Eva's Cousin
Page 13
That is what I offer the public, a chance to see this spectacle and the way in which, despite my blue eyes and robust appearance, the sickness mows me down. Every attempt to save me is bound to come too late.
Have I disappointed you all? Didn’t anyone see how much I needed help? Didn’t you realize that the liveliness you liked so much in me, my strength, my wildness were only the reverse of the extraordinary tenderness animating me, were its cover, its disguise?
I am the woman for whom men go to war, not Zarah Leander, still less Lida Baarová and Marika Rökk. They are the kind of woman to whom men hope to return some day. Alluring. Ever-changing. But I am the kind who deludes them into thinking it is worth dying.
I am on familiar terms with death. The stronger the temptations with which life approaches me, the closer death comes, too. I suffer a terrible vengeance for my actions and innocent wishes. A short trip to Prague comes to a fatal end.
All I want is to see my mother’s native city, where she was so happy before she went into the marshes.
That golden city! That captivating film in Agfa-Color into which I have found my way! The sinful red of the cheap dress I wear there instead of my demure traditional blue costume!
There is a powerful struggle going on in me between my mother’s blood, which makes me susceptible to urban temptations, and the blood of my father, calling me home to the soil.
The opposition of town and country. Their irreconcilability. The definitive border, the border one may not cross with impunity. It will be the death of me.
My end is tedious, accompanied by choirs of angels and screen monologues of a kind the public has not had to suffer since then.
Mother dear, I say, you are calling me. I’m coming to you. I must go the same way as you went.
My mother, to the sound of angels singing, tells me I am doing the right thing.
May God forgive you, I say, meaning my seducer, for I have forgiven you.
My countenance is already hovering over the marshes in a dissolving shot. I am as good as dead. So I can now be more generous than is really right in view of what my seducer has done to me: He has taken my honor, made me pregnant, and left me. Shame on him! I ought to be saying. Let him be accursed! But that doesn’t suit the character of the angel I am about to become.
Forgive me, Father, says the angel, for not loving my homeland as much as you do. Forgive me for giving you such pain.
And I see the light coming over the marshes. The rescuers are close! But the screenplay, supported by the heavenly choir, insists that I assume that light to be a kind of heavenly radiance.
Finally I am lying on my bier, pale with the pallor of death and my regained innocence. And now my father understands the message of his loss, the message of the entire film.
Drain these foul marshes, he says. And then, hand outstretched like a prophet:
Let the rye grow here!
And so it does. Cut. The grain is seen waving in the wind around my grave to the sound of Smetana’s music. Where there was once marshland, rye grows all the way to the horizon. The true gold of the ears of corn against the false gold of the city!
I need no projectionist now, no projector, no screen to see that film. It is inside me. I am forever in the cinema where it was shown.
I’m sitting there with my cousin Eva. It is Hitler’s living room. The projectionist switches the ceiling light on again in his cabin. For a while we still hear the hum of the machinery rolling back the film. We hardly dare look at each other. We’ve been crying. Crying our eyes out.
The few members of the domestic staff who sometimes join our film shows, which is permitted even when the master of the house is at home, have already stolen out of the room. They’ve been crying, too.
We feel ashamed, but we know crying is permissible. It is desirable. It is the right reaction. We are meant to be shattered. Spellbound. Harrowed. We are meant to see that there’s something worth giving your life for.
Oh yes, we see that. We understand that a country girl can’t visit the big city with impunity. We know that vice dwells there. We guess at the presence of dives where people dance hip to hip, to the music of saxophones. Alcohol. Bad smells. Sex in unmade beds. Dirt.
What is good, genuine, and true, on the other hand, has its natural home in the country. The dirt of cowsheds and farmyard dunghills is clean dirt. Something ancient, reliable. Something we want to preserve for the future. Something familiar, redolent of home. Even those of us who are not from the country—and Eva and I are not country girls ourselves—believe that all this is a part of our souls, the true, the better part. The farmhouse is our spiritual home.
We are young people born for the land. Our cities, the cities we shall build after the war and live in forever, will be clean. We see broad avenues. Buildings like manor houses made of great stone blocks. We will suffer no one but ourselves there. A healthy race, strong, hardworking, reliable, and honest to the point of idiocy. Only Germans can be like that. Only their roots go deep enough.
That’s what counts: knowing your roots and defending them once you know them. We want to call out and tell this to Kristina when we see her falling for the seducer. We involve ourselves in the ensuing tragedy. We experience it as if it were our own tragic story, and she is suffering it in our place, so that we are spared.
We understand that it is dangerous for blood to mingle, for the blood of those who come of the soil to mix with the blood of those who don’t know their roots. We know the seducer has no conscience. We wax indignant on seeing him make a beeline for the pure country girl. We curse him. We curse the city that produces such monsters. We go back to the country and call it our home. We would rather be dead than anywhere else. We vow to die for our land. Our eyes are wet, we have a lump in the throat. We join the singing of the choir of angels that Kristina hears from heaven as she dies.
The feeling that inspires us, our deep sensitivity, is honestly felt. Nothing is further from our minds than hypocrisy. We are genuinely moved. We long for something similar to this Veit Harlan movie for ourselves. Fate, I come!
