This was the Viennese waltz so far:
A strapping blond Dutch lad flies to Vienna, Austria, and installs himself in a classy hotel room, knowing that just about every historian, sociologist, cultural critic, writer, philosopher, and journalist who has anything at all to do with his field is in town. Hitler studies is a broad church: its research areas overlap and overtake one another and accelerate further and further away from the original historical object (1889–1945); potential colleagues and competitors will meet here in Vienna. Yet at first this Dutch boy scarcely leaves his hotel room. The tension is palpable: flyers have been printed, websites designed, banners are waving from facades, the research question “What was Josip Brik’s contribution to perceptions of Hitler and the War in the twenty-first century?” has been postulated and spoken aloud, and the problem is that he doesn’t have a direct answer. Or rather, he has an answer, but he doubts whether there’s a consensus. Somehow he can’t shake off a premonition that Brik’s about to undergo some kind of de-Stalinization. That he will join the forum with the printout of his speech like a burning secret in his inside pocket, and that just as he starts to speak people will begin to jeer and bang on the table with their shoes. Boo! Down with Brik! He laughs at the idea. This is of course the worst-case scenario. Other scenarios are infinitely more likely. And yet he can’t shake off the feeling that he must be prepared, must arm himself, have quotations, one-liners, observations lined up like bullets in a gun barrel, must be able to parry every argument.
Can he do that alone? Does he need an ally?
This lad met Brik in college. One taught, the other learned. A fair division of roles. A fellow student said he’d once found himself standing next to Brik at a bus stop. It was a hot day in June, not a cloud in the sky. And he discovered that if he positioned himself carefully, he could stand entirely in Brik’s shadow. Literally. “That guy’s colossal—man, you can just use him as a sunshade!”
What did he see when he looked at Brik? Because that was the point. As a rational being he should surely be able see something in him that went deeper than the surface. He knew the jokes his fellow students told. Just after the start of the academic year he saw Brik in town and followed him for a while. Like a tiger strolling through the jungle, knowing that no matter what crosses his path he’ll always be the victor, the apex predator, the top of the food chain—that’s how Brik was walking. He could see him thinking. Something was happening behind those eyes and, though it felt a bit wallflowerish thinking this, whenever he saw Brik looking at shop windows, at advertisements, saw him observing people, he knew, he knew!, that whatever happened, this man would always be able to save himself purely by mental superiority. The apex thingamajig, what was it called again…the apex brain.
Now all that was left was the output of that brain: the books, the YouTube clips, one or two box sets of documentaries, obtainable from niche outlets. Did he doubt his love for Brik? Not for one second. Did he doubt Brik’s love for him? Well, it all came down to hierarchy. Brik moved in different circles, saw people in different capacities. Did his favorite student outrank his favorite editor? Who came first: his regular publisher or his regular cameraman? Who did he spend the most time with? Was it the quantity or the quality of the hours spent with him that counted? So many people had dealings with Brik, in so many different ways.
Now he’s dead (mentally he hears his father correct him: he’s passed on—only common people say dead), and people are tentatively trying out a first come, first served approach. Everyone’s crowding around that mighty corpus to claim the first rights, just as the Greeks crowded around the fallen Achilles, fighting for his armor. Where do I stand, wonders the lad, can I give myself an advance on the truth, can I appoint myself executor of his legacy, curator of his work (whatever that means), perhaps even biographer?
What’s with that other favorite student of Brik’s? What does he know that I don’t?
Bring a pretty girl along, Brik would always say, when he was giving a cocktail party or some other do. That made him feel good: the fact that Brik assumed he just had a supply of pretty girls on tap.
So there he is, alone in his Viennese hotel room with nothing on TV but ski jumping—the commentary in that incomprehensible pseudo-German of theirs—and somewhere out there, like satellites in orbit, people are circling around him. He knows this instinctively. That’s why he finds it hard to leave his room. Even though no one’s come out of the woodwork and declared their intentions, he knows people are lying in wait, ready to sink their teeth into him, to see how salty his blood tastes.
Mr. and Mrs. Chilton of Brik’s home university in the States have been so sickly sweet toward him that he instinctively knows he can’t trust them. Can’t allow himself to trust them, because he’d dearly like to believe in their professed affection, it would make everything so much easier. The comforting feeling that someone’s got your back. But he doesn’t know what they really want of him. And even supposing it was something concrete, he wouldn’t yet dare say how concrete his influence really is.
