“Emmenberger operated without anesthesia on a German doctor named Nehle and murdered him,” was Barlach’s cold-blooded reply. He sensed that he had to win this woman over.
He was determined to risk everything.
“He did a lot more than that, our doctor,” she replied.
“You know it!”
“Certainly.”
“You admit that Emmenberger was the camp doctor in Stutthof under the name of Nehle?” he asked feverishly.
“Of course.”
“You admit the murder of Nehle also?”
“Why not?”
With one stroke Barlach found his suspicion confirmed—this monstrous, abstruse suspicion, which had begun as a hunch when Hungertobel turned pale at the sight of an old photograph, and which he had been carrying through these endless days like a gigantic load. Exhausted, he looked out the window. One by one, drops of water were running down the bars, catching the light with a silvery gleam. He had longed for this moment of knowledge as for a moment of rest.
“If you know everything,” he said, “you are guilty too.”
His voice sounded tired and sad.
The doctor gazed down at him with such a peculiar look that her silence unsettled him. She pushed up her right sleeve. On her lower arm, burned deeply into the flesh, was a number, like a cattle brand. “Do I have to show you my back too?” she asked.
“You were in the concentration camp?” the inspector exclaimed, staring at her in dismay and raising himself slightly, with a great effort, using his right arm for support.
“Edith Marlok, inmate 4466 in death camp Stutthof near Danzig.”
Her voice was cold and dead.
The old man fell back into his pillow. He cursed his sickness, his weakness, his helplessness.
“I was a communist,” she said, pushing down the sleeve.
“And how did you manage to survive the camp?”
“That’s simple,” she replied, and she took in his gaze with complete indifference, as if nothing could move her any longer, no human feeling and not even the most terrible fate:
“I became Emmenberger’s lover.”
“But that’s impossible!” the inspector exclaimed.
She looked at him with surprise.
“A torturer had mercy on a sick and starving dog,” she finally said. “Becoming the lover of an SS doctor was an extremely rare opportunity for a woman in Stutthof. Any way to save yourself is good. You yourself are trying everything to get out of Sonnenstein.”
Feverish and shaking, he tried for a third time to sit up.
“Are you still his lover?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“You can’t do that!” he shouted. “Emmenberger is a monster! You were a communist, you’re not without convictions!”
“Yes, I had convictions,” she said calmly. “I was convinced that this sad thing of stone and mud that revolves around the sun deserves to be loved, that it is our duty to help humanity, in the name of reason, to get rid of poverty and exploitation. That was my faith, and it wasn’t just a slogan. And when the postcard painter with the ridiculous moustache and the kitschy strand of hair on his forehead seized power—that’s the technical term for the crime he committed from then on—I fled to the land in which, like all communists, I believed; to the mother of all virtue, the venerable Soviet Union. Oh, I had my convictions, and staked them against the world. I was as determined as you are, Inspector, to fight against evil until the blessed end of my life.”
“We must not give up this struggle,” Barlach replied softly. He had sunk back into his pillows and was shivering with cold.
“May I request that you look in the mirror above you,” she said.
“I’ve already seen myself,” he replied, anxiously avoiding an upward glance.
