The Edit Page 14

  I was soon inducted into the SD, the security branch of the corps, and wore the silver SD lozenge emblazoned on the cuffs of my black tunic quite proudly. Jost came to rely on me heavily. We at Ausland SD were responsible for a network of agents in foreign countries, for deciphering and interpreting their cables, for keeping up our end of the show and not letting the Gestapo or Abwehr scoop us. That autumn, our biggest coup was the capture of Captain Best of the British mission in the Netherlands whom, via a double agent, we enticed to a meeting near the border. It was a fine bit of work, a real shoot-’em-up cowboy type of abduction, as we had to chase him right back over the border into neutral Netherlands and kill his bodyguard to capture him. All this right under the noses of the potato-headed Dutch border guards who did absolutely nothing to stop us! Himmler was ecstatic at the news, and Heydrich sent promotions all around to those involved. I began the process that would ultimately elevate me to lieutenant colonel by the end of the war. At this time, I won my lieutenant’s bars. But it was not only for my planning on the Best affair. My strength lay in organization, and that became apparent to everybody at headquarters. I knew how to find the people needed for a job and how to keep them busy. There was a sense of great things in store for me.

  I wanted very much to succeed in my new position, for by this time, my wife, Uschi, had joined me from Vienna and we had set up household in the suburb of Wannsee. The small villa I took for us was above my means, of course, but by this time, I had learned the importance of presentation. One must act the part one wishes to obtain. It is that simple. The villa was, in fact, a trifle superior to that of my boss, Heydrich, who lived in Grunewald, another nearby green suburb, and to that of the chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, also a neighbor. With all the fervor of the petit bourgeois graduating into the middle class, I went for ostentation.

  The villa was rented before Uschi arrived. It would need all the interest her dowry earned to pay the rent; we would have to eat, clothe ourselves, and entertain on my meager salary. Uschi was not happy with the arrangements from the very first. A member in good standing of the upper middle class, she had no need to prove her membership status. Far better, she suggested, that we take a commodious flat in town that was within our means. After all, she reminded me, we had not arrived yet. We had hardly earned the right to flaunt all the privileges of the station. Those would come with time.

  She had patience; she could afford to. But I, who saw the world from the bottom up, would not be lulled by her arguments. I knew how chimerical history could be. What I wanted, I wanted right now; let the satisfied make do with patience, let them trust in history. I was paying the ultimate price for my prizes. But I could not explain this to Uschi, nor could I even say that I understood how she felt about the villa: Burgher als Edelmann—the bourgeois acting like nobility. I could even laugh at my own ambition, but not with her. We unfortunately disallowed each other the ultimate comfort of total, naked honesty, one with the other. If there is one thing I could imagine a marriage to be good for, it would be this comfort, this release from the worldly roles that we assume. But this I was unable to do with Uschi, nor she with me, which was a great sadness for us both. I maintained the role of the stolid silent anchor, she that of the frivolous, gay, spritely girl. Such roles had obvious advantages during the early days of our courtship; they made for simple straightforward dealings with each other.

  But they lingered, they continued past the point of usefulness. Now we were as two marionettes. There was no ease between us; we were only players in a very bad farce and neither of us knew a way out. The villa in Wannsee was cold and cheerless with only the two of us habituating it, and I began finding reasons for staying later and later at the shop. These were now the months of the Sitzkrieg, the phony war as the English call it, but still it was wartime. Uschi could hardly complain that I, a soldier in uniform, was not spending more time with her.

  No, there was no ease, no comfort there for either of us, in even the most literal of ways. Uschi was a woman of very limited libido. Which is not to say that I am the eternal Don Juan, but she found the entirety of the sex act somewhat disgusting. Ultimately she refrained from even a casual kiss or cuddle in fear that it would lead to more.

  And thus we lived for months on end, avoiding each other, happy for the work that would take me out of Berlin on occasional inspection tours, for by this time, I had been transferred to another and most important posting: Section IVA, 4b of the Schutzstaffel desk under a man named Eichmann.

  “I read the rest of the manuscript.”

  “Quick reader.”