There’s a man with a hat and a knitting pattern of bleeding follicles, who’s prepared to lavish serious money and heavy insinuation on acquiring Brik’s collection, God knows why. There are blonde girls who smile compliantly at him. He doesn’t know the extent to which he’s being watched, the extent to which his name’s being bandied about. He doesn’t know who’s out to gain something from him, or what his options are. Whether people would really dare blackmail him, strong-arm him into making certain decisions. He doesn’t know whether there are international criminal gangs that film hotel guests on hidden cameras and extort money from them. He knows nothing. There are unknown unknowns. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
He’s not inclined to look for an ally, actually, he’d prefer to defend Brik on his own. But if so many unseen forces are at work, how does he know he has the guts not to deny Brik three times before the cock crows?
He’s getting support, of course. Encouraging emails from fellow Brikians. Heartening messages from some of his old lecturers. A few professors send him pointers. There are emails from the editors of talk shows, checking to see if events in Vienna might provide fodder for their programs. The Dutch lad takes note. He tries to see with the eye of the camera, to summarize things that are worth telling hundreds of thousands of television viewers.
And sweet emails from his girlfriend. Affectionate “go-get-’em-tiger” emails from his girlfriend. Tender text messages, “sleep well” messages. Yet more love he’ll never have to doubt.
He doesn’t attend any of the lectures in his field. Instead, he visits a few museums, but the paintings don’t mean anything to him. Bruegel’s blue-gray pastoral landscapes, Arcimboldi’s silly fruit faces. Of course he’s academically trained to perceive a deeper value in such art, but when he sees these pictures all that happens is that a little box is ticked somewhere in his head, of the paintings from his childhood Memory game that he’s now seen in real life. Tower of Babel: check. Dürer’s Rhinoceros: check. Then he goes quickly back to his room.
But the outside world mercilessly breaches the safe barrier of his hotel room: when he wakes up someone has pushed something under his door. It’s a sheet of paper, folded double lengthwise, like menus tend to be. It’s been written on an old-fashioned typewriter, he can feel the profile of the letters with his fingertips.
We are young, love is a battlefield. For too long now, the past has dominated the present. For too long now, gestures that should be timeless have been hijacked by old meanings. As far back as Caesar’s day, generals would salute their troops with an outstretched right arm, as a sign of respect and solidarity. An outstretched arm as a mark of unity. Twelve years of German Fascism has tainted that gesture—twelve years in the previous century. The time has come to de-Hitlerize the right arm. We call on teachers to greet their pupils in this way, actors their fans lining the red carpet, TV hosts their viewers. We call on soccer players to raise their right arms after scoring a goal, as a symbol of disengagement from an old drama, as a symbol of a new age. Liberate the right arm. History can’t hurt us. We are the Right Arm Liberation Front.
Guillaume Beaujolais, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris-Nord Fatima Meerburg, Rijksacademie, Amsterdam Robbie Decoster, MoMA Curatorial Program, New York
Up to now everything that has happened to him has added up, but this is over-the-top. The Right Arm Liberation Front. The letter bears an official stamp with a Facebook account and a phone number. Initially he hopes it’s nonsense, that when you go to their page it’ll turn out to be a commercial stunt: a website advertising a new liqueur with some macho name like Gladiator’s Finest, but instinctively he knows it’s genuine. The straw and the camel’s back. Everything that’s happened since Brik’s clumsy hotel death seemed real enough, but the realism is now mounting up too fast, building up to an excessive, hysterical amount. Which is exactly what he doesn’t want. The accumulation of plausible events contradicts their very plausibility. Logic is undermining itself. When events start behaving like a plot, watch out (Brik always used to say). Then they are no longer events but sets of steps, and you never know what basement they’ll lead you to.
At least, that’s how I imagined Philip de Vries’s Viennese days had gone till now.
He must have known the sunshade joke, or if not, a similar one. At least a hundred Brik jokes had made the rounds in Groningen. That he was getting supportive emails was also logical—he’d be getting them, because that’s what happens when you get your mug on TV. The bit about “dead” versus “passed on” seemed appropriate: he looked so middle-class. The fact that I was on his mind was obvious, otherwise he wouldn’t keep trying to contact me. That he felt unsure was also clear, otherwise he wouldn’t be so tentative, wouldn’t be trying so slavishly to reach an entente cordiale—while I was taking all the mental blows meant for him: the insinuations, the video clips. I was the one who was warding off the Burgers and the Winterbergs and the Chiltons and the Ninas of this world.
That he’d found a manifesto under his hotel room door was easy to deduce, because I’d found one under my door, so I assumed all the conference hotels had been flyered. A serious statement or a jokey art project? At first I’d been scared of what Sweder Burgers might do. Oil and fire. If only he and his henchman Winterberg didn’t get heavy! But if I thought about it a bit more, which I did, I concluded it might even be a good thing. His camp actually stood to gain from this kind of initiative, I’d tell him. Elite athletes giving the Hitler salute? That wasn’t going to go down well with anyone. Extremes of this kind would in fact help to promote his own cause, a cause that, now that I gave more thought to it, hadn’t in fact ever been entirely explained.
