by Lavie Tidhar
– Oblivion? What are you doing? the Old Man screams.
But Oblivion is still looking only at Fogg.
– Go, he says, and his voice is both brittle and hard. Go. You’ll only get the one chance.
He turns to the glass. Touches it, gently, and it disintegrates, it disappears. Cold conditioned air from the inside rushes at their faces. He pushes Fogg through. Go! he yells. Fogg stumbles in. Surprises the nurse. Everything is moving sluggishly, as if he’s swimming. Get away from me! the nurse says. Give me that! Fogg says, making a grab for the syringe, but the nurse waves it in front of her like a weapon and Fogg pulls back, wary. The nurse waves the needle wildly, panic on her face. Then, without a word, she drops it on the floor and turns and runs off, disappearing through the side door, which slams behind her.
Fogg picks up the syringe. He stares at it in his hand.
– What are you doing? The Old Man is wild, his voice rising. What is he doing? Stop him, Oblivion!
But Oblivion reaches the Old Man instead. Holds him, but gently. Fogg goes to Klara. Kneels by her side. Strokes her cheek. Her eyes flutter open. Henry … she says.
– We have to get away, Fogg says. Whispers. Klara’s lips form the beginning of a smile. Can you do it? Fogg says.
Klara sighs. It is a struggle to keep her eyes open. There will be no coming back … she says. Fogg smiles back at her, tenderly. I know, he says.
Klara’s eyes close. A haze of light, faint at first but growing stronger, seems to emanate from her, the bright sunlight of a summer’s day.
– Stop them! the Old Man says. He pushes Oblivion, catching him by surprise, and pulls free. Fogg turns back, still crouching. The Old Man runs at him, Fogg raises his arms, stands to intercept the Old Man: until they collide violently.
– Fogg? What did you do? Oblivion says.
The Old Man sags in Fogg’s arms. Fogg lowers him gently to the ground. The Old Man is breathing heavily. Fogg turns, kneeling beside him. And Oblivion can see it, now.
Can see the syringe sticking out of the Old Man’s chest like a knife.
– Fogg!
But Fogg doesn’t hear him. He kneels by the Old Man, his face twisted in pain. The Old Man’s breathing is ragged, laboured. He looks into Fogg’s eyes.
– Old Man, I … Fogg says, and his voice breaks.
– Henry, the Old Man says. He raises his hand, touches Fogg, briefly, on the cheek. He tries to smile.
– I just wanted to be free, he says.
His hand drops to his side. He closes his eyes. A moment later, his breathing ceases. Fogg looks down, blinks. Looks up at Oblivion, his face full of grief. Oblivion nods wordlessly. Walks to him, offers Fogg his hand.
– I didn’t know, Fogg says.
– He ran out of things to believe in a long time ago, Oblivion says. Everyone needs to believe in something, Henry. As implausible as that something is. Oblivion’s eyes are blue and clear. You have Klara, he says. And I … He tries to smile. I suppose I have you.
He pulls Fogg up. Their hands part. Fogg nods, wordlessly.
Then: Klara! Fogg says. He turns.
The light suffuses her now. It brings with it a hint of the scent of fresh grass, of flowers in bloom. The sunlight grows until it forces them to shield their eyes and look away.
The sunlight emanates out from Klara, a blinding glare. Then it fades and, when Fogg looks back at the chair, it is empty: Klara is gone.
– Henry, Oblivion says.
Fogg looks at him.
– Don’t go.
The words catch in his throat. Fogg walks up to him. He puts his arms around Oblivion. He hugs him. He is shorter than Oblivion, his cheek is pressed to Oblivion’s chest. He can feel the beating of Oblivion’s heart, the way he did all those years before, at the Gare du Nord, when they were leaving Paris. He releases Oblivion. Can’t bear the look in Oblivion’s face. He turns away. It always ends by us turning away. We know. We, too, have been hurt before.
Fogg whispers, I have to.
Oblivion says, I know. So quietly, we’re never sure, later, if we heard it.
Fogg says, Goodbye, Oblivion. He doesn’t look back. He walks to the interrogation room’s door and pulls it open, and a flood of summer sunlight pours into the underground room. The room is grey and white, glass and concrete. But within the frame of the open door we see the suggestion of colour, of blue skies and green grass and white clouds and yellow sun.
Somewhere beyond music plays, faintly, and a girl laughs in childish delight.
The sunlight pours into the underground room.
Fogg walks towards the light.
A NOTE ON HISTORICAL PEOPLE AND EVENTS
While this is a work of fiction, care has been taken to present the historical events and personages within these pages as accurately as possible. Operation Paperclip was an American operation to locate and bring German rocket scientists back to the United States. Dr Wernher von Braun, the developer of the V2 rockets, in particular, became a senior member of the American space programme and eventually developed the Saturn rockets used to launch the Apollo missions into space.
Josef Mengele’s horrific medical experiments in Auschwitz have been well documented elsewhere – one of the most wanted Nazis in the post-war period, he was never captured, and is believed to have died, peacefully, in Argentina, of old age.
