The Western Lands (3 page)

"Something I been waiting to say for a long time, Mister Kim."

August 16, 1984, Thursday

The sheer nightmare horror of my position, of all human positions, waiting for some lunatics or conspirators going to ride out on the blast like a surfboard to explode the atoms we are all made of. A lucky survivor, blind, stumbling about in my ruined house, hungry mewling cats underfoot. How about that, Kim?
Kill your dogs and cats. Repeat. Kill your dogs and cats.
The boiled eggs were just right. Debonair heartless Kim striking histrionic poses on the buckling deck of a doomed planet . . . reflecting a flawed unbearable boy image in an empty mirror. Radiant Kim, the fearless ostrich, escape child of a frightened old man. Anybody isn't frightened now simply lacks imagination. Is there any escape? Of course. A miracle. Leave the details to Joe.

An old man in a rented house with his cat, Ruski. So he looks about in quiet desperation for an escape route. That's Thoreau, I think, wasn't he the one drowned himself in Waiden Pond with a dead loon around his neck? Pick a card . . . any card. . . .

So he writes about desperately for an escape route. Such openings are only there in times of chaos when the cry goes up, "Every man for himself!"

"Chacun pour soi!"

"Sauve qui peut!"

If you're going to slip in somewhere and save your skin it has to be when the ship is sinking, a country falling apart, a time when nobody knows who is who and you can pass yourself off as
anybody
.

The Weimar Republic. Cocaine is cheaper than food. Starving boys—
die
wandervögel
,
the migrating birds—flock to Berlin to sell themselves for a meal. The hero prances out in drag singing,
"Einer Mann, einer Mann, einer RICHTIGER Mann!"

Easy to pick up a pair of shoes in the Weimar Republic.
Jeder Mann sein eigener Futbol.
(Every man his own football.) They deserved to lose for such vapid nonsense. The Lesbians had a marching song:
Wir brauchen keiner Männer mehr
.
(We don't need men anymore.) And the gays tripped along to:
Wir sind anders von den Andern
/ Die nur im Gleichschritt der Moral geleibt haben
.
(We are different from the others / Who have only loved in the same step of morality.)

Three hundred gay bars, bread riots and street fighting and hunger . . . every man his own football.

SA marchiert
.  . . .

Master Levy, when asked for the price of a flop by one of the
Wanderbursche
who came from all over Germany to Berlin— some queen's jissom may be the first food they have had in three days—so Levy says, "Well, I can't give you any money. But I will give you good advice. Over there under that railroad there is a
particularly
cold wind."

He denies the story. He was a strong man, reminded me of Korzybski. Rather heavy, with big arms and a strong voice. At times the strong must commit acts of incredible cruelty to stoke their strength. One sultan used to cut the arm off whoever helped him into the saddle. You have to be strong to live with such acts, very strong. I do not aspire to such strength. Obviously such strength is forced upon the recipient slowly, a bit at a time . . . the door closes behind him, only one door open. A man's arm.
Slice
. . . he spurs his horse before the blood spurts out. . . .

At the Russian front, morphine is the most precious commodity, a warm, comfortable blanket against the cold that gets down inside you so finally you don't shiver anymore because there is no place to shiver to. You can tell how long a soldier has been at the front by how much he shivers. The new ones are shaking like they had malaria. The old hands move slow, like lizards.

Wilhelm was lucky. His colonel in the Waffen SS was an addict. As soon as a town was captured he was into the drugstores and the doctors' offices. Wilhelm had a superb Männlicher with telescopic sights. It's a
wunderbar
feeling, to tag someone at five hundred yards, like the hand of God, the tiny figure falling in the snow . . . way out there near the skyline. And he practiced with his P38, worked over by a gunsmith and with a butt custom-molded to his hand. He could hit snowballs in the air.

Back to some requisitioned farmhouse, no need to ask permission from the owners. They have been removed by a work crew . . . had to . . . dead, you know . . . the ampules and syringes and alcohol laid out. The Colonel is a thin, aristocratic man of fifty with a fine thin nose and thin lips and little blue veins hard to hit. But Wilhelm could find a vein in a mummy.

"Allow me, my Colonel."

The blood blooms in the syringe and he pushes the plunger home.

