Dracula vs. Hitler

by Patrick Sheane Duncan

  Then they went to Coco Chanel’s shop, and for two days she thought that high fashion might be her metier.

  She remembered the first time she saw an advertisement for a performance of La Revue Negre with Josephine Baker. The posters were everywhere, on every lamppost, vacant wall, and pissoir. She wanted to be like, no, wanted to be this exotic woman with the slicked-down coiffeur and spit curl on her forehead. Her father refused to allow her to attend what was considered a risque show, and this only added to the allure. Still she imitated the look with her own hair for at least a year after. Until her Greta Garbo phase.

  After they returned home she became a fanatical Francophile. Not necessarily the country. Her fixation was on the doings of Paris. This was the golden age of literature and art in the City of Lights, and this made her all the more aware that she was mired in what she considered a rural backwater. She made her father’s life miserable with constant hectoring about her wretched, sequestered life.

  She made him subscribe to all of the Paris magazines and journals: the Transatlantic Review, Gargoyle, Tambour, Transition, Vogue, the Chicago Tribune (Paris Edition). She kept track of the exploits and accomplishments of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Pound, the Fitzgeralds, Joyce, Picasso, and Chagall, who, to the delight of the teenage Lucille, painted in the nude. She knew what Diaghilev was up to with the Ballets Russes, pestered her father for the latest Stravinsky record, followed the existentialists like her girlfriends followed the dating habits of their peers. Gertrude Stein had named her two-seater auto “Godiva,” so Lucille gave her bicycle the same appellation.

  She was a Communist for a month or two, a Socialist for less, an anarchist for an entire winter.

  Her father bought her the silk stockings, Ambre perfume, and Fleur de Peche she had read about. She ordered crushed-almond skin cream and began to smoke evil-smelling cigarettes with a long, ivory holder. She felt as much an expatriate as any of the Americans.

  As soon as she left her last finishing school, she picked a fight with her father and packed a case for Paris. But five years had passed since first love, and the creative fire that had ignited so many talented people had dimmed to dirty embers. The days of wine and absinthe and cocaine had claimed too many victims. She would sit with the pimps and street girls at the club Le Rendevous des Mariniers on the Quai d’Anjou and the scene made her sad, not a bit of romance to be found.

  She would go out at night to dance at the jazz clubs. She met Hemingway, an angry drunk with a fragile ego. Her idol Zelda was in an asylum. She bought a year’s subscription to Shakespeare & Company, spotted Sylvia Beach bringing tea to Sam Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. She ambled through the stacks so she could overhear the two. They spoke no great thoughts, but merely complained about the rain. Lucille was too embarrassed to announce her own recent ambitions to be a novelist.

  She dallied among the colony of the third sex and found herself in the arms of a penniless drinking colleague of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

  After a short time she came to the conclusion that the parade had passed, the streets were filled with nothing but has-beens and never-bes. The golden age had turned to brass, and tarnished brass at that. She heard a bearded young piano player say that the lost generation, generation perdu, had become the fichu—ruined—generation. Sadly she realised that Paris had become less an island of artistes and more a conclave of tourists and posers.

  She sipped onion soup at Le Chien Qui Fume in Les Halles, overheard the reporters describing the savagery of the Nazi party in Munich. She decided to abandon the rotting fruit of Paris and try Berlin.

  After a brief interlude and debauch in Berlin she headed west to England, then the United States, reading as she went, e. e. cummings on the Isles, John Steinbeck in the Americas. In the Orient she read Fei Ming and Kawabata.

  But even there, the clatter of sword against shield was increasing in volume. Despondent and depleted in her mind and soul, she decided to return home and warn her father. But first she stopped in Berlin to confirm the rumours of war. The city had changed dramatically in the few years she had been travelling the globe. During her first visit it was known as “Wicked Berlin,” a city determined to break every social convention. Provocative behaviour in the extreme had been the rule and the raison d’etre.

