by Stephen Fry
Axel did remember.
To Axel Bauer—
Grow up to be as fine a man as your father! Rudolf Gloder
He still had it somewhere. In a trunk in Cambridge he supposed.
Axel remembered too standing on the back of a sofa, his face pressed against the glass window of the morning room, waiting for his father to return. He remembered the great black car swinging into their street, a flag on each front wing. Other children across the street stopped and stared, he remembered, dropped their footballs or stood up in their bicycles to watch. He remembered the chauffeur stepping smartly out to open the door for Papa. He remembered the smiles, the hugs, the happiness pervading the whole household for weeks later, until they moved from Münster forever.
“The Führer had a great enterprise for us to undertake, Axi. He wanted Kremer and me to synthesize this water of Brunau on a large scale. He wanted us to set up a small manufacturing plant, somewhere discreet. We chose a little out of the way town in Poland called Auschwitz. The Brunau Water was to be produced in the greatest secrecy of course and with superhuman care. Each flask to be numbered, sealed in wax and accounted for. They were to be used in a great task, the greatest task then facing us, now that Russia had been defeated and absorbed into the Reich, and Europe was stable and free of Bolshevism. The water of Brunau was to be used, in the Führer’s words, ‘to cleanse the Reich, as Hercules had cleansed the Augean stables. All the filth of Europe will be washed away.’ For my part in this historic achievement a barony was bestowed upon me in 1949. That is what you are inheriting, Axel. That is the title you will shortly own. Freiherr Bauer, the destroyer of a whole race of men. God forgive me, son. God forgive us all. Christ Jesus have mercy upon me.”
Ten minutes later, Axel pressed the red button on the wheelchair’s right arm and walked calmly through the gap in the hedge. He saw a figure in white running towards him across the lawn.
“Is there a problem, sir?”
“My father . . . I can find no pulse. I think he is dead.”
OFFICIAL HISTORY
Talking in his sleep
“Bauer died in a Berlin retirement home, July 1989,” said Brown. “Kremer, the senior partner in their little manufacturing enterprise, he had curled up his toes fifteen years earlier, no one is quite sure where. Now you may be wanting to know how we found all this out. ‘Jeez, you guys have sure as heckfire got some smart agents working for you,’ is what you’re thinking. Sorry, but that just ain’t so. We know all this on account of Professor Bauer’s son, Axel, who has become our friend. Weren’t for him, we wouldn’t know Jack Poop.”
I dunked the last of the chocolate chip cookies into cold coffee. My father was looking down at his hands, which were folded neatly on the table in front of him. Hubbard’s eyes were closed. No one was watching me, but still I maintained a face that I hoped was innocent of any traces of the thundering torment inside.
“And that pretty much brings us to the end of the tale,” said Brown, turning to the window and looking through the thick velvet curtains at the brightening sky. “Axel decided to stop by outside the American consular gates in Venice, Italy, two years ago and ring the doorbell. He was in town as a member of a European Physics Convention, representing Cam . . . representing the institution he was working for at the time, it needn’t concern us where that was . . . and he asked to be allowed to come over to us. So happens that he worked in a field that was of great interest to the scientific community here, so he’d have been worth his weight in gold to us whatever his background. But see, the reason he wanted to defect was guilt. Couldn’t take the discovery that he was the son of the man who wiped the Jews from the face of Europe. So after we’d smuggled him safely out of Italy and gotten him on United States soil, he spilled us the whole story between great gulps of grief and howls of anti-Reich rage. Showed us the original Austrian doctor’s diary and all the documentation his father had managed to keep. Enough to convince us that it was all true, the whole nasty tale, from Chestnut Soup to Pumpkin Pie.”
My father straightened his back and looked up at the ceiling. “But why wasn’t this story announced? Why wasn’t the world immediately informed? I should imagine the propaganda value alone would be—”
“Would be what, Colonel? It’s history. It’s over. What’s done is done. May sound harsh, but that’s a fact. Everyone responsible, so far as we know, is dead. Europe has changed. Our relationship with Europe has changed. What would happen if we told the world? All the Jews in America and Canada would be up in arms, for sure. Every liberal and intellectual would leap on the moral bandwagon and cry vengeance. Then what? Armageddon? Either that or a mighty embarrassing climb down. Who wins either way? It’s history. It’s all just history. Might as well make a stink about the Black Hole of Calcutta or the Salem Witch Trials.”
