Darling Adolf Read online

  Darling Adolf

  Рэй Брэдбери

  Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

  Long After Midnight (Далеко за полночь)

  Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

  Ray Bradbury

  Darling Adolf

  They were waiting for him to come out. He was sitting inside the little Bavarian cafe with a view of the mountains, drinking beer, and he had been in there since noon and it was now two-thirty, a long lunch, and much beer, and they could see by the way he held his head and laughed and lifted one more stein with the suds fluffing in the spring breeze that he was in a grand humour now, and at the table with him the two other men were doing their best to keep up, but bad fallen long behind.

  On occasion their voices drifted on the wind, and then the small crowd waiting out in the parking lot leaned to hear. What was he saying? and now what?

  «He just said the shooting was going well.»

  «What, where?!»

  «Fool. The film, the film is shooting well.»

  «Is that the director sitting with him?»

  «Yes. And the other unhappy one is the producer.»

  «He doesn't look like a producer.»

  «No wonder! He's had his nose changed.»

  «And him, doesn't he look real?»

  «To the hair and the teeth.»

  And again everyone leaned to look in at the three men, at the man who didn't look like a producer, at the sheepish director who kept glancing out at the crowd and slouching down with his head between his shoulders, shutting his eyes, and the man between them, the man in the uniform with the swastika on his arm, and the fine military cap put on the table beside the almost-untouched food, for he was talking, no, making a speech.

  «That's the Fuhrer, all right!»

  «God in heaven, it's as if no time had passed. I don't believe this is 1973. Suddenly it's 1934 again, when first I saw him.»

  «Where?»

  «The Nuremberg Rally, the stadium, that was the autumn, yes, and I was thirteen and part of the Youth and one hundred thousand soldiers and young men in that big place that late afternoon before the torches were lit. So many bands, so many flags, so much heartbeat, yes, I tell you, I could hear one hundred thousand hearts banging away, we were all so in love, he had come down out of the clouds. The gods had sent him, we knew, and the time of waiting was over, from here on we could act, there was nothing he couldn't help us to do.»

  «I wonder how that actor in there feels, playing him?»

  «Sh, he hears you. Look, he waves. Wave back.»

  «Shut up,» said someone else. «They're talking again. I want to hear ―»

  The crowd shut up. The men and women leaned into the soft spring wind. The voices drifted from the cafe table.

  Beer was being poured by a maiden waitress with flushed cheeks and eyes as bright as fire.

  «More beer!» said the man with the toothbrush mustache and the hair combed forward on the left side of his brow.

  «No, thanks,» said the director.

  «No, no,» said the producer.

  «More beer. It's a splendid day,» said Adolf. «A toast to the film, to us, to me. Drink!»

  The other two men put their hands on their glasses of beer.

  «To the film,» said the producer.

  «To darling Adolf.» The director's voice was flat.

  The man in the uniform stiffened.

  «I do not look upon myself ―» he hesitated, «upon him as darling.»

  «He was darling, all right, and you're a doll.» The director gulped his drink. «Does anyone mind if I get drunk?»

  «To be drunk is not permitted,» said Der Fuhrer.

  «Where does it say that in the script?»

  The producer kicked the director under the table.

  «How many more weeks' work do you figure we have?» asked the producer, with great politeness.

  «I figure we should finish the film,» said the director, taking huge swigs, «around about the death of Hindenburg, or the Hindenburg gasbag going down in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, whichever comes first.»

  Adolf Hitler bent to his plate and began to eat rapidly, snapping at his meat and potatoes in silence.

  The producer sighed heavily. The director, nudged by this, calmed the waters. «Another three weeks should see the masterwork in the can, and us sailing home on the Titanic, there to collide with the Jewish critics and go down bravely singing „Deutschland Uber Alles.“»

  Suddenly all three were voracious and snapping and biting and chewing their food, and the spring breeze blew softly, and the crowd waited outside.

  At last, Der Fuhrer stopped, had another sip of beer, and lay back in his chair, touching his mustache with his little finger.

