Well, we pitched in, ferrying the people back to their villages and so on. Logistics. But the work also had its creative dimension. We used vans, vans marked with the Red Cross; and machine guns; and dynamite. I turned out to have a modest talent for neuropsychiatry. The men to whom I gave counseling (and prescribed sedatives) would, for a while, complain of nightmares, anxiety, and dyspepsia—but they all recovered by the end of the tour. The measures to which we were sometimes reduced were distressingly inelegant, and, in those cases where dynamite was used, required hours of backbreaking preparation. But this was our mission, after all: to make Germany whole. To heal her wounds and make her whole.
One morning of diagonal sleet and frozen puddles we were unloading some Jewish families at a rude hamlet on the River Bug. It was the usual sequence: we’d picked up this batch from the mass grave, in the woods, and stood waiting by the van on the approach road while the carbon monoxide went about its work. All my men were dressed as doctors, with their white smocks, their dangling stethoscopes, their talk and their laughter and their cigarettes, waiting for the familiar volley of shouts and thumps from within. I myself toyed with a philosophical perfecto.… We then drove them closer to town, where one of our men was readying the piles of clothes. Out they all filed. Among them was a mother and a baby, both naked, naturally, for now. The baby was weeping in a determined, muscular, long-haul rhythm, probably from earache. Its mother already looked exasperated by these cries. Indeed she looked stunned—stopped dead in the face. For a moment I wondered if she’d fully come round from the carbon monoxide. I was concerned.
We then escorted this group of about thirty souls into a low warehouse littered with primitive sewing machines and spindles and bolts of cloth. Normally, now, one would have to chivy them off into their cellars and outhouses. But these Jews, led by the weeping baby, made their solemn way past a series of curtains and blankets suspended from the ceiling and, one by one, backed their way through a missing panel in the wall. This panel I myself replaced with a softly spoken “Guten Tag.” I don’t know. I was moved, by their continued silence, by the baby’s muffled cries. “Raus! Raus!” I shouted—to the men, who romped off to explore the premises, and to lay out some trinkets, and some food, some bread and tomatoes, say, as was traditional, for the Jews’ later use. “Raus! Raus! Raus!” But I remained alone in the still warehouse, crouched by the wall, and listening. Listening? To the baby’s weeping, and to the sound that perhaps the whole planet makes when it tries to soothe: “Schh … Schh.” Hush now. I tiptoed away, and joined the men. Quiet. Best to leave them to it. Schh. This may be the way they soothe their young. Thirty souls in the black gap, saying Schh … The baby, then, was clearly much loved. But of course it had no power at all.
Finally Treblinka, on which we paid a brief courtesy call as we journeyed homeward through northern Poland to the Reich. This place too was already half-dismantled, its work done. As with Auschwitz, no memorial would mark the spot. But I wasn’t too late. I got to see the famous “railway station”—which was a prop, a facade. Looked at sideways on, it rose like a splint into the winter sky. The idea was, of course, to reassure the Jews—the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, and the Bialystok districts whom the camp had serviced. There were signs and so on, saying, Restaurant and Ticket Office and Telephone, and informing passengers where to change for their onward journey, and a clock. Every station, every journey, needs a clock. When we passed it, on our way to inspect the gravel pits, the big hand was on twelve and the little hand was on four. Which was incorrect! An error, a mistake: it was exactly 13:27. But we passed again, later, and the hands hadn’t moved to an earlier time. How could they move? They were painted, and would never move to an earlier time. Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.
Indeed, at the railway station in Treblinka, the four dimensions were intriguingly disposed. A place without depth. And a place without time.
Herta continues to be very good, or at least very silent, about my impotence. After my tour, I didn’t expect to hit top form right away. But this is ridiculous. It seems that the work I do takes so much of what is essential in me that there is nothing left. Nothing for Herta. In that sense I suppose I am making the ultimate sacrifice. During the counseling sessions some of the young troopers in the East mentioned impotence as being chief among their difficulties. My position there was simple: I told them not to worry about it. And that was a joke, because I was half-dead with worry myself. The bit of me, that is to say, that wasn’t dead already: from impotence. Yes, most amusing, telling them they have to be hard (harte), that they have to be men (Menschen). And there you are, facing each other, two soggy zeros. Multiply zero, or anything else, by zero, and you still get zero. Furthermore, I’ve been doing my sums in another area and generally putting two and two together, and I figure that something has to happen before I’m reposted—to account for the baby. Our baby is a bomb, too: a time bomb. And if I don’t do it … Herta’s belly has gone down now. I am no longer obliged to lurk limply behind her. These days I get to lurk limply on top of her. By my absence I am conspicuous. We don’t talk about it anymore, thank God. But I’m assuming it’s still noticed.
