Canasta at Phil's

Thursday was Canasta at Phil’s. Thursday was the normal day, but this particular Thursday was special because Leni said that she’d come.  In the old days, say, fifteen or twenty years ago, someone, somewhere would have made a big deal about Thorstag, uttering some Teutonic blather to stir the ignorant faithful, and to give everyone a mystic sense that they were all rowing in the same direction.  But that was when everyone was green in the salad days of innocent youth; now Phil lived a humbler life, merely a Baltimore cabby, entertaining with slender means the few who, like him, had managed to reinvent themselves following the great curtain call.  Well, what could be said?  The Reich was a bit of a venture, a gamble, a throw of the dice, but it had failed, and so, like any failed entrepreneur, Phil, his luck out, had moved on to greener pastures.

He had been in the states for two years; the journey hadn’t been easy.  There were the two months in Bolivia with the insufferable Eichmann – a man who never really knew his place and always spoke in meaningless clichés.   “Winged words”!  Did he really talk like that?  Phil had never even heard of Homer till Joe introduced him.  But it was enough to clue him in to Eichmann’s banalities when they did appear.  And there was the irritating fact that Eichmann seemed nearly incapable of accommodating a vegetarian’s most simple needs. He was actually surprised, indeed, nearly offended, to learn, for example, that fish were not virtually the same thing as plants in the vegetarian scheme of things.  Demonstrating that incontrovertible fact by itself was a tedious two-day discussion that, frankly, never would have occurred at Berchtesgaden.  The man was also utterly humorless, and, despite having been an officer, had never learned how to use his silverware properly, insisting that the spoon was the fork’s superior in every way.  Phil could hardly suffer the two months in Bolivia under such intolerable conditions, his easy-going nature notwithstanding.

Before Bolivia, there was a brief interlude in Hungary where Phil had to pass himself off as a local courtesan of high rank.  Actually, he viewed this whole charade as a kind of chef d’oeuvre, as it really had given him scope for the artistic, one might say, bohemian, inclinations that were native to his personality.  Indeed, it goes without saying, towards the end, after weeks in the Berlin Bunker, he’d have said “yes” to just about anything.  Eva had gone off and killed her self, which gave a rather gloomy cast to an otherwise promising Springtime.  Granted she did this at his suggestion, but still she’d gone and left him in what he later reinterpreted as one in a series of betrayals.  Then Blondi, the dog, suddenly, though not inexplicably, died, and so Phil found himself decidedly at a loose end.  And, when the Russians finally closed in, his closest advisors, the remaining flower of his Reich’s intelligentsia and its assorted parasites, came up with an idea for how he might just survive; well, survive he did.

It was ingenious.  An SS Feldmarshal proposed that he escape as a Hungarian working girl, and the ridiculousness of that suggestion so tickled Phil that he felt it had to work, truth always being stranger than fiction.  So he submitted to a crack disguise artist, who’d honed his talents serving as Ernst Roehm’s faithful handyman, but decisively and irrevocably drew the line at his trademark, the prized moustache, which he swore to surrender under no circumstance whatsoever.  A well-placed mole was proposed by a voluptuary, who, as a senior officer and hero of the submarine fleet, was a confirmed expert in such matters.   Vigorous debate did ensue among the gathered experts, but the proposal was ultimately rejected in the face of convincing logistical arguments.  Traudl offered a brooch, and Magda was kind enough to provide shoes and a dress that she figured she wouldn’t need anyway: her taste was legendary, so Phil jumped at that opportunity.  A spontaneous fashion show ensued, in which Phil put the whole scheme to the test; “delicious” escaped the mouths of not a few on-lookers, confirming that the whole apparatus was a smashing success.  And so, having secreted on his person a few key mementos to keep the Teutonic flame alive, he slipped into Budapest, posing, more or less, as a mustachioed whore.  Oddly enough, no questions were asked, practically no propositions made, which suited Phil just fine.  In point of fact, it had been another of Eva’s failures that she’d not thoroughly skilled Phil in the necessary arts.  Fate does sometimes smile upon the fallen.

