SOMEDAY, SWEETHEART: a short story

(EXTREME TRIGGER WARNING. Do NOT proceed if you have a weak stomach. This is a story about a Southern lyncher living as an expat in Nazi Germany during Kristallnacht. You have been warned.)

He was sitting in the café in Chicago next to her and staring idly into his “set-up”—an empty coffee cup, brought out by the proprietors of the speakeasy. He felt nervous, yet excited to be next to her at that hour. “Well,” he heard her say, in a husky, slightly raspy voice, “Why don’t you pull it out?”

R. reached for the liquid-filled flask in his hip pocket and looked around. There was an intermission on stage and the black-faced comedians didn’t make him as jittery as the band did. Those Cotton Pickers had his goddamned ears ringing.

Good, he thought, his eyes scanning the tables filled with people: no cops. And no nigs—at least not in the audience.

He pulled out his hip flask and poured the whisky into his coffee cup, and into hers. As he did the girl smiled a devilish grin. She bounced her sun-kissed leg on her knee and giggled. R. felt a free hand unbuttoning his fly and a kiss on his cheek.

For some reason he heard knocking on the speakeasy’s front door. He ignored it and turned to get a better look at the woman he was with. All of a sudden the speakeasy ceased to exist and R. found himself, quite incredulously, in bed. He couldn’t understand it. It had seemed so real, and he had almost seen her face again.

It was the third dream in two months in which R. had almost seen the way she looked—actually, in the dream, he knew how she looked—but in his waking state he could not remember a thing. R. felt agitated. The knocking continued. R. looked up through the shutters and saw it was still dark outside. And yet the knocking out in the foyer continued unabated.

Knowing where he lived now—it certainly was not Chicago—he must have been a damn fool to get up and answer the door. But he did. When he recalled what he’d seen that night over breakfast the following morning, he felt outraged.

It was a swarthy, black-haired, long-faced, bloodied man with a long, scraggly beard who was knocking on his door. The man had on an old dark-brown sport-coat with noticeably worn pants. R. was aghast. The very fact that some fucking Jew knocked on his door, let alone broke his reverie filled him with hate. Dirty Jew, he thought. What the hell was this all about? And how come he managed to get past the doorman?

Whatever the case, his worst fears had been confirmed: nothing of his was safe, as long as he stayed in this building. He had to move to another flat.

As for the Jew’s fate, R. thought, whatever. So what if the cops finally showed up and machine gunned that fucker, right up against his apartment building. So what if one emptied an entire magazine into his face. Serves him right for breaking my goddamned reverie, you think, trying to recall the reverie as you sharpen the razor on the strop.

Serves him right, the fucking kike.

Ever since moving to Berlin six years ago, R. had come to hate Jews even more than he ever hated niggers. Maybe it was because there were so few niggers in Germany that his general hatred, his anger, needed a new target. He had never really liked Jews to begin with, being a Southerner, so turning his rage on them was easy. There was good reason for hating them. They even acted like niggers when he came to think about it; and in some ways they were even worse than the niggers he’d known back in the States. Over there, the niggers at least knew their place; Jews everywhere had the nerve to think they were not only the equals of but better than a white man…No wonder, he thought, the Germans hunt them in the streets.

Later that morning R. called his friend Ulf and told him what happened. Ulf wasn’t in the least bit surprised. He was one of those dour Germans who hardly expressed any emotion, so R. assumed Ulf was simply being Ulf. Not quite, however. Ulf gave him an earful of what happened the night before. “You mean to tell me, you didn’t hear it? Scheisse, even the sick men in the krankenausen could hear all the noise and smashingk vindows.”

Smashing windows? Gunshots? Screams? What the holy hell was happening now? He wondered what had happened to Berlin since he’d wandered into that strange funk for the last two weeks, claiming that he was sick with pneumonia. Actually, R. had been in a bad funk for the past six weeks. He didn’t even turn on the radio for fear of disturbing his own delicate sense of equilibrium. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on what was wrong. He was not homesick for the States, even though he’d been living in Europe for ten years. It couldn’t have been money—he had plenty of that at his disposal. He had a mid-level executive position with the Berlin branch of Prescott Bank. And he didn’t lack for friends. He spoke very good German and oft-times, just walking the streets of the city, people assumed he was German—until he opened his mouth and heard his faint but obvious American accent.

