Hitler's Boat

by Pierre Turgeon

  “Where is your wife?”

  I spit and quickly returned back there, to the text that was being drawn out that I deciphered in the glow on the DCA projectors. And what I was reading there- that was the story of my life, as I was ending it in this moment. But when the power of the words began to flicker, I found myself with Hofer leaning above me and saying to me, “There you go you loudmouth. Stopped from betraying us, nein?”

  So it was him that had driven me out, pretending that he wanted to take me with him on the Helgoland so that I could no longer be wary of him. He had found out I was spying for the Allies using a classic method: giving false information only to me to see if it would then be transmitted to the enemy. So – except for him – I had been the only one to read Hitler’s diary, long excerpts of which the German BBC was now broadcasting to show the Nazi troops how demented their leader had become.

  The material Soldaten Calais was using came from a traitor that they were not able to unmask. But as the Führer retreated to the depths of his bunkers in Eastern Prussia, in the wolf’s den, or in Bavaria, in Berchtesgaden, the number of suspects diminished. Slowly, the clamp tightened around me.

  “It was Lizbeth who recruited you for Admiral Canaris, nein? Then you were sent to that phony mission in Quebec. A friendly gift for Churchill: the head of the killer Himmler had sent him himself. Canaris is dead. Strangled with an E major piano wire. A favor for a music lover.”

  “You hatched up this scheme with your half-brother Perceval. But he will be punished too. I will see to it myself. I will also make sure you will go down in history as a traitor to your country. The fake invasion plans you gave us cost us thousands of men.”

  He tore up the films that were dangling on the wire and handed them to the dentist who saluted by clicking his heels.

  “Let me introduce you to Doctor Heusenberg,” he said, “the Führer’s personal dentist. Did you know that after a partial incineration, the jaw is usually the only thing left to identify a corpse? Your mouth will serve the Reich one last time, my dear von Chénier.”

  Two guards untied me and escorted me to a car that drove a few kilometers in a morning fog that covered us from the bombardiers.

  “Follow me,” Hofer barked. He slammed the car door and we climbed a monumental staircase, flanked by two somber Breker statues, symbolizing justice and the party, towards the porch with columns defying the bombardments.

  The rain, coming from the north, was falling on the blond archangels in black and silver uniforms, legs apart in front of the monumental door, beneath the eagle that held a swastika in its talons. I swallowed the blood that kept pouring out of my gums.

  “The rats are fleeing the ship, Hofer said. Kommen Sie, schnell!”

  We crossed the grand marble halls of the New Chancellery, finely wrought chandeliers strewn across the ceilings, with complex curves ending in bronze hooks. We exited in a garden. A giant mole had dug a hole. Of the decapitated trees, only stubs of trunks remained.

  A hall opened on a rectangular, brownish blockhaus, half-buried underground: the entrance of the bunker. Steel doors. On the first level: the kitchens, the servants’ quarters, Gœbbels’ bedroom. Then, at the bottom of the metallic spiral staircase, about ten meters below, a sentinel turned his globular eyes, their cornea a grayish color, on our Ausweiss before opening the airlock to the second bunker, in a pressure of that of ten atmospheres stinking of tobacco and the generator’s diesel. The faces seemed to grow tenser and more closed off, as we were getting closer to the Führer.

  Electric cables and garden hoses intertwined on the moist ground, in a smell of oil that the loud ventilating system could not get rid of. Soldiers in uniform were crammed in a hallway; they were drunk and stupefied. Hofer gestured for me to enter a small room at the back.

  He ordered me to write a detailed confession before my execution. He left me with a ream of paper and a lead pencil.

  “And watch it, I want the truth,” he said. “None of those extravagant tales you’ve concocted and then microfilmed for the Propaganda Ministry.”

  “You will soon meet the one whose fillings you now have. We’ll need the dental work of a burnt corpse to identify him. We’ll keep you alive until the end.”

