“What are you about here, man?” he demanded with his fists still on his hips.
“Why, I’m on my holiday, sir,” Thistlethwaite told him. “It’s a lovely country you’ve got here, excellent for ballooning, flat for the most part, but some of your natives are not very respectful, one of them shot a hole through my balloon. I don’t call that a neighborly thing to do, when our rulers are all cousins, don’t you know-our Dear Queen is the grandmother of your present Emperor.”
“That’s all very well, but you’ve landed your contraption in my farmyard, and without permission.”
“Why, it was just to bring your lad home,” said Thistlethwaite with a broad smile, thus defending himself while inculpating Georg as the ultimate Bad Boy, flying off into the sky when he was supposed to be attending to his duties on the farm. Georg thought it best to climb out of the gondola at this point, sending it straining upward so that two more boys had to come forward to seize it, knotting the muscles in their arms and showing their teeth.
“Well, I’d have to valve more gas to stay, so it’s auf Wiedersehen,” said Thistlethwaite, putting his cap back on. “Let go then, lads! loslassen!” he cried in his imperfect German, and pried the eight unclean hands from the rim of the gondola. Lighter now by the weight of a boy, or two sand-bags, the balloon sprang into the air and rose rapidly away, dwindling until it was only the size of a red-and-white rubber ball that boys might play with, soaring away into the wide heavens with its fortunate and privileged pilot; and Georg’s spirits soared, soared, soared with it, never again to return to earth, to the old prosaic earth that his heart left behind it at that moment.
Thenceforth all his thoughts were on balloons, and this at an age when most boys are thinking of girls. Thistlethwaite with his cap and his tufts of hair was permanently engraved in his mind as the epitome of the hero, of the Übermensch. In his notebook he drew balloons instead of dirty pictures, and in his math class he calculated the lift of a balloon twenty-seven feet in diameter which was six-sevenths full of hydrogen, a gas which has a specific gravity of 0.09, so that a cubic foot of it at sea level will lift a weight of 0.072 pounds. He read books about Montgolfier, the Communard couriers who escaped from Paris in balloons in the siege of 1870, and the ill-fated Andrée expedition which set out in a balloon for the North Pole in 1897 and was never seen again. He studied the history of early dirigible balloons, including those of Henry Gifford whose pointed cigar was run by a steam-engine, Renard and Krebs whose elongated gas-bag was propelled by an electric motor powered with batteries, and Santos-Dumont who won a prize by piloting an airship of his own design from Saint-Cloud around the Eiffel Tower in 1901, just a year after Georg’s encounter with Thistlethwaite.
As the war clouds gathered over Europe (“I always thought that funny-looking Englander in his balloon was a spy,” said Georg’s father, forgetting that the English Queen, now dead, was his Emperor’s grandmother) the German Army and Navy competed in their research with airships. The old Count Zeppelin set up a factory at Friedrichshaven on Lake Constance to build dirigible airships, which were soon called after his name. At eighteen Georg went off to the Naval School in Kiel, and three years later, graduating as a sub-lieutenant, he was posted to Friedrichshaven for training in Zeppelins.
Thank God for the War! Or Georg’s life would have been meaningless. He rose rapidly in this service for which he was inclined by temperament and talent and which seemed a miraculous culmination of all his secret reveries. By 1910 he was second in command of the experimental LZ-1, and at the outbreak of the War he was a full lieutenant in command of his own airship, the L-12. She had two Maybach engines, a pair of machine guns, and an open control car in which the crew wore arctic clothing against the freezing cold. She carried four thousand pounds of bombs, which hung by their tails from a girder running along the keel. There were no accommodations at all for her crew of twelve and no provision for sleep; when the mechanics came off duty in the engine gondolas they took up their posts at the machine guns.
In this ship, which seemed to him so magnificent that he could hardly believe it had been confided into his hands, he took part in raids on Paris and Verdun, and in 1915 joined the squadron which bombed London for the first time. George had never been in England—the land of Thistlethwaite, which lent it a slightly fabulous or mythic quality—but he soon knew the southeast part of it by heart: the rounded coast of East Anglia, the inlets at Ipswich and Colchester which on dark nights were easy to confuse the one for the other, the mouth of the Thames at Southend, and the sinuous twists of the Thames itself, each one of which he identified from the air until they came at last to Woolwich, to the Tower, and to the city with its vulnerable docks. The great metropolis was blacked out and lay motionless and scarcely breathing, attempting to conceal itself in darkness. They could turn out their lights, Georg thought, but they could never conceal their river, which pierced their land like a silver dagger pointed at the heart of London.
