Eugene Ganin
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
Translated from the original Russian by M.A. Ashot
***
“Never forget that we are that breed, that race, that people, that knighthood, to which come those who heed the call of their bloodlines and which they leave only upon death. For centuries, a single purpose confronted our fair-haired race: to inherit lawful dominion over this world. For centuries, this race of ours lived up to the summons to bring happiness, culture and order into the world.”
Heinrich Himmler, Imperial Minister of the Interior of Germany’s Third Reich
Excerpt from a speech delivered in the Berlin Aviators’ Building, in 1942.
Chapter One
BUBI
* * *
1. Erich von Beck
Erich’s heart was pounding wildly from the enormous, all-consuming happiness that engulfed him. He was a pilot! Such a short, glib magical word it was – and it opened up before him, in the glorious time of his youth, the indescribable joy of soaring freely above the earth. Frozen in the correct pose within the monolithic line of a military formation of freshly-minted graduates of the aviators’ academy, precisely lined up on the cement strip of the military Berlin – Gatow airfield, Erich Beck felt it for the first time, deeply felt it with all his heart: he was one of Great Germany’s flying knights. The mystical dimension had merged with reality. Henceforth, he has every right proudly to wear the chevrons, shoulder boards, regimental insignia, rakish hat and splendid, impeccable uniform of an officer of the invincible Lueftwaffe. These strong, young, elegant, fair-haired Aryans all around him, with their unmistakably, vividly Nordic chiselled faces, were the fighter pilots whose mission it was to eradicate the enemies of the Third Reich; with incandescent eyes, as if on fire, they hung upon every word of the orders issued by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Commander-in-chief of the Reich’s airborne forces, in which he bestowed upon each one of them their very first military rank, that of Lieutenant, and appointed them to permanent service within the combat squadrons. It was the summer of 1939. As soon as they heard the command, “At ease!” ring out, these grown up boy children broke out of their exquisitely precise ranks and, like so many young unbroken mustangs, began to leap about, neighing and braying and whooping loudly in their own specific voices; they embraced, congratulating each other with their commencement day; they hurled their hats wildly up into the air, as if they might be able to land them on the sparse clouds of the idyllic German sky. Not a single one of them yet imagined that very soon, even before fully coming of age, he would be shot down out of the sky over France, drowned in the English Channel, or burnt to a crisp in remote, chilly Russia…
Erich Beck was born in the German colony of Zindao, in a city of Protestant churches, and of residences built in the neo-Gothic style of the 19th century. His father was a doctor of the central military hospital. Naturally, he took personal charge of his own child’s delivery. Elisa, herself an aviatrix, an athlete, a great beauty – the epitome of German womanhood, in fact – brought their son into this world with ease, with speed, with efficacy. His father joyfully caught the newborn Aryan as he emerged, smacking him promptly on his bottom: the infant gave a piercing shriek in response. Otto showed the son to his mother. Elisabeth, gave a slightly pained smile through her tears, and whispered: “Oh, my God! My baby, my little, tiny, precious boy, Bubi!” And so, even though his father named the son Erich, Bubi, the endearment his mother had bestowed, gradually became the one by which he was known, albeit unofficially. In fact, it became for all time the name by which their bonny boy would be known to the world: his nom de guerre, his combat alias.
When Hitler came to power, the family of Otto von Beck returned to Berlin. Not far from Stuttgart, Elisabeth organized a club of glider plane enthusiasts. Next to it, they built an imposing home for themselves. When Erich turned ten, his mother took him out for his first flight. As it turned out, the canvas-and-plywood bird drifted into the front of a gathering storm. The motor-free glider plane was tossed around from side to side, like a tiny leaf. Erich was being pushed back against his mother by the force of the turbulence. Rain drummed harshly against the vibrating wings of the glider. Outside the cramped little cabin, the wind whistled, boomed, howled. The flying sailboat spun madly, whipped around in a kind of mystical dance. With considerable effort, his mother was able to guide the glider out of the danger zone: the picturesque curve of the Neckar River swam into view beneath the wing; there was Castle Rosenstein, and then the celebrated vineyards of the Baden-Wuerttemberg country. Elisabeth’s hands were shaking as she brought the glider down.
“Were you frightened?” She asked her son. “Will you fly again?”
“Absolutely, mother! I loved flying in the storm.”
“Ah, you’re just like me, then!” she remarked. And blessing him with the sign of the cross, she kissed her precious only Bubi, her adored firstborn, on his forehead.
At sixteen, Erich passed the test that certified him as the youngest ever glider flight instructor in all of Germany. At twenty, he flew off to join the 10th training regiment of the Lueftwaffe, situated near Koenigsberg, in Prussia. And so his long warrior’s journey began, and with it an awareness that he had been granted the happy privilege of being born an Aryan – an uebermensch, above mere humans: a member of a chosen race of mystical authorities that transcended even God.
