Stormfuhrer (16 page)

He helped Savina out of the side-car.  It had begun to snow lightly, and they trudged their way towards the dark cabin.  Richard carried his Luger under the high mound of blankets, in case he was wrong about it being uninhabited.  They walked down the sloping hill of trees, the motorcycle hidden in an indentation behind a hill of snow and brush.  Savina whispered, “Are you still the good Heinrich?”  He thought for a moment and replied, “If I weren’t, would I be here trying to get you safe?”  She squinted through the snowy flakes in the direction of the cabin.  “Stay the good Heinrich, OK?”

“
Count on it.”

Richard kept his word until three days of fatigue and a splitting headache took the choice from him.

CHAPTER 9

It was a wind whose sand would rip the skin from one’s body.  It was the Mongolian waterless rain.  A storm of hot, stinging glass.  The tent whipped violently and ripped in places, filling quickly in its recesses with heavy mounds of sand.  It was in everything and began weighing down on the pair from above.  Savina was smiling at Richard’s determined scowl.  He was determined that they would survive the night.  There was simply not enough cover between them to leave the tent for more than a few seconds before being ripped to shreds.  Staying meant being buried alive.

The dream quickly faded. 

When Richard finally awoke in his futon, he sat up and stared into the circular window just below the triangular roof.  Nails stuck out from the plywood overhead.  He watched the particles of dust in the air shift in the hazy light emitted from the dingy little circular window.  He thought back on the dream, trying to recall its allure--and menace.  After a vain attempt, he refocused on what he was seeing now from below on his mattress: a dim and open space, boxes piled against the edges of the A-frame, floating dust.  “There must be more than this,” he thought.  “There must be more.”

There was more.  There was the Game, the corner of his cabin where he had played, and lived.  He began to climb down the narrow stairs and stopped midway.  When he saw the computer, it came back to him in flashes.  Where had he last seen Savina?  There was snow, cold and hunger.  It had become so real for him over the last several days that while his avatar ate, from some of the stores he could find in the winter cabin, he, Hayes, had forgotten to do so.  He hadn’t eaten for . . . then he remembered. . . “Savina!” 

Richard surged forward, tripping down the stairs, and fell hard on both palms.  His arms ached to the elbows.  He slid across the room and to the corner, and dragged himself into the squeaky, black chair.  He had no idea how he had ended up on the futon or how the helmet was now lying beside the computer.

He squashed the helmet over his head and hit buttons impatiently.

When he reached her through the wires, diodes, and chips, she was asleep.  He could now feel the cold intensely.  That was new, he thought vaguely.   Or was his aircon turned down too low?  No, it had been turned off for some reason.  The beast had been silent.

Only a second’s pause occurred, less than a second, and he was there, stroking her hair, now as Richard.  His head throbbed with pain and dizziness, which began as soon as he entered the avatar.  He felt dampness at his right ear.  Blood.  That explained the headache and the dizziness.  An iron poker lay near the fireplace of the snowed-in cabin, dabbed with blood at its tip.  He was stroking her hair.  He had been doing so when he entered the game and the Mauer avatar.  She was clothed and bundled in the blankets on the floor in front of the fireplace, apparently asleep, breathing slowly.  She didn’t look hurt.

2027

“How do you know Mr. Hayes?” Karl looked at the old woman leaning against the wall beside him.  She seemed asleep.  He slipped off his shoes, in case they might accidentally rub against the woman on the narrow bed, dropping them lightly to the cold floor. 

“
It is a long story.  But it is all in the journal.”  Her eyes never opened.

“
How did you get it?  The journal I mean?”

“
He left it.  In Poland.”

“
I didn’t know Mr. Hayes had been to Poland.” 

No response.

“Did you both meet in Poland?” 

Again, nothing.

Clearly he would get more information from the old hand-written book than from this living artifact. 

“
Mr. Hayes, okay if I read your journal?” 

No response. 

“I won’t if you don’t want me to.  Seems sorta private.” 

Nothing. 

Hayes was still staring into the layers of mesh and window from his little desk by the wall.  The derelict pair of headphones still covering his ears.

Karl watched Mr. Hayes for some sign of understanding.  He went back to reading the book.  He flipped through the beginning and found a paragraph that looked interesting, his legs propping up the book in front of him.  A part of him hesitated to dig into the man’s personal life.  A bigger part was curious, as everyone was, how and why Mr. Hayes had become this way.

With so little physical activity, I’ve been getting away with only four hours of sleep a night.  All I want right now is to see the game through, but more than that—to be with Savina and keep her safe.  In her eyes I am a schizophrenic. 

Carlos has been here a few times.  In and out like a silent wasp.  Left some onions.  I’ll have to ask him why he changed the old lampshade on the corner table.  Maybe he broke it and replaced it without saying anything.  I like the new shade better than the old anyway.  No, no point in bringing it up when he comes back.

