Birthday
(A verse play for radio)
THE SPEAKER.
Five or six years ... take a look. Yes, this is the Present
Which we kept in that warm stable at the back of our minds
Chewing away at our dreams and aches and pains
While the War went on. Armistice turned it out
To graze on earth with a mellow Moo. And now
Some villain—not you or I—has butchered it,
Made it this numb undress of giblet colours
Without the glossy hide or symmetrical eye
Or anything shining and complete. O for a needle
To stitch it together again for our contemplation!
And I say, we don’t lack that needle, our greatest gift, though a sharp one.
Come back to the stable-days: conjure up the Past,
Capital letter and all. But there is the difficulty,
That black cap, that capital letter; and all our duties
Nicely resolved into pat passings of judgment.
History, and good morals, and remembered walking-in-a-fog
Have stamped, icily distinct, with date and initials,
The little envelope of the Third Reich and its leader,
And shoved it industriously into the box marked Hell.
Now whenever you and I happen to be yarning
And a certain white mask, drab and dead, with the hair brushed so,
Twitches and shifts at your casual change of subject
Which might mean life to it:
I know more or less what you are going to say.
Admittedly, the psychiatrist’s weekly metaphor
Will cold-shoulder that of the public bar;
Much the same grammar though. Sentence has been passed.
Now, with all of you looking at me like that,
Perhaps I’m growing a mask—where’s the mirror, how’s my hair?
I repeat: this entertainment isn’t after...
Revoking that sentence (but O how we love to judge,
And if only we cleaned our teeth every morning before
Telling someone —Until You Are Dead): no, it will simply
Never offer you the legal document as the head-to-foot,
Any more than the Cenotaph as being entirely
That bloke who showed me the way once, and gave me a light.
Therefore, now, here, at the beginning, I shall say
—Despite your tight silence promising forays to follow—
All I am going to say. Hitler was a human being!
(A long pause)
THE SPEAKER.
All right, then, don’t just sit there and stare at your wireless,
With a nervous finger at one ear. Come into the studio,
Some of you. Ah, an ex-serviceman
With his weather-eye wide open. (And he would be taller than I am.)
THE EX-SERVICEMAN.
Yes, a pretty long day when there’s no Dick or Ken to call on...
But I’ve settled in; might get a bit nervy sometimes,
Then I’ll go to the pictures, even read a book,
And we’re easy again. And that’s what I want to say:
Nothing against this Art business, useful enough,
Helps pass the time. But does it only one way,
By enlarging right and left. What will the movies
Deal me for back-stalls medicine? Maybe, that I joined the Army
Through valour, and hatred of injustice, and love of adventure,
And so forth. A great pill to swallow—till I remember
How I wet my pants that first time in the Desert.
And not only that—it’s just the same if you’re reading
Those modern novels the Censor lets through these days—
Although you’ve been in it yourself and give all the rough details,
No matter what you put into written words
It’s changed straightaway. Bigger, yes, always bigger;
The people aren’t the real ones, you know, they seem to
Stand out somehow, and mean more; and the whole affair
Goes on in the distance, seen through a kind of glass.
And after it’s over you’ve got to go down the street
Again, have a meal, wind up as one of the boys.
Well, now we’re due to hear all about that mongrel
They called the Fuehrer, and how he finished up.
(No, a man couldn’t have asked for a better couple of mates...)
We’ve paid our taxes to have the Fuehrer stand out
On a stage and grow bigger—look like a blasted hero.
He’ll be holding all our attention.
But I think this shiny
Totalisator, this Art business, might have done better
With Ken or Dick for coin, and given us more.
THE SPEAKER.
Not a hero. Nor better, nor truly bigger.
Think of the old racehorse—an image suggested
By our last speaker—
Corralled from his true mainland, turned out in a paddock,
From the green surge underfoot, the crisp furlongs, and the Cup.
Now it is all a mincing memory. Yes, yes.
The favourite food comes still—but it is eaten
By something inorganic. Outside they speak of
His Big Race, but as won by a jogging word
Rather than a galloping concept with a conformation
And a pair of lungs. And so the absent-minded
Stablehand that opens the wrong gates
And turns our racehorse loose, isn’t a reconditioner
Nor a shortener of the odds. He is simply letting
A part of Truth on to the tracks, for us to watch.
Art business? Simply thus—
The mosquito in the earhole, could it be bigger?
The First Time in the Desert, could it be bigger?
The wheatsack of routine, could it be bigger?
The Holy Communion, could it be bigger?
Evil lunches with us, doesn’t catch the early bus.
‘That mongrel’, yes: but make plans to transplant the natural
Darkness—human as the whiteness—and its gross of districts
On to one single dedicated mishap of Nature:
Here’s a sidestepping, a denial, a suicide...
Now you, lady—before the War you were a mother.
THE MOTHER.
He wasn’t designed to have an end.
Dream up your grandeurs or delicacies,
Make poems for steeples or butterflies
Fated. O, he was a friend.
