The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (18 page)

He walked briskly and tirelessly, his coat collar turned
up against the November damp, h
is hands stuffed into his pockets. Once he stopped at one of the big
Litwwas Saü
len
,
a sort of a cylindrical public advertising board that stood on certain street corners with announcements of theatres, or music, or Government decrees. He studied a large, blood-red poster affixed to it, and the black lettering thereon. He had heard about them, but this was the first time he had seen one. It was the famous, gruesome, death notice of those whose heads had rolled on to the stones of the old Moabit prison courtyard for treason. Even Hiram could translate the wording, or at least gather the import. It was to the effect that Johann Grosch and Herta Vieralt had been executed the morning before for
Landesverat -
betrayal of country.

Hiram shuddered and touched the poster with his fingertips as though the contact with the glossy surface could somehow bring him closer to the torment of the poor souls who had walked out into the grey morning to face the terrible apparition in the frock coat, the high silk hat, and white gloves with the shining axe. But it told him nothing.

He looked at his wrist-watch. It was four o'clock of the morning of Thursday, November 10. He heard the chimes of the clock in the Gedachnis Kirche at the nearby Auguste Viktoria Platz strike the hour. At the fourth stroke a crashing explosion shook the pavement beneath his feet, followed by another and a third and fourth, mimicking almost in rhythm and spacing the strokes of the clock tower. Hiram Holliday knew where they came from. The Fasanen Strasse was only a half-block away and on it was a huge, ornate synagogue. He ran and turned the corner and saw four columns of smoke pouring up from the roof of the edifice, and two of them were already laced with shoots of bright orange flame. Simultaneously, Hiram heard for the first time the sound that was to ring through Berlin for the next twelve hours, the high-pitched crashing of shattering plate-glass to the accompaniment of the cry:
'Judah - Verrecke!'
'Perish, Jewry.'
...

The sleeping streets awoke at once to the roaring of motorcars and motor-cycles and fire apparatus. Crowds materialized out of the darkened houses. Hiram recognized the brown uniform of the famous storm-troopers, and the black and silver of the S.S. men, the Elite, or Black Guards. Police, with their small, coal-scuttle helmets, appeared magically. The crowds were silent except for a venomous rustling, the scrape-scrape-scrape of their feet, so that it seemed to Hiram as though some great, shadowy serpent was abroad and uncoiling through the streets. From distant quarters of the city came like kettledrum beats, the 'Poom
...
poom
...
poom
...'
of other explosions.

The curving dome of the synagogue began to throw orange flame in large boiling gouts. Someone had started a bonfire in the middle of the street and men, booted and leather-jacketed, kept running in and out of the great central door. They carried out with them books, and scrolls, and trappings, desks and benches, which they heaved into the blaze in the street. Firemen, their brass helms gleaming in the double firelight, went into action with their hoses, but Hiram noted that the streams were not directed into the flames but on to the houses adjoining the burning church.

With a sudden pang, he bethought himself of the antique store in the Kurfursten Damm, and threading his way through the growing mass of people he went back to it. He had to shoulder his way through another crowd to reach it, but here his harmless and nondescrip
t appearance again stood him in
stead, and they let him through. He reached the inside of the circle just as the first wooden club, in the hands of one of the dreaded Roll Kommandos, battered in a section of the huge plate-glass window.

There were seven in the Roll Kommando, or wrecking crew, and Hiram noted that they all wore the so-called
Rauberzivil
uniform, or 'bandit mufti,' consisting of short leather jackets without identification marks, worn over uniform trousers and boots. Hiram saw that two of them were young boys who wore knickers beneath their jackets.

The air shivered and danced to the ring of breaking glass and a deeper crash announced that the door had been smashed in, and then came the sharp clinking sound of porcelain and china and cut glass swept off shelves to shatter on the ground. A little man with grey hair ran out of the door from somewhere into the bare circle made by the police who kept the crowd back, and he held both hands to his head, and cried:
'Oh Gott
,
Oh Gott!
Nein
...
Nein !'

One of the wreckers immediately struck him on top of the head with his wooden batten and he fell to his knees, moaning and weeping, a dark strain showing in his white hair. Two or three voices from the crowd shouted:
'Jude
...
Jude..
..
Gib den Jude.
..
!
Two storm-troopers in brown uniforms yanked the man to his feet and held him while a third slugged him with his fists, so that his head bobbed from side to side.

