The House of Rumour A Novel

3

the empress





There is an art to forgetting. History soon becomes dementia, a babble of voices clamouring to be heard. One has to have a selective memory to make any sense of the past. To forget is a cautious act of the will, more the gaining of a faculty than the loss of one. And through all the long days of his confinement, he had made it his study, his device. A trick. Revenge on the clever ones that had tricked him. Over the years there had been so many occasions when he had methodically assumed a state of amnesia that even he was unsure whether it was faked or not. And then he would have to work his way back to the beginning.

Memory: this is how we travel in time. Backwards and forwards, trying to escape the prison of present consciousness. Forgetfulness was his liberation. His retreat. His place of refuge. This secret world with no official record.

Half his life had seemed a preparation for senility. Now he truly felt as old as Methuselah, sitting in the summerhouse, waiting for the end. He had long wondered if old age might grant him its promised release from recollection. A true oblivion after all his long days of pretence. But time had its own trick to play on him. His mind was almost as sharp as the night on which he had made his flight nearly fifty years earlier. Now he was ready to fly once more, he decided. He could go right back. It was all as bright and vivid as ever.

A childhood in Egypt. Alexandria. The nights in Ibrahimieh, in a garden by the desert with its rich evening scent of violet, anemone and narcissus. He would walk out with his mother beneath the vast celestial canopy. She was the empress then, the queen of his universe. She would trace the shapes of constellations that wheeled above and pick out the brighter stars, naming them for him in a magical incantation: Vega, Cassiopeia, Aldebaran. Pointing to the wandering planets, she would tell him that the heavenly bodies had fixed courses, which mapped each lifetime that passed below. You will be a bright star one day, Rudi, she promised.

The days brought a harsher light to their quiet suburb of Alexandria, the fierce sun with its burning-glass focus. The chamsin wind conjured sandstorms and a salt breath to the air as it foamed the waves of the sea beyond. He would hide from the sunlight as it threatened to darken the olive skin he had inherited from his Greek mother. His father recounted the country of his golden ancestors. ‘We have our place in the sun, Rudi,’ he was told, an echo of something that had recently been said by the Emperor, ‘but remember you have a homeland. Your fatherland.’

One afternoon he noticed a thin Greek man in the street outside their house, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. Remembering his manners, he asked the man if he might help him. The Greek gave him an absurdly beatific smile.

‘I walked here by chance,’ the man told him and pointed up at a balcony across the street. ‘I used to visit here when I was young. Now this one and the next one are rented as commercial offices. Ah! The room, the Turkish rug, the shelf with two yellow vases.’

Rudi pointed to the villa of his family. ‘We live there,’ he said.

‘Yes, yes,’ the Greek replied absently, shielding his eyes with a hand as he looked up at the window opposite.

‘Soon we will be leaving.’

The man turned to look down at him.

‘Leaving?’

‘For Europe.’

The Greek laughed.

‘Perhaps it’s Alexandria that’s leaving.’

‘That’s silly.’

‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ The man sighed and began to wander away, gazing up one last time to study the wall of the house beyond, the balcony, the window. ‘But when you go, bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing.’

The heat had become unforgiving and he imagined, as he often did, a cold land far to the north. A mythical island set in a frozen sea. He dreamt of a black sun, an opening in the sky, a cool tunnel that he might fly through to the pure Arctic wastes. Even from the beginning he had longed for flight.

He was twelve when they left Egypt. They took a steamer from the port and he stood on deck with his father who pointed out the column of Pompeius and the lighthouse built by Alexander the Great. ‘Take a long look at that land,’ he told Rudi. ‘You won’t see it for many years to come.’ He thought of the Greek man in the straw hat as he watched the coastline slowly recede from sight.

This was his first attempt at the art of forgetting: that the home of his childhood could become immemorial dream. An ancient myth. At boarding school in Germany he was awkward and conscious of his Levantine looks, his delicate manner. His classmates mocked his oily black hair and beetle brows, calling him ‘The Egyptian’. He grew determined to prove his bond with his father’s land, adopting a strict sense of patriotism. He learnt the Fleet Calendar by heart and could recite the statistics of all the principal imperial battleships. He developed a passion for astronomy, to understand the stars he had observed with his mother, though it was made clear that he was expected to follow his father in the family export business.

