The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino Read online

  I share the view that if the allies had been more generous and not attempted to suck the last marrow from our bones, Hitler and the Freikorps would have had nothing to complain of. But our situation was manifestly unjust and in such a climate even the most moderate of burghers can somehow find himself condoning the actions of people he would have condemned out of hand before the War.

  Thus, in 1933, fearing Russian-style civil conflict worse than tyranny, many of us voted for a “strong man,” in the hope it would bring us stability.

  Sadly, of course, like most “strong men,” Hitler was merely a political construct, no more the man of iron his followers declared him to be than any other of his wretched, ranting psychopathic type.

  There were a thousand Hitlers in the streets of Germany, a thousand dispossessed, twitching, feckless neurotics, eaten up with jealousy and frustrated hatred. But Hitler worked hard at his gift for cheap political oratory, drew power from the worst elements of the mob, and spoke in the grossest emotional terms of our betrayal not, as some perceived it, by the greed of our leaders and the rapacity of our conquerors, but by a mysterious, almost supernatural, force they called “International Jewry.”

  Normally such blatant nonsense would have gathered together only the marginal and less intelligent members of society, but as financial crisis followed crisis, Hitler and his followers had persuaded more and more ordinary Germans and business leaders that fascism was the only way to salvation.

  Look at Mussolini in Italy. He had saved his nation, regenerated it, made people fear it again. He had masculinized Italy, they said. Made it virile as Germany could be made virile again. It is how they think, these people. Guns and boots, flags and prongs / Blacks and whites. Rights and wrongs . . . As Wheldrake put it in one of those angry doggerel pieces he wrote just before his death in 1927.

  Simple pursuits. Simple answers. Simple truths.

  Intellect, learning and moral decency were mocked and attacked as though they were mortal enemies. Men asserted their own vulnerable masculinity by insisting, as they so often do, that women stay at home and have babies. For all their worship of these earth goddesses, women were actually treated with sentimental contempt. Women were kept from all real power.

  We are slow to learn. Neither the English, French nor American experiments in social order by imposition came to any good, and the communist and fascist experiments, equally puritanical in their rhetoric, demonstrated the same fact—that ordinary human beings are far more complex than simple truth and simple truth is fine for argument and clarification, but it is not an instrument for government, which must represent complexity if it is to succeed. It was no surprise to many that juvenile delinquency reached epidemic proportions in Germany by 1940, although the Nazis, of course, could not admit the problem which was not supposed to exist in the world they had created.

  By 1933, in spite of so many of us knowing what the Nazis were like, they had taken control of parliament. Our constitution was no more than a piece of paper, burning amongst great, inspired books, by Mann, Heine, Brecht, Zweig and Remarque, which the Nazis heaped in blazing pyres at crossroads and in town squares. An act they termed “cultural cleansing.” It was the triumph of ignorance and bigotry.

  Boots, blackjacks and whips became the instruments of political policy. We could not resist because we could not believe what had happened. We had relied upon our democratic institutions. We were in a state of national denial. The realities, however, were soon demonstrated to us.

  It was intolerable for any who valued the old humane virtues of German life, but our protests were silenced in the most brutally efficient ways. Soon there were only a few of us who continued to resist.

  As the Nazi grip tightened, fewer and fewer of us spoke out, or even grumbled. The storm troopers were everywhere. They would arrest people on an arbitrary basis “just to give them a taste of what they’ll get if they step out of line.” Several journalists I knew, who had no political affiliations, were locked up for months, released, then locked up again. Not only would they not speak when they were released, they were terrified of speech.

  Nazi policy was to cow the protesting classes. They succeeded fairly well, with the compliance of the church and the army, but they did not entirely extinguish opposition. I, for instance, determined to join the White Rose Society, swore to destroy Hitler and work against his interests in every way.

  I advertised my sympathies as best I could and was eventually telephoned by a young woman. She gave her name as “Gertie” and told me that she would be in touch as soon as it was safe. I believed they were probably checking my credentials, making sure I was not a spy or a potential traitor.

  Twice in the streets of Bek I was pointed out as an unclean creature, some kind of leper. I was lucky to get home without being harmed. After that, I went out as little as possible, usually after dark. Frequently accompanied by my sword. Stupid as it sounds, for the storm troopers were armed with guns, the sword gave me a sense of purpose, a kind of courage, a peculiar security.

  Not long after the second incident, when I had been spat at by brownshirt boys, who had also attacked my old manservant Reiter as an aristocrat’s lackey, those bizarre, terrifying dreams began again. With even greater intensity. Wagnerian, almost. Thick with armor and heavy warhorses, bloody banners, butchering steel and blaring trumpets. All the potent, misplaced romance of conflict. The kind of imagery which powered the very movement I was sworn to fight.

  Slowly the dreams took shape and in them I was again plagued by voices in languages I could not understand, full of a litany of unlikely, tongue-twisting names. It seemed to me I was listening to a long list of those who had already died violent deaths since the beginning of time—and those who were yet to die.

  The resumption of my nightmares caused me considerable distress and alarmed my old servants who spoke of fetching the doctor or getting me to Berlin to see a specialist.

