The Austrian: Book Two Page 20

  I didn’t choose you, Reichsführer chose you for me, because you were the most suitable candidate, just like I was the most suitable candidate for the post of the chief of the RSHA. The thought flashed in my mind, shaming me, causing indescribable hurt, and leaving me feeling like a lifeless doll, broken and thrown into the garbage by the puppet-master.

  “I don’t want to go to hell, Lisl.” I voiced another thought that was slowly making me sink deeper and deeper in the severe depression lately. “I don’t want to meet them all again. Enough is enough.”

  “Meet who, Erni?” my wife asked, stealing a concerned glance at my guard, silently asking if such ramblings and behavior was normal or if I’d gone mad without them announcing it.

  “Reichsführer… the Führer… Heydrich – everyone, all of them.” I started studying the ceiling again, so Elisabeth couldn’t see the dark demons reflected in my eyes, which had been haunting me for so long that they had somehow become a part of my nature. Or maybe I was going mad indeed… after all, the blessing of insanity is that you never know when you go insane, and maybe that’s why it’s such bliss for all madmen? “Is there a religion where they don’t believe in hell? I would like to listen to what their priests have to say…”

  “There is one,” the guard behind my back said in surprisingly good German. “Judaism. But you killed almost all of our rabbis.”

  I turned my head to him and caught the cold glare of his bright blue eyes, which looked very familiar for some reason.

  “You’re Jewish?”

  “Yes,” he answered after a pause. “Why?”

  “No, it’s nothing. You look just like the brother of… one woman I knew. Norbert his name was, such a handsome young man…”

  “Who are you talking about?” Lisl inquired, with even deeper concern and confusion furrowing her brow.

  “No one. He’s dead anyway. I wish I spoke to him at least once… maybe he would’ve told me… I should have asked her, too. I should’ve asked her about her religion, but I wasn’t ready back then, because it was the enemy religion, it was what we were fighting against. But maybe we should have studied it then, maybe we should have done everything differently, because it all turned out to be the opposite of what we believed in, and the Russians turned out to be a superior nation, and the Jews were the ones who offered us a hand of help in the last months of war, in exchange for the concessions, but still they did it, and, who knows, maybe it was their rabbis who were right all along when…”

  I stopped mid-sentence under Lisl’s openly petrified stare. My poor wife clearly assumed that I was officially clinically insane. I straightened out in my seat, regaining my composure and gave her a reassuring smile.

  “I’m sorry, Lisl. Sometimes I speak absolute nonsense since I had that brain hemorrhage. Please, don’t pay attention to me.”

  It seemed as if she breathed out in relief.

  “I wrote something for the children. They will give my notes to you after my execution.”

  “Ernst—”

  “No, please, don’t interrupt me. I have something to say before you go. Can you tell them, when they grow up, that I beg for their forgiveness for their ruined childhood? Tell them also that they have to take care of each other and be strong for each other, because sibling ties is all they have now, since no child will want to befriend them because of their father. Tell them I’m sorry that I didn’t spend enough time with them and missed seeing them grow. Tell them I’m sorry for every birthday I missed, every occasion I didn’t celebrate with them, and every tear that I wasn’t there to wipe.”

  Elisabeth’s quiet sobbing turned into weeping, even though she was trying to hide her wet face in a handkerchief.

  “And tell them that I’m sorry for every night that I wasn’t there to put them in bed, and for all the stories that I promised to read but never did…”

  Chapter 14

  Berlin, July 1943

  “Tell your secretary not to make up such horrifying stories for poor Gerthrude anymore! What’s gotten into her head to even come up with something like that? The poor girl is afraid to go to sleep, petrified of some sorcerer and the black army that will supposedly come and get her, and throw her into some oven!”

  “What oven? What are you talking about?” I was barely listening to my wife, busy with the paperwork that I had brought home from the office, but that last word for some reason caught my attention.

  “If you could have watched your own daughter on her birthday, let me remind you, instead of dumping the responsibility on your secretary, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.”

