The Secret of Lions (8 page)

The breathing became louder. Heinrik heard
panting. It was coming from the center of Adolf’s room. My father
crept closer to the door, leaning in. His vision began to clear and
he could see the figure of the cell’s occupant. The prisoner sat in
the middle of the room. Heinrik’s eyes squinted. He tried to focus.
The outline of the prisoner rose to a stance. He faced the
window.

A lightning bolt flashed outside. It
startled Heinrik and he drew back a little. He returned to his
position at the door, but this time he looked even harder. Inside
the cell, he could make out Adolf’s figure again. He stood in the
nude. There were red markings all over his body. My father noticed
the same markings drawn all over the room—the walls, the ceiling,
the floor, everywhere.

“What are the markings you have drawn on
yourself?” my father blurted out over the screaming that emitted
from the other inmates down the corridor.

The man in the cell did not answer back.
Instead, he continued to stare out the darkened window.

Heinrik could hear him mumbling something.
His ears focused on the prisoner’s words. He could barely make them
out.

“Swastika, swastika, swastika.” This was the
word that Adolf chanted over and over. His eyes were tightly shut.
The lightning filled the sky through the window. This illuminated
the cell again; Heinrik could see the room clearly. The drawings
that covered the room resembled a Greek cross with each edge bent.
Not many people had ever seen this design before. Never had my
father been more frightened by a symbol than that night.

The lightning struck again and Heinrik
noticed that the prisoner’s arm gyrated profusely. He was
masturbating to a picture that rested in his hand. It was a drawing
of a woman. She looked familiar. He could have sworn that it was
Gracy, his wife, my mother, but he could not tell for sure.

“Go away!” the prisoner screamed.

Heinrik jerked away from the door and left
cell thirteen.

26

Six Months Later

A sparrow flew over the prison yard. Its
black wings fluttered under the warm sunlight. It followed its
destiny.

The prison yard was empty, except for one
prisoner and a handful of guards. The prisoner preferred to be
separate from the rest of the inmate population. From the day that
he’d arrived, he’d gotten everything he’d desired. For reasons
unknown to Heinrik, Adolf’s requests went directly to the
warden.

He sat on a rickety bench in the middle of
the yard, sketching something. Occasionally, he looked up from his
drawings and stared into the sky as if contemplating the next
stroke of his pencil. The sparrow circled above him as if it were
lost. The prisoner doubted the bird was lost. He viewed it as a
sign, a symbol of fate.

Heinrik Kessler sat twenty or more meters
away from the other guards. This was his first time guarding Adolf.
The other guards joked about how they were assigned to follow
around one political prisoner every day at lunchtime. They never
spoke to him or even near him. It was forbidden to speak directly
to him unless he acknowledged them first. This order was issued
directly from the warden.

Heinrik ignored the conversations of the
other guards. Instead, he watched the prisoner. He felt curious
about the man, as though he had seen him before, but was unsure
from where. Having so much freedom in a prison, Adolf was
important. The thought of what the man was imprisoned for scared
Heinrik. In a prison full of murderers, this one man was granted a
variety of allowances afforded to no one else. Heinrik did not keep
up with politics. He was more interested in art and music. Yet, he
felt that it was dangerous to ignore the politics of this
particular prisoner.

“Kessler,” a voice shouted from behind him.
He turned around to see a guard standing at the entrance to the
prison’s yard. A beautiful and familiar woman stood behind the
beckoning guard. “Your wife is here.”

“Send her in; it’s all right,” he signaled
to the guard.

Gracy walked elegantly into the yard. A
hand-stitched picnic basket she’d made rested in her grasp. She
approached her husband and his fellow guards with an impressive
smile on her face. She was the key to Heinrik’s happiness. And they
could all see why. She was breathtaking.

After the Great War, Heinrik had returned
home to nothing. His parents were both accidentally killed by gas
bombardments from the German military. The Germans thought that
their village was hiding British soldiers.