It was something else entirely. He couldn’t speak of it to the people he knew of without risking his life, let alone his job. Hell, he could not even bring himself to acknowledge what he really desired. He tried writing about it, and then cast the writings aside; a few weeks later he looked at what he wrote and decided to burn it for safety’s sake. It was all right, a voice told him in the back of his head; maybe I don’t need to burn it; it wasn’t as if somebody was going to break into his flat and confiscate it. But you never knew in today’s Berlin, especially when Hitler was running things.

No wonder, then, when that Jew pig broke into the flat, he really got all shook up. Maybe the Jew wasn’t a Jew, but some dark German, or an Armenian, or an Italian posing as one. Some of these German blokes could be awfully dark. After all, German officers had not kept their cocks clean when gallivanting around the Levant.

R. knew the reality of what Berlin had become once he put on his clothes yet, for once, he had to open up the window to let out the smell of cigarette smoke. He knew he was putting his head on the chopping block after the Kristallnacht. The usual smell of coffee, baked bread, fresh newspapers and gasoline was pervaded with another strange scent. He remembered that scent only too well. The smell of cooked human flesh.

R. felt hung-over, so he called the bank and told him he’d be there tomorrow morning. After that, he called Oscar, his old Southern buddy, whom he’d known since the middle of the last war. Oscar told him to meet him at a café near Linienstrasse, in Mitte. R. was greatly pleased; he knew that Oscar could be counted on to round up a bunch of other friends of his, and reminisce once more about the good old days.

Glass was strewn all up and down Orianienburger Strasse; the synagogue where those “hook-nosed monsters” worshipped their “Jew god” had been burnt to the ground. Good god-damned riddance, R. thought, smelling the maliciously deliciously evil odors of burnt Jew, charred wood, brick, mortar and tires that filled the chilly September air. Berlin was always getting too cold, too soon; never a real spring and hardly what you’d call autumn, what! –just a dash of a humid summer on a flat plateau of a city which was, to be truthful, none too pretty: and as much as you admired the Fuhrer, Berlin seemed to be getting blander and blander by the moment. The terrace was at the intersection of Linienstrasse, August Strasse and Orianienburger, at the Café Judenfrei.

R. sat at the Judenfrei and was pleased to see his old buddies wrapped up in Burberrys and looking chipper than ever. It was a beautiful day, with hardly a cloud in the sky. R. sat with his buddies and talked—about the good old days, before Germany, before Paris, before London. His recollection of what his German friends did to the Jew last night inspired within him a reverie of days gone by. Memories of his Southern youth, when he used to hunt the niggers. Oh yes. We hunted those stinking niggers, he boasted, privately, to himself. I and my pals did just about every thing to those coons except eat them, and if they weren’t three-fifths of a person (according to our Constitution) then most certainly you would: If the coon is an animal, nothing more than fair game, then why not eat him?

Just as these pleasant reveries filled his mind his German friend Klinkel told him, in a laughing voice, about how he went after the kikes in his neighborhood. He heard it on his big upright radio that the Jews were disturbing the peace, and then he got a phone call from Otto, Jimmy and Ralf. The three met at his apartment and decided to have a contest as to how many kikes they could kill in a six hour period. Of course, their poor fingers might get tired in pulling the trigger so many times….Otto bagged ten kikes; Jimmy claimed he had 12, and Ralf 8. You only got one—I’m sorry, you said, but I was just too tired and hungover when I heard about what that stupid Jew Greenspan did in Paris. You returned to Winterfeldt, took some tea, and went to bed when this other stupid Jew woke you up, all aflutter. To-day, however, the most remarkable thing has happened: the sun has shone upon this wretched city.

Amazing.

