12

Once – he had forgotten the year – he met Frau Gerstein on the street near the Gabrielen-Platz in Munich. She was trying to cross against the busy traffic, standing on the edge of the pavement, turning her head this way and that. He touched her elbow and she turned, trembling slightly, as if he had disturbed her in the middle of a dream. She looked at him absently, without recognition. She turned away, an expression of contempt on her face, like a spinster accosted by a drunk. She moved forward through the traffic, and reached the opposite side of the street without looking back. Puzzled, offended, he remained where he was, watching as she disappeared in the crowd. Why had Frau Gerstein – whom he had known for some years – why had she ignored him?

Later in his apartment he mentioned the incident to Martha.

Martha said, ‘Frau Gerstein’s husband has forbidden her to speak to Jews.’

Grunwald looked from the window of their front room down into the street. It amazed him that people could be so narrow-minded. They had known the Gersteins for years. Hans was a salesman who travelled up and down the country with a pigskin suitcase.

‘Does it surprise you?’ Martha asked.

Grunwald didn’t answer: there was a sense of puzzlement, but beyond that nothing. He turned to look at his wife and saw in her expression an appeal to his own awareness of what was happening in Germany.

‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t surprise me at all.’

Grunwald shrugged: ‘Does it matter if Frau Gerstein and her husband won’t speak to us? Who are they anyway?’ He realized his voice was rising in cold anger – and yet he knew that he was only trying to justify his own attitudes.

‘Who are they?’ Martha asked, looking at him in surprise. ‘They’re Germans. They’re ordinary, everyday Germans.’

‘They’re bigots,’ he replied. ‘Narrow-minded …’

His voice trailed off. Martha had gone into the kitchen. He could hear the sound of running water in the sink. He felt furious with himself: he clenched his fists and went into the kitchen. She turned to him and smiled.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they aren’t really typical.’

He relaxed all at once. He put his arm around her shoulders and saw – but did not recognize – the expression of anguish in her eyes.

He moved blindly towards the Westkreuz station. Of all the things he might have remembered why had he selected so trivial an incident? Frau Gerstein was a meaningless figure from the past. Why remember, with such frightening clarity, an unimportant affair, an incident that – in the light of subsequent events – was insignificant? Did it seem to him now that the meeting on the Gabrielen-Platz contained the infinitesimally small seeds of genocide: the blank silence, the unacknowledged greeting, the face turned silently away? He recalled Frau Gerstein’s expression, almost as if she were standing in front of him now and the intervening years had never happened, and he thought he recognized in it the reflected looks of everyone who had ever contributed to the lunacy of the final solution. And if he looked in a mirror now, if he looked in a mirror at his own face, could he justifiably claim that the expression he saw there was entirely different from that of Frau Gerstein? He felt a brief compassion: yes, yes, it was easy to understand, it was simple to conclude that what had driven Frau Gerstein – fear, fear of her husband, fear of being seen associating with Jews – had driven him also, shunted him relentlessly into acts of such monstrosity that he was no better than Frau Gerstein or her husband, or Obersturmführer Mayer, or Hauptsturmführer Schwarzenbach, or the bloody minions who had carted them first to Mauthausen and then to Chelmno in murderous transports, he was no better than any of them and the guilt that lay across the wreckage of the Reich was as much his to share as it was anyone’s, because what he had done had been prompted entirely by the worst fear of all – of dying. If he had chosen instead to die, if that had been his way, if he had closed his eyes for the phenol injection in the heart or stepped naked into the gas chamber, now he would be one of the uncounted dead. But he had chosen differently, conscious for the first time in his life of the sheer necessity to exist.

When the door had slammed shut behind him in Schwarzenbach’s hut in Chelmno he knew that he did not have whatever extremes of courage it took to sacrifice himself.

There was a great deal of activity around the Westkreuz station. Trucks full of workers were preparing to continue the task of clearing Berlin of its rubble. Men in shabby overalls sat hunched together in open lorries, soldiers milled around supervising the loading, drivers smoked cigarettes and stamped their feet against the cold of the morning. Grunwald stood for a time watching them, conscious of their sense of impending purpose, a tangible thing that seemed to rise from them collectively like the fumes of smoke from their cigarettes. He felt unwell. Sensations of dizziness pierced him and he moved away slowly from the gathering of trucks to sit down amongst a pile of stones that had once formed the wall of a courtyard. For some days now he had been sleeping in different places, moving from one bombsite to another, from one flooded cellar to the next, like someone deliberately trying to obliterate the tracks of his existence. And yet this was futile: no matter how hard he tried he was unable to shift the feeling that life, like a hunted animal, left its own scent behind.

