Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology) Read online

  “How old are you?” she asked. When he didn’t answer right away, she grinned. “I’m nineteen.”

  “I’m . . . old.” He set down his brush.

  She laughed; it sounded like gypsy music to him. Then she repeated herself. “You don’t look so old.”

  He nodded.

  She stretched out her hand. “I’m Tesia.”

  He took it, uncertain what to do with it. Finally, he raised it to his mouth and kissed it lightly. “Adolf.”

  “German?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “Polish.”

  “We’re neighbors then,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

  She smiled. Her teeth were straight and white. “Yes.” She pointed at the bench near his stool. “May I sit and watch?”

  “May I paint you?”

  She laughed again. “I couldn’t let you. You’d get the colors all wrong and I’d be cross with you.” She caught her breath. “I wouldn’t want to be cross with you.”

  He snorted and went back to work. She was right, he realized. He could never paint her.

  He painted quietly and she watched in silence. When it grew dark, he asked her if she wanted to have dinner with him and she said yes. He packed up his supplies and tossed his canvas into a nearby waste-bin.

  “Why do you do that?” she asked.

  “Like you said: I’m no good.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I use them to keep me warm at night. They burn well.”

  “Ridiculous.” She dug the unfinished painting from the garbage. “I like it.” She tucked it under her arm.

  They walked to a small cafe that overlooked the Seine. He went in first as she paused at the door. From inside, the smell of roasted rabbit, baking bread and fresh sliced onions drifted out. The waiter frowned when he saw them.

  “No,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  He pointed to a newly painted sign near the door. “No Jews.”

  Adolf felt a stab of anger. It passed quickly. “Monsieur,” he said in careful French, “I’m not Jewish.”

  “Not you,” the waiter said, pointing at the girl. “Her.”

  Adolf looked. She blanched, her eyes a bit wide and her nostrils flaring. She clenched her jaw. He saw the band on her arm now. He hadn’t noticed it before but why would he? He’d heard about the new laws but they had seemed far away to him. He shook his head in disbelief. “You are making a mistake.”

  The waiter said something under his breath that Adolf couldn’t quite understand. He opened his mouth to protest but felt a firm hand on his arm.

  “We’ll go somewhere else,” Tesia said.

  They had a quiet dinner by moonlight. She stole two apples from a cart. He bought bread and cheese. After eating, she kissed him again, this time more slowly.

  He pulled away. “I’m too old.”

  “Nonsense,” she said and kissed him again.

  Afterwards, he asked her, “Why did you kiss me that day when you first saw me?”

  “Because,” she said, “you were beautiful and you stood alone.”

  He walked her home. Twice, as blue-coat soldiers passed them on the street, she pressed herself closer to him, concealing the band on her arm.

  “Why don’t you take it off?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, standing on the doorstep of a run-down hotel. Inside, he could hear loud voices conversing in Polish and Yiddish and Russian. “It’s against the law, I suppose.”

  “It’s a silly law.”

  “Most laws are.” She smiled, kissed him quickly and fled inside.

  Whistling a love song he dimly remembered from his youth, Adolf made his way back to de Gaulle’s and his waiting friends.

  When he looked for her the next day and the next, she was nowhere to be found. When he returned to the old hotel, he found it somber and empty.

  July slipped into August.

  My father never talked about the events leading up to the war. He simply smiled, waved his hand and said it was unimportant. After he died, I found a photograph in his belongings. He and two other men sitting at a table in some nameless bar raising their glasses to the camera. He was gaunt, bearded and hollow-eyed, dressed in a tattered Prussian coat. The back of the photograph reads Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky, scrawled in his pinched, careful German script and it seems to have been taken at night, possibly in 1941, the year he met my mother. His companions, their connection to my father and their present whereabouts are unknown.

  Jacob Ernest Hitler

  Memories of My Father: An Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Unser Kampf, Penguin Books, New York, 1992

  The explosion was all anyone could talk about.

