The Witch in the Mountain Pass: Chapter 5
A Novel
The one who laughs the heartiest is the one who laughs last.
—Ancient Greek proverbChapter 5: The Last Laugh
Date: 19 August 1934 To: Konstantin Hermann Karl Freiherr von Neurath, Reichsminister of Foreign Affairs Against my recommendation, an insufferable third secretary under my employ, though apparently not under my control, has dispatched a communiqué to the SS Race and Settlement Main Authority in Berlin concerning a self-proclaimed witch living in a mountain pass on the north bank of the river Acheron. His intent is to degrade the Epirotes and deride what he perceives to be a general state of primitivism among the Hellenes. As you know, my father was an Egyptologist and antiquarian. He had a deep respect for the Greeks and their culture. He once quoted to me the lines from Juvenal where the satirist speaks of the Greeks’ protean ability to be whatever one wants them to be: “A grammarian, an orator, a surveyor; a painter, a trainer, an augur; a rope-dancer, a doctor, a mage. The starving Greek knows all.” After reciting these lines, he remarked with a frown: “If you were to translate that passage from Latin into German and change the word ‘Greek’ to ‘Jew,’ it would sound like something the antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, might have written.” Four years later, having completed his second excavation in Upper Egypt, my father and I stood on the pier in Alexandria, waiting to board the ship that would carry us to Trieste. An elderly Greek was juggling batons. The man grinned and nodded toward his wife, who winked at the people in the queue and rattled a cup of coins. The Germans with us laughed at the couple’s shabby appearance and made crass remarks about their facial features. My father leaned over to me and said, “The Germans don’t realize that it is the Greeks who are laughing at them.” Ernst Eisenlohr, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the German Reich in Athens
Thekla Witte thanked the man who took her hand and helped her down from the tram on Mauerstraße in Berlin. It was a late September morning. The streets of the city were still festooned with placards and paraphernalia commemorating the rousing success of the Sixth Party Congress in Nuremberg that had ended the week prior.
Thekla’s high heels made negotiating the cobbles challenging. The auburn cloche hat she wore complimented her chestnut hair and matched the color of her skirt. Her steel-rimmed glasses made her look studious and arrogant, which was fitting since she was both. Her decision to spruce up was due to the language and nature of the summons she’d received—not so much a summons as an invitation laced with a threat. Crossing the street, she entered the slab three-story building of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. She made her way to the reception desk.
A stout harridan with a swastika armband led Thekla up the steps to the third floor’s carpeted corridor.
“Archaeologist?” the woman asked.
“Anthropologist.” Thekla replied.
“Married?”
“No.”
“Why?” the woman asked, knocking heavily on the oak door and then immediately opening it.
“Why should I be?”
The woman clucked her tongue in annoyance before announcing in a brittle voice: “Herr Reich Minister!—Herr Professor Thekla Witte here to see you!”
Did she have to say ‘Herr Professor’? Thekla thought to herself.
“Thank you,” Joseph Goebbels said, rising from his desk.
“Heil Hitler!” the woman said.
“Yes,” Goebbels replied and waited for the door to close. “Welcome, my dear. Please join us.” He extended his hand.
Thekla could tell he was impatiently waiting for her to cross the distance between them, so that he could execute the courtesy and resume his seat. He must’ve hurt his foot. He stood at an odd angle and kept touching the surface of the desk while shifting his weight. He was shorter than he looked in the newspapers. Goebbels took her gloved hand, not to shake it but to kiss and press it. He gestured to a wing-backed leather chair with tufted buttons. She took her seat but kept both feet on the floor. She removed her gloves. There was a heavyset man with a bushy mustache sitting in the chair next to her. He was smoking a cigar and flicking the ashes into a pig-iron ashtray on a marble-top end table.
Goebbels pressed his fingertips together and smiled at Thekla. Then he spoke in Greek in a thick accent and without the appropriate stress on the words: “Atreides te anax andron kai dios Achilleus…Recognize it?”
“It’s the opening line of Homer’s Iliad,” Thekla said.
“Very good!” Goebbels remarked.