Homeland, The Call of the Mountains, Sacrifice, Romance in a Minor Key are titles we would like to give to the operatic libretti of our lives. We consider the metaphysics of kissing a universal truth, like the magic of the announcement, “I love you.” Both come with inevitable finality, authenticated by the tragic or happy ending to which they lead.
It is something very much more elevated than kitsch, since it is the true substance of our dreams. If anyone had told us that three decades later love would be less revered, would no longer appear as the force of destiny but simply as what it is, we would have thought that person was speaking of some other planet.
We Nazis were a generation of a thoroughly melodramatic cast of mind, and only when the choir of angels failed to strike up in the last act did we realize what kind of film we were in, and realize that what we saw was not some bad tragedy but hell itself. Nor was it a film at all. It was the play in which we had acted the part of ourselves. Suddenly we found ourselves personally involved in the showdown, saw that it all boiled down to saving our bare lives, which we did, and when it was finally over we crept offstage very quietly.
We remember everything. The great crimes committed in our names. The small acts of treachery and cowardice that were our own part in it. We remember the lies we heard, the stern order instructing us to spread them, and we remember that we carried out that order. We remember gray-faced people whom we saw passing by, and we remember that we saw them in the knowledge that they were lost. We remember.
But there is something that is too shameful to be remembered, even after all the years that have now gone by. No one can expect that of us! It is easier to admit to guilt than embarrassment. The memory of a spurious emotion is horrible, shameful, humiliating. And hidden deep down, disguised and camouflaged out of all recognition, the evil of which we were capable lies in the same memory. That is where it hides.
CHAPTER 4
Eva had a key to the Tea House. She kept a little hoard of cigarettes there, and used to go and inspect it like a squirrel checking on its winter provisions. It was in a cupboard in the anteroom of the circular tea salon, which you reached by going up a few steps. Sometimes we sat there smoking while our guards stood outside the building and smoked, too.
The Tea House lay hidden in a part of the woods a little way down from the Berghof. There was a spurlike area in front of it looking out over the valley, with the rocks falling precipitously away below. The view from here had none of the Alpine grandeur that Hitler and his visitors admired so much. It was an idyllic view, hemmed in by the tall trees to left and right, a friendly picture of a friendly world, a river valley with lush meadows where grazing cows were dotted about, and bordered by the forest that began here at the foot of the Untersberg, whose massive heights cut off the horizon. Now and then, as if dabbed on the canvas by an amateur painter, you saw the rooftops of barns. This was the place where Hitler liked to take his guests, rather than the Kehlstein house. He seldom went there; he came here daily.
He was never as private anywhere else. It was here that he sometimes nodded off in an armchair with a flowered linen cover, while the conversation died down around him until all present were preserving an awkward silence as they listened to his breathing, trying not to notice when his facial expression slipped and his chin sagged.
A tyrant’s nap, even if it lasts only a few minutes, can be endless for his companions, and it was Eva who at some point would gently touch his lower arm and get him through the dangerous moment when even he was a child, helpless and vulnerable, the moment everyone must survive when waking up in company. To bridge that moment he would put his hand to his forehead and smooth his hair. He did not put it back from his brow as a man whose hair had fallen into his eyes while he was asleep would have done, but used the palm of his hand to plaster it where it would always belong, at a slant over his forehead. A hairstyle sui generis, marking the physical appearance of evil in the world for all time. A masterpiece of the spirit of the age acting as barber.
It was a gesture that, although intended to be energetically disciplined, looked curiously awkward and affected. For an unplanned, unguarded moment his lack of grace and elegance was visible, and with it all the arrogance of the lordly bearing he assumed. He was neither a bear nor a god. His paw was white, fleshy, weak. People would have laughed if it had been allowed. But laughter was not allowed even in the Tea House.
A part of Hitler’s power lay in his peculiarly distinctive appearance, which was an extraordinary phenomenon.
No picture of him comes as a surprise. No picture suggests that there is anything else there, a face behind the mask, a character looking over his own shoulder. He is always the same. No smile, no gesture, no item of clothing, no state of mind or body can add anything to his appearance. Nor can age or the signs of failing health—he does not change. Not since then has anyone of such a dominant physical appearance been seen. An appearance in which every single feature was ordinary and bore witness to the ordinary. An appearance that has outlasted its time. His physical death could not affect it. It stares at us down the decades. Hitler, always the same. A face as phenotype. If we forget everything else, even if death extinguishes all our memories and we take none of them into the underworld with us, we shall recognize him in Hell. There is no draft of oblivion for that memory. And although I never actually set eyes on him, he was as present to me then on the Obersalzberg as is the master of a household who has just gone out for a walk and is expected back for dinner.
That day we found that the cigarettes from Eva’s hoard were missing. The cupboard in the anteroom was open. Someone must have been there.
First, Eva got our guards to give her a cigarette. Then she fell into a kind of detective frenzy.
She told our guards to search the surrounding area while we ourselves set out to look for clues in the building.