The act of love did happen—and only once, and only just—immediately before I took up my new post at Schloss Hartheim, near Linz, in the province of Austria. Real last-gasp stuff: it happened in the eye of a storm of tears that the whole house must have heard with horror. I was still crying when I put on my boots and picked up my kit bag; and after a few desperate embraces I burst out into the stars and the snow—the constellations of snow, the blizzard of stars.
With its noble grounds, its archways and courtyards, Schloss Hartheim—an hour from Linz, toward Eferding—looked fair to provide the ideal setting for my full recuperation. This Renaissance castle had until recently served as a children’s home. And when you sat, trembling forgetfully, on one of the benches in the frosted gardens, with the grass like white hair standing on end, you felt you could hear the ghosts of the children’s cries and shouts—for here they must surely have played in their packs. Behind you stood the tall windows, in fives, and the glimpsed interiors always the color of watery gravy. A bucket, a mop; an orderly in his white coat; a patient’s illegible gaze. That smell again. The sweet smell … Now I lean forward and pick up a dead bird whose wings sag open like a fan or like the streets of Berlin under their cam nets. Berlin, where Herta waits.
Considered as an institutional bridge, Schloss Hartheim was part of my winding down from the experience of the KZ. Apart from obvious differences in scale, there were close analogies. You found the same collegial spirit, with its masonic taciturnity and instinctive discretion, the same camaraderie and grit, the same alcohol reliance. I am positioned between the two chief medical officers and the fourteen nurses, seven male, seven female. This is not a convalescent home: no patient ever spends the night. Here comes the bus with its tinted windows. It surges up into the grounds of the fabled castle, into the cold and weary magic of Schloss Hartheim.
It went like this, the sequence. Step one saw the arrival of a regulation urn of ashes, sent to us direct by the patient’s family, who would also notify the Condolence-Letter Department in Berlin, with whom we worked in parallel. These ashes, in their small portions, were accompanied by the death certificates of distinct individuals; but ashes are just ashes, and they all look the same, and they went straight into the pot of the Hartheim incinerator. What was wrong? What was the matter? Were the ovens malfunctioning? Was the Chamber faulty? Because the people we produced just weren’t any good anymore. All the wizardry and delirium, all the insomnia and diarrhea of Auschwitz—it was failing. Yes, that’s right: the wards, the examination rooms, the silent gardens of Schloss Hartheim were heavy with a sense of failing magic. At first the patients really weren’t that bad. Some little defect. Clubfoot. Cleft palate. But later they were absolutely hopeless. I try not to look at them closely, the patie
nts, as I lead them in their paper bibs from the Chamber; I keep visualizing my own viscera, and there is something solid and man-made in there, like a lead pipe, snagged and dragging. Here, the gentle hesitancy of the blind. There, the lopsided, the scalene visage of the deaf. The white-haired lady looks nice but everything is wrong. The mad boy screams as he chases the male nurses down the damp corridors. The mad girl crouching in the corner with her frock up and the unforgivable substance coming from her mouth. There is such a thing, we say here, as life that is unworthy of life, and I don’t know about that, but nobody wants them, not even us, and they leave here the same day for some other place, in the coach with the tinted windows.
