5

The tables in the darkened room were crowded and waitresses had to push energetically through if they wanted to serve drinks. Over everything hung a blanket of tobacco smoke so thick it seemed deliberately to have been woven in the air. Away in a corner, partly hidden by a curtain, a man played a piano and sometimes a sad-faced girl would get up and attempt to sing over the noise. Most of the customers were American soldiers but here and there Germans sat drinking in tight little groups, men who were making a decent living on the black market and who could afford to spend time discussing world affairs and how, since the fall and surrender of the Reich, Germany had become a better place to live in. Grunwald took some coins from his coat and asked for a beer and the barman, staring at him as if a memory of a time when Grunwald would not have been served had crossed his mind, drew the beer slowly from the tap.

Grunwald looked for a chair but none was vacant. Eventually he decided to stand near the pianist and listened to the girl as she made yet another attempt to sing her song to an unwilling and uninterested audience. He was aware of a curious mood about the place; it was somehow transitory and people were drinking as if they suspected that next day the supply of alcohol would cease to exist, as if some sort of decree would prohibit them from ever drinking again. The girl opened her mouth and shouted the first line of her song and as she sang her body swayed back and forth to the rhythm of the piano. The pianist, a thin man in shirtsleeves, touched the keys with an expression of contempt. Grunwald, suddenly cold, put his free hand into the pocket of his coat. It was impossible, even in the midst of so much noise and human company, not to remember Schwarzenbach leaning over the body of the girl and the sight of his fingers on the slashed throat.

He felt a sensation of fear. It was connected with Schwarzenbach; it had something to do with seeing the doctor again and something to do with the way he had so casually brushed aside Grunwald’s utterance of his name, and his insistence that he was called Lutzke. And yet it was more than merely seeing Schwarzenbach again. Other phantoms seemed to come alive and the questions that had frequently gone through Grunwald’s mind appeared to answer itself. Where were they now? The Obersturmführers, like Mayer, the doctors, like Schwarzenbach, the other thousands of men who had manned the machine and made it run with barbarous efficiency? The answer was that they still existed – under other names, living in other districts, doing other jobs. Their uniforms safely tucked away at the bottom of trunks, their party cards dutifully burned, they perhaps raised hens and collected eggs and men like Mayer, retired forcibly in their prime, presumably tended flowers in rural Bavarian gardens and persisted in denying that they had ever done anything else. And Schwarzenbach? What did he feel now when he came across a typhoid case or cured a child’s measles? Or found it difficult to get the right sort of medicine when he needed it? Or brought a new baby into the universe?

For a moment Grunwald was conscious of his own physical self: the shabby overcoat, the unshaven face, the thinness that seemed to emphasize his appearance of Jewishness. And seeing himself in this way brought back yet another image – of a thousand men walking through mud towards an unknown destination, like soldiers searching for a battlefield upon which no war could conceivably be fought, a thousand men ploughing through acres of mud in falling, cutting rain, some sinking in marshes, some stumbling, all moving as fast as they could, hurrying, the ice of the rain slashing through their garments, aware of the cry of the dogs that came up through the darkness out of the electric lamps and the noise of men in greatcoats who carried rifles and sometimes fired random bullets into the crowd.

Grunwald listened to the girl singing: a soldier came back from the war, from a faraway front, and couldn’t find his girl because she had died in an air-raid. A thousand men had gone across the mud and some had fallen and you could sometimes hear the clutching noise the mud made as it sucked against their flesh. And the dogs. The rattle of chains. The sullen cries of the dogs and the shouts of the guards and the way the lamps penetrated the darkness, gathering into their bands of light the frozen breath of a thousand men.

Gerhardt Schwarzenbach had practised medicine in a surgery near to the Prinzenstrasse. The house was nineteenth century and Schwarzenbach’s name, together with that of his partner Dr Muller, was embossed on a brass plate nailed to the front door. The doctors occupied rooms on the ground floor, Schwarzenbach’s being to the rear of the house with windows that looked into a small, walled garden. The Munich practice was profitable and popular chiefly because Schwarzenbach was efficient: his patients often thought that he regarded the human body as a mechanic might a machine, that he conceived of human existence as nothing more than a mass of physical impulses and reactions. But he was efficient, and this fact cancelled the impression of aloofness that he presented.

Grunwald had visited him on several occasions and Martha, early in her pregnancy, had consulted him once. Martha had gone to another doctor shortly after, arguing that she didn’t like Schwarzenbach because he seemed uncaring. But Grunwald, who considered this a perfect example of irrational feminine intuition, continued to consult Schwarzenbach until the autumn of 1935. At that time he had been suffering from severe headaches.

Early in October 1935 he paid his last call. Schwarzenbach kept him waiting in the reception room until all the other patients had gone – even though some of them had actually arrived after Grunwald – and when Grunwald entered the surgery Schwarzenbach announced that he could no longer regard Grunwald as a patient. It appeared, Schwarzenbach said, that in view of the Nuremberg Laws, Grunwald would be well advised to seek a doctor of his own race. Besides, as a member of the National Socialist Party – in which organization he was held in some esteem – it could hardly help his career if it were discovered that he had Jewish patients. There was the additional fact, of course, that the practice had become too large and unless the number of patients were kept to a reasonable limit, everyone would suffer. Schwarzenbach had spoken these words without once looking at Grunwald, his eyes fixed to the window and the dishevelled garden at the rear as if he were discussing the failure of his flower-beds. Grunwald looked round the office: it had not occurred to him before, in spite of his suspicions, that Schwarzenbach was a Nazi. The gleaming instruments, the white coat hanging starkly on the back of the door, the tidy desk, the neat bundles of papers – what had political affiliations to do with the practice of medicine?

