The Third Reich (34 page)

dying and rebirth,

you are but a sullen guest

on the gloomy earth.

[Und so lang du das nicht hast,

Dieses: Stirb und werde!

Bist du nu rein trüber Gast

Auf der dunklen Erde.]

All for nothing. I tried to assuage the loneliness, the sense of forlornness, by calling Conrad, Ingeborg, Franz Grabowski, but no one answered. For a moment I wondered whether there was a single soul left in Stuttgart. I began to make random calls, flipping through my address book. It was fate that led me to dial the number of Mathias Müller, the pompous kid from
Forced Marches
, one of my sworn enemies. He was in. The surprise, I suppose, was mutual.

Müller’s voice, phonily masculine, obeys his intent to show no emotion. Coldly, then, he welcomes me home. Naturally, he thinks I’ve returned. Naturally, too, he expects that I have some professional reason for calling, that perhaps I want to invite him to work together to prepare our Paris lectures. I disabuse him of this notion. I’m still in Spain. I heard something of the kind, he lies. Immediately he turns defensive, as if calling from Spain in itself constituted a trap or an insult. I’m just calling you at random, I said. Silence. I’m in my room making calls at random, and you’re the lucky winner. I burst out laughing and Müller tried in vain to imitate me. All he managed was a kind of squawk.

“I’m the lucky winner,” he repeated.

“That’s right. It could have been any other citizen of Stuttgart, but it was you.”

“It was me. So did you get the numbers from a phone book or your address book?”

“My address book.”

“Then I wasn’t
so
lucky.”

Suddenly Müller’s voice changed markedly. It was as if I were talking to a ten-year-old boy trying out bizarre ideas for size. Yesterday I saw Conrad, he said, at the club; he’s changed a lot, did you
know? Conrad? How could I know when I’ve been in Spain for ages? This summer it looks like someone snagged him at last. Snagged him? Yes, dropped him, roped him, brought him down, took him out, put a bullet in him. He’s in love, he concluded. Conrad in love? On the other end of the line there was an affirmative “uh-huh” and then the two of us retreated into an embarrassing silence as we realized that we’d said too much. At last, Müller said: The Elephant is dead. Who the hell is the Elephant? My dog, he said, and then he burst into a torrent of onomatopoeic sounds:
oink oink oink
. That was a pig! Did his dog bark like a pig? See you later, I said hurriedly, and I hung up.

When it got dark I called the reception desk asking for Clarita. The clerk said she wasn’t there. I thought I caught a hint of disgust in her reply. To whom am I speaking? The suspicion that it was Frau Else disguising her voice again lodged in my breast like a horror movie with swimming pools full of blood. This is Nuria, the receptionist, said the voice. How are you, Nuria? I asked in German. Fine, thank you, and you? she answered, also in German. Fine, fine, very well. It wasn’t Frau Else. Convulsing with happiness, I rolled to the edge of the bed and fell off, hurting myself. With my face buried in the rug, I let out all the tears that had built up over the course of the afternoon. Then I showered, shaved, and kept waiting.

Spring 1944. I lose Spain and Portugal, Italy (except for Trieste), the last bridgehead on the western side of the Rhine, Hungary, Königsberg, Danzig, Kraków, Breslau, Poznan, Lodz (east of the Oder, only Kolberg still stands), Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ragusa (in Yugoslavia, only Zagreb still stands), four armored corps, ten infantry corps, fourteen air factors . . .

SEPTEMBER 23

I’m woken by a noise from the street. When I sit up in bed I can’t hear anything. And yet the feeling of having been called is strong and ineffable. I go out to the balcony in my undershorts: the sun isn’t up yet or maybe it has set already, and parked in front of the hotel is an ambulance with all its lights on. Between the back of the ambulance and the stairs, three people are speaking in soft voices, though they gesture emphatically. Their voices reach the balconies reduced to an unintelligible murmur. The horizon glows dark blue with phosphorescent streaks, like the prelude to a storm. The Paseo Marítimo is empty except for a shadow that vanishes along the boardwalk toward the tourist district, which at this time of day (but what time of day is it?) resembles a milky gray cupola, a bulge in the curve of the beach. At the other end, the lights of the port have faded or simply gone out. The asphalt of the Paseo is wet, a clear sign that it has rained. Suddenly an order rouses the men who are waiting. The doors to the hotel and the ambulance open simultaneously and a stretcher comes down the stairs carried by a couple of medics. With them, lagging solicitously a few steps behind, near the head of the prone figure, come Frau Else dressed in a long red coat and the big talker with the heavy tan, followed by the receptionist, the night watchman, a waiter, the fat lady from the kitchen. On the stretcher, a blanket pulled up to his chin, is Frau Else’s husband. The way they come down the stairs is extremely
cautious, or so it seems to me. Everyone is watching the sick man. Lying on his back and looking desolate, he murmurs instructions for going down the stairs. No one pays any attention to him. Just then our gazes meet in the transparent (and shuddering) space between the balcony and the street.