Then the Great War came and liberated him from the tedious trade of commerce. ‘Rejoice with me,’ he wrote to his family when he had enlisted in the 1st Bavarian Foot, ‘I am an infantryman.’ Through pitch-black nights he crouched in the sunken mud-filled trenches, watching the old fighters squat among the milk-white faces of lads who, a few days before, garlanded with flowers and singing, had marched away through the streets of home. In the glaring lights of rockets and star shells, the youngsters gazed bemused at their fellows lying so still through the bombardment. Despite the dreadful noise, the awful scent of putrefaction mingled with the acrid clouds of gas and high explosive, comrades would huddle together and find a bitter comfort, each man gently leaning on a friend, seeking out a respite from the terror.

One cold morning, gazing up over the rim of the trench, he spied a formation of aeroplanes glinting in the dawn light. Like watching heavenly angels from an open grave, he mused with a smile. He knew then where hope belonged: in the sky.

At Verdun he took a shrapnel wound and was sent to a hospital at Bad Homburg. On convalescent leave he applied for a transfer to the Flying Corps. He was turned down and posted to a reserve regiment on the Eastern Front. Here he was injured once more: a Romanian bullet went right through him, missing his heart and his spine by a finger’s breadth. It was after he recovered from this, in the very last year of the war, that he was accepted into the imperial air force.

Flight! Yes, it came so naturally to him. His calling, his mission in the world. The sky was his element. Mankind’s future would be determined in the air, he decided, just as its destiny was written in the stars beyond. A war in heaven would end all arguments. He flew reconnaissance sorties for the final offensive on the Western Front.

And then came the terrible betrayal. Armistice and surrender. The shameful peace in the Hall of Mirrors. So it had all been in vain, he wept, all the sacrifices and privations just for a band of criminals to get their filthy hands on the country. No more Empire. No more Emperor. Revolt and starvation: mutiny in the ports, bread riots in the capital. All reason would now be forgotten. The only hope was to cherish hatred and nurture revenge.

He arrived in Munich the following spring at the height of the Bavarian Soviet. A degenerate utopia had been instituted, a comic opera of anarchists and café intellectuals who staged peace festivals and composed revolutionary hymns. A self-appointed Commissar of Public Instruction ordered an end to the study of history – ‘that enemy of civilisation’; a Governor of Finance declared himself in favour of the abolition of money; the new Foreign Minister had only recently been discharged from a mental institution and tested even the extreme radicalism of his colleagues by declaring war on Switzerland and Württemberg.

But there were meetings of a secret club in private rooms of the Four Seasons Hotel: a mystical society that called for a new dawn of blood and honour. Members had to prove that they had no Jewish ancestry for at least three generations. He was deeply anxious that his appearance might not pass muster: there was open criticism of exotic features, suspicion of dark complexions, even of excessive hairiness. But when he cautiously explained that he was half Greek he was admitted warmly into the fold. It was explained to him that the name of this cultural order, the Thule Society, referred to a Greek name for the ancient Arctic homeland of the Aryans, a Hyperborean Atlantis of godlike men. This was the meaning of his childhood dream! The wondrous infantile prophecy of the cold land of the North, with a holy symbol of a black sun. That he had been born in Alexandria no longer caused him embarrassment. Egypt, declared one of the speakers, had been the home of sacred wisdom, a true religion of hermetic magic that had been corrupted by Judaism. ‘The Jews are the slave-race who stole the ancient knowledge,’ the man insisted contemptuously. ‘The Jews are the excrement of Egypt!’

Other candidates for membership were not granted such hospitality. A young count had his application to the Thule Society rejected when it was discovered that his mother was of Jewish descent. In a rage of disappointment he took a pistol and assassinated the head of the Munich Soviet on the Promenadestrasse. Terrible reprisals followed. Leading figures in the Thule Society were rounded up and executed. Rudi only just avoided being caught himself. He slipped away in the night to join the Freikorps.

These were the men who refused to be demobbed. A generation of angry losers bred by a dishonourable peace. War had taken hold of them and would never let them go. They had forgotten the civilisation that had betrayed them, their minds having been wiped clean with a pure nihilism. ‘Kaput!’ declared one of them, pointing a finger to the side of his head. ‘In November 1918 I blew out my brains. We have already died for our nation. Now we are dead men on leave.’ They had found a comradely love amid the filth and stench of the trenches. With no stomach for the soft life any more, many would never go home. A battle-hardened trooper told Rudi he could find sleep only on a camp bed with rough blankets. ‘I can no longer abide sheets,’ he explained. ‘They remind me of the flag of truce.’ Yet this old soldier was found in a disgraceful attitude of surrender in a hotel room years later on the Night of the Long Knives.