In Hiram Holliday there was already a desperate sickening that had begun with the spiteful destruction of the beautiful things that lined the shop, and his stomach turned again as he watched the storm-trooper beating the helpless man, the more so because he was using his fists the way a woman does, and screaming hysterical imprecations in a cracked falsetto voice. It was so foul that he had to turn away to fight off the nausea, and when he shifted his glance it fell full upon the cruel, magnificent, fantastic breath-taking woman who had forced her low-slung, lavender-coloured nickelled sports car to the kerb and was standing up in the driver's seat, her hair flying in the wind that had come up.

Her background was the fire glare from the burning synagogue, but her hair was redder than any of the shoots and tongues of flame that boiled up out of the coal black and sulphur yellow smoke, and it poured and swirled and ascended from her head as though she, too, were on fire. The dead white, oval face beneath it, lit green and red by two staring emerald eyes, and the crimson cut of her mouth made Hiram Holliday think of an Egyptian temple urn he had once seen, and her hair was the votive flame rising from the top.

She was large - Hiram judged her to be as tall as himself -and she was dressed in a glossy mink coat, and a white scarf was wound around and around her throat until it seemed to him that her appallingly beautiful head rested not upon her neck, but floated disembodied upon a white cloud. And when the wind that fluttered her hair turned back the edges of her coat, he saw that beneath it she wore nothing but a nightdress.

The uproar and the terrible night was catching up Hiram's soul, and bending and buffering it, and he saw the girl thus the first time to the evil music of destruction, the 'thop-thop-thop' of the blows of the storm-trooper, still striking the now unconscious man, the near to inhuman screams, the wild clanging of the fire bells, and the wrenching and cracking of splintering wood. He was conscious of two impulses, and they shook him so that he felt that he was near the end of his control. The one was to rush to her and bury his face in her breast, and the other was to get his fingers into the white fluff of silk beneath her chin and grope until they found the flesh, and then throttle her until those staring green lamps of eyes went out for ever.

It was Walpurgis Nacht, and she the Red Witch upon the Brocken, and the Brocken was her cream and lavender car, a colour that deadened her face and brightened the pyrotechny of her hair. She stood on her car with both hands to her breast, a weird, wonderful, compelling figure of a woman, with her mouth half-parted, and a curl to her lower lip, and Hiram could not tell whether she gazed upon the maudlin, obscene sight being enacted before her with love, or with hate, but he knew that he, Hiram Holliday, was looking upon this woman that he had never seen before with such longing and hatred combined that they were well-nigh unbearable.

The air was full of the pungent, acid smell of smoke, but in Hiram's nostrils was nothing but the scent that his tortured imagination pictured as coming from her, the distant waft of the rising perfume of hell, smelled at the gates of heaven. The spell was partly broken, but only for a moment when she gave a little cry, but again, he could not tell whether it was of horror or of glee, and when he turned his head back to the scene of riot and ruination, he saw that three of the wreckers had dragged the lovely maple harpischord out of the window on to the street. A man yelled:
'Ha, Junge
r Volksgenosse, spiel uns etwas
auf dem Juden-instrument
' One of the young wreckers in
knickers and leather jacket,
bare-headed, adolescent fuzz on
his broad, flat mouth, pulle
d up a spindly French chair and
sat down at the instrument, an
d began to pound out a military
march and the poor, pathetic
, tinny, tinkling sound that it
gave forth suddenly brought half-blinding tears to Hiram's
eyes....
It cried to him with it
s whispering, ancient, cultured
voice that rang down the corridor
s of the decades from civiliza
tion to savagery: 'Mozart
...
Mozart Help
me....'
The
crowd took up the tune and began to chant it, and stamp their feet, and the other wreckers came and beat the time upon the polished case with their hardwood billets, and each beat gouged and scarred the surface. Hiram stole a look at the tall girl in the car, and with horror saw that ever so faintly, her head was moving, hardly perceptibly, to the rhythm of the beat.

