The Vengeance of Rome

  ‘Brodmann the Jew? The Soviet agent? What can you tell me about him? This would help me in Berlin. And that would let me help you. Where did you last see him?’

  ‘I saw him in Paris. In New York. Perhaps Cairo. Tangier. Rome. He followed me here. I might have seen him in Berlin. In Munich. He is my nemesis. He hates me. He is implacable.’

  ‘He is Cheka?’

  ‘He reports directly to Stalin.’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  It is clear to me he thinks Brodmann is my invention. But Schnauben is himself my invention. Through him I survive. He is the phantasm I create to facilitate my journey into the future.

  ‘And he followed you to Tangier?’

  ‘He is a bloodhound. I told you.’

  Holding a small, leather-bound notebook, Sturmführer Schnauben jots a memorandum with a slender silver pencil. I disguise my triumph. My trick is to make my file so huge it will become impossible to organise.

  ‘Brodmann tells me you are a cocaine addict. Is that how you came by these delusions?’

  He frequently makes this suggestion. Before Brodmann, he credited Prince Freddy with the calumny. Then it was Kitty. Then Kolya. Even Mrs Cornelius has been summoned to support his tricks. I reply as I have always replied.

  ‘I am addicted to nothing but the truth. To science.’

  ‘You were naturally suspicious, eh? Naturally given to sweating day and night, raving in your sleep?’

  ‘You know nothing of this. Given my conditions, Sturmführer Schnauben, it is not surprising. I have been here for — for how long?’

  ‘You have been here for almost five months. I would guess that you have a powerful patron, Herr Peters. Oh, yes. Some old fan of yours in Berlin is looking after you. Someone with the Führer’s ear, I’d say.’

  Mrs Cornelius! ‘I’ll be released?’

  ‘No, but you will not be shot. I have had no instructions. Not yet, at any rate. Who is it? Some old lover? We are a sentimental people. You should be grateful. Such a thing would not save you in Russia.’

  It occurs to me that Brodmann and Schnauben are negotiating an exchange. Am I to be sent back to Moscow? In return for a captured German spy? I have no means of escaping such a fate. Yet what can be worse than this? When I first arrived the stink gagged me. Only I appeared to notice it. I am too refined for this life. The striped prison uniform and cap were not clean. I had to stand before the SS, holding my cap before me, at attention. Yes, sir. I understand, sir. I had to march at a run. Into the barracks. The straw of the palliasse was becoming rancid, even then. There was a brute with a badge on his uniform. He was the hut capo. To prove himself, he behaved worse than the SS. For the first few days I had a blue and yellow star on my sleeve. It was supposed to be violet. I was shocked. This branded me a Jew. When I was taken in to Schnauben, I begged to have this removed. He made a joke. ’Blue and yellow make violet, don’t they?’ But he saw the justice of this. The yellow star was replaced with a blue triangle, which meant ‘emigrant’. My crimes were still numinous, but my status was improved. Only weeks later, after I had suffered the most vicious and humiliating treatment, did I eventually get my violet armband.

  ‘White Aces? Is that what you told me one of your films was called.’ He looks back through his notebook. ‘I understood that was Prince Badehoff-Krasnya’s favourite. You told us you were an officer in the White Army.’

  ‘The Germans were our allies.’

  ‘An American in the Russian Imperial Army?’

  ‘A volunteer flyer. I joined in 1916.’

  ‘At the age of sixteen?’

  ‘Exactly. My father was a dentist. He married a Russian woman. Then we all went home to America in 1910. My father took us to Odessa in 1914. By 1924 we were back in New York. Driven out by the Reds.’

  ‘Yes. And then you went to Hollywood. Your films speak for themselves, of course. Would you be prepared to fly for the Reich?’

  ‘Of course. I sent my plans to Reichspräsident Göring. I am an expert pilot, especially of my own craft. Mussolini himself asked me to teach his son Bruno to fly.’

  One moment he pretends to disbelieve me. The next, he will accept everything. ‘And when you went into film-making with Prince “Mongol”, what were your arrangements? A percentage of the profits, perhaps?’

