The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story Page 11

  “So what do you think of it?” He asked me gingerly, quickly stealing a glance over to the MPs, who were leisurely leaning on the wall and chatting among themselves.

  “What do I think of what?” I asked, after washing down the remains of my bread with coffee.

  ‘Mud water’ would be a better expression to describe both its texture and taste to be truthful, definitely not coffee. At least I don’t remember having to clear my throat from the sandy residue for ten minutes after drinking the normal, Brazilian coffee back in the day. Coffee always brought back memories of her. She always made it the best way. Or maybe it was the way she used to serve it to me, with a tender smile pouring the freshly brewed drink into a porcelain cup. “Here you go, Herr Gruppenführer. Let me know if it’s too hot, I’ll pour more cream for you.” I shook my head involuntarily, trying to get rid of the memories and concentrate on what Seyss-Inquart was asking me.

  “That chart that they demonstrated today, with the concentration camps. Do you really think we had that many? It certainly seemed misleading to me…”

  “No, of course we didn’t. I don’t know where they got that map from.”

  “I trust your opinion more than I trust theirs. You would know.” He carefully picked up another spoon of porridge and soundlessly swallowed it. I smiled with a corner of my mouth. I felt sorry for him, one of the few men out of the former top of the Reich who still spoke to me. Seyss-Inquart always sat so unnaturally straight, and always dined like he was at the Führer’s reception and not a prison canteen with scratched aluminum utensils. I stirred my porridge without any desire to eat any, even though I knew that I wouldn’t get anything else till dinner, not much more nourishing than this meal.

  “Why?” I chuckled quietly, putting my spoon away. “You were basically a Minister without a portfolio. You held a much higher position than me. Wouldn’t you know better?”

  “I didn’t have much to do with the camps.” Seyss-Inquart lowered his eyes under Jodl’s stern look, who was sharing the table with us. The former Wehrmacht generals were trying to distance themselves from us, the ‘criminals,’ as much as they could, keeping to their story that they were ‘noble military men’ and had nothing to do with the atrocities. Right. The only one who wasn’t guilty of anything, Erwin Rommel, was long dead, I wanted to yell in their stuffy, insolent faces right in the courtroom. They were ignoring me for the most part anyway, so what did I care if they stopped talking to me altogether?

  “Neither did I,” I replied honestly, and added with a grin. “No matter how much ‘Stars and Stripes’ are trying to persuade everyone to the opposite.”

  “I thought… The RSHA…” He looked at me from behind the thick lenses of his round glasses, trying to ask a question without offending me.

  “Oswald Pohl, not the RSHA. He was in charge of the system. And Reichsführer, naturally.”

  “Yes, of course. Reichsführer.” He nodded obediently, easily accepting my explanation without the slightest attempt to dispute it.

  I smiled sadly at the thought that neither of us could refute anything of what the other was saying, simply because we really didn’t know what those others were doing. Yes, we had a very structured hierarchy, but we only knew who to report to and who should report to us in our own department. When it came to the sibling departments, we had as little idea of what was going on and who was responsible for what, as some ordinary Hanz in the street did. In fact, by Heydrich’s order, it was a criminal case to pry in the neighboring department’s business.

  I swallowed hard and shuddered at that name, which wouldn’t leave my thoughts from the night after which they had to hospitalize me again, with the reoccurrence of the brain hemorrhage. I saw him that night, the man, for whose assassination I was responsible, and whose death brought me and Annalise together for the first time.

  I woke up in the middle of that night from freezing cold numbing my feet, opened my eyes to tuck the thread-thin blanket in, and saw him, the former Chief of the RSHA, sitting at my feet with a crooked smile on his white face and staring at me with his ice cold eyes, glowing in the dark. Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. I sat up warily and pulled my legs away from the ghost in the black uniform, who seemed to be very comfortable on my cot. I caught myself thinking that either that damn brain hemorrhage did something to my brain, or I was so stressed out and malnourished that I had started hallucinating.

