How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie

Disturbing and fascinating, How to Quiet a Vampire takes the reader into the mind of Konrad Rutkowski, a former Gestapo officer who sets himself the impossible task of both renouncing and justifying his Nazi past through a series of letters to his brother-in-law. Pekić posits himself as an editor publishing these letters, adding subtitles from philosophical masterworks as well as endnotes and postscripts. These editions are particularly fitting as Konrad is himself a historian. Pekić also gives readers quality secondary sources, researched historical context, and his own often wry insights, all of which amplify the unsettling result that Konrad, “in his attempt to erase his old mindset, … renewed it in still a darker version.”

Konrad starts writing to Himlar (his brother-in-law and colleague) when he goes to D., a town on the Mediterranean coast of Yugoslavia where he had been stationed during WWII, on vacation with his wife Sabina. Past infiltrates present as he describes the town both on his entering it for holiday and when he entered as part of the Gestapo. Konrad alludes to an Adam Trpković, but focuses on describing the others in his unit, notably his commanding officer SS Standartenführer Heinrich Steinbrecher. Steinbrecher is a firm believer in the police state, a Jarvet-like character whose attention to detail and manipulation of logic is breathtaking. Upon taking possession of the former Italian police headquarters, everything from the color of the walls to the arrangement of the carpet fringe is considered and regulated. His frequent discourses are darkly absurd, delving into the inner workings of a police state, torture, and interrogation. He is clearly twisted yet the fascination hidden under all of Konrad’s loathing quickly becomes our own.

A prisoner is found in the basement of the new headquarters, one Adam Trpković who was arrested for not saluting the Italian flag because of his umbrella (which he oddly still has possession of). Konrad decides that he will attempt to free this man as a way of undermining the Nazi regime. Mean-while, in the present of 1965, Konrad and Sabina visit the unveiling of a statue of a local hero who resisted the Nazis. Konrad thinks it will be a worker who said nothing despite torture, but discovers that it is actually Adam (except that he does not have his umbrella). He offends both his wife and the local waiter (neither of whom know Konrad’s wartime activities) by commenting on the error that has been made and falls into a meditation on compromise and its role in his life.

Adam’s ghost appears and cuts into Konrad’s excuses – Konrad wanted to save Adam for purely selfish reasons, not altruistic ones. He accuses Konrad of being worse than a Nazi because he collaborated in full possession of his moral mechanism. Konrad didn’t hamper the Gestapo at all, despite what he claims to the contrary. He aided and abetted, something he has been loath to admit. The ghost claims to be an envoy from hell and charges Konrad with the mission of destroying the statue, saying that he needs to tell the truth for once in his life about himself and Adam. After the ghost leaves Konrad realizes he spoke more like Steinbrecher than Adam. Thus not only is the ghost’s existence ambiguous, but its identity and motives are as well.

Going back to Konrad’s past we see the methods he uses to try and release Adam turn against him. He believes he is outsmarting Steinbrecher and goes so far as to write up a completely false interrogation transcript, describing each move like a chess game with painstaking attention to detail. Adam signs it even without reading it. Konrad moves on to giving advice about what to do in an interrogation (never admit to anything because there are no minor confessions) and showing a superb example of manipulating facts to become whatever is desired, a truly Steinbrecherian feat. However Steinbrecher proves himself to be a master player once more, revealing that contrary to Konrad’s carefully falsified transcript, Adam in roughly fifteen minutes gave the list of conspirators’ names that they wanted with no problems. Despite his cooperation, Steinbrecher has decided to hang Adam simply to make the correct number for his initial gesture of German authority. He will hang four people because “four is the right number – logical, harmonious, closed on all sides,” and thus carries the proper message to the local populace.

Konrad is given another prisoner to question as a way of redeeming himself. The worker will not speak at all and Konrad ends up beating him to death. Konrad reveals himself to be no different than the others around him despite his talk of humanity. Now he questions if his attempts to save victims were worth anything and his “Steinbrecherization” becomes more and more clear (as well as his precarious mental state commented on by three different experts in the endnotes).

Konrad’s interview with the mayor and his attempts to vilify Adam turn into another exercise in logic twisting facts to fit desired conclusions; once more Konrad fails to achieve his objective. Adam’s ghost appears again, explaining how Konrad’s true failing is always seeking compromise and thus he does not have the extremity necessary for a will of his own. Adam wants his statue demolished and a deal with the devil is made (even as Konrad says he refused Adam’s offer with resoluteness we clearly cannot trust him).

Adam’s execution is the next major event, clouded by Konrad’s ruminations on the philosophy of language and Steinbrecher’s discourses on the theater of executions, the police state, and how to justify killings. Konrad subsequent ideas about the superman and eugenics are dramatically interrupted by Sabina’s screaming from the shower because ‘blood’ was coming from the showerhead. Despite the plumber saying it is mineral deposits, Konrad asserts that test results showed it to be 20 year-old blood (even as the editor notes the records agree with the plumber) and takes it as a warning sign.

Obviously unstable, Konrad tells us that Adam ascended after his hanging by his umbrella. Konrad also planned to shoot Steinbrecher (saying that killing him would not be murder at all) but fails to do so, instead locking himself in the toilet and then being sent to the hospital. All the while Konrad mediates on history, his past, logic, the police, and existence.

Konrad by this point has clearly become deranged; he beats his wife, who runs away to her brother. He truly has turned into what he claimed to despise – someone like Steinbrecher, like the vampire he was trying to quiet. The umbrella becomes more and more important as a manifestation of the devil and evil with its own will, a free agent of corruption. He seeks it out, thinking this will solve his problems – instead the umbrella takes possession. Konrad swings from apparent rationality to obvious insanity, descending into ellipses and going on an umbrella destroying rampage. Evidently the line between the two is not as defined as we would like to believe. By the end Konrad sounds exactly like Steinbrecher, adopting his logic and rhetorical style.

Even when Konrad’s letters end, the narrative continues with the postscripts reinforcing his discourses on confession, evil, corruption, and changing into a Steinbrecher. Konrad dies in a mysterious car crash, Adam’s umbrella between him and the wheel. Pekić assures us in the last endnote that the umbrella’s demonic career is over because it is locked and chained in the basement of his London house; an unsettling ending to an unsettling novel.

This translation not only captures Konrad’s grandiose style, delusions of grandeur and complex history, but also the richness of the philosophical meditations within it. Vampires, compromise, confession, and interrogation are just a few of the themes intricately woven together to show just how fine the nuance is between good and evil, right and wrong (if one even exists at all). A magnificently intelligent novel, thought-provoking and disturbing with a truly spectacular range of ideas, How to Quiet a Vampire makes us question whether we really are all that different than what we despise.