The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

62 The Hymen Cap 1942

A night of bombing in Hamburg felt like four or five nights elsewhere. The planes arrived in groups, loaded with fire, and relieved themselves over the beautiful old residential neighbourhoods before vanishing west again like satiated hyenas. This gave us a pause for a nap until the next round arrived and sirens and anti-aircraft guns sounded once more, followed by a downpour of whistling bombs, and those horrific bangs started all over again.

‘I wander about on my stumps at night. I need only half a sleep,’ said my friend Aaron with a wink.

‘Where do you sleep?’

‘Oh, I try to spread myself around. Once I slept in a drawer, another time in a swan’s nest. If I sleep on something light I sleep heavily, and if I sleep on something heavy I sleep lightly. If I sleep inside I sleep in, if I sleep outside I sleep like a dog, with one eye open. It’s good to sleep in the gutter because then you dream of tea parties with God. Oh, those cakes! But the safest place of all is in a bomb crater because Tommy’s a miser and never drops a bomb in the same place twice. Besides, nothing scares me, least of all death. Whatever will be will be, no point in doing things by halves!’

It was as if it had all been scripted long ago. Like an old play. He had rehearsed answers to every question and never ran out of words. And every line contained some ear-soothing energy; they came sparking out of him like electrical cables out of a power plant, and his voice was like red wine to the ear, gently flowing, savoury, and intoxicating, from that death mask of a face.

And then he sang for me:

God, I was bewitched by that tailless centaur with his Chaplin moustache! But then my other friend reappeared again, Hans Smartypants, the one with the white eyebrows and helmet. He started by shooing off the Dutch countrywomen, who clambered to their feet and were on their way. Then finally he came to us.

Hitler’s half-brother launched into a brand-new routine.

‘Good morning, good morning, good boy. And what pretty boots you have! If they made boots like that for the arms, I would have dashed to the front line ages ago, to smack the arses of those Russians east of the Don and then find my feet in the infantry, because in war I’m good at everything, except legging it, of course!’

‘Who are you?’ Hans asked, slightly thrown off-kilter, before turning to me: ‘Is he with you?’

‘Peace be with you because the war sure won’t. But you’ve managed to protect this fortress and that is good. Yes, an honourable achievement, which I will be reporting to my people in due course. My name’s Aaron and I’m a Hitler, the little brother of our great father, his majesty’s half-brother, to be more precise. Yes, half a Hitler, as it happens, but the other half bore no relation to my brother and me and therefore had to go,’ said Aaron, making a whistling sound over his stumps and an appropriate gesture.

The white-eyebrowed soldier stared at this freak a long time. Who was… no, what was this lump who spoke up to him like a slave but down at him like some high-ranking aristocrat? Was this (!) his brother? Yes, maybe they were not that unlike, although this one’s hair was curly and his nose seemed to be squeezed out of the depths of Jewdom. The boy pondered on the sacred name a while.

‘Heil Hitler!’ the young Hans exclaimed, his voice echoing against the hall’s 121-foot-high ceiling, thrusting his arm into the air as he straightened and clicked his heels.

I’ve witnessed many comical scenes in my life, but the puerile reaction of that soldier had to be considered one of the funniest. But I didn’t laugh, except on the highlands of my soul, in the shelter of a little shed that stands there. On the other hand, I could see that my friend Aaron was heroically struggling not to smile as he responded to the salute. It was a comedian’s smirk in the middle of a performance. And finally I understood that man, that half-man, half-reckless flippancy.

The soldier continued: ‘Footman Hans Jürgen Rupert, sir, from Air Defence Division 161 B, under the command of Sergeant Major Gunter von Affenberg. North Hamburg Defence Unit, transport and construction.’

Aaron was still struggling with himself but did his best.

‘End of communications, message received, hand at ease. You are a splendid specimen of the Aryan race. The future is ours. Have you procreated?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Produced offspring?’

‘I have no children. I’m still young.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen years old, sir.’

‘Good. Can you sire frogs?’

‘Huh?’

‘Got any seed in your mill?’

‘Erm… yes, I think so.’

‘Aryan seed is the gold of this earth. Mark my words. Once the tap has been connected, it’s got to be turned on. Superiority is one thing, but expansion is another. Every boy must supply his yield; every maiden must nourish her stock. Just think about it, my good Hans. You produce hundreds of soldiers a day, allowing them to colonise the palm of your hand, precious conquests no doubt, but ones that do little to expand our land-thirsty Reich. You must find a hundred women today and two hundred tomorrow. Our shelters are full of them! Go fill them to the full! That’s what we need. Why do you think we’re getting nowhere in the mud graves out east and making no headway against those Rrrandy Rrrrussians? Because we’re running out of people! We need soldiers!’