  «Nothing can provoke me on a day like this. The rushes last night were so beautiful. The casting for this film, ah! I find Goring to be incredible. Goebbels? Perfection!» Sunlight dazzled out of Der Fuhrer's face. «So. So, I was thinking just last night, here I am in Bavaria, me, a pure Aryan ―»

  Both men flinched slightly, and waited.

  «— making a film,» Hitler went on, laughing softly, «with a Jew from New York and a Jew from Hollywood. So amusing.»

  «I am not amused,» said the director, lightly.

  The producer shot him a glance which said: me film is not finished yet. Careful.

  «And I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun…» Here Der Fuhrer stopped to take a big drink, «…to have another… ah… Nuremberg Rally?»

  «You mean for the film, of course?»

  The director stared at Hitler. Hitler examined the texture of the suds in his beer.

  «My God,» said the producer, «do you know how much it would cost to reproduce the Nuremberg Rally? How much did it cost Hitler for me original, Marc?»

  He blinked at his director, who said, «A bundle. But he had a lot of free extras, of course.»

  «Of course! The Army, the Hitler Youth.»

  «Yes, yes,» said Hitler. «But think of the publicity, all over the world? Let us go to Nuremberg, eh, and film my plane, eh, and me coming down out of the clouds? I heard those people out there, just now: Nuremberg and plane and torches. They remember. I remember. I held a torch in that stadium. My God, it was beautiful. And now, now I am exactly the age Hitler was when he was at his prime.»

  «He was never at his prime,» said the director. «Unless you mean bung-meat.»

  Hitler put down his glass. His cheeks grew very red. Then he forced a smile to widen his lips and change the colour of his face.

  «That is a joke, of course.»

  «A joke,» said the producer, playing ventriloquist to his friend.

  «I was thinking,» Hitler went on, his eyes on the clouds again, seeing it all, back in another year. «If we shot it next month, with the. weather good. Think of all the tourists who Would come to watch the filming!»

  «Yeah. Bormann might even come back from Argentina.»

  The producer shot his director another glare.

  Hitler cleared his throat and forced the words out: «As for expense, if you took one small ad, one mind you! in the Nuremberg papers one week before, why, you would have an army of people there as extras at fifty cents a day, no, a quarter, no, free!»

  Der Fuhrer emptier his stein, ordered another. The waitress dashed off to refill. Hitler studied his two friends.

  «You know,» said the director, sitting up, his own eyes taking a kind of vicious fire, his teeth showing as he leaned forward, «there is a kind of idiot grace to you, a kind of murderous wit, a sort of half-ass style. Every once in a while you come dripping up with some sensational slime that gleams and stinks in the sun, bu
ster. Archie, listen to him. Der Fuhrer just had a great bowel movement. Drag in the astrologers' Slit the pigeons and filch their guts. Read me the casting sheets.»

  The director leaped to his feet and began to pace.

  «That one ad in the paper, and all the trunks in Nuremberg get flung wide! Old uniforms come out to cover fat bellies! Old armbands come out to fit flabby arms! Old military caps with skull-eagles on them fly out to fit on fatheads!»

  «I will not sit here―» cried Hitler.

  He started to get up but the producer was tugging his arm and the director had a knife at his heart: his forefinger, stabbing hard.

  «Sit.»

  The director's face hovered two inches from Hitler's nose. Hitler slowly sank back, his cheeks perspiring.

  «God, you are a genius,» said the director. «Jesus, your people would show up. Not the young, no, but the old. All the Hitler youth, your age now, those senile bags of tripe yelling 'Sieg Heil,' saluting, lighting torches at sunset, marching around the stadium crying themselves blind.»

  The director swerved to his producer.

  «I tell you. Arch, this Hitler here has bilge for brains but this time he's on target! If we don't shove the Nuremberg Rally up this film, I quit. I mean it. I will simply walk out and let Adolf here take over and direct the damned thing himself! Speech over.» -

  He sat down.

  Both the producer and Der Fuhrer appeared to be in a state of shock.

  «Order me another goddamn beer,» snapped the director.

