Like all history buffs, Beatrice is impatient with fragmentary situations.
I have a rule of thumb, one that will often enough rescue me from one miserable situation only to plunge me into the next one. That is why to this day I have never made it as a general, a company executive, a cardinal, or a university professor, but only enjoy my status as a jester at my own private court and as the chronicler of the applied recollections of Vigoleis. This life-sustaining maxim of mine is as follows: in case of doubt, let truth be told. And it was in light of this motto that I proceeded to unveil for Beatrice the situation at hand. My family was going along with it—my father with a certain amount of hesitation, my “Get a move on!” brothers with all the excitement their nationalistic short-sightedness could muster. But Mother? Hers was a simpler case. She refused to lift her right arm, and would sooner bite off her tongue than shout “Heil Hitler!” For behind her stood centuries of devout Catholic tradition, the unshakeable doctrinaire beliefs of the Scheifes clan. What’s more, she was a member of the Mothers’ Society, and she wasn’t about to dirty her hands by murdering Jews. She was practicing passive resistance, she wrote me, adding that if all the mothers in all the Catholic Mothers’ Societies in Germany did the same, Hitler would soon be history. Beatrice shook her head and said I was still the same incorrigible utopian.
It took five days for mail from the Lower Rhine to reach Palma de Mallorca. So five days later I found a letter in our post office box, and a little later Beatrice found me squatting on a crate in our apartment, with an empty stare and with my prominent lower jaw rattling audibly. Among the Neanderthals the woman of the family would have snuck into the bushes, fearing a vicious clubbing. But Beatrice was all solicitude. “Darling, what’s wrong? Food poisoning from the octopus?” (Only one in 30,000 octopuses is poisonous). “Quick, where’s our medicine book?” Then she noticed the letter. “From your folks?”
“Yes, and now they’re all in it together, even Mother. They’re ‘politically coordinated’ one and all. A disgusting letter. The Beast of the Apocalypse has won out.”
In brief, my folks had decided to march along with Hitler. They hung out the flag. They were singing the songs of the Brown Revolution. To put it even more briefly, they had completely lost their senses. And yet this was just what I expected. The worst of it was surely my mother’s contribution to this missive. This devout woman hadn’t echoed the chauvinistic rhetoric of the others. She was unaccustomed to extended writing, and anyway she was surrounded by wiseacre menfolk who knew how to express themselves readily, with conviction, and in passable prose. She penned just a few lines, explaining in simple words that she, too, was now committed to the Führer. Writing to her so very distant son, she gave voice to her joy at Germany’s return to prominence in the world, and to her dismay that this son of hers wasn’t there to experience all of this with them back home.
Beatrice pulled out our medicine book. But in all of nature, Dr. Hahnemann and his homeopathic school hadn’t discovered an antidote for nationalistic toxins. I started explaining that no such discovery would ever be possible. But she was already busy doctoring me. “Mother, too!” I lamented, my jaw still aquiver. She felt my pulse, counted the seconds, and lifted my eyelids. I rolled my eyes. She took a pile of clothes and bedded me gently up against our whitewashed wall.
“You’re having convulsions. Internal ones, too?” “Yes.” “Strong ones?” I was shivering mightily. “It could be tonic spasms, or maybe colonic ones. Does it feel as if the back of your nose is pressing into your head?”
In case of doubt, let truth be told. “No, just the opposite,” I said. My nose feels as if it’s leaving my head, along with my brain. Am I turning into a German chauvinist, too?” “Do you feel something warm rising up from your abdomen, causing shortness of breath?” “We haven’t eaten a thing all day, so there’s nothing down there that could rise up. But my breathing is kaputt.” “Aha, you see? Then you must have a tickling in your neck, as if there’s a thread hanging from your throat down into your gullet.” “Several threads, Beatrice, thick as ropes. My father writes us that Uncle Josef has also started hanging out the flag, but not at half-mast. A Catholic Center Party man, a pillar of the Church, the most respected guy in the city—but down he goes!” —“How about pains?” “I can now say with Unamuno: me duele Alemania. Germany gives me a pain. It’s funny that I’m feeling this way. I’m seeing double.” “That always happens. I’m going to give you some cuprum aceticum. Hahnemann always used cuprum metallicum in cases like this, and Grandfather, who liked to argue with Hahnemann about such things, would have prescribed cuprum ustum D4.” “My grandfather would prescribe a generous shot of schnapps. The Führer would prescribe for me a bullet in the head.”
