Hitler's Boat Read online

  She found that dear Hofer was a little sad as of late. “After having had a taste of the Russian winter, the generals don’t really want to test the Quebec blizzards. Our future gauleiter is seeing his future empire slipping away from him. But your returning with good news is sure to cheer him up.” She told me to run to him at his suburban villa where he was healing a bad cold. I saw her partner from the corner of my eye reprimand her as if she had just made a faux pas.

  She stopped sharply and said, “What was I thinking? Before that, you wanted to kiss your charming Lizbeth. Excuse me, I have to get back on.” Suzanne-Fernand having changed her mind so quickly raised a few suspicions that I did not want to explain clearly. I went down to the Ministry underground garage where I had left my car for safe keeping in the hands of the janitor in exchange for some Dutch gin. I removed the tarp that covered the engine and gave it a kick-start full of rage. Instead of heading towards Tempelhof, where our modest cottage was, I went up Unter den Linden, covered at the time with chestnuts and dead leaves, to the east, towards the posh Spandau where Hofer had received me on several occasions the previous summer.

  As I sped up, I was trying to re-learn the excesses of the now, the percussion that follows each breath, the creation of the ordinary universe with each wink, the desert of entrails, the ecstasy that comes when you stop thinking, the solid links of dreams, the search for a unique voice, the one that is God’s. I also noticed that nothing changes; there is no other universe, perhaps only a way to place the world in emptiness. I was a turtle among snakes. I was following the Speer; roofless, I squeezed my BMW through the freezing September rain between the double-decker buses that were changing their course according to the bomb holes, the Mercedes of the Nazi dignitaries, the wounded that flowed back from the east, the mounds of garbage where bottle shards glittered.

  At the end of the acceleration, I found stupefaction. It is a matter of rhythm, I told myself. I braked in front of Hofer’s villa. It was a whimsical construction, rococo, all of gables and half-timber, with a great garden where tons of bird houses rose on poles, painted like the signs of barbershops, with red and with spirals. His rank as gauleiter of Quebec was still too imaginary to warrant him a military guard, so there were no obstacles as I walked up to the massive double door, surmounted with a fleur-de-lis bas-relief. A chain with an ivory handle activated the doorbell that played “Vive la Canadienne.”

  The master of the domain opened the door; he was dressed in a red plaid shirt, his feet encased in lumberjack boots. Shocked for a moment, he grabbed me heartily by the shoulders, and shook me vigorously, as if to confirm my physical presence. “Von Chénier! You survived! You came back! The essence Quebec heroes are made of!” His breath stank of Schnapps. I entered the hall. Lizbeth appeared in the door that led to the living room where logs were joyfully burning in front of a grizzly skin lying under the stone-faced gaze of a moose head. “You know of my passion for photography? Lizbeth accepted to take part in a session.”

  She resembled the character of a Zurbaran painting. A soft air, resigned, her blond hair falling on a purple negligee out of which came puffy white sleeves, the saint offered her cut breasts on a platter, like two perfectly cone-shaped ice cubes drenched in the red sauce of her own blood. As she fixed her outfit, her arm on the doorframe, her hair in a tangle, her eyes red and puffy from lack of sleep, I saw that her thighs were sporting marks from a crop.

  I wanted to hold her in my arms, but she beat my chest while calling me a Dummkopf, scolding me for having come back, and when I told her that if I had not she would have been executed, she screamed that she would have preferred to be dead, that I had only prolonged the torture.

  I was trying to spot the shadow of an emotion on Hofer’s face, but only the devil could decipher his reptilian soul. “Do not look at me like that! Lizbeth is still my legitimate wife, nein? Actually, you could not marry her even if I divorced her. The law protects our Aryan racial capital from your Iroquois genes.” He imitated the cries of savages while tapping his mouth. “You are right on time, dear friend. I was waiting for you to celebrate a burial. Come!” He pushed me towards the villa’s garden.