Herta comes down to visit me as often as she can, which is not very often, because this is wartime, after all. We stay at the Gasthaus Drei Krönen on the Landstrasse near Linz, where I am impotent, and once we had a romantic weekend at the Hotel Gretchen in Vienna, where I was impotent. There is a small officers’ annex in the village itself for me to be impotent at, and it is on this hygienic apartment that we increasingly depend. As time goes by, Herta seems more and more put out—by my impotence. She says I’ve changed but I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been impotent for as long as I can remember. She also upbraids me about the work I am engaged in at Schloss Hartheim. There are rumors in the village, there is gossip—latrine talk. She has got it all wrong, but then, too, I pooh-pooh her less grandly than I might. We hold hands across the table in the coffee shop. We part. Later in the dusk I entertain a perplexed perfecto as I walk back up the hill to the castle, to Schloss Hartheim. Above its archways and gables the evening sky is full of our unmentionable mistakes, hydrocephalic clouds and the wrongly curved palate of the west, and the cinders of our fires. I can see a lock of snow-white human hair drifting upward, then joining the more elliptical and elemental rhythm of the middle air. Tonight there’ll be a party in the basement at the Schloss to mark the arrival of our five thousandth patient (though I’m sure we’ve had many, many more than that), with Manfred on accordion: songs, toasts, pink party hats. Christian Wirth, our roving director, will be there: his belly, his colorful language, his exploded drinker’s face. Patient Five Thousand will also be present, in paper hat (and paper shirt), suspended in its journey between fire and gas, awaiting its span of deformity, hallucination, and constant itching.… He walks on, alone, Odilo Unverdorben.
* * *
Fully alone.
I who have no name and no body—I have slipped out from under him and am now scattered above like flakes of ash-blonde human hair. No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart—and then he put them back together again. For a while it worked (there was redemption); and while it worked he and I were one, on the banks of the Vistula. He put us back together. But of course you shouldn’t be doing any of this kind of thing with human beings.… The party is over. He lies there in the peeling pyramid of the attic bedroom, on his cot shaped like a gutter. A damp pink pillow is twisted in his fists. I’ll always be here. But he’s on his own.
7
She loves me, she loves me not
The world has stopped making sense
again, and Odilo forgets everything
again (which is probably just as
well), and the war is over now (and it
seems pretty clear to me that we lost
it), and life goes on for a little while.
Odilo is innocent. His dreams are innocent, purged of menace and sickness. Oh, sure, he quivers on slippery poles as tall as the moon is high, and lopes nude down tunnels while alarm clocks sound, etc.—but there are no worrying resonances. And, as against that, his sleep savors many vulgar triumphs with treasure chests and locks of hair and sleeping beauties. And toilet bowls. The tutelary spirit of these dreams is no longer the man in the white coat and the black boots: it is a woman, a woman the size and shape of a galleon’s sail, who can forgive him everything. My hunch is that this woman is his mother, and I’m anxious to know when she’s going to show up. Odilo is innocent. Odilo is, it turns out, innocent, emotional, popular, and stupid.
Also potent. He has no power whatever, of course, and does his stuff in the Reserve Medical Corps with impeccable ovinity. But he’s potent. Ask little Herta, who will defeatedly attest to it. She can barely walk. National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology. Odilo is a doctor: a biological soldier. So this two-year orgy we’re having must form part of his personal campaign. He’s on active service; he smells powder; he’s going over the top for the baby. Yes, they still want one, even though Eva was such a disappointment. When Odilo has Herta on the bed, splayed and buckled, with her ankles on either side of the headboard, it’s as if he’s trying to kill something rather than create it. But we all know by now that violence creates, here on earth. Never before have we been so potent, not even in New York when we were combing nurses out of our hair. Herta sometimes looks as though she could do with the odd impotent interlude. But there aren’t any. What made the difference, I wonder? After Schloss Hartheim, which seemed to go on forever, the three of us moved out of her parents’ house and came down here to Munich and its Alpine air. Away from Herta’s childhood room, away from the angels on the walls that used to watch over her. Here, in our apartment, we have a skeleton watching over us, made of white wood, and anatomical drawings loud with ginger meat.
