The Butterflies of Memory

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative... In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? 'An Appeal to Adolf' tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; 'Lover of Statues' of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid - while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. 'Hijack Holiday', written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 438

Sample

IF YOU’RE OF THE OPINION that science fiction is above all else a literature of ideas, then Ian Watson is your man, and this collection, which contains more than enough ideas to set up a couple of lesser writers for life, is very definitely your cup of meat. Of course, ideas aren’t everything. For one thing, apart from a few incredibly rare once-in-a lifetime, fifty-carat, career-defining originals, ideas are as cheap and ubiquitous as advertising. Ideas, good or bad, are the human animal’s speciality. Day in, day out, we see clouds and think them very like whales. We put together two and two and make five. And even if you do have an idea that’s both brilliant and original, in the end it’s what you do with it that counts, and that’s where qualities like hard work, talent, and that indefinable but instantly recognisable quality, voice, come into play.

Ian Watson knows all about this, of course. Check out “How to be a Fictionaut”, which not only has a lot of fun with the myth of ideas and originality, but also pushes the notion of the anxiety of influence about as far as it will go.

This isn’t to say that the ideas on display here aren’t witty, outrageous, daft, unsettling and plainly fantastic, because quite frankly that’s exactly what they are. But more importantly, they have also been woven into stories by a writer who not only possesses a restless and capacious imagination, but also knows exactly what to do with his ideas, and has an enviable talent for stretching them in unexpected ways, testing them to destruction, or using them to smash open accepted notions about the way the world works.

After publishing around a hundred and seventy short stories, Ian Watson is still messing with his readers’ heads and their expectations of what he’s going to do next. Like all the best science fiction writers, he isn’t content to write the same thing over and over again. His stories aren’t about the comfort of the familiar, but the frisson of the unexpected, the shock of the new, and all the other good, brain-bending stuff that keeps science fiction out there on the bleeding edge. As far as I’m concerned, this is very definitely a good thing, even if it does mean that it’s kind of hard to find a peg on which to hang this introduction.

Ian Watson: he does things differently. Every time.

But all writers, even one as jaw-droppingly dexterous as Ian Watson, have a couple of favourite themes or obsessions to which they return again and again, on which they play endless variations. As in many of Ian’s novels, more than a few of the stories collected here are about people who find a way of transcending ordinary human limitations to win a glimpse of what really runs the universe. It’s a very science fictional theme; indeed, it’s possible to argue that it’s the primary theme of science fiction, cropping up in an enormous number of guises, from stories of supermen or superintellects who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, to stories of cosmic agape in which heroes hurl through cosmic depths of inner or outer space in slack-jawed wonder. But even in straight-from-the-heart-of-science-fiction stories that deal with conceptual breakthroughs and revelations that the universe really is far stranger than we can imagine, Ian’s characters aren’t drawn from the usual suspect cast of princes in disguise or resentful geeks empowered by the discovery that the odd corner of human knowledge they alone have mastered just happens to be the key to the Universe. His characters are more human than that, more ordinary, and as a result, more heroic (“One of Her Paths” does feature a baby empowered with superhuman knowledge, but in the end it’s still a baby, with all the physical limitations and frustrations that implies). For although Ian is a science fiction writer working squarely in the centre of the genre—you’ll find stories here about spaceships or intrusions from other dimensions, about weird worlds or technology running wild—he’s also a British science fiction writer, and as such he’s part of a community that, although overshadowed by the commercial blockbusters and cocksure vigour of American sci-fi, has its own traditions, most of which can be traced back to the granddaddy of us all, H.G. Wells.

Most British science fiction writers owe a debt to Wells, but Ian is the only one of us who attempts to repay that debt by channelling his ghost at science fiction conventions. At the drop of a top hat, he’ll adopt the costume and prickly persona of the most famous writer of scientific romances, by turns confounded by aspects of the comic inferno of our present that’s so at odds with his Utopian ideals, and delighted by other aspects that confirm the accuracy of his vision. Like Wells, Ian possesses an irrepressible energy and a restless, far-ranging imagination, and he also shares Wells’s abiding sense of Englishness. Although Wells saw himself as a world citizen, the world into which he was born and in which he did his finest work was a world dominated by the British Empire, and his heroes are more often than not straight out of an instantly recognisable English mould: they’re modest tradesmen or middle class professionals who prize a sense of fair play and a comfortably settled existence, ordinary men who live very ordinary lives, yet who, when jerked out of their comfortable quotidian, surprise themselves by the reckless confidence with which they embrace strangeness and adventure.

