The Darkroom of Damocles

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  There can be no doubt about this, in our opinion. O. led the Germans to the address where Dorbeck was staying. The house concerned was rented by a student of theology named Moorlag, an old acquaintance of O.’s: he had previously been a lodger with the O. family at Voorschoten. No one in the world knew O. better than this Moorlag, but he too is dead. His body was found in the street a few days before the liberation, round the corner from where he lived in Amsterdam … Coincidence? By no means! Moorlag is dead, and Dorbeck certainly existed, but he too is dead! Both betrayed by O.

  Hidden truths

  That the judiciary has failed to make these simple deductions may seem strange, but it is well to bear in mind the following. No prisoner ever tells the whole truth during interrogation. Nor will those conducting the inquiry, in their turn, reveal all they know, in the hope of drawing out the suspect. Thus O. lied to the Germans, the Germans lied to him, and afterwards O. did not tell the whole truth to the British or the Dutch, while the Germans, of course, do nothing but lie when interrogated by their former enemies. They have no interest in helping the Dutch authorities, or in bringing to light the historical truth, their sole commitment being to save their own hides. Consequently we recommend taking no statement whatsoever at face value, but rather bringing reason and logic to bear in fitting together the pieces of this puzzle.

  Love

  The Germans kept their promise to O.: his girlfriend was not sent to Germany. They expedited O. himself, disguised as a female nurse, to the liberated south. He was driven there by a uniformed German officer in a small car: a DKW. This car was later found in Dordrecht containing the body of the officer, who had been stabbed to death by O.

  These facts were conveyed to us by the priest of the church of St Ignatius at Dordrecht, with whom O., still disguised as a nurse, had sought refuge. What better way would there be for O. to remove all suspicion from the minds of the Allies than by killing the German officer?

  However, this is not all. On his journey southwards O. paid a visit to his tobacco shop in Voorschoten, where his legal wife Maria Nauta, his first cousin and seven years his senior, was still living. This woman had a relationship with a Nazi sympathiser named Turlings, which was common knowledge in the locality. On the day of O.’s journey, his wife was found dead in her shop. She had been stabbed. Local residents reported having seen a German officer and a nurse leaving the scene in a car prior to the discovery of the body.

  We are aware of the objections to our line of reasoning: that all these circumstances give rise to complications that are beyond the judiciary’s remit, who are, after all, concerned exclusively with establishing irrefutable proof against O. They have no interest in composing his biography – a daunting venture by any standards, given the complexity of the affair. Whatever the case may be, O. is not entirely innocent, but neither is he as guilty as some of our countrymen believe. He started out in good faith, and that his wife and her Nazi lover betrayed him is beyond all doubt. In so far as O. was a traitor himself, it was out of love for his friend Mirjam Zettenbaum. It was to save her that he denounced Dorbeck and Moorlag to the Germans. Small wonder that Dorbeck has not turned up.

  Hoping to come out of this alive, O. seized the opportunity to take revenge on his wife, no doubt with the half-formed intention of starting a new life with his girlfriend after the war.

  Let us return to our first question: why is Miss Zettenbaum keeping silent in Palestine? In the light of the foregoing, does this question merit further investigation? No! The answer is obvious.

  She is keeping silent because there is nothing she can say in O.’s defence. Assuming she were actually able to prove that Dorbeck existed, she would at the same time be proving that he was betrayed by O. She is silent out of love for O.

  It is probably best for O. if she remains so.

  To: Miss Mirjam Zettenbaum

  In a kibbutz

  Palestine

  Camp Eighth Exloërmond

  19 October, 1945

  Dearest Marianne,

  It was only last week that I heard, to my amazement, that you are still alive. I was told by the police. My joy is impossible to describe. This is the first chance I have had to write you a letter. I was convinced you were dead. I went to visit you in the Emma Clinic in Amsterdam, on 6 April. The matron said you couldn’t see anyone. But they did let me see the child. Oh, Marianne, I can’t tell you how I cried, and now that I’m writing this I am crying again. I have nothing, not a single thing, left from the days when we were together, and they were such happy days. The happiest days of my life, and nothing will ever be the same again. Oh, Marianne, I can’t bear to think of you being so far away, but I don’t think I could still make you happy.