Georg dropped his bombs and watched abrupt pink blossoms spring out below him on the India Docks, in Hyde Park, and in Piccadilly. The anti-aircraft fire was heavy, not very accurate at first, but the British gunners improved. Some Zeppelins were lost in this dangerous work; the rumor spread among the crews that your chances of being killed were forty percent on any given raid. Georg’s L-12 was holed several times by non-incendiary shells which failed to ignite the gas in the bags, and while landing at Cuxhaven in a gale in early 1916 the ship was blown sideways against the hanger and destroyed. Georg was assigned another Zeppelin and went on with the same crew, minus two men who were killed in the accident. A little later a mechanic fell out of a gondola into the North Sea while trying to tighten a loose strut, and over London at night his executive officer had his head pierced by a stray bullet from a British fighter. Those people probably believed in Fate. I’m the enemy of Fate, he told himself. I’m not a Greek, I’m a Prussian. I make things happen. I’m invulnerable and immortal. This hubris sustained him, and he survived the War.
There was one unfortunate incident that left him and his crew unscathed but afflicted Georg with a nagging nightmare that stayed with him for the rest of his life. A night raid over London in April of 1916; a squadron of six Zeppelins approached the capital from the east. Von Plautus was nominally the commander, although such raids were loosely organized and each captain was free to take action on his own as the circumstances justified. Two ships were lost before the squadron reached the target: L-24 was shot down by anti-aircraft fire off Harwich and fell into the sea, and L-9 exploded over the mouth of the Thames in a fireball that turned the clouds pink. The four remaining ships made their way up the river at eight thousand feet. The targets were Charing Cross Station, Waterloo Station, and the Hungerford Bridge with its cluster of railroad lines connecting London with the southern counties. The wind was from the east so that the Zeppelins swept along at seventeen knots faster than their cruising speed of forty knots, making the landmarks of the blacked-out city spin by under them at a dizzying pace.
The four Zeppelins were flying in loose formation, L-22 and L-23 ahead, and L-8 and Von Plautus in L-14 behind them and a little higher. As they crossed Tower Hill Georg saw a weaving cone of searchlights ahead. The roses of anti-aircraft fire were already flashing in the air. Those fools Schieffer and Winckelmann were headed right into it. Impatiently he broke formation and ordered up elevator, left rudder, and flank speed on the engines. The ship rose up like a seal springing from the waves, her girders groaning from the strain. The two Zeppelins ahead sank out of sight, and he saw through a gap in the clouds the barrel-shaped glass roof of Waterloo. It was coming up fast. The bombardier was bent over his rapidly tilting sight. Georg: heard him shouting over the speaking tube to the gunner’s mate in the keel.
“Ein, los! Zwei, los! Drei, los! Vier, los!”
The four sticks of bombs were gone, at intervals of a second which would spread them over a range of a hundred yards. Georg sprang to the window on his left and looked
down to see their effect. At that exact moment there was a heavy thump from underneath like a thunderclap, then another and a third. The aluminum floor under his feet leaped up as though hit with a hammer, and the air sprang red, illuminating the river ahead, Lambeth Bridge, and Lambeth Palace in a flash of blood-colored sunlight. L-23 had been to his left and a little lower when he broke formation; he had moved to a point exactly over it when he dropped his bombs.
A chill sprang out on his skin. Nobody spoke in the control car. The Captain of L-23 was Bobo Winckelmann, a classmate of Georg’s in Naval School, a pudgy cheerful fellow who was fond of women, wine, and Viennese waltzes. There were eighteen other men in his crew, including the son of the Commander of the Air Wing of the German Navy. There were no survivors. Waterloo Station was slightly damaged by the bombs that missed the Zeppelin. The L-23 was listed as lost to enemy action. Only three Zeppelins returned to Germany of the six that had left Cuxhaven at sunset. Nobody in the L-14 crew ever mentioned this incident to anyone for the rest of their lives.
