The Effects of Alienation
IT ALWAYS SEEMED TO BE SNOWING in Zürich that winter, but as Peter walked toward the café, he found himself looking up at an astonishingly blue sky.
Cold, still colder than a well-digger’s ass, but clear nonetheless. He was so taken aback he stopped. There was a dull sun, looking as frozen as an outdoor Christmas tree ornament, over to the west. The houses and buildings all seemed new-washed; even the slush on the sides of the street was white, not the usual sooty gray. Perhaps the crowd for the opening night might be larger than even he had hoped. If Brecht were still alive, he would have said, “Weather good for a crowd, good for a crowd.”
There was a stuttering hum in the air, a summer sound from another country and time, the sound of a fan in a faraway room. It got louder. Then above the lake the airship Herman Göring II pulled into view like an art deco sausage on its daily run from Freidrichschaffen across the border to Berne. Some mighty Germans aboard; an admiral’s and two generals’ pennants flew from the tail landing ropes just below the swastikas on the stubby fins. Peter’s eyes were getting worse (he was in his fifties) but he noticed the flags while the thing was still two kilometers away. The airship passed out of sight beyond the nearest buildings. Its usual course was far northwest of Zürich—one of the Aryans must have wanted a look.
Higher up in the sky he saw the thin slash of white made by the Helsinki-Madrid jet, usually invisible far above the snowy clouds over Switzerland. Peter hadn’t seen it for months (not that he’d even been looking). To people here, the passenger planes were something you only occasionally saw, like summer. Well, maybe that will change tonight, he thought. They’ll never look at a jet plane or a rocket the same way again.
Then he asked himself: Who are we fooling?
He went on down the street to the Cabaret Kropotkin.
The actor doubling in the role of the blind organ grinder was having trouble with his Zucco, so in the last run-through he had to sing a cappella. Another headache, thought Peter. Brecht’s widow sent the offending instrument out: The one thing you could get done in Switzerland was have things fixed. More trouble: The ropes holding some of the props had loosened; they had to be restrung.
Peter tugged on a carabiner. “Zero,” he said to the actor, “you really should lose some weight.” Peter had the voice of a small, adenoidal Austrian garter snake.
The other actor (in the Cabaret Kropotkin, everyone was an actor; everyone a stagehand, an usher, a waiter, a dishwasher) pulled himself to his full height. He towered over Peter and blocked his view of the stage. He let go of his end of the rope.
“What? And lose my personality?” said Zero. “It’s glands!”
“Glands, my ass,” said Peter. “On what we make, I don’t know how you gain weight.” He pulled on the guy rope.
“Do what? Gain? Back in America, I used to weigh—”
“Back in America,” said Shemp, the other actor with a leading role in the play, “back in America, we all had jobs. We also knew how to keep a rope tight.” He jerked it away, burning their hands.
“Quit trying to be your late brother!” said Zero, sucking on his fingers. “You just don’t have Moe’s unique personality.”
“And he didn’t have my looks. Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!”
Peter shook his head, twisted a turnbuckle past the stripped place on the threads.
“Vaudeville!” said Zero. “God, how I don’t miss it!”
“Eight shows a day!” said Shemp. “Your name up in lights!”
“The only thing your name is going to be up in is the pay register,” said Brecht’s widow from the cabaret floor where she had returned without a sound, “if you don’t get those ropes straightened out.”
“Yes, comrade Ma’am,” said Shemp for all of them.
A little after 5:00 P.M. they finished the last rehearsal and it was time for supper. They’d had to cook that, too. A healthy cabbage soup with potatoes and a thick black bread Zero had kneaded up that morning.
Madame Brecht, who wore her hair in a severe bun, joined them. The conversation was light. The Poles, Swedes, English, American, German, French, and Lithuanians who made up the ensemble had been together for such a time they no longer needed to talk. One look, and everybody knew just how everybody else’s life was going. When they did speak, it was in a sort of pig-Esperanto comprised of parts of all their languages, and when the Madame was around, great heaping doses of Hegelian gibberish.
Not that a single one of them didn’t believe that being right there right then wasn’t the only place to be.
Bruno, the old German gaffer, was staring into his soup bowl like it was the floor of Pontius Pilate’s house.
Shemp whispered to Peter, “Here comes the fucking Paris story again.”
“I was there,” said Bruno. “I was in the German Army then. What did I know? I was fifty-three years old and had been drafted.”
Madame Brecht started to say something. Peter caught her eye and raised his finger, warning her off.
“Paris!” said the old man, looking up from the table. “Paris, the second time we took it. There we were in our millions, drums beating, bugles blaring, rank on rank of us! There was the Führer in his chariot, Mussolini following behind in his. There they were pulling the Führer down the Champs-élysées, Montgomery and Eisenhower in the lead traces, de Gaulle and Bomber Harris behind. Poor Bomber! He’d been put in at the last moment after they shot Patton down like a dog when he refused. Then came all the Allied generals with their insignia ripped off. It was a beautiful spring day. It was fifteen years ago.”
