Hitler's Boat

by Pierre Turgeon

  “There. I am proposing a clandestine archaeological dig. Here, behind the coach door, a garden that would give the site all the privacy it needs. The police prefecture will not bother us; I still have old friends there. People are still digging dozens of tunnels beneath the wall. From the East to the West, which actually presents more risk than our project, since we are not aiming to come back up to the surface, but instead we would stay down in the crypt beneath the Soviet zone. We could pretend we are digging up the villa to build a disco, that would be named the Führerbunker, just like Hitler’s refuge located nearby. It will give the tourists as well as the Berliners, a chill. The barmen would be dressed as Adolf, in uniforms with steel crosses and little moustaches. We would play heavy metal.”

  “Fifty-fifty?” Christophe asked. “Spending and profits?”

  Schuppmann was not following them aboard the Mercedes anymore. Christophe wondered why, and then shrugged his shoulders. They wrote down the agency’s number written on the rental sign and headed towards the café around the corner to make a phone call. The owner wanted a three-month lease, at two thousand marks per month, payable in advance. They sat in a corner drinking beer. Two griffins opened their protective wings over the bar’s bottles. The short waitress in a purple jumpsuit pretending like she was boxing a patron, on the giant screen, the heroine of a soap was sending a distress call on her CB. Too late: the minivan was falling and exploding at the bottom of a ravine. A UVA tanned client dropped her dirty jeans on a stool and ordered a Pils as the WC’s bowls talked to each other by moving their lids like jaws.

  There. They had found the basis of their operation. They had made the calculations: a hundred and fifty meters to cover, twenty dollars for every meter of tunnel. In total: twenty thousand dollars, with half for Christophe. His entire fortune! He would have to open an account in a bank in Berlin.

  “We could become associates by creating a company…” Hofer said.

  “That we would call Eckel und Schmidt Import-Export,” Christophe said, who still did not trust his companion. But hearing the name of a company that had tried to purchase the Helgoland, the other did not flinch. “The name matters not,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the paper where he had begun to list all the material needed.

  At that moment, with a haggard look, Fatima entered the room, miniscule next to the huge Schuppmann that was leading her by the elbow.

  “Do you know this girl?” he asked Christophe.

  “Yes. Let her go!”

  The chauffeur silently questioned his boss who blinked slowly as a sign of agreement. Fatima snuggled next to Christophe who had stood up and was sizing Schuppmann with his eyes.

  “Did he hurt you?” he asked.

  She shook her head and smiled bravely.

  “I am sorry, miss,” Hofer said. “I noticed that you had been following us from the restaurant a little while ago. I wanted to know why. Here, in Germany, with all the terrorists, businessmen have to take extra care. Come sit with us, please.”

  Christophe hesitated. Twenty years earlier, he would have tried to break his chair on the chauffeur’s black cap without thinking. But Fatima lightened the mood by answering Hofer.

  “Christophe hired me as a guide and interpreter. I did not want to bother the private nature of your meeting, but I did not realize that my behavior could seem suspicious. My name is Fatima.”

  Christophe did the introductions and the four of them ended up around the solid oak table.

  “Istanbul?” Hofer asked.

  “No. Ankara.”

  “Oh? Do you know who drew the plans of your city? Jansen, a Berliner who inspired Speer with Hitler’s new chancellery. It stood exactly where we are now. Monsieur Chénier and I have decided to become partners in the practice of historical digs in the neighborhood. We will need a few workers. Would you know any compatriots it might interest? We would pay cash and would not ask any questions.”

  “I can give you a few names.”

  “Very good. You will see to that with Christophe. You will live on site, in the pension. We will save money that way.”

  “Tomb raider!” This insult of the Egyptian archaeologists toward the pharaoh looters, Christophe addressed himself as the conversation went on about practical organization of the future site. Underneath the flooring swept by a black sleepy waitress with sawdust, were possibly hidden irrefutable traces of his past, partially disintegrated by the winds of treasons. He felt the same uncontrollable nervous excitement as he did at the moment of his attacks. In this instant, he was not defying the federal state of Canada, but the four powers of the Berlin occupation. For a futile and microscopic reason within history: learning the fate of his parents. And the identity of their killer. Who still lived, and was laughing in his beard, if he even had one, rather than a shaven face like Hofer’s.

