Hitler's Boat Read online

  Before leaving for Berlin, we had to pay our last respect to Lizbeth’s father. We took the train to the thatch where he had lived next to his temple, near Dortmund. Friedrich, my beloved’s brother, welcomed us in the garden where he had taken out his father’s furniture and clothes, which he was selling to the neighbors; only a few dared to offer their condolences. He was a tall young man with a bony face and red hair like mine, though the length surely was not in regulation with his navy uniform; his round and dreamy eyes expressed a great determination. On the living room’s mantelpiece, between a photograph of the deceased and a bouquet of white lilies, shone the metallic urn the commander of Dachau had sent along with a curt condolence letter. Instead of reading a passage from the Bible, the two orphans recited by heart, in a flat voice, their father’s poems, the very ones the SA had burnt in public a few months earlier.

  “Light of love! Your golden glory, it also shines for the dead then!” At nightfall, we formed a little procession with a few flocks of readers and pastor colleagues who were walking huddled under a sky reddened by Krupp’s highest furnaces, up to a bridge of the Ruhr. The poet’s ashes were dispersed over the black river. After the funeral, Friedrich took me aside and told me, as he crushed my hand, “You came to this country for Lizbeth. Not to escape prison nor to make political speeches on the radio. So if you need any help, do not hesitate to call me at the Marine Ministry.” Our voices resonated in the house now void of furniture, in front of which Lizbeth was waiting for us, her red scarf flapping in the wind.

  “Well,” I said clearing my throat in embarrassment, “if you had a tip for a cheap flat in Berlin…”

  At first, we did not feel the weight of dictatorship. My first radio performances satisfied my masters and my fees allowed us to rent a small furnished flat on the corner of Joachimstaler and Kurfürstendamm streets, near the Kaiser-Wilhelm cathedral; to the West, the French Infantry was hanging its laundry in the shadow of the Maginot line. The downfall of the British Empire, which I sensed near, justified my wildest pro-independence dreams.

  But Lizbeth worried me; she considered the death of her father as murder. Choosing at random in a directory, she addressed anti-Nazi letters to strangers that she would write on a typewriter all day before mailing them in the evening from different mailboxes. Here, censorship was operated from one apartment to the next; neighbors could rat you out to the Gestapo for rebellious remarks made in your own room. But when rage had a hold on her, nothing could make her silent; in a high-pitched voice, that could surely be heard through the walls, she insulted the regime’s chiefs: shitheads, scrofulous, impotents, syphilitics. I granted her impunity to Hofer’s protection. My doubts were confirmed when he asked me to calm her down. A postmaster had denounced her. He reassured me: these accusations would be returned to the sender. He was, in fact, arrested by the Gestapo two nights later.

  I do not wish to go into the details of my performance as a Radio-Berlin speaker. We were broadcasting from Stuttgart. I gave news on the war prisoners: at first, rather well treated; I ironically compared the English officers’ menus with the ones for “the little guys back home.” Behind the microphone of the Empire Broadcasting Company, in Adolf Hitler Square, I could still meet colleagues from CBS who transmitted, with translations, the Chancellor’s speeches. I was spitting fire. Especially after the Dieppe cliff catastrophe: six thousand deaths, the best of the French Canadian youth sent to the slaughter house, photographed in the carcasses of tanks and broken ships. Discontentment and dissonance. The German language was very harsh. My teeth were biting the words, chewing them to say them, breaking on them as on pebbles. In the sink, my blood dripped mixed with saliva; a coughing fit from the depths of the throat like a remote country calling to me on blizzard nights.

  Aside from her brother, who had gone back to sea on a torpedo boat, Lizbeth had no family except an aunt in Munich. She worked in Section II at the Abwehr, for General Erwin von Lahousen-Vivremont, at 74 Tirpiz, on the same floor as Admiral Canaris, for whom she seemed to have a boundless admiration.

  “He’s a fox. But I am so afraid those bastards will end up catching him!”

  She told me nothing of her work at the section for sabotage abroad. As it were, we never saw anyone. I would sometimes invite Merry Groves, of the Chicago Tribune, but after Pearl Harbor in 1941, such dinners between North Americans became impossible. During the big hockey finals, I snatched a hundred marks by betting against his club, the Chicago Black Hawks and for the Montreal Canadiens.

