Ray Bradbury. Darling Adolf

Даниил Серебряный
                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                Darling Adolf
                1976

     They  were  waiting  for  him to come out. He was sitting inside the little
Bavarian  cafe  with  a view of the mountains, drinking beer, and he had been in
there  since  noon  and  it was now two-thirty, a long lunch, and much beer, and
they could see by the way he held his head and laughed and lifted one more stein
with  the  suds fluffing in the spring breeze that he was in a grand humour now,
and  at  the  table with him the two other men were doing their best to keep up,
but bad fallen long behind.
     On  occasion  their  voices  drifted  on the wind, and then the small crowd
waiting out in the parking lot leaned to hear. What was he saying? and now what?
     "He just said the shooting was going well."
     "What, where?!"
     "Fool. The film, the film is shooting well."
     "Is that the director sitting with him?"
     "Yes. And the other unhappy one is the producer."
     "He doesn't look like a producer."
     "No wonder! He's had his nose changed."
     "And him, doesn't he look real?"
     "To the hair and the teeth."
     And  again  everyone  leaned  to  look  in at the three men, at the man who
didn't  look  like a producer, at the sheepish director who kept glancing out at
the  crowd  and slouching down with his head between his shoulders, shutting his
eyes,  and the man between them, the man in the uniform with the swastika on his
arm,  and  the  fine  military  cap put on the table beside the almost-untouched
food, for he was talking, no, making a speech.
     "That's the Fuhrer, all right!"
     "God  in  heaven,  it's  as  if no time had passed. I don't believe this is
1973. Suddenly it's 1934 again, when first I saw him."
     "Where?"
     "The  Nuremberg  Rally,  the  stadium,  that was the autumn, yes, and I was
thirteen  and  part of the Youth and one hundred thousand soldiers and young men
in  that  big  place  that  late  afternoon before the torches were lit. So many
bands,  so  many  flags,  so  much  heartbeat, yes, I tell you, I could hear one
hundred  thousand  hearts banging away, we were all so in love, he had come down
out  of  the clouds. The gods had sent him, we knew, and the time of waiting was
over, from here on we could act, there was nothing he couldn't help us to do."
     "I wonder how that actor in there feels, playing him?"
     "Sh, he hears you. Look, he waves. Wave back."
     "Shut up," said someone else. "They're talking again. I want to hear -"
     The  crowd shut up. The men and women leaned into the soft spring wind. The
voices drifted from the cafe table.
     Beer  was being poured by a maiden waitress with flushed cheeks and eyes as
bright as fire.
     "More  beer!" said the man with the toothbrush mustache and the hair combed
forward on the left side of his brow.
     "No, thanks," said the director.
     "No, no," said the producer.
     "More  beer. It's a splendid day," said Adolf. "A toast to the film, to us,
to me. Drink!"
     The other two men put their hands on their glasses of beer.
     "To the film," said the producer.
     "To darling Adolf." The director's voice was flat.
     The man in the uniform stiffened.
     "I do not look upon myself -" he hesitated, "upon him as darling."
     "He  was  darling,  all  right, and you're a doll." The director gulped his
drink. "Does anyone mind if I get drunk?"
     "To be drunk is not permitted," said Der Fuhrer.
     "Where does it say that in the script?"
     The producer kicked the director under the table.
     "How many more weeks' work do you figure we have?" asked the producer, with
great politeness.
     "I figure we should finish the film," said the director, taking huge swigs,
"around  about  the  death of Hindenburg, or the Hindenburg gasbag going down in
flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, whichever comes first."
     Adolf  Hitler  bent  to his plate and began to eat rapidly, snapping at his
meat and potatoes in silence.
     The  producer  sighed  heavily.  The  director,  nudged by this, calmed the
waters.  "Another  three  weeks  should  see  the  masterwork in the can, and us
sailing  home  on  the  Titanic, there to collide with the Jewish critics and go
down bravely singing 'Deutschland Uber Alles.' "
     Suddenly all three were voracious and snapping and biting and chewing their
food, and the spring breeze blew softly, and the crowd waited outside.
     At  last,  Der Fuhrer stopped, had another sip of beer, and lay back in his
chair, touching his mustache with his little finger.