It would surely be like Philip de Vries to view those paintings purely as a box-ticking exercise, and it would definitely be like him to make some classical allusion or other—the armor of Achilles, the betrayal of Peter—just as he did, of course, in that idiotic document about the Bunker and Arkady Rossovich: the heavy symbolism, the Norse myths, death interpreted through images from antiquity. The old misconception that classical references make you look intellectual and well-read, when in fact they just reveal a narrow, predictable, bourgeois view of art.
What else did Rossovich think of? (Or rather: what else did De Vries have him think of?) Of Clausewitz, of Machiavelli—it’s easy to score with such solid names, names that conjure up a world of ideas, but who believes that you really read them?
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror, in my boxers, and did a Hitler salute. Then I put the manifesto down and did a Hitler salute while making a diagonal mustache under my nose with my index and middle fingers. It wasn’t a good look. I put on a new anthracite suit and a mist gray shirt and a brown-blue woolen tie. I looked touchingly capable.
There had to be more Hitler-saluting people you could think of: weathermen, rock bands. The salute needn’t be confined to TV hosts, it could also be given by their guests as they stepped up to the podium (Come on down!), and by directors and actors receiving awards. Train conductors. The Right Arm Liberation Front really needed to press for train conductors. And it would work too. The first few times it would be revolutionary, controversial. People would be called to account, but that was just what was needed here. A rational discourse. That was what it was all about: removing something contentious from the sphere of the irrational. That’s what art is for. (“What is art? Art is the possibility of grasping the unreal.” Oh really? Slogans so freighted with significance they don’t signify anything. Abstraction, vocabulary, ambivalence, shifting frames of reference, etc.) Think of all those fourteen-year-old boys who like nothing better than to tell jokes about the Jews, jokes about Hitler, how-many-Jews-fit-in-a-shower-cubicle jokes—you could take the wind out of their sails. If teachers do it, you no longer want any part of it.
I laughed. Rarely had any plan been so doomed to failure. The greater the scale of the Right Arm Liberation Front’s operations, the more right arms were stuck in the air, proudly erect and pointing toward a far, far horizon, the more everyone would hate, hate, hate, hate it. The perpetrators would have to appear on all those TV panel shows; the script had already been written.
“Philip de Vries, can you explain, very briefly, what on earth you hope to achieve with this campaign?” It was masterly. I couldn’t help myself, fate was smiling on me, I had to call them.
I had no second thoughts as the phone rang three times at the other end. Or when it was answered:
– Hello?
– This is Philip de Vries, I said in English. I’m a hotel guest. I just found something under my door.
– Our manifesto?
– You betcha!
– Have you read it?
– Absolutely, and I was wondering if it would be possible to add something to it. To start with, my name’s Philip de Vries. “Philip,” as in Philip, and then “de Vries” is spelled D.E.V.R.I.E.S. with a space between “de” and “Vries,” and I’m Josip Brik’s biographer, you see.
– I’m Guillaume.
– Great, Guillaume, the thing is, I totally agree with your campaign. It’s a novel way of thinking. And very convincing. Just what we need. And, as I said, I’m the biographer of Josip Brik, the great Hitler philosopher. I’m sure you know him. I’m hoping to finish my biography next year, the working title is Brik-a-brac: The Life of a Thinking Animal. Various publishers have already expressed interest, both at home and abroad. So I thought, perhaps you could use my support.
– But…that would be fantastic. Brik was…our hero. As our statement says, we are pressing for a de-ideologization of our soma, a denazification of our loins, we as artists passionately believe that…
– What I was thinking, Guillaume, sorry to interrupt you, was: Could you perhaps add my name to the manifesto? If you’re going to be flyering at other hotels in Vienna over the next few days, that is? Because then you could add my name to your list, Philip de Vries, followed by “Josip Brik’s biographer,” so everyone knows who I am, and what’s more, you’d have the weight of Josip Brik behind you—wouldn’t that be good?
– Good? That would be fantastic! Guillaume said.
Merveilleux, he added. Superbe. He asked if I could spell my name once more and then I had to put my hand over the mouthpiece, as I couldn’t suppress my laughter any longer, and I didn’t want him to take fright just as he was dutifully telling me they would type out more manifestos today so as to spam the other conference hotels. I hung up and fell back on the bed bellowing with laughter, laughter that sounded surprisingly old and hollow. Josip Brik’s biographer. He’d still be allowed to come and talk about Brik on TV, but now no one would ever take him seriously.
Jesus Christ, I thought, when I’d stopped laughing—Brik was their hero?
