A Man Lies Dreaming (18 page)

And those long interminable hours on the slow train away from the front and the groaning of the wheels and the murmur of soldiers and the taste of hot strong tea which he never drank but was given anyway, his shaking hands all but spilling the drink, and turning his head, this way and that, helplessly: where was the
window
?

In that slow procession of the train Wolf died and was reborn and died again. Could this really be the end of him? To be just another casualty of the war, another disabled soldier, blinded, lame: never to hold a brush and paint again, never to know the sun setting over a field, the colour of fire or blood, and to become – what? A beggar in the streets of Vienna or Berlin, coins rattling in a tin cup, Spare some change, spare some change for an ex-soldier?

He put his hand against the window, feeling the cold outside. He could not see; and yet could see so clearly.

The future lay ahead like a broken road. He would kill himself, he thought with sudden savagery. Put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, no time for thought, a quick ending denied him by the war. No more would he be Wolf, he would be nothing, dust as all men must become dust. And was that so terrible? Was that so wrong?

He must have dozed off, eventually. He was woken to the silence that follows the breaking of a train, the lull between stop and renewed motion. Outside, the other soldiers were gathering their kitbags, calling to each other, doors were opening and slamming, boots on snow, and Lance-Corporal Wolf roused himself to follow, into the cold and the unknown.

Although he did not know it, the future lay ahead for him still …

‘Mr Wolf?’

Wolf roused himself. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, almost spitting out the English word. That sibilant sound. He ran his tongue around his mouth. It tasted sour. He stepped out of the car. ‘Yes, what is it?’ he said testily.

‘Come, Mr. Wolf,’ Virgil said grandly. He nodded and, as if responding to his command, the wharf was suddenly bathed in bright electric light. Wolf was momentarily blinded. He blinked back tears. When he opened his eyes again the wharf was transformed and he took a step back unwittingly.

The warship floating down the river was enormous. Its grey hull shone wet and above it rose an armoured citadel, topped by the rising conning tower, with gun-slits like malevolent eyes. It was a marvel of engineering, lying low in the water yet carrying enough firepower, Wolf saw at a glance, to lay waste to a small coastal town. Wolf was immediately in love.

‘What
is
she?’ he said, awed.

‘She’s an amphibious HST Destroyer,’ Virgil said, with obvious pride. He was like a cowboy out of one of Karl May’s Western novels, speaking of his prized cow.

‘High Speed Transport?’ Wolf said.

‘Indeed, Mr Wolf. American born and bred, our USS
Valkyrie
.’

Wolf turned his head sharply, but Virgil seemed not to notice.

‘The Chooser of the Slain …’

‘Indeed, Mr Wolf. You have a knowledge of the classics.’ Virgil barked an order and the doors of the warehouses opened as one, and Wolf saw men streaming out. They wore civvies but they were military men all the same, American soldiers in civilians’ clothes. Beyond the open doors he saw the warehouses were in fact giant hangars. There were planes inside, crates of ammunition and arms, camouflage netting, an arsenal for a small and private war.

Wolf said, ‘Does the British government …
know
of your presence here?’

Virgil waved his hand dismissively. ‘We are not officially here, Mr Wolf.’

‘And unofficially?’

Virgil shrugged. ‘Everyone wants to see the Red Menace removed,’ he said.

Wolf surveyed the dock, which only moments before had appeared abandoned. The warship floated serenely in the Thames. ‘What if I say no?’ Wolf said; he spoke low; the words were loath to depart his larynx.

Virgil seemed amused. ‘You would refuse?’ he said. ‘We would make you great again, Mr Wolf. We would put men at your service, arms at your disposal. The offer of the might of the entire United States of America behind you, Mr Wolf, is not something to refuse lightly.’

Probabilities swam in Wolf’s mind, futures diverging like roads in a yellow wood. His mouth felt dry. He nodded his head, slowly, uncertainly. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he agreed.

‘Good man!’ Virgil clapped him on the back, as if all were decided, nearly sending Wolf sprawling. ‘Come. Let me show you our little base.’ He walked with great purpose, his giant hands swinging loosely by his side. He looked like a great ape then, and yet he walked as though he owned the very earth he stepped on. Wolf followed him with trepidation, and yet with wonder, too. Like a sleepwalker he was dragged in Virgil’s wake through the bright unreal glare of floodlights high overhead, and when he moved his hand before his face it was as though bio-luminescence had clung to his skin and trailed a ghostly band of colour through the air. Inside the first warehouse he saw men with a military bearing and civilian clothes sitting tensely around a radio receiver; maps of Europe on the wall, dotted with coloured pins; unmarked heavy wooden crates piled in one corner; camouflage nettings in another; an upturned rubber dinghy, a mechanic working patiently with a boat engine between his knees; more crates, one open, showing Wolf the armaments inside, guns oiled until they shone. Then through to the second warehouse where two Cessna light aircraft were sitting at rest, a group of men in overalls sitting playing cards on upturned empty crates. Then last to the water where the destroyer,
Valkyrie
, sat in all her glory, with her silent power, and the men climbing on board her like worshippers at temple, for all that they seemed as small as ants. And more warehouses, on the other side, filled with ammo and guns, tinned food, parachutes, rockets, grenades, bayonets and handguns, an Aladdin’s Cave of lethal wonders, not to mention the explosives. Round and round in the empty space before the jetty Wolf turned and turned like a bride whose face was raised to the high sun, round and round he turned as though he’d been dancing.

‘All laid at your service, Mr Wolf, and in the service of your country, your Fatherland, to be liberated, made whole, replenished and resplendent once again.’

As in a dream: ‘And if I say no?’

‘But you won’t, Mr Wolf. Why would you?’ A paternal chuckle, perhaps that is who Virgil reminded him of: his old man the ogre, dead and buried these many years. ‘How could you refuse?’

