We are in the dank black sepulchre under Crematory IV. Doll stands there with his gun in one hand and a cigar in the other; he smooths his eyebrow with a little finger.
‘All right. Let’s practise your thrust. Let the weapon drop down out of your sleeve and into your hand. And spear that sack there. As fast as you can . . . Very good, Sonder. I think you’ve had a bit or practice already, ne? Listen. To repeat. They will come for Shulamith Zachariasz at noon on May the first. Unless I countermand my order that morning by telephone. So it’s very simple. And very elegant.’
He steps forward and leans into me, chin to chin, saying bright-eyed in a spray of spittle,
‘Walpurgisnacht, nicht? Walpurgisnacht. Nicht? Nicht? Yech? Nicht? Yech? Nicht. Walpurgisnacht . . . Sonder, the only way you can keep your wife alive’, he said, ‘is by killing mine. Klar?’
The earth obeys the laws of physics, turning on its axis and describing its loop round the sun. So the days pass, the land thaws, the air warms . . .
It is midnight on the spur. The transport has made good time from the camp in unoccupied France. Each boxcar was equipped with a keg of water and, even more unusually, a child’s potty. The selection is beginning, and the queue, winding down the entire length of the platform (traced by the white glow of the reflectors), remains orderly. Some of the floodlights are dimmed or have their faces averted; there is calm, and a soft breeze. A sudden flock of swallows dips and climbs.
They recast you (I am muttering to myself), they recast you in their own image, they recast you as if on a blacksmith’s workslab, and, having battered you into a different shape, they grease you with their fluids, they smear you with themselves . . .
I realise I am staring at a family of four: a woman of about twenty with an infant in her arms, flanked by a man of about thirty and another woman of about forty. It is really too late to intervene; and if there is the slightest commotion I will die tonight and Shulamith will die on May Day. And yet, eerily impelled, I approach, touch the man’s shoulder, draw him aside, and say as meaningly as I’ve ever said anything,
‘Monsieur, prenez le garçon et donnez–le à sa grand-mère. S’il vous plaît, Monsieur. Croyez moi. Croyez moi. Celui n’est pas jeune?’ I shook my head. ‘Les mères ayant des enfants?’ I shook my head. ‘Que pouvez-vous y perdre?’
After several minutes of troubled hesitation he does as I say. And, when their turn comes, Professor Entress selects two, and not one, to the right.
So I delay a death – the death of la femme. I have, for now, saved a wife. More than this, for the first time in fifteen months I have suffered a man to look into my eyes. I take this as a sign.
It is not today. It is not even tomorrow. It is the day after that.
I am in the empty changing room at the Little Brown Bower. There will again be a very long delay caused by the handlers of the Zyklon B, who are both incapacitated by drugs or alcohol and will have to be replaced.
We are awaiting a transport from Hamburg, the SS and I.
The undressing area looks businesslike with its hooks and benches, its signs in all the languages of Europe; and the hosed-down gas chamber has resumed its imitation of a shower room, with nozzles (but with no drains set into the floor).
Here they come. They are filing in now, and my Sonders move among them.
An Unterscharfuhrer hands me a note from Lagerfuhrer Prufer. It says:
20 Wagons (approx. 90 in each) out of Hamburg. Stop at Warsaw: additional 2 Wagons. Total: 22 Wagons. 1,980 Settlers minus 10% found fit for work = 1,782 approx.
I see a boy, who is clearly alone, walking strangely and painfully. He is club-footed – and his surgical boot will have been left in the stack on the platform, along with all the other trusses and braces and prostheses.
‘Witold?’ I say. ‘Witold.’
He looks up at me, and after a moment of emptiness his face flares with gratitude and relief.
‘Mr Zachariasz! Where’s Chaim? I went looking for him.’
‘Went looking for him where?’
‘At the bakery. It’s shut. It’s boarded up. I asked next door and they said Chaim went ages ago. With you and Schol.’
‘And his mother? His mother? Pani Zachariasz?’
‘They said she went too.’
‘On a transport?’
‘No. Walking. Her brother took her. Mr Zachariasz, I got arrested! At the station. For vagrancy. Pawiak Prison! We thought they were going to shoot us but they changed their minds. Is Chaim here?’