So clouds and wars contrived to tent
His sunnier tiltings at other boys...
Still I sleep near his gold in his granite noise,
I pretend to know Third Man from Point.
A shadow took him: I stood aside.
His hungry letters, sprinting from camp
Towards freehold, under a foreign stamp,
Stopped coming. Much that was friendly died.
THE SPEAKER.
‘Before the War,’ I said. You are still a mother.
Against your voice I do not speak—thank God
I do not have to.
Now, a man, and now
That same drab white mask with the hair brushed so.
Speak up, man of the Jewish faith. And you, Mask,
Make noises for me: I am making noises for you.
THE JEW.
The guards will be on the way.
It’s all mad; but these walls have a wit:—
They potter round the leaking grey
Tiles, the greasy darkness, the greasy white,
And range them for that one grey Soon—
The gas-wagon. Reason? It’s the air,
The voices, the eye of the moon
Coin-callous, lidded. We must hear...
THE MASK.
‘Surely I have a right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!’
THE JEW.
That megaphone, is it man? Can it seem
Breakfast, the hurt finger, the Sabbath dream?
THE SPEAKER.
Yes, you’re both making it hard. Nor will this aid my purpose:—
(A trundling sound)
THE SPEAKER.
That sound you heard was a guard being wheeled in,
Away from the concentration camp, his line of business.
Don’t complain at the sound-effects and go to bed:
We in the studio have the smells besides.
THE GUARD.
Hans went mad ... Well, here we are, and another
One of the mangy-blooded—look at his face!
Ah, that’s what Hans forgot—look, you can see
There’s nothing alive to it, an old puddle in summer,
Dirty dust of rain, wants to be skygoing,
Lifted up, Aryan, with a sun’s bloodstream in it.
Hans forgot to look—no expression on the thing:
Kill them, kill them all!
But I have to work for it now. And Hans went mad...
THE JEW.
There were Father and Mother—they looked
Love of an evening; and
The river was my pony; and my friend
Laughed with the pigeons while we walked
Through an old wine-colour and taste.
It’s true. Before the young boys
Threw muck at us, and the rest
Was letters in typescript, noise
From the radio or beneath
The window. It was not all death.
THE MASK.
‘Nature is cruel, therefore we may be cruel.’
THE GUARD.
Better when we’re on the march. There’s the Square;
Are we moving more slowly today? Well, we must—under orders—
And this big crowd’s in our way, looking and looking:
What are they looking at? Women. And Jews, Jews—
What did he call them? vermin. This is their last trick,
Like air trying to make wind,
Snatching at names, carving—see the hands waving!
So long as none of them screams, like last time, when they move in.
THE JEW.
Ah, we’d heard that famous passage
Announced in the known voice
For a moment new, and that message
Inked even into traffic-rules, plays.
And then there was always the fallen
Bird for a theme—simpler here,
Doddering sometimes, for the pylon
Of a moral couldn’t stand up to the year
Swimming, all ashine. Then we heard
We were less than the fallen bird.
THE MASK.
‘My testament: Above all else uphold the racial laws in all their severity, and mercilessly resist the universal poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.’
THE GUARD.
Now that I’ve killed them and it’s over again,
They still seem to wriggle all ways in some part of my head,
As if I were a jerry-built shanty, creaking and slamming
Before any sort of wind because wood torn from a tree
Has still the tree’s instinct. You see, there’s nothing solid
Now to wrestle with, nothing like a weevil or a forest-fire,
Nothing, only that last snatching at a name...
And Hans went mad...
(A trundling sound)
THE SPEAKER.
The Jew and his body’s guard have gone back to the dead.
No, they may not rest together. Only, only,
Perhaps five tender fingers of that mite of knowledge
May go hunting for a harpstring within that hideous innocence...
Grotesque, isn’t it? But that’s the reason I am here
With this Mask I want to fit eyes into, and a mouth.
O no, you or I, with the factory or the office
Or whatever, the housework and the kids, pious willy-willies,
We whose universe rounds us in good formation, drilled nicely,
We are not among those gibbering several whose universe
Holds only them and the Dagoes, Wogs, and Dings,
And similar dross. O no—still, I remember
One incident:—hero, the bloke in the office
(That player we summon so often, for so many roles);
He blew his nose and loudly stated his wrongs
And pronounced sentence—‘They ought to kill all those Dagoes
And keep the place for our own kind.’ And all I said was:
‘Ah, take it easy, mate.’
—You know, The Poor Feller;
Besides, if I preached, the girls up the end might laugh.
So that was that. Hans was more of a man.
Still I insist upon my humanness.
Enough, then. Your coats and hats, please, and follow me
Down. Down to these eighteen fireproof rooms
Laid out like a dead snake under the Chancellery
Whose wrought-iron terms for living rattle at a mouse’s footstep.
World War Two, coughing in the last stages
Of bombs and shells, sits up to shake you by the hand.
