Unforgiving Years (32 page)

Franz set off down Foundling Strasse, that is, down a track tamped into the rough brick dust. There was no moon, and the stars were overrun by clouds which moved forward like invaders across a map. The earth has a phosphorescence all its own. The crutch, the cane, and the iron tip of the prosthesis added nothing to the scattered sounds of solitude. Stones fell of their own accord. The nocturnal rustlings of the city were like those of a forest: they filled the silence with a minute tremor that was the very substance of silence. The vibration of a spring night in the Black Forest orchestrates the beating of wings, the cries of animals seeking one another out or simply expressing their joy to be alive, the pricking of deer hooves along paths known only to them, the fall of dead branches, the hum of the wind … And there can be no doubt that the respiration of leaves, the radiance of the stars, the thrust of roots through the soil, the rising saps must chime in with subtle, essential descants on this enchanted frequency. What’s got into you, Minus-Two, dreaming of the Black Forest as you haul yourself, gasping, over the rubble? Fairly stinks around here, sure enough there’s a family of refugees asleep in that cavity underneath, if you can call it sleeping, rotting’s more like it … An arresting clash of odors made him stop and sniff the air. He was in a bulldozed clearing where the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz had once presided over their drugstore, the Scented Herb. One of these ladies might still be alive, if she could live without her sister, her Siamese cats, her potted plants, her window display; the other was last seen as a pool of guts caramelized by acids, essences, medicinal potions, and Lord knows what else. All of the esoteric liquids stored in the basement had run or burned or melted, hissing and fizzing through everything in their path, including Fraülein Mitzi’s plump chaste tummy. Around the tidied rubble (for it had happened in the far-off days when there were still enough sweepers to meet the demand, who were even paid a meager wage) blew cloying, faintly heady fumes. The old biddies had kept quite a respectable stock hidden under their hats, “to save for a rainy day, hooray” tootled Franz cruelly, and he gave a laugh, balanced on a chaotic tumulus that rose seven feet above this extravagant landscape. He laughed because he was remembering a lecture on the redistribution of stocks in wartime, which he’d heard at his advanced course in Work Reinsertion Training for the Maimed in Action. This was a compulsory sprint through economic geopolitics or geopolitical economics, otherwise known as the art of selling a moon of green cheese by promising world domination to a bunch of cripples at the very moment when our invincible army, instead of taking Suez, was taking it on the chin at El Alamein … Behold the theory:

Grandparents save. Parents save. “In saving lies the strength of nations,” says the Great Economist. The Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz save. An elite division is goose-stepping by; the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz, throwing thrift to the winds for the sake of patriotism, ply the boys of the division with sandwiches and pretty gifts; the next day, there are a few pfennigs added to the price of the perfumes the factory girls buy before going to bed with their boyfriends, home on convalescent leave … This young soldier was in fact decorated for destroying a boutique identical to the one run by the Misses Hahnkowski-Simmelkowski — in Warsaw. And down comes a bomblet straight from the United States: adieu savings, thrifty sisters, declared inventory, hidden inventory! From out of his tall silk hat, the professorial magician pulls a hilarious monster with a death’s-head and seven flaccid limbs and introduces him to the audience: Herr Geopolitik! Wild clapping from the audience, which continues to save …

Franz, still chuckling to himself, started to applaud, but you need two hands for that. He smote his cane against the ground with contained fury. Men are insane, Franz! Their destructiveness will not be sated while anything exists, since the magician-professor is probably still teaching his course, people are still alive in the cellars, I am still here to watch the show. The horizon was quieter now, the fighting had moved elsewhere. Not yet the end, goddammit!

He clearly saw a big human bat drop silently between two walls, as though fallen from the stars. A quadruped that was part bear, part pig, part jackal, and part outlaw slunk close to the ground, paused to test the air with its snout, wiggled its rump grotesquely, and disappeared … “Ha ha! Geopolitik, my friend, geopolitics! I know where you’re headed: toward a bullet in the ass. I’d give something to know where you crawled out of: Bosnia, the Volga, Normandy, Zeeland, or Neukölln, like me? Fugitive, looter, deserter, parachutist, Black Front, dead white all over, d-d-death penalty, my good friend. Same goes for me if I don’t report you. If I do report you, your pals will take care of me instead. If we happen to bump into each other ten minutes from now, it could go either way …” Franz did not quite know what he was doing. But then what’s the use of knowing that?

