Ink (21 page)

ou're crazy,” I say. “I mean, the army I can just about understand, but the SA? They're thugs, plain and simple. Brutal, sadistic vermin. What is it, the pretty uniforms?”

He bristles, eyes narrowed with resentment and defiance, and I regret my words instantly, knowing that where he might have listened to me before, it will be useless to talk to him now. I sigh and turn back to the display cabinet where all of Mother's precious knickknacks seem so fragile now, so delicate, the Dresden china that was never to be actually used, the ceramic clogs from Antwerp, the framed pictures of my brother and myself. The cabinet itself is so terribly solid in comparison, Chippendale or somesuch, if I remember right, brought over from England when we left.

What will we do with all of her things now, I wonder.

“Jonni,” I say more gently. “Jonni.”

He sits on the piano stool, one
finger plinking
on the same black key; we were never very good students, either of us, he too easily distracted by the sunshine outside the window, while all I ever wanted to do was play the razzling dazzling jazz music that I listened to on the radio. He rakes his fingers through his corn-blond hair. His mother's golden boy, his father's little soldier… I wonder why I never felt jealous of their pride in him, only ever protective toward his … innocence. It is ironic, really—my elder brother, dynamic, athletic and more than capable of looking after himself in a fight, and I feel protective of him. And angry, yes, because I know what attracts him to this fascism nonsense, under it all.

“Take some time,” I say. “Come back to Nice with me. Or we'll go to Berlin and I'll show you the nightlife. There are clubs I know of. You don't have to …”

I tail off into an old, old silence.

“Times are changing, Reinhardt. I know—I know that some of them are thugs. I know that some of them just want to throw firebombs at Communists and Jews. But that's just now. This is just the start.”

“That's exactly what worries me, Jonni. Who's next?”

I'm worried about you
, I want to say.
You.

“The Futurists,” he says, “are the real threat, to our whole way of life.”

“Come to Berlin with me,” I say weakly.

“Come back to Strann with me,” he says.

I close the safe and turn the dial, hang the painting back on its hook. For the thousandth time, I think how much I despise the print but, as it's a present from my brother, I can't insult him by not hanging it in pride of place behind my desk, over the wall safe. One of Herr Hitler's dreadful Teutonic Knights series, all gray and monumental, the angles and curves, the cogs and wheels of some unspeakable mechanism, it tries to blend the shining, articulated armor of some Siegfried with a robotic imagery redolent of Lang's
Metropolis.
All it succeeds in doing is looking monstrous and overblown. I sit back down in my chair, the Eye of the Weeping Angel in my hand, trying to think of what to say next.

“Did you ever really like that thing?” I say, beckoning over my shoulder.

He looks at his feet.

“I'm not an authority on art,” he says, “but I thought, well…”

“If it was Hitler's, then it must be good, yes?”

He looks uncomfortable. Good, I think. He should be.

“What do you think of it now?” I say.

“I don't know. Look—”

“No,
you
look,” I say. “Look at it and tell me what you see. You don't think it looks a little Futurist?”

“Yes,
yes
,” he snaps, “so Hitler betrayed us, yes. I know.”

“But fascist too,” I say. “Is it armor or is it armament, man or machine? It's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. It's hard to tell the difference, I'd say. Fascist or Futurist, Jonni—what is the difference?”

“Germany!”

He thumps his fist on the desk.

“The difference is that
we
believe in something. We believe in this country, in the people, in our heritage, our history, in …”

I shake my head. I lay the jewel on the desk and slide it across to him.

“Romantic lies,” I say with a deep weariness. “Take it and go.”

“Come back with me,” he says. “You'll see, I promise you. When you see, you'll understand.”

“I don't think I'll
ever
understand,” I say.

“I don't think I'll ever understand you,” I say. “As long as I can remember all you ever wanted was to go to Heidelberg, to become an officer, and now… now you throw it all away to join these maniacs.”

He closes the piano's keyboard lid and swivels round on the stool.

“Believing in something greater than yourself doesn't make you a maniac. Yes, right now the SA is full of … wild young men. They come from the Freikorps, yes, a lot of them come from the street, and they're not educated, not like us. They haven't had our privileged lives, but they're the front line against communism and—”

“What? International Jewry? Zionist conspiracies? You don't really believe that rot. I know you don't.”

I walk over to the window, pull the lace curtain aside and point along the street.

“Is Herr Hobbsbaum a Zionist conspirator? Does he deserve bricks through his windows? Dogshit on his doorstep? Slogans in pig's blood?”

“No, of course not. There are good Jews, Reinhardt—you and I know that— but… you can't expect the man on the street to understand. The discipline will come, though. Things will settle down. We'll get the …
fire
under control. Yes. Right now, it's like a fire, Reinhardt, it's sweeping across Germany, and it's going to transform it, but once we get it under control… we'll be a new Sparta, a new Athens. Brothers-in-arms, that's what it's all about. That … simplicity, that honor and nobility.”

I walk back to the display cabinet and I pick up the photogram of my brother in his Wandervogel outfit, standing there against an alpine backdrop, mountains and meadows. Is it a contradiction in his character, I wonder, that before that trip he was obsessed with old revolutionary heroes, communists, anarchists and republicans, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Danton and Robespierre, with little understanding of the actual ideologies they stood for? Or does it make perfect sense, like this new sacrifice of Reason to Romance?

