The Kaiser's Last Kiss

by Alan Judd

  Very soon it seemed to Krebbs that every answer, from whomsoever and to whatsoever, was accompanied by a suggestion of contempt. His own manner hardened and he became more officious, yet still he held back from approaching the Kaiser or Akki.

  He was at his desk when the Kaiser, whom he thought asleep, emerged abruptly from his study with an unlit cigarette between his fingers. It was hard to tell from his look whether he was more surprised or displeased to see Krebbs. ‘The Princess informs me that you are asking about von Islemann.’

  ‘I have been ordered to complete the records of the household, your Highness.’

  ‘By Himmler?’

  ‘By the Reichsführer, yes.’

  ‘Von Islemann has been with me since before I came into exile. He has been exemplary throughout. He is a loyal German officer. I have the highest opinion of him. There is no other member of my staff whom I value more.’ He held his cigarette before Krebbs. ‘I find neither lighter nor matches in my study today. Bring me some.’ He went in and closed the door.

  Domestic errands were no part of Krebbs’s duty. He was not a servant, was not attached to the Kaiser’s staff. HQ SS would undoubtedly support him if there were a row about it. At the same time, he had the habit of obedience and took positive pleasure in the prompt and efficient execution of orders. Nor did he dislike the old man, unreasonable and inconsistent though he was. He found a lighter that worked, a heavy little piece modelled on an antique field gun, and took it in.

  The Kaiser, who was sitting with a book, put it carefully on the arm of his chair after lighting his cigarette. ‘A memento of the 1870 war,’ he said, ‘when we were wise enough to fight only the French. What would that old fox, Bismarck, have to say to this present business, I wonder?’ He groaned as he shifted in his chair. ‘My pains again, damn them. “Balance your friends and enemies,” he would say. “Choose each carefully.” Well, have we done that, do you think? Are we doing it now?’ His eyes bulged slightly.

  ‘We are in alliance with Russia this time, your Highness, instead of against her.’

  ‘Alliance with the Bolsheviks? What is it worth, an alliance with the people who murdered my cousin the Tsar and his family, and all his little ones, too? What is the value of an alliance with people for whom blood is the argument of first and last resort? And what of us, in that respect? It will be a race to see who breaks this alliance first, if what Herr Himmler said about the east is anything to go by.’ He stared at the unlit fire. ‘Yes, and then when I am gone and your task here is ended you may find yourself on a new eastern front, my good Untersturmführer. A different kettle of fish to life here at Huis Doorn, as the English would say, eh?’

  ‘I hope to acquit myself well wherever I am sent, your Highness.’

  ‘I am sure you do and sure you would. A soldier’s duty is to do his duty, no more, no less. He is a monk in arms. But Russia is very big, especially when you are still at war in the west. We did it, remember. But that was before the Bolsheviks took over. And remember Napoleon, too. He failed, yet he, like Herr Hitler, had swept all before him. And he failed with the English, too.’

  He continued staring into the neatly stacked kindling wood, logs and coal, as if his thoughts could be read there and need no longer be spoken. Krebbs made to withdraw.

  ‘It is colder today,’ the Kaiser continued, without looking round. ‘Unless it is just me. Have someone light the fire, would you?’

  Krebbs was kept busy during the middle part of the day, prevented from starting his report by an urgent and pointless demand from battalion headquarters for an inventory of all their rations, kit and weapons, to be sent back with the next ration lorry, arrival time unknown. It was the infuriating sort of paperwork that lower formations blamed on High Command’s having nothing better to do, and that High Command was forever calling on lower formations to reduce. Its urgency was probably due to battalion HQ having ignored it until the deadline was imminent. He also had to rearrange the guard rosters since five men were due home leave.

  He was aware, of course, that at any turn of the corner he might run into Akki but, for the time being, he almost didn’t want to. He was still digesting his memories of the night before, some of which he preferred not to think about directly but to circle round and explore, as it were, by feel. Seeing her might throw everything he was beginning to order into turmoil.

