We spent the meal discussing the Nazi reorganization of the legal system and what it meant for lawyers trained in a very different tradition. At that time we had not seen the ruin which fascism brought to all who professed it and still talked about the “good” and “bad” aspects of the system. It would be a year or two before ordinary people came to understand the fundamental evil which had settled on our nation. Gaynor’s views were common. We had grown used to anti-Jewish rhetoric and understood it to have no meaning beyond gathering a few right-wing votes. Many of our Jewish friends refused to take it seriously, so why should we? We all failed to understand how the Nazis had made that rhetoric their reality.
Although the Nazis had developed concentration camps from the moment they came to power and used exactly the same methods at the beginning of their rule as they would at the end, we had no experience of such appalling cruelty and horror, and in our desire to avert the foulness of the trenches, we had created a worse foulness from our unthinking appetites and fears. Even when we received credible stories of Nazi brutality we thought them to be isolated cases. Even the Jews scarcely understood what was happening, and they were the chief objects of that brutality.
That is how we take for granted the fundamental social bargain of our democracy, whose deep, historic freedoms were won for us by our ancestors, step by noble step, through the centuries, the bones and sinews of our common compact. When those structures are forgotten or destroyed, we know no other way to think.
So familiar had their democratic freedoms and rights become to those citizens that they constantly asked “What have I done?” to brutes who had overturned the rule of law and replaced it with violence and raging hatred, with loathing and unwholesome sexuality. These were not policemen but torturers, thieves, rapists and murderers who had been given power by our own lack of moral courage and self-respect. And now they controlled us all! We have nothing to fear, the great FDR would tell us, but fear itself. Fear won in this case.
Although not of a superstitious disposition, I felt that real evil had fallen upon our world. Ironically, the century had started with the common belief that war and injustice were rapidly being eradicated. Had our complacency encouraged attack? It was as if some demonic force had been attracted by the stink of the Boer War’s carnage, by Leopold’s Congo, by the Armenian genocide, by the Great War, by the millions of corpses which filled the ditches, gutters and trenches of the world from Paris to Peking. Greedily feasting, the force grew strong enough to begin preying upon the living.
After dinner it was a bit chilly for the terrace, so we smoked our cigars by the fire in the study and enjoyed our brandy and soda and the familiarity of old-fashioned, civilized comforts. I realized that my cousin had not come for a vacation. Some sort of business brought him to Bek, and I wondered when he would raise the issue.
He had spent the past week in Berlin and was full of gossip about Hitler’s new hierarchy. Göring was a great snob and liked to cultivate the aristocracy. So Prince Gaynor—whom the Germans preferred to call by the name of Paul von Minct—was the personal guest of the Reichsmarschall which, he said, was a great deal better than being Hitler’s personal guest. Hitler, he assured me, was the most boring little man on the face of the planet. All he liked to do was drone on and on about his half-baked ideas while a flunky played the same Franz Lehár records over and over again. An evening with Hitler, he said, was like the longest evening you could imagine with your prissy maiden aunt. It was hard to believe his old friends, who said he used to keep them in fits of laughter with his impressions and jokes. Goebbels was too withdrawn to be good company and confined himself to sly remarks about the other Nazis, but Göring was great fun and had a genuine love of art which his colleagues only pretended. He was making it his business to rescue threatened paintings from the Nazi censor. In fact his house in Berlin had become a haven, a repository for all kinds of art, including ancient German folk objects and weaponry.
Although that ironic, slightly mocking tone never left him, I was not convinced that Gaynor was merely playing along with the Nazis in order to keep Waldenstein free from their direct influence. He said he accepted the realpolitik of the situation, but hoped that it would suit the new German masters to let his little country remain at least superficially independent. Yet I sensed more than this. I sensed his attraction to the whole perverse slew of corrupted romanticism. He was drawn by the enormous power he saw Hitler and Co. now wielding. I had the feeling that he did not want to share in that power; he wanted to take it all for himself. Perhaps he intended to set himself up as the new Prince of the Greater Germany? He joked that he had as much Jewish and Slavic blood as he had Aryan, but it seemed the Nazis turned a blind eye to some of one’s ancestors if one was useful enough to them.
