Room no. 6—An MP-44, hung sidelong on the wall to the right. A World War II German assault rifle, supplied to Regiment 1083 of the 544th Division of the Wehrmacht, where Otto Schimek had been assigned to the 8th Panzergrenadier Company. First prototypes in 1941, first models in 1942, companies involved in the production Haenel and Walther. Elegant elongated shape, wide, heavy stock. Thirty-shot clip, bayonet and grenade launcher mounts, Zf telescopic sight. Practical, essential, eagerly welcomed by division commanders on the eastern front, where it was employed for the first time in 1942. High production costs, for that reason initially halted by the Führer, then stepped up due to the remarkable results achieved, leading the Soviets to produce the AK-47 Kalashnikov, similar in design and cartridge though made differently, milled for the Russians and non-milled for the Germans. In the final phase, equipped with a short cartridge (7.92 Kurz) and, in limited numbers, with an infrared device for night vision (the so-called Vampir). Subsequently named the Sturmgewehr 44, an assault rifle, but mainly for propaganda purposes, when the German Army was on the defensive, on all fronts. Supplied mainly to the crack infantry of the Waffen-SS. Used by the Vopos (the Deutsche Volkspolizei or German People’s Police) in the GDR and in the Czechoslovakian People’s Army and that of Yugoslavia until the ’80s. Models sometimes used by Islamic guerrillas in the Middle East.
“Otto Schimek, executed by the Wehrmacht for refusing to fire on the civilian population of Poland.” A plaque in gold letters at the entrance to the cemetery of Machowa, Poland. Summer red begonias on the tomb, watched over by white birches, a graceful, soaring Honor Guard among the tombstones and crosses. War and peace, perpetual peace thanks to war. A lovely cemetery, as orderly as a museum. The deceased down below surely experienced grim times, but at least they are spared further adversity.
Yes, it’s as if the two of them—Dr. Pollack and Christoph Ransmayr—had written the words on that tombstone, the reporter who’d gone to dig up that story, or nonstory, had said, at least for us Austrians, who perhaps without them, especially without Dr. Pollack and his famous first article, would not have paid much attention to that Polish mess.
Luisa had never managed to meet Dr. Pollack and Dr. Ransmayr, they were always busy or off traveling. It was their assistant or collaborator, Hascher, who received her. “What I know, he knows better,” Dr. Pollack had written to her. “We did the research together, and he is informed of everything.” Hascher had not objected, and Luisa had gone to see him at his home in Krumpendorf, on the banks of the Woerthersee, where the lake becomes a spongy, muddy marshland.
He’d shown her in and invited her to sit down. Polite, but seemingly uncomfortable, maybe irritated, the gray watery eyes flitting evasively among the furnishings in the room. “Oh, Schimek, I see, though after so many years . . .” He tried to appear distracted, but you could see he was a bit nervous. “And what exactly would you like to know? Oh, the rifle . . .” He looked almost absently out the window to his left. And suddenly sarcastic, almost aggressive: “Which rifle, the one with which he failed to shoot the hostages or the one the firing squad used to riddle him?” He hesitated a moment. “Or the one he tossed into the bushes, when . . . It must be the same one though, right?” He was uncertain. “Yes, I think so, it must be an MP-44, which was the one supplied to his regiment.” “Of course,” Luisa had said, “without your research, your investigations, that poor Otto would be one of the millions of unknown casualties, at least outside of his country, whereas now a steady stream of pilgrims visit his tomb, Poles, Germans and especially Austrians . . .” “It’s understandable,” he had smiled bitterly. “We too finally have a hero, an anti-Nazi martyr who refused to point his rifle at those hostages, we can’t believe it. Oh, do they still come?” He toyed with a button on his jacket. “You know, you really don’t feel like—when you hear talk of miracles, even if it’s true that the truck driver, what was his name, oh, Grębski, I think, Roman Grębski . . . that he was paralyzed and more dead than alive, as a result of the accident he’d had, whereas after they took him to that tomb he came back spry and good as new—and maybe without us he might not . . . —oh, my help was entirely secondary, I merely assisted with the research here and there, as directed by Dr. Pollack and Dr. Ransmayr. The Poles never stopped thanking us after Dr. Pollack’s first article appeared, they all but kissed our hands, but afterward, when they learned that while they were still thanking and blessing us, the second article had meantime come out—oh, the two of them wrote it, my contribution was modest, just a few details, some concrete facts—later on, as I was saying, when the second article appeared—you know, like a soap opera serial, ‘The Rise of Otto Schimek,’ ‘The Fall of Otto Schimek’ . . . after the second article they were ready to spit in our faces . . .”
He’d narrowed his eyes. His face was framed in the small window behind him, the glass streaked by snowflakes that melted as soon as they hit the pane leaving slanting trails of water, scars that lengthened into the deep creases of his face, accentuated when he squinted his eyes. God knows how things must look through those narrowed slits; the world, seen through those lidded eyes, must be a keen, sharp-edged blade, ready to wound. “Right,” he continued, “you must always take cover. Build yourself a nice wall, a high, impenetrable fortification. But what good is it if all of a sudden, just when you feel safe from everything and everyone, a crack suddenly appears in the wall, a crack that widens, grows, splits it apart? The curtain suddenly rises and you’re not yet ready, you’re alone on the stage, in front of an audience smiling contemptuously, cheerful and ruthless; you look behind you, to the wings, but the show is late, around you there is only the absurd coming and going of people carrying in chairs, moving them around and taking them away again.