And yet, neither Otto, James, nor R. really liked Berlin. They complained about the confusion of Potsdamer Platz; Otto says that even after four years of Hitler they still haven’t been able to change the ways of Berliners—they are as always rude and insolent. The waiter serves them their coffee in the snippy local way—“danka! Bitta-shun!” and with some muttered comments under his breath to boot. These people here seem to think that everybody is an oaf. Have one coat lapel awry and you will never hear the end of it. Berlin is unbearable, really—but where else can we live as we feel? “Really,” Otto says, “Munich is a whole lot classier than Berlin—these Berliners are incorrigible. But exactly how did you deal with the Jews in America? Or you were saying someseenk about the niggers there? I don’t like zem either. Ja, ja. Stupid fuckeeng animals, Zey only want one thing and zat is Aryan women. Why? Because even zey know zat zeir women are no better than smelly, ficken neger-affen.” But, Will says, in the North, the niggers think they can do what they want. They’ve taken over the North. They have nigger police, nigger congressman, nigger musicians playing their filthy, decadent swing music—it’s gotten so bad people even think stupid, illiterate coons like Duke Ellington or Don Redman or Red Allen are as good as Beethoven! You even have historians claiming that even the great Beethoven himself was a nigger!! Only in America—or maybe a shithole like Paris, eh? Over there, the French have become so dotty they throw Wagner to the winds for some darky like ‘Satchmo’!”

Otto laughs. “And just who is zis ‘Satchmo?’”

“Another dumb nigger who thinks he can play a trumpet,” snarled Jimmy. They all laughed heartily. Jimmy continued. “I used to see those stupid niggers in San Antonio and heard what the fuss was all about in New Orleans, St. Louis and all these other nigger rat-holes. I was not impressed. You know what it is? It’s the obscenity of the music. The immorality it suggests…It just makes these dumb American college kids horny, that’s all. But that’s niggers for you. Look at those big, blubbery, ugly lips of theirs. Not one nigger I know of can get a decent sound out of any wind instrument because first of all, his fucking brain is so small, so ape-like, how can he understand a melody? Niggers were not meant to understand melodies, so they have to make things up as they go along. And then, those ugly, fat, fucking LIPS. My God, they are so ugly, so greasy, so inky. Even the very color of their skin affects their playing. No class, no beauty, just vulgarity and over-the-top obscene sexuality….”

“One day, you will have to kill those monkeys,” Otto then said, matter-of-factly.

“In the South, we tried to kill them,” R. added, all of nothing. “I remember. We tried. It didn’t work. It isn’t the numbers, my dear man….it’s what the darky has done to the whole damn country. The fucking Bolsheviks own us, now….”

“You need a Hitler,” Otto added, “it’s the Jew who is pumping up the nigger. Behind every big nigger is always a Jew, my friend. Niggers are too primitive—“

“Otto, these American niggers ain’t like these Congo coons you see in the colonies. They’re trickier. Yeah, they’re inferior, but they sure are tricky. I don’t believe those dumb grinning monkeys for a second,” James then said, angry. “William’s right. Most Americans don’t know this, but I do. They think that Stepinfetchit is reality. Bullshit. Stepinfetchit is a phony. Stepinfetchit grins in your face because he is trying to lull you to sleep—and once you’ve dozed off, off he goes with your woman. Stepinfetchit carries a fucking razor in his back pocket, and Americans are too stupid to know that the razor is really meant for them. Americans are idiots. They believe everything they read in magazines and see in the talkies or hear on the goddamn radio. It’s too late to save America….the niggers have it.”

“So you want to stay in Germany, then?”

Jimmy didn’t say anything. He seemed lost in thought. Jimmy then related a story, when he moved to Ohio, away from the South. It was the biggest mistake he ever made. His wife was beautiful, classy, elegant, refined, educated, the finest woman you’d ever want to see. A year after we moved to Ohio she disappeared. Turns up in the arms of some stupid, fucking buck NIGGER! Can you believe that? In the South, he says, quivering with anger, “I would have drawn and quartered that coon, and wouldn’t have seen a day in jail.”