After some minutes the trucks began to move away. They swayed from side to side as they shuttled forward, scraps of tattered canvas billowing like the sails of ships. Grunwald watched them go and then he rose. From Westkreuz he made his way to the Kurfürstendamm, losing himself in the endless drift of people that moved along in listless droves. What were they living for – the grey faces, the eyes tired of war and conquest? They depressed him: he found himself turning his face away from them, as a squeamish person might from the sight of blood. In his imagination they ceased to exist as separate entities, as individuals with regrets and grievances, they merged and fused into one indistinguishable whole. He stopped in a doorway. There was a tight ache in the centre of his chest under the rib-cage: heart? Lungs? He put his hand to the area of pain.

‘What are you doing here?’

He turned round quickly when he heard the voice. The woman was in her thirties: she wore a beret on her head and her face was covered with cheap make-up. She looked old and used and unhappy, as if one morning she had woken to find that her youth had dissolved overnight. In the palm of her hand she held a key-ring that rattled faintly.

‘Sheltering,’ Grunwald said.

‘It isn’t raining,’ she answered.

‘There’s no law against standing here, is there?’ he asked.

‘You look filthy,’ she said. Her eyes, funereal blue, were cracked with tiny lines of blood.

‘I can’t help how I look.’ He turned away from her. The last thing he wanted was a conversation with a whore.

‘Have you got any money?’

‘Not enough for you,’ he said.

‘Suit yourself.’ She stood beside him, staring silently into the street, smiling absently from time to time at men who drifted past. After some minutes she said, ‘See what happens because you’re standing here? Nobody’s interested in me. You put them off.’

Grunwald stared at her. She was badly dressed: a cheap fur, looking as if it had never been part of any living animal, was hung around her shoulders; her black skirt was stained with cigarette ash; the lipstick had been drawn carelessly across her mouth and her lower teeth were tinted with a light red stain.

‘Got a match?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ he said.

‘Shit.’ She had taken a pack of American cigarettes from her bag. She held them a moment despairingly and then returned them to the bag. ‘You could do with a bath. Really. Haven’t you got anywhere to go?’

‘I move around,’ Grunwald said.

‘We all move around these days – but don’t you have a regular place to sleep?’

He shook his head: did he detect a sound of pity in her voice? He wanted suddenly to laugh. It seemed absurd – being offered comfort by a prostitute whom he couldn’t afford to pay.

‘Don’t you have a job?’

‘That’s a stupid question,’ he said. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

‘Recognize you?’

‘I’m von Ribbentrop.’

She raised her eyebrows: ‘I’m Eva Braun.’

‘Then perhaps we might have recognized each other,’ he said.

She opened her bag and fished inside it. Amongst various objects – hairgrips, a tattered pack of playing cards, cigarettes, items of cosmetics – she produced a scrap of paper with an address on it.

‘If you want a bath,’ she said, and she smiled for the first time.

He took the paper silently: written on it in broad pencilled letters was an address in the Barbarossa Strasse. He thrust it into his overcoat pocket, not knowing how to react. He felt the need to say something, anything, but he remained silent.

‘Sometimes I’m there, sometimes not,’ she said.

He looked at her but already she had pushed past him to the street where she was soliciting a passer-by. He saw the man light her cigarette for her and then they became involved in conversation. He watched them move along the pavement, the woman taking the man’s arm, the man trying self-consciously to free himself from her grip. Why had she given him the address? Did she imagine that he might one day come into some money and become a regular customer? Or was it something else – some sense of guilt she was perhaps trying to expiate? As he stepped from the doorway into the busy street it did not occur to him that her offer might be genuine and her act one of impulsive generosity, because these were terms that had been erased from his vocabulary.

