Lycanthropos (5 page)

Almost immediately, she rebelled against her own
reflections.
No,
she thought as she picked the largely unused breakfast dishes up from the table and placed them in the sink.
No, he isn't right. We can take the risk of
disobedience; we can at least not pretend that we think that
what is happening is right. At the very least, at the very, very least, we could leave the country, we could at least
try to leave the country…

The telephone rang, and she went to answer it. Not everyone had a telephone in their house, but the Weyrauchs did. It was deemed necessary for a minister to be able to easily to contact his superiors, his church building, the government's Ministry of Cults...Lord, how that name bothered her!...the hospitals, and other places where his
services might be needed; and, of course, it made it easier for all these agencies to contact him as well.

Louisa picked up the phone and said, "Hello? Weyrauch residence."

"Hello, dear," her mother's voice said from the other
end of the line. "Is everything all right?"

Louisa sighed, not wishing to discuss her marital
problems with her mother. "Yes, fine, Mother, just fine.
Everything is just fine."

"Are you getting along well with Gottfried?"

She sighed again. "Wonderfully, Mother. Splendidly."

"Good, I'm glad to hear it. You know, Louisa, I just
can't stop thinking about the argument you and Gottfried had last weekend when I was there for dinner. You really must be
supportive of your husband, and not be so critical."

"Yes, Mother."

"I certainly hope you don't behave that way when people
from the parish are in your home. You have a responsibility
as a minister's wife, Louisa, and whatever else may be
happening, you must keep any domestic problems to yourself."

People are dying by the millions
, she thought glumly,
and Mother is worried about my committing a social faux pas
.
"Yes, Mother," was all she said. She had learned years
before that arguing with her stubborn parent was an exercise
in futility and frustration.

Louisa muttered an occasional word of agreement and
paid very little attention to what her mother was saying. She
glanced out the front window of the parsonage and saw that her husband was standing outside on the pavement, looking down the street. Louisa watched him for a moment and then sighed.
Why are we still here, Gottfried?
she thought miserably.
Why in God's name have we stayed in
Germany
?

 

Weyrauch had intended to eat breakfast and then take a nap, but he now found himself standing on the street with nowhere to go. Having made a rather dramatic exit, he would have felt foolish walking right back into the house, and he stood motionless for a few moments as he wondered what he
should do next. Then he remembered that he had a pastoral
obligation to offer words of comfort to poor Frau Neumann, so he turned and began to walk toward the Neumann home.

"Dietrich Bonhöffer," he muttered aloud as he strolled
along the narrow cobblestone streets of the little Silesian
village
of
Kappelburg
. "I am so sick to death of hearing about Dietrich Bonhöffer." He knew that Louisa and the now rather well-known dissident minister had been friends since childhood, and it grated on him that she so obviously admired the man, admired him with the same intensity with which she despised her husband. "Why didn't you marry him, then?" he muttered, addressing his absent wife, answering
his own question in his mind.

He remembered those days over a decade ago, when he as finishing his doctorate in Theology at the seminary at
Erfurt
. He had met Bonhöffer, then a young seminarian,
after a lecture they had both attended, and it was through
Bonhöffer that he had met Louisa Keimes. Bonhöffer was five years and Louisa a full decade younger than Weyrauch, and he found their youthful, enthusiastic idealism infectious, inspiring,
invigorating. He thought back on his decision to attend
medical school in preparation for joining Albert
Schweitzer's team of missionary physicians in
French
Equatorial Africa
, and for the life of him could not remember if it had been his idea or Louisa's. Had he made
such a peculiar, uncharacteristically selfless plan in order to impress Louisa, or had he been so inspired by the passion of his young friends, a passion for changing the world, that
he had taken his own words seriously? He simply could not
remember. It was as if the Gottfried von Weyrauch of 1932 was a different person from the Gottfried von Weyrauch of
1944. That earlier Weyrauch had voted for the small,
democratically oriented Progressive Party; he had been a vocal, outspoken critic of the Nazis; he had preached resistance to evil, he had ridiculed the nonsensical diatribes leveled at the Jews, had been a pillar of strength and a defender of truth. Louisa had fallen madly in love
with him, had married him, had cherished him, respected him,
looked up to him, loved him.

All of this was before Hitler came to power, before
standing up to the Nazis ceased to be theoretical and became
downright hazardous. All of this was before Weyrauch began seriously to consider what life would be like in tropical
Africa
, without such basic creature comforts as hot and cold running water and beer gardens and good food. There was a new man inhabiting the body of Gottfried von Weyrauch, one whom Louisa detested, one with whom she had not been physically intimate for over seven years, one whom she would have divorced had she not disapproved of divorce on religious grounds. This new Weyrauch was an exemplar of two very important truisms. The first was that when faced with
the desire for ease and comfort, the ideal of self-sacrifice
tends to wither away. The second was that in the absence of danger, courage is common; when danger is present, courage
is rare.

At least, these things were true for him.

He arrived at the front door of the Neumann home and,
after clearing his throat and straightening his clerical
collar, he tapped the brass door knocker against it. He waited for a few moments and then knocked again. No one appeared to be home. Weyrauch reasoned that poor Frau Neumann, having found her pastor absent when she came by earlier that day, had gone to a friend's house for some measure of support and condolence.
Well
, he thought,
no
matter. I'll see her eventually and do whatever I can for her
.