It was then that it came back to R.: why he was living in Germany. He wanted to live in an environment where there was no shame in hunting niggers. The south had gotten soft; it was now dangerous to go nigger hunting like you could twenty years ago. He blamed it on the Jew Bolsheviks and that Scottsboro Boys rubbish. The niggers had the whole country by the balls and that was why he had left for Germany. Now-a-days, he thought, if you wanted to hunt the nigger like that, you’d have to live in some boring, ugly rube town—and you could not hunt nigger in the north now without putting your life at risk.

But there was a time in which our actions held no shame. It was during World War One. It was a glorious time to be a man—a white man, that is. (Is there really any other kind of man??) R., when you were a student at Lice University, and when word got out that a young white woman was “raped” in Parkhurst, Georgia—in the nigger section--you didn’t show up for Latin class that afternoon. Remember? You were pissed off, because you knew that some “nigger” was up to no good again.

And it doubly pissed you off because you knew the girl. She was a former “girlfriend” of yours and a closet slut. Emily Gordon. You dallied with her a couple times and that was it. You didn’t think anything of her, but the very thought that some nigger had gotten his hands on her riled you up. Of course, she didn’t do anything; you just wanted an excuse to string up a nigger. You had been reading a newspaper you found somewhere in the Lice University library—in the newly installed toilet. It was a nigger newspaper called the Chicago Defender. That got you hopping mad. The very idea that the niggers had a life away from the South, where they should have been picking their goddamn cotton and eating their fucking watermelon—that made you want to puke. Yeah. Niggers with a newspaper. Niggers….Burrheads….Tarbabies….Coons….Monkeys….Apes….Pickanninies….Savages….Eight-balls….dinges….Goddamned onion-stinking black SHIT, you fumed all the day long. You went to the library looking up info on the nigger apes. The Leopard’s Spots…oh. A good one. Nice. Thomas Nelson Page was always full of the sturm und drang that later drew you to Berlin after her death. The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon. The Negro is a Beast, by Charles Carroll. The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, by Robert Shufeldt. These, and a bunch of other things, were squirming around in your head like so many worms by the end of the month. You had already seen the Birth of a Nation and found it amusing, and never really thought it was true; you told me you’d never seen niggers act like that. But that April of 1918, you took The Clansman to heart.

What further pissed you off was the rumor that Miss Gordon has been raped by a black man in uniform. The nigger still thought he was in France, and needed to be taught a lesson. So you phoned a friend for verification. The friend didn’t know. You phoned another friend, and he said, yeah, he heard about it. He wasn’t so sure, however, and decided to drop it, because he was afraid the niggers might be armed—these were new niggers coming from the front. But then a newspaper clipping called you guys together. You gathered at McPherson’s old general store, just outside on the porch, and decided to fuck the niggers, once and for all.

R. went on and on, reminiscing about the good old days while sitting at the terrace. R. ordered bockwurst and beers, and then wiener schnitzels and kartoffeln, and polished it off with some lieblich wine. They lost all sense of time talking about what they did in Parkhurst, Georgia, in 1918. Of course, R. hesitated to tell her these things when she was alive—he knew she didn’t want to hear them. About him hurling a Molotov-cocktail into a general store owned by a “nigger.” And then R. and his pals beating him with the butts of your rifles and stringing him up on a telephone pole. Which was, by the way, just the very beginning.

R. then boasted about what he did to an eight-year old colored girl. R. and his boys danced around it until the truth came out and then you admitted to using a bayonet taken from yours truly, Germany, during the hostilities, and slitting her vagina to make more room for his great big white prick. Why the hell you had to do that, R., you do not know. She was just a nigger bitch. You always assumed those nigger wenches were born with huge holes to accommodate those huge black pricks their black buck beaus carried around with them. Alas, there are always exceptions to the rule, and in this case you had to use a bayonet to open this little wenches’ sachet. Jesus, the blood was everywhere. The mother fainted—hell, she looked like someone had doused her with wallpaper paste, so many of your boys had had her way with her. And you guys weren’t even through yet. Blood covered your clothes, your hands, your pricks. And then you hoisted the girl over our heads, near the old well that the niggers used, and slammed her head down on it. Her burry little head sounded like the cracking of a coconut wrapped in a wet towel. WAPPP!—you thrust her head down once more over the well, and it broke open—the little nigglette’s brains sprayed out, literally, with blood oozing out everywhere. Luckily it was over the well. Not satisfied, you kept on smashing and smashing—you guess you wanted to get rid of that stupid, fucking face. It looked oddly angelic, but you see, it was black, black as molasses. It was just so damn sickening—a face that angelic, that sweet, encased with a skin so wretchedly dark. It was a crime against nature, you said.