2.The Girl of His Dreams
Ursula was fifteen when she first saw a glider plane in flight. She would usually travel from Weisssach to Stuttgart for the summers, to be with her grandmother. Encircled with flowers from all sides, her grandmother’s old mansion was situated in the quiet suburb known as Stuttgarter Weindorf. This so-called wine village was the ancestral home of Ursula’s forebears. Her maternal grandfather, Johann Winterbach, was a renowned vintner, and a fabulous chef known for his Schwabian specialties. Her maternal grandmother, Martha Mueller, had danced in her youth in the Weissenhof cabaret, but later she found employment as a tour guide for the Schiller Museum. Granny would often take Ursula around to see the sights of this resort town. Once, while strolling along the river, they wandered onto the local glider plane airfield. Suddenly, a small snub-nosed plane without any propeller took off without making a sound, catapulted upwards by its rubber cable and winch, and soared over the waters of the Neckar. The air currents billowing over the river’s surface carried it aloft; it circled smoothly and immediately landed. The glass canopy was thrown back: two young pilots stepped out onto the meadow. One of them made his good-byes and left; the other stayed behind. Driven by her curiosity, Ursula walked up to the blond youth:
“Aren’t you afraid to fly?”
“No, of course not,” the glider pilot answered. “Would you like to go up?”
Ursula’s heart skipped a beat: a pair of beautiful grey eyes gazed out at her with warm encouragement. “And who are you?”
“Me? I’m Erich Beck, glider flight instructor…” He spread his arms out wide in a straight line, and mimicking a bird’s flight, circled the pretty young girl in a mischievously deliberate way.
“And I’m Fraulein Ursula Mueller. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance…” She really was pleased. She was more than pleased. She had fallen in love with Erich the instant she saw him: it was love at first sight.
“Come again tomorrow. We’ll begin by my taking you up into the air as a passenger.”
“I’ll be sure to come, without fail, Erich.”
To fall in love – head over heels in love – at first sight, at fifteen, is more alarming than accidentally swallowing a toad whole: can’t sleep, can’t sit still, can’t lie in bed, can’t speak coherently, don’t feel like saying anything, can’t read, plus you’re queasy… And can’t get the sight, the sense of it, out of your mind… He was all she could think of. In the morning, over breakfast, grandmother Martha took a good close look at Ursula and said:
“I daresay, precious, you haven’t actually gone and fallen for yesterday’s flying boy, now have you?”
“What a preposterous idea! Whatever on earth for?”
“Oh, Ursula! You know what the say: love is blind, and often unkind! Girls have been known to throw their hearts away on all manner of troublemakers!”
“Troublemakers don’t fly!… Erich’s a pilot!” Outraged at the slur, the young granddaughter retreated back into her room.
She reappeared some twenty minutes later, wearing a stylish dress of brilliant, snowy white, with a cream-colored beret perched jauntily on her head, at a steep angle to her ear. She paused at the door and brusquely announced:
“I’m off to see my flying troublemaker.”
Erich was waiting for her by the glider. As befitted a young aristocrat with a von in his name, the seventeen year old Erich von Beck kissed the dainty hand of Fraulein Mueller:
“To begin, Ursula, you must familiarize yourself with the theoretical elements of glider flight. Please follow me into our classroom.”
“Excellent! But surely you might address me by the informal pronoun, and I you? After all, we aren’t old people, are we…?”
“Oh, yes, by all means!” von Beck gladly acquiesced.
In the training hall, where the demonstration gliders were set up, Erich installed the young girl in the pilot’s seat, boldly dropping into the place right next to hers. With the well-chosen phrases of a seasoned instructor, Erich began to explain the mechanics of the motor-less flying machine. He tried as much as possible to use the lower register of his vocal range. The young Fraeulein, her cognition clouded over by the intensity of the novel experience, her magnificent eyes wide open, tried as hard as she might to comprehend every word coming out of her teacher’s lips; nevertheless, she struggled to grasp the purpose of all those steering devices, handles, clocks, buttons, cables, cords, gears, pulleys that poked out at her from every corner of the small, see-through enclosure that was the cabin.
Her teacher, carried away, accidentally touched the student’s hand. She started, but did not move it away. Ursula’s face lit up with the dreamy half-smile of a maturing young woman who had already experienced, if only in her girlish dreams, the yearnings of erotic desire. Her lovely bare leg, exposed by a chance movement of the hem of her white dress, brushed up, entirely unintentionally, against the pilot’s hard muscular one. They both reacted at once, as if a charge had been set off inside them.
“Feels as if we’re about to dive and crash…” muttered Erich.