I place the picture back on the cabinet, close the glass door gently.

“At least do one thing,” I say,
“please.
Don't wear the uniform to the funeral.”

“I don't have—”

“Borrow one of mine,” I snap.

“Of course,” he says. “Of course.”

“Of course,” he says. “You could still change your mind, you know.”

The station is busy, thronging with the hubbub of families and businessmen pushing this way and that, or standing saying goodbyes, or waiting, watching clocks and checking watches, and we weave our way through, the porter behind us carrying my brother's solitary carpetbag with his uniform in it. I managed to persuade him, at the last minute, to travel in civilian clothes, to avoid any trouble, any run-ins with those less … patriotic than himself.

“Oh, yes,” he'd said absently. “You're right. You're quite right. It's going to happen soon. Don't want to draw attention to myself, eh, Fox?”

I didn't ask him what was going to happen soon.

He squares the Homburg on his head and excuses himself as he passes a young frau with a pram. I follow him, tipping my own hat as I pass and smiling at the baby. I hate the dreadful things but old habits die hard; women like a man who smiles at babies.

“You're quite sure you won't come with me?” he says.

My answer drowned out by the low, deep toot of a train, I shake my head. Steam hisses. Farther down the platform a group of young men in black shirts and circle-and-cross armbands stand laughing and chatting; they're all around the station, all around the city, more of them than ever now. Two, three years ago they were probably all wearing swastikas, I imagine, but the split went better for Hitler than it did for Rohm, who's virtually alone now as the last of the old upper echelon of the Nazi Party. And the lower ranks are dwindling all the time; what red-blooded male wants to join an army of buggers and bum boys in this day and age?

“You've heard of Thermopylae and the Spartan army that held the pass,” my brother said once, nervously. “Not three hundred men, but a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers. Not physically perhaps,” he hastened to add, “but spiritually.
Spiritually.”

But I fear the physicalities have long since rendered that rhetoric less than useless. Herr Hitler saw that, saw that the middle-class businessmen and working-class thugs he needed couldn't—wouldn't—stomach what they considered
mere depravity. No, Rohm and his fascists, their days are numbered now, I think. Tomorrow belongs to those for whom the rhetoric of history, of brotherhood, of anything can be abandoned once it has outlived its use.

“This is me.”

I step out of the way to let Johann take his bag from the porter. He places it on the train and climbs up into the doorway. He reaches out a hand and I shake it stiffly, awkwardly.

“Don't be so worried, Fox,” he says. “Everything will be fine now.”

He pats his breast pocket where the jewel sits wrapped in a handkerchief. He wouldn't pack it. I think of its owner, this man Pechorin, his meeting with Himmler, and what they might be discussing. More zeppelins and crews to drive the Japanese back? The power of German engineering joined with Russian ruthlessness? I wonder if my brother hopes to sow discord between them with this theft, but somehow I am sure there's more to it than that.

The future he fears will not be stopped so easily, I think.

He comes in on a gyring vector, braking his backways fall through days, months, years as best he can with woolen coat unfurled and billowing, black wings behind and above him, shredding in the snarling currents of time. The coat won't last much longer, but it's the nearest thing he's got to a parachute, so it's going to have to do.

He catches a vortice and goes sailing sideward on a slipstream, twists his body to add a subwise motion to the slide. A kamikaze fighter going down, he corkscrews through the ether, plummeting through time toward a landscape as much history as geography, keeping the spiral tight to stay on target. Time, Joey knows, is not a straight line but an explosion moving outward in three dimensions, like a bullet fired point-blank into a person's skull. There's more than one way to move through it.

Spinning into drop position, a fetal ball, he sees the crop circle below him like a smaller version of the trees flattened at Tunguska back in 1908. Meteor impact, so they say, but it wasn't a meteor that came down out of the skies over Siberia, Joey knows for sure. He's seen enough of these things—simple circles or more complex sigils—to recognize the mark of something that has torn a hole in time itself and dived right off the straight and narrow path the mundanes plod along time's arrow. These crop circles are landing marks and Tunguska's just a big
one. A fucking big one, right enough. He used to think one day he'd catch Tunguska, drill a hole in time and drop right down to 1908, be there waiting when it came through, see just what was big enough to make that kind of mark on the world. Tunguska's the fucking mother of them all, he thinks. The impact pattern of a fallen angel.

He unfolds in the air above the circle, like a diver coming out of a somersault, but breaking the liquid surface of reality feet-first, arms spread, in cruciform position. Moving backways in relation to the world, he sees the wheat unflatten as he lands; the stalks leap up to meet him, the record of his arrival unmaking itself.

Then he's standing in the field of wheat, motionless in space but moving slowly backways in terms of time, crows overhead circling tail-first through the air, it seems, like a video in rewind. He's seen his own landings many times but the sight of it never grows old for him, so he strolls a minute or two back across the field then turns to face frontal, to observe the moment from the distance, with his time track running forward. He watches his other self walk backward to the point of arrival, stretch out his arms like a scarecrow, rocket up into the sky, curl in a ball, and simply vanish, leaving Joey standing there outside the crop circle, marveling at this mark of mystery in the world.