Rex Nemorensis

By Richard Bankowsky

A former Hitler Youth and documentary filmmaker finds himself at the fabulous Alban Hills estate of Il Conte Nemorensis, a former Iberian vice king resurrected as a world renowned entrepreneur, philanthropist, and economic and political adviser to developing Third World nations. What follows is a shattering confrontation of material and spiritual World Views, and a conspiracy to murder a Saint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Bankowsky
• Release date: Nov 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452481029

Richard Bankowsky

California State University Emeritus Professor of literature and creative writing. Yale and Columbia degrees. National Institute of Arts and Letters and Rockefeller grants in literature.

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November 1, 1942

Moczary, Polen

Mein lieber Sohn,

Ich erinnere mich, wie Ich verwendet, um die geistig Natur des Menschen in Mein Professor Tagen. . . I remember how I used to teach the spiritual nature of man in my professor days: Man, the supreme achievement of the evolution of the universe, its end and its raison d'être, whose sole purpose is to humanize and spiritualize the world he lives in, to free himself and his world ultimately from the compulsion and determinism of gross materiality, and through his works (his technology, his art, and his moral activity) bring the entire body of the universe under the rule of mind.

But that was before the war, my darling. Before Belzec. Before this slaughter of the innocents. For I know now that it was all just a dream, that man is the lowest form of animal life, lower even than the insect, the worm. For what animal, what insect, could ever commit the crimes we have? Why, all civilization, all culture, all progress is nothing more than the grotesque refinement of the jungle, the hive, and the maggot heap. Man is nothing more than a hotbed of irrational passions and unconscious barely hidden savage desires. Blood is all. Food, lust, survival are his only gods. Murder, tyranny, warfare, his greatest goods.

And so I resign from the human race. I totally and finally and irrevocably give up the dream. What I did was push the collapsed piano and the broken furniture and overturned bookcases into the center of the salon and doused the lot with petrol, flipping my cigarette from the staircase. I would prefer of course to put a bullet in my head. But my holster is empty. The partisans not only confiscated my Luger, billfold, and wedding ring before my escape back at the compound. They took all the arms they could find here at the shooting lodge into the marsh with them. Also all food and medical supplies so that there is not a sleeping pill left in the medicine cabinet or an aspirin or bottle of iodine. What's worse they did not leave even a finger of Cognac in the larder. Well, since I am too cowardly to slit my throat, my only hope is that the smoke and fumes will overcome me long before the flames reach us.

I left Klaus where I found him in the salon. His Ukrainian gate guards must have deserted with the first shots. Judging by the color of the snow outside around his motorbike, he must have put up one hell of a fight defending your mother and the children. But of course he did not stand a chance. He and his Ukrainians were on temporary duty from Belzec helping with the Jews passing through my rail depot. Your mother must have written you about him; he was a Nazi, but we all loved him. I found her body in our bedroom. She was packing. We were to leave for Zamosc this very evening. I resigned my command immediately upon verifying for myself that the so called resistance propaganda regarding the murdering of Jews at Belzec was not just propaganda after all. They are shutting down the entire operation, busily removing all evidence of our crimes with quicklime. I will not attempt to describe it; you will learn of it soon enough. The whole world will, for not all the quicklime in Poland can ever erase the crimes committed here, my darling. Not only by us would be supermen, but our victims also, these partisan murderers of mothers and babies.

I do not know why I write all this down. It is futile of course. This child's picture book I scribble in full of your brother Mitya's and little Kashi-Elise's crayon drawings will perish in the flames with us. No doubt our remains will be sent home for burial with full military honors eulogizing the valiant defense of my command against the partisans. And I do not suspect they will even mention the Jews. Certainly they would never reveal that one of their own, an officer in the Führer's own personal military corps, could possibly be so unGerman as to feel compassion for these so called subhuman defilers of the race, who in return have murdered most of his family to thank him for it.

