The Right Hand of Sleep (40 page)

She nodded. —He talked about you as though you were dead, she said, running her hands along the edge of the table.

Voxlauer was quiet for a time. —Where would we go?

—I don’t know. She smiled weakly. —Tyrol?

—Tyrol would be all right. Except for the Tyroleans.

—Where, then?

Voxlauer shrugged. —Not Italy. Not east, either, if we can help it.

—It doesn’t matter, really, does it? said Else.

—No. I suppose it doesn’t.

One half hour later they went down the steps and crossed on tiptoe to the bed. Resi was curled on the parlor couch, whistling tunelessly. Voxlauer leaned over tiredly and unlaced his boots. Else ran her fingertips along his scalp, over his forehead and his eyes. —Thank you, he said in a whisper.

Else gave him a light kiss on the neck. He drew in a long and grateful breath. Opening his eyes he saw Resi watching from the couch.

—Aren’t you a peach? he said, smiling at her crookedly.

—Leave us alone for a little while, mouse.

—What for? said Resi, giggling.

—Evil spoilt child, said Voxlauer.

—Suffer the little children, Oskar, said Else. —Suffer them. The Good Book tells us to.

—Damn the Good Book, said Voxlauer, falling back onto the bed.

Resi’s eyes widened. —Mama!

—Shh, mouse, said Else. —Don’t bother us just now. The springs chirped sweetly as she lay down next to him. He felt the shifting of the mattress as she turned onto her side and the unbelievable fineness of her hair against his face and neck. —Good night, Voxlauer, she breathed into his ear.

In Berlin I found myself quite the celebrity for a time. Mittling had
friends very high up in the brass and they took to me at once. I was
put on display that very week at all the most exclusive cocktail
parties.

“The Bolshevists have their pet subversive movements, of
course, in every nest,” one bird-faced general with hair the color of
dirty wool said to me, waving his sherry glass in my face like a
baton. “Spain, Italy, the Argentine. Now, by God, we have ours!”
He held on to my arm tightly, teetering a little.

“I’m sure you’re right, General.”

“That Dollfuss affair was regrettable. But you’ll have your time
yet, son. Your golden moment. What do you say?”

“I hope to, General. Watch yourself.”

“Thank you, my boy. Very kind. Blood of Christ! If we had
fifty more like you . . .”

It was the same everywhere I went, particularly with the
drunks. Himmler never came to these parties but I received a brief
note from him through Schellenberg, the Brigadenführer for foreign intelligence, instructing me to work closely with both of them
in preparation for “the intersection of public policy with what is
dearest on the international front to all our hearts.” The only work
I seemed to be doing, however, was to go to six or seven endlessly
dull cocktail parties every evening.

The purported need for secrecy in smuggling me from one
salon to the next worked on everyone like an aphrodisiac. I was
moved about the city like a theater prop those first few weeks,
gawking at everything from the wings. Here at last was a great city,
a German city, fully ecstatic over the Cause. People addressed me
by my full title of Obersturmführer, Austria SS, although it was
now of course meaningless, and flattered me in a thousand other
ways. There was some talk from Schellenberg and certain others of
actually forming an Austrian Legion, unifying the various bands of
illegals that had fled across the border in the weeks following the
putsch, but I quickly realized that greener fields lay elsewhere.
Already it was too crowded in the middle brass, too many ambitious young officers and not enough room for them in the Reich
bureaucracy. Expansion was inevitable. When the annexation happened it was clear enough it would be Reichs-Germans, not Austrians, filling the posts. Positions would be open to Reichs-Germans
and to Reichs-Germans only. So, with help, I became one.

An old Junker heiress took me into her house in the first glow
of my celebrity and outfitted me in the clothes of her late husband,
whom she fancied me to resemble. Maria von Lohn was a well-preserved sixty-five; I slept with her only once, after which she
sent me away in a fit of melodrama and self-reproach. I took up
with her daughter-in-law, Lotte, and occasionally with Liesl the
chambermaid, who came from the Rhineland and was obliging
and very generously put together. I stayed in the von Lohn house
three years. The arrangement had something of the bedroom farce
about it that kept me, by and large, in very high spirits. I’m not sure
where else I could have gone after the novelty of my story faded,
and it faded quickly enough.

Lotte, the daughter-in-law, was married to Gustav, a high-ranking general in the Waffen-SS who was often away from Berlin.
It was through him, or through her, to be more accurate, that I
became a citizen of the Reich. Through the indulgence of certain
fortunately placed friends of the family, a plea for asylum was
made on my behalf. My dearest hope, it was explained, was to
become a German. This, of course, was absolutely true.

“Like our Führer,” Lotte would say, wrinkling her nose at me.
“A fugitive from your Austrianhood!” Lotte was not a great patriot.
“I’m sure he had a woman behind him, too, the sly bastard.”

“He only has his secretary, darling. Fräulein Braun.”

“Pah, Kurtchen! Secretary. Pah!” She made an obscene gesture
with her hand and let out a giggle.

“Please, Lotte.”

Lotte sat up at once, frowning. She’d been lolling at the edge of
the bed, watching me dress in front of her heavy pier glass. “Look
at yourself, Herr Bauer! Another tight-lipped citizen of the Reich. I
liked you better when you were from the territories.” She laughed
to herself in that high, sparrow-like way she had. I can still hear it,
dry and chittering and unhappy, girlish and middle-aged at once. A
drinker’s laugh. When I try to remember her face now it escapes
me, fittingly enough. But that laugh I remember very well.

“I have a meeting with the Reichsführer-SS today, not that
you’d care,” I said, straightening my tie.

