by Dennis Bock
He set the ledger on the workbench by the window that gave onto a view of a courtyard, crossed the concrete floor and found the crate with the series of numbers he was looking for. He slipped the teeth of the crowbar he’d taken from the bench under the seal and pulled the bar towards his chest. The nails gave way with a dry, high-pitched groaning. He opened the crate and found thirty-six smaller boxes, cardboard, inked, and tightly packed together.
He opened the top of one of the boxes and removed a single detonator. It was a small brass and copper tube not much larger than a pencil, an innocuous-looking thing, inside of which was contained the simple mechanics and basic chemistry of change.
He rolled it in his fingers and imagined the near future as he’d dreamed it so often, free of this scourge, a country where once again he could walk and think and breathe. Here was the idealist in him set aloft, the man of principle who for too long had been fearful of the thought that had been keeping him awake for nights on end. But now the conviction was made real. He held it for a moment to savour the small triumph, the metal cool in his palm, then slipped it into his breast pocket. He returned the resealed box to the crate and tapped it shut again.
For years he’d refused to offer the straight-arm salute that had been taken up by everyone around him. Until now, this small expression of principle had been the only act of defiance he’d been able to muster. In his own mind and heart he would not succumb to the world’s ignorance and malevolent nature. But he’d felt powerless. Too often he witnessed the sort of brutality in the streets that left him nauseated with guilt and horror.
Now, with the detonator in his possession, the world seemed alive and available to Elser in a way he’d never known before, and with this moment of courage surging in his chest he felt he had at least a chance to get closer to the sickly heart of the regime than anyone had before him.
For an hour and more that afternoon his hands shook uncontrollably. He tried to calm his breathing, attempting to get through to the end of the day as if it were any other. The steady hum of machines and men at their work reassured him to some measure. He walked through the various departments as he checked deliveries and outgoing manifests, the detonator still tucked into the folds of his breast pocket. If discovered it would mean the end of him. But the day rolled on without incident. From a scaffolding above the heavy presses that shaped a thousand shell casings an hour he watched hundreds of men working the machines on a factory floor so vast that the end of the production line dissolved in a thick blue haze.
When his shift ended he carried the single detonator out past the guards by the factory’s east exit into the failing afternoon light. He tipped his cap as he always did and commented on the weather, which was cold and bracing and dry, then located his bicycle among the many hundreds stationed there at the racks and started down the road to the next village over, where he lived. It was a pleasant ride on most days. He passed through a band of air that smelled of drying hay and thick rich soil. The sun as it hit the hills in the far south bathed the edges of the autumn fields with a cool light that turned his hands the colour of gold. He watched this as he rode home and felt in his heart more alive than the world itself.
AS A BOY HE’D studied the grandfather clock that crowded the sitting room of his family’s small home and wondered at the mechanism that marked the steady march of time. He anticipated the moment when the brass pine cone strung from a chain began to move on the quarter hour. The ringing chimes were a joyful sound. It made his heart race. Sometimes it brought him to tears—not for sorrow but for the beauty of such a miraculous instrument. Once, at the age of ten and marked by a curiosity that his father would have regarded as devilment, he opened the clock’s glass panel and stilled the pendulum with a finger, this his first experiment with the altering of time.
It was the sort of nuisance his old man would beat him for if he found him out, sure as the forest was green. But the temptation was great and the beatings would come for whatever other reason.
The pendulum resting against his finger, he watched his siblings in the field across from the house through the window. They’d been chasing a red kite, laughing and calling out, but now the kite and the clouds and voices fell still and silent. The entire world paused. Dust motes held in the sun’s rays over the windowsill; the games outside froze in the summer heat; time itself ceased its steady beat. He himself continued to move, to breathe, the pulse in his neck beating with expectation. But everything else, nothing. Oh, the world went on, he knew. But in his child’s mind—and even in memory as he looked back on that strange day—it was pretty to believe that he’d had the power to cause this brief disruption.
He was reluctant to surrender the delirious rush of power that came over him that day. His mind raced. His little heart pounded. He held the world in his hand and believed that all around him was fluid and subject to his will. But he was a good boy, too, and feared the thought of his mother and siblings trapped forever in this state of unbeing, though he might have left his father like that for all time if he’d been able. He released the pendulum with a delicate push, closed the clock face, and the day jumped back to life.
HE STOOD AT THE edge of the crowd on Rosenheimerstrasse in the Bavarian capital three weeks after stealing the first detonator and listened to the cheers rising from inside the beer hall. A band of cloud blighted the dying late-afternoon light. Street lamps flickered on. It was the anniversary of the 1923 Munich Putsch during which Hitler had stormed the Bürgerbräukeller with six hundred men and declared, with a pistol shot into the ceiling, that the national revolution had begun. Two days later he was arrested and soon after condemned to Landsberg Prison. Now every year on this day in November the Party gathered to celebrate the birth of the mighty struggle that awaited.