I found the children in the cook house with their nurse. She was not harmed; she is Polish, and the partisans were only interested in Germans. Poor woman, she had combed their bloody hair and washed their faces as though readying them for bed. She could not seem to accept that they were dead and ran off into the marsh maddened with grief before I could stop her. I let her go. I needed to carry your brother and sister up to bed myself and kiss them goodnight one last time. Unlike the rest of the house, the nursery is in no more than its usual state of confusion. The stuffed teddy bears and the rag dolls and building blocks are scattered about as usual, and the photograph you sent last Christmas is here on the desktop before me as I write. So handsome in your Jungvolk uniform, flashing a smile at me in the moonlight. And though the cabinet is in splinters down in the salon, the machinery of the gramophone still functions and is weakly grinding out your first childhood piano recital. The album was somehow miraculously preserved amid the chaos. It is beginning to wind down, however, and the smoke drifting under the nursery door is making it difficult to breath. My eyes are watering now with more than grief and shame. How sentimental. How German. Exit the dreaded Waffen SS Hauptsturmführer Christian Jan Romansky to the accompaniment of A Child’s Favorite Piano Pieces.

BOOK ONE

1973

On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliff on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood . . . A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, . . . reigned in his stead with the title Rex Nemorensis.

Sir James George Frazer

The Golden Bough

I – Il CONTE NEMORENSIS

1

The undulating shadow of the villa's commuter copter traversed the long lazy slope of the Via Appia Antica like a tracking long shot in a Fellini flick. Pines, cypresses, old Roman tombs. In the background, the commuter traffic on the autostrada, the catacombs, the Colloseo, the dome of St. Peter's aflame in the summer solstice twilight. In the foreground, the Alban Hills, summer playground of the Roman rich. Monte Cavo. Lago Albano with its posh villas, regatta sails and dour Castel Gandolpho, the summer palace of the Pope, nestled on its eastern shore. To the south, bustling Albano, Arricia, and the picturesque little village of Nemi slumbering on a precipitous cliff overlooking the unpretentious Lago di Nemi, a tiny crater lake hardly more than a big bullfrog pond really. And finally, adorning a wooded hillside like a jewel, the fabulous Villa Nemorensis. Acres of rolling lawns carpeted with anemones. Groves of exotic trees and shrubs. Formal gardens and knotted parterres resplendent with marble fountains and nymphaeum grottos. Huge weathered bronze urns blossoming with primrose, wild orchid and maidenhair fern lining statued walks along which magnificent white peacocks preen like princesses in ermine. The likes of which Jan Christian Romansky, president, producer, writer, director and just about everything else of Mexico City based Docufilms International hadn't seen since a childhood family visit to Versailles before the war.

Despite his unforeseen late evening arrival due to a mechanical delay in Lisbon, the villa's private commuter copter was waiting for him at the Rome airport, as was the uniformed servant down on the villa's south lawn helipad that ushered him up a long flight of lily pooled water stairs to the villa’s magnificent Terrazza Grande. And as they passed through the Porta de Sala dell'Apollo into the Palazzo Diana's Galleria Cosmologica —a long salon under a vaulted ceiling decorated with a Tiepolo fresco depicting the chariot of the sun passing across the continents of the world —the bedazzled documentary filmmaker felt as though he'd been invited to the wedding of the daughter of the modern Italian equivalent of the Sun King himself.

Why he of all people had been invited, he had no idea. All he knew was that the invitation had arrived at precisely the right time in a commercially unremarkable independent film career during which, over the past fifteen or so years, he had barely managed to keep body and soul together teaching philosophy, film studies and screen writing at Mexico City's St. Cassian Martyr polytechnic. And absorbed as he was at the moment in the final edit of a hopefully commercial semi autobiographical fiction film script dramatizing the romantic exploits of a callow youth some twenty years younger than the presumably sophisticated forty five year old he assumed himself to be at the moment (at least in matters of the loins if not the heart), he simply tossed the morning mail aside and returned to the typewriter without even noticing the Italian postmark.

Not until he heard his part time housekeeper fussing with lunch en la cocina did he finally turn back to the greeting card sized envelope, which instead of one more saccharinely romantic Hallmark from his recently estranged graduate student protégée proffering reconciliation, contained of all things under the hazy Mexico City sun, a magnificent gold engraved invitation requesting the honor of his presence at the June wedding of the beloved daughter of someone called Il Conte Nemorensis, at someplace called La Villa Nemorensis, somewhere in the Alban Hills of Rome. And since his fiery little Constancia threatened mayhem if her confirmed bachelor gringo professor didn't marry her, and since an unsigned note in a distinctly feminine hand accompanying the invitation named a local Thomas Cook to handle all travel arrangements –including first class air to Rome and a private suite at the villa for as long as he wished to extend his stay– he had little trouble convincing himself that a summer holiday change of scene was a pretty good idea, if not an irresistible mid life imperative.