Grunwald asked, ‘If you saw a Jew dying, and no Jewish doctor happened to be available, would you treat the man?’

Schwarzenbach said nothing for a long time but stared at Grunwald as though the question were too naive to deserve an answer. He then moved to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. ‘Adolf Hitler has clearly stipulated the way in which the Jews of Germany are to be regarded.’

‘What about you?’ Grunwald asked.

‘Me? What do you expect me to say?’

‘I don’t know. What do you want to say?’

‘I don’t have to answer your questions, Herr Grunwald.’

‘It’s up to you, naturally. But what are you? A doctor?’

Schwarzenbach looked angry. ‘A good doctor, Herr Grunwald, as most of my patients would testify – including yourself, I imagine.’

‘Until now, yes,’ Grunwald said.

‘And because I refuse to treat you, I’m no longer a good doctor?’

Grunwald said nothing. He watched Schwarzenbach walk up and down the room. He was a man in his middle-thirties, already almost bald; a few strands of soft dark hair covered his skull. He was a neat man and Grunwald could imagine him meticulously hanging his clothes each night before he slept in his well-made bed. He wasn’t married although some of the patients in the waiting-room sometimes whispered of a vague love-affair that had gone wrong; and that he carried the scars of the shattered romance like some veteran returning from the front with his medals of martyrdom. It was Schwarzenbach’s walk that fascinated Grunwald: it was like that of a sailor who has spent his life struggling against head-on gales in rolling ships.

Schwarzenbach said, ‘I don’t want to see you here again. I don’t want to treat you again. The laws of the Reich – the laws of the Führer – are inviolable.’

For one moment Grunwald thought that he was joking and that the solemnity was a charade, something that could not be taken seriously. It was like the feeling he had when he watched the Liebstandarte march past and heard the noise of drums.

‘Do I have to say anything more?’

Grunwald got to his feet, still waiting for some explanation that would clarify everything. But there wasn’t an explanation; there was none to be given. Schwarzenbach remained grim and silent and did not even turn to look as Grunwald left the room.

Several years passed before he saw Schwarzenbach again. During that time he heard two things, both – as he then thought, unlikely rumours. The first was that Schwarzenbach had been invited to advise on the so-called Reich euthanasia programme. The second that he had been seen in the Marienplatz, in the autumn of 1938, wearing a resplendent new black uniform.

And now Schwarzenbach was in Berlin, calling himself Lutzke. Grunwald closed his eyes: all at once he was tired, he experienced a fatigue that seemed to sink through his bones as if they were blotting-paper and the noises around him – piano, the song, the empty rattle of human voices – came from a long way off. He looked up at the ceiling where a single lamp, shrouded in smoke, burned bleakly. He got up from the table and went outside and wondered if he should go back to the house in the Augsburgerstrasse. The dead girl – there would perhaps be questions to answer. But the idea was pointless. It wasn’t death he wanted to see: he wanted clean air, fresh air, an atmosphere that hadn’t been polluted by the scents and stenches of destruction.

He crossed the street. A wintry wind flapped through his thin overcoat. He saw in a sudden flash of cold insight the dilemma of his life. He had a duty to speak out, and to tell what he knew.

Schwarzenbach. No mistake. The face, the voice, the hands, the manner of walking.

Suddenly he was afraid again. The wind seemed to crucify him with driven shafts of ice. Dr Schwarzenbach – will you save my life? I am afraid of dying. I want to live.

Was that the way it had been? Had it happened like that? In Chelmo concentration camp, in the bleak backwaters of occupied Poland, had he really genuflected in front of the good doctor like some half-mad slave pleading to be spared? Spared from what? From precisely what? He thought of the barbed-wire strung across the dead landscape like an artificial horizon imposed upon nature by a crowd of lunatics and the memory seemed to drag out of him some deep longing to be free, to forget.

Schwarzenbach. He had a duty to reveal what he knew. He is in Berlin and the war is over and he is one of the men you are looking for on the count of crimes against humanity in occupied Poland. What are you going to do?

An American sergeant went past him, bent forward against the lash of the wind. Grunwald, hurrying, caught up with the soldier and fell into step only a few paces behind him. It would take only a few seconds, it would take no more than that to expose Dr Lutzke. He held his breath.

The soldier swung round and stared hard at him.

‘Beat it, Fritz.’

Grunwald brought his hands out of his overcoat.

‘Look, fuck off. No cigarettes. No chocolate. Unnerstand? Now fuck off.’

The soldier walked briskly away and Grunwald, motionless, watched him go. A sense of imposed silence fell across him. He felt despair, loneliness.

It was impossible to speak out against Schwarzenbach. He saw that now. He saw the frailty of the past and realized that, if he were to tell the truth, the whole skeletal edifice would come toppling down. And it would fall not only on Schwarzenbach but on himself because the guilt was something they shared between them.