  I write while I wait for them to come get me. A bunk, a netted light bulb and the device I use to microfilm the documents the Führer is still producing, and that they’re burning up there in the chancellery’s garden as I photograph it. I scribble on the back of the loose sheets they bring me, and I use my free time to insert my story under the Zeiss lens. Discipline is becoming lax: an odor of Schnapps and vomit, cries of voluptuousness and sobs of despair. Götterdämmerung and company.

  I talk to myself, I sing in French, no one is paying attention to me, I mobilize the verb’s resources, from the abundant saliva to the melody of love, deep baritone voice and then high like a eunuch’s, from Wagner to Mozart. God is a heart. When you look at them closely, all human beings are gods: they vibrate with an extraordinary intensity, in their every move, look and breathe. “Alouette, gentille alouette!”

  “Alouette, je t’y plumerai!” the voice of my soft, tender, beloved Lizbeth answers from the other side of the wall. The door of my cell opens a little for a moment and then my wife throws herself in my arms. In the torture-induced delirium, did I betray her before that? Her blue dress with white polka dots smells of mould. I want to kiss her, but she hides her face in my shoulder, which she wets, through my shirt, with a warm substance. I think she is crying; I firmly lift her chin: blood is dripping from behind her lips. She smiles bravely, but even before she opens her jaw, I know I will find the traces of Doctor Heusenberg’s work. Fortunately, she only had to endure two useless removals of upper-molars. At that moment, she notices that I have also suffered. She takes her hands in mine and makes me sit on the bunk next to her.

  “Before I was arrested,” she whispers in my ear, “I warned Friedrich. He is already in contact with high elements of the Red Army. They will try everything they can to destroy the tunnel beneath the bunker. They think they will manage it by going through the subway.”

  “Heraus! Schnell!” A guard enters and pushes us in the hall. It is panic. Odors of vodka and vomit. Sitting in a semi-circle, filthy marshals are listening to a secretary read them their tarot cards. Distraught messengers run, carriers of contradictory orders. In a tiny room, Gœbbles’ seven children are freezing on their pillows placed directly on the floor, eyes looking up at their mother, Magda. The six girls’ pajamas are pink and the one boy’s is blue. When they turn their baby faces toward us, I feel the same pity as I did when a carpenter had cut the flooring in our basement, exposing a litter of young mice still blind, tightly packed and squeaking against one another, searching with their soft and moist noses for their mother’s side, who had escaped. They had only found the cold blade of the shovel that was lifting them and carrying them to the WC’s white bowl, towards a long slide to drowning.

  Hofer greets Mrs. Gœbbels by leaning his torso and takes her to a corner. From his brief case, he pulls out a beribboned box wrapped in green and red paper: “The promised gift, gnädige Frau,” he said. “Candies, for you and your children.” She takes off the paper wrapping. I see glass capsules, carefully placed in cotton wool to prevent them from knocking each other.

  Lizbeth seems terrorized. Hofer comes back towards us, softly closing the door while saying: “Be good, children.” He is exalted: in the last few days, his career got a dizzying ascension. He is now consoling his Minister’s children. “Follow me!” he says dryly.

  We are now in front of the Führer. Haggard, his eyes bloodshot, rings under them, temples pulsating, purplish tinge, looking like a ghost, on the verge of collapsing his terribly trembling body, he is leaning over a map and is not looking at me. He is wearing a green shirt under a grey pearl tunic, as well as grey pants. A war cross and a gold plate are dangling on his chest. His voice still seems to hold the threads that operate the puppets around him. The badl
y tightened joint of a garden hose is leaking water on the Turkish rug. Eva Braun comes out of her bath: she wipes the beads of sweat from her forehead with her bathrobe sleeve. Hitler sits on a Louis XV sofa; a strand of hair falls over his forehead.

  The woman examines him with the tip of her fingers. And here, did I hurt you? Every spot touched is attached to millions of men dressed in rags, covered in bloody bandages. Long black hair lay next to his navel, that are being lifted by a deaf, blocked breathing relieved by a dry cough, to which echo the thousands of cannons on the surface, that are protecting the sacred breath, this umbilical hole of Berlin, where we are still alive with the rest of the intestinal fauna of the bunker.