  “One moment!” I turned to Lizbeth: “Are you putting your coat on?” I said while kissing her. She tilted her head and blew me a kiss as I threw over her shoulders the loden coat a servant had brought with an insulting smile. We went out. A coffin of badly squared-off boards rested on two trestles. “Do you know what it holds?” Hofer declared. In a dramatic gesture he opened the lid: “Quebec!” I saw books, posters, flags, all marked with fleur-de-lis. “A country can only be born in blood. And you did not want to kill! Alone, Fagl would have succeeded. You made him fail. Without the protection given to you by that imbecile Canaris, I would have quickly known what happened. Even the Gestapo cannot interrogate you about your mission… With Churchill killed, I had a squadron of parachutes leaving from Oslo this morning and heading for Quebec after a stop in Reykjavik. Now they will be leaving for Stalingrad. Burn, Quebec!”

  He threw a match on the logs he had staked underneath the coffin. The works of Groulx, Dostaler O’Leary, Wilfrid Morin began to burn as Hofer poured Schnapps on them. I really wanted to hit him, but that would have condemned me to death. Just like Lizbeth sitting on the saddle behind me, while the other continued his acting and was telling me to “party with her” all nightlong; he would wait until morning for me to make my report.

  I turned the gas levers to the max. The world is a collection of facts, not things. The pain in my abdomen made me want to rip myself out of my body.

  My acts of kindness became violent. While my brain was pouring its toxic substances on my insides, I preferred to roll. I found a temporary peace on the motorcycle, my arms shaking from the handlebars, the vibrations of the engine between my thighs, the heels of my boots wedged on the footrest. At a low altitude, just over a viaduct where a Wehrmacht convoy had been blown up, a Mosquito was passing, pointing like the finger of God towards the Tiergarten’s forest where I wanted to be alone with Lizbeth.

  She tightened her hold around my waist and caressed me. Let this delirium be, as long as it remained purely physical, in the base of the body’s baroque architecture. To hurt, to split, to lose oneself in the illusion, to slow the descent of the scavengers down on our conscience. Free Quebec of all the Hofers; let sense gush out like blood. The glow from a passing convoy’s headlights crossed the frozen cosmos of my brain. On the boulevard, the caress created a maelstrom. I stopped photographing the moment. I accelerated swiftly: the speed clustered the light posts in the centerline into a green wall, the memories of the Gold of Rhine gave me Wagnerian goose bumps on the back of my neck. The moon in its last crescent was baiting the predatory black sky that would gobble us all.

  I was brooding over what everyone knew: I was not self-sufficient. Solitude and worry drove me insane. I needed to find allies, companions, a nation. I needed to drink and destroy myself; another existence became brutal. I had thought I would be able to look at it coldly, philosophically. What a terrible mistake! Objectivity killed. I had to commit excesses. They were committing them against me all the time. I am happy; I yelled to the cover, the cylinder shaped demons that were backfiring against my ear, and behind their rough voices. I found silence.

  I was trying to stand there, in the past, before everything was spoiled. But to make Germany disappear, that was impossible. I was touching it, smelling it, rubbing my nose, my intestines, my eyes, my ideas in it, she came in and out, cuddling against me, just like Lizbeth, whose cheek I could still feel against my shoulder blades.

  Grossman Street. The sky jagged by the linden trees. I wanted to kneel down and adore it. How far could this darkness carry us? I went into the Tiergarten on a deserted path, whirring, turned into a slough by the rain. I was looking for the high point of absence to recover from existing in the same universe as Hofer. I felt sucked in by the peak of this trail cluttered with tree trunks. It was then the lights of the BMW lit up a fi
eld of grass that was waiting for us like a nest on the side of the path.

  “I want to meet your brother! Tell him I have a coded antenna for America and that I’m willing to transmit his group’s information,” I whispered in her ear, after I had recounted my journey and more importantly, after having described all of our son’s words and actions.

  NOTEBOOK SIX

  It’s the End of the world, with the blood of Berlin flowing out in great gushes through the bomb holes; great victories followed by three years of defeat. This story will be manipulated, swallowed and regurgitated by Gœbbels’ impeccable propaganda machine, or rather by his successor, since the clubfoot will soon burn along with his wife and his children.

  I love the shapeless larvae of this war, the millions of bodies that I created that are now my only possession, the one that no enemy will ever be able to take away from me, and with ease that brings bliss and trance. I am hiding at the end of the bunker. I would need a periscope like in the trenches in 14. I don’t dare stick my nose outside because of the one-ton bombs that fall from the holds of the flying fortresses. There’s a risk it would slow me down. So, I’m counting on my messengers, who bring false news because I don’t want to hear the real news anymore and if I do, I threaten them with death.