Sitting in the compressed space of the glider, almost pressed together cheek-to-cheek, they were both overcome with such an enormous, synchronized wave of mutual passionate love for each other, that Erich, unable to restrain himself, kissed the soft, round, tenderly swollen bud of her blushing earlobe. Ursula pulled away by a micron or two, and asked:
“Are we going to be flying today?”
His lips were parched. The grey eyes had darkened:
“We will!… Of course we will!…”
“Thank you!...”
Ursi bent closer to his face and kissed the semi-parted lips. Her head spun. She was ready to give him everything she had: her heart, her soul, her body, her destiny, her life… And he, then and there, wanted immediately to enter completely into every atom of her being. His hand settled onto the firm swell of her breasts – and just then he heard the familiar cadence of his strict mother’s footfalls. Instantly Erich was outside the glider cabin. Ursula, her head at a studious angle, concentrated on looking innocent by moving an inquisitive fingertip over the instrument panel, back and forth, bock and forth…
“What are you up to here?” asked Erich’s mother, sternly.
“Look! We have a new flight student… Fraeulein Ursula Mueller.”
“I see,” Elisabeth remarked, ironically. “When did she materialize?”
“Yesterday.” Erich overcame his initial embarrassment. “We are having our first lesson today.”
“Understood! Fraeulein, I must ask you to come see me later to fill out the necessary paperwork. My name is Elisa. I am the Director of this Glider Plane Club. I trust that our flight instructor, Erich von Beck, who is my son, will turn you into a first-class pilot. How old are you, young lady?”
“I’m fifteen, Frau Elisa.”
“Well, it’s not too late, but by your age I had been flying for three years. I will expect you tomorrow, then.”
Elisabeth executed a precise turn counter-clockwise, military style, and vanished down one of the long corridors of the hangar. Ursula clung even closer to Erich.
“So, are we going to fly up into the sky today?” Ursula gazed searchingly up into her teacher’s eyes.
“Come on!”
“One moment!” Ursi looked around, making sure no one was left in the hangar, and then rapidly kissed her instructor on the cheek.
3.The Ideal Mother
Has there ever been a mother who did not feel concern when she first discovered that her son had fallen in love, as men will? The future mother-in-law, whom nature endows with an innate conviction that her offspring appear only so that she might shower her own maternal love upon them, and make them participants in her own joys, slowly but certainly becomes consumed by a subconscious fear of losing, forever, that life which she conceived in bliss, brought forth in agony, that dearest, closest, most cherished, most purely loved “ Baby Bubi.” Borne by the waves of maternal love, Darling Mummy then applies all the means at her disposal to ‘rescue’ her young son from the machinations of that other woman, ‘the outsider,’ who competes with her for influence over the future of her little boy. Naturally enough, she is not opposed to her son marrying. She wishes only the best for him; she desires his happiness – yet, knowing as she does from her own personal experience as a woman the enormous power of love, she attempts to defer her baby’s ‘serious’ erotic liaisons to a time when his formation and education shall have been completed. In such cases , all mothers give voice to essentially the same sentiments that Elisabeth, as mother, spoke to Erich, her son, after Ursula’s first outing in the glider, in the glorious heavens of love:
“I understand you, my son! I have no objections to your choice. But you must also understand that you are at an age when your career is only beginning to take shape. Your future depends on it. You have a vast potential as a gifted pilot, an ace! Yes, love and family mean happiness and serenity in one’s home, but only when that home is financially secure. And the financial security of a family is forged with the hands of a man. You are a man, Erich! You are German, you are Aryan: that says it all! You must master the gift of sacrificing your present in order to build a greater, brighter tomorrow! The present vanishes in an instant. It consumes and destroys fools: those who do not know how to wait patiently.”
At some point in their lives, all children want to resemble their parents. Erich was no exception. The son emulated his mother, Elisabeth Reinecke. She had become infected with a predilection for aviation as a little girl, when a travelling street circus paid a visit to her own little town of Hirschberg. The circus brought roaring airplanes, instead of the usual elephants and hippos. All of Germany was flying high. Aviation was the future. Air shows were being organized all over, on just about any empty field: acrobatic circus-pilots were performing daredevil feats, amazing stunts of reckless precision flight. Painted and decorated in colourful hues, with sirens blaring, the airplanes and their soundless, bat-like companions, the gliders, performed fantastic somersaults in the skies. Their pilots would climb out onto the wings of biplanes and drink champagne straight out of the bottle; or they would wave calmly out of their cabins to a spellbound crowd, as their silently plunging gliders would suddenly dive under the spans of mock-bridges. A flying German knight, in full armor, took to the skies, eliciting rapturous cries from the adoring females present. In a tiny, agile plane, he buzzed low over the ground, well below the level of the bleachers, rocking the wings of his machine as he went; then, climbing straight up, he executed a complex knot manoeuvre and, rolling over, grazed the field upside down with the tip of his wing, using a special hook to snatch up from the ground a scarlet lady’s handkerchief – the emblem of chivalric love and devotion. Topping it all came the moment when Elisabeth Reinecke herself, now madam von Beck, a pilot of the highest order, began repeating this identical stunt, and others like it, her ten-year old son sitting on the lap of his flying mother as she guided the military high-speed monoplane. She had become Germany’s top flying ace.