The previous evening, after Nina, after the video, after Winterberg, after Arkady Rossovich, after Sweder Burgers and after Mrs. Chilton, I’d gone to bed feeling wide awake. A pointless exercise, I thought. Sleep seemed impossible; too much adrenaline, too much of that feeling that something’s about to happen, something that will change everything. But like a child who resolves not to fall asleep before midnight on New Year’s Eve and then wakes up with a start at the sound of fireworks, my tormented body wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip. I only woke up once, when it was already starting to grow light. I got up to pee and thought about everything in my life. I switched on my laptop and discovered what I’d already suspected, namely that the website of the Burgers Foundation was beautifully designed, with classical music playing in the background, and a page listing all twelve of Sweder Burgers B.A.’s staff with a photo and contact details, and that neither Nina Barth nor Markus Winterberg was among the twelve.
I Googled a bit more and wrote down the addresses of the four Viennese antiques dealers where Arkady Rossovich might conceivably have offloaded his loot. Then I went back to bed and fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
Now I was hurrying across the Heldenplatz—was it possible to walk through this city and not cross the Heldenplatz?—with the collar of my covert coat up, like someone who didn’t want to be recognized. Because that was my role, that was what I was thinking about the whole time. Events that assume the form of a plot: yes indeed! An accumulation of plausible events: damn right! A plot had been set in motion, one involving treachery and blackmail, in which logical steps would be taken. Someone had set a trap, I had fallen into it, the means of blackmail had been shown, and now all I had to do was wait for the blackmailer to reveal himself. Which in turn would give me the opportunity to shed my Philip de Vries role. As long as Friso wasn’t, I wasn’t, the target, I held all the aces. There was something safe and reassuring about this step-by-step plan. I would stick to my role and everything would automatically turn out right.
So it wasn’t me who crossed the tram rails, onto the Maria Theresien Platz, where I looked around furtively, as someone would who thought they were being followed—that was my role. It wasn’t me who walked, erect and resolute, into the antiques shop, who stood and stared at the old clocks, the heavy wooden figurines of gypsies and knights, it wasn’t me who gazed pensively at snowy landscapes by lesser masters, my ears pricked. It wasn’t me who expected to hear loud footsteps and feel a hand on my shoulder. Perhaps even a revolver pressed against my back.
How wonderful it was to be an intellectual! To live the life of reason, so you could always see things at this meta-level—it was the culmination of what Brik had taught me, that yes also meant no, white also meant black, here also elsewhere, life also fiction.
Cool, calm, and collected.
But no hand landed on my shoulder, no revolver was poked in my back. The narrative was slow to take off. The first antiques dealer on my list did indeed go back three generations, but had only been based in Vienna for four years—“Why do you want to know, sir?” asked the friendly gentleman behind the till. I merely smiled at him and fled (“It wasn’t me who fled…”) and made my way to the second antiques dealer, where I also drew a blank. They’d been there for sixty years, in that building, on that street. In good times and bad: sometimes it was a struggle, “but je maintiendrai,” the owner of the shop told me, quoting the motto of the House of Orange, clearly pleased at his own sharpness—I’d told him I was Dutch. They had sold paintings to Americans, to Russians, to museums, to businesses, to members of royal families—but they’d never sold anything other than paintings and the odd sculpture, and then only as a favor to loyal customers. “Alas…”
For the time being, the plot had gotten stuck. Alas. The only other thing worth mentioning was that I saw Philip de Vries, the real one, in the flesh. I was just crossing a shopping street when I saw him, out of the corner of my eye, going into a department store. I followed. He was wearing a long, light coat, with a thin scarf draped nonchalantly around his neck. Tall, slim, with a blond quiff—Goebbels would have liked the cut of his jib. He looked like Ric Hochet, the dauntless reporter hero of the comic strip. He ran up the kitschy, mock–Art Deco staircase of the department store with careless ease, as if it were his second home.
There he was. Here he was. Each step he took was a revelation, as if I were seeing things. So he also existed outside my brain. It was like looking out of the window and seeing Santa flying over the roofs in his sleigh. There he goes, Josip Brik’s heir apparent. His favorite pupil. You could just picture him, sitting in the front row in the lecture room, busily taking notes, hanging around after class, hoping for a minute of private time with Brik. Bless him. His hair was every bit as fair as mine, we were indeed about the same height, probably about the same age. Did we resemble each other? As far as I could see, we had the same laugh lines around our eyes, perhaps even the same nose. Was my smile just as self-satisfied?
