Hitler's Boat Page 16
Comfortably lolled in his couch, he put his feet up on the windowsill. He had his back to Christophe and spoke in the accent of Quebec City. A little annoying, with its twitching, his reflection in the window next to his.
“They left the patrol without saying a word. Then, they went up the current to the lake. They called me and I came out of my hiding place. We only had to blow up the tunnel behind us. Poor Friedrich: a random shot when we were crossing the American lines! We ended up in Portugal, then in Venezuela. We couldn’t go back home. Everyone still believed me to be a traitor.”
He unscrewed the thermos Christophe had brought from Montreal and spread Virginia’s ashes in the flames that crackled on the fireplace.
“Stop crying. You’re not alone. I, your father, your reason, I will take care of you. Don’t worry. I love you. I won’t order you to destroy yourself. I’ll cradle you when you whimper. Light you up in the darkness. You think me mad to come back from the dead to talk to you like this, distinctly, out loud. Since I have to scream for you to hear me, I will. I’m not a jealous god that hides his face in the clouds. I understand your despair, that you would damn me. But when death is there, very close, you’ll hear my voice again. I’ll console you. I’ll teach you that you are your own father and your own son. You don’t have to suffer from any flame, from any hell. And we will reform the broken, unlinked chain of all the sons with all the fathers.”
“Lie down; your mother will bring you some aspirin.” This tale was nothing but lies: Lizbeth had died with von Chénier, during the battle in Berlin; under circumstances he would never clarify.
And yet he obeyed. He closed his eyes. He heard the water flow from the tap, then the sound of high heels on the parquet floors. A cold hand touched his forehead. “But you’re feverish! Here, swallow!” He heard a muffled explosion that shook the ground. He rose on his elbows and saw Fatima who was handing him a caplet. “The explosion, what was it?”
“Go look at the yard.” He partially opened the curtains on the window: a thick cloud of dust was lifting from the tunnel’s well.
“What are you doing here?”
“Hofer locked me up in his villa. I was scared, but he stayed courteous. Adboul and Saïf waited for him to leave with Schuppmann and they came to rescue me. When I came back here, you were raving in the room, covered in mud. The djinns wanted you to join them. The earth had to close up, like a wound that heals. And there was that accident! The tunnel wasn’t very sturdy… Were you the one who killed Schuppmann?”
His little Hittite from the deep Anatolian gorges was pulling him away from the monsters only with her smile. To the ones you could not show, who screamed and contorted. That ran like magma behind the facemask.
The next day, he wrote one last time, using the computer Hofer lent him. The, he mailed the disk containing his tale and his father’s to a Berlin editor. Maybe they would publish their little song, the two or three steps that had been taken with a little bit of grace, without mocking anyone, while listening to their own rhythm.
He splashed hot water on the lower part of his face, and then lathered with foam “closer to smoothness.” The blade on his skin: seismograph of his feelings. On this Thanksgiving Sunday, he was able to shave without cutting himself for the first time in months. Then he threw the Sperry computer at the bottom of the well that Abdoul meticulously buried with dirt.
“We have to catch the big grey wolf by the tail,” he said. Inside the Opel, he went to the posh neighborhood near the free University of Berlin. He closed the door soundlessly. The two lions at the entrance of the garden of Hofer’s villa were covered in hemp tarps for winter. Between Sirius that shone above the slate roofing and the Mauser, precision weapon with a scope that weighed heavily on his shoulder, he guessed an obscure link.
He moved forward under the balcony with marble columns. Behind the partially opened windows, violently lit by a crystal chandelier, Hofer was wearing his old black uniform. He was alone in front of the mirror above the fireplace.
The von Chénier cell punished the enemies of the people, its gauleiters, even imaginary. The revolutionary violence was going to sew back together a history torn apart by chance. Christophe heard Hofer say: “Alas, father and mother, homeland, torrential rain, squalls, screams are only illusions. What good does it do to get attached to them? What good does it do to be afraid? It would be like looking at something that has no existence as if it had any.”
To an assassin, the victim has no form, Hofer believed, remembering Schuppmann’s agony. To see it, he only has to close his eyes and stop thinking about it. An emptiness that digs itself and sucks in, that is what it is. Only words give an appearance of shape to the chaos dreamt at night. Final thrust of life from the bottom of the abyss. If everything went faster, it would already be over.
And the dead passed in ever-tighter rows, as history lined them up. How could truth come from the lips, from these exposed muscles that moved from simple ticks, that nothing stopped, no repulsive blasphemy, no name of god or of the devil? In all directions, they weaved a web above the void with suctions, grimaces and smiles. Always the glottis pushing, blocking, breathing. Nothing binary.
Jewish bibles. A code that oozed ambiguity, which allowed for an infinite amount of positions between yes and no. But soon, he would give a new bible to the Hermann Antique representative, who had come from Munich with a signed check of four million marks. Enough to live in luxury until the age of ninety.
Under their peaches and cream skin, he thought, men are all monsters, watching for the next exposed throat, faces offered with a smile, the second the guard is brought down to strike with the speed and precision of a viper, to inject their poison: words. As soon as they can: bite, hold, hypnosis, delirium. I want you, I dominate you. I say nothing more. No more speech, only strikes and parries.
He heard the sound of a rifle being loaded. Suddenly, he noticed the confusion, the trap, and the disaster that would fall upon him. In the shadows, from the other side of the French windows, Christophe’s face appeared. His mouth slightly frozen, as if under anesthesia, grimaced and showed teeth that were still intact, but the enamel was worn. His eyes were mere slits as he took aim with the Luger equipped with a silencer.
Hofer wanted to convince him in a soft voice to continue his research. Who really was his father? Why did I spare you at the hotel before? What really happened between Lizbeth and I, during my stay in Washington, in 1938, a year before you were born? He wanted to invent one last lie. Which he might have believed himself, since he had spared Christophe. But he did not have the leisure to do so. Already the other was pulling the trigger. Time for one more sentence:
“Ich bin dein Vater!” he shouted.
I am your father. Breathed from within. Complete trepanation, the brain exposed to the air in the skull. The world exposed itself. Illuminated by his death. Because, to stop Christophe, he had picked the wrong words, the ones that reminded the old hero of his encounter with von Chénier, on that beach of the Chaleurs Bay, just before the inflatable raft brought him to the submarine. He had bent down and had whispered that very sentence in his ear, the meaning of which Christophe never understood.
But now he remembered and he understood. No, Christophe thought. Neither this one nor the other, Perceval. Neither the English nor the German. But Chénier. The father he was choosing as he emptied the barrel trough the windowpane.
As he died, wrapping himself in a shroud with the sheer curtains before falling forward on the rug, Hofer had whispered a few other words in German. But Christophe had not listened to him. Passing his hand through the shattered window, he opened the lock and entered. Hitler’s notebooks were on the chimney mantle, opened on a lectern like a sacred text. Without hesitating, he threw them into the flame.