Cesare E-Book

Jerome Charyn

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 495

Beschreibung

On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him 'Cesare' after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies. Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin's Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR CESARE

‘Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. Cesare is by no means lightweight fare, but it’s provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying’ – Washington Post

‘A breakneck adventure… it’s a dark art to make a subject this grotesque quite this much fun’ – Wall Street Journal

‘Spectacular… this extraordinary tour de force showcases Charyn at the top of his game’ – Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

‘[An] edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable’ – Kirkus (Starred review)

‘Darkly resonant… a convention-upturning tour de force’ –Washington Independent Review of Books

‘Charyn’s taut story line is full of surreal visuals and elaborate illusions’ – Booklist

‘A complex and detailed story of the inner workings of the German Third Reich during World War II… Highly recommended’ – Library Journal

‘Charyn has created a terrific cast of original characters who speak in a language that reflects the selfish and predatory nature of that time… He tells a fascinating story of resistance against evil with a great deal of energy’ – Historical Novels Review

‘Deftly written and original… Unreservedly recommended’ – Midwest Book Review

‘Charyn conjures up a narrative punctuated with powerful imagery… In a novel full of its share of the grotesque, it takes an artist with a precise touch such as Charyn to achieve such artful results’ – Comics Grinder

PRAISE FOR JEROME CHARYN

‘Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination’ – William Giraldi

‘One of our most rewarding novelists’ – Larry McMurtry

‘Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy–a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons’ – New Yorker

‘One of our most intriguing fiction writers’ – O, The Oprah Magazine

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.

– W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Dramatis Personae

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Erik Holdermann, a member of German military intelligence; he’s also known as Cesare the somnambulist, or the magician

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German military intelligence; he’s also known as Uncle Willi, or the Old Man, and sometimes as Dr Caligari

Lisa Valentiner, the daughter of Baron von Hecht; she’s also known as Lisalein and will later be known as the baroness, or the Frau Kommandant

SECONDARY CHARACTERS

Baron Wilfrid von Hecht, a German Jewish baron and industrialist

Emil von Hecht, the baron’s nephew, also known as the little baron

Fanni Grünspan, a Jewish Greifer, or grabber, who works for the Gestapo

Colonel Joachim, a member of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s bodyguard corps, who will later be commandant of Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp

Commander Helmut Stolz, a member of German military intelligence who is the head of his own espionage group, Aktion

Franz Müller, a member of Stolz’s Aktiongroup; he’s also known as the acrobat

Fränze Müller, Franz’s twin sister, also a member of Aktion

Benhard Beck, the cabaret king of Berlin, who ends up at Theresien-stadt; he’s also known as Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife

Veronika, a little girl

Heinrich Percyval Albrecht, Erik’s uncle, an aristocratic Bavarian farmer

Eva Canaris, Admiral Canaris’ daughter

Werner Wolfe, a member of American naval intelligence

Tilli, a gun girl who is in charge of her own anti-aircraft battery

Josef Valentiner, Lisa’s husband, a Nazi minister

Kapitän Peter Kleist, a submarine commander

Fräulein Sissi, a prostitute out of Erik’s past

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Frau Hedda Adlon, mistress of the Adlon Hotel

Pola Negri, a silent film star who once lived at the Adlon

Herr Winterdorf, known as Fritz, a Nazi barber at the Adlon

Little Sister, Colonel Joachim’s adjutant at Theresienstadt

Ännchen, a retarded girl at Theresienstadt

Glossary of German Terms

Abwehr, German military intelligence

Aktion, an activity, or undertaking; Aktion is also the name of Erik’s group within the Abwehr

Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari(1920), a German expressionist film about a mad magician, Caligari, and his somnambulist slave, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who sleeps in a coffinlike Kabinett and murders people in a tiny mountain village while he’s in a dream state

Das Schwarze Korps, Black Corps, the weekly journal of the SS

Die Blutige Rose, the Bloody Rose, in reference to Rosa Luxemburg, who helped lead the SpartakusUprising in late December 1918, during which the Spartacists took over Berlin for several days

Dreckshunde, literally shit-hounds

Fabrikaktion, literally factory raid; Hitler and Goebbels were quite unhappy that there were still Jewish slave laborers in Berlin; the SS and the Gestapo organized a Fabrikaktion in February 1943 that would snatch Jews right out of their workplace and lock them up in various Sammellager throughout the city

Frauenprotest, women’s protest; when the Nazis began putting half Jews in holding pens, their non-Jewish relatives staged a protest outside these Sammellager in March 1943

Fuchsbau, Fox’s Lair, the code name of Admiral Canaris’ headquarters

Greifer, or grabbers, Jews or half Jews who worked for the Gestapo and helped ferret out Jews who had gone underground in Berlin

Judenstern, the yellow star that all Jews in Germany had to wear from September 1941 to the end of the Third Reich

Jupo, Jewish auxiliary policemen who worked for the Gestapo

Krankenhaus, a hospital

Kriegsmarine, the German navy

Kripo, criminal police whose main headquarters was on Alexanderplatz in Berlin

Kristallnacht, Night of the Broken Glass, November 9, 1938, when Nazi goons and disgruntled Party members began attacking Jews throughout Germany; over a hundred synagogues were destroyed

Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a special unit within the SS that began as Hitler’s bodyguards

Luftwaffe, the German air force

Milchkuh, or milk cow, an older submarine taken out of action and used to service other submarines

Mischling, a half Jew, someone with more than one Jewish parent or grandparent

Ritterkreuz, Knight’s Cross, the highest award that a member of the German military could ever hope to achieve; it was worn from a ribbon around the neck

Sammellager, as used here, a holding pen for Jews waiting to be transported to a concentration camp

Schmiss, a dueling scar

Schwanz, a man’s prick, used here as an expletive

Schweinerei, filth

Schwester, or sister, used here to describe a nurse or keeper at a hospital or asylum

Schwesternheim, the nurses’ residence at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin

Spartakus Uprising, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who, in quixotic fashion, attempted to bring a socialist revolution to Germany in December 1918, with the help of an unruly band of radical workers and sailors; the uprising failed, and Liebknecht and Luxemburg were both murdered by right-wing military thugs in January 1919; Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal

Spinnen, Spiders, high-priced whores who worked for the Abwehr

Spitzel, an informer or spy

Tipper, a stool pigeon

Totenkopf, death’s-head, an insignia appropriated by the SS

U-boat, submariner, a Jew hiding from the Gestapo

V-Mann, a foreign informant or spy who serves as a go-between

Wehrmacht, the German military machine under Adolf Hitler

February 11, 1943

From the desk of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris

72-76 Tirpitz-Ufer

Berlin

They did not want to hear anything but the latest news about Cesare. That’s how bad the war was going. And the bombings over Berlin had started again after the quietus of a year. They were frightened, these wives of generals and diplomats. I shouldn’t have been here. I ran a secret service, not a brothel for spies.