It wasn’t that I wanted to talk to him, far from it, I always made sure there was a mannequin between me and his line of vision, a buffer of at least two racks of garments, so I could grab a shirt or a pair of trousers from a hanger if he looked in my direction. He paused briefly, and I plucked a pink sweater from a shelf. I held it up and pressed it to my face, pretending to gauge the quality of the wool, while squinting to see if Philip was looking at me. He wasn’t. He was just getting his bearings. The only person who’d seen me was a hopeful-looking salesgirl. I folded up the sweater again, faster than I’d ever folded a sweater, and hurried after him, toward the cafeteria; I had to stop myself from running. Though I got to within three paces of him, he only had eyes for an older woman, now getting up from her little table, whom he embraced warmly. I quickly put a soggy sausage roll on my tray, so I could stand close to their table while getting in line for the till. He was telling a long story in flawless Austrian German, and even then it took a while before I realized—first having to recover from the fact that I’d never heard a Dutch person speak such fluent German, so much better than me, so unaccented—only then did the possibility arise in my mind that this wasn’t Philip de Vries at all, just some other slim blond guy out of the ten thousand or so at large in this city. Close up he also seemed older, more intelligent.
Was it him? It wasn’t him.
In the toilet I splashed water on my face and imagined the water drying as soon as it touched my skin, as if it were falling on a stovetop. Using my fingers, I combed my hair in the same direction as the fake Philip’s hair and pushed up my forelock in the same way. I didn’t have the same kind of scarf, but I could turn up the collar of my jacket like he did.
Markus Winterberg noticed.
– Your hair’s different.
Of course he had to be there, sitting on a bench in the Marcus Aureliusstrasse, just as I was passing. The bench faced away from a little square where children played around a climbing frame, screeching like gulls. He had an unimpeded view of the front door of antiques dealer number three, who with any luck could tell me more about Arkady Rossovich and the Speer maquette. On the other benches women huddled together in little groups, nannies probably, keeping half an eye on their charges while they chatted with each other in a language that wasn’t Austrian. Winterberg’s head was pale and gleaming, as if he’d put just a bit too much moisturizer on his face. He was peeling an apple while keeping the peel in one piece, something he clearly found satisfying.
– The Indians ate apples to stay awake, I said. An old military trick.
– Do you know many Indians?
– I know a lot of Westerns.
– You don’t say. But I’ve got this to stay awake, he said, and produced a can of Coke from his coat pocket.
– An apple and a can of Coke. A healthy combination. He gestured at me to sit down, and I brushed some snow from the bench. He cut off a few pieces of his apple, transferred them to his mouth with his penknife, and washed them down with a mouthful of Coke.
– When I just a kid, half my intestines were surgically removed, and over the years I’ve discovered I digest food better if I drink a lot of Coke with it.
A ball bounced onto the narrow street, and a small child dashed after it. One of the nannies had to dive forward to grab her by the scruff of the neck. The child began to wail at the top of her voice. The nanny picked her up and rubbed her back. Winterberg stood up, crossed the street, and retrieved the ball from under a parked car. For a man of his size he moved easily. He was fit; he obviously worked out. The ball was printed with cartoon figures, a sort of blue koala and an Indian princess. He walked toward the crying child and I wondered how she felt, seeing this figure bearing down on her. Was it like standing on the deck of a ship and seeing an iceberg coming straight for you? When she got the ball back at least she stopped bawling.
– Where did you grow up? I asked, when he sat down again.
– Have a guess.
– I’m pretty sure you’re not from the Netherlands. So I was thinking…Israel.
– You think I’m a Sabra?
– That sounds like a make of car.
– It’s what you call a Jew who was born and bred in Israel.
– So that’s what you are? A Sabra?
– Do you think that because of Mr. Burgers’s tattoo, by any chance?
– That tattoo…I don’t quite know what to make of Mr. Burgers.
– Let me reassure you: I don’t intend to talk as much as him.
– Mr. Burgers does indeed have a certain talent for oratory.
– He’s a man of many talents, certainly.
– And what are your talents?
He raised his eyebrows playfully, perhaps even flirtatiously, then described a circle in the air with his penknife, as if he were about to say something. I waited for an explanation, but it didn’t come. He put his knife down on his thigh, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and held up his hands with the fingers spread out, as if he wanted me to count all ten of them.
– I like to use my hands, he said. I can make things, I can break things. If I come up with a plan, I can carry it out myself. No messing around: I can act independently. Which means not having to be accountable to anyone else. I don’t need to put up with anybody. I doubt there are many people in this city, at this conference, with hands as callused as mine. That’s okay. That’s fine. They’ve got bookcases, I’ve got calluses.
He took another bite of apple and I waited until he’d finished eating it.
– I don’t like artists and I don’t like intellectuals, Winterberg said.
– Okay.
– Intellectuals think they’re the brains of a nation. In fact, they’re not, they’re its shit.
I thought for a moment.
– That sounds like something Stalin might have said.
