Siegfried Read online

  “I still don’t know to this day,” said Falk. “I felt as if I was turning into a pillar of ice. When I could speak again, I of course also asked that question, but Bormann snapped, ‘An order is not explained, Falk, but given. The Führer is the last person to be accountable to you.’ I realized it was pointless to discuss it further. The Chief had taken his unfathomable decision, and so it must happen. You should know that in those days an order from the Führer had in the most literal sense the force of law. I summoned up courage to ask what the consequences would be if I refused.”

  “And?” asked Herter, when Falk remained silent.

  “In that case Siegfried would die anyway, as he had been sentenced to death. That was irrevocable. The Führer never went back on a decision. But in addition Julia and I would be sent to a concentration camp, and perhaps I could imagine something of what that would mean. If I loved my wife, he said, it might be more sensible not to refuse.”

  “And Miss Braun? Did Miss Braun know about it?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Herter. I know no more than I’m telling you.”

  “I’m speechless,” said Herter. “What kind of creatures were they? They were what they said the Jews were: vermin out for world domination. What scum! But actually we knew that anyway.”

  “Yes, you say that now, but at the time I didn’t really know. For the first time in all those years, it dawned on me with a jolt the kind of people I was dealing with. In my naïveté I had identified them with what I saw of them. Hitler could rant and rave when he was involved in politics, but that was part of his job; aside from that he was courtesy incarnate, just like a professional boxer who doesn’t floor anyone out of the ring. I was once given a jovial wink by Göring, and I remember that that dreadful Heydrich once pulled a rose out of a vase at lunch and handed it gallantly to Julia. Do you remember, Julia?”

  She nodded without looking at them.

  “I had shut myself off from everything else they did. Of course I suspected that terrible things were happening, because you sometimes picked things up, but I didn’t want to know. I did not even talk about it to Julia. Only Bormann, who could never relax, always had a sinister air about him, though he was not the biggest criminal in the bunch.”

  “But he was enough of a criminal to blackmail you with the death of your wife, wasn’t he?”

  “Of course. He was an extension of Hitler.”

  “Like the others.”

  “That’s true. Hitler had turned almost the whole German people into himself, and he intended to do the same with the whole of mankind. His followers did exactly what he wanted, even without orders. They were able to destroy people because they had first been destroyed as human beings themselves by him.”

  “You put that very well, Mr. Falk. And where did things go from there?”

  “It must look like an accident. There would be no inquest, because why should I murder my own son? I must think up something for myself. It must not be within the next week—of course so that no one would make a connection with Bormann’s presence—and no later than in two weeks’ time. Then he said ‘Heil Hitler,’ and I was dismissed.”

  Herter pulled a face. “Do you realize that what you are saying is making me feel sick? What on earth got into those people? Did you discuss it with your wife?”

  Julia had taken another drag on her cigarette, and at every word some pale blue smoke escaped from her mouth, as if from a creature of fable. “He only told me what had happened at the end of the war, after we had heard on the radio in The Hague that Hitler was dead.”

  “One day after he had married Eva Braun,” said Herter. “How in heaven’s name is it all possible? For some reason he wanted Siegfried murdered—who knows?—because he had discovered that he was not the father?—and finally he marries the mother, who may have deceived him but whom he has allowed to live. I can’t make head or tail of it. Obviously something completely different happened.”

  Falk raised both hands for a moment and dropped them limply onto his thighs. “Mysteries, mysteries. You won’t find an explanation by thinking about it. No one will ever get to the bottom of it. There is no one left alive who could say.”

  “And you, too? Were you not in danger as well? Didn’t you know too much?”

  “I wasn’t frightened of that,” said Falk. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have dreamed up such a complicated plan. In that case they would simply have murdered all three of us; the gentlemen had no problem with that, certainly in such a hermetically sealed place as the Berghof. No, obviously they trusted us, and we had found mercy in their eyes because we had looked after Siggi so well.”

