In Salzburg, Helmut first glanced at the contents of the pouch. It was packed with yellowed sheets of paper, and included transcripts of several conversations. He closed it after a few minutes. He didn’t need to read it just now. He had what he wanted, and it was time to enjoy himself with Ariane.
The Sassolini villa in Florence astonished Helmut. Two huge wrought-iron balconies overlooked the heart of the city. A labyrinth of rooms, whitewashed and neat, extended from an enclosed courtyard bursting with hanging vines, trees and flowers. The family had owned the building for generations. Ariane’s father was a lawyer for the government; her mother managed other family properties in Florence. One sister was a fledgling model; another was a high schooler. Her twin brothers were mischievous brats who upended every room they invaded. An older brother was studying to be a lawyer like his father.
Everyone was curious about Helmut. That he had expected. What was surprising to him was the fearful deference they paid to Ariane. She seemed to grow in stature as soon as she walked through the front door. Glowing with pride, Mama Sassolini hugged her daughter at every turn. The twins taunted Sofia, the youngest sister, but not Ariane, whom they approached warily.
When the beautiful sister, Adriana, came home, Helmut put the puzzle together. Mama Sassolini and Ariane were cooking their welcome-home dinner. Adriana said hello to Helmut, who was relaxing in the parlor. She asked him about renting an apartment in New York, and what difficulties she would face if she were a model. She asked him if he had ever traveled to Los Angeles. Her English was a mishmash of Italian and English words and phrases, and Helmut did have trouble understanding her. But the real reason was that Adriana was stunning. A perfect face, with the most seductive almond eyes he had ever seen. A body so proportioned that Helmut could not help but imagine discovering endless bliss over every curve. Adriana wore a tight black skirt with a blood-red silk blouse, and no bra. Yet, as their awkward attempt at conversation dragged on, her allure faded like a weakening scent. Helmut realized she just wasn’t that smart. Not dumb, but naïve. Maybe immature.
Helmut asked Adriana about her older sister, how Ariane had been as a child. Adriana rolled her lovely eyes and recounted the story of a young rebel. A girl who had been thrown out of Sunday school for arguing that the virginity of the Virgin Mary was preposterous. A young woman who had screamed at and fought with her father about what she wanted to do with her life, where she wanted to go. A sister who left for America without her parents’ blessing. Adriana Sassolini said that without Ariane, the trailblazer, the younger siblings, particularly the girls, would not have enjoyed the freedoms they took for granted every day. By dinnertime, when Ariane’s father returned home and greeted him with a warm, but formal hello, Helmut felt the tension swell in the house. The father and daughter found each other in the living room. Without hesitation, Ariane jumped into her father’s arms. Tears streamed down Don Sassolini’s fat cheeks and big nose. The man and the child sobbed in each other’s arms. Ariane was finally home.
A few nights later, Helmut began to flip through the old army pouch he had found at Melk. Several hundred pages of material were bound together with clips. These formed small piles of documents, transcripts and carbon copies. He examined the transcript of a conversation between Captain Johnson and Mr. Drabek. Mr. Drabek had originally been from Estonia. German soldiers had captured him two and a half years ago. Helmut looked for a date. At the top of the first page in tiny block figures, he found the numerical cipher: 160646 14:30. Next to it was “U.S. Third Army: Military Trial Records: Dachau, Germany.”
The conversation was really an interrogation. Captain Johnson asked questions about Mr. Drabek’s trek to various concentration camps and finally to Dachau. Mr. Drabek would answer dutifully. The transcript contained brackets where the translator would add commentary on the exact meaning of a phrase or what he thought Mr. Drabek had really meant to say.
The story Mr. Drabek told was grim. Captain Johnson pressed him for details about Nazi atrocities. Mr. Drabek described the repeated beatings and torture of prisoners weakened by malnutrition, starvation and grueling marches toward southern Germany. The prisoners had been made to stand abreast in excrement-filled boxcars. There had been countless suicides. Summary executions were carried out behind farmhouses, and in the middle of desolate roads. Fathers were executed in front of their families. People were forced to dig graves and then fill them with the bodies of friends and family. A German soldier laughed after committing murder. Jews. They wanted Jews, Mr. Drabek said. They were obsessed with killing Jews. Mr. Drabek had survived, he explained, because he wasn’t a Jew and because he was a good mechanic.