At any rate, the border-crossings might have been the trickiest, if not for the collective ingenuity gathered in that fabled bunker.  After all, he couldn’t have a passport imprinted with the name Adolph Hitler; that much he knew and declared before his expert staff even raised the matter.  Therefore, the Reich’s great surviving brains, the heirs to Hans Delbrück, carefully deliberated on the matter.  Some suggested Adolfo Sanchez.  Others, Hans Hitler.  Phil himself, intuiting that something far subtler was required, hit upon Phil.   If he were to travel West, he argued, Phil Hitler would be the most unremarkable and versatile of names, while the alternative, Adolfo Sanchez, posed a variety of profound challenges, not the least of which being the fact that he could scarcely pronounce the name with any confidence, let alone conviction, so much did it imply an innate swarthiness; Phil seemed reassuringly bland by a long ways.  As for Hans, he knew instinctively that proclaiming his German heritage would pose problems in his future home, wherever that might be.  Well, that was his considered opinion based on a familiarity with the greater world that actually didn’t embrace much beyond Germany or bit of France and maybe Rome.  But for years he’d managed to convince himself, and those around him, that such provinciality was a mark of purity, a gateway to cultural integrity unappreciated by Junker eggheads.  He was unsullied, he felt, by their “decadence”, a word imparted to him by his cultural lodestars, Joe and Al, that would, like an infection, inexorably come from contact with more cosmopolitan climes and places.

The escape itself wasn’t easy.  There’d been the few weeks in Budapest where, despite being a committed vegetarian, he was forced to eat goulash to keep up appearances and avoid penetrating questions.  Although the truth of his disguise had not been fully tested there, he did have to fend off the drunken proposition of an obscure count, who haled from the Banat.  And, it must be admitted, there was a blinking moment of uncertainty during baccarat, when Phil actually weighed the possibility of life in Hungary as well as the question of how he might keep his true state from this ardent suitor, who seemed to judge the cherished mustache as an exciting promise of hirsute wonders to behold after the wedding, but sober minds prevailed, diverting the count from further pursuit of the matter: he was pitched headlong off the Chain Bridge by a couple of loyalists who’d accompanied Phil from Berlin, posing, one, as chauffer cum bodyguard, the other as a desperately devoted and obsessively protective fraternal twin.  Actually, once time and space allowed Phil a moment of quiet reflection, he concluded on his own that throwing his lot in with the count never could have worked, as he deeply resented it whenever the provincial aristocrat affectionately tweaked the mustache: no amount of flattery, which Phil did indeed find persuasive, could have overcome that irritation in the long run.  His two companions had done him a favor, he later felt.  At any rate, after Berlin, after Budapest, after La Paz, after Havana, and after a dozen even more abhorrent and darkened places in between, he finally landed in Baltimore.

Phil’s decision to emigrate to the United States after the war, while not immediately approved by all who had been invited to offer an opinion, turned out in hindsight to have been a stroke of true genius.  The Americans, after all, were at the time laundering former Nazis with abandon, Herr Dr. Werner being only the best known.  Obviously, Phil never planned to announce himself at the border as a former Nazi, but, at least, it could be said that a season of renewal, occasioned by a new political calculus, was at hand.  Well, in the end, the communists had done some good, an irony Phil would occasionally recall with a chuckle when among good friends.  So seeing off his two traveling companions with the understanding that, although, perhaps, they’d meet again in the U.S., each going his own way might be safest, he boarded the S.S. Tasmania, a Cuban tramp steamer bound for Baltimore, and looked towards the happy end of his peregrinations.  That was maybe two years ago. 