Beatrice fetched forth her Grandpa’s homeopathic traveling kit. This satchel had already proven its efficacy at the sickbeds of a King of England, the Sultan of Morocco, the Tsar of Russia, a President of the United States, and other world potentates. It was the treatment of choice for cold patches on the soles of the feet, a condition that commonly worsened between 11:00 and 12:00 o’clock at night, as well as for cases of flatulence aggravated by anger—and it is men of power who often go black-and-blue with rage. It was prescribed for the ingestion of eggs during the autumn months, or for the imbibing of stale beer, as well as for halitosis, an ailment the patient never notices himself. In short, this famous man’s homeopathy was a remedy for the German national disease, a condition that Hahnemann never identified.
Beatrice lifted a vial from her little valise and poured a few drops into a tumbler. It was high time, too, for now I felt the incubus of hunger rising up inside me—an event that never fails to disquiet me, desperate fellow that I decidedly am. “No alcohol, no coffee,” Beatrice warned. “Otherwise this dose won’t work. Keep lying down. I’ll go get you some bread.”
After she left I took our bottle of Felanitx and swigged down the golden drops left in it, letting the blanco roll around where the threads were hanging down in my throat. I heard it hit the bottom of my stomach. When Beatrice returned I was again feeling top-fit. “You see?” she said. “With homeopathy it’s all a question of the correct diagnosis. My family tells me that Grandpa was better at such things than any of his teachers.”
I embraced her, and assured her that both of our grandfathers knew their way around with medicinal drops. Then I composed a letter to my dear Mother of the Catholic Mothers’ Society, a letter that has become renowned within the family. And I received a no less remarkable letter in response. The prodigal son was carrying on correspondence with his prodigal mother.
I argued that “Heil Hitler” would mean the death of millions of Jews. All the rest, all the so-called political aims of the Nazis, didn’t concern me in the least, as I had no comprehension of them. I had never read the editorials in newspapers anyway, and had never gone to the voting booth because, seeing that I was never able to get straight about my own self, I doubted that I could play any constructive role on behalf of an entire nation. Catholic Center? Social Democrats? Communists? Nationalist groupings of all stripes? I had got to know good guys and bad guys in all of these sects. But: “Let Judah perish”? No, no! A thousand times No!
After the fall of the Spanish monarchy, the mob started harassing priests and nuns in public. Miguel de Unamuno, the arch-enemy of the monarchy and the clergy, hung a big crucifix around his neck—and woe to whoever dared to point a finger at him! Abajo el Cristo? “Let Christ perish”? Nevermore, said Unamuno. But as for priests who financed bull-fight arenas, brothels, and railroads in Christ’s name—down with them! In my letter to Mother I mentioned this exemplary form of tolerance. How can somebody’s mother shout “Heil Hitler”? My filial communication ended with the announcement that as a result of the German Revolution, no one should expect me to return home within the foreseeable future. I suggested that they wait until Hitler had prepared, unleashed, and lost his war. If I hadn’t been made to perish by then, I would come back home. But of course I wou
ld telegraph ahead.
The Führer kept his word, but Vigoleis did, too. Mother received the telegram. She had waited eighteen years for it. Bombed out of her home and starving, she fell into my arms—the return of the prodigal son to a prodigal hearth.
The reply to this letter caused Beatrice to reach once again for our self-help medical book. Although our copy was the 11th revised and expanded edition, she hunted in vain for the drops that would cure my symptoms. She looked up under “anguish,” “anxiety,” “distractedness,” “fluids, loss of,” “hair, greying of leg,” “hair, sudden rising of head,” “homesickness,” “shaving, avoidance of,” “mouth, sudden closing of with danger of biting the tongue”—and she found nothing. My syndrome was beyond the purview of the great guttologist. He prescribed mercurius to counter the ill-effects of eating beef, but what to do for the ill-effects of bull-headedness? Or for infamy? My bile was aroused mainly by Mother’s pastor, who had heaved the mothers of the Catholic Mothers’ Society onto the patriotic track. Mother wrote me that she was a simple woman, ignorant of politics. She was only following her pastor’s recommendations from the pulpit. The Church did not condemn the Führer. She, Mother, was praying for him—and for me and Beatrice, since we were in need of divine grace. Our counterfeit marriage was sinful…
The murdering continued in the Reich. Christ and the Antichrist: ecce homo, Pascoaes says. Beatrice decided to try out antimonium crudum, as my tongue now had a coat of white fur.
