“You will lose your game,” Barlach said quietly.
Emmenberger laughed. “That is possible. I would be a poor chess player if I didn’t count on this possibility. But let’s have a closer look. The odds are all against you. At seven I will come with my knives, and if by some accident that does not happen, you will die of your sickness within a year. But what about my odds? Pretty bad, I admit: You’re already on my trail!”
The doctor laughed again.
“You seem to enjoy that,” the old man noted with surprise. The doctor seemed more and more strange to him.
“Yes, I admit it amuses me to see myself wriggling in your net like a fly, especially since you’re in my net at the same time. But let’s look further: Who put you on my trail?”
“I found it myself,” said the old man.
Emmenberger shook his head. “Let’s move on to more credible things,” he said. “As for my crimes—to use this popular expression—you don’t just ‘find’ them; this kind of thing doesn’t just fall in your lap. Especially not if you’re the Detective Inspector of the Bern City Police. As if I had stolen a bicycle or performed an abortion. Let’s look at my case. Since you’re beyond hope, you shall be permitted to learn the truth—that’s the prerogative of the doomed. I was careful, thorough, and pedantic—in this respect I did a clean, professional job—but despite all my precautions there is, of course, some circumstantial evidence against me. A crime without evidence is impossible in this world of chance. So let’s list the possibilities: Where could Inspector Barlach begin? First, there’s the photograph in Life. I have no idea who took the fantastic risk of shooting that picture; it’s bad enough that it exists. But let’s not exaggerate. Millions have seen this famous photograph, among them surely many who know me: and yet until now, no one has recognized me, the picture doesn’t show enough of my face. So who could recognize me? Either someone who saw me in Stutthof and knows me here—which is rather improbable, since the characters I brought with me from Stutthof are all under my thumb; but, like every coincidence, not impossible, therefore not to be discounted entirely—or someone who, similarly, remembers me from my life in Switzerland before nineteen thirty-two. There was an incident at that time, an experience I had as a young student in an alpine hut—oh I remember it well—it happened under a red evening sky: Hungertobel was one of the five men who were present at the time. It can therefore be assumed that Hungertobel was the one who recognized me.”
“Nonsense,” the old man firmly retorted. “That is an unjustified idea, an empty speculation, that’s all.” He sensed that his friend would be in grave danger if he did not succeed in diverting all suspicion from Hungertobel, though he could not quite imagine what this danger would consist of.
“Let’s not pass the death sentence on the poor old doctor too hastily. Let’s see if there’s any other evidence against me; that might exonerate him,” Emmenberger continued, his chin resting on his arms, which were still folded on the back of chair. “The business with Nehle. You found that out, too, Inspector, congratulations, it’s quite amazing, Dr. Marlok told me all about it. So let’s admit it: I myself gave Nehle the scar in his right eyebrow and the burn in his left lower arm, to make us identical, to make one out of two. I sent him to Chile under my name, and when he came home, as we had agreed—this simple-hearted nature-boy, who was never able to learn Latin or Greek but had this astonishing gift for medicine—I visited him in that rickety, crumbling hotel room in Hamburg and forced him to swallow a capsule of cyanide. C’est ça, as my beautiful mistress would say. Nehle was a man of honor. He submitted to his fate—I had to push a little, but there’s no need to go into that—and he simulated the most beautiful suicide imaginable. Let’s forget this scene among whores and sailors, in the foggy dawn of a half-incinerated, half-rotted city, with some lost ships blasting their foghorns somewhere out at sea, a melancholy sound, to be sure. That story was a risky game that could still trip me up rather badly; because who knows what that talented dilettante did in Santiago, and what sort of friends he kept, and who might suddenly turn up here in Zürich to visit Nehle? But let’s stick to facts.
“What would be the evidence against me if someone discovered this trail? First of all, we have Nehle’s ambi- tious idea of publishing articles in Lancet and the Swiss Medical Weekly. That could be a fatal piece of evidence if anyone thought of making a stylistic comparison with my own, earlier articles. Nehle’s style was too irrepressibly Berlinish. But to notice that, someone would have to read the articles, which again suggests a doctor. As you can see, things aren’t looking good for your friend. Granted, he’s unsuspecting. That’s in his favor. But when a criminologist joins him—as I’m forced to assume—I’m afraid I can no longer vouch for the old man.”
“I am here on a police assignment,” the inspector calmly replied. “The German police have become suspicious of you and have entrusted the investigation of your case to the Bern police. You will not operate on me today, because my death would convict you. And you will leave Hungertobel in peace as well.”
“Two minutes after eleven,” the doctor said.
“I can see,” Barlach replied.
