waiting rooms, the central circle of prevarication. In Bohemia, Poe had fallen through cracks and been the last of the ignored. Here, he was merely the least of the hordes of the overlooked.
The hall was crowded with men whose finery suggested importance and worth. Within sight were enough feathered helms, gold tassels, sparkly epaulettes, polished buttons, medal clusters, white capes, shiny boots, brocaded waistcoats and striped trousers to outfit a comic opera company for a season. Yet supplicants paced with irritable energy or slumped in weary attitudes, revealing only powerlessness and irrelevance. Poe was a slumper, Hanns Heinz Ewers a pacer. He went back and forth like a sentry, hands clasped behind his back, neck stiff as a ramrod.
Their appointment was with Dr Mabuse, Director of the Intelligence and Press Department of the Imperial German Air Service. At nearly midnight, the building was still busy. The most Poe had gathered was that he was to be asked to write a book. He did not mention that in the last three years, he had been unable to complete so much as a humorous couplet.
Junior officers clutched document bundles, desperate to be relieved of the bad news they brought. Colonels, generals, a field marshal were levelled in rank by an age of waiting.
A clerk, his hair a peculiarly shocked bird's nest, sometimes emerged, like a figure from a cuckoo clock, from a tiny door to call a name.
'Von Bayern,' he barked. 'Hauptmann Gregory von Bayern.'
An elder, neatly uniformed without the trimmings, stood at the sound of his name and was ushered out of the room. Ewers's envious eyes bored into von Bayern's uniformed back as it disappeared smartly through doors marked with a gilded bas- relief of the imperial German eagle.
'They always get preference,' Ewers stage-whispered bitterly, meaning elders. 'The centuried fools don't know what year it is, but are sure of a commission and the opportunity to eclipse the work of an able new-born.'
Obviously, Ewers was eaten inside by resentment. Poe was learning more of his doppelgänger.
In the first-class railway carriage, numbed by Ewers's reminiscences, Poe found his travelling companion tolerable only because his position guaranteed patronage, advancement or degradation. Ewers's stories of life in the service of the Kaiser were laced with the ironic, justified falls of those who had crossed or disappointed him. Each gem of truth in his autobiographical monologue was polished until it shone, then set in a tracery of arrant fiction.
It was an uncomfortable journey, with the etched faces of soldiers returning from leave always outside the compartment or in the darks between the carriages. The grey of their uniforms spread to their faces, showing colour only in the red around their eyes.
Apparitions haunted Poe still. On a nearby couch, squeezed between a puffy diplomat and a mightily whiskered general, was a man from the front, a wild-eyed walking skeleton wrapped in a uniform. Jittery at every heel-click on marble, a muddied despatch clamped under his arm, he was one of the living dead, a warm man who seemed more dead than the vampires either side of him. His dented helmet was smeared with French dirt.
The stomach of his coat was pink-tinged with his own blood. Any rank insignia he might once have worn were obscured or ripped away. The man's stretched face was a mask of pain.
The general, fussily eating live mice from a brown paper bag, pretended not to notice the state of his comrade. He shrank to one side to avoid actual physical contact with such a disgusting remnant. The diplomat too, concentrated on a mid-air spot in a direction that did not require him to look at the soldier. The worthies, new-born vampires of the most distinguished station, conversed over and around the mud man, discussing the course of the war. Both were confident of imminent victory because the German fighting man was the best in the world. With the Russkies out of it, there was no excuse not
The hall was crowded with men whose finery suggested importance and worth. Within sight were enough feathered helms, gold tassels, sparkly epaulettes, polished buttons, medal clusters, white capes, shiny boots, brocaded waistcoats and striped trousers to outfit a comic opera company for a season. Yet supplicants paced with irritable energy or slumped in weary attitudes, revealing only powerlessness and irrelevance. Poe was a slumper, Hanns Heinz Ewers a pacer. He went back and forth like a sentry, hands clasped behind his back, neck stiff as a ramrod.
Their appointment was with Dr Mabuse, Director of the Intelligence and Press Department of the Imperial German Air Service. At nearly midnight, the building was still busy. The most Poe had gathered was that he was to be asked to write a book. He did not mention that in the last three years, he had been unable to complete so much as a humorous couplet.
Junior officers clutched document bundles, desperate to be relieved of the bad news they brought. Colonels, generals, a field marshal were levelled in rank by an age of waiting.
A clerk, his hair a peculiarly shocked bird's nest, sometimes emerged, like a figure from a cuckoo clock, from a tiny door to call a name.
'Von Bayern,' he barked. 'Hauptmann Gregory von Bayern.'
An elder, neatly uniformed without the trimmings, stood at the sound of his name and was ushered out of the room. Ewers's envious eyes bored into von Bayern's uniformed back as it disappeared smartly through doors marked with a gilded bas- relief of the imperial German eagle.
'They always get preference,' Ewers stage-whispered bitterly, meaning elders. 'The centuried fools don't know what year it is, but are sure of a commission and the opportunity to eclipse the work of an able new-born.'
Obviously, Ewers was eaten inside by resentment. Poe was learning more of his doppelgänger.
In the first-class railway carriage, numbed by Ewers's reminiscences, Poe found his travelling companion tolerable only because his position guaranteed patronage, advancement or degradation. Ewers's stories of life in the service of the Kaiser were laced with the ironic, justified falls of those who had crossed or disappointed him. Each gem of truth in his autobiographical monologue was polished until it shone, then set in a tracery of arrant fiction.
It was an uncomfortable journey, with the etched faces of soldiers returning from leave always outside the compartment or in the darks between the carriages. The grey of their uniforms spread to their faces, showing colour only in the red around their eyes.
Apparitions haunted Poe still. On a nearby couch, squeezed between a puffy diplomat and a mightily whiskered general, was a man from the front, a wild-eyed walking skeleton wrapped in a uniform. Jittery at every heel-click on marble, a muddied despatch clamped under his arm, he was one of the living dead, a warm man who seemed more dead than the vampires either side of him. His dented helmet was smeared with French dirt.
The stomach of his coat was pink-tinged with his own blood. Any rank insignia he might once have worn were obscured or ripped away. The man's stretched face was a mask of pain.
The general, fussily eating live mice from a brown paper bag, pretended not to notice the state of his comrade. He shrank to one side to avoid actual physical contact with such a disgusting remnant. The diplomat too, concentrated on a mid-air spot in a direction that did not require him to look at the soldier. The worthies, new-born vampires of the most distinguished station, conversed over and around the mud man, discussing the course of the war. Both were confident of imminent victory because the German fighting man was the best in the world. With the Russkies out of it, there was no excuse not
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