Schwarzenbach heard the noise a second time: there was someone in the surgery. His first reaction was that Eberhard and Spiers had returned – perhaps with some new scrap of information, perhaps even to take him to their headquarters for intensive questioning. He searched his mind frantically. What had he overlooked? What had he forgotten? Moving into the kitchen and towards the surgery door, he tried to dismiss the Americans from his thoughts: he was becoming obsessed with them. Whoever was in the surgery, it didn’t have to be either Eberhard or Spiers – it could be anybody. One of his patients, perhaps, with an emergency case. Anybody. He listened. The sound came again. Someone was moving around the room. He went forward, hesitating at the door that led to the surgery. He wanted to call out but didn’t. Catching his breath, he pushed the door open. The surgery – with a window that faced the street – seemed inordinately bright and for a moment, a foolish moment, he thought that the room was empty, that the sounds he had heard had been manufactured – not by some human agent – but by the house itself. And then he saw Franz Seeler standing by the door. He went to his desk and sat down.

‘You shouldn’t have come here, Seeler,’ he said, aware of the way in which his voice was broken and hoarse.

Seeler looked profoundly apologetic: ‘I heard what happened last Thursday. I heard about Broszat and the others –’

Schwarzenbach looked up at him. ‘You should have been there. Why weren’t you?’

‘I couldn’t make it,’ Seeler answered. He sat down. ‘Thank God.’

‘It’s as well for you that you couldn’t make it.’ Schwarzenbach felt unaccountably nervous all of a sudden, as though Seeler’s presence had a deeper and more intense meaning than he could at present fathom.

‘And Broszat’s dead,’ Seeler said.

‘They’ve got Katzmann as well.’ Schwarzenbach looked at the other man: Seeler was of a physical type that he couldn’t tolerate – a broad, flat forehead that suggested brute idiocy, a nose pushed back against his face like a prizefighter, and thick negroid lips.

‘Katzmann?’ Seeler asked. ‘They took Katzmann but they didn’t keep him for long. My information is that when he learned he was to be handed over to the Russians he committed suicide.’

‘Katzmann did?’

‘So I have heard.’

So Spiers had been bluffing – in all likelihood Katzmann had told the Americans nothing. Schwarzenbach rose from his desk and went to the window. With increasing frequency these days he found himself scanning the street below the window. ‘Why did you come here anyway? It’s a bloody stupid thing to do.’

‘I came to say that I’m leaving Germany.’

‘Leaving? When?’

‘I go tonight,’ Seeler said. ‘First to Geneva and from there to Spain.’

‘And then?’

‘Africa, possibly.’ Seeler shrugged, as if it didn’t matter where he went so long as he left Germany.

‘And you came to offer your farewells?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

‘Not entirely.’

‘What then?’

Seeler was silent for some time, playing with his fingers, cracking the bones in a way Schwarzenbach found highly annoying. He seemed intent on jerking each finger out of its socket.

‘I think you should come with me,’ he said at last.

Schwarzenbach was surprised. ‘How can I?’

‘It can be arranged quite easily. You only have to say the word, and I will see that your papers are prepared and tell you how the transport has been arranged –’

‘Why should I? Why should I run away?’

Seeler laughed: ‘Gerhardt, you persist in fooling yourself that nothing can touch you. You’re blind. Do you imagine that you’ll be able to live out the rest of your life without the truth being discovered? Do you really think that?’

‘I hope so –’

‘Just think. Just think about it a moment. All over Germany now people are putting the bits and pieces together. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle. Someday someone will turn up the fact that there’s something very odd about Gerhardt Lutzke. I don’t know what – but the piece just won’t fit the jigsaw. And they’ll start to ask questions. Embarrassing questions for you. Don’t you realize that?’

Schwarzenbach felt that he was being patronized: ‘It may seem extraordinary to you, Seeler, but I feel much safer here than I would in Spain or anywhere else.’

Seeler made a noise at the back of his throat that might have been either contempt or disbelief. ‘Gerhardt, time is running out for every one of us. Why are you so stubborn? Why don’t you realize what’s going on around you?’

Schwarzenbach moved towards his desk. It was preposterous that Seeler should come here and tell him what to do. Why didn’t Seeler simply leave? What did he want? Schwarzenbach felt curiously safe all at once, safe and impregnable, as if nothing could ever touch him, as if he were above and beyond the whole squalid situation. Seeler was the one who wanted to run, to get out: Seeler was the coward.

‘I’ve nothing to say. I’m staying here.’ Schwarzenbach touched the various objects that lay on the surface of his desk – paper-weight, pen, blotter – like a man seeking some sort of proof that the external world existed. Why couldn’t he make Seeler realize that there was nothing to be gained in fleeing? A life of exile – foreign countries, alien languages, strange food, uncomfortable climates: what sort of existence was that? It was a negation of life: it was unGerman.