Life in Baltimore, or rather his new manner of living, required adjustment.  Weak in English, particularly when German could shed no light on the matter, he quite naturally was drawn to the Germanic communities already occupying various pockets around town.   Having cast off Magda’s dress and reasserted his native masculinity, Phil had to admit mixed feelings of perplexity and gratitude at never having been recognized for who he actually was.  Of course, he partly attributed that to the genius of his disguise, but the changes in his appearance and habit, necessitated by his wanderings, did have their cost.  For example, though once so prominent a vegetarian and lover of animals that he’d appeared in the now defunct periodical, Das Freitier, he’d since become, as the price of his own freedom, an ostentatious omnivore wherever he traveled; indeed, once in Baltimore, he always made a point of asking specifically for scrapple, or Skrapfel, as he pronounced it.  What’s more, while previously he’d avoided alcohol, now he drank his National Bohemian, or “Nazi Bau,” as he couldn’t help but pronounce it, with real brio, the name itself fostering within him a welcome sense of nostalgia.  As to his appearance, wearing an old pair of woolen trousers, some beat up GI-issue Army boots, and one or two shirts picked up at a second-hand store, was enough to keep him nondescript.  Thus, changed, repackaged, and equipped with an endearingly forceful pidgin fashioned from German and English – people often wondered if a slight “l” was heard whenever he said “Hi” – he managed, after a brief stint rolling cigars in a little atelier near the B & O roundhouse, to land a job as a cabbie. He lived near the synagogue in a flat on Eutaw Street, carved out of one of those grand buildings that had been fractionated into an endless series of apartments during the war.  And he gathered around himself a few fragments of the past, admiring irredentists who remained true to the old project despite more recent setbacks.  There was Franz Liebkind, an ex-sergeant who, somehow slipping through the cracks of officialdom, basically moved straight to Butcher’s Hill from a prisoner-of-war camp in rural Virginia, where he’d become an accomplished darner of socks.  He actually fancied himself a writer, but reality in Baltimore compelled him to earn his bread polishing buttons for a Slovakian tailor and tending his landlord’s pigeons.  There was a friend from the old days: Hesse.  Phil had always thought him a bit of a kook, especially once he crashed an airplane into the Scottish countryside.  But that was water under the bridge.  It was nice to have a familiar face on hand, or, at least, someone who claimed to be.  And Hesse, who was making his way in a Frisian bakery located on the city’s fringe, could usually be counted on to arrive for canasta with a nice tort or strudel.  There, of course, were others.  Mostly survivors from the Reich’s demimonde: a cashiered postal worker, a retired sewerman, a provincial baggage handler from outside Vienna who had started out laying crossties during the surge in demand before working his way up the ranks of railway workers.  At any rate, whatever they lacked in formal status, they made up for in spirit and rarity, and Phil more or less appreciated their company whenever they turned up: after all, they all knew the Horst Wessel Lied.  Nevertheless, there were sometimes those darker moments, when he would ruefully confess that the new life offered comparatively little scope for his natural talents.  Plain drudgery crowded him.

He was always fighting with neighbors.  Often, he would return from a late evening spent prowling the city for fares.  His mustard-stained undershirt locked in a struggle with his paunch, he would sink into the ratty, overstuffed chair that dominated the flat’s living room, clutching a Nazi Bau, and let the crank phonograph play the one or two Wagner 78s still in his possession, only to be interrupted, at the very cusp of reverie by furious pounding and shouting from the neighbor, demanding that he turn off that music at such an hour.  The back and forth would ensue, the neighbors complaining about his selfish neglect of their peace and quiet, Phil, in his pidgin, saying something about Lebensraum.  Exhaustion usually helped settle matters, but tension had been part of the building’s culture ever since Phil’s arrival. It was difficult to adjust: to go from an old time and place where he could do as he wished, to a new time and place that called for give and take from a man who just couldn’t give, was a heavy burden.  Phil managed humble only as a kind of triumph of the will.  He had to be, or strive to be, an ascetic in this new world.  There was one ray of light.  In truth, it was actually his new calling as cab driver that gave him scope for his commanding ways.

In the cab, Phil was master of his domain.  It is true that a fare-paying passenger would name the destination, but the route was Phil’s. He could even refuse a fare.  What pleasure that was.  Once he pulled up on Charles Street to pick up some poor women who was burdened with groceries.  She opened the door; he took an immediate dislike to her vaguely Slavic accent and sped off, satisfied that he was, in some sense, still at it.  The Führerprinzip was not completely gone!  There were times when his shaky English would overcome his desire to pick up a passenger.  Taking someone to a place like the Shot Tower never posed a problem, of course, even if he thought it was Schattentur.  But there was, for example, the passenger he’d picked up at Penn Station who wanted to go to “Fader’s”, the cigar store on Calvert.  “Vetters?” asked Phil, a little puzzled, as he thought he’d heard what sounded like the German for cousin.  The man emptily confirmed “Fader’s” with an almost disdainful flick of the head.  “Who is dis nobody to demand I know where lif dis cousin,” Phil thought to himself.   In an instant, he saw the slight, clearly.  That was enough; he flashed his ruby anger, transformed like a roused octopus, hair disheveled.  There was a contentious, but brief exchange.  Phil cast the would-be migrant from the car with an authoritative and weighty gesture and sped off in a grey cloud of asphalt, exhaust, rubber.  Although his daily existence was now humble and distastefully contingent on others, he had managed to retain, in this sense, a satisfying mastery over this one domain.  The only other echo of his fabulous past, when the world nearly floated upon his fingertips before bouncing from his grasp, was supplied by those regular, mirthful nights playing canasta, when the few husks of Nazi empire who’d landed in America gathered round for cards, conversation, and camaraderie.

