Hitler's Boat Read online

  “Heil Hitler!” Hofer answered.

  The two men conferred in whispers. The ceiling was rounded like a palate. I was already feeling the gastric juices around me. Eckel preceded us to the basement, behind a gate that opened in the purring of an electric engine. In a room that stank of coffee long forgotten on its heating element, Hofer asked me to wait for them a few moments. He only came back after an hour, leaving me to fear that my unfortunate approach could have harmed Lizbeth. I was simply hoping that she had remained in the United States, but upon his return with Eckel, Hofer confirmed my worst hypothesis.

  “Too late! She has gone back to her Fatherland; her father’s land was calling to her; Rheingold, oh Rheingold, like the mermaid’s chorus at the beginning of Siegfried: an irresistible song for us, Herr Chénier. For you too, perhaps? We shall see. She had to go back. So Eckel stamped the papers, the Ausweis, the Pass, she took the boat for Bremen two days ago. Heartbroken! Without you, without her son. She did not warn you? Women can be so cruel sometimes. War leads to so many sacrifices. If only England had respected our desire for peace when we decided to bring the Germans from Dantzig back to the Reich.”

  As he was talking, his voice sounding like the buzz of a razor, I could feel on my wrists and my throat cold steel shackles that clasped to teach me the great alchemy, not that of lead to gold, but of suffering to pleasure.

  “Our friend publicly laughed at the Führer in his articles,” continued Hofer. “But his real hatred, he keeps for the English. And he would like to create a Republic of Quebec, without war and without violence.”

  He threw a pile of pamphlets I had written under a penname. “In a bucolic way, really?” Eckel asked, amused.

  “I have studied your country a lot,” Hofer said. “Typical little people politics! Quebec belongs to history’s oubliettes, with the Bulgarian separatist kingdom, the Great Duchy of Burgundy and the Kurd Empire. Unless it finds itself powerful allies…”

  I interrupted him: “Did you force Lizbeth to return to Germany?”

  “The Reich has no power here, and a simple cultural attaché such as myself, even less.”

  “You lie! You could blackmail her with her father who…”

  I stopped. Too late! By losing my cool, I had compromised Lizbeth. Hofer smiled.

  “I had given her a mission. If she has betrayed the Reich, she will have to face the consequences.”

  They both stared at me in silence. And the look they were giving me, mineral and merciless, made me fear for Lizbeth. I decided to feign. “Excuse me. What betrayal are you talking about?”

  “The other night, I charged her with the responsibility of giving you a job offer. The Reich wants peace. Just like you do. And since your government is forbidding you from promoting your pacifist and pro-independence ideas, we offer that you speak to your compatriots through us. Our Empire Broadcasting Company has become a real society of nations: Arab, Indian, Turk, Irish and Scottish separatists. All in a war against the British colonizer. Through you presence, Quebec would join the fight.”

  Without any hesitation, I dove into the abyss: “Who said that Frau Walle has not succeeded in her mission? I haven’t come to a decision yet, that’s all.”

  To buy time, I asked for more details on their proposition. As a Radio-Concordia host, I would get 1200 marks a month (800 American dollars). I would be allotted an apartment near my workplace, the Rundfunkhaus. My employer, the Ministry of Propaganda, could fire me with a four-month notice, but I would receive a full year of salary in compensation. I could keep my Canadian passport and I would be provided with a working permit that could also be used as a visa. I would be able to circulate anywhere in Germany. For trips abroad, I would need special permission from the Gestapo, In which case, I would be allowed to ask for my naturalization as a German citizen. As for Lizbeth, she would be given a position in Berlin in order to stay with me and help me adapt to the Reich.

  In a barely covert manner, Hofer was using Lizbeth as a hostage. I preferred not to imagine what her fate would be like in a “re-education camp” like Dachau. I called my half-brother who agreed to take the Montreal-New York train the same evening.

  The sun was hitting the dirty stained-glass windows of Grand Central at an angle. The train hit the buffer lightly before releasing steam, through which the first passengers soon made their way behind the Black porters and their elastic strides. As agreed upon, Perceval passed me by with a look of total indifference and got in a taxi that I followed. He stopped at the Taft, which he quickly crossed to join me in the Packard that I had parked near the hotel’s rear exit.