Georg made several more raids over London, like an automaton that goes on running because someone has forgotten to turn off its switch. But the Zeppelin war over England died away to a trickle as the British perfected their defenses. In July of 1918 Georg’s L-14 burned in its hangar when the Zeppelin base at Tondern was bombed by Sopwith Camels, and in August Fregattenkapitän Peter Strasser himself, the Navy Chief of Airships, perished when the L-70 in which he was flying as an observer was shot down by RAF fighters over Great Yarmouth. After that the heart was gone out of the thing, and four months later the War was over.
Georg received an Iron Cross for his unblemished heroism in combat. His mother died of the flu, and his father broke his hip and had to limp around the estate at Friedland with a cane, held up on one side by his steward. These disasters Georg irrationally attributed to the War, and in a shadowy part of his mind to his stupid blunder that had killed his comrades.
In the spring of 1919, not knowing what else to do with himself, he married. The thing was arranged by his Prussian relatives (his father was too cross and feeble to have much to do with it), and the bride was Mitzi Falkenburg, the heiress of a prosperous estate in Pomerania, which would be useful to Georg since his father had not made very much money raising miniature Icelandic horses at Friedland. For the time, they took a house in Berlin. Mitzi had expensive tastes and the household ran precariously even with the income from her large dowry. It would be at least thirty years, Georg calculated, before his Pomeranian father-in-law died; he was in perfect health and an athletic horseman.
Georg sought about for various expedients to make a living, partly to contribute to the household economy and partly to maintain his self-respect. He asked for advice from a Navy friend who was said to be knowledgeable about such matters, and this friend persuaded him to invest a large sum of his wife’s money in a scheme to use monkeys captured in Africa to perform simple tasks in factories. The monkeys were actually apes called bonobos, somewhat smaller relatives of chimpanzees, and one of mankind’s closest relatives in the primate world, interesting to zoologists because they are the only known animals except for humans to copulate face to face. Hundreds of bonobos were brought from the Congo to a warehouse on the outskirts of Hamburg, and former zoo employees were hired to train them to turn handles, tighten bolts with a wrench, and walk in treadmills, with a view to setting them to work later on factory lines in the American manner. Georg himself, with nothing on his hands to do, went to work in the Hamburg warehouse as a manager.
The scheme was a terrible failure. Georg lost everything he put into it. He came to hate monkeys with a force usually reserved for nationalistic and ethnic prejudices. Their mocking, clownish, irresponsible ways. Their malicious agility. Their brains which seemed so supple and extraordinary and in the end were adapted mainly to outwitting the wills of people who wished them to do things other than as they pleased. A monkey, he discovered, never does anything but what it wants to do. A monkey could spin a wheel, but delighted in spinning it the wrong way. Or the right way for a few turns, then the wrong way for a few turns, and so on. Monkeys could pull ropes, but only at the wrong time, and the wrong rope. Monkeys could work treadmills, but put six of them in a turning wheel at once (they were so small that one of them alone could not work it) and you saw an army of midgets gone berserk and falling into piles on each other at the bottom of the wheel; and for some reason monkeys loved to fornicate at the bottom of treadmills. Monkeys could peel fruit with great skill for their own account, but woe betide anyone who tried to make them work in a canning factory. It was expected that the monkeys would reproduce themselves and thus produce a constant supply of new workers, but monkeys proved to be agile at coitus interruptus, premature ejaculation, and other contraceptive techniques.
