The Butterfly

By Paul M. Hedeen

In THE BUTTERFLY, Paul M. Hedeen takes us back to the fall of 1963, a few weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination. An obscure émigré Russian professor dies of a stroke—or so it is believed. The professor’s eccentricities and complicity create both mystery and jeopardy as his documents lead his student backward into a century of famine, political terror, and war and forward into a bewildering underworld of malevolent opportunists, unstable identities, and improvised histories.

When the student falls in with the troubled daughter of the Nazi elite, she becomes his lover, guide, and tormentor as both are irresistibly drawn into the dark aftermath of World War II. Memoirs, fairy tales, fiction, and scenarios interweave and reveal the postwar fate of Eva Braun and secrets concerning the famous Holocaust photo, “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: BHC Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948540605

Book preview

Excerpt from AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth. Copyright © 1997 by Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Line from the poem What Wasn’t Said, Is Now Impossible to Say by Lina Kostenko. Copyright © 2012 by Lina Kostenko. Reprinted by permission of A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha Publishers. All rights reserved.

Graphic of the EB butterfly by Sarah Tasseff. Copyright © 2017. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Tasseff. All rights reserved.

Photograph of The Last Jew in Vinnitsa. Public domain.

Editor: Taylor Anhalt

THE BUTTERFLY

Copyright © 2018 Paul M. Hedeen

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by BHC Press

under the Gelan imprint

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930618

ISBN: 978-1-947727-34-2 (Softcover)

ISBN: 978-1-947727-33-5 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-948540-60-5 (Ebook)

Visit the publisher:

www.bhcpress.com

Warren Hart, the novel’s editor and compiler, is also a fabrication, so his Notes and Acknowledgments, Editor’s Foreword, and Notes should be read as part of the novel.

for Maryna

HOW I, DR. Warren Hart, long to echo Edgar Allen Poe and write the thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.¹ Alas, there will be no revenge except one granted by my having the last word—if last words are possible.

So as not to seem ungracious, I must acknowledge my Fortunato, Mr. Fortunatus Carlyle, has contributed much to what you will read. He began revising these documents after the murders at Adolf Hitler’s Wehrwolf bunker. I suspect some of these revisions are sheer invention, but others apparently were based upon private interviews with real people: Jürgen Blend, Albert Krause, and Olesya Feodosiyivna Aborovyk, among others. Also, I could not have known of Carlyle’s stepfather’s deep connections with these people, even indirectly with Aborovyk. It is quite possible Carlyle himself had no knowledge. I will speculate, though, if he was ignorant, his mentor Dmitriy Kapailenko was not. Professor Kapailenko’s knowledge was a damning and conspiratorial one and led to his pursuit of both his hated enemy Jürgen Blend and Kapailenko’s unrequited love Olesya. The professor’s own obsessions and murderous past encouraged others to pursue him and brought about the unfortunate events this narrative will describe—among them my own downfall and disgrace.

As I was languishing in prison at Stryzhavka, Ukraine, Carlyle became a brief but prolific correspondent with Friedrich Kaspar and R. Brewster Zapruder, who were freshmen at my old institution. Naturally, these communiqués ceased when Carlyle, still on the run, burned to death with Miss Katrina von Dehlens in their Karmann Ghia—or so it is reported in the Stuttgarter Zeitung.

Carlyle’s, Kaspar’s, and Zapruder’s (even my own) interventions acknowledged, I must say time has done nothing to reassure me about the honesty of many of Dr. Kapailenko’s manuscripts. As will be shown, many were found by Carlyle and returned to students Kaspar and Zapruder—some heavily revised, some not even touched. The manuscripts’ dubious yet collective authorship requires us to see them simultaneously as both fruitful collaboration and complete hogwash. Anything with origins this unclear has to be challenged, and I beg the reader to do so.

As I am suggesting and you undoubtedly will realize, this book is a hodge-podge of authors and forms. Reflecting its sources, some of the writing is so bombastic and self-serving as to be almost unreadable. For example, whereas Dr. Kapailenko’s manuscripts refer to Dmytro rather than Pavlo in the Olesya segments, even to her calling out to Dmytro, we now believe this to be Kapailenko’s self-indulgence, for Olesya was devoted to her husband Pavlo Aborovyk.

I also removed other embellishments clearly odious. For example, there were nine references to the great Comrade Stalin, sixteen to the people’s courageous commissars, eleven to history’s bold experiment (the Bolshevik Revolution), eighty-three to the fascist murderer Blend, twenty-six to the the whore Braun, nineteen to the monster Hitler, and a striking one hundred seventy-one to the hero Kapanelov.

