Montserrat turned the volume between her hands, when suddenly she remembered what she’d told Tristán the other day: that she thought this book had been rebound.
“You crafty bastard,” she whispered.
Montserrat went to the kitchen and opened a drawer, shoving forks and spoons aside until she found a sharp knife.
She sat back in the office and opened the book flat, plunging the knife along the interior fold of the cover. It was a harder task than she had anticipated, but she managed to take off the cover and remove the pages, revealing two pieces of paper, as thin and delicate as the skin of an onion, which had been neatly hidden in the binding.
She unfolded the pages and saw that they were written with ink, and in the same tight, small letters she’d seen penciled along the margins. Smaller, still. Had he written this with a magnifying glass? She turned on the green desk lamp and adjusted the angle.
The following is a brief but accurate account of my life, written this April 4 of 1961, at the age of 38. I was a sickly infant. A bout of rheumatic fever left me with a weak heart and I spent the bulk of my childhood cloistered at home, for my delicate constitution could not abide the outside world. My parents heaped praise upon my older brother and left me to spend lonely afternoons in my room, anticipating my early demise. But I did not die then and proved to be a precocious and brilliant child.
It was my intellectual father’s personality which bestowed upon me the gift of culture and wit. From my mother I inherited a certain melancholy and inquisitiveness, as well as an ease for languages. I found solace and companionship in books, paying special interest to the works of Guido von List and other thinkers of that ilk.
When I was eight years of age my older brother drowned in a terrible accident. My mother, distraught, asked my father to consult with mediums and magic practitioners in a quest to contact her dead child. Years before his marriage, my father had been engaged in such explorations, and now he returned to them.
Thus, I became accustomed to perusing the same books my parents read and listened to the conversations they maintained with learned practitioners of the magic arts.
My father was acquainted with members of the Thule Society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and other similar organizations. I was introduced to the many spiritualists, dowsers, astrologers, chirologists, and clairvoyants who assembled in Munich, which, in those days, numbered quite a few, and who visited my father, whose vast library contained valuable tomes. We maintained a salon, and I enjoyed this motley group of guests.
My mother, at first keen to organize elaborate reunions and séances, drifted into a pit of melancholy after a few years. The one reason why those activities interested her had been the possibility of regaining her dead son, and once this goal proved unachievable, she plunged into a mixture of drug addiction and depression, neglecting me and my father.
My mother killed herself on the fourth anniversary of my brother’s death. After my mother’s suicide our salons seemed to take place more often, although I noticed my father, rather than conducting the serious studies he had followed before, now seemed to organize any reunions as excuses for drinking and socialization. I began to correspond directly with several of our guests, amassing whatever knowledge I could. I was especially interested in the idea of rune magic and was inspired by Kummer, Wiligut, and others of their ilk to develop my own runic system.
My father’s connections were at first a boon for me and then a liability, for the month of June of 1941 saw the arrest of numerous astrologers and occultists, including people like Krafft, who had been widely considered a favorite of Goebbels. We’d thought him and ourselves untouchable. We were wrong.
My father was not among those arrested. He had learned that a team of pendulum users was being put together by the Navy High Command to help them sink British boats, and he convinced a man in charge of these experiments to let us join the dozens of men and women who spent hours with their arms stretched out across the nautical charts, attempting to discern the smallest motion of their pendulums. Therefore, although many astrologers and occultists faced imprisonment, we were spared.
The year 1941. Montserrat opened a book, then another. She plucked a note from her desk. That was the year Reinhard Heydrich ordered the Gestapo to take action against “fringe” sciences. The Krafft in the letter must be Karl Ernst Krafft, who had been recruited by Goebbels into the Propaganda Ministry so he could produce a new edition of Nostradamus’s prophecies; an edition that would pinpoint a German victory. Krafft had eventually fallen out of favor. This part of Ewers’s story had the ring of truth.
Our luck did not hold for long, and we found ourselves in a precarious position by the end of 1942, when we were both thrown under house arrest. My father’s reaction was to drink whatever he could get his hands on, and I understood, from his feeble mutterings and complaints, that he was ultimately a weak-willed and pitiful man whose possibilities had been exhausted. My poor health, ironically, kept me safe during this time as few people thought an alcoholic and his wan, feeble son could cause problems.
It was in 1943 that Mussolini was kidnapped, and in desperation Himmler decided to assemble a large group of occultists, ranging from astrologers to pendulum users, to locate the man. My father and I were among those invited to join this motley group at a villa on the Wannsee. Although the purpose of the congregation was to gather for work, the atmosphere was of that of a great bacchanal, with enormous quantities of food, drink, and tobacco available to energize us, plus the promise of one hundred thousand Reichsmark for anyone who could provide the required coordinates. My father promptly sunk into a stupor, and I watched the fools around me carousing and eating until I thought they might explode, all while I considered our situation and its inevitable conclusion.
For I must confess that my experiments with the pendulum had never yielded many results, and my studies of runes and astrology charts produced few effects. I knew, therefore, that just as we had been marched into those vast rooms filled with wine and food, we would be marched out to our doom once we were proven to be frauds and fools. There was not one amongst the lot of us that could claim access to a higher power.
After paying attention to the layout of our abode and studying the guards who kept watch over us, I determined that security was lax. No doubt this was because few people would wish to abandon such luxurious accommodations. At any rate, I arranged, through clever subterfuge, to make my way out of the premises. I carried with me what few belongings I had, including my pendulum. My father attempted to bar my way, but he was drunk. I managed to land a blow against his head, and he lost consciousness. I ran.
This was the first turning point in my life. I realized that my father would be punished for my escape, maybe even killed, but he was too much of a liability to me, old and weak as he was. I understood, at that moment, that the universe was inhabited by those who trample and those who are trampled, and I was determined to survive this war. No one would tread over me.
I lived in terror for days, not knowing where to go or how to get there, unable to chart a route. I was hungry and tired; one evening my luck took an even worse turn when I was suddenly beset by a man by the name of L, who was a thief. L pointed a gun at me and went through my belongings, pocketing what little he could find before he noticed my pendulum and a map. Curious, he asked what it was, and I explained to him the work I conducted, quickly adding that not only could this be used to locate British boats, but to locate anything at all.