  The house was quiet after lunch and he became more aware of his lack of sleep. Unusually, the Kaiser had gone out to chop wood, which he normally did in the mornings, and the sounds of his axe came through Krebbs’s open window. The intervals were longer than usual; perhaps the old man was tired, too. The only other sounds were the chiming of the household clocks – less ragged, thanks to Krebbs, but far from simultaneous – and the occasional splash and protest of ducks in the moat. The sun was veiled by cloud and the air felt like rain.

  Akki came to him while he was sitting at his desk pondering how to start his report on von Islemann, and waiting for the next fall of the Kaiser’s distant axe. He didn’t realise she was behind him until she spoke.

  ‘I’ve never seen you so still, not even in your sleep. You were restless then.’

  He stood, smiling with relief at seeing her, despite everything. ‘I wasn’t aware I had slept. Did you?’

  ‘Probably, but it didn’t seem like it.’

  She wore her day dress and carried a feather duster and dustpan and brush. They spoke in undertones and stood well apart, although there was no one nearby. His concerns about what was happening were not vanquished by her presence, merely pushed to the periphery. They remained real enough but when she was there they seemed less important. In his mind, though he tried not to show it in word or gesture, he happily surrendered to her.

  ‘You are having to report on von Islemann?’ she asked.

  ‘You have heard about that?’

  ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘He may be. It depends on what I say.’

  ‘Because of the questions he asked the Reichsführer?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘That’s enough, I think. What else were you thinking of?’

  ‘Nothing. You.’

  He stepped across and kissed her. She smiled as she rearranged her dress. ‘You’re so ardent, yet you always look so cool and official.’

  ‘You’re so articulate, yet you always look so meek and maid-like.’

  ‘Of course I’m maid-like, I’m a maid.’

  ‘Better educated, though. More sure of yourself.’

  ‘We have better schools in Friesland.’ She turned to go into the Kaiser’s study.

  He folded his arms and leant against the wall, blocking her. ‘Why are you so worried about von Islemann?’

  She looked at him, unsmiling now. ‘It’s not only him, what happens to him. It’s that someone like you can believe in and follow someone as evil and grubby as your Reichsführer.’

  His arm muscles stiffened, but he did not move. It was dangerous to talk like that, even in undertones, dangerous for him to hear it. ‘What makes you think I am so different?’

  ‘It’s obvious you find dishonesty and disloyalty difficult, although you know in your heart it may be right to be so. As for Himmler and his henchmen, you have eyes and ears, even if you don’t want to use them.’

  Once again he could not help picturing the Reichsführer pocketing the Princess’s envelope. It made him angry with Akki. ‘You seem to think you know me better than I know myself.’

  ‘I do not, Martin. That is my point. You know the truth about yourself and these people, really. You are better than them. I have sensed that in you since we first spoke. It is why I like you. If you cleave to them they will absorb and destroy you.’

  ‘And you learned to speak like this in your hamlet in Friesland?’

  At the sound of footsteps on the stairs he straightened and moved away. She went into the Kaiser’s empty study with her duster, while he collected his papers and rang th
rough to the gatehouse to say he was coming down.

  He wrote his report there, undisturbed. It was not easy to write as if there were something to say while at the same time saying nothing very much. No one in the household reported anything of von Islemann that was remotely bad or threatening to him: his political opinions were unknown since he never voiced them; his work for the Kaiser was a model of discretion, exactitude and courtesy; his advice to his master was never offered unless asked for and tended always to be cautious and sensible, urging restraint; the Kaiser, though he sometimes huffed and puffed, invariably took it. His relations with the staff were formal but cordial; for one often remote in manner, he was surprisingly popular. People sensed fairness and integrity, perhaps also an underlying kindness. The inwardness of his marriage and family life was unknown but from the externals it appeared quiet and content; at least, well organised.

  Little was known of his background. Military gentry, aristocratic, of course, the Kaiser would know, or the Princess. He had travelled with the Kaiser to the Kaiser’s house on Corfu, where the Kaiser practised his archaeology, but it was not known whether he had made other overseas trips or had foreign friends, apart from local Dutch friends of his wife’s. He spoke fluent Dutch to his wife and it was assumed he spoke French and possibly some English, but no one knew. It was true that he had fought in the last war. He had had a good war, people said.

