‘Forget it. I like my records. Why did you give it to me anyway? I didn’t ask for it and it’s not my birthday.’ He tossed the CD back to his son.
‘I thought you would like it. I know what your music means to you. Besides, you love new toys.’
‘And what do you want?’ He was failing to keep his voice in check.
‘Nothing.’
‘Sure.’
‘Papa, what’s wrong?’
‘I’m missing some money.’
‘You think I took it?’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘In future you can just ask for it. I wouldn’t say no.’
‘I wouldn’t steal from you.’ There was a firmness there as Aaron began to match his father: venom for venom.
‘Well someone is. Maybe your woman, Moira.’ Aaron was up now, brandishing the CD like a bizarre weapon.
‘It’s Mira! How could you say such a thing? You asked us to stay here, do you want us to move out?’
Saul studied his son as he had studied so many others in the past. Normally he tried not to use those skills on his family, but right now he could not control it. This was not his son, but a subject he could dissect, probe for weakness and inflict pain, just to see the result.
‘I thought I raised you better than to be a liar.’ Saul said finally.
Aaron stood and threw the CD case against the wall, smashing it in two and sending the CD spinning through the air like a frisbee. For a beat he looked like he was going to shout but holding his tongue he took the only other option and stormed out of the room. Saul heard the front door slam.
Alone at last, Saul, with great patience, moved over to his beloved record collection and selected Nina Simone again. It was as if the argument had never taken place and Saul had indeed entered an empty room, never encountering his son. Removing the vinyl from the dust cover he gave it a careful wipe and placed it on the turntable. Saul was able to make it to his armchair just in time before Nina’s voice replaced the crackles of the needle: I love you Porgy.
As the room filled with the sound of music Saul found himself carried away into another plane of existence. He sank deep into the chair. His arms on the armrests seemed not to belong to his mannequin body. That vacant look returned to his eyes and finally his body seemed to melt away like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland; except it was not the smile that was last to go, but rather the eyes that refused to leave with the body.
When the first side came to an end, Saul decided not to flip the record over to side two. Recalling his mental note outside the pharmacy he decided to write out his cheat sheet. This lifted his mood even further: the pills were already starting to take effect and with this new weapon flowing through his system he was ready for battle.
Moving into his bedroom he opened the bedside table and took out his notebook and pen. It would be short: with names; addresses and phone numbers. He knew of a copy shop nearby where he could duplicate the list and the notebook size would fit perfectly into his pockets. He was about to close the drawer when his eye caught something sticking out of his passport. He knew instantly what that bit of coloured paper was and what it meant but he still felt a burning desire to confirm what he knew to be true, so he picked up the passport and opened it. Two hundred Marks fell into his lap: Aaron was not a thief and he was a crazy old man. He replaced the money and fought the sense of helplessness back. He sat on the edge of his bed trying to come to terms with what was happening to him and failing. Saul was not ready to give up and this meant not acknowledging his mental degradation. He resolved to move to the desk where he would complete the task he set himself.
As he wrote his list the shame was almost unbearable and impossible to keep in check. Finally, his mind landed on a defence without which he could not have continued: Aaron had just put the money back. The last thing he added to the list was a brief description: Smart foreign man with glasses - beware!
It was not the voice of the dead man that startled him but-
CHAPTER 12
- but the fact that the lights went out and Saul was plunged into darkness.
A moment before he had been at his station making bagels; the first bagels he had made in more than ten years. Before him, Saul had rolled out a long sausage of dough about a meter in length. He took hold of the sausage from one end and wrapped it around the knuckles of his right hand making a loop, which he then broke off from the main length of dough. This created the bagel shape. Without the bagel leaving his hand he rolled it expertly on the work surface joining the ends so that they did not come apart during the next stage: poaching them in boiling, lightly sugared water for about a minute. After that he would dip them in poppy seeds and bake them in the oven.
He added the bagel to the four he had already made. The recipe would make too many for the basket he wanted to present to Edna but that was fine, he was sure they would not go to waste at his home. Who knew, perhaps they could even start selling them again. The last time he tried, the locals had not taken to them but this was the eighties and maybe the Germans were ready for bagels now.
The astonishing fact was that he had not needed his recipe book, which lay unopened on the work surface. He had dug it out as a precaution but found it to be redundant: the ingredients; the quantities and the method were all there and his skill had not abandoned him either. He was on autopilot, reaching for what he needed without thinking about it and knowing what would come next. He had of course prepared the dough during the day so that it would have time to rise and he had purchased the poppy seeds, but that was all. He had no idea if this was down to the Cotropic or just the fact that some things were never forgotten. Either way it was good news and Saul liked the idea that no matter how far he may deteriorate something of him would remain.
Then Mark Ramek had spoiled the mood by calling for him. Saul knew it was Mark straight away; the deep bass of his voice was unmistakable even across the expanse of time that it had traveled over.