Captain Johnson devoted the last third of the interrogation to the grisly details of several incidents that occurred near the Dachau camp. Mr. Drabek claimed to know the names of some Germans who had perpetrated heinous acts against prisoners. He was asked to confine himself to eyewitness accounts of outright murders or fatal tortures of prisoners. Mr. Drabek indicated he had seen the guard Johann Lübeck smash his rifle butt against the face of a woman, a Mrs. Paslavsky, after she pleaded for the release of her daughter. The daughter had been dragged to the medical barracks, although she had not been ill. There were rumors, Mr. Drabek said, that German doctors were conducting experiments inside, with huge vats bubbling with a smoky liquid. Mrs. Paslavsky, her face bloody, latched onto Lübeck’s leg and swung wildly at his groin. He shot her in the stomach, in front of the other prisoners. Two other guards rushed out, screamed at Lübeck and dumped the moaning woman into a cart. Lübeck pushed the cart to the far edge of a fenced field, and dumped the body into a ravine. Then he picked up a bucket with yellow powder. With a practiced motion, the guard pitched arcs of color into the ravine as if he were spreading seeds in a field.
Mr. Drabek continued. An alcoholic sergeant with a psychotic temper routinely conducted surprise inspections in the middle of the night, and dragged men into a storage shed. Those who returned were badly beaten, bones broken, even sexually abused. Three men never returned. One inmate discovered a severed hand dangling on the camp’s barbed wire. He recognized a ring on the hand as belonging to one of those three men. The name of the sergeant? Sergeant Rudolf Spranger, Mr. Drabek answered. He had the ring, if Captain Johnson wanted to see it. He had traded some quinine for it. The ring saved his life. But Captain Johnson didn’t want to hear about the ring.
There was one other thing. Mr. Drabek said it was the worst because he saw it happen. He didn’t know the name of the man involved. The incident happened before any of the other things he had already told Captain Johnson about. Not long after he arrived at the Mühldorf camp, in the autumn of 1944, Mr. Drabek was working in a remote field, digging holes for a line of fence posts. It had been a sunny day. The work crew was near a thicket of trees and bushes, just beyond where the fence would be. It looked like a beautiful island of green to him. He was digging when he thought he heard a yelp. A puppy’s yelp. The sound came from the thicket. Mr. Drabek saw something move. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw the soft whiteness of a hand or a leg. Then he saw a young German soldier on the far side of the trees. He wasn’t one of the regular guards. The soldier was walking toward the thicket. Mr. Drabek saw something move again. Someone was there. The soldier reached the trees, glanced back. He didn’t pay any attention to the prisoners. They were far in front of him. The soldier slipped inside the thicket and took something from his breast pocket. Mr. Drabek saw a flash of metal. The soldier, just dark shadows and sunspots in the trees, unzipped his pants. Mr. Drabek thought he was going to pee. But then he fell to his knees, on top of a bush, what Mr. Drabek thought was a bush. Legs flailed in the branches. He heard a high-pitched moan, a woman’s moan. Then nothing. The bushes stopped trembling, the legs stopped flailing. He saw a figure hunch over a bush and fiddle with something for a few minutes. Then the soldier stood up and fixed himself. As the soldier walked back to the barracks, away from the prisoners, he cleaned several pairs of handcuffs on his trousers. Mr. Drabek turned to the thicket again. Nothing moved anymore. There was no sound.
Mr. Drabek didn’t know who the soldier was. He saw him once more, the next day. But the soldier had not been at Dachau when the Americans arrived. Mr. Drabek remembered the soldier’s face, though. With deep blue eyes and ghostlike skin. A young man in a trance, this soldier. He walked right past Mr. Drabek, who noticed the index finger on the soldier’s right hand was in a splint. That’s all Mr. Drabek remembered.
Helmut shook his head clear and left the papers beside his bed and tried to fall asleep. The next day, he and Ariane said a tearful goodbye to her family. He looked at the files again on the transatlantic fight home. Ariane dozed next to him.