‘Yes, he’s here,’ I say. ‘Witold, come with me. Come on. Come.’
It is spring in the birch wood. The silver bark is peeling; the brisk wind frees droplets of moisture from the papery leaves.
I give the Kapo, Krebbs, a meaning look and say with the authority the German power has invested in me, ‘Kannst du mich mal zwei Minuten entbehren?’
With my hand on his arm I lead Witold down the path lined with flowerpots to the white wicket gate. I stand in front of him and hold his shoulders and say,
‘Yes, Chaim’s here. With his brother. They’re working in the home farm. In the fields. With any luck you’ll get the same job. They’re big boys now. They’ve grown.’
‘What about my boot? I’ll be needing my boot for the fields.’
‘All the luggage will be waiting at the guest house.’
A sound makes me look up: Doll’s staff car, its flabby bald tyres slithering furiously in the mud. I gesture to Krebbs.
‘You’ll get cheese sandwiches straight away, and then there’ll be a hot meal later on. I’ll have Chaim come and find you.’
‘Oh, that’d be good.’
And those are his last words.
‘What was going on there?’ asks Doll as he watches the body being dragged behind the ambulance.
‘A troublemaker, sir. He kept asking for his surgical boot.’
‘His surgical boot. Yes, I could tell there was something wrong with him. Friday at six, Sonder. In the garden. As night falls.’
I flinch as a bird flies so low that I see its huge shadow sweep across my chest. ‘As night falls, sir.’
From 1934 to 1937 Witold Trzeciak and my Chaim were as close as twins. They spent every weekend together, either in his house or our house (and sleeping, at the slightest excuse – a frightening story, a black cat glimpsed under a ladder, Halloween, or indeed Walpurgis Night – in the same single bed).
In 1938 his parents divorced, and Witold became a grimly intrepid little commuter between Łódź (father) and Warsaw (mother). He went on doing this until well after the invasion. In 1939 Witold was twelve.
Now he falls as if in a swoon. Krebbs steps back. It takes Witold less than a minute to die. About twenty seconds pass, and he is gone. There are fewer things to say goodbye to, there is less life, less love (perhaps), and less memory needing to be scattered.
It is not tomorrow, it is not even the day after. It is the day after that.
CHAPTER VI. WALPURGIS NIGHT
1. THOMSEN: GROFAZ
ANY INTEREST I might have had in the cosmic-ice theory came to an end after four or five pages of ‘The Theory of the Cosmic Ice’; similarly, I satisfied myself about the thrust of volkisch Cultural Research after four or five minutes in the Ahnenerbe. So even if you included the massive handwritten exercise in hypocritical impartiality and rigour, my business in the capital was well and truly over by the last week of February.
All through the rain and wind of March I grew increasingly desperate to return to the Kat Zet. This tearing impatience did not centre on Hannah Doll (that situation, I hoped, was more or less static). No, I was in another kind of quandary: it had to do with the tempo of the Buna-Werke and the tempo of the war.
And what was keeping me? The indefinite but non-optional appointment with the Reichsleiter. Uncle Martin, at that time, seemed to be spending his entire life in the troposphere, as he shuttled between Alpine Bavaria and East Prussia, between the Eagle’s Nest and the Wolf’s Lair . . . Seven, eight, nine meeting
s were arranged, and then cancelled, by the trusted spinster Wibke Mundt – secretary to the Sekretar.
‘It’s this new interest of his, dear,’ she said on the phone. ‘He’s deeply engrossed.’
‘What in, Wibke?’
‘It’s the new craze. Diplomacy. He’s been going round with all these Magyars.’
She talked on. Uncle Martin’s remit was Hungary – the question of Hungary and her Jews.
‘I’m sorry, dear. I know you’re chafing. You’ll just have to sit back and enjoy Berlin.’
Unlike Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, and Mainz (together with the whole of the Ruhrgebiet), Berlin was still in one piece. There had been dozens of nuisance raids in late ’40 and early ’41; then these tapered off, and there was nothing at all in ’42. But everyone knew for a certainty that pretty soon the sky would be black with planes.
