The Abominable: A Novel

The Deacon has not even booked us into a hotel. We have tickets for sleeping berths on a train leaving for Zurich at ten p.m. I’m curious about this, since it would have been easy to put the cost even of luxury hotel rooms in Munich on Lady Bromley’s advance money expense account. I know that unlike Jean-Claude, the Deacon doesn’t hate Germany or Germans—I’m also aware that he’s traveled here frequently since the War—so it isn’t anxiety or fear that is rushing us out of town tonight even before we can get a good night’s sleep. I sense that there is something about this simple interview with climber Bruno Sigl that bothers the Deacon on some level I don’t understand.

In a curt telegram, Sigl has agreed to meet us—briefly, he says, for he is a very busy man (his phrase)—in Munich at a beer hall called the Burgerbraukeller way out on the southeastern fringes of the city. The appointment is for seven p.m., and the Deacon and I have time to stow our luggage, such as it is, at the train station, freshen up there a bit in the first-class lounge lavatory, and wander the strangely shopless streets of downtown Munich for an hour or two under our dark umbrellas before taking a cab to the edge of town.

Munich looks old but not picturesque or attractive to me. It is still raining hard against the slate-shingled rooftops, and the streets are as dark and chilly as on any November evening in Boston. All my conscious life I’ve thought my first real encounter with Germany would be strolling down the Unter den Linden in rich summer evening light, with hundreds of well-dressed and friendly Germans strolling along nodding “Guten Abend” to me.

The rain pours down as the cab’s window wipers slap uselessly against the rivulets on glass. We cross a river on a broad, empty bridge, and a few minutes later the surly cab driver announces in broken English that we are “hier”—at die Burgerbraukeller in den Haidhausen neighborhood on Rosenheimer Strasse—and demands what has to be three times the legal fare. The Deacon pays it without protest, counting out the huge stack of high- numbered marks as if it were play money.

The stone entrance arch to the beer hall is huge and has the words

Burger-

Brau-

Keller

tacked one atop the other in the middle of a circular, heavy-handed wreath, a sort of lumpy stone oval with an arch key design at the bottom. All of it is dripping water running from a steep slate roof and from several overflowing gutters. Through that arch toward the actual doorway, and it’s like we are entering a train station rather than a bar or restaurant. But at least it’s not raining in the foyer.

When we are actually inside the Burgerbraukeller, both the Deacon and I stop in a kind of shock.

Besides the fact of two or three thousand people—mostly men, guzzling beer out of huge stone mugs at tables so rough-hewn that they look as if they’d been carved in the forest that very afternoon—the place is gigantic, echoing, more a huge auditorium than any sort of restaurant or pub that I’ve ever seen. The noise of conversation and accordion music—unless that’s people screaming while being tortured—hits me like a physical shove. The next shove is the smell: three thousand partly or totally unbathed Germans, mostly working men, judging from their rough clothes, and mixed with that wall of sweat smell washing over us like a rogue wave, an accompanying stink of beer so strong that I feel like I’ve fallen into the actual beer vat.

“Herr Deacon? Come here. Here!” It’s a shouted order, not a request, from a man standing at a crowded table about halfway across the crowded room.

The standing man, who I assume to be Bruno Sigl, watches us approach through the bedlam with an unblinking, cold, blue-eyed stare. Sigl has a European reputation as a good climber—especially good, according to the alpine journals, at route finding on previously unclimbed faces in the Alps—but except for the massive forearms visible because his dark tan shirtsleeves are rolled up, he doesn’t look like a climber to me. Too self- consciously overmuscled, too top-heavy, too stocky, too blocky. Sigl’s blond hair is cut so short that it’s almost flat as a bristle brush on top and is actually shaved on the sides. Many of the larger men sitting along the table with him sport similar haircuts. For Sigl, it’s not a good look because of the jug ears that jut out from his granite block of a face.

“Herr Deacon,” Sigl says as we approach the table. The German’s deep voice cuts through the beer hall babble like a knife through soft flesh. “Willkommen in Munchen, meine Kletterkollegen. I have read of many of your brilliant first ascents in the Alpine Journal and elsewhere.”

Bruno Sigl’s English has the expected German accent but sounds easy and fluent to my untutored ear.

I was aware that the Deacon spoke fluent German as well as French, Italian, and some other languages, but I’m still surprised at how quickly and strongly he replies to Sigl: “Vielen Dank, Herr Sigl. Ich habe ebenfalls von Ihren Erfolgen und Leistungen gelesen.”

During the night trip home on the train later that night, the Deacon will translate from memory everything that Sigl and the other Germans said, as well as what the Deacon replied in German. Here my guess is right that the Deacon is returning Sigl’s compliment by saying that he’s read of Sigl’s mountaineering exploits and successes as well.

“Herr Jacob Perry,” says Sigl, shaking my hand in a granite-crunching grip through which I can feel his rock-calloused hand. “Of the Boston Perrys. Welcome to Munchen.”

Of the Boston Perrys? What did this German climber know about my family? And Sigl somehow had made the “Jacob” with its German Y-sound pronunciation sound very Jewish.

Sigl is wearing lederhosen—leather shorts and bib—over his military-looking brown shirt with the sleeves rolled high, and the whole getup should look ridiculous amidst all the rumpled business suits in this gigantic beer hall, but his massive, sun-browned bare thighs, arms, and oversized Rodin-sculptured hands make him look powerful instead—almost godlike.

He waves us to the bench opposite him—several of the men there move down to make room, never pausing in their drinking as they do so—and the Deacon and I sit, ready for the interview. Sigl waves over a waiter and orders beer. I’m disappointed. I expected Frauleins with low-cut peasant blouses to be serving the beer, but it’s all men in lederhosen carrying trays of the giant stone mugs. I’m also hungry, and it’s been a long time since the Deacon and I had a light lunch on the train, but the tabletops here and all around us are empty except for beer steins and hairy male German forearms. Evidently the eating time here has either passed or is yet to come or simply doesn’t happen except for beer.

Our beers arrive almost immediately, and I must admit that I’ve never before drunk good, strong German beer from an icy-chilled stone stein. After lifting the thing three times, I begin to understand why all the men on this side of our table have huge biceps.

“Gentlemen,” says Sigl, “allow me to introduce some friends of mine here at the table. Alas, none of them is confident enough in your language to speak English this evening.”

“Although they understand it?” asks the Deacon.

Sigl smiles thinly. “Not really. To my immediate left is Herr Ulrich Graf.”

Herr Graf is a tall, thin man with a thick and absurd black mustache. We nod toward one another. My guess is that there’ll be no more handshaking.

“Ulrich was his personal bodyguard and shielded him with his own body last November, receiving several serious bullet wounds. But you see that Herr Graf has recovered nicely.”

I hear the odd, almost reverential emphasis on “his” and “him” but don’t have a clue as to who they are talking about. It appears that Sigl’s not going to enlighten me, and rather than break into the ongoing introductions, I turn to the Deacon for a hint. But the Deacon is looking at the men across the table being introduced and won’t acknowledge my questioning gaze.

“To Herr Graf’s left is Herr Rudolf Hess,” Sigl is saying. “Herr Hess commanded an SA battalion in last November’s action.”

Hess is a strange-looking man with oversized ears, a dark five o’clock shadow—the kind of man who probably has to shave twice or three times a day if he has a decent job or interacts with the public—and sad- looking eyes under heavy, cartoonish eyebrows that are either kept raised in evident surprise during the time I observe him or lowered to a glowering position. To be honest, Hess reminds me of a madman I saw once in the Boston Public Garden when I was a boy—a madman who’d escaped from a nearby asylum and who was peacefully