  “You have more judgment for sports than for politics,” he said with a wink as he paid me. Hofer also came, with his colleagues from the Berliner Rundfunk. He told atrocious stories about Jews, like this Frau Liebermann who the Gestapo arrested in her apartment decorated with paintings of her eighty-six-year-old husband Max.

  “They carried her out on a stretcher,” he said. “She had a tube of Veronal hidden on her and she took it in the ambulance. She was already dead when they arrived at the assembly point of the camp. A very clever old woman. Officially, we burned all her husband’s paintings. But in reality, you’ll find them in the basement at Gœring’s.”

  Lizbeth had put an end to her musical career, but I insisted that we continue our duets that appeased her while in Montreal. I requisitioned two upright pianos, which, for lack of space, we had to put in different rooms: one in our bedroom and one in the living room, next to the big white porcelain Wilhelm stove. Her fingers and choices betrayed a great sorrow; she cast aside Mozart for Schumann and the latest from Liszt. One day, after I was back from the old royal palace gardens, where Gœbbels had given a reception for the ministry with powdered lackeys holding torches behind tables crumbling under pheasants, I heard her play a heart wrenching piece. She stopped after a few bars but did not come to meet me in the vestibule. I listened carefully to the alarming silence coming from our bedroom, veiled in heavy velvet curtains and furnished with a large German-style bed, so sober with its bolster and its duvet, so different from our Canadian bed with its pillowcases and its colorful quilt.

  I repeatedly heard a screeching noise, like the noise of a phone dial and I thought Lizbeth was trying to call Canada, but, as I stepped through the door, I saw our son’s mechanical bunny on its wheels covered by grey furry paws.

  I dropped it on top of a buffet, upside down so it would wheel its movement in the air, and taking the sobbing Lizbeth in my arms, I swore to her that I would bring back our child. “Don’t you understand anything? We have to leave him there. He eats meat every week. He sleeps in his room, far away from those stupid bombers.”

  “Perhaps, but this separation is killing you.”

  She wiped her tears on my chest, freed herself from my hold and smiled bravely: “I’ll tough it out. The war is almost over anyway, isn’t it?”

  Through the rare letters that still made it from the German consulate in Portugal, I learned that my family had moved to Quebec. My brother, Captain Perceval, claimed he felt even more cruelly about what he called my treason, since he was part of the intelligence service staff where they openly mocked the cowardice of the “frogs.” My son had begun to talk. “In French, surely how you want it to,” Perceval specified, temporarily acting as if he were the child’s father to avoid any indiscretion that might reveal that Christophe is traitor von Chénier’s son.

  During his leaves, he brought him to Ancienne-Lorette to see the take off of bombers that would cross the Atlantic after a stop at Gander, Newfoundland, to join the Canadian squadrons that had already begun to attack the German skies.

  My brother had married an Acadian from Halifax. With Christophe, she had consoled herself of an infertility she said was only temporary, but no one ever had the chance to verify it as she died on the wreckage of Charlottetown, torpedoed in 1942 off the coast of Matane, one hundred and fifty miles away from its destination, Halifax, where she was to spend two weeks with her family. Christophe was now mourning the death of a substitute mother whose body was never found, whi
le his real one was surviving the bombing of Berlin.

  NOTEBOOK FOUR

  Behind the microphone of Berlin-Radio, during the winter of the year 1943, I bellowed loud enough to dislocate my jaw. The devil was born from the downfall of reason; the meaning went higher, in a less clear pattern, but even more powerful. I was organizing my spasms. I was spitting the wafer from the tabernacle, how good it was to defy the criminal force that had created us on a night of restlessness.

  Attention owners of the Longueuil ammunition factory! Do not bother to paint the roof, you will not need it. The Jean-Étienne Dumont bakery, on the corner of Sainte-Catherine Street and Saint-Laurent Boulevard, will offer a good landmark for the Junkers’ bombers. As for the merchants of Saint-Jean Street, in Quebec, who are demanding that the road be widened, rest assured the Stukas will take care of it. Destroy words to better say them.

