Cesare Page 3

  Fräulein, he wanted to say, please take me with you to the Grunewald, or drop me at the orphanage. I have to continue my studies.

  But the mirrored door of the salon shut on him and he was left with this tall stranger who might have been his uncle in another world, but his mother had barely mentioned her older brother, who lived in a castle, with a whole village at his beck and call. This ogre hadn’t even entered the boy’s dreams. Erik was a Berliner, not a Bavarian. Munich was the stronghold of Herr Hitler; Munich was where the Brownshirts marched with their swastikas and banners. Munich didn’t have a workers’ paradise like Wedding, with its Jewish Hospital and its Red Front that could swallow swastikas and massacre Brownshirts who strayed onto its streets. And Uncle Heinrich didn’t even take Erik’s hand. The boy had to follow Onkel out of the salon, or be put on a shelf where the Adlon deposited orphans who were lost and never found.

  Bavarian Nights

  2

  THE WORST OF IT WASN’T THE FARM BOYS who beat him up and tried to turn Erik into a slave. They kicked him without mercy, but they could not bend his will. He stole whatever scraps he could—a blackened carrot, a turnip, a stale piece of bread—and ate alone in the barn. He grew stronger within his isolation and learned to bite and kick. But what he couldn’t bear was the lack of a book.

  There was no schoolhouse in the tiny village attached to the castle. The loutish boys who belonged to Uncle Heinrich’s manor couldn’t even spell their names. They wore Nazi pins and practiced the Hitler salute among themselves. They copulated with their sisters and cousins, who at least went to sewing school and had grammar lessons from seamstresses and cooks at the castle. Some of these savage little girls were kind to Erik. They marveled at him because he came from a world of readers and could mouth entire sentences with his own peculiar melody.

  “The master’s nephew sings whatever it is he has to say.”

  They undressed in front of Erik, let him watch while they went to pee. They fought over Erik, fed him, began to wash his clothes, and kept their brothers and brutal male cousins from harming him. He had to slave for his uncle, to feed the pigs in their mud piles, collect the hay, and milk the cows, but he soon realized that all the brutal children within a mile of the castle were related to him. Uncle Heinrich, who kept up the pretense of culture at his castle, who had a library of nine thousand volumes, with murals and tapestries on his walls, who invited string quartets to play for him, also slept with half the women in his service—seamstresses, pastry cooks, and chicken pluckers who warmed the master’s bed. He sold his bastard sons off to the military or kept them in bondage on another farm.

  His daughters were a dilemma. They could do little else but sew and copulate. They wandered into his bedroom in their nightgowns, their bellies outlined under the silk, their nipples almost as high as their necks, and he had to chase them with a stick.

  He wished only to hoard them as he would a harem of racing horses he didn’t intend to race. But Heinrich’s daughters planned their revenge. They plotted his overthrow with nothing more substantial than a string of sentences. They had the orphan from Berlin give them lessons so that they could correspond with police chiefs and Nazi thugs in Munich when the time came to rid themselves of Heinrich. But he caught his nephew teaching the Mädchen how to write, and he scattered them all, ripped their notebooks apart, locked them in their rooms for a week, and made Erik live in the barn.

  The Mädchen eased Erik’s banishment. They shared his cot in the hayloft and sneaked him into the library while the master was away. But they were startled by the boy’s reaction to this mortuary of leather tomes. He fondled the books, sniffed at the leather like some castle rodent.

  “My darlings,” he said to the bewildered girls, “you cannot imagine how happy I am.”

  “But little Holdermann,” said Rose Marie, the brightest of Heinrich’s daughters, “you cannot go to bed with a book. A book cannot caress your tiny Berlin balls.”

  They let Erik climb the ladder to all that musty leather, but it seemed like an unholy place, and they were much more content the moment they locked the library and returned the key to its corner behind the master’s apothecary jars.

  Once the Nazis toppled Weimar in ’33, these same girls followed behind their brothers in the Hitler Youth and joined the League of German Maidens; they worked on farms in the countryside and slept with the farmers and their sons until the farmers’ wives swept them back to the Maidens’ barracks in Munich and Berlin. Erik missed these ferocious Nazi Maidens who had befriended him, missed their company. He was more stranded than ever in the barn, sleeping with horses and cows.

