Max Read online
Sarah Cohen-Scali is an award-winning French author. She writes for both young adults and adults. Max was first published in France and has sold into a number of other territories. It was awarded the prestigious Prix Sorcières.
Penny Hueston is an editor and translator.
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Copyright © 2012 Éditions Gallimard
Translation copyright © Penny Hueston 2016
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
First published in French in 2012 by Éditions Gallimard as Max
First English publication in 2016 by The Text Publishing Company
Cover design by Le Gall & Chassagnard
Page design by Jess Horrocks
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author: Cohen-Scali, Sarah, author.
Title: Max, by Sarah Cohen-Scali; translated from the French by Penny Hueston
Subjects: Eugenics—Germany—Fiction.
World War, 1939-1945—Children—Fiction.
Other Creators/Contributors: Hueston, Penny, translator.
ISBN: 9781922182852 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925095753 (ebook)
Dewey Number: A843.914
I hope that, as I did, you will be able to feel indulgent towards Max’s flaws, and that you will love him, defend him, and adopt this orphan of evil.
SARAH COHEN-SCALI
I don’t know yet what my name will be. Outside, they can’t decide between Max and Heinrich. Max, like Max Sollmann, the director of the Home where I’ll soon be arriving. Or Heinrich, in honour of Heinrich Himmler, who first thought up the idea of my conception and those of my future buddies.
My personal preference would be Heinrich. I have a lot of respect for Herr Sollmann, but you should always aim for the top when it comes to hierarchy. Herr Himmler is more important than Herr Sollmann. He is no less than the Führer’s right-hand man.
But who cares anyway; they’re not going to ask my opinion.
It’s the 19th of April, 1936. Nearly midnight.
I should have been born yesterday, but that’s not what I wanted. The date didn’t suit me. So I’ve stayed put. Motionless. Rigid. Of course, that means a lot of pain for my mother, but she’s a brave woman, and she’s putting up with the delay without complaint. Anyway, I’m sure she approves of my tactic.
My wish, the first of my future life, is to come into the world on the 20th of April. Because that’s the Führer’s birthday. If I’m born on the 20th of April, I will be blessed by the Germanic gods and seen as the firstborn of the master race. The Aryan race that will henceforth rule the world.
Right now, as I speak to you, I’m in my mother’s womb and my birth is imminent. Only a few minutes to go. But you’ve no idea how nervous I am! My stomach is in knots. Even though I’ve got no cause for concern, I worry that the down on my little newborn head, and later when my hair grows, won’t be blond enough. Because I absolutely must have blond hair. Platinum blond. The fairest possible, without the slightest trace of brown. As for my eyes, I’m desperate for them to be blue. A clear blue, like pure clean water that you can’t gaze into without the feeling of drowning. I want to be big and strong…Oh, I’m expressing myself badly. That sounds so flat and dull; I just can’t find the right words. But that’s normal. I’m not quite the finished product yet; I’m only a baby…I’d be better off reciting the words of the Führer. I heard one of his speeches a few months ago, when I was still a tiny foetus, but his voice resonated so powerfully that it reached me here inside. I shivered with pleasure and that was precisely when I gave my first kick in my mother’s womb—to communicate my joy.
Our beloved Führer proclaimed: We must build a new world! The young German of the future must be lean and supple, as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather and as hard as Krupp steel!
So, that’s exactly what I want to be. Supple. Lean. Swift. Hard. Tough. I’ll bite rather than suck on the nipple. I’ll yell rather than babble. I’ll hate rather than love. I’ll fight rather than pray. Oh, my Führer, I don’t want to disappoint you! I won’t let you down. In fact, I’d better pull myself together. Why should I worry? It’s ridiculous, unwarranted—it’s obvious that I’m going to look like Mother.
Let me tell you about Mother: tall, blonde. She ties her beautiful golden hair either at the nape or in a crown of plaits. She never wears make-up. Make-up is only good for Oriental women, whose coal-black eyes are like cockroaches. Disgusting. Make-up is only good for whores. (I’m not frightened of saying words like that, even if I’m only a baby. It’s pointless not to speak frankly to a baby, even if the words are crude; it only weakens the child by rendering it timid.) Let’s get back to Mother and her hair: it’s dead straight; she’s never used dye or those products that make fake curls—they’re for whores! She doesn’t smoke, because that harms fertility, and she has broad hips. She’s not like those women who just pick at their food in order to stay thin. Anyway, on the eve of war that would be stupid, because supplies will be scarce one day, so we have to make the most of things while we can.
Mother wears a brown skirt and a white blouse and she never wears heels. Thanks to her large pelvis, she’s had no problems carrying me. She has to rest now but she used to love working here in the Steinhöring Home on the outskirts of Munich. She helped with setting up and decorating our nurseries. Because, as you are no doubt aware, I’m not the only baby who will be delivered here. There are hundreds and hundreds of us on the way; the program was set up a long time ago. Hundreds will turn into thousands, thousands into millions. We’ll form an army!
