The amplitude of her arms, although in perfect proportion to the trunk, prevented them from swinging straight and free as they had in springtime years. Their movement now was short, choppy, vaguely semaphoric. She was, in fine, both caricature and idealization of the classic German Hausfrau, serene and strong and solid, as content with her position as the mere fact of her existence contented others.
Thus she departed from me, rolling gently as a full-sailed brigantine through placid seas—departed without even knowing she had approached. The warmth of her scent still lingered above my beer as she thrust aside a dangling fringe of sausages and slaughtered hares and vanished into the cool shadows of a butcher’s stall.
Inquiry established that little Inge, in prosperous union with her second cousin (a wholesaler of cabbages and other produce), had matched each of those charming birthmarks with a sturdy child. I like to think, and have no reason for believing myself wrong, that by now she recalls with pleasure those happy mysteries into which she was at least symbolically initiated by the music master’s son so many years ago in Forchheim, when the world was young and the word “hope” could be uttered without a curse to qualify it.
♦ 9 ♦
With the Wandervoegel in the last golden summer of my youth
Anno Domini 1913: the last year of the twentieth century in which absolutely nothing happened: the Jews in the Reichstag screwed up their nerves to the point of passing the first vote in history against an Imperial Chancellor; some spies were found operating in the Krupp works; there was trouble, but very little, about the Zabern affair in Alsace-Lorraine; the First Balkan War ended, and the Second began and ended also, but they were small wars between petty peoples whose fates concerned no one; Germany led the world in steel production—fourteen million tons to America’s ten to England’s six—but that did not make me nor those I knew any happier than had the figures been reversed; the Belgians introduced universal military service; the Reichstag passed an act that doubled the amount of gold reserves for the military; the King of Greece was murdered in Salonika (how could I then have known the blood relationship with Salonika that I should develop before I died?); Princess Victoria Luise of Prussia married Prince Ernst August of Cumberland, Pretender to the throne of Hanover, and the Tsar was there and so was the King of England and, of course, the Kaiser, still grieving, they said, in his loneliness for Prince Eulenburg; Ernst August ascended to the throne of Brunswick, ending the regency of Johann Albrecht; crazy Otto was deposed in favor of Ludwig III, who was rumored to be only half-crazy at the very worst. Anno Domini 1913. That and nothing more.
What an innocent year it was! Crisp ortolans and wild strawberries in clotted cream (or so I’m told), amongst which dolls and puppets and princes and kings of kingdoms half the size of postage stamps moved with such grace, such elegance, such splendor, and even such beauty (who could fail to drop a tear for Elizabeth of Austria?) that from the beginning of their lives to their very ends they were actually considered to possess a significance far larger than the tiny sum of the earth’s atmosphere their living carcasses actually displaced.
I am reminded of it because the other day one of those nameless, joyless, old-stocking-odored creatures who call themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses (Beata and I staffed our house at Auschwitz with them) knocked at my cottage door and harangued me for half an hour because the world was coming to so terrible an end so quickly that I’d scarcely have time to repent before the all-encompassing flames reduced me to ash and unforgiven sins. Without mention of my experience with human ash, I tried in vain to explain to her that the world ended in 1919 and that, unbeknown to her, we have been living the resurrection ever since, whether in heaven or hell or purgatory being entirely beside the point. She hadn’t the faintest notion what I was talking about.
The truth is that although she was by no means young, neither was she old enough to have the remotest idea of what the world was like before it died. Only I, it seems, dream hack to that magical summer of 1913 in what was destined to be the gentle climax of half a century of peace—the last of those mysteriously golden summers before the dream exploded like a festering corpse in the broiling suns of mid-July, and the most believing of all generations in the long history of Europe toasted each other with beakers of blood and pus and then, like surprised children, sank back in their millions to fill a continent with graves that ended the dream for all time.
When the dreamer dies, the dream dies with him and it dies forever. What it leaves behind is also forever. Don’t look for change, don’t look for anything better, look only at your own mirror image in every other human face and recognize the dreamless animal for which there is no comfort and from which there can be no escape. What began with man as god has ended with animal as man, and there’s no way to change it now.