The German girl is a natural girl. She comes just as she is. With no makeup and hairy legs. This is okay by Odilo. In fact he forbids the use of cosmetics, even soap; and as for her hair and down, her crackling armpits, her upper locks and lower wreath—Herta, I suspect, could be woollier than any yak and still keep Odilo happy. He calls her his Schimpanse: his chimpanzee. I have to say that I’m mad about her too. Herta’s body gossips with youth. Her ears are like cookies, her teeth are like candy. Her flesh is as taut as the flesh of an olive. At first she wasn’t so keen, always complaining of tiredness or soreness or emotional unease; but these days, as Odilo says again and again to all his friends (and the compliment, I think, is pitched decorously high), she bangs like a shithouse door in a gale. Herta is so small that it seems natural to be quite strict with her. She is eighteen. And getting smaller all the time. One mustn’t give in to pessimism, and it’s pointless to look too far ahead, but in a couple of years she won’t even be legal.
It’s very sweet. Now that the wedding nears, Odilo is altogether gentler. He has stopped having tantrums. No longer is his chimpanzee required to do the housework naked, and on all fours. Herta responds with gratitude, and with an apparently unbounded tenderness, never seen before.… Erotic rapture, it transpires, is in a sense a reptilian condition. The higher mind, the soul, the princes of the faculties—they absent themselves. And so, too, most emphatically, does the reptile brain. Let me think about it. When reptile brains get together, they want to do harm from a position of safety. But when it’s just their bodies, they seem to want to do good, and close up, with maximum risk to the self. I don’t know. I’m still there, in their bed, and I like it; but the oozy ecstasy belongs to Odilo, that glistening lizard, and to Herta, that glistening lizardess, in their world of succulent slime, where no words are necessary: you just croak and hum.… Their love life is steadily divesting itself of all irregularities. For instance, they used to play a kind of game (about twice a week, or rather more often if Odilo put his foot down), where she must lie still and show no sign of life, throughout. Similarly, he used to take a healthy interest in his wife’s bowel movements, as is meet. But that’s all behind him now. When she weeps and sulks, he dries her tears with kisses, and not with a punch in the breasts. And nowadays she hardly cries at all: the wedding is only weeks away. Less and less often, though still pretty regularly (say most nights), Odilo quits his pact of reptiles and, with enthusiasm, seeks his herds of friends: their strength in musky numbers, their heat of hide and stall. We shout and we drool, with the distorted faces of babies; in
dividually we have no power or courage, but together we form a glowing mass. Often the night’s play begins with us going out and helping Jews. Odilo, Herta, and I are officially on our honeymoon now but in fact we’re going nowhere. Except back to Berlin, for the wedding.
My position on the Jews has always been without ambiguity. I like them. I am, I would say, one of nature’s philo-Semites. It’s their eyes I particularly admire. That glossy, heated look. An exoticism that points toward the transcendent—who knows? Anyway, why talk about their qualities? I am childless; but the Jews are my children and I love them as a parent should, which is to say that I don’t love them for their qualities (remarkable as these seem to me to be, naturally), and only wish them to exist, and to flourish, and to have their right to life and love.
I remember names and faces, names I heard called at dawn gatherings in town squares, or by empty fuel pits and antitank ditches, or under the light of policemen’s bonfires, or in waiting zones, in train stations, in green fields at night. And names I saw on printed lists, quotas, manifests. Lonka and Mania, and Zonka and Netka, Liebish, Feigele, Aizik, Yaacov, Motl, and Matla, and Zipora, and Margalit. Back from Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz, from Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Theresienstadt, from Buchenwald and Belsen and Majdanek, from Belzec, from Chelmno, from Treblinka, from Sobibor.
The sick smile that Odilo sported throughout his wedding day seems, in retrospect, all too appropriate. I kept seeing this leer of his, the leer of a wary yokel, reflected in the numerous little mirrors set around Herta’s marriage crown (traditional: to ward off evil spirits, and so on). Yes, his smile was a good commentary on the occasion; ditto the painfully explosive backslaps delivered by his many new men friends. How else should a person look, while, in the course of a single ceremony, he kisses everything goodbye—just blows it all away in a prodigal storm of confetti and rice? She gave me the wreath of myrtle, the saffron and cinnamon, the bread, the butter, and the rest of it. And I gave her all my power. We switched our rings from the fourth finger of the left hand to the fourth finger of the right. They said it was an auspicious marriage moon: it was rising. But I could see that the moon above my head was really on the wane. Hence the unbearable blows to back and shoulder. Hence the coprophagic smile. Hence Herta’s triumphal laughter.