“And yellow park benches?”
“I’m so proud that we consider the smallest detail. Jews, my dear, are carriers of cancer.”
“Aren’t Jews some kind of nation?”
“A nation unified by money. Rassenfeinden. The enemy race. I’ll quote Nietzsche as the Führer approves of me talking to you about a philosopher so practical. Nietzsche, my dearest, questions morality itself. All our moral babbling comes from stupid Christian tradition. If the Führer were a Christian, he could never have written Mein Kampf, a book advocating salvation without the false consolation of religion. As a good Nazi woman, you know that God is dead. It’s the lamb, Nietzsche tells us, that decides the birds of prey are bad. Jews are afraid of us because they carry around a fear—a Jewish Mojre. Washed gloves hide muddy hands.”
“Didn’t a Jew reserve-officer recommend the Führer for his Iron Cross First Class in World War I?” I asked.
“I prefer to call that Jew an Israélite.” Hermie helped himself to his usual bowl of fig laxatives. “And isn’t resettlement not reward enough? For the Jews have the honor of contributing to the greater good. We must all submit to a genetic obedience. Repeat after me… destroy… vernichten.”
“Vernichten,” I said softly. “And will it always be that way for the Jews?”
“Dearest, you need to see the stone walls of Mauthausen. Those walls are extremely thick. Built to last for centuries. This is no passing theory; it’s essential to our New Order. Now, getting back to Proust.”
“I heard Proust was homosexual,” I said.
“They don’t breed. But that’s no excuse for Goebbels not to have tasted a Madeleine. And Proust did publish an article in France’s Nouvelle Revue saying Tristan and Die Meistersinge were great, and any angry nationalism was not to be used in matters of aesthetics.”
“I don’t think it’s disloyal to read remote literature. We’re not at war with Tolstoy or Hemingway. What harm can they do?”
“Literature is death, my sweet.”
“How do you know, Hermie?”
“Shakespeare says so. Though he says it in such a bland language. Romeo and Juliet. Gott! One has to learn English in German to find any beauty in their patter.”
“Romeo and Juliet killed themselves.”
“Ja. And we likewise burned them. But they rest together. Forever. Death is a paramour, dearest.”
Hermie unzipped his pants, undid his cummerbund and wire corset saying he knew I wasn’t squeamish, not about something as patriotic as his putsch. He loved to call his manhood “putsch” because doing so seemed heroic. He took out his small shining giblet rouged as bright as his ears. Pink powder, the color of forced roses, was thick all around the fat corded little neck down there. Rousseau, he said, once complained that the poor went without bread because face powder was made of wheat flour. In that sense, it was uncivilized. Now, powder comes from uneatable fluff.
Trying not to look between his legs, I was determined to be like Magda, worldly and amused. But my eyes would not be diverted from what he called his fleshy “council of war.”
“I wasn’t a child who played airplanes. Pilots were never my heroes. I didn’t run around with my arms out like fluttering wings. A large plane was a woman. Something I could fit into and control. Watch her speed. Knowing when to roll her over. A little one-seater was a boy jerking, skidding into turns, but finally coming to an end in a bounce and roll.“
Hermie took off his jodphur boots with silver spurs on the heels and threw them at the door. “Oh, where those little spurs have been,” he said as two young and very thin boys came in, their parachute harnesses clinking on the floor. “They’re from the Youth Battalion. Being a pilot, I like a couple of willowy sticks at my side. May I introduce Falk and Jurgen.”
The boys were perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Adult uniforms hung loosely over their shoulders, and their trousers were rolled at the bottom. Boots too big and without laces flapped noisily without holding in their feet. Boy pilots, they were trained on gliders. Their other job was the haphazard defense ring around big cities. Having a pistol each, they hid in any line of foxholes they could find, sleeping at night in burned out streetcars that lay sprawled with useless dangling electric wires trailing behind. Like civilians, they stood in line for bread.
“I like to push my boys briskly out of a plane, watch them dropping fast until that sudden fierce parachute jerk of sperm billows alive.”
Falk and Jurgen ignored Hermie’s putsch that had now become engorged as they entered.
“During the Weimar days, caning boys was forbidden. I’m glad the Führer reversed that, and these two come from a good school where they’ve bent down many times to receive five or six of the best.”
“They’re so young.”
“Didn’t Napoleon have the ‘Marie Louises’ in 1814, young boys in his cause. The Führer remembers.”
Hermie took out a bottle of wine from a drawer in his desk.
“Youth! Shall we drink to them? Snake wine from a good general in the Japanese army. I assure you the snakes at the bottom of the bottle are dead.”
“Our Führer doesn’t drink,” I replied, feeling loyalty suddenly flush my cheeks like desire.
“He’s quite lenient with the rest of us.” Hermie poured a glass of snake wine for himself and each boy. “I like that special foreplay I get from a plane when it stalls, stops in midair. At the peak of desire, I ache to let go as the plane falls, the nose down shuddering… falling… falling before I pull up quickly to recover. If I’m lucky, I blast an eardrum and have blood on my neck.”
Hermie smiled, pressing my hand for support. “With a multitude of duties to consider, I have to resort to ether in my whiskey. Boys are only one half of my complexity, but happily I offer my backside to all—what the knowing French call codette du legionnaire. I subscribe to Balzac’s philosophy… forgiving him for being French. Pleasure, Balzac averred, is like a drug. To keep getting the same results, you have to double the dose. Death or brutalization is the final one.” Swishing the wine on his swollen gums, he gulped it along with Sparacodeine pills from Dr. Stumpfegger.
The boys drank as well, each coughing in a different tone.
“Where is our bath? Must you gentlemen forget all the time, you silly creatures?”
Falk ran quickly out of the room and returned with a large pan of water.
“Both my boys did a year at Karlsruhe Cadet School in Baden. So they’re not without knowledge of our training manuals. They studied Schlieffen and know to go forward. Onward. So to prepare ourselves, we clean our pipes together. And we appreciate an audience.” Hermie stood and put his engorged putsch in the pan. Unzipping his pants, Falk observed Hermie’s floating sausage without emotion.
Anticipating how little boys might look, I was not impressed with what I saw—a glob of speckled dough hanging between skinny thighs. Nor was I embarrassed. Just intrigued.
“Come on, boys, I can’t last forever.” Biting his tongue in happy anguish, Hermie looked forward to their jerking and yawing.
Suddenly Falk began to cry, his head bent over the water. “I see my mother’s face,” he whimpered to his reflection. “I see my mother’s face.”