  ‘He would have been a good priest, or a scholar,’ the major-domo added, after Krebbs had finished questioning him. ‘He has a conscience and scruples. He is honest. He always wants to get things right. That is, to see things clearly and fairly and to be exact about them. Of what is happening now in Germany or in this war he never speaks, except that when he told us who our guest was he said we should use the best silver but count it afterwards. But that was just a joke, I think.’

  It was the kind of joke that the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security department, liked to hear about. Krebbs knew enough of them to know that. One man had disappeared from his training course after making a joke about the Führer suggesting he could not give a woman children. All von Islemann’s studied rectitude, his assiduous propriety, his caution, his loyalty to Germany, would count for nothing if the Sicherheitsdienst were given that stick to beat him with. This, along with his questioning of the Reichsführer, would be sufficient to constitute an attack on the Reich, a plot against the state involving not only von Islemann himself but his wife and children and any friends within reach. At the same time, the career of Untersturmführer Krebbs would benefit greatly by the uncovering of such a plot. There would be promotion and a prestigious headquarters post. He would have more money, would meet more women, be more attractive to more of them. But not to all.

  On the other hand, if he did not report the joke and it were subsequently discovered that he had not, he might be assumed to be part of the plot. Whatever he did now, therefore, was bad. ‘That is the fault of the system you serve,’ he imagined Akki saying. He thought for a while, then concluded his report with, ‘The only other remark von Islemann was reported to have made about the Reichsführer’s recent visit was to the effect that the best silver should be used.’ He had made it a boring, neutral report, hard to get a handle on either way. It would bring him neither praise nor blame, and would probably mean that he was left where he was.

  Later that afternoon the Kaiser and the Princess came as near as was possible, in the Kaiser’s eyes, to having a row. It was not conceivable for him to have what he would consider a proper row, a real man’s row, with anyone less than a fellow sovereign. Cousin Georgie in England would have been suitable, given what he had done – or not done – to save Tsar Nicholas. A fine, thumping row he would have given Georgie, perhaps even an actual, well-deserved thump, but death had claimed that pleasure first. Well, perhaps they would meet beyond the undiscovered bourn and have it out there, with poor Nicholas himself to referee them. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Wearying of his chopping, he had come back in for his afternoon nap a little later than usual. Afterwards, when he had just awoken and was beginning to stir – waking and the ability to move no longer coincided as they used to, especially with these confounded pains in his legs – she sailed into his study, arriving in full flow, her long dress billowing behind her, in mid-sentence as though they were already talking. Her hands, her big horny hands, were clasped before her. If she had had the remotest idea how he loved beautiful hands she might have had the decency to hide her own. He hated being walked in on before he was ready to deal with the world.

  ‘So it is clear I must go to Berlin and follow up on the good relationship we have begun,’ were the first words he heard, before he could turn his head. ‘And I must secure an introduction to Herr Hitler in order to negotiate his introduction to you so that you can make suitable arrangements for your return to the throne. But I should not mention that yet, do you think, my darling?’ She stood smiling down at him and rubbing her great hands.

  ‘To Berlin? You? Now?’ He struggled to his feet, his calves suddenly aching as if he had walked from St Petersburg. He was momentarily breathless. ‘To see that man Himmler again?’

  ‘On your behalf, my darling.’

  The Kaiser felt he might explode. His right hand shook. This was worse than Bismarck. ‘And what if I do not wish it? If I wish never to talk to these people again? If I wish that no one – no one on God’s earth, no matter who they are or think they are – should talk to these people on my behalf? What if that is my wish, eh?’

  Her face went very quickly from determined smile to wide-eyed indignation, as if she might have been prepared for this. ‘Willie, you cannot afford these attitudes. You cannot be like this any longer. Such self-indulgence is ridiculous nowadays. What does it matter if the Nazis are not nobility? They are the people in power, the people we have to deal with. For you to refuse Herr Hitler an audience, under the right circumstances, is an abdication of responsibility.’