And it happened, after the Day of the Luftwaffe (parades, march pasts, grand ceremonies): on the night of March 1/2 came the first multi-squadron bombardment. Sirens woke me (three solid chords followed by a skirling howl); I lackadaisically donned my dressing gown and went and joined the drinks party in the Eden wine cellars. Ninety minutes later the decadent levity suddenly evaporated, and it seemed that a blind, stumbling, block-straddling giant was trudging its way towards us, with a prehistoric thunderclap at every footstep; just as we were wondering how we were going to die (atomised, scorched, crushed, smothered, drowned), Brobdingnag or Blunderbore just as suddenly lurched and veered and went crashing off to the east.
Hundreds dead, thousands injured, perhaps a hundred thousand homeless, and a million gaunt and horrified faces. Underfoot, an endless carpet of crackling glass, and overhead a fume-laden, sulphur-yellow sky. The war was finally coming home to the place where it started – coming home to the Wilhelmstrasse.
Something was already very wrong with the city, something was already very wrong with the movements and dispositions on the streets. After half an hour you realised what it was: there were no young men. You saw lightly guarded knots of bowed work crews (labourers from subjugated lands), and municipal police, and SS; but otherwise there were no young men.
No young men, except for those on crutches or in handcarts or rickshaws. And when you ventured down the steps to the pubs of the Potsdamer Platz, you noticed all the empty sleeves and empty trouserlegs (and, of course, all the smashed faces).
At night in the corridors of the hotel you saw lines of what seemed at first sight to be amputated limbs – jackboots, left out for shoeshine.
‘May I start with an attempt at perspective? It’s been much on my mind.’
‘Yes, sir, please do.’
‘. . . The crime without a name began, let’s say, on the thirty-first of July, ’41, at the zenith of Nazi power. The letter drafted by Eichmann and Heydrich and sent to Goring, who returned it with his signature. The Fuhrer’s “wish” – for a total solution. The letter said in effect, All month we have been assembling the manpower in the east. You have the authority. Begin.’
‘For full-scale . . .?’
‘Well, they were perhaps still thinking they’d just dump them somewhere cold and barren – after the quick win over Russia. Somewhere beyond the Urals and up in the Arctic Circle. Extermination the long way round. But there was pressure from below – a kind of extremism contest among the plenipotentiaries in Poland. You’ve gone and annexed an extra three million Jews, mein Fuhrer. We can’t cope with the numbers. Well? By August/September, as the territorial answer receded – another push on the levers. The moral breakthrough had been made. And what was it, Thomsen? Killing not just the men, which they’d been doing for months, but the women and the children.’
March 29. Konrad Peters in the Tiergarten – the garden of beasts – with its black boles and the icing of smoky dew on the grass . . . Professor Peters was even more senior, in both senses, and even more formidable than I remembered. Short, vast, and the shape of a rugby ball, with bow tie and richly colourful waistcoat, thick spectacles, and a huge frown-riven pate that was by now almost flawlessly bald. He looked like a dandified giant cut off at the legs. I said,
‘They claim there’s a rationale for the children, don’t they, sir?’
‘Yes. Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we’re at it.’
He rocked to a halt and for a moment seemed out of breath. I looked away. Then he flung his head back and marched on.
‘People, people like you and me, Thomsen, we wonder at the industrial nature of it, the modernity of it. And understandably so. It’s very striking. But the gas chambers and the crematories are just epiphenomena. The idea was to speed things up, and economise of course, and to spare the nerves of the killers. The killers . . . those slender reeds. But bullets and pyres would’ve done it in the end. They had the will.’
The pathways of the Tiergarten were dotted with other amblers and wanderers, in groups of two or three, bent in donnish converse; this was the capital’s equivalent of Hyde Park in London, with its Speakers’ Corner (though everyone here spoke not in shouts but in whispers). Peters said,
‘It’s known that the Einsatzgruppen have already killed well over a million with bullets. They would’ve got there – with bullets. Imagine. Millions of women and children. With bullets. They had the will.’
I asked him, ‘What d’you think . . . happened to us? Or to them?’