But O my God and all His Blessed Beings, how beautiful it was then—low fields, broad rivers, winding trails, deep woods, far-gleaming peaks, the earth, the sky, the yellowing sun, the moonlight, and all the young boys no longer boys but men. Gunther and I, having put Inge far behind us, were now fifteen. The mortician’s son, by some miracle of growth and attenuation, had turned slim as an arrow and almost two inches taller than I, who was plainly destined to grow square and strong but never tall.
For two summers now (1913 being, of course, the last) Gunther and I had tramped the summer countryside as Wandervoegel, clad in leather shorts, stout boots, lederhosen, rucksacks, carrying a bedroll or blanket strapped to our backs, eating where we might, sleeping beneath the stars in fields and forests, by lakes and running rivers, drawing our strength from the earth and each other, eschewing all that came from the city or stank of age or blew from the West.
We were, in those opening years of the century, already in revolt against our bourgeois fathers, our bourgeois schoolmasters, our bourgeois government, yes, even our bourgeois Kaiser. Our revolt looked not toward the future but to the past, to the far deep Teutonic past when each worked for the other and all for the whole, when unquestioning obedience to a leader of our own bone and blood and spirit offered—as it still does—a far more joyous concept of freedom than the street pedlars’ freedom to swindle each other through “elected majorities” in that corrupt and corrupting commercial network of parliaments and exchanges and shops and factories and unions which Western democracy has so carefully fashioned for the destruction of the Teutonic state and soul and peoples.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Esau and Job and Baal—these were not the holy or unholy names we called upon. When it wasn’t Wotan or Siegfried who sang in our blood, it was the voice of the East, the voices of Nietzsche and Stefan George, of Langbehn and Lagarde, the voice of Hegel right side up, the philosophers of materialism, the voices of a blood brotherhood as different from Western Europe as Loki from Christ himself. Not against each other but for each other, for all, freely for all, freely obedient, held in total thrall by devotion to the leader. We had left the city, the merchant, the professor, the politician, the banker, the Jew, the self-proclaimed virgin and her fraudulent son who was killed at last by the Jews—we had left them forever behind as we searched for something older, simpler, and infinitely more pure: for something, in short, worth dying for.
When I say that Gunther and I were of the Wandervoegel, I mean both more and less than the word actually conveys. The Wandervoegel was composed of many groups, some under the leadership of teachers and others without formal organization or steadfast identity or aims. Some had sworn against the eating of meat, some were pledged to pacifism, to atheism, to celibacy, to epicureanism, to self-abnegation, to mortification of the flesh, to religious fanaticism; some called themselves the Brotherhood of the Soil, Pathfinders, Wanderers into the Void, Youth Culture, Seekers of the Message, the Folk Brotherhood, Penitents of the North, Voyagers to Nowhere, etc., etc. Many tramped the woods and fields as established groups, but others moved at random from group to group in what became known as the Journey to Nowhere—a term so dear to the heart of German youth tha
t in the end it became its goal.
Nonetheless, as we drifted from Forchheim to Bamberg and beyond, a whole concatenation of secret messages began to spell out our destination: words scrawled on a rock, a note floating in the breeze, glances exchanged around the campfire, a general drift of movement down trails and across the banks of rivers, a feeling in the air, a whispering in the wind, a yearning, an urgency, a silent passion that raged from one end of Germany to the other until, at some point in the journey, all of us, in our thousands and tens of thousands, knew, without having consciously chosen, that we were going to Hoher Meissner and that no power on earth could now prevent us from arriving at our destination. It was as if the old Teutonic Gods had spoken to us.
Outside of Bamberg we slept beside the Regnitz for two nights before following its course to the river Main. There we fell in with two other comrades, Karl Rader and Paul Koch by name. They were close to our own ages, both from Nuremberg, and, to our surprise and perhaps also theirs, they too were going to Hoher Meissner.