“Little Heinrich Himmler, of the pince-nez?”

“That’s the one.”

“He’ll have need of you to ‘off’ someone or other,” said Lotte,
falling back onto the bed. “That’s what murderers say in America.
It’s from a picture, not that you’d care. Edward G. Robinson.”

“You and your America,” I said, still looking myself over in
the glass.

“You’re being exceptionally peacock-like today, Kurtchen,”
said Lotte, twisting her mouth disapprovingly.

I smiled patiently at her reflection. “I’ve waited for this for an
eternity, darling. You know I have.”

“You look silly in Papa’s clothes.”

“Mama doesn’t think so.”

“Mama is a senile old cow.”

I looked at her again and saw that she was glaring at me. I
turned around. “I’m not going to ‘off’ anybody,” I said. “Honestly,
Lottchen.”

“Promise?”

I raised my right hand in solemn oath. Lotte cursed me and slid
back under the covers. She always looked much younger than she
was, I remember, in spite of the fact that she was near to permanently hungover. She had freckles across her cheeks like a girl of
seventeen; in fact she was nearer to forty. “Get out of here, peacock!” she clucked at me, already beginning to smile. I bowed and
took my hat up from the floor.

The Schutzstaffel High Command was housed during that time in
an unobtrusive gray building down the avenue from the newly
built Air Palace. The boys at the gate knew me well by then and
waved me through without ceremony. They think I’ve come here
to see old Schellenberg, I thought, and the idea filled me with a
deep and secret happiness. One of the clerks at the lobby desk, a
nephew of Lotte’s who passed the time dropping a bewildering
variety of innuendos about my connection to the von Lohns,
smiled at me as I passed, and I was sorely tempted to inquire as
to the location of the Reichsführer’s new suite of offices, but of
course I knew exactly where they were. Passing the desk and turning without hesitation to the left-hand of the two stairwells, I had
the satisfaction of feeling everyone’s eyes on me, widening, or so I
imagined, with growing astonishment as I stated my business to
the sentry at the top of the stairs and was wordlessly allowed to
pass. The doors closed on all of them a moment later.

The hallway was immaculate, its concrete and tile floor polished to mirror-brightness, so I was very much surprised, at the
end of it, to find the Reichsführer’s front office in even worse disarray than Mittling’s had been. Papers and photographs of all sizes
spilled from dog-eared, water-speckled folders and littered the
floor between chairs set at strange and irrational angles to the walls.
I watched a clerk sift through a massive pile of manila envelopes at
the foot of a three-legged table for the space of almost a minute
before recovering the presence of mind to clear my throat. The
clerk looked up at me blankly, muttered a grudging pleasantry and
reached up to the intercom button set into the wall above his desk.
A very long time later the black-and-white-checked door of the
inner office opened slightly, seemingly of its own accord, and the
clerk waved me on. I cautiously pushed the door open.

Himmler’s office, in turn, proved very much like the hallway: a
high-ceilinged rectangular room furnished only with three straight-backed farmer’s chairs and a narrow steel-topped desk, from which
two high, square windows looked out onto the street. The uniform
of a captain of the Waffen-SS hung from a coatrack. The Reichsführer himself was nowhere to be seen. I stood stiffly in front of
the desk, in anticipation of his appearance, but after a number of
minutes drifted over to the windows and finally to the uniform. I
was holding one of the boots to my foot when Himmler entered,
so quietly I gave a little cry of surprise when he spoke my name.

“Obersturmführer Kurt E. Bauer,” said Himmler, peering at
me nearsightedly. “The last of our unsung freedom fighters. That is
how you see yourself, am I correct? The hope of our as-yet-fettered
south?” He drew his lips together not unkindly. The expression on
his face, one of myopic, schoolteacherly attentiveness, was deeply
unnerving. His eyes were so tiny behind their bottle-glass lenses
that you could never make out precisely where they were pointed.
Innocuous, colorless, well-intentioned eyes. I shook my head.

“Not at all, Reichsführer. I’m sure the south has long forgotten
me.”

“Well. Let’s hope so.” Himmler smiled. “Please be seated now,
Herr Bauer. Please. That’s better.” He paused. “We hear good
things about you, in circles. You’ve made yourself some very
devoted friends. Vocal friends.”

“I try to be worthy of them, Reichsführer.”

“Yes,” he said, less benevolently. “I’m sure of that.” He sat a
moment lost in thought, his breath whistling through his nose.
“You’re a citizen of the Reich now, I understand.”

“Yes, Reichsführer.”

“Please, Herr Bauer. This is a casual visit. Herr Himmler will
do between us for the moment.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, biting back my disappointment. “Of
course, Herr Himmler.”

Himmler smiled. “You did good work, Bauer, in your brigade.
What’s more, you lived to tell about it.”

“I’ve lived to tell no-one about it, Herr Himmler.”

He smiled again, settling back in his chair. “Yes. We know that
very well.”

Both of us were silent. Himmler seemed to look down at his
desktop, on which lay an assortment of passport-sized photographs, and at the next moment past me toward the uniform.

“It’s a shame to see you in a common suit, Bauer,” he said
finally. “What’s more, yours doesn’t fit very well.”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. “I know it doesn’t, Reichsführer.”

“We’d like to see you in a uniform again.”

I said nothing, struggling to hold in my excitement. Himmler
was squinting at me patiently, apparently expecting some sort of a
response, running a slender upturned finger along his clipped
blond mustache. I thought of the state portrait we’d had of him in
Vienna, above Glass’s cherished couch. What an inaccurate picture! I thought. He isn’t at all an ugly man.