Only a few of the stories collected here are set in the middle of England, where Ian happens to make his home, but many of them are narrated by characters who embody the distinctive Englishness of Wells’s ordinary heroes. But while Ian’s characters are often quintessentially English, they most definitely have nothing in common with the kind of small-minded little Englander who, puffing on his pipe in slippers and braces while rattling the pages of the Daily Express, rails against the mendacious meddling of the European Community and secretly mourns the loss of the British Empire or the bracing lash of the bitch goddess, Thatcher. Instead, they’re freethinkers who blithely embrace adventure, novelty, and the happy coincidence. They don’t recoil from the weird depths they’ve uncovered, or try to tidy them away, destroy them, or even make a profit from them, but instead embrace or plunge into the strangeness they’ve uncovered, or unriddle it with a bracing dose of commonsense. The amnesiac hero of “A Free Man” discovers a welcome liberty in his condition; the policeman in the shaggy-dog story “Barking Mad” finds his unusual fusion intriguing rather than alarming; in “The Black Wall of Jerusalem”, the narrator happily joins a conspiracy that’s privy to the secret entrance to another dimension where creatures like unto gods dwell, and, despite the graphically depicted dangers, has no second thoughts about volunteering to be the first to explore it.

If, like me, you like to read the story notes before reading the stories or the introduction, you’ll know from Ian’s anecdotes about searching out Israeli restaurants rumoured to serve turkey testicles, or his experiments with absinthe, that he is as well-travelled and adventurous as his characters. I suspect that if there was such a thing as a World Citizen passport, he’d be one of the first in the queue. This worldliness, coupled with an alert curiosity that relishes the obscure corners of every department of human knowledge, provides a fertile mulch for the growth of weird ideas, but Ian wears his erudition with a raffish ease. He explicates the irrational with rational thoroughness. His creative delight dances us through the crossfire of plot lines, wild suppositions and general bizarreness, and irradiates his stories with a puckish sense of fun. They’re guaranteed to mess with your head, but in a good way. If you’re the kind of person who values what you can do with ideas, and what ideas can do to you, you shouldn’t need any further recommendation.

Paul McAuley

MASSES OF DIRTY SMOKE pour from the many funnels of Der Sieger—our conqueror—and drift westward across the waters of the Atlantic. Will people far away in the Caribbean smell our passage faintly and wonder whether Africa itself is on fire? I fantasise—yet soon enough England will be ablaze!

It goes without saying that Der Sieger’s funnels are spaced so that their smoke should not blanket the fire control positions, but in the distant haze which we are creating it could be difficult to spy the exact fall of our shot if any enemy vessels appear on the vague westerly horizon. Accuracy at long range is always such a problem. The colossal muzzle blast, the vibration, the long barrels whipping. It is that haze into which we must stare eagle-eyed, August Lenz and I, through our big Zeiss binoculars.

What a sight it is when one of our superheavy guns test-fires a supercharged shell! The gush of orange cordite flame is a hot orgasm hanging in the air.

Petty by comparison is the smoke that issues from the steam train which transports crew members and slave labourers and stores and all sorts of equipment along the deck between fore and aft, seven kilometres apart. The train-stops on board the deck of Der Sieger are named after the city gates of Munich—Isartor, Sendlinger Tor, Karlstor—but also Hofbraühaus, although the only beer served in the vicinity of this, its marine namesake, is alcohol-free.

Very tasty, nevertheless, coming from the huge brewery in Swakopmund. German desalination technology is easily able to support brewing in dry South West Africa for hundreds of thousands of thirsty throats.

So huge is our ship it seems not like a ship so much as a coastline of continuous steel cliffs—an Iron Coast, perhaps, akin to an Ivory Coast—and a heavily industrialised coastline at that, chimneys venting as far as the eye can see. What a demonstration of German might. Even in moderate storm the ocean scarcely makes us tremble. Today the grey waters swell gently like innumerable backs of whales.

