Herr Blobel thought for a moment, his face turning darker as memory stirred. “You are right!” he said, fiercely brandishing a stomach pump at her. “I remember it all now, and especially that fool of a photographer! And then the minute I got the mess cleaned up they took the choker anyhow! They weren’t going to bury that! No, sir! Not even a family as rich as the Grossfelds! All show and vanity! When we buried my father, God rest his soul, he wore his gold regimental ring, cuff links and studs, and the Glasshutter Uhrenfabrik gold watch and chain which my grandparents gave him on his wedding day. Six feet underground, God give him peace, he still wears them and always will. Those are the values I was taught to live by, not this business of snatching pearl chokers just before the casket is closed.”
With this, he rushed out to resume work on his gravestones. Two minutes later the almost rhythmic sound of Herr Blobel’s hammer and chisel began to ring out through the quiet afternoon air, adding to the sound of Frau Blobel’s heavy breathing as she struggled with the lining of Count Firsky’s casket, of Gunther and me as we polished the casket, and the first inevitable buzz of blowflies attracted by the odor of Count Firsky’s blood, and gathering en masse to pay it the most sacred homage of all, which is consumption.
A few moments later, Herr Brinkerhoff came by to examine the casket’s seal, which he pronounced in perfect condition. “Myself,” he said, nodding wisely to Herr Blobel, “I’d guarantee it for a century.”
While Frau Blobel, her mouth full of safety pins, worked on the unitary all-purpose uniform which had been selected for the count, Herr Blobel pumped and thumped at what remained of the old man’s body to make certain it contained as few surprise eructations as possible. I decided I had seen the main show and told Gunther I was going home.
“Wait a few minutes,” he whispered, gesturing toward his father, “or you’ll miss the best part of all.”
Who could have resisted such an opportunity? I remained transfixed as Herr Blobel took a two-inch needle, threaded it with stout white silk, and went to work on the count’s remarkably long foreskin, sewing it together drawstring fashion as tightly as a bag of gold dust. He then selected from a jar filled with some sort of preservative a piece of corklike material the size of a Ping-Pong ball. With a single jab of his needle he impaled it, drew the thread through it, squintingly estimated the distance between ball and foreskin and then, his sights clear, passed the needle through the ball at least two dozen times, secured it with a complicated knot, nipped the thread with his front teeth, dipped the ball in a white cream, and then, with infinite care, began to slip it into Firsky’s somewhat shriveled anus, twisting it slowly until it sank into the position he desired.
The less one saw of the ball the less one also saw of the penis until finally neither was visible, which was precisely the effect Herr Blobel desired. Closure of other orifices was a much simpler process, after which hair-curling, shaving, dyeing, skin-taping, painting, rouging, wax-moulding, wrinkle-restoration, cheek-puffing, new eyelashes, and moustache-shaping completed the task of preparing him for eternal rest. By the time Herr Blobel had finished, Count Firsky even looked comfortable.
When it became known that the count had outlived three generations of Firskys, with the melancholy exception of the feeble-minded nephew; that the only surviving member of his regiment was ninety-six and confined to a home for the worthy indigent near Erlangen; that he had no close living in-laws; that his reclusive life had resulted in only two or three persons, aside from his valet, his gardener, and his doctor, who could even be called acquaintances; and that, contrary to popular belief, his estate was sound, of respectable proportions, and in excellent condition thanks to his lifelong hobby of accumulating debts, aging them for a decade or so, and then redeeming them at handsome discounts, all talk about the personal sacrifice of time and energy involved in trying to balance out the dead man’s obligations and assets became transformed overnight into a community-wide eagerness to assist in every possible way with the sad task of winding up the deceased’s affairs and assuring him a decent burial. In the end, however, the aggressive persistence of Herr Blobel, fortified by dark sacerdotal murmurs from Monsignor Schenkel of St. Boniface, routed the Samaritans and gave the monsignor and the undertaker control not only of the count’s corpse but of his estate as well.