“And this?—En arche en ho logos kai ho logos en pros ton theon.”
“It’s part of the Easter Mass.”
“It’s the beginning of the Gospel of John,” Goebbels quipped with a leer.
Condescending shithead, Thekla thought. Her face flushed. She was embarrassed and tried to hide it by removing her hat.
The man in the chair next to her brushed ashes from his waistcoat and said, “All Greek to me, Herr Reich Minister.”
“Truth be told,” Goebbels said, “that’s all the Greek I remember. I dabbled in it when I was a boy.” He pointed at Thekla. “I’ve read your work, Professor Witte. And, although you are obviously no theologian, I’ve been told that you have a formidable understanding of modern Greek… You’re half Greek, they say. I assume that’s where the chestnut hair comes from: a blending of the black and blond?”
“No, Herr Reich Minister—I mean, yes, I’m half Greek.” Thekla spoke quietly. “My mother’s family was originally from Corinth. But she was raised in Leipzig. She had black hair… She died two years ago.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Goebbels said, looking away.
Thekla kept speaking. “But my father, who works as a miner in Silesia, has chestnut hair, like mine.”
“So you’re Polish and Greek?”
Thekla adjusted her glasses. Thekla had never been close to her father, whom she had met half a dozen times when he came to Leipzig to beg his mother for money. He was a toad of a man. But Thekla remembered that her father’s mother’s parents were Polish. But that didn’t mean she was Polish, as far as she knew. Then again, navigating such murky waters was difficult these days. The best response was not to respond at all.
Goebbels seemed to enjoy watching her squirm. He inhaled deeply, turned his head toward a bust of the Führer on a pedestal, and spoke: “The reason I have invited you here today, Fräulein Witte”—(he had dispensed with her professional title)—“is to offer you the opportunity to conduct field research in northern Greece, followed by the prospect of an honorable career and guaranteed advancement in the SS Race and Settlement Main Authority. I understand you’re already working with the SS.”
She didn’t fancy the direction the conversation was going. She “taught Greek” to SS officers, but wasn’t “working” with the SS. She was about to decline the offer, when Goebbels fixed her with a blank stare and spoke again: “If you decline, you will be summarily dismissed from your position at Friedrich Wilhelm University due to the regrettable facts concerning your background that have come to light in the course of this interview.”
Thekla gasped and looked at the man in the chair next to her.
“Ah, how rude of me,” Goebbels resumed. “The gentleman next to you is Herr Egon Koebner, film director.”
The director asked Thekla in a hopeful voice, “The Clown, the Cake, and the Crow?” Her face was drained of all color, all emotion. “It’s a knockabout comedy,” Koebner added with a scowl. “It’s hilarious.”
“Herr Koebner has volunteered his services to the Fatherland,” Goebbels said. “He is producing an educational documentary on the primitive customs of the Greeks. Your skills as an ethnographer and anthropologist, not to mention your fluency in the Greek language, will allow us to keep the costs of this project within reasonable bounds. There are still many Germans living under the spell of Homer and Plato—aesthetes and homosexuals who harbor misty-eyed, sentimental notions about the Greeks. This film will take a broom to all that. It will show the German Volk the moral and racial degeneracy that has corrupted the Hellenes in the centuries following the death of the last great Greek—who was not even a Greek himself, Alexander of Macedon.” He looked at Thekla in disgust. “The Romans themselves recognized the bestial nature of the Hellenic race. Your flight departs tomorrow morning. Third Secretary Günther Rippenberg at our Mission in Athens will meet you at the airstrip in Ioannina. He will escort you to the Epirote town of…”—he squinted at the communiqué on his blotter—“Dagitsidos.”
Manolios heard his mother’s treadle loom on the other side of the door. He knocked tentatively.
“Come in,” Philippa of the Holy Vision said. He opened the door and stepped inside. The room was dark and smelled. None of the windows were open. Daylight filtered through the jalousies. Manolios saw his mother sitting at the loom in the hooded black robe of his grandmother, Yiayia Elena. Around his mother’s waist was a golden braid. She wore a veil with narrow eye slits to conceal her disfigurement. After the incident on the river Acheron a month ago, the whites of Philippa’s eyes turned blood-red. Black scabs covered her pupils and irises. Mosquitoes were attracted to the scabs and laid eggs underneath them, but this did not seem to bother Philippa.