All the light seemed to fade away and Saul turned to face Mark, who was as big and powerful as Saul remembered him forty years ago, a stark contrast to the old man’s obituary photograph from last week’s paper.
Mark, topless, was sweaty and dirty from all the heat and ash and as far as Saul could make out illuminated only by the fire from the oven. Not the oven from Saul’s kitchen - which had vanished - but a line of furnaces from the camp. Standing next to Mark was another colleague, altogether thinner, but then no one needed to be as physically strong as a Heizer (stoker). Saul himself was a Leichenträger (corpse hauler) and could get away with dragging them having used water as a lubricant.
‘Give us a hand, Saul,’ he said. ‘We’re a man down.’
On the floor at Marks feet was a pile of naked, washed corpses glistening in the firelight. There was nothing in the world that looked or felt like them. Saul had never experienced that combination of rubbery and slimy before. Still warm, but not warm enough. Their heads had been shaved, some of their faces still showed the final agony of their struggle to breathe and some had dribbles of drying blood around their mouths: gold tooth removal. There were blue/purple patches on their skins as a result of the gas.
Saul entered the fray.
‘What shall I do?’
‘Just pass them up,’ said Mark.
Saul joined the other man at the end of a metal stretcher.
‘Start with the fat woman - plenty of fat - and then the thin man, head to toe,’ Mark instructed.
Saul and the other man did as they were told and lifted the metal stretcher up. Mark used a pitchfork to impale the bodies and toss them into the furnace. There was an audible squelch as the flesh was penetrated: this was not a delicate operation; they had all been working too long to see the bodies as anything other than meat and failure to work fast enough would result in them ending up in the furnace themselves.
The bodies popped and sizzled and the smell of fresh burning meat fille
d the air.
‘Now the kids, four will do - oh, and the baby.’
Saul looked at the pile of dead children. One of the boys still had his eyes open and some water had leaked down from his black hair leaving a trail to the corner of his mouth. It was hard to imagine that all these bodies had less than an hour ago been full of vitality. Now they were things. The gulf that existed between life and death never failed to baffle Saul, who saw the transition every day. It remained as incomprehensible to him as the size of the universe. He knew that their bodies were still warm but something had vanished and try as he might he did not see how some gas could make such a profound difference. Understanding the mechanics did not, in Saul’s mind, explain the transformation. These were things now. How could it be that these people were born to die? That their parents had loved them and taught them and hoped for them only for it to end here. Full stop. No more future, no more hopes and dreams and a little bit of gas would end it all. To look at the containers it all seemed harmless enough. But to Saul so did the guns: harmless chunks of metal that spat smaller chunks of metal, soulless items to kill the soulful. It made no sense at all.
He had no idea that the decision that made all this reality was taken at a lake not half an hours drive from his home in Charlottenburg but he knew that somewhere some people had decided that they were not to be part of the future. Did they really know that to take a future you had to reduce a human to a thing and did they know what it was they actually killed? As far as Saul was concerned they were failing: the thing they wanted to kill escaped over and over and one look at the bodies would confirm it for them.
Saul did as he was asked and Mark tossed the empty vessels into the furnace and slammed the door shut. He then moved to the next furnace that already had some bodies burning in it.
‘Time to flip these,’ said Mark and using his pitchfork he turned the bodies over and continued his instruction. ‘See, the efficiency is all in the way you load it. Four adults or six to eight children or a combination and then flip them at half time.’
Saul nodded his understanding.
‘You’ll be alright boy,’ said Mark grabbing a bottle of vodka and taking a swig before passing it around. They all drank.
‘How’s it going down there?’ asked Mark.
‘Busy. A full load from Holland and some Greeks,’ said Saul. ‘I should be down there.’ Saul turned to leave but Mark was shaking his head.
‘No, I need you up here. I’ll speak to the Kapo.’
‘But the Greeks might have olives.’
Mark tilted his head back and laughed.
‘Okay, we’re full for the next fifteen-twenty minutes anyway. Why don’t you go down there, see what you can organise and bring it back up here?’
‘Fair enough,’ replied Saul, nodding his agreement.
Saul started to walk and Mark called after him:
‘Tell those guys to share. We work hard too!’
Saul raised his hand in acknowledgement and kept walking into the darkness until he disappeared from sight.
CHAPTER 13
Saul was hit by the fresh smell of linoleum. She had had the floor covering replaced. So this is where they found him, thought Saul.
When it’s me they find I hope Hannah moves rather than redecorates.
Saul followed Edna to the dining table and she indicated to a chair.
‘Please take a seat.’
Saul handed her the fresh bagels and sat in the chair next to the one she had pointed to. He wanted to be able to see the room and more importantly have his sights on the doors leading to the front of the house and the one that led to the kitchen. Saul thought there must be another door beyond the kitchen that led to the garden.