When those Thursdays came round, he would buy pretzels and beer for the guests.  He would select one of the better bottles of bad schnapps that he had come to favor by dint of circumstance.  The card table would be set up and some creaking chairs and an uncertain stepstool drawn from the kitchen’s stock would be placed round, along with his dilapidated, overstuffed chair, which in addition to fitting him well, emphasized his superior status.  A lamp would be brought from the bedroom to complement the bulb dangling from the ceiling.  Sometimes he might offer some cabbage too, or, if he’d been tipped well, a few sausages.  Thus had he built himself into quite the host.  Everyone usually came in clothing that was slightly above what they’d wear to work: fewer patches.  Newish shoe laces.  The former sewerman would smoke cheroots, which Phil tolerated as the price of memory.  And so they would meet regularly to eat, drink, and be merry.  For this particular Thursday, however, in light of the honored guest, Phil went all out.  Leni was a great artist, like him and maybe Speer.  She would bring glamor and class to their otherwise dour Kaffeeklatsch.  He could hardly wait, and he’d ordered everyone to dress appropriately, although he granted that the weather was too inclement for Lederhosen; Homburgs were permitted to any who could afford one.

Phil had cut his day short to prepare, even driving past an obviously well-heeled man in Charles Village as he vainly attempted to hale his cab.  But Phil had no time.  Everything had to be just right.  The pretzels, a bottle of the best second-rate schnapps he could find, the cabbage, some liverwurst, a wedge of cheese.  And he had to pick up his best pair of shoes from the cobbler who did what he could with the materials at hand to resuscitate leather that had given up the ghost years ago.  All the driving around took time, and then he had to prepare the flat.  He dusted and scrubbed and smoothed what was beyond smoothing.  And then, as the time for the arrival of the regular guests drew near, he entered the inner sanctum of his bedroom, in which he’d hidden, inside a tatty Bostonian shoebox rescued from a Roland Park trashcan and pressed into service as a kind of reliquary of the Reich, the few Nazi ostraka that had survived the journey with him to Baltimore.  There was a party membership card, sadly, not his own.  A scratched Swastika lapel pin, the very one he customarily wore for sits with his photographer.  A cake of guest soap from the Wolf’s Lair.  An SS sock in mint condition.  An uneaten candy. And an IOU from that deadbeat, Himmler, who’d borrowed 50 Reichsmarks for lunch in Wannsee during the summer of 1940.  All these precious objects bore about them the spirit of what had been, and normally they were produced only on special occasions, such as Phil’s birthday, or when he felt particularly low.  Their trivial nature was transubstantiated by a holy nimbus of fond and expectant memory surrounding them.  The box positively glowed from its contents, and Phil reverently withdrew each one, carefully recalling his day in the sun, now eclipsed by history.  Leni’s arrival called for a display of the holy bits.  Like a mystagogue, Phil would reveal them to the initiates at an appropriate moment, for their shock, wonder, and awe.

The sacred remains carefully placed upon the fireplace mantel opposite the card table, Phil turned his attention to final preparations.  The careful arrangement of the furniture.  The cards, from Argentina, of course, neatly placed on the table.  The glasses, beer and liquor, and food laid out on a sideboard made of two sawhorses and a plank, but covered in a linen made of old shirts shorn of their buttons and roughly stitched together by an accomplished taxidermist who’d inhabited the flat before Phil.  He brushed his teeth with baking soda and an old, matted boar-bristle brush, and carefully studied himself in the mirror as he precisely trimmed that moustache and carefully shaped with a small dab of lard his glistening, black hair.  If only the opportunity came, he thought, he’d be up to the task: he was ready for a return, some day, when the timing was right.  He’d been big; everything around him had somehow gotten small, he felt.  And he just slipped by.  And then he looked away, exhaling deeply, and proceeded to get dressed in a brown suit that was very stylish 20 years ago.  For a moment, though, he couldn’t locate his red armband.  Where had it gone?  He hadn’t worn it for two years, but he always returned it to the dresser.  And now at this moment he couldn’t find it.  That rage, born of profound frustration and disappointment, surged within, and, as he tore the sheets from his bed and thrust aside the small rug and shifted the bedroom furniture, he felt himself submerge in rising tides of anger.  The doorbell. Feigned composure.