In Kapailenko’s, Carlyle’s, and my defense, please note lies are not necessarily the antitheses of truth, but may be its catalysts. As all historians know, much claimed as fact is open to question. Without historians’ and writers’ attempts to unite the slivers of what is verified, what we call history would be like trying to paint a landscape at night with only heat lightning for light. It is said to respect the past, we must believe in its mystery.² Please understand this believing, like all acts of faith, requires the imagination.

• • • • •

Some of these texts are now over sixty years old, and their presentation would not be possible without the significant contributions of others. I would like to thank Professor Friedrich Kaspar for his ground-breaking research into die Mabusen, Albert Krause, Jürgen Blend, Constanze Kochen, and the fate of German POWs after the Battle of Berlin. Bruce Zapruder, now the director of The Berlin Institute, generously funded Professor Kaspar’s work as well as Ms. Margarete Schüller’s research trips to both the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Mr. Zapruder has also agreed to have his Institute preserve my notes and principal documentary sources. Taras Oleksandrovych Mirschuk, who works in the prosecutor’s office of Vinnitsa Oblast, Ukraine, was crucial in the investigation of Soviet and Nazi atrocities against Ukrainians as well as of this narrative’s last events in Stryzhavka.³ The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation was instrumental in establishing the identity and fate of Colonel David Eisenbraun.

Special heartfelt gratitude goes to Maryna Lysun for her hospitality during Margarete Schüller’s and this editor’s several trips to Vinnitsa. Ms. Lysun’s research and knowledge also helped establish Olesya Feodosiyivna Aborovyk’s identity, whereabouts, and history, thus making possible my brief descriptions of Helen’s and Olesya Feodosiyivna’s later years.

ON APRIL 30, 1945, at 3:30 p.m., with Russian soldiers destroying the last of SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke’s battle groups barely a block away, Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of Nazi Germany, carried out what was probably his only significant moral act—he killed himself and ended German National Socialism. Reportedly, at his side, also a suicide, was Frau Eva Hitler, his bride of thirty-nine hours and a woman popular with the young men of Hitler’s headquarters and entourage.

Owing to the subjectivities of those present, the various accounts are inconsistent on minor details. All accounts, however, suggest shortly after the deaths, the corpses were cremated in the Chancellery garden outside the Führer bunker’s emergency exit. After a thorough burning, the ashes and fragments were gathered into a canvas sheet and buried nearby. Supposedly, although it has never been confirmed (in fact, it was denied for years), the Russians found these remains and after transporting them to various locations, the last being Magdeburg, burned them again in 1970 and dumped the ashes mixed with pounded charcoal into the Ehle river near Biederitz.

As you will read in what follows, this is not the whole story.

Although I wasn’t in Berlin at this time (I was in London), eighteen years later I was forced to meet people whose ordinary lives ended with their Führer’s. Among these were Jürgen Blend, SS-Sturmbannführer; Albert Krause, SS-Hauptsturmführer and Blend’s comrade; other members of die Mabusen, the Liebstandarte Division veterans’ organization; Constanze Kochen, Hitler’s dietician and Eva Braun’s close friend; and Olesya Feodosiyivna Aborovyk, the Ukrainian who befriended and cared for both Braun and Kochen, even though she had every reason to despise them.

My ordinary life also ended precipitously, but in 1963, the year of this story. I can’t claim I did not witness the actions leading to my harsh imprisonment. I certainly can claim innocence of the crime for which I was incarcerated. I’ve never conspired to kill anyone (even when serving in World War II), and my presence in the Soviet Union was neither my idea nor a result of any action I initiated. Yet I took the rap, as they now say, for multiple murders I did not commit.

I do take responsibility for the book you are now holding. As its editor, I’ve worked to make the master narrative complete. I’ve also labored to make the major characters’ actions comprehensible. In the process, I’ve made necessary contributions to the story. I trust readers will pardon my editorial and artistic liberties, especially as they involve representing my own character. I appear to be something of a rascal, but this is not an attempt to transform myself into some sort of romantic antihero, as is now the fashion. In fact, the young Dr. Hart of these narratives is their most striking realism. I consider my moral reformation, begun during my term in the Soviet prison in Stryzhavka, the most dramatic and difficult process in my life. Suffice it to say my days as a lover boy ended shortly after this story begins.