  The Friedrichstadt quarter had teemed with prostitutes in the thousands, so many that the whores were divided into categories, any act to fit any depravity. It seemed colourful at the time, the streetwalker specialties given various sobriquets: boneshakers, grasshoppers, boot girls, woodchucks, half-silks, gravelstones, Kontrol Girls, and Nuttes.

  Gigolos and pretty boys prowled the tourist hotels and downtown pensiones, their faces painted with rouge and mascara like toddlers raiding their mother’s makeup case.

  To Lucille, this city of iniquity fascinated and titillated her. Children hawked dirty postcards on the streets like newspapers. Dark cabarets were host to drug parties and nude dancing—by the patrons! There were naked boxing and wrestling arenas, private torture chambers, and pornographic films depicting Gymnasium masters and nannies humiliating their naked charges with a variety of objects.

  Berlin had been a constant, almost hysterical, bacchanal as the German people tried to erase the monstrous horrors of the recent lost war and the daily tragedy of massive unemployment and unparalleled inflation. It was an economic nightmare where a wheelbarrow of marks might purchase a mealy loaf of bread.

  And Lucille dipped her toe in the shallow end of this polluted pool. She was sucked into the seductive maelstrom of dissolution and desperate thrills.

  She spent a wicked weekend with a degenerate adventuress, an aging flapper who strutted into parties with a terrified spider monkey clinging to her neck, the monkey clothed and the woman wearing nothing but a thigh-length mink coat and a brooch packed with cocaine.

  Lucille partook of a bizarre concoction of white roses dipped into a potion of chloroform and ether, then consumed the frozen petals. She woke the next morning amid a half-dozen other naked bodies, in an apartment she did not remember travelling to, her body spotted with bruises, smears of lipstick, and a cigarette burn. She had no memory of the night.

  She fled the city the next day and began wandering the globe searching for experience and herself.

  Her return found a completely different Germany. At first the newly cleansed Berlin impressed Lucille. The Nazis had brought a certain order and prosperity to the city, and thus a comity she had not seen before. But behind this sedate curtain she discovered a new hysteria rising.

  She was witness to a woman being thrown from a trolley, her head shaved, her beaten and bruised face distorted by fear. This desolate creature lay in the street and was kicked by ordinary citizens just passing by. Lucille hurried to the woman’s side and helped her to her feet. That was when she saw the placard hung about the poor woman’s neck, “Consorted with a Jew.” Lucille suddenly realised that what before had been a whisper was now a scream.

  Virulent anti-Semitism was evident in the movies, the radio; and the newspapers fuelled the fire. There were book burnings and demonstrations where speakers spewed hate and vitriol. Brownshirts cruised the streets beating Jews while the legitimate police just watched. Cabaret comics were imprisoned for telling mild jokes about Hitler and his cronies. American jazz and modern art were condemned as degenerate.

  And the little Corporal with the Charlie Chaplin mustache gave belligerent rants, inciting the populace into a national fervour exalting the purification and glory of war.

  The Berliner luft, the idea that the air in Berlin made the residents excited and full of life, that intoxicating atmosphere, had turned poisonous.

  The tipping point where unease turned to fear came on a cold November night. The brownshirts and their thuggish sympathizers attacked nearly every Jewish store, house, and synagogue in Berlin and, as she learned later, across Germany. They set fire to Jewish buildings except when that conflagration might threaten an adjacent non-offending Aryan struct
ure. In those cases, instead of torching the Jewish building they demolished it with sledgehammers and axes.

  Storefronts were smashed until the streets were carpeted with broken glass, giving the rampage the name “Crystal Night.”

  Lucille wandered the cold city witnessing the brutal destruction of Jewish property. That night police and fire departments stood idle and watched the violence. Fashionably dressed women clapped their hands in excited applause as Jewish hospitals were ransacked and the patients tossed from their beds to be kicked and beaten.

  Mothers hefted their babies over the heads of the crowds so that the infants could see synagogues turned to rubble, and encouraged their older children to fling those very stones and bricks through the windows of Jewish homes.

