Playing Chess with Rudolf Hess
I’m in Berlin. It’s nineteen eighty-four,
The Army on the Rhine, and I’m a nurse.
I’ve got an ego like an exocet,
(it’s safe enough, if regularly flattered),
and I have had enough of NAAFI-lore.
Four Powers – us, Froggie, Yank and Soviet –
have brought down on ourselves an endless curse:
we dance a careful monthly minuet
whose point is to uphold a badly-battered
self-image. Think of Tet – Lest We Forget!
A Captain of the Royal Medical Corps
(as sexy as a Wootton Bassett hearse)
Says, “Kathy, we’ve a mission for you, pet,”
(I got the feeling I was being Sepp Blattered).
She says, “We’ve carved you out a special chore.”
“We’ve got one inmate who’s a tad upset,
And you, we think, can put him in reverse ...”
The drill went on outside. Each pirouette
was polished like a boot. As if it mattered!
“Democracy will long be in your debt.”
As Häftling Hess held back the spring-hinged door,
his manner was teutonically terse.
I was the only woman that he’d met
in forty years. His chessmen were all scattered.
A single sock lay supine on the floor.
“So masculine, this space, I must regret,”
(all Germans, speaking English, think it’s verse),
“If I would say ‘bekom’, may I use ‘get’?”
He kept his overcoat on as we nattered.
I wore my civvies – Pringle puce twin-set.
He told me that my chess was very poor
(if anything, the practice made me worse:
but I won the NAAFI Cup that year, no sweat!)
His sense of self was ruinously shattered –
meticulous, but crap at keeping score!
I owe that man some sort of spiritual debt
(the kind of due you never reimburse),
that coelacanth in Spandau’s gloomy net,
his only greatcoat permanently spattered
with garden filth (and permanently wet!)
Whenever I think back on what he wore,
in my imagination I rehearse
short back and sides, the top still black as jet,
that turtle head, so wizened and so battered,
and I am not now what I was before.
Copyright © Michael Coy | Year Posted 2025
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