After serving eight years of a ten-year sentence (for being a fellow-traveler with murderers), I was released from Stryzhavka, which is a mere three kilometers from my alleged crime at the ruins of Wehrwolf. I then began the work you are now reading. In part owing to professional pressures and my own inadequate skills, the following compilation of texts is fragmentary, flawed, recursive, and frequently hypothetical. Complete stories, like complete answers to complex questions, simply do not exist. As the Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko writes, What wasn’t said, became impossible to say. ⁴ My first goal was to establish my own innocence, but then another and more important goal emerged: I wanted to hear and understand the voices calling me to my fate.

That my and others’ fates would have anything to do with love is an irony almost impossible to appreciate. Yet something must be said of the role of transgressive love in what follows. A transgressive love is enacted not only beyond time and understanding, but also in defiance of those conventions regarding morality, class, age, race, and nationality seeking to destroy it. For this reason, a transgressive love is adoration’s most revolutionary form, enacting radical and progressive change. The assemblage in your hands is a series of interlocking stories about transgressive love.

Because every major character in this narrative may now be dead (except me, of course), to speak about love is especially poignant. There is, however, no true end to life or love. In all stories, destruction somehow kisses creation—even if outside the porous limits of knowledge and the imagination. No deeper kiss has ever been experienced. Death and life are existence’s great transgressive lovers, each other’s sweetest extremity and reprise.

My job now complete, I affirm my thirty-year attempt to discern the truth of my history, at least as well as memory and Fortunatus Carlyle’s manuscripts allow. History should be the final judge, I suppose, of what I and this story’s characters have been and done. If so, I would like the imagination to be my advocate and time, once just a jailer, to be my release.

Warren Hart, PhD

Chicago, Illinois

2005

People think of history in the long term, but history,

in fact, is a very sudden thing.

~ Philip Roth ~

A MAN HAS died. Dr. Warren Hart, Chair of the Foreign Language Institute, knew a memorial service’s first purpose is to steep, as in the blackest and most bitter tea, its participants in death’s irrefutable claim. Given the human desire to embroider endlessly and colorfully, to attach to life all sorts of inane addenda like heaven or hell or reincarnation, this fact might be the last of knowledge before the gossip would begin.

Yes, a man has died. They were dying all over Chicago, after all, as they must.

Hart clicked his tongue. To be honest, he thought, the dead are irrelevant almost before they hit the gurney. Life is relentless, all about sex, about yes and now, and the dead are like… Well, what are they like? Even with one war behind him and another ahead, Dr. Hart struggled. How had this morning’s hymn stated it? Hart screwed up his face trying to remember. Oh, yes, truly, the dead have crossed over. The Lethe? From earth to where? Whitman said it best; a body was good manure. Look for me under your boot-soles, he commanded at the end of his great poem. Into manure, then earth, and then the grass, the hair of graves. No matter, Hart thought, smiling. Whitman was crazy—like the now dead Professor Kapailenko. Maybe I’ll know better when my time comes, Hart concluded, reassuring no one, especially himself.

Professor Dmytro Kapailenko’s death had been sudden. The cause was rumored to be a stroke. The burial had been quick and private. Even the just concluded memorial service had been brief, not the appropriate one hour. The Russian Orthodox hymns, chants, and liturgy requested in the funeral instructions could not be learned by the college choir in the time allowed, and so the chaplain’s watery nondenominational fare had been served up with ample portions of the Book. Did Dr. Hart care? No, not as long as appearances had been kept up. Appearances, after all, were his strength. After even one glass of Merlot, always after lunch, he’d admit as much.

Now with his colleague’s funeral rites concluded, Chair Hart was only too eager to escape. Others had fled, nodding with restrained good nature, yet allowing their faces to brighten as soon as they spied the light blasting in bent rainbows through the cut glass squares on the chapel’s oaken doors. God light, some had called it, half-ironically, for the chapel and chaplaincy persisted at Hart’s university as a gesture rather than commitment. The attendees’ lit masks, even in near twilight, hid a liberal disrespect Hart could appreciate. Hypocrites, I suppose, Hart thought, but then tact and civility were often dishonest, filing the teeth of egotism, declawing the human beast.

But what were the attendees supposed to feel? Dr. Dmytro Kapailenko, or Kappy as his few friends called him, had brought to their Institute only a livid embarrassment, giving his colleagues a collective red face.

