by Stephen Fry
“It will be a state funeral then?”
She rocked her head from side to side to indicate a yes and a no. “Officially it is a state funeral. Naturally. But these days . . .” She raised her arms apologetically.
“No, no, that’s fine,” Axel assured her. “I prefer something private. Truly.”
“So,” said Frau Mendel, stopping in front of a large, pedimented door, painted in eau-de-nil. “The Freiherr’s quarters.”
She knocked briskly three times with the sharp end of her middle knuckles and entered without waiting for a reply.
Axel’s father was slumped down in a wheelchair, his head on his chest, fast asleep.
Axel felt he never would have recognized him; never in a thousand years. He had evolved from the brisk, white-coated father of memory into a generic Old Man. He had Old Man’s yellow skin, Old Man’s bony legs, Old Man’s wet mouth, Old Man’s breath and Old Man’s wisps of hair, all of which pervaded the room with Old Man’s odor. Somehow even the sunlight that streamed through the windows had been transformed into Old Man’s sun, the kind of bright, prickly warmth only felt in retirement homes.
Frau Mendel’s hand was on his shoulder. “Freiherr, Freiherr! Your son has arrived. Here is Axel.”
The Old Man’s skull slowly rose and Axel looked into his father’s watery eyes. Yes, perhaps there was something there that he might have recognized. The pupils were surrounded by a corona of yellow fatty tissue that narrowed the width of iris, but there was a soul looking out through those clouded rings of cobalt blue that Axel recognized as belonging to his father.
“Hello Papa!” he said, and was amazed to feel in his own eyes the springing up of tears.
“Milk.”
“Milk?”
“Milk!”
“Milk? You want milk?” Axel turned in some confusion to Frau Mendel.
“He is just waking up. Usually when he wakes up after his afternoon sleep he has a glass of warm milk.”
“Papa, it is Axel. Axel, your son.”
Axel watched the clouds in the eyes begin to clear.
“Axel. You are here.” The voice was husked and fogged, but Axel knew it and was transported by it at once to his childhood home in Münster. A great feeling of love overwhelmed him, overwhelmed him with its own force and overwhelmed him perhaps more greatly with surprise at its existence.
A cold hand came up to pat his own. “Thank you for coming,” his father said. “It was kind.”
“Nonsense, not kind. A pleasure. A pleasure.”
“No, no. It was kind. I would like you to wheel me outside. To the garden.”
Frau Mendel nodded her approval and held the door open while Axel maneuvered the chair into the corridor.
“Just follow it along to the end and then turn left through the door and down the ramp into the garden. If you need anything there is a button on the arm of the wheelchair.”
Axel tried to open a conversation about the beauty of the landscape and the lake, but was cut off.
“That way, Axel. Take me that way. Past the cedar of Lebanon, towards the lake, there is a path no one takes.”
Axel wheeled his father across the lawn and past the tree as he was bid. He nodded to attendants and loyal family members who were doing much the same as himself all around. One old man was sitting on a bench in pajamas talking to himself; on his pajama jacket, Axel saw with amusement, were pinned more than a dozen medals.
“Here, here! It is private here,” his father said, leaning forward to urge the wheelchair on.
Axel pushed him, as directed, along the pathway towards an opening in a variegated box hedge. They went through into a small, horseshoe-shaped flower garden.
“Pull my chair round so that we can face the entrance,” said his father. “There, you sit on the bench. Now we will know if anyone comes.”
“The sun isn’t too hot? Perhaps I should fetch a hat.”
“Never mind the sun. I am a dying man. I am sure they told you that. What does a dying man want with a hat?”
Axel nodded. It seemed a fair point.
“When I die, you will inherit my title, you know this?”
“I haven’t given it much thought, Papa.”
“Liar! I bet you have thought about little else for years. Well, I want to tell you what the title stands for.”
“It is a mark of distinction for services rendered to the Reich.”
“Yes, yes. But that is not what I mean. You have no idea why the Führer gave me the honor, have you?”
“No, Papa.”
“No one has, or if they did know they are dead and the secret has died with them. But if I am to bequeath an honor to you, it is only right, is it not, that I pass on the story of how it was won? There is no land with the title, only this story. So I want you to sit still and listen. Have you learned how to sit still?”
“I believe so, Papa.”
“Good. You may give me a cigarette?”
“I only smoke a pipe, Papa, and that is with my luggage at the hotel.”
“Oh? I had been looking forward to a cigarette.”
“Perhaps I can find you one?”
“No, no. Sit down, it’s of no great matter. At my age the pleasure lies in the contemplation not the act. But you will find a bottle of schnapps in the table at the back of my chair.”
“In the pocket, you mean?”
“Yes, yes. Pocket, that is what I said.”
No matter, thought Axel. Tasche and Tisch were not so unalike as words. If that was the extent of the senility he was to look forward to himself, then perhaps age wasn’t so much to be feared.
He found the bottle, unscrewed the lid and passed it to his father, who took a large swig and passed it back, his eyes running. “Sit still and listen. Don’t talk, just listen. The story I am about to tell you is known to very few people in the world. It is a great secret. A great secret. You understand?”
Axel nodded.
