Karl felt like a starving sparrow contemplating a viper’s offer to guard her nest while she hunts for food. Surely her nest would be well protected from other birds in her absence, but could she count on finding any eggs left when she returned?
He’d spoken to a number of Jews in Munich, shopkeepers mostly, engaging them in casual conversation about the Kampfbund groups, and Herr Hitler in particular. The seismic upheavals in the economy had left them frazzled and desperate, certain that their country would be in ruins by the end of the year unless somebody did something. Most said they’d support anyone who could bring the economic chaos and runaway inflation under control. Hitler and his Nazis promised definitive solutions. So what if the country had to live under a dictatorship for a while? Nothing—nothing—could be worse than this. After all, hadn’t the Kaiser been a dictator? And they’d certainly done better under him than with this Weimar Republic with its Constitution that guaranteed so many freedoms. What good were freedom of the press and speech and assembly if you were starving? As for the anti-Semitism, most of the Munich Jews echoed Ernst’s dismissal: mere rhetoric. Nothing more than tough talk to excite the beer drinkers.
Still uneasy, Karl found himself drawn back again and again to hear Hitler speak—in the Zirkus Krone, and in the Burgerbraukeller and other beer halls around the city—hoping each time the man would say something to allay his fears and allow him to embrace the hope the Nazis offered.
Absinthe only added to the compulsion. Karl had taken to drinking a glass with Ernst before attending each new Hitler speech, and as a result he had acquired a taste for the bitter stuff.
Because Herr Hitler seemed to be speaking all the time.
Especially since the failed communist putsch in Hamburg. It failed because the German workers refused to rally to the red flag and Reichswehr troops easily put down the revolution in its second day. There would be no German October. But the attempt had incited the Kampfbund groups to near hysteria. Karl saw more uniforms in Munich’s streets than he’d seen in Berlin during the war. And Herr Hitler was there in the thick of it, fanning the sparks of patriotic fervor into a bonfire wherever he found an audience.
Karl attended his second Hitler speech while under the influence of absinthe, and there he experienced his first hallucination. It happened while Hitler was reaching his final crescendo: The hall wavered before Karl, the light dimmed, all the color drained from his sight, leaving only black and white and shades of gray; he had the impression of being in a crowded room, just like the beer hall, and then it passed. It hadn’t lasted long enough for Karl to capture any details, but it had left him shivering and afraid.
The following night it happened again—the same flash of black and white, the same aftershock of dread.
It was the absinthe, he was sure. He’d heard that it caused delirium and hallucinations and even madness in those who overused it. But Karl did not feel he was going mad. No, this was something else. Not madness, but a different level of perception. He had a sense of a hidden truth, just beyond the grasp of his senses, beckoning to him, reaching for him. He felt he’d merely grazed the surface of that awful truth, and that if he kept reaching he’d soon seize it.
And he knew how to extend his reach: more absinthe.
Ernst was only too glad to have another enthusiast for his favorite libation.
“Forget Herr Hitler tonight,” Ernst said. “This will be better. Bavaria’s triumvirate will be there in person—Kahr, General Lossow, and Colonel von Seisser. Rumor has it that Kahr is going to make a dramatic announcement. Some say he’s going to declare Bavaria’s independence. Others say he’s going to return Crown Prince Rupprecht to the throne and restore the Bavarian monarchy. You don’t want to miss this, Karl.”
“What about Hitler and the rest of the Kampfbund?”
“They’re frothing at the mouth. They’ve been invited to attend but not to participate. It’s clear, I think, that Kahr is making a move to upstage the Kampfbund and solidify his leadership position. By tomorrow morning, Hitler and his cronies may find themselves awash in a hysterical torrent of Bavarian nationalism. This will be worse than any political defeat—they’ll be . . . irrelevant. Think of their outrage, think of their frustration.” Ernst rubbed his palms with glee. “Oh, this will be most entertaining!”