Seeler gazed at the upturned palms of his large hands. ‘It’s your funeral, Gerhardt. Stay in Germany, if that’s what you want. But do you really think they won’t track you down? Do you imagine that they aren’t looking for you even now, at this very moment?’

‘Looking for me?’ Schwarzenbach laughed. ‘They may be looking for a man called Schwarzenbach, but they aren’t looking for me.’

Seeler shook his head incredulously: ‘You imagine that you’ve got it made, don’t you? How long do you think your false papers will support you?’

‘You won’t convince me,’ Schwarzenbach said.

Seeler hesitated a moment and then, moving forward, held out his hand. ‘Who knows? We may meet again.’

‘Perhaps,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘And perhaps not.’

‘The world isn’t such a large place, Gerhardt.’

Seeler shrugged. At the door he stopped and turned, as if he were about to say something else. But he was silent, and when he left he went in silence.

Schwarzenbach went into the kitchen and opened a fresh bottle of cognac. He poured himself a drink and sat at the table clenching the glass tightly. The room was cold. For a moment he wondered if perhaps there was a grain of truth in what Seeler had said; but after a moment’s consideration he realized that there wasn’t. Poland was a century away and his memories of it now were dismal recollections, like those of some half-glimpsed object brought back to mind. The trail was dead. What did it matter if Bothmann’s papers made mention of someone called Schwarzenbach? The Polish landscape hid beneath its surface more crumbling bones and putrefying corpses than there were names to be accounted for: who could say with certainty that Schwarzenbach hadn’t died, and was buried there, buried deep in some miserable weed-choked field? There was nothing to prove otherwise.

When he had finished his drink he put on his overcoat and went out.

He kept thinking about the woman. Why had she given him the address in the Barbarossa Strasse? Did she want something out of him? But what? He had nothing to give. There was nothing he could offer her. Walking through crowded streets, considering her, he rejected the possibility that she had been motivated by kindness. It was a concept alien to the post-war world, incongruous in ruined cities where everyone grafted and struggled to survive.

It was turning dark now. A hard wind was blowing through the streets. She was a prostitute and nothing more. She sold her flesh – hadn’t he seen her in action? He remembered the painted face and the threadbare clothes, the dead fur that lay around her shoulders. What could he offer a woman like that, even if he wanted to offer anything? And yet it was human contact of a kind, a collision with another being after days of silence and solitude. It broke the barriers he had erected around himself like the last frail fences of sanity, and it had drawn him, however briefly, into a pale memory of what relationships were like. But he was being absurd: she was only a whore – and Berlin was full of whores, every woman would spread her legs for a few ounces of fresh butter – and since she was no more than that it was ludicrous to invest the meeting with a significance it couldn’t possibly have.

He took the scrap of paper from his pocket and unfolded it slowly. Peering at the faded letters in the dim light, it occurred to him that possibly he was the butt of a practical joke. What guarantee did he have that the woman actually lived there? That it wasn’t the address of the local police station, or the headquarters of an organization, or even more likely still a blank bombsite? He tucked the paper back into his pocket. He turned off the Lutherstrasse and into a side street where the wind, travelling full blast, struck him with threats of ice. Frozen, he found his way into a bar and spent the last of his money on a glass of beer.

He stood against the bar and listened to the silence of conversations around him.

Schwarzenbach waited for a break in the passing traffic before he could cross the street. The lamps of vehicles hung in the darkening air like disembodied eyes searching for recognizable objects. Lamps like those had been suspended over rows of barbed wire in the concentration camp: he heard a voice, someone crying out from a point somewhere above, and then he realized that what he had heard had existed only in his imagination. He shook his head. Thinking of Seeler, some part of his mind still wondering if Seeler were right, he found his way to the other side of the street. Muffled in heavy greatcoats, three or four American soldiers passed him, and he heard their excited talk drift away as they receded. Was Seeler right? Was he right to take his chance and run? And exactly how much credence could Schwarzenbach put into Seeler’s warning? How long do you think your false papers will support you? How long? How long?