– It was Lenin, in a letter to Trotsky.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Again the eyebrows did their little move. He took the apple peel out of his coat pocket and cut it into small pieces, tossing them toward a few pigeons that were idling about under a trash can.
– You people aren’t the first to ask me to read something these last few days, I said. Just making conversation.
– As long as we’re the most important.
– Does the Right Arm Liberation Front mean anything to you? Didn’t you get the manifesto from that arty bunch of intellectuals about their initiative?
– The difference between you and me is that when I use the word “front,” I’m not talking about an artists’ initiative.
I stared, aware of the screeching of the playing children. I realized I was staring, but couldn’t help it. Perhaps I was hysterical, but I needed time. Everything he said could be interpreted as a threat, and at the same time, nothing he said could be interpreted as a threat. Israel. Did Israel mean Mossad? Was he a sort of freelance spy like you see in films, the kind who takes time off between deals involving atomic secrets and liquidation contracts to set up editors in chief of academic journals? Each danger that I perceived, each hint of peril, came as much from my own racing brain as from him. And he knew it. He was playing a role just as much as I was: that whole monologue about intellectuals and shit—well, if he wanted to stay in character, that was fine, but then I had to do the same.
– Wow, I said, finally. Wow, what you said about the front, that was a pretty cool thing to say.
Looking at him now, it was difficult to put my finger on it, but there was something feminine about his face. A hint of something. He might well be as gay as a goose.
– There’s the antiques dealer’s, I said. Why don’t you go there yourself?
He smiled at me, broadly, mockingly, and it struck me this was the first time I’d ever seen him really smile. His gums were white, the dark bags under his eyes hung down like little curtains.
– Mr. Burgers is known in the antiques world. He can’t simply stroll in anywhere just like that.
– So that’s what you’ve got me for?
– So that’s what we’ve got you for.
The door triggered a little bell. I stepped inside and unbuttoned my jacket (probably to say: Look, I’m wearing a tie, you can trust me) and noticed that my right hand was tingling in an RSI-ish way, just as I’d woken up yet again with a stiff neck and the feeling that my intestines were made of liquorice bootlaces.
The shop was named after the street in which it stood: Marcus Aurelius. You could think of a worse name for an antiques dealer. It consisted of three large rooms, the main one dominated by a black grand piano on which stood a couple of Eastern vases and a Greek nude. A sign propped up on the keyboard said NOT FOR SALE. The rest of the shop was an organized chaos reminiscent of Marlinspike Hall, the home of Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock: a promiscuous jumble of suits of armor, busts of composers and deposed monarchs, framed photos of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century regiments, bronze statuettes, and Buddhas large and small. There was a cupboard full of porcelain (mainly Delft blue), Persian rugs on the floor, African masks on the walls, still lifes, European landscapes, sabers and knives dating from, I estimated, five different centuries, as if a time machine had gone haywire and beamed up all kinds of random objects.
A little ways off stood a man in a raincoat and a tweed cap talking to a younger man in a sweater vest, who was giving him a mini-lecture on the historic value of the statuettes he was holding. I was greeted by a woman with short gray hair, who was holding a brush. She wore a pale pink pullover; a gold locket hung over the collar.
– Good afternoon.
She had to be over fifty, the skin on her neck hung like wattles. Her eyes were clear and blue and friendly enough, but when she smiled at me her teeth were strangely short and transparent, as if she’d never lost her milk teeth.
– Good afternoon, I said. What a nice shop you have.
– Thank you. Are you perhaps looking for a Christmas present?
– Have you got enough wrapping paper? I said, pointing to a suit of armor.
The woman laughed, clutching her chest (Oh, Friso, you’re such a charmer). She put her brush away, on top of a cupboard.
– Are you a collector?
– Not really.
– A connoisseur, though?
– That’s a nice term.
– We don’t often get people of your age in here. They tend to find old things, well…old.
She laughed at her own words, so I laughed along with her.
– Some people come in here just to look around, she said. Other people come to buy something. And others come to buy something on behalf of other people.
– Does that happen much?
She looked at me with a faint smile. She was sizing me up, I thought, trying to place me.
– We sometimes get buyers who are operating on behalf of a third party, because the third party doesn’t want to reveal his or her identity to the outside world.
– I’m here in Vienna for a big historians’ conference, End of History, perhaps you’ve read about it.
– Oh, of course. It’s been excellent for business, actually, we’ve had conference-goers coming in all week. That’s the appeal of a shop like ours, you know—that sense of history, the feeling of holding something truly old in your hands.
I nodded. Indeed, indeed, that sense of history.
– I’m the editor in chief of a small academic journal, and we recently ran an article about an antique item that was probably sold here, I ventured.
She looked at me uncertainly. Might as well put your cards on the table, I thought.