My grandparents slept while it happened.
Wind carried the gas in large gusts over their home. It seeped into
their house and killed them. The locals knew of the war, but no one
thought it would come to their small town. Most of the people
Heinrik grew up with died in that war. For the longest time, he was
alone. Meeting Gracy had changed all of Heinrik’s misery. She’d
turned his life around.

Gracy stopped short of the other guards and
reached into her basket and pulled out a rolled-up napkin. She
handed it to one of them. The guard unrolled the napkin to find
fresh, hot rolls. She made baskets of rolls every week and usually
brought some.

The guards said their salutations and Gracy
continued toward her husband. She was the only part of Heinrik’s
life the other guards cared about. Since he was their supervisor,
they didn’t care for him. However, they all liked her. Most of the
other guards wondered how Heinrik had such a beautiful wife.

Heinrik kissed her, embracing as if to make
them jealous. As he held her close, he looked over her shoulder.
The prisoner stared back at him from beyond the other guards. His
stare was cold and void completely of any discernible meaning or
emotion. It was the first time Heinrik had ever made direct eye
contact with him. It gave him an eerie, nightmarish feeling of déjà
vu. It was the prisoner’s cold stare that would haunt his dreams
from that day forth.

27

20 April 1924

It was a Saturday morning when the large
black car drove up to the gates of the prison. Dust rose behind it.
The rims on the tires gleamed even under the shadow of the
watchtower. The guard approached the driver’s side window and asked
the driver for details about his business—what he was doing there,
who he was seeing.

Heinrik worked the gates most Saturdays
until noon. Afterward, he followed the prisoner from cell thirteen
around in the yard.

Whenever a car approached the gates, Heinrik
walked around to the rear of the car. It put him in an advantaged
position over the car’s occupants. He stood in their rear,
observing their movements. In case of armed hostility, all he had
to do was raise his gun and he was automatically in their blind
spots.

The driver wore a dark suit and hardly
acknowledged the other guard. Heinrik became suspicious. He pulled
his rifle up to his chest, so it was in plain view of the rearview
mirror. That way the driver of the car could see he was armed and
ready for anything. It was a risky threat, but Heinrik was almost
positive these men were legitimate agents of the government and not
marauders.

The two men in the backseat wore suits and
trench coats. They looked diplomatic or government-like. One man’s
receding hairline showed from under his hat. He wore glasses.
Heinrik stared at him. He took off his hat and glanced back at
Heinrik as if to acknowledge him. He wiped the lenses of his
glasses with his tie.

A strand of blond hair fell across Heinrik’s
face, obstructing his vision. He reached up and moved the strand.
The bald man returned his gaze toward the front of the car.

Heinrik could not hear the words exchanged
between the driver and the guard at the gate. He moved closer to
the car. His hand slid along the butt of the rifle until the
trigger was near his fingertips. He was prepared to respond quickly
if there was an altercation.

“Who are you here to see?” the guard asked
while looking at their identification papers. “Mr. Schneider?”

“We are here by permission of Dr. von Ortan,
your warden,” the bald man leaned forward from the backseat and
answered. The driver produced a writ proving this claim. He handed
it to the guard, who studied it carefully.

“I don’t doubt that you are authorized to be
here; just tell me whom you are here to see,” the guard said. He
leaned against the driver’s side door, handing the writ back to the
driver.

“We are here to see Adolf for his birthday,”
the balding man leaned forward again and answered.

“I will open the gates,” the guard said.

The black car drove off to the innermost
checkpoint. Heinrik saw that they’d brought with them large, blank
canvases resting along the passenger seat. As the car drove farther
away, he noticed small paint canisters lining the inside of the
back window. They’d brought Adolf art supplies for his
birthday.

28

Another day came and it was lunch time.
Heinrik was on duty guarding his prisoner. Adolf paced underneath a
cluster of trees on the western side of the yard. He walked around
all afternoon with a sketchpad and two pencils in his hand. He
never actually stopped to draw anything. Normally, he was peaceful
and calm. Today, he acted restless.

Heinrik noted the change in Adolf’s
behavior. With Adolf, Heinrik had learned to be ready for anything.
Although he was normally calm, the guards were well aware that
Adolf’s mood could shift at any moment and without warning. Very
quickly, he could become belligerent. Adolf was prone to unexpected
outbursts.