  “You’re not hallucinating, and you haven’t gone mad either,” the dead man chuckled, and with a theatrical gesture fixed his always perfectly combed platinum hair. “I’m really here.”

  “You, saying that, confirms that I’ve gone mad,” I remarked and glanced at the cell door, by which an MP guard always stood on duty. Good, now he’ll hear me talk to myself, will report me to Gilbert and they’ll lock me away together with the other psychos. Good thing that it’s not the former Reich, or they’d quickly put me down like a sickly dog.

  “They should have, in 1938, right after the Anschluss. They’d have done a big favor to humanity.” Heydrich sneered, once again replying to my thoughts.

  “What do you want?” I asked him tiredly.

  “Came to see you suffer in solitude before they snap your neck, like you deserve. Do you mind?”

  “Still holding a grudge for me killing you?” I asked sweetly.

  Dead Heydrich laughed with his high-pitched voice, which used to annoy me to no end, like my Austrian accent used to annoy him.

  “You’ll be surprised, but no.” He glared at me with his phosphoric eyes once again. “As a matter of fact, I wanted to thank you. After all, if it wasn’t for you, I would have been rotting in this damp, disgusting cell instead. You did me a big favor, ordering my assassination back then. I died like a hero, I had the most pompous funeral in the history of the Reich probably. The Führer put my posthumous awards on my pillow. Reichsführer Himmler gave a eulogy. The whole of Berlin was following my coffin to the cemetery. And you’ll die like a dog, strangled on a rope by some Jew.”

  “I don’t care. It was worth it.”

  “What was worth it, idiot?”

  “I’ll die, knowing that I rid the world of you at least.”

  “Oh, that hurt! Why would you say that?” He mockingly pressed his hand to his chest, covered with crosses and other signs of distinction. We were almost of the same age, but I was never as ambitious as he had been. “Of course you weren’t. All you wanted to do was drink and fuck everything that had two legs and a skirt. How could Himmler appoint such a pathetic mediocrity to my position?”

  “Himmler didn’t appoint me. Hitler did.”

  “Ah, so it was the Austrian thing.”

  “Call it whatever you want.” I sighed and rubbed by eyes. “Could you… disappear with a flash or dissolve, or whatever it is you ghosts do? I’m really tired and I have to be in court by eight.”

  “Why, you aren’t a fan of Goethe? You don’t find my fateful appearance a sign of the magical salvation it may bring you?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” I yawned. “You aren’t Lucifer to offer me anything.”

  He laughed quietly and looked at me almost kindly.

  “No, of course not. There is no hell and there is no Lucifer.”

  “Yes, I know. Only an endless night and a cemetery, where all of us will be walking until we cry over every single soul we wronged. Been there.”

  “You didn’t die though…”

  I looked away, remembering her small figure, kneeling in front of the grave with my name on it. I never wanted her to cry over my grave, and I lived, just to prolong my purposeless existence so she’d have a hope for… I didn’t know for what, but I lived for her.

  “Ah, the girl.” Heydrich lowered his eyes with a dreamy expression on his face, which suddenly looked almost angelic. “It was all because of her, wasn’t it? My assassination, you giving yourself up, enduring all the suffering, allowing them to confine you here… getting hanged soon? Why? She’s just a girl.”

&
nbsp; “You’d never understand. You never loved anybody except yourself.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Heydrich agreed cheerily. “Still, as a thank you for taking up my guilt for everything, I would like to offer you an easy death. How about that?”

  “How are you going to kill me?” I smirked, giving him a despising look. “You’re a fucking ghost.”

  Instead of an answer, dead Heydrich moved towards me with unnatural agility and squeezed my temples with icy hands, staring me square in the eye without blinking, smiling at my fruitless attempts to release myself from his deadly grip. I started feeling that pounding, pulsating headache, which had almost killed me during my first brain hemorrhage. With horror, as my reality began slipping away, I realized that it was happening again.