  Things have gone terribly wrong for me. I am a prisoner. The war has ended, all the occupied countries have been liberated, but I have yet to have a moment’s freedom. I have been through so much, more than I have the strength to tell you, but my suffering is without name. I stand accused of treason. The basest, most evil motives are attributed to me, and everything I do to try and prove my innocence only backfires. Everyone who could have testified in my favour is either dead or impossible to trace. And you know as well as I know – and as my other close friends knew – that I was acting on Dorbeck’s instructions at all times. I’m sure you remember my telling you about Dorbeck, that night at Labare’s, before the place was raided by the Germans. You consoled me, remember? I told you about my absolute dependence on Dorbeck, that without him I was nothing, less than nothing, even. You contradicted me, you said I was a person in my own right, with my own worth.

  But, dearest Marianne, things have turned out otherwise. Dorbeck has vanished. Dozens of attempts to track him down have been made, so far without success. There is no trace of him. Sometimes I think he must be dead, then I think the British must be hiding him. And so what I told you was true: without Dorbeck I am nothing, without him coming forward to explain my actions, everything I did in the Resistance can be twisted and distorted into crime and betrayal.

  I am not at all well. I have a fever. I cough day and night. I am not being badly treated, but I rarely, if ever, see daylight. The interrogations sometimes go on all night, but I still can’t sleep on the other nights. And yet I am privileged, because I have a cell to myself. The prison camp is an old milk factory. The other rooms are filled to bursting with all sorts of lowlife, former members of the SS, provocateurs of the Sicherheitsdienst and other traitors. It makes me laugh sometimes to think of the company I am in, and then I say to myself: why make such a fuss? It’s all a big mistake, just one insane coincidence on top of another, that’s all. Dorbeck could turn up at any moment, and then everything will be fine.

  But I must confess, Marianne, that I sometimes get more worried than is good for me, which is why I want to ask you this: couldn’t you write to the Public Prosecutor of the Special Court and tell them I was definitely in contact with Dorbeck during the German occupation? That I talked to you about him, et cetera. That he really exists. Because the people dealing with my case are so badly informed it sometimes seems they are out to convince me that I made him up.

  Turlings, the Nazi who reported me to the Germans, is the only person still alive to have seen Dorbeck. It was after the shooting in Haarlem, at Kleine Houtstraat 32. He saw a man in a grey suit. He thought it was me. When he saw me wearing white shorts a few minutes later, he said: you got changed very quickly! He had seen Dorbeck instead of me.

  But I can’t very well ask them to get a statement from a traitor like that, can I? What would the judge think of me? So I’m keeping quiet about him.

  And, Marianne, please write back. I would so love to know how you are getting on in your kibbutz. They say you people play recorders and tambourines out there. Perhaps you haven’t forgotten me yet. I hope you don’t think I abandoned you. At least now you know why you haven’t heard from me. Once I’m free I want to try and save some money (except I don’t know how, as the tobacco shop no longer exists)
, but if I can lay my hands on some money I’ll come over to you, Arabs or no Arabs.

  The new matron, Sister Kruisheer, was a gaunt woman in her fifties with a clearly visible blonde moustache.

  She bent over the hospital bed, removed the thermometer from Osewoudt’s mouth, and said: ‘Thirty-eight point nine. Lucky you. Thirty-eight point five and you’d have had to go.’

  With her left hand she held a tray with medicine bottles and glasses. She added the thermometer to the others in a tumbler of sublimate solution. Then she took from her tray a tin dish containing a Gillette razor and a dab of shaving cream, and said: ‘Time for a shave.’