Walk for a day in these rooms under the Chancellery:
No fresh air, and not much exercise;
Look straight at sleep without dreaming of closing your eyes.
We helped to make this, I say. With Field-Marshal Goering
On his rounds we shall approach that steel box of an office
Where Death, or a mask, or a man, hangs over the desk.
Barest essentials—What’s the French for Today?—
Are of a learning, a teaching. Down this way.
(Intermittent muffled bursts of shellfire are heard now and throughout the play)
GOERING.
This place gives me the creeps when I creep around.
Quite young, I took off the oxygen-mask of youth
To kill our pet dachshund; then with amazement I found
Myself scared while the dog-chain rusted on the ground
And parents pondered and I didn’t tell the truth.
Then I sold the late hours and dance-floors for the uncouth
Cabin of a dream, fitted for altitude
But silly in the struts. From a distance the thing is crude:
Baling-out and watching an empire nose-dive to death.
Weep for the Luftwaffe? mine was an earlier war,
Germany’s honest jugend, when clouds stood by,
Bowing and scraping to my dog-fought pinnacle.
(Cocaine getting short ... Morell will get me some more.)
Those clouds are still by me at Karenhall, for I...
But no more speculations—The Fuehrer’s cell.
(Opening and closing of a steel door)
GOERING.
All heil, mein Fuehrer: I come on this your birthday
And Germany’s, with good wishes for you and her.
HITLER.
Ah, Goering. Are all things well at Karenhall?
(Sotto): The fat drug-mugged fool!
GOERING.
Yes, all is well.
A sort of lushness there, even at this time
Of the year ... air, sun, farm-hands, sun, air—
Now your instructions. But, mein Fuehrer, but...
HITLER.
Your hands wobble, Goering.
GOERING.
It is cold down here.
HITLER.
Your wheezing ‘buts’, Goering, are more of their guns,
Though somewhat less apostolic. Quiet now, quiet:
Defeat walks word-wise. This day a Germany was born
To gibes and poverty, to time-bombs in the hands of shipmates,
To burial in this reliquary, under this
Flapping altar-cloth of ceaseless thunder—
Yet (curse this left arm!) I shall ram my way through them.
GOERING.
Are you quite finished, Sire?
(Aside): God save us all!
HITLER.
Luftwaffe, steel of our universe,
Genius of our hoverings,
Rearing and plunging of decision—
Cages are not for you.
Goering, your weedy crow shall take off to defend,
Hawk-fashion, this our city from strange birds
And ugly, till Wenck arrives...
GOERING.
Mein Fuehrer, I cannot—
HITLER.
The Gestapo, the drome and sheds you fitted out,
Still operate and will take you in at touch-down.
God, in uniform, will keep an eye on the weather.
Be airborne, Goering; you look fat on the tarmac.
GOERING.
Better to be—pardon, mein Fuehrer. Yes, at Karenhall
A sort of peasant life: little hands on the breasts
Of warm humus, and old nodding habits. One forgets
What it is like up there, with gasping slipstream.
Funny, I recall how Hans, my mess-man in the old days,
Used to listen when I talked. Face like an empty bed,
Ready for anything. Eyes used to open out
Like Warsaw when we dumped commonsense into it.
The blubber of his chin used to sound, like a whale
Harpooned, down and down. That snub nose of his
Went out of business while he gorged himself on
The rarefied air of my exploits; made him drunk, at times.
H’m-m, Hans. Became ill. I found him a job as a guard...
HITLER (mockingly).
Are you quite finished, Goering?
GOERING.
Your pardon, Sire.
HITLER.
My instructions. Bear yourself as a man.
Auf Wiedersehen.
(Anxiously) Auf Wiedersehen, Goering, I say!
(Steel door’s opening and closing. Pause)
HITLER.
Nineteen-forty-five. Year of grace, and my birthday.
(Clock, quarter-hour)
Now to take stock. Haydn and the clock—tick-tock.
No, better the guns, my language.
Germany in this mirror.
History brought to bed
For Herr Doktor Morell
And his twenty-five needles.
Heil, scourge of God,
Apocalypse, and fruition—
All the Walkyrie bleating
Through a mint of ivy and sandstone,
Under milky horoscopes.
Here, here, in this mirror,
Germany. Skinny, yellow;
Bones knocking—come out!
Russia, Russia, Russia.
Germany—foam on the lips,
Gone in the left side,
Many happy returns.
Deutschland uber Alles.
And Radio Werewolf would have all this dead,
News for the back-yard telegraph, carted along wires
Of a stray word:—
April twentieth, I am born:
Ha, Braunau, my birthplace, little town,
But lovely you were, you skipped, you sang Austria,
You sang me the dream-timber for my architecture
—Not the towers all attention, and ratified cultural measures
In the market-place—no, you were amateur bird,
And river because of its trees, and elegy.
Austria, I have guns, they have guns.
Girl, do you sing yet?
(Clock chiming one)
Ring the changes, ring the changes,
My little gold clock fished up from a Jew’s room in Venice,
With your face not quite a circle, your fine trim numbers,
And the small prim orchestra making ready inside you:
Beckon Goebbels along!