She laughed. “A lovely skeleton grinning down at you there, representing the chief detective of the city of Bern! Our doctrine of the necessity of fighting against evil, and of not giving up under any conditions, holds true in a vacuum or, what amounts to the same thing, on a desk; but not on this planet on which we fly through the universe like witches on a broom. My faith was great, so great that I did not despair when I felt all around me the misery of the Russian masses, the anguish of this mighty land, which would not be ennobled by any violence, but only by freedom of the spirit. When the Russians buried me in their prisons and shoved me, without a trial and without a sentence, from one camp to another, without my knowing why, I never doubted that this too had a meaning in the great plan of history. When that marvelous pact came about, the one between Mr. Stalin and Mr. Hitler, I recognized the need for it. After all, the great Communist fatherland had to be saved. But one morning, deep in the winter of nineteen-forty, after several weeks of traveling westward in a cattle car from Siberia, Russian soldiers chased me and a crowd of ragged specters across a miserable wooden bridge. Beneath us a river, dirty, sluggish, dragging along clumps of ice and wood. And when, on the other shore, the black shapes of the SS emerged from the morning mist to receive us, I realized the betrayal, not only of us poor godforsaken devils who were now tottering toward Stutthof, but of the idea of Communism itself, which has no meaning unless it is identical with the idea of charity and love of humanity. But now I have crossed the bridge, Inspector, I have crossed those black, swaying planks forever, and beneath them the river Bug—that’s the name of that Tartarus. Now I know the stuff that human beings are made of. You can do anything with them, whatever some tyrant or an Emmenberger might think of for his entertainment or to test his theories. I know that any confession can be forced from the mouth of a human being, because human will is limited, but the number of tortures is legion. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here! I abandoned hope. It’s nonsense to resist and fight for a better world. Man himself desires his hell, prepares it in his thoughts, and brings it about with his deeds. Everywhere the same thing, in Stutthof and here in Sonnenstein, everywhere the same gruesome melody, the same sinister chords rising up from the abyss of the human soul. If the camp near Danzig was the hell of the Jews, the Christians, and the Communists, this hospital here, in the middle of dear old Zürich, is the hell of the rich.”
“What do you mean by that? Those are strange words you are using,” said the old man, staring at the doctor, who fascinated him as much as she frightened him.
“You are curious,” she said, “and you seem to be proud of it. You’ve crawled into the fox’s den, and there’s no way out. Don’t count on me. Human beings mean nothing to me, not even Emmenberger, who is my lover.”
THE HELL OF THE RICH
“Why for this lost world’s sake, Inspector,” she began talking again, “why were you not content with your daily larcenies, and why did you have to nose your way in here, where you don’t belong? But I guess a retired police dog yearns for higher things.”
The doctor laughed.
“The place to look for injustice is where you can find it,” the old man replied. “The law is the law.”
“I see, you like mathematics,” she replied, and lit another cigarette. She still stood by his bed, not with the hesitant and careful air of a doctor approaching a sickbed, but the way one might stand next to a criminal who is already strapped to a gurney and whose execution one has recognized as correct and desirable, a rational procedure to extinguish a useless exist- ence. “I thought right away you’re the type of fool who swears by mathematics. The law is the law. X = X. The most monstrous phrase ever to rise to the eternally bloody night sky that hangs above us,” she laughed. “As if there were some sort of moral law that held true for man regardless of the amount of power he possesses. The law is not the law. Power is the law; that is the decree written over the valleys of our destruction. Nothing is itself in this world, everything is a lie. When we say law, we mean power; when we pronounce the word ‘power,’ we think of wealth, and when the word ‘wealth’ passes our lips, we hope to enjoy the vices of the world. The law is vice, the law is wealth, the law is cann