  ‘I don’t need a shave.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘I don’t have a beard. Want to feel?’

  She gave him a wide-eyed stare, and slowly removed the tin dish. ‘Lucky you,’ she said, with a mean smile.

  Bleak morning light filled the ward, which had walls of pale blue distemper covered in stains and blisters from the damp. There were no windows, but the roof consisted of double-pitched toughened glass. This had originally been the bottle-rinsing room. Taps for hot and cold water abounded, even in the most unexpected places, hence its conversion into a sick bay. Not only were there taps on the walls, there were pipes running down the middle of the space upon which more taps were mounted, some dripping and others constantly emitting puffs of steam.

  The patients lay in metal beds. The majority were malingerers. Whenever one addressed Osewoudt, he shouted: ‘Shut your trap, you dirty traitor!’

  The uproar that ensued could only be calmed by the guards going down the aisle between the beds, lashing out left and right with rubber truncheons. Osewoudt was not spared, of course, but to him it was worth it.

  Thirty-eight point nine, thought Osewoudt, four tenths too many. What could he do to make the fever go down, so that he would be sent back to his own room in the basement?

  He felt his damp sheets, sniffed the smell of engine oil that came from the steam, looked up at the dingy glass ceiling and thought: I’ll never get better here. His cheeks bulged suddenly, he threw himself over on his side, writhing with pain, and tried to smother the cough in his pillow, but his lungs felt as if they were bursting, and his chest muscles contracted in rib-cracking convulsions.

  ‘Hello Henri Osewoudt!’

  He turned over on his back and looked up.

  An elderly gentleman stood at his bedside. In his pale, liver-spotted hand he held a black trilby. His large head hung forwards at an angle, forced into this position by a sickly red swelling on his throat.

  ‘I am Dr Lichtenau. You don’t know me any more, but I still know you. A lot has happened since then, but I still recognise you very well.’

  Sister Kruisheer came up with a chair and Dr Lichtenau sat down. He laid his hat on his knees.

  ‘I am the psychiatrist who treated your mother when she was in the institution. I remember you used to come and visit her, with your uncle.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Indeed I do! I asked you: what do you want to be when you grow up? and you said: a nurse!’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Yes. You were about five years old at the time. You haven’t changed very much, really. Your father was still alive then.’

  Dr Lichtenau stared into space and shook his head.

  ‘Did you treat my mother again later, when she went back to the institution after that business with my father?’

  ‘At first, yes. The murder of your father did not in fact shed any fresh light on the diagnosis. She herself did not feel responsible for what she did; that was nothing new. There was a voice, a “something”, an “it”, telling her what to do.’

  Dr Lichtenau made two small gestures, as though seeking to portray the ‘something’ and the ‘it’ while indicating that he did not believe in their existence. ‘She would sometimes disguise herself, tear a strip off a sheet and tie it over her face like a mask, and say: there it is again, I’ll just chase it away.’

  He looked intently at Osewoudt; he had watery blue eyes with sagging lower lids, and seemed to be wondering if his simple résumé had sunk in.

  ‘She used to do that later on, too,’ said Osewoudt.

  ‘Indeed. That was her peculiarity – that she did things at the behest of some external agent. She did not like this, it frightened her. So she would try to chase the “something” or the “it” away. Clearly, she did not always succeed.’

  ‘I suppose you heard about the Krauts finishing her off, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes, Henri. Yet she was not incurably insane. She was a perfectly normal woman as long as she did not feel threatened by the “it”. But tell me, you must have been very fond of your mother, no?’

  ‘Need you ask? The only way I could take care of her was by moving into the flat over the tobacco shop and running the business. I was only doing it for her.’

  ‘Then why did you put her at such risk by getting involved in underground operations?’