  On August twelfth a blast ripped through Notre Dame Cathedral as Napoleon IV knelt to receive Mass from his archbishop. Fourteen people were killed, including the Emperor and his young wife. Photographs of the bombers, arrested later that night, filled the newspapers. Four frightened Jewish youth. Hanging them, the generals now in command claimed, would not even scratch the surface of the conspiracy that threatened the Empire. Still, they hanged them quickly.

  Hemingway threw down the newspaper in disgust. “Those sons of bitches,” he muttered.

  Chuck and Adolf looked up at him.

  Ernie kicked the paper. “Do you believe this?”

  He’d been drinking most of the day. At least once, they’d taken his pistol away as he waved it about. There were more soldiers in the streets these days and though the patrons of de Gaulle’s little tavern thought their American mascot eccentric, the blue-coats might not be so inclined.

  Chuck shrugged. “Name of the game, my friend.”

  “It’s a goddamn travesty,” Ernie went on. “They killed their own goddamn Emperor and then they blamed the Jews.”

  “It’s just four,” Adolf said.

  Ernie pulled back one fist, reaching for his pistol with the other. “Four? It’s not just four. Don’t you see it coming? There will be more laws. It’s a shell game, Adolf. They will whip up the people and keep them focused on their chosen scapegoat. They will move the Jews now to a separate place for their own good, to protect them from the angry mobs that they themselves have created. When the dust settles, there will be a lot of dead Jews and a new Emperor who is not a Bonaparte.” He pointed to the picture of a French general in the newspaper. “Behold your new Emperor.”

  People were listening. They looked uncomfortable. Chuck lowered his voice. “That’s enough, Ernie. You’re making a scene.”

  Ernie jumped up, his chair tumbling backwards. “Someone sure as Christ needs to. What you people need is a revolution.”

  Adolf caught his sleeve. “Sit down, my friend.”

  Ernie looked around as if suddenly coming to his senses. He sat.

  Chuck laughed. “You and your revolutions.”

  “It worked for us, didn’t it?”

  “If it worked so well,” Chuck said, “why are you here?”

  Ernie stole Adolf’s beer. “Because I’m an American. I’m free to come and go as I please.”

  Adolf remembered stories about the American Revolution. He’d studied it in school, though his textbooks said little. No one really believed that the young nation of upstarts would live beyond its cradle. But Lincoln averted civil war over slavery and assisted the Canadians in gaining their own independence. Naturally, the grateful northerners joined the Union. And shortly after, the Spanish-American conflict left the United States with an entire continent under its sway.

  “A revolution would never work here,” he told Ernie.

  Chuck agreed. “He’s right. The army’s far too strong.”

  “Ah, but words are stronger,” Hemingway said.

  Adolf leaned forward. “Words? Against rifles?”

  Ernie waved for another round. Suddenly, his eyes glinted with an almost savage intelligence. “Listen,” he said. “I’ll tell you just how I’d do it.” The beer arrived, de Gaulle looking pained when Ernie waved the t
icket away. “Later, mon ami. That’s a promise.” He looked around to make sure no one was listening. “First,” he said, “I’d write a book.”

  Chuck laughed. “But you’re a terrible writer. Your words stumble about on the page like drunken soldiers in women’s shoes.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And those were just your grocery lists.”

  Ernie pointed, eyebrows narrowed in a mock scowl. “You’re quite the bloody comedian.”

  Adolf chuckled at his friends. “So you’d write a book?”

  Ernie nodded. “Yes. A book about all of the horse-shit here. A book so passionate, so full of raw rage and sorrow that people’d sit up and take notice.”

  “And that would bring about a revolution?”

  “In time it would. Yes.”

  “Nonsense,” Chuck said. “Who’d read it? The Jews? The gypsies? The Marxist refugees? They don’t have pots to piss in or blankets to sleep in. It’d do them more good on the fire, keeping them warm.”

  “Not the Jews,” Ernie said. “The Americans.”

  Adolf sat up. “The Americans?”

  “Naturally. You’d have to get them involved. First, with the book. Then with speeches. Maybe even a traveling troupe of the persecuted and oppressed. They’d eat it up for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they’ve got the resources. Strong army. Strong navy. Airships.”