‘Herr Admiral,’ they said, ‘is he phantom or flesh?’

And I had to reply, ‘Gnädige Frau, I cannot discuss my agents.’

But it was the talk of Berlin. How Captain Erik Holdermann of the Abwehr had strangled a notorious traitor in a room full of Goyas at the Prado.

‘And that swine had five bodyguards, did he not, Herr Admiral?’

They would embroider, multiply, manufacture, until I was their Caligari with his slave, Cesare, who strangled enemies of the Reich at will and then returned to his coffin at Tirpitz-Ufer. I have no coffins, I wanted to say. I didn’t belong in Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari. I am not an ogre. I wanted to rid myself of their company and ride my Arabian mare, with her stunning white flanks. And I, who had always sought to be anonymous, a man of shadows, had become a hero in Berlin because of Cesare.

‘Why do you not bring him to our luncheons, Herr Admiral?’

I would have strangled them all in the Beethoven Salon if Goebbels himself had not asked me to attend these affairs at the Adlon – it was necessary for our morale.

‘But if you sat with him, gnädige Frau, what use would he have as a secret agent?’

They guzzled wine from the Adlon’s cellars but still had to give up their ration stamps to the waiter, who cut out the stamps with a pair of scissors that hung on a silver chain at his side.

‘But he’s not a Jew, is he, Admiral?’

I had to answer, or they would complain to their husbands that Canaris was surly with them. How could I not be surly when I lived among sadists who butchered women and children in the streets?

‘Herr Holdermann is not a Jew, but sometimes we employ Jews.’

And then Goebbels’ own man, a clerk with bluish hair, intervened. ‘The Führer permits Admiral Canaris to employ Jews for a reason – to trick the Jewish bandits in England and America.’

Thank God one of my own aides entered the salon. I had signaled to him from the door with a slight twist of my head. He handed me a blank slip of paper, which I began to peruse. I cupped my chin and then rose from my chair.

‘You will have to forgive me,’ I said with a bow. ‘It’s an urgent matter.’

They were thrilled.

‘Does it have anything to do with Cesare?’

‘Indeed,’ I said, crumpling the slip of paper. They were gawking now. And I felt miserable. I shouldn’t have talked about strangling them. I wasn’t Berlin’s Bluebeard. I had known some of them before this reign of terror began. I had gone riding with one or two of these wives in the Grunewald. But the war had turned them into petulant children, who had to be pampered and stuffed with foolishness. I went around the table, kissing their hands, the ever-gallant Canaris. But the moment I left the salon a sadness settled in. I grew morose. I couldn’t return to the Tirpitz-Ufer. I longed to flee Berlin, and its cruel season – Jews were not allowed to enter the Adlon with their yellow stars. But such badges were also my own badge of shame. I had suggested to the Führer, years ago, that German Jews wear a yellow star…

Gott, I should have had Cesare cut my throat or strangle me. I was no less a monster than Goebbels and his men. I whistled for my driver. I tried to imagine Motte, my white mare, but another picture crept into my brain. I dreamt of my daughter locked away in an asylum as luxurious as the Adlon. I could not visit my poor little Eva. I did not have the courage. But she was twice as clever as her papa. Eva wrote to me from her mountain.

‘Papa, my nurses insist that cowards make the very best managers of spies. But I tell them to be quiet. You have no time for one mad girl. You are much too busy with your spies.’

I didn’t know where to turn. In another moment I would have wept in the arms of my aide.

‘Herr Admiral,’ he said, ‘are you ill?’

‘Don’t be insolent, Hänschen – take me to the Lichtenstein Bridge.’

Hans was more confused than ever. ‘Is it one of your private meetings, Herr Admiral? I neglected to bring my pistol.’

‘The bridge, the bridge, before I pluck out your eyes.’

I had shaken the poor fellow. He’d never heard me shout. In order to compose himself, Hans shouted at my driver.

‘The admiral has important business at the Lichtenstein Bridge. If you want to save your own skin, you’d better learn to fly.’

So we flew from Pariser Platz, but I didn’t want to cross the Tiergarten.

‘Tell him to take the longer route… I’d like to ride on the Budapester Strasse.’

Both of them must have thought their admiral had gone insane. We went down the Hermann-Göring-Strasse, which was blocked with every sort of construction and traffic – it looked like a war zone, with squads of SS men, and I wondered if Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen were back from the front to haunt us all and make Berlin into their own killing field. But they didn’t menace us when they peeked through the glass. In fact, they were very polite.

‘Forgive us, Admiral, but there’s a lunatic afoot – he has threatened to blow up Herr Goebbels. Would you like an escort?’

Before I could say yes or no, we were ushered through all the cordons on Hermann-Göring-Strasse. I was waiting for Wilhelm Canaris-Allee to appear on the map, or perhaps the gauleiter of Berlin would honor me with a portion of the zoo. The Cage of Dr Caligari.

My driver wound through the darkened, moonstruck streets and delivered us to the Budapester Strasse. He was flying much too fast.

‘Slow down, damn you. I would like to breathe in the scenery.’

There was no scenery; the bars were closed in the middle of the afternoon. The shutters were painted black; I saw a crippled woman hobble along – I didn’t believe in ghosts. I waved to her.

Hans was a suspicious little toad. He understood the route I was taking; I hadn’t trained him for nothing.

‘Herr Admiral,’ he whispered, cupping one hand over his mouth.

‘Isn’t this where they took die Blutige Rose?’