On the day of the funeral the sun rose so angrily that all four horizons quivered against the assault. The air grew acrid with prophecies and the earth turned unnaturally silent, as if that small funeral procession had consequences that one day would have to be reckoned with. Although it seemed impossible to believe that anything—anything at all—had been lost to the world with one old man’s death, still and all the living were one less and the dead were one more, and no matter how insignificant the gain or loss, there had been change.
The local commandant of the Royal Grenadiers turned out an honor guard of fifty men plus six beplumed officers as honorary pallbearers. My father provided the drummer—his finest—to lead the cortege, feeling that the beat of a single drum would add much more solemnity to the occasion than the only band he could muster from Forchheim’s limited supply of competent musicians.
In order to lend the event a sense of genuine community participation, the children of the Blessed Servants of Saint Veronica paid the penalty for their elders’ lack of Christ-like charity. On one of the hottest days in local history the children of Forchheim were stuffed into their Saint Veronica uniforms, each handed a bouquet of withered and sometimes dehydrated field flowers, and compelled to follow the hearse, chanting hymns or prayers at Father Grimalden’s (he was head man of the Blessed Servants) command. Behind the children straggled a disappointing handful of townspeople, the men fiery-faced from the heat and dripping sweat; the women wearing veils, which from time to time they surreptitiously used as fans.
Half a dozen dogs, amorously unbalanced by the wandering presence of a bitch in heat, brought up the rear of a procession dedicated to death with a carnival of lust, which ultimately could not fail to add more to the world’s reservoir of life than was being withdrawn from it to the solemn heat of a drum, the slow clatter of horses’ hooves, the rumble of hearse wheels over cobblestones, the shuffle of feet, and the occasional frantic warning of a Blessed Servant of Saint Veronica that it had to go to the toilet right now, couldn’t wait another minute, and was as good as on its way already.
As we reached the open grave, Monsignor Schenkel, who had led the procession waving his censer as a baton to preserve the rhythm of his prayers and incantations, halted and faced the grave and the hearse which was backed up to its other end.
Gunther and I, who had marched immediately behind Monsignor Schenkel in the procession, now assumed positions at his left, it being our function to display the count’s rather pitiable honors and decorations on small, gilt-fringed, black velvet pillows. Gunther’s pillow displayed the Guard’s Badge of the House of Wittelsbach; mine, his Meritorious Conduct Medal Second Class, which he was said to have earned by not running away from the Prussians during the Battle of Sadowa.
As the hearse doors creaked open to expose the splendor within, a mare of the hearse detail spread her legs and urinated resoundingly, while the Grenadier pallbearers, scrambling with as much dignity as possible to avoid the flood, slid the coffin onto its carrier, rolled it out of the hearse, and suspended it above the open grave with canvas straps.
It was at this precise moment that Gunther and I heard a sound which caused him to whisper in my ear, “What do they mean, ‘sealed for fifty years’? I could have soldered this one together.” I nodded, but there was nothing I could think of to say.
I began to write these notes, or whatever they may be called, in the hope that memory, such official records and documents as remained, and those portions of my diary that had not been lost or destroyed, if published now or in some future time, or, for that matter, ever, would add in some small way to the truth of my life, of my time, and of the world as I experienced it. Not selective
truth, which is false by its very nature, but all of the truth, even that which is most loathsome.
Before sending the first two hundred pages off for the publisher’s approval I went through them with great care to check for conscious (as apart from accidental) violations of the standard I had set for myself. I found and corrected three small but self-serving errors and one forthright lie of which I was shamefully conscious even when I wrote it.
It was not Gunther alone who slipped Frija and her kittens into Count Firsky’s coffin: It was Gunther and I together.—L.G.
What we had heard, dimly to be sure, but nonetheless plainly, was a muffled wail of despair, a cry for mercy so anguished, so inconsolable, so desolate that I hear it still. Somewhere inside that casket, searching with sensitive paws for some small opening in her prison walls, sniffing at every seam in the casket’s structure, burrowing frantically through Count Firsky’s sixteen-percent-pure eiderdown pillows for a hole to crawl through or a puff of air to breathe, was Frija, lost and suffocating in the darkness.
