Ubermensch
an excerpt

I pulled back my fist to hit him one more time, and for a second it seemed as if everything was right. Just the two of us frozen there, like a pair of dancers in silhouette. Me with one hand on his shoulder, guiding him through the tango, my other hand poised to strike.
The next second my knuckles connected bloodily with his jaw, his head connected loudly with brick, and it was as though the universe shattered. I saw nothing but whiteness for a moment, and then it was all over. The Jew hung limp in my grasp, now, his skin still feeling hot through his shirt, or perhaps that was the warm trickle of his blood, glittering blackly in the dim of the alleyway. I was shaking all over as I let go of him, allowing him to slip down the wall and slump at the bottom, unmoving. My muscles were slack with release.
Violence has beauty. Violence is the chief process by means of which the strong overcome the weak. It is the mechanism of natural selection, the impetus of evolution. It is nature’s editor. It’s also a kind of connection, a romance. It can be many things: a means, an end, art, destruction, addiction, flirtation, competition. Violence has beauty, yes: and beauty can be dangerous and misleading.
My friends—well, my companions, I suppose—were hooting and cheering. They’d aided me with the early stages of the beating, but for some reason they’d formed a habit of drawing back and leaving me alone at the end, to finish it. Perhaps because I did the dance so well. I knew the steps, and felt them in my heart. I was an artist of oppression, a painter in blood, re-sculptor of the human shape. I was the poet of violence, and I played the part of evolution’s cruel enactor better than anyone else.
‘I could only believe in a God who understood how to dance.’ So said Nietzsche.
I stood there, stone-still, staring down at my victim who lay in the looming Goliath of a shadow that I cast on the wall. He did not seem to breathe. I was tormented by the gruesome urge to bend down, put my hand over his mouth, to feel if there was breath coming from between his lips, or, perhaps still more deliciously, not.
A hand on my back, contact with a human. It calmed the beast, the avenging God in me. “That’s our boy, Tanner!” It was Dieter’s voice, my best friend, crowing on my behalf. “Teach scum like him to spit on the master race!”
“’All opposition must be stamped into the ground.’” That was me, wasn’t it, quoting a dictum of the Sturmabteilung. My voice sounded different than usual, as if I heard it on a recording. Or perhaps as if I’d become merely another speaker blaring propaganda.
They cheered me anyway (do you cheer the voice on the radio? You do now, don’t you, when the Führer speaks through the machine). “Excellent! Who’s going to buy our man a beer?” “Yeah, let’s have a round for our Ubermensch!” “Come back inside, you big mean son-of-a-bitch! We’ll drink to Germany.” “My god, you knocked him flat! Is the bastard still breathing?”
I wondered. Yet there was hardly any time, as I was being pushed back into the tavern by my guard of honor. Under lights so bright I could see nothing, assailed by conversation so loud I could not think, I quickly lost track of my conscience once again. I wordlessly accepted the beer that Dieter brought me and guzzled it without savor or complaint, like a child too sick to whine about the taste of his medicine.
I came here looking for life, for the struggle for perfection. I wanted to be the man they told me I could. I’d became a cog in the machine. Instead of discovering my humanness, I’d wakened the animal, the jungle part of me better left sleeping. Was that the party’s fallacy, or my own?
“Nationalsocialismus,” Someone proposed, by way of toast. I drank to it, or maybe, I was just drinking. It must have been the latter, because Dieter, as ever-watchful and sensitive to my moods as a house pet, was frowning at me.
“My friend,” he said to me, so quietly that his voice was almost just a part of the tavern-murmur, “Recent victory notwithstanding, you seem to be in low spirits.”
I grimaced and clenched my fingers around the mug. It was very cold, yet my palm was sweaty. “I don’t count it as a victory,” I muttered.
He chuckled indulgently. Dieter’s a pasty-faced thug, of lesser breeding than I but with almost equal education, who has foul breath from the cigars he smokes, the ends of which he tends to chew. He does this mainly when he’s thinking. I’ve never asked if it really assists the process of reasoning. He has features so bland and unremarkable that it seems as though even his face is wearing a uniform. In a sense, I suppose, it is. A brown shirt suits him no better or worse than it does any other blue-eyed blonde.
“What, you prefer a fair fight?”
I nodded tautly, looking at my mug, not at him. I wasn’t particularly keen to finish it. The beer was the color of frothy piss.
“Like when we crashed those Sozis last week,” I answered, forcing myself to take a gulp.
Dieter’s laugh was like a sheep’s bleating. “That was different?”
I set down the mug, a little too hard, but made myself look at him coolly. “Yes. They were able-bodied men, and the numbers were even.”
“They were impure.” Dieter gnawed on a fingernail, bit off a cuticle and spat it on the table. This time, I didn’t even wince. Good breeding, Caesar once said, does not include remarking upon the lack of it in others. “As long as it’s you against the racially or morally corrupt, liebe Tanner, the fight will never be fair.”
I grunted noncommittally and wondered why I needed to be told this over and over again, if it was true. The truth should only need to be spoken once. Why then do religious people need to hear sermons, do nations chant mottos, do men repeat credos?