  Unscrew your eyes as to not form any images; soften the lips to pronounce nothing else but ecstasy. Oh! The feeling of the wafer on my palate! This god on your tongue, inducing a sudden and abundant salivation that melts and that we swallow with our eyes closed, attentive to the sacred fall that is formed in the esophagus, flowing all the way to the stomach, ten thousand kilometers lower, because we feel like a mountain, the Himalayas, when God takes a hold of us, and our bodies harbor immense caverns. Give me Patmos, and I will write the apocalypse for you , I will invent exterminator angels for you with faces of mad Jews.

  All mighty Father, take me in your arms. Oh! God, my brother must feel so happy when our mother holds him in her arms! But me, no one will console me, not even Nirvana that keeps backing up as I move forward. Hamlet of Quebec is who I am, with an eternal book in his hand and a head full of dark plots doomed to fail.

  NOTEBOOK FIVE

  During June of 1943, I received an order for a mission signed by Doctor Gœbbels himself, transferring me from the Propaganda Ministry to the Abwehr. They settled to plainly tell me that I was soon to leave for my hometown, for the Quebec that I had almost given up on seeing again as the war dragged on and on. I was flabbergasted.

  Catapulted from my comfortable apartment on Kaiserstrasse, where Lizbeth would type my speeches before their broadcast on Radio-Berlin, dispatched very quickly to an Abwehr training camp in Dortmund, I, the intoxicated pencil pusher, the Nelligan of misinformation, escaping the RAF’s string of bombs thanks to the scapular given to me by Abbot Dion when I finished my studies at the Séminaire de Québec. I was being subjected to intensive sniper training. An important mission awaited me, judging by the amount of people busying themselves around me, and the high importance given to my movements.

  One of the instructors told me that, aside from me, they were able to find, in all the Reich, only one who was reliable and friendly to the French Canadian cause. So, then they apologized for taking me away from my microphone, but that was when I would learn the purpose of my mission, which would be communicated to me at the very last moment for security measures, I would understand that according to my repeatedly claimed wish, I had been given a date with history.

  One night, Lizbeth’s brother, Friedrich, asked for me in front of the station without giving his name. He pulled me to a narrow street. He had an arm in a sling and a wound the same color as his bushy hair sticking from under his marine lieutenant cap. After two years in the line of fire, he was now on Tirpiz Quay, under the command of Colonel Baron Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven, Abwehr Section II chief, thanks to Lizbeth’s intervention.

  “The baron noticed you during one of the parties at his villa, which explains your mission order. Your boss Hofer is furious and he has complained to Gœbbels. But I did not come for that…” He had to interrupt himself just long enough to cross a square where speakers were blaring a speech from the Chancellor of Stalingrad, here like everywhere else in Deutschland: “Never will the German soldier retreat…” From a deep low-pitch to a high-pitch in the same word, the voice kept screaming over an indifferent crowd.

  “You will have a companion on this mission. He will meet you in Quebec. He received orders from Himmler to help with everything, and when it will be time to return, to execute you. Kill him before he acts. And then, come back. You have to come back. Because a traitor’s family is also guilty. When they found the authors of the failed assassination attempt, they killed the babies. So Lizbeth, if you were to stay in your Quebec… That is how you like to call your country, is it not? I brought a few documents that might interest you… I am not the only one who thinks the Monster should be killed.” He left with an ironic Heil!

  I only opened the envelope he had given me once I was back in my room. It was the plans for the integration of Quebec to the Great Reich, elaborated by Hofer in his smoky office on Friedrichstrasse. He had covered the walls with faded maps and fleur-de-lis he gathered during his first stay in Quebec, with Ribbentrop, during the construction of the suspension bridge that a German engineer was able to crumble right in the middle of Saint-Lawrence River due to his erroneous calculations.

  After the fall of Poland, defended by hussars on horses as if by many toy soldiers, the Teutonic strategy had become global, and Hofer, jealous of his colleagues’ brilliant careers, formerly butchers and now viceroys of Czechoslovakia or Poland, could already see himself as Quebec’s gauleiter. He had drawn himself on a poster, ranting from the top of a tribune to a crowd assembled in front of the neo-gothic decor of the Chateau Frontenac. A huge eagle spread its wings over a fleurde-lis crest.

