Europe Central (23 page)

10

Another weakling, another little shirker requests permission to report. The sleepwalker gazes at him with angry eyes.

The shirker complains about certain extreme measures. What a gallows-raven he is! He croaks and croaks. (In the
Ring
, don’t even gods have to trick the dwarfish Jewish capitalist and even rob him in order to save the world?) The sleepwalker stares him down, but the shirker will not dwindle. Where’s Keitel? Where’s Jodl? Someone should show him out! On the conference room table there at Wolf’s Lair, the shirker lays out photographs of hungry street-crowds in the Warsaw Ghetto, of children’s faces like weeping skulls, pale, immobile bodies on the pavement, skinny, pale people lying in crowds on hay mattresses.

A typist gasps.

The sleepwalker whirls to kiss her hand.—Never mind, child, he comforts her. She smiles, rushes from the room.

The shirker whines on and on. He’s sure that this matter was never brought to the Führer’s attention before. Of course the Jews are our misfortune, but this . . .

And the sleepwalker? He flicks at one of the photographs with his thumb-nail. The mouth tightens.

11

Another general insists on disturbing him with bad news of the Russian advance. He says that conditions are degenerating along the entire front.

Well, let them degenerate! he rages. All the better for me!

Yes, my Führer. But our own troops are freezing to death. Just yesterday I saw—

The sleepwalker covers his ears.—Perhaps I’m too sensitive, he replies.

12

The workers have gathered before him into rectangular armies. Swastika standards begin marching in file down a long well of futurity. They shout; he waits, expressionless and dour. Long before the first Blood Purge of 1934 they’d seen him striding up to the dais of destiny, standing atop an immense dais with a swastika on the wall nearest his feet. Now they must all be conscripted, their factories to become still another front. He needs gold rings and henchmen.

He speaks of spiritual matters. Only they can save his grey cathedrals and greatcoats from the Russian Jews, who return to life no matter how many of them he burns. The workers must build new breastworks. Aren’t they all answerable to the war dead? Even women will have to labor now, in spite of all his principles. Emergencies require extreme measures. Didn’t Siegmund mate with his own sister to save the blood of their race?

And the workers listen. They honor his sacrifice. They will not bereave him of his war. Like the crowd at the Opera House, they offer him “stormy applause.” At his drumbeat comes the gorgeous flash of ten thousand spades raised upon the Labor Front. In his honor, German women have strung buntings upon their gingerbread houses. Soon enemy bombs will tumble upon them, and he’ll turn away, his face milkily shining by torchlight.

13

He always attends the first cycle at Bayreuth every year. This time again he comes early. At Bayreuth the stage is roofless like bombarded Stalingrad. The sleepwalker paces unyieldingly in his private box, brooding down the fan-shaped tiers of empty seats. He strokes the Corinthian columns. He unbuttons the collar of his shirt. He can almost hear the breathing of Verena Wagner outside. The
Schalldeckel
gapes before him: music’s open grave. Like the bridegroom who longs to meet his bride beneath the linen sheets, he craves this hollow of secret repose. Only there can he hoard himself safe from the others whom he must ever watch with turning head. His magic renews itself there; he sleeps without dreaming.

And so he descends into the
Schalldeckel.
The old floorboards creak beneath his jackbooted tread. Coldheartedly nervous, he grips his sweaty forelock, gibbering softly to himself, wondering where to rest. But this time, beyond the darkness he spies the flickering fires of forecourts! Call him not afraid. He’s the blond against the dark. But it’s
so
dark, just as it once was during the previous World War when he was young and blinded by poison gas . . . He strides blindly forward. Don’t his own soldiers hunker down to run through tunnels in the ruins even though flashes of Russian rocket-light and snakes of flame pursue them?

The flames lunge up. A tall woman stands ahead. He scarcely comes up to her knees. The pupils of her eyes resemble sparks from the spearpoints of Valkyries. Jealously mistrusting, he halts, mistrusting, his own eyes glaring like twin red rings.

She clenches her fist. Then he knows he’s on trial. Momentarily he awakes, staring candidly at her with his wide, piercing eyes. He could win her over if he put his mind to it. He thrusts his head back, speaks from the chin. He’s somber, godlike, expressionless. Dreaming an answer to what she hasn’t yet said, he tells her that in the operas, Wotan’s noblest striving is for his own supplanting. He doesn’t care if he loses the war, if he can only keep the Jews from getting back the magic ring.

Why, then, it’s well for you, she replies.

What do they name you?

Laugh-at-Wailing.

Who gave you birth?

Fire
’s my father.
Doom
is my mother called.

And why do you await me here?

To tell you what you’ve always known—that you were born guilty and overmastered, that the nothingness you burn for refuses to receive you, that olden treasures grow corrupted at your touch.

The sleepwalker screams: It’s all treason! Now I know why my Russian offensive’s failed! That’s my justification. If I was fated, then how was I to blame? You Jewish bitches have opposed me at every step, but do you think I care? Go ahead; stab me in the back; I’ll annihilate you; I’ll exterminate you all! You think you’re immortal, but I’ll test you with every poisoned acid there is! I’ve always been too lenient. Well, that’s about to change. I’ll have you broken without mercy; I know what it takes; I’ll wear you down . . .

But
Laugh-at-Wailing
answers with a chuckle like a rattle of futurity, like bones jiggling inside a procession of pale coffins across the scorched earth of liberated Auschwitz.

I won’t give up! cries the sleepwalker. I don’t care if it’s useless!

The Valkyrie stands silent.

So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers:
Why did you make me?
I never wanted to be made . . .

For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?

Mercurially calming himelf, he smiles and remarks: You might as well have spared yourself the trouble. What did you think I’d do—walk sheepishly to the gallows? Do you think I’ve never been judged before?