ons, monopolies, political parties. Whatever we say, it is never illogical, except for the statement that the law is the law, which is the only lie. Mathematics lies, reason, intelligence, art, they all lie. What do you want, Inspector? We’re deposited on some brittle shoal, without being asked, and without knowing why; there we sit staring into a universe, monstrously empty and monstrously full, a meaningless waste, drifting toward those distant cataracts that we’ll eventually reach—the only thing we know. We live in order to die, we breathe and speak, we love, we have children and grandchildren, so that we and our loved ones and those we have brought forth out of our own flesh can end up as carrion and disintegrate into the indifferent, dead elements we are composed of. The cards were shuffled and dealt and gathered together: c’est ça. And because all we have is this drifting shoal of dirt and ice to which we cling, our dearest wish is that this our only life—this fleeting moment within view of the rainbow that arches across the foam and steam of the abyss—should be a happy one; that the earth—our only, meager grace—should give us all her abundance for the brief time she carries us. But that is not how it is, and it never will be, and the crime, Inspector, is not that life isn’t that way, that there is poverty and misery, it’s that there are poor and rich people, that the ship in which we are all sinking together has cabins for the rich and powerful next to the mass quarters for the poor. We all have to die, they say, so it doesn’t matter. To die is to die. Oh this farcical mathematics! The dying of the poor is one thing, and the dying of the rich and powerful is another, and there is a world in between, the stage on which the bloody tragicomedy between the weak and the powerful takes place. The poor man dies the way he lived, on a sack in a cellar, on a tattered mattress if he climbs a little higher, or on the bloody field of honor if he reaches the top; but the rich man dies differently. He has lived in luxury and wants to die in luxury, he is cultivated and claps his hands as he kicks the bucket: Applause, my friends, the show is over! Life was a pose, dying an empty phrase, the funeral an advertisement, and the whole thing a good deal. C’est ça. If I could show you through this hospital, Inspector, through this Sonnenstein that has turned me into what I am now, neither a woman nor a man, just flesh that needs bigger and bigger amounts of morphine to make the kind of jokes about this world that it deserves—if I could, I would show you, a retired, used-up police dog, how the rich die. I would unlock the fantastic sickrooms for you where they’re rotting, the rooms with the vulgar, sentimental décor and others, more subtly designed, those glittering cells of lust and torment, caprice and crime.”
Barlach did not answer. He lay there, sick and motionless, his face turned away.
The doctor bent over him.
“I would tell you the names,” she continued relentlessly, “of those who have died and are dying here, the names of the politicians, the bankers, the industrialists, the mistresses, and the widows, celebrities all of them, and those unknown crooks who have raked in millions at our expense and at no cost to themselves. So here’s where they die, in this hospital. Some of them make blasphemous jokes about their own decrepitude, others revolt and spit out wild curses against their fate, against the fact that they own everything and yet have to die, and still others whine the most revolting prayers in their rooms full of silk and brocade, begging to be spared the substitution of paradise for the bliss of living down here. Emmenberger grants them everything, and they are insatiable, they gobble up everything he gives them; but they need more, they need hope: and this, too, he grants them. But the trust they give him is trust in the devil, and the hope he gives them is hell. They have forsaken God and found a new god. Voluntarily these sick people submit themselves to this marvelous doctor’s tortures, just so they can live a few more days, a few more minutes (they hope), and postpone their separation from what they love more than heaven and hell, more than bliss and damnation: their power, and the earth that lent them that power. Here, too, the boss operates without anesthesia. Everything Emmenberger did in Stutthof, in that gray, convoluted city of barracks on the plain outside Danzig, he does here as well, in the middle of Switzerland, in the middle of Zürich, untouched by the police, by the laws of this land, and he does it in the name of science and humanity. Unwaveringly he gives these people what they want from him: tortures, nothing but tortures.”
“No!” Barlach screamed. “No! He must be destroyed!”
“Then you’ll have to destroy the human race,” she replied.
Again he screamed his hoarse, desperate No and, with a great effort, raised himself up to a sitting position.
“No, no!” The words escaped his mouth, but they were merely whispers.
Casually, the doctor tapped his right shoulder, and he fell back onto his pillow.
“No, no,” he gasped.