There was no recession at the service. Rushed into the ground, the casket had not been present to view, so there was nothing to follow out. In fact, no one Hart knew had even seen the body, which was found by a friend whom no one on campus had ever met and rushed by private ambulance to an undisclosed funeral home. All other arrangements for this modest memorial had been thrown onto Hart’s hands.

As Kappy’s chair, Hart also had been required by propriety and protocol to attend. But to suggest a willing duty did Hart too much justice, as he would admit. Provost Limpf, one of his bosses, had ordered him to attend, and she had let it be known this order began with the much rattled University President Chelivek, who had reported our State Department as well as embassy officials from West Germany, Israel, and the Soviet Union had an interest in the professor’s passing, even in the contents of his office. When Hart had asked why, the Provost had simply put her finger to her lips, and so he’d hushed. His instructions were simple. Be a good chair. Engage and cultivate Kapailenko’s protégé, a misled boy named Carlyle, who for some stupid reason was the dead professor’s literary executor with the legal authority to manage his mentor’s work.

So Hart had put on a brave face: respectful, stoical, and enlightened; an august face creased with studied consideration; a face reflecting thoughts of the brevity of life inspired by an untimely death. Hart’s wavy graying hair, worn long, as was becoming the fashion, framed his smooth face, even teeth, and bright blue eyes. His jaw, which still retained its edge, communicated, when set, seriousness without severity. His jawbone aside, his face flushed with a rosiness betraying, he knew, self-indulgence. Being so well-tended had not enhanced his position among his poorer paid colleagues. Fortunately, Hart’s eyes could be made to soften, feigning sensitivity to the tragic arc of Kappy’s story.

This story’s hero was a starving Ukrainian boy who escaped a 1930s famine to become a young man who in the 1940s had evaded both Stalin’s and Hitler’s murderous dictatorships, fighting them both at different times in the war and afterward as a UPA partisan with Stepan Bandera in western Ukraine before escaping to Turkey. He was a wartime friend of anyone who loved his motherland—or so went the tale. Ultimately, remarkably for someone not otherwise blessed by upbringing and connections, he became a refugee-academician educated among other émigrés in Toronto and Chicago and who, against all odds, championed the triumph of Ukrainian enlightenment and learning over Soviet brutality and oppression. The patriot’s credentials also had scholarly heft, for the not-so-young academician had published with lightning speed (and light) some of the best analyses of Pushkin ever penned—before his genius turned to folly.

Unconvinced as Hart was about the high points of this canard, the Chair wore a mask of official yet poignant mourning, even as his mind drifted into shameful places. These included Provost Limpf’s aging but still eager body and, at least on this occasion, the undeniable relief he’d felt at this Ukrainian superhero’s surprising extinction, saving Hart the enormous trouble of keeping the fractious eccentric on course or steering him into retirement’s safe harbor.

But there was no shelter for Hart, at least for the moment, for he could see Dmytro’s student, young Carlyle, across the room. The boy’s dour look, his lowered chin, the aimless tapping of his scuffed wingtips all suggested he shared none of Hart’s lift. As usual, he peered over his black-framed glasses. He wasn’t an idiot, as Hart and others once had suspected, just disappointed, probably because the attendance at this reception was scant. For most of those who had only half-filled the small chapel, the memorial service had been enough of the old Slav—what more could be said?

Warren Hart moved closer to the coffee and cookies. He must be nice, or at least try, so he tried a bright tone. The thing you read—Eva Braun? She really used those words? When he got no response, he added, You were going for comic relief, no doubt. He chuckled, a noise dry and thin, hoping the young man might join in. I bet this was the first time in the history of funeral oration Mrs. Hitler has been quoted.

Summoned and stung, Carlyle turned and closed the few steps between them, his first words and steps in equal pacing. Maybe you’re right. But whether she said it or not, it was in Dr. Kapailenko’s manuscript. So… Carlyle looked around, reddening, as if realizing for the first time how grotesquely absurd his use of this text really was. Dr. Kapailenko had gathered all sorts of sayings, characters, stories—even mementos somehow. Over the years I mean. He has letters and diaries, too. Remarkable, he never gave up. Quite an archive. He was always searching, trying, he said, to beat the bear out of the birches. He’s shared his stuff with me, and I’ve only begun to get it into some sort of order.

