Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

From a lie to the truth is but a single step. Beatrice was teaching a certain Señor Alvarez, Don Alejandro, owner of the “Casa Barlock,” where he sold typewriters and office equipment. There I purchased, on the installment plan, the machine I lied about preemptively, and was given 100 pesetas for my worn-out Diamant — a merchandising challenge if there ever was one. Don Alejandro was up to the task. He knew a young man who wrote poems but was otherwise quite normal and had some money, and who could make good use of my old rattletrap. So my writing apparatus simply changed hands, and everything remained as it had been. I often wonder if that Spanish son of the poetic Muse got more out of the machine than I did.

I opted for a Continental, the latest model with all the fixings except the ones I had dreamed up myself but couldn’t find in any catalogue. It took some time to alter the letters. Don Alejandro had to order new combinations from the factory. As we waited, he let me use a machine on loan, and I started familiarizing myself with Graves’ handwriting and, engrossed by his manuscript, by his English. What I found was not an army of monkeys marching toward a commode from Martersteig’s ancestral attic, but He Himself, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, marching towards a Continental typewriter. That is why I cringed when the Captain told us the news, and Beatrice felt the same way: nothing must happen to Graves. For if anything did, it would be curtains for our new machine.

“It’s odd, Beatrice, but I was thinking the very same thing: the enemy and the installment payments. If Graves were to die, it would be a catastrophe for us. But it’s a lot worse than that. The National Socialists are now at the helm, and now they’ll start doing what La Gerstenberg was so afraid of: they’re going to kill all the Jews. Hitler has been proclaimed as the God of the Germans, and as you know, thou shalt have no other gods before him. The first heads have already been lopped off. The first un-German cadavers are floating in the Rhine, ‘Germany’s river but nevermore Germany’s border.’ Patriotism is once again official public policy. You’re supposed to take your hat off when you hear the national anthem. This is weird. It’s like in the jungle. You can’t tell when the dance is going to start up, and you’ll have to put a ring in your nose so as not to be conspicuous. And Martersteig was a little strange. He’s no longer so anti-militaristic, although he rejects any comparison between his monkeys and the hordes of brown-shirt apes. He thinks that great times are ahead. You’ll see — he’ll get his pension raised! I saw him coming out of the Colmado Parisién, where a slice of Edam costs 50 centimos.”

This marked the onset of political discussions on the Street of the General. Whereas previously we had talked only about generals, we now chatted about a certain corporal, for whose sake the Ultima Hora came out a whole hour late on the day when he announced his plans to upend the whole world. Verdaguer, an energetic co-worker at this newspaper called The Final Hour , told me that such a thing had never happened since the paper’s very first hour.

We talked a great deal, and eventually even Beatrice began to lose her faith in historical progress. I was the optimist, she the pessimist. I insisted that a hundred or a thousand people might go crazy when commanded to, but not an entire nation of 70 million. And after all, the Church was still there. The Church would surely have a thing or two to say about this development. It was the beginning of great times for the Church—“Saint Boniface…”

“… This time Saint Boniface will go along with the barbarians. At the moment I consider it more important to figure out what we’re going to do about our typewriter.”

“What has that got to do with the Third Reich?”

“It’s very simple. Every German mark that we spend on installments will be converted into Nazi poison that can get thrown back at us sooner or later.”

The next day I explained our situation to Don Alejandro. This Barlock typewriter man thought I was nuts. What was I trying to do, be more popish than the Pope? A puny private boycott of this kind would not alter world history by a single iota. Nevertheless, even though it meant taking on a somewhat higher debt, we shifted our order to an American Royal.

With this move we declared war on the Third Reich, breaking off trade relations with the newly awakened Germany just twenty-four hours after it commenced its thousand-year-long history.

The newspapers informed us that the world at large was still unsure about how to respond to Germany’s brownshirt pronunciamiento . Governments were taking matters under advisement, diplomats were hastening back to their capitals for secret briefings, spies were getting bonuses, and the code machines were tapping furiously day and night. The world hemmed and hawed, preferring to wait things out.

To this very day we are under no illusions concerning our swift and correct decision, which was easy enough for us to make. We didn’t believe in God, nor were we nominal Christians, and this meant that we felt responsible only to our own conscience. We had no need to keep up appearances or protect a private fortune.

Our conscience said no, the world said yes, and so more heads would roll. Diplomatic relations were not broken off, and it was the same with trade relations. In this regard we stood quite alone there on our isle of second sight. The Vatican signed a Concordat with the brownshirts. Christ and Antichrist ambled off arm-in-arm on the safe middle road.

As a child I worked up for myself a totally false conception of God, and that is why this life of mine on God’s green earth has veered off in the oddest directions. My devout mother, concerned for the eternal salvation of her four children, detected signs of this oddity early on, and in her old age still finds repeated confirmation of her forebodings. I never became a true-blue Nazi, nor did I ever turn into what I like to refer to in summary fashion as a general manager, that is, somebody respectable and adaptable in human society. All I do is vegetate at the side of the road. Any passing goat can eat me up, any passing cartwheel can crush me. In a word, one that my own family is prone to use, I am a good-for-nothing. No marksman’s badge, of no matter what regiment, decorates my chest.

When the burnt-out pastor of our home-town parish gave me that bang on the tongue with his St. Peter’s key, my little edifice of inchoate, mystical faith came crashing down. No matter how hard I shoveled, I couldn’t get rid of all the rubble, and in the ruins I recognized God. God had ceased to be a mysterious being, unapproachable, nameless, unthreatening, sacred and demonic. My innate longing for the darkness from which we all proceed led me to the path of poetry.

The world around me, the tiny world of a tiny town, kept on talking about God, but this wasn’t the same God that I failed to stretch out my tongue far enough to receive. The war presented me with further problems that the curate who gave religious instruction at our school wasn’t able to solve. Wasn’t it blasphemy if “our” soldiers had the name of the Almighty on their belt buckles and, “God With Us,” slit open the bellies of the Frenchies who weren’t wearing such divine armor? It wasn’t until years later that I realized that the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm’s motto “God with us,” cheaply reproduced by the millions in its metal belt-buckle version, was remarkable in religious history for being the only blasphemy ever to receive the imprimatur of all the churches. And wasn’t it blasphemy to celebrate victories by bellowing forth the name of God? I had a lot of stupid questions like these, and the curate ended up by punishing me. He sent a written notice to my parents, and the religious school principal, the same man who was expecting to be named president of the “Rhenish Republic,” had some devout advice for me: “My son, just don’t confuse our teachers with pointless questions. If you keep this up, you’ll never amount to anything, and that would be a real shame. Once you have outgrown school, you’ll realize that there are certain questions that a person should ask only of himself. And you have to find the answers by yourself. Anybody else would have to lie about them. You got that, you little snot-nose?”