XIV.
Adolf was already waiting outside the art-house cinema box office when I arrived.
He looked smaller than I remembered, and, on his own, without his burly Mossad escort, almost a little vulnerable.
He was wearing baggy blue flannel trousers, a Harris tweed sports jacket, and a pair of mustard loafers. He had slicked his famous hair away from his forehead and had trimmed his Islamic beard fashionably. He looked like an elderly but successful crime novelist: comfortable in his well-chosen clothes and comfortable with himself by way of his well-earned status.
He waved as he saw me making my way across the road.
“Glad you could make it,” I said politely.
He brushed my comment aside.
“What’s showing?” he asked.
“Wavelength,” I said. “And some Stan Brackage.”
“Bah!” he said, dismissively, but enigmatically.
Did he mean that the films were stupid or that my choice of them was?
Unsettled, I handed our tickets to the doorman and we went inside.
We were required to climb some stairs.
Adolf studied some of the film posters advertising forthcoming attractions displayed next to the auditorium door. Coming soon, some Hollis Frampton. I think I’d seen them.
He insisted that we stop at the cinema café.
He had me buy a six-pack of strong lager, some ham and cress sandwiches on rye, and two big daddy-sized bags of Kettles’ barbecue bacon-flavoured crisps.
A slovenly usherette, fondling—nay, masturbating—an enormous flashlight give us complicated directions as to where we were supposed to sit.
Eventually, after a series of false trails, I managed to locate our seats, with Adolf following me patiently up and down the cheaply-carpeted staircases and along darkened walkways.
“Here we are, Mein Führer,” I said, respectfully.
“You sit on the aisle,” he ordered, his old military training shining through like a blaze of glory.
No sooner had we taken our places than the house lights went down.
We both cracked opened cans of lager and sipped them as the film began.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Wavelength.
And when the lights came up for the interval, I could think of nothing to say.
The Führer turned to me. “What’s that bitch up to?” he asked, pointing to a busty student clutching a tray.
“She’s the ice-cream seller,” I answered.
Eventually, the girl, inching along foolishly, made it to our row.
“Any custard trifle with added fresh cream?” Adolf asked her, loudly, in Hebrew.
“Wut?” The girl’s South African accent was pulverising.
“Any vegetable samosas? Poppadoms?” the Führer asked, this time in English.
“Hey? Leave me, fucking leave me, you fucking creep!” she wailed hysterically.
“Give the Führer a sherry trifle!” I roared.
“Kraaist! I’m only a fucking ice-cream seller,” she whined angrily. “Fuck off, you bloody junk. You’re both fucking cracked. Leave me!”
“Fuck you, you dirty African slut!” I roared.
“Now, now,” said Hitler to me firmly, sensibly calming the situation.
I angrily tore open another beer. How dare an uneducated rock-spider whore talk to the Führer like that! These art-houses are prepared to employ more or less anyone nowadays. I was trembling with rage.
Hitler craned his neck about the auditorium, studying its many dust-encrusted architectural features.
I prayed for the interval to end.
Eventually, it did.
After a truly disgusting advertisement about diarrhoea, the Brackage shorts opened. All I can remember is a lurid close-up of a vagina.
Yeah, yeah.
I had seen it all before.
And no doubt would see it all again.
Suddenly, somewhere below me, to my right, the sound of a tight stream of running water, accompanied by a startlingly caustic smell.
Heavens!
The Führer was casually and fulsomely pissing up against the seat in front of him!
When he had finished and zipped back up, I sensed him staring intently at me.
Did he want my fucking approval?
What for?
And those black Nazi eyes ! Oh, you bitch.
But when in Rome.
I unzipped and, having primed my knob, self-consciously leaked a few drops out onto the curved scratch-panel on the back of the seat in front of me.
The Dictator of the Third Reich seemed satisfied.
Fortunately, no one was occupying seats anywhere near us.
Say what you like but, in a way, our shared experience—our mutual urinating, our brotherly piss—surely said something about the ontological astrology of fascism and the rich inner life of nationalist mythology. I’m so sorry a big black man like Louis Farrakhan was not there to share this tinkle with us. But perhaps, thanks to the pioneering volumes of Dr. Rogers and others, he was.
XV.
Afterwards, we dropped in at a nearby brasserie for coffee.