  “And if you stayed in Linz and watched the children yourself, instead of dragging them across the country to Berlin, I wouldn’t have to dump them on my secretary.”

  “I’m sorry that your child wanted to celebrate her sixth birthday with her father, Ernst. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the heart to refuse her. I’m sorry that we’re invading your personal space with our inconvenient presence here,” Elisabeth replied with contempt.

  I wanted to say in my defense that I was planning to come and spend the weekend with them in Linz, but my little daughter appeared in the doors of my study, pressing her doll to her chest and grabbing her mother’s skirt.

  “Why aren’t you in your bed, schatzi?”

  Instead of an answer Gertrude glanced up at her mother and then asked in her little voice, “Papa, can you come check under my bed?”

  “I told you,” Lisl huffed.

  I gave her a pointed glare, went to pick up my daughter in my arms and brought her back to the guest bedroom, which she shared with her brother as I didn’t have a suitable nursery for them because we lived in two different towns. Countries even, if it wasn’t for the Anschluss of Austria. I offered Lisl my own bedroom and bed, however I was hoping to stay up late working so she would get tired and fall asleep, and therefore wouldn’t demand any marital duties from me.

  I put Gertrude to bed next to her snoring brother, theatrically checked under the bed and reassured her that there weren’t any monsters hiding there.

  “I’m not afraid of monsters, monsters don’t exist,” Gertrude even folded her little arms just like an adult, as if explaining the obvious.

  I chuckled involuntarily. “So who are you afraid then? Enemy spies? Or Comrade Stalin?”

  “No. The spies of the black army. They’re everywhere.”

  “What black army, sunshine?” I sat on the side of the bed and smiled at the girl, tucking her hair behind her ears.

  “The black army and the sorcerer, who’s leading them.”

  “Did Annalise tell you this story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, she was just trying to entertain you. It’s a fairy tale, a made up story. Sorcerers don’t exist.”

  “This one is real,” Gertrude insisted, frowning. “She’s hiding from him. I promised not to tell anyone, but I was afraid that he would come for me at night and throw me in the oven with the rest of them.”

  Now this was starting to sound quite strange. I thought that maybe Elisabeth wasn’t so wrong in her scornful rebuke, accusing me of leaving the children in the care of a young woman who didn’t have any children of her own and therefore didn’t know any normal children tales to tell them. Why would Annalise make something like this up though? And what’s with the ovens?

  “Tell me the whole story, Gerti,” I asked my daughter.

  She took a deep breath, concentrating, and went on to tell me how the evil sorcerer came to the beautiful land that the people of the Kingdom shared with the fairy tale creatures. But since the sorcerer was evil and hated the fairy habitants of his new country, he decided to create the Black Army and get rid of them, so there wouldn’t be anyone left except for the ones of human origin. I caught myself frowning more and more.

  “… and the sorcerer’s Black Army is everywhere, they’re under his evil spell and their only task is to catch and kill every single fairy. They’re all dressed in black
and have a skull with crossbones on their clothes, as the sorcerer’s symbol, because they only bring death. And they catch and herd all the fairies together and burn them alive in the big ovens that the sorcerer ordered to build just for that purpose.” Gertrude finished in a dramatic whisper, but pulled the blanket closer to her face, frightened by her own words. Quite a strange story, to say the least. Suspiciously strange.

  “And why did Annalise say that she’s hiding from them?”

  “Because she’s a fairy princess herself.” My daughter’s words sent chills down my spine; chills of a very strange origin. That didn’t make any sense whatsoever… “She and the other fairies lived together with people in peace, before the sorcerer came and destroyed their beautiful temples and gave the order to kill them all.”

  “The temples?”

  “Yes. They had beautiful temples with stars on them.”

  The chills started spreading down to my lungs. “And the sorcerer ordered to kill them all.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he commands the Black Army.”

  The girl nodded several times enthusiastically because I had caught onto her story. I started catching on more than her story though.