The wind blew strongly against him, catching papers and tossing them up in the air as if they were white hands grasping for something solid. Suddenly desperate, a stab of fear running through him, he tried to think of all the precautions he had taken to bury Schwarzenbach: there were the papers of course, genuine government issue, even if the facts on the papers were false; before leaving Poland in the scared chaos of the Soviet advance, he had destroyed the records pertaining to his work in the camp; he hadn’t known about the references to himself in Bothmann’s documents – how could he? – but these weren’t important because without any kind of substantiation they were useless. What had he overlooked? He could think of nothing except that he might have been more cunning; he might have murdered a prisoner in the camp and dressed the corpse in an SS uniform with Schwarzenbach’s papers in the tunic – but there hadn’t been time. In spite of the fear that the Russians were advancing and would shortly be upon them, he might have considered his own irrefutable destruction more thoroughly. But there simply hadn’t been enough time. He had done what he could – but what had he overlooked?

He was allowing Seeler’s conversation to worry him inordinately, that was all. He was permitting his imagination to take flight. Nerves, nothing but nerves: that was the effect Berlin could have on a man. The great ragged shadows that seemed to leap alive from nowhere, the streets that deceived you into thinking they led to other streets but ended instead in smashed apartment houses – it was nothing but an attack of nerves.

A drink. He wanted a drink.

There was suddenly some sort of commotion. A bottle went spinning through the air and splintered against the wall. Flakes of broken glass showered across someone’s head and someone else, pushing his table back, got to his feet and cursed. Grunwald moved to the other end of the bar away from the action. He saw two men circle one another with ugly slices of glass in their fists. They were breathing wildly and one was already cut: blood ran across his face and into his open mouth. The men were both civilians and whatever had caused the incident, whatever offence, it was obvious that they were thinking of nothing else than how to damage each other. Grunwald watched in fascination as they closed together and the slivers of sharp glass swung like flashing razors through the air, drawing more blood from the men. Both were smeared with incoherent streaks of red and as they clashed together again one yelled out painfully and dropped his weapon to the floor. As he stooped to retrieve it, the other brought his knee sharp and hard upwards into his face, and the man who received the blow went sprawling back across chairs and tables, toppling them, losing his own balance and striking the back of his skull against the wall. For some seconds there was silence and then the barman went towards the unconscious man with a wet towel and began to wipe his face. The other man dropped his piece of glass, picked up his jacket, and began to wipe his bloody hands on his trousers with slow self-conscious movements, as if he were only just aware of the fact that he had inflicted pain and injury and was amazed by the realization. Grunwald lifted his glass and sipped beer. Like people who had frozen into immobility at some prearranged signal, those who had been watching the fight suddenly began to come alive again. Grunwald stared into his beer and wondered why it was that violence – as if it were some kind of magic spell – could silence people.

Schwarzenbach pushed the curtain back from the doorway and before he could reach the bar a fight had broken out. He stepped away for safety since blood and glass seemed to be flying everywhere, and when he felt he was safe he observed the fight closely. In a matter of seconds it was finished. Someone lay in a slashed mess against a wall, motionless, as if all life had been crushed out of him. Schwarzenbach felt as if he had been cheated in some strange way, and the excitement he had experienced during the brief fight remained unfulfilled. Why did it seem that violence had its own peculiar beauty? He watched a barman run to the inert figure on the floor, a towel flapping in one hand.

He pushed the curtain away from his face and moved towards the bar. Halfway across the floor he stood suddenly still: some faint intuition, some vague impulse, made him turn his head to the side. As if frozen he stopped, his arms stiff and numb by his side, his legs – like limbs subjected to a mild electric shock – tingling quietly.

Beyond the bar there was a cracked mirror, faded and brown: in this mirror – in spite of the cracks – he saw reflected an unmistakable face.

For a moment he did not know how to act. If seemed that a paralysis had stricken him. His mind would not function. And then with a great effort of will he turned round, went back through the curtain and climbed the steps to the street. He stood there in the penetrating cold of the night, shaking like a child after a nightmare.

He pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat and moved off some yards from the entrance to the bar. He waited there in the shadows, chaotic thoughts pushing through his brain.

Grunwald put down his empty glass and turned to leave. He examined the scrap of paper and the address yet again. It wasn’t far to the Barbarossa Strasse and he wondered if he should go there. What could he lose? At the very worst the woman could turn him away: on the other hand it might mean the chance to sleep under a roof for once – if in fact the whole thing wasn’t a practical joke.

He left the bar. He climbed the steps to the street. His breath hung on the biting air. He moved away in the direction of the Barbarossa Strasse.

Schwarzenbach watched the figure go down the street and then, when there was a safe distance between them, he followed.