Pretty girls dressed in colourful dirndls walked through the crowd offering beer and sausage cuttings from wooden platters. The event had about it the high spirits of a country fair. Grease and burning tobacco smells hung over the street, and nearby stood a group of schoolgirls, giggling as they tidied their hair and competed for the one compact mirror among them. Elser felt their energy; they were flirtatious, hungry with intention, excited to be party to the occasion, as if waiting for a handsome headmaster who’d dazzle them with his worldliness and restraint.
SA men dressed in sharp uniforms stood at attention on either side of the entrance to the beer hall, their weapons pointed at the ground.
The speeches—piped outdoors by a system of wires and speakers—were of the type Elser was used to hearing on the radio—repetitive, obsequious, and bitter. They told of past injustices and the coming glories of a resurgent and grateful nation. Sleep no more, a voice intoned. Another spoke of a people on the march. They spoke of community and of better times ahead. All of them spoke of the man who would lead them from the servitude of Versailles and the crimes of its reparations and territorial demands.
The passions of the crowd grew, the defiance and delight crackling as if with electricity, and when Hitler’s voice finally issued from the loudspeaker there rose a rapturous applause and a round of adoring salutes. As Elser clapped, he noted the precise time as indicated on his wristwatch, and afterwards, too, when the oration finally came to a close, and soon after the entourage emerged from the beer hall.
Cheers and yet more applause rose as the Chancellor walked through the crowd in the direction of the three cars waiting at the curb. He was dwarfed by the men who surrounded him—political chiefs, officers, and bodyguards—but a clear view suddenly opened between him and Elser. The two men locked eyes, and Elser, who’d committed his crime a hundred times over in his mind by now, believed the plot would be written clear as day on his face. The SA men would come for him. It was all over, and barely even begun, all of it vanished like smoke.
But now the Chancellor was holding a bouquet of carnations and speaking with a young girl. He nodded in agreement, smiling, and kissed her forehead, then continued on to the black Mercedes that waited at the cur
b. Once in the car, he raised the flowers to his nose and seemed to take in their fragrance with a deep, hallucinatory breath.
Elser wondered what killing a man would feel like, or if he’d feel anything at all. He’d be in another city when it happened, if the bomb successfully detonated one year from today. But he wondered if his soul would know and feel the moment somehow, as a flame at a fingertip registers in the brain. He’d been raised in the ways of the Protestant Church. The belief that only faith and good deeds delivered you to the Lap of God was one he could not unlearn. It was seared into him. For this one, sharp moment he wavered.
He entered the banquet hall for the first time an hour later, after the crowd had finally dispersed. It was a grand room cluttered with long tables and overturned benches and ringed by a second-floor balcony that looked down over the wide-open space. The air was still heavy with tobacco smoke and the smell of spilled beer. A team of women swept the floors of pamphlets and stacked beer glasses and plates onto wheeled carts, ignoring him as he studied the position of the speaker’s rostrum in front of the pillar that supported the balcony. Wood-panelled from floor to waist height, the brick was covered over with white plaster. One of the washerwomen turned and asked if he’d forgotten something. He shook his head and bent to pick up one of the pamphlets and carried it to the restaurant-tavern that was linked to the banquet hall by a brick passageway.
The waitress there greeted him and led him forward to a table, where he sat and ate a meal of sausage and potato and blue cabbage. On the back of the pamphlet he sketched from memory a drawing of the pillar and the speaker’s rostrum and the small stick figure of the man who would stand before it a year from today.
HE WAS FOCUSED NOW. He worked slowly, pacing himself, always careful. He created a false bottom in his lunch box and carried out more detonators from the armaments factory, two or three at a time, only a few of which he’d need to build the seven bomb prototypes he’d later test in the back quarter of his parents’ orchard over the coming months. When he decided he’d taken enough and could steal nothing more of any value, he found a way to get himself fired, and two weeks later he rode a bus up to the Vollmer quarry, eighteen miles north of Königsbronn, and petitioned for a job as a quarryman.
He needed access to dynamite.
Over the two months he worked there he accumulated two hundred and fifty packages of gunpowder, eighty-three blasting caps, and sixty-eight cartridges of Donarit 3. He required only a fraction of this for the prototypes he was already sketching in the notebook he carried with him everywhere. He hid what he stole in the closet in the room he rented from the Schmauder family in Schnaitheim, two miles from the quarry. He left the quarry in May and stayed with his parents in Königsbronn for a month, where three days in a row he churned the earth of his parents’ orchard with the bombs he worked on through the night. In August, nine months after he first visited that city, he boarded the train to Munich.
Here he rented a room in the flat of an old couple named Baumann. It was a small space that overlooked an interior courtyard filled with drying laundry, bicycles, and a store of coal piled beneath a rusted-tin lean-to. One evening his landlords found the tools he often laid out on the desk in his room—among them pliers and a soldering iron and a coil of copper wire. These tools were common in his declared trade. He’d told them he was a cabinetmaker and inventor of household appliances that would improve the lives of ordinary people. He knew working people had few enough hours in the day as it was. He smiled as he explained the nature of his inventions-in-progress to Frau Baumann. It was slow going, he said, but surely he would get there. The old lady nodded and clicked her tongue against her teeth in a way that was her habit and told him she couldn’t agree more, not enough hours, she said, not enough at all, God as my witness. He paid his weekly rent a day in advance, left no signs of himself anywhere in the flat other than in his room and the shoes he left on the mat to the inside right of the entrance beside the coat rack. They had no problem with their quiet lodger, who worked mostly in his room all day long, leaving the apartment only to buy supplies and to take a late supper at a nearby restaurant from time to time. He seemed busy with industry, of which they approved, a driven individual who might one day better the lot of the common working family with the mysterious inventions he tinkered at into the small hours.