“The police, the police,” Emmenberger continued, thoughtfully looking at the old man. “It is of course conceivable that even the police might find out about my life, but this strikes me as improbable, because it would be the most advantageous set-up for you. The German police giving the Bern police an assignment to find a criminal in Zürich! No, that doesn’t seem logical. I might believe it if you weren’t sick, if you weren’t in a life and death struggle yourself: for your operation and your sickness are genuine, I can tell as a doctor. And so is your widely reported dismissal from the police force. What sort of person are you? Mainly a tough and stubborn old man who hates to admit defeat and probably doesn’t like stepping down either. The possibility exists that you have taken up battle against me privately, on your own, without any support, without police backing, just you and your sickbed, so to speak, because of a vague suspicion that may have arisen in a conversation with Hungertobel, and no real proof. Maybe you were even too proud to involve anyone else besides Hungertobel, and even he seems to be highly uncertain. Your only concern was to prove that even as a sick man you can do a better job than the people who have dismissed you. I consider all this more probable than the possibility that the police would plunge an extremely sick man into such a delicate undertaking, especially since the police up to this hour have not sniffed out the right trail in the Fortschig case, which should have happened if they suspected me. You are alone and are proceeding against me alone, Inspector. I suspect that even that derelict writer didn’t have a clue.”
“Why did you kill him?” screamed the old man.
“As a precaution,” the doctor replied indifferently. “Ten after eleven. Time flies, sir, time flies. Caution requires that I kill Hungertobel, too.”
“You want to kill him?” cried the inspector, and he tried to sit up.
“Lie down!” Emmenberger commanded so firmly that the sick man obeyed. “Today is Thursday,” he said. “That’s when we doctors take an afternoon off, as you know. So I thought I would give you and Hungertobel and me the pleasure of a little get-together. He will come here by car from Bern.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“My little Tom Thumb will be sitting in the back of his car,” Emmenberger replied.
“The dwarf!” exclaimed the inspector.
“The dwarf,” said the doctor with a confirming nod. “Again and again the dwarf. A useful tool I brought back with me from Stutthof. The silly thing kept tripping me up when I was operating, and according to Herr Heinrich Himmler’s Reichsgesetz I was obligated to kill the little shrimp as ‘unworthy to live,’ as if there ever was an Arian giant who was more deserving of life! And why should I have, anyway? I have always loved curios, and a degraded human being makes a most reliable instrument. The little monkey sensed that he owed me his life, and that made him train
able, to my great advantage.”
The hands of the clock pointed at eleven fourteen.
The inspector was so tired that he closed his eyes for long moments; and each time he opened them again, he saw the clock, again and again the large, round clock, which appeared to be floating in mid-air. He understood now that there was no way out for him. Emmenberger had seen through him. He was lost, and Hungertobel, too, was lost.
“You are a nihilist,” he said softly, almost whispering, into the silent room, in which the only audible thing was the ticking of the clock. On and on.
“Are you saying that I believe in nothing?” asked Emmenberger, and his voice betrayed not the least bitterness.
“I can’t imagine that my words could have any other meaning,” the old man replied in his bed, his hands helpless on the blanket.
“What do you believe in, Inspector?” asked the doctor without changing his position, and he looked at the old man with intense curiosity.
Barlach was silent.
In the background, the clock was ticking steadily, the clock, always the same, with merciless hands imperceptibly and yet visibly pushing toward their goal.
“You are silent,” Emmenberger said, and now his voice had lost its elegant, playful manner and sounded clear and bright: “Silence. A man of our time does not like to answer this question: What do you believe in? It has become improper to ask that. People don’t like to make grand pronouncements, as they modestly say, and least of all to give definite answers, such as: ‘I believe in God the father, the son, and the holy ghost,’ as the Christians used to answer, proud that they were able to answer. Nowadays people like to keep silent when they are asked, like a girl when she’s asked an embarrassing question. Basically one doesn’t really know what it is one believes in. It’s not nothing, God knows, it’s definitely something, though one’s notions of it are rather vague, like some sort of inner fog—something like humanity, Christianity, tolerance, justice, socialism, loving one’s neighbor, things that sound rather hollow, and people admit that, too, but then they think: It doesn’t matter what you call it; what’s important is that you live a decent life according to your best conscience. And they’ll try to do that, partly by making an effort and partly by letting things drift. Everything they do, their deeds and their misdeeds, happens by chance, good and evil fall into their laps like lottery tickets; it’s by chance that one of them turns out well and the other ill. No matter: That fancy word, ‘nihilist,’ is always at hand as a weapon to throw—with a lot of bluster and even greater conviction—at anyone who makes them uneasy. I know these people, they are convinced it’s their right to claim that one plus one is three, four, or ninety-nine, and that it would be unfair to ask them to answer that one plus one is two. Anything that’s clear looks rigid to them, because in order to have clarity, you need character. They don’t realize that a determined Communist—to use a far-fetched example; for most Communists are Communists the way most Christians are Christians, out of a misunderstanding—they don’t realize that a person who believes with his whole soul in the necessity of revolution, and believes that only this path, even if it is paved with millions of corpses, will one day lead to a better world, is less of a nihilist than they are, than some Mr. Müller or Schmidt who believes neither in God nor in the absence of God, neither in hell nor in heaven, but only in his right to make money—a belief that they are too cowardly to postulate as a credo. And so they muddle along like worms in some sort of general pulp that doesn’t allow for any decisions, with a nebulous notion of something that is good and right and true, as if there could be such a thing when everything has been reduced to pulp.”
“I had no idea that a hangman is capable of such verbosity,” Barlach said. “I thought your kind would be sparing of words.”