Before following the animal shadow, he let himself be distracted listening again to Altstadt breathe. Pieces of cornice broke off and skittered down with a noise like tiny landslides. A door was banging emptily. A tinkle of shattered glass, a cock crowed. Somewhere a tank column was rumbling along on metal treads. Two muffled whistle blasts chased each other from one constellation to another and were gobbled up by a fat fish of cloud. A child started crying, where? Franz pressed his eye to a crack in a wall and saw a white-haired woman stretched out, reading a book bound in black, the New Testament presumably. What light was she using to read by, the witch? He put his lips against the slit in the brickwork and lowed, spectrally: “The good Lord protect us!” He looked again. The old lady was beaming and nodding, their eyes met but she could not have seen him, she must have thought the voice had been sent from heaven above, the end was nigh! Franz considered following up with a ripe rosary of imprecations, before deciding it was too much trouble.

The manhole through which his four-legged quarry had just vanished made him hesitate. The ladder was twisted, and he would never be able to crutch his way down without being heard. But the warren below probably connected with the old brasserie cellars; some, considered inaccessible, were probably inhabited. Franz found the way in. He moved along as nimbly as a spider. He dragged himself over the sharp stones of a tunnel, making only surreptitious use of his torch. The tongue of light licked at a seething of white maggots in a viscous, purplish slick. He was glad not to have stuck his hand in it, even with his canvas glove on. Just what you’d see if your personal idea of fun was crawling beneath a graveyard. As he was about to turn back, thinking he was lost, the murmuring of voices reached him. He had only to raise his head in order to see. The cellar was open to the sky: a jagged hole in the vault let in the unreal glow of the cloudy heavens. There were human shapes down there, talking low, each in turn, holding council; a poised female voice said something in a language he couldn’t identify — Czech, Russian, Serbian, Polish? He was watching from above, through an oblong hole the size of his hand. If he’d had his revolver on him, it would have been easy to knock down those four opaque forms and collect the four rewards, not to mention a Civil Defense Merit Badge, yes sir. He trained two fingers on the sitting, thinking ducks, one by one, click-clack, your worries would be over my dears. The game amused him. And it was a good job he’d left that gun behind, because the temptation would have been strong: the ingrained habit of killing, the urge to do the right thing, the spirit of fraternity! The incentive of the reward: human motivation is nothing if not complex. Down below, the woman struck a match over a sheet of paper. Franz had a glimpse of slender fingers, an oval face, chestnut-ash hair above the brow. The match went out, but the vision of that stern countenance, youthful yet aging, had imprinted itself so well upon the cripple’s retina that he seemed still to see it in the darkness. Gleefully he prepared his throat for his spectral voice, waited for a silence, and pronounced: “Lady, gentlemen …”

The four shapes scattered into the blackest depths of the vaults. Franz could feel them below him, tense, crouched, unsheathing knives, intently scanning the recesses of the walls, the hole to the sky … Not a flicker of movement. He paced his phrasing, to bring out the humor.

“Honorable fodder for the gallows and the stake! An unknown well-wisher, who doesn’t actually give a fart about anything, advises you to decamp without delay … The neighborhood is getting dangerous.”

Feeling better now, graveyard rats? Franz believed he was feeling in his own breast the beating of four terrified hearts calmed by the balm of such an improbable reprieve. Taking a deep breath, he concluded: “Reasons of State. Good night.”

A man’s deep voice rose from the cavern and said, in good German, “Thank you. Good night. Beat it.”

A pause ensued, like a rising tide of silence slowly sealing off the underground world. And the woman’s voice added, from farther away, “Brotherhood.”

Franz lost his temper. In the light of day, this woman would be repelled by him, his crutch, his stick, his rubberized extension, the hook in place of a hand, the sourness etched into his zero-hero kisser. “Which one’s the glass eye?” she’d wonder, and, “Tell me, are your balls synthetic too?” He loathed her. There’s precious little brotherhood to spare for the armless and the legless, except in official speeches … He answered violently, “And a bucket of flaming shit to you too!”

Laughter melted his anger.

You see, there’s only one brotherhood these days, and that’s in the pit, the common pit, where the same fraternal lime is shoveled over Slavs and Aryans, Negroes and Jews! They’re all the same when they’ve twitched and defecated their last, all equally stinking, putrid, impotent, pacified, delivered … All the drowned look alike, salt water or fresh, and corpses are the truest brothers, the only ones you can trust: they neither murder nor betray … Just as the devastated cities are sisters, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, London, Lübeck, and this city too: they could all be mistaken for one another in a photograph. Brotherhood.