“Mama,” Manolios said. “Do you want me to light the coals in the brazier?”
“Why?” Philippa asked.
“Aren’t you cold?… You always complain that it’s too cold.”
Scores of mice scurried over the ratty Turkish carpet, which was stippled with their droppings.
After a moment of silence, Philippa resumed her work. Her foot depressed the treadle, and the loom click-clacked as the shuttle slid along its tracks. She adjusted the bobbins. Manolios quietly withdrew.
When he was gone, Philippa looked at the Ottoman brazier. A green-white glow was emanating from its porous copper lid. She rose and went to the brazier. When she was standing over it she spread her arms. The spirit body of Yiayia Elena took Philippa’s right hand, and the spirit body of the witch in the mountain pass squeezed her left hand. The shrouded women formed a circle over the brazier.
The glow under the lid intensified. A luminous mist began to fill the room. It was accompanied by the sound of a drum and tambourine: tum ta-ta tum-tum, tum ta-ta tum-tum, tum ta-ta tum-tum. The mist between the women condensed and resolved itself into stormclouds.—And there, in the midst of the flashing green-white lightning, were the wheels and corrugated underbelly of a twin-prop airplane.
As the airplane began its descent to Malpensa Airport outside of Milan, Thekla looked across the aisle. Herr Koebner was asleep. They were the only two passengers. It was a private flight. Outside, the lightning flashed. The plane jostled in the turbulence. They had flown from Berlin to Munich where the plane had refueled. According to Herr Koebner, once they landed in Milan, they would transfer to an Italian Royal Air Force plane, which would take them across the Adriatic to Ioannina.
Thekla had been unable to sleep after yesterday’s interview, but now that the initial shock of it all had worn off, she was exhausted and numb—and a bit relieved. Deep down she had expected something like this to happen for months. Whenever someone at the campus began a sentence with the words “have you heard,” she grew tense and cold. It was inevitably the prelude to yet another ghastly revelation.
First there were the book burnings, which she had opposed initially. But one night, a young brownshirt explained to her that the bonfire in Alexanderplatz was fueled exclusively by obsolete religious texts: “We found a library,” he said, “filled with these useless books!” No sooner had the young man told Thekla this, than her mood changed. Such books are impediments to progress, she thought. This is a step in the right direction. We are shaking off the yoke of primitivism, tribalism, shamanism. Then the young man handed her two hefty volumes in Hebrew, and she cast them into the flames.
But not long after, the situation escalated. The state passed its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in the spring of 1933. The law aimed at removing all Jews from the government, including those working in state-run academic institutions. The day the law was implemented at Friedrich Wilhelm University, Thekla walked between the tear-stained faces of colleagues as they were ejected from the premises, often with no prior notice, sometimes dragged from the classrooms: students, faculty, it didn’t matter. She was afraid to speak out, afraid to say “I’m sorry.” What if someone saw her do this and reported it? She was a coward, she knew this.
She asked her lover Franz, an electrical engineer, what she should do. They were walking arm in arm down the Kurfürstendamm.
“You still have your position,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re concerned.”
“I’m worried that they’ll broaden their inquiries. What if they discover that my father has Polish ancestry? I don’t even speak with him. He could be dead for all I know or care…This isn’t fair. I’ve worked hard to get to where I am.”
“Thekla,” Franz said, “that’s a selfish and ugly thing to say.”
“I’m not even Jewish,” she remarked. “It’s not like I have any Jewish relations or friends.”
“No Jewish relations or friends?” he asked in astonishment. “What about the people you worked with at the university? Or the people you spend your leisure time with?” Then he looked at her in a peculiar way and said almost as an afterthought, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
The next day, there was a note under her door.