You then burned that house down. All of the other niggers were fleeing for their lives, screaming their heads off. Some of them were armed, though, those fucking bastards. But life is bittersweet….you want a hunt, sometimes you have to face the consequences that the animal is going to hunt back. The hunter need not be the hunted. So we called for more reinforcements, you bragged. We were going to kill EVERY damn nigger we saw. We were going to do to those goddamn niggers what our Fuehrer did to these goddamn Jews last night. Flay each and every one of them. Pop out their eyeballs. Douse ‘em with gasoline. Cut off their cocks and shove them down their throats. Ram red-hot pokers into every known orifice in their stinking bodies. Blow up their homes! Crush them under the hooves of horses and bathe their wounds in brine before stuffing their assholes with gunpowder and blowing them up. Speaking of which….that was how you ended the night, while you played gramophone records and snacked on some fried chicken, apple cider and cornbread. You blew up ten niggers. You filled their rectums up with gunpowder and then stuck dynamite sticks inside, sometimes in their vaginas if they were female. It was a special treat to find not one but TWO pregnant niggers and fill up their holes with that good black stuff before jamming the sticks inside. One old maid you didn’t bother with gunpowder, but stuck a stick of TNT into each of her three holes--rectum, cunt and mouth….

“How d’you like that, granny? Feelin’ a little stuffed down there for ya?!”

You had the niggers upside down, the easier to pour the stuff in. And then you played the records while they screamed and begged for their lives. That was the funny part, listening to the whinny of the Dixieland clarinet mingling with the cries of the coons you were about to dynamite. “Shut the hell up, Rastus!” you shouted, “We’re just sending you to a better place, you black sonofabitch!”

“Yeah, nigger,” Jimmy added, right behind you, laughing, “I guess we done made life hell for you-all down here so I guess when your smoky black ass—oh, shit, what am I saying? Who the hell ever heard of coons going to heaven?!”

“Blow the coons up!!”

And with that, you blew those niggers all up at once. One old guy said it was almost like the Civil War. Too bad it was dark, and we couldn’t see those darkies flying every which way, but some of their remains, including bits of a fetus, actually rained down on our heads….and into your food. Gross.

We played other records: All Coons Look Alike to Me, by Vess Ossman, someone singing in the background, which added to it. Roll on de Ground; a real old one called Coon Coon Coon, so old, it didn’t even have a paper label. A Berliner, they called it. How telling…maybe it was a foretelling of our future?....

Ah….youth. Fried chicken. Apple cider. Stringing up niggers and burning them alive. Walks in the meadows with your Sunday girls. We were young, however, so I can’t be surprised that we played records by Vess Ossman—and the Original Dixieland Jass Band. You’re a little ashamed to admit it, now. But we all grow older, mature, and put away childish things. To this day you have yet to play another ragtime or “jazz” record.

But there was something else you forgot to tell them. Or just perhaps, it didn’t behoove you to tell them, because they probably would have slit YOUR throat for admitting that, a little later, you met her during a trip to Chicago. You hung out with her in Chicago dives listening to uneducated, baboon-lipped niggers playing their monkey music. It was in one of those dives that you told her you loved her. You rubbed her thigh and felt the wench’s face. You even told her that she was beautiful, and you kissed her big, baboon-like nigger lips.

There you have it: the reverie. The one that the kike fucked up last night. It’s crystal clear, right before your eyes, kid, but you’d better not tell Otto and Jimmy what you’re thinking.

