A Visit From Hans Landa
Once upon a time in reverse point-of-view
I wrote this as an assignment submission for Amit Varma’s clear writing course. The idea was to pick a story/passage/scene of my choice and reverse the POV.
I chose the first scene from Inglourious Basterds. In the movie, Quentin Tarantino has cut between Hans Landa and Pierre LaPadite’s faces, but the dialogue, and thus the perspective, is dominated by Landa. I wanted to get into LaPadite’s head.
"Pappa!"
I heard them coming. Their percussive din cut through the silence between my axe hits. I just hadn't processed it fully when Julie spotted them through the clothesline. I looked up and saw two columns of grey silhouettes accompanying that sound towards us. It was all too familiar, this sight and sound of an approaching motorcade of uniformed men, and it often ended with loss.
The convoy whirred to a pause outside my house. An officer, high-ranking going by his blazer and the convertible he had just stepped out from, walked over to me. He was carrying a black leather folder.
"Is this the property of Perrier LaPadite?" he asked me. I felt like he knew before I could answer. When I told him my name, he outstretched his hand and introduced himself as Colonel Hans Landa of the Secret Service.
It was the last name I had wanted to hear. Over the past few months, I had heard about him from sweaty faces with trembling voices. He was called The Jew Hunter, and Hitler had specially placed him here to round off all Jews who hadn't been killed or put in ghettos.
He spoke with a beaming smile and exaggerated gestures. The gentility was unnerving.
We agreed that we best talk inside the house. My wife, Charlotte, and our three daughters were standing near the kitchen. The Colonel went over to Charlotte and introduced himself with a disconcerting kiss to her hand. A little later, he held my eldest daughter Suzanne by the wrist when she was walking over to get him wine. I clenched my fists inside my pockets. He told me he preferred milk instead because he was at a farm. He gulped a glass of fresh milk down within seconds before showering more patronising praise on my family.
Landa then invited me to join him at the table and suggested we speak in private. As soon as my wife and daughters left, he, surprisingly, requested to switch to English. Till that point, his French had been immaculate, but he was now citing lack of knowledge. I didn't think I had much choice apart from agreeing in monosyllables.
He asked me if I knew who he was and what he had been sent to do. When I replied with a simple nod, he probed me like a teacher in primary school. I had to spell it out, each word pushing and pulling at me. I tried to mask my anxiety by telling him about a futile visit from the German military a few months back, but he barely paid attention.
While I was talking, Landa had taken out a set of papers from his folder. It had names of the Jewish families that had lived around here. He read them out, one by one, pausing to let the familiarity of loss pierce through me. They were all farming families and our only friends in this lonely place, but I now had no clue if they were alive. At times, given the fate Jews were subject to under the Nazi occupation, I hoped they weren't.
On his way down the list, Landa stopped at The Dreyfuses: they were the only family unaccounted for from his list. The farmer, his wife, and his brother had escaped before the Nazis could get to them. Before they set off south, they had left their two young children - Amos and Shosanna - with us. They didn't want to risk the kids getting caught on the run.
When I told Landa their age, he noted it down and closed the folder. I could feel my shoulders retract and my heartbeat slow down. The clouds were clearing.
He requested another glass of milk before leaving. As long as he left my family alone, he could have all the milk I had. Just as I was pouring into his glass, he asked me if I knew about his nickname. When I told him I did, he spoke about his fondness for it. He had earned the moniker of The Jew Hunter through his instincts and actions. He claimed to understand Jews more deeply than the average German, which I attributed to his Austrian roots.
He then introduced a comparison. Germans, he claimed, were similar to hawks because they shared a predatory instinct. Jews were similar to rats. I let it slide as typical propaganda, spoken in the same timbre as Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the band.
But just then, Landa elaborated his idea: it wasn't, according to him, an insult. The rats live in a hostile world: they are treated with disgust by humans, even though they rarely attack unprovoked. He paused, almost letting the metaphor sink in, before continuing his ramble about how even I would treat the rats with the same animosity.
Just as I wondered where this was headed, he broke the silence by mentioning how Germans would rarely search for Jews at the right spots. They could only look at places that occurred as hideouts to them. Landa understood desperation; he knew where to look.
The elaborate play of the metaphor finally dawned on me; Landa's smile had vanished too.
I tried and tried but couldn't move as he asked me if and where I was sheltering the Dreyfus kids. He stood up and pointed to the floorboard, to which I could only nod. He then switched back to French and broke into an exaggerated charade, bidding me farewell and thanking me for my hospitality. Moments later, the Secret Service guards walked through the door.
Colonel Hans Landa opened his arms, screamed "Adieu," and dropped the guillotine blade. The sound of bullets, the sound of blood, the sound of loss.