“Poor Otto must have felt like that too, shoved onto the stage of war without understanding what was happening, what was about to hit him. A soldier with a swastika on his arm who, before going on stage, looks for his rifle, can’t find it; voices are heard, shouts of reproach, it must be the assistant director incensed at someone who still isn’t ready, a sergeant can be seen, his fat face furious beneath his helmet. And maybe he too, Pollack I mean, had gone a little too far; he had leaped forward, landing, surprised, in the middle of the scene, and then made an even bigger leap backward, but clumsily; a tumble, more than a leap, while the audience, taking it as a cheap gag, laughs callously and boos, some in the back rows even shouting obscenities. So it’s not clear where you stand; an actor hears the applause and the boos and tries to peer into the darkness, to distinguish a face, a look, in the murky dimness of the few iridescent lights, anyone in the shadowy crowd applauding or booing him, trying to figure out who’s clapping and who’s booing, who they are.
“No, the abandoned rifle turned up afterward”—Hascher had raised his eyelids, thick, heavy curtains, brooding and seemingly somewhat irritated—“and we were the ones who found it. Found, so to speak; how can you expect that after so many years, so many years later, under one bush or another . . . When I went to talk to the corporal who had been in the same company with Otto, he, rather than talk about Schimek, told me about all those soldiers hanged from the trees; the Feldgendarmerie wasted no time, let alone in those days when it was clear that everything was going to hell, and if someone tried to cut and run he quickly found the noose around his neck. In those days you thought about shooting, rather than not shooting; the Russians who were advancing, the Polish partisans, anyone you came across, even yourself, because in those days putting an end to it could seem like a relief. And a soldier like Otto, wounded by a Russian grenade moreover, might feel like being a hero . . .
“‘I know,’ the corporal told me, ‘that for you, who weren’t there, it can be difficult to understand. But in the smoke of those grenades, in the mud, with bombs and gunfire exploding in your ears as if it were your head firing and feeling the recoil, with those rifles blasting in your head and shrapnel that seemed to shatter inside you, shooting from your brain, when you don’t know whom you’re shooting at, who is shooting, well, being a hero . . . that poor Otto, after the grenade that he had taken in his pants, wasn’t even sure who he was anymore and in that state of shock . . . So I had him transported to the hospital in Tarnów and then I learned that he had disappeared, maybe ran away, I don’t know, and in those days you couldn’t give much thought to someone . . . even today you can’t . . . those times weren’t times; they weren’t even war, who knows what . . . an earthquake, a house caving in on you, you wake up and debris keeps falling on your head . . . it’s as if no one really existed any more, one man as good as any other, comrades and enemies—Well, a piece of bread undoubtedly tells you something, maybe he left the hospital to take a loaf of bread from a bakery gutted by bombs and then, with a loaf in your hand, dry and hard but good, solid, you don’t care all that much about everything else . . . and if the patrol then seizes you with the loaf and without the rifle, which is what happened . . .’
“That, more or less, is what the corporal said. In his recollection, there is no talk of rifles; he talks only about the loaf of bread. Schimek, a soldier without a rifle. It ended up somewhere, that rifle, in a bush, or under the rubble, in any case, he didn’t have it.
“Why, when it was learned—oh, well, learned . . . hypothesized—that this rifle was missing, did everybody get so angry? All we found was a gun that didn’t exist, that is, we didn’t find anything. But how do you find a piece, even a tiny piece, of a story like Schimek’s which doesn’t exist yet and therefore cannot be verified or even corrected because you don’t yet know what to look for to then be able to tell about it? Only at the end is there a story—sometimes not even then, there’s only a handful of unrelated, incoherent facts, a jumbled pack of cards, no longer in the deck and not yet dealt according to the game. Before the end, when it is therefore a good story though it doesn’t exist, you don’t know what its pieces are, in the verbosity and bustle of things and events, you don’t know what may be part of it. Why, for example, should a piece of that story be a rifle found or not found in a ditch rather than an empty box of ammunition or the tire of a jeep a few meters away, how can you know?
“Nevertheless, if the gun that wasn’t there had already been in the first article, there would perhaps have been fewer begonias and less flag-waving. It would have been quite a disappointment for many; for our foreign minister and Vice Chancellor Alois Mock, for instance, who had at least been able to finally lay a wreath on the tomb of an Austrian anti-Nazi martyr, and also for Austria, which was thereby able to wash its face a little. Of course it’s strange that it should wash its face only when a nice, unexpected opportunity to do so occurred, before that no one felt the need to. Dirty face or not, it was proud of its nice clean face, Austria Felix, the first victim of Nazi infamy, invaded by fire and sword and occupied by the army of the Third Reich, well, by the threat of fire and sword, with guns that had no need to spit out that fire, but did so just the same, violent invasion and barbaric occupation. Yes, 1,953 Viennese in all of Vienna vote against the Anschluss, not many, but what does that mean? Maybe it means something, but the story—when Hitler entered Vienna triumphantly on March 13, 1938, Hitler triumphant but also Vienna—has just begun, so we still don’t know what those 1,953 opposed and millions of favorable votes mean. We will perhaps know in the end—even though we don’t really know when a story ends either—and therefore we will never know.