After fantasizing all afternoon about the good old days, they decide to call it a day. But then Jimmy has an idea. He says, “This is Germany. I want to do it again. Things are still a little crazy around here, so let’s take advantage of the way things are before things settle back to normal.”

Normal?….Things will never be normal again, you suddenly think to yourself. They never were. You call this shit normal?

Yet R. agrees, and after leaving the Café Judenfrei he decides to poke around through the shards of glass on the street. What he sees makes him want to laugh. He does laugh. Yet, R., you obviously feel a bit disturbed seeing Jews on their knees, surrounded by clusters of Germans, a large number of them women, laughing, and some snapping pictures with their Agfas. One German woman barked, in German, “hey, hurry it up, ja, we don’t have all day to clean up after you filthy schweine! Scheiss-Juden-affen!” and then roughly kicked a prone Jew who was twisting a dirty rag into a bucket.

The Jew made no noise. He was one of those authentic Jews, in that he had a nose you could see for miles. He had big globular eyeballs that were really black and piercing. He had a blank, defeated look on his face. Seeing that damn kike on his knees, groaning, trying to keep himself from falling apart, R. instinctively smiled. The German woman barked something again, laughed, and then a man stepped forward, with round wire-rimmed glasses, clean-shaven, with his light brown hair parted on the side and faded at the temples. He took the bucket that the Jew was using and, making those grotesque faces that only Germans can make, dumped the contents on the Jew’s head. The whole crowed roared with laughter….

“Come on, we got all day to see this,” Jimmy mumbled, as they walked further up the street; a streetcar rumbled past them, stopped, and off lumbered people looking as respectable, clean and need one say it, unconcerned about the fracas as their generation had been watching those wonderful uprisings of 1917 and 1918, when niggers were hunted like dogs in America’s greatest cities.

Ten minutes later they piled into a cab at Linienstrasse. R. lit a cigarette and after a single puff he saw something that made him palpitate. It was a black woman! An African—or, rather, an Afro-German. “Stop the car,” Jimmy shouted, in German. They leap out of the cab. R. felt the old excitement coming back. There are no cops around, so Jimmy feels free to do as he wishes. “Hey, neger!” he shouts. “Schwartze!”

At first, they just shouted at her and spat, but then the driver decides to back up and do his worst. R. says, “no, don’t run her down, I have some ideas on what to do to the bitch.”

The African girl put up little resistance in getting into the cab. Yet R. noted the obvious terror on her face. Deep down, he felt a palpable disgust and a weird feeling of self-loathing. It seemed to go away at first when he saw the mansion at Grunewald where Otto lived. The African girl saw the mansion and began to ask, in almost perfect German, “Why on earth are you taking me here?”

The African girl soon saw why the moment the door swung open, and she was roughly pushed to the floor by Jimmy. The girl then screamed and Jimmy side-swiped her with his foot. “Shut your trap, you nigger whore. You’re gonna get the time of your life.”

Jimmy pulled out an old handkerchief and tied her hands behind her back. Then he found another cloth and tied it around her mouth to stop that horrible screaming. Nobody screams like a nigger bitch, R., thought, with the same buried feelings of unease still gripping him. They ought to be born silent, like a dog. Too bad they can talk—it just makes things nasty…

I wonder if she had any human feelings; these niggers seemed the same as white people. Actually, they were….my whole life I had been avoiding it, dealing with the humanity of the people we were killing. Somewhere, in some deep unreachable cranny in my mind I assumed they were really no different than we were—maybe, in some strange way, a bit better. They were always so colorful, they had such a flair for language, music, and so I was told had even tried their hand at the higher arts. Perhaps if they were given half a chance they could be as….no, no. It was too late. I had chosen my path, my lifestyle, and right or wrong, I was sticking to it. It was killing niggers and Jews.