“When are you going back to London?” he asked.
“I think I’ll have to go soon, Mein Führer,” I said. “My work is almost done.”
“Oh,” he said nonchalantly.
Did I detect a note, however faint, of sadness? Did I mean anything at all to this strange old Arab who had single-handedly gassed so many grannies and changed the entire course of Western history?
We sat quietly munching our Chelsea buns and sipping our cappuccinos, like a couple of stupid old fags on a date.
“What is your favourite album?” I asked him.
“Filth, by Swans,” he answered immediately, before volunteering, “I listen to it at least once a day, as loud as my Palestinian neighbours will tolerate. Through it, I hear the resolution of the mind-body problem and the unearthly calling of a distant land.”
He smiled at me, and I smiled back.
It was all very relaxed.
I felt very affectionate towards the old prick. He was genuinely likeable.
“May I order you a brandy?” I asked.
He hummed, and nodded. “That would be nice.”
He sat peacefully with his hands clasped in his lap.
I signalled to a waiter.
“What is your favourite classical piece of classical music?” I continued.
“Another easy one,” he said. “Stockhausen: Mixtur.”
“Which version?”
“One.” He was emphatic.
Someone elbowed the back of the old man’s rattan chair by mistake and apologised profusely.
Our brandies arrived.
“What does Mixtur do for you?” I asked.
He paused.
“Cheers,” he said, raising his glass. “Oh, this is nice.” He admired the bouquet. “Delicious. Well, I think it was Allen Ginsberg who said ‘Back in Times Square, dreaming of Times Square.” So here I am, in the Holy Land. And this music reminds me to forget.”
“Forget?”
“Forget the long, dreadful years of the war, and of exile.”
“What about those war years?” I asked, plucking up courage. “How do you look back on them?”
He paused.
“A performance, if you like, gone horribly, horribly wrong.”
A performance! What a choice of word!
I nodded.
The atmosphere seemed palpably even more relaxed. The old man, looking more like Carl Jung every minute, had become expansive. I took out an exercise book and an HB pencil, the tip of which I licked.
“Mein Führer, what do you really look for in a woman?”
A flicker of irritation. “We are not here to talk about fucking women,” he said.
I shrugged.
Of course: he was thinking about his beloved Eva.
But where was Eva? I certainly had no idea.
Were those tears lubricating those faraway eyes, or brandy fumes? We shall never know, but I know. I know.
Try another angle.
“Could you name a favourite film? Your absolute number one?” I asked.
I expected the old fool to name some galloping piss like Casablanca.
He nodded. “Sure.” He paused. “Wavelength.”
“What?” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe my ears!
He smiled. “Wavelength.”
“The film we’ve just seen?” I asked delightedly.
He nodded, beaming now.
“Had you seen it before?” My excitement was mounting.
“No.”
I grinned from ear to ear. I chuckled with delight. I had just taken Hitler to see his favourite film of all time!
“Did you know the work of Michael Snow?” I was struggling to contain myself.
“I’d read about it in Cahiers, or Fangoria, I think. But that is all.”
So there you are!
Beat that, you Nazi cunts worldwide! Sieg heil! Sieg heil! I struggled to stop my arm from erecting itself in a Nazi salute. I wanted to dance a jig on the table!
Suddenly, the old man bent towards me confidentially.
I responded by doing the same towards him.
“Where are the restrooms?” he whispered.
I pointed to a door with a spread-eagled mannikin motif on it.
He appeared to hesitate.
I bent further forward. “Are you going to do a shit, Mein Führer?” I whispered.
He looked startled. “What?”
“Are you going to have a crap, Herr Chancellor?”
He looked genuinely afraid. He swallowed hard. “Why?” he asked.
I leant back in my rattan chair. “I could read it for you,” I said, confidently.
“Read it?” He was bewildered. “What the fuck are you talking about, nuh?”
I sensed the resurgence of the old Arab in him.
“Read it. Read it,” I repeated. “It’s an astrological gift. I read it like some people read bones, signs, dice, tarot cards, or newspapers. Haven’t you read the book by Chief Johnny Two-Rivers?”
“Gaaah!” he spat. “You watch the Joan Rivers Show?”
Me and my big astrological mouth. I had ruined a perfectly good evening.
