Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

  “Fränze, I thought the Reds had captured you.”

  “Brother, there haven’t been Red sailors in this harbor for twenty-five years.”

  “There are always Red sailors,” he said.

  She plucked his ears to reassure him and flew into the wind with the Forty Thieves. Kiel had become a graveyard with several submarines. The town didn’t even have a commandant. The submarine bases had been moved to France and Norway, with their deep vaults to withstand the shock of nightly bombings and attacks. But the Engländers still bombed Kiel. And there was no one to resist Fränze. She raided a tiny canteen on Kaiserstrasse that served as a club for Ukrainians who were starving to death in Kiel.

  Fränze was their avenging angel. She shouted at the civilian recruiters who had come from Hamburg to lure these large-boned Ukrainian women into prostitution rings that would service crippled warriors home from the front. They had a permit from the Gestapo in their hands, licenses from half a dozen ministries. They had two gray trucks parked in the street, with barbers inside who would disinfect the women and probe their scalps for lice, give them girdles to wear and lace underpants.

  These recruiters waved their permit at Fränze.

  “We’re protected,” they said. “One phone call, Fräulein, and the Gestapo will wage war on you.”

  But Fränze leapt on the recruiters, tore up their licenses, and bit one of them on the cheek. “Werewolf,” he moaned, and ran out of the canteen with the other recruiters. All the Ukrainian women kissed Fränze and flirted with the Forty Thieves. They even danced with Emil, fondling the bump on his back. Fränze danced with Franz, but she never took her eyes off the magician—Erik alone seemed to recognize the plight of these large-boned women. They would starve in Kiel, no matter how many rations of salami the crew members gave them. And what would happen after Milchkuh Number Nine left port? The women might have been better off in the gray trucks, as part of a portable brothel, wandering from town to town. At least they would be fed, and wouldn’t have lice in their hair.

  But he didn’t even have time to ponder their fate. The recruiters returned with the shore patrol and a team of Gestapo agents in felt hats.

  “A werewolf, she’s a werewolf,” said the recruiters, pointing to Fränze, as they scampered behind the Gestapo agents, who had to be cautious around such a tall, brazen woman in the purple leather coat of a Leibstandarte commando.

  “Gnädige Fräulein,” they said, “you have destroyed official documents. You must give your filthy Ukrainian whores to these gentlemen. They have to be deloused. They have not bathed in a month’s time. Their stench is unbearable. All of Kiel smells like a rat’s den.”

  “You must learn to live with it,” she said. “Berlin will not like this interference.”

  The Gestapo agents seemed agitated. Their quarters in Kiel had been bombed twice, and they’d inherited a mousy station near the submarine corrals. They were frightened to death of Berlin. They had spent the last six months rounding up laborers who had run away from the dry docks and precision-instrument factories. They had little appetite to sleep with these lice-infected women and decided to sell them to Hamburg as whores. And now there was talk of Berlin from this werewolf in a leather coat.

  In their own hysteria they decided to beat her brains out with their leather truncheons. The Forty Thieves stood idle. Devoted as they were to Fränze, they were Party members and couldn’t attack the Gestapo. It was Franz who leapt on these agents, and also the magician, after he hid Emil behind the bar. But they couldn’t shield Fränze from all the truncheons.

  Fränze wasn’t afraid. She kept watching Erik with hungry eyes as he battled for her. The recruiters chortled while blood and spit began to fly. The Gestapo agents would have dragged Erik and the twins back to their cellar if the Ukrainian women hadn’t intervened. They beat back the Gestapo with nothing but their hands. They squashed the felt hats, thwacked the recruiters, and drove the Gestapo out onto the Kaiserstrasse.

  Fränze saw the blood behind Erik’s ear and whispered, “Liebchen, run while you have the chance, run for your life. I cannot speak for Franz. But I will find no pleasure in killing you on the Milchkuh.”

  The magician had spots in front of his eyes. The Gestapo had clubbed him into the canteen’s sticky floor. He’d lost the power to calculate. But he wouldn’t flee from Kiel. Fränze kept mooing in his ear. It sounded like a serenade, moistened with Fränze’s own spit. He had nowhere to run, not the Black Forest, not Scheunenviertel, not the castles in Bavaria. He had to cross the ocean, dead or alive.

