As a child he had no more rights, and little more power, than a bondservant. Till he turned thirteen he hired out to work in the fields. Then he joined his father in the mines at Kladno.
There was little he could do till he became a man.
Except study. The village priest overcame his revulsion and helped a haunted but brilliant child find the navigation markers of life in that age.
Those were the years when he learned patience. He had no choice. A strapping was the inevitable consequence of the slightest rebellion.
His mother died when he was nine.
His father loathed him almost as much as did the midwife. His childhood became one long exercise in discipline. He learned, without coming to understand, what it was like to live on the receiving end of dictatorship.
In time he became perfectly willing to invest decades in his vengeance. And absolutely determined to carry it out. For these years of hell the Zumstegs would pay in agony and blood.
The summer of 1908, finally, saw him fleeing his hell for Vienna, taking his own, his father's, and his church's savings. There, through applied gall and a talent for forgery, he enrolled himself in the Academy of Fine Arts, where his work as a sculptor was just good enough to keep him in. Two years later he reverted to old habits, began studying contemporary medicine with a Dr. Mayer in Leopoldstadt, Vienna's Jewish district.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his background in twenty-first century medicine, he was an abysmal failure as a medical understudy. Students weren't permitted to contradict the common wisdom of their teachers, nor to promulgate crazy medical theories. Mayer endured him for two years. The doctor was a patient, tolerant man, completely oblivious to any aura of the alien. His cause for dismissing his apprentice was, in fact, personal. He learned that his goy pupil had been bedding his daughter-and had gone so far as to abort their love-child.
Mayer expelled his protege from his practice with that air of great sadness characteristic of the career long-suffering European Jew.
There had to be, Neulist thought at the time, laws of temporal inertia, or laws of chronological thermodynamics, that refused to permit the introduction of changes or new ideas.
He could not comprehend the importance to these people of being goyim or Jew, nor the intense revulsion the period's habitues bore abortion.
His response to the dismissal was blind despair. Medicine was the only field he knew-since people in this age had little need of a chief of secret police whose duties were to maintain the purity of the party ideal. Not even his obsession with the Zumstegs could break through. When the depression at last lifted he was left with nothing but indifference and a bottomless well of self-pity. His social condition slipped from bad to worse-he made his few kronen performing abortions-and to worse still, till in January 1913, so destitute that he no longer possessed a winter coat, he pawned his shoes for enough money to spend a week in the Mannerheim. The Mannerheim was a five-hundred-bed dormitory maintained for the not-quite-indigent, a sort of Viennese YMCA.
Even there, among outcasts, he remained an outsider. It was as if he exuded some alien scent that kept most everyone at a distance. There was just enough human contact to start him on the road back up.
His one friend, a man as alienated as he, was one he had long admired, in historical retrospect. Even though marooned in this desert isle of time, he had never hoped to meet the fellow. Certainly not among the down-and-outs of Brigittenau district, where Jews were thick as flies.
At that time, though, the man was just a young, directionless crank and third-rate artist, possessed by no political ideals and certainly not obsessed with the Jewish Question.
"Things must be different this time," Neulist mumbled to Hitler one morning, when they were alone in the writing room. "Unless I'm more ignorant of your biography than I thought."
The skinny, homely youth glanced up from his watercolors puzzledly. This was the sort of mysterious, never-to-be explained remark that had first drawn him to his companion, this Michael Hodzв. That and a shared feeling that they were trapped in a foreign world.
Over the months, the vague remarks included such cryptic admonitions as, "Finish Sea Lion before you start Barbarossa," and, "Don't trust Count von Stauffenberg."
After each remark Hodzв became embarrassed, as if he had spoken out of turn.
Neulist, aka Hodzв, no longer worried about altering history. His experience with Dr. Mayer had convinced him that he could not. So he did as he pleased, spending his little energy scrounging a living, and for a time completely forgot the Zumstegs.
His latter days of poverty and impotence were, paradoxically, among his happiest in two lifetimes.
Yet he remained the Avenging Sword of the State. It was his duty to pursue traitors even here in the backwaters of Time.
But the State, to all practical purposes, did not exist. How could he presume to act in its behalf?
In this age, in a whole body, he suffered none of the pain, physical or mental, that had driven him over the borders of rationality in his own time.
The friendship with Hitler never deepened, though they became traveling companions. On May 24, 1913, they set off together on a railroad adventure which ended at the cradle of the Fыhrer-to-be, Munich.
The piling international crises of the time, the Balkan Wars and the separatist movements in the imperial Hapsburg hinterlands, brought Europe to a simmer. In June 1913 the men separated. Hodzв returned to Prague. Using forged credentials, he established himself as a physician. He met Hitler again briefly in 1936, when he was physician to the Czech Olympic team. Hitler didn't recognize him.
But the Fыhrer did remember him later, on July 20,1944, at about 12:35 p.m., when the Count von Stauffenberg entered the conference room in the Lagebaracke at the Wolfsschanz with a fat black briefcase.
Hitler puzzled the vague memory till it was too late to flee. The bomb went at 12:42…
But this time it didn't kill.
The colonel had effected a major alteration of the past.
By 1936 he suspected things could be radically changed. There were subtle little differences in this history and they seemed to be accumulating. He continually wished he had studied his history closer so he could identify their nature. The big, shaping changes then still seemed improbable.
Those Prague years, more than a score of them, hurried past. He made only halfhearted attempts to fulfill his duty toward the Zumstegs: He was content with his life.