I didn’t answer him. We turned left on the embankment. I got out of the car. Hans was perplexed. He followed me to the bridge. I watched the water roil in that bloody Kanal. Hans was frightened of the smile he saw on my face – not for himself. He was the most loyal aide I had ever had. We often joked that if I went to the gallows, Hans would want the same wire around his neck.

‘But this is where the Freikorps pitched Frau Doktor Luxemburg,’ he said.

Hans was always a fine one for titles. Frau Doktor Luxemburg. I liked the ring of it. He’d heard the rumor; everybody at the Tirpitz-Ufer had. Their Old Man – when he was younger, of course – had helped the monarchists murder that bloody anarchist bitch, Rosa Luxemburg, and dropped her in the Landwehrkanal, crippled leg and all. My coup de grâce, they said, had broken the Spartakusbund and put an end to the Berlin uprising. Did it matter that I wasn’t even in Berlin? That I had gone to quiet down the mutinous sailors in Kiel? My minions had to shove their Old Man into the middle of history. In times of crisis, Dr Caligari was always there.

‘Herr Admiral,’ Hans said. ‘You look pale. Should I find Cesare?’

I started to cackle. ‘Do you want to rouse him from his slumber? He might murder us all.’

‘God forbid, Herr Admiral.’

Hitler’s reign began with the death of Rosa Luxemburg. Her disappearance had robbed the Weimar socialists of all their teeth. And the Reds never had another Rosa. I had once watched her stand on a table, under a circus tent, and harangue thousands with the voice of a bitter cherub. The women wept while the men shouted ‘Long live Rosa,’ until their voices broke.

I wasn’t spying on her for my own silly pleasure. Die Blutige Rose was a danger to us all. She had to be stopped. But the Brownshirts appeared in her wake. Hitler climbed right out of the blood in the Kanal. The Spartakusbund had rebellious sailors who sang love songs while they occupied the royal stables, but not Einsatzgruppen, who create killing fields wherever they go. I should have joined those sailors, kissed their hands and feet.

There was no blood in the water now, nothing blutig at all. And then I saw some creature bobbing in the Kanal, a woman, yes, but not with Rosa’s dark brown hair. This creature was a blonde with broad shoulders. Was she practicing for some phantom Olympiad? Her strokes were perfect as she bit into the water. She was wearing goggles, I think – my winter mermaid.

‘Hänschen,’ I said, ‘do you see the Mädl in the water?’

‘No, Herr Admiral.’

‘But I insist. You must talk to her… She’s a Jewish mermaid, hiding from Herr Himmler.’

Poor Hänschen started to cry. ‘There are no Jewish mermaids, Admiral.’

I did not want him to cry. It irritated me.

‘Ah, you’re right,’ I said. ‘My mind is playing tricks. Jewesses are verboten in the Landwehrkanal.’

Hans was a magician. Suddenly he had a blanket in his arms. He unfurled it like a cape and let the blanket wind around my shoulders. I could have been a pensioner out on a stroll, or a madman with his keeper. We were all madmen at the Abwehr. We had to be. How else could we have survived the Führer’s fiery wind day after day?

Lisalein

1

He hadn’t always slept in a coffin, hadn’t always been Cesare. Erik was born in Berlin the same year Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into the Landwehrkanal like some fat mermaid, a mermaid who couldn’t swim. His mother was a member of the Bavarian aristocracy who had fallen in love with a postman, Magnus Holdermann. The postman died when Erik was two, and his mother disappeared into Scheunenviertel, Berlin’s Jewish slum. Erik grew up among the Osten Jews in their pointy hats and long cloaks. His playground had been the back alleys of Scheunenviertel. And then his mother died of tuberculosis a little after Erik’s ninth birthday. It was 1928, and he roamed the streets like a wolf. It was the Jewish whores of Scheunenviertel who left their stations to feed him kuchen and coffee with hot milk. Erik was their spotter. He signaled whenever a policeman approached the Prenzlauer Allee, with its lane of cheap hotels. He lived at one of these hotels, the Kaiser’s Hat, with its neon sign that hissed all night and blinked into Erik’s eyes.

But the whores held their own council and decided Prenzlauer Allee wasn’t the right place for their own little wolf. They sent him to the Jewish orphanage on the Rosenstrasse and subsidized his stay. He didn’t live in any barracks. He had his own room, his own bed, his own pencil case.

Three years passed.

He wasn’t apprenticed to some carpenter or sent to a trade school where he had to stitch leather aprons with a long needle. He attended the Jewish Gymnasium near Rosenthaler Platz. There wasn’t much talk of religion at the Jewish Gymnasium. It was a German school that celebrated Mozart and Mendelssohn, Goethe and Heine, and every sort of foreign literature. Erik wasn’t frightened to speak up in class.

‘I do not understand Herr Hemingway. His men are all wounded and too sick to fall in love. It is like amerikanische jazz – much bumping of the body and a little music.’

The professor laughed and stroked his walrus mustache.

‘HerrHoldermann, if you want to learn American, you must put your mind to baseball.’

The professor removed a baseball almanac from his desk, closed his eyes, and repeated the names of players as if he were reciting the profoundest poetry: Baby Doll Jacobson, Jimmy Outlaw, Shoeless Joe Jackson…

The baseballer, Herr Shoeless Joe, was an orphan, like Erik. He went from team to team, from the Cleveland Browns to the Chikago Black Stockings, but with his own Wunderwaffe, the Black Betsy, a bat that never split and could knock a ball out of the baseball park and into the cattle yards of Chikago. Herr Joe was declared a baseball Krimineller because he took groschen from gamblers and let the other team win the famous World Series of 1919. He became a wanderer, had to disguise himself with a false beard if he wanted to play for teams in the lesser baseball leagues. Herr Joe was still playing somewhere, in Alabama or the Tennessee.

Erik kept a memorial candle for Herr Joe near his bed. It was called a Yahrzeit candle, and Jews lit it once a year to remember the dead. But he did not think it unethical to light a Yahrzeit candle for Shoeless Joe, a living dead man, the zombie of baseball.

Erik also had to worry about his own fate at the orphanage. A bitter famine clung to the city. There was panic and unrest in the streets of Scheunenviertel. Berlin was a Red town, but that didn’t stop the Brownshirts from coming into Scheunenviertel and pulling on the beards of old men. The Red Front had terrific battles with the Brownshirts. Professors at the orphanage predicted that Berlin would soon be run by gangsters of the Right and the Left.