  Milchkuh Number Nine

  21

  THEY PACKED THEIR WHITE WOOLEN SWEATERS, their leather pants and leather jackets, their sou’westers and sea boots. None of them were real navy men. Erik was a cadet who had been ripped out of training school, even though Admiral Canaris had awarded him the rank of Kapitän zur See. He was no sea captain. He was some sort of magician who seemed to resurrect the men he had to kill. Fränze and Franz had never once been on a tub, and the little baron was scared to death of ocean voyages. The Forty Thieves pretended to be sailors; some had even gone to submarine school. But their whole lives depended on the Party, and the Party had sent them here, to preside over the funeral of a rogue Abwehr agent. They might even have to hurl Kapitän Kleist into the Atlantic. But none of them, even Fränze, was capable of captaining a U-boat—sinking Kleist was also to sink themselves. But they might tie him to the periscope saddle with a gun to his head and have him conduct a periscope school.

  They marched across Kiel, from their shed on the Mühlenstrasse to the submarine corrals. Not one sailor welcomed them; there was no pink champagne or a band with tubas and a drum. There wasn’t another sea captain in sight; cadets were scarce, and the admirals had abandoned Kiel with its regatta. The Ukrainian women had all gone into the gray trucks, seduced by little pots of perfume and underpants made of synthetic silk. The Forty Thieves found nothing but their own tub in its berth; the captain was standing alone on the weather deck. They climbed the gangplank and hopped over the steel cables and onto the tub, a gray monster with fiendish fins.

  Six red-and-white pennants flew from the periscope housing on the bridge; these pennants marked a captain’s “kills”—white for tankers and red for warships—but they were flown at the end of a voyage, when a tub that was part of a combat flotilla returned to its base. Milchkuh Number Nine didn’t belong to Wolf Pack Neptune or Polar Bear, or any wolf pack at all. It had never had a single kill. And yet Kapitän Kleist flaunted sea lore with pennants on a submarine that didn’t have a single torpedo. And he’d had a picture of the Devil painted on the conning tower, replete with red horns and a gruesome red mouth.

  It was Schweinerie, according to the captain’s Nazi crew, men who would have been worthless in a wolf pack, or any combat flotilla, but who could thrive on a Milchkuh that wasn’t trying to hunt Engländers, only remain invisible on the high seas. But to paint a red devil on the conning tower, as if Herr Kapitän Kleist were reviving his own past as the war’s most prominent submarine ace. He hadn’t commanded a tub in over a year. He was drunk half the time, this captain who had lost his own tub and all his men in foreign waters and rose out of the sea months later. The Kreigsmarine could no longer trust Herr Kapitän Kleist and had banished him to a training ship in a huge bathtub near the submarine corrals. Yet here he was, a captain again, hoping to ferry Abwehr agents into American waters.

  The Forty Thieves meant to shove Kapitän Kleist out of the way. But he stood on the weather deck in his dress uniform, with ceremonial scabbard and dagger, his black silk tie stained with mustard and his buttons having gone a bluish green with rust. He wore his Knight’s Cross with Diamonds, its red-white-and-black ribbon knitted around his neck like a hangman’s noose. He swayed on the deck, of course, swollen with schnapps, but the dagger and silver-and-black cross disheartened the Forty Thieves, intimidated them. They were shy around daggers and dress uniforms.

  He didn’t return their Hitle
r salute, but he was clutching a dented water bucket that often doubled as a lemonade pail.

  “Youngsters,” he said, “no one will bring an unauthorized weapon on board while I am captain—give over or get off my tub.”

  Franz and the Forty Thieves growled among themselves, but they couldn’t risk a mutiny in Kiel, before the Milchkuh left the harbor. They held on to their sailors’ knives but threw their pistols and truncheons into the lemonade pail and crept down the nearest hatch into the belly of that worthless sea cow.

