The House of Rumour (51 page)

A hostage of the Cold War, he still indulged in the art of forgetting from time to time. It had become something of a habit, to keep them guessing. And forgetting had become something of a protocol.

Only the previous year, in 1986, it had been revealed that the new President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, had lied about his war record. Whilst serving with the Wehrmacht, Waldheim had witnessed, and perhaps been complicit in, many more war crimes than Hess ever had. The Deputy pondered on this more with relish than indignation.

He had taught the world its gentle amnesia.

But he let no one judge him. He was still the pure fool.

He looked back again at the black guard. The man kept his distance. Perhaps there was a mutual sense of contempt. Hess entered the summerhouse unescorted.

He had heard strange rumours that the Cold War was coming to an end. A new Russian leader with a policy of openness. The Soviets had always refused to let him go. Until now.

He had regretted nothing, remained loyal until the very end. He closed the door of the summerhouse and went to sit by the window.

That spring there had been an article in a German newspaper claiming that the Russian premier was considering his release. The thought of it filled him with terror.

He looked out of the summerhouse. The Soviet warders would usually watch him through the window. He could see no one. An electrical extension lead for the reading lamp was tied to the latch.

He had always denied their right to try him. Ignored their verdicts and sentences. They had no power to grant him freedom now.

He carefully wound the cord around his neck, judging the distance he would have to fall. It was simple enough, to slip sideways off his chair. Yes. He was ready. Ready to pass the final judgement on himself. Ready to fly once more.

21

the world

If you can’t change the world, build a spaceship.

Ever since we started dreaming, we dreamt of flight, of escape.

And as I write, the Voyager 1 space probe is 10,843,294,886 miles from the sun, about 0.00183 of a light year away. It’s been travelling for thirty-four years and will soon cross the Heliopause, a terminal boundary where the solar wind’s strength is no longer sufficient to repel those of other systems. Then it will enter the Interstellar Medium, the space between the stars of our galaxy.

It will be the first human artefact to leave our solar system and it might well be what we are judged by one day. About the size and weight of a Volkswagen, it’s moving at 38,185 miles per hour with no particular place to go, though in forty thousand years it will come within 1.6 light years of a star known as AC+793888 in the constellation of Ophiuchus. On the probe is a gold-plated phonographic record encoded with music, sounds and images from earth, intended for any extraterrestrials that might one day encounter it. On the disc are greetings, the breath of fifty-five languages and a message from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the official spokesman of our world.

Forgive me if I wander – now that I am so close to the end, my mind is firing off in all directions. I can offer few conclusions, no great revelation at the Last Trump. It’s merely been a fool’s journey through an arcana of knowledge. I feel like the solitary space probe, hurtling towards the furthest reaches of deep space, yet still emitting faint signals of particle data. I have no belief in an afterlife, only the unmanned hope that information survives and can continue to be understood. Maybe Voyager will outlast us all and tell our story to the rest of the universe.

As above, so below.

Built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Voyager 1 is still responding to messages and commands sent from its mission control in Pasadena, now an industrial complex built on the scrubland of the Arroyo Seco where Jack Parsons and his group tested rocket engine prototypes over seventy years ago. I remember the night of the party there back in ’41 and what might have been a special Mass to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain. I see Mary-Lou’s face haloed by firelight, naked figures flickered in shadow, and I think of it more as the site of my own foolish emotional trajectory. The brief euphoria; the abrupt falling to earth.

But it was there Jack Parsons dreamt of his own cosmic journey. He has since become a cult figure with an counter-culture mythology so rare and glamorous that it’s sometimes hard to believe he actually existed. Always on the edge of fantasy and reality, he embodies that wondrous time when magic and technology merged, and science fiction became fact. And the conventional world eventually recognised his contribution to space exploration. In 1972 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the moon after him (on the dark side, naturally).

Mary-Lou once said that it was I who never got over him and she was right. I couldn’t help feeling eclipsed by him when I was with her. Ours was a tentative relationship, to say the least. The uncertainty that comes when two people know each other so well. I knew that it was never going to be a grand passion and for a while I was happy enough to hold on to what we always had. There was this warm charge of potential, as if it might be the beginning of something. I just wish it could have been more than that.

I wasted far too much time trying to make sense of things. Asking her stupid questions, brooding on all the strange connections in our past. I’m still doing it now. It’s clear that Astrid, the German fortune-teller who lived at the commune in Pasadena, was the same woman mentioned in Trevelyan’s manuscript, and though Mary-Lou didn’t know about her having any direct involvement with the Hess case, she was sure that Astrid had been arrested as part of a Gestapo crackdown on astrologers. So I did my own reading on the subject and found out that on 9 June 1941, the Reich Main Security Office ordered
Aktion Hess
, a widespread arrest of astrologers and occultists. Books and papers were confiscated; hundreds of men and women were questioned and many were detained in concentration camps.

Trevelyan mentions this but he overlooks the possibility that this action might have been an aspect of German disinformation – that they too could have used the Hess affair to confuse their enemies. It certainly caused the Soviets to distrust British Intelligence at a time when it was warning them of an impending invasion. The Nazis’ response to the Deputy’s flight stressed an occult symbolism right from the start and their own House of Rumour became a vortex for conspiracy theories. Aktion Hess could well have been an exercise in counter-intelligence since some of its guidelines are patently absurd. A questionnaire drawn up by an SS ‘ideological research’ unit, to be used during interrogations, lists as question 11:
Should members of different races (Aryans, Jews, Chinese and Negroes) born at the same place under identical constellations expect the same astrological interpretations? If yes, then do you not admit the racial requirements of fate?
But then such is the logic of National Socialism. Perhaps Hitler was determined to prove to the world that he no longer feared any superstition. He ordered the surprise attack on Russia thirteen days later on 22 June, the precise anniversary of Napoleon’s ill-fated campaign against Imperial Russia, and he gave it the code name Barbarossa, after the doomed emperor who drowned in the River Saleph during the disastrous Third Crusade.