  The digestion is blocked, those idiots know it, but they will die to protect him. Aida. The hero walled up alive. The woman goes to change in the room next to the boudoir, and comes back wearing a silk strawberry-colored scarf around her neck. She grabs Lizbeth’s hands and looks at her in the eyes.

  “So, du bist mein Dopplegänger!” she says. Then she shakes her head, turns around swiftly and declares that she will not need this double of herself. She prefers to get it over with right now. Hofer protests to defend his plan, but It is done in vain. He ends up giving in and opening the soundproof double doors to the Füihrer’s private quarters.

  Klempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, enters. He is carrying a bag of cement and puts it on the floor. Then I am ordered to help him move the furniture that we are pushing, along with the rolled carpet, against the back wall. I am forced to put on the chancellor’s clothes: iron cross and a cap with a black visor. A huge concrete block suddenly loosens from the wall, moving with a crash in the desk, scraping the floor, freeing an opening bit by bit through which Hitler disappears, head low, after cold goodbyes to his wife.

  She is crying as she comes to sit next to me on the white and blue sofa. She throws her goatskin sandals in front of her and brings her feet under her supple body. She is holding two capsules in the palm of her hand. She brings one to her mouth. I hear the glass crack between her teeth. A violent twitch and she is dead as the bitter hazelnut smell spreads in the stuffy air. Oddly, her body takes the pose of a horse rider, bent in half and her arms stretched in front of her as if her hands held invisible reigns. A muffled discussion continues between Hofer and Klempka. I think they are trying to determine the angle of the bullet they will shoot in my head, with a Walther 7.65mm, so that it would look like a suicide. Lizbeth silently mouths: “Ich liebe dich!”

  When Klempka is about to pull the trigger, we hear a deafening roar and feel the ground tremble beneath our feet. Cries, barks. Hofer catapults himself towards the secret opening. He comes back a few minutes later with the Fürhrer.

  “They just blew up the emergency exit,” he says to Klempka. “All is lost.”

  I squeeze Lizbeth’s hand and hold back a victorious smile: Friedrich found the tunnel and blew it up just in time. Now Hitler cannot go ahead with his plan. He thinks a victory is still possible. He demands that Steiner’s armed group be called; his last hope. After that, he will see. His hunched back and lurching shoulders startle and shake. His head is snuggled between his shoulders like that of a turtle in its shell. The two puppets click their heels. Then he begins to write at the sane time as me, in a notebook identical to the one I took out from under my jacket and in which I am writing this.

  I know that soon we will be taken out by the opening through which Hitler came. For now, I continue to observe the pencil that is tracing these lines. Hofer has just left us. He plans on escaping the Surrounded City by barge. He brings the microfilms with him. A massive deception awaits him: every time I recognized Hitler’s handwriting, I overexposed the film. Contrary to his hopes, he will have nothing to sell at a high price to future American Nazi relic collectors.

  From Lizbeth, I can hear everything, even the story of my death. “You were alive and now you’re not. That’s how it is,” she says with a smile.

  But she is talking about something else, about the miracle of space. “Just before, when I was brought here, I felt an enormous, infinite space. There’s enough for all of us. It contains all the fragments of nothingness. That’s where the B-17s are flying, not here in our heads. Where Christophe is sleeping. Dreaming about us.”

  I close my eyes and continue to write what Lizbeth is telling me. Everything lights up from the inside, in the soft pulsating of my conscience.

  PART TWO

  May 7, 1987, Quebec

  Dear Christophe,

  All my life I have wanted to confess something. But the circumstances – and my cowardice – have prevented me from doing so. I hid the identity of your parents from you, to protect you. What irony! I could not have known you would ruin your life because you believed you were the son of an Anglo-Canadian officer. Or that rebellion against your fake father Perceval would lead you to become a terrorist and rot in a federal prison cell.

  I see you again every year, becoming harder, dryer, more unemotional, behind the transparent wall, the grill so low that it forced us to bend forward in a humiliating fashion to talk together, as our hands followed each other on each side of the scratched Plexiglas.