There were tears streaming down his face, and he looked at the Madame and smiled in a goofy way.
“I remember it well,” continued Bruno, “for that night, while looting a store, under the floorboards, I found the writings of Mr. Brecht.”
“Thank you for your kind reminiscence, Bruno,” said the Madame.
“Suck up!” said Zero, under his breath.
“Just another hard-luck story,” said Shemp.
“I like it very much,” said Peter to Zero quietly. “It has a certain decadent bourgeois charm.”
“Does anyone else have an anecdote about the Master?” asked the Madame, looking around expectantly.
Peter sighed as someone else started in on yet another instructive little dialectic parable.
Arguing with Brecht had been like talking to a Communist post. When the man’s mind was made up, that was that. When it wasn’t was the only time you could show him he was being a Stalinist putz; only then had he been known to rewrite something.
The first time Peter had met Brecht, Peter had been nineteen and fresh off the last turnip truck from Ludow. All he wanted was a Berlin theater job; what Brecht wanted was a talented marionette. He’d ended up doing Brecht’s comedy by night and Fritz Lang’s movies by day, and in his copious free time learning to spend the increasingly inflated Weimar money, which eventually became too cheap to wipe your butt with. Then Peter found himself in America, via Hitchcock, and Brecht found himself in Switzerland, via Hitler.
Peter sighed, looking around the table. Everybody here had a story. Not like mine, but just like mine. I was making movies and money in America. I was nominated for the Academy Award twice, after playing Orientals and psychopaths and crazy weenies for ten years. There was a war on. I was safe. It was that fat old fart Greenstreet, God rest his soul, who talked me into the USO tour with him. There we were, waiting for Glenn Miller’s plane to come in, near the Swiss border, six shows a day, Hitler almost done in, the biggest audiences we’d ever played to when BLAM!—the old world was gone.
And when I quit running, it’s “Hello, Herr Brecht, it is I, your long-lost admirer, Peter, the doormat.”
* * *
“And you?” asked Madame. “What can you tell us of our late departed genius?”
Peter ran through thirty years of memories, those of the first, and the ones of the last fifteen years. Yes, age had mellowed the parts of Brecht’s mind that needed it. Yes, he had begun to bathe and change clothes more often after his second or third heart attack, which had made things much more pleasant. He had exploited people a little less; possibly he’d forgotten how, or was so used to it that he no longer noticed when he wasn’t. No, the mental fires had never gone out. Yes, it was hard to carry on their work without the sharp nail of his mind at the center of their theater. He could also have said that Brecht spent the last three years of his life trying to put The Communist Manifesto into rhymed couplets. He could have said all that. Instead, he looked at the Madame. “Brecht wanted to live his life so that every day at 6:00 P.M. he could go into his room, lock the door, read cheap American detective stories, and eat cheese to his heart’s content. The man must have had bowel muscles like steel strands.”
Then Peter got up and left the room.
* * *
Walter Brettschneider was the Cultural Attaché to the Reichsconsul in Zürich and was only twenty-five years old. Which meant, of course, that he was a major in the Geheime Staats Polizei. His job at the Consulate included arranging and attending social and cultural affairs, arrangements for touring groups from the Fatherland to various Swiss cities (Zürich, he thought, rather than Berne, being the only city in the country with any culture at all). His other job was easier—he could have been assigned to one of the Occupied Lands, or South America, or as liaison with the Japanese, which every day was becoming more and more of a chore for the Reich; his friend back in Berlin in the Ministry of Manufacture told him the members of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had come up with many technical innovations in the last few years; they were now making an automobile as good as the Volkswagen and had radio and televiewing equipment that required only three tubes.
That second job of his consisted of forwarding to Berlin, each year or so, a list of thirty to forty names. Of these, a dozen or fifteen would be picked. These people would suddenly find that their permanent resident alien status in Switzerland was in question, there were certain charges, etc. And then they would be asked by the Swiss to leave the country.
Everyone was satisfied with the arrangement, the Swiss, the Reich, in some strange way the resident aliens, as long as they weren’t one of the dozen or so. Switzerland itself was mined and booby-trapped and well defended. If the Reich tried to invade, the Alps would drop on them. Germany controlled everything going in and out—it surrounded the country for two thousand kilometers in every direction—the New Lands, New Russland, New Afrika, New Iceland, the lands along the shiny new Berlin-Baghdad Eisenbahn—except the contents of the diplomatic pouches, and some of those, too.
If the Fatherland tried to use the Weapons on the Swiss, they lost all those glittery numbered assets, and endangered their surrounding territory.
So the system was understood. After all, as the First Führer had said, we have a thousand years; at a dozen a year we will eventually get them all.
Edward, his assistant, knocked and came in.
“Heil Bormann,” he said, nonchalantly raising his hand a few inches.
“OK,” said Brettschneider, doing likewise.
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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