“It would have been better for everyone if the truth about that MP-44 had come out right away—that is, if it had not come out, just as the rifle did not come up—in that case, no grave or tombstone. Of course, those priests harassed by the communists in Poland and those brave, even more harassed Polish workers in Gdansk and elsewhere in the country would have had to find some other basis of support, which they deserved, persecuted as they were by informers from the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, which the central office of the party’s Security Service had set on them like bedbugs, I say bedbugs for good reason, nasty filthy little creatures that sneak around like those others, equally hidden between the skin and one’s clothing. So it is not a bad thing, except perhaps for us, that the rifle hidden in the bushes did not come up that time, that no one realized it was missing. Those imbeciles fail to understand that the young man would deserve all that just the same—gravestone tomb pilgrimages church hymns prayers of thanksgiving for favors received—even if he had tossed away his rifle and been executed for that rather than for refusing to kill women and children.
“He was a good boy, Otto Schimek, of this there is no doubt, and no story, true or false, can say otherwise. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, and a person who in a war doesn’t shoot, especially in a heinous war like that, in those atrocious times with all those savage brutes around—‘I shoot a little here and there but no ciapo nissuno, I don’t hit nobody, my hands won’t never be bloody, but don’t tell nobody, for the love of God,’ he’d told his sister—a person like that deserves a monument regardless, and votive candles lit under his photograph, no matter why he didn’t shoot, even if it was only because he no longer had his rifle. He had retained his decency and the clean scent of wood from when he was apprenticed in Vienna’s second district to become a carpenter, as the priest from the Karmelitenkirche who had helped him had said; he didn’t do well, just as he hadn’t done well in elementary school, where they had placed him in a special-needs class. He hadn’t even learned spelling and grammar, as shown by the gross mistakes in the letter he wrote to his brother Rudi before the execution, but only a cretin can find fault with spelling and grammar errors in a gentle, loving, serene letter written by a boy just before he is shot.
“Yes, dear lady”—Hascher had said, pacing back and forth across the room between the armchair and the window, unthinkingly shifting a paperweight resting on some documents and newspapers every time he passed a small credenza—“it’s appropriate not to overlook anything, not even that letter, and it is especially important to make sure that the gun is the right one, an MP-44 is a relic after all and those flag-waving bigots said we had besmirched it. As if rifles, among other things, weren’t destined to be dragged through the mud, there’s a reason why they are constantly being polished and God help us if they didn’t shine like dancing shoes. If it hadn’t been for us—especially the two of them, I only helped out—I’d like to see if all those pilgrims who came to Machowa to sing ‘Glückliches Österreich, glückliche Jugend, die ein Vorbild hat für jede Tugend,’ ‘Fortunate Austria and fortunate youth who have a model for every virtue,’ ‘Wyrwij murom zeby krat Zerwij kajdany polam bat,’ ‘rip open the bars knock down the walls break the chains the knout and the hatchets . . .’ and President Lech Wałęsa, on August 1, 1994, in a speech to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising: ‘Auschwitz and Warsaw are on Polish soil. Otto Schimek also rests in this ground.’
“Yes, in the good old days of Solidarność Otto had become a symbol of resistance to communism, and the Polish media of the regime got angry at the Archbishop of Przemyśl, His Excellency Monsignor Ignatius Tokarczuk, who in front of 300,000 pilgrims in Częstochowa had celebrated Otto for his heroic refusal to obey inhuman orders, unacceptable for a Christian, and had urged the Poles, all Poles, to follow his example, to disobey authorities who want to impose acts contrary to the principles of the Church and of morality. Monsignor Tokarczuk might be grateful, he probably is, at least he was . . . Anyway, it is likely that the rifle was not fired or was fired aimlessly, any old how, just not to be conspicuous, though without bloodying his hands, as Otto had told his sister the last time he had gone to Vienna on leave after returning from the campaign in Yugoslavia, and before being sent with his regiment to Poland, for operations against the partisans in the area of Dębica.
“Actually”—Hascher was now staring out the window or maybe he was staring at his cigar, aimed at the window like a gun—“actually he said these things to his mother, Maria Schimek. His sister, Elfriede, heard them from her, at least so she said. Her mother, she’d added, repeated those words to her constantly, ‘My hands won’t never be bloody.’ She instead, Elfriede that is, remembered his departure when he’d been recalled. ‘He was seventeen years old, my mother and we sisters, especially me and Mina and Rosa, had always babied him so much, he was still little more than a child . . .’ Elfriede, the widow Kujal, an even more inconsolable sister than an inconsolable widow . . .
“‘He died because he did not want to kill,’ the article by Dr. Pollack began. ‘Who will ever know who Otto Schimek is, a young Austrian nonetheless revered in Poland as a martyr? Many lament the fact that our young people have no role models or that they have the wrong models; there are some, however, though too little is known about them.’ He, too, Dr. Pollack, was so touched by the story that he had written it with genuine emotion, something no longer done today. Yes, we journalists should do so every now and then, to move our readers a little more. The editor of the Oesterreichischer Beobachter always reminds us: the public likes to cry occasionally—not actually weep, but almost. Certainly neither Pollack nor Ransmayr were fazed by the loutish insolent abuse that was later heaped upon them by those devotees of Otto who earlier had praised them to the sky. A courageous, experienced journalist isn’t fazed by that, he’s well-aware that every decent act of love and truth is repaid with base affronts. The gratitude of the House of Habsburg, as they say in our country. The fact is that to us, if I may humbly include myself, Otto is more dear than he is to those sanctimonious hypocrites who later . . .