And it was clear that “Captain von Minct” was currently useful enough to the Nazis for them to equip him with a staff car, a driver and a secretary. And from his manner, it was obvious he was here on some connected business. I could only believe my eyes and use my intelligence. Had Gaynor been sent here to recruit me, too?
Or perhaps, I wondered, he had been sent to kill me. Then logic told me that he’d have many better means of doing that than inviting himself to dinner. The one thing the Nazis were unconcerned about was the murder of their opponents. They hardly needed to be clandestine about it.
I needed fresh air. I suggested we stroll onto the terrace. The moonlight was dramatic.
Abruptly, he proposed that his secretary, Lieutenant Klosterheim, join us. “He’s a little touchy about being treated as an outsider and he’s rather well-connected, I understand, to Goebbels’s wife’s people. An old mountain family. One of those which refused all honors and maintained their landsman status as a matter of pride. The family had some kind of fortress in the Harz Mountains for a thousand years. They call themselves yeomen-mountaineers, but my guess is they kept themselves through banditry during most of their history. He also has other relatives in the Church.”
I no longer much cared. Gaynor’s company had begun to irritate me and it was growing harder for me to remember that he was my guest. Klosterheim might relieve the atmosphere.
This fantasy was dispelled the moment the cadaverous, monkish figure in his tight SS uniform came out onto the terrace, his cap under his arm, his breath steaming with a whiteness which seemed colder than the surrounding air. I apologized for my rudeness and invited him to drink. He waved a pocket Mein Kampf at me and said he had plenty to engage him in his room. He carried the air of a fanatic and reminded me in many ways of his neurotic Führer. Gaynor seemed almost deferential to him.
Klosterheim agreed to take a small glass of Benedictine. As I handed him his drink he spoke to Gaynor over my shoulder. “Have you made the proposition yet, Captain von Minct?”
Gaynor laughed. A little strained. I turned to ask him a question and he raised his hand. “A small matter, cousin, which can be discussed at any time. Lieutenant Klosterheim is very direct and efficient, but he sometimes lacks the subtler graces.”
“We are not very gentlemanly at Klosterheim,” said the lieutenant severely. “We have no time to cultivate fine manners, for life is hard and constantly threatened. We’ve defended your borders since time began. All we have are our ancient traditions. Our craggy fortresses. Our pride and our privacy.”
I suggested that modern tourism might consequently be welcomed by his family and bring them some relief. Some ease, at last. A busload of Bavarians round the old place and one could put one’s feet up for a week. I’d do the same, only all I had was a glorified farmhouse. I don’t know what encouraged such levity in me. Perhaps it was a response to his unremitting sobriety. Something unpleasant glinted from his eye sockets and then dulled again.
“Perhaps so,” he said. “Yes. It would give us the easy life, eh?” He consumed his Benedictine and made an awkward attempt at grace. “But Captain von Minct came here, I believe, to ease one of your burdens, Herr Count?”
“I have none tha
t need easing,” I said.
“Of responsibility. Of stewardship.” Gaynor was now cultivating a rather over-hearty manner. Klosterheim had no trouble sounding threatening but Gaynor wanted my approval as well as whatever it was he had come for.
“You know I place little value on our remaining heirlooms,” I said, “except where they pertain to personal, family matters. Is there something you want?”
“You remember the old sword you used to play with before you went to the War? Black with age? Must have rusted through eventually. Rather like von Asch himself, your tutor. What did you do with that old sword in the end? Give it away? Sell it? Or did you place a more sentimental value on it?”
“Presumably, cousin, you speak of the sword Ravenbrand.”
“Just so, cousin. Ravenbrand. I had forgotten you christened it with a nickname.”