"Sieg Heil!"
breathes the Colonel.

Wilhelm is tying up . . . ahh the blessed warmth.

"Heil Hitler!"

"Heil Hitler!"
the Colonel echoes.

Wilhelm knows the whole thing is insane, like Napoléon. He remembers the Victor Hugo poem, "It snowed it snowed it snowed."

He knows the Colonel is thinking the same thing. How can we get out from under this madman and save our assholes? But such thoughts are better left unspoken. As the Russian offensive gathers momentum and the Allies are close to Berlin, watch what you say and even what you think. The Black Dogs are sniffing for defeatism and disloyalty. One wrong word and you can hang with the Russian partisans with a placard around your neck: "Here is a pig who deserted his comrades. Now he is dead forever." And this is a lieutenant. Officers are not exempt from such summary execution . . . on the contrary. So play it
kalt
,
and watch and wait.

Shots outside . . . Wilhelm packs the drugs and the syringes. They will have to fall back, though they have been ordered to hold the position
bis in der Tod.
"Let Goebbels and Goering and Hitler come up here and hold it," growls the Colonel. "I am pulling back."

The long retreat, the frostbitten soldiers hobbling along on toeless feet. And those with their eyelids frozen off who can never again close their eyes. And the genitals that drop off when you try to take a piss and the concentrated yellow urine seeps out with sluggish black blood . . . back back back . . . to the outskirts of Berlin.

Berlin is a ruin, without water or food or police or medical facilities. Clearly it is every man for himself. The Russians are in the eastern outskirts of Berlin, the Allies in the west. Wilhelm is following his instincts. He knows that the name of the life game is
Survival
.
The War is lost but the SS is out with ropes, grimly and methodically hanging all deserters and defeatists from trees and lampposts and the projecting beams of bombed-out buildings.

Ah, a dead major. Wilhelm goes quickly through his clothes. A .25 automatic, which he pockets, and four boxes of ampules and a syringe with extra needles in a little metal box . . .
Eukodol
. . .
what is this? Wilhelm draws up two ampules of .02 grams. He hits and presses the plunger home.

"Sieg Heil."
It's almost a speedball of morphine and cocaine. A real updraft, like he used to feel when he was flying gliders. But he never made the air force. His sight was short.

Keep moving, get to the Americans! They will believe anything if you tell them what they want to hear.

The fall of Berlin . . . music from Götterdämmerung . . . thunder and lightning. Dazed citizens dipping water out of bomb craters. Lightning freezes into the lightning insignia of the Waffen SS . . . face of the dancer blazes with alertness . . . WHOOSH! He throws himself to the ground as a shell explodes in front of him. He stands up immobile, watching.

Dangling from the beam of a bombed-out building is the body of a civilian youth. The body oscillates slowly and the face comes into view. Wilhelm pulls a knife and cuts the boy down, and drags him into the shell of a building. Wallpaper, a shattered dresser, suggestion of a theatrical dressing room. He works quickly, stripping off his uniform. Pulling the body up to remove the jacket . . . shirt . . . he strips off his pants and his underwear, placing his P38 on the dresser. His cock flips out half-hard. He is junk sick, shivering burning junk sick. He hoists the boy's buttocks and pulls his pants down. The shorts are stained with sperm in front. He smiles and pulls the boy's shorts down and puts them on with a bump grind leaving his cock sticking out all the way up now he fingers his cock and goes off showing all his teeth as he spurts over the naked corpse. He tucks his cock in. Pulls on the pants. Fit just right around his skinny waist and ass. Even the shoes fit. Ah, my
shoes
.
He puts on the jacket and reaches into the left inside pocket.

Carl Peterson. Age: twenty-two. Occupation: mechanic.

On-screen advertisement:
Children's shoes have far to go
. . . (An agent's cover, his false identity, is known as shoes.)

Over the hills

And far away

"Hans!"

"Wilhelm!"

"What are you doing still in that uniform? Are you full crazy?"

"But Wilhelm, we were soldiers, not policemen. We are entitled to a soldier's treatment under the Geneva Convention."

"Would you like to explain that in Russian to the Ivans?"