  “How in heaven’s name did you get through those days?”

  Falk sighed and shook his head. “When I think back, I see nothing at all. After the war I once had a car accident and was concussed, and I couldn’t remember anything about that.”

  Small and old, Julia and he sat on the worn-out sofa, under Brueghel’s four-hundred-year-old gluttonous feast, like two hyperrealistic statues by an American artist.

  “Of course I wanted nothing better than to talk to Julia about it,” he continued, “but what was the point? Why should I burden her with something so horrific, which nothing could be done about anyway? I had to choose between one or three dead people—the only way of escaping was flight, preferably all three of us. But that was completely impossible: no one could enter the Führer’s zone on the Obersalzberg, but neither could they leave it. There were sentry posts everywhere. Anyway, Bormann had naturally given instructions for reinforcement of the guard. I considered involving Dr. Krüger, because he was a decent man; perhaps he could smuggle us out in his DKW, but then I would have had to phone him, and of course the telephone was tapped. Apart from which, I would have endangered his life by doing that. No, the situation was hopeless. Whichever way I looked at it, I had no choice. I had to do it, for Julia. So it must appear to be an accident for her, too.”

  There was another silence. Herter tried to imagine murdering his little Marnix because otherwise not only he but Maria, too, would have to die. The very thought made him feel ill. What would he do? Probably he would have reached the conclusion with Maria that all three of them might as well die. How could one go on living after such an act, even if carried out under compulsion? But perhaps the difference lay in the fact that Marnix was their own child.

  “Do you want to hear?” asked Falk.

  No, he didn’t want to hear, but Falk wanted to tell the story. Herter made a scarcely visible motion of his head, whereupon Julia got up and went to the bedroom. When she had shut the door behind her, Falk closed his eyes and did not open them again during the whole of his account. As if Herter were also enveloped in the darkness behind those eyelids, in which Falk again saw the drama unfolding, he listened to the faint voice, feeling as if the Eben Haëzer Home were sinking into oblivion and through the words he was physically present at the events of the story, there in that doomed spot, destroyed over half a century ago—seeing everything, hearing everything. . . .

  A minute before his alarm clock goes off, Falk opens his eyes. He immediately starts sweating. Today. He has imagined it countless times during those two weeks, but now that the moment has come, it is completely different. He turns the alarm off and looks at the back of Julia’s head. She is asleep, breathing peacefully. Confused and shivering all over, he gets out of bed and opens the curtains. A chilly, gray autumn morning, the summits of the Alps now invisible in the approaching winter. The world has changed its aspect. He feels like someone who is mortally ill and has decided that today is to be his last day. Soon the doctor will come in secret with his syringe. He is still asleep now, the friendly doctor who is prepared to take a risk, or he is reading the morning paper with a cup of coffee in his hand. Russian offensive in the Memel region. For as long as he can remember, people have been dying in huge numbers. Dying has become insignificant. The Führer’s orders have the force of law. The irrevocability of that law is harder than the granite
of the Alps. In a few hours he will have to obey it.

  With a yawn Julia turns onto her back and folds her hands behind her head.

  “Is something wrong, Ullrich?”

  “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Is Siggi already awake?”

  “I think I heard something. I promised I’d show him the firing range today. He’s been pestering me for weeks about it.”

  With a sigh Julia throws off the blankets and gets out of bed.

  “Why are you men always so crazy about that stupid violence? If Siggi had been a girl, she wouldn’t have pestered you about it.”

  “That difference has a long history, I think.”

  Siggi is already dressed. In his chamois leather Tyrolean shorts with the horn buttons, he is sitting on the floor, slowly moving a red magnet around his compass.

  “Look, Daddy, that needle has gone crazy. Do you know why that is? Because the magnet is horseshoe-shaped. The needle wants to tear itself free and be happy, because a horseshoe brings luck, but it is tied, just like a dog on a chain.”

  Marnix. That is exactly how Marnix might have put it.