Helmut flipped through another packet of testimony. It was a conversation between a Captain J. Miller and a Vytis Petruskas. Helmut read:
031146 11:30. You Americans are good. Let me tell you. But I have seen things that were not so good. Your soldiers, some of them, were not good. They did terrible things. It’s true. Who doesn’t hate the Germans? I certainly do. But you Americans must be careful you do not become like them. Not like them. Please. That would be such a waste. That would give me nothing to believe in anymore. I love America. America saved us from dying. America came to us. The soldiers who opened up Dachau were our friends. They helped us out. They gave us so much food my friends got sick from eating those first days when we won our freedom again. I love America, really. But I have to say this. At the end of March 1945. Right before the liberation. The exact date? I don’t know the exact date. Half of my mind is gone. You should be happy I’m still alive telling you this. Okay, I’ll go on. May I have a drink of water? Thank you. I think it was in March, maybe the last week. Okay? There was chaos everywhere. You didn’t know who was German and who was a prisoner. The Nazis were running away, the war was lost. I know two of the guards tried to steal the prison clothes from me and my friends. They wanted to hide from the Americans, from the Soviets. Prisoners roamed around in bands; groups of Nazis were everywhere too, scared and trying to hide. We just wanted to hide to keep from being shot by anyone who might want to shoot us. Mistakes could be made.
A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare. One day in the forest, three of us went searching for food. We were on a hill coming down when we heard voices yelling. We didn’t understand the language completely. It certainly wasn’t German or Russian. We thought it was English. A group of about fifteen soldiers had just captured seven German soldiers. A woman was with the Germans. Maybe an officer’s wife. The Americans were angry with the Germans. They were shouting at them. One of them was screaming out of control, raving. Screaming and pointing at the Germans. Another American soldier ran behind a clump of bushes and dragged out several bodies. Others helped him. Bodies of dead American soldiers. That was the first time I saw a black man and he was a body without life. Their hands were tied behind their backs. They had been shot in the head. Four Americans. It was horrible to see this. Blood was everywhere. Now more American soldiers were yelling too. At each other. The Germans waited patiently, their arms raised. One American who was guarding the Germans was nervous, a blond fellow. He kept looking at the two who were screaming at each other. The other guard wasn’t nervous. He seemed bored. This is the one who fired the first shot. He shot one of the German prisoners in the chest, then the head. Then another one. The nervous one started shooting too. One soldier rushed to stop the shooting, but was grabbed by another soldier. More soldiers shot their weapons. The Germans were motionless, like cardboard. They fell back with bullets ripping up their uniforms. The only one they didn’t shoot was the German woman. The cold American soldier, the one who started this, raised his rifle to shoot her too. But he didn’t. He grabbed her and started ripping off her clothes, touching her. A good American soldier pushed the attacker off. When the other one got up to fight him, the rescuer hit him and screamed at him. Then he turned around and shot the woman in the head before she looked up to thank him. That’s what I saw. No, I don’t know who they were. I don’t know anything about those American soldiers. We ran back up the hill before anyone could see us.
May I have another drink of water? I have one more thing to say. One more thing before I go. You have been asking about what the Germans did to us when we were in the camp, right? I have just one thing to say. I made a promise to someone I met in Vilnius, when the Nazis invaded us and dragged us from our homes. I promised my friend I would take care of her daughter. Yishka died soon after the city was invaded and we were captured. The horrible thing was that she died slowly, of an infection, my beautiful Yishka. I felt terrible I could not get anything for her wounded leg and the German soldiers ignored me when I told them I needed something for her. What does this have to do with the camps? Well, if you wait a minute you will see. You Americans are so impatient! I waited long enough to be rescued. You can wait a few minutes for me to finish. Okay. Before Yishka died she asked me to watch out for her daughter. This happened when we were already heading south, in boxcars full of prisoners. The Germans just threw poor Yishka off the train when she died, like a sack of rotten potatoes. Yishka’s daughter stayed with me. I was like her father now. The girl was not just beautiful but strong. An epidemic of malaria broke out among the prisoners and she got sick. But she did not die. We made it together to Mühldorf after many days of struggle. There, I thought, if we could stay together we would be rescued after the war. There were rumors that the Americans were advancing, that the Russians were also attacking from the east. The last few months we knew something was about to happen. The guards would gossip anxiously. We hoped and then we would lose hope.