Mother’s expansive hips will make my task easier: I’ll have no problem getting out, forging the way for my future half-brothers and -sisters. Mother promised our Führer that she would produce a child a year for him.
As for my father, it’s a bit tricky to say much about him. I don’t know who he is. I’ve never heard his voice. I don’t know him and I’ll never know him. That’s what it’s like for the children of the future. Our one and only spiritual father is the Führer. My biological father only met my mother once. One night. To conceive me. I know he’s a Sturmbannführer of the Waffen-SS, meaning he’s a major. Two ranks to go and he’ll be a colonel. It’ll be easy once the war gets started: he’ll kill lots of enemies and be awarded a higher rank.
I hope I’ll have a nice black uniform like him one day.
In the beginning, without knowing what to expect, my mother applied to be a Schwester, a Sister. She wrote a letter and they summoned her to the offices on Herzog-Max-Strasse, where she underwent a series of examinations. They weighed her. They measured her. Standing. Sitting. Squatting. Leaning forward. Leaning backward. They studied the shape of her skull and measured it, as well as the height of her forehead, the placement of her eyes and how wide apart they were set. They measured the length, width and angle of her nose. The length of her arms, her legs, her torso. They measured the distance between her lips and her chin, between her cheekbones and her nose. They measured the back of her head, her neck. The doctors called out number after number and the
ir secretaries recorded them. Then the secretaries did additions, subtractions, multiplications, and wrote down the results. They also recorded the colour of Mother’s skin, hair and eyes: white, blonde, blue. Anyway, Mother wouldn’t have been allowed into the offices if she had dark skin and brown hair and eyes. But the doctors also checked the colour of her pubic hair, which was as blonde as her hair, not overly lush, and sprouting in the right direction.
Next Mother was sent to the Doktoresses, who took off her clothes. They studied her all over with a magnifying glass. Everywhere. Even inside her. Especially inside her. Right where her future partner’s penis would go. To make me, yes, me. Alles in ordnung! they pronounced.
Mother was declared ‘perfectly suited for selection’. That’s top marks! Others were not so lucky; they only received ‘average suitability’, and others, well, they got ‘not at all suitable’. The latter were ‘relocated’. Watch out, that’s a code word! It doesn’t mean they were relocated elsewhere. No, it means they were exterminated.
Garbage! Get out! Gone!
There are swear words and there are code words. You can use both with me as much as you like. The first lot don’t shock me, and I know the hidden meaning of the second lot. Well, not all of them; I’ll need to learn a whole lot more as I grow up. I’ll also learn code names. Code names are extremely important. The program for the years ahead, established by our Führer, is riddled with them. Here’s an example: for the time being, my buddies and I have to be born in the utmost secrecy. Nobody knows yet the real meaning of Lebensborn, the code name of our program. I’ll tell you, but don’t tell anyone else. It means ‘the fountain of life’. A programmed life, regulated according to precise parameters set up in advance. A life that feeds on death.
Getting back to Mother. She wasn’t over the line yet. It’s very difficult to become a talented Sister. It’s not handed out on a plate. Even though Mother got through the first part of the test with flying colours, the second part was still to come: she had to assemble all the documentary proof that she belonged to the Nordic race, and present it to the fertility advisors in another office, the RuSHA (the SS Race and Settlement head office). She provided them with papers proving that her ancestors had been German since 1750, that they were in perfect health, and that not a single drop of Slavic blood flowed through their veins. And especially not Jewish blood…So here we are!
I’m a bit worried about the last point. Papers are all very well, but when you haven’t got the guy in front of you, how can you be sure? What I mean is that, if, for example, my great-great-great-great-grandfather had the unfortunate idea of sleeping with a Jewish woman, could a drop of this inferior creature’s blood, given the mysteries of genetics, reappear in my blood and contaminate it? That would be a disaster! How would I know? How? Impossible.
The only thing I know for sure is that I’m a boy. Yes, at least there’s no doubt about that—the little bump at the base of my belly is proof. My penis: I’m male. I’m so happy I’m not a girl. When girls become women they have to obey the rules of the three Ks: Kinder, Küche, Kirche.* Whereas I prefer the K of Krupp: tanks, cannons, guns, war…
Enough of that! Let’s banish depressing thoughts. It’s impossible for me to have Jewish blood in my veins. I’ve got nothing to worry about.
Because of my father.
That brings me to the third part of Mother’s examination. After being checked out by the fertility experts, and after passing the genealogy test, she had to send in a photo of herself in a bathing suit. The doctors studied the photo (I think they took even more measurements) and put it alongside other photos—of SS officers, also in bathing suits—in order to work out the best combinations, the best sexual partners. Imagine you had a stallion and you wanted to breed from it: aren’t you going to choose the best performing mare to get the best result? How do Hitler’s favourite Krupp factories make those cannons, which will soon turn on our enemies and annihilate them? With top quality steel, of course. And just as the best steel is made with the best materials, so I had to be the product of the union of the finest bodies. That’s why the doctors studying the photos chose my father. Blond, blue eyes, tall, lean…You know the drill.