  “If our research is conclusive before the Book Fair in Frankfurt in October,” the editor declared, “we could rent a plane for the serious customers and let them visit the Führerbunker. When given a chill, the Americans quickly bring out their checkbooks.”

  Fatima was slowly recuperating from the fright she got when Schuppmann had seized her by the arm while she had been waiting in front of the café. She thought he was part of the law enforcement until he brought her to a small room, in front of the old man whose opaque gaze made a scorpion run up the back of her neck.

  When Hofer left them, Christophe ran to the café’s urinal. Oppressed, he splashed his forehead with water. Both faucets bore the letter H, engraved in cursive style with baroque embellishments, thus falsely indicating with the abbreviations H H (heiss, heiss) two jets of hot water. As he fixed his hair, he could not recognize himself, as though he were wearing a sinister mask. He thought that the real flaw in all the stories of pacts with the devil was that they assumed the prince of lies was coming forth with his real name.

  NOTEBOOK FIVE

  The abandoned hostel that Christopher and Hofer rented from September second stood fifty meters away from the wall of Potsdamer Square and, beneath it, the Führerbunker; in the middle of the wasteland full of cast-iron bathtubs that floated under the streetlights. As a means of protection against vandalism, the windows were heavily boarded up, except on the fourth and final floor. Daylight penetrated the rooms only through the backyard where the spiral staircase rose, lit by light shelves on the right of the path that lead to the coach door,

  Christophe had moved in with Fatima under the attic, in an empty and echoing room. A Venetian blind hid him from the guards in the watchtower, on the other side of the wall. He often watched the official cars that passed the Eastern-Western border at Checkpoint Charlie with binoculars, on the American military convoys that went along the wall: dozens of trucks, Jeeps, trailers spiked with antennas, full of containers, covered in camouflage print tarps with numbers written in chalk over them. On Radio-Moscow, a French feminine voice spoke in monotone about the “Palestinian students that had walked in the streets of Jerusalem while chanting slogans demanding the immediate departure of the occupation forces.”

  Aside for a few heavy and scratched mahogany pieces of furniture, Bauhaus style, there only remained a few tens of thousands of paperback novels from the deceased owner’s library; all worthless. Everywhere, in the halls, in the dining room with oak paneling, in the bedrooms and even on the staircase walls, the obscure books lined up as fine as the ones that had covered Pompeii right before the lava came down.

  He had not properly closed the shower curtain so water was splashing on the tile floor where the ceiling light erased all traces of dawn. He could not find the towels; he had surely thrown them at the back of a closet, where the smell of mold would eventually grab his attention. For now, he was drying off with his bathrobe. When he exited the bathroom, his watch was beginning to defog: six o’clock. The first bus was already moaning.

  So, as to not wake Fatima up – she was still sleeping – he dressed in the dark, knowing where his clothes were around him. He was an order
ly man. He went down the stairs and found himself in the yard where they could, for now, easily hide the earth coming from the excavation.

  The rain was showering down Christophe’s black Opel, as well as the tools scattered around the well that was covered with linoleum. Crouched on a squared pile of lumber, Abdoul was smoking while he waited, a shovel in his hand. His black hat down on his ears, he hummed in Arabic. “Boss, we dug fifty meters yesterday. You happy?” he asked. “Where are the others?”

  “They’ll be here right away.”

  “The Turks only understand kicks in the ass!” Schuppmann said in a sharp and precise voice. He lived with them to protect Hofer’s interest, calling him every day. Shirtless and powerful, he blew his nose as he stood in the door of the old janitor’s lodgings, where he slept with his weights, which he would not stop lifting according to a body builder’s choreography, in which steel replaces woman as a partner. He had given some explanations to a police patrol a few days earlier, but his contribution to the work site stopped there: he hated physical labor that might harm his astonishingly white and delicate hands.