“When I think of Germany in the night, / I find I cannot sleep aright.” The verse is by Heine, and after 1933 they were his most-often-quoted lines.
My grandfather proved his Christian worth by providing hot water for Kevelaer pilgrims, showing that he was a man of action. But he also became a man of words when he bought an old printing press at an auction, started a newspaper and, with the aid of a deaf, dumb, and blind woman of prodigious muscular strength who could yank the press lever, produced every separate issue. This little operation was the forerunner of our town’s regular paper, a Catholic sheet that, together with “The City of God” and “The Steyl Missionary Newsletter,” represented periodical world literature in our household. My father sent it to me regularly in Mallorca, which is how I learned of the “political coordination” of my home town, a community that sports in its coat of arms the image of a chapel dedicated to a virgin whose holiness is confirmed in the Acta sanctorum of the Bollandists. The little place of worship is located on the wooded slopes outside of town, where you can also find a famous mental asylum. The Director’s kids were schoolmates of mine, as were the kids of one of the teachers at the institution, and that’s how I eventually got to enter a place where the human mind goes off in strange directions, just as it has so frequently done with geniuses whose acquaintance I have made face-to-face: Napoleon, Nietzsche, Buddha, Christ. I spent time with inmates at the asylum, as I did with the crippled wreck of a man who did the hoeing in my parents’ garden. Each one of these people had his own Mémorial and his own St. Helena. Once in a while a patient escaped and ran through the town chased by orderlies, causing the populace to disperse like the citizens of Palma at the approach of the Sureda’s stampeding dogs. On one occasion a patient ran amok, brandishing a fence-post as his make-believe Malaysian dagger. The panic was indescribable. The only people in town who kept their wits about them were two policemen, who calmly drew near to the places where rumors told them the madman was lurking.
Wherever this doubly insane fellow had passed, so the local stories had it, he left corpses in his wake. Eventually members of the asylum staff were able to subdue the escapee, and the town could breathe free again. Many people considered it a miracle that nobody had run afoul of the sick man’s dagger. It’s so easy to stab somebody to death.
When Hitler ran amok with his patriotic rage in 1933, the asylum opened all its cells and released the inmates into our town. From the Mayor on down to the lowliest Town Clerk, from the Pastor on down to the smallest altar boy, everybody was caught up in the crazed St. Vitus dance. A few normal types unaffected by the epidemic were taken into custody. I read about this in my hometown paper. Every day a new miracle, every day some new recruit for the Party. Everywhere you looked, people were shucking off the old inner man and putting on the new outer man. To me, as I harkened here on Mallorca to the echo of my country’s self-debasement, the greatest miracle of all seemed to be that our town’s patron saint, the noble Irmgardis, Countess von Zütphen, Mistress of the Townships of Rees, Emmerich, Straelen, and Süchteln, was no longer performing miracles. According to legend, she lived in pious seclusion inside a hollow tree in a nearby forest among the deer and the owls, the otters and the squirrels. Once she was pursued by lascivious knights, and a single word from her mouth sufficed to make these libidinous barons’ castles suddenly go up in flames. Ten centuries later, as the walls of the towns under her blessed patronage echoed shouts of “Heil!” the saintly virgin’s word remained unspoken. Just one single word, I thought, and my home town would be reduced to a pile of ashes, Germany would reconsider, and a minor saint would have rescued the entire nation! But our little saint remained silent. She had no power over the Knights of the Crooked Cross.
My homeland was now “coordinated.” Overnight, the Movement got moving, and the populace of my home town was scrambling all around. Everybody is familiar with the experiment: take a water glass and a handful of hay, place the mixture out in the sun until muck starts to form, and then put a drop of it under a microscope. You will witness a back-and-forth teeming of the organisms called “infusorians.” When an entire country begins to putrefy, it likewise gives rise to infusorians, the swarming animalcules of the Movement. But these are visible to the naked eye. When they scramble toward you, and you refuse to lift your arm, they reach out and strike you dead.
My home town was beginning to fill me with dread. Whenever I thought of Germany in the night, I found that I couldn’t sleep aright.
But now, instead of writing a book about Spain, a country I was beginning to love and to understand, I was writing one about Germany, a country I never loved and was having a harder and harder time understanding.
“Die kleine Stadt: ‘The Little Town’ —Wouldn’t that be a good title for your book?”