  I recounted my conversation with Hofer.

  “They want you to be the French-Canadian voice of Radio-Berlin. Who would write your texts?”

  “I would, but I’d have to submit them to the censors before broadcast.” Perceval warned me about our apparently fortuitous meeting: Hofer had surely planned it all the way to the broken glass. Lizbeth was surely an agent under his service. Her rushed departure was surely a way to force me into following her. I must have been identified as a sentimentalist and easily influenced nationalist early on.

  “Ernst Hofer is manipulating you to get you to join their cause. He’s the first director of the Aussenpolitischer Amt, Nord Amerika. He comes under the official Nazi philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg and his special intelligence office, the Aussenpolitischer Amt (APA), attached to the organization of the Nazi Party overseas and Gœbbles’ Ministry of Propaganda. He built himself an Empire within these organizations.”

  A spy? Lizbeth? Then she was lost if I didn’t follow her quickly. She had not had the heart to complete her mission and bring me to Germany with her. Maybe she truly did love me? The separation from our son surely tore at her. Politics are made with good feelings. To liberate Quebec, perhaps we had to associate with the Nazis. Like the Irish.

  “Don’t do it!” Perceval said. But I thought this war would not last and the Germans could tear away some of the concessions from the British. No one, Perceval promised, not even his closest colleagues, would know that he had met with me. I drove him back to the train without telling him I had made up my mind to betray the Dominion of Canada.

  “We will take care of your son,” he said. I shook his dry, but brotherly hands, the ones of an enemy no doubt, but ones that would fight me face to face. Without this war between us, what a team we could have made!

  While I was filing out the necessary bureaucratic formalities for my departure for Bremen, a dream haunted me. My son Christophe lay on a hospital bed, almond shaped eyes, and thin lips. He was wearing pajamas unbuttoned at his chest, he was hot, sweat pearled on his forehead, and he was wiping it off with his grey woolen blanket. Turning around, he let his bunny fall, with its long floppy ears, torn from being pulled on from the pain of moist and post-operative nightmares; the bunny on the linoleum stank of disinfectant. I bent over to pick him up, and I heard Hofer’s voice behind me: “It’s so stuffy in here! We need some air!”

  He was throwing the window open. The outside air swept in like a frozen wave on a ship’s deck. Instead of intervening, I stayed on my knees, snuggling my face on the bunny, its fabric moist from having absorbed Christophe’s fever and delirium. In one swoop, Hofer heaved Christophe at arm’s length, all soft, smiling and confident, and, moving towards the window, he hung him in the air, among the snowflakes. The little head fell back, mouth opened to taste the snow.

  Suddenly, Hofer was whispering: “It’s better this way,” and he let him go from the fourth floor. As he fell, Christophe lifted his arms and his eye towards me, his father, bent over the window, he shouted: “I love you!” Instead of falling vertically, Christophe was gliding over the sidewalk and then, was flying over the rooftops. I then stepped over the windowsill and threw myself into the middle of the storm.

  NOTEBOOK THREE

  On November 9, 1939, I got onboard the Ernst-Günther liner for Gothenburg, Sweden. From there, a virtually empty cruise boat brought me to Kiel. A
counter torpedo boat was setting out to sea between two DCA towers. Covered trucks were driving all over the piers towards the formidable Bismarck cruiser’s massive silhouette. The entire German navy seemed to have assembled there, from the pocket sized Deutschland battleship, to the Gneisenau battle cruisers, along with fifteen submarines or so. We moored next to a huge dock, where an army of workers was sealing off a breach in the Köln’s right flank in dry dock.

  Lizbeth was waiting for me in the middle of a tight crowd that was hurrying to the pier to leave Germany. Instead of the bright colors she was fond of, she wore a poorly fitted grey suit that made her look fatter. Never before had her face moved me so much as under this pale winter light. I saw in it the only loving traits death could have. She ran through the customs gate before the guards could stop her and, in the moment of our embrace, she whispered: “What have you done? Go back, you still can! Look behind me!”