Dieter went right on singing that old, old song; talking incessantly, mindlessly, like a voice on the radio, spouting words, just words, that were disconnected from any person. “Evolution isn’t a fair fight, Tanner. The odds are stacked. That’s how it should be: survival of the fittest. What do you think they mean when they say ‘let the best man win?’ When you look at it a certain way,” he said thoughtfully, or with some parody of thoughtfulness, “There are no fair fights.”
That at least was true, all too true. All fights are unfair. No two people are perfectly matched in ability, and circumstance, that most partial referee, can at any time intervene. A truly fair fight would never, ever end. The outcome of each finite struggle we may face in life is more or less preordained.
“If that’s so, then I can’t conceivably be proud of my win,” I flung back at him, allowing myself a smile.
He shrugged easily. “That’s not the point, is it? The point is that you’re serving the Party.”
“Oh yes?” I shot back. “By knocking out a single uppity Jew?”
Dieter’s expression was one of pain on my behalf, and of gentle disgust at my stupidity. “He cast a slur on all of us when he called you that name, Tanner.”
Schwule, he’d said. Homo. It was almost funny, the cruel accuracy with which he’d seen into the heart of my problems—well, some of them, anyway. Perhaps there was something to the old idea that Jews had occult powers, I thought with black humor, though I didn’t for a minute believe it.
I was momentarily overwhelmed with despair and fury. I wanted to grab Dieter and shake him until the cigar fell out of the corner of his mouth, until his teeth smashed together and his tongue was bitten bloody. ‘That’s not why I had to do it!’ I wanted to yell at him. ‘I had to prove it wasn’t true of me, had to show that I was man enough to be righteously outraged, instead of slinking away like a defeated archer whose opponent has hit far too near the mark!’
Lucky for me, I didn’t have time to put my foot in my mouth, because Dieter was pontificating again. “The purity of the S.A. has already been cast into doubt by some of our opponents. We can’t let filthy libel like that be spread.”
There was the word again, purity. The state of which I was still, at least hypothetically, the absolute paragon. Pure, like a blank canvas. Pure, like a virgin. What’s the use of unspoilt purity? I’d forgotten.
“To Germany,” someone on the other side of me proposed, as if to give me a timely reminder of why I was really doing all of this. I turned around with a smile on my face, raising my mug.
“I’ll drink to that!”

I leaned over the sink, scrubbing determinedly away at the muddy red-brown spots in the front of my shirt. Sure, we have the household help, but it simply doesn’t seem gentlemanly to make them work with bloodstains. Alternatively: why should there be more witnesses to my guilt? Should the old laundress find out after all these years that the young master was as brutish as a common butcher, or should the new young housemaid become terrified of me already? I would do it myself.
I was smoking as I worked—not a vulgarly expensive cigar like one of Dieter’s, but actually a cheap cigarette from a pack I’d bought on the way home. Probably I wouldn’t even have needed to pay the frightened shop-keeper, looking as I did as if I’d come straight from a slaughter. Were I the kind of brute that likes to throw the party’s weight around for little favors, he might have sold me his shop for free.
My reflection faced me out of multiple mirrors, and, like a crazy person, I couldn’t bear to look it in the eye. Out of the gore-splattered shirt, I really looked no less bestial, perhaps more. My membership on a rowing team meant more to me than just a chance to develop highly impressive muscles, for I really did enjoy the sport; however, I normally found the physique to be a nice side effect. Normally, I also politely enjoyed the frequent compliments about my handsomeness, though I wasn’t really vain. I had a typical Aryan face, though perhaps with eyes a little bluer, hair of a whiter gold, and more than the usual determination around the chin, refinement in the cheekbones, and petulance around the mouth. It was the eyelashes that made the girls love me, I was convinced of it. They weren’t too long, but they were significantly darker than my hair and gave my eyes an expression of what had been termed lazy playfulness. Yes, women loved me, and I did love women—with their slim, bendable waists and their frail, breakable wrists, with their velvety skin, their graceful necks. But they weren’t all that I loved.
Right now, my Aryan-ness, my strength, my perfection, all disgusted me. All I could think of was how each trait was, as Dieter had said, stacking the odds in my favor. Of how lucky I was that my sickness showed no outward symptoms, nothing that was visible to the casual observer or even to the prying eye, except to a canny Jew who’d diagnosed it at a glance. Such perception did not serve him well. I’d left him for dead. Perhaps, by now, he was.
Schwule. Homo. I couldn’t believe someone, especially a stranger, had found out. I ducked my head again to concentrate on a particularly stubborn spot. Perhaps tonight I’d had the tiniest taste of what it was like to be branded Jude. It was bitter indeed. But, generous as I was, I’d given far more than I got.
I put aside the shirt, clean as I could make it; then I bent my shoulders, bowed down my head until the stream of water from the faucet could run across the back of my neck. I let the cool deluge clear my head, staying that way until my eyes had stopped aching with tears that wouldn’t come.