I see him stepping towards me: that nervous walk
Itching to be a real stride, and those round-and-round eyes,
And those intense layers of words—pick-me-ups, laxatives—
He carries in a bag slung out of sight:
Words that I know before I assent to them, take them.
They are mine. Didn’t I find him as a sand-castle
Left behind by that child the Jesuits call God,
And surrounded by makeless mullocks—his children and his wife?
Didn’t I dampen them and stand over them?
Come, Goebbels, makeshift of my hands: I need to see you.
GOEBBELS.
A long way to his room
And that yellow, holy face
Worked out from the loom
Of my hands and intellect.
I made this to replace
That shoaling corridor
Of the gaunt seminary
Where my youth was wrecked.
Germany, Germany,
You are my own creation,
Distilled from my every sense.
Such loftiness and art
I weep before on occasion
To salute the eloquence
Of my ingenious heart.
(Pause. Steel door’s opening and closing)
GOEBBELS.
Heil, mein Fuehrer, all happiness on this your birthday.
(Aside)—Emaciated, tingling foam on the jaw—
But this is my god; this must live—
HITLER.
Thank you, Herr Goebbels.
And the news? Has General Wenck broken through to us?
GOEBBELS.
Alas, mein Fuehrer, sadly I must say
There comes no good news to your natal day.
Wenck impends not; the Russians to Berlin
Push ever onward; everywhere the thin
Line of our troops is breaking, everywhere;
Our aircraft are outnumbered in the air—
HITLER.
In the air, everywhere—I tell you it is the Aryan,
Of my own kind, my shipmate, he has turned against me:
He was once all the moon over my long trip—
He has locked me in here. He has planted the time-bomb. He
Is the coward, liar, traitor, assassin, Jew:
He wants me dead: I will have him rot beside me:
This is the life.
GOEBBELS (aside).
And this divine, solipsist scheme of things
From Adolf Hitler, living God, who rings
Down all the blinds when travelling in his car
Through hunched-up cities cringing at a star.
Ah, but this is my mirror, this my will,
My wandering eyes are his that can stand still,
Air I take in and finish with is moulder
Of all his godly carriage, hip to shoulder—
HITLER.
Herr Goebbels, shake yourself! Why this morbid silence?
(Sotto, quickly) Such a vigil he keeps—perhaps some further
Treason is here—see how his eyes go round—
GOEBBELS.
Know on your birthday, Lord, that I, my wife,
And our six children, we are yours for life:
Yours is our playtime, yours our light and dark,
Your burial is our burial and Ark.
Dying, my children who have chattered through
Childhood, shall all join hands and sing to you.
HITLER.
Words nobler, friend, for that it took a long time
Often I wonder, Goebbels,
At the strength of your faith, more perhaps than I gave you.
Tell me:—in their million tiny book-lined cells
Do the Jesuits, clusters of bees without a queen,
Distil some sweetness by accident?
GOEBBELS.
Ach, the seminary!
Factory of oozing grace and sin
For Slavs and swine to bed their thick sows in!
You are my Church, I am your priest; inside
This bottle are the wafers—cyanide.
My children, wife, and I shall be content
With this, your flesh and blood and sacrament.
HITLER.
Thank you, thank you. Give me the bottle, Goebbels...
Cyanide. Only steel, I think, can stomach it,
I carry mine in a steel tube.
GOEBBELS.
We are steel.
HITLER.
Yes, yes. But the pills, so very small and flat
And round—to think that these could wrap a blanket
Round Germany and me. I wanted holocausts,
Not these things, small and flat. Can’t they make faces?
Quickly, give me a pencil—
GOEBBELS.
Hitler, Hitler!
HITLER.
GOEBBELS (musing).
Ah, but be sure I understand;
It is the Bunker; even I tend to go over
Strange things, illogical. As when I left the seminary
And wanted to speak with someone, and this man of the people
—Boy, rather—Hans, I think his name was,
Brooded beside a church-door, with tears in his eyes;
I spoke with him. Woman had left him. Told my tale:
‘Seminary!’ he said, ‘O, you can tell me
So much and help me.’ And we discussed God,
While his eyelids, that had shot up like lantern-shutters
When a man (myself, I mean) wanted to talk to him,
Went down again ... No woman; and that particular
Church locked its doors at night...
So he shambled off
Somewhere, so I come to pawn in the shop I built—
HITLER.
What was that, Goebbels?
GOEBBELS.
So, so—oh, pardon.
HITLER.
Shake yourself, Goebbels. Here, don’t forget this bottle.
Present yourself at your usual hour next day.
(Steel door’s opening and closing. Pause)
HITLER.
Goering, Goebbels—a fat terrain and a poor one
For fear to lay siege to. But I hold straight in the midst.
Or, no, it is my birthday; I am by myself now:
Or am I? Because there is Russia, Russia, Russia.