“It all begins in the small town of Brunau-am-Inn, Austria, exactly one hundred years ago. You have heard of Brunau?”
Axel shook his head.
“Ha! Exactly. No one has. I have no doubt it is as undistinguished a dorf today as it was then, no different in fact from any other dusty little town in that part of the Habsburg Empire. Brunau was a dull provincial place then and I am sure it is the same now. Nothing ever happened there. Life went on, birth, marriages, death, birth, marriages, death. History passed it by.
“But one hundred years ago a young physician in this small town, he made a discovery, an extraordinary discovery that was to change the world. He had no idea of this, of course, this physician. His name, by the way, was Horst Schenck. He was not an eminent man of science you must understand, he was merely starting out in life as a family doctor in a small town, full of ideals and hopes no doubt, in keeping with the age, but academically he was most undistinguished, I assure you. A second-class brain at best. Like many of his type and generation, he kept a full and faithful diary of his medical round, which for the most part makes very dull reading indeed. So, we have a dull young doctor in a dull town in a dull part of the world. But the discovery he made, this was not dull, not dull at all.
“One day in 1889 a young woman comes to see him, blushing in confusion and distress. Her name is, let me think . . . good God, there was a time when I knew Schenck’s diary for those years by heart, absolutely by heart . . . Hitler! That was it, Klara Hitler, née Plotsl or some such name. This Frau Hitler comes to see Herr Doctor Schenck because she and her husband have been unable to conceive. At first the doctor thinks there is nothing unusual in this. Her husband, Alois, some kind of petty official with the customs office, is fifty-four years old, nearly twice this Klara’s age. She has been delivered of three babies already, but none has survived infancy. Alois has fathered plenty of chi
ldren from other liaisons, but maybe now he has simply reached the end of his fruitful life, you understand? Or maybe the three unsuccessful births the wife has undergone, maybe they have mangled up her insides. Maybe also, Schenck notes in his diary, there is truth to the rumor that this pair are in fact uncle and niece—such are the ways of these provincial backwaters—and we all know the dangers attendant upon the union of such close blood relatives. Frau Hitler is desperate to have a child, however, and begs for the doctor’s help. He examines her, finds nothing wrong, aside from evidence of beatings—again common enough in those places in those times—so he suggests that she keep trying, notes the circumstances in his diary and thinks no more about it.
“The good doctor was surprised, however, when two days later another young woman, a Frau Leona Hartmann came to him reporting a very similar set of circumstances. She was the mother of two healthy young girls and for a year she and her husband had tried to produce another child without success. Now, it so happens that the Hartmanns lived in the same street as the Hitlers. Schenck noted this coincidence in his diary, but attached no especial significance to it. But by the end of the following week two more women, a Frau Maria Steinitz and a Frau Claudia Mann had also been to see him, also complaining that they were unable to conceive. They too lived in the same street.
“A coincidence, it must all have been a coincidence, Schenck decided, for the very next day he attended a birth in that selfsame street and the mother was safely delivered of a healthy boy, no complications, no problems. Indeed in the next-door house but one, the wife of the family was joyfully, robustly pregnant too. We must not forget that Austria was a Roman Catholic country then, and these were the days before the phrase ‘family planning’ had ever been heard. Just one of those strange coincidences, then, that doctors often find in their daily round. No significance, no importance. Just bad luck on those barren women.
“It was only as he was leaving the house that Schenck looked across at the houses opposite and it struck him that all the women who had been to see him lived on the other side of the street.
“Schenck had naturally examined these women in so far as he was able and was not able to find anything that, superficially at least, could explain such a strangely localized outbreak of infertility.
“It soon turned out, however, that there was no need to examine the women further. After a day’s thought, Schenck persuaded one of the husbands, Otto Steinitz, who was a cousin of his, to provide him with a sample of his semen. The sample he was given he examined under a microscope. He found it to be entirely free of spermatozoa. He persuaded other men on the same side of the street, the west side, to offer him samples. Some refused indignantly, but of those who donated, all were found to have entirely sterile seminal fluid. He tested the men on the east side of the street and found that their sperm count was entirely normal. What do you think of that?”
Axel, faintly disgusted by the hand-rubbing glee and chuckling relish with which his father was telling the story, shrugged. “The soil, I suppose. Possibly the water supply. Some spermicidal agent—”
“Exactly! A child could see that. Even our hero, the dull doctor Schenck, was smart enough to realize that the answer must lie in either of those directions. The most obvious explanation, the correct explanation as it turned out, was to be found with the water supply. Schenck discovered that there was a mains pipe that divided at the head of the street, feeding an east cistern and a west cistern. Water was manually forced up by the householders from pumps in the back garden of each house.
“Schenck immediately took numerous samples of the water from both sides, tested it on pigs and then, in great alarm, alerted the health officers in Innsbruck. There is an especially amusing diary entry written in highly flustered nineteenth-century euphemism, in which Schenck describes the business of persuading male pigs to yield up their semen for examination. The poor man was not a vet, after all, eh? More schnapps, please.”