Like this:

Then the doors close, the ambulance sets off with its siren blaring, though there isn’t a single car to be seen on the Paseo, the light coming through the ground-floor windows goes out, silence descends once again on the Del Mar.

Summer 1944. Like Krebs, Freytag-Loringhoven, Gerhard Boldt, I record the stages of war despite knowing that it is lost. The storm has broken and now the rain is beating down on the open balcony like a long and bony hand, strangely maternal, as if trying to warn me of the hazards of hubris. There’s no one keeping watch over the doors to the hotel, so El Quemado had no problem coming up to my room on his own. The sea is rising. It whispers inside the bathroom where I’ve brought El Quemado to towel offhis hair. It’s the perfect moment to hit him, but I don’t move a muscle. El Quemado’s head, wrapped in the towel, exerts a cold and bright fascination over me. Under his feet a little puddle of water forms. Before we start playing I make him take off his wet T-shirt and put on one of mine. It’s a bit tight on him but at least it’s dry. As if at this point it were only natural for me to give him something, El Quemado puts it on without a word. It’s the end of summer and the end of the game.
The Oder front and the Rhine front collapse at the first onslaught. El Quemado moves around the table as if he’s dancing. Which may be the case. My final circle of defense is Berlin–Stettin–Bremen– Berlin; everything else, including my armies in Bavaria and the north of Italy, is cut offfrom supply lines. Where will you sleep tonight, Quemado? I ask. At my place, answers El Quemado. The other questions, of which there are many, stick in my throat. After we parted, I went out on the balcony and stared into the rainy night. Big enough to swallow us all up. Tomorrow there is no doubt I’ll be defeated.

SEPTEMBER 24

I woke up late and with no appetite. Which is all for the best because I don’t have much money left. The rain hasn’t let up. When I ask for Frau Else at the reception desk, I’m told that she’s in Barcelona or Gerona, “at the Grand Hospital,” with her husband. The verdict on his health is unequivocal: he’s dying. My breakfast consisted of coffee and a croissant. At the restaurant only one waiter was left to wait on five elderly Surinamese and me. All of a sudden the Del Mar is empty.

In midafternoon, sitting on the balcony, I realized that my watch wasn’t working anymore. I tried to wind it, I tapped at it, but nothing helped. How long has it been broken? Is this a sign? I hope so. Through the balcony railing I watched the few passersby who hurry along the Paseo Marítimo. Walking toward the port, I spotted the Wolf and the Lamb, in identical denim jackets. I raised a hand to wave, but of course they didn’t see me. They looked like two puppies, jumping puddles, pushing each other and laughing.

A little while later I went down to the dining room. There once again were the elderly Surinamese, sitting around a big paella pot heaped with yellow rice and seafood. I took a seat at a table nearby and ordered a hamburger and a glass of water. The Surinamese were talking very fast, whether in Dutch or their native tongue I couldn’t say, and the hum of their voices managed to soothe me for an instant. When the waiter appeared with the hamburger, I asked
whether they were the only people left at the hotel. No, there are other guests who go on bus tours during the day. Retirees, he said. Retirees? How odd. And do they come in very late? Late and making a racket, said the waiter. After eating, I went back to my room, took a hot shower, and went to bed.

I woke up in time to pack my suitcases and to ask that a collect call be put through to Germany. The novels I’d brought to read on the beach (and that I hadn’t even flipped through) I left on the night table for Frau Else to find when she got back. The only one I kept was the Florian Linden novel. After a while the receptionist came to inform me that I could talk now. Conrad had accepted the call. In a few brief words I told him that I was happy to talk to him and that with luck we would see each other soon. At first Conrad was a bit brusque and distant, but he soon realized the gravity of what was brewing. Is this our last good-bye? he asked in a rather affected way. I said no, though I was starting to sound less and less sure. Before we hung up we reminisced about our evenings at the club, the epic and unforgettable matches, and we had a good laugh when I told him about my phone conversation with Mathias Müller. Take good care of Ingeborg, I said by way of farewell. I will, Conrad promised solemnly.