The famine had come to Erik’s orphanage. There was much less strudel and liverwurst. The whores at the Kaiser’s Hat could no longer subsidize him. They couldn’t even subsidize themselves. Overseers at the orphanage began to resign. Jewish children were turned away. Rosenstrasse couldn’t feed another orphan, couldn’t pay for its fuel. And then the orphanage found a savior in Baron Wilfrid von Hecht, Berlin’s foremost philanthropist. The baron owned department stores and investment banks, manufactured chairs and table lamps. He’d been the first Jewish cavalry captain in the Great War and liked to wear his Iron Cross. He had the finest villa in the Grunewald, but he didn’t forget the orphans of Scheunenviertel. Coal trucks returned to the Rosenstrasse. Strudel arrived from the bakery on Alexanderplatz. And the baron himself had come to the orphanage.

He was no taller than a twelve-year-old boy. He had wide nostrils and a broad nose. His eyebrows resembled an unruly forest. He wore a frock coat with a velvet collar and spats that glistened in the orphanage’s weak light. The frock coat couldn’t erase the slight hump on his back. The orphans stood in line to greet their benefactor, the tallest boys towering over him. He gave each orphan a Montblanc fountain pen to encourage all of them in such hard times. It was a Meisterstück – Masterpiece – with a gold nib and midnight black barrel, the exact pen that Greta Garbo used to scratch her initials in someone’s souvenir book. And the baron had each orphan’s name inscribed in silver on his very own pen. It was the gift of a lifetime.

The Direktor could have run Rosenstrasse for a year on the hard currency that such Montblanc Masterpieces could fetch. But his orphans were shrewder than he was. They grasped the baron’s motives. He needed something outlandish in such difficult times. The Direktor was a compassionate accountant who lived with loaves of bread. But Herr Baron Wilfrid had to find the imprint of everything he touched.

He proceeded from boy to boy with each pen in its own velvet sack. He had studied every name and profile beforehand. And when he presented a boy with a pen, he could talk about the boy’s dead parents and the district in Berlin where he was born. He had an assistant who helped him with the velvet sacks. It was his daughter, Lisa von Hecht, who was fifteen and seemed very bored. She was a head taller than the baron in her velvet shoes. She scowled at the boys, and Erik was frightened to look into her eyes. He had never seen a girl who could create such a storm and still be so beautiful. She had clipped blond hair like the ticket-takers on the tram, but none of them had azure eyes that softened the angrier she got. She was much more spectacular than a fountain pen.

‘Vati,’ she said, stifling a yawn, ‘how much longer must I remain with your children? I have tennis class this afternoon with a divine boy who has dueling scars.’

The baron began to groan. ‘Lisa, Lisalein, you’re spoiling the presentation. I will bring you another boy with dueling scars.’

She pouted, and the long crease at both sides of her mouth made her twice as adorable. She clutched the baron’s list of orphans and read Erik’s name aloud. Lisa was near-sighted and had a terrible squint. But she wouldn’t wear spectacles on her nose.

‘Ah,’ the baron said, ‘Erik Holdermann. But your mother’s maiden name is Albrecht, Heidi Albrecht… Isn’t she the brother of my good friend Heinrich Percyval Albrecht?’

‘I believe so, Herr Baron.’

‘But this is astonishing!’ said the baron, growing very agitated. ‘Lisalein, make him give us back the pen. The boy is an impostor.’

Erik wouldn’t cry in front of the baron and his beautiful daughter, even though the baron’s accusation bit him to pieces. But it was Lisa who saw the dread and indignation in his eyes.

‘Father, you must question the boy.’

‘I will not.’

‘Then I will.’

And she scrutinized Erik with the full force of her myopia.

‘Junge, why are you here?’

‘I am not certain, Fräulein. My mother died three years ago and I was brought to Rosenstrasse. It has a much better reputation than the other Berlin orphanages.’

‘But your uncle is alive. Heinz Albrecht. I have visited him many times. Why are you not with him?’

‘He would not have me, Fräulein, because my mother married a postman, and Uncle Heinrich said it was a stain on the family – a blotch.’

‘Blotch,’ the baron repeated, the word hovering on his tongue. He took out a silk handkerchief, which was as long as a man’s shirt, and started to sniffle.

Lisa had to reprimand him. ‘Vati, behave yourself. You are embarrassing me in front of all the boys.’

‘I can’t help it,’ he said. ‘I remember now. The Rotten Sister – he spoke of Heidi several times. But I did not know there was a little boy… Erik, you must forgive my rude language. Come with me.’

‘But where are we going, Vati?’

‘To the Adlon. That is our Percyval’s hotel. I spoke to him yesterday. He has some business in Berlin.’

‘But you cannot steal the boy from Rosenstrasse.’

‘Why not?’ said the baron. ‘I am his benefactor. And I can do with him whatever I wish.’

Erik couldn’t understand the ferocious turmoil of the baron and his Lisalein. They propelled him out onto the Rosenstrasse like one of their own toys; a limousine was waiting, a black Mercedes with a sunroof. Children from all over Scheunenviertel surrounded the car, which had a chauffeur in a uniform that drowned in silver and gold. The chauffeur stood with one of his polished boots on the running board. He was the most insolent man Erik had ever seen. He looked at Lisalein with such lechery that even the boy blushed. His name was Karl-Oskar, and the baron had to slap his boot off the running board before the chauffeur would budge.

‘Will I be driving you, Herr Baron?’

‘Of course not,’ the baron growled. ‘Get in the back.’

Karl-Oskar ruffled his nose. ‘With the little orphan?’

‘Dummkopf, he is the nephew of one of the most distinguished men in Bavaria. Be grateful that I have not yet asked you to shine his shoes.’

‘Then I would leave your employ, Herr Baron. And you will never find another chauffeur who is as cultivated as I am.’

‘You are mistaken, Karl. Berlin is cluttered with unemployed lawyers and tax accountants. I could also replace you with a Lithuanian prince.’

Karl-Oskar smirked. ‘There aren’t many princes in Lithuania, Herr Baron, only Jews such as yourself and Lisalein.’