‘When Barbarossa begins,’ Hitler declared, ‘the world will hold its breath.’

The largest military operation in human history and the most devastating in loss and suffering: this was the destiny of the Nazi
Weltanschauung
. Along a frontier eighteen hundred miles long, Germany and her allies massed 4.5 million troops with 600,000 motor vehicles, 7,000 field guns, 3,580 tanks, 1,830 aircraft and 750,000 horses. The Soviets were utterly unprepared for the attack. Stalin deliberately ignored clear warnings, even from his own Red Orchestra intelligence network, denouncing them as disinformation. When the mobilisation against the invasion did come, however, the struggle became ruthless and apocalyptic. ‘If the Germans want a war of extermination,’ Stalin announced in a speech marking the anniversary of their great utopian revolution, ‘they shall have it.’

The world held its breath.

Millions perished in a conflict of unimaginable cruelty while at the same time the Third Reich began to fully implement its genocidal Final Solution. Yet Barbarossa failed. Overstretched and frozen into paralysis by an early winter, the Nazis were pushed back from Moscow. Despite enormous losses in territory, people and resources, the Soviets fought on and survived. This was the turning point of the war; from then on the Nazis began losing. And finding itself at a logistical disadvantage with depleted resources, the Reich began investing in research and development to create
Wunderwaffen
: super-weapons that they imagined would give them a strategic advantage. Science fiction prototypes and the rocket technology that would become an essential component of the American space programme.

I’m tempted to read the Hess affair as a jonbar moment – that crude device of SF’s Golden Age. In a time of uncertainty when we clumsily applied quantum ideas to pulp narratives with multiple worlds and parallel universes, 1941 seems the point when fiction was at its most speculative. It was the heyday of the Mañana Literary Society and the year that Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ was first published. And the flight to Scotland was like the double-slit experiment, where any event can have more than one outcome. If Hess had made peace in the West, could the Nazis have won in the East? In a labyrinth of dangerous possibilities, any number of brutal alternate histories or guilty fantasies of power proliferate. Hess himself was drawn by his paranormal sense of destiny – to make his leap in space to try to disrupt the order of time. And, in turn, I start to retrace my own steps. All memoir can become an exercise in counter-faction in the end. What might or might not have been. I might have been spared combat duty and never have flown those thirty missions, nor seen those strange lights in the sky over the Rhineland. I would not have had to come home from a European war to find Mary-Lou still in love with Jack Parsons and, out of some misplaced shell-shocked bravado, pretend that I didn’t care any more. I could have acted even then but I left it too late. And the scarce time we had together was spent at the wrong end of our lives. Mary-Lou died five years ago, but it hardly seems like anything at all. Everything speeds up so much when you get this old.

A half-life of memories in decay: my twilight affair with Mary-Lou short-term and fading fast; the image of her and Jack burning brighter than ever. Mary-Lou once showed me a poem of his:

I remember

When I was a star

In the night

A moving, burning ember

Amid the bright

Clouds of star fire

Going deathward

To the womb.

This now seems such a prescient image of the Voyager probe, that tiny starship forever linked to him, sent out on a grand tour of the solar system, taking advantage of an auspicious alignment of the planets that allowed for gravitational slingshots to extend its trajectory so that it could visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before being catapulted into deep space. A flight augured by an astrological conjunction, as if guided by that synthesis of science and the occult that Parsons tried to conjure. It even calls to mind ‘Zodiac Empire’, Mary-Lou’s space-opera that I tried to finish.

But the universe has a nasty sense of humour. When you try to force these sorts of connections on it, it’s liable to respond with irony rather than revelation.

Trace another particle, tease one more individual out of the cloud mass of history. Take Kurt Waldheim, a cavalry lieutenant in the Wehrmacht in 1941. His true path is uncertain: wounded during the Russian counter-attack to Barbarossa, he later lied about his war record, claiming that he was discharged from further service at this point. We know that he became an intelligence officer in Bosnia and Greece, that circumstantial evidence links him with atrocities committed there, but we may never discover the truth of his actual involvement in them. This has been lost in the art of forgetting. There have even been allegations that his subsequent diplomatic career was part of a Cold War game, that both the CIA and the KGB knew of his dishonourable past and blackmailed him for their own purposes. Echoes in the House of Rumour. What is certain is his soaring trajectory in international politics. In 1965 he represented Austria at the UN; in 1968 he was president of the First Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. He achieved the highest office as de facto spokesman and leader of the United Nations when he was elected Secretary-General in 1971. In 1977, in his second term as the official spokesman of the world, he was invited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make a recording.

Yes, it is Waldheim’s breath etched into the golden disc aboard Voyager 1, sending greetings of peace and friendship to the occupants of outer space. W.G. Sebald, in his book
The Rings of Saturn
, has pointed out this rather bleak joke: that our diplomatic representative to the galaxy is a suspected war criminal. Perhaps we deserve nothing better. But I feel sorry for Nemo; he put so much faith in the Posadist vision that interstellar craft would necessarily be piloted by progressive socialists.