by Glen Duncan
Heinrich demanded the transcripts.
I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now so I’ll tell you. There was a woman in the camp. These things don’t matter to me now so what do I care? I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know about Marcus. He came in on us. I don’t know if it had ever occurred to him before. It soon did! She worked up in the kitchens most of the time, but sometimes I saw her. I’ll tell you, it’s a strange thing, sergeant, but I knew, you know, that it would be a defilement to let her touch me, to touch her . . . but it’s difficult to explain. What does it matter me saying this now? A strange thing. Really a strange thing. My mother took me to see my grandfather one time in Weimar, and he had a huge turd in his pocket, his own turd, you know? The nurse said it was common in the old. Not that I’m old. Touching something like . . . whereas you know . . . What? Yes. You know I can say these things now because it doesn’t matter. And what can it matter to Marcus, that idiot? They ran short of fuel up at the house and she came down to our shed. Franz was on duty and Dieter was playing solitaire – but they didn’t see her, you know. I went by myself. Marcus only came in by chance, I think. It was all very simple. The odd thing was neither of us said a word. What can I tell you? I remember her body was cold. She didn’t do anything, just let me move her arms and legs where I wanted. What is there to say? She felt like clay. Bits of clay from my old school in Leipzig, but a bit harder. She made barely a sound even when I stuck her. Couldn’t believe I got away with it. Well, I guess I didn’t, did I? Heh-heh! I don’t think the commandant believed a word. But what did he care? She never made a sound. Afterwards, I remember Marcus lifting up her arm and letting it flop back down. It had become dislocated – I don’t know how, she didn’t put up any kind of fight. Lifting it up and flopping it down. It was like he had a fixation or something. If you ask me he should never have been in the camp in the first place. No backbone.
Willie betrayed me, you see. When I touched her, she felt just like the Jew in the woodshed. Just like clay. I kept trying but I couldn’t feel any difference. Somehow I couldn’t stop myself. It seemed not to matter whether I did it or not. When I did do it, I felt a great calm peace all over me, you know, like when you’ve had a fever and then you wake in the morning and know that it’s gone, like magic . . .
Heinrich has been to see Gerd Kreiger in his cell. Kreiger read a two-week old newspaper. Didn’t bother saluting. Didn’t bother standing up. The cell was clean, but with an unpleasant smell, compressed and feral, as of a furiously alive rodent in a box no bigger than its body. Heinrich had insisted on going in alone. The bodyguard would have pistol-whipped Kreiger for his insolence – but how would that have helped? (Beyond, obviously, the minute addition to the wildly sculpted mass of the Reichsführer’s ego; astonishing, given the weight of power that already attended him, that Heinrich still noticed each new particle of another’s fear that increased it. He marvelled at it somewhat himself.) He went with the intention of questioning Kreiger, but found, when confronted with the youth’s recumbent body and mildly enquiring face, that he could not think of what to ask him. So the two had regarded each other in silence for a few moments, then the Reichsführer had turned on his heel and left.
There is also, gentlemen, a very grave matter about which I must speak. I mean of course –
Hoffman’s suicide bothers Heinrich, if possible, more than Kreiger’s murder, stirring up not just fear, but contempt. (One of the downsides of my work with the Nazi Party was that its evils threatened perpetually to become internecine, the brilliant by-products endangering the process as a whole. I felt like the parent of a gifted but hyperactive child: take your eye off it at the wrong moment – Stalingrad ’43, for example – and there was no calculating the damage it could do to itself.) He doesn’t know the cause of it, Hoffman’s suicide. He doesn’t know the particulars. (I do, obviously. I was there, believe it or not, on a flying visit, touching up details, checking loose threads, tensions, weights, contrasts – no rest for the wicked and whatnot.) Heinrich doesn’t know pins and needles killed Marcus Hoffman. An off-duty nap in his bunk. His left arm resting at an odd angle under his head. A cut-off blood flow. Pins and needles. He woke, as you do, with the sense that his arm was by his side, in some deadening pain – only to find, on investigation in the dark, as you do, that his arm wasn’t by his side at all, but in fact strangely elevated and seemingly possessed of a will of its own.
It was just that it had never happened to him before. It was just that he’d never touched his arm and not felt himself touching it. Manhandling it, in tingling increments, back to where it belonged, he was reminded of the Jew in the woodshed. Her arm had felt . . . Her arm . . .
Well. It’s a slippery slide, the imagination. Once you set off there’s no telling where you’ll end up.
Heinrich stands in front of the bathroom mirror washing his hands, scrupulously. The soap is good, and lathers as if with hyperenthusiasm. He is not satisfied with his hair. But against the odds – perhaps, perversely, because he has allowed his anxiety to take him through the two cases, the illuminated fear less potent than the one that still lurks in the dark – his addendum is finally starting to flow:
I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. I mean . . . the extermination of the Jewish race . . . Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written . . . It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must . . . cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear . . .
Yet still it bothers him, later that night under the lights and the blood red banner with the stage wings like two dark beckonings into eternity, that the after-image of languid Kreiger and Hoffman’s hungry ghost are slipping away from him, their meaning, these unique bookends to the danger . . . and on the run, ad libitum, so to speak, he takes a risky detour from his belaboured and beloved script:
. . . must be accomplished without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. The danger is great indeed, for only the narrowest way stands between the Scylla of their becoming cold-hearted brutes unable any longer to treasure life where it must be treasured (he thinks of Willie, the chignon, the Certificate of Excellence, the five boisterous nippers that will now never be) where it must be treasured, gentlemen, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft, enfeebled, nervously debilitated, or in danger of mental breakdown . . .
You lose even your golden earthly students, eventually. As I did Heinrich to suicide (after continual problems with nausea, stomach convulsions, tics and a whole range of physical and psychological irritations, bearing witness that even the Reichsführer had difficulty quite practising what he preached) in 1945. But you’ve got to appreciate the sheer effort he made to hold on. You’ve got to appreciate the commitment to civilizing brutality. Nothing fucks the Old Man off more, believe me. He can forgive the animal in you dragging you down to the trough. He can’t forgive you inviting the animal up for afternoon tea.
But the system petered out, you’ll say. The death camps were liberated. The fucking Nazis lost.
Well, yes, my darlings, they did. But their victory wasn’t my goal. (Obviously it was their goal, the morons.) Their victory, ultimately, was neither here nor there, as long as, after they’d done their thing, millions of people could no longer sustain the preposterous fallacy that the Old Man loved the world.
Heinrich, by the way, was awfully surprised to find himself screaming in agony – I mean sipping his complimentary arrivals cocktail – in Hell.
I have of late – wherefore I know not . . .
Evening in Clerkenwell. I’ve been writing for hours. Apathetic rain and London’s sky like a tarry lung. The City’s gone home, exhau
sted, with aching feet and sour skin. It’s gone home to seek the relief of diversion. It’s gone home to consume, to drink, to masturbate, to babble, to smoke, to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It’s gone home to an ordinariness only occasionally punctuated by the awful intimation that despite everything, despite Coronation Street, Silk Cut, chat rooms, Sainsbury’s, Christmas and the Wimbledon fortnight, despite all these and infinitely more, one day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death. I sat at Gunn’s window and watched the offices and banks exhale, the systole and diastole of rushhour traffic. I saw what I always see, what I’ve made it my business to make sure any ethereal observer would see: human beings avoiding God. How beautiful you are to me still, after all these years! Eyes – I’ve never quite got used to the beauty of human eyes, so transparently enslaved by the soul, so ready to show me how much I’ve achieved.
Hard to calculate the things that brought me here. I’ll tell you one of them.
Not long ago, having been lengthily busy in the corporate world, I decided to put some time back into the meat and potatoes of the operation and get down amongst the plebs for a bit of slap and tickle. You need to keep your hand in. Senior style consultants in elite hair salons around the world will tell you: every now and then you need to just give someone a haircut. So you find me in a wood at the northern edge of Salisbury Plain (Stonehenge? Me again. Ritual rape, torture, murder. Calendars? These boffins kill me) with Eddie and Jane. Eddie’s been hearing voices – Baraquel, Arioc, Ezekeel, Jequon and Shamshiel to be precise, whispering words of wisdom in the small hours. In any case, up until a few hours ago Jane and Eddie were strangers – or rather, Eddie was a stranger to Jane; Jane was no stranger to Eddie, who’d been observing her for some time. Eddie’s a thirtyeight-year-old telecommunications engineer with a tankard-shaped head, small brown eyes and one permanently blackened thumbnail. Jane’s a twenty-four-year-old brunette of no special features but nothing wrong with her either who works as one of two receptionists in a small van hire office on an industrial estate at the edge of the city.
Serial potential written all over Eddie. Topple this domino and there’s no telling how many (look out girls!) will fall after it. Plus, his mother’s a rabid Catholic, which is icing on any cake. The boys have put in some time, but confessed that ultimately and against their expectations they need His Master’s Voice to clinch it. This happens to me a lot. I delegate, but sooner or later they shuffle in, sheepish, cap-fingering, wondering if I might find time to . . . ah . . . etc. Needless to say it’s a piece of Battenberg to me, the old Blade Runner. ‘Eddie,’ I said to him in his mother’s voice. ‘It’s okay, you know. You won’t get caught.’ (That’s pretty much all you lot need to hear, not that it’s morally defensible, but that it’s covered.) Did the trick. Downloaded the recommended chloroform dosage from the web (eeeeyup: me again) and off he went.