Enormous Russia, farrowing Russia, rolling Russia.
France, on the slant, and oily, was never more
Than the first metre of the marathon; and it is strange
That not even now, with its screeching brood above me,
Can I begin to take England seriously:
Those scrawny two islands, flinty; like the skeleton
Of an old, dead sea-bird in the port-side museum,
Dragging its sustenance from far lands, pulling the wavy
Caretaker from his teapots to polish its glassiness.
Bone and bone...
Ah, but now the familiar
Flesh falls over my thinking. Athletic flesh,
With deep lines and moods of movement caulking it:
Woman and child in the camp and the gas-chamber,
Making all the familiar signs, staring at me, companionable
Almost. And noisy besides. Call then, howl then!
It was you who washed against me; when the epilepsy
Had hoisted me out of the schoolroom to the cinematic height
Of a bad dream, always I would come back to you
Whispering, gurgling—the normal healthy silver spray.
It was you, even in the morning, when I stepped out to see
What this earnest whisker-rubbing of dawn at my window
Might mean:—Oh, here he comes again,
The town’s Adolf Schicklgruber (laugh at the name),
He likes music and books and things,
No good at games; you know what they say, he sprang
From no marriage-bed, cosy and legal—but fun in a woolshed.
No more from you now! Have I not chipped you, tugged you
From the loyal roots of Germany? Kill them all!
(Clock chiming two)
And now, my little gold clock, your two steady chimes
File out bravely, preening themselves. And now
Himmler will be coming, honest Himmler, my friend.
HIMMLER’S VOICE.
Familiarity will breed contempt.
Each time my uncle thought of his unkempt
Prize pig—often, that is—he’d say it;
All my experience proves the man a poet.
At the beginning, I could feel the blast
Of damned inferior races—even past
Our gloved interrogations and humane
Gas-wagons their silly virus shoved again.
Again I’d pinched some cake, been questioned: why,
A thousand dead men’s faces made one eye.
So help me God, some poisonous young Jewess
Raised hands within my sleep, hardly to bless.
Now, comfortable trainloads pass, whole breeds.
Good gardeners are not haunted by dead weeds.
Another day: warrants to sign, this meeting,
And so on. The place could do with extra heating.
Trousers are baggy. Certainly getting fat.
Need a new razor. Did I feed the cat?
Well, Hitler or no, the War is lost to us—
But never tell him that. Soon, when the fuss
After he kills himself is safely over,
I shall be strolling—London, New York, or Dover—
With all their lords.
—Be kind, but never cease
Laying down laws for a sensible German peace.
Maintain the correct distance—not too far,
Just dignified—and wear ... But here we are.
(Steel door’s opening, closing)
HITLER.
Himmler, friend, I greet you; man of our Party
Which will sparkle at the drawling trade-wind of your honour
At this time when it can scarcely breathe in the airless
Wards of betrayal. Himmler, my friend, friend.
Tell me, what is the world become? I have plans:
Wenck must come: the Russians—a new poison-gas,
Tabun, will halt this careering bloodhound, I tell you
In absolute secrecy. My horoscope. My birthday.
I can talk to you. Tell me the news, the news—
HIMMLER.
Ah, yes, the news. Excuse me; it’s odd, but down here I get a sort of throat-trouble. Oh, yes:—I am afraid that I can scarcely give you a favourable report. There doesn’t seem to be much fresh news from the fighting fronts; of course communications are bad at the moment, which fact must be taken fully into consideration. However, as to the immediate sphere of my duties, all is fairly satisfactory. I have received no further report of serious mutiny in the camps. Prisoners are still being provided daily with the prescribed quantity of food. Sanitary conditions, in spite of recent heavy air-raids, are reasonable. Discipline in all branches is being maintained nicely; perhaps, however, I should make report of one incident. At one of the camps a guard known to his intimates as Hans—the notice I received did not include his surname—attempted to stir up a serious mutiny and for a time was successful. Upon the measures customary to such circumstances being taken, I am pleased to say, peace and order were restored. Before the routine interrogations could be completed, it was found necessary to confine the guard as criminally insane: nonetheless, the disturbance would seem to have been purely local in origin. And how are you keeping, mein Fuehrer? Well, I trust.
HITLER.
Himmler, you have a certain healthy fullness
As of unbaked bread brimming with virgin essences
Of the field; your droning loafing voice is the closing-in
Of sleep, the bringer of strength even when news is hopeless—
O do not misunderstand me—
HIMMLER.
HITLER.
Forgive me for asking, Himmler, but does there never
Come to your mealy voice and mallow flesh
Some distress or outbreak? For you are not exactly
My doctrine made man, not as I thought of it:
It was to be of the earth—unsentimental
Masonry, gratings and corners, but still the ascension,
The steeple-chasing. Say, at its limits no limits;
Think of the weathercock, fast, but a thing of whirlings and pointings
That tells the men-of-the-ground, in familiar language,
The true tale of its sightseeing—yet all day long may give heed
To the long Nibelungenlied of four winds in a row...
