At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

“See you in twenty days.”

  I didn’t reply. His was a cry for help, but I didn’t understand that. No—I denied it to him.

  I could make love to Ziegler while ignoring who he was. In the barn there were only our bodies, our joking, and that little boy I had formed an alliance with—nothing else. No one else. I could make love to Ziegler even if I had lost a husband at the front, a husband who had also killed, killed soldiers and civilians, and perhaps he too had become sleepless or impotent or had fucked Russian women—They’re Asian, they’re not like us—because he had learned how to make war, and he knew that was how war was made.

  * * *

  YEARS LATER I imagined Ziegler sitting on his cot in Crimea, elbows on his knees, forehead weighing on his interlaced fingers. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to leave, to ask for a transfer. He’s afraid it might jeopardize his career. If he leaves the Einsatzgruppen, he’ll probably never be given any more promotions. It isn’t a question of morals. Russians, Jews, Gypsies … he’s never cared anything about them. He doesn’t hate them, but he doesn’t love the human race either, and he certainly doesn’t believe in the value of life.

  How could anyone see value in something that can end at any moment, something so fragile? One sees value in things that have strength, which life doesn’t, in things that are indestructible, and life isn’t—to the point that someone might come along and ask you to sacrifice your life for something that has more strength. The homeland, for example. Gregor had decided to do that, by enlisting.

  It isn’t a matter of faith. Ziegler has seen it with his own eyes, the miracle that is Germany. He’s often heard his men say, If Hitler were to die, I would want to die as well. Everything considered, life matters so little, and devoting it to someone fills it with meaning. Even after Stalingrad the men continue to have faith in the Führer, and the women to send him birthday gifts of cushions they’ve embroidered with eagles and swastikas. Hitler has said his life won’t end with death: that is when it will begin. Ziegler knows he’s right.

  He’s proud to be on the right side. No one loves losers. And no one loves the entire human race. One can’t cry over the interrupted existences of billions of individuals starting from six million years ago. Wasn’t that perhaps the original agreement, that every existence on earth had to be broken off sooner or later? Hearing with one’s own ears the distressed neighs of a horse being tortured causes more torment than the thought of some unknown man who’s dead, dead because history is made of dead men.

  There’s no such thing as universal compassion—only being moved to compassion before the fate of a single human being. The elderly rabbi who prays with his hands on his chest because he knows he’s about to die. The Jewish lady, so beautiful, about to be disfigured. The Russian woman who’s locked her legs around your hips and for a moment makes you feel so protected.

  Or Adam Wortmann, the mathematics teacher, whom they arrested before my eyes. The victim who back then incarnated for me all the others, all the victims of the Reich, of the planet, of God’s sin.

  * * *

  ZIEGLER IS AFRAID he won’t get used to the horror and will spend every night sitting on his cot without closing an eye. He’s afraid he will get used to the horror and will stop feeling pity for anyone, even his own children. He’s afraid he’ll go insane. He needs to ask for the transfer.

  His Hauptsturmführer will be disappointed—of all people, Ziegler, who had never backed down, who had persevered despite his health problems. Who’s going to inform Himmler? He had made an excellent impression, he won’t accept having made a mistake.

  Ziegler has blood that hisses instead of flowing silently without bothering anyone. It seems to be roaring as he’s on his cot and isn’t getting sleepy. And so he asks to be transferred and gives up everything, but his heart doesn’t stop hissing. It’s defective, it can’t be fixed, there’s no remedy for things that are born flawed. Life, for example. There’s no remedy for it. Death is its destination. Why shouldn’t men take advantage of that?

  When he arrives in Krausendorf, Obersturmführer Albert Ziegler realizes he’s going to remain Obersturmführer forever. No more ranks to scale. He has a loser’s longing for vengeance and imposes the same strictness that took him to the top, and yet he feels like he’s falling apart. Then one night he comes to my window and begins to stare at me.