One of his European distributors must have miraculously managed to arouse enough interest in his fiction film project at some international film festival or other so as to . . . To what? Get him invited to a wedding? To do what? Discuss business? At a wedding? Truth was, his European distributors hadn't managed to interest anyone at all in the project, much less the billionaire Italian venture capitalist described in an old Forbes magazine subsequently researched in the polytechnic library as a universally acclaimed and admired humanitarian, philanthropist and economic consultant to presidents, kings and princes of developing nations throughout the world?

Wishful thinking or not, however, on the outside chance that his prospective host might miraculously turn out to be the illusive angel he had for so long been futilely petitioning all nine muses to send to the rescue of his all but financially defunct film company; he deliberately made no further inquiries of his European distributors or any at all of his aristocratic host which might in any way possibly jeopardize his spending at least a week or two summer holidaying in sunny Italy. And within the week, the R. S. V. P. was in the mail.

That the summer break at St. Cassian Martyr happened to begin late enough in June to require his turning in semester grades the very day before the scheduled wedding was nothing more than a minor inconvenience promising, if not a major, at least a very pleasant payoff. And since all of it was much too improbable to be anything but a dream, he resisted pinching himself awake during the twelve hour fight to Rome and the ten minute commute to the magnificent Villa Nemorensis some fifteen kilometers south of the Eternal City as the crow flies. And following a much needed shower and late supper in his own luxurious apartamento ospite, he spent the rest of the evening at a chamber concert for overnight guests in the palazzo's Galleria Musica which the Concert Master announced was apologetically unattended by the villa family, who were unavoidably engaged in last minute wedding preparations.

The ceremony the following morning much more than adequately confirmed their host's international reputation. The family chapel –a late baroque church in miniature complete with a miniature swell organ– overflowed with kings and princes of state, Church, and commerce from around the world. Dashikis, saris and colorful native finery of every description spilled out on to the adjacent lawn where the wedding march down the chapel isle of the beautiful young bride in her pearl colored gown and jeweled tiara was gloriously televised on a gigantic screen in the villa's open air amphitheater. Jan, on the other hand, was inexplicably privileged to witness the ceremony right up front in the wheelchair accommodating family pew seated beside the magnificent foster mother of the handsome young groom and the wizened, soft spoken, strangely familiar father of the bride. And leaning out of his wheelchair extending a palsied hand that Jan wasn't sure he was expected to shake or kiss; as in a jet lagged dream, the old gent lamented without preamble "the regrettable loss of our beloved Countess, who no doubt would have loved to see you now, my son –somewhat older of course, but just as romantic looking as ever in your black eye patch and Hauptsturmführer father's Nordic good looks."

And looking into the pouchy, watery, old eyes of the man whose untimely suicide in the Mediterranean he had read about in the International Times some seven years earlier, knowing of course that it was nothing more than poor circulation accompanying old age; Jan just couldn't help feeling it was a drowned man's hand he was shaking, if not the hand of the cold, dark oceanic depths itself.

2

He had first met the Polish Count Arkady Arkadievitch Moskal and his magnificent Countess Anna some twenty years earlier on the first leg of the round the world filming of his A Hitler Youth in Search of His Soul novice documentary. There he was cranking away on his German military surplus, hand wound 16 mm tripod camera atop the roof of his camouflaged military surplus panel truck parked directly beneath the balcony of the aristocratic couple's Malaga townhouse when the then still ambulatory sixty some year old Count leaned over the wrought iron balcony railing and graciously invited "our virile young cameraman to join our Semana Santa sangria party." And immediately leaving off shooting a procession of black cowled penitents shouldering a grotesquely crucified plaster Jesus in the calle below, he handed up his camera and tripod and scaled the balcony railing to the enthusiastic applause of an impressive gathering of aristocratic Spaniards and European expatriates.

Most enthusiastic of all, was the beautifully bejeweled and tiaraed middle aged Countess, herself, who all in one breath and in perfect German allowed as how she had wagered her doubting husband a million pesetas that their virile young cameraman was surely the son of Herr Doktor Professor Christian Jan Romansky, whose romantic good looks (and she smiled oh ever so warmly cupping his face in her perfumed and perfectly manicured hands) I immediately recognized in the beautiful boy cranking away on his tripod camera within kissing distance of our balcony.