Order? Remarkable? the older professor added, shaking his head. Not remarkable if you knew old Dmytro. Pardon me, I mean, Dr. Kapailenko. His collecting was just crazy. Not to speak ill of the dead… But he so wanted to, to say how Kappy’s was an ordinary compulsion and of sexual origin, as compulsions usually are. Hart paused, knitting his brow, holding back the flow, for a reception after a memorial service was hardly the time to profess, yet words surged to the wellhead. The man, against all prudence, common sense… There it came. He bit it back again, desiring to add, against professional respect, integrity—dignity, I suppose—and whatever else, …Pursued this questionable topic, and others like it, after so promising a beginning. Hart looked down into Carlyle’s eyes, hoping to make a point without being boorish. Hair, clothes, personal effects, letters, silver, photos—in the end a doll. Like a blow-up doll for a model? And then there was talk of a live model. A student, no less. The senior professor wanted to hoot, but settled for a toss of his chin with another chuckle, this time from even lower in his throat, for to laugh now would be unseemly—still, he had gone too far. Sorry. I was worried some of this might come up in the eulogy or remembrances. Good we dodged a bullet, eh? Hart pretended his hand was a pistol and pointed it at the floor.

Carlyle flushed and then pressed his point. Not a doll! A mannequin. And there were no students. He frowned, looking to Hart as if he were feeling the stagnant mass of real grief and needed a good cry. Well, yes, unique, I know. This interest in Eva Braun—and the war criminal Jürgen Blend. But you aren’t him. You haven’t been through what he’s been through. You don’t know what he knows. He paused and corrected himself. "What he knew. What I know, too, I think. The beginnings of it, anyway. It’s there in the manuscripts—all kinds of writing."

Hmmm. Hart thought of a quip about the differences between sleeping with a mannequin and an inflatable doll, but he held back and looked away. He spent a few long seconds gazing out over the heads of his fellow attendees, hoping the young man would drift to someone else, but when he looked back, there the implacable Carlyle remained, his face even more pinched by suffering.

Just read this, the young man demanded, pulling from his jacket pocket some folded pages. Reluctantly, Hart put on his reading glasses:

SCENARIO⁵

WE LOOK OUT upon a snowy field. It is a late November afternoon in 1963. The slanting light has the silvery quality of early winter. Shadows are long. Freezing fog is apparent. The land is flat. Here and there furrows and stubble emerge from the remaining snow. A plot has been excavated and roped off. In the left background, there is a tumbled stack of simple wooden coffins, behind these a dense forest: beech, aspen, pines so dark they’re black. The wet trees are like prison bars against the snow. Centered in the near distance are several graves. At one a lone man kneels. At another, two very poor country women stand. The man is Jürgen Blend, and one woman, in more traditional Ukrainian dress and headscarf, is Olesya, but we won’t know any of their identities until later. We are near Vinnitsa in Soviet Ukraine.

Decomposed figures are in the graves. One, where the man kneels, has an open coffin. In it is a woman. She wears a very dirty blue dress. There is light hair and a skull. As we look down upon her, the skull becomes a beautiful but battered face on the day the dirt fell. It is Eva Braun, Blend’s Butterfly. But we cannot know of this yet.

The blue eyes are open in death. The mouth is parted. The face is bruised to black on one side. The face now comes to life and smiles. Distant laughter is heard. At first it is joyous, but in just a beat or two it becomes hysterical.

Then we are back in the present. Russian voices, male, gruff then laughing, are in the background. There is the sound of a bottle tinkling as it is tossed away. It and the roaring of a truck motor both indicate there are people present besides the old man and the two women.

The woman named Olesya looks down at a decomposed male figure in a large grave. Now this figure also changes to a very grainy and shadowed image of the man’s death. The camera shakes. It is an enacted depiction of the famous The last Jew in Vinnitsa photo encountered in this narrative a number of times. The moving image freezes into the photo.

As the scene at the graves continues, traces of the photograph and film persist. The three people and the graves they gaze into form a quiet tableau. The man and women weep, but there must be only grief, no sentimentality. The sound of this weeping ends with an echoing Pavlo screamed from somewhere in time. With this scream, the women and man look up into our eyes.

The distant trees are stark against the melting snow. All sound—weeping, a woman distantly screaming—is swept away by the sound of wind, which is itself replaced by another woman speaking.

As she speaks we see the distant sky, then a raven lifting from a tree bough. When she says figure, a young Adolf Hitler appears in the manner she describes and when she states you this figure dissolves into the young Jürgen Blend, the man in the photograph killing the last Jew.

„Zeit vergeht und unsere schicksale entstehen."