  One night, his male cousins returned to the castle with members of the SS in long military coats. They weren’t abusive. They bowed to Uncle Heinrich, marched up to the library, broke down the door, and flung every book out the castle window. Erik could witness those strange projectiles from the barn, Moroccan leather flying like colossal birds and crashing into Uncle’s unkempt garden. The Hitler Jugend hurled the bruised and broken books onto the auto-da-fé in the garden and fed their little fire.

  And then they were gone. Uncle Heinrich reached into the fire with his own hands and plucked out books shorn of their morocco covers and their spines, while Erik ran from the barn with a rake.

  “Onkel, you’ll burn your hands.”

  And he poked at the charred remains in the fire.

  “I feel like Saturn,” Heinrich said.

  “But I don’t understand, Onkel. Saturn ate his own sons. There is a painting on this subject at the Prado. I did not see it with my own eyes. But my professors at the gymnasium say that it exists.”

  “You are mistaken, Junge. It was the sons who devoured Saturn.”

  Heinrich did not take one book with him into the castle. He strode within its walls, a slight tremor between his shoulders. The castle could have belonged to Saturn; its ramparts were ravaged; bits of stone crumbled from the walls.

  Erik returned to the barn with his own prize—bits and pieces of burnt books. He devoured the pages under the wick of an oil lamp. The Jewish Gymnasium of Berlin had given Erik a ravenous appetite: He gorged on books the way Saturn had gorged on his sons, in spite of what Uncle Heinrich said.

  But so occupied was he with the remains of Uncle’s library that he had forgotten about the next winter storm, and he awoke one morning trapped within a wall of snow. Erik could not budge the barn door. And the snow that gleamed through the barn’s one little window nearly blinded him. He had to stand on a ladder and block out the light with a horse blanket. He lit a fire near the feeding troughs and moved all the animals near the fire. The crumbs of cheese he had and a crust of bread lasted for two days, and then he had to live on whatever the animals ate. He could not milk the cows in such cold weather; their teats were hard as bone. The cows bellowed at him as if he were some kind of interloper. The horses did not make a sound; the bells tied to their ears didn’t jiggle once. And the pigs couldn’t root in mud that was as unbending as armor. Erik’s teeth rattled in his head. The noise exploded in his ears.

  He could no longer feel his fingers. And he had no more fuel to start a fire; the matchsticks he had were useless—their heads would fall off whenever he tried to strike one of them. The hay was hard as a knife. The whole barn was starving. And that’s when he thought of Lisalein. She had stayed with him like a still wound. He hadn’t seen her in four years.

  It was his memory of Lisalein that fed sparks into him like some magic fuel. He had slept with six of Heinrich’s daughters from the League of German Maidens—Rose Marie, Hildegarde, Helga, Ursula, Ingeborge, and Blondi—and he wouldn’t have been so startled by the baron’s little blond Venus with her cropped hair and tall shoes if he were fortunate enough ever to find her in the flesh. In fact, he’d imagined himself hovering over Lisa’s limbs while he rutted with Rose Marie—her nostrils flared under him like one of Heinrich’s prize horses. He clutched her hands the way he always did with Ursula, but he wouldn’t sti
fle her love cries. He’d let Lisa scream and scream.

  But he couldn’t hold on to her. The hunger pains seemed to split his skull. He lost the sea green of her eyes; the sockets stared back at him, mocking his own passion. He was making love to a skeleton, some bag of bones that wasn’t Lisa. Herr Teufel had entered the barn, had poisoned Erik’s mind. Heinrich’s cows were lowing at him with the Devil’s own music.

  HIS EARS PRICKED. HE WAS LYING on the barn’s earthen floor. He could hear a slow, relentless gnawing on the other side of the door, as if a hundred rats were nibbling away at wood. Then the door began to splinter. A huge chunk of it exploded in front of his eyes. Uncle Heinrich stepped through the hole in the door, his face wrapped in scarves, like a Bedouin chief. He was wearing enormous fur mittens and clutching an ax.

  “Onkel,” the boy whispered, his throat parched, “we have to save the horses and cows.”

