Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

As a child, I often put carnivorous beetles in a box. In a very short time they ate each other up. I repeated this cruel experiment many times, because I just couldn’t imagine that all of them would die. One of them, I thought, must stay alive: the strong guy, the hero, the Chosen One. If I had continued on with my research, I would have discovered the secret of Nature. But I just wasn’t sadistic enough. The problem went unsolved. It was too dangerous to ask the curate or the professor of religion about it; they would have eaten me up. And so, after leaving school and in the years of my maturity, the answer was revealed to me by the current, future, and faded Führers of all countries.

Germans were leaving the Third Reich in droves, seeking refuge in the neighboring countries. Once resettled, they pondered their fate and the closely related question of money. Whoever could do so, moved on. Spain? Why not? You don’t need coal there in winter time (they thought). And Mallorca? The island still enjoyed a reputation for its ideal climate and its even more ideal cheap living. Hospitality was somewhere in between, insofar as the islanders offered any hospitality at all. Refugees from Germany who found their way to Palma also soon made the further short journey to the Librería Alemana, and there they told their stories, countrymen to fellow countrymen. If they spoke with the easy-going Swabian proprietor of this bookshop, they were told to ask for directions to Barceló, just a few streets farther on. There, at No. 23, lived another German who could offer advice. No, not another emigré. This fellow was an old island hand, with very special island experiences.

The first victim of Hitler who was directed to my door was a Jew.

His case was resolved quite simply, and with a logic that could have led to the purest insights if it ever emerged from the obscurity it deserved.

The gentleman was about sixty years old, highly educated, as I soon found out, and dressed in black, so that he looked to me like a Catholic clergyman — which he in fact turned out to be. He had forsaken his rabbi and entered the One True Church of Christ. He took his first vows when he was nearing fifty. He had been a lawyer before he fell into the hands of “the false messenger of God.” The Nazis wanted to lynch him because, as a Jew, he was hearing Aryan confessions. I told him that my uncle, a bishop, once was likewise almost lynched because he gave Extreme Unction to a construction worker who had fallen from a scaffold. Someone had summoned him to attend to a dying man. In such cases a priest doesn’t ask, “Are you a Catholic?” The worker was a Jew, and the pious mob grew restive. My uncle came within an inch of being stoned. There was no lack of stones at the building site.

My story was no consolation for this emigrant priest. He refused to go back to the jungle. I began swearing at the Catholic Church for tolerating Hitler instead of excommunicating every Catholic who lifted his right arm. In his own particular case, the exemption bordered on the criminal. The convert didn’t share my opinion. On the contrary, after arriving so quietly and submissively at my door, he suddenly broke out in a Jesuitical tirade that was not nice to behold. He defended Rome’s position. The Church must survive, even if that meant marching over corpses — his own, for example: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam…

“Reverend Sir,” I said, “why didn’t you stay in the Reich? By now, you would be in the appropriate cadaverous condition. And why have you come to me? Did the little Swabian bookseller suggest that I could whisk you off painlessly into the Great Beyond? Or would you prefer that a silken rope be placed around your neck? Go visit the savages in Africa and get yourself converted once again, this time by your Protestant competition. The only thing left is poison. Right around the corner is a farmacía . For insomnia they’ll give you veronal without a prescription. We don’t have a bed for you here. But if you want to stay, we share meals and chairs in ancient Christian style.”

If the Salvation Army had maintained a station on Mallorca, I would have sent this errant fellow to visit them. He wanted nothing more to do with his confratres . I spoke with one of the padres from the monastery across the street, and he offered to help out. But the Jew helped himself. In an obscure apartment house he took his own life. The matter was hushed up. Neither the secular nor the ecclesiastical authorities wanted anything to do with this marrano .

In fact, many emigrés now began throwing their lives away, which made them unpopular in foreign lands. First you welcomed them, and then they messed up your household and caused all kinds of trouble. They seemed unwilling to give any consideration to the locals.

Along with the first refugees, the first spies arrived on the island, followed by the murderers sent to rub out dangerous opponents of the National Uprising. Life again became exciting for Vigoleis and Beatrice. To swim against the tide, you need strong arms. We could have got as rich as Croesus — there was no lack of opportunity. Just lift your arm, Vigoleis, just pretend, and then cash in. Nobody is interested in what you really believe.

The first time I was asked to be an altar boy for Mass in the hospital chapel — I was ten — I admitted to the priest, who was also my friend and the principal of my school, that I hadn’t yet learned the Latin responses by heart. An orphan boy had skipped his turn, and I was supposed to take his place. The priest then said — both of us already had our vestments on—“My son, just mumble any old thing. That’s how I do it.”

The prayers don’t matter at all. If all the priests who stand at the altar believed in God, the Church would long since have gone up in smoke. The bell was rung, and I mumbled something inside my scrawny neck. Just pretend… I was well trained. To this very day, I am grateful to this priest for his candid advice at God’s altar. So then why didn’t I mumble “ Heil Hitler ” on Mallorca?

A new German Consul arrived. His predecessor was a pencil-pusher, a dyed-in-the-wool chargé d’affaires and bureaucrat, a conscientious public servant who always kept his stamp pads moist and wouldn’t hurt a fly. In the colony he was known as “Potato Bud,” because even in the golden sunlight he failed to get a tan, and always looked as if he had just been pulled out of long-term hibernation. This gentleman gave up his post, or it was given up for him, and then he washed his hands in innocence and went back to selling oranges wholesale. His successor, likewise, did not emerge from the bright sunlight, although he was brown — first to look at, and then by political conviction. Just a slight change of color, and he had it made. We got to know each other well. He stood far to the left, and started out as a minor employee in a travel office, good at languages and aiming high. He landed the job as director of the Agencia in Palma that I did my lying for as a “ Führer .” He approved, since that was a good way to be a Führer . For quite a while he worshiped the hammer and sickle, but then he discovered another path to salvation. I sought my own redemption first in poetry, then in roasts at Mamú’s house. Later it appeared in the form of the donkey at the seaside castle of the Archduke, and again and again it was the bullfight. Many times we saved up money for the tickets by going hungry. Beatrice, clad in a mantilla , was transformed on such occasions into a genuine daughter of the Incas. As soon as the bovine colossus entered the white-hot ring, she lost all traces of her Basel origins and their ck-dt’s.

One day the Consul summoned me to appear before him in his official capacity. Now completely brown, and very important as he sat there under a picture of the Führer and singing the Führer’s praises, he gave me an official pronouncement: it was his duty to monitor me in the interest of the Party, and would I kindly sign this — some document or other declaring loyalty to the Führer , unconditionally. Without hesitation I left his office. Now the Consul knew what kind of person he was dealing with. “Don’t leave out a single answer,” he once said to me. I had answered every last question of his. But I wasn’t shot on the spot, for the Consul knew what I knew — and since, to be clear about it, he was himself on the spot, he chose to be careful. All the more careful now, since during our first conversation I didn’t hide from him the fact that I came from the same region of the homeland as Joseph Goebbels, that Goebbels and I once sat together — not in school but in the closer quarters of a university literature seminar — and that, as he no doubt realized, both Goebbels and I were failed poets and philosophers. I intimated that Goebbels and I were bosom buddies. From bosom embraces to denunciation is but a single step — Hagen’s people! You don’t have to be very bright to discover that in a regime of terror nobody trusts anybody else. That is why the Nazis didn’t shoot us dozens of times. Spies never earned a penny on me or on Beatrice. We made no bones about calling the bastards bastards. And so the spies thought, “They must be spies!”