"Time passes and our fates emerge. Indistinct yet unmistakable, they are like a figure approaching out of the mist. His pale face is obscure; his demeanor is relaxed, confident. He wears an expensive coat of the finest gray wool. The man turns and leads you to what must be. Yes, he is of the same clay as you. He hides his hands, so look at your own. You see, you have shaped him as well as yourself."

EVA BRAUN SAID this thing about fate and time? Then, feigning ignorance, for Hart, too, had tried his hand at writing for movies: What, a monologue? He stabbed the passage at the end with his forefinger. Seems labored. Cinema is a visual medium, after all.

He looked over the young man’s head to someone, anyone who might rescue him. He gave back the pages, nipped at his cookie, and winked. I thought Eva Braun was an idiot.

It is Dr. Kapailenko’s scenario, or one given to him. I was to play my stepfather, he told me, although his family is Ukrainian, not German, so I don’t know what he was talking about. He had a ton of money. He’d hired a producer already. Then, apparently remembering how Dr. Hart had described Eva Braun, he asked, Why would you think she was stupid? The younger man looked concerned.

Hart didn’t answer but looked at him closely, hoping to discover in his eyes the motivation for what might become a confrontation. Well, Hitler said as a genius he should have a servile and stupid woman, right? Didn’t he also say geniuses shouldn’t have children, for they are always disappointments?

So?

Well, he chose Braun.

Yes, I suppose so. But you are suggesting consistency between thought, speech, and action—a lot to expect from a human being.

Hart smiled. He didn’t expect to be schooled by this schoolboy.

The boy pressed, And one has to consider Braun, knowing her man’s beliefs, might have played up to them, to please him, you know—something other Hitler women could not do.

Hmmm. Hart sipped his coffee, hoping again to be saved by an interruption.

She was smart this way, I think. She was at his side until the end. Maybe through the end and beyond. Kept faith, which counts for something.

"Yes, something. But, my dear Carlyle, dogs are loyal, too, and we don’t require of them any real thinking. Hart gave the last two words heavy emphasis. Too heavy, he realized, making him seem both pompous and obvious. As the boy moped, Hart thought again about Carlyle’s given name Fortunatus, as if his parents wanted to mark him out for special ill-fortune. To Hart’s thinking, Carlyle had turned out to be a crackpot, just like his dead mentor. First of all, Fortunatus couldn’t finish his degree, which in Dr. Hart’s academic world was a killing demerit. Moreover, poor Carlyle couldn’t seem to get anything else going. He was stuck. Hart smiled at the irony, given the fate of his Kappy. Carlyle was one of those people who hang about a campus and college town, gradually aging, increasing the disparity in years between the real students and him, and showing up at university events as a parody of the intellectual he might have become. Interesting, Hart realized, this never seemed to happen to women. They either finished or moved on; they became something. However, to add to this young man’s afflictions, Carlyle was probably also a poet, or at least demonstrated an artist’s, rather than a linguist’s or scholar’s, attachment to life’s stuff. Hart returned to the moment. My boy, only you think these things. Didn’t others also say Braun was a simple girl?"

Simple is not the same as stupid. Simple could mean uneducated, which I think was true. Hitler himself was only half-educated. Carlyle seemed to have found some fire. His eyes narrowed, concentrating on Hart’s face. Grief was being replaced by purpose.

Hart didn’t want Carlyle to have purpose. He especially didn’t want to become the object of this purpose. He didn’t like the young man enough to be generous. Hell, he didn’t like him at all. Time to throw him off. Anyway, why was Professor Kapailenko writing film scenarios? Or even beginning one? Or collecting them?

The failed Carlyle, abject, hardly human in Hart’s world of superhuman credentials, responded to the challenge. I’m not quite sure, but this is just the first scene. The first pages. There’s more. Lots more. I thought I’d share just a little, to demonstrate Dr. Kapailenko’s creative side. Well, you know… There were others on today’s list, and then they decided on no formal eulogy at all. He glanced away at the others milling about the coffee, punch, and cakes, then back. Well, Professor Kapailenko had this idea, a little risky, but he was all risk, you know. When his research wouldn’t come together as anything more than a collection and a theory—well, he decided to write scenarios, or find them, and try to get somebody to make a movie. He’d hired someone for the preliminaries, he called them. A man named Eisenbraun, I think.⁶ He smiled indulgently, understanding, Hart supposed, this was as quixotic as everything else the old Russian had attempted. He had a ream of stuff, and revisions upon revisions. And a novel, or a chunk of one, history, and a memoir, or someone else’s memoir, I’m not sure. Stuff in three languages. Even German, so four. I could show you… And essays and scholarly stuff. Genealogies, too. Some sort of consultation with intelligence people in both Europe and on the Soviet side. He should have been in history, or political science.