  Abdoul spit in his direction and got up when Selim, the skinny guitar player, and Saïf, the mustached truck driver, arrived. They removed the tarp, uncovering the ladder and the well that led to the end of the tunnel. In their advance towards the Führerbunker, they were now progressing under the zone protected by machine guns with acoustic triggers that threw steel cubes at the slightest sound. With their shovels, they dug frantically for ten marks per meter. The sandy soil did not cave in. They were treading in several centimeters of water. It was cold and humid. They caught colds with fevers. Christophe himself was suffering from laryngitis. When he cracked and fainted, the others pulled him by the legs up to the ladder at the bottom of the well.

  They took turns every other hour. Abdoul, who had a friend working at a slaughterhouse, was able to get tinplate containers. Each container could hold one hundred and fifty pounds of sand and soil. The worker removed the soil and packed it in the containers. He had to fill up fifteen times before trading shifts with someone else. Sometimes they would hear the Vopos patrolling over them and they would stop. Despite the freezing cold, they all wore jeans and short-sleeved shirts.

  At night, Fatima would tell him he smelled of soil, das Erd, in her tongue, which she would slide over his volcanic stomach, the saliva leaving a trail of vapor below his navel. He came, his sperm leaked in the tunnel, stimulating the digging work, throwing itself like an acid assaulting the last obstacles separating him from Hitler’s illuminated form, still scratching his pen on the lined pages of the notebooks he had bought in Vienna with his friend Kubizek, as he was already dreaming of building a new opera house in the city of Linz, but the ground was catching up with Christophe with its steel teeth, he could not move this frigid earth anymore.

  Fatima was worried. Christophe liked this earth and the silence around him too much. He was slowly giving up on the world of the living for that of the dead.

  “You’ll take me to Canada tomorrow?” she asked as she leaned her elbows next to his on the windowsill. She imagined the wall in front of them was a huge mirror that was sending back to them a reversed image of the city, reflecting the towers, the cars, the buses, imprinting them with a silence that was reminiscent of the country, under the bulb like the tip of the DDR television antenna, as if the whole of Berlin was a show being broadcast permanently in their brains .

  She spoke to him softly, in this French she had begun to learn from him: murmured sounds, whispered against the night’s ear. “No word is sensible, not even the most humble, the most reassuring. They are all shaking in anxiety, repeating I am not dead, no, not yet, since I still talk.”

  It was raining outside; the wind was chasing the newspapers that the lazy neighbors had left outside the door, up the wall. The news travels fast, as they say, and the photo of a terrorist can be seen on the front page, with the promise of reward. Christophe recognized Abdoul. No one picked up the paper that then fell in a puddle where the ink ran.

  Always faithful to his promise to publish the chronicles about the dig site, Hofer had lent him a microcomputer to send his text directly to the reviser with the description of discovering the Führerbunker. When Christophe sat in front of the keyboard, he felt like he was being tortured to write. A shiver ran through him and the slash of a sword cut his abdomen open; he could not breathe anymore. Then, Fatima would kneel in front of his wound, kiss it and bandage it. Berlin did stand for any such barking in front of its wall. They made love. What a machine, all contact, breath, weight and counterweight! The room shifted behind the arched nape of his neck.

  Fatima Nursi felt that her Quebecer lover was slipping away from her, not to the scented hands of another woman, but to the dubious prestige of death, which, stuck to Christophe’s heels and under his nails, his hair and, it seemed to her, behind his dull and absent gaze, was now spreading its odor of festering mud even into their bed. She, who had known how to fight for the rights of Kurds and women, who had eight lawsuits hanging over her head for a total of forty-five years in prison, remained powerless in front of the melancholy that she felt was inspired by Christophe’s past – digging the maternal soil of Berlin, was he not trying to rewind the course of time up to the time of his birth, his separation from Lizbeth – of which he had no memory?