  “There’s very little else to do here.”

  “You’ve your own writing.”

  “That accounts for four, maybe five hours. Then there’s the other twenty. Can we talk?”

  “Of course. I should like that.”

  “I was hard on you about that Wotruba thing. And I think it helps. I assume you’re going to rewrite, I mean reorganize, the materials rather than include my criticism directly in the narrative?”

  “—”

  “I’d advise it, anyway. What’s the old dictum? Everywhere at work and nowhere apparent. I know these are memoirs, but still you don’t want every nail and joint visible. Writing is like cabinetmaking, not carpentry. If you’re going to do it at all, you must agree to the code: You must not diminish the world of letters by your contribution. The old Latin saying for doctors holds with us, as well. Primus, non nocere. First …”

  “Do no harm. Yes, Miss O’Brien. I know my Latin, too. But you surprise me. Such conservatism. Such pomposity. And about mere words.”

  “There’s nothing mere about words. They’re the one thing that matters to me. And no one demands that you elevate literature by what you do, or that you make revolutionary changes in form or content. But you must not belittle it, reduce it. You must not take it down. You understand that, don’t you? I’m not talking simple style here, for some of the best work in letters is done by amateurs. Those who have a story that must be told, any way they can tell it, rather than those old pros who have to tell a story, any story will do. Like a traffic warden and her quota of tickets for the week. You do see that, don’t you? I know you do. For your writing at its best has an urgency. It cannot be stopped. It must come out. I respect that, and that is why I attack when you present me … us … with less than candor. That’s the betrayal I was speaking of in my note to you. You make a bargain with the reader when you use the confessional mode. You’re not allowed to break that deal by using less than total frankness. Trouble is, though, you’re playing a game somewhere in between much of the time. You’ve enough verbal skills to seem polished, and enough frankness to seem confessional. But in between all that, you dissemble and revert to stuffy writing. That’s a problem. A definite problem.”

  “But you like it, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry to say I do. It would be easier for me if I didn’t. I’m taken with your writings. You display a full character, pimples and all, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s a gold mine for researchers.”

  “How do you mean pimples and all?”

  “I don’t want to make you self-conscious.”

  “How do you mean? Aren’t you going to eat at all? It’s getting cold.”

  “You spice your beans enough to keep them hot for hours. … I mean that, in many ways, you are an intellectual naïf. Others would examine their writing for hidden messages. For the Freudian slip, or a connection to the Jungian consciousness. But I honestly believe that you do not know more than the few obvious buzzwords about depth psychology. I mean that you’re a tabula rasa intellectually, so that your experience is not filtered through any intellectual apparatus before it is served up to us.”

  “Miss O’Brien. What are you getting at?”

  “Take Cow, for instance.”

  “He was the most straightforward one of us all. He had no need for sill
y Jewish head games.”

  “I don’t mean Cow himself. Rather your relationship with him. Again, you revealed it yourself quite unconsciously.”

  “Revealed what?”

  “If you’re going to be like that …”

  “All right. Sorry. But please do not be so elliptic. I am a stubborn old German. Ossification has set in. I need things spelled out.”

  “Okay. But you’re not going to like it. There was an obvious homoerotic content to your friendship. Take the incident of Cow falling asleep in your bunk.”

  “It was the lightning storm. It scared him. Can’t a man have a close friend anymore without the onus of fairy being leveled at him?”

  “And the feelings of jealousy you experienced when he went to the camp prostitutes, using your chits as well as his own. That’s suggestive of more than simple camaraderie, don’t you think?”

  “What is your point?”

  “Operation Himmler. The first go-round of it when you killed your friend. I assume he died, for you do not mention him again in the manuscript. He simply disappears. You voice no remorse, no sadness. Heady symbolism there. The belly shot and all. And your very first shot of the war at a potential enemy. To shoot one’s silver bullet is, in American slang, to lose one’s virginity. The penetration of the bullet. Destruction of that which is unattainable. I assume Cow did not share your inclinations? There’s nothing wrong with it, you know. It’s not a sickness, not something to hide from the world.”