     "Nothing  can  provoke me on a day like this. The rushes last night were so
beautiful.  The  casting  for  this  film,  ah!  I find Goring to be incredible.
Goebbels? Perfection!" Sunlight dazzled out of Der Fuhrer's face. "So. So, I was
thinking just last night, here I am in Bavaria, me, a pure Aryan -"
     Both men flinched slightly, and waited.
     "-  making  a  film," Hitler went on, laughing softly, "with a Jew from New
York and a Jew from Hollywood. So amusing."
     "I am not amused, said the director, lightly.
     The  producer  shot  him  a glance which said: me film is not finished yet.
Careful.
     "And I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun..." Here Der Fuhrer stopped to take
a big drink, "...to have another... ah... Nuremberg Rally?"
     "You mean for the film, of course?"
     The  director  stared at Hitler. Hitler examined the texture of the suds in
his beer.
     "My  God,"  said  the  producer,  "do  you  know  how much it would cost to
reproduce  the  Nuremberg  Rally?  How  much did it cost Hitler for me original,
Marc?"
     He  blinked  at his director, who said, "A bundle. But he had a lot of free
extras, of course."
     "Of course! The Army, the Hitler Youth."
     "Yes,  yes,"  said Hitler. "But think of the publicity, all over the world?
Let us go to Nuremberg, eh, and film my plane, eh, and me coming down out of the
clouds?  I  heard  those  people  out  there,  just now: Nuremberg and plane and
torches.  They  remember. I remember. I held a torch in that stadium. My God, it
was  beautiful.  And now, now I am exactly the age Hitler was when he was at his
prime.'
     "He  was  never  at  his  prime,"  said  the  director.  "Unless  you  mean
bung-meat."
     Hitler put down his glass. His cheeks grew very red. Then he forced a smile
to widen his lips and change the colour of his face.
     "That is a joke, of course."
     "A joke," said the producer, playing ventriloquist to his friend.
     "I  was  thinking," Hitler went on, his eyes on the clouds again, seeing it
all,  back  in  another year. "If we shot it next month, with the. weather good.
Think of all the tourists who Would come to watch the filming!"
     "Yeah. Bormann might even come back from Argentina."
     The producer shot his director another glare.
     Hitler cleared his throat and forced the words out: "As for expense, if you
took  one  small ad, one mind you! in the Nuremberg papers one week before, why,
you  would  have  an  army of people there as extras at fifty cents a day, no, a
quarter, no, free!"
     Der  Fuhrer  emptier his stein, ordered another. The waitress dashed off to
refill. Hitler studied his two friends.
     "You  know,"  said  the director, sitting up, his own eyes taking a kind of
vicious  fire, his teeth showing as he leaned forward, "there is a kind of idiot
grace to you, a kind of murderous wit, a sort of half-ass style. Every once in a
while you come dripping up with some sensational slime that gleams and stinks in
the  sun,  buster.  Archie,  listen  to  him.  Der Fuhrer just had a great bowel
movement.  Drag  in the astrologers' Slit the pigeons and filch their guts. Read
me the casting sheets."
     The director leaped to his feet and began to pace.
     "That  one ad in the paper, and all the trunks in Nuremberg get flung wide!
Old  uniforms come out to cover fat bellies! Old armbands come out to fit flabby
arms! Old military caps with skull-eagles on them fly out to fit on fatheads!"
     "I will not sit here-" cried Hitler.
     He  started to get up but the producer was tugging his arm and the director
had a knife at his heart: his forefinger, stabbing hard.
     "Sit."
     The  director's  face  hovered two inches from Hitler's nose. Hitler slowly
sank back, his cheeks perspiring.
     "God,  you are a genius," said the director. "Jesus, your people would show
up.  Not  the  young, no, but the old. All the Hitler youth, your age now, those
senile  bags of tripe yelling 'Sieg Heil,' saluting, lighting torches at sunset,
marching around the stadium crying themselves blind."
     The director swerved to his producer.
     "I tell you. Arch, this Hitler here has bilge for brains but this time he's
on  target!  If  we don't shove the Nuremberg Rally up this film, I quit. I mean
it.  I  will  simply walk out and let Adolf here take over and direct the damned
thing himself! Speech over." -
     He sat down.