  And when she asked him to describe his country – to distract him as well as to get information for herself on this America where she planned to find refuge at the end of September when the German authorities would want to deport her back to Ankara – he talked to her about the snow banks his compatriots had to plough to get around. “Snow, it’s nothing, it’s void that we spend our lives moving around between two short summers. Our only national palace is the ice palace of the Quebec Winter Carnival.”

  He quoted mad poets; authors who had committed suicide, all bards of this people one half of who, after the defeat, accused the other half of treason. The sun warmed the Spree being patrolled by the RDA gunboats, and where the watchtowers were reflected. She looked at his face wound up in thought, wrinkled around the lips, the ones of a seducer who refuses to grow old.

  He had hoped to give birth to himself in the crude lights of the being, with the forceps of his mind; but he was giving in to the vertigo of the void, inspired by the biggest lack of history of the world.

  “Was ist Kebek: ein Mus oder ein Muss? Marmalade or necessity?” he asked himself, chuckling. “My father believed we were vanquished. But there was no defeat because there was no battle. And no battle because there was no country to defend.”

  What could she answer him? She felt that only actions would reach him. At night, they would join up in the yard, around a fire, beneath the starlit rectangle cut by the lead gutters. Slim Selim was playing the guitar, Saïf-the-mustache was telling stories of his wild runs on the road between Teheran and Ankara, in the mountains where the villagers ransomed the truck drivers by forcing them to pay ‘insurance’ on the broken windshields and the flat tires and Abdoul, the engineer-dirt digger who was wanted by the police, was calculating the number of support beams they would need for the next day.

  They spoke in the bastardly language of their group: of Ankara, the “Grey Wolves,” the Turkish fascists. They spoke of baklava, shish kebab, goat’s cheese, the Prophet. But mostly, they talked about the Helgoland.

  Fatima participated in the dig by spreading the containers of soil throughout the rooms of the ground floor. Twice a day, she would bring them Big Macs in little styrofoam coffins. They all suffered from stomach cramps.

  One afternoon, Christophe did not have the strength to go on, so he came back in earlier than planned. He found Fatima standing in the middle of their room, naked, her hands tied behind her back and a rope around her neck that was tied to one of the ceiling beams, which forced her to stand on the tip of her toes so as to not strangle herself. He untied the ropes as well as the towel around her mouth that prevented her from spitting o
ut the ping-pong ball that served as a gag.

  “Schuppmann?”

  He had come in just as she was coming out of the shower. He had insisted on drying her off. The others couldn’t hear her from the bottom of the tunnel. She had obeyed him, even allowing him to tie her up in that position. And finally, he had been content to watch her in silence. Then he left, saying he would be back right away.

  Alone in his improvised gym – which smelled of sweat and varnish – Schuppmann was pushing away invisible images with his muscles. The others did the same. All of them lost in their thoughts, suffering for her. Every movement, whether repulsion or attraction, costs energy. His thoughts crumbled. Athletic nirvana. He did not have to sum himself up with the aesthetically rational synthesis of an ‘I’ anymore. He lifted his weights to achieve the impossible transcendence. Sterile hysteria that screamed in silence.

  Total war ruled on the cover of Schuppmann’s magazines where SS whipped women who docilely obeyed, clicking their heels, their bathrobes opened on their bras.

  He was listening to rock music and did not hear Christophe come in. His hands covered in powdered chalk, he was lying on a bench, grabbing a weight held up by two forks behind his head so he could bench press. Christophe prevented him from lifting the supported weight in cantilever with his triceps – above his chest and elbows locked. In this position, a light pressure of his thumb exerted a greater force than that of the entire colossus, puffing and turning red.

  The bar touched his nose and crashed down on his teeth, the enamel screeched under the engraved steel. With a start, he pushed the bar to his throat where it crushed his windpipe; then he used it as a handlebar to twist his head in every which way. His red face grimaced. Pity took hold of Christophe before this puppet with its wires cut off, with marshmallow hands clamped on his and he let him catch his breath. Behind them, the Turks, covered in mud, had come in, and Abdoul was holding a knife.