  Later, he admitted to himself it was the word ‘abdication’ that had done it. He could not abide that word used in relation to himself and he yielded to anger in a way he had not done for years. Yet even as he permitted it to lift and carry him like a great surging wave he was aware that he could have chosen not to, that he could have stepped aside from it. This was his real self-indulgence, not what she thought. He shouted and ranted, his eyebrows rising and falling with his voice, his cheeks quivering and his good arm gesticulating, though he felt like doing so much more with it. These Nazis were terrible people, he stormed at her, worse than animals. The visit had been a success from only one point of view – Himmler’s – and that was all that mattered so far as he was concerned. In every other way it had been a disaster, a scandalous occasion. She was worse than stupid if she could not see that. He wanted absolutely nothing more to do with the Nazis than he absolutely had to, and he absolutely forbade her to go to Berlin and talk to them on his behalf. It was mad, undignified, humiliating to crawl to them. Worse, it would be a public and international scandal. These were not people one should have anything to do with. That was nothing to do with their birth but everything to do with the gangsters they were. Did she not see that? Was she a moose or an elk not to see what was before her eyes, to understand what that hollow man, that husk of a fellow, was saying?

  Krebbs, returning to his desk in the corridor, heard her protestations from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Willie – it is our good fortune – your good fortune – that Herr Himmler approves of us!’ she exclaimed, almost breathless with indignation, injury and her sense of injustice. ‘If he did not we would be paupers begging on the streets of Berlin or working our hands to the bone in prison. It is because you know this in your heart that you cannot forgive him and his party anything they do. It is pride in you, you hate to acknowledge your own dependence. But you are dependent and thanks to the support of the Nazi leadership – and some thanks to your wife, too – you are highly regarded. Do you not see that?’

  The K
aiser replied as if through clenched teeth. ‘So, Hermine, you would have me dance like a puppet before these people, on strings, to dignify their show. You would have the Kaiser jerk and twitch and grin whenever Heinrich Himmler, the schoolmaster’s son, snaps his fingers. That is what you are asking me to do, don’t you see? And I become part of the show to distract attention from their disgusting fouling of their own nest, which is also Germany’s nest, our nest. That is what you want, is it, my darling?’

  The sarcasm of his last words made her pause. When she replied her tone was one of wounded dignity, restrained and hurt. ‘It may not have been apparent to you, Willie, but Herr Himmler impressed me and everyone else who took the trouble to listen to him as a natural gentleman. He was polite and considerate and generous. He is easily our best hope. We must be logical.’

  There was a longer pause, after which the Kaiser spoke reflectively, as if considering an archaeological exhibit. ‘That man is from another planet. He is not like us. He is not of us. There is something missing in him. He is a man without – without – that is what he is, a man without. And he is low. I do not mean low-born, but low in his behaviour. Little things matter more to him than big things, which he does not see. Method, process, details, rules are his angels, and that jumped-up corporal, that failed Viennese artist, his god. He and all his kind, they are the sort who would take money from you.’

  The Princess uttered a guttural noise, a mixture of snort and cry. ‘I don’t care! I don’t care what you say! I am going to Berlin!’

  She swept out of the room and past Krebbs, her eyes glassy with emotion, her heavy features baffled and determined. He felt the warm wind of her dress.

  The ripples of the row surged through the household. When, shortly afterwards, Krebbs went down to the kitchen, the cooks already knew of it. In the hall two whispering maids fell silent when he passed. The Princess’s personal maid was summoned to help her pack, the railway timetable was called for, a car and driver were summoned. When Krebbs returned to his desk with the coffee he had ordered from the kitchen, there was no sound from the Kaiser’s study, only the smell of a newly-lit cigar. He peered through the crack in the door but could see nothing. The gatehouse rang to say that a despatch rider had arrived with another signal. He sealed and addressed his report on von Islemann so that the man could take it back with him.