Reluctantly, Karl agreed. He felt he was getting closer and closer to that elusive vision, but even if Generalstaatskommissar Kahr tried to pull the rug out from under the Kampfbund, Karl was sure he would have plenty of future opportunities to listen to Herr Hitler.
Karl and Ernst arrived early at the Burgerbraukeller, and a good thing too. The city’s Blue Police had to close the doors at seven fifteen when the hall filled to overflowing. This was a much higher class audience than Hitler attracted. Well-dressed businessmen in tall hats and women in long dresses mingled with military officers and members of the Bavarian provincial cabinet; the local newspapers were represented by their editors rather than mere reporters. Everyone in Munich wanted to hear what Generalstaatskommissar Kahr had to say, and those left in the cold drizzle outside protested angrily.
They were the lucky ones, Karl decided soon after Gustav von Kahr began to speak. The squat, balding royalist had no earthshaking announcement to make. Instead, he stood hunched over the rostrum, with Lossow and Seisser, the other two thirds of the ruling triumvirate, seated on the bandstand behind him, and read a dull, endless anti-Marxist treatise in a listless monotone.
“Let’s leave,” Karl said after fifteen minutes of droning.
Ernst shook his head and glanced to their right. “Look who just arrived.”
Karl turned and recognized the figure in the light tan trench coat standing behind a pillar near the rear of the hall, chewing on a fingernail.
“Hitler! I thought he was supposed to be speaking in Freising.”
“That’s what the flyers said. Apparently he changed his mind. Or perhaps he simply wanted everyone to think he’d be in Freising.” Ernst’s voice faded as he turned in his seat and scanned the audience. “I wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?”
He leaned close and whispered in Karl’s ear. “I wonder if Herr Hitler might not be planning something here tonight.”
Karl’s intestines constricted into a knot. “A putsch?”
“Keep your voice down. Yes. Why not? Bavaria’s ruling triumvirate and most of its cabinet are here. If I were planning a takeover, this would be the time and place.”
“But all those police outside.”
Ernst shrugged. “Perhaps he’ll just take over the stage and launch into one of his speeches. Either way, history could be made here tonight.”
Karl glanced back at Hitler and wondered if this was what the nearly grasped vision was about. He nudged Ernst.
“Did you bring the absinthe?”
“Of course. But we won’t be able to fix it properly here.” He paused. “I have an idea, though.”
He signaled the waitress and ordered two snifters of cognac. She looked at him strangely, but returned in a few minutes and placed the glasses on the table next to their beer steins. Ernst pulled his silver flask from his pocket and poured a more than generous amount of absinthe into the cognac.
“It’s not turning yellow,” Karl said.
“It only does that in water.” Ernst lifted his snifter and swirled the greenish contents. “This was Toulouse-Lautrec’s favorite way of diluting his absinthe. He called it his ‘earthquake.’ ” Ernst smiled as he clinked his glass against Karl’s. “To earthshaking events.”
Karl took a sip and coughed. The bitterness of the wormwood was enhanced rather than cut by the burn of the cognac. He washed it down with a gulp of ale. He would have poured the rest of his “earthquake” into Ernst’s glass if he hadn’t felt he needed every drop of the absinthe to reach the elusive vision. So he finished the entire snifter, chasing each sip with more ale. He wondered if he’d be able to walk out of here unassisted at the night’s end.
&nb
sp; He was just setting down the empty glass when he heard shouting outside. The doors at the rear of the hall burst open with a shattering bang as helmeted figures charged in brandishing sabers, pistols, and rifles with fixed bayonets. From their brown shirts and the swastikas on their red armbands Karl knew they weren’t the police.
“Nazi storm troopers!” Ernst said.
Pandemonium erupted. Some men cried out in shock and outrage while others shouted “Heil!” Some were crawling under the tables while others were climbing atop them for a better view. Women screamed and fainted at the sight of a machine gun being set up at the door. Karl looked around for Hitler and found him charging down the center aisle holding a pistol aloft. As he reached the bandstand he fired a shot into the ceiling.
Sudden silence.
