The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  Every night during the long weeks of rehabilitation, Stoessel-Leifhelm had read aloud to his father whatever he could get his hands on from the National Socialists’ headquarters, and there was no lack of material. There were the standard inflammatory pamphlets, pages of ersatz biological theory purportedly proving the genetic superiority of Aryan purity and, conversely, the racial decline resulting from indiscriminate breeding—all the usual Nazi diatribes—plus generous excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The son read incessantly until the doctor could recite by rote the salient outrages of the National Socialists’ message. Throughout it all, the seventeen-year-old kept telling his father that following the party’s program was the way to get back everything that had been stolen from him, to avenge the years of humiliation and ridicule. As Germany itself had been humiliated by the rest of the world, the Nazi party would be the avenger, the restorer of all things truly German. It was, indeed, the New Order for the Fatherland, and it was waiting for men of stature to recognize the fact.

  The day came, a day when Stoessel-Leifhelm had learned that two high-ranking party officials would be in Munich. They were the crippled propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the would-be aristocrat Rudolf Hess. The son accompanied the father to the National Socialists’ headquarters where the well-tailored, imposing, obviously rich and Aryan Doktor requested an audience with the two Nazi leaders on an urgent and confidential matter. It was granted, and according to early party historical archives, his first words to Hess and Goebbels were the following.

  “Gentlemen, I am a physician of impeccable credentials, formerly head surgeon at the Karlstor Hospital and for years I enjoyed one of the most successful practices in Munich. That was in the past. I was destroyed by Jews who stole everything from me. I am back, I am well, and I am at your service.”

  The Lufthansa plane began its descent into Hamburg, and Joel, feeling the drag, dog-eared the page of Leifhelm’s dossier and reached down for his attaché case. Beside him, the actor Caleb Dowling stretched, script in hand, then jammed his screenplay into an open flight bag at his feet.

  “The only thing sillier than this movie,” he said, “is the amount of money they’re paying me to be in it.”

  “Axe you filming tomorrow?” asked Converse.

  “Today,” corrected Dowling, looking at his watch. “It’s an early shoot, too. Have to be on location by five-thirty—dawn over the Rhine, or something equally inspiring. Now, if they’d just turn the damn thing into a travelogue, we’d all be better off. Nice scenery.”

  “But you were in Copenhagen.”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re not going to get much sleep.”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh.”

  The actor looked at Joel, the crow’s-feet around his generous eyes creasing deeper with his smile. “My wife’s in Copenhagen and I had two days off. This was the last plane I could get.”

  “Oh? You’re married?” Converse immediately regretted the remark; he was not sure why, but it sounded foolish.

  “Twenty-six years, young fella. How do you think I was able to go after that impractical dream? She’s a whiz of a secretary; when I was teaching, she’d always be this or that dean’s gal Friday.”

  “Any children?”

  “Can’t have everything. Nope.”

  “Why is she in Copenhagen? I mean, why isn’t she staying with you—on location?”

  The grin faded from Dowling’s suntanned face; the lines were less apparent, yet somehow deeper. “That’s an obvious question, isn’t it? That is, you being a lawyer would pick it up quickly.”

  “It’s none of my business, of course. Forget I asked it.”

  “No, that’s okay. I don’t like to talk about it—rarely do—but friendly seatmates on airplanes are for telling things. You’ll never see them again, so why not slice off a bit and feel better.” The actor tried haltingly to smile; he failed. “My wife’s name was Oppenfeld. She’s Jewish. Her story’s not much different from a few million others, but for her it’s … well, it’s hers. She was separated from her parents and her three younger brothers in Auschwitz. She watched them being taken away—away from her—while she screamed, not understanding. She was lucky; they put her in a barracks, a fourteen-year-old sewing uniforms until she showed other endowments that could lead to other work. A couple of days later, hearing the rumors, she got hysterical and broke out, racing all over the place trying to find her family. She ran into a section of the camp they called the Abfall, the garbage, corpses hauled out of the gas chambers. And there they were, the bodies of her mother and her father and her three brothers, the sight and the stench so sickening it’s never left her. It never will. She won’t set foot in Germany and I wouldn’t ask her to.”