“They say,” murmurs August, my beloved Gustl, “that the Führer’s real purpose is not so much to defeat England by a devastating blow—England’s already starving—but to capture Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge and hang him by piano wire so that he’ll speak no more. That’s why the Führer will board Der Sieger for the final assault, at risk to his own safety.”

“What risk? Never mind our half-metre of armour plating, the Führer is always protected by destiny.” I look around—just as a lookout should do! “Maybe even by magic? Who knows what rites the senior SS fellows get up to in Wewelsberg Castle?” Those blond butch black-clad SS boys, no don’t think of them. My Gustl’s hair is chestnut and his eyes are hazel.

“But the guns of Dover…” He’s sometimes a little timid, is Gustl. How ravishing he looks in his tropical uniform, the white cotton shirt with blue cuffs, the white bell-bottomed trousers. Any day now we’ll be obliged to change into northerly uniform, quite horrid coarse trousers.

Let me reassure my Gustl.

“We’ll knock out those guns from forty kilometres away. We’ll have fifth columnists on land equipped with radios as spotters. Bound to have! The British won’t even know where we are.”

Hmm, even assisted by spotters we might bombard the whole of Dover and environs without a single shell actually hitting the guns themselves.

Gustl ventures to stroke my thigh, secure that no one can see more than our upper bodies here on our lookout turret high above the aft bridge platform, quite like one of the slim fairy-tale towers of our Führer’s beloved Neuschwanstein Castle.

“Died, my darling man…”

Even alone together up here, skirted by armour and with armour overhead, Gustl and I need to be very careful. The love of a man for a man is forbidden love! Such feelings must be sublimated into comradeship, solidarity of soldiers or seamen, so says the Party. Or woe betide. So many men who experience uranian feelings have been castrated or have disappeared. Instead, emulate our Führer! He’s widely rumoured to be denying himself consummation with Eva Braun until his mission is totally accomplished. He must concentrate all his energies upon the guidance of Germany.

When the war is won, when all of Europe from England to the Urals is a cleansed Greater Fatherland, will Gustl and I ever be able to go to a bathhouse openly together? And where would such a bathhouse be?

Only in sultry Angola or the Congo perhaps, where officials turn a blind eye or are of our own inclination. Oh the joys that Gustl and I experienced in the tropics during shore leaves while training to crew the vastest battleship ever!

A far cry from the Naval Academy in stern Prussian Potsdam. In one particular bathhouse in Luanda—oh the black bucks who were the attendants!—I heard it asserted by an impeccable eyewitness that in Weimar and Bayreuth establishments survive, catering for uranians who are high enough up in the Party hierarchy to be exempt from the harsh anti-uranian laws. How can something which Gustl and I do together in privacy for our delight whenever we get a chance be punished, yet the selfsame be permitted for those in power? How can the Führer in his wisdom overlook this injustice? Maybe that magician and king of men does not know about it. Great rulers sometimes must rely on self-interested advisors. Those people do their jobs splendidly and cleverly, yet they also foster their own desires and ambitions.

If only someone would tell the Führer about this hypocrisy. What is permitted for some should be available to all, as used to be the case. Or to nobody! I prefer all. No, what am I talking about! A lot of men, probably most, sincerely enjoy women. How else could our race propagate? Maybe the real intention behind the anti-uranian laws is to encourage population growth. We have lost many men in gaining our victories. Empty spaces on the map must fill up with German and Nordic population. The Führer is wise.

It’s highly likely that England remains in utter ignorance of these victory weapons of ours—our own seven-kilometre-long battleship and its four- and five-kilometre-long companions accompanying us both ahead and astern like great lengthy floating Gothic castles.

Had we built such vast vessels elsewhere than in tropical Africa, word would have leaked out. In Angola we were safe from scrutiny. Neither the millions of black slave labourers, nor the hundreds of thousands of Jewish artisans whom we relocated there as a merciful alternative to extermination, had any means of contact with the rest of the world.

Annexation of Belgium during the First War gave us that ridiculous little country’s huge Congo colony, so therefore during the years of battleship building the closest place from which hostile spy balloons could be launched—at great risk—was Brazzaville. Or else from out in the Atlantic, but our U-boats cruised the waters off equatorial and south-west Africa like sharks.