Hitler climbed up next to General Commissioner von Kahr and turned toward the crowd. Karl blinked at the sight of him. He had shed the trench coat and was wearing a poorly cut morning coat with an Iron Cross pinned over the left breast. He looked . . . ridiculous, more like the maître d’ in a seedy restaurant than the savior of Germany.
But then the pale blue eyes cast their spell and the familiar baritone rang through the hall announcing that a national revolution had broken out in Germany. The Bavarian cities of Augsburg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, and Wurzburg were now in his control; the Reichswehr and State Police were marching from their barracks under Nazi flags; the Weimar government was no more. A new national German Reich was being formed. Hitler was in charge.
Ernst snickered. “The Gefreiter looks like a waiter who’s led a putsch against the restaurant staff.”
Karl barely heard him. The vision . . . it was coming . . . close now . . . the absinthe, fueled by the cognac and ale, was drawing it nearer than ever before . . . the room was flickering about him, the colors draining away . . .
And then the Burgerbraukeller was gone and he was in blackness . . . silent, formless blackness . . . but not alone. He detected movement around him in the palpable darkness . . .
And then he saw them.
Human forms, thin, pale, bedraggled, sunken-cheeked and hollow-eyed, dressed in rags or dressed not at all, and thin, so painfully thin, like parchment-covered skeletons through which each rib and each bump and nodule on the pelvis and hips could be touched and numbered, all stumbling, sliding, staggering, shambling, groping toward him out of the dark. At first he thought it a dream, a nightmare reprise of the march of the starving disabled veterans he’d witnessed in Berlin, but these . . . people . . . were different. No tattered uniforms here. The ones who had clothing were dressed in striped prison pajamas, and there were so many of them. With their ranks spanning to the right and left as far as Karl could see, and stretching and fading off into the distance to where the horizon might have been, their number was beyond counting . . . thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions . . .
And all coming his way.
They began to pick up speed as they neared, breaking into a staggering run like a herd of frightened cattle. Closer, now . . . their gaunt faces became masks of fear, pale lips drawn back over toothless mouths, giving no sign that they saw him . . . he could see no glint of light in the dark hollows of their eye sockets . . . but he gasped as other details became visible.
They had been mutilated—branded, actually. A six-pointed star had been carved into the flesh of each. On the forehead, between the breasts, on the belly—a bleeding Star of David. The only color not black, white, or gray was the red of the blood that oozed from each of those six-pointed brands.
But why were they running? What was spurring the stampede?
And then he heard a voice, shouting, faint and far off at first, then louder: “Alle Juden raus!” Over and over: “Alle Juden raus! Alle Juden raus!” Louder and louder as they approached until Karl had to clasp his hands over his ears to protect them.
“ALLE JUDEN RAUS! ALLE JUDEN RAUS!”
And then they were upon him, mobbing him, knocking him to his knees and then flat on his face in their panicked flight through the darkness, oblivious as they stepped on him and tripped over him in their blind rush to nowhere. He could not regain his feet; he did not try. He had no fear of being crushed because they weighed almost nothing, but he could not rise against their numbers. So he remained facedown in the darkness with his hands over his head and listened to that voice.
“ALLE JUDEN RAUS! ALLE JUDEN RAUS!”
After what seemed an eternity, they were past. Karl lifted his head. He was alone in the darkness. No . . . not alone. Someone else . . . a lone figure approaching. A naked woman, old, short, thin, with long gray hair, limping his way on arthritic knees. Something familiar about her—
“Mother!”
He stood paralyzed, rooted, unable to turn from her nakedness. She looked so thin, and so much older, as if she’d aged twenty years. And into each floppy breast had been carved a Star of David.
He sobbed as he held his arms out to her.
“Dear God, Mother! What have they done to you?”
But she took no notice of him, limping past as if he did not exist.
“Mother, I—!”
He turned, reaching to grab her arm as she passed, but froze in mute shock when he saw the mountain.
All the gaunt living dead who had rushed past were piled in a mound that dwarfed the Alps themselves, carelessly tossed like discarded dolls into a charnel heap that stretched miles into the darkness above him.