– The item in question is something you might have sold over two decades ago.
– Okay.
– It’s a piece of a maquette.
– Could you be more specific?
– It’s a piece of a maquette of Germania, designed by Albert Speer, allegedly found in the Hitler bunker in Berlin. It’s said to have ended up here after the war. I believe the seller was a Russian. You sold it on about twenty years ago.
Something changed in the way she looked at me. Her mouth closed, her eyes grew smaller, as if something was locking her face.
– That’s to say, it’s not genuine, apparently, but a fake, I added quickly.
– I can’t imagine that we would sell a fake here, said a voice behind me. It was the boy in the sweater vest. He was prematurely bald and had a serious face, with teeth resembling the woman’s.
– This is my son. We’re a family business, going back over seventy years. If you have more concrete information about your maquette, I could perhaps take a look in our archives, she said, while she gestured with her head at her son. He took himself off, back to the man with the tweed cap, who was now admiring a couple of ornately carved walking sticks.
I followed her to a table with wooden ornaments; on it lay a snoring red tomcat. She opened a drawer and got out a heavy iron box containing hundreds of filing cards.
– And can you tell me anything more about this maquette, or the Russian who sold it?
– I can. It’s supposedly just a small fragment, and the person who brought it to your shop was said to be called Arkady Rossovich.
– Any idea what year?
I shook my head. Hopeless. What did I actually know? Data, data, data, I cannot make bricks without clay. She, too, must have thought the same thing, because she stopped leafing through the cards and shut the lid of the box.
– Are you a journalist?
– Not exactly, I said.
– Where are you from?
– From the Netherlands. But I work in the States.
– In what field, did you say?
– Well, Hitler studies, actually. We carry out research into, well, Hitler.
– You said you worked for a journal?
– That’s right. The Sleepwalker. Set up by Josip Brik, if the name means anything to you.
She looked aside and smiled a secret, private smile.
– And may I know your name?
– Philip de Vries, I said.
She wrote the name on a filing card and showed to me.
– Is that right?
– De Vries with a V not an F. Then it’s right.
Her mouth had grown serious again, yet her expression was slightly mocking.
– Tell me, Mr. De Vries: are you here for our German cabinet?
– I am indeed, I said intuitively. Don’t say “huh,” don’t shilly-shally, don’t ask “What’s the German cabinet?”
She was talking much more quietly now:
– I must say, I thought so from the look of you. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. I can tell immediately. Please follow me.
And why not follow her? Why not? Act as if you always do this, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. Keep smiling. The whole time I’d been in the shop, I’d been smiling, so much so that I was getting cramps in the corners of my mouth. Because this was what I did, this is what I always fell back on: I was blond and Caucasian. I possessed above-average good looks. I was well dressed. I’d had braces on my teeth for three years as a teenager: my gleaming white smile represented thousands of euros’ worth of orthodontic care. Who wouldn’t want to have me on their side? Just like Mrs. Chilton telling me about her affair—who wouldn’t want to confide their secrets to me? Everything about me breathed Europe, the West, the First World—so I took it for granted that wherever I was, people would treat me with the respect and decency associated with the First World. I was my own talisman and I was just going to have to try my luck.
So I followed her down the wooden staircase to the basement. We walked to a large room that was clearly the office. It was full of filing cabinets; an antiquated computer purred on a massive desk. She took a key from the desk drawer and pointed to a wide door with a numeric lock.
– I have to ask you, Mr. De Vries, to be discreet about what I’m now going to show you. Can we agree on that?
– We can, I said.
Using the key, she first unlocked something at knee height, then stood between me and the other lock so I couldn’t see the code she keyed in. A little light turned green, followed by a long, approving bleep. The door was under such tension that it sprang ajar.
– We don’t show this room to everybody, she said.
She pushed the door open wider, giving me a glimpse inside. The first thing I saw was a flag with an enormous swastika.
– Please go in.
The room measured about twelve by twelve feet, if that. Light came from small windows close to the ceiling. You could only see the feet of passersby; the chance of anyone looking inside was minuscule. Thought had clearly been given to this. Above me I could hear her son’s footsteps, but the sound of classical waltz music from the radio had grown much fainter.
– Our shop is apolitical. Our clients have specific interests and we want to meet their needs.
But that wasn’t what this was about, I thought. Bullshit. This was a secret church. Holy relics were sold here, and for that you needed believers. If you opened her locket, who would you find? Give you three guesses. I stepped into the room. On the top of a dresser lay ten or more Long Knives, the ones the Night in 1934 was named after. Where the handle ended and the blade began, there was an ornamental swastika. Once again she spoke in dulcet tones:
– See how sharp the blade still is. And look, just above the handle, you can see the serial number. That tells us which soldier it belonged to.
