by Steven Uhly
“My wife and I are settlers here. Our farm is about one and a half hour’s walk to the west. We have scant supplies for the winter, and so my wife had the idea, well, you see she inherited this antique clock from her father, and so we thought the commander might like to take a look at it. Maybe he’d like to buy it.”
“The commander’s not in town today.”
“Not in town,” Herr Kramer repeated, without really taking it in. The S.S. guard’s cold eyes were still fixed on him, immovable as a wall.
“When will he be back?”
“None of your business, Comrade.”
“No, no, of course not. I just wanted to . . .” He broke off, for he realized he was arousing suspicion. The noise behind him and the uncompromising indifference in front of him obstructed his thoughts. As he stood there he was suddenly gripped by the sensation of all the sounds in the square bundling into his head. Having decided that their conversation was over, the sentry was now ignoring him. It was if he had been turned to stone again, as if he had never really been alive. Uncertain what to do, Herr Kramer lingered a while on the steps, before returning to his cart like a defeated wrestler. He had failed, thanks to the indifference of a sentry. I’ve allowed myself to be bullied, he told himself as he unlocked the wheel, bullied as if I were the boy and he the old man. So here I am with a grandfather clock that nobody wants, whose time is past, whose deep bell would only ever continue to chime in his wife’s memory, inaudible to him, a distant echo from better times. He knew he could not take the clock home again. His wife had performed her ritual and it would pain him to have to nullify it. But he had no idea what to do.
7
He did not deliver the speech he had improvised. During the night he had sat down at his beautiful English desk, with his back to the terrace, and drafted a new text. He had not called for Anna to try it out on her. Now he stood on the terrace, gazing out at a gray, overcast morning, lost in thought as if he had planned this, gazing beyond the roofs of the town hall square with its timidly low houses, paying no attention to the three hundred men in rank and file at his feet, waiting for him to set the mood for the day. He looked as he always did, an aloof deity with the inscrutable face of a Red Indian, the chiseled aquiline nose—which gave the impression it could slice into and mortally wound any enemy—the narrow mouth that never smiled in public and only rarely in private, and the powerful reserve that emanated from his eyes.
But in reality everything was different today. He had never been a Jew-hater; their persecution and extermination had only ever been a way to bolster his career, and his career had only ever been a way to bolster his self-esteem. But this is precisely how he had been able to endure the strain and burden, the ruthless hounding of people, the never-ending killings, the necessary punishments; precisely because he was not a Jew-hater he had been able to remain a decent man, in the sense implied by the Reichsführer S.S. Decent in the midst of the slaughter, the weeding-out process, as it was known, and of the struggle against Jewish–Freemason–Bolshevist subhumans.
But since yesterday evening everything was different. Since yesterday evening he was full of hatred. He hated Anna, even though he was unable to pinpoint why. When he thought back to the previous evening he was overwhelmed by a feeling of humiliation, which had called his entire career into question at a stroke. She had made him look ridiculous. She would pay for that. But first of all, others would pay. He had to overcome his hatred to reach a purer source of retribution, a place devoid of the emotions that might cause him to show signs of weakness or act prematurely. This was the covert reason for his speech. Ranzner knew that hatred would undermine his authority and compromise the common cause. He knew that only without hatred could there be an objective requirement to kill people. He anticipated that this speech would be the most important of his career to date. And he was ready to take on the challenge.
Ranzner looked at his three hundred men. Many of them spoke no better than broken German. They would barely be able to follow his speech. Ranzner thought back wistfully to the early days, when they had dashed from victory to victory, he and his German warriors. They had blindly confronted each danger, sticking together like blood brothers, saving each other’s lives even if that meant snuffing it themselves. Snuffing it, Ranzner thought again, emphatically this time, as if this had changed. He looked at his men, still waiting there in silence, as they would have done for another three hours. Thank goodness the Reichsführer S.S. had not accepted any Poles. Inferior, the Reichsführer S.S. said. I’d rather have German criminals, the Reichsführer said, and had trawled through German prisons for volunteers. He, Ranzner, had only found out about this by field post.
He let out an involuntary sigh. There was no use in complaining, the Reich needed soldiers and the S.S. was still prepared to give all it had for the final victory, whether as an elite or a multinational army—that was of secondary importance. Now it was purely about efficiency, which is why he had to remind these soldiers why they were here and what their common mission consisted of. Once more he had to invoke the poetry of their deeds to make them forget the suffering they witnessed on a daily basis, and he must remind them of the sacred cause to which they had pledged themselves. If they engaged in battle they ought to be aware of their nobility, every last fiber of their being must radiate such a superhuman aura that the enemy could not help but sense it and quake in their boots, no matter how firmly they entrenched themselves behind their fortifications. As an example they ought to look to him, standing steadfast here, ready to shed every drop of his Aryan blood to lead the German Volk to the greatness and power that was its due, as spearhead of the Holy Reich.