  ‘We had no arrangements. He was blackmailing me. I hardly knew the man. He threatened me with exposure. Originally I didn’t know he made pornography. But he concocted a story.’

  ‘Fiction upon fiction.’ Schnauben walks to the window. He smokes another cigarette. ‘What about these financial dealings of yours in Paris?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with the financial side of that scheme. I merely designed the airship. I had innovative ideas. I wanted to see them made concrete.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you are an inventor.’

  ‘I have invented everything.’ My secret. I have invented him.

  ‘Stavisky? He is your cousin?’

  ‘We were never related.’

  ‘You heard he had shot himself?’

  ‘Inevitable, I suspect, in such an introspective man. A private man. No doubt a manic-depressive.’

  And Shura? Was he, too, dead? Really dead, this time? My past is reinvented for me by liars. I met a Jew in Odessa. He put a piece of metal in my stomach. I can feel it there to this day. It is in the shape of a star. The points prick at my innards.

  ‘You are a man of many identities. The doctors will be interested in you.’

  Taking a deep pull on his cigarette, he strolls to the window and tugs a cord at the bottom of the blind. The blind shoots up with a bang, silhouetting his unreadable face. The grey eyes stare from hollow darkness. The smoke pours from his mouth and nostrils. The sun is up. A voice shrieks an order. Bodies begin to convulse. The Dachau day has begun.

  * * * *

  FIFTY

  Originally thirty-two of us occupied the long block. The majority were red or green triangles or violets, like myself. We were regarded as the aristocrats among the prisoners. Social misfits, such as Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, were the least favoured. Jehovah’s Witnesses were also hated, for some reason. They had their own triangle, which was purple. From our ranks were drawn the capos and camp servants. Having, on my arrival, been mislabelled a Jew, some of that mud still stuck to me, so I could not hope for promotion to capo. But by and large my hut-mates were no more prejudiced than I was, and we got along reasonably well. They were almost all red triangles, Sozis, commies or dissident Nazis, like Röhm’s SA rounded up in the putsch. Some were genuine criminals. The hut’s senior man, an ex-burglar and anarchist called Hoch, was not overly strict.

  For the most part I was able to avoid the daily brutalities of the camp. While I continued to amuse him, Sturmführer Schnauben offered me a certain protection from the worst excesses of the guards. They laughed at me. Their nickname for me was ‘the ex-Jew’. I was lucky. I was in a wretched position, but I was actually leading a charmed life. They respected my armband. Luckily, nobody associated me with the SA.

  I trembled often, convinced that Röhm had died because of what he knew. Strasser had died for the same reason. Almost everyone associated with the Raubal affair was either dead or in danger. Only Hanfstaengl and Hess were still alive, as far as I knew.

  By some miracle I had so far not been closely connected with Röhm. Such a large dossier on me existed from other sources; no one had thought to compile one on my association with the party. Physically, too, I had changed. When Baldur von Schirach visited Dachau, he did not recognise me. I saw him sharing a joke with Himmler but it would have been death to have raised my voice. I knew if any one of those high-ranking Nazis should ever recall having been introduced to me in Röhm’s company and put two and two together, or if Himmler took a special interest in my file and its details, my end would be certain.

  I had no way of identifying my ‘protector’ in Berlin. Schnauben had mentioned a ‘guardian angel’ more than o
nce, though never by name. I owed my violet armband to Kolya, I knew. But who else saw to my safety? I was baffled. Suppose Göring, planning to claim my inventions as his own, did not understand them enough to have me done away with but could not afford to release me? I devoted considerable time to the problem. Certainly it could not be Hitler himself. Nor was it likely to be Himmler. Goebbels, too, was not an obvious candidate. It could only be Göring, possibly interceding on behalf of Mrs Cornelius.