He began to walk back toward his own house, feeling
somehow relieved that he was not going to have to engage in
the pastoral counseling which he knew the poor woman needed
so badly at this tragic time.
First her husband and now her only
son
, he thought, shaking his head.
What a shame
.

There seemed to be a spring in his step as he strolled
back along the medieval street, and he found his mood lifted
by the cool morning air and the sounds of the birds singing
in the trees that lined his way. As he drew close to his house he noticed that two soldiers of the S.S. were approaching from the other direction. His mind registered
the fact that a black limousine was parked across the street
from his door, but he did not connect the automobile with the soldiers. He was thinking to himself that his wife had
misjudged him, that he was as brave as any man, that he
would walk right by the two S.S. with his head held high and
would give them a condescending and disapproving look as he
passed them.

Of course, all he did was crouch over very slightly,
avert his eyes from them, and touch his fingers to his
forehead in a tentative, pathetic salute. He opened his front
door and walked into the parlor of
the parsonage
.
Louisa was standing in the middle of the room,
feather duster in hand, and he began to say something to her
when he noticed that she was looking past him, her face reflecting a combination of fear and anger. He turned to find that the two S.S. soldiers had followed him to his
front door, and that behind them, across the street, a third
member of Hitler's elite troops was standing beside the
limousine.

"You are Doctor von Weyrauch?" one of them asked.

"I...yes...yes, I am. Why? W...what do you want?" he
stammered.

The man turned to Louisa. "And you are Louisa von
Weyrauch, maiden name Keimes?"

"Yes," she replied evenly, frightened but bitterly resentful of this intrusion.

The S.S. man nodded. "You will both please pack a bag
and accompany us."

"Accompany you where?" he asked, his lip quivering. He
reached back to take Louisa's hand, ostensibly as a gesture
of protection, in reality out of need for support. She snatched her hand away from him and stood glowering at the two men so intimidating in their black uniforms and jack boots.

"Your presence is required at S.S. headquarters in
Budapest
," he replied. "You have very little time, so you
had better see to your packing immediately."

"
Budapest
!" Louisa exclaimed. "Why? What in God's name for? Who has ordered this?"

"The order comes, I understand, from your cousin,
Madam."

Weyrauch rushed upstairs to pack bags for them both as Louisa, her face flushed and her hands curled into trembling
fists at her sides, argued with their unwelcome escorts.
Weyrauch knew as well as she did that the only cousin of Louisa's to whom the trooper could have been referring was, when last they had heard of him, a colonel in the S.S.

Less than an hour later they were on a military
transport plane, flying through the blue Moravian sky on their way to
Hungary
.

Helmuth Schlacht dropped the file folders onto the
large mahogany desk and shook his head.
Facts do not lie; the information written in the files were facts, and the two dozen mutilated bodies stored in the freezers in the basement of the
Ragoczy
Palace
were facts.
But when facts seem to run counter to reason, documentation
must be very carefully assembled before action is taken.
If Weyrauch can assist me in presenting this to Himmler
, he
thought,
I'll
see that he and Louisa are taken care of. He
should be grateful, even if she isn't
. He laughed humorlessly, recalling the many conversations, arguments actually, in which he and his cousin Louisa had engaged when they were children back in the twenties, before their estrangement had become so deep and fundamental that they
had stopped seeing each other altogether.

When was the last time I saw Louisa?
he mused.
Was it at her wedding? No, it was after that
. She had refused to allow him into the church if he insisted upon wearing his uniform...he was in the S.A. then, a storm trooper, a brownshirt, until he
was recruited by the S.S....and while he had no desire to attend the wedding in the first place, having agreed to go
just to placate his forever needling mother, he was nonetheless angered at Louisa's attitude. He had consoled
himself with many foolish, adolescent dreams of vengeance
upon her for the affront, but he had outgrown them.

It had not taken long for him to realize that Louisa,
married to a weak-kneed, spineless clergyman, living out her
life as a petite-bourgeois
Hausfrau
in a provincial Silesian backwater, had taken a greater vengeance upon herself than he would have taken. He was reasonably certain that she was
miserable, and he derived some satisfaction from the
knowledge, even though on a different level he felt sorry
for her.

S.S. Colonel Helmuth Schlacht did not think himself a
vengeful man. He was, of course, a dedicated and devoted
National Socialist, and did not regard the necessary execution of national and racial enemies as vengeful acts, regardless of the harm these creatures had done to the Fatherland and the
Volk
. It was simply as the Führer had so often said, that
the lying, deceitful, thieving, traitorous, destructive,
parasitic, syphilis-ridden Jews had to be done away with,
along with the Gypsies and, ultimately, the Slavs and the
Asiatics and the intelligent apes that inhabited
sub-Saharan Africa. There is no vengeance involved in the destruction of germs, he reasoned, though he did acknowledge experiencing a scintillating pleasure in the exercise of
power, in the ability, indeed the right and duty, to cause pain and suffering to the enemies of the Reich. To his own
mind, Schlacht was neither vengeful nor sadistic, but was rather a soldier in a great crusade which had as its goal
the racial purification of the world and the establishment
of a
global German Empire. And if this goal necessitated the
extermination of millions of sub-humans, what of it? And if
he
enjoyed his work, so much the better. Soon enough the
work
would be done, at least in
Europe
.