“Emphatic or not, the beginning of that article is the beginning of the story, the explosion of the affair. God decrees, fiat, and from nothing (or from almost nothing, from a tiny ovule) everything is born; similarly, from something overheard, from a flatus vocis drifting in the wind, by pure chance the story of Otto Schimek is born, solely because someone accidentally passes by, hears something, a whisper, before it’s lost in the wind, and concocts something based on it, repeating it so he won’t forget it, in his own words, of course”—Hascher went on, irritated—“those whispers weren’t yet words, and once he gets home and closes the door, leaving the howling wind outside, the story is already born, very quickly, like the world from that exploded egg. Is it true or false? Everything that happens is a master forgery. The entire universe is a retouched copy of some other world.
“A story, too, is a world, one of several possible worlds; who knows how many such universes there are besides ours—ours . . . well . . . not mine, not Schimek’s either, nor those who killed him, yet in some way . . . not ours, thank God, but . . . a world, a story, with its chapters, its parts, its settings, the Galician plain and the road that goes through Tarnów and Przemyśl, and the sun that rises and sets wanly on that torpid plain and that night, millions of millennia after the big bang and years and years after Otto’s death, when Elfriede . . .
“It was 1970, I think—according to our calendar, maybe Jews would assign a different date and Muslims yet another and paleontologists, geologists, physicists and cosmologists still others—that night when Elfriede had gotten off the bus on route E22, the Galician road that runs from Kraków to Ukraine. She had gotten off at the Machowa stop, where there was only a sign with the name of the village but no village, or at least none that could be seen, and found herself among the crosses of a cemetery. ‘I wandered here and there at random,’ she later told me when I met her in Vienna to learn more; ‘I walked back and forth from one grave to another,’ she repeated pensively, pacing between the few pieces of furniture in her room, in her home in Leopoldstadt. A home that gave you a feeling of great apathy, I don’t know why; life seemed to have drained out of it, an odor that seeps through the cracks and slips out of the room. That night, among the graves, Elfriede had not found anything and neither had I at her home in Vienna . . .
“But on the bleak, damp Galician plain that night in Machowa, Elfriede would later say, she had been overcome with emotion and upset enough to have become confused and a little lost, so much so that for years she forgot the house and farmyard with the poultry pen that she had seen when leaving the cemetery, the birches pale in the darkness, and the farmer who had led her to the rectory of the small wooden church, where Otto’s story as well as the location of his grave had been learned, as she reported, though later, much later.
“Then there is Machowa’s parish priest, Eugeniusz Szydlowski, interviewed at the time by a colleague of mine, a journalist from the Kronen Zeitung. There’s even a photograph. A broad Slavic face, not much hair, a few wisps on his nearly bald head, a raincoat over his clergyman’s cassock. ‘It was moving,’ the Kronen Zeitung reported his words, ‘I will never forget it. Since that time, that young martyr has been the patron saint of all of us, one of us here in Machowa. Born in Vienna, he died in Machowa—our true homeland is not where we happen to be born, but where we die, the earthly abode that becomes the gateway to the celestial homeland. The blood of a martyr made him Polish and a Christian twice over. One of us. I will never forget that day, when his sister Elfriede came to see me and told me everything. I was ashamed that I knew almost nothing about it.’
“She’s there too, in the photo, between those three priests, there she is, you look at her, in front of the monastery of the Redemptorist Fathers in Tuchów, three years after her first meeting with the parish priest. ‘She told me that her brother,’ the priest says, ‘whom she had not heard from for many years, had been shot by the Germans because he had refused to fire on some Poles, civilians, not military, women and children, twenty I believe, taken as hostages. Oh, I assure you, I had tears in my eyes, and as a priest I’d seen it all. She told me about their family, about her widowed mother with thirteen children, eight who had died at birth or were stillborn, God has them now in His glory, the others all raised in the purest Catholic faith, and about their very humble economic situation, about how difficult it was to make a living by repairing and selling used sewing machines—nearly new, the poor woman would say—to buy one of her children a pair of shoes that would later be handed down to another. A family deeply united, devout, especially toward the Madonna. It wasn’t easy being Catholic in the public housing flats in Red Vienna where they lived . . .’ But a Catholic, Fascist Austrian chancellor saw to it that Red Vienna’s working-class neighborhoods were bombed, that everyone was sprayed with red blood. Otto Schimek was nine years old when Austrian bombs fell on Austrian housing. Wien, Wien nur du allein.
“‘It was in front of the statue of the Virgin,’ the priest had continued, ‘owing to the devoutness of our faithful parishioner Franciszek Tobías, that Otto, as he wrote to his sisters when he was in Machowa, would stop to pray. I truly hope that our archbishop will be able to quickly initiate the process of beatification. It is certainly hasty to affirm it and I will not be so presumptuous as to offer him suggestions, however, the miraculous, in a word, astounding healing of our good parishioner Roman Grębski, and he’s not the only one . . .’