  “And Annalise told you that she’s hiding from the Black Army?”

  “Not exactly…” She wrinkled her nose for a moment, trying to recall the right words. “She just can’t let them know who she is, or they will burn her too – the soldiers with skulls.”

  “With skulls like these?” I turned my wrist so that she would see my cuff-link with the SS-Totenkopf symbol on it. Skull and crossbones. Only the uniform was field grey now, changed due to the war.

  My daughter studied the cuff-link for some time and then shrugged indecisively.

  “So according to your new friend I’m from the Black Army too?”

  Gertrude paused for a while, chewing on her lip, and then finally said, “I don’t think she was talking about you.”

  “Of course, she wasn’t. It’s a fairy tale, Gerti. That Black Army doesn’t exist. And neither do fairies. And Annalise is most certainly not one of them. She is a human. Just a regular human, like you and me, understand?” I don’t know who I was trying to persuade more – my daughter or myself.

  “What about the ovens then? Are they real?”

  I held her gaze even though it took all the strength in me to do so.

  “No,” I replied firmly. “They’re not.”

  “Swear on my life,” she suddenly demanded, and the room at once felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it, for I couldn’t bring myself to take another breath.

  “Swear!” Gertrude screamed, almost waking Hansjörg, who shifted in his sleep and mumbled something indistinctive. I remained frozen in my spot while my brain feverishly tried to think of things to say.

  “Papa?” The girl was looking at me with eyes welling with tears this time.

  “Those ovens from the story are not real. Just like fairies,” I quickly cheated my way out of the answer. “I swear.”

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, September 1946

  I swear, this year the fallen leaves had some special, musky smell, or maybe they smelled so good, kicked by my feet off my way as I was taking the scheduled walk that day, because I was going to die soon, and all these petty, trivial things all of a sudden carried such meaning.

  Every passing day I met with the greediness of a condemned man, who I in fact was, although not officially yet. I woke up with the sunrise and sometimes even earlier, long before the wake-up call, just to prolong the day, and to prolong my life by one more hour. I finally understood the meaning of the phrase ‘You’ll sleep when you’re dead.’ Only it wasn’t amusing anymore, but eerily menacing.

  Even food tasted different now, but more than anything I felt my stomach twist each time Henry, my sympathetic guard, sneaked me another treat – an apple or a strudel, which the bakers had only recently started baking again – for each time I fondled his offering in my hands, the utmost terror would creep up together with a thought that it might be the last apple or the last strudel that I had in my life. I started crying again, quietly, without anyone to see, broken, terrified and so unbearably lonely.

  I watched the young MPs exchanging jokes in the courtyard, and listened to their animated chatter in the prison hallway while alone in my cell; about someone getting married soon; about someone’s sister giving birth to twins; about someone reuniting with their old comrade, who they thought had been long dead. I would cross my hands on my chest defiantly, thinking about how unfair it was that they would be able to get married, have children, hug their friends and go on with their lives, when mine was going to be over in probably over a month. If I’m lucky, they’ll have enough decency to at least hang me after my birthday, I thought sulkily one day and squeezed my eyes with my hand again, fighting bitter tears and the cursing I threw at myself, at my hurt feelings and my animosity towards my captors. What right did I have to be bitter, really? It was all my fault, through and through. It was me, I got myself into this noose, and not some Bolshevik Russians or the allied MPs.

  I was on my third circle in the courtyard, deep in my brooding, when I noticed him again, the man, who seemed unable to let go of my hopeless situation – my best friend, Otto Skorzeny. Once again, he was hanging on the bars of his window, holding the weight of his body on his elbows only, and waving to me maniacally. As soon as I acknowledged him with a barely visible nod, he, holding onto the bars with one hand, reached with the other one into his pocket, I guess, and, glancing warily in all possible directions where guards might be, he threw a pen on the ground, just where I was going to pass in twenty more steps.