Heinrik didn’t care about Adolf—most of the
guards didn’t. He was not afraid of Adolf, not physically, but
there was something else about him, something terrifying.

At this moment Heinrik only wanted to see
his wife. She’d said she was going to bring him lunch today. She
snuck up behind Heinrik. He almost didn’t notice her because he
watched Adolf so closely.

“Good afternoon, darling,” she said.

Surprised, Heinrik turned to face her. Gracy
wore a green, flowing dress. He liked her body’s combination of
curves and slimness. She looked like a sculpture of a goddess. The
image of her engraved into him as if God himself had chiseled it
into his brain. She was beautiful.

Heinrik was not the only one who stared.
Adolf’s gloomy eyes traced her every step.

“Afternoon, Frau Kessler,” Heinrik snorted
in such a way so that the other guards and Adolf could hear him. He
enjoyed reminding them that Gracy was his wife and that he went
home to her.

“I hope that you brought me a delicious
turkey sandwich.”

“I did,” she said. He motioned for her to
follow him. The two of them walked to a nearby dirt mound. A dead
log lay on the ground next to it. It made a perfect bench, so they
both sat on it.

For the moment, Heinrik forgot to watch
Hitler. Instead, he enjoyed the lunch Gracy had brought.

“How has your day been? Any excitement?”
Gracy asked. Her eyes revealed her eagerness to hear an
entertaining story.

Gracy complained that her days were rather
banal. She needed his stories for the excitement. The truth was his
days were very routine. Still, he indulged her with stories of
prison breaks, fights, or mysterious visitors, anything to
entertain her.

The only terrifying story he had was the
night he’d witnessed Adolf in his murky, dank cell—masturbating.
And that one, he kept to himself. Not even the other guards knew
about it.

“Actually, there was a rumor floating around
that…Never mind. It’s probably not true,” Heinrik teasingly
boasted.

“What? Tell me. I want to hear it,” Gracy
begged. She pulled in close to him. Her hands squeezed tightly
around his left arm.

Heinrik looked down at the dirt around his
boots for a moment and smiled.

“Well, there was this rumor that a woman
came in the other day to visit her husband, a prisoner named
Meulette—an Algerian anarchist, who was captured in Munich for his
involvement with something, I don’t remember what.

"Anyway, his wife came here to see him.”

“Yes, go on,” Gracy said.

“Well, she brought him a large loaf of
French bread. I guess she thought that was appropriate because
Algiers is a part of the French empire,” Heinrik said.

“I know that,” Gracy said.

“Anyway, she walked into the visitor’s area
with it. She tripped on her way in. The bread bounced off the
ground, and when it finally stopped bouncing, a sharp metal object
protruded from it. The guards discovered she had baked the bread
around a handsaw.”

“That’s not true. I don’t believe you,”
Gracy said, smiling.

“Well, it happened,” Heinrik said, shrugging
his shoulders.

“You’re making that up.”

“Gracy, I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said,
half smiling.

Gracy laughed.

“You are strange sometimes,” she said. She
leaned in to kiss him.

Heinrik caressed her face with the back of
his hand. Before he could kiss her, a shadow cast over them. They
looked up. Gracy shuddered. Heinrik reached for his rifle, which
rested next to him. He stood with the rifle at the ready.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked
Adolf.

Adolf stood perfectly still, holding his
pencils and sketchpad down by his side. He gripped them tightly in
his left hand. Strands of brown hair fell across his face, mapping
the emptiness of his features. All that was memorable about him
were two piercing, devilish eyes and slicked, brown hair.

Finally, he spoke. “Are you a Jew? I have
never seen one so beautiful. Your blood must be Aryan in origin. My
blood is like that,” he said.

He paused for a moment.

“I have never told that to anyone before.
But I am a hundred percent Aryan.”

Heinrik ignored Adolf’s babble. Instead, he
quickly reacted. Without thinking, he butted Adolf in the jaw with
his rifle. Adolf fell back and dropped his sketchbook and
pencils.