“In fact, a few years later the Archbishop of Tarnów, Monsignor Jerzy Ablewicz, celebrating Mass at Otto’s tomb in Machowa, stated solemnly (the Oesterreichischer Beobachter reported his words along with those of the Pope): ‘As soon as the process of beatification of Karolina Kózka is completed, we will take up the case of Otto Schimek.’ And His Holiness Wojtyła, deeply moved: ‘I would like to remember a dear person, beloved by our people, a soldier, an Austrian: his name was Otto Schimek and during the war, given orders to shoot and kill the civilian population, he refused to do so and was executed . . . The great distinction he has attained is the distinction of Servant of God. People of my nation constantly gather to pay tribute to this young Austrian. . . .’ John Paul II.
“But he did not bless the tombstone, as he wanted to. That rabid Jesuit, Reverend Groppe, SJ, interfered—all in all, given what he thought and said about the Poles, he could have added a second S to his title. He flew into a rage, one of the refugees told me, when he heard and read that at Otto’s grave they sang ‘Kiedy ranne wstaja zorze Tobie ziemia, Tobie morze,’ ‘when the morning dawn arises, to You the Earth, to You the sea.’ ‘Never mind yours or his or theirs, it’s our land, German soil,’ he thundered—I read his homilies—preaching to the exiles from the East on Saint Hedwig’s day. In any case he was glad to see that scandalous fraud come to naught; it would indeed be very fortunate for Schimek, he proclaimed, if the Lord had forgiven him and meanwhile the Polish bishops bring him up to repeat that East Prussia is urpolnisch when we all know that it’s urdeutsch. Did dear Otto therefore die for Poland? Yes, because his base act helped the Poles, and if all German soldiers were like him . . . Well, it’s not as if it would have ended much differently, though few German soldiers were like him . . .
“A big crowd, that day, at Monsignor Ablewicz’s Mass, unsurprisingly, everyone singing, the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom should I fear? Of course, especially when they began singing the hymn of Solidarność . . . I was there too, that time in Machowa; processions aren’t my cup of tea, but to see, among all those priests and nuns, the little Samaritans, boys and girls, in their white caps and blue capes with little red hearts . . . and among them so many faces of the SB—the secret police are the most transparent thing in the world, a spy is immediately recognizable, even from a distance, like the story that circulated in Poland about the Central Committee, which, to prevent its spies from being spotted, decided to hire Negroes who had never been in Poland before and were therefore unknown to everyone. Bland faces then, those spies, but nasty and obtuse, menacingly nasty, better off with those priests dressed in black, not that they inspire joy either, but preaching is still better than the SB. Even the smell, that stale odor in the sacristy, isn’t as bad as the rotten stench in the party’s headquarters. The agents slipped in, scribbled things on scraps of paper, tried to strike up a conversation between one psalm and another; not that they accomplished much, but it was annoying.
“But then seeing Polish and Austrian flags flying together—nothing to fear, Austria was a neutral country, not part of NATO or the Warsaw Pact—was a pleasure, because any reason, real or bogus, is good if it makes people hug and kiss rather than slaughter each other. Right, because even we in the Eastern March, as Austria was called from the time it happily entered the Reich—true, it was the Reich that entered Austria, but in the end it’s the same thing—we too were happy to lose our name, no more Austria, only March of the East, Ostmark, the Eastern March of the Reich, everyone in agreement, no, not everyone, only 99.73 percent of Austrians in the referendum proclaimed themselves happy to become inhabitants of the Eastern March, and keep in mind that Jews could not vote, so those 0.27 percent opposed were all pure Aryans. Blood is thicker than water. However, we too had invaded Poland by fire and sword on that September 1, 1939, we Germans and Germans of the Eastern March, among them Otto as well later on, and we beat the living daylights out of them, we destroyed 99 percent of Warsaw and if it’s helpful to now sing together, all together as Germans and Austro-Poles, not Austro-Germans and Poles, I too will put on the pale blue cape with the red little hearts. ‘This night our historical enemy attacked the Polish State without declaration of war. I confirm this fact and let God and History be my witness. At this historical moment I turn to all Citizens of the Polish State in the belief that the whole Nation will stand by our commander-in-chief and the armed forces in the fight for freedom, independence, honor and an appropriate response to the invader . . .’—Ignacy Moscicki, president of the Polish Republic, September 1, 1939. ‘This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5:45 A.M. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs . . .’—Adolf Hitler, address before the Reichstag, September 1, 1939.
“Yes”—Hascher resumed—“the bombs of the living are met with bombs. That’s why you’re better off with the dead than with the living, because you don’t have to drop bombs or be in danger of being bombed. ‘We would have buried the unknown German, even if we ourselves had killed him,’ the gravedigger Paul Koza said—actually he’s a farmer who for a little money and out of Christian piety also digs graves from time to time—‘it happens, especially in war and times like those when you don’t know what’s going on anymore, in any case it had nothing to do with Christian duty, we buried him in consecrated ground, although with those Germans you never know if they are Catholic or Protestant or godless, with a Pole at least you know he’s Catholic and you know where to put him, and he got the four shovelfuls of earth that everyone is entitled to. I heard about it only afterward from my daughter, she did it all, I stayed put at home, risking my life for someone they had already killed was asking a little too much, with the Germans you didn’t take chances.
