In Search of Klingsor. Jorge Volpi

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СКАЧАТЬ it would be as a hero, not as a fugitive.

      He turned on the faucet and waited for the hot water to pour out, but nothing more than a weak stream of lukewarm droplets emerged from the tap. “The Führer wouldn’t have stood for this,” he laughed to himself, and proceeded to bathe with the help of a towel and a freshly opened, pungent cake of soap. When he was finished, he went back to the bed and, before he knew it, fell into a deep sleep, though the unsettling dream he had nearly asphyxiated him: There he was, in the middle of a dark, rainy forest, when suddenly Vivien appeared out of nowhere. Vivien, the young black woman from Princeton with whom he had maintained a secret relationship for so long. Ruefully, he noted that his life was strewn with puddles and potholes; in fact, it seemed to have evolved into something more like a moldy, threatening swamp. In the dream, he tried to kiss Vivien when suddenly he found himself face-to-face with his ex-fiancée Elizabeth instead. “There’s lipstick on your mouth,” she said to him, and proceeded to wipe it off with a handkerchief. “You shouldn’t do that,” she reprimanded him. “It’s bad, very bad.” By the time Bacon managed to extricate himself, it was too late: Vivien had already disappeared.

      It was almost three in the afternoon when he awoke. He kicked himself: This was the worst possible thing he could have done. Not only had he neglected his work, but he had done so thrashing about in Hitler’s bedsheets! He quickly put on his clothes, scurried down the stairs, and ran as fast as he could to the pressroom at the Palace of Justice.

      A few hours later, he was informed of the news which would soon travel to the rest of the world like an infectious disease. From the crumbling streets of the ancient medieval burgh, the communiqué was sent out that the Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering—the highest-ranking Nazi prisoner sentenced by the International Military Tribunal—had been found dead in his cell a few hours before Sergeant John Woods was to carry out the hanging for which he had been sentenced. According to the rumors, Goering had ingested a capsule of cyanide, a cruel, eleventh-hour joke which allowed him the last laugh over the judges’ decision. “One day there will be statues of me in every plaza and little figurines in my likeness in every home in Germany,” the Reichsmarschall had once arrogantly proclaimed, so certain he was that he would be redeemed in the eyes of posterity. After his death, a stack of letters was found in his cell (number 5, cell block C), all of them written with the same small, precise lettering. The first of these letters explained the reasons for his suicide:

      To the Allied Control Council: I would have had no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate the execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot permit this. Moreover, I feel no moral obligation to submit to my enemies’ punishment. For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.

      On another sheet of paper, addressed to General Roy V. Rickard, member of the Quadripartite Commission in charge of supervising the executions, Goering confessed that he had always kept a capsule of cyanide close by. He also wrote a letter to his wife: “After serious consideration and sincere prayer to the Lord, I have decided to take my own life, lest I be executed in so terrible a fashion by my enemies…. My last heartbeats are for our great and eternal love.” Henry Gerecke, the Protestant pastor who ministered to the German prisoners, was the last recipient in this small pile of letters. In his note to Gerecke, Goering asked for pardon and explained that the motivation for his actions had been purely political.

      The next day, Gunther Sadel told Bacon all he knew about the matter. At 9:35 the previous evening, October 14, the guard had informed the necessary officials that the prisoner was resting peacefully in his cot after Dr. Ludwig Pflücker had administered him a sleeping pill. Just like every night, a soldier was stationed at the door to Goering’s cell, specifically to keep close watch over him until the early dawn; after all, it was to be his last night under prison surveillance. Colonel Burton Andrus, the chief officer of the prison, had suspended all external communications with the outside world as a special precaution. The guards’ only source of outside contact was a telephone line connecting them to the staff at the central offices, who continually updated them, inning by inning, with the score of the World Series, which was under way at the time.

      All of a sudden, someone began calling for Pastor Gerecke’s aid. It was the voice of Sergeant Gregori Timishin: Something was wrong with Goering. The chaplain ran toward the cell of the once plump Reichsmarschall, but when he arrived, he knew instantly that any resuscitation attempt would be pointless. Goering’s face, which had seduced so many thousands of men and women, the same face whose glare had inspired both fear and fury among his captors, was now focused on a spot somewhere far off in the distance. Only one obstinate eye remained open. His rosy complexion had turned greenish, and his body, though twenty-five kilos lighter since his imprisonment, lay like a bale of hay, impossible to move. The cell smelled like bitter almonds. Gerecke took his pulse and said, “Good Lord, this man is dead.” By the time the other members of the Joint Staffs arrived, it was already too late: Out of either cowardice or pride, Goering had foiled them.

      Bacon could hardly believe it: At the very last moment, that miserable fiend had gotten away with it. And Bacon was not alone. The general feeling among the Allied forces was one of bitter disappointment, and several newspapers even dared publish the following headline: GOERING CHEATS HIS EXECUTIONERS.

      “Where the hell did he get that pill?” Bacon asked Sadel.

      “That’s what everyone wants to know,” Sadel responded. “They’ve already launched a full-blown investigation, though for the moment are not pointing the finger at anyone. Andrus is shattered,” he added, referring to the prison director. “A lot of people think it’s his fault, but you know, Goering wasn’t the first prisoner to commit suicide. I don’t think anyone could have prevented it.”

      “But Goering! The day before his execution! It’s unbelievable.” Bacon shook his head, incredulous. “Could it have been that German doctor?”

      “Pflücker? I doubt it,” said Sadel. “It would have been too difficult. The guards always searched him carefully before he entered each cell, and the pill he gave Goering was only a tranquilizer…. No, the Reichsmarschall must have had it hidden among his things, in the storage room, and someone must have brought it to him.”

      “But who would want to help that pig?” Bacon asked, cracking his knuckles.

      “Well, it’s not as simple as it may seem. I never had contact with him, but several people have said that Hermann was quite a character. During the trial proceedings not only Germans but Americans actually sympathized with him. He was just too cynical and biting to hate.”

      A strange explanation, thought Bacon, especially coming from such a young man like Sadel, who was half Jewish and at age thirteen had been forced to flee Germany to find his father in the United States. Since then, he knew nothing of his mother’s whereabouts or whether she was alive or dead, for she had been forced to divorce his father and remain in Berlin. When he returned to Germany with General Watson, Sadel was given permission to search for her, and when he finally found her, she agreed to be one of the witnesses for the prosecution.

      “Tex Wheelis is the prime suspect,” Sadel continued. “He was the officer in charge of the storage room. They say that he and Goering had become friendly, and that he might have been the one to help him. But we want to be able to find out for certain. The men in charge want to put this issue to bed. Their opinion is that it was an accident, and they feel the case should be treated as such.”

      “An accident?” Bacon was getting more and more heated. “Hundreds of people worked for months to have him hanged and at the last minute he managed to escape. Was Hitler’s suicide in Berlin another ‘accident’? And what about the Final Solution? Doesn’t that make you feel as if all of this has been useless? That we fought against an evil that got the best of us in the end?”

      “The СКАЧАТЬ