He said, ‘It is still happening. Something quite eerie and alien. I wouldn’t call it supernatural, but only because I don’t believe in the supernatural. It feels supernatural. They had the will? Where did they get it from? Their aggression has sulphur in it. A real whiff of hellfire. Or maybe, or maybe it’s quite human and plain and simple.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but how could it be?’
‘Maybe all this is just what follows when you keep putting it about that cruelty is a virtue. To be rewarded like any other virtue – with preferment and power. I don’t know. The appetite for death . . . In every direction. Forced abortions, sterilisations. Euthanasia – tens of thousands. The appetite for death is truly Aztec. Saturnian.’
‘So modernity and . . .’
‘Modern, even futuristic. Like the Buna-Werke was supposed to be – the biggest and most advanced plant in Europe. That, mixed with something incredibly ancient. Going back to when we were all mandrills and baboons.’
‘Decided on, you said, at the zenith of their power. And now?’
‘It will be prosecuted and perhaps completed in the colic of defeat. They know they’ve lost.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Berlin. The mood’s completely changed, it’s all flipped. Defeat is so palpable.’
‘Mm. Guess what everyone’s calling him now. After Africa. After Tunisgrad. Grofaz.’
‘Grofaz.’
‘A sort of acronym. Greatest field marshal of all time. It’s just childish German sarcasm – not bad expressively, though. Grofaz . . . It’s all changed. No more straight-arm salutes. It’s Guten Tag and Gruss Gott. Making scores of millions of Germans yell out your name thirty times a day, by law. The name of that osterreichisch guttersnipe . . . Well, the spell is broken. Our ten-year Walpurgisnacht is coming to an end.’
The branches of the trees were growing downy with green, and would soon be giving the place its usual deep shadows. I asked him how long it would take.
‘He won’t stop. Not till Berlin looks like Stalingrad. I suppose the resistance might manage to kill him.’
‘You mean the Vons – the colonels.’
‘Yes, the Junker colonels. But they keep arguing among themselves about the make-up of the government-in-waiting. A laughable waste of time and energy. As if the Allies’ll put another crew of Germans in charge. Prussians at that. Meanwhile, our petty-bourgeois Antichrist is keeping a lid on things – by means’, said Peters, in English, ‘of the nation’s nineteen
guillotines.’
I said, ‘Then why all the sour satisfaction? I can’t get over how pleased everyone looks.’
‘They feel Schadenfreude even for themselves.’ He halted again, and said with a sympathetic look, ‘Everyone’s pleased, Thomsen. Everyone except you.’
And I told him why. I didn’t attempt to vivify it; I didn’t say that every other time I closed my eyes I saw a flesh-coated skeleton pegged out on the whipping horse.
‘So Grofaz and Rupprecht Strunck, between them, have exposed me as a Schreibtischtater.’ A writing-table perpetrator – a desk murderer. ‘And for nothing.’
Peters scowled and raised a horizontal finger at me. ‘No, it’s not for nothing, Thomsen. The stakes are still enormous. Buna and synthetic fuel wouldn’t win the war but they’d prolong it. And with every day that goes by . . .’
‘That’s what I keep telling myself, sir. Still.’
‘Events will put a brake on your Herr Strunck, believe me. Very soon they’ll only be killing the women and the children. Because they’ll need the men for labour. So cheer up, eh? Look on the bright side. Shall I tell you the question that’s hanging in the air?’
‘If you would.’
‘Who are they killing the Jews for? Cui bono? Who will wallow in the fruits of a judenfrei Europe? Who will bask in its sun? Not the Reich. There won’t be a Reich . . .’
Just for a moment I thought of Hannah – and the unities, and what war does to them. Peters smiled and said,
‘You know the people Grofaz hates most – now? Because they failed him? Germans. You watch. After he’s chased out of Russia, all his efforts will be in the west. He wants the Russians to get here first. So hunker down.’
I shook his hand and I said I was grateful for his time and trouble.
He shrugged. ‘Kruger? Well, now we’re almost there.’
‘I’m pretty sure I’ll learn more. My uncle, he can’t resist a good story. In which case I’ll certainly . . .’