Georg wrote off his loss and pondered over a scheme of his own invention. It came from the improbable connection between Iceland, where his father bought the breeding stock for the miniature horses he raised on the estate, and aluminum, which had aroused Georg’s interest because of its use in dirigibles. Aluminum was a magic substance to him, light, silvery, shining, incorruptible, as strong as steel if alloyed a little with other metals. Aluminum is silver made from clay. Its ore, bauxite, is one of the commonest substances on the face of the earth, but its refining requires tremendous amounts of electric power. Iceland had electricity in abundance, from waterfalls and boiling water springing from the earth, but nothing much to do with it. Georg formed a company to bring bauxite to Iceland in ships and to build factories to refine it. The scheme was economically sound, but came to nothing when the Icelandic government, which had previously given its permission for the factories, discovered that for every shipload of ore which came to the island country ninety-nine and a half percent was left behind in the form of slag. In vain did Georg protest that this waste material could be spread out over shallow bays and would become valuable farmland, all the more so because Iceland was a mountainous country and short on flat surfaces. He found that the Icelanders were proud of their mountains and disliked flat surfaces, and also that their scientists (he had no idea that there were such things as Icelandic scientists) had determined that the fumes given off in aluminum refining were bad for the health. A healthy, proud, plain-hating race, the Icelanders. In short, he lost half of his wife’s dowry on this venture and the other half trying to train monkeys to work in factories.
About this time his father broke another leg and died of septicemia, and the estate in Friedland was sold up to pay the creditors. Georg’s ancestral home was gone; he had nowhere else to live now but in the arms of Mitzi. This was an uneasy place of repose, because Mitzi had never loved him any more than he had loved her, and besides she was annoyed at him now for losing all her money. As a husband and a Prussian, he disciplined himself in a steely way to perform the conjugal duties that God and society expected of him. For years he strove to please Mitzi with all his might and main, like one of the Teutonic knights who were his ancestors setting out with raised spear against dragons. But the spear drooped. At one point he tried a clever Swiss device which had to be inserted into his shaft of manhood by surgery; it hurt when they put it in, it hurt when they took it out, and it hurt during the two weeks that he used the thing, or tried to make it work. He encouraged Mitzi to have lovers, throwing young lieutenants and so forth at her. This didn’t work because she didn’t seem to care much for men of any sort, perhaps because of her experience with him, and it only made him feel guilty. Now in addition to his other failures he was an unsuccessful cuckold.
He held dialogues with himself. I am the way God made me, the one Georg told the other.
No you aren’t, you coward. You are what you make of yourself. Leave God out of it.
Each man is born with a nature, said the first. He must be true to it.
No, said the other, he has a race, and it is to that that he must be true. Deutschland über alles!
The Prussians are a much maligned race,
Georg thought. They just try to do their duty to God and the Fatherland, and everyone thinks they are stiff and inhuman. Well, by God, they are, thought Georg. The Tahitians lolling under their coconut trees are not stiff and inhuman. They know how to enjoy life. Maybe I should have been born a Tahitian, said Georg. But I was not. I was born a Prussian. He knew now without a doubt that he was two persons. He was Von Plautus, and he was also Georg, a Bad Boy. Von Plautus strove in conjugal labor to be a proper husband, and perhaps a father, and the Bad Boy drew pictures in his notebook. This was getting him nowhere and he decided that maybe it was time to try being a Bad Boy, a Tahitian.
He left Mitzi and took lodgings in Träumerei Strasse, in a rather disreputable part of Berlin behind the zoo. There he spent his days sleeping and reading erotic magazines, and his nights in the cabarets around the Alexanderplatz: loud smoky rooms filled with Negro jazz musicians, wealthy American degenerates, Polish women who claimed to be countesses, breastless flappers in tiny cloches and short skirts, Brazilian heirs with tickler mustaches, German boys with rumps swelling in tight white pants, and melancholy former officers like himself. His favorite of these places was the Pinakothek in Fleischmarkt Strasse, which was the most expensive but had Manet and Renoir reproductions on the walls, and operetta music instead of savage tribal clangor. The air was thick with smoke, the waiters had whitened faces and wore lipstick, and the cadaverous girl who sang Lehar songs smoked cigars at the bar when she was not performing.
It was there that Georg encountered Albertino, a well-known figure in the quarter, lean and suave, clean-shaven, with a skullcap of glistening black hair and a fluent German accented with something Mediterranean, or perhaps it was Romanian. He wore evening clothes even in the daytime; Georg had once seen him in his tuxedo at noon Unter den Linden, parading his cigarette holder and gazing disdainfully into the shops. At that point he knew him only by sight, but one night at the Pinakothek in the early hours of the morning (the doors of the place were locked at midnight) Albertino slid into a chair across from him as though they had been friends for years.
The Carp Castle Page 6