Two giggling Jewish girls appeared at the Führer’s side. One of them asked, self-consciously, “May we have your autograph, sir?”
Adolf obliged with a smile, and his famous titled scrawl. It read “To Shoshy, with much love, Addy Hitler.”
The waiter intervened. “Excuse me, Herr Hitler, sir, but I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to move on. Quite a number of people are queuing up for your autograph, and our customers are being distracted.”
“Yes, yes. I quite understand,” said the old man considerately, signalling to me.
We left some shekels on the table and wandered outside into the warm evening air.
I felt maniacally up, I felt fucking wonderful.
I whistled “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music.
Our hands in our pockets, our jackets unbuttoned, we strolled casually along the street, enjoying the many sights and sounds of a vibrant Middle Eastern people at leisure.
I never did get to read the old boy’s dump, thank Kraaist.
XVI.
The cold.
The trees.
The railways.
Wood; string, straw; meat; dried meat.
Sausage, cabbage.
Pepper.
Gristle; poor-quality meat.
Fire.
Cold.
Tracks.
The laughter.
XVII.
I wrote an article on my meeting with Hitler for some Jewish right-wing magazine or other. Phrases included: “Despite his bloodthirsty rhetoric and his uncompromising stance, Hitler turned out to be a perversely likeable man….Indeed I became distinctly—and perhaps unsettlingly—fond of him…Attempts to get him deported are misguided….many of his urbane Jewish critics spout the same form of bigotry under a different guise…” and so on. I don’t know if anyone read it.
XVIII.
While I was in Jerusalem, I was asked to give a talk at the Hilton to a small group of professionals. I don’t know who they were; perhaps I ought to have been told. I chose the topic “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace.” I spoke about the increasing eye-breast contact between males and female employees as becoming unexceptional; I spoke about an increase in eye-vaginal contact, as well as the taboo subject of eye-anal contact. “Women can hardly type a letter any more without someone attempting to penetrate them,” I concluded.
Applause was muted, to say the least.
A stocky, bearded Jewish brute came over to me afterwards. “What the fuck are you trying to do?” he asked rhetorically, in a dense South African accent. “You deserve to get drilled.”
Yeah.
XIX.
The last evening, whenever it was, when I went to the Führer’s apartment, I think it had been raining.
What makes me say that?
Because the streets of the quarter in Jerusalem where I was staying smelt putrid.
I had spent the last two days in my hotel room, alone, with the curtains drawn, with instructions not to be disturbed under any circumstances, except by prostitutes giving the code-words “Man Ray” to the night porter.
The door to the apartment was at the end of wrought-iron outside stairwell.
The evening air was stale and thick and humid.
I knocked. I waited.
A horrible old woman, half-a-century past her best, her lank grey hair tied in a bun, her flabby torso swathed in a semen-stained field-grey kaftan, answered and invited me inside.
“Hermy, who is it?” called a voice in another room.
“It’s your young gentleman, Addy,” said the woman.
“Send him in,” said the voice, and I recognised it to be that of the Führer.
I was ushered into a sparsely-furnished and undecorated front room.
The man himself, looking thoroughly relaxed and at home, was lounging on a threadbare floral-patterned Ikea sofa. He was wearing a pair of black boxer shorts and a white T-shirt and was watching a flickering black-and-white video on an ancient wood-veneered TV set in the far corner.
The milky thighs of his old legs were lumpy and varicose-veined.
“Have a popper,” He offered me a red plastic mug of them.
I took one and cracked it.
I recognized the video, the sound turned low, to be Kuramoto’s Unabridged Agony.
A woman, tied to an office swivel chair, is being spun around and around.
I glanced at the titles on Addy’s video shelf.
Cannibal Holocaust; Men Behind the Sun; Emanuelle in America; a grubby four-box set of Claude Lansman’s Shoah; The Animal Film.
From the kitchen, the sound of a beer bottle dropping onto the stone floor. Followed by a loud “Fuck it!” from the old woman.
“Clumsy bitch!” roared Herr Hitler.
The woman in the swivel chair, still spinning.
“What can I offer you, chum?” Adolf asked me.
“Carlsberg,” I answered.
“Sure,” he said, pointing to a squat refrigerator next to the sofa.
I glanced at the titles of the neat vertical stack of books on the floor beside the TV.
