A sound swiring in his mind: Bang. Like a quick bark from a gun wasn't it? Yes. In Haeften's mind, now he is standing between two soldiers， they hold him tightly, just if he will become a bird and fly away from their eyes filled with hatred.
"Wow, two german soldiers? How interesting. Another prank to me." He thinked. He lowered his head and looked at his clothes. Very good, you have to do the whole set of acting. These Schei?e even borrowed military uniforms from the Wehrmacht(German armed forces).
He scoffed at the sheer detail of the "costume": the field-gray service tunic felt heavy and real, its dark green collar stiff against his neck with those silver litzen patches. They had even pinned a Wound Badge in Black and an Iron Cross 1st Class to his left pocket, right next to the ribbon of the Eastern Front Medal. He could felt the weight of the silver officer's aiguillette brushing his right shoulder, a perfect touch for an Oberleutnant. He might forget, he was never an Oberleutnant. Never.
"Do you really think I'm easy to deceive?" he muttered to himself. He wanted to turn his head so he could see what the hell is this going on here more clearly, but they suddenly turned his head straight to a open field which was cold and solemn. The light here was so garish that he almost felt a white wallpaper fill up his eyes.
"Stand still and looked to your partner. You traitor!" One of the soldiers shouted.
But this little time for observation was enough for him: He saw a dark sky, seem it is at night , but white beam made it more like daytime. The headlights of the armored vehicle lights illuminate the execution ground, enclosing them in a dazzling and bright circle of light, while the surroundings are absolutely dark. In this scene, the concrete wall appears extremely pale under strong light. Contrast with the small open field, on the other side, there's a line of soldiers, with a bunch of guns. Every move is like a clone action: Raise the gun, shoot, and then retract the gun.
Wait, shoot?
"You know what? I regret choosing History as my option." He became more awake now.
Beside him, there's a man speaking to another. He couldn't think what he was saying, and the soldier shouted again:
Next--Claus von Stauffenberg!
"Wait--Where am I?" He was really shocked. This familiar name replaced the gunshot sound, making him more confused. Stauffenberg is a student in Senior, what's this going on?
He saw that Stauffenberg was been pushed to the centre of the field, and soldiers were ordered to raise guns and shoot.
"Ready--"
"Aim--"
He doesn't know why, but his body was uncontrollable and ran in front of Stauffenberg. That sound finally sparked.
And he waked.
His back already sweating profusely.
A bad dream, a strange bad dream. He even thinks he could never go back to reality.
Sure he can't.
Haeften, from 1944 sit up straightly from the mattress and ducks to the bathroom naturally before he thinks. Cold water makes him calmer. And he started to think about the scene where he and Stauffenberg--a person he met before once or twice, but not a friend of his-- were shot by a ten-man firing squad. --But, this is the memory of another Haeften, who is also a stranger to him. A cold droplet of water accidentally slipped from his shirt and slipped into his chest, causing him to shiver and gently wipe it away with his fingertips, as if the pain in his heart had not yet faded away.
Monday, obviously a normal school day.
"Time to go to school!" Agnes von Haeften said. She's downstairs, but the voice was soft but clear.
"Agnes, please, not that too loud." A man's voice appeared.
Sure, he must remember, Agnes and Hans are always his parents. Even now, a place totally not in 1944.
He gets to know here pretty fast: Every notebook on the table, written the name "Werner von Haeften", and there are papers with full score neatly arranged on the bookshelf.
"I could do better." He smiles.
It's time to check the year. It isn't hard to see that this is an age far from the Third Reich. He casually opened a math notebook and picked up the latest page --2008.
"I know this is not 1944, but how can it be this far??"
"Are you coming downstairs or not?" Agnes calls him again.
Sitting in the car, Haeften still can't believe this truth. And he can't find a way to go back, to Stauffenberg's side. (Stauffenberg in 1944, he means.)
That Stauffenberg. Memories soared to his heart.