  She is a witch. She takes every fine noble intent and twists it to her own perverted ways. She questions, questions, and destroys by her questioning—like Turandot, only more malevolent. Perhaps like one of those goddess-witches in Russian fairy tales who always pose the series of life-­threatening questions to weary travelers.

  Of course I cared for Cow; of course I felt horrid about his accidental death. That I have not written of it does not mean I have something to hide, but only that I will not wallow in sentiment or false guilt. I shot Cow, yes. But quite by accident and without erotic intent!

  How ill must the Irish herself be even to see the possibility of such a relationship from what I wrote. Attempting honesty, I am rebuked for homoerotic tendencies. Yet if there is not some such psychological overtone to what I write, I am assailed by the very same vituperation for lack of candor. She puts me in a no-win situation. What is so surprising to me is that I have allowed her to do so. She is my prisoner; I have no need to deal with her at all. I started this for her own good, to give her something to do and because she asked me. I confess to having been swayed by flattery. She professed to like the first pages. At that time, she talked in the jargon of publishing, of line editing. Nothing of content. Yet that is all I have received from her thus far. Criticism upon criticism on the content only. She wishes to engage me in debate over the very basis of my life’s work; thus she must deconstruct me incrementally. This has now become apparent to me: her sinister plan. I am wise to her now; I shall not go into our friendly little discussions anymore without my own store of ammunition. It is her turn, now, to share.

  But first, I relate the following incident to demonstrate how far off the mark O’Brien is. It was January 1933, the very day, in fact, when Hitler came to power in Berlin. In modern histories, I see the proper way to refer to the beginning of the Third Reich is “the day Hitler seized power.” This from German historians wishing to avoid any shared blame. “Seized” be damned. He was duly elected by the German people to the Chancellery. They also write of the period in the passive voice, ever a popular mode for the gutless historian, but done to the extreme when writing about the Reich, to imply that all this was done to Germany; the Nazis were oppressors and not representing the true German Zeitgeist.

  In 1933, the Nazi Party is still outlawed in Austria. Vienna has clandestine cells that show their muscle on occasion. I am attracted to these sturdy youths in their crumpled trench coats and riding boots. They are full of a virility that is otherwise sadly lacking in Vienna. A most proper city is Vienna, a place-for-everything sort of city. I am not a Bolshevik as a youth, not the sort of anarchistic personality who would tear down the structures of society just for the fun of it. But even then, before more exactly identifying myself with the National Socialists, I know I want to see some of the old stodgy ways replaced, to let a breath of fresh air into our stuffy city.

  On this bitterly cold January day, the Hitlerians are out in force, celebrating the victory of their leader. “Austria next!” is their chant, and it rings in my ears as I walk the windswept Ringstrasse toward the university. The police do not interfere with the demonstration today; they dare not provoke an incident on such an emotion-charged day. This is an early indication of the new hands-off policy toward the Nazis now that Hitler is legitimated by elected power in Germany. So the Nazis stride brazenly down the center of the boulevard, obstructing cars and trams alike. Yet the motorists are strangely quiet; no one dares honk his horn at the marchers.

  “Austria next! Austria next!”

  This, the tramping of boots on cobbles, and the cawing of the Russian crows in the parks, are the only sounds to be heard.

  I stop for a moment in front of Café Landtmann to view the procession. There is something hypnotic about it, the fanaticism of young men in a ragtag assemblage of uniforms and trench coats. The interstices of relative quiet between chants is punctuated by the sound of their boots on the stones of the street. I stand where the café terrace is located in the fine months; customers inside have their faces pressed to the windows watching, watching.

