Good People (55 page)

All that night he heard panting and snorting, as though of a tired bull, from the ground floor. Finally her shoes pounded on the steps, and she knocked on his door brandishing a smoking candle. She
complained that he had promised her grandsons would return safely. Those were exactly the words that had been said to her in 1914, and two years later her husband had been killed.

‘I didn't say they would return safely, Frau Gruner. I said they would return.'

He immediately packed and left. Where would he go? To Heidelberg? Perhaps he would sit in the university library, do some research. Aachen? The week before he had planned to take a train to the Belgian border. Now he wandered among the platforms, heading first, as always, for the Berlin train before remembering those regions—far from the bright city lights, which he had always held in a kind of contempt—where he had decided to stay. Maybe you'll learn to enjoy the little things, he sometimes mocked himself: Carlson Mailer, Rudolf Schumacher, Frau Tschammer, Weller all wanted him to have a holiday.

He wondered whether he was being pursued. Was the Foreign Office looking for him? His discharge was the direct consequence of his actions. In the first week of June, Frenzel had summoned him to his office. Adopting an official manner, as though they had only ever been colleagues, he informed him that his delay in presenting the Model of the Belorussian People had aroused great resentment in the Foreign Office.

Thomas replied that he hadn't managed to finish it because of his workload regarding the Germano-Soviet parade.

Frenzel interrupted him and said frostily that to the best of his knowledge it had been two months since anyone had talked to him about the damn parade. The bureaucratic junkyard, as Thomas well knew, was overflowing with initiatives that had come and gone, and his parade was just another one of them. But Thomas insisted on annoying everyone, sending letters, travelling to Warsaw and Cracow to all sorts of questionable meetings, revealing details to people who weren't supposed to know them, arousing anger in the highest circles. ‘The party is over,' declared Frenzel. His severe tone sounded forced, as if imposed from above. ‘Indeed, in early May they were already
urging you to finish the Model of the Belorussian People.'

‘Does this mean that war with the Soviet Union is close?'

‘No,' said Frenzel. ‘The Belorussian model interests us for philosophical reasons. Please don't ask me questions that I'm not permitted to answer. All I know is that you have been asked to deliver the model or bear the consequences. The Foreign Office is complaining about your negligence and suggesting you have been deceitful. After all, you received a salary to do a certain job.'

‘I was asked to work on the Germano-Soviet parade, too.'

‘True, you were asked to do both things together, but, with all due respect, one meeting in Brest-Litovsk and an exchange of letters is not exactly a full-time job.'

Thomas couldn't help admiring Frenzel's official manner, in which no trace of doubt or discomposure was evident. As if he truly believed they had never shared anything but a working relationship.

‘There is no Model of the Belorussian People,' said Thomas.

‘Do you understand the implications of saying that?' Frenzel asked, and his tone softened. He leaned towards Thomas. ‘Look, even if lots of the material still needs to be written up, I have no doubt that within a week you can prepare an excellent report. Maybe it won't be as impressive as the Model of the Polish People, but you can easily explain that.' ‘You may inform the Foreign Office that I haven't completed the work.'

‘Perhaps you should go home and reconsider your reply,' proposed Frenzel, straightening his papers, as though hinting that the meeting was over.

‘I've thought about it more than enough.'

‘So your answer is final?' asked Frenzel, rising.

‘Absolutely final.'

A week later Thomas was discharged, and received a letter ordering him to leave Lublin immediately, advising that the Foreign Office was considering prosecuting him for fraud. He was invited to supply a detailed answer explaining his conduct. He didn't reply and left Lublin in the middle of the night.

Before leaving the apartment he took a last look at his desk, which was piled with typewritten pages. He had come to think of the apartment as a kind of factory for assembling models, but now the machinery had shut down, and whatever left his hands was stunted and ugly, a bloody stump without shape, inspiration or spirit.

The last thing he did in Lublin was send a letter to Viktoria Sovlova, a resident of Brest, in which the writer, Ewa Pushchinska, regretted to inform Viktoria of the death of her beloved aunt: the funeral had already taken place. Everyone was brokenhearted. She urged her dear friend to leave Brest at once, to return home to console her widowed uncle, who, left alone even for a week, might die of sorrow. She must return to him right away!