If even a microscopic drop of Jewish blood had tried to emerge, I’m sure my father would have dealt with it on the night he was set up with my mother, here, in Steinhöring, in a different building from the one where I will be born.
Right, now I must tell you about Steinhöring. I like telling you all this; it passes the time, and as I talk we’re getting closer to midnight, to the 20th of April, to my birth.
The Home used to be an asylum. An asylum for mentally retarded people, imbeciles, idiots, in fact, all those useless people that society subsidises. Parasites. They were ‘relocated’. (No point in repeating myself, you remember what that means, don’t you?) Then there was a huge redesign and the asylum was transformed. It had to be a radical renovation, a total change that reflected the difference between the old and the new residents. The old ones represented the country’s shame, the new ones its pride.
First of all they disinfected the premises. Then they set up living rooms, dining rooms, birthing rooms, visiting rooms, treatment rooms, dormitories for the new mothers, nurseries for the babies, verandas. They had to knock down walls, erect partitions, construct a brick wall around the park and plant tall trees so spying eyes couldn’t see us. It was a huge project that came together quickly, thanks to a large number of labourers who worked for nothing: prisoners from Dachau—a camp that imprisons Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and political opponents of our Führer and his regime. (Unfortunately some of these people still exist. But soon they’ll be gone, ‘relocated’ like the others.) They worked night and day, without a break, and built our Home, as well as the building I mentioned earlier, the one where the couples go for their meetings, their sexual intercourse.
It’s a smaller building. Inside there’s a music room, a dining room—usually the selected couples have dinner together before doing what they have to do—and bedrooms. The bedrooms are not as inviting as the dormitories in the Home. That’s intentional. No unnecessary furniture: only a bed and a table, that’s all. A large window: it’s very bright in there. Very cold too, so that the sexual act doesn’t last too long. And so that if the individuals happen to like each other—which isn’t necessarily the case—they don’t get a taste for what they’re doing. Apparently, some girls try to get out of there at the last minute, when they understand what is expected of a Sister. What on earth are they thinking? That they get to choose their partner and live happily ever after? How naive. How cowardly. We have to make the most of these men, while they’re alive. A lot of them are going to die fighting for their country. The birth rate will decrease. And we don’t want a population of oldies in Germany. So we have to stay focused, take action. Hence our special program.
From now on, the sexual act is a patriotic duty. So our country can be guided out of darkness into light. The sexual act (I remind you that I’m not frightened of words and I already know a lot) can no longer be about personal pleasure; even if it’s difficult, even if it’s painful, it’s an obligation, a sacred task, destined for a higher purpose.
I think Mother had a hard time when she and my father did it.
I don’t think she knew what the code word Sister really meant.
I think she was about to give up and try to get out of there, too. But my future father and I urged her on. My father made her drink a good slug of schnapps to warm her up, so she’d relax and do the right thing. I was still only a small inner voice, an abstract notion in my mother’s mind, but I urged her on: ‘You have to do it, Mother! You have to! For National Socialism! For the Reich! For the thousand-year Reich! For the future!’ So she kept her eyes glued to the portrait of the Führer hanging in the bright, cold room. She gritted her teeth and hung in there.
She did it.
I’m here.
And, now that it’s after midnight, I’m off.
Cheer me on!
Wish for what I told you: I must be blond. I must have blue eyes. I must be sharp.
Lean.
Hard.
Tough.
Made of Krupp steel.
I am the child of the future. The child conceived outside the Law. Without love. Without God. With nothing but force and fury.
Heil Hitler!
It was hard, extremely hard.
I can admit it to you, but it has to stay strictly between you and me, okay? Because the child of the future never complains about hardship!
Still.
Ahead of me was this narrow tunnel I had to go through. I couldn’t see the end. Nothing. Not the slightest glimmer of light to guide me. It was like a long trench, mined with traps and all sorts of obstacles in which I could at any moment be snared. But with a headbutt here or a shoulder nudge there, I managed to widen my sphere of operation. Not by much, not enough. I realised that if I wanted to make headway properly, I had to alter my position. A quarter turn to the right and I was on my belly, which was much better. I managed to gain a bit of ground. Except I had to watch out that I didn’t get tangled in my safety harness, the rappelling cord that keeps me alive—‘the umbilical cord’, if you prefer the scientific term. It was so tight that I wasn’t getting as much oxygen.
I hung in there. I edged forward as fast as I could. By manoeuvring my arms, I crawled over the hostile terrain, never hesitating to thrash out with kicks, headbutts, fist blows, like a little stallion, like the little warrior that I am…That’s how I got most of the way, until I glimpsed in the distance, still too far away, a gleam of light that I followed through the darkness. It shone from behind the final barrier I had to cross: The Cervix. The notorious Cervix. The frontier to the world that was waiting for me.
Max