  With Himmler’s help, Hitler had killed everyone who knew even the smallest details of his sexual history. Poor Father Stempfle had been finished off in this very camp. Shot, one of the politicals told me, in the usual spot behind the Kommandanturarrest, where he, too, had at first been a privileged prisoner. Dozens of known members of the Black Front had been killed there, behind the Bunker. The politicals often spoke of them. Many were left-wing Nazis themselves. Hitler had lost thousands of supporters because of his so-called purge.

  Thanks to the circumstances of my second arrest, I was not even regarded by the SS as a political prisoner now, and this, with my violet armband, offered certain privileges. I had greater freedom to move about the camp. I could keep my eyes and ears open. Guards trusted me to run errands for them, rewarding me with extra food and occasional luxuries, such as a piece of soap. As well as the ex-Jew, I was der Spanier or sometimes Spanner. A pun I never quite understood.

  While the communist propaganda machine has been blamed for its exaggerations, it is true that in Dachau the Jews were not well treated. They were given the dirtiest and most humiliating jobs, and frequently beaten, even killed, before our eyes for the smallest infringements of camp discipline. Reds and others, many of them pure-bred Aryans, suffered the same fate. I agree with those scholars who say the figure of six million is exaggerated, but nobody can deny the suffering of individuals I saw daily, especially after an old, but unwelcome, acquaintance came to share my quarters. I had hoped never to see him again, that extremely lucky man. I needed no more of the type of luck he brought with him.

  He had been on holiday in Rome during the blood purge. Much to his surprise he had returned to find himself under arrest. He remained in a state of shocked dismay, yet more than fortunate to be alive. If he had been at the Hotel Deesen, Bad Godesberg, on the night Röhm and his colleagues were there, he would certainly have died. He understood I would not betray him if he was careful not to accuse me of being Jewish. To Seryozha’s good fortune, he had been designated a political, with a red triangle, and not a homosexual with a pink.

  Sergei Andreyovitch Tsipliakov had been running to fat the last I had seen him. After so many months, first as a prisoner in Stadelheim, and later in another section of Dachau, he had lost weight but was still bulky and unhealthy when he arrived at our hut. Hoch, our hut commander, had rather let us down. He had abused his privileges. During an attempt to escape, he had been shot. His replacement was Seryozha, already popular with the Dachau authorities as a good, strict leader.

  Seryozha’s old, confiding manner had disappeared. To the other inmates he presented only a scowling swagger. Gone were his exaggerated, effeminate mannerisms. In the whole of the camp, only I ever knew he had been a ballet dancer. If he thought I was Jewish, he kept the idea to himself. Indeed, he confirmed to the others that I was of Spanish extraction. He understood I had some relationship with Schnauben and could always betray him. He was wary of my violet armband. Needless to say I cultivated him as a friend, though it was not always within my power or inclination, especially when he went on one of his rampages or ‘pogromettes’, as he described them with a new tone of camp whimsicality.

  That so many of these inmates had brought their suffering on themselves hardly excused Seryozha’s brutality towards them. He had to demonstrate his skills to our masters. I suppose I sympathised, but some of his actions sickened me.

  Even in Stadelheim during my first incarceration, I had witnessed some moving scenes. Certain Jews had been picked on by SA. I had heard them weeping and begging not to be beaten as they were dragged out of their cells. Even the most anti-Jewish inmates among us had been shocked by what was done to them. Some guards and trustees were positively sadistic. A good few of the arrested Jews, who had committed no crime, had died as a result of their privations. In Dachau, however, things were a little different.

  To show his zealotry and his keenness, and in the hope of early release, Seryozha made it his daily habit to pick on Jews. For the entertainment of our masters he would force them out of their hut, where they lived in worse conditions than we did, and assemble them there or in the Appellplatz. These were usually the Jews who were schanung, or off work for some reason. Though I had known him for many years, I would never have guessed this side to his character. He clearly derived real pleasure from hurting the Strajkompanie.