  A little man in a black jacket was watching us. He had accompanied Lizbeth from Hamburg, where she had been imprisoned since her return. I grabbed her by the arm and went to stand in line with the other travelers waiting to fill in the disembarkation forms. I told her of our son’s latest prowess, as told to me by my mother on the telephone before my departure from New York. I soon had the opportunity to test the power of the visa Hofer had given me, first with the customs agent who did not search my suitcase and then with the agent in civilian clothes who obeyed my orders before disappearing.

  “I decided we were taking our holidays here. The air is fresh. And in the off-season, it barely costs anything.”

  She almost got angry, but then shrugged. As soon as she had arrived in Kiel, the Gestapo had arrested her for “treason.”

  “Don’t laugh. Singing a forbidden melody, doubting the victory, displeasing a chief- that is all treason.” A few hours before my arrival, she had been brought out of her cell and dragged to the port without any explanation. “You were crazy to accept Hofer’s offer,” she repeated.

  In a common and tacit agreement, we decided not to speak of the war anymore. The seagulls were flying over the dunes. Our joy - inappropriate and almost obscene - did not want to die, despite the war; it discharged its electricity, which smelled like a storm, into our mortal bodies and it allowed us to seize the other in an ultimate thrust.

  We had to stop ourselves from starting to laugh out loud on the grey streets of Bremen, crowded with young soldiers at the end of their leave. We took the train to Cuxhaven, a seaside resort on the North Sea, which was deserted at the time. The casinos and Gasthäusen stood in a row along the shore. On the horizon, the U-Boats stood out, these great steel sharks that opened their jaws to the depth of the Baltic Sea only to dive into the farther and colder waters of Greenland and the shores of my homeland of Quebec to rip up Canadian ships with their torpedoes.

  Off-season. All the hotels were closed except for the Neue Liebe, this “new love” where we were staying. When the owner told us we were the only guests, I asked for a master key so we could change rooms every night. So there we went, from one room to the next over the ten floors of the tower that was being assaulted by the hurricanes blowing in from the sea, and when we would go to bed, no one knew where to find us. To reach us by phone, one would have had to call the one hundred and forty-two rooms, one at a time.

  I had the impression of resembling a diver who trains to jump a little higher everyday, up to this altitude where you are no longer falling but flying, with the difference that I was traveling through time, and that my last jump, the one where I would wish for luck to be on my side, would furtively drag me head first and forever toward absolute sadness. How beautiful death seemed, at the Neue Liebe, in Cuxhaven, a few sailing hours from Hamlet’s kingdom.

  In the evening, we enjoyed oysters in the restaurant on stilts. We rose our glasses of wine from Rhine. We knew nothing of the war yet, except for the bomb dropped by a solitary Mosquito: the strike of a hammer, under which the city’s granite skeleton shook, even through her body, Lizbeth’s, as we made love.

  She fell ill. Rolled in a tight ball under the covers, her right hand gripped my wrist tightly and her teeth chattered. Where her fever had dropped slightly, I turned the lights off in the room and went to sit by the partly opened patio-door above the sea. Night and fog enveloped us.

  The next day, she felt better. She was wearing a green dress, the same bright shade as her eyes. Only a light redness around the sides of her nose betrayed her cold. Her hair was up on the left side, revealing a pearl on her ear, and fell to her shoulder on the other side. When resting, Lizbeth’s beauty had something a little intimidating, but when in action, it was bewitching.

  Our idyll, which actually got its charm from its extreme precariousness, ended that morning at breakfast when Hofer erupted in the dining room.

  “Herr Chénier! Here I am at the exact time: German precision…. Gnädige Frau.”

  Very tall, he leaned to kiss Lizbeth’s hand. He seemed to want to portray a last century British gentleman with his grey tweed suit and a gold pocket watch attached with a chain to his coat pocket.