  Lucille despaired at the sight. What had happened to these people?

  Thirty thousand Jews were arrested that night and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. A thousand synagogues burned, seven thousand Jewish business destroyed. No one was sure how many Jews were beaten to death. And in the aftermath, to add perverse insult to disgraceful injury, Jews were fined a billion dollars to repair the damages. Jewish businesses and properties were seized to pay the bill.

  She hurried home to warn her father.

  Lucille had never told anyone the details of her travels across the globe, and she had no idea why she was opening her heart to this strange man. And it was not just a recitation of her personal history. The Prince interrupted the narrative to ask questions, offer opinions. It was a conversation in which he shared only a little of his own history, exploits, and embarrassments.

  The discussion became heated at times, neither of them taking offence at the other’s opposing viewpoint. Sometimes the debate sank into argument for argument’s sake, a verbal conflict that both of them engaged in with equal enthusiasm, point-counterpoint, sparring with words like two fencers, thrust and parry, no concessions, no surrender.

  They even fought over the movie they had just seen.

  “I love the movie, do not doubt that,” Lucille said. “But it is yet another example of some male fantasy of a woman at the mercy of a domineering male.”

  “And you do not think this is also a female fantasy, to be carried away by some strong male?”

  “I will concede this trope, but only because women have been indoctrinated by a male ruling class to think this way,” she countered. “But it is still woman as object.”

  “An object of beauty and desire, an age-old theme for poetry, literature,” Dracula argued. “Why not these same themes for this new form of story?”

  “Still an object. Not an equal,” she said. “Another victim from another male-dominated industry in a male-dominated world.”

  Lucille was surprised at her own vehemence and had not realised that she felt so passionately about the subject. During her world travels she had witnessed the subjugation and drudgery that most of her sex experienced, but she’d never felt she was one with them and part of their struggle. She was sensitive to the fact that she had always been separate, different. Maybe it was her intelligence; she knew she was smarter than the average person, much more educated. But her individualism was more than just her brain; it was the way she looked at the world, somehow outside it. She was always the observer, no matter how much she participated, alien to the rest of mankind. She didn’t bemoan the fact; she was just aware of it and accepted her plight as she did her red hair.

  She was alone, and her state of loneliness was as much a part of her as her dislike of squash and peas.

  “I think,” Dracula said with a smile, “that you have let your modern way of thinking intrude upon what is but an entertainment, a remarkably effective one, one that may transcend its mode. Still I admit my experience is limited in this form.”

  “That’s right,” she interjected, teasing. “I am arguing with the uneducated. You are woefully unqualified for this debate, sir.”

  “Agreed.” He met her grin with his own smile. “Let us look at the story from the point of view of this gentleman, Doctor Freud. I read his book, and it seems to me that the symbolism of the giant male, of dark nature and complexion, taken from the wild continent and introduced to the modern world, the great metropolis, then attacking the mechanised beasts of that city, climbing to the highest pinnacle, an evident representative of the male member . . .”

  Dracula’s rumination was interrupted by the entrance of Professor Van Helsing and the young Harker.

  “Lucille.” Her father kissed her on the forehead. “Did you not sleep?”

  She glanced at the clock and was astonished at the time. It was an hour past sunrise.

  “We were talking,” she explained.

  “Ah, talking through the night,” her father said while examining Dracula with acute scrutiny. “A pastime I indulged in many a time.”

  “Me, too,” Harker interjected. “School days, uh, nights. Solving the problems of the world over a pint. Or two.” He grinned at Lucille. “Or three, even.”

  “So, Doctor Van Helsing, I read the book you gave me. What do you think of this Freud?” Dracula asked.

  “Let us have some breakfast first,” her father said and led them downstairs.

  “Hokum,” Harker declared as they descended the steps. “Freud. A pseudo-scientific sham.”

  Lucille helped with the cooking, Harker getting in the way. Dracula sat at the table, awaiting further discussion.