  Adolf swallowed. “Why ever would they be interested in a Frankish Revolution?”

  “Two reasons,” Ernie said, holding up two fingers. “One: A democratic foothold in Europe. Two: The liberation of the Jews.”

  “The Jews?” Adolf asked.

  “Freedom for every race, color, creed,” Chuck said in German. “You saw what they did with their emancipated Africans. Liberia’s doing quite well; shining that blessed light of liberty for all of Africa to see.”

  Adolf leaned in. “But most Americans are Christian, aren’t they?”

  “They are indeed,” Ernie said with a grin.

  “And?” Chuck asked.

  “Jesus Christ was Jewish,” Ernie said. “It’s all a matter of perspective.” He raised his glass. “To democracy,” he said.

  They raised their glasses, too. A boy who sold photographs to tourists pointed his camera at them and raised his eyebrows. Ernie winked at him.

  A bulb flashed. A shutter snapped.

  The next night, Adolf gladly handed over a handful of coins for the photograph and tacked it up on the dressing mirror in their loft.

  He never considered himself to be a great man but an adequate man. He never considered himself to have made history but rather to have been in the right place and the right time to do his small part. Well-spoken but shy, intelligent but unassuming, he caught the public off guard with his dry wit, his careful words and his passionate commitment to human rights. For this reason, it is said that only Hitler could go to America.

  Dr. John F. Kennedy

  Out of the Ashes: A History of Modern Thought from the French Revolution for Democratic Change to the Re-Birth of the Nation of Israel, 1941 - 1952,

  Harvard University Press, Boston, 1971.

  Throughout August, he kept an eye open for Tesia but Adolf was convinced he’d never see her again. She was a smart girl, he told himself. Smart enough to see the stirred pot start to boil. As badly as he wished to see her, he hoped he would not because that would mean she hadn’t left this dangerous place.

  There were more soldiers now and more laws. More signs in shop windows. Rumors flew of outlying rural churches desecrated by Jews. The local synagogue was burned to the ground by angry citizens while the police and soldiers stood by.

  “It’s heartbreaking,” Adolf told Chuck one afternoon as they walked to de Gaulle’s. They spoke in exclusively in English now; Adolf had gotten quite good at it.

  Chuck kicked an empty can. “It is. Man’s inhumanity to man, I think they call it.”

  Adolf stopped. “I think Ernie was right.”

  Chuck laughed and stopped, too. “About the book?”

  “Maybe. About the Revolution. About the Americans.”

  “Perhaps,” Chuck said, resuming his brisk pace. “But I don’t think it will happen.”

  “Why not?”

  He clapped Adolf on the shoulder. “Who’s going to do it? Are you going to do it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not?”

  Adolf opened his mouth. He started to say because I’m not a Jew and the realization of it twisted his heart in his chest. “It’s not my line of work.”

  “Exactly,” Chuck said. “This sort of work requires more than just a willing body.”

  “More?”

  Chuck’s hands moved as he talked. “Joan of Arc, King Arthur, Moses. What did they have?”

  Adolf thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know.”

  “God,” Chuck said. “They had the voice of God, the vision of the grail, a light from Heaven. A power they could point to over their shoulder.”

  “A light from Heaven?”

  Chuck pointed up. “Licht vom Himmel.”

  Adolf nodded. They stood outside de Gaulle’s now, waiting to go in. He smiled at his friend. “And when they have that?”

  “One spark to start the fire,” Chuck said.

  They walked in. Ernie waved them to their table. He was remarkably sober for the time of day. He grinned. “You’re becoming popular, Adolf.”

  Adolf raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

  Ernie nodded towards the bar. “De Gaulle said a girl was in looking for you earlier. Said she’d be back later.”

  He coughed as a shudder passed over him. “Did he mention her name?”

  “Foreign girl. Dark.” He lowered his voice. “He thought she was Jewish; I assured him she was not.”

  Adolf took the meaning from his words and nodded. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “She’s more trouble than you need, friend. These are bad times for love.”