Recall the afternoon in November 1943, when I first walked into his office in the domestic reserve army (Ersatzheer). At that time, we had just survived from serious injuries on the front line, but there was no warmth of reunion among our comrades in the air, only suffocating vigilance and silence. The shadow of the Gestapo was everywhere, and in Berlin at that time, saying the wrong word meant the gallows. I stood straight, while Oberst von Stauffenberg, the new top boss, was staring at me with his only left right eye. There was no warmth in that blue Fluss(River) colored eye, deep like a dry well, piercing my cheek. His damaged right sleeve and left face with a black eye mask make him look like a cold military statue, and I am just a new assistant officer of unknown origin under his command. In each other's eyes, we may be fanatical Nazis loyal to the Frührer, or the eyeliner of informants.
He didn't rush to assign me documents and things to do, but instead, he knocked the desk slowly but powerfully with the remaining three fingers of his left hand.
"Oberleutnant Haeften,"
He suddenly spoke, speaking very slowly with a tentative hoarseness,
"What do you think of our 'complete victory' on the Eastern Front? "
That was a question that if I answered 'Heil Hitler', I was a dumbass at all. But if I show any pathetic emotion, as long as he comes out of this room and reports me, I will be sent to the guillotine. My back instantly sweated, my brain was blank, because the answer is close at hand, but a wrong one.
"Oberst von Stauffenberg,"
I took a deep breath and risked my life. I stared into his lone wolf-like eyes as I whispered,
"I think Deutschland is bleeding, and someone is pushing her into the abyss."
As the words fell, the room fell into a deathly silence. Stauffenberg's fingers tapping on the table stopped. What's that mean? Should I thanks to the god or not? At the moment, the coldness and suspicion in his eyes didn't completely disappear, but turned into a more cautious gaze. He's really like a lone wolf, and who said I'm not? We sniff each other's rebellious and dangerous scent. We vaguely see the light that belongs to the Heilige Deutschland (Holy Germany), but not to the Third Reich.
We are certainly not opponents; we are partners.
Haeften was still immersed in that cold Berlin afternoon, with a trembling feeling of life hanging by his fingertips.
"Haeften? Haeften?" Hans’s voice finally broke the spell. The car door opened, and the morning air rushed in, chilling the cabin. "We are arriving, Schatzi." He handed over a packed lunch. "Have a good day at school."
"Ah...Alright." Haeften mechanically responded, only to find himself unable to step out of the car door. His brain was still locked in the confrontation between loyalty and betrayal, unable to merge the modern streets in front of him with his memories.
What's wrong with you? You look exhausted, "Hans frowned anxiously, gesturing to reach out and pull him out of the car.
Haeften instinctively avoided his father's hand. This modern intimacy made him feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I'm gut! Tschüss, Vater! ”He forced a stiff smile until he saw the doubts on his father's face dissipate slightly, then turned around and walked towards the school gate.
He opened the school diary from Haeften 2008, compared it with the map, and walked through the intricate corridors. First class: History.
When he walked into the classroom, there was a piercing burst of laughter coming from the back row, which sounded like some kind of malicious cicada chirping. Among a group of boys and girls, a boy was pointing at Haeften and laughed,
"Hey! Are you going to talk about your long essay on the Third Reich today?" he exclaimed exaggeratedly,
"You're such a 'Little Führer'."
Haeften froze in place. His eyes, which had experienced war and conspiracy, swept over these children, only to find himself unable to find any words to counterattack at that moment. This modern humiliation left him more bewildered than the lights in the interrogation room.
A girl with bleached blonde hair and garish eyelashes screamed, "Müller is talking to you! Are you deaf?"
They barked like Obersts, but lacked the quiet command of the man he remembered. This **ing bastard Müller... he muttered to himself.
Half a day was spent in this nauseating atmosphere. It's unbelievable that this school even has a cafeteria. Haeften walked in with exhausted steps, his brain racing: he must accurately calculate the time and find a seat farthest from Müller's group. Although he was ridiculed in school, whenever he thought about the injuries he had suffered on the Eastern Front, the troubles in front of him seemed insignificant again.
However, tranquility is always short-lived. Müller deliberately lowered his voice and provoked as he passed by his desk,
"Heil Haeften! That’s what you want, huh? Fourth Reich Führer?"