♦ 6 ♦
Not all her tears can save Inge from becoming my toy, my bride, my slave
Whether it is a mercy or a curse I do not know, but youth by its very nature is callous, and the memory of youth is short. My shooting of the squirrel, the cruel yet somehow bewitching murder of my lovely doe with her seal-brown ears, my night visions of Frija trapped with her kittens deep under the earth in eternal search of an escape she will never find—the immediacy of these horrors passed quickly, although their mystery remains with me to this day.
I think there is a reason for this—a reason without which we would all go mad. I think that when the evils we have committed become too painful to remember we begin, stealthily and quite unconsciously, to eliminate them from the category of acts remembered, and find for them a place in the quite different category of acts we merely know about. Caesar died and Christ was born and Charlemagne was anointed Emperor of the West at Aix-la-Chapelle, but we do not remember them at all, we only know about them. Their reality we do not doubt, just as we do not doubt the reality of what we remember, but by shifting them from things remembered to things known we have put sufficient distance between them and ourselves to make life tolerable and civilization possible.
I doubt that this process is found only among the young. I remember the second and third epidemics of “war criminal” trials (Germans prosecuting Germans for the “crime” of obeying wartime orders to execute a few thousand Jews!), which began in Hamburg in 1961; and I could tell by the surprise or astonishment or perplexity on the faces of the “defendants”—most of whom were known to me and several of whom were friends—that already it was becoming truly difficult for them to remember, in the sense that I use the word remember, the acts or crimes which they were charged with having perpetrated a quarter of a century earlier.
Already the healing process of shifting their “crimes” from events remembered to events simply known about was on its way to completion, having enabled them to build new lives, develop new careers, sire new families—in short, to become useful, valued, and sometimes distinguished members of the new German Reich, which war and the Allied surrender to Stalin had left behind as an infection in the heart of Europe.
These, however, are afterthoughts which belong elsewhere in this chronicle if I live long enough to deal with them in their proper order. In the meanwhile, the process of growing up in Forchheim continued as slowly as it always seems in the eyes of youth. Suns rose and set, weeks multiplied and then divided into months and months sedately turned to years. I became thirteen. Although I had no way of knowing it, the season for taking my pleasure of Inge lay at hand.
During the summers, at least three or four of the Kulig girls slept on the rear porch of their house to take advantage of the night’s coolness, not to mention escaping from overcrowded bedrooms where in wintertime they must have lain three and four to each featherbed. I too slept on the porch of my father’s house, our porch no more than fifteen paces from theirs, both porches canvased for protection against summer storms and for privacy as well.
The Kulig residence, like most of the better houses in Forchheim, contained an indoor water closet. One may imagine that in a family consisting of two adults and so many young and flighty girls, those demands of nature which recognize no rules of time or precedence sometimes outran the capacity of that one small utilitarian chamber to relieve them, particularly if two or three feminine necessities should coincide. This, of course, is merely an informed guess deduced from the fact that occasionally at night little Inge—who was eleven when I discovered her secret—found it sometimes convenient to steal from her porch into the garden and there, squatting primly, lift her nightgown and bedew the midnight grass with diamonds.
It is not remarkable that I, a healthy, lynx-eared boy, throbbing to the promise of this thirteenth year, lying on a cot no more than five meters distant from that porchful of sleeping Kulig girls, should ultimately hear the dainty hiss of Inge’s salute and draw back my canvas to learn its source. Once discovered, I became a lad obsessed. Night after night I crouched on my cot in the starlight, crouched through the rising and waning of moons, crouched through the flash of summer storms and blazing showers of equinoctial meteors, utterly incapable of sleep or even sanity until Inge, in the remarkably various hours of her need, made use of her father’s garden and returned to her bed.