Unobserved by our enemies, that genius Albert Speer was able to excavate his ten-kilometre dry docks running inland from mighty gates that held back the sea, and to dredge trenches in the sea floor so that our mammoth vessels could launch straight into deep water. For decades battleships had become steadily bigger, evolving rather like Brontosaurus. The ships of our secret fleet are of ultimate size. The world will see none greater.

Gustl points. “What’s that?”

I train my binoculars.

“An albatross.”

Biggest of birds, gliding through the air on wings that seem motionless, like—like something which does not exist, something impossible, yet which we must watch out for nonetheless.

I don’t quite understand why. If, given all the science and technology of our Reich, a flying machine with fixed wings cannot be made, then how can the Americans, ruled by Jews, succeed? Does this imply a lurking fear that Jews, and the hotchpotch of people whom they manipulate on the other side of the Atlantic, might be more ingenious than Germans?

Yet suppose the albatross to be a hundred times as large—or bigger, bigger! Suppose it to be made of wood or aluminium, fuelled by kerosine, able to fly hundreds of kilometres. Imagine it able to carry torpedoes to launch from the air against ships.

Visualise a hundred such machines attacking Der Sieger. Despite the protection of our water-line coal bunkers and our bulging belt of inclined underwater armour, could enough harm be caused for us to wallow and break our back? Can many mosquito bites cripple an elephant?

I did try to pay attention during our instruction session which touched on the impossibility of fixed-wing flight. Trouble was, I was feeling so horny for my Gustl, seated next to me. Just a hand-span away. Might as well have been on the far side of the world. Didn’t dare touch him, not even seemingly by accident. Too many upright Prussians in the room.

The instructor’s wire-rimmed glasses made him resemble an owl as he hooted on about the way that air flows, and about pressure, was it pressure? And about some Swiss scientist years ago, Berne something or other—Berne’s in Switzerland, which is how I half remember the name. Oh yes, and about the death of one of those American brothers. Tried every shape of wing, the brothers did. Trial and error—and error after error. Eventually they constructed wings that would flap like a bird’s and one of the brothers did get airborne at last, only to crash and be killed. Still, we must watch out for that mythical flying machine in case somewhere in the great plains or deserts those Jew-Americans established an enormous secret project and have recently succeeded.

I so yearn to unbutton Gustl and cup his balls and cock in my hand and squeeze ever so gently. Need to clutch my binoculars one-handed. They’re rather heavy. Can’t just let them dangle round my neck by their strap while on watch. Regulations; must hold them all the time alertly. Shall I, shan’t I? Rebuttoning quickly with one hand is quite an art.

Softly I whistle our song, Wagner’s Du bist der Lenz which Sieglinde sings to her Siegfried. You are the Springtime for which I longed in the frosty Winter season. Your first glance set me on fire et cetera et cetera. Sieg for victory. Sieg Heil.

I first met my Gustl at the Jena Conservatoire where I studied the reedy, plaintive oboe, and he the bright, piercing piccolo. Before long we were blissfully playing one another’s instruments, in a manner of speaking. How happy we were in that attic room we shared in Zeitzerstrasse. Impending mobilisation put paid to our musical studies—together, we volunteered for naval service. The navy would save us from soggy trenches, or, as it turned out, heroic but brutal dashes across vast landscapes filled with death.

I love my Gustl but, like so many millions of men and women, I adore my Führer—in an entirely different manner, of course! I have only seen him once in the flesh, when he drove from Berlin behind the wheel of his supercharged Mercedes to deliver a speech in Potsdam. His voice was so vibrant. His eyes shone. His face glowed. There was such charm in his every gesture, and oh the pure force of his will! On that day he was Siegfried and Parsifal.

Magical, truly magical. Yes, literally so. We all knew it. Who could deny it?

When the Führer spoke, it was as if words spoke through him spontaneously, his not the choosing. His words issued from out of the Aryan over-mind, a primeval heritage which all we Germans share, unifying us fervently, empowering us to feats of labour and valour.

Shall I compare the Führer to the conductor of an orchestra, whose gestures conjure from a host of players a thundering, unified symphony? Actually, delicious thought, the Führer was once a choirboy, although hymn-singing wasn’t the only source of his vocal force. Not a conductor, no—he is more like an oracle whose statements become reality.