My father nodded his head briefly. He tried to take it well but I saw his shoulders sag a little and a tired look come into his eyes. Too much pride there, I supposed, to allow him to express any outrage at the nuts and bolts of Realpolitik, only a worn-out, “very well then, it’s your world, I’ll leave it to you and your generation” kind of resignation.
“So,” said Brown. “We return to the cute part of this little story. Me, I’ve read the diary of the Austrian doctor, Horst Schenck. But Mr. Hubbard here, he hasn’t read it, have you, Tom?”
Hubbard shook his head.
“My agency director has read it. Axel Bauer, now working for us with a new name and a heart full of vengeance against all things European, he brought it to us, so you can be sure as shooting that he’s read it. We allowed the president of the United States to take a peep at a neatly typed digest . . . hell, it was only polite. The vice-president, well now, he’s never had so much as a smell of the consarned thing. Same goes for the secretary of state. Far as I know, only twelve people in this whole country have ever even heard of Horst Schenck’s diary. So what we need you to tell us, Mikey, is how come, in conversation with your friend Mr. Steve Burns yesterday afternoon, how come you attached such importance to that selfsame one-horse township of Brunau-am-Inn where the whole story begins and how come you mentioned the names Pölzl and Hitler, the very names of the first couple to visit Dr. Schenck all the way back in 1889? And Auschwitz where Bauer and Kremer ended up in 1942. How come you know about that? I think we have a right to know. You see what I’m saying?”
All eyes were on me now.
What harm could they do me? The worst crime I had committed in their eyes was that I had happened upon sensitive information. They didn’t really believe I was some engineered clone of the real Michael Young, planted in Princeton to spy on the United States government. They couldn’t believe that. It was unthinkable. They could never guess, not in a million, million years the real truth, which was more unthinkable yet. That most awful truth that only now was rearing up, dragon-shaped from the swamp of emotions within me. That most awful truth that it was I, Michael Young, who had contaminated the waters of Brunau. That it was I, Michael Young, who was the genocide. They would find it easier to believe that I was an android from another galaxy or a shaman endowed with paranormal powers to whom the diary of Horst Schenck had appeared in a dream. Anything would be easier for them to believe than the truth.
It was not what I could tell Hubbard or Brown that consumed me, however. What consumed me was what they had already told me. What they had told me about Leo, about Axel, or whatever name he might now be using.
What we had done—and done, I now saw, more out of a desire to relieve Leo of his miserable inheritance of guilt than out of any altruism or high humanitarian purpose—what we had done had not loosened the tentacles of history that had been gripping him so remorselessly back in that earlier world. No, those tentacles were now clutched about his throat more tightly than ever: they had strangled the life out of a whole people, out of the whole world.
And me? It was one hell of a
Big Wednesday for Keanu Young, PhDude. The history surfer, hanging nine on the point break of yesterday. Tubing it through the big rollers of tide and time. Why had I agreed to help Leo in the first place? Cockiness? A desire to feel big? No, it was simpler than that, I decided. Stupidity. It was just plain stupidity. Or perhaps, at a pinch, stupidity’s sweet baby brother, innocence. Maybe even cowardice. The world I lived in was too scary for me, so why not make another?
“We’re waiting, Mikey.” Hubbard was tapping a pencil gently on the table.
I took a deep breath.
It was a gamble, but I had kind of gotten used to the ways of history by now. I was beginning to be able to read her.
Somehow I knew it just had to be.
“Well, you know,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about this and I guess I must have met him.”
Brown’s friendly eyes rested on me. “Met who, cowboy?”
“This guy you were talking about. Not met him exactly. Seen him.”
My father slapped the table impatiently with the palm of his hand. “Which ‘guy,’ Michael? Talk sense.”