Eisenbraun—Dr. Hart had heard a similar name, or read it in a memo. Hart believed he was the friend who had found Kappy and taken charge of the body. Hart raised his hand, indicating stop. The boy was getting too much momentum. Hart articulated, slowly and precisely. Each word was intended to be a blow. But no more on Pushkin, I suppose, for which he was hired. Right? Pausing, letting this have its effect, he then offered, deliberately patronizing: Well, no one doubts his range of interests, and, well, his fanciful side. Hart watched the boy and decided it was time to cut him to silence. Doesn’t all of this unpublished pabulum bother you a little? Doesn’t it undermine the credibility of his scholarly research? What’s to be said of his professional responsibility? Maybe everything is just a story, a movie, a fantasy after all, eh? But I know the difference between bullshit and serious bullshit. And I’m wondering, too late now, I suppose, what kind he was shoveling. Who the hell was he? People were beginning to doubt.

"You were beginning to doubt, you mean. Carlyle pointed at Hart’s chest. He had credibility elsewhere. There is a group of historians, Slavic specialists, some Germans, people of real courage. People not necessarily interested in belaboring what we all know. No, he knew powerful people out in the world." Without looking, Carlyle pointed over his shoulder toward some apparently more authentic world beyond this reception room.

Hart signaled stop again, and Carlyle did. We have standards, you know. Hart condescended to smile. Dumb Fortunatus was racing, and it was time to throttle him down.

But Carlyle wouldn’t stop. "Well, my Professor was creative; he was brilliant, too. Could have been famous. Might still be. If I… Then looking Hart in the eye, then away, he swallowed and mumbled. No thanks to you and others here, I must say."

Careful, please.

The persecution, I mean.

There was no persecution. Anyway, personnel matters are confidential. Ah, the refuge of cowards, Dr. Hart thought, feeling a queasy rush of shame as he seized the Chair’s prerogative of institutional words. He wondered if his face had flushed. His hand came up a third time, no more it said, and he looked around. I suppose everyone has credibility somewhere. What can you say? This switch to art hardly raises him at the end, though, if moving up was in his and your plan. Anyway, the man’s funeral is certainly not the place and time to discuss such matters.

Carlyle added, It is cruel, yes, thanks to… He looked down, gathering his thoughts. He had no family. And everyone here humiliated him at every opportunity.

Perhaps a little harsh? Hart discovered his feet were beginning a small dance. His tongue clicked again. Perception includes interpretation. True? But what would be the point now of debating?

Fortunatus Carlyle looked back. I see your point, I guess.

Hart smiled. Tit-for-tat, he thought, almost always showed a retreat from any real thinking. They were just fizzing now.

Carlyle looked him in the eye. Well, you’ll see.

Even though the service had been humanely brief, it had been a long morning for Hart, just as the last few years of managing his old colleague had seemed to add a month or two to the calendar. The ill-starred, even tragic Professor Dmytro Kapailenko had gathered less reputation than suspicion, less fame than notoriety. There had been accusations, a few students sick of digressions and bullying, the usual stuff, but mostly a growing sloppiness of method and practice belying his credentials. Where was the follow-up to the Pushkin? Talk about a sophomore slump! Kapailenko never again had shone as he had in the beginning. He’d become a different man. Take his morbidity. What could one say about a man who kept on his office wall a poster of The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, a young man sitting on the edge of a mass grave, facing the camera in the instant before his Nazi executioner puts a bullet in his brain, or so one assumes. There is no next frame to confirm it. Unforgettable, it haunted any person who saw it. It looked too natural to be staged. In the foreground was a filling grave, in the near background a line of soldiers looking on.