  NOW ERIK UNDERSTOOD WHY THE CAPTAIN had disappeared for ten days and never met with his crew on dry land, wouldn’t even rehearse them or have any mock runs. He had been on the milk cow all this time. Kapitän Kleist couldn’t depend on a crew of cutthroats. He was his own first mate, his own navigator, and chief engineer. He hopped across the narrow passageway that snaked across the length of the submarine, spilling bags of lemons and cartons of canned bread off hammocks, bumping into crew members, banging into the open doors of lockers while pots and pans flew all around him, as he hopped fore and aft, from the engine room to the conning tower, from the map chest to the radio shack, or else he was in the saddle of his periscope, or up on the bridge with his binoculars. They couldn’t leave him stranded, have him strangle in the water while they submerged the submarine. They didn’t know how to crash-dive, or dive at all. And the captain taught the cutthroats only what he wanted them to know. They could start or stop the diesels, pick up the soundings of another sub, sight an enemy ship on the horizon while they stood watch, but they couldn’t master the periscope, outrun a Swordfish torpedo bomber, or return to Kiel on their own.

  They were helpless without Herr Kapitän Kleist and hated him all the more. They watched him at the periscope, watched him crawl among the engines, with grease on him like a Jewish blackface singer—Al Jolson of the North Atlantic—and hoped to mimic his actions and moves, and thus become their own Kapitän. But they mastered only what he wanted them to master, not one whit more, and so they grew surly and mean. They grumbled whenever he ordered them to their stations and barked some command.

  They saluted and said, “Jawohl, mein Führer,” and dreamt of murdering him in his sleep. They no longer cared whether they were stranded at sea, or if one of the Engländers’ corsairs flew out of the fog and captured them. But the Kapitän always slept with one eye open behind the red curtain of his tiny closet. There was no real captain’s quarters, only a bunk enclosed by a bulkhead and a flimsy wall, where he wrote at his tiny desk screwed into the bulkhead, and where Erik and Emil slept on boards that also served as the captain’s table.

  Erik and Emil wouldn’t have survived long in their own separate bunks. Both of them ate at the captain’s table, stood watch with Kleist, accompanied him to the tiny toilet, which was aft of the crew’s quarters, showered right after him, though they had to preserve what water they had, and their showers were nothing but a trickle of cold water. They grew whiskers, like the Kapitän, dug into the same bag of prunes, sucked on lemons with him. Kleist was suspicious of the cooks, who happened to be Franz and Fränze, but Erik didn’t believe that the twins would poison them.

  So he gobbled Fränze’s puddings and cakes, while Emil and the Kapitän looked at him agog.

  “Mensch,” Erik rasped, “she might split me from ear to ear, but she wouldn’t poison us. It’s beneath her dignity. Herr Kapitän, you commissioned her as a cook, and cook she will be.”

  “Why are you so sure?” Kleist asked.

  “Because I’ve gone on Aktionen with her and Franz. They both have a medieval sense of battle, even for Abwehr agents.”

  “I thought they were with the Death’s-Heads.”

  “They’re still loyal to Uncle Willi. If they decide to harm me on this tub, they’ll drop their gauntlet.”

  “What gauntlet?” the Kapitän growled.

  “It could be anything—a cake with a candle in it, a torn scarf. But she could also change her mind and attack without notice, or send her Nazis after us.”

  But Fränze was far too perverse to read or unravel in that stinking cave of a Milchkuh, where red and blue lights blinked, where cockroaches as long as fingers crawled out of the galley and climbed into Erik’s pockets, where lice plagued everyone’s eyebrows and eyelashes, where ringworm grew rampant and half the crew had to have their heads shaved, where bread, boots, and lemon rinds turned a moldy green, where the reek of men wafted across the tub like sour perfume.

  Fränze had stopped bothering to wear clothes. She slept in the same hammock with Franz, probed the scalps of the Forty Thieves for the first signs of ringworm. She was the one who shaved their skulls. She also inspected their groins for crab lice. And she threatened to stop cooking for the whole tub unless Erik, Emil, and Kapitän Kleist stood in front of her magnifying glass with their pants down. She didn’t bother much with Emil or the Kapitän, raising and lowering their cocks with one finger while she foraged with her glass in their little forest of hair.

  “Perfect specimens,” she muttered, an unlit Roth-Händle in her mouth. “No crabs.”