How else, indeed, could he have come to power than through a kind of practical magic? Think back…

The bloody muddy stalemate in the trenches of northern France had to end for the sake of all concerned, and the armistice did leave the fatherland in ownership of the Congo with all its riches, so despite our losses we could hold our heads as high as the British or French. The Trotskyist takeover of Russia caused the fomenting of revolution anywhere and everywhere and enough German Marxists were eager to oblige, so the Kaiser was assassinated. The new republic might easily have weathered all this, had not our future Führer begun to preach his crusade against the Jews. Jew Marx, Jew Trotsky, Jew America: behold the pattern. Deutschland erwache! Our German racial soul awoke. And spoke through him. The people heard and surrendered their petty individualities in magical rapport, for our Führer is at once nobody yet also everybody.

How odd to think of such a towering figure as being “nobody”! Yet consider Tristan and Isolde singing together, Selbst dann bin ich die Welt Then I myself am the world! How oceanic the love between those two, how transcendent of the mere self. Our Führer transcends ordinary existence.

What of Gustl and I in this regard?

On the occasions when we’re able to be together, naked unto one another for long enough, flesh and soul certainly both play their role. Gustl is the world to me, I to him. Curse the anti-uranian laws!

I think of Gustl’s cock erect, my lips slipping over it, to and fro. Kissing him intimately is such a joy. When his cock swells before he comes, oh moment of ecstasy.

Dead of exhaustion and heat, bodies of black stokers are thrown overboard every day. Did I mention sharks? Enough sharks may attend us to form a torpedo shield. Those sharks may accompany us out of the tropics as far northward as France and England. Considering how hot equatorial Africa is, you’d suppose that the black man could tolerate the heat of the boiler rooms better than us Europeans. Aboard a vessel accommodating a crew of fifteen thousand souls and twenty thousand non-souls, a certain number of people are bound to die from natural causes. By non-souls I mean the blacks and the smaller complement of artisan Jew slaves, them not being part of the Aryan soul. Everyone who was in the Hitler Youth knows how to smile death in the face. Our Führer aimed to forge hard boys, as hard as Krupp Steel. When I hear the phrase “hard boys” I can’t help thinking of a different meaning.

Along with a little crowd of other ratings in our free time Gustl and I take a hike to the Hofbraühaus amidships. He and I don’t wish to be conspicuous by strolling together, nor one of us trailing after the other—that could look even odder. This constrains any genuine conversation we might have. We must pretend to be merely comrades in arms. I’m not sure whether this sort of neutral proximity to Gustl is pleasant and teasing—oh if only you knew our secret!—or deeply frustrating.

The steam train is reserved for ship’s business, but hiking is positively encouraged as one way of keeping fit. Certainly we have enough deck space, two hours at brisk pace from bows to stern and back. Our Führer loves to hike when time allows. Visualise him in his Bavarian mountain dress, the lederhosen and white linen shirt, the pale blue linen jacket with staghorn buttons. Quite fetching.

“Best foot forward, Schmidt!” Hoffmann says to me. “Eins, zwei—”—and down the hatch, the Hofbraühaus drinking song. “What a shame there aren’t any busty lusty barmaids eh?” Hoffman is a short but burly chap with a birthmark like a thumbprint of dark blood on his brow.

Only black barmen send the foaming stone steins sliding along the steel counters into the waiting hands of other Africans to carry to the tables. No Black can carry as many steins in each hand as your average blonde pigtailed Munich barmaid, not my type of person at all. Songs arise in the huge dim drinking hall adorned by a giant framed photograph of our Führer, kiss-curl upon his forehead, wearing his Iron Cross and Wound Badge. It must be some years since that photo was taken. In it our leader possesses an almost erotic charisma. Of course he is pure male, yet celibate even with Fräulein Braun, hence the adoration of the ladies of Germany. In their minds any of them might have him (or rather, he them) at least for one night so that they will conceive a superman. The same can happen in the love camps, so in a sense those besotted women are succeeding by proxy.

“How about you then, Lenz?” asks skinny, flaxen-haired Scharffenstein. “Got a girl back home, good-looking fellow like you?”

Danger, danger.

“Oh,” says my Gustl, “it would be unfair. All of us have been away for three years now. Besides,” with a wink, “she might be unfaithful or become fat in my absence due to lack of exercise!”