I don’t need opinions, little man.

And you truly believe I’ll deviate one hair’s breadth from the course I’ve laid out for myself? You think you can goad me into doing anything more extreme than I would do in any case? Are you so hopeful? Why, then,
it’s well for you.

He withdraws, escorted almost into the light by goblins like Russian tanks scuttering across ruins. He’s in a panic. He rushes home to Berlin, where he can closet himself with Speer and gaze down at the Grand Avenue of postwar Berlin, modeled at one to one thousand scale. Speer’s cabinetmakers have built the new Opera House at one to fifty scale, and over here there’ll be a cinema for the masses. Every edifice will be the same height.

With deferential formality, Speer asks his opinion on some aspect of the Central Railroad Station. Carefully, the sleepwalker tries out the Valkyrie’s phrase:
I don’t need opinions.
I already see everything.

Speer stares woodenly. The sleepwalker feels inspired.

14

And now what? The inclined arm replicated a millionfold, the knife-edge hand, the shouting voices of his echoers, his chin-strapped orators, all sing out to stand firm. Germany lies obediently below him, like an aerial view of fields, a corduroy of bodies who soon will fight in Russia, shivering, warmed only by the pain of their own wounds. His swastika banners are grassblades in an infinite meadow of war. Up standards!
Sieg Heil!
He’s guarded by grimy soldiers with deep-sunk eyes. Comes the great battle between Siegmund and Hunding; the Nibelungs fight on in the burning hall; then long lines of gravediggers are carting corpses two by two to the open pit; down the chute they go; then we paper them over, and add a sprinkle of dirt, hastily so that we will not get into even more trouble with the Germans who have dressed us in the striped uniforms and pale wrinkles of concentration camp inmates and who are even now building our doom out of squat towers and barbed wire.

15

Italy falls, but the sleepwalker knows how to save her from the Jews. Parachutes as beautiful as white flowers bloom upon the skies which he’s now capturing. Black columns of smoke have translated the beaches of Normandy into the stage darkness after an intermission. In the next act he must sing of retreating German troops, of dead horses and throttled light. The inky moustache in his grey face, the black, gaping mouth, and above all the raised hands of him suck new blood down the marching orchard-lanes of swastika standards. Before him, beyond his warriors hunched under their caps, he seems to see a plain of faces and lights. Where might it be? Increasingly golden, this country draws him on beyond himself. Now he comprehends in his soul why Gunnar and Hogni could not resist the Hunnish invitation: Although it meant doom and sister-woe, at least they’d win that brilliant if sinister moment of light when they drew near their foemen’s forecourts. Futurity shone like a flame-flicker reflected on gold foil. They knew they’d be greeted by raised arms and by faces, faces more pale and numerous than raindrops. The sleepwalker mutters, as he did on the eve of the Russian campaign:
The world will hold its breath
. . .

16

Soothed by solid rows of columns marching alongside the seats at Bayreuth, he fingers the acanthus scrolls. He helps Verena Wagner and her mother with gifts of munificent gold. Soon his
Ring
will begin again. He’ll watch it from start to finish, without fail. He always keeps his promises.

17

A horizontal salute from Hitler in the clouds! The sleepwalker dreams his face away from the long line of German prisoners of war so ragged and dirty, who march off to Soviet Arctic prisons, their jaws bound up in blankets and rags. Meanwhile, his own lines of slave workers march feebly past ruined apartments and railroad sidings. His dreams are shriveling and scorching. His henchmen have given over running across each other’s corpses in Africa. Shells and flames, tanks in snow, ice-maned horses, siege guns echoing in the wind, all these assault his dreams as the Russian Frost-Giants come west.

18

Now he dwells within walls of smoke. Flames rush up his staircases; chandeliers transform themselves into scorched spiders. The light excites him. In the distance he can see electric glows of barbed wire. To fight the Jews, his henchmen have built many a city of factories in the snow whose long alleys of barbed wire are signposted by frozen, snowy corpses with outstretched arms. Heaps of jawbones, mountains of pliers mark the spots where his vassals extract gold teeth from the living and the dead. Lives blow away like waves of sand. If he can only dream this dream a little longer, they’ll all be safely up the chimney. But where are his muscled heroes with their swords? Are they all dead? Snowy Russian tanks breast bluish flames and bluish snow to conquer Auschwitz, where more than seven tons of human hair await transshipment. A parade of skinny, desiccated corpses comes forth to tell lies and inspire new Jewish conspiracies.

19

When the captive Gunnar told the Huns that he’d only reveal to them the hoard of the Niflungs (whose gold shone even brighter than the vertical gleams of sunlight upon marching
boots) on condition that they cut out Hogni’s heart, they tried to trick his rich-wrought mind by carrying to him a mere thrall’s heart upon a board; but he knew his brother’s heart would never quiver in terror as that one did even in death. Helpless before his cleverness, they killed Hogni then, who laughed as he died. Then Gunnar said that since only he remained to tell the secret, he had no more fear, for tell he never would.

When they lowered Gunnar into the slimy dungeon of adders, he played upon his harp so beautifully that all the serpents slept. Yet finally he wearied, and from that ball of reptiles he perforce lay upon rose up one to bite his liver, and so he perished there in the darkness of snakes.

Knowing her duty, valiant Guthrún served up her own sons’ hearts to the husband who’d slain her brothers. After that she razed the castle by fire.

The sleepwalker in his pale grey coat (our memories of him have become so grey and grainy) craves to be another Gunnar. Isn’t he a harpist, too? Hasn’t he always been able to lull all snakes to sleep until now? And his Germany, she shall be Guthrún. Germany must die ferocious, burning down everything . . .