     Both the producer and Der Fuhrer appeared to be in a state of shock.
     "Order me another goddamn beer," snapped the director.
     Hitler  gasped in a huge breath, tossed down his knife and fork, and shoved
back his chair.
     "I do not break bread with such as you!"
     "Why, you bootlicking lapdog son of a bitch," said the director. "I'll hold
the  mug  and  you'll  do  the licking. Here." The director grabbed the beer and
shoved  it  under  Der  Fuhrer's  nose. The crowd, out beyond, gasped and almost
surged.  Hitler's  eyes  rolled, for the director had seized him by the front of
his tunic and was yanking him forward.
     "Lick! Drink the German filth! Drink, you scum!"
     "Boys, boys," said the producer.
     "Boys,  crud! You know what this swill-hole, this chamberpot Nazi, has been
thinking,  sitting  here,  Archibald,  and  drinking  your  beer?  Today Europe,
tomorrow the world!"
     "No, no, Marc!"
     "No, no," said Hitler, staring down at the fist which clenched the material
of his uniform. "The buttons, the buttons -"
     "Are  loose  on  your  tunic  and inside your head, worm. Arch, look at him
pour!  Look  at  the grease roll off his forehead, look at his stinking armpits.
He's  a  sea  of  sweat because I've read his mind! Tomorrow the world! Get this
film  set  up,  him  cast in the lead. Bring him down out of the clouds, a month
from  now.  Brass  bands. Torchlight. Bring back Leni Reifenstahl to show us how
she  shot  the  Rally  in  '34. Hitler's lady-director friend. Fifty cameras she
used, fifty she used, by God, to get all the German crumbs lined up and vomiting
lies,  and  Hitler  in his creaking leather and Goring awash in his blubber, and
Goebbels doing his wounded-monkey walk, the three superfags of history aswank in
the  stadium  at dusk, make it all happen again, with this bastard up front, and
do  you  know  what's going through his little graveyard mind behind his bloater
eyes at this very moment?"
     "Marc,  Marc,"  whispered the producer, eyes shut, grinding his teeth. "Sit
down. Everyone sees."
     "Let them see! Wake up, you! Don't you shut your eyes on me, too! I've shut
my eyes on you for days, filth. Now I want some attention. Here."
     He  sloshed  beer  on Hitler's face, which caused his eyes to snap wide and
his eyes to roll yet again, as apoplexy burned he cheeks.
     The crowd, out beyond, hissed in their breath.
     The director, hearing, leered at them.
     "Boy,  is this funny. They don't know whether to come in or not, don't know
if you're real or not, and neither do I. Tomorrow, you bilgy bastard, you really
dream of becoming Der Fuhrer."
     He bathed the man's face with more beer.
     The  producer  had turned away in his chair now and was frantically dabbing
at some imaginary breadcrumbs on his tie. "Marc, for God's sake -"
     "No,  no,  seriously,  Archibald.  This  guy  thinks  because  he puts on a
ten-cent uniform and plays Hitler for four weeks at good pay that if we actually
put  together the Rally, why Christ, History would tam back, oh turn back, Time,
Time  in  thy flight, make me a stupid Jew-baking Nazi again for tonight Can you
see  it.  Arch,  this  lice  walking up to the microphones and shouting, and the
crowd  shouting  back, and him realty trying to take over, as if Roosevelt still
lived  and  Churchill  wasn't  six  feet  deep, and it was all to be lost or won
again,  but  mainly won, because this time they wouldn't stop at the Channel but
just  cross  on over, give or take a million German boys dead, and stomp England
and  stomp  America,  isn't that what's going on inside your little Aryan skull,
Adolf? Isn't it!"
     Hitler  gagged and hissed. His tongue stuck out. At last he jerked free and
exploded:
     "Yes! Yes, goddamn you! Damn and bake and bum you! You dare to lay hands on
Der  Fuhrer!  The Rally! Yes! It must be in the film! We must make it again! The
plane! The landing! The long (hive through streets. The blonde girls. The lovely
blond  boys.  The  stadium. Leni Reifenstahl! And from all me trunks, in all the
attics,  a  black  plague  of  armbands  winging on the dusk, flying to assault,
battering  to  take  the  victory. Yes, yes, I, Der Fuhrer, I will stand at that
Rally and dictate terms! I-I-"
     He was on his feet now.
