We were in Pest when this story began. Christ, was it Pest? It might have been Buda. One of them is up the hill and the other one is across the river. It doesn’t matter. We were in Budapest when this story began and I was a young man and as strong as an ox with the looks of a young Hercules, whiskers like the horns on a prize bull and a whang you could hang wet towels off.
Now I’m an old man and I’m shit-scared and I’ve left it too late and, if you’re reading this, I’m already dead. I’ve always wanted to write that: “By the time you read this I shall be dead.” That and “It was a dark and stormy night.” Stories come after words like that.
Well, this is a dark and stormy night all right, pitch black except for where the fires are burning all along the docks, black as hell, except for the flashes of bombs going off, thunder and lightning, the fires screaming like a gale, lumps of metal the size of pianos falling out of the sky and screaming all the way down and bits of shrapnel, fizzing and spitting off the roof like a rain of red-hot needles.
Two hours ago I was in Wilhelmstrasse. There was this kid—I don’t know how old he was, maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen, I don’t know, they’re throwing anybody they can get into the mincer now. So there he was, in his crappy uniform, proud as a dog with two pricks, marching a column of Italians back to spend the night in the docks. That’s the punishment for our gallant allies. That’s what they get for throwing in the towel. Screw the Axis. Stuff the international brotherhood of Fascism and National Socialism. To hell with all of that. We work the poor bastards half to death all day and then we tuck them in at the docks to see if another night of bombing might cheer them up a bit.
They shuffled along in their cardboard shoes with the kid pretending to march, acting like he was driving them on when the only thing keeping them going was the thought of black bread and cabbage soup. And, all of a sudden, he shouts, “Halt!” and he looks at me like I’m Winston Churchill, sticks me with his rifle and demands to see my papers. Little shit. I’m seventy-three years old, for God’s sake. How many seventy-three-year-old spies have you ever heard of?
I reached into my jacket while he stood there, keeping me covered, half hunched, two hands on the rifle, ready to spring into action if I should suddenly decide to overpower him and steal his Italians. So of course, when I produced my papers like a good citizen of the Reich, he couldn’t take them because his hands were busy.
“Open them,” he said.
I did.
“Hold them up a bit higher.”
“That can’t be right.” He was looking at me really hard, his eyes darting to the picture on my pass and then back at me again.
“Bring it closer,” he said.
So I did. I was right up against him with my hand in his face when I felt the rush of wind and the kid wasn’t there any more. No warning. Not even a siren. Just a bomb that dropped so close we didn’t even hear it until it landed, straight through the roof of the house on the corner and right down to the ground floor. That whole wall disappeared just as if somebody had cut it out like a slice of cake, and it took the kid and it left me. Nothing touched me. Not a brick, not a stick or a bit of broken glass. Nothing. I felt the fire of it pass me and I thought I was going to die. I felt it roar and growl and rumble so it shook my heart inside my chest and now every bone aches like I’ve been three rounds with a Turkish wrestler or three days in a Turkish brothel, and my suit’s scorched and there’s plaster between my teeth but I didn’t die. The kid died but I didn’t die. I ran—and I can still run, believe me. I ran until I got back here to my little caravan and I climbed inside and I locked the door as if a few slats of wood and a couple of sheets of tin could keep the bombs out. I got away with it, but I expect to be dead by morning. It’s been five months since the Allies landed in Normandy and the radio says our unstoppable forces are about to throw them back into the sea any day now. In the meantime they come as they please and the bombs fall in long lines, crump, crump, crump, like an angry child trampling on sandcastles, flames bloom in the night like jungle flowers, kids vanish in the gale of a bomb. That’s what we get. That’s all we deserve for following that stupid, Jew-hating bastard into hell.
But I can’t sit here all night just pissing my pants and waiting for the bombs to drop, and that’s why I’m writing this.
I want one final round of applause before the curtain. I want somebody to come picking through what’s left of my caravan to find this and say, “That can’t be right,” the way that kid said, “That can’t be right,” when he saw my pass. I want people to know how Otto Witte, acrobat of Hamburg, became the crowned King of Albania.
A story like that needs a drum roll and trumpets. It needs girls with feathers in their hair and spangled tights. It needs colored lights and velvet curtains. You can’t start that story with an old man pissing his pants in an air raid. I’m going to tear this up and start again.