Axel passed over the bottle, marveling at the vulgarity of the older generation. The Founding Generation, they called themselves. They had no time for the mealy-mouthed primness of the young. “A true Nazi’s language wears no fine silk,” as Gloder used to say. Except in the company of women, naturally . . . when respect and propriety are all.
“So,” said the old man, licking schnapps from his lips, “there you have it. The householders on the western side of the street from that day onwards obtained their water from their healthy neighbors on the east side. A few years later the households were switched to a direct mains supply and the problem was never heard of again, not a single new outbreak of male sterility was ever recorded. Schenck records in his diary, however, that not one of the infected men ever regained his fertility. Each one of them remained sterile until the day he died.
“The authorities in Innsbruck reported the matter to Vienna. The leading Viennese scientists—epidemiologists, pathologists, histologists, chemists, biologists, geologists, mineralogists, botanists, they all analyzed samples of the water but no one could discover what was wrong with it or what substance it might contain that had done this damage. Minute quantities of the water were tested on animals and it was found to have the same permanent sterilizing effect on all male mammals.”
“That’s simply astounding!” said Axel, his scientific interest now fully awakened.
“Astounding indeed. Astounding and utterly unprecedented. Nowhere in the world has such a case ever been reported before or since.”
“I never heard about it or read about it. Surely . . .”
“Of course you didn’t. This was Imperial Austro-Hungary, and in the interests of averting panic and prurient interest, the matter was never publicized. Schenck was not allowed to write a paper on the epidemic, a restriction that annoyed him intensely, frustrating his dreams of medical glory and world fame. He moans endlessly about this in his diary.
“So, a medical mystery. Not by any means the strangest in the history of science, but unusual and intriguing all the same. Nothing more was heard of this strange contamination of the water in Brunau for many years. The Great War came and went, followed by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Finally, in 1937, more than fifty years after Klara Hitler paid him that first tearful visit, Horst Schenck dies. He had managed to preserve three fifty-liter carboys of Brunau Water, all that remained of his original sample. These he leaves, together with his diary, to his old medical school in Innsbruck, Austria. That very year, I should remind you, Austria has become part of the Greater German Reich.
“The newly formed Reichsministerium of Science instantly impounds the diary and the samples of Brunau Water and throws down a massive blanket of secrecy. The scientists fall on these flagons of strange water like lions on antelopes. They analyze it, they test it, they bombard it with radiation, they swirl it round in centrifuges, they vibrate it in vibrators, they condense it in condensers, evaporate it in evaporators, mix it, boil it, dry it, freeze it, they do everything they can to unlock its tantalizing secret.
“The Führer, you see, he understands the importance of this Brunau Water to the security of the Reich. The glamorous men at the Göttingen Institute are dreaming up a bomb for him, but perhaps that won’t work. A little insurance is important to him. If Bolshevism cannot be eradicated one way, maybe it can be eradicated another. That is how the thinking went.
“Well, as we all know, Göttingen in the end produced the goods for him, the bomb was born, good-bye Moscow, see you later, Leningrad. The freedom of the Reich was secured and Europe set free. So much is public history.
“But meanwhile two very brilliant men at Münster continue to work on this damned Brunau Water. They are, of course, your godfather Johannes Kremer and myself, your noble parent. We had been given access to all the previous research, everything from Schenck’s original diary to all the latest analyses of this frustrating fluid. You’ll find the diary in the back table of my chair. The back pocket,
the back pocket of the chair. Take it out.”
Axel took out the diary, an old leather book, stained and frayed at its edges and held together with a brass clasp.
“That is the volume that covers the years 1886 to 1901. Very tedious reading it is too, most of it. But there, it’s yours. No one knows I’ve held on to it all these years. Keep it now. Keep it.”
“I’ll keep it,” Axel assured him. He noticed a note of hysteria creeping into his father’s voice which he did not like.
“It was I, not Kremer, who unlocked the secret of Brunau Water. We worked together, he was the senior partner of course, but it was I who succeeded in isolating and synthesizing the active spermicidal compound. What we would now understand as a freak genetic mutation—that science was then in its infancy of course—had somehow taken place naturally in such organic matter as existed in the cistern. The effect on the male body took place at such a deep level within the human gene that it was no surprise previous generations of doctors had been unable to comprehend its working. I was incapable of grasping the full meaning myself until much, much later. But I was able to synthesize the agent, that is the point. It was brilliant work, brilliant! Years ahead of its time.”
Axel stared at his father, at the bright light shining from his watering eyes and the twisting hands in his lap; the knuckle bones writhed under the skin and every yellowed ball and socket of their joints showed through.
“The Führer was delighted. Ecstatic! I had met him before of course. He had personally come to open the Institute of Advanced Medical Studies at Münster University and made one of his great speeches about science and nature. But that was just a handshake in a long lineup. This time . . . oh, this time! We were provided with a car, the long black DW 2s, you remember them? We were driven to Berlin, to the Reichs Chancellery itself, and there we spent four hours alone with just the Führer, Reichsminister Himmler and Reichsminister Heydrich. Just the three of them and Kremer and me. Imagine! Afterwards, dinner with dancing and music. An incredible day! Perhaps you remember me going? I brought back presents and a signed photograph of the Führer.”