“It would be excellent, if Heinrich Mann hadn’t beaten me to it. I’m just going to call it ‘Hun-less Tombs of the Huns.’”
My outline: Hitler sends out an order that all civil marriages were to take place with patriotic trappings. The magistrate performing the ceremony must appear in his finest livery, the city hall must be suitably decorated, and the bridal couple must step forth in accordance with ancient Germanic custom, amid moon-gazing, the sacrifice of small animals, unrestrained consumption of mead, worship of the goddess Nerthus, de-braining of tribal elders by one-eyed demonic cadavers, followed by priestesses performing auguries over the mass of collected brains. Following a torchlight parade around World Ash Tree Yggdrasil, once upon a time known as Saint Irmgardis’ Linden, the wedding night was to be spent beneath the holy tree. Heidhrun, the Führer’s sacred goat, and Saerhimnir, the Führer’s sacred pig, would eat out of the wedded couple’s hands. The presiding magistrate would ride the stallion Svadilfari, the Mayor would be astride the eight-legged Sleipnir. Then the march of the mistletoe legions would resound. Prisoners of war would be displayed, and Nidhögger, the Dragon of Envy, would blast his fire against Judah. There would be a commotion in the heavens: wing-flapping Valkyries would start singing the “Horst-Wessobrunn” song. The Fenris Wolf would be on the prowl for tasty morsels, but anyone who was “coordinated” would go scot-free. In order to seal the neo-pagan wedded union, a Christian was to be slaughtered at the runic stone next to the forest spring known as the Siep, and his bones scattered to all the four corners of the globe to ward off evil spirits. Finally, a wreath would be placed at the Tomb of the Unknown Brain.
The local Gauleiter then discovers to his consternation that there is not a single Christian left i
n the community. The blood-wedding, for which thousands of participants were expected from near and far, is threatened with cancellation. The Jews, who might have been a fitting substitute, have already all been killed. At this moment, so very critical for the prestige of the vainglorious Reich, the bridegroom raises his arm, commands silence, points to his bride and then to himself. He makes the Sign of the Cross. He and his girl have remained Christians in secret; they have not abandoned the faith of their forefathers. There is general amazement. A rattling of shields. Ravens start crowing. And then the cry is again raised at the World Tree: “Slaughter them!” The mayor lifts the giant hammer Mjölhnir, and slays the groom, Hinnes the weaver, and the bride, Minchen the flax spinner, whose combined weekly wage is 142 marks. When the Mayor, unaccustomed to committing murder, spies the two corpses lying beneath the sacred ash tree, he is seized with terror. He lifts a hand to the back of his head and notices for the first time that his brain is gone. If he could still think, he would be thinking along these lines: “What the hell, the Führer will do my thinking for me!” But this couple here—they can’t have any children! Still, the Reich Master of Funeral Ceremonies knows just what to do. Using a hemp rope, he leads Audhumla, the Primeval Cow, to the scene and lets her lick a salty block of ice, out of which steps forth Buri, the first-born brainless Homo hitlerius.
Secondary incidents were contained within my plot, plus certain statements made by leading citizens of the town, quoted verbatim from the newspapers. The names of all the active characters are real, since it would not be possible for me to invent them so convincingly in all their self-revealing infamy. This novel of mine was finished except for the final chapter. But the ending, for the novel as well as for its heroes, came unexpectedly.
“And why are you calling it ‘Hun-less Tombs of the Huns?’”
“It’s meant as a purely poetic analogy to Buri. Do you remember that hilly stretch of woods north of the town, the one called ‘Süchteln Heights’? There are quite a few Hunnish tombs and so-called ‘Huns’ Beds’ up there, the sepulchral chambers of my Stone Age ancestors. But they don’t contain skeletons or urns with the remains of immolated bodies. No, these giant ‘beds’ were the ingenious invention of a town citizen with piles of money and imagination—two things that seldom occur in unison. Only it’s too bad that this finance manager never consulted a professional menhirologist, for if he had, then even the most erudite Sunday hiker would have been filled with awe at the sight of his bogus gravesites. The very same philanthropist had a sunken church named after him; all you can see is its weathervane, poking out of the surface of the lake. When I was a kid I thought a lot about those empty graves, and about that church symbolized by a barnyard cock. Such were the origins of my mystical speculations concerning the creative potential of non-being.”
The Island of Second Sight Page 92