Haeften’s blood boiled; He felt a surge of anger explode in his chest, and instinctively wanted to draw his gun. His fingertips swept over his thighs, but only touched the cold denim fabric. No gun holster, no Luger, nothing.
Suddenly, his gaze stopped.
In the front rows, there is a strange boy sitting. That is a lonely figure sitting between several rows of boys. That boy possessed a healthy, tanned complexion rather than a sickly pallor, thick and deep eyebrows, and a pair of blue eyes shimmered with a sharp, almost stubborn gleam.
At that moment, Haeften's breathing stopped. This person's demeanor, the lone wolf like sense of loneliness, and even the flames in his eyes all astonishingly matched his memory. But he doesn't look at all like a soldier who has been to the battlefield, but rather like a marginalized person who could be abandoned by this world at any moment.
Haeften stared fixedly at the back, his heart beating like a drum. He looks too much like Oberst von Stauffenberg... but who exactly is he?
The cafeteria noise， the clattering of plastic trays, the shrill laughter of teenagers—faded into a dull, white noise. In the middle of the crowded room, that boy wasn't talking and laughing, Different compared to the others.
Haeften didn't realize he was moving until his feet had already carried him halfway across the room. His body was acting on a muscle memory 35 years old. As an adjutant, his place was to gravitate toward that aura of command.
He stopped a few feet away, his so exciting but afraid. Up close, the resemblance was even more terrifying. Haeften remembered so well, he is Stauffenberg. And as the boy slowly looked up, he quirk with confused.
"Claus?" Haeften whispered. The name felt like a prayer and a transgression.
The boy didn't react to the name. He didn't offer a secret signal or a knowing nod. He stared at Haeften with a defensive intensity. It was the look of a predator who had grown used to watching for threats. To this boy, Werner von Haeften was a stranger—perhaps another person coming to join Müller’s ranks of tormentors.
"Are you talking to me?" the boy asked. His voice was steady, possessing an innate authority that didn't need a uniform to be felt.
Haeften felt a wave of coldness. He was looking at the man who was his entire world, yet he was staring into a void of non-recognition. To this Claus, Haeften didn't exist. He was just the weird student who looked like he was about to collapse.
"I... I thought you were someone else," Haeften stammered, his hand instinctively reaching for a holster that wasn't there.
The boy frowned, his stubborn blue eyes scanning Haeften’s pale face. He saw the way Haeften's hands shook, the way he looked marginalized and abandoned by this world.
"You're the new guy Müller was shouting at," Claus said. It wasn't a question. He stood up, and even in a modern school setting, he possessed a commanding presence that made Haeften feel smaller, more fragile. "Don't let them see you're afraid. That's what they want."
He began to pack his things to leave, his movements efficient and quick. Haeften felt a desperate, clawing need to tether himself to this person. He couldn't let him walk away—not again.
"Wait!" Haeften called out. Claus stopped, looking back over his shoulder with that piercing gaze.
Haeften's brain raced. He needed a reason to be near him, a way to serve him again without sounding insane. He remembered the History lesson. "I... I am struggling with the history curriculum. The Third Reich essay." Haeften dropped his head, a submissive gesture that came naturally in this man's presence. "I heard you're... the best. Could you help me?"
Claus stared at him for a long beat, his eyes searching Haeften's for any sign of a prank. He saw only a terrifyingly sincere desperation. Something in him relented—perhaps a subconscious recognition of the loyalty Haeften was offering.
"My home." Claus said shortly, scribbling an address on a scrap of paper. "Don't be late."
As Claus walked away, leaving Haeften alone in the aisle, he opened that note:
9 Uhr, Tristanstra?e 8, Wannsee.
Haeften gripped the paper so hard his knuckles turned white. He had his foot in the door. He would find out who this boy was, even if it meant rediscovering his Stauffenberg from scratch.
Lesson in the afternoon was a kind of secretive torture for him. He sat in the middle line seat of the classroom, to hide that bastard and to observate Stauffenberg better. Haeften's eye stick to his silhouette， Claus--the name called by the students and teachers here, concentrated on his notebook, writing something. as a top student, he always sitting front.