Franz stood at the door, wearing his old helmet.  To his left, the sewerman emeritus, holding a pink box of pastries splotched here and there with oil stains.  To his right, Hesse, sheepishly rubbing his ear as he extended a well-handled bag of strudel.  The postman and the baggage handler had both begged off to attend a Tom Mix film festival across the Bay. That decision was not unnoticed.  Curtly and with authority, Phil invited everyone in, and then he thrust his face through the doorway to cast a glance down the hall and see if those neighbors might be spying on him and his guests.  He didn’t offer anyone anything.  They were to serve themselves, but under no circumstance were they to approach the würst.  Phil knew to make a point of this for Hesse’s benefit.  For now, only pretzels and drinks were fair game.  The rest was held in reserve to honor the anticipated guest.  Phil glanced at the little wristwatch he’d purchased at Wempe all those years ago: it was a little before seven.

“Well, Leni will be hier soon, don’t overdo the pretzels,” he admonished the guests.

“Nein, mein Führer,” Hesse answered, habituated beyond repair.

Phil, finding himself at a loose end because the party really couldn’t start without Leni, yet guests already had gathered, offered: “Perhaps, we von’t play de Kanasta with Leni.  A fift player doesn’t werk.”

“Nein, mein Führer,” Hesse answered, habituated beyond repair.

“Mein Führer, we shall simply talk of happier days,” Franz suggested.

“Ja, and, perhaps, of my return. But where?  Where could I return?”

Hesse had a thought: “Yes.  That will take some werk.”

“What?! The return? Where? What?!,” shouted Phil, moderately roused by the vacuous nature of Hesse’s comment, as if he were merely an empty vessel awaiting contents.

Hesse admitted that he hadn’t thought it through and couldn’t decide if he was responding to the problem of the return itself or where the happy event might take place, although he was certain that wherever it did happen, the ordinary people would welcome their imminent salvation. If that’s what Phil wanted, he added.

“Idiot!!” shouted Phil.  “I always knew your were an idiot.  Oh sure, you don’t mind jotting down vat I say, ‘my struggle’, as I aptly put it, but you always were a hopeless numbskull.”  He swatted Hesse, who shrugged and turned to his pretzel: Phil had a point, and yet in serving Phil, Hesse had found a kind of calling for himself, as he was solely a man with nothing more than the potential for loyalty, once the object of loyalty could be found.

The sewerman, disobeying orders, closed in and sniffed at the sausage, audibly, then grabbed a can of Nazi Bau and cracked it open with an effortless flick of the wrist.  Franz sat himself uneasily on the protesting step stool, clutching “ein pils”, as he’d often say, in one hand, a pretzel in the other.  As he bit it, the thing loudly exploded into a cloud of dust and crumbs, scattering white fragments all over his dark shirt.  He munched contentedly, washing down the dry contents of his mouth with a baritone gulp of beer.  He wondered out loud why the postman and the baggage handler had chosen the Tom Mix gala over an opportunity to meet Leni Riefenstahl.  It made no sense: here was a woman who made the German with blond hair and a tan into an Aryan, even when he was pledging fealty with a shovel; here was a woman who proved with art, by art, and through art, that Aryan Olympians were not to be trifled with, even if the American, Jürgen Owens, had actually won the footrace.  And what was Tom Mix?  Merely a cowboy, a romantic image from our days of youth.  Franz seemed to feel a bit let down by the absence of some of the regulars.

“A hass-been kowboy from the days of da yoot!”