“This Axel Baum or whatever his name was.”
“Bauer? Axel Bauer? You think you’ve met Axel Bauer?” Hubbard could not hide the excitement in his voice.
“Well, it might not have been him,” I said, considering carefully. “But it’s the only explanation I can think of.”
“When did you meet him?”
“Where?”
The two questions simultaneously from Hubbard and Brown. I swallowed silently. This was where the gamble lost or won. I chose Hubbard’s as the easiest eyes to meet.
“When? I’m not sure. It was a couple of weeks ago. On a train, New Jersey Transit. I took a trip one time up to New York City. There was this guy in the seat across from me. I mean it might not have been him. I mean, your guy, for all I know he’s on the West Coast . . .”
Loathsome as the gesture might be, I came within a touch of executing the exultant Macaulay Culkin Yes! complete with triumphal fist pump. Because I could see, I could clearly see, from the expression, from the lack of expression, in Hubbard’s eyes, that I had hit it right on the nose. Leo had been relocated here. In Princeton.
I might well have seen him on a New Jersey Transit Company train. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.
“You’re saying you talked to Axel Bauer on a train from Princeton to New York City?”
“No, not at all. We never exchanged a word as far as I can remember. He was asleep the whole journey. It’s just that . . . well, he spoke.”
Brown’s eyebrows shot up.
“And I know it sounds crazy,” I said, “but I was fascinated. I’d never heard anyone talk in their sleep before. I mean really talk. There was just him and me, no one else close by, so I started to write it down, you know? I thought it was cool.”
“Cool? I don’t understand.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, that’s a kind of new slang thing. I thought it was neat. I thought maybe I could use it. Being a philosophy major and all? So I wrote some of the words down.”
I could sense Hubbard wanting to look at Brown and Brown willing him not to turn round or show any sign of weakness or hesitancy.
“Anyhow, when I was back in school that night, in my dorm, I started playing around with some of the words I had written down. There was lots of them. Martyr was one, or maybe it was a woman’s name, Marthe. Münster, he said, you know, like the cheese. Nazi. Hitler. But I’m pretty sure it was Adolf, not what you said. Alois? I remember Adolf, but of course, it was hard to tell, I mean the guy was asleep, right? We were in a moving train. Then there was Perltsl. That’s what it sounded like. Brunau-am-Inn, he kept saying that. ‘What happened in Brunau-am-Inn, Upper Austria?’ Guess that’s why I always had it down as a place name. Time after time he said that. Another word, sounded like Schicklgruber to me, but obviously that doesn’t mean anything to you, so maybe I had that down wrong. And he said that other name you mentioned. Kremer? Only he said it in full. Johannes Paul Kremer, pretty sure that was it. And Auschwitz. Another one too, Dachau, it sounded like, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything to you either. So I started to write these names down and try and construct a story out of them. I mean, it was obvious the guy was German. And he was old. Only some of the names he mentioned were English. I mean real English English. Cambridge University. St. Matthew’s College. Hawthorn Tree Court. Porter’s Lodge. King’s Parade. Stuff like that. Didn’t mean diddley to me, but I tried to make up a history for him, like about how maybe he was a refugee from the old Nazi days? And this really got to me, for days I was going around thinking real hard about this old guy. Something in his eyes, there was something spooky in his eyes. Really bugged me. I thought maybe I could write a short story about him, a movie even. You know how you get these crazy notions in your head. I decided he was a German Nazi who had gone to live in England, but that he had some guilty secret. I started to do some research about where he might go and what he might do. You know, looked up Cambridge, England, in the library, stuff like that. Then, last night, I got wasted with some of the guys. I bang my head on a wall and my mind goes all weird. I’m going around the place next morning half in and half out of this imagined world. I forget the most basic things, the Gettysburg Address, I mean, jeez, can you beat that? But at the same time I remember all this weird stuff clearly, like it was more real than the real world, and my accent goes all blooey.”
I shook my head with the wonder of it all, as if I were still waking up.