This was somebody who was proud of her wares. A real professional. Next to the dresser was a large bookcase. I ran my fingers along the books. Racial Science of the German People by Hans F. K. Günther. Race and Soul by Dr. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. The Toadstool, an anti-Semitic children’s book by Julius Streicher. I could feel the profile of the lettering on the spines under my fingertips. The case contained a framed letter, signed by Joseph Goebbels, and a framed, signed portrait of Leni Riefenstahl. The shelves were well dusted; the book jackets stood as straight as a row of soldiers. Between a bronze and a white marble bust of Hitler stood five, ten, fifteen copies of Mein Kampf. Old, leather-bound editions, with the kind of yellowing paper that I loved. I could smell it: sweet, this time too sweet.
In the middle of the room stood a wooden showcase the size and height of a billiard table. Under the glass, four Luger pistols lay side by side. The guns rested on red plush, and were lit by special spotlights, as if they were the keys to the city. Two small handwritten price tags were attached to the first two pistols, tucked away so they were quite hard to read, but not so tucked away as to be unreadable: €5,000, €8,500. Placards lay next to them, as if they were museum exhibits:
“Service weapon of Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisleceny, January 19, 1911, Regulowken—May 4, 1948, Bratislawa, SS-number 2.177.889, recipient of the Iron Cross First Class for valor in Operation Barbarossa.”
“Service weapon of Haupsturmbahnführer Ditrich Ernst zur Lahn, SS number 2.891.626. Born August 22, 1920, Salzburg, German Reich—died for the German people, the Fatherland, and the Führer in Königsberg, March 8, 1945.”
She gestured to the fourth pistol in the row. I read the short text on the placard: “Service weapon of Field Marshal Otto Moritz Walter Model, Genthin, January 24, 1891—Duisberg, April 21, 1945.”
Once again she looked at me with that subservient smile, as if she were a stewardess giving me an extra little packet of cashews:
– I take it that doesn’t need any further explanation. This was his personal service weapon, the one he used right to the end. Perhaps you know that in 1945 Field Marshal Model, well…With her thumb and index finger she mimed a pistol, pressing the trigger against her temple. Pow, her mouth said, soundlessly.
– We’re very proud of this item. We haven’t had it long, but I can assure you we’ve already had several offers.
– How do you know this was the real pistol, may I ask?
– Discretion prevents me from telling you too much about the exact provenance of our items, but you must understand that this business has been in our family for five generations now. We’ve built up a regular network of clients and suppliers, so can absolutely guarantee the authenticity of our wares.
What had I said or done to give her the confidence to show me this? What was it in my face that made her think “from the look of me” that I was looking for this? Was “Brik” the magic word? Once again, questions that I could not ask. The trick is to reduce the riddle.
Next to the pistols and showcase lay an open book, Mein Kampf, of course. Something had been written on the title page. A lone letter that looked like a flash of lightning, or a Nordic rune, and next to it a word that had been written diagonally, a capital J and L next to each other so that together they formed an H, an i without a dot, a t that looked more like an a, an l that looked like an I, and a wiggle that presumably represented an e and an r.
– That’s not for sale, she said smilingly, but firmly. That’s a family heirloom.
This was the first time, I realized, that I’d seen Hitler’s signature. In real life. Nazis. I was suddenly reminded of what Mr. Chilton had said. They didn’t just exist in movies, they were real people, you know. That memory, Brik and I drinking coffee in the sun, just outside our office, laughing, took me away from the present moment. Instead of the book in the showcase, I could now only see the reflection of my face in the glass. I looked so much younger than I felt, my hair just like the fake Philip’s. I felt as if I were choking—not a lump in my throat, more like being throttled, as if the oxygen was gradually being sucked out of the room. As if I were grappling with some unseen force. It took a while, but then it hit me. I’d already seen so many swastikas, in all those films, all those novels, all those editions of The Sleepwalker, hundreds of thousands of them—Pip had occasionally complained that we had so many books with swastikas on the spines she couldn’t bear to look at our bookcase anymore. But that was different. That was out in the open. To suddenly find a flag with a swastika, behind lock and key—that was different. This room, this cellar. The secrecy gave the flag significance. It was the first time I’d ever seen a swastika that meant something. Running into it like that was like coming across a toilet that hadn’t been flushed—that had been the stench that was sucking away the oxygen.
– If you ever find that maquette from the Bunker, Mr. De Vries, do bear us in mind. I’m sure we could find a buyer for it.
By the time I got outside, Winterberg was no longer sitting on his bench. My neck and my back and my shoulders ached as if I was carrying a menhir and someone had forgotten to give me the magic potion, but I didn’t care. The fresh air had seldom tasted so clean.