‘Do not mention my daughter, Karl. And if you keep ogling her, I will have the pleasure of plucking out your eyes. Get into the car – and be quick!’

The chauffeur retired to the rear of the Mercedes, while the baron, Lisa, and Erik sat up front. The baron had to plop himself onto two cushions, or his eyes wouldn’t have been level with the windshield. There was plenty of room for the boy to have his own seat, but the baron insisted that Erik sit on Lisa’s lap. The boy turned crimson.

‘Herr Baron, I am the man. Shouldn’t Lisalein sit on my lap?’

‘No,’ said the baron. ‘You are my guest.’

And so they bumped their way out of the Rosenstrasse, the baron driving in random jerks, and Erik couldn’t even concentrate on the little shops and alleys he loved – the shoemaker at the corner of Neue Friedrichstrasse, the candy stalls in the courtyard nearby, the little store that sold model airplanes and tanks. It wasn’t the baron’s peculiar driving habits that bothered him. It was the fantastic engine of Lisa’s body engulfing him with its heat and aromas. He began to shiver all at once, and Lisa wrapped her arms around him as if she were calming a dazed turtle, not a little man with his own desires.

They left the crooked alleys of Scheunenviertel and bumped onto Unter den Linden with its wide carriageway that was meant for a baron’s limousine or the cavalcade of a king. The Jewish shopkeepers had told him about their Kaiser, who could be seen half an age ago riding with his honor guard along that line of trees. ‘Kid,’ the shopkeepers had said, ‘Unter den Linden is the nearest we’ll ever get to heaven.’

The Brandenburg Gate was a stone mirage at the very edge of Unter den Linden, but he couldn’t enjoy a vista that was like a wicked dream while he rocked on Lisa’s lap. The baron’s Mercedes jolted to a halt in front of a sandstone castle with a mansard roof. It was the Adlon, where millionaires kept their mistresses in ten-room suites.

A doorman in derby and ducktail coat arrived out of nowhere, dusted off the baron and bowed to Lisa and the boy, who had begun to brood now that he’d had to climb off Lisa’s lap. Then the baron and his little cortege, including Karl-Oskar, walked under a canopy and entered the Adlon, a wonderland the likes of which Erik had never seen. It had the mystifying light of a cathedral, but with carpets and red chairs, pillars with red veins. The baron could not take a step without a member of the staff saluting him and blinding himself to the hump on his back.

‘Herr Baron, would you like your usual suite? It will only take a minute. We’ll move out the admiral who has booked your rooms.’

‘No, no,’ the baron had to insist. ‘Leave the poor admiral alone. I’m not staying, Fredi. It’s just a visit. Please tell Herr Albrecht to come downstairs. Say it’s urgent.’

The baron didn’t even have to tread across a lobby that was larger than a Fussball field, filled with every sort of seeker – impoverished aristocrats, courtesan countesses, and bankrupt financiers who wanted some favor from the richest man in Berlin and would have loved to be caught chatting with him. But the baron was shown to a private salon hidden by a wall of mirrors. He stepped through the wall with Lisa, Erik, and Karl and disappeared from the turbulence of the lobby.

But then a very tall man in a silk dressing gown strode through the same wall – Heinrich Percyval Albrecht, a gentleman farmer with his own estate a hundred miles north of Munich. His family had held the land for five hundred years. He had been a member of the Kaiser’s honor guard, had protected Wilhelm II all through the war, but had decided not to go into exile with him. Heinrich wasn’t suited for exile. He hunted, shut his eyes to the intrigue around him, and waited for the monarchy to be restored.

He was irritated and didn’t even say hello to Lisalein, who visited his estates twice a year and was like a goddaughter. He grimaced at the boy.

‘Baron, what is the meaning of this? I don’t like mysteries or intrusions. You could have sent your card up to my suite, or rung me from the front desk. I don’t care to traipse around in my robe. Come down immediately. I didn’t even have time to dress.’

‘Ah,’ said the baron. ‘Heinzi, I know you too well. You would have kept us waiting for hours if I hadn’t resorted to a trick. But don’t you recognize the boy? I found him at the Jewish orphanage. He’s your own kin.’

Heinrich Percyval drank his lager and came to Berlin twice a year, met with his bankers and a few friends, and couldn’t forget that Berlin had almost become a Red republic – the rabble would have killed Kaiser Wilhelm had the Reds seized power. He wasn’t in the mood to barter over the baron’s boy.

‘Wilfrid, have you come to blackmail me? I’ve fallen behind on our little loan. But I will pay you the next time.’

The baron’s face was very raw. ‘Damn you and your Junker ways. I’m not talking money or merchandise. Heinzi, you cannot disappear behind the Adlon’s wonderful walls. And you cannot abandon this boy. Gott, he has your sister’s face.’

‘I have no sister,’ said the Bavarian Junker.

And the baron began to cry into a handkerchief that was longer than a man’s shirt. ‘Heinzi, you have no heart.’

It was Lisa who continued her father’s attack. ‘Come, Vati. We’ll adopt the boy ourselves. He will live with us in the Grunewald. I will become his aunt.’

Heinz Albrecht pursed his narrow lips, until he looked like a man with no mouth.

‘Wilfrid, I could duel with you all day, but I cannot win against your daughter… I capitulate.’

‘Then you agree that the little Herr Holdermann is your nephew?’

‘I agree to nothing. I will take him off your hands and have my solicitor look into the matter. Meanwhile, he can stay with me.’

‘But he is not your cattle,’ said Lisalein, her eyes ablaze in the hotel’s curtained salon. ‘You must afford him some rights.’

‘Lisa, be still,’ said the baron. ‘We’ve gotten this far with Heinz. He wouldn’t deny his own flesh and blood.’

‘Vati, don’t gamble your life on that… but we have to allow the lion to get used to the cub that was thrown into his lap.’

She stood on her toes to kiss the tall farmer – ‘Good-bye, Onkel’ – and then she emerged from the deep shadows of the salon to touch Erik’s crown, as if to anoint him.

‘You must not shame us, little man. My father has vouched for you. You will have to obey your new uncle.’

He could not see much of her in the shadows. But the scent of her hair weakened his knees. Her blondness was like a visceral ghost in the salon.