I left the door ajar and waited. The sound of the elevator preceded the arrival of El Quemado. The room clearly looked different than it had on previous nights—the suitcases were next to the bed, in a very visible spot—but El Quemado didn’t even give them a glance. We sat down, I on the bed and he near the table, and for an instant nothing happened, as if we had been granted the ability to exit and enter the inside of an iceberg at will. (Now, as I think about it, I see El Quemado with a face floured lunar white, though beneath the thin layer of paint his scars are visible.) The initiative was his, and with no need to draw up sums—he hadn’t brought his notebook, but all the BRP in the world were his—he unleashed the Russian Army on Berlin and conquered it. With the British and American armies he made sure to destroy the units that I might have been able to send to retake the city. Victory was that simple. When my turn came, I tried to move my armored reserves out of
the Bremen area and came up against a wall of Allies. Actually, it was a symbolic move. Immediately thereafter I acknowledged defeat and surrendered. And now what? I asked. El Quemado exhaled a giant’s sigh and went out on the balcony, gesturing for me to follow. The rain and the wind grew stronger, bowing the palm trees of the Paseo. El Quemado’s finger pointed ahead of us, over the seawall. On the beach, where the fortress of pedal boats rose, I saw a light, flickering and unearthly as St. Elmo’s fire. A light inside the pedal boats? El Quemado roared like the rain. I’m not ashamed to confess that I thought of Charly, a ghostly Charly returned from beyond the grave to mourn my ruin. Clearly I wasn’t in my right mind. El Quemado said: “Come on, there’s no turning back now,” and I followed him. We went down the steps of the hotel, passing through the bright and empty reception hall, until we were in the middle of the Paseo. The rain that struck my face worked on me like a stimulant. I stopped and shouted: Who’s there? El Quemado didn’t answer and kept heading down to the beach. Without thinking I went running after him. Suddenly the mass of stacked pedal boats rose up before me. I don’t know whether it was because of the rain or the bigger and bigger waves, but it looked to me as if the pedal boats were sinking in the sand. Were we all sinking? I remembered the night when I slipped stealthily out this way to hear the war counsels of the stranger whom I later took to be Frau Else’s husband. I remembered how hot it was back then and I compared it to the heat that I now felt coursing through my body. The light we’d seen from the balcony sputtered furiously inside the hut. I leaned heavily on a floater in a stance that communicated both determination and exhaustion, and through the cracks I tried to make out who could be in there by the light; it was useless. Pushing with all my might, I tried to topple the structure and managed only to scratch my hands on wood and rusting metal. The fortress was like granite. I had taken my eyes offof El Quemado for a few seconds, and now he was standing with his back to the pedal boats, absorbed in contemplation of the storm. Who’s there? Please answer, I shouted. Without waiting for a response that might never come, I tried to scale the hut but took a wrong step and fell flat on the sand.
As I was getting up, El Quemado appeared beside me. I understood that there was nothing left to do. El Quemado’s hand grabbed me by the scruffof the neck and yanked me up. I flailed a little, without hope, and tried to kick him, but my limbs were limp. Though I don’t think El Quemado heard me, I whispered that I was no Nazi, that none of it was my fault. Beyond that, there was nothing I could do; the strength and determination of El Quemado, spurred on by the storm and surf, were boundless. After this my memories are vague and fragmented. I was lifted up like a rag doll and instead of what I expected (death by water), I was dragged toward the opening of the pedal boat hut. I put up no resistance, I made no further pleas, I didn’t close my eyes except when—grabbed by the neck and the crotch— I commenced my trip inside. Then I did close my eyes and I saw myself inhabiting another day, less black but still not bright, the “sullen guest on the gloomy earth,” and I saw El Quemado leaving town and country down a winding path of cartoons and nightmares (but what country? Spain? the European Union?) like the eternal mourner. I opened my eyes when I felt myself beached in the sand, a few inches from a kerosene lamp. It wasn’t long before I realized, as I twisted like a worm, that I was alone and that there never had been anyone beside the lamp; it had been lighted in the storm precisely so that I would see it from the hotel balcony. Outside, walking in circles around the fortress, El Quemado laughed. I could hear his footsteps in the sand and his clear, happy laugh, like that of a child. How long was I there, on my knees among El Quemado’s sparse belongings? I don’t know. When I came out it wasn’t raining anymore and dawn was beginning to appear on the horizon. I put out the lamp and hoisted myself out of the hole. El Quemado was sitting cross-legged, gazing toward the east, away from his pedal boats. He might easily have been dead and still propped up there on the sand. I came closer, but not much, and said good-bye.