Wilhelm points to a derelict in rags scuttling past. Hans shoots the derelict in the back of the head. "He deserves to die for stinking like this," Hans grumbles as he puts on the old man's rags. "Nameless asshole didn't have papers. I will probably get typhus from his doss-house lice!"

"There are worse things than typhus, Hans.  . . . We must find the Americans. Go west, young man, go west, and stay well away from the Ivans."

Say, are we glad to see you guys!"

"What took you so long?"

Berlin is swarming with police looking for war criminals. Kim, using the name Carl Peterson, gets a clerical job with the American CID so that he can photograph their list of wanted SS personnel. He accumulates a few thousand dollars trading coffee and chocolate, Spam and cigarettes, for antiques and paintings, P38s and Nazi daggers, which he sells to the American and English officers.

Kim feels grotesquely miscast as a black market operator. Look at them—sleek, pomaded, with manicured dirty fingernails, narrow shoulders and broad hips, expensive clothes and dirty underwear.

Kim singles out a cold-eyed tech sergeant. "Can you get rid of these?" He shows some morphine ampules. "Plenty more."

The sergeant nods.

Soon he has ten thousand dollars saved up. Time to move on to Tangier.

The town is booming, quivering with avarice and money fever like the seismic tremors of an earthquake. There are no rooms to be had in Tangier, but he manages to find a place on Calle Cook in a run-down stucco villa operated by a former madame from Saigon, in return for a small Renoir. He issues a bulletin to the effect that he has money to invest, and is beseiged by operators with money-making ideas: to open another bar, a clothing store, an antique shop, to buy into a smuggling operation. He is just testing the air, shaking the tree.

So many Arab boys about, Kim decides to take the cure and indulge in sex. He checks into a clinic in the Marshan, run by a French doctor and his wife. The doctor is burly and vigorous, with a black mustache—
un vrai bonhomme
.
The wife fades in and out in a perpetual state of well-founded jealousy. She is soon crying on Kim's shoulder about her husband's indiscretions. Three weeks, and Kim is over the hump.

"Sois sage,"
the doctor says, with a crushing handshake.

And now for the list. There are five former SS in Tangier on the Allies' list of wanted war criminals. He knows some of the names on his list are posing as Jewish refugees.

Ah, yes, here we are, Doctor Wellingstein. A former concentration camp doctor. I've got
him
on my list.

The Doctor is cool and reserved.

"So what can I do for you?" He makes a point of speaking in English. Kim has made it clear that the visit is not medical.

The Doctor receives him in a small parlor with chairs and a couch upholstered in blue satin, a glassed-in bookcase, all of it as dead and unlived-in as the Doctor himself—a tall, gaunt man with something dank and cold and dead in his face. Kim helps himself to schnapps from a carafe on the coffee table.
Réalités, Der Spiegel
,
neatly laid out. Kim walks around the apartment looking at the pictures.

"Hummmm, Klee . . . Monet . . ."

"They are reproductions, of course."

"Very good reproductions, I'd say."

"What do you want?"

"Oh, I might be interested in buying some of your, uh, reproductions. Just arrived in Tangier. Place is a bit bare you know. Now, that"—he points to a small Klee—"would brighten up my digs."

"This isn't a shop. It's not for sale. And now, if you will excuse me."

Kim stands up. "Of course, Doctor
Unruhe.
"

The Doctor's face freezes. "I think you have me confused with someone else."

"Perhaps, but a phone call to the War Crimes Commission, or whatever they call themselves, could clear up the confusion." Kim picks up his hat.

"Wait! Who are you?"

"A simple soldier of the Third Reich . . . misled like all the German people . . . Waffen SS."

The Doctor speaks in German. "Sit down, we will talk. Let me get a decent schnapps."

After a
sehr gemütlich
little chat with Kim, the Doctor puts his fingertips together. "I think that I can put you in the way of some profitable employment. You see, the Swiss are not pleased with the situation here in Tangier . . . secret banking facilities . . . a second Switzerland . . . this they do not like. I could introduce you to a man here . . . a Swiss."

The Doctor makes a phone call. "He will be in the Parade Bar at seven this evening. He walks with a cane."

Kim stands up to go. "You may rely on my discretion, Doctor. You see, I am more interested in employment than money.  . . . Oh, yes, I would advise you to remove your
reproductions
to a bank vault."