“You fool!” the doctor laughed. “What do you think this ‘No, No!’ will accomplish? In the black coaldistrict where I come from, I too said ‘No, No’ to this world full of misery and exploitation, and I started to work: in the Party, in evening courses, later at the University, and with more and more determination in the Party. I studied and worked for the sake of my No, No; but now, Inspector, standing before you in this white coat on this misty morning full of snow and rain, now I know that this No, No has become senseless, for the earth is too old to become a Yes, Yes, the embrace between Good and Evil was too intimate on the night of that godforsaken wedding between heaven and hell that gave birth to this humanity, they are too intertwined to ever be separated again, to allow anyone to say: This is well done and this is bad, this leads to the Good and this leads to Evil. Too late! We can no longer know what we do, what actions will result from our obedience or our revolt, what exploitation, what sticky residue of crime clings to the fruit we eat, to the bread and milk we give our children. We kill without seeing our victim or knowing about him, and we are killed without the murderer’s knowledge. Too late! The temptation of this existence was too great and man was too small for the grace that consists of living and not being nothing instead. Now we are sick unto death, eaten by the cancer of our deeds. The world is rotten, Inspector, it’s decaying like a badly stored fruit. What more do we want! The earth can no longer be made into a paradise, the infernal stream of lava we conjured up in the blasphemous days of our victories, our fame, and our wealth, and that now lights our night, can no longer be banished back into the caverns from which it arose. Only in our dreams can we win back what we have lost, in the radiant images of longing that can be attained with morphine. Thus I, Edith Marlok, a thirty-four-year-old woman, commit the crimes that are demanded of me in exchange for a colorless liquid which, injected beneath my skin, gives me the courage of contempt during the day and the beauty of dreams at night, a fleeting illusion of being in possession of what no longer exists: this world as God created it. C’est ça. Emmenberger, your compatriot, this son of the city of Bern, knows people and knows the uses to which they can be put. He applies his merciless levers where we are weakest: in the deadly consciousness of our eternal perdition.”
“Go now,” he whispered, “go now!”
The doctor laughed. Then she stood up, beautiful, proud, unapproachable.
“You want to fight Evil and are afraid of my C’est ça,” she said, putting on make-up again, leaning on the door. Above her, alone and meaningless, hung the old wooden cross. “You’re already shuddering before a lowly servant of this world, who has been defiled and degraded a thousand times. How will you stand up to him, the Prince of Hell himself, Emmenberger?”
And then she tossed a second newspaper and a brown envelope on the old man’s bed.
“Read your mail, sir. I think you’ll be surprised at what you’ve accomplished with your good will!”
KNIGHT, DEATH, AND DEVIL
After the doctor had left the old man, he lay motionless for a long time. His suspicion had been confirmed, but what should have given him satisfaction filled him with horror. He had calculated correctly but sensed that he had made the wrong move. He was all too co
nscious of his body’s helplessness. He had lost six days, six terrible days erased from his memory. Emmenberger knew who was after him, and had delivered his blow.
Then, finally, when Nurse Kläri came, he let her help him into a sitting position. Suspicious but defiant, determined to conquer his weakness and attack, he drank the coffee and ate the rolls she had brought.
“Nurse Kläri,” he said, “I’m from the police, maybe it’s better if we don’t mince words.”
“I know, Inspector Barlach,” the nurse replied, a formidable menacing figure next to his bed.
“You know my name, so you’re well informed,” Bar lach continued, taken aback. “Does that mean you know why I’m here?”
“You want to arrest our boss,” she said, looking down at the old man.
“That’s right, the boss,” the inspector nodded. “And I imagine you know that your boss killed many people in the concentration camp at Stutthof in Germany?”
“My boss has been converted,” Nurse Kläri Glauber from Biglen proudly replied. “His sins have been forgiven.”
“How come?” Barlach asked, astonished, staring at this monster of rectitude that stood by his bed, her hands folded over her belly, beaming and convinced.
“He read my brochure,” said the nurse.
“The Goal and Purpose of Our Life on Earth?”
“That’s right.”
“This is nonsense!” the sick man cried angrily. “Emmenberger is still killing people.”
“He used to kill out of hatred,” the nurse cheerfully replied, “but now he kills out of love. He kills as a doctor, because man secretly longs for death. Just read my brochure. Man has to pass through death to his higher possibility.”
“Emmenberger is a criminal,” the inspector gasped, powerless against such sanctimony. She’s a typical Emmental sectarian, he thought desperately, damn the lot of them.
“The meaning and purpose of our life on earth cannot be a crime,” said Nurse Kläri, shaking her head disapprovingly as she cleared away the dishes.
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