  I am your grandmother, but I’ve loved you as more than a son. Our meetings tortured me: I sometimes wished sickness would prevent me from going to Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on Sundays. I felt guilty of your fate, especially when my psychiatrist explained his theory to me: the nostalgic love for an Acadian mother, dead shortly after you were born, the hate towards a military father, authoritarian and Anglophone seemed to have led you to place a bomb in front of a station, for the sake of the Francophone independence.

  If he had known what I did not dare tell you at the time, and later on, when you were freed and you appeared to be so fragile to me: those parents were a fiction maintained by me, would he not have held me responsible for your problems?

  As I write these lines now, ten years have gone by since you were let out of prison. I see you are more solid, earning a living as a translator. But I do not have the courage to tell you the truth face to face. This confession, I agreed to it only because I know you will read it after my death. I will therefore never have to look you in the eye. Even so, I am still hesitating…

  Know that your father was von Chénier. Yes, your uncle André. So you are still my grandson. You will also understand the reasons for my discretion. You father being considered a national traitor, I was afraid your life would be ruined. And because I was not taking your parents away from you since they had already disappeared, perhaps dead, in Berlin, in 1945.

  When I remarried André-Didier Bouchard in the fall of 1947, I told him everything and asked him to decide what we should do. He begged me not to tell you anything, so as not to harm your psychological state. You know how much the man loved peace. Another engineer, like my poor second husband. And, I might add without any malicious intent, another French Canadian. My father, the colonel, has surely turned in his grave.

  But I should not have followed André-Didier’s advice: we were building your past on lies, and we could only bring misfortune upon you.

  I have many things to tell you about your father: first of all, do not believe what the history books say about him. He was not a traitor to his country, certainly not in Quebec where he fought for the liberation until the very end, with dubious methods and allies, but also with a total and admirable devotion to his cause. But in the end, my son did not betray Canada either, even if he did renounce it as a homeland.

  In 1943, and until the end of the war, he had become a double agent for the Allies. His programs seemed odious, calling the French Canadians to lay down their arms, to sign an alliance with Great Germany, and so with the devil, and that everyday on the airwaves of Radio-Berlin served to transmit precious information.

  Unfortunately, he made Perceval and I swear absolute discretion, warning us that within the Canadian headquarters there were Nazi traitors who would betray him in Berlin should the slightest rumor about him circulate. And u
s, he had forced us to compromise ourselves by handing over secret documents. This act that he had demanded in order to save his mission at the Quebec conference, and perhaps as proof of our good faith, would cost Perceval his life. I will tell you how soon.

  Towards the end of the war, I do not know exactly when the Germans found out a traitor had infiltrated Gœbbels’ entourage and was transmitting spicy and authentic details to the Allies about the Führer’s personal life. He became enraged when the BBC mocked his sexual habits. He suspected his closest collaborators and often, the most efficient. He would hit randomly at the smallest doubt. His natural paranoia grew stronger and hindered the conduct of war. Sooner or later, he found your father out, who kept his cool in spite of it all, and continued to encrypt and broadcast his shows.

  But on an April day in 1945, Perceval searched the specter of short waves looking for his half-brother in vain. We were mortally worried right away. It was not a power failure or a destruction of the antenna: Radio-Berlin was still broadcasting. But without any explanation, they had replaced the usual Wednesday Quebecer speaker by a German voice. The Nazi propaganda effort in French Canada had abruptly stopped.

  Perceval examined the recordings of von Chénier’s latest programs without finding anything out of the ordinary. What should he do? Alert his superior? He did not dare. No one at headquarters knew the identity of the propaganda representative for Nazi Germany. Of course your father’s name was on a short list of suspects, but they lacked conclusive proof as your uncle and I pretended we did not recognize his voice.

  Hence, we were accomplices in more than one way. Of course, after the war, when we would establish who von Chénier was and what great services he had rendered to the homeland, we would be covered in medals. If the Canadian Information Service knew that an unknown informant was using the broadcast towards Canada to communicate with them, they did not know that the mysterious author of these texts encrypted in a childish code would easily break in a few hours, once the Gestapo experts were alerted. They were based on the number of words of the program according to the date. Who was it? The speaker, the director, or the scriptwriter? What character pulled the strings from the shadows?