F ritz smokes an entire pack of cigarettes before the girl arrives. He stands in the window and watches morning come to Munich, the first pedestrians on the sidewalks, the first cars speeding through the darkened streets. As the light comes, so does the laughter and loud conversation, faint but reassuring through the thick panes of his windows.
He slept only three hours, and during those hours he dreamed of Geli. Not the Geli who has haunted him for years, but the Geli he knew, the dead woman whom he touched ever so lightly so many years ago. He knows he cannot speak of this properly, of the elongated feel to the event, as if each minute lasted a day, nor can he describe the physical reality of the smell. It had been another presence in that room, a living reminder of the reality of death.
Father Pant had provided the only comfort, the only warmth, and that too Fritz cannot relay. How does he tell a girl he does not know about the faith he lost before the war? How does he explain that for a brief moment, Father Pant’s compassion revived that faith? The priest’s shock, horror, and concern revived similar emotions in Fritz, emotions he thought long dead, buried with his son, but dying since the war. He cannot explain how he needed to remind himself of God’s essential lack of caring, how often and how well God had shown his complete lack of mercy.
How Father Pant would have looked at him, at Fritz, if he had known, truly known, what sort of man Fritz was.
Fritz does not know how to explain the depth of his sudden feelings, the profound change Geli’s corpse and the priest’s humanity evoked in him. He has tried to find words for that experience since he awoke, but they are inadequate.
All of the horrible events of his life crystallised in that one moment and pointed the way to the future, to the gas chambers and death squads, the casual murders and the upcoming war itself. The atrocities, which some now saw as isolated, were part of a fabric, a thread, woven long before Hitler was born, long before any of them were born, and honed to a fineness in the years after the First World War.
Somewhere, somehow, the people around him took on a meanness, a lack of caring, a casual evil. And he had become so inured to it that it took a face like Geli Raubal’s, a reaction like the priest’s, to remind him that the world was meant to be different.
And yet it is not, even now. He stands at his window and hears the sound of construction not too far away. The Olympic Games, symbol of hope, an attempt to cover over that casual evil. But the evil will appear somewhere during the event He knows that. He does not know how. And if he were still a detective inspector, he would go to his chief and remind him that nothing is easy in this land. That an entire people do not unlearn hatred in less than a generation. That such hatred breeds extremism, not just in the Germans, but in everyone who contacts them.
Even the girl. Every time Fritz mentions Hitler, she shies back, as if she expects the man’s ghost to appear in the room. ‘I do not believe in studying the deeds of evil men,’ she has said, as if she had a choice, as if they all had a choice, as if closing one’s eyes made all the evil go away.
Closing one’s eyes only makes the evil thrive.
That is what he needs to tell her. Because in Geli Raubal’s face he saw a reflection, a reflection of all he had closed his eyes to, a reflection of all he has tried to forget.
When the girl, Annie, does arrive, she brings pastries from the bakery he has pointed her to. They look fresh but he does not eat, wanting instead to speak of his dream, of his memory. He waits until she finishes, until her coffee is gone, and her tape recorder is in its place. Then slowly, carefully, he speaks the words he has rehearsed, watching her face as he does.
Her eyes are wide, her cheeks flushed. As he describes the extent of the wounds, the edges of her mouth tighten. She is not an investigator. In her life, she probably has seen few corpses. She probably has seen only photographs of murder victims.
He does not describe the smell.
When he is finished, she says, ‘Why have I never heard of this case?’
Her voice shakes. Even though he has glossed over the details and has not spoken of his own change, he seems to have conveyed it. She is clearly moved. If she was not involved before, she is now.
‘You have not heard of it,’ he says, ‘because you were not meant to.’