As soon as he got back to Berlin, he sold his mother's apartment. On the morning of 22 June, when the German invasion of the Soviet Union was announced, he signed the contract. He packed his clothes in two suitcases, having already donated everything else in the apartment to the NSV. He even received a letter of thanks for his generosity.

He didn't see Clarissa. Her parents had gone on holiday, and the concierge, the only acquaintance he met in the city, didn't know where. The concierge had heard from Clarissa that Thomas had received a lofty promotion in the Foreign Office; he congratulated him. It was regrettable that Herr Heiselberg was leaving, but nothing had been the same since Frau Heiselberg had died. ‘She's engaged, our little Clarissa,' added the concierge. ‘Maybe she's even married by now. Her mother told everyone that she was engaged to a young man with a bright future.'

‘And where is that bright future going to be?' Thomas asked.

The concierge didn't remember. The fiancé's father was something in the film industry. He recalled only that Clarissa's mother said the young man was finishing a doctoral dissertation.

Thomas didn't leave a forwarding address. If the Foreign Office decided to take him to court, they'd have to take the trouble of finding him.

The summer passed. He went to Heidelberg (and did indeed spend
a few hours in the university library), visited Aachen, too, the Swiss Alps and quite a few villages and towns. He didn't go near Munich, of course. It didn't matter whether he went to the Ruhr district or Bavaria, to Schleswig-Holstein or Hesse. There would always be fields and orchards, tall bushes, a blacksmith shoeing a horse beside a smoking chimney, and a steeple and a church bell, a barn piled with hay, peasants' houses painted yellow, and a forest not far away, as in Rettenberg, for example, where the men used to hunt quail in those lovely days. But now most of them were hunting and being hunted on the Russian front.

He crashed into mornings when everything seemed unreal, and his banishment from life was like a cruel punishment, incomprehensible, a story with no moral. On mornings like that he stayed in bed, prayed not to be, but when his imagination smashed his head against the wall or sent him another unbearable attack, he was so ashamed of such images that he burrowed under the sheets, and the sound of every step from outside made him shudder. When he saw his face reflected in a train window, in a mirror, in a glass bowl of fruit, it seemed expressionless. Something had been laid upon it that would neither expand nor contract. He decided to choose certain expressions, but none of them stuck, there was always a hollow space. He grew a small neat beard, but that only made the situation worse. Like a little demon, the beard jumped on his face and shouted: Look, isn't something missing? Or, after attaching the requisite facial expression, he went out determined to make people pay attention to it, to believe in it so they would ask him: Why, dear fellow, are you so sad, so happy, so tormented?

He didn't feel lonely. Among strangers he was calm, and could chat about ordinary matters or prospects for the war. Contact whose meaning he never understood, loyalty as insubstantial as a soap bubble, the pursuit of vague associations, describing encounters at work in terms of friendship, revealing aspects of his personality that he had never in any case hidden—the demands of social connection finally disappeared.

He didn't try to conceal that he didn't have any schedule, status or position. If people asked him his field or his plans, he answered with total sincerity that he had no notion where he was heading. He was offered ridiculous jobs managing small businesses, supervising a distillery, in a watch factory, and he respectfully refused them all. He didn't intend to settle anywhere. The urge to wander was like a spiritual command that he scrupulously obeyed.

There were no men in the villages he passed through. The fields, gardens and greenhouses were orphaned, unless young women or prisoners of war took the men's places. In the stations he sometimes ran into a group of girls, all from the same village in Poland, Belorussia or Ukraine, who got off the train wrapped in heavy coats lined with cotton, and carrying cardboard cartons on their heads. Representatives of factories or workshops were waiting for them.

One day, for no apparent reason, he offered to translate for the masters of a group of young Polish women. The girls were dispersed in different houses. Thomas mediated between one farmer in particular and a few girls, even demonstrating as the farmer instructed them to thin out his sugar-beet field: you dug a little trench around the strongest plant and weeded out the stragglers. You moved forwards on your knees in a broad line: your knees turned black, but you got over that. You had to keep a straight line, and if someone went too fast, they'd hear the whistle. The farmer's wife scolded Thomas: ‘Sir, it is not right to ruin such fine clothing,' and she insisted on laundering his shirt and tie, and even sewed up his trouser cuff.