Most of you probably want the abduction, the rape, the murder, all the Thomas Harris palaver with the corpse, and believe me if this were Gunn I’m sure you’d get it; some pseudo-poetic cladding, some poignant details about cloud-shadows or the vividness of an empty Coke can by her knee, some watch-the-birdie writing to distract your attention from the possibility that the entire thing’s titillating to him (and you) – but even baldly listed facts will be enough to delight others among you, as they often do Gunn, decaf and gutless sadist that he is. My hands were tied and I was forced to perform oral sex. These are just impersonal newspaper details, but still lights wink, bells ring. He comforts himself with the belief that it’s the writer’s job to tell the truth unselectively, be that the truth of motherhood or the truth of murder. ‘Go ahead,’ Penelope barked at him. ‘You’ll be joining a venerable list of male writers who’ve written about men committing violence against women. Men killing women is a fucking genre all on its own. Of course I realise it’s your obligation to write about it, if it’s at all a part of the world (as is friendship and honour and simple kindness and people dying for their beliefs – but maybe none of those is creatively interesting) but it’s also your obligation to understand what it means to you and why you’re doing it. At which point, Declan, don’t come fucking crying to me if it turns out you’re doing it because you like it.’ As you can see, Penelope’s critical faculties were not to be engaged lightly – a lesson I’m not sure boneheaded Gunn ever learned.
But this isn’t Gunn, Hell be praised, nor is the business of Eddie and Jane the point. The point is that in the middle of everything a dog dragged itself past.
A black one, too. This dog had seen better days. This dog was dog tired. I don’t know where this wretched dog came from, but if he’d ever had his day it was a long time ago. To say that something had happened to this dog is to say that Hiroshima suffered a slight disturbance back in August ’45. Everything had happened to this dog. He’d been hit by something, some vehicle, an incident which had amputated a front leg and broken a back one, so that forward motion was a curious combination of hopping and dragging. But this was only his most recent bit of hard cheese. One eye was cataracted. His mouth (broken jaw, too, by the way) was rotting with a suppurating infection and most of his hair was gone. The exposed flesh revealed the wounds of a beating, all of which had gone bad. His arse was bleeding and his semi-exposed phallus unhealthily inflamed.
That wasn’t it. You didn’t think that was it, did you? Hello? I’ve presided over the torture and deaths of millions of human beings with as much emotional engagement as a nail-filing receptionist on a Friday afternoon. You think an injured hound is going to break my heart?
No, that wasn’t it. What was it was that moments from death this dog stopped to sniff and tentatively lick another dog’s turd that just happened to be coiled and glistening nearby. I watched him. I thought, State he’s in there’s no way; state he’s in he’s not going to be capable. A part of me even then was thinking (not knowing why): I do sincerely hope he doesn’t. I hope being this close to expiry finally releases him from the cage of his dumb instincts. I hope he just fucking dies, now.
But he didn’t. (He did less than a minute later.) He drag-hopped, bent his hideous head, sniffed and licked – and my voice inside me said: That’s you, Lucifer.
I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine.) Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell everyone looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of . . . If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.)
I didn’t want the job – the job, that is, of spending all that would remain of time working against God, the job of personifying evil – but look at it from my point of view: as far as Himself’s concerned it’s over between us. No conciliatory cappuccinos under the fat waiter’s benevolent presidency. No Relate. No saw this and thought of you, Love, Lucifer cards. You know the routine. You’ve Broken Up, yes? Locks changed, CDs divvied and boxed, ring returned, cuddly toy drawn and quartered?
Doesn’t matter that I felt lousy. Doesn’t matter that I realised I might have been a tad hasty. Doesn’t matter that I would have been willing (we all would) to turn over a new leaf. Doesn’t matter. You’re an angel, you fall, you don’t rise again, the end. (Or so one was led to believe, until this whimsical turn of events . . .) We could all have devoted ourselves there and then to cancer research or pet rescue – wouldn’t have made a dint, not in the infinitely hard heart, and certainly not in Arthur’s prima donna ticker, reserved as it was for Humanity. (Junior and that heart. Like a pregnant woman with her suddenly enlarged mams: Get off. These are for the baby.) We all knew the score. The score was, God: a lot, Fallen Angels: nil. And everyone’s looking at me. If I’d bottled then they would have massacred me. And so to the Hail horrors! Hail infernal world speech, which, despite my virtually inhabiting his quill, Milton
sheared of its Angelspeak glory (as well as wreaking nomenclatural havoc among the angelic host). Whatever else I’d lost I still had the gift of the gab. You should have seen how it stirred them up. Had myself going by the end of it. But I still felt dismal inside. I had an inkling of what being utterly evil would be like. I had an inkling it would be demanding. But I repeat: What choice did I have?
Evil be thou my Good. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, but it’s a phrase (he was such an inveterate simplifier, was Milton) that’s too often been taken to mean something it doesn’t. Most commonly: that evil, in and of itself, actually feels good to me. Now, let me ask you – I’m sure you’re a reasonable human being with a functioning brain – do you seriously think that by sheer fiat an archangel (the Archangel – oh no really, you’re too kind . . .), that by sheer decree, I say, an archangel can invert his pleasures and pains like that? If only it were so simple!
No. I know this is going to be a stretch for you, but I might as well come right out and say it: I don’t like evil. It hurts. It absolutely kills, if you really want the truth. Where else do you think this outlandish pain of mine originates? Evil gives me pain. Pain. As much as it would have had it existed independently of me before I Fell. If only it were as simple as the traditions suggest. If only it genuinely seemed to me that evil was good and vice versa – but it doesn’t. Good is still good, evil still evil.