Chapter Three
The Odin Temple
(Aryan St., 46 opposite the Kommandatur)
I had to leave the car at a
remote parking lot. Even though I have the clearance, no one’s allowed to park
their cars by the walls of the Kommandatur. The place is wallowing in paranoia,
they see terrorists everywhere.
I receive a token made of hard
cardboard and head for the turnpike. A fat bespectacled middle-aged guy in a
brown uniform with an Obergefreiter lapel badges is manning the booth by the
barrier. His tongue hanging out from the effort, he’s studying a fresh issue of
Völkischer Beobachter plastered with
glossy pictures of scantily clad girls. That’s crisis for you. The party press was
obliged to adopt the tabloid format in order to survive in the free market.
I knock at the glass of the
booth. We've known each other for ages.
“Heiley heil,” he mumbles
unceremoniously, turning a page.
I wave a greeting. “Heil to
you too.”
I know every inch of the Aryan
Street which stretches from Berlin Station all the way up to the Reichstag. I
can walk the whole length of it blindfolded. Its sidewalks are lined with the
blackened skeletons of tanks fenced off with strap barriers: a reminder of the
street fighting of the Twenty-Year War. Half a dozen charred Tigers are grouped
together opposite the Luftwaffe Heroes Boulevard like a small herd of
droopy-trunked elephants. The walls of the state-of-the-art office buildings
touch the rotting ruins of bombed-out houses. Apparently, in Bolshevik times
there used to be a monument to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin here. He’s
long been removed both from the square and from the school curriculum. He was
of African descent, wasn’t he?
Actually, the Ministry of
Education did a great job. They banned Tchaikovsky’s music — apparently, the
composer was a closet homosexual. They destroyed some of the most popular old
movies which had featured Jewish actors, no matter how minor the part.
The center of the boulevard
gapes with black holes edged with fire-licked scabs. These are bonfire sites.
On weekends, the Aryan Street becomes a scene of multiple book burnings. They
confiscate books from the Schwarzkopfs, like they used to do at the Opernplatz
in Berlin. The books by Herbert Wells, Vladimir Mayakovski and Jaroslav Hašek
squirm as they reduce to ashes.
When I was still a young
Führerjugend activist, I brought here a copy of The Three Musketeers that the school janitor had been hiding in his
cubicle. I threw it in the fire. Its author Alexander Dumas wasn’t Aryan. There
was African blood in his veins too. Have you heard this ripping noise made by
burning paper? It sounds like a heart being ripped apart.
In place of the old Pushkin
monument, they’ve got Nietzsche standing now. At first, lots of people confused
him with Gorky (another banned author) because of his fat moustache. The Führer
used to love Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Unfortunately, he didn’t know something that Nietzsche had
said, “Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish
blood in their veins.” Having said that, it’s probably all slander spread by
the Shogunet forum trolls. Trust them to write all sorts of sick nonsense.
The government buildings on
the Aryan Street are a sorry sight. Most of them are just copies of Berlin’s
gloomy edifices. Take a look: the Moskau Ministry of Propaganda and Public
Education, perfectly in keeping with Dr. Goebbels’ old office. Gray columns,
colorful mosaics depicting young Aryan people flashing white smiles as they
applaud National Socialism. A piercing wind invigorates the fluttering
Reichskommissariat flags: the scarlet-red banners with a black eagle clenching
a wreath of oak leaves. The swastika is long gone. Only souvenir vendors at the
Richard Wagner pedestrian zone still sell merchandise featuring Die Hakenkreuz, the “angled cross”. The
swastika on the flag was banned soon after the Twenty Year War. Regardless of
how much everyone worships the Führer, not all of the Reichskommissariats were
happy with his legacy, especially those where constant uprisings of the “Forest
Brothers” were the norm.
Next, the dilapidated office
of the Labor Front. A long time ago, this trade union organization used to be
headed by Robert Ley. Reichsleiter Ley was killed in 1968 by some partisans
during his visit to Kiev. They sent him a messenger pigeon carrying a miniature
grenade.
A blood-curdling screech of
car brakes shakes the air.
“Where do you think you’re
going, you motherf- Or, sorry, Priest. My mistake.”
I was so busy staring at the
Labor Front windows that I didn’t even notice myself stepping out into the
traffic and very nearly being hit by a green Nissan. Nissan, what a funny name.
One of those words you can’t help but tweak to make them sound more lewd, if
you know what I mean. Nissan, pisspan, that sort of thing. Most of Moskau cars
are Japanese. The Mercedes, Opels and Volkswagens are reserved for official
missions. Their production just isn’t viable anymore. Even street buses are all
Mitsubishis. I won’t even mention the Tokyo-imported pushbikes.