His sturdy body aroused surprise and drew nasty comments; then an old quarry owner asked him why he hadn't enlisted. The homeland needs her sons. This isn't the time for self-indulgence! Thomas amiably told him (venomous answers, that he would have loved serving up to the old simpleton, bubbled on his tongue) that he had worked in the office of Generaloberst Fromm in Berlin, had volunteered to serve and as proof showed him the document he had received.

Then he deluged the old man with gloomy economic figures: the economies of the Western countries that Germany had conquered were
collapsing. We were wasting valuable raw materials on France, Belgium and the other countries, but the end of the war was near. And while the old man listened in awe, Thomas praised the power of the Luftwaffe and predicted that soon all of Moscow would go up in flames, ‘and we'll visit the German Kremlin together'. The old man stared at him with bloodshot eyes and groped for a sentence that would stitch the predictions together, but Thomas had already gone away.

As the year drew to a close, the atmosphere grew murkier. Everyone was talking about tragedies: parents who had lost sons, miserable widows, children longing for their fathers or big brothers. The joyous shouts of victory, which he had been absorbed by in Poland, and which he had heard in Germany during the past summer, had disintegrated into little sighs, stammering discontent beneath the cries of faith in the Reich and the Führer.

When he encountered people mourning around a table in an inn, shouting about Germany's righteousness and the cruelty of her enemies, he wanted to tell them about the Jewish woman whose face was smashed between the asphalt and the policemen's boots in Lublin, or about the class of archaeological orphans who in his dreams were still at their studies.

One day he met a doctor who had come back from Ukraine on a short furlough, and who described dead men and women loaded onto wagons, and gigantic pits housing layer after layer of human beings. Only then did it occur to him that he wasn't privy to such a great secret. All the people he met had friends and acquaintances and sons and relatives at the front or in Poland who probably knew much more than he did. It wasn't the information, but how you arranged it.

For example, he had rebelled against the Foreign Office when he refused to give it the Model of the Belorussian People. But a stubborn voice within him argued that, big hero that he was, the real reason he had refused them was his remorse that his Polish model had sentenced so many people to death. Now that voice was mingling with other voices, with memories that, when the dust settled, would form his story. He would consign to some attic the knowledge that he hadn't
supplied them with the model because he was unable to write it; nor would he remember that maybe he had refused to finish it in order to defend his honour, because he wasn't going to give another organisation the opportunity to absorb his strength and then vomit him out; and mainly he wouldn't remember that he had refused them because he knew that the price wouldn't be high, that they wouldn't behead him. If they'd put a gun to his temple, would he have left the model unfinished?

Everywhere in the country horror stories were told about soldiers who had frozen to death in light military coats. ‘We lost twenty-nine men out of a hundred and twenty-seven in the Great War,' the wife of a village mayor told him. ‘This time an even greater disaster will befall us.'

The talk—in the train, in restaurants and inns, in the street—didn't change. Strangely, until now, he hadn't paid attention to idle secondhand chatter of this kind. One day, consumed by pain because he was wasting his life among these miserable souls, Thomas tried something new: he complained with them and consoled them, predicted a smashing victory and hinted at certain defeat, praised the Führer and expressed doubt about future success. At last he had found an amusement that gratified him—playing the role of the ghost who floats all over the country creating confusion. There were fundamental contradictions in everything he said. People heard endless facts and figures, but nothing cohered. That was life, no? In Baden-Baden he terrified a small audience with the vast numbers of the enemy armies, and mocked the Red Army as a rabble; in Dessau a restaurant owner invited his friends to a secret meeting where Herr Heiselberg would lecture about the war; at the end, after the applause, when he had already left the restaurant, he heard them yelling at each other, and every voice offered a different interpretation of his views; at a dinner in the home of a wealthy estate owner in Lübeck, who invited Thomas after he had impressed his daughter in the library, he told them that in Dortmund they had melted down a precious statue because metal was badly needed for the war effort, and the next day someone had put a
piece of paper on the empty pedestal. There was a poem on it—‘Woe to the nation who chose these men/ Wurm, Spiegelberg, and Franz Mor' (and he explained to the young people that the scum who wrote it was apparently hinting at Göring, Goebbels and Hitler) —but in the same suburb women donated their fur coats to soldiers, and they all composed love letters to the Führer. ‘Doesn't this faith in our victory makes one's heart swell? Most regrettably, we can expect ruin,' he declared, leaving an oppressive silence behind him.