  * * *

  FOR YEARS I thought that his secrets—the secrets he couldn’t confess, the secrets I didn’t want to hear—were what kept me from truly loving him. That was foolishness. I knew little more about my husband. We had lived under the same roof for barely a year and then he set off for the war. No, I didn’t know him. Besides, it’s between strangers that love happens, between people who don’t know each other and are eager to break down the barriers. It happens between people who frighten each other. It wasn’t the secrets but the fall of the Third Reich that our love couldn’t survive.

  33

  In summertime the smell of the swamps grew so powerful that it was as though everything around me were decomposing. I wondered if I too would soon begin to rot. It wasn’t Gross-Partsch that was ruining me—I had been tainted from the start.

  July ’44 heaped muggy days upon us, the humidity making our clothes stick to our skin, along with platoons of crane flies: they besieged us, hounded us relentlessly.

  There had been no news from Albert since his departure. Everyone disappeared without writing to me anymore.

  One Thursday, right after work, Ulla, Leni, and I went to see a film with Heiner and Ernst. The heat was unbearable. Shut up inside the tent, without even a window to let in some air, we would suffocate. But Ulla insisted. The idea of a movie after lunch had her all excited, and Leni wanted to spend time with Ernst. Come on, please, come on, she kept saying.

  The film was almost ten years old and had met with incredible success. It had been shot by a woman, one who always did as she pleased—at least that was what Ulla said, and Ulla knew everything about the people in show business. Maybe she had read it in the magazines she thumbed through back at the barracks, or maybe it was her own notion, but she was convinced there were feelings between the director and the Führer. After all, the woman was rather pretty.

  “She has the same name as you,” Ernst told Leni, opening the tent to let her in. “Leni Riefenstahl.” Leni smiled and shyly looked around inside for a place to sit. She had never seen the movie, unlike me.

  The wooden benches were almost all full. The soldiers had rested their muddy boots on the spots in front of them. When they saw us come in, some of them composed themselves and wiped off the wood with the back of their hands while others stayed there, leaning back casually, arms crossed, with no intention of disturbing their torpor. Sabine and Gertrude were there too. I recognized them by the braids coiled on the sides of their heads. They turned around and though noticing us didn’t stoop to acknowledge our presence.

  We sat down in the spots our chaperones found for us—Ernst and Leni in a row on the right, Heiner, Ulla, and me on the left.

  Wild about all kinds of technological innovation, Heiner said Triumph of the Will was an avant-garde film. He was thrilled by its aerial shots, the plane slicing through the clouds, penetrating the sooty white mass without fear of getting stuck in it.

  I read the words superimposed on the images—“20 years after the outbreak of the World War,” “16 years after the beginning of German suffering,” “19 months after the beginning of the German rebirth”—and the clouds seemed to come rushing at me, blinding me. From up there, with the tall bell towers, Nuremberg was beautiful. The shadow that the plane cast over it was an anointing, not a threat.

  Glancing at Leni, I saw her lips parted, her tongue between her teeth, struggling to understand everything there was to understand. Maybe before the movie was over Ernst would put his arm around her waist. Maybe Leni’s jutted-out chin was the sign of expectation, an offer being made.

  I fanned myself with my hands, and when Heiner anno
unced, “Here, it’s going to land now,” to get Ulla and me to pay attention, I grumbled. On the screen, the Führer’s nape was too bare, as pitiful as any bare nape, and the Wagnerian exaltation in the background did nothing to remedy it. The Führer returned the simultaneous salute of the thousands of raised arms but kept his elbow bent, and his hand wobbled on his wrist—almost as if he were excusing himself, I have nothing to do with it.

  I couldn’t have known, only later would I learn, that just then, not far from the tent that the soldiers had set up as a movie theater, another hand was fumbling around a briefcase. Though lacking two fingers, the hand clutched a pair of pliers and broke a glass capsule to release the acid that would corrode the wire, a thin metal wire. Ten minutes and it would dissolve.

  The colonel gritted his teeth, and his nostrils flared. He had to wrap everything in a shirt and shove it back into the briefcase, well hidden among the documents, and to do so he had only one hand—actually, only three fingers. His forehead was beaded with sweat, but not from the muggy air.

