Nacht Und Nebel 2011

In the summer of 1982 Count-No-Count phoned my East Village apartment. Kurt was calling from Hamburg with an offer of a job as 'tursteher' at his nightclub BSIR. The pay was $150 a night, free accommodations, and all I could drink. Being dead-broke I answered, "Ja."

I spoke bad German with a Boston accent thanks to an ancient Bavarian teacher Bruder Karl at my high school south of Boston. My stay in Hamburg was pleasant throughout the warm season, but the coming of autumn brought the cold rain, gray fog, and dark days. The sun's traverse of the sky descended each day approaching the winter solstice like a frisbee weakening in flight. Even worse was how German the Germans became once the tourist had fled south to southern climes.

There were old Nazis on the streets. The bad weather brought these arrogant fascists out of their hiding places and I walked through Jungfernstieg spotting various members of the Waffen SS and Gestapo. Maybe it was my imagination playing tricks with the shadows, but their eyes didn't lie about what they had seen in Russia, Poland, France, or Germany. They were not extras in a Hollywood movie. These men had not only obeyed orders, they had carried them out to the letter.

Of course the young Germans were obsessed by the ghosts of the pasts.

"We are the Porsche Reich, not the Fourth Reich," Count-No-Count told me on many occasions in Paris. The Telex millionaire's best friend was a Reeperbahn pimp, Nigger Kalle, the son of an American sergeant from Harlem and a local woman from Hafenstrasse on the harbor of Hamburg. A black Zuhalter was an anomaly in Hamburg, but his right-hand man was SS Tommy, a deadly killer without any humor. The two of them controlled the notorious Eroscenter's six-floors and the thousands of Huren or whores for their boss Thomas Baker. Nigger Kali was always good to me. In truth he was my boss and not Count-No-Count.

SS Tommy believed in the Second Coming of the Third Reich. The original Thousand Year Reich had lasted twelve years, but he was not a real Nazi. Not like those old men who had done things no one liked to speak about at parties or even behind their backs. Still when SS Tommy presented me a large bill for having sex with a blonde girl at BSIR, I handed him the keys to my car and left Hamburg that evening without saying good-bye to anyone. The Rechtung was for 20,000 DMs or $12,000. Everything had been itemized on his list.

Everything. Every sex act in five words or less. He had charged twenty DMs for holding hands. Nothing was left off the list.

A midnight train pulled into Hamburg's Hauptbahnhof a little after midnight on time. I expected SS Tommy's to grab me from the platform or at the Belgian frontier, but I reached Paris at dawn and I felt lucky to be in France. Everyone does if they left someplace else in the middle of the night.

In the autumn of 2011 I had been living at the British Embassy in Luxembourg. The old fortress city was centrally located in Europe and I had visited to Paris, Brussels, and Charleroi in the first month. I googled Germany.

It was very close and I planned a trip to Trier, the ancient Roman city of 70,000, only a forty-five minute ride on the train. Telling the Ambassador my plans, I caught the morning express to the Moselle and ferried across the river to Konz for a short ride to Trier. At my arrival I half-expected SS Tommy to be waiting on the train platform, but several years ago we had met in Pattaya, Thailand. The criminal had aged into a stone-cold killer and was threatening my dear friend, Fabo, and pretended to be a friend. He hadn't recognized me and I hadn't bought the act. Fabo's French friend confronted the killer with the fury of an ex-legionnaire. I was lucky not to have been involved in the confrontation and had later heard that the monster had been arrested for a solo bank robbery in South Africa. Still I feared he might be out and sighed relief leaving the train station.

Germany had changed in the last thirty years.

The old Nazis had died off and while the young Nazis had become very active in the East, they weren't here, but I kept my eyes open. Walking through the old Roman ruins I studied the faces of the young and old. I didn't spot a single Nazi. It was, as if their genes had been erased from the Germanic race.

In town the only broken glass were from broken bottles and not the windows of Jewish homes and synagogues. I ate a bratwurst and drank a Kloster beer.

I visited Karl Marx Haus. The creator of Communism had been born in the old city. The street was in the heart of the sex zone. Nothing was happening in the afternoon. As I stood outside the house and old man passed and muttered under his breath, "Juden."

"And fuck you, you old Nazi." My comment made him turn his head. "Ja, du alte arseloch."

I rushed him and he cringed in expectation of a blow. His uplifted arm stopped my blow.

"Gehst heim," I said with Boston accent.

He was about 91. I was 59. One blow would have put him in the hospital and I would have gone to jail. He was still a Nazi and I was me.

Some things never change.

"Nicht war."

ADDI LUXEMBOURG on Kindle

In the autumn of 2011 and winter of 2012 I was appointed the writer-in-residence to a foreign embassy in Luxembourg. The small duchy was in the center of Europe. I had lived on the continent during the 1980s. It was good to be back there again.

