me of my assumption that any éclat stemmed from her attitude towards sex which was for the times radically permissive. As indeed it had remained.
Young Boys for ever!
“You know, 1972 was not the first time that Brunnenbach Bücher was attacked. There was a very violent incident in ’39… maybe ’40.”
Bea and Dirk had moved ahead on a stretch of the trail wide enough for four to walk abreast.
“Nazi sympathisers! Swiss copycats inspired by the book burnings promoted by Goebbels back in ’33!” said Dirk.
“And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.”
Aunt Ursel gave Dirk a long look.
“Quite the opposite, young man. This was years later and the books on display in Marktplatz… in German, French and Italian… all echoed the themes elaborated in Mein Kampf, spoke of Lebensraum and Aryan supremacy… the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings of Nazi dogma.”
I almost tripped on an exposed root.
“In Heinrich Lange’s shop window?” I said with a slight squeak.
“Yes. Like his father, Heinrich was a true believer. In 1936, the year before we married, he and his father attended the Olympics in Berlin. As soon as he came back Heinrich became a member of the Swiss National Front. That was the organization convinced that the ‘ethnically compatible’ populations of the north-eastern cantons of Switzerland should be citizens of the Greater Germany.”
So that had been the opprobrium bringing shame to the Marktplatz, shame and retaliation.
A gate blocked the path ahead. Dirk opened it when the train had rushed past, speeding up the flanks of the Seerücken on its way to Kreuzlingen, the town divided by the frontier on the other side of which was the German city of Konstanz.
“But his… Nazi politics were no problem for your sister, my Omi?”
Once across the railway line it was a short downhill stroll to the outskirts of Weinfelden.
“She was clever. She pushed him gently but firmly in a different ideological direction. Different, but just as fraudulent, dangerous and perverse. He became a fervent convert to fundamentalist Catholicism. My sister was religious but not fanatical. In fact it may have led her to question her own faith when she saw that Heinrich’s new zeal was just as excessive and obsessive as his former one. She was a loyal wife, though, but I think one of the happiest days of her life was when Heinrich Lange was buried in 1968.”
For a minute or so Aunt Ursel trudged ahead, dealing in silence with memories which were still painful. I remembered Omi’s funeral. I’d been thirteen. When Heinrich Lange died I had not even been born.
“Well, one way or another that explains two of the books, doesn’t it? One Nazi, the other religious.”
Ursel whipped round.
“Wrong, Dirk. The notebook with the Nazi emblem on the red leatherette cover only reached us much later, long after old Heinrich was gone.”
Aunt Ursel was not sure how the Fortezza file and the Black Madonna monograph had come into the hands of Heinrich Lange.
“During the war years, I imagine. They were entrusted to him for safe-keeping. His will stipulated that both Erika and I must do likewise. They were to be given every protection. It was our duty, not open to question.”
Not that they were locked in any safe. Heinrich Lange had believed that best hidden was in plain sight. At Brunnenbach Bücher the two volumes were shelved in the antiquarian section among a miscellany of books devoted to Swiss historiography. Each of these dusty tomes, seldom examined and even more rarely bought, trampled anew across the Rütli meadow where in 1307 three ‘oath-takers’, Eidgenossen, swore allegiance to the earliest confederacy of cantons.
“The Nazi stuff had all gone?” Dirk ventured.
“From the shop, yes, and Notre-Dame de Champbasse was right there with the Fortezza file guarded, one might say, by William Tell.”
“Heinrich Lange’s flirtation with Nazi ideology… even the fact he was German… the good people of Weinfelden forgave him?” Bea wondered.
“He kept a low profile during the war years. And he had not been alone in his beliefs, after all. As a holier-than-thou follower of the Church of Rome in its most restrictive form he became something of a recluse. He took up bee-keeping and planned to build a chapel in the garden of our house…”
Aunt Ursel shook her head.
“The chapel never happened and Heinrich Lange died leaving his magnum opus unfinished, the definitive account of St. Guinefort’s miracles.”
Even Dirk was lost for words when we learned that St. Guinefort was a thirteenth-century French dog revered as a saint after miracles were reported at his grave although the hound was never in fact canonized by the Church.
The Mighty Quinn
I wondered for a moment if I had inherited any of my grandfather’s madness as well as the painting.
St. Guinefort. A couple of type-written pages taken at random were more amusing to read than the Notre-Dame de Champbasse text. In my mind’s eye I kept on seeing Snoopy wearing a halo, although the doings of those who conducted blood thirsty rituals at the holy greyhound’s shrine were far from edifying.
“Could there be a Disney movie in it?” Dirk wondered. The holy grail of an investigative journalist was to have his story bought by Hollywood for filming.
Who Let The Dogs Out?
I read more of my grandfather’s meandering tale of cynocephalic superstition and his contorted musings about the infallibility of canonizations. Aunt Ursel had probably thought that it would be a welcome distraction from the three books I had brought back to Weinfelden and had given me the pile of pages before retiring for a nap.
Bea and Dirk were more focussed, Dirk awestruck by the menu listing the crime series stored on my aunt’s Sky Box, Bea cautious in her appraisal of the three books on the ledge.
Caute, sed impavide, so goes the Latin maxim. ‘Cautious but without fear’. It is the motto of a Scottish baronial family but also of Segirtad International. I hadn’t known that the concern was Swiss, with world headquarters in the mountains of the Engadin. The name of the outfit was in the regional language and meant ‘security’. No messing about, none of the coyness of Blackwater, Alba, Greystone, Titan, Sandline or Aegis, firms inclined to resort to such euphemisms as ‘situational awareness’ when speaking of plain old espionage.
Noble words can be the disguise of base intentions.
The new Bea took some getting used to. She had wanted to change when we got back to the house, the invitation to plunder my wardrobe on her mind.
Halter-top, backless, sky blue, quite short, quite sheer, two years old, suited her. In that dress from the Brazilian designer Osklen I had thought I looked fragile and submissive.
Bea 2.0 looked fragile and authoritative.
Impavide.
Dirk protested that the dress was diaphanous enough to allow her black thong to show through. Bea shrugged. Later when we went into town the panty problem was resolved. I heard the rumble of my thunder being stolen.
“The man who was your grandfather, Thea, may have been a bit of a nut case but that is not relevant to the books he was asked to look after. He was a man who would tend to obey orders given by men in black… either the black of the SS uniform or the black Jesuit cassock.”
“I don’t think Heinrich Lange was a Jesuit…”
“No… more on the lunatic fringe, the frantic faithful. He would feel at home there after his espousal of Nazi thought. Fact