  That child! Falk feels as if his veins are filled with molten lead. He himself has never had such an idea in the thirty-three years he has been alive. What kind of world is this? Surely it’s not conceivable that in a short while he will destroy that little life! Should he not grab his pistol right away and shoot himself in the head? And what about Julia, then? Suddenly he remembers the one and only time that he had previously shot at anyone, nine years ago in the Vienna Chancellery, during the failed coup. In the chaos and din of gunfire, shouting, exploding hand grenades, and shattering glass, he suddenly saw Dollfuss lying on his face on the carpet, groaning and calling for a priest: he recognized him immediately, for the chancellor was only slightly bigger than Siggi. He was bleeding from a large wound below his left ear. At that moment the violence took hold of Ullrich, too, and before he knew it, he had also fired a shot. A few days later, Otto Planetta confessed to the first, probably fatal shot; within a week he was sentenced and hanged. The second shot, with a different caliber, has always remained a mystery and is still speculated about. From shame he had never told anyone about it, not even Julia, not even when those involved in the coup were honored as heroes after the annexation, not even after the war. He tried to pretend to himself that it had been a coup de grâce; when that failed, he buried it in himself and never thought about it again.

  He puts on his pistol and goes to the kitchen, where Siggi is stirring a knob of butter and half a bar of milk chocolate into his porridge, as he has learned from his father. The condemned prisoner’s last meal. Why bother to eat? He won’t even have time to digest it. Time! Julia has lit up her first Ukraina cigarette and sings softly as she moves about:

  “Everything will pass by now,

  Everything will pass. . . .”

  Time is harder than the granite that surrounds the house; not even a scratch can be made in it. The realization that she is seeing the child for the last time, without knowing, cuts him even more to the quick than the thought of what he must do in a few moments.

  “We must go.”

  “Put your scarf on, too, Siggi, don’t catch cold. And for goodness’ sake be careful, you two.”

  When they go outside, the air is full of glittering icicles, which seem to be hanging still in the chilly air.

  “Look, Daddy, the Mother of Our Lord has dropped her pincushion.”

  A sob goes through Falk’s chest, and he takes Siggi’s hand. As they climb up the alpine meadow, the boy constantly makes wild leaps, as if he wants to fly. Among the firs they are halted with a “Heil Hitler” by a patrolling SS man with a German shepherd on a lead and a rifle over his shoulder.

  After Falk has shown his pass, issued to him by Mittlstrasser, Siggi asks, “Daddy, how was water made?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think Uncle Wolf knows?”

  “I’m sure he does. Uncle Wolf always knows everything.”

  “But he doesn’t know that Auntie Effi smokes when he’s not there.”

  “Perhaps even that.”

  The sound of bellowed orders becomes audible, but it does not seem to get through to Siggi. As they walk on, he looks thoughtfully at the ground and a little later says, “But if you know everything, how do you know that it’s really ‘everything’?”

  “I don’t know that either, Siggi.”

  “I know a lot, too, but how can I find out all that I know?”

  Falk does not answer. This torture! The world should not exist, the world is a terrible mistake, an absurd miscarriage—so absurd that nothing, absolutely nothing matters. Everything will be forgotten and finally disappear and will never have happened. And it is this thought that suddenly gives him the perverted strength to do what he has to do. He takes a deep breath and lets go of Siggi’s hand.

  The large parade ground is surrounded by barracks, canteens, garages, and administration buildings. Flanked by a swastika flag and a black SS flag, helmeted troops are on parade and move with the same discipline as the Chief’s body, when he is in public. Via the gym they go down a flight of steps to the underground firing ranges, and Falk thinks, what difference does it make that he has seen daylight for the last time? A steel door, whose main function is to ensure that the Chief is not disturbed in his world-historical reflections, closes behind them.

  “Perhaps this is not really the place for children,” says the duty Obersturmführer, shaking his head in the booming and rattling, after reading Mittlstrasser’s document. “Well, everything’s one big mess in Germany these days.”