Fräulein, he wanted to say, please take me with you to the Grunewald, or drop me at the orphanage. I have to continue my studies.

But the mirrored door of the salon shut on him and he was left with this tall stranger who might have been his uncle in another world, but his mother had barely mentioned her older brother, who lived in a castle, with a whole village at his beck and call. This ogre hadn’t even entered the boy’s dreams. Erik was a Berliner, not a Bavarian. Munich was the stronghold of Herr Hitler; Munich was where the Brownshirts marched with their swastikas and banners. Munich didn’t have a workers’ paradise like Wedding, with its Jewish Hospital and its Red Front that could swallow swastikas and massacre Brownshirts who strayed onto its streets. And Uncle Heinrich didn’t even take Erik’s hand. The boy had to follow Onkel out of the salon, or be put on a shelf where the Adlon deposited orphans who were lost and never found.

Bavarian Nights

2

The worst of it wasn’t the farm boys who beat him upand tried to turn Erik into a slave. They kicked him without mercy, but they could not bend his will. He stole whatever scraps he could – a blackened carrot, a turnip, a stale piece of bread – and ate alone in the barn. He grew stronger within his isolation and learned to bite and kick. But what he couldn’t bear was the lack of a book.

There was no schoolhouse in the tiny village attached to the castle. The loutish boys who belonged to Uncle Heinrich’s manor couldn’t even spell their names. They wore Nazi pins and practiced the Hitler salute among themselves. They copulated with their sisters and cousins, who at least went to sewing school and had grammar lessons from seamstresses and cooks at the castle. Some of these savage little girls were kind to Erik. They marveled at him because he came from a world of readers and could mouth entire sentences with his own peculiar melody.

‘The master’s nephew sings whatever it is he has to say.’

They undressed in front of Erik, let him watch while they went to pee. They fought over Erik, fed him, began to wash his clothes, and kept their brothers and brutal male cousins from harming him. He had to slave for his uncle, to feed the pigs in their mud piles, collect the hay, and milk the cows, but he soon realized that all the brutal children within a mile of the castle were related to him. Uncle Heinrich, who kept up the pretense of culture at his castle, who had a library of nine thousand volumes, with murals and tapestries on his walls, who invited string quartets to play for him, also slept with half the women in his service – seamstresses, pastry cooks, and chicken pluckers who warmed the master’s bed. He sold his bastard sons off to the military or kept them in bondage on another farm.

His daughters were a dilemma. They could do little else but sew and copulate. They wandered into his bedroom in their nightgowns, their bellies outlined under the silk, their nipples almost as high as their necks, and he had to chase them with a stick.

He wished only to hoard them as he would a harem of racing horses he didn’t intend to race. But Heinrich’s daughters planned their revenge. They plotted his overthrow with nothing more substantial than a string of sentences. They had the orphan from Berlin give them lessons so that they could correspond with police chiefs and Nazi thugs in Munich when the time came to rid themselves of Heinrich. But he caught his nephew teaching the Mädchen how to write, and he scattered them all, ripped their notebooks apart, locked them in their rooms for a week, and made Erik live in the barn.

The Mädchen eased Erik’s banishment. They shared his cot in the hayloft and sneaked him into the library while the master was away. But they were startled by the boy’s reaction to this mortuary of leather tomes. He fondled the books, sniffed at the leather like some castle rodent.

‘My darlings,’ he said to the bewildered girls, ‘you cannot imagine how happy I am.’

‘But little Holdermann,’ said Rose Marie, the brightest of Heinrich’s daughters, ‘you cannot go to bed with a book. A book cannot caress your tiny Berlin balls.’

They let Erik climb the ladder to all that musty leather, but it seemed like an unholy place, and they were much more content the moment they locked the library and returned the key to its corner behind the master’s apothecary jars.

Once the Nazis toppled Weimar in ’33, these same girlsfollowed behind their brothers in the Hitler Youth and joined the League of German Maidens; they worked on farms in the countryside and slept with the farmers and their sons until the farmers’ wives swept them back to the Maidens’ barracks in Munich and Berlin. Erik missed these ferocious Nazi Maidens who had befriended him, missed their company. He was more stranded than ever in the barn, sleeping with horses and cows.

One night, his male cousins returned to the castle with members of the SS in long military coats. They weren’t abusive. They bowed to Uncle Heinrich, marched up to the library, broke down the door, and flung every book out the castle window. Erik could witness those strange projectiles from the barn, Moroccan leather flying like colossal birds and crashing into Uncle’s unkempt garden. TheHitler Jugend hurled the bruised and broken books onto the auto-da-fé in the garden and fed their little fire.

And then they were gone. Uncle Heinrich reached into the fire with his own hands and plucked out books shorn of their morocco covers and their spines, while Erik ran from the barn with a rake.

‘Onkel, you’ll burn your hands.’

And he poked at the charred remains in the fire.

‘I feel like Saturn,’ Heinrich said.

‘But I don’t understand, Onkel. Saturn ate his own sons. There is a painting on this subject at the Prado. I did not see it with my own eyes. But my professors at the gymnasium say that it exists.’

‘You are mistaken, Junge. It was the sons who devoured Saturn.’

Heinrich did not take one book with him into the castle. He strode within its walls, a slight tremor between his shoulders. The castle could have belonged to Saturn; its ramparts were ravaged; bits of stone crumbled from the walls.

Erik returned to the barn with his own prize – bits and pieces of burnt books. He devoured the pages under the wick of an oil lamp. The Jewish Gymnasium of Berlin had given Erik a ravenous appetite: He gorged on books the way Saturn had gorged on his sons, in spite of what Uncle Heinrich said.

But so occupied was he with the remains of Uncle’s library that he had forgotten about the next winter storm, and he awoke one morning trapped within a wall of snow. Erik could not budge the barn door. And the snow that gleamed through the barn’s one little window nearly blinded him. He had to stand on a ladder and block out the light with a horse blanket. He lit a fire near the feeding troughs and moved all the animals near the fire. The crumbs of cheese he had and a crust of bread lasted for two days, and then he had to live on whatever the animals ate. He could not milk the cows in such cold weather; their teats were hard as bone. The cows bellowed at him as if he were some kind of interloper. The horses did not make a sound; the bells tied to their ears didn’t jiggle once. And the pigs couldn’t root in mud that was as unbending as armor.