  “Get… away… from me!” I growled through gritted teeth, almost losing consciousness at the agonizing pain. He pressed his hands even tighter, and at the very edge of nearly dying, I threw the mug of water from the table that stood at the head of my bed. The deafening noise it made falling on the concrete floor and the immediate sound of my door unlocking was the last thing I remember.

  Chapter 8

  Linz, January 1920

  I couldn’t possibly remember what the Italian Black Shirts had to do with the situation in the Weimar Republic – the subject, which Melita was so passionately talking about just a day ago – and faked a guilty smile at the girl, not able to make any particular point when she asked me to.

  “You’re still such a child.” Despite her intent toward sounding scornful, she reproached me almost kindly, and ran her fingers through my hair. “When are you going to start listening to me?”

  “I am listening to you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Melita reached into her pocket to get her cigarettes. We just got home – her home – or an apartment to be exact, which she was renting together with her younger sister, Annika. Apparently, the girls’ parents didn’t accept their daughters’ lifestyle and political views that well, and decided to rid themselves of any embarrassing explanations they might have to give to their neighbors by paying their daughters off to live as far from the family as they could, so as not to corrupt the youngest members of the family with their behavior. Melita herself found such a situation very much convenient. We were still sitting by the little kitchen table in our overcoats, deciding if it was too late for coffee or too early for alcohol. Finally, Melita handed me her cigarette, wriggled her way out of her coat and went to get two glasses and a bottle of wine.

  “Just admit it, you’re not interested in this at all,” she said, filling the glasses almost to the rim. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “I am interested. I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m graduating soon. Diploma, exams, university… you know. All that.”

  Melita nodded understandably and raised her glass. “Well, to your future then. Do you know what you want to be when you grow up yet?”

  I took a sip from my glass and took a drag on her cigarette, taking my time before answering her. I did know what I wanted to be, but even my own father looked at me skeptically after I voiced my decision to enter the University of Graz, probably the most famous and oldest university in Austria, where he obtained his law degree, and to join the Dutch colonial service as an engineer to travel the world. I was afraid that Melita would burst out laughing when she heard that.

  “I want to study chemistry and technology in Graz,” I answered carefully, avoiding going into details.

  “Good for you. Graz is known for its universities.”

  She sounded surprisingly supportive, but I still thought of Dalia for some reason, wondering what her reaction would have been if we were still together. Annoyed by her constantly interrupting my thoughts when I needed it the least, I drank more of my wine.

  “Yes. And I can become a member of their fraternity too, Arminia. They are nationalists, very well-known in Graz,” I added, trying to persuade Melita that I did share her interests and therefore was a part of her world. I didn’t want yet another girl to reject me because we weren’t thinking alike.

  “Good, good.” Melita tucked her blond curls behind her ear and gave me a reassuring smile. “You’ll do well in life, precious. You’re very smart. Too bad I won’t be there with you.”

  “We can write to each other,” I suggested.

  Melita rolled her eyes. “I’m a girl, and it sounded far too girly even to me.”

  I chuckled. “Alright, sorry. How about I come down to see you during winter and summer breaks?”

  “Not going to work, sweetie. You’ll move away, become a member of your fraternity and forget all about me.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You don’t know the University life yet. You’ll be bathing in liquor and girls by the end of the first year, trust me. With that handsome face of yours.” Melita affectionately pecked me on my cheek, even though she didn’t sound too upset about the possibility of our upcoming separation. She looked at me a little longer, slightly biting her lip, and suddenly rose from her chair. “How about I make one part of your life in the university a little easier for you?”

  I gave her a confused stare, while she was standing over me and playing with my hair. “What?”

  “Come, before Annika comes back from her evening classes.”

  Melita disappeared in the living room, and I, secretly hoping that she meant what I wanted her to mean, got rid of my coat, finished my glass and followed her inside.