  No alarms, just surprises … and another Iron Cross for the Erich Leifhelms of the past, retroactively presented.

  “Christ, I’m sorry,” murmured Converse. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “You didn’t. I did.… You see, she knows it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Doesn’t make sense? Maybe you didn’t hear what you just described.”

  “I heard, I know, but I didn’t finish. When she was sixteen, she was loaded into a truck with five other girls, all on their way to that different type of work, when they did it. Those kids took their last chance and beat the hell out of a Wehrmacht corporal who was guarding them in the van. Then with his gun they got control of the truck from the driver and escaped.” Dowling stopped, his eyes on Joel.

  Converse, silent, returned the look, unsure of its meaning, but moved by what he had heard. “That’s a marvelous story,” he said quietly. “It really is.”

  “And,” continued the actor, “for the next two years they were hidden by a succession of German families, who surely knew what they were doing and what would happen to them if they got caught. There was a pretty frantic search for those girls—a lot of threats made, more because of what they could tell than anything else. Still, those Germans kept moving them around, hiding them, until one by one they were taken across the border into occupied France, where things were easier. They were smuggled across by the underground, the German underground.” Dowling paused, then added. “As Pa Ratchet would say, ‘Do you get my drift, son?’ ”

  “I’d have to say it’s obvious.”

  “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of hate in her and God knows I understand it. But there should be some gratitude, too. Couple of times clothing was found, and some of those people—those German people—were tortured, a few shot for what they did. I don’t push it, but she could level off with a little gratitude. It might give her a bit more perspective.” The actor snapped on his seat belt.

  Joel pressed the locks on his attaché case, wondering if he should reply. Valerie’s mother had been part of the German underground. His ex-wife would tell him amusing stories her mother had told her about a stern, inhibited French intelligence officer forced to work with a high-spirited, opinionated German girl, a member of the Untergrund. How the more they disagreed, and the more they railed against each other’s nationality, the more they noticed each other. The Frenchman was Val’s father; she was proud of him, but in some ways prouder of her mother. There had been pain in that woman, too. And hate. But there had been a reason, and it was unequivocal. As there had been for one Joel Converse years later.

  “I said it before and I mean it,” began Joel slowly, not sure he should say anything at all. “It’s none of my business, but I wouldn’t ever push it, if I were you.”

  “Is this a lawyer talkin’ to ole Pa?” asked Dowling in his television dialect, his smile false, his eyes far away. “Do I pay a fee?”

  “Sorry, I’ll shut up.” Converse adjusted his seat belt and pushed the buckle in place.

  “No, I’m sorry. I laid it on you. Say it. Please.”

  “All right. The horror came first, then the hate. In side-winder language that’s called prima facie—the obvious, the first sighting … the real, if you like. Without these, t
here’d be no reason for the gratitude, no call for it. So, in a way, the gratitude is just as painful because it never should have been necessary.”

  The actor once again studied Joel’s face, as he had done before their first exchange of words. “You’re a smart son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “Professionally adequate. But I’ve been there … that is, I know people who’ve been where your wife has been. It starts with the horror.”

  Dowling looked up at the ceiling light, and when he spoke his words floated in the air, his harsh voice quietly strained. “If we go to the movies, I have to check them out; if we’re watching television together, I read the TV section … sometimes on the news—with some of those fucking nuts—I tense up, wondering what she’s going to do. She can’t see a swastika, or hear someone screaming in German, or watch soldiers marching in a goose step; she can’t stand it. She runs and throws up and shakes all over … and I try to hold her … and sometimes she thinks I’m one of them and she screams. After all these years … Christ!”

  “Have you tried professional help—not my kind—but the sort she might need?”