     The crowd, out beyond in the parking lot, shouted.
     Hitler turned and gave them a salute.
     The  director  took careful aim and shot a blow of his fist to the German's
nose.
     After  that  the  crowd  arrived,  shrieking,  yelling,  pushing,  shoving,
falling.

    
     They drove to the hospital at four the next afternoon.
     Slumped,  the  old producer sighed, his hands over his eyes. "Why, why, why
are we going to the hospital? To visit that - monster?"
     The director nodded.
     The  old  man  groaned.  "Crazy world. Mad people. I never saw such biting,
kicking, biting. That mob almost killed you."
     The  director  licked  his  swollen lips and touched his half-shut left eye
with  a probing finger. "I'm okay. The important thing is I hit Adolf, oh, how I
hit  him. And now -" He stared calmly ahead. "I think I am going to the hospital
to finish the job."
     "Finish, finish?" The old man stared at him.
     "Finish." The director wheeled the car slowly around a comer.
     "Remember the twenties. Arch, when Hitler got shot at in the street and not
hit,  or beaten in the streets, and nobody socked him away forever, or he left a
beer  hall  ten  minutes before a bomb went off, or was in that officers' hut in
1844 and the briefcase bomb exploded and that didn't get him. Always the charmed
life.  Always  he  got out from under the rock. Well, Archie, no more charms, no
more  escapes. I'm walking in that hospital to make sure that when that half-ass
extra  comes out and there's a mob of krauts to greet him, he's walking wounded,
a permanent soprano. Don't try to stop me. Arch."
     "Who's stopping? Belt him one for me."
     They stopped in front of the hospital just in time to see one of the studio
production  assistants  run  down  the  steps,  his  hair wild, his eyes wilder,
shouting.
     "Christ,"  said  the  director.  "Bet  you forty to one, our luck's run out
again. Bet you that guy running toward us says -"
     "Kidnaped! Gone!" the man cried. "Adolf s been taken away!"
     "Son of a bitch."
     They circled the empty hospital bed; they touched it.
     A  nurse  stood  in  one comer wringing her hands. The production assistant
babbled.
     "Three men it was, three men, three men."
     "Shut  up."  The  director  was  snowblind from simply looking at the white
sheets. "Did they force him or did he go along quietly?"
     "I don't know, I can't say, yes, he was making speeches, making speeches as
they took him out."
     "Making speeches?" cried the old producer, slapping his bald pate. "Christ,
with the restaurant suing us for broken tables, and Hitler maybe suing us for -"
     "Hold  on."  The  director  stepped over and fixed the production assistant
with a steady gaze. "Three men, you say?"
     "Three, yes, three, three, three, oh, three men."
     A small forty-watt lightbulb flashed on in the director's head.
     "Did, ah, did one man have a square face, a good jaw, bushy eyebrows?"
     "Why... yes!"
     "Was one man short and skinny like a chimpanzee?"
     "Yes!"
     "Was one man big, I mean, slobby fat?"
     "How did you know?"
     The producer blinked at both of them. "What goes on? What-"
     "Stupid  attracts stupid. Animal cunning calls to laughing jackass cunning.
Come on. Arch!"
     "Where?"  The old man stared at the empty bed as if Adolf might materialize
there any moment now.
     "The back of my car, quick!"
     From  the  back  of  the  car,  on the street, the director pulled a German
cinema directory. He leafed through the character actors. "Here."
     The old man looked. A forty-watt bulb went on in his head.
     The director riffled more pages. "And here. And, finally, here."
     They  stood  now  in  the cold wind outside the hospital and let the breeze
turn the pages as they read the captions under the photographs.
     "Goebbels," whispered the old man.
     "An actor named Rudy Steihl."
     "Goring."
     "A hambone named Grofe."
     "Hess."
     "Fritz Dingle."
     The old man shut the book and cried to the echoes.
     "Son of a bitch!"
     "Louder and runnier, Arch. Funnier and louder."