“Good boy,” Emmenberger replied, laughing. “You seem to have regained your courage. Good boy! I need courageous people for my experiments in my laboratory. It’s a pity my object lessons always end with the death of the pupil. All right, let’s see what sort of faith I have, we’ll put mine and yours on a pair of scales and see which one of us has the greater faith, the nihilist—since you call me that—or the Christian. You have come to me in the name of humanity or some such idea, in order to destroy me. I don’t see how you can deny me the right to this curiosity.”
“I understand,” replied the inspector, wrestling with the fear that was building up in him, more and more powerfully, more and more menacingly, as the hands of the clock advanced: “Now you want to grind out your credo. It’s strange that mass murderers have one too.”
“It’s eleven thirty-five,” Emmenberger retorted.
“How nice of you to remind me,” groaned the old man, quivering with rage and impotence.
“Man! What is man?” laughed the doctor. “I am not ashamed to have a credo, I don’t shroud it in silence, as you do. Just as the Christians believe in three things that are only one thing, I believe in two things that are really one and the same. I believe that something is, and that I am. I believe in matter, which is simultaneously energy and mass, an incomprehensible one-and-allness, and a ball one can walk around, which we can touch and feel like a child’s ball, on which we live and travel through the uncanny emptiness of space; I believe in matter (what a shabby, empty thing it is, by comparison, to say: ‘I believe in a God’), palpable matter, graspable as an animal, as a plant, or as coal, and impossible to grasp, almost incalculable, as an atom; matter, which needs no God or whatever else you want to invent in addition; whose only, incomprehensible mystery is its being. And I believe that I am—a particle of matter, atom, energy, mass, molecule, as you are—and that my existence gives me the right to do what I want. As a particle, I am just a flash of an instant, a coincidence, just as life in this enormous world is just one of the measureless possibilities, and as much an accident as I am—move the earth a little closer to the sun and there would be no life—and my meaning consists of being nothing but an instant in time. Oh the tremendous night when I understood that! Nothing is holy but matter: man, animal, plant, moon, Milky Way, wherever I look I see accidental arrangements, all of them as insubstantial as foam, or waves on the water; it’s neither here nor there whether things are or are not; they are interchangeable. If they are not, something else is. When life on this planet dies out, it will reappear on another planet somewhere in the universe: just as the jackpot always turns up at some point, accidentally, according to the law of large numbers. It is ridiculous to lengthen the span of human life, because it will always be an illusion of duration; ridiculous to invent systems of power in order to vegetate for some years as the head of some state or some church. It’s meaningless to strive for the welfare of man in a world that is structured like a lottery—as if it there would be meaning in having each ticket win a penny instead of most of them winning nothing, as if there existed any other yearning but this one: to be, for once, that singular, solitary creature, that monster of injustice, who won the lottery. It is meaningless to believe in matter and at the same time in some sort of humanism, it is not possible to believe in anything other than matter and the I. There is no justice. How could matter be just? There is only freedom, which can not be earned (for that, there would have to be justice), but that has to be taken. Freedom is the courage of crime, because freedom itself is a crime.”
“I understand,” cried the inspector, convulsed in his white sheets like a dying animal at the edge of an endless, indifferent road. “You believe in nothing but the right to torture!”
“Bravo!” replied the doctor, clapping his hands. “Bravo! That’s what I call a good pupil: one who dares to deduce the law by which I live. Bravo, bravo.” (Again and again he clapped his hands.) “I dared to be myself and nothing besides. I devoted myself to that which made me free—murder and torture; for when I kill another human being—and I will do it again at seven—when I place myself outside of every human order that has been erected by our weakness, I become free, I become nothing but a moment, b
ut what a moment! An intensity as huge, as powerful, and as unjustified as matter, and in the screams and in the torment that burst out at me from open mouths and glassy eyes, in the quivering, helpless, white flesh under my knife, I see the reflection of my triumph, my freedom, and nothing else.”
The doctor fell silent. Slowly he rose and sat down on the operating table.
The clock above him showed three minutes to twelve, two minutes to twelve, twelve.
“Seven hours,” Barlach whispered almost inaudibly.
“Now show me your faith,” said Emmenberger. His voice was calm and matter-of-fact again, no longer hard and passionate.
Barlach did not respond.
“You are silent,” the doctor said sadly. “You’re always silent.”
The sick man did not respond.
“You’re silent, silent, silent,” the doctor said, leaning both hands on the operating table. “I stake everything on one ticket, unconditionally, I was powerful because I was never afraid, because I did not care whether I was discovered or not. I’m willing to stake everything again, a pure gamble. I will concede my defeat if you, Inspector, prove to me that you have a faith that is as great and as pure and unconditional as mine is.”
The old man was silent.
“Say something,” Emmenberger continued after a pause, during which he tensely and greedily watched the old man. “Give me an answer. You are a Christian. You have been baptized. Say to me: I believe with a certainty, with a strength that surpasses an abominable mass murderer’s belief in matter as the sun’s light surpasses a feeble winter moon. Or just this: with a strength equal to that of Christ, who is the son of God.”