  “Oh, hell, she recovers pretty quick,” said the actor defensively, as if slipping into a role, his teacher’s grammar displaced for effect. “Also, until a few years ago we didn’t have the money for that kind of thing,” he added somberly in his natural voice.

  “What about now? That can’t be a problem now.”

  Dowling dropped his eyes to the flight bag at his feet. “If I’d found her sooner … maybe. But we were both late bloomers; we got married in our forties—two oddballs looking for something. It’s too late now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I never should have made this goddamn picture. Never.”

  “Why did you?”

  “She said I should. To show people I could play something more than a driveling, south-forty dispenser of fifth-rate bromides. I told her it didn’t matter.… I was in the war, in the Marine Corps. I saw some crap in the South Pacific but nothing to compare with what she went through, not a spit in the proverbial bucket. Jesus! Can you imagine what it must have been like?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  The actor looked up from the flight bag, a half-drawn smile on his lined, suntanned face. “You, good buddy? Not unless you were caught in Korea—”

  “I wasn’t in Korea.”

  “Then you’d be hard put to imagine it any more than I. You were too young and I was too lucky.”

  “Well, there was …” Converse fell silent; it was pointless. It had happened so often he did not bother to think about it anymore. ’Nam had been erased from the national conversational psyche. He knew that if he reminded a man like Dowling, a decent man, the air would be filled with apologies, but nothing was served by a jarring remembrance. Not as it pertained to Mrs. Dowling, born Oppenfeld. “There’s the ‘no smoking’ sign,” said Joel. “We’ll be in Hamburg in a couple of minutes.”

  “I’ve taken this flight a half-dozen times over the past two months,” said Caleb Dowling, “and let me tell you, Hamburg’s a bitch. Not German customs, that’s a snap, especially this late. Those rubber stamps fly and they push you through in ten minutes tops. But then you wait. Twice, maybe three times, it was over an hour before the plane to Bonn even got here. By the way, care to join me for a drink in the lounge?” The actor suddenly switched to his Southern dialect. “Between you and me, they make it mighty pleasant for ol’ Pa Ratchet. They telex ahead and Ah got me my own gaggle of cowpokes, all ridin’ hard to git me to the waterin’ hole.”

  “Well …?” Joel felt flattered. Not only did he like Dowling, but being the guest of a celebrity was a pleasant high. He had not had many pleasant things happen to him recently.

  “I should also warn you,” added the celebrity, “that even at this hour the groupies crawl out of the walls, and the airline PR people manage to roust out the usual newspaper photographers, but none of it takes too long.”

  Converse was grateful for the warning. “I’ve got some phone calls to make,” he said casually, “but if I finish them on time, I’d like very much to join you.”

  “Phone calls? At this hour?”

  “Back to the States. It’s not this hour back in … Chicago.”

  “Make them from the lounge; they keep it open for me.”

  “It may sound crazy,” said Joel, reaching for words, “but I think better alone. There are some complicated things I have to explain. After customs I’ll find a phone booth.”

  “Nothing sounds crazy to me, son. I work in Holl-eee-wood.” Suddenly, the actor’s amused exuberance faded. “In the States,” he said softly, his words floating again, eyes distant again. “You remember that crap in Skokie, Illinois? They did a television show on it.… I was in the study learning lines when I heard the screams and the sound of a door crashing open. I ran out and saw my wife racing down to the beach. I had to drag her out of the water. Sixty-seven years old, and she was a little girl again, back in that goddamn camp, seeing the lines of hollow-eyed prisoners, knowing which lines were which … seeing her mother and father, her three kid brothers. When you think about it, you can understand why those people say over and over, ‘Never again.’ It can’t ever happen again. I wanted to sell that fucking house; I won’t leave her alone in it.”

  “Is she alone now?”

  “Nope,” said Dowling, his smile returning. “That’s the good part. After that night we faced it; we both knew she couldn’t be. Got her a sister, that’s what we did. Bubbly little thing with more funny stories about Cuckooburg than ever got into print. But she’s tough as they come; she’s been bouncing around the studios for forty years.”