Here's a small sample of this booklet.

On a murky November evening I attended the opening of the "Dream' exhibition at Luxembourg's Mudam Museum. Madame l'Ambassador bailed early for a formal dinner. I was not invited for supper.

"It's a diplomatic thingee." Madame l'Ambassador explained, as we walked through a thickening fog to the waiting Jaguar.

"I understand." A writer-in-residence has to accept his place in the scheme of things.

Francois the driver opened the right-hand rear door for Madame l'Ambassador. It was the safest seat in the car. He asked if I needed a lift back to the city. The museum was located on the opposite side of the gorge running through the city. I had traversed it several times on foot and refused his offer.

"You go with Madame. I'll be fine." After all I am simply the guest writer.

I lingered at the soiree for another half hour. The crowd was young and artistic. The curator waved to me. The amiable Italian was chatting to an aristocratic couple in their 70s. Patrons of the museum were much more important than a well-unknown writer and I ordered a Duvel.

The bartender poured the triple-strengh beer into a special glass with reverence. Mittel Europe worshipped its beers.

I leaned at the bar and studied the passing faces. The queue at the bar seemed contently unconcerned by the chaos of the Euro. Their luxurious clothing cloned the bare threads of down-and-out artists, then again Luxembourg has the highest individual income in Europe and even the poor are rich in comparison to America.

The first beer had gone down quick and I ordered a second. No one commented on the speed of my drinking. The grand duchy marked the highest beer consumption per capita in 1993 with an unbeatable score of seventeen beers for each man, woman, and child in the tiny country.

A light-weight in my late-50s I called it a night after my third beer.

I had a good walk ahead to the upper city across the canyon of the Petrusse.

The I.M. Pei structure was shrouded by a spectral fog and I remembered my High School German teacher's translating fog for our German class.

"Nebel." Bruder Karl at Xaverian High School had spoken the word with the muted thunder of someone whose wrist bore the tattoo of the camps.

Nebel coupled with Nacht became night and mirrors, a mystical combination for the intrigues of the Gestapo.

I heard no jackboots and descended into the reconstructed fortifications with the night's cold touch on my skin.

The Mudam disappeared into the gray murk. I followed the switchbacking trail like a man going blind. A train sounded its whistle on the tracks below. It was the 7:43 from Troisvierges.

During its reign as Gibraltar of theNorth Luxembourg had housed thousands of soldiers and his path from Fort Thungen would have been travelled by hussars, dragoons, and mercenaries back in the 17th Century. Tonight my footsteps ricocheted unanswered against the stone ramparts.

The slurry of leaves crossed my path and I thought about a movie that an actor friend had made here several years ago. Bill had played a blood-lusting Nosteradu. The city's medievalism had lent the exterior scenes an unexpected aura of horror and this evening I glanced around me with a rising apprehension.

I was all alone.

The city was old.

While I no longer believed in God, I had seen enough vampire movies to know that I offered a fairly easy target for a bloodsucker. Were-wolves were not a worry, because the earth was in the middle of the synodic month.

A twig cracked in the surrounding woods. Something was out there in the forbidding shadows. I wished for a sword in my bare hand.

A single pinpoint of light broke through the swirling overcast.

Venus.

I salvaged a little confidence with the sighting of a familiar object in the night sky, then a lisping wind scrapped the bare branches to chant an incantation from a time before the invention of electricity.

Meeting a woman under a light was too much to ask from this evening.

This was Luxembourg and not Paris' Rue St. Denis.

My pace accelerated through the tunnel underneath the outer bastion. A shiver scrapped a dull razor against the skin of my spine. My cellphone dimly illuminated the black passage of stone. Running would have been a sign of fright to creatures of the night preying on the weak.

I crossed the tracks before the 7:45 train to Wiltz raced beneath the steep embankment. The smooth cobblestones gave way to gravel and the trail bore the ruts of wagons.

A rusting grate blocked the tunnel under the railroad tracks. Something inhuman was in the trees. I hopped over the metal fence and bushwhacked through the underbrush to the tracks. I looked both ways and clambered across the double set of steel rails to the other side.

I reached the street ten seconds later.

A streetlight glowed overhead.

The fortifications along the Petruche were in sight.

My cell phone rang.

It was Francois the driver.

He asked if I was all right.

I had reached the safety of the old city.

"Okay." The word meant the same in English as in French.

"Sure?" Madame l'Ambassador was concerned that something bad might have happened to me. She was a longtime friend. We shared mutual acquaintances. Neither of us wanted anything bad to happen to me on her watch.

“Fine, I'll be back at the residence within fifteen minutes. Thank the ambassador for asking."

It was a nice feeling to know someone cared and also that a good scare made a man feel alive, which is 100% better than being killed by a vampire any night of the week.

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Villmols merci

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