlieb’s hope—that he could undo his nature, as though it were simply a neurosis, and take a wife with something approaching enthusiasm. The doctor remained a skeptic.

  He set off through the orchards, which would lead to the riverbank, where the others here might be found, doing their afternoon calisthenics. And having contemplated that happy prospect, he turned his mind away again from Gottlieb, pondering his true patient, if one could call such as he a patient. . . .

  The doctor smiled to himself and shook his head, as though to dislodge something that had fixed itself inside there.

  He could not call that one a patient. He had never laid eyes upon him. The doctor could only list what he knew of him, on one of those index cards they used in America.

  He was a huge man. Brown haired. A single eyebrow. Very ugly. But muscular. And fearless. With fantastical charisma. But a man with no name or identity yet—not one the doctor could decode, until he could break through with Gottlieb, or the amnesiac French girl, or perhaps some others as his associates in Belgium might uncover. For the time being, the doctor had nothing with which to find him . . . next to nothing beyond that description, and what was almost certainly his phylum:

  Übermensch.

  1931

  “When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.”

  - W. Somerset Maugham

  “He alone who owns the youth, gains the future.”

  - Adolph Hitler

  PART I

  The Inferno Conundrum

  One

  A cold spring rain made for Jason’s final night in the room at the Hôtel de Badricourt on rue de la Hachette. It came steady past the supper hour, washing up a wormy, familiar stink from the cracks between the cobblestones outside . . . a very Parisian stink, all dank and mouldering, like a year ago someone’d buried a privy, or maybe someone’s aunt, under those stones. It would be good to be away in the morning; Jason didn’t think he would miss Paris even a little once he took to the air. As long as the rain stopped, or at least let up a bit, it ought to be safe.

  And even if it was a little stormy . . . there would be nothing to fear.

  As he smoked in his room, he regarded the droplets forming on the windowpanes, misting in the street lamps outside. Jason thought about the first storm he’d flown in. That was over France too, in the Nieuport. It had nearly killed him and, in another way, it had surely saved his life. The Eindecker on his tail either could not match him as he climbed into the black cloud, or the pilot had lost his nerve as they rose to face sheets of rain that turned to
daggers on their flesh.

  Either way, Jason and the Nieuport climbed together and alone into the limbo of the storm. It was freezing and black, rainwater smearing his goggles, in a way that seemed without end.

  But—it did end, in the brilliance of the sun, atop a mountain range of cloud, all gold, purple, and blue. . . .

  Heaven.

  He should not be sitting up smoking this late, and he knew it.

  He would be flying again in the morning, and that was that. It wouldn’t be a Nieuport. It would be a Latécoère 28, and he’d flown planes like it for many more years than he’d flown that tiny Nieuport, which in any case he hadn’t flown for more than a decade now. The Latécoère was a big aircraft with a snug cockpit, and room for passengers and cargo in place of machine guns. It would carry him on a long, hopefully easy flight across the Mediterranean, not touching ground again until Algiers. And there he’d commence a new, or at least newer, life: an end to the long drought that had started for him in ’29—which was, no fooling, two years gone now.

  In the morning, he’d be a flyer again.

  Jason finished his cigarette in three deep drags, and dropped the butt in the old teacup he’d been using as an ashtray. The pack in his shirt pocket had two more. He didn’t have to check to know that but he did anyhow, and then he pulled one of them out and regarded it, and having done that, put it between his lips, which were dry like his mouth.

  There was nothing to be afraid of out there.

  Jason found a box of matches in his overcoat, and lit his second-to-last cigarette.

  His room was on the first storey of the Hôtel, a floor up from the street, its window situated above a canvas awning. So from where he sat, he could not easily see what was going on at the front door. Jason did not know why that should make him uneasy. When he’d returned after an early supper, he’d had to ring a bell to get in, same as he had the past three days here. The place was safer than most.