And, still in that dreaming state: ‘But think it over. And Bernie will drop you off wherever you like.’

*    *    *

Half-asleep in the infirmary, Shomer listens to the sounds of Jews gossiping.

‘I heard he can’t get it up.’

Laughter.

The same speaker: ‘Not in the … usual way.’

‘What does that mean.’

‘
I
heard …’ the man lowers his voice. ‘
I
heard he likes to be … whipped.’

A shocked indrawn breath. ‘Whipped?’

‘Spanked. Like a child.’

‘Feh!’

‘
I
heard he only has one ball.’

‘One ball! Can you imagine such a thing?’

Shomer stirs. Around him there is temporary merriment. In the infirmary no one has to work, there is nothing to do, and nothing to wield but words.

And he thinks of
him
. And pictures him humiliated, gagged, dominated, abused.

‘I heard he has a thing for young
shikses
. The blonde, zaftig ones. Good Aryan types.’

‘What I wouldn’t give to shtup one.’

Laughter.

‘
I
heard he’s fucking that film director.’

‘Who, Fritz Lang?’

Laughter.

‘No, Leni Riefenstahl.’

‘Her? I heard they’re thick as thieves.’

‘I’d slip her the sausage!’

‘What sausage? You mean your toothpick?’

‘Screw you!’

‘I thought she was good in
The Blue Light
,’ someone says.

‘She’s a Nazi!’

‘So
nu
? They’re all Nazis.’

A lull. Shomer turns, blinks. Thinks of
him
, in bed: does he ever think of them, in the camp? Does he imagine what they feel, what they miss, how they die? Does he know them at all, beyond the numbers on their arms? And he pictures a book of accounts, filled with rows and rows of endless numbers, a book as large as a world.

‘I heard he likes them to …’

‘To what?’

‘No, no.’

‘What?’

‘No, no …’

‘Go on!’

‘I heard he likes them to, to
piss
on him!’

‘
Feh
!’

‘Are you
meshuggeh
? Who does such a thing?’

‘A wilde
chaye
, a wild beast!’

‘I have a bucket here for him, a bucket of piss!’

Laughter.

Then silence, as each man withdraws into his own private cell of the mind. Shomer tosses and turns, restless. From below: ‘And what do
you
think,
luftmensch
?’

Shomer almost smiles. It’s what they’d taken to calling him: a dreamer, a man with his head in the clouds.

‘What I think, boychiks?’ he says. He pauses to consider. Says, ‘I think what I think doesn’t mean a God damn.’

‘Putz!’

‘After the war I’m only going to buy German-made pens,’ someone says. Waits expectantly.

‘Why?’

‘The ink won’t come off!’

Groans all around, then a silence.

‘May he die a thousand deaths,’ someone says, but quietly.

Wolf’s Diary, 7th November 1939 –
contd
.

It was a glorious dream. ‘Bernie will take you wherever you want,’ Virgil had said. The car moved soft and smooth like a young woman; the whole city glittered that night, its lights burned clean and clear; the very air was warm, enchanted. To be old and in love with an impossible dream is the bitterest thing.

‘Where to, sir?’

‘Just drive.’

As the docks receded behind us, the dream lost tangibility, the air became colder and thinner, and I felt as though I were waking up.

A dream. It was just a dream.

And I was cursed with greatness, or had been once. I knew when I was being sold a falsehood. Shit wrapped in roses smells no less like shit.

Oh, I had no doubt this man who called himself Virgil was, in his own mercenary way, sincere. And for a moment I had let myself be dazzled by the promise: the grand warship, the airplanes, the guns, the men. For a moment longer I was seduced by the American dream.

Then reality set in.

One ship, two rickety airplanes and a handful of men with guns.

Did Virgil propose to take over Germany with
that
? It would have been laughable if it weren’t so heartbreakingly sad. Once I had held all of Germany in the palm of my hand. I had men beyond count, the army on my side. What Virgil was offering me was a group of mercenaries who would not get farther than a Hamburg suburb before they were slaughtered and fed to the local farmers’ pigs. What was I saying – that bunch of American cowboys wouldn’t have made it as far as fucking
Glückstadt
.

‘God damn you!’ I said, with feeling. ‘
Scheisse
!’

‘Excuse me, sir?’

‘Just drive!’

He must have been told to humour me, for he obliged without a murmur.

Which led me back to my first question, the one I had asked Virgil, and then again: the one he would not answer.

What if I turned down his offer?

Virgil wanted a regime change in Germany. What he needed was a symbol, a figurehead to reunite the remnants of Nazism into a resistance force.

I knew better. The communists had put what was left of the Party in prisons and camps, and brutally oppressed any and all dissent. National Socialism was done, finished, its practitioners dead or scattered. My old comrades who had managed to escape were now homeless émigrés, and small-time gangsters in all but name …

But the Americans were mad enough to try. Maybe. Not too mad as to provide more than a handful of mercenaries, though. Working without official sanction, maintaining deniability.

If not me, I thought: then
who
?

And somehow answering that was important: more important than I could say.

Who could replace
me
?

Göring was a good comrade, now. He was fat but he was smart: he would sell his own mother if it benefited him and he would have sold the Yanks down the river without a blink. But Göring had gone over to the communists, was no doubt flourishing in the new Germany.

So Göring was out.

Hess? But Hess was in London and comfortable with his émigré club and his principles lost. Hess could have been second only to me, but he had always been weaker, softer: and he corrupted.

Not Hess.

Then who? Goebbels? Himmler?

Whereabouts unknown.

Streicher? Dead.

Bormann? He had been Hess’s deputy but I could not underestimate him. He liked to work behind the scenes.