  One elderly gentleman, quite distinguished looking with a fresh white carnation in his lapel, smiles at me. It is one of the law professors at the university. I do not know him personally and have not yet had a class from him, being only in my first year at university, but I know him by sight. He is well respected in his field, one of the brighter stars in the law faculty firmament, an expert in constitutional law. Austrians have seldom proved talented at jurisprudence. Perhaps this is a legacy of Habsburg paternalism, perhaps a result of the Viennese penchant for “what-if” living. In a city ruled by the god of stodginess, the intellectuals take refuge in dream worlds and idealism. Freud is the biggest dream merchant of them all. Wittgenstein, too. Arguments spun out of air. No practical value. Those are the legacies of the city. Schoenberg and company, as well, with their antimusic. Theorizing, theorizing. Never creating anything usable. Applied physicist Ernst Mach was the only so-called brilliant Viennese to give the world something lasting: He left behind a benchmark of speed relative to that of sound. I bring these names up to illustrate my point: Austrian theoreticians of jurisprudence follow in the same nonapplied, non-reality-bound tradition as those other intellectuals. Yet law is the most reality bound of all disciplines. Or should be.

  Professor Haberloch, the man sitting in Café Landtmann smiling at me, had somehow avoided that terrible tradition. He had been a first-class trial lawyer in his day. It was he who won the suit for Lieberman AG against the government, a groundbreaking decision setting the limits of culpability for private corporations. He was a brilliant tactician and had the accompanying strength of brilliant elocution. He could explain complex points to a jury or judge alike without making either feel patronized or manipulated. In short, Haberloch was every fledgling law student’s hero. He still kept a limited private practice even though he now taught full-time at the university.

  His lectures on criminal law were attended by half of Vienna it seemed, for they were far more than mere lectures. They were events in which, by his very power of speech, Haberloch made one feel in the presence of great authority. His talks encompassed the entire spectrum of creation: He could make law appear to be the sun around which the planets of ambition, love, sadness, longing—around which all aspects of life—revolved. Some of these lectures I had sat (or rather stood, they were that crowded) in on, and I had been impressed by the man’s charisma, like all the res
t of those attending.

  But there is absolutely no reason that man should recognize me, a face out of the multitude. It is unmistakable, however: He continues to smile at me in a very knowing manner, as if he sees right into me. He nods once and indicates a free chair at his window table inside the café. I am already late for my geopolitics course, yet such an opportunity of talking to the great man one-on-one is not to be missed. I enter the door and push aside the heavy felt curtain that serves to catch drafts at the entrance. He has risen from his chair. I think for an embarrassing moment that I have misunderstood his gesture. But instead of preparing to leave, as I thought momentarily, Haberloch pulls out the other chair for me. I move to the tiny marble-topped table in a dream and make a bowlike nod of respect to the proffered chair. The place is rich in the smell of roasted coffee, cigar smoke, and hot chocolate. I cannot look at the great man for a time, for I am too embarrassed and tongue-tied. I watch, three tables distant, a group of well-to-do pensioners playing Tarok. I start, shocked, when I realize that one of these card players is the onerous Dr. Freud, who occasionally makes such a stir in the press with his psychoanalytic theories. Haberloch notices my glance of recognition and smiles. It is as if he wants to initiate me into the world of great men. Me, a first-year student at the university who still works afternoons and Saturday mornings in his mother’s tobacco shop!

  He asks me if I would like a cup of coffee and I say yes, that would be very nice, and I still cannot believe I am sitting here. Or cannot understand what he could want with me, but suddenly I blurt out how honored I am, a simple law student, and how much I respect his work. It comes tumbling out of me without grace or much coherence. And he smiles again, quite pleasantly, at my accolades. I feel his strength even in his silences. Power emanates from him palpably. My right leg begins to move nervously: My heel taps and jerks my knee up and down like a piston as I sit poised on the edge of my chair, brittle as a china cup in expectation. Coffee is brought. It is a mélange, I remember, with a liberal dose of chocolate powdered on top of the creamy froth. I do not know why I should remember that detail. I look at the coffee nervously for a moment and he tells me it is his treat. That he remembers how it is to be a poor student. And I feel a comforting kinship with him after this remark. I quit wondering why this distinguished, almost famous man is wasting his time on me. With that absolute arrogance of youth, I assume Haberloch is lonely and thinks me to be an interesting-looking fellow to chat up. He is unorthodox enough in his lectures to make such personal behavior an accepted eccentricity. I drink the mélange contentedly. My foot slowly stops tapping.