  Hitler gasped in a huge breath, tossed down his knife and fork, and shoved back his chair.

  «I do not break bread with such as you!»

  «Why, you bootlicking lapdog son of a bitch,» said the director. «I'll hold the mug and you'll do the licking. Here.» The director grabbed the beer and shoved it under Der Fuhrer's nose. The crowd, out beyond, gasped and almost surged. Hitler's eyes rolled, for the director had seized him by the front of his tunic and was yanking him forward.

  «Lick! Drink the German filth! Drink, you scum!»

  «Boys, boys,» said the producer.

  «Boys, crud! You know what this swill-hole, this chamberpot Nazi, has been thinking, sitting here, Archibald, and drinking your beer? Today Europe, tomorrow the world!»

  «No, no, Marc!»

  «No, no,» said Hitler, staring down at the fist which clenched the material of his uniform. «The buttons, the buttons ―»

  «Are loose on your tunic and inside your head, worm. Arch, look at him pour! Look at the grease roll off his forehead, look at his stinking armpits. He's a sea of sweat because I've read his mind! Tomorrow the world! Get this film set up, him cast in the lead. Bring him down out of the clouds, a month from now. Brass bands. Torchlight. Bring back Leni Reifenstahl to show us how she shot the Rally in '34. Hitler's lady-director friend. Fifty cameras she used, fifty she used, by God, to get all the German crumbs lined up and vomiting lies, and Hitler in his creaking leather and Goring awash in his blubber, and Goebbels doing his wounded-monkey walk, the three superfags of history aswank in the stadium at dusk, make it all happen again, with this bastard up front, and do you know what's going through his little graveyard mind behind his bloater eyes at this very moment?»

  «Marc, Marc,» whispered the producer, eyes shut, grinding his teeth. «Sit down. Everyone sees.»

  «Let them see! Wake up, you! Don't you shut your eyes on me, too! I've shut my eyes on you for days, filth. Now I want some attention. Here.»

  He sloshed beer on Hitler's face, which caused his eyes to snap wide and his eyes to roll yet again, as apoplexy burned he cheeks.

  The crowd, out beyond, hissed in their breath.

  The director, hearing, leered at them.

  «Boy, is this funny. They don't know whether to come in or not, don't know if you're real or not, and neither do I. Tomorrow, you bilgy bastard, you really dream of becoming Der Fuhrer.»

  He bathed the man's face with more beer.

  The producer had turned away in his chair now and was frantically dabbing at some imaginary breadcrumbs on his tie. «Marc, for God's sake ―»

  «No, no, seriously, Archibald. This guy thinks because he puts on a ten-cent uniform and plays Hitler for four weeks at good pay that if we actually put together the Rally, why Christ, History would tam back, oh turn back, Time, Time in thy flight, make me a stupid Jew-baking Nazi again for tonight Can you see it. Arch, this lice walking up to the microphones and shouting, and the crowd shouting back, and him realty trying to take over, as if Roosevelt still lived and Churchill wasn't six feet deep, and it was all to be lost or won again, but mainly won, because this time they wouldn't stop at the Channel but just cross on over, give or take a million German boys dead, and stomp England and stomp America, isn't that what's going on inside your little Aryan skull, Adolf? Isn't it!»

  Hitler gagged and hissed. His tongue stuck out. At last he jerked free and exploded:

  «Yes! Yes, goddamn you! Damn and bake and bum you! You dare to lay hands on Der Fuhrer! The Rally! Yes! It must be in the film! We must make it again! The plane! The landing! The long (hive through streets. The blonde girls. The lovely blond boys. The stadium. Leni Reifenstahl! And from all me trunks, in all the attics, a black plague of armbands winging on the dusk, flying to assault, battering to take the victory. Yes, yes, I, Der Fuhrer, I will stand at that Rally and dictate terms! I―I―»

  He was on his feet now.

  The crowd, out beyond in the parking lot, shouted.

  Hitler turned and gave them a salute.

  The director took careful aim and shot a blow of his fist to the German's nose.

