The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 2

When Ostwald was reassigned to France, I followed. It was here I learned the true nature of his experiments, here I learned the tissue samples he labored on day after day came...from vampires. I had no idea if he pursued this path at the behest of the Reich, or if it was a private matter. Again, he reported to no one, and it was as if he had been put into exile.

The nature of the Reich itself came into focus, not in Munich but Paris. This was a population forced to live under the Reich, not as the conquered or the oppressed, but as the embodiment of what the world might look like if the Reich succeeded. Every interaction was a test of will, was a test of loyalty, whether to the occupation or to France as it had been, and many hoped would be again, though life continued in a semblance of normalcy. There was no war here, no visible resistance, as it would look like in later decades, constant acts of destruction, their toll taken on themselves, a constant act of martyrdom...

Having breakfast at a cafe:

“Yes, I will have coffee, thank you.” (The Reich spoke French here. The cafe workers spoke French. I spoke French.)

The waiter gives me a neutral expression, but I have been here long enough to interpret it. You can fool those who aren’t paying attention, see only what they choose to see, sense danger only in expected ways. To my eyes, the waiter distrusts me, would rather I didn’t come to the cafe, but I do, every day, despite such a reception, daily. It is not easy, living like this, the doubt manifest in every ordinary action, never with the agonizing certainty that something will happen, with sudden awful clarity that such a thing would be better.

Ostwald, of course, never went to the cafes, never went out at all. He may have been a golem, but I understood his obsession all too well. He saw a glimmer of recognition in the tissue he examined, something otherwise impossible, which made it doubly so, for anyone but himself, and I, although he didn’t know it, would never have been able to reconcile the existence of golems and vampires, much less at the same time, much less together.

He never suspected me. He was careless, too fixated on his own thoughts.

But I saw no vampires in Paris. I don’t know where he found his samples, but he was a golem, and I knew as much about golems as I did vampires, then.

The waiter brings me my coffee, and I register the scowl hidden deep within, and choose not, as always, to address it, and he walks away, and the coffee of course is too hot at first to do anything but sip. I stir it with a spoon for a few moments. The Reich walks these streets as an everyday sight. Dreadful. Ostwald never gave the salute, either. Not once. But it didn’t matter whether or not he considered himself a Nazi. That was the real crime in it. Perception is everything, isn’t it?