“Men!
As members of the S.S. you are
not merely soldiers, you are
model custodians of Adolf Hitler’s vision.
Your hallmarks are experience in war,
toughness,
pride in our
myriad victories,
an awareness of having withstood tremendous strains
and great dangers, as well as
the great legacy that the National Socialist idea
has imposed on you all,
since you have been fighting in the ranks of the S.S.
With courage and composure, with
a sense of your soldierly ability
and your superiority
you have grown into a new entity,
a far from average entity,
shaped by the extraordinary circumstances of war.
Your name is linked with the battles in
Poland, Belgium, Holland,
France, Yugoslavia,
with the mountain passes and straits
of Greece, and the Karelian snowfields,
the central Russian forests, the Ukrainian steppes
and the Caucasian pastures, your tenacity and your
attainment give you
that masterful stoicism,
which earns you success in battle
and the hatred of the vanquished foe,
but back at home the admiration and
love
of the German people.
Men!
There is one principle,
by which we must abide without reservation
or hesitation: We are to be honest,
decent,
loyal
and fraternal
to members of our own blood
and to no one else!
We Germans, the only people
on earth with a
civilized attitude toward animals,
will also assume a civilized attitude
toward human animals.
We will not, therefore,
act more cruelly
than is necessary, this much is clear.
Whether or not
ten thousand Polish women die
in the construction of an anti-tank ditch
interests me only in so far as the
anti-tank ditch
is completed for Germany.
For this reason
no one is to come to me
and say I cannot
use women and children
to build anti-tank ditches
because they will perish.
To him I should respond:
You are a murderer
of your own blood,
for,
if the anti-tank ditch is not built,
then German soldiers will die,
the sons of German mothers.
Our own blood.
Men!
I want you
to arm yourselves with this outlook
when confronting the problem
of all foreign, non-German races,
especially Poles
and Russians.
Anything else is
lather!
Sieg
Heil!”
“Sieg Heil!” three hundred throats bellowed back, and anyone listening carefully might have detected the Danes’ guttural vowels or a Hungarian’s voiceless S. But nobody was listening carefully. Ranzner’s last word would ensure the foreigners remained mystified for a while longer, while the Germans hid their smirks. Lather? What was that supposed to mean?
The speech was over. Ranzner turned on his heels and left the balcony. He was satisfied. He had managed to regain a composure befitting his superiority. He believed that the best way to spur on his men was not to provide emotional justification for violence, but to explain why it was necessary, an explanation that crashed over everything and everyone like a raging torrent to which nobody could possibly offer resistance because it is the very force of nature itself. Ranzner was satisfied. His speech had been a successful therapy against his own hatred. Now he knew that he would not kill Anna until the right moment had come.
8
This was the last thing he saw:
Raindrops falling straight on top of him through the dark-gray crack between two shadowy gables, on they went until the chink turned black and the raindrops white, as when looking at a photographic negative or pressing your fingers down onto your closed eyes, or as if the rain had turned to snow and twilight to night.
He smelled:
The tang of freshly baked bread.
He felt:
The cold stealing through his body, quietly and quickly like an army in the dark invading a neighboring country. Seconds later he heard a voice calling out his name. It was everywhere and nowhere. It was loud and soft. It was near and far. He thought that it must get lighter again now, the mass of white dots hanging above him like distant stars must fuse together to form the exit from a tunnel he could walk through to be free, free from whatever—this darkness, this cold, which he could barely see and barely feel anymore, but which were still there.
And it did get lighter. But at that very moment he stopped hearing and feeling. Everything was silent. A beautiful silence, so beautiful that he remembered just how much he had missed this silence his whole life long.
A silence that meant tranquility. And peace.
Suddenly, a face, right in front of him. His father, Adolf Treitz, his father’s farm, Eisen in the Saarland, 1907. The face hovered right in front of him in a milky light, without contours. He felt pain, unbearable pain, his head, his body, everything felt as if it were being brutally crushed, he turned around, saw two huge thighs covered in blood, and far beyond these, between the breasts, the face of his mother, Anna Treitz, née Gettmann. She had just given birth to him and now she raised her head to look at him, without any joy, without any welcome.
He turned back to his father, who looked as bold and bleak as a Rembrandt painting. His white skin gave off a pallid shimmer and his piercing alcoholic’s eyes with their heavy bags penetrated as if through a fog. Darkness surrounded his father, he seemed to have sucked up all the light, leaving none for him, his son. When his father noticed the bewilderment he let out a loud and vulgar laugh. He could see his father’s poor teeth, eaten away by decay and he heard the laugh as if it were his own. He smelled the alcohol escaping from his father’s open mouth as though a bottle of schnapps had been opened beneath his nose. He was afraid, but his father gave the fear a meaning. He said, “I’m going to make a man of you, whether you want it or not.”