“‘My daughter was more courageous, she was the one, and the good Lord even rewarded our good deed, because the day after that—one or two days, I don’t remember—a German who had come with his patrol told us that the dead man was a friend of his, at least so he thought, in fact, he was almost sure of it, and he let us get away before arbitrarily shooting things up a bit and burning an old sawmill near our house, for no reason, just to show that he was doing his duty; the rain, which had continued all night and all day, quickly put the fire out and we were able to get the mill back in shape when we got back.
“‘Only many years later, when even my daughter had forgotten, did we learn what had happened and who that dead boy was, and I hope he’s praying for us today. All things considered, it’s the least he can do after all we did for him, at our peril, not even thinking of fleeing before the Germans came, though they could have killed us too, it wouldn’t have been the first or last time, and maybe our fellow Poles might have taken us for collaborators, wasting our time burying a German, not to mention any Jews among them, they could have made us pay for it, me and my daughter, the one who helped me and is now in Tarnów—the other two had already fled months before, with their mother—they could have made us pay in full plus interest. Anyway, when the parish priest, yes, Father Szydlowski, told us who the dead boy was, and that he had been a hero and a good Christian, a true martyr, he was sure of it, the dead man’s sister herself, Elfriede, had told him, and now everyone knows . . .’
“Even the chance meeting on the train, Elfriede had told Father Szydlowski, had been a miracle, you could say. She had never been able to find out anything about her brother Otto and it bothered her. She had even turned to the Austrian Black Cross, the section that dealt with the graves of the war dead, but the office had replied, even in 1970, that they’d been unable to obtain any information about where he might be buried. She brooded over it, she spoke of nothing but that, even to people she didn’t know. Like the time on the train, on her way to Spittal to visit a cousin, when she was talking about it with a woman from Wiener Neustadt, and a man standing at the door of the compartment, who had overheard the whole story even though his back was turned to them and he was looking out the window, said that he knew Otto, that he was an old friend of his, that they had been in the same company, and that he’d heard he must have died somewhere around Tarnów or Przemyśl.
“No, not actually in Machowa, but in short, yes, in Pilzno, in the forest near Lipiny, less than ten kilometers from the cemetery of Machowa. ‘Of course I’ve seen the place,’ Elfriede said, ‘I had to see the place where my brother died, in the Lipiny forest, a very nice farmer, Czeslaw Madej is his name, took me there. I myself don’t even know why I set out like that, without having any idea . . . but I thought it was heaven above that let me meet that friend of Otto and so I went to Galicia. When I saw the sign Machowa it seemed to me that, in fact, the young man had been talking about that very place as he drew a sketch on a sheet of paper—not very exact—that was supposed to indicate the route to Ukraine and a couple of places where it must have happened. I got off, not really knowing where I was, what I was doing there, but, well, I felt like I was following a voice in my heart . . . Ottile, Ottile, where are you, I’m here, your Elfriede . . .’ and when the farmer whose farmhouse she had knocked at had brought her to the priest and she had showed him the sketch, he’d gone with her, in the cold, gray rain, and had led her to that small mound of earth in the forest. ‘Perhaps he is here,’ he’d told her. ‘Every so often we hear about a German soldier buried more or less here, the only one—you know, in war even Christian piety becomes difficult and after what happened it wasn’t easy to think, as we should have, that even a German soldier is our brother . . .’ Especially if he’s dead,” Hascher had remarked, brushing off some cigar ash that had fallen on his jacket like the grayish, snowy rain that was falling outside the window, and perhaps had also been falling that night in the forest where the priest and Elfriede wandered around aimlessly. “Graves, graves . . . the whole earth is a grave, isn’t it? Everywhere there is someone buried, or rather, there isn’t, he has become moist soil, yes, a few bones, like leftovers on a plate, but there is really no one in a grave anymore, they should write ‘here does not lie’ and the same goes for everyone in the world.
“‘You had already heard of this story?’ the reporter from the Kronen Zeitung had asked Machowa’s parish priest. ‘Yes, of course . . . well, that is . . . I knew that an unknown German soldier, whose body had been placed in a munitions chest in Pilzno, where he had died—shot to death for desertion and cowardice, some had heard, that was the rumor spread by the Nazis who were frightened by his example of courage and faith, as later became clear. That lie, the widow Kujal told me, had been told to the family in a dispatch from the war tribunal operating in Galicia, which had also let the family have the last letter written by Otto before his execution. The family did not even deign to refute the slander, what sense does it make to waste time arguing with the father of lies, with the Tempter? Just pray, Our Lord will be the One to confound him. Elfriede told me that three soldiers had brought him to the cemetery in Machowa, but that November night the ground was frozen and no grave could be dug. So they left him there, Elfriede kept saying, under a watery sleet, and they went away, planning to come back and bury him the next day. Later I learned that Matylda, the gravedigger’s daughter, had buried him. Without a coffin, because they had no money to pay for one and Danek Kopalski, the carpenter who made coffins for the graves in Machowa, refused, given that they couldn’t pay him, and it was understandable, you can’t expect a Pole to take the bread out of his own mouth for a dead German at a time of hunger . . . And so, Matylda told me, we dragged him through the snow.’