And then the thread that held Hiram Holliday in check was snapped. The last wrecker came out of the shattered shop. He was a tall, powerfully built man dressed in a raincoat, and his trousers were stuffed into huge, military boots. He timed himself with his running jump so that his leap into the air coincided with the fall of the boy's hand playing the finishing bar of the tune, and with the chord his boots went through the top of the harpsichord, with a wrenching, tinny, tearing sound through the slender wires of the harp; the delicately carved legs splayed outwards and gave way, man and instrument crashed to the ground, and a roar of laughter went up from the uniformed men watching, though now the crowd was quite silent. The head of the girl was thrown back and her face was turned towards the orange-coloured sky, and Hiram thought that it was in silent laughter. He could stand no more. He must kill her, but kill her he could not. Yet act he must, or not care to live to see himself mirrored, ever again.

The storm-trooper who had been beating the proprietor of the store had relinquished him, and was standing looking down at the mess of man and wreckage tangled on the pavement, and laughing in a silly high-pitched shriek. Hiram Holliday walked over to him, and because he was on the other side of the circle, he had to go some fifteen steps, and everybody saw him and watched him, and he knew the girl in the car was watching him, too, and when he reached the shrieking trooper, he pulled back his right hand, and hit him on the point of chin with every ounce of drive, of protest, of disgust and sorrow and outrage that was in his being. The blow went 'Smack!' and cut off the top of a shriek of laughter as though the man had been garrotted. He fell backwards on to the pavement, his arms and legs spread-eagled, and lay still.

Hiram saw the three storm-troopers making for him, their faces, eyes and mouths distended, black uniformed guards converging from another direction, and went to the ground rolling, and kicking out at legs and ankles as the first wave broke over him. He struck out and fought, seeking to trip and break up the white-hot, angry men, and bring them to earth. He felt blows and kicks, his hand was trampled on. There was a roaring in his ears and his chest was burning from his exertions.

He was saved for a moment by the numbers of men trying to get at him to tear him apart, their blind savagery and the confusion helping him. He had hoped to be able to get his hands on some kind of a weapon, but found nothing, and rolled out from under a tangle of shouting, flailing men, struggling to his feet looking for an avenue of escape. But he was spotted immediately, and there were angry cries and a sullen roar from the gathering crowd. Something struck him on the head and dizzied him so that he could no longer think clearly, but he knew that in the next few moments he would most surely be beaten to death. And then there was a new noise in his ears, a roaring larger and louder than that of the inflamed crowd, the
grinding and exploding of a
tremendously powerful motor, as
like an antediluvian monster emer
ging out of an ancestral dream;
its siren horn screaming, he saw the nickelled snout and fiercely
glaring eyes of the headlamps of the lavender
roadster boring
through the crowd, cutting a la
ne by knocking bodies right and
left. At the wheel, and leaning
out of the side was the girl of
the white face and the burning
hair, and she was crying in the
voice of a Brunhilde:
'Achtung..
..
Achtung.
...
Pl
atz
machen.
Achtung !'
She r
ammed a black uniformed guards
man in the stomach with a
mudguard, and crushed the foot
of a Brownshirt who tried to
stop her. The blazing eyes were
coming nearer and nearer t
o Hiram as she battered her way
through the screaming
mob....
She was coming to kill him,
to run him
down....
Hiram
stood there swaying, hypnotized
by the blinding ray
s of the headlights, and waited for the jug
gernaut to smash him dow
n and trample him dead, but the
lights as they pounced upon him swerved s
uddenly aside, and
he felt a strong hand at his coat
collar, jerking him toward the
car. His foot found the runn
ing-board, his good hand groped
for the side. He heard her yell:
'Juche!'
a strange, sobbing,
eerie cry, and then:
'Fest Halten !
Hold on tight,' you stupid,
glorious fool!' and then wit
h a great, leaping surge, every
cylinder racketing like artill
ery salvos, the big car crashed
away, turned, spun sharply,
skidding - he would have fallen
off, but a firm, strong arm went around his waist and held h
im
jammed to the side - and was zooming down the street, picking
up speed, whipped a corner
in a hair-pin turn, another and
another, and then shot away
down a long, broad, tree-lined
avenue. Hiram spat out a m
outhful of blood. The cold wind
was clearing his head. The girl
shouted to him: 'Can you climb
in now?'