Haeften keenly observed that even as a student, Stauffenberg's sitting posture exuded a rigor engraved in his bones. His back was upright and his shoulders were straight, a posture that made Haeften feel as if the next second he walked over and called him Oberst von Stauffenberg, he would give him a gaze of scrutiny and majesty when he turned back.
However, Claus was only writing there. He has no missing fingers, his eye sockets are not covered in black eye masks, and there is no smell of Berlin dust or gunpowder in his mind.
"Haeften? Am I call you right? What are you looking for?"
A classmate next to him quietly poked his arm. It's a Italien boy who tryed to accost with him in the first lesson, named Gorlami.
Haeften suddenly snapped back to his senses, the cold and murderous aura flashing in his eyes made Gorlami shrink his neck. His finger take back fastly, as if Haeften targeted him as his next plot. That kind of emotion doesn't belong to a Senior student, which only the people who have seen dead people and pulled the trigger would have.
" Nothing...I'm..." He even startled himself.
"I'm just wondering why you know my name." He made his eye even more low.
"Oh, that, frankly to say, you freaked me out."
Gorlami swallowed his saliva, and continue the sentence,
"And, I think you are looking Claus, am I correcto?"
He continued to speak on his own， but there was a hint of awe in his tone this time,
"He's the weirdest person in our grade. But this is objectively, I didn't see any wrong with him. Anyway, although his grades are frighteningly good, no one dares to approach him. He's like...emm, like a lone wolf."
A lone wolf. This word pinched into Haeften's heart like a thin needle.
He is certainly a lone wolf, Haeften silently responded in his brain. Because in this world, there is no soul worthy of standing beside him.
Except...
Except for those who have already been strangled to death in the Plocen Lake prison or executed by firing squad in the backyard of Bendlerblock.
The time after school was so long, so the first thing he came home is to find a excuse.
"Schule ist so langweilig, und ich m?chte meine Hausaufgaben schreiben. Bis sp?ter, Vater!"(School is so boring, and I want to do my homework. See you later, father!)
He neatly arranged his shoes behind the entrance and rushed upstairs, entering the bedroom and sitting on the edge of the bed. He carefully recalled in his mind what everyone was holding in school.
Yes, computer.
He grab the computer and open it slowly. For god sake, there's a note on the case of the computer, a string of passwords, written by Haeften 2008 version.
He trembled as he entered the name into the search engine.
Countless messages instantly popped up on the screen:
Stauffenberg, July 20th Incident, Hero, Betrayer, Monument. He saw a series of photos. That's his familiar face, that's his familiar scar. In these historical archives, Haeften also found himself. In a blurry corner of the photo, he saw the young lad in the field-gray service tunic, closely following behind Stauffenberg, holding that deadly briefcase in his hand.
On the history books, they all died.
"I'm clearly here," Haeften caressed the cold computer screen, his fingertips sliding over his face in the black and white photo， and outlining Stauffenberg's face.
"I'm here, and you're here too."
A nearly insane sense of mission surged in his chest. Since fate has enabled him to cross the gap of eighty years and find his Oberst again in this absurd era of peace, he must complete the unfinished operation--his own operation, that is to protect Stauffenberg. He had to stand by him in a completely new, and even somewhat humble way.
He must force himself to learn everything about modern life. He endured nausea and looked at those so-called high school history textbooks, watching the definition of that war in later generations. He must make himself look like a "normal student", otherwise he will be locked up as a maniac, and lose the opportunity to approach Stauffenberg forever.
"What sweet, terrible enchantment,
Winter’s changing into May,
Snow is changing into blossom,
Your heart’s in love again."
--Neuer Frühling: ‘Unterm weissen Baume’, Heinrich Heine.
纯练英语加看 2008 阿汤的电影 Valkyrie结合史实论文写的。不过那个德语论文翻译过来看挺费劲的所以有纰漏见谅（）本人德语水平够呛 A1 依然给自己找罪受 555
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