In the beginning I observed those tender rites with no more than a voyeur’s earnest curiosity. With the passage of time, however, curiosity changed to desire, and desire to inflamed resolution. Although as I have mentioned I was then but thirteen, already in my heart’s mirror loomed the image of a bravo who strode through his dreams as the stuprator of all Franconia.
Hence, on a night never to be forgotten, in a moment of breathless purity and aching desire, precisely when the nightgown arose and the small haunch swung low to the summer lawn, Inge discovered a pilgrim at her shrine.
She started up at my first word, but before she could turn to flee, even before she could raise an alarm, my hand struck her wrist and held it fast while I pled my cause in desperate sibilants. There is an urgency about whispered speech in moments of stress which not only savors of conspiracy but invites—nay, almost compels—response in kind. Instead of rejecting my advance in tones that would alert her sisters on the porch, Inge compromised herself at the very outset by whispering back to me. In that instant she unwittingly became the partner of my conspiracy rather than its object.
I begged her to carry through the action I had interrupted. She refused. I persisted. She turned chill and haughty. I redoubled my pleas. She began to search her mind for answers more persuasive than simple negatives: It was not nice, she had not been going to do it anyhow, someone might see, her sisters would miss her, the dog might bark. Almost imperceptibly she had passed from flat assertions of her right to refuse into areas that verged upon my right to demand, thereby raising the issue to the level of debate in which each point for rejection implied the logical existence and even the possibility of a better one for acquiescence. Instead of discussing her right to dispose of her person as she wished, we now wrangled over my right to do with it as I desired. The mere thought of victory excited me almost to the point of suffocation. My temples throbbed, my throat tightened, my vision blurred. I threw logic to the winds. I gave myself over completely to hope and lust and awful humiliations. I gasped, I panted, I whimpered, I sobbed. I fawned, I groveled in the earth at her feet like a penitent pup. I begged. And then, in the midst of these wild entreaties, she yielded, Solemnly and almost reverently, she yielded.
I sank on my haunches to observe at close quarters a ritual that would change the whole course of my life. Shyly the nightgown drifted upward, sweetly the buttocks descended to enfold her young girl’s form in the gracious posture of nature’s most innocent act. Then, her face intent and grave, her eyes instinct with somber expectation, Inge sent forth her bright greetings to the night.
As the moment passed, but before she rose, I begged her to let me touch her skin. Just once, only once and no more, just once and then never again. Never. She whispered a sharp “No!” dropped her gown, and soared to her feet like a candle. But I was not to be denied. It seemed monstrous and altogether incredible that having surrendered one small part she could now withhold the rest. Stumping behind her on my knees like Quasimodo, wildly clutching the hem of her nightgown, I followed, whispered, prayed, and hung fast.
She paused, perhaps to save her gown from tearing, perhaps out of pity for me, perhaps from her own secret desire to reveal herself and be touched. For a long moment she stood perfectly still, as if thinking. I held my breath in respect. Slowly she turned her questioning face to mine. Her eyes explored me from naked feet and grass-stained knees to yearning upturned face. She turned away again, although not so far that she couldn’t watch me from the corners of her eyes. Her arms sank to her sides. Her hands fluttered for a moment like butterflies against her flanks. Then, shyly and ever so delicately, her fingers plucked the folds of her gown to draw it upward. It rose like a ballet curtain, slowly, so slowly, ankles to slim calves to the swell of her thighs to the slender stem of her waist, stem of a lily in bud to the diaphragm’s first curve, rising at last to proud shoulders encaped in billowing white.
I can see them still, those soft twin ovals gleaming like melons in the frost of moonlight, the left one made lovelier still by three delicate, wine-colored birthmarks. My palms caressed both halves gently, reverently, impartially, one stroke for each, or two, I can’t remember, my fainting heart allowed no count. And then, with the most exquisite grace, everything blurred, withdrew, receded from my touch, dissolved. The curtain fell in snowy cascade to her feet. She fled across the grass and disappeared.
Night of the Aurochs Page 6