  Christmas. I feel good, but my right hand is shaking more and more. (The situation in Hungary!) For the last two days, feeling of uneasiness and gassiness, a consequence of pea soup. The larynx is perfectly healed, despite the fact that I still have the feeling there is a slight irritation.

  I slept in the bunker because the enemy planes were disturbing my sleep. What can be done to stop my right hand from shaking? I refuse sedatives, because they would slow down my mental process and that would be catastrophic considering my current responsibilities.

  I become a fiction, I invent myself to the degree of my fear, and from Moscow to Tangier, from the Ridge to Norway, my fear is immense! We had to stop the ventilation in the bunker because it was sucking in the smells of sulfur from the outside, from the bombs, the dust of Berlin; the Berliners charred behind their pieces of artillery, like my brother-in-law, Fegelein who was executed for having tried to escape.

  I am hardening, like granite: the flesh is dead. I go to the kitchen to retrieve a remaining piece of cake, and I prepare to fulfill my ultimate promise: “At the moment of supreme danger, I will disappear.”

  “So, from a literary point of view, what do you think?” Hofer asked me as I finished deciphering the shaky spidery scrawl that he had given me to read that night.

  Despite a mine launched by parachute that had destroyed the Empire Broadcasting Company’s south wing, we were still broadcasting, but from our underground studio. And we had our service meetings in the neighboring bars. The camera that was used to microfilm still worked and Hofer brought me new documents from the Führerbunker to photograph everyday.

  “Adversity gives great men wings,” I answered.

  “I admit I feel honored by the mission I was given,” Hofer said, teary eyed. “Taking to Canada the Führer’s lyrical expression and ensuring its publication later, when the time is right. This noble task fell upon Goebbels but he decided to commit suicide... What an idiot! As for the Führer, he had a tunnel dug beneath the bunker, an escape route where he could wait as the events unravel. As for me, I prefer to disappear.”

  He burst into a booming laughter. The Helgoland was waiting for us in Kiel, well hidden from the bombs in the fortified U-Boat harbor. It was von Gundrich himself who was supposed to take us to the freedom and safety of my coveted Quebec. I repositioned myself on the velvet seat. I stretched. I was looking for a rhythm that would make me sleep in the artillery’s rumble. Everyday, in the Adlon Hotel’s underground bar, next to the Brandenburg Gate, with the diplomats of neutral countries, Hofer and I would write even wilder and more frenzied propaganda as the Russians were getting closer. We asked everyone to write a note on a piece of paper, to roll it tightly and then to slip it in the belly dancer’s garments.

  She went around the room and came back to our table, swaying her hips, and carrying the primary substance of the next release destined to cheer up the troops and signed by Gœbbles. A cash register clinked at the back of the bar. We were waiting for the words to die out, mouth wide open, as if we were fishing with dynamite. There would not be one left alive. We would kill them all with the little notes we read out loud. The barman was playing Glen Miller on the gramophone. The trumpet was “debaptizing” the universe since its creation; exterminating the rats from the tabernacles. Ah! Lohengrin and Walhalla! The music was destroying us; nothing would beat the last shock in its harmonic vagina, if not for its wicked return. Nietzsche was right: every pleasure has a thirst for deep, deep eternity. The music was pushing us even further toward the end. A tall SS was standing up and slapping a French prostitute, a Kokotte. The bottles on the bar were clinking against each other. The gin added vinegar to my ulcers.

  Hofer told me that some technicians were going to move the camera to the Führerbunker so I could continue my archiving work until the very last moment.

  “Hang in there, mein Freund. We will soon be in Gaspésie.”

  We were camping in the basement of our villa, Lizbeth and I. A candle was molding the shadows in conniving and moving arches. Our breaths became entwined. The world above us is exploding, meine Liebe. Her breasts tensed under the silk, she was eating a potato as she read my palm.

  “It seems you will meet a great love, I think!” Lizbeth said with a sad smile, soon to be stuffed in the museum of eternity. We would all go through, and quickly. No matter how much we stuck our chests out, in the pit and curtain! No problem.