As you know, I’m from Vienna. My private papers are there. I’ve been working in Berlin under a false name. I’m returning to Vienna. If you’re so concerned about the matter we talked about yesterday, I would recommend that you leave Germany too. Things are not going to get better. You could come to Austria. But if you do, I have no interest in resuming our acquaintance.
—Franz
Thekla destroyed the note but it unnerved her. Too many people knew that the two of them had been familiar with each other. What if it got back to the officials at the university that she had been romantically involved with a Jew? She paced the room, clenching and unclenching her fists. Then it came to her. She would confess. She would send a memorandum to the rector, explaining that she had inadvertently allowed herself to enter into a relationship with a man from Austria. “The moment I suspected him of being a Jew,” she would write, “I terminated the relationship.”—But they might ask her if the reason Franz had abruptly quit his job and left Berlin was because she had tipped him to her suspicions. No, she wouldn’t say anything at all. But if she didn’t say anything, it could be worse. If a neighbor or colleague reported on her relationship with Franz, she might be accused of having willfully suppressed this information. What if they suspected Franz of being a saboteur? He had worked at the main electrical power station in Berlin! Could she be charged for treason for not telling someone that a potential saboteur was working at the main electrical power station under a false name? Surely not!—But maybe!… It was all maddening! But in the end, and to set her mind at ease, she wrote the letter to the rector and waited for a response. But the days and weeks passed and no response came.
Then one morning in July, she was directed to report to the office of Rector Eugen Fischer. She remained poised, although her heart was pounding uncontrollably in her chest and her face was flushed. Fischer, too, was an anthropologist. Before his promotion to rector, he was her department chair. Sitting in his office was a man in a black uniform. He was introduced to her as a representative of the SS Race and Settlement Main Authority (RuSHA). Thekla nodded curtly at the man.
“As you know,” Fischer began, “we have a visiting American scholar who will be lecturing on archaeology beginning this fall. She is also a woman.”
“Yes,” Thekla remarked. “But I teach anthropology.”
“I know,” he said. “But it would look odd to have two women lecturing on more or less the same thing. She may be here for two terms.”
So this was it! This was why she had been called in. It shouldn’t have surprised her. The writing had been on the wall. Thekla knew another single woman who had been lecturing at the university in physiology for nearly a decade. Last month she had been let go; and now she was a nurse in Hamburg. A theoretical mathematician she knew had given up her lectureship, explaining that it was her duty—and the duty of all German women—to marry and support a family for the betterment of the Reich.
“Why am I here?” Thekla asked.
“The RuSHA has proposed organizing courses for the training of SS officers in languages spoken in the Eastern territories and the Balkans.—All part of the Führer’s visionary Drang nach Osten (Push to the East). Berlin is blessed with an abundance of educated Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles. But we don’t not have a lot of ethnic Greeks to draw from.”
At this point, the RuSHA official interjected, saying, “We don’t want our men taught by illiterate farmers and charwomen. We want scholars.”
Thekla felt relieved. True, modern Greek was not her field of expertise, but she believed that this arrangement would mean that she would be able to retain her job at the university. And since Fischer himself was an anthropologist—and a respected one at that—if she performed well in this proposed venture, then her career might take off in ways she could never have dreamed of.
She spoke rapidly and with confidence: “It would be an honor, Herr Rektor!” And since she didn’t know the RuSHA official’s name or his rank, she turned to him and said, “It would be an honor, Mein Herr. I will need to gather materials—newspaper clippings, etc. But I am fluent in the language and am up to the challenge of formulating an appropriate curriculum for your men.”
But the idea was not well thought out and the entire venture degenerated into a farce. The attendees numbered between twenty and thirty men at any one time. The students enrolled in the class or dropped out through a process that was seemingly at random and entirely beyond her control. There were no testing requirements or mechanisms for evaluating whether the students were picking up the language. The men themselves didn’t seem to care one way or the other, because they all knew they would pass no matter what. Attendance was strictly recorded by the class monitor, who was the only one in the class who was not there in order to learn the language, but rather to study and report on the way the class was conducted and the way the students behaved. The students were respectful on the whole, but Thekla was reduced to reading aloud Greek passages out of books and newspapers and then translating these word for word herself, as the students followed along and tried to make out what they would never be able to understand. To break up the monotony, she taught them basic expressions and created scenarios so they could practice conversational Greek. She wrote words and phrases on a blackboard and even the monitor sometimes joined in. There was always at least one wag who wanted to know the dirty words. A few of the students were sharp and picked up more than the others: a former Catholic seminarist and a Prussian aristocrat’s son who’d received a classical education at Cambridge. But she could’ve counted the intellectuals in the class on one hand.