  I had not told Lizbeth about this meeting. I was still wondering whether or not they were in cahoots to drag the boundaries of Germany in me. I remained convinced that the meeting between the three of us, at the Rockefeller Center, was no coincidence, but a skillfully calculated ruse. I hoped the element of surprise would betray the real nature of the feelings Lizbeth still had for her ex-husband. On her face, I only saw a mixture of fear and disgust. She handed him a miniature battleship-shaped bun the bakeries were making. “Take a bite of this Graf von Spee. Unless you would prefer a little Bismarck? The English would surely like to eat one!”

  He shook his head, and then winced, as from a secret pain, an ulcer perhaps, which sent him on a new line of thought like a horse that has just been whipped. “I have news from your father,” he said to Lizbeth. “Not very good. He died in Dachau. Heart failure. My condolences.”

  She had already stopped listening to him. She opened the door to the terrace and leaned on the railing. He let out a deep sigh.

  “One never knows how to word these misfortunes… And so here is the Pacifist with the lords of war. Very good! Berlin needs you. Oh! Not at the front, but on the radio waves, alongside the Irish, Indian, Scottish and Breton nationalists.”

  “Stand up!” He had barely gotten to his feet when Lizbeth slapped him with all her might. “There shouldn’t have been a cardiac arrest! Our agreement is kaput!” I felt a strong surge of jealousy: this physical violence let on a great intimacy between them.

  Ignoring the blood trickling from his left nostril, he lit a cigarillo and then, with a smug grin, placed a photo on the table between us. Our son was smiling from the bottom of a baby carriage that my mother was pushing between two snow banks in front of the Atwater fire station in Montreal.

  “It was like the North Pole at your place last week,” he said to me. “And you will never guess who took the photo. Freedom does not exist. To make history, you have to let your rage out of yourself. You, the weak people, you cross the Red Sea that roars above your bent heads. Us, we curse this God who slowly chews on our bodies in the saliva of time.”

  Lizbeth left us, sobbing. He had boasted to the Propaganda Ministry of my talents as a speaker and my sharp quill. I would have to convince my compatriots not to go to arms for the British Empire’s lost cause.

  I listened without batting an eyelash. The two-week romantic hiatus had come to an end on the shores of the North Sea. I had preserved our tranquility to the very last moment, because I knew it was the eye of the cyclone that would take us away.

  He suggested that I work under the alias von Durham, after the dictator of Canada, who had written to a young queen Victoria in 1838 that “the Canadian people had neither history nor culture” and that it was better to make it disappear by assimilating it. I refused this suggestion that would have alienated us from our audience from the start. We agreed on the code name of von Chén
ier, who embodied this liberator full of Prussian military strategies that I prided myself in becoming.

  I came to cruelly realize that my conduct gave reason to the famous lord who declared that the French Canadians would buy vengeance and a momentary triumph against the British thanks to “a call to any enemy and by the submission to any yoke.”

  Hofer clicked his heels and bowed.

  “Von Chénier? Perfect! Auf Wiedersehen! One little thing: you do not spit enough when you speak German. Ask Madam: you have to spit at least a meter; otherwise no one will understand you in Berlin. I will be waiting for you there next week, at the Ministry.”

  He marched out of the room like a military caricature.

  I went back to my room heartbroken, and I lay next to Lizbeth who was hiding beneath the covers. I felt as if my whole world was spiraling down. This is the fall the Scriptures talk about, I thought. With difficulty, I stood back up and took Lizbeth’s crisped and moist hand. “We will be the strongest. But first, you have to tell me the truth about you and Hofer.”

  “He means nothing to me anymore.”

  “But you work for him.”

  “No. For the Abwehr. I summarize newspaper articles. On steel production. Internal political issues.” Our meeting then was not accidental. She had been asked to investigate the separatist movement. I had spent weeks explaining the run of it to her. To save face, I claimed that, already back in Montreal, I had figured it out, and that I was fully aware of it all when I followed her to Kiel.

  The halo around the lighthouse was glowing in the thick fog; it was Christmas. It was cold and we had no coal and only sauerkraut to eat. The rivers were frozen. Churchill was saying that he would end the war in Canada if he had to. Hitler answered in the newspapers: “It is probable that only the gentlemen interested in the pursuit of war will exile themselves there. The people, I am afraid, will have to remain in England.”