Only now they had eyes. Dead eyes, staring sightlessly his way, each with a silent plea . . . help us . . . save us . . . please don’t let this happen . . .
His mother—she was in there. He had to find her, get her out of there. He ran toward the tower of wasted human flesh, but before he reached it the blacks and whites began to shimmer and melt, bleeding color as that damned voice grew louder and louder . . . “ALLE JUDEN RAUS! ALLE JUDEN RAUS!”
And Karl knew that voice. God help him, he knew that voice.
Adolf Hitler’s.
Suddenly he found himself back in the Burgerbraukeller, on his feet, staring at the man who still stood at the rostrum. Only seconds had passed. It had seemed so much longer.
As Hitler finished his proclamation, the triumvirate of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser were marched off the stage at gunpoint. And Hitler stood there with his feet spread and his arms folded across his chest, staring in triumphant defiance at the shocked crowd mingling and murmuring before him.
Karl now understood what he had seen. Hitler’s hate wasn’t mere rhetoric. This madman meant what he said. Every word of it. He intended the destruction of German Jewry, of Jews everywhere. And now, here in this beer hall, he was making a grab for the power to do just that. And he was succeeding!
He had to be stopped!
As Hitler turned to follow the captured triumvirate, Karl staggered forward, his arm raised, his finger pointing, ready to accuse, to shout out a denunciation. But no sound came from his throat. His lips were working, his lungs pumping, but his vocal cords were locked. Hoarse, breathy hisses were the only sounds he could make.
But those sounds were enough to draw the attention of the Nazi storm troopers. The nearest turned and pointed their rifles at him. Ernst leaped to his side and restrained him, pulling his arm down.
“He’s not well. He’s been sick and tonight’s excitement has been too much for him.”
Karl tried to shake free of Ernst. He didn’t care about the storm troopers or their weapons. These people had to hear, had to know what Hitler and his National Socialists planned. But then Hitler was leaving, following the captured triumvirate from the bandstand.
In the frightened and excited confusion that followed, Ernst steered Karl toward one of the side doors. But their way was blocked by a baby-faced storm trooper.
“No one leaves until the Führer says so.”
“This man is sick!” Ernst shouted. “Do you know who his father was? Colonel Stehr himself! This is the son of a hero of the Argonne! Let him into the fresh air i
mmediately!”
The young trooper, certainly no more than eighteen or nineteen, was taken aback by Ernst’s outburst. It was highly unlikely that he’d ever heard of a Colonel Stehr, but he stepped aside to let them pass.
The drizzle had turned to snow, and the cold air began to clear Karl’s head, but still he had no voice. Pulling away from Ernst’s supporting arm, he half ran, half stumbled across the grounds of the Burgerbraukeller, crowded now with exuberant members of the Kampfbund. He headed toward the street, wanting to scream, to cry out his fear and warn the city, the country, that a murderous lunatic was taking over.
When he reached the far side of Rosenheimerstrasse, he found an alley, leaned into it, and vomited. After his stomach was empty, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and returned to where Ernst waited on the sidewalk.
“Good heavens, man. What got into you back there?”
Karl leaned against a lamppost and told him about the vision, about the millions of dead Jews, and Hitler’s voice and what it was shouting.
Ernst was a long time replying. His eyes had a faraway look, almost glazed, as if he were trying to see the future Karl had described.
“That was the absinthe,” he said finally. “Lautrec’s earthquake. You’ve been indulging a bit much lately and you’re not used to it. Lautrec was institutionalized because of it. Van Gogh cut off one of his ears under the influence.”
Karl grabbed the front of Ernst’s overcoat. “No! The absinthe is responsible, I’ll grant that, but it only opened the door for me. This was more than a hallucination. This was a vision of the future, a warning. He’s got to be stopped, Ernst!”
“How? You heard him. There’s a national revolution going on, and he’s leading it.”
A Soft Barren Aftershock Page 115