Erik’s teeth rattled in his head. The noise exploded in his ears. He could no longer feel his fingers. And he had no more fuel to start a fire; the matchsticks he had were useless – their heads would fall off whenever he tried to strike one of them. The hay was hard as a knife. The whole barn was starving. And that’s when he thought of Lisalein. She had stayed with him like a still wound. He hadn’t seen her in four years.

It was his memory of Lisalein that fed sparks into him like some magic fuel. He had slept with six of Heinrich’s daughters from the League of German Maidens – Rose Marie, Hildegarde, Helga, Ursula, Ingeborge, and Blondi – and he wouldn’t have been so startled by the baron’s little blond Venus with her cropped hair and tall shoes if he were fortunate enough ever to find her in the flesh. In fact, he’d imagined himself hovering over Lisa’s limbs while he rutted with Rose Marie – her nostrils flared under him like one of Heinrich’s prize horses. He clutched her hands the way he always did with Ursula, but he wouldn’t stifle her love cries. He’d let Lisa scream and scream.

But he couldn’t hold on to her. The hunger pains seemed to split his skull. He lost the sea green of her eyes; the sockets stared back at him, mocking his own passion. He was making love to a skeleton, some bag of bones that wasn’t Lisa. Herr Teufel had entered the barn, had poisoned Erik’s mind. Heinrich’s cows were lowing at him with the Devil’s own music.

His ears pricked. He was lying on the barn’s earthen floor. He could hear a slow, relentless gnawing on the other side of the door, as if a hundred rats were nibbling away at wood. Then the door began to splinter. A huge chunk of it exploded in front of his eyes. Uncle Heinrich stepped through the hole in the door, his face wrapped in scarves, like a Bedouin chief. He was wearing enormous fur mittens and clutching an ax.

‘Onkel,’ the boy whispered, his throat parched, ‘we have to save the horses and cows.’

Heinrich wouldn’t let him continue or drink from the canteen that was attached to his belt. He wet the boy’s mouth with little pinches of water.

‘Cows,’ the boy repeated. ‘Save the horses and cows.’

‘We can’t, Junge. It would take half a year to dig a tunnel tall enough to drag them out of the barn.’

‘But I am in charge of all your animals. I will not leave without them.’

‘Junge, they’re all dead. You have been in the barn for two weeks.’

Erik closed his eyes. He could no longer listen. The words flew around into the rafters. Heinrich wrapped him in an old bearskin. He carried Erik out through the hole in the door. But they couldn’t stand up. There was no sky, no clouds, no trees, nothing but the walls of a tunnel that was screwed into the snow by some whirling, implacable machine. That machine was Heinrich himself, who dug the tunnel with his own hands, picking at the snow with an ax – the handle had split halfway to the barn, and Heinrich had to clutch the head of the ax and burrow with it through barriers of ice.

It took him most of the morning to drag the boy from the barn to the castle door. He spat water into the boy’s mouth and sucked on a few raisins and nuts. The boy was an icicle that could still breathe by the time Heinrich laid him out on the dining room table. He wouldn’t bathe the boy. The shock of scalding water on his skin might have killed him. Working with his seamstress, who was as snowbound as he had been, he rubbed the boy in axle grease and machine oil, covered him with the bearskin, and rocked him in his arms. Erik was pampered for two weeks. He lived in the library, which had become a lit cave of ladders and shelves without books. He slept on a cot and ate with the servants. He was still a vagabond in his uncle’s eyes.

The servants moved Erik back into the barn after his convalescence. He still had his treasure of burnt books. And with no chores to do, he read from morning to night.

And then, one afternoon, in the spring of ’35, he was summoned out of the barn. There was a small gathering in Heinrich’s wild garden. Laughter rang in his ear like a rifle shot. How could he fail to recognize Lisalein’s robust voice? She was sitting on a chair in the garden, next to Uncle Heinrich and another man, who had thick eyeglasses and wore a Nazi Party pin in his lapel. His name was Josef Valentiner, and he was married to Lisalein. Erik could feel a wound in the walls of his chest. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen – a Mischling, a half Jew, and the bride of a Party man. This Josef was one of Herr Hitler’s economic advisers, and he wasn’t that much older than Lisa. He was a wunderkind who had managed the baron’s whole empire before he was twenty. He had pudgy fingers, and he sweated a lot under a weak sun.

But it was Lisalein who also irritated him. She’d changed her hair since he last saw her. It wasn’t cropped like a cadet or a convict, but cascaded to her shoulders; she looked like one of his cousins in the League of German Maidens. And she glowered at him with her weak eyes. He wanted to strike her – out of jealousy, out of rage.

‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘Onkel, what have you done to the boy? He’s all in tatters… and is he living in a barn?’

‘Fräulein,’ Erik insisted. ‘It’s the place I prefer. I am not comfortable in a castle, and Uncle Heinrich knows that.’

‘But where are your schoolbooks?’

‘In the barn,’ he said. ‘Uncle Heinrich does not believe in country schools. He is my tutor.’

The boy turned brazen, looked into Lisalein’s eyes, not as a mendicant, or some petitioner from the Jewish orphanage, but as a lover might. He wasn’t crude. He was declaring his own territory with a glance, as if he wore the special badge of a boy who had slept with the whole League of German Maidens and did not have to depend on a Mischling – a Jewess with some Christian blood – who was married to a man with a Nazi pin. Lisa had an attack of vertigo – the boy’s boldness bothered her, but she recovered quickly enough.

‘Onkel, shame on you. I believe you have mishandled my protégé. He is wild as a wolf. And a wolf with books is still a wolf.’

‘Lisa darling,’ said Uncle Heinrich, ‘how can I make amends?’

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘He is wasting away at your castle… and his education is already ruined. What gymnasium will have such a wolf? We must conspire to have him accepted as a cadet.’

Heinrich frowned at her. ‘What kind of cadet?’

‘At the naval college in Kiel,’ she said, and nudged her husband, who had not said a word. ‘Josef darling, you must have met an admiral or two at the Chancellery.’