  ‘I wouldn’t … If I’d never met Dorbeck …’

  ‘This Dorbeck business, do you believe in it yourself?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you really believe that Dorbeck existed, that you met him several times, and that he gave you all sorts of assignments? Look here, Henri, please don’t interrupt! I don’t mean that you’re not well in the mind, not by any means! But the war has been a time of enormous strain for all of us. It could be that in periods of great fatigue you came to believe that Dorbeck existed, that he telephoned you, sent you messages on the back of photographs, and so on and so forth. Come now, Henri, we who both knew your mother so well need have no secrets from each other. What I’m saying is that we all have our moments of weakness. You don’t believe in Dorbeck yourself, if you ask me! There were times when you did believe in him, such as when you were suffering from mental exhaustion, but you don’t believe in him any more. You are only sticking to your story because you are in a tight corner. What do you hope to achieve by that? The judiciary have obliged you in all sorts of ways. Tons of paper have been used up on your case – and that at a time when paper is in such short supply. The files keep piling up. The search for Dorbeck has extended to every country in the world, every person who might have met him at one time or another has been questioned, but he is nowhere to be found. If the authorities had not gone to such lengths to trace him, they would never have called me in. It is only because they have been scrutinising your entire past as well as your family’s that they found me. No, don’t contradict me, Henri, let me finish. The brief for your case is now as good as complete. It won’t be long now before you are brought before the judge. What course will you pursue then? Saying you knew that Dorbeck didn’t exist won’t help, because you will not only be held responsible for everything, but the judges will also be greatly annoyed with you for having misled the police inquiry for months on end. Let me give you some advice: from now on, say as little as possible. Stop contradicting them, just let them get on with it. Remain silent in court. I shall draw up a report for the judges saying it was all a delusion in your mind, a hallucination. I shall say that you yourself were convinced Dorbeck existed. Dorbeck was simply the personification of certain inclinations embedded in your own soul. I shall say that this in fact reveals moral instincts on your part, in that you could not tolerate being responsible for your criminal inclinations, so you stepped outside of yourself, so to speak, by attributing them to Dorbeck.’

  ‘So you want to declare me of unsound mind?’

  ‘It’s not me declaring you of unsound mind! It’s you, by placing all the blame on Dorbeck, by saying that Dorbeck was behind it all. It’s not me saying that, not the prosecution, it’s you. If Dorbeck is indeed responsible, the only logical conclusion is that you are not.’

  ‘No! No! No! I was obeying Dorbeck’s orders, but the fact that I obeyed him does not mean I’m of unsound mind! You’re confusing the issue!’

  ‘What do you expect, if Dorbeck do
esn’t exist? He is a figment of your imagination. You invented him – not deliberately, of course, you had no choice. That is what I am talking about: your invention of Dorbeck was involuntary, the will did not come into it. That is why your case qualifies for a plea of, no, not insanity – of diminished responsibility.’

  Osewoudt was seized with another coughing fit, and when it subsided he sat up straight, so that his head was almost level with the doctor’s. In a voice that could only whisper, he said: ‘Doctor, don’t listen to a bunch of lazy coppers who are too stupid to find Dorbeck. Don’t believe what they say about Dorbeck never having existed. I gave them proof. I showed them where his uniform was buried in my back garden, and they dug it up.’

  ‘What does digging up a uniform prove? It wasn’t a uniform marked with Dorbeck’s name, was it?’

  ‘Who else could it have belonged to? I always said Dorbeck and I were as twins, we were exactly the same height. And the uniform they dug up in my back garden was exactly my size. What more do they want?’

  ‘How do you know the uniform was your size? Did you try it on?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It had decomposed in the soggy earth. It fell apart at the touch. But it was clearly the right size.’

  ‘What is the value of a piece of evidence that falls apart at the first touch? Of course I knew about the uniform. I went though all the documents pertaining to your case before I came to see you. Look at my throat: swollen from all that reading. I have all the details. There is nothing left of that uniform of Dorbeck’s, just the brass buttons, green with mould.’