Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“ Heil Hitler! ”

As I exited, the Consul called after me, “The day after tomorrow the Monte Rosa is arriving with 2000 tourists. So I’ll need you again. You’re my best Führer! ”

“Thank you for the superlative compliment. I’ll be out there at the pier, right on time. And once again: Guten Morgen! ”

“ Guten Morgen! ”

A few chapters back I startled Beatrice with Captain von Martersteig’s query as to whether she had heard the latest news. She hadn’t, and so I told her that Hitler’s Third Reich had just begun its thousand-year history, and that heads were rolling, just as the Führer had promised the German people. Beatrice, whose fascination with history extends even to the kind that gets written against the grain, asked me this rather startling question in return: “Well now, I’m curious as to how your folks are taking all this. Are they going along with it?”

Like all history buffs, Beatrice is impatient with fragmentary situations.

I have a rule of thumb, one that will often enough rescue me from one miserable situation only to plunge me into the next one. That is why to this day I have never made it as a general, a company executive, a cardinal, or a university professor, but only enjoy my status as a jester at my own private court and as the chronicler of the applied recollections of Vigoleis. This life-sustaining maxim of mine is as follows: in case of doubt, let truth be told. And it was in light of this motto that I proceeded to unveil for Beatrice the situation at hand. My family was going along with it — my father with a certain amount of hesitation, my “Get a move on!” brothers with all the excitement their nationalistic short-sightedness could muster. But Mother? Hers was a simpler case. She refused to lift her right arm, and would sooner bite off her tongue than shout “ Heil Hitler !” For behind her stood centuries of devout Catholic tradition, the unshakeable doctrinaire beliefs of the Scheifes clan. What’s more, she was a member of the Mothers’ Society, and she wasn’t about to dirty her hands by murdering Jews. She was practicing passive resistance, she wrote me, adding that if all the mothers in all the Catholic Mothers’ Societies in Germany did the same, Hitler would soon be history. Beatrice shook her head and said I was still the same incorrigible utopian.

It took five days for mail from the Lower Rhine to reach Palma de Mallorca. So five days later I found a letter in our post office box, and a little later Beatrice found me squatting on a crate in our apartment, with an empty stare and with my prominent lower jaw rattling audibly. Among the Neanderthals the woman of the family would have snuck into the bushes, fearing a vicious clubbing. But Beatrice was all solicitude. “Darling, what’s wrong? Food poisoning from the octopus?” (Only one in 30,000 octopuses is poisonous). “Quick, where’s our medicine book?” Then she noticed the letter. “From your folks?”

“Yes, and now they’re all in it together, even Mother. They’re ‘politically coordinated’ one and all. A disgusting letter. The Beast of the Apocalypse has won out.”

In brief, my folks had decided to march along with Hitler. They hung out the flag. They were singing the songs of the Brown Revolution. To put it even more briefly, they had completely lost their senses. And yet this was just what I expected. The worst of it was surely my mother’s contribution to this missive. This devout woman hadn’t echoed the chauvinistic rhetoric of the others. She was unaccustomed to extended writing, and anyway she was surrounded by wiseacre menfolk who knew how to express themselves readily, with conviction, and in passable prose. She penned just a few lines, explaining in simple words that she, too, was now committed to the Führer . Writing to her so very distant son, she gave voice to her joy at Germany’s return to prominence in the world, and to her dismay that this son of hers wasn’t there to experience all of this with them back home.

Beatrice pulled out our medicine book. But in all of nature, Dr. Hahnemann and his homeopathic school hadn’t discovered an antidote for nationalistic toxins. I started explaining that no such discovery would ever be possible. But she was already busy doctoring me. “Mother, too!” I lamented, my jaw still aquiver. She felt my pulse, counted the seconds, and lifted my eyelids. I rolled my eyes. She took a pile of clothes and bedded me gently up against our whitewashed wall.

“You’re having convulsions. Internal ones, too?” “Yes.” “Strong ones?” I was shivering mightily. “It could be tonic spasms, or maybe colonic ones. Does it feel as if the back of your nose is pressing into your head?”

In case of doubt, let truth be told. “No, just the opposite,” I said. My nose feels as if it’s leaving my head, along with my brain. Am I turning into a German chauvinist, too?” “Do you feel something warm rising up from your abdomen, causing shortness of breath?” “We haven’t eaten a thing all day, so there’s nothing down there that could rise up. But my breathing is kaputt.” “Aha, you see? Then you must have a tickling in your neck, as if there’s a thread hanging from your throat down into your gullet.” “Several threads, Beatrice, thick as ropes. My father writes us that Uncle Josef has also started hanging out the flag, but not at half-mast. A Catholic Center Party man, a pillar of the Church, the most respected guy in the city — but down he goes!” —“How about pains?” “I can now say with Unamuno: me duele Alemania. Germany gives me a pain. It’s funny that I’m feeling this way. I’m seeing double.” “That always happens. I’m going to give you some cuprum aceticum . Hahnemann always used cuprum metallicum in cases like this, and Grandfather, who liked to argue with Hahnemann about such things, would have prescribed cuprum ustum D4 .” “My grandfather would prescribe a generous shot of schnapps. The Führer would prescribe for me a bullet in the head.”

Beatrice fetched forth her Grandpa’s homeopathic traveling kit. This satchel had already proven its efficacy at the sickbeds of a King of England, the Sultan of Morocco, the Tsar of Russia, a President of the United States, and other world potentates. It was the treatment of choice for cold patches on the soles of the feet, a condition that commonly worsened between 11:00 and 12:00 o’clock at night, as well as for cases of flatulence aggravated by anger — and it is men of power who often go black-and-blue with rage. It was prescribed for the ingestion of eggs during the autumn months, or for the imbibing of stale beer, as well as for halitosis, an ailment the patient never notices himself. In short, this famous man’s homeopathy was a remedy for the German national disease, a condition that Hahnemann never identified.

Beatrice lifted a vial from her little valise and poured a few drops into a tumbler. It was high time, too, for now I felt the incubus of hunger rising up inside me — an event that never fails to disquiet me, desperate fellow that I decidedly am. “No alcohol, no coffee,” Beatrice warned. “Otherwise this dose won’t work. Keep lying down. I’ll go get you some bread.”

After she left I took our bottle of Felanitx and swigged down the golden drops left in it, letting the blanco roll around where the threads were hanging down in my throat. I heard it hit the bottom of my stomach. When Beatrice returned I was again feeling top-fit. “You see?” she said. “With homeopathy it’s all a question of the correct diagnosis. My family tells me that Grandpa was better at such things than any of his teachers.”

I embraced her, and assured her that both of our grandfathers knew their way around with medicinal drops. Then I composed a letter to my dear Mother of the Catholic Mothers’ Society, a letter that has become renowned within the family. And I received a no less remarkable letter in response. The prodigal son was carrying on correspondence with his prodigal mother.