He was still feeling jubilant, carried away by his speeches to himself, when a security patrol hailed him at the corner of an erstwhile street. It was nearly sunrise. The corporal recognized him.

“Out prowling, Franz?”

The cripple produced an engraved silver goblet he had just found, undamaged, in a thicket of scrap iron.

“It was shining like a cat’s eye!”

“Anything suspicious back there?” “Everything, you name it. A ballet of ghosts. What’s the news?” The corporal edged a step away from his men, mobilized civilians who looked like the defeated insurgents they could never be. “It seems the elite division was crushed to a pulp this morning … The general’s killed himself …” “White of him,” murmured Franz hypocritically. “Does that mean the city is surrounded?” “Only halfway,” said the corporal, a perfect vessel in which official lies were preserved forever fresh. “An army of shock troops is poised to break through their exposed flank, but not for a few days …” “Only a few days?” marveled Minus-Two, reaching for a smirk of gratification, and rounding it off with a wink. His amputated hand was beginning to throb, it must be the damp. He raised his other hand in a parade-ground salute: “
Sieg Heil!
”

Back at home he removed his clothes by himself, in an agony of pain. His amputated limbs felt as though they were bleeding, severed raw, gnawed by the icy cold. “Warm me, Ilse.” At such times the Pomeranian woman would stretch out on top of him so as to clasp both of his stumps, and the prostheses would cut into her; but a saving warmth crept from her body into his. He began to doze off to the vision of a flaring match which threw light onto a hand and thence onto a face strangely framed by rays intermingled with ash-brown locks. Three human shapes, molded in opacity, were worshipping or menacing that hand, that brow … So he made haste, pointing his machine gun at the hand, the brow, the three crouching forms: fire, fire, fire! I killed all. Duty. Franz let out a groan, his head struck the partition, flakes of plaster rained down on his face. Ilse still sprawled hotly on top of him, suffocating him. “Ha, strangle me would you, vermin!” He shook her off in one convulsive jerk. Ilse knew these nightmares, when he joined battle with things unseen and often hit or abused her, without waking. She made herself passive, as if she didn’t exist, and waited for the storm of the blood to spend itself through his clenched body.

“What is it? An alert?” he asked in a childish voice.

A submachine gun, great strangling pincers, white maggots in the gruesome sludge, tetanus, a vault punctured by the sky; and the sound of the Schulzes snoring in the next room, like in a stable. “Ilse,” he said plaintively …

“Try to sleep, my man,” she answered roughly. “It’ll be light soon.”

* * *

Nurse Erna Laub’s dossier had of course been “carefully reviewed” by the appropriate offices … Her father was an agronomical engineer, Oscar-Julius Laub, a card-carrying National Socialist and vice president of a national association abroad, entrusted with the most delicate assignments, awarded top marks, last heard of in 1941 at a civilian prisoners’ camp in the north Obi, Eastern Siberia (there was no more on Oscar-Julius). Erna was his only child, unmarried, a nurse with a Red Cross diploma from Riga; fluent Russian from infancy, smattering of Spanish for having accompanied her father on a six-month journey to Peru, competent French after several visits to Paris; slight Slavonic accent in German. The data regarding her character could be summarized as follows: highly patriotic, member of the National Women’s Association, diligent, conscientious, of below-average intelligence (underlined). Doesn’t speak up at meetings, but ardent in her applause. Generous with donations. Not especially gregarious, strict morals, no offspring (underlined, a black mark). War record: crossed Lithuanian lines with a group of escapees from Russian prisons, which made a twenty-four-hour stand against the Sokolin gang. Slightly wounded in the shoulder, excellent morale, exerted a positive influence upon companions. Personal acquaintance of Standartenführer F. M. B., former Communist, sterling Party member, killed at … and of Lieutenant Colonel H. W. W., a boyhood friend of her father’s. Political acumen: nil. Physical appearance: forty years of age, appears younger, medium height, well built, sober of dress, extremely proper in demeanor. Chestnut hair, pulled back from the forehead and gathered into a low bun, sprinkled with gray strands; blue-gray eyes, and a set to the lips expressing severity.