I flash him a benign smile.
“It’s all right! Alles in ordnung!”
I didn’t even notice saying
it. We use Germanic words and phrases mechanically. Nobody refers to an “ID
card” anymore: it’s an ausweis. Russlanders
soak up foreign words naturally, me being no exception. Still, I can only think
in the local tongue.
I wipe my forehead. The sun is
blazing.
Odin’s priests don’t have it
easy. Sacrificial rites call for a special uniform: chainmail, a pair of fur-lined
high boots, a wolf pelt thrown over your shoulders and a fifteen-pound ritual
sword hanging from your belt. It does take some stamina, I tell you.
I can’t walk any faster but
I’ve almost arrived at my destination. I walk past a Hashi sushi bar – hashi means chopsticks in Japanese — and
there I am, entering Odin’s Temple.
If the truth were known, I’m
not a hundred percent happy with my workplace. The building is far too large
and ponderous, shaped as a medieval cave with a central grotto and several branching
tunnels. Admittedly, it's quite comfortable. There's a hot water source inside:
very convenient when one needs to clean blood from swords. By the entrance,
there's a sculpture: Tyr the God laying his hand into the mouth of Fenrir the
wolf. The year 1947 saw Norse mythology being adopted as the official religion
of the Third Reich, in compliance with Reichsführer Himmler’s last will and
testament[i]. No one
was going to destroy the existing churches or cathedrals: their congregations
were free to worship whoever they pleased. But what is the popularity-driving
engine these days? Exactly. Publicity. Billions of reichsmarks were channeled
into the promotion of new ideas. TV, radio, even the leading movie stars
including the-then star Marika Rökk and the publicly repentant Marlene
Dietrich. It worked. It took less than ten years for half the Reich’s
population to reject their religions and start worshipping at the altars of
Greater Germany. A sensation? Not at all. The entire history of humanity is
proof of the fact that people find it very easy to denounce their religion,
provided the publicity is right. The two thousand years of Christianity had
left a bad taste in their mouths. The new version of the same old (or a remake, as they call it in the
California Republic) was extremely timely. Everyone was already bored to death
with the four riders of the Apocalypse. Now the story of Fenrir the wolf
devouring the sun — that was fresh and original. After all, why shouldn’t
religion be fun?
I use my magnet key to open
the door and barge into the lobby, panting and sweating like a pig. Nobody
inside. The black sacrificial goat bleats plaintively. Of course. Trust my
assistants to go on vacation. This is Russland, after all. Even a nuclear war
won’t stop them from retiring to their summer cottages.
A written prompt shaped as an
axe hangs over the altar. I know it by heart:
Monday: Moon’s day
Tuesday: Tiu’s day
Wednesday: Woden’s day
Thursday: Thor’s day
Friday: Freya’s day
Saturday: Saturn’s day
Sunday: Sun’s day
Moskauers aren’t particularly
attentive. They still use the old week names, out of habit. But an experienced
priest like myself who was interned in Norway and Tibet can’t let his tongue
slip.
I walk over to the goat. He
stinks and tries to gore me with his horns. He has the right not to like me:
he’ll be slaughtered soon.
My to-do list, the one in the
altar box, renders me speechless. How am I supposed to find time for all this?
The very first item on the list is a funeral. This isn’t what it used to be: do
a bit of singing and incense-burning, bury the poor beggar, end of story. Oh,
no. It’s not just having to load the stiffs onto disposable plywood Mitsubishi
boats to be burned on the Moskva River. It’s the priests’ duty to cut the dead
men’s nails! Oh yes. When Ragnarök — the world’s end — comes, the earth will
disgorge Naglfar, the ship fashioned entirely from dead people’s nails. The
ocean will freeze over and the ship will slide over the ice, taking an army of jötunns — mythical giants — to their
last battle. To prevent Ragnarök from happening, dead people’s nails should be
cut short: this way Naglfar can’t form, you see. My scissors are always here.
What’s a quick manicure? Surely not a big deal.
You really think no one
believes it?
Not the Schwarzkopfs, no.
They’re either Bolshies or Orthodox Christians or just plain good pagans. But
the rest... there’s no zealot like a convert, you know. You won’t believe the
extent of it. Old ladies gossip on boulevard benches about the Goddess
Angrboda: were her children begotten by Loki or by Thor? The mind boggles.
I walk over to the statue of
Rübezahl, the forest sprite and the king of dwarves. A tiny, hunched old man
with a large beard. I mustn’t forget to lay a bunch of mushrooms at his feet.
A new bout of pain pierces my
head like a red-hot needle.