  After that the crowd arrived, shrieking, yelling, pushing, shoving, falling.

  They drove to the hospital at four the next afternoon.

  Slumped, the old producer sighed, his hands over his eyes. «Why, why, why are we going to the hospital? To visit that — monster?»

  The director nodded.

  The old man groaned. «Crazy world. Mad people. I never saw such biting, kicking, biting. That mob almost killed you.»

  The director licked his swollen lips and touched his half-shut left eye with a probing finger. «I'm okay. The important thing is I hit Adolf, oh, how I hit him. And now ―» He stared calmly ahead. «I think I am going to the hospital to finish the job.»

  «Finish, finish?» The old man stared at him.

  «Finish.» The director wheeled the car slowly around a comer.

  «Remember the twenties. Arch, when Hitler got shot at in the street and not hit, or beaten in the streets, and nobody socked him away forever, or he left a beer hall ten minutes before a bomb went off, or was in that officers' hut in 1844 and the briefcase bomb exploded and that didn't get him. Always the charmed life. Always he got out from under the rock. Well, Archie, no more charms, no more escapes. I'm walking in that hospital to make sure that when that half-ass extra comes out and there's a mob of krauts to greet him, he's walking wounded, a permanent soprano. Don't try to stop me. Arch.»

  «Who's stopping? Belt him one for me.»

  They stopped in front of the hospital just in time to see one of the studio production assistants run down the steps, his hair wild, his eyes wilder, shouting.

  «Christ,» said the director. «Bet you forty to one, our luck's run out again. Bet you that guy running toward us says ―»

  «Kidnaped! Gone!» the man cried. «Adolf s been taken away!»

  «Son of a bitch.»

  They circled the empty hospital bed; they touched it.

  A nurse stood in one comer wringing her hands. The production assistant babbled.

  «Three men it was, three men, three men.»

  «Shut up.» The director was snowblind from simply looking at the white sheets. «Did they force him or did he go along quietly?»

  «I don't know, I can't say, yes, he was making speeches, making speeches as they took him out.»

  «Making speeches?» cried the old producer, slapping his bald pate. «Christ,
with the restaurant suing us for broken tables, and Hitler maybe suing us for ―»

  «Hold on.» The director stepped over and fixed the production assistant with a steady gaze. «Three men, you say?»

  «Three, yes, three, three, three, oh, three men.»

  A small forty-watt lightbulb flashed on in the director's head.

  «Did, ah, did one man have a square face, a good jaw, bushy eyebrows?»

  «Why… yes!»

  «Was one man short and skinny like a chimpanzee?»

  «Yes!»

  «Was one man big, I mean, slobby fat?»

  «How did you know?»

  The producer blinked at both of them. «What goes on? What―»

  «Stupid attracts stupid. Animal cunning calls to laughing jackass cunning. Come on. Arch!»

  «Where?» The old man stared at the empty bed as if Adolf might materialize there any moment now.

  «The back of my car, quick!»

  From the back of the car, on the street, the director pulled a German cinema directory. He leafed through the character actors. «Here.»

  The old man looked. A forty-watt bulb went on in his head.

  The director riffled more pages. «And here. And, finally, here.»

  They stood now in the cold wind outside the hospital and let the breeze turn the pages as they read the captions under the photographs.

  «Goebbels,» whispered the old man.

  «An actor named Rudy Steihl.»

  «Goring.»

  «A hambone named Grofe.»

  «Hess.»

  «Fritz Dingle.»

  The old man shut the book and cried to the echoes.

  «Son of a bitch!»

  «Louder and runnier, Arch. Funnier and louder.»

  «You mean right now out there somewhere in the city three dumbkopf out-of-work actors have Adolf in hiding, held maybe for ransom? And do we pay it?»

  «Do we want to finish the film. Arch?»

  «God, I don't know, so much money already, time, and ―» The old man shivered and rolled his eyes. «What if — I mean — what if they don't want ransom?»

  The director nodded and grinned «You mean, what if this is the true start of the Fourth Reich?»