“No, no blood trail”—Hascher added—“it would be nice for the story, but the women never mentioned it; no reddish stain in the rain in the slush in the mud and in the furrow left behind by the dragged body, which quickly filled with murky water. Maybe the cold, stiff body wasn’t dripping any more blood, and at the morgue, namely the forest, that awaited him they undoubtedly did not do hematic analyses. ‘But you can see how they must have loved my brother,’ Elfriede went on, ‘if they practically apologized for not being able to pay for a coffin for him and had to bury him like that, in the cold and rain. A thing like that, in a time of war and with enemies, you only do for someone who has saved your life; maybe some of their relatives were among the hostages that Otto refused to kill.’
“By dredging up that story”—Hascher told Luisa—“we almost felt like we were the ones who buried that poor Otto in Machowa. The pen is a spade, it exposes graves, digs and reveals skeletons and secrets, or it covers them up with shovelfuls of words heavier than earth. It bores into the dirt and, depending, lays out the remains in darkness or in broad daylight, to general applause. Like until recently. Now, however, they just about call us, all three of us, Saujude, maybe communists. And to think that it is also our fault, sorry, I meant also thanks to us, that Monsignor Tokarczuk, in 1982, was able to thunder against General Jaruzelski, in that sermon in Częstochowa. ‘Brothers and sisters! Otto Schimek said no. He was executed and buried. A hero who paid the ultimate price in order to remain true to his conscience . . . but we too have our Polish Schimeks. The Schimeks of 1956, the Schimeks of Gdansk in 1970, the Schimeks of today, whom one day we will honor and celebrate as those who saved their honor and the honor of the nation!’ And what about the honor of those who dug up that honor and were then spat in the face?”
Hascher had blurted it out, no longer uncomfortable but furious. It’s good for your health, being angry; you feel confident, the world is a bunch of shit they throw at you, but you give it back tit for tat, shit for shit, only when you’re pissed are you really you, you know who you are, you’re that anger, a solid, well-defined “I” who knows what he’s doing and knows himself. You’re you, ready to return a slap in the face or even two. As long as there are dogs hounding you it means you exist, and you know who you are, principled in your fury. When he flew into a rage, she actually liked Hascher.
He wasn’t upset with those flag-waving bigots who called him and the two writers Jews and communists for having sullied the image of a pure Austrian Catholic hero, a banner of liberty and faith, saying that he had run off, taking advantage of being hospitalized for a slight wound, that he had been arrested three or four weeks later in Tarnów as he was roaming the streets in civilian clothes with a big loaf of bread under his arm, and shot a few days later for desertion.
According to several witnesses, German military authorities seemed more outraged over the loaf of bread than over his going AWOL—if in fact that’s what really happened, if it’s really true that he defected. A big loaf, the report of the Feldgendarmerie in Tarnów said, a dark loaf, carried under his arm the way a soldier should instead carry his rifle, fighting a war is not going to the bakery. That loaf must have also led the military court to be ill-disposed. Black bread, sour, made of rye and possibly potato. It must have been quite good, at least in those circumstances, because a bigger loaf keeps a little better, it doesn’t dry out until a little later. Bread, humble and good like the man himself . . . I was hungry, Colonel, Sir. All of Germany is hungry, soldier, you are here to defend it, to prevent the enemy, incited by the Jews, from taking bread away from German children. And today the German Jews, in Machowa they say, want to take away our martyr.
No, it wasn’t the abusive letters from the Otto Schimek Samaritan Group, with their flags sporting the Polish and Austrian colors, their pilgrimages and their works of mercy that troubled Hascher and his friends, the accusations of sullying a hero “of faith, truth and love,” as Prothonotary Apostolic Professor Monsignor Stanislaw Grzybek had said in his sermon in Kraków. And Dr. Pollack had certainly not been bothered by reading the book written against him by Lech Niekrasz, Spór o grenadiera Schimka (The Dispute over Grenadier Schimek), which portrays him as a malicious, caustic intellectual, perhaps of Jewish ancestry, sardonically satisfied with his iconoclasm.
No, it’s not the malice of others that wounds you; were it not for fundamental reasons of dignity, you would willingly offer the other cheek to your detractors, after all, who gives a damn. In fact, if a bastard picks on you, you feel you’re in the right. But if five sisters, Smilka, Dionisja, Ambrozja, Jadwiga and Marina, make a pilgrimage to the grave of that poor Otto and thank you for what you did for that hero, not knowing at the time that you later found out and wrote that he had instead deserted . . . Well, you feel somewhat hurt. Luckily there was always some SOB who made you feel you were justified, like that bastard Father Groppe who calls Schimek a coward, or like a certain Jan Suborski—they must be Jews, I’m sure, he had written from Wrocław, they destroy besmirch defile everything, they have it in for us Poles more than they do the Germans, and besides, before Hitler came they were hand in glove with the Germans against us.
Yes, Luisa said to herself, those three—Pollack, Ransmayr and Hascher—told the truth . . . but when? The first or the second time? Like Pontius Pilate, we don’t really know what truth is, and, unlike Pilate, we wouldn’t know whom to ask. Maybe it’s a landmine; it begins by destroying others and ends up destroying itself; it knocks the pedestal out from under an idol, and crash-bang! the idol falls, but then it smashes the plinth on which the pedestal rested and there’s another collapse, until the ground all around caves in and even the truth is sent flying, swallowed up by the quicksand to which it opened the way.