I clench my teeth. My fingers
squeeze the head of a goat lying on the altar. Great gods...
The haze before my eyes
refuses to dissolve. I gasp. My mouth fills with blood.
Darkness devours everything
around me. Rübezahl explodes in a cascade of tiny little stars.
Vision One. The Black Skies
The wind screams. Icy cold, it
reaches under my clothes, its skeletal fingers clenching my throat,
constricting my movements. My eyelashes have frozen together. I sniffle, wary
of opening my mouth. The wind’s not screaming anymore: it’s howling like a
fatally wounded animal, making me colder still.
I scramble through the
darkness. There’s not a single light here. The flashes of submachine gun fire
slice through the pitch black night.
Human hands poke out of the
ice. People stagger through the city, sinking knee deep into the snow. Not
people: rambling shadows, lice-ridden, in filthy trench coats. There’s nothing
human left about them. Their frost-burned cheeks are wrapped in women’s shawls,
their boot legs are stuffed with rags against the cold. Some of them seek
warmth by bonfires, wrapping bundles of blankets around themselves.
This is crazy. I turn a corner
of a collapsed building. A group of soldiers is swarming around a dead horse. They’re
delirious with starvation. One of them has crawled toward the horse’s head and
is busy nibbling at its stiff frozen ear. Not a star in the sky. Its blackness
merges with that of the earth. They’re one now. There’s not a single house
around still intact. Nothing but ruins, their jagged walls like the tooth marks
of a mysterious monster.
The earth begins to shake. The
starving lunatics duck into the snow, choking on horse meat. An air raid. The
howling of bombers adds to the screaming of the wind, growing into a symphony
of the Apocalypse. Orange flashes rip through the darkness.
Death.
It’s everywhere here.
Each of us knows what they are
going to feed on once all the horses are dead and all the cats have been
trapped. We’ll feed on each other. Warmth and food: this is what these ragged
people hunt for. A tin of canned meat goes for a gold signet ring. Only who
might need it here?
Barbed wire-wound stakes are
hung with frozen bodies. Nobody buries them. They’re just too many. Those still alive have gotten used to the dead men’s
company. I see shell cases scattered amongst the collapsed brickwork. Tank
crews are still alive inside their white machines but they have no gas left.
The tanks turn their turrets this way and that, unable to move. They're dying like
broken-legged mammoths.
I can see a deluded soldier
rip his trench coat open baring his chest, yelling at an Oberleutnant. The
soldier is young and drunk as a skunk. The Oberleutnant is older, his face
covered with stubble, a bloodied bandage on his forehead. The shrapnel scar on
his cheek is semicircular.
”Why did they send us here?”
the soldier screams. “We’re all gonna die!”
Alcohol is never in short
supply. Without it, all wars would have ended before they even started. Facing
death is scary. Alcohol dissolves the panicky fear. Not for very long, but
still.
He hurls his submachine gun at
the Oberleutnant’s feet. His face is distorted.
“This isn’t my country! Let me
go! I want to leave!”
The Oberleutnant shakes his
head. His pale blue eyes reflect the falling snow. The soldier collapses into a
deep drift and struggles to scramble back to his feet, then tries to crawl
away.
The officer pulls his right
hand out of his trench coat’s pocket. His hand looks so funny in a women’s
fingerless mitten. His index and little fingers are black — apparently septic
with frostbite.
He clenches the handle of his
eight-round Walther and takes aim in the snowstorm, mumbling something through
clenched teeth. The soldier has already made it to the trenches.
He fires.
The soldier drops on his back.
The helmet flies off his head. His blond hair is covered in blood.
Immediately another shot
resonates through the air: the heavy sound of a far-off rifle. An enemy sniper,
shooting blindly. The officer’s muzzle flash had betrayed his position.
The Oberleutnant sinks to his
knees, drops his Walther and lies down on his side as if to have a nap. It
takes the snowstorm but a few seconds to bury the two new corpses.
How strange. Only a moment
ago, two men were alive. And now they’re not. Every man who goes to war thinks
he’s going to survive. Human history might have been completely war-free had we
known that we were going to be killed. Yes, killed.
A new swarm of bombers dives.
Explosions. More explosions. And yet more.
I rub my cheeks with snow. I
don’t sense the cold. It's frostbite.
I know very well why I’m
seeing it all. The dead cities. The dead bodies. The ice desert.
She
makes me see it.
[i] In the real world, in 1943
the Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler prepared a plan to adopt Scandinavian
mythology as the country’s official religion. The plan provided for the
building of Viking temples as well as the execution of the Pope. However, he never
proposed the plan to Hitler.
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