But never mistake me, Himmler, my friend, my friend!
HIMMLER.
Why, no, I know what you mean; I have my ups and downs, too. And things aren’t too bright these days. Makes you think of that old saying about death coming like a thief in the night: true enough even if some numbskull thought it up. Think of Beethoven and—er—Wagner, and all those ones. And, you know, just speaking privately, to tell the truth, I didn’t feel all easy myself at the start when we had to start getting rid of the mongrels. Used to drink a lot and couldn’t get to sleep some nights. And even now, if I go out to, say, Belsen—pouf! The smell seems to stick in my nose no matter what I eat afterwards. Still, what must be must be. And it’s nice for a man to know that he’s got real friends that he’s never done any harm to. You know, we just can’t get along without that sort of warmness you get from a real friend. And, oh, yes, all the pets are in fine nick. Did I tell you about Millicent, the new cat? A Persian. Lovely. When I come in at nights, all out of sorts, there’s Millicent ... She has a lovely coat and gentle eyes; she purrs like an angel come to mortal men; and when I take her in my arms at last, there’s all that warmth and confidence and kindness ... But I say, I’m being poetic. Wasting your time, too.
HITLER.
No, no, I have slept; there is blood in my left arm:
HIMMLER (very sincerely).
Hitler, hear me now!
I am the Party. O, sir, I am you.
Death shall not part us while you look at me
With a face that sickness nor all the forty-eight nations
Have put a mark to. I shall carry out
Your orders to the letter, as always. So
You gave me this life, so it is yours forever.
HITLER (musingly).
And it was actually there, in that dough, the weathercock turning
And the ripe wheat making obeisance to the lean wind...
Yes, a good day to you, Himmler. I can trust you.
HIMMLER.
Yes, auf-ach, excuse me again: this throat of mine.
(Steel door’s opening and closing)
HITLER.
Three days of this. I look at steel, I touch steel
And fire-proof stuff. It has needed only three days
—Not time for a stubble on the long chin of history—
To pluck me from the battalions of sun and rain.
No more of the docile clouds and the green won over
And the adequate music and flags, no more for me.
Teeth of my enemies eating into my empire!
O Normandy, my fanfare, outpost, they have had you
For a year: you are digested. Normandy,
Your frosty beach was charitable to the young fool
Schicklgruber...
(Clock, five) Oh, my little gold clock,
Dally with the five-striking! Make a revelry
Of your nymph-notes, break the order up!
It is time for Eva, Eva will be walking out of step...
(Pause)
EVA.
He likes me in white. It’s his birthday, too.
Blondi! Good dog, don’t be naughty—here,
Look up at me when I play with your ear,
And whimper with joy like you always do.
—But perhaps it should have been navy-blue.
How will he want me? the level tone
And bearing (Mercy, it’s cold, this wall!)
Dignified and—and natural
Like a goddess gliding up to the throne.
Blondi! Please leave my skirt alone.
Marriage, marriage, I heard him say.
We are one—how should we need such things?
But that word has a height to it, tragic wings,
Beautiful, at the end of the play.
Don’t pretend, Blondi! you know the way.
(Steel door’s opening and closing)
EVA.
Adolf...
HITLER.
Come in, come in! No, just a second,
Give my eyes time to break the staples: from crossword
Squares of the bunker, to the Alpine folio
Of a masterpiece.
EVA.
You didn’t sleep last night, then—
HITLER.
And you are all in white,
And it is my birthday. Today the stars entered me
Diligently into the huge files of the Zodiac
So my nervous application-sheet leaned against yours.
The Pleiades took me to their bosom.
EVA.
Glorious...
But here, Adolf, I didn’t forget your birthday:
Some cream-buns. You know how you always liked them.
O, but I’ve interrupted you. I am sorry,
Do go on—how is your throat?—for listening to you
Is like hearing an organ, and this is the Holy Land.
You haven’t said a word to Blondi. Do you want to kiss me?
HITLER.
No, just give me a bun. Lean back,
Cross your legs. (Blondi, nice pup.)
I am taking you, from the track,
To the villages all looking up.
Come down from the beaten snow;
And your skis are some ancient trees
Kissing your feet; at your knees
Winds of the mountains bow;
And your small, set face is gold;
And your delicate breast is advancing
From the dark, warm armpits—dancing
Bravely out into the cold.
EVA.
Lovely ... I see all the colours, and it reminds me
Of those wonderful landscape-paintings you bought for me.
HITLER.
I wanted to be a painter or an architect.
EVA.
But you are an architect, a painter, of the German Reich.
HITLER.
Yes. Run outside to my exhibition hall,
A Late Renaissance design. There are spry jet-devils
Buzzing about in the dome; my great canvas is hung
Like a sheet of flame over Germany; see the crowds
Of exquisite buildings gathered round; listen to the rumble
As they blow themselves to pieces, retching applause;
Hear hand-claps from the guts of their builders, dead and rotten,
And dead now forever.