  Yet before I could decide what action to take, the white hare appeared again. She ran swiftly over corpses, between the legs of metal-covered men, under the guns and lances of a thousand conflicting nations and religions. I could not tell if she wished me to follow her. This time she did not look back. I longed for her to turn, to show me her eyes again, to determine if she was, in fact, a version of myself—a self freed at last from that eternal struggle. It was as if she signaled the ending of the horror. I needed to know what she symbolized. I tried to call out, but I was dumb. Then I was deaf. Then blind.

  And suddenly the dreams were gone. I would wake in the morning with that strange feeling of rapidly fading memory, of a vanishing reality, as a powerful dream disappears, leaving only the sense of having experienced it. A sense, in my case, of confusion and deep, deep dread. All I could remember was the vision of a white hare racing across a field of butchered flesh. Not a particularly pleasant feeling, but offering a relief from that nightly conflict.

  Not only my nightmares had been stolen, but also my ordinary, waking dreams, my dreams of a lifetime of quiet study and benign action. Such a monkish life was the best someone of my appearance could hope for in those days which were merely an uneasy pause in the conflict we began by calling the Great War to end wars. Now we think of it as an entire century of war, where one dreadful conflict followed another, half of them justified as holy wars, or moral wars, or wars to help distressed minorities, but almost all of which were actually inspired by the basest of emotions, the most short-term of goals, the cruelest greed and that appalling self-righteousness which no doubt the Christian Crusaders had when they brought blood and terror to Jerusalem in the name of God and human justice.

  So many quiet dreams like mine were stolen in that century. So many noble men and women, honest souls, were rewarded only with agony and obscene death.

  Soon, thanks to compliance of the church, we were privileged to see in Bek’s streets pictures of Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany, dressed in silver, shining armor and mounted on a white horse, carrying the banner of C
hrist and the Holy Grail, recalling all the legendary saviors of our people.

  These bigoted philistines despised Christianity and had made the swastika the symbol of modern Germany, but they were not above corrupting our noblest idealism and historical imagery to further their evil.

  It is a mark, I think, of the political scoundrel, one who speaks most of the people’s rights and hopes and uses the most sentimental language to blame all others but his own constituents for the problems of the world. Always a “foreign threat,” fear of “the stranger.” “Secret intruders, illegal aliens . . .”

  I still hear those voices in modern Germany and France and America and all the countries we once thought of as far too civilized to allow such horror within their own borders.

  After many years I still fear, I suppose, a recurrence of that terrible dream into which I finally plunged. A dream far more real than any reality I had known, a dream without end. A dream of eternity. An experience of the complexity of our multiverse in all its vast, limitless variety, with all its potential for evil and its capacity for good.

  Perhaps the only dream that was not stolen from me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Uninvited Relatives

  I was still waiting for another call from “Gertie” when in the early months of 1934 I had an unexpected and rather alarming visitor to Bek.

  My people are related through marriage and other kinships to the traditional rulers of Mirenburg, the capital of Waldenstein, which the Nazis, and later the Soviets, would annex. Although predominantly of Slavic stock, the principality has for hundreds of years been culturally linked to Germany through language and common concerns. It was my family’s practice to spend the Season in Mirenburg at least. Some members, such as my rather unwholesome Uncle Rudy, disgraced in Germany, chose to live there almost permanently.

  The rulers of Mirenburg had not survived the tenor of the century. They, too, had known civil war, most of it instigated by foreign interests who had always sought to control Waldenstein. The Badehoff-Krasny family had been restored to power, but more as clients of Austria than as independent rulers. They had married into the von Mincts, one of the great Mirenburg dynasties.

  Hungary, of course, also possessed an interest in the tiny country. The current Prince of Waldenstein was my cousin Gaynor, whose mother had been one of the most beautiful women in Buda-Pest and was still reckoned a powerful political mind. I knew and admired my aunt. In middle years she was an impressive woman, maintaining her adopted country with all the skills of a Bismarck.

  She was ailing now. The rise of fascism had shocked and exhausted her. Mussolini’s successes were an abomination to her, and Hitler was inconceivably shallow and vicious in his political rhetoric, his ambitions and claims. But, as she said when last I saw her, Germany’s soul had been stolen already. Hitler was merely addressing the corpse of German democracy. He had killed nothing. He had grown out of the grave, she said. Grown out of that corpse like an epidemic which had rapidly infected the entire country.

  “And where is Germany’s soul?” I asked. “Who stole it?”

  “It’s safe enough, I think.” She had winked at me, crediting me with more wit than I possessed. And that was all she had said on the subject.

  Prince Gaynor Paul St. Odhran Badehoff-Krasny von Minct lacked his mother’s calm intelligence but had all her wonderful Hungarian beauty and a charm which often disarmed his political opponents. At one time he had shared his mother’s politics, but it seemed he had followed the road of many frustrated idealists in those days and saw fascism as the strong force that would revitalize an exhausted Europe and ease the pain of all those who still suffered the war’s consequences.