  I did not want her to know that the Gestapo had seized my latest recording. For what purpose other than to decipher the code I was using during my transmissions to Perceval? Who had ratted me out? They would come to arrest me within the next few hours. And I did not want Lizbeth to be around at that moment.

  “Look at what my brother Friedrich gave me!” She took a grenade out of the chest drawer. She primed the grenade and looked me right in the eyes. Nothing. The detonator did not work. It took us a few minutes to settle down from our fit of laughter.

  I climbed up to the very last stair that led to the villa’s garden. “Go see your brother, I told her. He has to be told about the tunnel under the bunker. They have to blow it up. No one must escape.”

  She was sobbing. I rested my forehead against the wall. She passed behind me and brushed my dangling right hand. “Auf Wiedersehen!” she said. I did not answer. She was walking away in the devastated garden, skipping between the beams and the slate tiles that had fallen off the roof. I had always believed her face would be that of my death.

  I went back in. An immense outcry brushed against my skin. Rent your own name, prostrate yourself before it. Know that the mirror shows only a minute part of your face. Deprived of purpose, I was becoming a monster. I couldn’t breathe without my love. Do not deceive me, oh my torturers! It was dawn. I was waiting for you. I wanted you to dispossess me. I wanted you to make me into a man without a history.

  The sky was becoming overcast with planes, the windows were shaking, squares were being pulverized and blocking the sun, followed by a moment of peace. The undisturbed chirping of sparrows. Brakes cringed. Two Gestapo policemen in civilian clothes slammed the doors of a black sedan in front of our villa. Where were they still finding gas? I went to meet them. “Where is your wife?” I shrugged. They pushed me on the backseat like a lifeless body.

  We drove through the ruins, two motorcycles escorting us and a half-track behind us, following a complicated trajectory, bumpy, with sudden stops that hurt me since I could not protect my face with my hands that were shackled behind my back. My lips bleeding, I was trying to catch my breath as a soldier left on his BMW in reconnaissance to figure out how to go around a bomb whole.

  On the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Berlin Allee, hanging from light posts, three Hitlerian youths wer
e oscillating from the end of their ropes; the moon lit the face of one of the teenagers. I recognized the son of our neighbors who had participated in the ski descent at the Tiergarten: thousands of young people forming a swastika with torches to bait the allied pilots. Now his tongue was hanging out and he had a sign around his neck: I am a coward.

  The car started up again; I tried to hold on between my two jailors who were both holding onto the car door handles. The rubble unfolded, attracting in their empty unknown spaces the powerful winds from Ukraine, Byelorussia, Finland, on the heels of the German army, and they were digging grooves in the ash of department stores, the proud marble villas, the opera houses, the cathedrals. Crematory nightmare. At the end of Unter den Linden, even more extensive than the Champs-Élysées, the angel of victory, miraculously intact, was spreading its golden wings in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

  We are but love that passes or that does not pass. Jaws opened in stupefaction, I did not fear death anymore. I did not have a grip on anything. Wall sections were looking at us with their hollowed out windows. The sirens were spreading their sound blanket beneath the clouds that the DCA spotlights’ luminous fingers were blindly searching for, as if frantically trying to pick all the metal ticks that were proliferating out of it.

  I was being dragged through a mountain of rubble. Not to a firing squad, like I feared. To my great surprise, I found myself in a still intact vault. A torturer in a white smock sculpted my teeth, without anesthetic, with a dentist’s drill plugged into an emergency generator. He would sometimes stop to look at x-rays hanging from a piano wire that was hung across the room by two hooks. My head squeezed into the clamp that was holding my mouth opened, I lost consciousness several times.

  Revealing Lizbeth’s whereabouts seemed to be the only way to end the torture. I became delirious. I was going down a staircase, which was lit from below by a green glow, to an underground lake of crystal clear water, with a fine sandy beach and, in the absolute silence, I heard the scraping of a pen writing on the white chalk walls of the cave, held by an invisible hand, and when I came back to my senses, the sound became that of the drill on my molars, and then the stainless steel curette with which they filled the cavities in my teeth with lead.