He recalled not wanting it. But he had to pretend he did, or it would only make everything worse. And thus he became the person he was when a woman aimed her revolver at his head, like a large index finger calling upon him finally to do what he wanted. Perhaps this is why he did nothing as she struggled to pull the trigger; finally, as he watched her kill him, he did not do what was expected of him. And now, as she stood before him with her faded, greyish-red skirt, all those black scarves and her face, especially her face, he seemed to realize for the first time that his actions had only ever been prompted by a will to live. He had known at once that he would have loved her, had she not been the person she was, and had he not become the man he had never wanted to be. When he thought about her now, his memory played tricks on him. It felt as if he had put on a mask with her face, and as if she were wearing a mask with his face, and as if he were killing himself because he had forgotten that he was not her and she not him. Then, remembering again who they really were, he felt terrible because in reality he had shot her rather than she him. His fear vanished and he realized again that he was Sturmbannführer Treitz, and that she was nothing but a Polish Jew who he would have killed had he not failed.
The mask game was bothering him.
It lasted for ages.
It kept going of its own accord, without his being able to put a stop to it.
He thought: I’m in hell.
He thought: I’m being punished for everything I’ve done and haven’t done.
He looked for the devil. Someone must be organizing all of this.
He had thought he was alone.
But he was not alone.
Someone must be there.
No one was there apart from him. And even he was no longer there. He was Sturmbannführer Treitz. A man, born here, gone to school there, done this and that, died. A stranger whose life he remembered as if it had been his own. Perhaps he had staged his life like a theater director sat the whole time in the auditorium. He had allowed himself to be manipulated as his own puppet. He had even allowed himself to be killed, as if he were nothing more than the lead character in a drama.
How could he ever forget?
He felt terrible.
The fear had vanished, and he noted that even without fear you could let life slip.
Or had it only vanished because he was dead?
But I’m thinking, he thought.
Or was this no longer thinking?
Was he perhaps swimming as a tiny nothingness in streams of thought which came from somewhere and flowed somewhere else, and which were all logical because it was their own principle to be logical rather than his?
Had it always been thus and he had simply failed to notice it, believing instead that whoever is the master of their own head is also the master of destiny and the world? How much he must have been master of his own head!
His father’s head had not yielded any reliable information. He thought about his mother.
What had she looked like?
He no longer remembered exactly.
He felt like somebody staring at a photograph of total strangers, searching randomly for a fitting face, to be able to say: That is my mother.
He found one.
It was the face of a slim woman with a long, straight nose, broad, high cheekbones and gaunt cheeks. Her gaze was intense and grim. He detected in her eyes a sense of the remoteness which had always emanated from his mother, and which had enveloped them all like a cold blanket, his three elder brothers, his little sister, even his father. He recalled that her face was always serious, he had hardly ever seen her smile. As a young boy he had suspected that she did it in secret so nobody could catch her out. Or maybe she smiled only at Anna, his litt
le sister, the youngest. He had asked himself why she hid her smile, and never found an answer. She hid it from him, too, and although he had sometimes lain in wait for her—in a corner of the hallway through which she walked alone, or high up in the barn when she was gathering straw below—he never caught her smiling.
Thinking back to his siblings now, he felt total detachment.
From all of them.
Except Anna.
His father was always laughing, always laughing about somebody. A loud and vulgar laugh. A dangerous laugh, in fact it had not been a laugh at all, but a moment of chaos that could be followed by anything imaginable.
He remembered:
When he began to help out in the bar, he would often spill beer. One of the customers shouted, Hey, Adolf, your son still hasn’t learned how to carry beer glasses. He recalled in perfect detail the face of the man, a coarse, Saarland farmer’s face, broad and round, a regular in a bar where only regulars drank. His father came out from a corner, at the back on the right, where he was boozing with friends. He peered at the splash of beer on the uneven, scuffed tiles and gave a resounding laugh. Then he clipped his boy round the ear, which still hurt hours later, threw a cloth on the ground and returned to his friends, while the other men laughed.
He saw his mother behind the bar, she wore the face of the woman in the photograph. She had seen everything, but just stared, her expression serious and grim, before getting back to work. He had felt terrible, as terrible as he did now, as if this feeling were the light through which he had moved all his life, and for this reason he had never realized it until he was dead. Dead and alone.
When these thoughts turned into images he failed to notice at first. When he noticed he did not care.
The images sufficed; he no longer needed names, spoken words, they had only ever obscured what was now affecting him with the violence of blows, filling every nook and cranny of his senses with pain. Only now did he realize that his life had been devoid of happiness, only now, when he no longer knew who his father and mother had been, only now, when he no longer remembered his gender, but felt more like an it than anything else, the dwindling remains of a sad life, only now did he find himself.