My father leaned forward and gripped my arm. “For God’s sake, Michael. How many times must I tell you to speak properly? Why is it always ‘stuff’ and ‘weird’ and ‘neat’ and ‘guys’? You’re a Princeton man, can’t you utter a single coherent sentence in decent English?”
“My kid’s the same,” said Hubbard. “And he’s at Harvard.”
“He’s at Harvard and he can speak?” I said with incredulity. “You must be very proud, sir.”
The tension was easing a little, I could sense that.
Leo had taken flight from St. Matthew’s Cambridge to Venice. From Venice to Washington. Now he was here, in Princeton. I was as sure of that as I was of anything.
There was, surely, every possibility that he had been on a train to New York City in the last month? My memory loss could cover any gaps. Hubbard and Brown would have a hard time proving I was an out-and-out liar. They might suspect me, but what kind of a danger to anyone or anything did I pose?
“What took you to New York, Mikey?” Hubbard asked.
I shrugged. “Hey, what else? The Yankees.”
“You a Yankees fan?”
“You should see his bedroom,” my father said. “His sheets are black-and-white striped.”
“Yeah? Me, I’m a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
“Somebody’s gotta be,” I said.
Brown spoke for the first time. “This man on the train. You say his eyes got to you.”
“Really bugged me.”
“Seems strange,” said Brown, “that the eyes of a sleeping man should have such an effect.”
“He woke up when we got to New York,” I said, my mind frantically racing to remember something Steve had mentioned earlier. Not Grand Central, it wasn’t Grand Central Station. What the pants was it called? Ha! Got it. “When we stopped at Penn Station, he stood up and I saw his eyes. And you know, on top of this, like, monologue he’d been coming out with—”
“He wasn’t wearing glasses, then?” Brown sounded surprised.
“Nope,” I said with conviction. “Though come to think . . .” I screwed my eyes up as if trying to picture the scene. “Come to think, there was a pair of glasses in the breast pocket of his coat. Yeah, I’m pretty sure of that.”
“And what color were these remarkable eyes?”
“Brighte
st blue you ever saw. Kind of younger than his complexion if you know what I mean. A real piercing cobalt blue.”
“And was his beard white or gray?”
Beard! Double pants . . .
This was a problem. He had a beard at Cambridge when I knew him, but that was another life. Then he was Leo Zuckermann, living out the identity his father had left him with. That was a Jewish identity and Leo had played it to the hilt. But would he have a beard now? Very few of the older people I had seen in Princeton had beards. He would want to blend in, surely, as much as possible. On the other hand, if he was clean-shaven in Germany, maybe he had grown a beard as part of his new identity in the United States. It was a tough one.
“Simple question, my friend,” said Brown. “Was the beard white or gray?”
“Well it’s a simple enough question, okay,” I said, frowning in some perplexity. “But see, I’m trying to work out whether you’re laying traps because you think I’m lying, or whether this man we’re talking about really did have a beard when you knew him and it’s just a misunderstanding. Because the guy I’m talking about, he was clean-shaven. His hair was kind of silvery gray, salt and pepper I guess you’d call it. Receding up to about here.”
“And if we showed you photographs of a few people, you’d be able to pick him out.”
“Every time,” I said, all my assurance back again. “This was not a face I’d ever forget.”
Brown sat down at the table for the first time. “Well, son,” he said. “I must confess that when I asked you to tell me how you knew about Brunau, I could not begin to imagine what you were going to say. Professor Simon Taylor, as you might have guessed, he told us about you. Said there was something maybe a little fishy going on, might be worth our attention. We took the liberty of dropping by and following you about the town yesterday afternoon. When I heard you talking about the Hitlers and Brunau-am-Inn and all, just plain out in the open air like that, I gotta tell you I darn near jumped clean out of my slacks. Seemed to me just incredible that a young college student could come up with those names and still be on the level and according to Hoyle. But I guess your explanation is the only one that makes sense. You listened to an old man talking in his sleep. Maybe I should have worked it out for myself. Like Sherlock Holmes used to say, when you have eliminated the impossible then what you got left, no matter how unlikely, well, it just plain must be the truth.”