  On the parade ground Seryozha would sometimes be allowed to use the Pfahl, a pole on which a man with his hands tied behind his back could be suspended and sometimes whipped. But usually he made them stand before him in the wide Lagerstrasse. There he would kick and beat any ‘son of Shem’ who so much as raised his eyes to him. He would attack them with his whip or anything else he had to hand. He would revile them, torment them, make them beg for mercy even as he opened his flies and pissed on them. He was a great source of entertainment to the SS guards, who cheered him on. They were almost in awe of him in the early days, before such brutality became the norm. Scarcely anyone there was as vicious as Seryozha when he chose to take against a Jew. Within the first two weeks of our being reunited he had beaten half a dozen ‘Jerusalem colonels’ so badly that they died of their injuries. He killed two by splitting their heads open with the heavy stick he sometimes used. The Jews knew him well, and their fear of him could often be comical. Those who lived would do anything he told them. He was the one who, for the entertainment of the SS men at Easter, re-enacted the Crucifixion, using a young Christian priest as Jesus and a crowd of Jews as his tormentors. Nailed rather haphazardly to his cross, the man died of strangulation before his three days were up.

  Yet to me Seryozha remained the same rather sentimental friend of former days, sharing a nostalgia for our mutual past. Perhaps even Satan himself needs a confidant. He liked to discuss St Petersburg before the Revolution. He blamed the Jewish Reds for destroying his career. Even though he confided in me, he never mentioned what that career had been. In some ways he knew he had turned into a monster and could be remorseful. ‘As bad as any Cossack.’ His melancholy made him cruel. No doubt he lived in terror of replacing his red triangle with a pink one. I had no choice but to express sympathy, and he was grateful for that, though he never touched me sexually. I was grateful in turn.

  ‘It’s the sneg I miss most, Dimka dear. I miss it so badly, you know. The way another man might miss a woman. Sometimes I feel so ashamed of myself when I’ve hurt some of these people. I am not proud of myself. I do filthy things. Yet I understand how God has chosen me to be their nemesis. If it were not me, it would be someone worse. Jews refused God’s revelation. Perhaps I can help bring the survivors to Him. I am His instrument. I know it sometimes upsets you, and I am deeply sorry.’

  Not for a moment did he allow himself his former lacrymosity, though he could show a certain kindness. ‘I’d never do anything to you, my best and oldest friend. You have always been a good Christian. But unredeemed Jews attack the very substance of our civilisation. By rejecting Christ, they themselves are effectively Christ’s murderers, every one of them. Their writings sent hundreds of honest Germans to destruction. They squeak for mercy now, but they did not demand mercy for all those Russians and Poles they killed. You know as well as I do that their Red co-religionists have been responsible for the deaths of millions of our countrymen. And who benefited?’

  I could only agree. Moreover, if I challenged his ideas, I might turn him against me. He needed me to support his arguments. I had learned the virtues of silence with both my captors and my comrades. The Jews feared him as much as he fea
red the pink triangle. He displayed his brute manliness at every opportunity. In the way he strutted and swung his whip, he was determined to present the most aggressive masculinity possible. His friendship was of considerable advantage to me, since we now shared a home in which he was the undisputed master.

  Seryozha was especially cruel to Jewish artists. After he had been in our hut for a month or so, he proposed he prepare an entertainment for the camp. With our Lagerälteste’s permission, who in turn received it from his Untersturmführer, Seryozha formed a number of the Jewish prisoners into a ballet troupe to put on a burlesque of Swan Lake, in which Jewish elders were supposed to represent swans, with goose feathers stuck up their backsides. He, of course, did not take part. He was Diaghilev, these days, never Nijinsky.

  The burlesque was a massive success, popular with everyone, inmates included. Seryozha became a camp favourite for a while. His ‘performing Jews’ were even part of a general SS entertainment that Christmas. Seryozha was promised his freedom. Then suddenly, supposedly at the suggestion of Commandant Eicke and to my own personal relief, Seryozha and his performing Jews were taken away in a ‘trainload’, apparently ‘on tour’, and I never saw any of them again. Years later I heard a rumour that he had been promoted to the SS and helped set up one of the Polish camps. He had always believed his skills to be underappreciated. Possibly he even left the SS and at last fulfilled his ambition to command a ballet company entertaining the troops at the front.