  “I don’t love her,” Adolf said. “I hardly know her. And she’s just a girl.”

  Ernie patted his hand. “That’s what they all say.” He opened his mouth to continue but the sudden opening and closing of the front door stopped him. A young man stood panting in the doorway and the room went quiet.

  “They’re relocating the Jews tonight,” he said. “Outside of the city. For their own protection, they said.”

  “Who said?” de Gaulle asked.

  “I heard it from a soldier. They’re lined up along the Champs Elysées. Blue-coats for block upon block. They’ve even called up the reserves.”

  Ernie looked at Adolf. “For their own protection,” he said quietly.

  Outside, the shouting started. Whistles blowing, sirens wailing. Adolf hung his head. “They’ll go, won’t they? They won’t fight back.”

  “They might,” Chuck said. “But after a few of them are killed, they’ll stop. They’ll go like sheep and hope the butcher is a shepherd.”

  Adolf rubbed his eyes, disbelief gnawing at his stomach. “What do we do?”

  Ernie looked up, his face pale. “We wait here for it to be done. Then we leave Paris.”

  The bartender dimmed the lights. He passed around shot glasses and bottles. The handful of men drank themselves drunk and fell asleep at their tables.

  In a whisky fog, Hitler dreamed of another life, another time. A dark time, a time when a caricature of himself strutted about in uniform, barking out orders and gazing with pride upon a broken cross. And other men in uniform, men who saw the light from the sky spreading out behind Adolf like a halo, raised their hands to him and cried “Heil.” And on the hands that they raised, blood shone out in that awful light. Blood of the martyrs, blood of the ages, and Adolf looked down at his own hands and saw that they were bloody, too, and he reached back to find some of his father’s faith and compassion but found that in that life, in that world, there was nothing but rage and hatred to reach for.

  Hitler wept.

  He woke to screaming and le
aped to his feet.

  Ernie mumbled; Chuck stirred.

  He heard the screaming again, distant from the alley behind the tavern. Either the others were too drunk to notice or too drunk to care. He moved quickly to the back door and stepped out into the night.

  “Hello?”

  The screaming stopped. Instead, he heard muffled, muted sound. He followed it.

  Behind a pile of crates he saw two large forms crouched on the ground over a smaller bundle that bucked and twisted. As he drew closer, he realized they were two soldiers and a girl. One blue-coat held the girl down, a razor at her throat and a hand over her mouth. The other had pried her legs apart, his own trousers pushed down to his knees as he raped her.

  “Wasn’t enough to kill our Lord,” one of the soldiers hissed. “You had to kill our Emperor, too, Jew-bitch.”

  Adolf stopped. His heart fell into a hole somewhere inside him. His stomach followed after. His eyes locked with the girl’s and suddenly she stopped struggling.

  She’s waiting for me to save her, Adolf thought. He couldn’t move. He stood transfixed while powerlessness and shame washed over him. Tesia lay still and the soldier thrust twice more before looking up.

  “You there,” he said. “You this girl’s father?”

  Adolf cleared his voice. “No.”

  “Then mind your business. You can come back for your turn later.”

  Something snapped like a guitar string in his spine. Adolf turned and fled for de Gaulle’s, his feet pounding the cobblestones. Behind him, he heard Tesia struggling again, trying to scream but unable to do more than moan. He ran into the tavern, kicking over chairs and tables as he went, until he reached his own. He stood panting, sobbing over his friends, then bent over Ernie to frisk him.

  Ernie stirred. “What the hell—“

  Adolf found the revolver, yanked it from the pocket, and wordlessly stalked out of the tavern. Each step steady, deliberate, until he saw the soldiers. Until he saw Tesia beneath them. Then he stopped and looked down at them.

  A blue-coat looked up. “I thought I told you—“

  The pistol didn’t roar or buck like at the cinema. It popped and shimmied just a bit and he thumbed the hammer and pulled the trigger again to be sure it had really worked though the soldier was already falling sideways, his mouth working like a landed trout.