“It has never had a different name. It is as old as our family. It has all sorts of legendary nonsense attached to it, of course, but no evidence. Just the usual stories we invent to make generations of farmers seem more interesting. Ghosts and old treasure. No antiquarian or genuine historian would give credence to those legends. They are as familiar as they are unlikely.” I became a little alarmed. Surely he had not come here to loot us of our oldest treasures, our responsibilities, our heritage? “But it has little commercial value, I understand. Uncle Rudy tried to sell it once. Took it all the way to Mirenburg to get it valued. He was very disappointed.”
“It is more valuable as a pair. When matched to its twin,” said Klosterheim, almost humorously. His mouth twisted in a peculiar rictus. Perhaps a smile. “Its counterweight.”
I had begun to suspect that Klosterheim was not, as they say in Vienna, the full pfennig. His remarks seemed to bear only the barest connection to the conversation, as if his mind was operating on some other, colder plane altogether. It was easier to ignore him than ask him for explanations. How on earth could a sword be a “counterweight”? He was probably one of those mystical Nazis. It’s an odd phenomenon I’ve noticed more than once, that fascination with the numinous and the supernatural and a preference for extremist right-wing politics. I have never been able to understand it, but many of the Nazis, including Hitler and Hess, were immersed in such stuff. As rational, no doubt, as their racialism. Dark abstractions which, when applied to real life, produce the most banal evils.
“Don’t minimize your family’s achievements, either.” Gaynor recalled our ancient victories. “You’ve given Germany some famous soldiers.”
“And rogues. And radicals.”
“And some who were all three,” said Gaynor, still hearty as a highwayman on the scaffold. All face.
“Your namesake, for instance,” murmured Klosterheim. Even the act of speaking seemed to add a chill to the night air.
“Eh?”
Klosterheim’s voice seemed to echo in his mouth. “He who sought and found—the Grail. Who gave your family its antique motto.”
I shrugged at this and suggested we return inside. There was a fire going in the hearth and I had an unlikely frisson of nostalgia as I remembered the great family Christmases we had enjoyed, as only Saxons can enjoy their Yuletide festival, when my father and mother and brothers were all alive and friends came from Castle Auchy in Scotland and Mirenburg and France and America, together with more distant relatives, to enjoy that unchallenged fantasy of comfort and good will. War had destroyed all that. And now I stood by blackened oak and slate watching the smoke rise from out of a guttering, unhappy fire and did my best to remember my manners as I entertained the two gentlemen in black and silver who had come, I was now certain, to take away my sword.
“Do you the devil’s work.” Klosterheim read the coat of arms which was imbedded above the hearth. I thought the thing was vulgar and would have removed it if it had not entailed ripping down the entire wall. A piece of Gothic nonsense, with its almost alchemical motifs and its dark admonishment which, according to my reading, had once meant something rather different than it seemed. “Do you still follow that motto, Herr Count?”
“There are more stories attached to the motto than to the sword. Unfortunately, as you know, our family curse of albinism was not always tolerated and some generations came to see it as a matter of shame, destroying much that had been recorded where it pertained to albinos like myself or, I suspect, anything which seemed a little strange to the kind of mentality which believes burning books to be burning unpalatable truths. Something we seem prone to, in Germany. So little record remains of any sense. But I understand the motto to be ironic in some way.”
“Perhaps.” Klosterheim looked capable of carrying only the heaviest of ironies. “But you lost the goblet, I understand. The Grail.”
“My dear Herr Lieutenant, there isn’t an old family in Germany that doesn’t have at least one Grail legend attached to it and usually some cup or other which is supposed to represent the Grail. The same is true in England. Arthur had more Camelots than Mussolini has titles. They’re all nineteenth-century inventions. Part of the Gothic revival. The Romantic movement. A nation reinventing herself. You must know of half-a-dozen such family legends. Wolfram von Eschenbach claimed it was granite. Few can be traced much past 1750. I can imagine, too, that with your recruitment of Wagner to the Nazi cause, your Leader has need of such symbols, but if we did have an old goblet it has long since gone from here.”
“I agree these associations are ridiculous.” Gaynor took himself closer to the fire. “But my father remembers your grandfather showing him a golden bowl that had the properties of glass and metals combined. Warm to the touch, he said, and vibrant.”