I looked up at Hans Jürgen, who was staring down at the man on the ground with a Hitlerian glint in his eyes, a glint that yelled: I recognise him! This is his brother!

‘This is something I often bring up with brother Dolfy. “You should have children, my dear brother!” I say to him over a mug of beer. “You should be fucking women, three a day, so that you can have thirty thousand children in ten years!” Think of what that would do. Our men would be standing outside Peking, not Moscow. I myself have performed my nocturnal duties and produced seventeen children in seven months in the villages of Bavaria but had to flee when the farmers saw Jewish noses popping out of their daughters’ crotches. I ran so fast that my legs ran ahead of me and now live far from their torso and back, totally childless in America.’

‘Jew… Jewish nose?’ asked the soldier, just as I had done before.

‘Yes, sorry, did I forget to introduce myself? Aaron Hitler, the last Jew in my brother’s empire. I was so high up on the alphabetical list that they accidentally skipped over me.’

The clown lifted his hat, revealing the yarmulke that lay on the crown of his head beneath it, a black rag buried under his dirty hair. The soldier swallowed this sight with difficulty; his Adam’s apple momentarily jammed above the tightly buttoned collar of his jacket, hanging there from a few stiff bristles. I was therefore relieved when Aaron slipped his hat back on again.

‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m only half-Jewish. Both my legs were Catholics. Clean-living priests, the pair of them, who lived to make children hop on their knees. But they had problems being branded with a yellow star. But no worries, dear Hans, our beloved brother is Aryan from head to toe and not to be blamed if his brother is Jewish. That was our father, Alois, who so badly forgot himself when he took Dolfy to school one day, made the poor fellow wait in the corridor while he was having it off with that tart of a mother of mine, triggering an outrage that set the whole of Europe ablaze. Yes, I’m… I’m all to blame! My conception, my birth! Me! My father’s original sin! My brother’s revenge! The suffering of mankind! Oh my, oh my!’

He waved a hand in the general direction of the city, and in the same moment another bomb fell out by the Gänsemarkt.

‘But according to our Jewish faith, every conception brings shame to our tribe, and that is why we circumcised men wear a hymen on our heads.’ He lifted his hat again to reveal the kippah. ‘Crowned by original sin, we roam the earth hunched under the burden of sex and are daily reminded of our fathers’ sins. I myself wear the ancient relic of my foremother’s hymen, that of Rebecca the daughter of Salomon of the Jordan Valley in southern Judaea, who lived in the first century before Christ. My ancestors and grandfathers, six hundred men, have worn this on their heads for two thousand years across two thousand mountains, all the way down to the beer cellars of Bavaria. Care for a sniff?’

He removed the hymen hat from the crown of his head and raised it to the soldier, who by now had turned crimson. I struggled as before to smother my laughter, while at the same time remaining awestruck by this torrent of words. Hans Jürgen hesitated, then finally bowed to the name of Hitler and stuck out his nose to get a whiff of the two-thousand-year-old hymen.

‘According to our faith, the oldest male in the family must dip the hymen in his sperm before passing it on to the youngest offspring at his circumcision so that here’ – he turned the skullcap over, making it look like a primitive bowl in the palm of his hand – ‘here in this cap we have preserved the life juice of generations, from Abraham to Alois! Yes, yes, him as well, Dolfy’s and my father, he contributed to this cap, too.’ I had started to laugh out loud. I just couldn’t keep it in any longer, it was impossible. ‘So here you have it, in one yarmulke, the original Hitlerian sperm from which the Führer sprouted…’

A gunshot resounded and the yarmulke glided to the floor as the half-man keeled back and his stumps swung in the air. The comedian had completed his performance. The laughter froze in my throat. I looked up. I hadn’t noticed the soldier lifting his rifle. The shot was deafening. A threadlike trail of smoke oozed out of the barrel. A threadlike trail of smoke also seemed to ooze out of the ill-fated soldier’s head as he stood over his newly fallen victim, perhaps wondering if he really had killed the Führer’s half-brother. That gave me time to clamber to my feet. By the time the soldier had finally come to himself and prepared to shoot me, I was standing on the floor and was threatening him with a hand grenade.

Dad might have been a Nazi, but he was no fool.