     "You  mean  right  now  out  there  somewhere  in  the  city three dumbkopf
out-of-work  actors  have  Adolf in hiding, held maybe for ransom? And do we pay
it?"
     "Do we want to finish the film. Arch?"
     "God,  I  don't  know,  so  much  money  already,  time, and -" The old man
shivered  and  rolled  his  eyes.  "What  if  - I mean - what if they don't want
ransom?"
     The  director  nodded and grinned "You mean, what if this is the true start
of the Fourth Reich?"
     "All the peanut brittle in Germany might put itself in sacks and show up if
they knew that -"
     "Steihl,  Grofe,  and  Dingle, which is to say, Goebbels, Goring, and Hess,
were back in the saddle with dumbass Adolf?"
     "Crazy, awful, mad! It couldn't happen!"
     "Nobody  was  ever  going  to clog the Suez Canal. Nobody was ever going to
land on the Moon. Nobody."
     "What  do we do? This waiting is horrible. Think of something. Marc, think,
think!"
     "I'm thinking."
     "And -"
     This  time a hundred-watt bulb flashed on in the director's face. He sucked
air and let out a great braying laugh.
     "I'm going to help them organize and speak up. Arch! I'm a genius. Shake my
hand!"
     He  seized  the  old  man's hand and pumped it, crying with hilarity, tears
running down his cheeks.
     "You, Marc, on their side, helping form the Fourth Reich!?"
     The old man backed away.
     "Don't  hit me, help me. Think, Arch, think. What was it Darling Adolf said
at lunch, and damn the expense! What, what?"
     The  old  man  took  a breath, held it, exploded it out, with a final light
blazing in his face.
     "Nuremberg?" he asked.
     "Nuremberg! What month is this. Arch?"
     "October!"
     "October!  October, forty years ago, October, the big, big Nuremberg Rally.
And  this  coming  Friday,  Arch,  an  Anniversary  Rally. We shove an ad in the
international  edition  of  Variety.  RALLY  ATNUREMBERG. TORCHES. BANDS. FLAGS.
Christ,  he won't be able to stay away. He'd shoot his kidnapers to be there and
play the greatest role in his life!"
     "Marc, we can't afford -"
     "Five  hundred  and  forty-eight  bucks? For the ad plus the torches plus a
full military band on a phonograph record? Hell, Arch, hand me that phone."
     The old man pulled a telephone out of the front seat of his limousine.
     "Son of a bitch," he whispered.
     "Yeah." The director grinned, and ticked the phone. "Son of a bitch."

    
     The  sun  was  going  down beyond the rim of Nuremberg Stadium. The sky was
bloodied  all  across  the  western  horizon.  In  another half-hour it would be
completely  dark  and you wouldn't be able-to see the small platform down in the
center  of  the  arena,  or  the  few  dark  flags  with the swastikas put up on
temporary  poles here or there making a path from one side of the stadium to the
other.  There  was  a sound of a crowd gathering, but the place was empty. There
was a faint drum of band music but there was no band.
     Sitting  in  the  front  row on the eastern side ofthestadium, the director
waited,  his  hands on the controls of a sound unit. He had been waiting for two
hours  and  was  getting  tired  and  feeling foolish. He could hear the old man
saying:
     "Let's go home. Idiotic. He won't come."
     And  himself  saying,  "He will. He must," but not believing it. He had the
records  waiting  on  his  lap.  Now  and  again  he tested one, quietly, on the
turntable,  and  then the crowd noises came from lilyhorns stuck up at both ends
of  the  arena,  murmuring,  or  the  band played, not loudly, no, that would be
later, but very softly. Then he waited again.
     The sun sank lower. Blood ran crimson in the clouds. The director tried not
to notice. He hated nature's blatant ironies.
     The old man stirred feebly at last and looked around.
     "So this was the place. It was really it, back in 1934."
     "This was it. Yeah."
     "I remember the films. Yes, yes. Hitler stood - what? Over there?"
     "That was it."
     "And  all  the  kids  and  men  down  there  and the girls there, and fifty
cameras."
     "Fifty,  count 'em, fifty. Jesus, I would have liked to have been here with
the torches and flags and people and cameras."