  “Some of his theories, I admit, seem to be a mite outre,” Van Helsing said. “But the idea of exploring the human psyche as a scientific pursuit is one that I endorse. It is comparable to our own explorations of the far reaches of the Amazon, the depths of the ocean, our solar system, worlds of which we are ignorant and that wait for us to divine with every tool at our disposal. The human mind is one of these dark, mysterious lands where we should begin some kind of mapping, even if some spaces have the legend ‘Here there be monsters.’”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .’” Dracula began.

  “‘. . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” Lucille finished.

  She and Dracula shared a look and a laugh. The Englishman did not share the humour, but instead frowned at the pair.

  “How you two carry on,” Harker remarked. “You would never think that you were separated by five hundred years or so.”

  “Miss Van Helsing has a very old spirit,” Dracula said, more to her than anyone else in the kitchen.

  “Call me Lucille, please,” she told him. “And Prince Dracula is open-minded, not calcified in the old, restrictive, and oppressive ideas that dominate our era.”

  “But he is still a killer,” Harker said flatly. The statement put an instant damper on the conviviality. Lucille turned on Harker, her lips in a thin, hard line.

  “It is a time of war, Lieutenant,” she stated. “We are all killers. You as well.”

  “But we kill out of necessity,” Harker countered. “The Prince takes life to maintain his own vitality, for, shall we say, sustenance. And at times, for what he admits is bloodlust. It is not exactly the same.”

  “Not the same?” Dracula asked. “Have you not enough war experience to witness the occasional bloodlust of your fellows in battle? Do you not kill to perpetuate your own existence? And have you not killed or had killed an assortment of animals for your own sustenance?”

  “You are comparing human life to that of dumb beasts, cows and sheep?” Harker asked brusquely. “Of course you would. Because you are not human. You are some kind of beast yourself. A simulacrum of a human being.”

  “Similar enough to feel anger at your tone, young sir.” Dracula eyes were alight with anger. He stood and faced Harker. The Englishman could not help but quake at the vampire’s puissance.

  Lucille sought for a way to ease the tension that had suddenly arisen.

  “Father,” she said rather loudly. “Any word regarding the Nazi reaction to our little foray the other night?”

  Van Hel
sing was more than glad to take the baton. “It seems we have confused our enemy,” he said. “Or, rather, the Prince has done so. I would even say we have planted some seeds of fear among our occupiers. There are rumours of a bear attack upon the train, other tales of a wolf pack, even mountain lions. Or worse.”

  “Magnificent,” Lucille said.

  “German troops stationed in Ploesti are declining home leave unless they can get there by plane. We may not have the numbers or weapons, but we can scare the enemy into paralysis.”

  “Which we are doing,” Harker said, turning from the vampire. “Fear, a few well-placed bombs, a dash of perspicacious sabotage, and we are able to cripple them. For the moment. But what next?”

  “As to that, I serve up more than eggs this morning. We have the possibility of a new errand for our merry band,” her father said, motioning for Harker to sit. Lucille provided a plate and Van Helsing dropped a perfect omelette before the Englishman. Her father was as exacting a cook as a surgeon, and his food always looked as if it were made for illustration. He broke eggs into a bowl for Lucille’s.

  “An old Tatra auto fender factory in Sfantu Gheorghe has been recently converted to make artillery shells,” Van Helsing continued.

  “This is the place using slave labour, correct?” Lucille asked. “I thought it was too well-guarded for us to even think of attacking.”

  “It is,” her father agreed. “And heretofore the end result of such an assault, a momentary cessation of their armament production, was not worth the potential cost to us, in people and possible retaliation upon the local citizenry.

  “But while the price of the endeavour may not have decreased any, the prize has grown in value,” her father said. “Twofold: One, the German authorities have established an intelligence-gathering operation inside the factory, a cooperative group comprised of Gestapo and Rumanian Army Intelligence officers, taking advantage of the complex’s protective capabilities.”