On our first night together, after we had boiled and eaten our barley Schleim (fortified by a sausage the one named Karl had stolen from a butcher’s stall and cut into quarters and added to it), we lay back on the ground while the one named Paul read from Stefan George by the glow of our cooking coals:
THE QUESTIONER: You whom I cut down from the gallows, will you speak to me?
THE HANGED MAN: When amid the curses and the shouts of the whole town I was dragged to the gates, I saw—in each man who threw a stone at me, who set his arms akimbo full of contempt, who with staring eyes pointed his finger at me across the shoulder of the man in front—I saw that one of my crimes was latent in each, only narrower or hemmed in by fear. When I came to the place of execution and the aldermen showed both disgust and pity for me in their stern faces, I was moved to laughter: “Do you not realize how greatly you need the poor sinner?” Virtue—against which I had offended—on their faces, and on the faces of decent wives and girls, however real it may be, can only glow as it does if I sin and I do! When they put my neck into the noose my malice showed me my future triumph: I the buried man will enter as a conqueror into your brains…and I will be active in your seed as a hero about whom songs are sung, as a god…and before you have had time to realize it I shall bend this stiff bar round into a wheel.
That is what we were thinking of in 1913; that is what we dreamed before our council fires; and that is what, as our lives translated themselves into action, dominated the world’s history for more than half a century—and still does.
After leaving the Main we crossed north through Bad Kissingen and thence to the headwaters of the Fulda which would lead us to Kassel, south of which lay Hoher Meissner. There, beside our campfire on the river bank below Hersfeld, we were joined by a remarkable one-eyed comrade of seventeen, also bound for Hoher Meissner.
His name? “How can anyone say ‘my name’ when it isn’t his, it’s something chosen for him by others and attached to him without his permission? I have no name. None of us have a name, when you come to the truth of it; we’ve only got something for others to call us by. What I am called by I have chosen for myself. Call me Fenri, which is short for Fenrir, and if you don’t like it then go to hell and I’ll go to Hoher Meissner by myself.”
Fenrir, chained by the gods, who, shattering the earth with his struggles, broke free, sailed south to the field of Vigrid, and there allied himself with the giants in that last terrible assault on Valhalla: “Fire spurted from his eyes and nostrils” wrote the Ancient One; “from his gaping jaws dripped blood; his upper jaw touched the heavens, his lower jaw brushed the earth.”
So Fenri he was. We were very much for every man having his own taste, his own way, his own life—for having, in short, himself.
“Next you’ll be wanting to know about my eye.”
We shock our heads, but none of us could avoid stealing a glance at the great, staring, milk-white curdle of phlegm which he’d had the courage to call an eye.
“It’s no matter,” he said, “I’m not ashamed of it. I was milking a stupid bitch of a cow in my father’s barn and she swished her tail and caught me across the open eyeball with it. I rushed to the woodpile outside for an ax and came back at her. Good God, you’ve never heard such bawling. She backed and turned and shuffled and bellowed and spurted blood like the town fountain while I, with only one eye to see her through, hacked away at her eyes and nose and the skull between her horns and finally her neck until at last she sank to her knees and I slit her throat with my hunting knife.
“By the time my father got there I had her strung up by her heels and was bleeding her. He looked at the cow for a moment, then at me, then at my lost eye. ‘You’d have done better to follow scripture and make it an eye for an eye,’ he said. ‘We’d still have the cow and her milk instead of her dead weight in summer meat, and you’d be no worse off than you are now.’ I forsook him and his house and his farm and his name that very day, and I’ve never missed any of them since. I’m a Holsteiner, you know. We’re good haters.”
We agreed almost too fulsomely. There was something about the quality of his eyes that made agreement with him particularly easy. He regarded us for a moment with his one astonishingly good eye and then said, “Why pretend to understand something you don’t? I am one of Nechayev’s doomed men. By my own choice I have no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, not even a name of my own, as you know.” He pawed through his rucksack, withdrew a tattered paperbound book, and menaced us with it like a weapon. “Bakunin and Nechayev,” he said. “Men. More than men. Truth-tellers and destroyers. So long as we understand that’s the way I unchangeably am, we’ll have no trouble. Beyond that you’ll find me a good man in a just fight and the meanest bastard that ever pulled knife in an unjust one.”
