The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [171]
“Oh, bullshit! You’re making this up.”
He shrugged. “Hey, don’t believe me—ask Miri. We thought it was weird even then, even compared to the normal freak show that was our home.”
“You think I suppressed this abuse? God, how unbelievably trite! And this explains all my current problems on the love and family front?”
“No, the explanation is that God has given you free will and you have decided to use it to sin, rather than abandoning your monstrous pride and submitting yourself to God’s will. Since you asked.”
Or something to that effect, a style of discourse that goes right past me. The other interesting thing from that conversation is that somewhat later I musingly asked Paul why our parents had ever hooked up in the first place, and he looked at me strangely again and said, “You really don’t know?”
“A wartime passion, I always thought. They never talked about the feeling part, though.”
“No kidding. You never thought it was strange that a Nazi princess would choose to marry a Jew? And a very Jewish Jew at that.”
“The mysteries of exogamy?”
“No, she was just being a good Nazi.”
I must have shown puzzlement because he said, “Look, they took this master race business seriously. The Herrenvolk have the right to conquer everyone else because they’re strong, yes? And who is the chief rival for world domination?”
“The Russians?”
“No, the Russians are cattle. The Jews are the only rival race. They control Russia and they control the western powers, especially including the United States. The war was fought against the Jews. And the Jews won.”
“What? The Jews were destroyed.”
“They won. They lost six million, sure, but they got back to Jerusalem, and the Germans lost seven million. And the armies that beat Germany into the ground were controlled by the secret machinations of the Jewish race. You never got this from her?”
“Never.”
“Lucky me, then. It follows that since the Jews conquered, it was the Jewish race that was superior—sorry about the camps—and it further follows that it behooves an Aryan maiden to join her loins to those of the superior breed. It all makes perfect sense, if you happen to be crazy.”
I have to say that this had never occurred to me, and neither Paul nor my sister had ever brought it up. My parents fought like fiends, of course, but I had woven a romance around this, which I got from the movies. People fell in love, they had children, the man was unfaithful and the wife threw plates, at which point the man reformed and realized that home was where the heart was, or else he left, and the mom found a new and better husband (Robert Young) and turned the bad old husband away when he came crawling back, or (even better) he died.
After what seemed like a very long interval, nor did the plane drop from the sky, I said, creakily, “So what’re you saying, Paul? That we’re phase two in the plan to breed the master race? I thought that mongrelization was what they were trying to avoid.”
“Yes, but they were fascinated by mutts and the idea of breeding. They even saved Aryan-looking Jewish kids from the ovens and gave them to good Nazi families to raise, which they shouldn’t have done at all if they really believed their racial purity line. And all that skull measuring they did and the Mengele experiments with twins…”
I recalled something he’d just said and interrupted. “What did you mean by ‘lucky me’ just now?”
“Oh, just that Mutti gave me and Miri the blood lecture, which apparently you didn’t get. I mean, did you think I figured all this out myself?”
“She told you she married Dad to advance the racial theories of the Third Reich?”
“Not in so many words, but we were often told that the Nazis lost because they were too pure and noble and so she was sacrificing herself to inject some sneaky-smart Jew genes