I had to let him have Fraulein.  He’d always wanted a dog to guard his acreage.  Maybe the lamp was his way of saying thanks.  That and the bags of onions.

The war really hasn’t yet affected Bavaria, aside from the lack of some essentials that are being sent more and more into the cities.  Helmut and Greta came into the cellar just now.  They’re a good old couple with a lot of years left in them, and I certainly didn’t want them to get caught up in this, with the possibility of being turned in for harboring a Pole and an AWOL.  They would surely be sent to a camp if it were discovered, probably Dachau.  But there haven’t been any problems so far.  Not even a single house search for this old couple.  Their old radio here in the cellar has been a great source for information.  The Germans are using their U-Boats to sink everything in sight around the North sea, even the ships of neutral countries.  It won’t be long before the Germans begin bombing Britain and Hitler is strolling under the shade trees of Paris.  We need to be gone when Munich is attacked.

That sweet old frau danced with her husband, and then with me, and with Savina last night.  Helmut brought down armfuls of homemade schnapps in variously sized bottles.  We’ve never met a friend of this kind old couple.  They live kilometers from the nearest farm, which probably explains their lack of visitors and perhaps overly fond affection for us.  Thank God they never saw Bauer as he really is, the monster in me.  Or more accurately, the monster in whom I dwell and whom I control—most of the time.

Savina still believes me to be Mauer.  She thinks I have a split personality, so I’m going along with it.  It will be some time before she really understands.  I have her tie me up when I feel “the change” coming on, which for me really means that I’m just dead tired.  When I feel myself dozing off, I direct Savina to tie the appropriate knots that will keep Heinrich incapacitated until I come back.  Then I sleep.

There have been some rare occasions that we were both conscious at once—in those few seconds between sleep and waking.  When I half-doze after days of being awake, I felt him . . . yes felt him, urging up from within, like some tentacled creature rising up from a black tar-pit, wrapping my head in a cold, numbing embrace.  My arms begin to move on their own, my frame becomes heavier.  It’s chilling and seems to happen both in the game and in me, in my physical body.  But it only lasts for a few seconds until either I wake up and take full control or fall into oblivion. 

She is learning to call me Richard when I’m not Heinrich, the tied down monster of the Schutzstaffel.  There have been times after waking, with my helmeted head back against the chair, that I can’t move.  That my arms are welded to my sides, my ankles clinging together as if magnetized.  Again, lasting only some seconds, and then I’m back in the game, where, of course, my functioning is minimal until Savina unties the ropes, which she does once I tell her something Mauer wouldn't know.  What is it about her?  Her quickness of wit?  The lack of any contrived girly squeamishness on any subject of conversation?  She’s young, 25?  30?   There's so much else to discuss that age has never come up.

I woke up several hours ago with my hands around Helmut’s neck.  He was yelling.  Greta was screaming.  Savina was trying to pull me off of him.  I recoiled and collapsed on the floor.  They both left hastily up the stairs and out of the cellar.  They would have locked it but for Savina who followed them, pleading for understanding regarding my “condition,” using her body to keep the little door from shutting until she was able to make her case.  She was gone for a long time.  She then returned.

“What did you tell them?”

“
That you were ill.  Mentally ill since birth.  Seizures.”

“
Did they buy it?”

“
Not at first, since you and Helmut had been arguing about the war and it just sounded like an excuse for rude behavior.”

I was confused.  We were discussing the war and were in total agreement.  It was clearly Mauer who had taken over at some point.

Savina continued.  “I fell asleep.  When I awoke, you were shouting at Helmut, calling him an enemy of the Reich and the Fatherland.  You said that Germany would never fall, and that collaborators like Helmut should just turn themselves in.  Why were you so upset?”

“
I tell you it wasn’t me.  It was Mauer!  You’ve gotten used to him not being around very much, but when I sleep, in my home 83 years from now . . . he wakes up in this body.  This IS his body.” 

“
Explain it to me again.”

“
I am Richard Hayes, an American teacher living in the early 21
st
century,” I whispered, which was all I could seem to muster.

She was silent, as she usually was when I tried to explain my actual situation.  Then, she looked at me, closely.  She searched my eyes.  She seemed to know that it wasn’t Mauer and it wasn’t illness.  It was a different man from the one that threatened the old man and hurt her those months back.  I just looked at her and shook my head.  “I’m not Mauer.”

“I believe you.”

“
Really?”

“
Mauer referred to himself as ‘Schutzstaffel Stürmfuhrer Heinrich Mauer’ to the old man.  You don’t ever do that.  You've never discussed your rank.“

“
No, I don’t care about rank.“

“
You’re not him.”  Before I could respond she kissed me heavily, pressing me back to the ground, holding the back of my neck with one hand, the other on my chest.  I was still in ropes.  I didn’t believe it myself, but I could feel her touch through the helmet, across my ribs and neck.  It was real!  I was kissing the most incredible woman I had ever known, and I felt her on my lips, my neck, my chest as I sat at my desk wearing the helmet.