  But she was overwhelmed by Erik’s nakedness, and she lost most of her élan. The Roth-Händle fell from her mouth. She had set up shop in the crew’s quarters, and now the men stared at her from their hammocks and bunks. She probed with her glass without ever touching Erik. The glass wavered in her hand.

  “Herr Magician,” she finally said. “You will need some treatment. I have found something suspicious near your balls.”

  The Nazis began to laugh. “Shave him, Fränze. Deprive the magician of his magic.”

  But Franz wasn’t laughing. He watched this drama of the wavering glass from his hammock, his hands behind his head, his eyes like condemning coals in the uneven light of the tub.

  The crew cried, “Shave the magician,” but Fränze didn’t remove her razor from the milk cow’s medical kit. She’d become both doctor and nurse on board the tub. She had a foul yellow salve that could kill the crabs; she had pills to stimulate the heart, potions that could put a dragon to sleep, vials of morphine to deal with the pain of an amputated limb, but she had nothing in her metal box to hypnotize the magician and make him fond of her. Even with her kit, she was no Caligari, who could turn Erik into Cesare. She might have been able to seduce a sleepwalker, rut with him once like a wild rabbit, before she had to break his neck.

  So she lived on the morphine in her metal box; it eased the pain of loving a magician who couldn’t love her back. But she would walk around in a fugue while her muscles twitched, or lie down with Franz and feel the magician next to her. She couldn’t sleep. She was an assassin, not a seducer, but she still had to plot how to spend more time with Erik on this tub.

  “Herr Magician, I will have to treat you twice a day.”

  And she wandered into another compartment, her buttocks like two perfect overlapping hearts, and her back a musical instrument made of skin and bone. She had her own strange musk that seemed to soften the sour perfume of so many unwashed bodies. Perhaps it was the morphine, or the smell of her longing. But the men seemed riveted to her, would follow her around as if they were dreamers caught in a web and Fränze was a wildflower with a masculine face on a submarine full of cockroaches and marauding lice, ringworm and rampant rot.

  She had to trap Erik coming out of the toilet. Her own naked body, the litheness of her arms and legs, held little allure for him. Even Emil and the captain would glance at her buttocks and luxuriate in Fränze’s trail of sweet smoke. Only the magician was immune to her musk.

  She tried to be formal with him, to wear the mask of a medic.

  “You must not miss your treatments, Herr Cesare, or you will be covered with vermin. The salve stings, but it will cure you in five days. You do not want any lice with you in America.”

  “Fränze,” he said, Emil behind him. “We were both at Bad Tölz with the SS. We learned to groom ourselves every morning like chimpanzees. I don’t have any lice, do I, Fränze?”

&nbs
p; “No,” she said. “It was all a lie.”

  Emil tried not to listen, but Fränze pretended he wasn’t there.

  “Magician, I told you to run for your life. This milk cow is nothing but a mousetrap.”

  “But the mousetrap is going to America.”

  She had to beg the magician. “Couldn’t you kiss me?”

  “I kissed you once—in Kiel.”

  She could smile at him without wearing a mask. The sound of his voice, his hot breath on the submarine, had burnt her terror away.

  “But it’s not like a kiss on the ocean,” she said.

  And then she warbled in his ear, dizzy with the closeness of him.

  “Lie down with me, Erik, live with me on this tub, and I’ll let you have your America.”

  “Beautiful! Franz will kill both of us in our hammock, and that will be the end of our Milchkuh marriage.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “They’ll bury us at sea.”

  It hurt him to look at the hunger in her eyes. She had never longed for a man until the magician had taught her to spell and to read the pages of a book. She couldn’t even say if she desired Franz. They were twins who slept in the same bed. Their copulations were like a primitive form of exercise, as if Fränze were being fondled in front of a mirror. But she had no mirror for the magician. She could not find her own image in him. She was a different Fränze, wild with a tenderness she could not control. She wanted to touch his ears, hold his cock like a tiny bird. But she saw no recognition on his face, not the least desire, and her tenderness turned to cruelty.

  “Herr Magician,” she cackled, “if you can’t lend me your cock, you and the hunchback won’t breathe much longer.”

  She shoved Emil aside, her body unfolding like a knife, and disappeared into the gloom of the submarine while pots and potato sacks fell in her wake.

  Kapitän zur See