R. made an excuse and went into the bathroom to wait out the murder. He sat on the toilet seat, smoked half a pack of Gitanes and swigged some whisky out of his flask before working up the nerve to face the fracas downstairs. Once he almost left the toilet, but upon cracking the door and hearing moans downstairs, he shut it, and opened his flask again…

By the time R. left the bathroom, the Negress was already long dead. “Where were you?” said Otto in surprise. “You missed the killing! The negerin was drawn, like this”—Otto made motions with his hands to indicate just how it had been done—“and then your friends cut her to pieces! Mein Gott—better than killing a Jew!”

“R.,” Jimmy said, once you entered the room where the party was, “are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” R. lied. “That damn bockwurst and schnitzel gave me the shits.”

R.’s friend laughed out loud. “That’s funny,” Otto says, “they never make me shit. You Americans have weak stomachs!”

You saw what remained of the Negress, lying chopped up and bloodied beyond belief, on the floor, which was covered with layers of old newspapers. You took the arm of the Negress and walked outside to the German shepherd and fed it to him, and walked back in the house. Tres chic, what?

Now you have to do something about that noisy Victrola. You can hear it for blocks. Go into the other room to get a quieter record and look for a softer needle, one that doesn’t grate so much on the nerves.

It’s getting to you, isn’t it, old man?

You try and push it out of your head, but you know what you did those fourteen years ago, when you confessed it all to her that night. You and the girl were in bed, and you’d just finished making love. You were awfully good for somebody high on gauge. She knew what she felt then, and what she felt after R. was so foolish to open his mouth. But R. was not the type, unfortunately, to keep a secret among friends, so he told her what he did down there in Georgia.

You remember how it struck her in the chest like a sword swipe. She would never recover from what you told her. You remember how her face contorted, because it destroyed her. She could not believe that she had fallen in love with a monster like you. She ran out in the nude. You chased her down the cold South Side streets and when she got to a bridge, she was crying insanely, and then, after threatening to jump, she did just that…to her death.

You probably think that by going back outside, retrieving the arm from the dog and eating it yourself might make you feel at one with her, don’t you, kid? Of course—what are you thinking? Cannibalism is something HER people do, not yours—so you think. You forget about it, go back to fiddling with the goddamn victrola. Yeah. There. You got it in. A softer needle, and on comes an old His Master’s Voice of Wagner’s Tannhauser. And then you go back to your elegant chit-chat about the cultural scene in Berlin.

R. excused himself after three hours and took a cab home to Charlottenburg. While on the Kufurstendamm, he idly glimpsed out the side window to his left and saw the empty rows of café chairs along the boulevard. Precious few were occupied for some reason; among one of the occupants was an unusually swarthy woman, her bare tan legs crossed, hat turned down low over her face. In an instant she looked up from her coffee and R. was struck by her strange beauty. It wasn’t a great place, just some lone, empty terrace in front of a disheveled kneipe. The cab stopped at a light, and R. told himself that he needn’t go much further at that point; he could walk back to his flat from there.

R. got out of the cab, paid what was due in Reichmarks, and slowly positioned himself at a nearby terrace so he could get a better look at the dark woman. Yes, he thought, indignantly, she was a Negress. Yet something dangerous leaped into his heart when he looked harder and saw that it was, God forbid, her. It must be her. He doesn’t want to think of her name. Odette. Odette Williamson. The very mention of her name made him sick to the core. But there was no turning back.

R. walks over to the terrace where the Negress is sitting. R. notes that she even has the same statuesque build and the same haunted look on her face, one tinged with melancholy. But the woman’s name is not Odette. She speaks no English, only German, and Berlin German to boot. She once worked as a secretary but Aryan laws laid her off from her job, so she sells herself to stay alive.

R. takes a deep breath…

“Bitte?” he says, in his best German?

The Negress looks up at R. with a blank yet resolutely unfriendly look on her face. “Was?” she snorts.

R. now feels at a loss. He doesn’t know how to say or do anything. Should he just do away with her rather than face the music?

The Negress looks at him, and then looks at him. Her expression changes to one of knowing yet calculated lasciviousness. “Zwanzig reichmarks, fur eine stunde,” she says, making a motion with her hand.

R. breathes. “What is your name?”

“Dina,” she says, idly.

“Ficken? Blasen?”