He ate at the Bürgerbräukeller as often as three times a week over his last two months in the city. He kept a mental note of each new face he saw. The intermingling of military with civilian was usual enough in these times. Soldiers were everywhere now. He saw them in the morning when he called in at the shops where he purchased the supplies he needed—copper wire, batteries, paraffin wax—never visiting the same hardware store or electrical supplier more than once. He paid little attention to the Wehrmacht men. They were regular soldiers, not drawn particularly to the cause, he thought—farm boys, machinists, school dropouts eager for adventure. It was Hitler’s bullyboys, the SA men and Gestapo, he feared. When he saw this sort he walked steadily on, nodding perhaps in their direction if they seemed to take an interest in him. He did what he could to control the anxiety that took hold of him at these times. In the evening, when he saw a group of these killers enter through the high double doors of the Bürgerbräukeller, he always wondered if they were coming for him, his secret discovered, revealed perhaps by a snooping landlady or curious shopkeeper. He attempted to put this fear out of his mind, taking on the appearance of a man simply enjoying his supper, and when his hands began to shake uncontrollably as they neared his table he’d return his knife and fork to his plate and rest his trembling hands on his knees, safely out of sight under the table, where the satchel bearing his tools rested against his leg.
He was always observing, that fall, more alone than he’d ever been as he waited for the next opportunity to slip into the adjacent banquet hall to continue his work. Certain officers, as he waited through October and into November, became familiar to him in their routine and schedule; they came often, as he did, and always the men and women of the neighbourhood arrived—families and bureaucrats and tradesmen; sometimes students flush with Reichsmarks and the wealth of national pride that puffed their chests.
He often sat close enough to hear the creak of the leather of their boots and their belts, from which hung their sidearms. They spoke of the women they had conquered and the cities they soon would and the fortune that awaited a man who knew what he wanted in life. It was usually loud here, and louder still when waiters came and went through the kitchen swing door at the back of the room, industrious staff calling out orders, and the light from cooking fires illuminating the clouds of cigarette smoke that hung in the air. But the banquet hall was quiet on those nights he worked, reserved as it was for special dates in Munich’s social calendar and the sort of political gathering he was preparing for. The two large rooms were connected by the short corridor leading off the foyer near the restaurant-tavern’s exit, a darkened length of bricked archway that began at one heavy set of dark doors and ended at another, on the other side of which was a deep and unseen quiet.
Always he felt his stomach turn when he walked through the crowd of officers, their faces alight with good cheer and menace and celebration. He’d always been a bad liar. He was terrified that his halting step and the sweat on his brow would give away his treachery. This was the overriding fear that possessed him in the early days of his sabotage. It was the world of surfaces that would betray him. A trembling hand. An eyelid twitching with nerves. A bead of sweat on the brow on a cool September evening.
Once he listened to a man at the table next to his speak of the events in Poland that the press had taken to calling Bloody Sunday. Atrocities against the ethnic German minority in Bydgoszcz had proven beyond a doubt—if there had been any doubt to begin with, the man said—that Germany must continue to demand reparations. “Hundreds of Germans, can you imagine—people like you and me simply trying to live their lives!” He was trembling with rage, this man. The stor
y had affected Elser, too. The photographs published in the Völkischer Beobachter showed corpses of women and children dumped in a roadside ditch. He’d felt revulsion and anger when he saw the pictures, as he knew the whole nation would, and understood too well that they’d further stoke populist rage against the Poles.
ON A RAINY EVENING in late October a patron turned to him and said he’d just come down from Freiberg, and was he familiar with that lovely town? This man sold insurance and had been doing business up there in Baden-Württemberg, he said. Elser rarely engaged with the other diners, avoiding conversation when he could. But that evening he was taken up in the grip of nostalgia.
A lovely place, indeed, he said.
He told the man of his trips to the region as a boy with his father in the time before his father turned drunken and violent. This might have been 1909 or 1910. Discarding his usual caution, he carved a dangerous trail into his true past that might be used one day to find him, once he was done here.
He spoke about the stands of white pine that seemed to go on forever. Sometimes he’d walked with his father for an entire morning in complete silence, so entranced by the beauty around them. His father, hailing from deep within another century, country-born with hands like wooden paddles, had tormented his children and wife with an alcoholic tyrant’s rage. But out there in those hills the countryside seemed to bring him peace. A vicious old man, otherwise, he told the stranger. But weren’t they all like that back then, beaten in their turn, and those before them beaten too, the miserable cycle forever repeated? It was not for the likes of his father that he’d execute this act of grace he’d set himself. On this point he held his tongue. It would come in the name of the meek and the fearful, as he himself had been in his youth, oppressed and powerless under his father’s heel.