  Yes, of course Mittlstrasser is in the plot, or maybe not; it’s all the same to Falk. Siggi is excited by the pandemonium in the concrete area and shouts something that Falk cannot understand. On the longest of the three firing ranges, about a hundred yards long, two soldiers in battle dress, bathed in harsh electric light, are lying behind juddering machine guns, while instructors with binoculars monitor their results. The second range, in which rifles are used, is shorter; the third, shorter still, is not in use.

  A passing Unterscharführer yells, in passing, with a glance at Siggi, “Has that age group been called up already?”

  Falk produces his loaded 7.65 pistol and shows Siggi the magazine containing the bullets. He stands with his feet apart, holds the weapon with both hands, and fires a shot, which hits the schematic figure at the end of the range in the belly, at which Siggi cries, “Can I have a go, too? Can I have a go, too?”

  The world does not exist. None of it is true. Nothing exists. He drops to one knee and demonstrates how the pistol must be held. As a joke he points the barrel from close range at Siggi’s forehead. When Siggi begins to laugh, he pulls the trigger.

  Spattered with blood, he remains staring at the point where Siggi’s laugh was a moment ago. No one has seen or heard anything. He closes his eyes and slowly lowers the weapon, until the barrel touches the motionless body, thinking—It wasn’t me who killed him. Hitler killed him. Not me, Hitler. I. Hitler.

  FIFTEEN

  Herter leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands over his eyes. When the talking stopped, he looked up as if waking from a dream. It seemed as if it were now the room that had changed into something unreal. In the courtyard a dog barked. Falk had also opened his eyes; his hands were trembling. Herter could see that the old man was exhausted, but also somehow liberated. As a result of his gruesome story, everything had simply become even more incomprehensible, but at the same time it was proof that it was true, since otherwise the storyteller would have made everything fit neatly in place. Involuntarily he glanced at Falk’s right index finger, with which he had pulled the trigger fifty-five years ago and had to force himself not to look at the photograph on the television set. Siegfried Falk would have been sixty-one now, without knowing who he was; on certain days, with his wife and children, he would have visited his parents in Eben Haëzer.

 
Falk got up, opened the door of the bedroom door a fraction, and sat down again. Perhaps he had spoken so softly to spare Julia what she already knew.

  A little later she appeared and asked, “Would you like a glass of wine perhaps?”

  Yes, wine, he was ready for some of that now. Most of all he would have liked to get drunk and free himself of that haunted castle, as Falk had called it, compared with which Count Dracula’s was an idyllic country seat—but at the same time he knew that he would not be able to, any more than the Falks. Now the Obersalzberg site was impossible to find and completely overgrown with trees and bushes, through which certain kinds of tourists tried to find a way—but only in reality, not where it really mattered.

  In silence they sipped the cheap supermarket wine, which was too sweet and no more than one glass of which must be drunk. Herter felt that he should say something first, but what more was there to say? He shook his head.

  “I have never heard a more shocking or more unsatisfactory story. I can only repeat what I said, Mr. Falk. I am speechless.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I’m grateful to you for being willing to listen to me. You have helped us a great deal.”

  “Yes,” said Julia, looking into her glass.

  So now he could get up and take his leave, but that would be too abrupt.

  “What happened afterward?”

  “The following day we received a telegram of condolence from Bormann, on behalf of the Führer.”

  Herter sighed and was silent for a moment. “Where was Siggi buried?”

  “In the cemetery of Berchtesgaden, three days later. There were just a few of us: Julia’s parents, Mittlstrasser, Mrs. Köppe, and a few other members of the staff. The comedy continued, with us as grieving parents.”

  Julia looked up. “But that’s what we were, in fact.”

  “Of course that’s what we were, Julia. That’s what we still are.”

  Herter glanced from one to the other. There seemed to be a point of friction here.