So it was. Who wanted to argue with him? Thus it happened that five of us left Kassel and moved from the bottomlands of the Fulda and Eder through the forest of beech and oak and sweet-smelling conifers which marks the first rise of the land as it approaches the breast of Hoher Meissner itself.
Late in the afternoon we paused beside a shallow stream to drink and bathe our faces. From somewhere above us on Hoher Meissner we could hear, though very faintly, strains of The Song of the Freebooters rising and falling on the summer breeze. Nearer at hand the wild hunting cries of barnswifts proclaimed that particular hour in which the late afternoon sun, casting shadows against the east, steals the disguise of ordinarily translucent flying insects and lays them hopelessly open to their enemies.
The swifts, in their terrible need, cry food! food! food! and the sun-dancing insects die so quickly after they’re born that their lifetime’s history can be encompassed within a few fleeting heartbeats between the void from which they came and the void to which they have returned as food for that soft-breasted, full-feathered flight of reptiles which spiraled that afternoon more wildly toward the apogee than I had ever seen them before, wheeling and circling, darting and diving and twisting, reversing, stalling, looping, stabbing the air with their terrible beaks, crying hunger against that later moment when the light fades, the slaughter ends, the swifts sink to their nests, and the insects conceive new generations for tomorrow’s hunt.
Suddenly those faint cries from above which had absorbed our lazy attention gave way to a cacophony of shrieks much louder, much closer at hand. We leapt to our feet, scrambled through a growth of underbrush and briar, and emerged into a barnyard clearing.
A peasant’s thatched hut stood at its far end, together with a woodshed, a smokehouse, three half-shaded pigsties, and, at the center of the complex, a wide-eaved two-and-a-half-storey barn Alongside the barn a peasant stood on a massive wood plank supported at either end by half-filled rainbarrels swarming with larvae.
Sure-footed on his plank, the peasant slashed with his spade at perhaps ten generations of swallow nests, each the exquisitely beaded work of an architect with instinctive understanding that beauty is inseparable from
strength.
A litter of fragmented day nests, feather-down linings, tiny white cinnamon-spotted eggs, gluey yellow yolks, limp, unborn cadavers, the naked newly hatched, and crushed fledglings covered the plank on which he stood and spilled over onto the ground beneath it.
The peasant was squat, big-boned and filthy, with the receding horny brow, high cheekbones, and slow-blinking, water-colored eyes that always betray the Slav. His children—a boy of ten and a girl somewhat younger—pale-faced, stunted, bare feet covered with blood and foul-smelling yolk, hands hot and sticky with bits of claw and beak and matted feather-down still clinging to them, looked even less human than their father. From each nostril of each blank-faced child a trail of yellow snot descended to the brink of each upper lip there to tremble a moment before being trapped by the flick of a tongue and quickly sucked inward from view.
Between huge gulps of snot they fought each other in shrieking competition “No, no!” “That one was mine!” “You killed my bird!” for the pleasure of smashing still unbroken eggs, crushing to death those that lay panting with the first suspirations of life, or wildly tracing the looping, erratic flights of bewildered fledglings that rarely rose more than half a meter before life was crushed from them by the hot, sticky paws of a playful child.
Suddenly Fenri’s voice rang out, surprising us almost as greatly as the peasant: “Stop that, you Goddamned scheisser Sauhund!”
All sound but the lamentation of the swallows gave way to frozen silence as the peasant and his children turned to us and stared, each trying to comprehend the fact of our existence, the peasant himself obviously searching for some response to a circumstance that clearly could not have seemed stranger to him had we been talking bears, and Fenri the Kaiser himself leading the Household Guards at full charge toward the foul anesthetic stench of those pigsties on the nearest side of the bam. The two children nervously increased their consumption of snot.
Night of the Aurochs Page 9