Guffaws all round, including from me.

“I have a girl in Hamburg,” Hoffmann says. “She’s a cracker. If she’s unfaithful I’ll kill her.”

“Didn’t you use the Jew brothel in Luanda?” Gustl asks innocently. Risky in my opinion. Still, we have to say something.

“That’s different. A man must keep his juices flowing or else they sour. Never saw you there myself. Did you use the black brothel, then?”

Gustl shrugs judiciously. “The Jew brothel’s a big place.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I propose a toast,” I declare. “To the downfall of England and to brothels full of Englishwomen.” “Eh?”

“Those of the wrong racial categories,” I hasten to add. “There’ll be plenty.”

What, to pollute ourselves with? I must extricate myself from this topic.

Given the numbers of the crew, that of a medium-size town, there must be other uranians on this ship. I suspect who some of those are, yet it would be folly to confide in anyone in the hope that somewhere aboard this enormous vessel there exists a sanctuary to which Gustl and I can safely resort. The navy is a more tolerant environment than the Fatherland in some respects, but there are limits! Let me think instead about Ludwig Wittgenstein, our Führer’s bête noire.

Transmitted from Rhodesia, no doubt weeks or months after each had been put onto aluminium discs lacquered with cellulose nitrate in London, in Angola we could hear the philosopher’s broadcasts delivered in his upper-class Viennese accent. We Germans have the defector William Joyce talking to the British from Radio Hamburg to demoralise them; the British have Wittgenstein.

To be caught listening to Wittgenstein on your Volksradio is a bad idea, but the punishment—at least in the navy—is surprisingly light: a docking of pay, a leave cancelled, some dirty extra duty. I presume it’s a whole lot tougher for land-lubbers whom the Gestapo catch red-handed, or red-eared. The navy protects its own and Naval Intelligence does not seem unduly bothered, no doubt because talks about the sanctity of language are over the heads of the vast majority of people.

Not everyone aboard is as down to earth as a Hoffmann or a Scharffenstein. Gustl and I don’t exactly count ourselves as high-powered intellectuals. I mean, we’re educated, but we’re artists. Or we used to be. However, we do know a couple of chaps whom you might call intellectuals, if this wasn’t a dirty word. Not uranian chaps, I hasten to add, but never mind.

Jahn and Hager. That’s Rudolph Jahn and Gottfried Hager, both of them assigned to the nearest of the great quadruple gun turrets. Hager is very fond of music, which is how we got talking in the mess amidst the bustle of so many men eating. The tonnage of pigs consumed aboard Der Sieger every single day!

Hager asked me, “Do you actually hear the music in your head the way Beethoven did?” His is a face made for wistfulness, his close-set eyes peering out past a long sharp nose in a kind of diffident expectation of something good perhaps occurring, but probably not.

I was about to nod when in the nick of time I made the connection between Beethoven and deafness.

Instead I frowned. “Not exactly. Beethoven was special.”

Hager sighed. “Aah, so not even most musicians … The noise of the guns, you see… “

Hager was worried about being permanently deafened when the occasional test firing became the real thing, repeated over and over again. My fib seemed to console him somewhat. If he lost his hearing, the knowledge that professional musicians who were similarly deafened could continue to enjoy music would be a torment.

One thing led to another, and presently he and Jahn and the two of us were confidants, at least as regards certain topics such as Wittgenstein.

Gottfried and Rudolph are both philosophers, or had been so before the war. Both of them taught in universities. Taught a lot of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, needless to say. The Will to Power. The World as Will and Idea. And Plato too, the Führer’s top favourite. They both listen to Wittgenstein on their Volksradio because, as Rudolph explained one day, Wittgenstein is an heir to Schopenhauer as surely as our Führer is.

Physically I don’t fancy the melancholy Gottfried, nor Rudolph who has pockmarks all over a moon face and very wispy hair. Yet their minds seem to mesh with mine and with Gustl’s. Admittedly more so with each other—at times Gottfried and Rudolph seem to be talking to one another in code, where a word does not mean what you would ordinarily take it to mean! Acquaintance with those two serves as a useful protective cover for Gustl and me because Gottfried and Rudolph aren’t in the least good-looking and seem to