Phil sympathetically patted Franz on the hand, acknowledging his words of support, uttering softly, “I’m so tired.”  And adding, “it’s gut.”  Phil could be understanding; he often found himself obliged to prop up the faithful; that was especially the case in the Bunker.  But it took a lot of work.  And, in some ways too, he had his fill of this kind of love; he was sick and tired of this kind of love in which he played tree to their lichen.  He reflected and, like a latter-day Luther, as, perhaps, he saw himself, declared to the faithful:

“Hier I stand: I set men on fire; I have this power, but I am tired.” 

The shine of this happy occasion had dimmed somewhat.  Something about the setting had given him a touch of melancholy.

“Maybe I’m uninspired.” 

Franz, the sewerman, and Hesse all chorused: “nein, Führer, nein.”  It was strange, but it almost seemed that they needed the idea of Phil more than Phil did.  He sat into his overstuffed chair, which gasped out a bit of lint as he sank into it.  It was a little past seven now.  They could sing the Horst Wessel Lied, but “vat’s the point,” he thought.  These were dark moments, when he felt terribly alone, as though everything he’d worked for was pointless.  He did feel tired and uninspired with all the coming and going.  In some ways, he felt that he was tired of playing the game; that somehow, it was all just a crying shame, he was so tired.  Tired of being admired: the whole effort was, he nearly sensed, somehow kaput.  It wasn’t like him to complain, though; he normally put a brave face on everything, like a little corporal that could.  So he told himself.  Leni’s anticipated arrival only cemented that view in his own mind.

Franz loudly redusted himself in a burst of pretzel crumbs.  For a moment, Phil gazed at where he had placed the sacred artifacts on the mantle, if only to refresh his inspiration.  He sipped some beer.  The sewerman excused himself and went off to the toilet. 

Suddenly, the dour pall that had settled upon the room was cast aside as the klaxon-like noise of the doorbell loudly sounded, pressed by an obviously heavy finger that held the button down as though trying get the attention of everyone in the building.  Hesse rose instinctively and went to the door.  Phil made no effort to rise from his chair.  A candygram for Phil was Hesse’s first thought, and he recalled that Phil liked candy.  When he opened the door, he found a man clad in black, parallel buttons shining in rows up the front, wearing a Western Union cap. 

“Ja?” said Hesse, a little brought down at the sight of the deliveryboy.

“Telegram for P. Hitler, sir.”

Phil heard this and rose.  As he scanned the delivery boy, his mind shot back to other days, and he briefly, mistakenly looked for an Iron Cross or some other decoration before his eyes settled on the words, Western Union.  The boy confirmed Phil’s identity and, after the few awkward moments it took him to realize that no tip would ever emanate from the flat’s inmates, departed.  By this time, the sewerman had returned, and he sat there fumbling with his zipper, fixing his attention, as did Franz and Hesse, on Hitler as he tore open the yellow message.

MBOTE PHIL STOP

MET FRIENDS IN ALEXANDRIA STOP CHARTERED FLIGHT TO KONGO STOP FILM OPPORTUNITY STOP AS THEY SAY IN LEOPOLDVILLE STOP WHEN YOU HAVE A TOOTH CRACK A NUT STOP LET THE BAND PLAY ON WITHOUT ME STOP

KISSES, LENI STOP

It was the calm within the eye of a hurricane.  Hitler’s hands fell to his side, one of them twitching pronouncedly as he put it behind his back and paced over to the sideboard, not fully comprehending the contents of the message.  He sniffed the würst, tore off a piece, ate it.  All eyes remained eagerly, receptively fixed upon him.

“I deal?” offered Hesse, unsure of proper etiquette in a delicate situation such as this.

And, then, the eye had passed; Hitler’s rage boiled into view.  His earlier fatigue yielded before surging blasts of restored energy: his purpose was clear.

“All of you get out!” he thundered. 

The guests were a little stunned; Franz was grateful to be sitting.  Hitler picked up the crumpled bag that Hesse had brought, thrust it at him, and ordered him out of the flat.  And Franz and the sewerman.  Everyone get out.  There was confused stumbling as people put down beers, or grabbed a final handful of pretzels, or worked the zipper, and then they were all gone.  Hitler went to the mantle, where lay the relics.  He unwrapped the sacred candy; he ate it.  It was stale and hard.  A tooth cracked, and he fell back into his wheezing chair, defeated.