She untied me.  We sat in the cellar and stared at the opposite wall for thirty minutes or so talking about where we'd go from here.  Then, “Some part of me always knew you weren’t that bastard.”  It must have taken a tremendous amount of faith on her part, considering what she's been through.

“You know, you do that from time to time.”

“
What?”

“
Lapse into a kind of English.  It is English, isn’t it? 
I mean the word order.  You sometimes get it wrong, like you're thinking in another language while using German words.  Heinrich never did that.  He always spoke in perfect German.  Your German is full of pauses, and it’s sometimes not quite right.   I’ve never been around English people.

“
It’s been over 80 years since this war where I am, physically, right now.  You won’t believe how bad the war will be.  It has barely touched Germany, but the big cities will be ruins, like Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Munich.  It will start with Frankfurt.  If we don’t leave Germany, we need to at least get out of what will become the Russian sector.”

“
Russia and Germany will fight?”

“
Yes.  Germany will lose.  Badly.“  Her lack of even basic historical knowledge regarding the post-war world tells me that she isn't another player playing through an avatar.  She is a product of
this
world, but far more somehow.

I tried again to explain the situation of my world to her, to give her some notion of
my
reality—computers, Internet, satellites, nuclear missiles, cold war, Israel.  All of it resulting directly from how this war and its aftermath.  “Where I am, in the time period when I live, you are long dead.  Right now, I’m sitting in a chair wearing a helmet that allows me to see and hear, sometimes even feel, what is happening here.”

“
What do you look like?” she asked.

“
I'm in my late forties, balding, shorter. I wear glasses.  You wouldn't be impressed.”

“
I wouldn't care.”

I realize I will never really be with her, not in the way men and women are meant to be together.  This cyber existence I play like a curator in a museum fantasizing about living in one of his treasured, ancient paintings.  I am a horologist, a clock-builder, wanting only to turn the hands backward.   We're like two disembodied souls sharing a single sphere of space outside the time that separates our forsaken bodies.  But I'm no fool.  One day I'll wake up and the string that connects us will be cut, the bridge burned.  I will then walk alone amongst powdery bones of memory, pining for a woman long dead in every reality but that which I alone possess, in my mind.

Karen's avatar was dead.  She had risked her life keeping a pregnant Lithuanian woman from being “euthanized.”  She had stabbed a guard with the serum meant for the woman, and ran to hide in an empty closet.  She had been found and shot.

The problem was, she wouldn’t die, at least not completely.  She continued to play her avatar, waiting for a similar one to emerge, that never came.  She moved amongst the camp guards and prisoners with no one ever seeing her or knowing of her presence.  Her avatar was now, for all purposes, a ghost.

One afternoon after volleyball practice Karen opened the browser, hoping for a new character.  She had a key to Mr. Hayes’ room--many students did.  Almost instantly, she was there in Dachau, that cold early morning.  She saw the couple vanish past the crematorium at the back of the compound.  She followed them.  She knew Richard for who he was, a school teacher slash SS officer in the Dachau camp where she had been a medical officer.  She watched the couple make their way through the trees; he was carrying her.  Karen followed them until they had reached a barn.  They ducked inside where a motorcycle with a sidecar sat near some abandoned machinery.  Mauer, Mr. Hayes, had tried to start the motorcycle.  It did finally start, and they were allowed past the main gate with the girl buried in the blankets of the sidecar.

Karen had followed them and watched.  It was a real thrill to watch Mr. Hayes, the teacher who brought all this into the school, as he played his own game, using his own avatar.  Then again, what else could she do?  She found she could keep up with the motorcycle as it sped through the snowy Bavarian roads, over hills and wildly curving lanes.  Her avatar flew just above the ground.  Of course, she attributed this new power to the apparition that she had now become. 

Eventually, following the tracks of the motorcycle, she came to an embankment of thick brush.  She moved between the brush and the trees and found an abandoned cottage.  She watched the couple from a nearby room that the two had only entered once.  They seemed content to stay near the fireplace in the living area of the cottage.  The girl seemed passive and slept often.

Karen decided to stay in the cottage and watch the couple.  She thought he might need help, and she wanted to talk with him more about the game, in the game, particularly about the possibility of gaining a new avatar for herself.  She hesitated, however, as she was playing on a computer in his classroom while he was obviously playing at home.  So rather than risk a scandal involving the seniors possessing keys to a teacher’s classroom, Karen thought she might simply follow the instructor’s avatar.  It had developed into a very interesting scenario.

How Karen had found out about Mr. Hayes’ avatar went way back to an event that occurred a number of months ago near the “commissary,” as it was called, where mostly articles of clothing, glasses, and shoes were stored for distribution--after being taken from the newest inmates of the camp.  She had been in the process of recovering cloth to be disinfected and used for bandaging.  She heard him say his own real name in an attempt to bring this character into his confidences.