Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“She aches to be with you,” I said. “And if there is any sense in her that this is an important trip you are making, that only causes her to ache more urgently. She wants to be there with you. Beside you. Don’t you see?”

His face was uncrimping now.

“You are a lucky man,” I said.

He nodded faintly.

“Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a great leader,” he said.

Ah, Albert , I thought. This is your response to my invocation of Isabel Cobb’s love? What the hell does she see in you?

“Perhaps the greatest of all German statesmen,” he said.

But what the hell did she see in any of them?

I was glad he was speaking nothing but English. I wanted Mother to hear him clearly.

“There would be no Germany, in all its present glory, if it weren’t for him,” he said.

I was tempted to pick up the drink from the floor, but I did not.

“He is the quintessential figure of diplomatic moderation and balance. And those qualities were often useful. But he had to learn a lesson from an American general. Did you know that?”

“I did not,” I said.

“The great Union general from your Civil War, Philip Sheridan, dined with Chancellor Bismarck during the Prussian war with France. The critical last war that united us as a people. Sheridan said at table that the proper strategy of war consists not only in telling blows against the army of the enemy, but to cause the enemy’s civilians — and I am quoting Sheridan now—‘to cause so much suffering that they must long for peace and force their government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with.’”

At this he paused to drink. A natural pause for a man whose drinking was driven by a darkness in him that needed management, or encouragement.

“He had it in him, our dear father Otto,” he said. “But he needed to hear that. He dealt properly with the French from then on. He had no further qualms to shoot every prisoner, burn every village, hang every man, dispose of any civilian at all who might conspire against us. And such measures ended the war far more quickly. Won the war. Allowed us to become the people that we are.”

He paused again, looked at the empty glass. I thought to fill it, but I did not. Nor did he. He bent down and, with meticulous care, set his glass on the floor, beside the leg of his chair.

He lifted his face once more to me. “It’s ironic,” he said. “Our Kaiser himself dismissed Bismarck for failure to appreciate the call of God to create our German Empire. Wilhelm despised Bismarck’s moderation. And yet the same flaw resides in him. Particularly with regard to England. I sympathize. There is blood involved. But his grandmother the queen’s most powerful connection to all of us was her husband, and his pure blood did not actually flow in her veins. Her own Germanness, from her forefathers, was greatly diluted. Too much of England coursed in her. For our Kaiser thus to waver in his will because of his sentimental attachment to Victoria is madness. He will prolong this war. He will lose this war.”

Stockman grasped the two knobs of his chair arms, straightened his spine, lifted his chin. “It is time for heroism in our Germany, Josef. Time for a new hero.”

And the thing that was nagging at me, puzzling me, over this apparently drunken digression suddenly became clear. What leap had his mind taken from the adoring love of my mother to Otto von Bismarck and then to Kaiser Wilhelm? These men were the precursors for the new hero. The hero being Albert. The hero who needed a witness, a woman, my mother and her adoration.

I even bet that this chain of association had not yet snapped in Albert’s head.

Softly as his own voice whispering inside his own whiskey-heated brain, I said, “She needs to be with you for this.”

He lowered his heroically lifted chin and looked at me. “I should go now,” he said. “I will let her sleep.”

He rose. I rose. He was surprisingly steady on his feet. I was somewhat less so for a moment.

“ Eisen und Blut ,” he said, the first German he’d spoken since he entered my rooms. I recognized it from Bismarck. His most famous speech. Not by speeches and majority decisions would the great issues of the day be settled, he’d said. But by iron and blood .

It would have been a good exit line, his Eisen und Blut . But instead, Albert moved to Mother’s apricot scarf, bent, and took it up once more. He put it to his face and breathed deeply in. At this he grew unsteady, swaying a little until he lowered the scarf and blinked his way back to his purpose.

I, on the other hand, in witnessing this gesture, grew suddenly quite steady afoot and it was all I could do to restrain my right hand from fisting and knocking Stockman down.

But restrain, I did.

Indeed, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t forget what I’ve said.”

“You are my friend,” he said. And he was gone.

After the click of the door I stood in the center of the room and did some blinking of my own.

His declaration of friendship was the first thing to blink away.

Not so easy, I found.

But I blinked.

Then there was my mother.

I turned to face the bedroom.

And she was standing in the doorway.

She was not looking at me. Rather, she was studying her hands working at the buttons of her shirtwaist. She was half buttoned and I waited.

She did up every button to the top before she lifted her face to me.

I could not read her expression. I therefore assumed it was real.

“Where were you?” I said.

“Under the bed.”

“How?”

“Barely,” she said. And she looked down and took her two hands and fluffed her lately compressed breasts.

I looked away.

“Hamlet prepared me,” she said.

I gave her a moment and looked back to her. She’d finished with her breasts. I said, “Hamlet has not prepared you for what’s next.”

“‘I will screw my courage to the sticking-place,’” she said.

“Good,” I said, though it didn’t turn out so well for Lady Macbeth.

“Victor knows all the splendid Jews in Berlin,” she said. “Especially the theater lovers. I will find this man Einstein.”

And she did.

At six o’clock that evening I arrived at the Lessing and the old man on the chair nodded me through at once. I crossed the lobby and stepped into the back of an auditorium ringing with the sound of hammers. On stage the utility lights were lit and men in overalls were upstage center, building a wooden archway flanked by parapeted platforms. Barnowsky was no painted scenery man.

He was nowhere in sight. It was Saturday night. I figured rehearsal was finished already. I twinged in concern that she’d made no progress in finding the other Albert, but Mother had specifically said seven o’clock, and so I went along the side aisle and through the door that led past the wings staircase and down the corridor to her dressing room.

I approached the closed door. I drew near and laughter rolled into the corridor, my mother’s familiar bray — the one laugh of hers I could never quite identify as real or fake — and a man’s unfettered, alto laugh.

Was that the laugh of a man who faced down the mysteries of the physical universe? If it was and he was capable of this laugh, maybe things weren’t so bad, cosmologically.

I knocked on the door.

The laughter stopped.

I heard a murmur of my mother’s voice to her visitor, and then she called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door.

She was sitting in her makeup chair in an informal dinner gown of pale-green taffeta. She’d been waiting for a while, having already changed from her rehearsal clothes. I wondered how long the guy in the room had been here. A while, certainly. The pervasive greasepaint and cold cream smell of the room was actually beginning to yield to his pipe tobacco, a bland but insistent blend of burley and Cavendish and something vaguely nutty.