But at Mühldorf I did not keep my promise to my friend Yishka. The Germans slaughtered her daughter. When did this happen? The October before we were liberated. She had such a beautiful voice, this young angel. I had heard her sing once when we were being taken south to Mühldorf. But maybe she was too beautiful. One military officer, not much older than her, grabbed her one day, yanked her out of the women’s barracks. My friends told me she fought like a tiger and even hurt the German bastard. She grabbed a finger and almost twisted it off. But this only made it worse for her, I think. He punched her and tied her hands with shackles. Not only did he drag her out while the guards kept everyone else away, but he never brought her back. She was gone. That was the last time anyone saw her. No one knew exactly what happened to her. The German officer soon disappeared too. But I have no doubt she’s dead. I have no doubt about this at all. That’s all I have to say. What was her name? Anja Litvak. A child of God.
Helmut remembered the name Litvak from the papers in Hopfgartner’s office. Could Anja have been the daughter of Vladek Litvak? Could this nightmare be true? The director of the refugee center who had committed suicide in the Seine in Paris? After the suicide, the center had been the recipient of Hopfgartner’s anonymous donation. After the suicide, Hopfgartner had obsessively kept the old newspaper article for decades in his office cabinet. Anja Litvak, the daughter with the divine voice, from Vilnius, Lithuania. Anja, in the trees, Helmut thought. Anja Litvak, one young German soldier’s perverse delight when no one was looking. One worth three thousand marks of guilt. The reason why the professor had recklessly stolen documents from the authorities and hid them in the Melk library after the war! Werner Hopfgartner’s own guilt had betrayed him! Next to the sleeping Ariane, Helmut pushed his seat back and stared into the dawn of orange clouds in the horizon above the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, the sea of this reddish orange seemed to go on forever.
An icy snow covered the ground in New Haven. A northeaster had blown sheets of snow and rain across the coastline. The streets were deserted.
After Helmut dropped off Ariane, he drove home. His mind reeled. He imagined Anja Litvak shackled and tortured. He imagined her brave attempt to fight back, and that coward looking over his shoulder. Helmut imagined the carnal rape. It had been a clean and merciless destruction of innocent life. What an appalling lack of consequences! he thought. Only for a moment did Helmut think about turning in Werner Hopfgartner. Would the authorities believe Helmut had found these documents in Melk? Would they believe the documents referred to Hopfgartner? Would they believe the evidence–Hopfgartner’s handwritten note about the files in Melk, the old French newspaper article and the letter with the cashier’s check for the refugee center? Would they believe Helmut had found this evidence in Hopfgartner’s cabinet before the old man destroyed the originals? Would they believe anything at all? And in that moment, even after Helmut imagined that everyone would believe what he believed, this wasn’t enough. Turning Hopfgartner in was not nearly enough. Having Hopfgartner discredited and kicked out of the university, and even having him incarcerated forever—none of these punishments seemed enough.
‘Enough’ wasn’t even the right word for it. This wasn’t a matter of compensation or comparison. It wasn’t a matter of revenge. Helmut felt a personal connection to this act, its history, these years of deception, its resolution. He was a part of this truth. It was his truth now, to carry forward, to complete. It would have been the height of absurdity for him to try to communicate what he felt and what he reasoned. It would have been like trying to explain why you were truly in love with a particular person and how you knew what real love was. The experience of universal love linked you to every human being who had ever been in love. But it also particularized this love, with your own feelings and circumstances and capacities, so that no one else would know it as you did.
Anja Litvak was his angel, Helmut thought. Anja Litvak was his child. Anja Litvak was his blood. Helmut could not keep her out of his mind. He imagined he could have saved her even at the price of his own flesh. He imagined he could have freed her from that thicket of bushes and trees, and protected her. Helmut imagined a peace and a perfection that just wouldn’t allow for a death whose purpose was to fulfill simple greed or lust. He wanted to will into being a world without a murder all-too-easily born of the hope that no one was watching.
When, from these depths, Helmut Sanchez decided he would destroy Werner Hopfgartner for the murder of Anja Litvak, Helmut did so with the knowledge that this world wasn’t perfect. His dreams were just dreams, and this world was a nightmare to be possessed. It was his turn to stake his claim.