A Quiet Flame

“I guess I can hardly walk out the door if I decide you don’t like me after all. Even at this speed. Go ahead. I can always play patience if I get bored listening.”

“My brand of straight talk is strong stuff. It needs a little mixer. Like ginger ale or Indian tonic water.” I took a bottle of whiskey out of my bag and poured a measure in my one small glass. “Or some of this, perhaps.”

“That’s quite strong for a mixer,” she said, sipping it like it was nitroglycerin.

I lit two cigarettes and put one in her mouth. “It’s a strong story. Come on. Drink up. I can only tell it to you when you’re seeing double and I’m blowing smoke in your eyes. That way you won’t notice when I grow lots of hair on my face and my teeth get longer.”

The train was leaving behind the suburbs of Buenos Aires. If only I could leave behind my own past as easily. A strong smell of seawater arrived through the open window. Gulls hovered in the blue sky close to the shore. The wheels rattled underneath the carriage floor like a six-eight march and, for a moment, I remembered the bands that had marched underneath the windows of the Adlon Hotel on the night of Monday, January 30, 1933. That was the day the world changed forever. The day Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich. I remembered how, as each band had neared Pariser Platz, where both the Adlon and the French Embassy were situated, they stopped whatever they had been playing and struck up with the old Prussian war song “We Mean to Beat the French.” That was the moment I realized that another European war was inevitable.

“All Germans carry an image of Adolf Hitler inside them,” I said. “Even the ones like me, who hated Hitler and everything he stood for. This face with its tousled hair and postage-stamp mustache haunts us all now and forevermore and, like a quiet flame that can never be extinguished, burns itself into our souls. The Nazis used to talk of a thousand-year empire. But sometimes I think that because of what we did, the name of Germany and the Germans will live in infamy for a thousand years. That it will take the rest of the world a thousand years to forget. Certainly if I live to be a thousand years old, I’ll never forget some of the things I saw. And some of the things I did.”

I told Anna everything. That is, everything I had done during the war and its aftermath up to the time I’d set sail for Argentina. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to anyone about it honestly, leaving nothing out and not trying to justify what I myself had done. But at the end of it all, I told her who was really to blame for it all.

“I blame the Communists for calling a general strike in November 1932, which forced an election. I blame von Hindenburg for being too old to tell Hitler where to get off. I blame six million unemployed—a third of the workforce—for wanting a job at any price, even if it meant Hitler’s price. I blame the army for not putting an end to the street violence during the Weimar Republic and for backing Hitler in 1933. I blame the French. I blame von Schleicher. I blame the British. I blame Goebbels and I blame all those rich businessmen who bankrolled the Nazis. I blame von Papen and Rathenau and Ebert and Scheidemann and Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I blame the Spartakists and I blame the Freikorps. I blame the Great War for taking away the value of human life. I blame the inflation and the Bauhaus and Dada and Max Reinhardt. I blame Himmler and Goering and Hitler and the SS and Weimar and the whores and the pimps. But most of all I blame myself. I blame myself for doing nothing. Which was less than I ought to have done. Which was all that was required for Nazism to succeed. I share the guilt. I put my survival ahead of all other considerations. That is self-evident. If I was truly innocent, then I’d be dead, Anna. And I’m not.

“For the last five years, I’ve been letting myself off the hook. I had to come to Argentina and see myself in the eyes of these other ex-SS men to understand that. I was a part of it. I tried not to be and failed. I was there. I wore the uniform. I share the responsibility.”

Anna Yagubsky lifted her eyebrows and looked away. “My God,” she said. “You’ve had an interesting life.”

I smiled, thinking of Hedda Adlon and her Chinese curse.

“Oh, I’m not judging you,” said Anna. “I wouldn’t say you were guilty of much. Then again, you’re not entirely innocent, either, are you? But it seems to me as if you’ve already paid a kind of price for what you did. You were a prisoner of the Russians. That must have been awful. And now you’re helping me. It strikes me that you wouldn’t do that if you were like the rest of your old comrades. It’s not up to me to forgive you. That’s up to God. Always supposing you believe in God. But I’ll pray for Him to forgive you. And maybe you could try praying yourself.”