Thekla had an absurd dream one morning, months ago when she’d first started teaching the SS men. In the dream she was climbing over the shattered ruins of an ancient Greek temple under a cobalt sky. The temple was on a hilltop in Dodona. The SS men were waiting for her in the temple’s roofless center. They sat at wooden flip-top desks under the spreading branches of an oak tree that rose out of a crumbling mosaic floor. The mosaic depicted three women in hooded robes drawing thread from a spindle. It was the three Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. In the branches of the oak jagged fragments of bronze dangled from leather thongs and clanged in the wind. Far off in the distance the slopes and valleys were covered in asphodels. A flock of doves passed over the temple.
“Where are we?” one of the students asked.
“I don’t know,” Thekla said in Greek. “But I will consult with the Oracle of Dodona.”
“But where is she?” the Oracle asked.
Thekla wheeled around, trying to find where the voice had come from. Then she laughed in her dream, though she knew not why.
The witch in the mountain pass listened to the bronze chimes relate these things to her. The witch didn’t speak German, but the gods translated those parts for her.
Dorcas finished cleaning the taverna grill. She was nursing her newborn under the pergola. There had been no tourists to Dagitsidos for nearly a week. Just a few mountaineers, a few Suliotes and Albanians. It was late September.
The black dove, Queen Hecate, took flight from her ledge. The witch blew a gust of wind at the Queen, which caused the dove to veer erratically in her flight.
“The winds of the mountain are unpredictable, Hecate!” the witch said.
“Who are you talking to?” Dorcas asked. The witch ignored her and closed her eyes, so that she could step back into Thekla’s dream—the dream she had had months ago.
On the last leg of the journey, Thekla had managed to fall asleep. But her heart lurched when the Italian plane veered suddenly in the air and bumped in the turbulence.
The Italian co-pilot turned in his seat and leaned forward in the cockpit so that he could address the filmmaker and anthropologist. He grinned and spoke German in a thick accent: “Don’t worry. It’s normal. We are passing over the mountains and the winds are unpredictable!”
Thekla looked out of the window port. It was late afternoon and the sun was low in the west. Her mother had always spoken nostalgically of Greece, even though she had only been to the country twice. Thekla had never been to Greece. Her knowledge of the customs of the Greeks was based on the expatriate Orthodox community in Leipzig that she grew up among. A wave of anxiety overwhelmed her. What if the dialect in the north was different from the way her mother and the people in the Greek community in Leipzig had spoken? What if she couldn’t understand these people? The terrain looked rugged but beautiful from this altitude. There was a vast lake, presumably Lake Ioannina. The plane began its descent.
There were no permanent buildings near the airstrip, just a Nissen hut with a radio tower. The airport was less than two years old.
A ladder was lowered. As they stepped down from the plane, Thekla heard the dull clonk of sheep bells. About 20 meters away, an old man goaded his flock across the airstrip, his wife walking next to him, a goose in her arms.
“Dr. Witte, Herr Direktor Koebner!” A young blond man in a white shirt and brown slacks ran from the Nissen hut. “Welcome to Ioannina. I’m Third Secretary Günther Rippenberg. I’m going to be escorting you to Dagitsidos.” He shook their hands. “I hope your journey was uneventful.”
Koebner spoke: “We left at dawn. It’s almost sundown. Where is my camera?”
“Here!” the co-pilot said at the door of the plane. “And your film boxes—they are here too!”
Günther went to the ladder and accepted the camera, the tripod, and four crates with rope handles. After that, their personal luggage was removed.
“How are we getting to this town?” Koebner asked.