     "Marc, Marc, you don't mean it?"
     "Yes,  Arch,  sure! So I could have run up to Darling Adolf and done what I
did  to  that pig-swine half-ass actor. Hit him in the nose, then hit him in the
teeth,  then hit him in the blinis! You got it, Leni? Action! Swot! Camera! Bam!
Here's  one  for  Izzie.  Here's  one for Ike. Cameras running, Leni? Okay. Zot!
Print!"
     They stood looking down into the empty stadium where the wind prowled a few
newspapers like ghosts on the vast concrete floor.
     Then, suddenly, they gasped.
     Far up at the very top of the stadium a small figure had appeared.
     The director quickened, half rose, then forced himself to sit back down.
     The  small  figure,  against the last light of the day, seemed to be having
difficulty walking. It leaned to one side, and held one arm up against its side,
like a wounded bird.
     The figure hesitated, waited.
     "Come on," whispered the director.
     The figure turned and was about to flee.
     "Adolf, no!" hissed the director.
     Instinctively,  he snapped one of his hands to the sound-effects tape deck,
his other hand to the music.
     The military band began to play softly.
     The "crowd" began to murmur and stir.
     Adolf, far above, froze.
     The  music  played  higher.  The director touched a control knob. The crowd
mumbled louder.
     Adolf turned back to squint down into the half-seen stadium. Now he must be
seeing the flags. And now the few torches. And now the waiting platform with the
microphones, two dozen of them! one of them real.
     The band came up in full brass.
     Adolf took one step forward.
     The crowd roared.
     Christ, thought the director, looking at his hands, which were now suddenly
hard  fists  and  now  again  just  fingers  leaping  on  the  controls,  all to
themselves. Christ, what do I do with him when I get him down here? What, what?
     And  then, just as insanely, the thought came. Crud. You're a director. And
that's Aim. And this is Nuremberg.
     So...?
     Adolf took a second step down. Slowly his hand came up in a stiff salute.
     The crowd went wild.
     Adolf never stopped after that. He limped, he tried to march with pomp, but
the  fact was he limped down the hundreds of steps until he reached the floor of
the  stadium.  There  he  straightened his cap, brushed his tunic, resaluted the
roaring  emptiness,  and  came  gimping across two hundred yards of empty ground
toward the waiting platform.
     The  crowd  kept up its tumult. The band responded with a vast heartbeat of
brass and drum.
     Darling  Adolf  passed  within  twenty  feet  of the lower stands where the
director  sat fiddling with the tape-deck dials. The director crouched down. But
there  was no need. Summoned by the 'Siegffeils' and the fanfare of trumpets and
brass,  Der  Fuhrer  was drawn inevitably toward that days where destiny awaited
him.  He  was  walking  taller  now  and  though his uniform was rumpled and the
swastika  emblem torn, and his mustache moth-eaten and his hair wild, it was the
old Leader all right, it was him.
     The old producer sat up straight and watched. He whispered. He pointed.
     Far above, at the top of the stadium, three more men had stepped into view.
     My God, thought the director, that's the team. The men who grabbed Adolf.
     A man with bushy eyebrows, a fat man, and a man like a wounded chimpanzee.
     Jesus.  The  director  blinked.  Goebbels.  Goring.  Hess.  Three actors at
liberty. Three half-ass kidnapers staring down at...
     Adolf  Hitler  climbing  up on the small podium by the fake microphones and
the  real one under the blowing torches which bloomed and blossomed and guttered
and smoked on the cold October wind under the sprig of lilyhorns which lifted in
four directions.
     Adolt lifted his chin. That did it. The crowd went absolutely mad. Which is
to  say,  the director's hand, sensing the hunger, went mad, twitched the volume
high  so the air was riven and torn and shattered again and again and again with
"Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!
     Above,  high  on  the  stadium rim, the three watching figures lifted their
arms in salute to their Fuhrer.
     Adolf  lowered  his  chin.  The  sounds  of the crowd faded. Only the torch
flames whispered.
     Adolf made his speech.