Over the years, Hart had always found four things interesting about the photo, only the first three he ever mentioned: first, the doomed man’s eyes as he glanced to his left, perhaps hearing something from there; second, the men in the background who seem unconcerned with the act but very aware of the camera; third, the young, unbuttoned killer, an evil coward if there ever were one, wanting to strike a heroic pose; and fourth, by unlucky coincidence, the killer’s resemblance to a youthful anybody, appearing so average, just like the men behind him. For Hart, to want to be a hero, but to be both average and evil, typified the whole of the war—murder, directly or by proxy, carried out by ordinary men. Shrinking men. Falling men. Men whose actions guaranteed they would neither transcend their civilian selves nor be invited back to civilian life. But Hart’s interests hardly mattered in the long view. A man was about to die. And below him, waiting to receive him, were the murdered members of his community, thousands of his fellow Jews, forty percent of the total Jewish population of the Vinnitsa region. Their crime? They didn’t need one. They were Jews.⁷

Once when Kappy had noticed his young departmental boss examining the photo, he’d said, The largest massacre took place just after Rosh-ha-Shana, September 22, 1941. The man at the center of the line with his arms crossed is Hermann Fegelein. He rapped the poster with the old-fashioned hickory pointer he still used to indicate a place on a map or a word on the board—even poking a dozing student now and again. The Ukrainian fascist pig on the left… He then fell silent, perhaps considering something, and waved the thought away. "And the ubitsa, murderer—of course they are all ubitsy— he paused, is Jürgen Blend… He looked into Hart’s eyes, adding, Eva Braun’s lover."

Whether Kapailenko’s claim was fact or invention Hart didn’t know and didn’t pursue, but he was taken with Kapailenko’s tone when he added, whipping the pointer so violently it moaned in the air, And it is my destiny to prove it.

The executions of Jews in the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s wife’s private life were not Hart’s subjects. He was a language specialist and Kappy was supposed to be one also, but the Ukrainian was forever sidetracked into chasing after fascists and their lovers, working with Simon Wiesenthal and his bunch of young zealots as they pursued Nazis from Berlin to Buenos Aires. Since Kapailenko was tenured, there was nothing Hart could do to keep the old Slav on a more respectable research track, so Hart avoided the man and subject whenever possible. Besides, it was best not to get Kappy going if one

Reviews for The Butterfly

[delta61 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not my kind of book.

[fredlholmes · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a hard review to write, as there is much to like about Paul Hedeen’s novel, THE BUTTERFLY. The concept is fascinating, and a lot of the writing is brilliant. It also sheds light on a difficult period in human history—WWII, the Holocaust, and the many atrocities committed by the Nazis. I’ve seen the old black-and-white photograph much of the story revolves around—a Jew being murdered by a Nazi—and it is heart wrenching. And I champion anyone who wants to remind the younger generation of the tragedy of the Holocaust.However, on the negative side, as a piece of literature, THE BUTTERFLY is dramatically overwritten, and desperately needed a strong editor. It’s also confusing at times. But worst of all, it breaks one of the cardinal rules of writing—it tells instead of shows. Far, far, too many times it tells us what the characters are thinking and feeling, without showing us through their actions. And it happened so many times I found myself struggling to keep reading.Therefore, I give THE BUTTERFLY two stars for having its heart in the right place.

[carolibrarian-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really did not like this bookThank you librarything for the chance to read it

[liveshipvivacia · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I received this book for free through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers' program. Let me preface this by saying I got 45% of the way through this book before deciding to DNF. I can almost forgive the author for his strange seemingly self-insert Gary Stu love interest of Eva Braun, although it turns her into a tramp. Not that she was a paragon of virtue, being Hitler's love interest, but there is a line that should be drawn. I'm sure if I read further, he wouldn't seem like such a self-insert, but I have no intention of doing so.Throughout the book, the author tries to elicit sympathy for Eva Braun and even a little for the Nazis surrounding Hitler, as though the German people were really the victims in all of this. As a Jew, I find this offensive. I can ignore it, for the most part, up until they start calling Adolf Hitler a sex icon. I'm sorry, were you thinking of the same Hitler I am? Is there another Adolf Hitler I'm unaware of, maybe? Someone who was actually attractive?The author seems to be obsessed with a photograph that may or may not exist (I haven't Googled it) called the Last Jew of Vinnitsa. This is about the amount of Jewish presence in the book. It wouldn't be so bad if the author didn't keep returning to it and harping on it. We get it. Your self-insert screws Eva Braun and happily offs Jews. So does your so-called Russian hero, sans the Eva Braun part. I just, I cannot with this book. I can almost take making the Nazis sympathetic and "normal people", but there's a line here. And as a Jewish person, the anti-semitism rife within this book, although it is accurate to a certain extent, is bothersome. There's no one Jewish to provide a counterpoint and, as a result, the book comes out lopsided.This is a long review for a book I didn't like. I'm gonna stop here.