“Well,” Günther remarked, “we’re taking a truck from here to a launch on the river. We should arrive before midnight. The town has no telegraph, telephone, or radio—no electricity, in fact.”
“No electricity!” Koebner exclaimed. “How in the Devil am I supposed to film a full-length documentary with no electricity?!”
“We’ve been working on the matter all week, Herr Direktor.” Günther said. “There are five or six batteries making their way to Dagitsidos from Parga as we speak. And we were able to locate four in Ioannina, which have been loaded onto our boat. I also procured a recording device from our consulate in Salonica. Is your film a talkie?”
“It’s not a talkie,” Koebner mumbled. He removed a cigar from his jacket. The Italian co-pilot climbed down the ladder, so he could strike a match and light the director’s cigar. Koebner puffed twice and said, “Not a talkie in the sense you’re thinking of. We’ll be dubbing the sound when I get back to Berlin. There will be a RuSHA narrator reading a script against a pre-recorded soundtrack. I would, however, like to get recordings of maybe a fiery Orthodox sermon and some local tribal music—work songs, that sort of thing. Something with a bouzouki would be nice.”
Five Greek porters ambled casually out of the Nissen hut to take the luggage and equipment to the truck.
Thekla felt like a cipher. The men were ignoring her altogether. The Greeks probably assumed the swine Koebner was her husband.
Koebner asked Günther where the latrine was. The young man pointed to a row of shacks in the distance. When Koebner left, Günther turned to Thekla and addressed her with a smirk. “Do you remember me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I can’t say that I do.”
“I was in your Greek class for two weeks at the beginning of the year. But I received orders to go to Athens and had to withdraw. It was a good class.”
“I have so many students,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t recall you.”
“How could you forget a handsome man like me?” he asked, grinning coyly.
“Really, Herr Rippenberg,” Thekla said, turning away, “I’m old enough to be your sister.”
It was late in Dagitsidos. The witch in the mountain pass stood under the oak tree and listened as the bronze chimes rang out in the faint autumn breeze. The gods spoke languidly of the three approaching Germanoí. Then Queen Hecate from her perch on the uppermost ledge cried out and spread her wings. She had a secret to tell the witch.
“But you must come to me to hear it,” Hecate said.
The witch walked across the enclosure, touching one of the staves of the pergola for good luck. When she reached the rock wall under Queen Hecate’s ledge, her kneecaps swiveled to the back of her legs, so that she could bend her knees back and crawl like a spider up the sheer cliff. She reached the ledge and turned her good ear to the black dove, who whispered into the witch’s ear: “The one who laughs the heartiest is the one who laughs last.”
Then the witch in the mountain pass threw back her neck and laughed uproariously as the doves took flight and circled the enclosure. The birds rushed into the cave and the bronze chimes dangling from the oak branch rang out in their wake. Reemerging at the other end, at the mouth of the cave chapel where the corpses of the Christian dead were washed in former times, the doves rose high into the air and fanned out over the river Acheron, as the motorboat with the kerosene lamp at its prow rounded the bend near the steps leading up from the River of Death to the cemetery of the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God. Yiayia Elena was standing on her grave, pointing at the boat and cackling in the fog. Then Philippa of the Holy Vision rose from the treadle loom as the windows flew open and the doves came rushing in. The birds ate up the mosquitoes and with their preternaturally elongated carnivorous beaks chewed the mice on the Ottoman rug. The air was bursting balloon-like from the blood of the dying mice and the puffed-up mosquitoes, as the birds flew around Philippa, who tore off her veil in ecstasy, so that the dove’s fanged beaks could dig out the eggs of mosquitoes buried under the scabs covering her eyes. Then Philippa laughed and laughed and laughed—amid the flapping of the wings and the hellish squawk of the demon doves. She laughed more heartily than even the witch in the mountain pass or the ghost of her dead mother, Yiayia Elena. For Philippa of the Holy Vision was the last to laugh that night in Dagitsidos, as the boat bearing the three Nazis cut its engine drifted toward the pier.
For me, this is the scariest part so far. The interview, the university... The subtle human horror is the stuff that gives me nightmares.