  Heinrich wouldn’t let him continue or drink from the canteen that was attached to his belt. He wet the boy’s mouth with little pinches of water.

  “Cows,” the boy repeated. “Save the horses and cows.”

  “We can’t, Junge. It would take half a year to dig a tunnel tall enough to drag them out of the barn.”

  “But I am in charge of all your animals. I will not leave without them.”

  “Junge, they’re all dead. You have been in the barn for two weeks.”

  Erik closed his eyes. He could no longer listen. The words flew around into the rafters. Heinrich wrapped him in an old bearskin. He carried Erik out through the hole in the door. But they couldn’t stand up. There was no sky, no clouds, no trees, nothing but the walls of a tunnel that was screwed into the snow by some whirling, implacable machine. That machine was Heinrich himself, who dug the tunnel with his own hands, picking at the snow with an ax—the handle had split halfway to the barn, and Heinrich had to clutch the head of the ax and burrow with it through barriers of ice.

  It took him most of the morning to drag the boy from the barn to the castle door. He spat water into the boy’s mouth and sucked on a few raisins and nuts. The boy was an icicle that could still breathe by the time Heinrich laid him out on the dining room table. He wouldn’t bathe the boy. The shock of scalding water on his skin might have killed him. Working with his seamstress, who was as snowbound as he had been, he rubbed the boy in axle grease and machine oil, covered him with the bearskin, and rocked him in his arms. Erik was pampered for two weeks. He lived in the library, which had become a lit cave of ladders and shelves without books. He slept on a cot and ate with the servants. He was still a vagabond in his uncle’s eyes.

  The servants moved Erik back into the barn after his convalescence. He still had his treasure of burnt books. And with no chores to do, he read from morning to night.

  And then, one afternoon, in the spring of ’35, he was summoned out of the barn. There was a small gathering in Heinrich’s wild garden. Laughter rang in his ear like a rifle shot. How could he fail to recognize Lisalein’s robust voice? She was sitting on a chair in the garden, next to Uncle Heinrich and another man, who had thick eyeglasses and wore a Nazi Party pin in his lapel. His name was Josef Valentiner, and he was married to Lisalein. Erik could feel a wound in the walls of his chest. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen—a Mischling, a half Jew, and the bride of a Party man. This Josef was one of Herr Hitler’s economic advisers, and he wasn’t that much older than Lisa. He was a wunderkind who had managed the baron’s whole empire before he was twenty. He had pudgy fingers, and he sweated a lot under a weak sun.

  But it was Lisalein who also irritated him. She’d changed her hair since he last saw her. It wasn’t cropped like a cadet or a convict, but cascaded to her shoulders; she looked like one of his cousins in the League of German Maidens. And she glowered at him with her weak eyes. He wanted to strike her—out of jealousy, out of rage.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Onkel, what have you done to the boy? He’s all in tatters … and is he living in a barn?”

  “Fräulein,” Erik insisted. “It’s the place I prefer. I am not comfortable in a castle, and Uncle Heinrich knows that.”

  “But where are your schoolbooks?”

  “In the barn,” he said. “Uncle Heinrich does not believe in country schools. He is my tutor.”

  The boy turned brazen, looked into Lisalein’s eyes, not as a mendicant, or some petitioner from the Jewish orphanage, but as a lover might. He wasn’t crude. He was declaring his own territory with a glance, as if he wore the special badge of a boy who had slept with the whole League of German Maidens and did not have to depend on a Mischling—a Jewess with some Christian blood—who was married to a man with a Nazi pin. Lisa had an attack of vertigo—the boy’s boldness bothered her, but she recovered quickly enough.

  “Onkel, shame on you. I believe you have mishandled my protégé. He is wild as a wolf. And a wolf with books is still a wolf.”

  “Lisa darling,” said Uncle Heinrich, “how can I make amends?”

  “You can’t,” she said. “He is wasting away at your castle … and his education is already ruined. What gymnasium will have such a wolf? We must conspire to have him accepted as a cadet.”

  Heinrich frowned at her. “What kind of cadet?”

  “At the naval college in Kiel,” she said, and nudged her husband, who had not said a word. “Josef darling, you must have met an admiral or two at the Chancellery.”

