The Open Window

The bolt-action Mauser 98 is the weight of a healthy baby and the length of a young child. There is a method for calculating its recoil energy, but without the pain the algorithm means nothing. I was simply told that it kicked, and that the prize, (a slain tiger, a dead dictator) had better be worth it. It has a capacity range of 3/4 km, or half a mile as the British and the Americans would have it. I prefer the more poetic measurement of a thousand yards.

But I didn’t need anything like that. I only needed 20 meters, or 0.012 of a mile.

Or 22 yards. Not far at all. On firing, my shoulder would probably travel further than the bullet, no doubt taking the rest of my body with it before slamming against Dr. Feuchtwanger’s drinks cabinet.

Except that the Feuchtwanger’s have all left for England, the land of gills and bushels, quarts and ounces, where the zeitgeist would be less pogromatic towards their faith. So the drinks cabinet was no longer there, although I saw the outline of it in the dust that no one ever saw.

It was the 18th of September, 1931. The weather was an estimated 18°C, but the summer had been hot, and I expected it to climb to 25°C by lunchtime. There was no wind. Not a whisper of it. There was no rain. Not a chance of it. It was the perfect day to kill a dog.

I was neither a soldier nor a hunter. I was once a tutor, and at the end of that path lies a dull tale, not due to any nefarious or dubious activity on my part, but a depression of the spirits, something that runs in my family and for which there is no cure. Turning my back on lonely children and their parents' unreasonable hopes, I still knew that the world offered many doors, and that the outcome of one's life pivoted on which one you chose to open.

I chose the door where general factotums went. The steady rhythms of the Feuchtwanger’s home left me more content than I had ever felt before, and I discovered that being respectfully told what to do, and then doing it well, gave me greater satisfaction than any other marker of success.

Perhaps this nebulous grasp on life made me reckless.

The doctor left me the rifle as a parting gift for all the years of service: the driving and the shoe-polishing, the small odd-jobs that did not require an expert or his fees. Where or how he acquired it is a mystery to me, but perhaps he foresaw the providence in it.

I had a room in their attic which afforded me the tourist’s view of Munich and the romantisch Bavarian landscape beyond it. I was told that Hitler talked of a mountain retreat, but I could not fix the image of this essentially urbanite blowhard scaling the misty heights, or casting off his uniform for the lederhosen. He would seem out of place amongst the curious marmots, although I always feared that he would never seem out of time.

When the Feuchtwanger’s left I still kept a room in the attic, but it would not have been long before Hitler’s men acquired the palace of the Wandering Jew. And so I figured it would have to be then; that there would never be another time like it, when the building was still empty and before the installation of the NSDAP offices and the round of tasteless parties and connivances that would follow.

His suite sat at a close corner to the Feuchtwanger residence. Like I said, 22 yards close. His party was growing daily, his acolytes growing in spittled fervour, each speech longer and more tedious than the last, but he was yet to acquire a political position himself. At that time he was the führer of nobody. Even then there were people gathered on the pavement waving their obsequious salutes. In a new year he would seize the chancellorship and in short order he would declare himself President of the Reich. At such time the stink of his office would grant him a stifling protection, but on that particular day - when still not everyone was prepared to take him seriously - all I needed was for that odious, obdurate shit to step onto his balcony.

And so he did.

He was dressed in his comical military uniform, bearing the insignia of his ego and sipping from a cup, glancing down at the people below and nodding his avuncular approval. There was a Mercedes 770 purring beneath the balcony, waiting to whisk him off to one of his endless meetings or rallies. The sash window was open and the barrel of the Mauser was exposed. A glance that way would have announced me, but there was no one looking, not like they would be looking soon. My heart was storing beats. I was conscious of drawing a single, shallow breath in case it disturbed the battle beast on my shoulder, and my eyes were reluctant to blink. In those seconds, which bore the mark of eternity, my body, for the first and only time, obeyed the orders of my will. The sights settled on the irregularities of his buffoonish face. At that distance there would be no discernible drop in the bullet’s trajectory, so if not his skull then it would have been his throat. A mess, either way. My finger curled against the trigger as his bulbous eyes were cast downwards.

And then a girl came. Twenty or so. Plain-looking. She stood close to him and they appeared to argue like lovers might. She mentioned Vienna and he told her she could not go. There were tears from her and anger from him. The voices rose; his staccato and cruel, hers high-pitched and overwrought. His followers on the pavement scuttled away, embarrassed to see their leader in such a prosaic domestic tangle. She touched him, he touched back, but there was no tenderness. It was a struggle between dominance and desperation.

And then she stood directly in front of him. The Mercedes sounded its horn. 110 decibels. A conversation is 60.

I withdrew the Mauser. I could not risk shooting a woman.

Five minutes later he was safely within his car, and somewhere within the thirteen spacious rooms at Prinzregentenplatz 16, a woman cried.

*****

I spent an hour squatting on my haunches with the Mauser out of sight of the window. I had barely considered what would happen to me if I had been unable to make my escape. I would have left the Mauser there, of course, and raced down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the gardens. There was a gate, a blue wooden gate, through which I could have lost myself in the streets of Munich until my breath was restored to normal and I could be just another man in the crowd.

But by then I was no one’s assassin, and so I let myself out in the normal manner, never to return. The rifle, disassembled, was stored in its leather sling. As I was walking along Grillparzerstraße I heard what sounded like a gunshot, but which might equally have been a car running too rich and backfiring. In the haze of the day I thought nothing of it.

*****

Dr Ludwig Feuchtwanger had already had his feet under the table before he and his family decamped to England. Before they left he had pressed a cheque and a telephone number in my hand. The cheque was for my passage to England, (or elsewhere), if at any point I felt it was necessary, and the number was ‘for his London club.’

That afternoon, having sold the Mauser to a waffengeschäft on Marienplatz, I drank too many beers in too many kellers. My emotions were confused as my belly swelled with gas. I had booked a night in a cheap but respectable hotel, and during those actions of selling and drinking and finding a roof, my mind was grappling with a contradiction. How was it possible that I could be a brave man and a coward in the space of a day? How could I have dared to kill him in the morning and then plan my escape from him, and my countrymen, in the afternoon?

I suppose it resolved itself. I had been brave because I had seen a prescient opportunity, and but for bad timing I would have taken it. I became a coward when I realised that I could not live amongst my people as they were, and that without a Mauser 98 and the perfect window of opportunity, there was no escaping the consequences of Mr Hitler’s rise.

I suppose I might put it like this: if you want grandchildren some day, you have to know when you're beat.

The tragic irony is that I could have killed him. I could have finished him before it all really began, and I could have done it regardless of the intervention.

The girl on the balcony was Geli Raubal, his niece, the object of an incestuous obsession so pernicious and so lacking in good feeling that she could find no solution to it, and ended her precious life to be free of him.

Just an hour after I had withdrawn my rifle she withdrew her uncle's .22-calibre Walther pistol from his bedside cabinet and shot herself inexpertly, but fatally, in the chest.

It would not have mattered if I had traumatised her. It would not have mattered if I had clipped her flesh, and it would certainly not have mattered if the bullet had ripped through both of them where they stood.

Because she was going to do it anyway.