  “Come here,” she called again from her bedroom, and I followed her voice with the widest grin on my very happy face.

  Melita was sitting on her bed and rolling down her stockings from under her dress. She glanced at me standing in the door and smirked. “I know how you, guys, are. You’ll rip them in a second, and it’s next to impossible to get them nowadays. What are you doing standing over there? Come, sit.”

  I obediently sat next to her with my hands on my knees, exited like a puppy which had just been handed its first big bone, but did not really know what to do with it.

  Melita suppressed a little chuckle, took my hand in hers and placed it on top of her leg. I was looking at it like an idiot, not sure what to do next. She sighed and arched her eyebrow.

  “You do have the general idea of what we’re supposed to be doing, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” I answered confidently, only causing more chuckles from her side.

  “You’re so cute when you’re shy.”

  “I’m not shy.”

  And just to prove her wrong, I quickly moved closer and started kissing her. Well, that was about all I knew how to do, as it turned out from Melita’s next question.

  “Ernst? What are you doing?”

  “What?” I whispered somewhere in her neck, immediately freezing, not sure what I did wrong.

  “What are you doing with my breast?”

  Again with the breast! What is it with women and their breasts?! Why did nature put them there, if we aren’t allowed to touch them? At least I heard amusement in her voice, and not anger, like it happened with Dalia.

  “Nothing,” I replied, and just in case put my hand away, so she wouldn’t change her mind about the whole thing.

  “You’re not milking a cow. You’re supposed to fondle it, not grab it and just hold it in your hand,” Melita chuckled kind-heartedly. “And you might want to undress me first. You’ll have much more access to it without my dress on, if it happens to be your favorite body part so far.”

  Extremely excited about the very close perspective of seeing a naked girl with my own eyes, and not on tiny blurry photographs, which my classmates drooled over in the back of the schoolyard during recess, I readily climbed on the bed behind her back and started unbuttoning her dress.

  “Ernst. What are you doing now?”

  “You told me to undress you?” I held my hands over the next button, confused about what I did wrong this
time.

  “Yes, I did,” she explained patiently. “But when I say undress, you’re supposed to seduce me while doing it, and not just take my clothes off like my nanny would do before putting me to bed. Here, give me your hands, and kiss me where I tell you, very slowly.”

  I hardly suppressed a groan. The whole thing was turning out to be far more complicated than I’d ever imagined it could be, and we hadn’t even started yet. But when Melita gently covered her breasts with her hands on top of mine, I quickly decided that it was all worth it after all.

  “I’ll be guiding you. My hands will be your hands. Just remember what and how you should be doing for the next time. Deal?” She didn’t really need my reply, because at this point I was ready to do anything for her, especially now that she mentioned that there was going to be a next time. Melita pointed her finger to her neck. “Kiss me here. Slow.”

  I closed my eyes and covered her soft skin with my lips, inhaling her lavender shampoo and faint perfume. Melita was slowly caressing her small, round breast with her hand on top of mine, while directing my other hand to the back of her head.

  “Put your fingers through my hair,” she said mildly. “It’s very, very arousing. All girls love that and not too many guys know it, unfortunately. Scratch my scalp with your nails slightly as you move your hand back to my neck. Yes, just like that. And keep kissing my neck… yes, that’s good…”

  She leaned her head towards me, and I felt goosebumps on her skin as I kept kissing her. I took it as a very good sign as she moaned inaudibly.

  “Now you can finish unbuttoning my dress, but again, do it slowly and kiss my back as you do it.”

  I took my time with the rest of the buttons this time and was awarded with an approving nod. “Good. Now pull it down my shoulders, and caress my arms with your fingertips while you’re doing it.”

  After I did everything like she told me, Melita finally turned to me smiling, and right in time I caught my excited gasp, which almost escaped my mouth at the sight of her beautiful, round and perky breasts. I guess my facial expression gave away all my thoughts, as Melita laughed quietly, catching my hand midair.