  Undersecretary Valentiner bit his fat lips and seemed stupefied. “I cannot bother an admiral over some boy out of the blue.”

  “He’s not some boy,” Lisa had to insist. “We found the Little One, Vati and I, and reunited him with his uncle. You must not demean our accomplishment, or you will have to face the divorce courts.”

  The undersecretary may have once masterminded the baron’s empire of department stores, but he’d never won an argument with his wife.

  “Divorce?” he said. “I have done nothing wrong.”

  Heinrich intervened. “Do not worry. I will have the Junge sent to Kiel. I do not require admirals from Berlin.”

  Lisa grew tired of sitting in a country garden and wanted to be alone with the boy she hadn’t seen in four years.

  “Come, Little One, let’s leave the two monsters. They can talk about the window dressing in Herr Hitler’s own department store, how he’s turning Deutschland into a democratic state for next summer’s Olympics … but show me this classroom you have made inside a barn.”

  She took Erik by the hand and led him across the garden. She wasn’t shy. She squeezed Erik’s hand with all her might. And he began to tremble.

  They disappeared inside the barn, and Erik lost control in an instant. Lisalein seized upon his little empire of burnt books, fondling their shattered spines.

  “You are the most unpredictable boy,” she said. “It is a classroom, and I’ll bet that Heinrich never tutored you once.… Did you miss me?”

  “No,” he said, determined not to reveal himself.

  All his stratagems of wounding Lisa—showing off his manliness, pricking her—went awash in some foreign sea. What could it have meant to Lisalein that he’d suckled the breasts of Heinrich’s Nazi Maidens, bastard daughters who were born in a crumbling castle? He had no ammunition, nothing to wound her with. He was the same orphan, even with his wealth of books.

  It was Lisa who clutched his shirt of hairy wool. He froze like a rabbit encountering a pair of human eyes. He was taller than Lisalein, despite the alligator pumps she wore from one of the “international” shops on Unter den Linden, a shop the baron himself might have owned. She never asked the boy’s permission as she dug half her face into his mouth. It wasn’t like kissing a Nazi Mädchen. Her tongue didn’t leap. It was the brutal kiss of a blond executioner. Then she took her own mouth away from Erik, and he was utterly forlorn.

  “Is that what you wanted? You obscene child. How dare you look at me with such lust and contempt in your eyes. Gott, you can’t be a day older than fifteen. Did He
inrich raise you as a stud horse in his barn?”

  “I raised myself,” he said. He was trembling, and Lisa took him in her arms.

  “Fräulein,” he blubbered, “why did you not visit me once in four years?”

  “Darling,” she said. “I’m a selfish pig. If I had known … Vati should have realized that Heinrich would take his anger for his own sister out on you. He has revenge written all over him. I can’t imagine why he detests you so much.”

  “But he saved my life,” the boy said.

  “It doesn’t matter. You still can’t stay here. You must be around children your own age.”

  “But I’m not a child. And you are only a few years older than I am.”

  She scowled at him. And her azure eyes glowed in the shadows of the barn. She was still clutching his hairy wool coat.

  “I’m a married woman, you dolt.”

  “Yes, you’re married to a Nazi pin.”

  She slapped his face. And it wasn’t some polite love tap. His ears rang with the force of her perfectly shaped hand.

  “You’re twice a dolt,” she said. “That Nazi pin is keeping us alive.”

  “But the baron has millions. Why don’t you quit Germany with him? You can have a château in a Swiss forest, or half a fortress on Lake Geneva.”

  “How can Papa leave, my pretty little boy? Hitler is in power because of him. He and other Jewish financiers were more frightened of the Reds than of a lunatic with foam in his mouth. They considered him a marionette that could be dismantled and thrown in a box. But they did not take the measure of such a man, how he would be worshipped as the god of peace and war.”

  “Fräulein Lisa, I’ll take you to Switzerland if your father won’t.”

  “What would I do in a Swiss chalet? Wait for the next electrical storm? Row in the moonlight and read a book? I’m a Berliner. Let the Führer ride his bulletproof train to Munich and leave us alone … and you’re going to Kiel.”

  He could feel her drift away from him, and he started to sniffle.