EVA.
O Adolf, let me kiss you.
HITLER.
No, lean back. I wanted to paint pictures:
There was one of Manet’s—the dilettante French fashion,
No kultur, no hero—and I looked into those idlings
And uncertainties nor white nor black: for an instant
I saw something at the middle of the waste substance,
Knitting away at will-o’-the-wisp. It was a redeeming
Bird-shape, lifting the incomplete and abandoned
Twigs to a nest at the centre. It was Manet lecturing—or
Someone lecturing Manet. No, never! I have seen
Good and bad, black and white. I have told you.
Out with the stained linen, out with the tarnished cutlery,
Says the old hausfrau!
EVA.
Marvellous. But you know,
If only we could open a window down here
On to some sort of view. Coming from the corridor
Into this room—the whiz of electric light
Is almost a smack in the face. I can still hardly
HITLER.
Close your eyes.
And is light aware of herself?
—Just that last little look you couldn’t help taking—
Has light a smugness? O it is true enough
That her panicky skirts fly at the disorderly
Black-outs of Nature; that our curt buttons and switches
Make her so precipitately pretend to be nothing:—
But is it all a sham? And at the end will she pluck
All the naperies of time from her neck, to lean back
In sole control over the whole body
Of space? No stars then. Better the trembling stilts
Of moonshine on a night of storm. Come, open your eyes, Eva.
Are you just playing with me? Do you just twiddle the keys
Of Mein Kampf, patiently, while the master is looking on?
When you go out, will you improvise, call me The Corporal;
Or, worst, will you play hostess to the dirty themes
And finales ranted out in the synagogues?
Will you be sorry, betray me?
EVA (very gently).
I love you, Adolf...
Yet, just sometimes, I think of the other three girls...
HITLER.
They were a matter of duty. The way you lean forward
Now, puts me in mind of a little boy:
The only one whose face would look me in the face
In the classroom after I’d had a fit. He wasn’t
Trying to be kind. It was a strange little face
With the same pair of lolling lips for friend or foe.
My Hans...
But Eva, I have summoned you to speak of
Death. We shall be married, so you are mine till
Death do us part. We have rehearsed the manner
Of our dying: there is little to remind you of.
You carry the flask of cyanide?
EVA.
Here it is.
HITLER.
And, unless Wenck comes, you will use it. And then
The revolver: I have shown you twice where to place it:
In the mouth, so that the bullet must find
The lower part of the brain.
EVA.
Oh, but Adolf, I want to
Die with you. I will take the poison; but putting
My lips to that squat leering little thing...
HITLER.
You will do so. It is my order. And so very few
Are alive who are mine, mine: there shall be light
Wherever we go. And think, Eva, if they burst in
Before the cyanide could take effect;
If they drenched you like a horse with emetics,
Took what was left, and set it up as an effigy
For tourist pilgrims to look at and cross themselves;
And if some lewd Slav or Jew crept up to you,
Chucked you under the chin, then lurched away in a hurry
To tell his mates in the tavern about the adventure,
And —this very finger—and the shrill emotional laughs,
And chairs bouncing, and bottles going up and down.
No, make sure of it, Eva. Now, Auf Wiedersehen.
EVA.
I see, it is an order. Come along, Blondi.
(Steel door’s opening)
HITLER (in a rage).
Eva, I said Auf Wiedersehen!
EVA.
Auf Wiedersehen.
(Steel door’s closing)
HITLER.
The Little Corporal:—
Keitel, Jodl, and Speer,
Bags of deceit and beer,
Will be on the way here,
Discussing me as they come
With their husky theories like glum
Thumps on the rump of a drum:
The Little Corporal.
The Little Corporal:—
Keitel is in the clear,
Speer has a God to fear;
But faiths and interests sheer
Off when that common crumb
Of comfort swells to a plum:—
(Clock, quarter-hour)
My little gold clock, you strum—
The Little Corporal.
(Steel door’s opening and closing)
KEITEL AND JODL (together).
Heil, great Fuehrer.
HITLER.
My directions for this day.
Keitel, Jodl, be seated. Speer, be—oh.
But give me the latest bulletins.
KEITEL AND JODL (together).
Alas, great Fuehrer,
The Russian artillery—
HITLER.
Russia, Russia, Russia!
KEITEL AND JODL.
—is almost within range of Berlin. There are defections
To report, among the Combined General Staff
And our troops; many have fled; the German people
Are renouncing their holiest obligations to our Cause
And to you, Lord. News from the West is—
HITLER.
Stone;
And how I strove with the Palace! humoured it
From historic moody mountains, quarried it, eased it
Into good foundation-pits; and with entreaties
Of my hands at prayer coaxed it upward and outward,
Colonnades, terraces; and I—
The weathercock lecturing while the stars of Germany
Lectured me. So it was only stone,
The German people—only the masochistic, sleepy
Rocking at commands of unfavourable elements
To find more comfortable postures to crumble in...