  Gaynor was no racialist. Waldenstein was traditionally philo-Semitic (though not so tolerant of her Gypsies) and his fascism, at least as he presented it to me, looked more to Mussolini than to Hitler. I still found the ideas either foolish or unpalatable, a mélange of kulak bigotry, certainly not in any serious philosophical or political tradition, for all their seduction of thinkers like Heidegger and their incorporation of a few misunderstood Nietzschean slogans.

  It shocked me, however, to see him arrive in an official black Mercedes, festooned with swastikas, wearing the uniform of a captain in the “elite” SS, now superior to Röhm’s SA, the original rough and ready Freikorps fighters who had become an embarrassment to Hitler. There was still a considerable amount of snow. It would not be until the summer that Ernst Röhm and all Hitler’s other Nazi rivals and embarrassments were murdered in the so-called Night of the Long Knives. Röhm’s great enemy, now rising rapidly in the Party, was the colorless little prude Heinrich Himmler, the boss of the SS, with his prissy pinz nez, an ex–chicken farmer, whose power would soon be second to Hitler’s.

  My manservant Reiter disdainfully opened the door for them and took my cousin’s card. He announced, in high sarcasm, the honor of the arrival of Captain Paul von Minct. Before they were taken below stairs by a determined Reiter, Gaynor was addressed as Captain von Minct both by his driver and by the skull-faced Prussian, Sergeant Klosterheim, whose eyes glittered from within the deep caverns of their sockets.

  Gaynor looked splendid and sinister in the black and silver uniform with its red and black swastika insignia. He was, as usual, completely engaging and amusing, making some self-deprecating murmur about his uniform even as he followed the servants up the stairs. I invited him, as soon as he was in his rooms and refreshed, to join me on the terrace before dinner. His driver and the secretary, Klosterheim, would take their supper in the servants’ hall. Klosterheim had seemed to resent this a little, but then accepted it with the air of a man who had been insulted too many times for this to matter. I was glad he wasn’t eating with us. His sickly, gray skin and almost fleshless head gave him the appearance of a dead man.

  It was a relatively warm evening and the moon was already rising as the sun set, turning the surrounding landscape to glittering white and bloody shadow. This would probably be our last snow. I almost regretted its passing.

  As I lit a cigarette, I saw a movement in the copse to my left and suddenly, from the bushes, darted a large white hare. She ran into a stain of scarlet sunlight then hesitated, looked to left and right and loped forward a few paces. She was an identical animal to the one I had seen in my dreams. I almost called to her. Instinctively I held my peace. Either the Nazis would think me mad, or they would be suspicious of me. Yet I wanted to reach out to the hare and reassure her that she was in no danger from me. I felt as a father might feel to a child.

  Then the white hare had made her decision and was moving again. I watched her run, a faint powdering of snow rising like mist around her feet as she sped rapidly towards the darkness of the oaks on the far side. I heard a sound from the house and turned. When I looked back, the hare had vanished.

  Gaynor came down in perfect evening dress and accepted a cigarette from my case. We agreed that the sun setting over the old oaks and cypresses, the soft, snowy roofs and leaning chimneys of Bek did the soul good. We said little while, as true romantics, we savored a view Goethe would have turned into a cause. I mentioned to him that I had seen a snow hare, running across the far meadow. His response was odd.

  He shrugged. “Oh, she’ll be no bother to us,” he said.

  When it was twilight and growing a little chilly, we continued to sit outside under the moon exchanging superficial questions and answers about obscure relatives and common acquaintances. He mentioned a name. I said that to my astonishment he had joined the Nazi Party. Why would someone of that sort do such a thing? And I let the question hang.

  He laughed.

  “Oh, no, cousin. Never fear! I didn’t volunteer. I’m only a nominal Nazi, an honorary captain in the SS. It makes them feel respectable. And it’s a useful uniform for traveling in Germany these days. After a visit I made a few weeks ago to Berlin, they offered me the rank. I accepted it. They assured me that I would not be called up in time of war! I had a visit, a letter. You
know how they cultivate people like ourselves. Why, Mussolini even made the king a fascist! It helps convince old fogies like you that the Nazis are no longer a bunch of uneducated, unemployed, unthinking butchers.”

  I told him that I remained a skeptic. All I saw were the same thugs with the spending power of a looted state willing to pay anything to cultivate those people whose association with their Party would give it authority in the wider world.

  “Precisely,” he said. “But we can use these thugs for our own ends, can’t we? To improve the world? They know in their bones that they have no real moral position or political programs. They know how to seize and hold power, but not much else. They need people like us, cousin. And the more people like us join them, the more they will become like us.”

  I told him that in my experience most people seemed to become like them. He said that it was because there were not yet enough of “us” running things. I suggested that this was dangerous logic. I had heard of no individuals corrupting power, but I had seen many individuals corrupted by it. He found this amusing. He said that it depended what you meant by power. And how you used that power when it was yours. To attack and slander taxpaying citizens because of their race and religion, I said. Power to do that? Of course not, he said. The Jewish Question was a nonsense. We all knew that. The poor old Jews were always the scapegoats. They’d survive this bit of political theater. Nobody ever came to serious harm doing a few physical exercises in a well-ordered open air environment. Hadn’t I seen the film of those camps? They had every luxury. He had the grace to change the conversation as we went into dinner.