Songs of the Dead (9 page)

“I'm really sorry.”

Neither of us says anything for the longest time.

Finally I ask, “What can I do? How can I help?”

More silence. It stretches. Allison doesn't look at me, and I look away, too. At the edge of my vision I see her chest rise and fall with each breath.

She takes air in, holds it, then says in measured syllables, “I'm still lying to you.”

I know enough to wait. I still look away. After a time I look at her, at first not at her face, but at the movement of her chest, then up, to her chin, her cheeks, her eyes.

“My sophomore year in college I had a class called
Philosophy
of the Enlightenment
. The teacher paid me way too much attention, wanted to conference too often, sat too close during the conferences. It was a night class. One night I was the last student conferencing. We were probably the only people in the building, certainly the only ones on the floor. He shut the door behind me. Usually he left it slightly open, which I believe was department policy. I should have gotten up and re-opened the door. I should have gotten up and walked out of the building. There are many things I should have done. I didn't. I sat down. He sat next to me, too close of course. I remember that several times he brushed his arm against mine as he looked over the paper we were supposed to be talking about. And then he told me I was beautiful. I should have gotten up and walked out, but I didn't. For a long time I hated myself for doing nothing. He said it again. Put his hand on my arm, held it there. I put my paper in my pack and stood up. I took one step and he pushed me against the wall. I told him No. I told him so many times. But I should have screamed. I should have kicked him. I kept telling him No. He held me there with one hand on my throat. I kept saying No. I didn't scream.”

I look in her eyes. She's still not looking at me. I don't move. I'm scared to reach to take her hand, scared to do the wrong thing.

“The class was misnamed. It should have been
Gender Relations 101
.”

I don't know what she wants me to do. I don't know what to do.

“I didn't tell the police. I should have screamed. I should have kicked him. I never went back to class. I got an A. I guess I passed
Gender Relations 101
with flying colors.”

I close my eyes, take a deep breath. I open them again.

“I was young. And nobody would have believed me. Not the cops, not the other students. Nobody. They would have thought it was like that horrible movie
Oleana
.”

“Which is exactly why Mamet wrote it.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Of course.”

She nods, sits silent, then says, “After that I started taking self-defense classes. If that happened now I'd slit his fucking throat.” She reaches into her pack, pulls out a knife, opens it, shuts it, puts it back.

I think for a long time before I say, “I would help you do that, if that's what you want to do.”

“Do you mean that?”

I think some more, then say, “I do.”

“Thank you,” she says. “He's not worth it now. Or maybe he is. He's probably still doing this to other young women. Someone should do something. I just don't know that he would be worth the risk right now, to me or especially to you.”

“You did nothing wrong, by the way.”

“I should have screamed.”

“Someone once told me that we almost never get mad the first time something bad happens. That first time we're so surprised that we don't know what to do. Then afterwards we stew and reflect, and so the next time we're prepared.”

“Some of us don't learn after only one time.”

“I don't und—” I stop, then say, “I'm sorry.”

“I think the worst part is that all throughout he kept saying over and over how beautiful I am, and how he didn't do this with— can you believe he actually fucking used the word
with
, and not
to
— all of his students, but that I was so beautiful. Beautiful, he said. So so beautiful.”

“I'm sorry,” I say again. I wish there were more I could say. But finally I know at least one small thing I can do. “I will never again use that word around you, or any other word like that.”

“No—”

“I don't want to trigger you. You feeling safe is more impor- tant to me than me telling you that you—” I stop myself, then say, “More important to me than me commenting on your looks.”

“No.”

“I'll do what you want,” I say.

“I know I have to do the work myself. I know you can't fix it for me. But I want to have that with you. I want you to say it. Not someone else. I want you to help me make that word clean again. I want you to help me make it mean what it's supposed to.”

“He never saw me,” says Allison. “Not him, not anyone. They didn't even see my skin. They saw what they wanted, saw what they'd been trained to see. I was nowhere in their view. He was never holding
me
against the wall. I was being held, but in all of this, he never perceived me at all. So far as he was concerned, I didn't even exist.”

eight

enemy territory

Georg Elser was not the only person who tried to kill Hitler, and Hitler's life was saved not only by fog and by the seemingly meaningless choice of when to set a timer. In an odd way, Elser himself not only almost killed Hitler but in that attempt also saved Hitler's life.

In the fall of 1939, as Elser meticulously hollowed out the spot to hold his bomb, others, too, put in place their plans. Chief among the planners were many high-ranking members of the Wehrmacht (German Army) and Abwehr (foreign intelligence), who hated Hitler because they saw, rightly, that he was launching an offensive, illegal, and dishonorable war that could destroy much of Europe and, closer to their hearts, would destroy Germany. But many of these generals, trained in war though they were—which when you get past the abstractions means trained in the art and science of killing en masse—scrupled at assassination. The planners uniformly abhorred Hitler, hated what he was doing, wished he was dead or at least gone, but many—even those who had killed in battle and who commanded campaigns in which hundreds of thousands of lives were lost—could not themselves cross the moral line of killing an individual, especially one who was their leader, that is, one who was higher in their social hierarchy, and most especially one to whom they had sworn personal oaths of loyalty. Many valued their word and their honor more than the lives of those killed by Hitler and his policies.