A couple of paperbacks by George Steiner; a copy of Teach Yourself Philosophy; Martin Buber’s I and Thou; a Koran; a well-thumbed Spartacus International Club Guide; Wilbur Smith’s When the Lion Feeds; something by Doris Lessing, the Torture Garden; a book about Bob Flanagan; some Stephen Kings. And a couple of Agatha Christies.
Yeah, sure.
The woman is tortured with white noise.
Our conversation was desultory.
Addy asked me about the state of independent filmmaking in England. What the fuck’s that got to do with anything, I asked myself. I asked him if he’d seen the Yahweh broadcast. Looking bored, he shook his head. “I never watch classical music on TV, even if it is the Jerusalem Philharmonic,” he said, adding, “The fact is, I hardly ever watch the telly.”
The old woman shuffled in with some snacks on a tray.
Cheesy biscuits; twiglets, pork scratchings, anchovies, dry roasted peanuts.
She stank; it was as if she had never washed.
Who was she?
A cold shiver ran down my spine. What’s the matter with you, you fucking idiot! I roared silently to myself.
Eva!
Eva Braun!
But I was wrong.
“You remember Reichsmarshall Göring,” said Addy to me, pointing to the fat slag.
I nodded, stunned.
The old woman smiled at me. “Don’t keep Addy up too late,” she said. “He’s got to go to Beirut tomorrow for the launch of another Arab edition of Mein Kampf.”
“Gaaah!” said the Führer dismissively.
That old Arab again.
Which reminded me: “What exactly did you mean by the Volkswagen joke at the meeting the other day?” I asked.
“Volkswagen Beetle? Fucking good car. The best.” he answered.
“The joke,” I repeated.
“What joke?”
“Somewhere in all that fucking dogshit about contracts and obligations,” I said.
He looked puzzled. “I make many jokes,” he said.
Göring agreed. “He makes many jokes.” He sat himself down on the sofa next to the Führer.
I took a sip of my Carlsberg.
The woman has her hair torn from her scalp.
Hermy and Addy were cracking poppers. Fag magazines, boys with big cocks shafting and sucking one another in Californian sunshine, were passed around. Göring rolled his air-force grey kaftan up to his upper thighs and rubbed his legs. He did not have on any underwear. We could see his diminutive circumcised cock and undersized testicles. I thought the horrible old bastard was going to jerk off but, like a tedious passage out of an Alexander Trocchi novel, he ritualistically prepared a needle and shot up into his left thigh. Sighing, he collapsed back against some greasy, beer-stained scatter cushions. Hitler put his hand between Göring’s legs and attempted to manipulate the Reichmarshall’s tool, but was not able to generate an erection. Göring responded by rubbing the Führer’s crotch, through his boxer shorts. I could see the huge snake of a Nazi knob spring to life. Not that again! Hitler slipped out of his pants and Hermy went down on him, bobbing and sucking noisily. Never underestimate the elderly Nazi.
I’d had enough.
I sprang out of my chair and strode over to the open French windows leading on to the flat’s balcony, just gasping for a breath of fresh air.
I cracked another popper.
I looked out across Jerusalem, at the roofs of various churches, temples, mosques, cult centres, psychiatric institutions, art-house cinemas, filmmaking co-operatives, video libraries, video production units, video stores, thrift stores, flea markets, and whatever else.
I was really not sure if this whole Nazo-theological thing was really me.
Not sure at all.
Honestly, I’d never really been a great fan of the Middle East.
But I’d come such a long way.
I’d put so much effort into it.
There was no going back.
There is no going back.
XX.
On my way back in the aeroplane to London, I was astonished and delighted to be given a seat right next to the justly famous Minister Farrakhan, or was it Muhammed Ali or Mike Tyson? Perhaps it was just another harmless haji making his way back to the filthy, Satanic West.
Either way, we chatted and twittered about the metaphysics of bare-knuckle boxing in some considerable detail.
My body felt relaxed and relieved and at peace.
And I have a 51st birthday coming up.
***
For all installments of “Wavelength,” click here.
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Jakob Zaaiman is an artist and writer living and working in London, U.K. He is interested in creating works which are strange and disturbing, and which hopefully defy easy explanation. So far he has written a book of short stories, two collections of poetry and a book on interpreting modern contemporary art; all available online.
