Nothing touched him, nothing interfered with his world. He was in a trance, in a coma. In his inner mind he saw searchlights catching B-17 planes in the sky, he saw the platoon’s Hanomags parked under a violet sky, he saw an armour wreck burning, he saw blood and guts. He saw the spark of life ebbing from soldier Kellner’s face, watching his face turn blue and his eyes become lifeless.
Arno sat in his car with Renate at his side. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. They had reckoned they would reach Munich in the evening. But now Arno was in a coma, he had suffered some sort of fit, and now he was locked in a dissociative state. He sat stiffly, with his hands on the wheel. Renate put his hand on his shoulder; no reaction. For Arno was now off in his own world. And in his mind’s eye he saw flares in the sky, tracer rounds lighting up the land. He saw explosions, he saw MGs rolling out their networks of tracer over field and meadow. He heard the armoured machines growling, motorcycles rattling, cars roaring, strained engines going uphill. And above all, over all these imaginary sounds, he heard a wolf cry in the distance, the sound of a howling ghost dog, a cry out of the abyss.
“Garm roars outside Gnipahellir, the chains are broken, the Fenrir Wolf is running loose!”
Howling wolf, flying raven. Was it “Arno’s inner predator” who was waiting to come out or was it just an elemental cry, a roaring beyond good and evil, a faraway call that resounded through the dimensions – a cry from the open spaces, an echo from the battle zone, an eternal echo of battle, life, everything and nothing?
Walking in the ciaroscuro and howling with the wolves – advancing in artificial moonlight, staring with a pale face across the field and assessing the range of fire. Seeing burning magnesium in the sky, the night lit by green light casting shadows, hiking in Ersatz twilight with rifle at the ready – and every second, with every breath, being ready to die. Going under the searchlights through a deserted woodland, hearing bombers in the sky and chasing fleeing enemies with the occasional illumination round fired behind them, the burning magnesium lighting up the woods, the fiery green light gliding to the ground under the parachute holding the cup of burning magnesium, gliding to the ground and having the shadows of the trees moving in time, gliding to the ground and touching down and everything becomes dark again.
Someone was touching Arno’s shoulder. Someone waved a hand in front of him. He saw a steering wheel, a dashboard, a bonnet and a copse of grey hardwood trees. Where was he? Who was the woman at his side? He felt fear when he saw her, pure horror. He must get out of the car.
“Liebchen, was ist denn los…?”
Arno was in hell. But he had been there before. From 1942 through to 1945 to be exact. So he kept calm, took a deep breath and turned on his soldiery autopilot.
He returned to the operational mood, to the action pattern of a soldier: sharpening the senses, expecting anything, controlling his breath. Along with it, he could understand certain things. Like actually not being at war now. He had just been away in his war memories and his impressions of the front, but now he sobered up – he sobered up but within the shadow of his soldier persona. He was acting like a soldier, acting with his reptile brain in charge, saying in Swedish:
“Vik hädan, trollpacka!” (In English that would be, “Get thee hence, witch.”) Then in his usual German: “You have no power over me.”
Renate understood nothing. Arno looked at her, still without recognising her.
“Let me go out for a while,” Arno said.
He went out on the petrol station car park. He looked up at the cloudy sky. It was cold and raw. He saw the leafless deciduous trees, he saw the highway, he saw the station with its pumps and the station building. Caltex. Well…
He was still half gone. But he remembered vaguely that he shouldn’t smoke at petrol stations, even though he needed a cigarette. He walked thirty steps away to a patch of grass. He sat down on a bench that belonged to a rest area. He thought: what is it with me, who am I…? Am I going crazy…? What scares me is this: I actually want to return to the world of “howling dog in the distance, burning magnesium, bombers in the sky”. Some part of me wants to roam that twilight zone forever, howling with the wolves, patrolling the combat zone under artificial moonlight; target, the enemy’s field army, direction, infinity…
Yes, he realised: I’m about to go crazy. If I give myself up for that twilight world, I go mad for real. Well, I’ll try to avert it, trying the methods I vaguely remember. But what, exactly?
He got an inspiration: perhaps by saying to himself: I AM.
This brought some calm. The formula worked, the old formula he had been living for as long as he could remember.
I am… But what am I? I am, I am – what and who…?
Cars passed on the highway at furious speed. Everything formed an unmistakable noise, a rushing roar in the background. Renate remained in the Ford.
“I am the light of the world,” he said to himself. “I am the light. I am the light, the light of the world.
“I’m Arno Greif.” This he remembered now. He took another deep breath. Things clarified a bit: he knew who he was and what he was doing. Then, with a rush, everything came back to him. Oh, so nice, ain’t it good to be alive… That was close – me close to going insane. I was almost about to strangle Renate. She was completely foreign to me when I just saw her, when I sat at the wheel. I thought she was a witch who would wipe me out.
He thought, you can apparently be latently crazy – go to war, living as one of the masters of the devastated world, enduring it, liking it – and so, afterwards, out of the blue, be visited by blackouts like this, over 20 years after returning home. No one is safe, not even an Übermensch like me.
Arno took a breath of the air, saturated with exhaust fumes and the smell of fuel spills on the concrete. Then he got up, returned to the car, got in, smiled at Renate and started the car. They never talked about this incident again.
40
I Shine
A night in January 1968, Arno was sleeping in his Munich villa. Renate lay next to him. Not that her presence played any discernable part in the following drama.
A drama it was, indeed. For the book you’re now reading, this story, this whole epic about Arno Greif, is nearing its end. And the end will be staged in the form of a dream he had this night.
First, Arno dreamed that Ringo Badger and he were sitting at a stone table in an arbour of lilac bushes. The Badger was wearing his yellow and red silk hood. He smiled affably. And he said, with graceful courtesy:
“Mr. Greif, my venerable Arno man, what did you and the enemy forces do, in western Ukraine in 1944, with the intention to fight…?”
“You really want to know that, eh?”
“Yes. That’s why I asked.”
“And you did it with an allusion to the Bhagavad-Gita’s first verse, thinking that it would make me smirk and smile a little..?”
“Indeed. Maybe I did. Sanjaya uvâca –”
“…Dharmakshetre, Kurukshetre, samveta yuyutsavaha, / mâmakâha Pândavas caiva; kim akurvata Sanjaya…?”
“Brilliant. But now it won’t be about mythical Indians, fighting with bow and arrow and Brahma-Astra.”
“No, thank goodness.”
“Thank goodness…? So you’d really like to tell me about MGs and Jabos and everything else you fought with there in western Ukraine in March 1944?”