Edna, bagels in hand walked into the kitchen to prepare the coffee, leaving Saul alone to survey the room. He wondered how she had found him. From the picture he had seen he could not tell if Isaac had been clothed or not. He guessed he must have been on the floor and hence the new linoleum. The room itself was small and simple and furnished incongruously with cheap items mocked up to look grand: too grand to be part of the household. The table was old enough though and had suffered over the years. Saul could make out numerous scars over the wooden surface. In places, he could also make out the tell tale signs of writing from pens that had been pushed too hard through thin sheets of paper. He put his hand out and felt the wood probing the braille with the tips of his fingers. Many years ago the children must have done their homework at this table. The chairs in contrast had a fake veneer of wood stuck to them making them look more sold than they were. Saul decided that the chairs had come with the floor, concluding that Isaac had been strapped to a chair.
Even being strapped down, it would not have been easy to pull his teeth. A man would struggle and scream. The detachment of Mark and Isaac’s homes would have helped the killer and Saul was glad he lived in an apartment where the neighbours would surely hear his screams and react – they were on good terms with them all and some were even customers. It would surely have been easier to kill Isaac; but then maybe the killer was not experienced and needed to experiment first before he perfected the method.
He was told by the elders in the camp that this had also been true for the Nazis: Burning people in open pits, gassing them in vans, taking their clothes, shaving them at different stages of the process until the most efficient method had been reached. He had read that McDonalds did a similar thing when it came to their burgers. Everything seemed to come back to time and the SS being as industrious as they were had figured out the ultimate process: if they had been capitalists the death industry would have been the most profitable business invented. Never before had a dead body been reduced to its component parts and recycled until all that was left was ash: Nothing was wasted.
Or perhaps there was something in keeping Isaac alive? A lesson to be learned or something to be witnessed…
Saul could hear the coffee machine gurgling and Edna rummaging around collecting the cups, plates and spoons. Saul used her absence to dry swallow another pill from his mint box. He was by now used to the taste.
‘I didn’t know you sold bagels,’ she called from the kitchen.
‘We don’t. The Germans prefer normal rolls.’
Edna returned with all the paraphernalia required for afternoon coffee balanced on a silver looking tray, which she placed gingerly on the table.
‘Then, thank you, they look delicious,’ she smiled graciously.
‘Taste them fist. It’s been a while,’ he paused realising he had not thought one jot about how to broach this subject. Despite his feelings towards her, she was the wife of a dear friend and they had spent a great deal of time together in those early days: but it was more than this; if he took this step there would be no turning back, he had no idea where this line of enquiry would take him or what the ramifications on those he loved could be. Right now he had suspicions, well, more than just suspicions. If he chose to ignore them the worst that would happen was he would be murdered and the best-case scenario was that he was wrong about the whole thing, that it was all a product of his ailing mind. Which scenario did he prefer to have confirmed? He recalled the conversation with Mira. She represented the mood of the young: Never again like lambs to the slaughter; but he could not decide if the youth wanted justice or revenge or if both were one and the same in their minds. True, she had lost family but she was one generation removed from that now. It was simply not the same to be told that your grandmother or uncles were murdered before you were even born. How could people living today even understand what they had done without being exposed to the context in which up was down and wrong was right? Where did their appetite for a war they had no direct part in stem from? Films, books, television, documentaries and radio: he was sure not a day passed by without mention of the war. Aaron also had lost family to the camps but he had never displayed half the passion Mira had about the crimes committed against them. He pushed Mira from his mind.
One thing was certain: back then they had been helpless and right now he could choose to fight.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Isaac,’ he said. Yet this was not something that Saul would ever recognise as a decision. According to Saul, people did not decide anything but merely reacted to circumstances that were beyond their control. He did not believe he had made one decision his whole life that was entirely independent.
‘Okay,’ she said and started to pour the coffee.
‘I saw him last week. The first time in-‘
‘Milk, sugar?’
‘No. He seemed very…’ once again the words failed him. Edna tried to help him out.
‘Agitated.’ ‘Nervous.’ They had spoken simultaneously.
‘Did he tell you about Mark?’ said Edna laying her cards on the table.
‘You know?’
‘Of course. I am – was his wife.’
‘Did you tell the police?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘He said the police would not help us and what did they care about Jews anyway?’
Saul was astounded. ‘This makes no sense. You have to tell the police.’
‘Tell them what? They already know he was murdered. I don’t know who did it,’ her answer was almost facetious and Saul fixed her with a steely look. He did not come all this way to let her off the hook so easily. She caved to the pressure and kept talking:
‘At first I thought it was nothing, a bad day at work or something. But his moods got worse. He used to disappear for hours. I called the office sometimes and he was not there. Even at night...’ she could not bring herself to continue, looking to her coffee cup for a place to hide.
‘Where did he go?’
She shrugged and continued to watch the swirls of steam and Saul had a vision of her as a child.
The White House Page 9