“Ja, ja,” says the Negress, tiredly, picking up her black purse.

“Kommt,” R. breathes. “To my place. It’s a lot better than a hotel.”

Back at his place he was so nervous in getting out of his coat he left it on the floor. The Negress laughed and R. gently but firmly grabbed it from her. He offers her a glass of wine but she demurs, and sits down.

God, he thinks, how beautiful she looks…

“One moment, please,” he says, to Dina, who looks at him strangely.

He pauses to find a piece of foolscap somewhere in his desk. He pulls out a pen and using violet ink, he writes the letter. There: done. It’s off his chest. Now he had to do this thing. He walked back into the living room and ordered Dina to follow him. Yes, old man, you’re not calling her names now. Strange, isn’t it? Treating the nigger bitch like a lady. And yet, as she’ll readily admit, she’s just a common whore turning tricks to keep from starving…

Dina sat on the edge of the bed and watched him open up the lid of the victrola. The record was on the turntable. He nervously blew the dust off the record… “Someday, Sweetheart,” the record label read, by Jelly Roll Morton’s Red-Hot Peppers. He had never played it before, though he had purchased it right here in Berlin. He was too afraid. Absentmindedly R. began to wind up the victrola when he heard Dina giggling behind him.

“Was ist das?” he heard her say.

“You’ll hear soon enough,” he told her, in German, and set the needle on the record and closed the lid.

Dina peels off her dress and reveals a body even more splendid than he ever dreamed of: dark-brown nipples atop breasts as firm and ripe as grapefruits. No stretch marks, no Caesarian scars—hell, no pubic hair. She’s a beaut, kid.

“Scheisse,” R. said, looking her up and down, “so schon, wonderbar, wonderbar…”

R. pulled off his belt, and Dina’s black eyes widened. She fearfully held out her hand. “No, no,” R. said, “Nein, nein. It’s not what you think, sugar. Here.”

R. pulls out his wallet and offers her 3,000 Reichmarks. He tells her, in English, “If you are lucky, bitch, maybe you can catch a train to Paris when it’s all over.”

“Bitte?”

“Komm hier, mein schatz,” R. says, instead, in German, draping the belt around his neck, and laying down in the bed.

He pulled Dina on top of him. Inserting his prick inside was not difficult. Dina rides him and feels his chest with her palms. R. grabs her hands and pulls them up to his neck. Maybe her delicate hands would not be strong enough, he thinks; the belt ought to do it. One had the best orgasms on the verge of being strangled. And with a nigger bitch—he only liked dark meat, he finally admitted to himself—it should be the orgasm of a lifetime.

She is hesitant at first. He calls her a fucking nigger, a dirty slut, and a rage seizes her and she tightens her grip. More, he shouts. More, you dirty slut. Dina laughs at him and lets her grip loosen…

Fucking nigger, he calls out. You fucking baboon bitch. Neger, neger, neger.

Was ist das? She shouts.

“Kill me, you nigger monkey bitch,” R. spits, in German. “Kill me. Go ahead—I know you want to, you filthy black whore.”

She chokes him to death.

A few hours later, the butler comes in. He looks around for R. in vain and calls his name. Out of curiosity, he knocks on the door of the bedroom and when there’s no response, he opens the door, and finds the victrola still spinning in the bottom groove. He removes the arm from the record and shuts it off…and sees R. lying in bed with a belt around his neck. The butler calls the police, who search the flat and find nothing except the note on the desk in R’s office. It reads:

Odette, I’m sorry. I love you; you are the most beautiful girl I have ever known. I will always love you. But I love killing niggers more than I love you. Don’t take it personally, baby—you were a sweet girl. I’ll see you again in Hell.

Love, Roderick.

Dina was picked up at the French-German border after fleeing for Paris.

The police translated the letter, yet could not identify exactly who “Odette” was. Nevertheless, Dina Brumskine, half-German, half-Liberian, was found guilty of murder. Local papers carried the news: “Deranged Mulattress Murders American Playboy.”

On November 21, 1938, Dina Brumskine was beheaded in Sachenschausen.

2006-2012