And kiss they did. Politely, of course, in the European manner on that first evening, though within the week passionately enough to adjourn with the acknowledged blessing of her reportedly professionally city bound businessman husband to the aristocratic couple's ancient Moorish castle overlooking the Mediterranean and distant Moroccan coastline south of Malaga. Sumptuously restored and refurbished with priceless antiques and eclectic works of art, the former fortress was a veritable pleasure palace full of animal skins, Moroccan rugs, billowy pillows, and exotic water cooled hashish pipes where they played at love all summer long.

Filming his equestrian Countess riding bare breasted on their beach front or sunbathing au natural on the vistas of the castle's ancient battlements, the bedazzled former Hitler Youth regaled his indulgent hostess with artistic dreams of traveling the entire world in search of his and his disgraced country's lost soul, filming Bedouin Imams in the Sahara, Hindu and Buddhist gurus in the Himalayas, Zen and Taoist sages in the Far East, and Mexican shamans in the Brave New World. And in return his aristocratic enchantress indulged her darling orphan's insatiable longing for nostalgic reminiscences of his long lost family, who happened to have been quartered in the aristocratic couple's militarily commandeered shooting lodge back in the Polish marshland village of Moczary during the war.

Telling him only what a penitent son would most like to hear about Herr Doktor Professor Christian Jan Romansky, whose scholarly books he had learned to admire so very much since the war, she insisted his pacifist father had been the most reluctant German officer she had ever met. Never, however, no doubt out of aristocratic tact, did she ever question the former fanatical Hitler Youth's arrogant and unforgivable refusal to accompany his mother, sister and kid brother to join his, as he saw it then, shamefully unpatriotic Waffen SS Hauptsturmführer father, whose unrecognizable charred remains following the notorious 1942 All Saint's Day Massacre at Moczary were flown back home for a hero's burial along with the equally unrecognizable remains of the rest of his surviving fourteen year old orphan's beloved family.

Operation Barbarossa had begun the previous summer, and the fanatical Hitler Youth hoped, when old enough, to redeem on the Russian front his professor father's shameful pacifism. The family's burial as "Heroes of the Reich, however, made that as unnecessary as the Soviet advance on Berlin made it impossible. And in the end, he had not only succeeded in sacrificing, as he proudly boasted, a totally redundant right eye defending my Jungvolk barrack against a Soviet tank." He defiantly refused the horrid glass substitute offered by the family physician who had more or less adopted his orphaned nephew following the city's tragic fall, and arrogantly sported his black eye patch in continued defiance of every Russian Soldier in the Soviet Zone of partitioned Berlin as though it were a medal of honor bestowed on him by a Fatherland in ruins.

Only after the Nuremberg Trials and the revelations of the horrors of the Nazi Death Camps did he finally lose his romantic illusions about the National Socialist Revolution. His father, of course, had never had any such illusions, his tragic generation proving once and for all the fallacy of attempting to better the world via German National Socialism, Russian Communism or any other nationalistic would be Utopian panacea; something the former Hitler Youth only began to acknowledge after several years of studying philosophy at his professor father's former university, funded out of the family annuity and his family physician uncle's generosity.

And it was there during his second year of graduate study, while remaining just as proud as ever of defending his beloved German soil against the Soviet onslaught, that he despondently found himself taking long solitary walks around the divided city trying desperately to ward off recurring attacks of regurgitating vertigo every time he so much as looked at his barely begun doctoral dissertation. Only a medically prescribed, annuity funded, round the world search for his own as well as his benighted country's lost soul finally managed to mitigate the attacks, beginning as Fate would have it with a summer sojourn of nostalgic family reminiscences in his solicitous Polish Countess's Andalusian pleasure palace by the sea.

3

Family reminiscences as it happened proved rather more than less guilt assuaging. And come the autumnal equinox, the novice moviemaker reluctantly but resolutely crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in search of an illusive soul his short but idyllic Andalusian sojourn had only managed to project that much farther beyond the horizon. Naturally, out of honor if nothing else, he had asked his happily married Countess to go along fully expecting her to demur. And she did of course, assuring him ever so tactfully how immensely flattered she was by his gallant invitation.

But, alas, my romantic darling, she sighed. "I have lived much too long to do anymore than merely imagine