Undersecretary Valentiner bit his fat lips and seemed stupefied. ‘I cannot bother an admiral over some boy out of the blue.’

‘He’s not some boy,’ Lisa had to insist. ‘We found the Little One, Vati and I, and reunited him with his uncle. You must not demean our accomplishment, or you will have to face the divorce courts.’

The undersecretary may have once masterminded the baron’s empire of department stores, but he’d never won an argument with his wife.

‘Divorce?’ he said. ‘I have done nothing wrong.’

Heinrich intervened. ‘Do not worry. I will have the Junge sent to Kiel. I do not require admirals from Berlin.’

Lisa grew tired of sitting in a country garden and wanted to be alone with the boy she hadn’t seen in four years.

‘Come, Little One, let’s leave the two monsters. They can talk about the window dressing in Herr Hitler’s own department store, how he’s turning Deutschland into a democratic state for next summer’s Olympics… but show me this classroom you have made inside a barn.’

She took Erik by the hand and led him across the garden. She wasn’t shy. She squeezed Erik’s hand with all her might. And he began to tremble.

They disappeared inside the barn, and Erik lost control in an instant. Lisalein seized upon his little empire of burnt books, fondling their shattered spines.

‘You are the most unpredictable boy,’ she said. ‘It is a classroom, and I’ll bet that Heinrich never tutored you once… Did you miss me?’

‘No,’ he said, determined not to reveal himself.

All his stratagems of wounding Lisa – showing off his manliness, pricking her – went awash in some foreign sea. What could it have meant to Lisalein that he’d suckled the breasts of Heinrich’s Nazi Maidens, bastard daughters who were born in a crumbling castle? He had no ammunition, nothing to wound her with. He was the same orphan, even with his wealth of books.

It was Lisa who clutched his shirt of hairy wool. He froze like a rabbit encountering a pair of human eyes. He was taller than Lisalein, despite the alligator pumps she wore from one of the ‘international’ shops on Unter den Linden, a shop the baron himself might have owned. She never asked the boy’s permission as she dug half her face into his mouth. It wasn’t like kissing a Nazi Mädchen. Her tongue didn’t leap. It was the brutal kiss of a blond executioner. Then she took her own mouth away from Erik, and he was utterly forlorn.

‘Is that what you wanted? You obscene child. How dare you look at me with such lust and contempt in your eyes. Gott, you can’t be a day older than fifteen. Did Heinrich raise you as a stud horse in his barn?’

‘I raised myself,’ he said. He was trembling, and Lisa took him in her arms.

‘Fräulein,’ he blubbered, ‘why did you not visit me once in four years?’

‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I’m a selfish pig. If I had known… Vati should have realized that Heinrich would take his anger for his own sister out on you. He has revenge written all over him. I can’t imagine why he detests you so much.’

‘But he saved my life,’ the boy said.

‘It doesn’t matter. You still can’t stay here. You must be around children your own age.’

‘But I’m not a child. And you are only a few years older than I am.’

She scowled at him. And her azure eyes glowed in the shadows of the barn. She was still clutching his hairy wool coat.

‘I’m a married woman, you dolt.’

‘Yes, you’re married to a Nazi pin.’

She slapped his face. And it wasn’t some polite love tap. His ears rang with the force of her perfectly shaped hand.

‘You’re twice a dolt,’ she said. ‘That Nazi pin is keeping us alive.’

‘But the baron has millions. Why don’t you quit Germany with him? You can have a château in a Swiss forest, or half a fortress on Lake Geneva.’

‘How can Papa leave, my pretty little boy? Hitler is in power because of him. He and other Jewish financiers were more frightened of the Reds than of a lunatic with foam in his mouth. They considered him a marionette that could be dismantled and thrown in a box. But they did not take the measure of such a man, how he would be worshipped as the god of peace and war.’

‘Fräulein Lisa, I’ll take you to Switzerland if your father won’t.’

‘What would I do in a Swiss chalet? Wait for the next electrical storm? Row in the moonlight and read a book? I’m a Berliner. Let the Führer ride his bulletproof train to Munich and leave us alone… and you’re going to Kiel.’

He could feel her drift away from him, and he started to sniffle. ‘Stop crying,’ she said. ‘What a pest! You’re just like my father. You cry over the tiniest thing.’

‘But you won’t forget me?’

She smiled and pinched his earlobes. ‘Darling, how could I forget a boy in a wolf’s hairy coat?’

She pranced out of the barn in her satin cape that she furled around her shoulders like some sleeping bat. And all Erik could do was follow her footsteps with his brown eyes, dreading a future without Lisalein.

Kiel

3

He wasn’t even a cadet, but a subcadet, a toady attached to the old Warrant Officers’ School in the Mühlenstrasse, where all the cadets trained, not far from the Kiel Kanal. Heinrich sold him into an elaborate form of slavery. He lived in a shack with other subcadets behind the training school. He never got near a submarine, hardly even stepped onto the seawall. He went from Heinrich’s barn to a cave near the sea.

The cadets, with their enamel swastikas pinned to the pockets of their middy blouses, expected the subcadets to be their toads. Erik had to bring them blood sausages and beer, shine their shoes, and wash their underwear, but when the first cadet tried to kiss him, Erik broke his nose. He could have been tossed out of this lowly subcadet corps and sent back to Heinrich, but the cadets voted to keep him. They still thought to conquer the subcadet from Berlin and make him their whore. But they hadn’t counted on the Teufel inside him. Erik had fought Heinrich’s bastard sons, who were far crueler than these cadets; he’d had a training they never had. It didn’t matter how often they pummeled him or pissed in his locker. He could wield a ‘cheese knife’ as well as any of the cadets. And he kept that dirk with him whenever he was in the shower stall, or when he was in his little cave behind the cadets’ own barrack – he slept like a wolf, always half awake, one eye open, the dirk under his pillow. And when the cadets attacked in the middle of the night, he would lunge with his dirk an inch from their eyes. They’d hiss and call him a devil-boy, but they always scattered.

So it went on for more than a year, this game of cat and mouse, where the mouse was even fiercer than the cat-cadets. But they had other diversions, their cadet balls and their very own nightclub, Trocadero, on the Kaiserstrasse, while Erik had little else but the seawall and patches of sky when he wasn’t doing their chores.