“If there is such a family secret, cousin, then it has not been passed on to me. My grandfather died soon after the armistice. I was never in his confidence.”
Klosterheim frowned, clearly unsure if he should believe me. Gaynor was openly incredulous. “You of all the von Beks would know of such things. Your father died because of his studies. You’ve read everything in the library. Von Asch passed what he knew on to you. Why, you yourself, cousin, are almost part of the museum. No doubt a better prospect than the circus.”
“Very true,” I said. I glanced at the hideous old “huntsman’s clock” over the mantel and asked him if he would excuse me. It was time I turned in.
Gaynor began to try to charm his way out of what he now understood to be an insult, but his remark about me was no more offensive than most of his and Klosterheim’s conversation. There was a certain coarseness about him I hadn’t noticed in the past. No doubt he had the scent of his new pack on him. It was how he intended to survive.
“But we still have business,” said Klosterheim.
Gaynor turned towards the fire.
“Business? You’re here on business?” I pretended to be surprised.
Gaynor said quietly, not turning to look at me, “Berlin made a decision. About these special German relics.”
“Berlin? Do you mean Hitler and Co.?”
“They are fascinated by such things, cousin.”
“They are symbols of our old German power,” said Klosterheim brusquely. “They represent what so many German aristocrats have lost—the vital blood of a brave and warlike people.”
“And why would you want to take my sword from me?”
“For safekeeping, cousin.” Gaynor stepped forward before Klosterheim could reply. “So that it’s not stolen by Bolsheviks, for instance. Or otherwise harmed. A state treasure, as I’m sure you will agree. Your name will be credited of course, in any exhibition. And there would be some financial recompense, I’m sure.”
“I know nothing of the so-called Grail. But what would happen if I refused to give up the sword?”
“It would make you, of course, an enemy of the state.” Gaynor had the decency to glance down at his well-polished boots. “And therefore an enemy of the Nazi Party and all it stands for.”
“An enemy of the Nazi Party?” I spoke thoughtfully. “Only a fool would antagonize Hitler and e
xpect to survive, eh?”
“Very true, cousin.”
“Well,” I said, as I left the room, “the Beks have rarely been fools. I’d better sleep on the problem.”
“I’m sure your dreams will be inspired,” said Gaynor rather cryptically.
But Klosterheim was more direct. “We have put sentimentality behind us in modern Germany and are making our own traditions, Herr Count. That sword is no more yours than it is mine. The sword is Germany’s, a symbol of our ancient power and valor. Of our blood. You cannot betray your blood.”
I looked at the inbred mountaineer and the Slavic Aryan before me. I looked at my own bone-white hand, the pale nails and faintly darker veins. “Our blood? My blood. Who invented the myth of blood?”
“Myths are simply old truths disguised as stories,” said Klosterheim. “That is the secret of Wagner’s success.”
“It can’t be his music. Swords, bowls and tormented souls. Did you say the sword was one of a pair? Does the owner of the sister sword seek to own the set?”
Gaynor spoke from behind Klosterheim.
“The other sword, cousin, when last heard of, was in Jerusalem.”
I suppose I could not help smiling as I made my way to bed, yet that sense of foreboding soon returned and by the time I put my head on my pillow I was already wondering how I could save my sword and myself from Hitler. Then, in a strange hypnagogic moment between waking and sleeping, I heard a voice say: “Naturally I accept paradox. Paradox is the stuff of the multiverse. The essence of humanity. We are sustained by paradox.” It sounded like my own voice. Yet it carried an authority, a confidence and a power I had never known.
I thought at first someone was in the room, but then I had fallen back into slumber and found my nostrils suddenly filled with a remarkable stink. It was pungent, almost tangible, but not unpleasant. Acrid, dry. The smell of snakes, perhaps? Or lizards? Massive lizards. Creatures which flew as a squadron under the control of mortals and rained fiery venom down upon their enemies. An enemy that was not bound by any rules save to win at all costs, by whatever it chose to do and be.