KEITEL AND JODL (together).
Truly very sad.
HITLER.
Speer, move! What news?
SPEER.
They have given you all the news, and with obbligato.
HITLER.
But there is news in you, Speer. It is my birthday.
You have followed me to this day, the untrustworthy
That somehow I had to trust. Make no mistake:
I have seen you scuttling forlornly at the very fringes
Of Generals’ Plots to kill me: seen you touching
The crust of all the pies—time-bomb, gas-bomb—
Always too scared, or something, to lick your finger.
You have countermanded my orders, the scorched-earth policy,
Left hostels and conveniences furnished for Hell up in arms.
You are that stifling bag of conscience I jerked
From my head and shoulders, and you have flopped along,
Bumbling in the wake of me, the shadowless.
SPEER.
I eat, walk, sneeze. I do not think of myself
As a symbol or a sense of guilt; I have lived, and I live.
Quite a life this has been—I roped myself in
To a Cause, even loosened my own stifling bag a little.
Heil, life! I am he who has mused in meadows
And smacked his chops at the prizefight! tenderly, lovingly striven
To achieve miracles of Cana in the name of Satan!
KEITEL AND JODL (together, hurriedly).
Hear me, O Fuehrer. I fully dissociate myself
From such tomfooleries at this moment of grave crisis.
On your birthday, before you, I declare myself loyal always
To the Party, and so to your commands.
HITLER.
Keitel, Jodl,
And Speer—were your heads together as you came
Along the corridor? So let it be. My orders:
Resistance must be maintained to the last man.
Troops will be massed for offensive outside Berlin.
Officers suspect of mutiny forfeit their lives.
Townspeople’s risings will be dealt with according to regulations.
To your duties, Keitel, Jodl. And Speer.
(Steel door’s opening and closing)
Oh, Speer,
Auf Wiedersehen!
He has walked away. O God in Heaven!
Answer me: why will you not—do you want me
Down on my knees? Where is Speer, where is Speer?
He has walked away.
I remember how in our last War
—Chlorine was always a greenish daydream, sun and moon
With their arms locked on the ballet-floor of my brain—
I tried to lift my wings once as the gracious solid
White cap and behind of the night-nurse went off duty.
She didn’t look back.
Up and down I went like a moth in the middle of the road.
(Clock, half-hour)
Little gold clock, what is this mockery? You deal me
Half a hand, the half-hour; pattering up the stairway
Of your chime and standing there, tantalizingly quiet...
Time for Herr Doktor Morell. He has delivered
Many (he says), been abortioner to many (they say):
Baptism and Extreme Unction tucked away in his brief-case.
Here come his considering eyes and his bland make-merry tone
Consecrated in the College of Surgeons. My quota
For this day has been weighed and wrapped. My birthday:—
Why shall I not kill him, roll up my sleeves, and wedge
A free hand into his coffers of stimulants, drugs,
Then soar like a comet, replete, and kill them all?
No, he is the Doctor, the archangel. I submit.
(Steel door’s opening and closing) MORELL.
Greetings, Fuehrer. How are you this day? Did you sleep?
The mild sedative I prescribed will always reduce
Blood-pressure, inducing healthy sleep. Did you take it?
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
MORELL.
And are your duties pressing at this time?
Oh, of course. Here is a mild energizer:
Three tablets each hour, with extra fluid for the kidneys.
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
MORELL.
And that numbness in the left side? This small injection
Should at once soothe and quicken. Your left arm, please...
This will help to restore your circulation.
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
MORELL.
Now we can relax. Yesterday we were conversing
On effects that bodies other than the earth, in the solar system,
May have upon earth-life. Doubtless you recall this.
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
MORELL.
I was saying that eminent surgeons and physicists
Have by no means discarded the possibility that certain
Nuclear radiations may affect us. Do you follow?
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
MORELL.
Yes, interesting. Now I shall take my leave,
Reminding you that sound sleep is very important
And that all unnecessary disturbance should be avoided.
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
MORELL.
Above all, do not worry. Our experiments
Upon Hans the Guard, who died in a unique delirium,
Prove that mental images may influence bodily temperatures.
HITLER.
Yes, Herr Doktor.
(Steel door’s opening and closing. Pause)
HITLER.
It must be the pills. I have had a fit. They were laughing
At me: where is my mother? I mean, my Reich:
Clean blood, tall steel, take me into your cool final contortions:
Don’t leave me at the graveside. Mother, where are you?
I am calling over and over: answer me! Speer,
Where are you—where?
(ECHO. Speer, where are you?)
HITLER.
Then the dust, the thousand men, the one man—
Every grain of it taller than all the steel:
Belsen, Belsen, take up your bed and walk;
Work up one mouth to condemn me—only let there be
A footstep with a soul behind it—don’t just lie there...
Hans! Hans! Hans!
Here is the cyanide in my pocket: I can move this:
Here, here in my—
O my God, I have lost it...
(A long pause. Berceuse from ‘The Tempest’: Sibelius)