  I sighed, almost angry with him for his futile attempts to… I don’t even know what he was doing or thinking for that matter, but one thing I was certain about: all his stunts were nothing more but a useless mockery of a dead man. His efforts had the effectiveness of a bandage that a doctor puts on a cut finger, when his patient is already dying of septicemia. I thought for a second to ignore the damn pen and walk away, but at the last moment couldn’t bring myself to upset the only person who still cared about me.

  Just to humor him, I repeated the same procedure of safely picking up and hiding the second pen in my pocket like I had done with the first one. Where was he getting all these pens? He was still the best diversionist and schemer of the former Reich, so if he in fact stole them or begged his guards for them, probably lying that he’d lost the other, it wouldn’t actually surprise me.

  I glanced up, giving Otto the ‘are-you-happy-now’ look, to which he, always oblivious to my bad mood, showed me another thumb up. As soon as they brought me back to my cell, more out of boredom than out of curiosity I fished the pen out of my pocket and opened it, just to find another tiny note inside. However, it was the contents of the note that knocked the wind out of me for a second and made me stare at it with my mouth open for over a minute, reassuring myself that I hadn’t lost my mind yet and the words were indeed there; tiny, barely fitting together letters, forming the most impossible message I could have possibly fathom.

  “Führer alive. Coordinates pen 1. Negotiate w/Americans!”

  _______________

  Berlin, August 1943

  “The Führer made himself more than clear on that matter. If we get Mussolini out now, right from under the Allies’ noses, we’ll have the greatest possible moral advantage over them. Ernst? Are you listening to me at all?”

  Otto, snapping his fingers in front of my unblinking stare, woke me up from my musings.

  “What? Yes.” I cleared my throat and leaned over the maps, spread out over my table by the new chief of the diversion unit, Skorzeny. “Mussolini. So what’s the plan?”

  Otto shot me a pointed glare. “I have just told you everything in detail. Where is your head these days?”

  I had no time to answer because at the same exact moment Annalise walked in, carrying additional maps in her arms. I kept
scrutinizing her face while she was spreading them out on the table as she explained to Otto and I about the peculiarities of the topography and the possible difficulties they might represent for Otto and his squadron’s mission. Everything was the same about her; same cornflower blue eyes, same golden hair, same porcelain skin, only without the healthy summer glow because she was spending too much time in the office with me instead of using her free time to go to the countryside for a weekend or to take leave to go by the sea. She never asked me for leave, actually. Not once, as if she didn’t want to leave the office.

  She was sitting next to Otto, and the two of them were arguing over the advantages and disadvantages of gliders – the only option we had of getting into the enemy’s territory, according to Otto. Annalise was the only woman he listened to, as he admired her quick wit and meticulousness with which she always thought every task through and through, making it fool-proof, mistake-proof, and immune to failure.

  “That girl is so smart she could talk you out of her execution if she was caught red-handed killing Hitler,” Otto said jestingly one day, sipping cognac in my villa.

  I almost choked on mine after his words. She did talk me out of her execution, when she was caught red-handed with a radio, which was used by members of the Underground. Well, not red-handed, per se… Her fingerprints were on the locks, but not on the radio itself, though. It was like it had happened just yesterday how she sat so poised and calm across the table from me, with her hands folded on her lap, telling me the story of how she helped some woman on a train with her luggage. Somehow, someway, another agent from SD was with her and confirmed it…

  I was very ill-tempered that day. I was so menacing that even Müller slowly stepped further and further away from me, closer to the door, and then disappeared behind it completely, right when my fist slammed the table. She didn’t even flinch, but only smirked slightly, just like she did later when I took my dagger out and held it in front of her eyes, daring her to let me do something with it. And I did. I pressed it to her throat so tightly that any further pressure would be lethal. I wanted her to be afraid, I wanted her to tell me everything, but she, as if making fun of my fruitless interrogation techniques, just put her hand on the back of my neck, pulled me close and kissed me, for the first time. She injected me with her poison, snapped something in my mind, and made me believe that she was innocent. But was she really?