Rudi had learnt to control the temptations of intimacy. The love of men was not to be squandered on base desires. Some of the Freikorps had become so used to action without conscience that they had lost their moral sense. He sought a greater will, a belief in something pure. It was a deep love that he felt, which soared up to the heavens. He found a girlfriend to share the healthy outdoor pursuits that would clear his head. They would go on hikes together through the mountains, to breathe the clean air of the Fatherland.

He found his professor too: Dr Haushofer, a retired general who lectured in geopolitics at Munich University and tutored him in new ideas for a mystical future. The struggle for survival was the struggle for space, the professor declared; space is what the German people needed. It lay to the east, to be conquered as it had been before by the Teutonic crusaders. Rudi dreamt of a space beyond the horizon, reaching upward to the stars. He learnt a new and mournful word: Weltanschauung, the world-view, the destiny of nations. He spent days of study in the lecture theatre, nights of struggle in the beerhalls. He was waiting for the man who would lead them forward.

When he first saw him in a back-room meeting of a minor nationalist party, the man looked unremarkable. He held himself stiffly, with that tense and uncertain authority that one associated with the non-commissioned. His hands were clasped flat against the front of his shabby grey overcoat. But when his turn came to speak, a strange and shocking animus was unleashed. A howl of pain pierced the muttering gloom. His was the song of their suffering, the melody of their anger. He had a rhythm, too, that stirred them, a cadence and gesture that seemed to channel their sad rage. To them this was no mere rhetoric. They had long grown weary of that. No, this was shrill delight, the sweet aria of their fury.

‘I am just a drummer,’ this man said when it became clear that their promised leader had been found. Rudi called him the Tribune and followed him faithfully ever after: even into Landsberg prison after the failed putsch.

This was his time of joyful confinement, as amanuensis to the Tribune while they worked on his great book together. Professor Haushofer helped them forge ideas of sacred geography and political mysticism. Rudi held the memory of this time close to him, even when he would feign forgetfulness of everything else. In all the other places where he had been incarcerated after his flight – the Tower, the country house where he was first held for interrogation, the hospital in Wales, his cell at Nuremberg and now here, in the summerhouse of Speer’s garden at Spandau – Landsberg had been his one prison of happiness.

He remembered the moment when one night the Tribune read to him a passage he had written, describing the life and death of his comrades in the Great War. The Tribune read slowly and haltingly, his face drawn and weary as he struggled to articulate his seemingly boundless concepts. The pauses grew longer and more frequent until he suddenly dropped his head into his hands and sobbed out loud. Then, he rose majestically from this posture of despondence and burst out: ‘Oh, I shall exact a pitiless and terrible revenge on the very first day that I can! I shall take revenge in the name of all whom I shall see then before my eyes!’ It was then that Rudi knew that he would always be beholden to his Tribune. That he loved him.

And it was Rudi who would always remain the closest to him. While others in the party nursed their own petty ambitions, his fulfilled wish was simply to be the Deputy, the Tribune’s loyal second. At rallies it was his duty to introduce him to the crowd and to lead the cheers at the end. At functions he would act as attentive escort. The seeming passivity of his ceremonial role inspired many arch and facile comments. The spiteful murmur of gossip dubbed him ‘Fräulein’, ‘First Lady’, even ‘Black Paula’. Yet he felt aloof from these stupid remarks. Only those who could truly grasp the purity of his devotion had any power to judge his character. Such as his own loving wife, who always understood that the Tribune came first.

There was a truth, though, behind the absurdity of these nicknames. Rudi held a latent power, always ready to be used. When they had conquered half of Europe and there was much celebration of the Tribune’s imperial status, it was reported to him that a middle-ranking party official had been heard to say: ‘Well, if Hitler is the Emperor, then Hess is his Empress.’ He had seen to it that the man had been punished for such sedition, but was secretly glad that such a blasphemous name had been given to a destined role that even within himself he had found hard to acknowledge. A feminine potency, one that could surpass all others. Yes, this was the meaning of his flight. His one great act of love for the Tribune. Like in a chess game when the queen suddenly leaps from her consort’s side across the board to break the stalemate.

Now all the pieces on his side were gone. They were all dead except him. He had been the first and the last. He waited in the summerhouse in Speer’s garden. He was ready. Ready to fly once more.