Sure, those priests singing hosannas at the tomb of a soldier holding a fake rifle instead of a real loaf of bread are irritating, but the spies from the Służba Bezpieczeństwa who mingle with them and mark down their names to report to the Central Security Service and the party’s higher bonzes turn your stomach. If someone ends up in trouble for having prayed at Schimek’s grave or for maybe having shouted “Long live the Schimeks of Poznań, long live the Schimeks of Gdansk!” and then someone else comes along to snatch away the flag for which that Schimek took a beating, to tell the first one that it’s not true, that in that grave lies not a hero but just a poor devil who didn’t make it, and if that someone then turns out to be the same one, the one who earlier sang the litanies of the hero and saint, well, then nothing makes any sense and you feel like taking it all back, the first article, the second and all the rest, like the one in the Tygodnik Powszechny, the Catholic weekly of Kraków, which compares Schimek to Father Kolbe and even argues that poor Otto is holier and more heroic because Father Kolbe was a priest and a mature man, whereas Otto was a boy who didn’t even know how to write properly and so it’s all the more miraculous that he found the strength, the courage—the last who became first. And the Arbeiterzeitung, an Austrian newspaper—a government publication, true, but still socialist—said more or less the same things.
So why go rummaging, nosing around underground? History is a garbage dump—of course, if you look closely useful things are also found, some object that’s still good that can be reutilized and recycled. Those beggars, in short, those historians who stick their hands in trash bins may sometimes even find something to eat . . . however, if they bring you stew in a restaurant, it may be best not to ask whether leftovers from the day before have been thrown back in—chewed up meat, Luisa’s friend Bepo always used to say, frowning and eyeing the dish suspiciously.
That’s why a waiter ducks his head when the rotten apples he’s served are thrown at him; he’s just trying to dodge them, it’s human nature, but without protesting. Mishaps along the way, when your job is that of a bloodhound and you go home with findings in your mouth, often untrue. On the other hand when you receive letters—it still happens, Hascher said, news arrives late in Galicia and in general in the Polish provinces—letters from Tarnów or Pilzno or from some other Galician village, maybe from Machowa, thanking you for having made this martyr known, this saint, this hero, and telling you how moving it was to make a pilgrimage with the priest to the tomb, and how they sang and prayed, and how one of them, Roman Grębski, was miraculously healed, and thanking you for having helped bring this blessed beautiful story to light, how do you explain that when afterward, however, it seems you have discovered that . . .
It’s terrible to hear those battered good people cling to Otto as if to a piece of wood in the sea and thank you for having tossed them that piece of wood, not knowing that meanwhile you’ve taken him away, and you’d like to tell them, tell them that for you too Schimek is a very dear boy, a good, religious boy, and that, even if—but how do you talk about it, words are sour breath repeating on you . . . Maybe, after sending that letter, so grateful and touched, they’ve read and know about the other article and are perhaps now writing you an abusive letter . . . Maybe if you make a mistake it’s best not to correct it and just keep quiet, lie low, say nothing . . . yet in any case it’s right to honor that boy, who at least did not want to kill, and if everyone in the Wehrmacht had done as he had, millions of people would have been saved . . . His rifle was always jamming, a witness says. That says something.
And what if things had actually gone as you had believed the first time? Stories come and go, you find them in your pocket, who knows how, then they fall out of your pocket and you can’t find them anymore, a handful of leaves lifted and blown about by the wind, one leaf indistinguishable from the other, and it’s useless to stand there fussily arranging them in an herbarium. With men, with their feelings, with their lives and their deaths you can’t be precise; with things you can, that’s better than nothing, but it’s best to forget it. Instead of photographs and begonias, they should just place a nice big loaf of bread on that grave in Machowa, Hascher concluded; when it gets stale and crumbles, it can be replaced by another one, like you do with flowers that have dried and withered. He deserves it, the glory, because of that loaf. And maybe we deserve a little too, we who, searching for a rifle, found a loaf of bread. Real, tangible, something you can chew and put in your mouth or maybe even give a piece to another starving man, never mind plaques and songs and medals, bread is bread . . .
Twice a hero, that’s the only thing you can say. A hero for running away, for not wanting to shoot or be shot even though he was shot precisely because he did not want to shoot. A hero for that loaf of bread under his arm that rises majestically against the sludge of war, flags and graves. “My heart is calm, in the hands of God, I know that we will all see each other again in heaven,” he wrote before his death to his brother Rudie. The letter is full of mistakes—spelling, grammar, syntax errors. Good thing they didn’t correct those gross blunders, as some pious souls wanted to. Maybe only two things are certain in this story, those grammatical mistakes and death. Maybe there is a third as well, the rifle. It exists and was certainly fired—at someone, aimlessly, haphazardly, in any event sooner or later it was fired. Bullets aren’t the only things fired from its barrel, but also stories—stories about the person who fired, about the person who was shot, about the person who dumped his weapon. Polishing the barrel is like rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, the genie appears and has many tales to tell, stories and smoke screens. And every story, when it ends, Luisa thought as she said goodbye to Hascher, converges in the great inverter where everything begins or recommences.
“War didn’t interest him,” is how Pollack and Ransmayr summarize Schimek’s life and death. Maybe it would have been better to write the second article to begin with, then the first one. That way at least there would not have been any ill-timed thank you letters, so hard to accept; being attacked for what you did is nothing, what hurts is being praised for what you did not do or maybe being praised for one thing when you did just the opposite. It’s as though someone you once loved fell in love with you when you were sick and tired of him, it’s worse than the other way around.