Kurt Lischka was the head of the Paris Gestapo in 1944. He was responsible for the largest single mass deportation of Jews in Occupied France. After the war he was sentenced to ten years in prison. He died, a free man, in 1989. Like Mengele, Carl Clauberg worked in the Auschwitz death camp, where he horrifically experimented on human subjects – over a thousand Jewish women, many of whom died or suffered permanent physical damage. After the war he was put on trial in the Soviet Union, sentenced to twenty-five years, but released after seven and returned to West Germany. Boasting of his ‘scientific achievements’, he was soon rearrested, but died of a heart attack in his cell before the trial could begin.
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s devout friend and filmmaker, was never charged with any crimes. She died at the ripe old age of 101.
Arnold Deutsch, who spots Fogg in Cambridge for the Bureau, was in real life a Soviet spy of some renown. A Jew, he was an early recruit of the NKVD, the Russian secret service that preceded the KGB. While at Trinity College, Deutsch acted as a recruiter for the NKVD, identifying and ‘turning’ several promising candidates. These were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. A fifth member has never been officially identified. They were known as the Cambridge Five. Burgess and Maclean escaped to Moscow in 1951, followed by Philby (by then a senior member of MI6) in 1961. Blunt remained in the UK; he was later secretly pardoned.
Deutsch was recalled to Moscow in 1937, where he survived Stalin’s purges, then in full effect. He disappeared in the 1940s: some say he died when parachuting into Austria, others that the ship he was on was sunk by a U-boat. His true fate remains unknown.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place in 1943, defying the Nazi forces for almost five months. Thirteen thousand Jews died in the uprising. The remaining 50,000 were sent to the death camps, the majority to Treblinka.
Paris fell to the Nazis in June 1940. Minsk fell in 1941, during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. German forces had reached Leningrad (now St Petersburg) by September 1941, beginning a harrowing siege of the city. It lasted almost two and a half years, one of the longest and most devastating sieges in history. Hungary – and with it Translyvania – fell in 1944, leading to the mass transportation of the Jews of Hungary to the death camps in the year just before the end of the war. Some 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the camps.
The Vomacht abduction and trial are loosely modelled on the abduction by Mossad agents, and subsequent trial, of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi and one of the architects of the Final Solution. He was executed by hanging and his ashes scattered beyond Israel’s territorial
waters, in the Mediterranean Sea, so that there would be ‘no future memorial and that no country would serve as his final resting place.’
Stanley Martin Lieber is better known by his pen name Stan Lee. The son of Jewish emigrants from Romania to the United States, he became one of the most influential creators of comic book heroes.
Joseph ‘Joe’ Shuster was the son of Jewish emigrants from the Netherlands to Canada. Jerry Siegel was the son of Jewish emigrants from Lithuania to the United States. Together they created the comic book character ‘Superman’ in 1932.
The Potsdam Conference took place in 1945 (not 1946), with Stalin, Churchill and Truman all in attendance.
The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 and came down, famously, in 1990, almost three decades later. Over two hundred people died trying to cross the wall, the last of whom, in 1989, did indeed attempt to use a home-made balloon to cross.
By 1967 the American war in Vietnam was in full swing. Less well known is the so-called Secret War that American forces carried out in Laos. The CIA and its civilian airline, Air America, had established a major military base in Laos, carrying out mass-scale bombings over Laos and Cambodia. Some 260 million cluster bombs were dropped over Laos alone, of which 75 million remain unexploded, leading to some 300 deaths and injuries a year to this day. Rumours of the CIA using opium shipments to fund their operations have never been fully confirmed nor comprehensively negated.
Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The war against the Soviets drew a large number of Mujahedeen, many from the Arab world. One of their leaders was the young scion of a wealthy Saudi family. By 1984, Osama bin Laden had established an entire network of fighters, arms supplies and financial support, some of which was provided by the CIA.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No novel exists in a vacuum. My thanks first and foremost to Kate Myres, who first set me on the road to Oblivion: this book would not exist without you.
To Nicola Sinclair, friend and muse, for always pushing me when I need a push.
To my parents, for always being there, and for providing the space where I wrote the first version of what would at last become The Violent Century.
To Richard Kunzmann for friendship and help when it was most needed.
To Marcus Rauchfuss for graciously correcting my German, and to Ekaterina Sedia for help with the Sverhlyudi. Any mistakes are entirely my own.
Both Bella Pagan and Shimon Adaf read an earlier draft of the manuscript and offered much useful criticism. To them my thanks.
To Shimon, too, for inspiration, and to Nir Yaniv, for much patient listening.
To my agent and friend, John Berlyne, for sticking by me.
And to Elizabeth, always.
Also by Lavie Tidhar
Osama
Martian Sands
THE BOOKMAN HISTORIES
The Bookman
Camera Obscura
The Great Game
Also by Lavie Tidhar
Osama
Martian Sands
THE BOOKMAN HISTORIES
The Bookman
Camera Obscura
The Great Game