  “An actress?”

  “Not so’s anyone could tell, but she’s a great face in the crowd. She’s a good lady, too, good for my wife.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Joel, as the aircraft’s wheels made bouncing contact with the runway and the jet engines screeched into reverse thrust. The plane rolled forward, then started a left turn toward its dock.

  Dowling turned to Converse. “If you finish your calls, ask someone for the VIP lounge. Tell them you’re a friend of mine.”

  “I’ll try to get there.”

  “If you don’t,” added the actor in his Santa Fe dialect, “see y’awl back in the steel corral. We got us another leg on this here cattle drive, pardner. Glad you’re ridin’ shotgun.”

  “On a cattle drive?”

  “What the hell do I know? I hate horses.”

  The plane came to a stop, and the forward door opened in less than thirty seconds as a number of excited passengers rapidly jammed the aisle. It was obvious from the whispers and the stares and the few who stood up on their toes to get clearer views that the reason for the swift exodus of this initial crowd was the presence of Caleb Dowling. And the actor was playing his part, dispensing Pa Ratchet benedictions with warm smiles, broad infectious winks, and deep-throated laughter, all with good-old-wrangler humility. As Joel watched he felt a rush of compassion for this strange man, this actor, this risk-taker with a private hell he shared with the woman he loved.

  Never again. It can’t ever happen again. Words.

  Converse looked down at the attaché case he held with both hands on his lap. Inside was another story, one that held a time bomb ready to detonate.

  I am back, I am well, and I am at your service. Also words from another time—but full of menace for the present, for they were part of the story of a living man’s silent return. A spoke in the wheel of Aquitaine.

  The first rush of curious passengers filed through the exit door after the television star, and Joel slipped into the less harried line. He would go through customs as rapidly and as unobtrusively as possible, then find a dark corner of the airport and wait in the deepest shadows until the loudspeakers announced the plane for Cologne-Bonn.

  Goebbels and Hess accepted Dr. Heinrich Leifhelm’s offer with enthusiasm. One can easily imagine the propaganda expert visua
lizing the image of this blond Aryan physician of “impeccable credentials” spread across thousands of pamphlets confirming the specious theories of Nazi genetics, as well as his all too willing condemnation of the inferior, avaricious Jew; he was heaven-sent. Whereas for Rudolf Hess, who wanted more than his little boys to be accepted by the Junkers and the monied class, the Herr Doktor was his answer; the physician was obviously a true aristocrat, and in time, quite possibly a lover.

  The confluence of preparation, timing and appearance turned out to be more than young Stoessel-Leifhelm could have imagined. Adolf Hitler returned from Berlin for one of his Marienplatz rallies, and the imposing Doktor, along with his intense, well-mannered son, was invited to dinner with the Führer. Hitler heard everything he wanted to hear, and Heinrich Leifhelm from that day until his death in 1934 was Hitler’s personal physician.

  There was nothing that the son could not have, and in short order he had everything he wanted. In June of 1931 a ceremony was held at the National Socialists’ headquarters, where Heinrich Leifhelm’s marriage to “a Jewess” was proclaimed invalid because of a “concealment of Jewish blood” on the part of an “opportunistic Hebrew family,” and all rights, claims and inheritances of the children of that “insidious union” were deemed void. A civil marriage was performed between Leifhelm and Marta Stoessel, and the true inheritor, the only child who could claim the name of Leifhelm, was an eighteen-year-old called Erich.

  Munich and the Jewish community still laughed, but not as loudly, at the absurd announcement the Nazis inserted in the legal columns of the newspapers. It was considered nonsense; the Leifhelm name was a discredited name, and certainly no paternal inheritance was involved; finally it was all outside the law. What they were only beginning to understand was that the laws were changing in changing Germany. In two short years there would be only one law: Nazi determination.