  Time was up. The meeting had been moved back to twelve-thirty because of Mussolini’s imminent visit, and Field Marshal Keitel, who was waiting outside his quarters in the Wolfsschanze, quarters which the colonel had made up an excuse to return to, called out to him to hurry up. He was running out of patience. Even earlier Keitel had taken the liberty of pressing him, though with the respect due to a wounded officer such as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the charming colonel of whom Maria was so fond.

  Stauffenberg came out carrying the briefcase. Keitel scrutinized it. Nothing more normal than going to a meeting with a briefcase full of documents, but perhaps Stauffenberg was gripping it too tightly, and that was the odd detail that stuck out to Keitel. “They’re all here,” the colonel said. “The documents about the new Volksgrenadier divisions I’ll be presenting to the Führer.” The field marshal nodded and walked alongside him. Any odd detail became of secondary importance, given their urgent need to arrive at the meeting in the Lagebaracke.

  I was sweating inside that unbearable tent where I had gone only to please Leni, who was talking intently with Ernst and giggling, her cheeks sprayed red, along with her ears and neck, as if the blotches had invaded every centimeter of her skin.

  Ulla was spying on them instead of watching the movie, and Heiner had started drumming his fingers on the bench. He was bored by the speeches of the party officials—not because of what they were saying but because of the repetition of the shots. He tapped his pointer finger on the wood almost as if to tell the orators to hurry up, but at the National Socialist Party Congress of September 5, 1934, everyone wanted to speak their mind. Rudolf Hess, who that day hadn’t yet been declared insane by Hitler, shouted from the screen, “You were our guarantor of victory. You’ll be our guarantor of peace.”

  Who knew if General Heusinger would agree with that prediction? I couldn’t have known, only later would I learn, that when Stauffenberg walked into the conference room, Deputy Chief of the General Staff Heusinger, to Hitler’s right, was reading a discouraging report. It said that after the latest breach of the central Russian front, the position of the German troops had become very dangerous. Keitel glared at Stauffenberg: the meeting had already begun. Twelve thirty-six, the colonel thought, six minutes and the acid will eat through the wire.

  His back to the door, sitting at a heavy oak table, Hitler was fiddling with the magnifying glass he needed to study the maps spread out in front of him. Keitel sat down to his left while Stauffenberg took a place beside Heinz Brandt. While in our tent Dietrich’s recorded voice demanded that the foreign press tell the truth about Germany, Colonel Stauffenberg’s nostrils flared again as he breathed deeply. Anyone who looked him in the eye would have understood, but he wore a patch over the left one and his head was bowed. Trembling slightly, he pushed the briefcase under the table with his foot, slid it across the floor so it was as close as possible to the Führer’s legs. He licked off a drop of sweat that had trickled to his lips and slowly, one step after the other, left the room. No one took any notice. They were focused on the map Heusinger was gesturing at grimly. Four minutes, Stauffenberg counted, and the wire would be completely consumed.

  In the makeshift movie theater set up by the Wehrmacht soldiers, Ernst took Leni’s hand and she didn’t pull back. In fact, she rested her head on his shoulder. Ulla looked away, bit her fingernail, and Heiner nudged me, though not to comment on their idyllic scene. “The second part is amazing. Remember when the eagle fills the entire shot, without sound?” he asked me, almost as though the quality of the movie were a question of honor—his own. From the screen came Streicher’s admonishment: “A people that does not protect its racial purity will perish!”

  Inside Stauffenberg’s briefcase, the metal wire was corroding. Expressionless, the colonel walked away from the building somewhat stiffly. He certainly couldn’t run, but his heart was thumping as though he were running.

  In the Lagebaracke, Heinz Brandt leaned over the map for a better look—the writing was tiny and it wasn’t like he had a magnifying glass—and knocked his boot into the abandoned briefcase. He pushed it away from them with an automatic gesture, absorbed as he was in Heusinger’s report.

  Twelve-forty. Stauffenberg didn’t stop. Stiffly, he carried on walking. Two minutes left.