4.Our Precious Boy Is In Love!
Early the next morning, as soon as Erich had taken his new student up into the air on the two-seated training glider, Gruenau Baby, the door that led to the study of Otto von Beck – Erich’s father and Elisabeth’s husband – burst open with a resonant thump: the eyes of the venerable distinguished professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Berlin beheld his wife, Elisabeth, in a state of heaving fury. The professor even leaped from his armchair:
“Ella, what’s happened? You’re unrecognizable!”
“It’s just dreadful!… Can you imagine?… Our son’s in love!”
“Did he survive?”
“Don’t tease, Otto!” Elisa collapsed onto the sofa. “A serious love affair at his age will deal a fatal blow to his future! Don’t you understand? He’s a pilot from God!”
“But I thought he was from me…”
Otto smiled and made himself comfortable next to his wife. “What’s to be upset about? So he’s in love! At seventeen, that is only natural… Our young boy is responding to the activation of his male hormones; he’s a true, full-blooded Aryan. He already needs a woman. Sex is good for the health; it will only make him stronger!”
“What woman? She’s all of fifteen! A girl! She’ll shatter his life! They love each other; it’s Romeo and Juliet all over again. I saw it yesterday…”
“Well, in that case, we need to think of something.”
“I propose that we urgently sell my gliding school here in Stuttgart, and also our house, and move to Berlin. That way you won’t have to make all those trips between your university and my glider flight school. All the more so, since my own teacher, Wolf Hirtom agreed to help get our Erich admitted to the Berlin Lueftwaffe Academy, and General Ernst Udet is simply enthralled with our son’s piloting talent. On top of that, I’ve been offered an interesting position at the Dornier company, as First Test Pilot for their new airships.”
“Well, clearly, since one of Germany’s heroes, the idol of our youth, has seen fit to praise our son’s talent, then that must be what we should do.”
“God, Otto! How I do love you!”
Ursula nearly died in flight. No, not from fear. From the pleasure of it. She felt like a bird brimming over with love. The glider circled soundlessly in loops over the vine-covered slopes. She wanted to sing, and sang out in a full-throated voice:
Give me a rose to show how much you care:
Tie to the stem a lock of golden hair;
Surely tomorrow you’ll feel blue,
But then will come a love that’s new,
For you, Lilli Marlene –
For you, Lilli Marlene!
Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Bubi began to sing along in unison with Ursula. Pilots commonly like to sing while airborne. But in this particular flight, he experienced for the first time a surging tide of infinite bliss. He was ready to fulfil her every command…. Instead of singing, “For you, Lilli Marlene…” he all but shouted out: “For you, Ursu Mueller!”
Rolling across the lawn of the airfield, the glider obediently came to a standstill next to the waiting Elisabeth, and meekly lowered the left wing to the ground.
“Hallo, Mutti!” Erich called out cheerily, as he helped Ursula jump out of the cramped little cabin.
“How was the flight?”
“Wonderful! A beautiful flight! Like a fairy tale!” Ursula answered, the words rushing in a torrent. “It’s such a pity that I have to go back home to Berlin, to Mama.”
Erich turned white:
“But what about me?”
“Ah, but you must come visit me…”
Elisabeth nearly jumped for joy:
“Well, it’s not meant to be, then. And what are your plans for the future? You are studying to be what?”
“A doctor.”
“Oh! My father’s a doctor,” said Erich, trying to inject himself into the conversation.
“As for you, my flying son, I have a bit of pleasant news for you personally…”
“I have no secrets from Ursula. Go ahead, say it!”
“But you must hold on to the wing first, so you don’t fall over!”
“I’m holding on!”
“You, being the winner of the glider flight competitions, have received a telegram from General Wolf Hirtom, congratulating you on your enrolment into the highest level of training for the Lueftwaffe fighter squadrons. Congratulations, my son! Your dream is coming true.”
Erich was at a loss: “So many powerful emotions, all in one day! It’s impossible!”
His eyes welled up with tears. Ursula stood on tiptoe so as to reach his lips with her own: “Congratulations! See you again soon! Until we meet in Berlin!”
Her head tilted at a stubborn angle, Fraeulein Mueller, the glider pilot that was not to be, almost raced back to her grandmother’s house, so that she might leave Stuttgart this very day, on the evening train for Berlin. A single thought danced incessantly through her mind, in a constant refrain: “Ah, but I will be his wife, wait and see! And he will be MY husband! He will! He will! He will!”