In the kitchen I found the door of the fridge left ajar. I quickly closed it before Eva noticed. There was nothing in it but a few cans of milk anyway, as I knew, and I didn’t want to give Eva new grounds for her childish suspicion that someone had broken in here. None of the windows were damaged, nor was the door leading to the cellar below the house on the valley side. The cellar windows were barred anyway. I knew how happily Eva would have worked this up into a little anecdote. I knew she was already polishing up the text for Hitler’s benefit.
A break-in on the Mooslahner Kopf! Just what she needed to spice up her evening phone conversation with him. As if strange things were part of our experience. As if we, too, were a little headquarters for issuing orders and making decisions.
Perhaps there’s still someone in the house, she said.
At that moment we both heard the voice in the next room.
It was a quiet, regular voice, male and monotonous. After a short pause it began again, still speaking in the same monotone. At first it sounded as if it were saying a prayer. Then we realized that it came from a radio.
Eva recovered first and opened the door. In a room furnished as a single bedroom a radio stood on the small table by the bed-head. It was playing as if some invisible hand had switched it on, and the voice speaking to us from the radio was our enemy’s voice. The man was speaking German, but very obviously in the way educated British people speak German, almost without an accent, but their vowels are just a little too long, and the a and e sound slightly nasal.
Our enemy was saying that we were going to lose the war.
Who switched that radio on? cried Eva, and I saw the bullfighter look in her eyes again, lids wide to dart glances that this time conveyed not an assumed but a genuine wish to attack. I explained that it must already have been switched on when we entered the house, because the BBC was broadcasting its German-language program at intervals.
There was one of the breaks between transmissions until just now, I told her. That’s why we didn’t hear it sooner.
How do you know? Eva asked sternly, as if she were a teacher who had caught me out trying to cheat.
My father, I said. My father listens to the BBC.
I knew she wouldn’t give him away.
But somebody must have switched it on some time or other, she said.
That’s right, I said, somebody switched it on.
When had it struck me that there was no radio in Hitler’s Berghof? Or not for us, at least. Not while I’d been there.
Not a single People’s Wireless Set in Hitler’s own home. In every other living room in Germany, but not his. Radio silence reigned there.
I have never been anywhere so quiet since then. There was nothing but the wind blowing around the houses that stood in isolation on the mountain heights, a whistling wind, rising and falling, always in the same key, and although it is always there, always audible, it is the song of nothing, it speaks of nothing but the vacuum surrounding every building set high above a valley floor, where your neighbors are the abyss below and the air above it, nothing but air as far as the eagles fly. You get used to it. You call it silence, yet sometimes you hear that piping sound as if it were a confusion of airwaves gone into overdrive, shrill, sending messages into the ether that are never received.
But there was something else. A recurrent rumbling from the depths. Sometimes the ground under our feet seemed to quiver as if an earth tremor were announcing itself. The mountain appeared to be laboring.
What is it? I asked Eva.
No idea, she said. Just take no notice.
There was no point at all in asking Eva questions.
(Do you love him?
Of course.
Does he love you?
Yes, I think so.
Would you like to be married to him?
Why not?
Aren’t you afraid, then?
Afraid? What of?
Afraid we’ll lose the war. And afraid of what happens after that.
Let’s talk about something else, little one. You’re so serious.)
Sometimes the rumbling seemed to come from the depths right below us. It was as if the mountain itself were telling me something I ought to know.
Why weren’t we given a radio?
We got everything else we asked for: smoked goose breast; banned Duke Ellington records (because we did have a gramophone); Tyrolean hats, one for Eva and one for me; lily-of-the-valley perfume, it made no difference to us where it came from; Merano figs; as many of the Salzburg sweetmeats called Mozart balls as we wanted. But no radio.
The truth is that we didn’t ask for one.
Didn’t we want to know what was going on?
Well, we did know. We were on the spot. We were the news ourselves. Its center, the whole secret point of it. Could anyone be closer than we were? Wasn’t it here, where we were, that all the strands of world events came together, wasn’t this place their end and their beginning? Any theater of war, whether in the East or the West, was only a sideshow of a battlefield. Every command post could be regarded as expendable in an emergency except for the place where we now were.
It was the innermost citadel, the real fortress for which the Second World War was fought, the “Alpine Fortress,” the most profound and precious heart of Hitler’s Reich, and at the same time the safest place in it. Anyone waging a war of conquest starts out from somewhere, and intends to return there either victorious, with the world in his baggage, or beaten. This was that place.
It was the object of every military engagement, every exchange of firing in this war, every attack and every defense. All the men’s courage was mustered for its sake, all the blind will to achieve with which our soldiers set off for foreign lands—Africa, the Balkans, Russia, Finland, and Norway, all those places where their whole business was to kill and to die. Places where they were ordered to run uphill while marksmen posted above them had them in their sights, finger on the trigger. All that remained of life was crammed into that moment. It was not for that hill they were fighting, however, it was for the mountain from which their commander had set out to conquer the world and to which he meant to return in the end. That was what they were dying for. This place was the center, the place where I was now, and everything else was peripheral. Outworks in front of it, worth defending because this place was being defended.