     He  must  have  yelled  and  chanted and brayed and sputtered and whispered
hoarsely  and  wrung his hands and beat the podium with his fist and plunged his
fist  at  the sky and shut his eyes and shrieked like a disemboweled trumpet for
ten  minutes,  twenty minutes, half an hour as the sun vanished beyond the earth
and  the  three  other  men  up  on the stadium rim watched and listened and the
producer  and the director waited and watched. He shouted things about the whole
world  and  he  yelled things about Germany and he shrieked things about himself
and  he  damned  this  and blamed that and praised yet a third, until at last he
began  to  repeat,  and repeat the same words over and over as if he had reached
the end of a record inside himself and the needle was fastened to a circle track
which hissed and hiccuped, hiccuped and hissed, and then faded away at last into
a  silence  where  you  could only hear his heavy breathing, which broke at last
into  a  sob and he stood with his head bent while the others now could not look
at  him  but looked only at their shoes or the sky or the way the wind blew dust
across  the  field.  The  flags  fluttered. The single torch bent and lifted and
twisted itself again and talked under its breath.
     At last, Adolf raised his head to finish his speech.
     "Now I must speak of them."
     He  nodded  up  to the top of the stadium where the three men stood against
the sky.
     "They are nuts. I am nuts, too. But at least I know I am nuts. I told them:
crazy,  you  are  crazy.  Mad,  you  are  mad. And now, my own craziness, my own
madness, well, it has run itself down. I am tired."
     "So  now,  what?  I  give the world back to you. I had it for a small while
here today. But now you must keep it and keep it better than I would. To each of
you  I  give  the world, but you must promise, each of you to keep your own part
and work with it. So there. Take it."
     He made a motion with his free hand to the empty seats, as if all the world
were in his fingers and at last he were letting it go.
     The crowd murmured, stirred, but said nothing loud.
     The  flags  softly  tongued  the air. The flames squatted on themselves and
smoked.
     Adolf  pressed  his  fingers onto his eyeballs as if suddenly seized with a
blinding  headache.  Without  looking  over  at the director or the producer, he
said, quietly:
     "Time to go?"
     The director nodded.
     Adolf  limped  off the podium and came to stand below where the old man and
the younger director sat.
     "Go ahead, if you want, again, hit me."
     The director sat and looked at him. At last he shook his head.
     "Do we finish the film?" asked Adolf.
     The  director  looked  at the producer. The old man shrugged and could find
nothing to say.
     "Ah,  well,"  said  the  actor. "Anyway, the madness is over, the fever has
dropped. I have made my speech at Nuremberg. God, look at those idiots up there.
Idiots!"  he  called suddenly at the stands. Then back to the director, "Can you
think?  They wanted to hold me for ransom. I told them what fools they were. Now
I'll  go  tell  them  again. I had to get away from them. I couldn't stand their
stupid  talk.  I  had to come here and be my own fool in my own way for the last
time. Well..."
     He limped off across the empty field, calling back quietly:
     "I'll  be  in  your  car  outside, waiting. If you want, I am yours for the
final scenes. If not, no, and that ends it."

    
     The  director and the producer waited until Adolf had climbed to the top of
the  stadium.  They  could hear his voice drift down, cursing those other three,
the  man  with the bushy eyebrows, the fat man, and the ugly chimpanzee, calling
them many things, waving his hands. The three backed off and went away, gone.
     Adolf stood alone high in the cold October air.
     The  director  gave  him  a  final  lift  of  the  sound volume. The crowd,
obedient, banged out a last 'Sieg Heil.'
     Adolf  lifted  Ms free hand, not into a salute, but some sort of old, easy,
half-collapsed mid-Atlantic wave. Then he was gone, too.
     The  sunlight went with him. The sky was no longer blood-coloured. The wind
blew dust and want-ads from a German paper across the stadium floor.
     "Son of a bitch," muttered the old man. "Let's get out of here."
     They left the torches to burn and the flags to blow, but shut off the sound
equipment.
     "Wish  I'd brought a record of Yankee Doodle to march us out of here," said
the director.
     "Who needs records. We'll whistle. Why not?"
     "Why not!"
     He  held  the  old  man's elbow going up the stairs in the dusk, but it was
only halfway up, they had the guts to try to whistle.
     And then it was suddenly so funny they couldn't finish the tune.