But some did not.

Abwehr Major General Hans Oster had from the beginning recognized that Hitler must die: Hitler's power over the German people and over the majority of German generals was too great to allow anyone to stop his actions without physically killing him. Oster famously said, “There are those who will say that I am a traitor, but I truly am not. I consider myself a better German than all those who run after Hitler. My plan and my duty is to free Germany, and with it the world, of this pestilence.”

Oster's question became: How do we free Germany from this pestilence, when so many refuse to strike? On the first of November, 1939, Oster put the problem succinctly: “We have no one to throw the bomb which will liberate our generals from their scruples.”

The man to whom Oster said this, Dr. Erich Kordt, replied, “All I need is the bomb.”

Oster responded, “You will have the bomb by 11 November.”

Kordt was well-placed to carry off the assassination. His job as a Foreign Ministry spokesperson not only caused him to follow the Foreign Minister “like a shadow,” as one writer put it, but made him no longer subject to identity checks and gave him complete access at any time to the Chancellery. He was even allowed to wait in the main anteroom until Hitler appeared.

Having decided to make the attempt, Kordt went to the Chancellery more often than normal so the guards would become additionally desensitized to his presence. He told his cousin and a few others close to him of his plans. I do not know what else he said to them, or what they said to him. I do not know if they spoke of his almost certain death.

Kordt recorded a statement to be delivered after the assassination to the American Chargé d'Affaires and to a member of the Swiss Legation. All that remained was for Oster to provide the explosives.

This was harder than it would seem. Even a Major General was not allowed to requisition explosives without good reason. Oster told co-conspirator Major Lahousen, head of the Abwehr's Section II (Sabotage), that someone was ready to kill Hitler. Lahousen requested a few days to figure out how to remove explosives and a detonator from his section. It would be difficult, but could be done.

Hitler intended to invade France, Belgium, and the Netherlands on November 12 (the invasion was delayed). The plan by the resistance was to get Kordt the bomb, and for him to kill Hitler, on November 11.

Elser's bomb went off at 9:20 p.m. on November 8.

Kordt arrived at Oster's home late in the afternoon of the eleventh to pick up the explosives. Just as I do not know what Kordt said to his cousin, I do not know what he was thinking as he walked up to the house. I do not know if he considered that this might be the last time he would see trees, the last time he would see Oster's face. I don't know if he took in breaths that were extra deep, to taste even the foul city air. I do not know if he was scared, anxious, excited, grim, determined. I do know that he was ready to die. Oster let him in. Perhaps Kordt could see immediately on Oster's face that something was wrong. Perhaps he could not: perhaps years of organizing resistance to Hitler had taught Oster how to mask his feelings. In any case Oster told him the bad news: increased security following Elser's attempt had made it impossible to acquire explosives. Had they made the attempt one week earlier, or had Elser's attempt come one week later, they might have been able to procure the explosives, and Hitler may have been killed. As it was, Hitler survived.

Kordt begged Oster to let him kill Hitler with a revolver.

“I can make it through security.”

“You are never alone with him, and there are too many aides, orderlies, and visitors. Someone would be able to stop you.

We cannot risk it.”

Kordt did not make the attempt.

His brother did. Theodor Kordt was also a diplomat. As Ambassador to England, he passed on all information he could to the British. He pleaded with them to not appease Hitler, to stand up to him, to stop him from invading Czechoslovakia. They ignored him.

He, like his brother, volunteered to kill Hitler, knowing it would cost him his life. But he, unlike his brother, often met with Hitler, close-up, where no one could stop him.

A meeting was scheduled. On the appointed day Kordt ate his breakfast, considered it may be his last. He put the gun into his pocket. He went to the Chancellery. He passed one checkpoint, and then another. No sentries searched him. He arrived for the meeting.

He found that Hitler had, for reasons unknown to Kordt, cancelled the meeting. Kordt went home. He did not make another attempt.

Nika almost never remains on the table. Even when she repeats to him the lines he has made her memorize, even when she groans or screams from the dull or sharp pains he inflicts, she herself is nowhere in the room. She spends more and more time inside her box of memories, with her mother and father and brother and Osip and the land where she grew up. She was, for a time, afraid to bring any of them out, especially Osip, for fear the man would by association contaminate them, but the solution she realized was to not bring out the box for her to hold and open and look at, but instead to leave the box where it was, deep inside, and for her to crawl into it. There she sits surrounded by those she loves as she listens to the distant screams of someone she no longer knows.

This is how she spends her time.

Her bladder brings her back. Her captor—she now knows his name is Jack—has a horror of her bodily fluids, and so periodically uncuffs her, recuffs her hands, and leads her to a toilet in a small room to the side of the basement. He watches out of the corners of his eyes for quick movements as she empties her bladder and bowels and cleans herself. He returns her to the table.