  “Make the German worker an upright, upstanding, proud, and decent citizen, enjoying equal rights!” Ley’s voice thundered inside the tent, and by then Ernst was already holding Leni tightly against him. He seemed to be planning to kiss her. Even Heiner noticed. Ulla was just about to stand up and leave when he stopped her by whispering in her ear, “Have you seen the lovebirds?” I thought of my father, of when he said Nazism had done away with class conflict through conflict among the races.

  Standing straight-backed on the screen, Adolf Hitler personally saluted the army of fifty-two thousand labor service men in attendance, all lined up in rows.

  “Shoulder spades!” he shouted.

  The spades snapped back like rifles and a deafening blast thundered through the tent, hurling us off the bench. I felt my head slam against the ground, then nothing, no pain.

  As I died, I had a final thought: Hitler was dying too.

  34

  For several hours after the explosion, I couldn’t hear out of one ear.

  A shrill whistle pierced my eardrum, monotonous, relentless, like the sirens in Berlin. Whatever note it was, it rang in my skull, muffling the outside world, cocooning me from the havoc that had been wrought.

  A bomb had exploded inside the Wolfsschanze.

  “Hitler is dead,” said the soldiers, scrambling back and forth. The projector, left atilt by the blast, played only darkness, a constant hum, and Leni trembled with the same desperation as she had the first day in the lunchroom. She was no longer concerned with Ernst, who in a state of panic was asking Heiner, “What do we do now?” Heiner didn’t reply.

  “He’s dead,” said Ulla, and she was surprised, because no one would ever have believed in Hitler’s death. She had gotten back to her feet before the rest of us, had looked around as though drowsy, and said, “It’s over.” It was barely a murmur.

  Facedown, I saw my mother’s eyes, the nightgown under her coat. She had died dressed in a ridiculous outfit. I had hugged her, her scent lingered on her, I had seen my mother dead beneath the bombs as a tone I couldn’t identify rang in my eardrums. It was a punishment devised just for me, I thought.

  But the Führer was enduring the same pain as me, and not only that. To make his way out of the wreckage of the Lagebaracke, he leaned on a miraculously unscathed Keitel, though most of the people at the far end of the table had been wounded and four officers, including Brandt, had died on the spot. With his chimney-sweep face, his smoking head, marionette arm, and striped trousers like a hula skirt, Hitler looked far more ridiculous than my mother.

  It’s just that he was alive. And determined to get revenge.

  * * *

&nbs
p; HE ANNOUNCED IT over the radio at about one in the morning. Herta, Joseph, and I listened to him as we sat around the kitchen table, exhausted yet awake. We had done nothing but sit glued to the radio, even forgetting to eat dinner. That day the afternoon shift in Krausendorf had been canceled, the bus hadn’t come to get me, and in any case they wouldn’t have found me. I managed to return only several hours later, on foot and speechless, leaving behind Leni and Ulla, who couldn’t stop speculating: What would happen now that Hitler was dead?

  But Hitler was alive, and through the Deutschlandsender microphones he delivered a message to the nation and all of Europe: the fact that he had escaped death was a sign that he would accomplish the task entrusted to him by Providence.

  Mussolini had said so too. Having arrived at four in the afternoon due to a delay with his train—though the meeting had been held early to accommodate him—he wandered the ruins with his battered friend, who the year before had sent a Nazi commando to Gran Sasso to free him from the prison where he had been confined.

  Hitler’s calves were burned and one of his arms was paralyzed. Nevertheless he had taken Mussolini around the ruins because if he had gone to bed, as his doctor advised, who knew what nonsense the world would start saying about him?

  Faced with the danger his friend had undergone, the Duce wielded his expected optimism: it was impossible for the two of them to lose, after that miracle. And he was the one who had granted that miracle, though Hitler didn’t realize it. The change of schedule had caused problems for his assailants, who’d had time to arm only one of the two bombs they had planned to set off, and one hadn’t been enough. Mussolini had saved his life.

  Over the radio the Führer screamed that it had been the work of a band of criminals, people who had nothing in common with the spirit of the Wehrmacht, nor with that of the German people. They would be mercilessly annihilated.