  To Franck, who complained that the Poland he was running did not have enough trees to supply the paper on which he printed his execution orders, Hofer replied that the Quebec forest would allow him to publish the names of the condemned for a thousand years. Knowing to what point Quebec’s defenses were ineffective, he had become a very boisterous partisan of a blitz similar to the one that had taken Norway down. A single parachute division, supported a few days later by the landing of a group of panzers would allow him to take over the entirety of Quebec. A hurriedly constituted national government of Quebec, like the ones from Quisling to Oslo, would ensure order on the streets, all while waving to the German troops like liberators from the British yoke. “We would then have a revolver pointed at the industrial United States’ temple. Remember, gentlemen, that the fate of the continent was decided in this little town, following the boldness of a divisional general: Wolfe. Let us rewrite history backwards.”

  My right shoulder was sore from the violent recoil of my weapon during the long hours of training on the firing grounds, but I was still dressed in civilian clothing and I reported to the marine Commander Hans von Gundrich in Kiel. “Ach so, you are von Chénier,” he said with a surprising smile in the middle of his red and puffed face due to the long months passed in a steel sarcophagus. “I always listen to your program when we are patrolling the Gulf of the Saint-Lawrence.”

  “You’re Adrien?”

  Despite his protests, I knew he was my secret informant, the one who would communicate to me via shortwave the musical program of the different hotels in Gaspésie, with the aim of demoralizing my compatriots by showing that the Axis’ spies were everywhere, but also to distract himself, he who had bags under his eyes for less patriotic and more carnal causes than long hours of being awake at the periscope, watching the horizon to find the convoys from the Atlantic.

  “Unfortunately, he said, my U-Boat is still not repaired. We won’t be leaving for another two weeks.”

  Von Gundrich, who knew and loved Quebec, invited me to stay in his home. He had worked as an engineer with Hofer, working for von Ribbentrop’s firm when the latter had come to build the suspension bridge between the two shores of the Saint-Lawrence. “I had already left your country before the catastrophe, he told me. I hope the Reich and its diplomatic alliances will be more solid than its bridges.”

  That same evening, when I was trying to reach Lizbeth through a blockade of calls with higher priority than mine, Hofer called to tell me she was seriously threatened with impriso
nment for defeatist remarks. But the imminent success of my mission – he thought it to be of the first importance even if he knew nothing of it – would surely give her back her indispensable optimism and would compensate for her father’s poor posthumous influence, that homosexual who had suffered from a genetic deformation of character usually virile of the Aryan race.

  Von Gundrich burst into my room and invited me on a cruise aboard the Helgoland, the Fürher’s yacht where the Great Clown had only been on twice, for propaganda film purposes, showing him smiling and suntanned with the fishermen of the Baltic Sea. “The Helgoland won the New York-Barcelona race in 1937,” von Gundrich said nonchalantly, as we left port where the absence of the great battleships, all sunk by now, hit me. “It can always be useful, can’t it?” he said with a wink that removed all ambiguity from his word; if the need should arise, he would flee his Fatherland in this small boat.

  However, it is the same defeatist, who on a moonless night, refused to hand me the sealed envelope containing my mission order and my fake identity papers before seeing me leave in a submarine. By which means, I do not know, but the Germans had found out that Churchill and Roosevelt, the two masters of the Alliance, were meeting in the capital of their colonial empires, in Quebec, from August 10th to the 15th, to discuss the invasion of the continent. My mission? Eliminate these potentates or, if I failed, find out the location they would choose for the landing.

  The Submarine left me in the Chaleurs Bay, in the middle of the night, and then dove, making the sound of a huge sink being emptied. I clumsily paddled to the pier of Paspébiac and immersed my deflated inflatable boat in the lagoon with a Precambrian rock, specific to the region.

  At dawn, before leaving the forest and entering New Carlisle where a train left at nine thirty for Quebec, I opened my suitcase only to notice the anachronism committed by Admiral Canaris’ spies, as well as the ridiculous Ontarian driver’s license, my only identity paper, perfectly imitated by the Nazi forgers if not for the detail that it was in both French and English and that it would have been better to just give me documents completely written in German!