by Dan Vyleta
At length she located what she had been looking for, took a step towards the front door (a man in a black uniform was standing there, watching all her movements with close interest but making no move to help her), then decided otherwise and headed into the living room instead. There were very few people left there now: a drunk sitting in an armchair, mouth wide open and sleeping with a dirty china plate cradled in his lap; and a group of four men who were talking to Otto in one corner of the room, while the latter was spooning custard out of a dessert bowl with his fingers, then licking them off with childish glee. He had taken off most of his make-up, though some paint still clung to the creases of his face. Drawing closer she realised that the men were complimenting Otto on his performance and making suggestions for future acts. One of them – a muscular man in his forties, with a messy fencing scar beneath one eye – seemed to be a senior figure in the Party’s youth movement, and was painting a picture of an open-air performance in the Augarten, in front of an audience of ‘five thousand German lads’, and was offering his help in putting together material with a ‘suitable, pedagogic content’. Otto smiled, licked his fingers, and nodded his thanks when one of the others held out a bottle of schnapps.
It took Zuzka a few minutes to attract Otto’s attention. She tried to catch his eye, but he seemed to look right through her, was focused on the food, the booze, the fawning, loud-mouthed men. In the end it was the youth leader with the duelling scar who pointed her out to him.
‘Looks like you have another admirer,’ he said rather loudly, turning around and scrutinising her from top to toe. ‘Fräulein Speckstein, I believe. You two know each other?’
Zuzka shook her head and was relieved to see Otto do the same. The mime seemed to be angry with her for intruding on his moment of triumph; he knitted his brows and stared at her with a peculiar coldness. The man with the scar did not seem to notice.
‘Well, Fräulein,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy the show?’
She coloured and did not know how to answer; panted rapid, shallow breaths, her eyes fixed on Otto, pleading with him to please hear her out. All four of his admirers were staring at her now while she stood sweating into her blouse.
‘Speechless, are you? Oh my, my dear Herr Frei – you must have made quite the impression! I believe the lady is going to swoon.’
The men started laughing. She pushed through them and staggered towards Otto. It must have looked to them as though she were drunk and had decided to throw herself around his neck. For a moment his ear was very close, and she aimed for it, came close enough to kiss.
‘You lied to me,’ she said.
And: ‘Eva is in danger.’
Her hand found his, and tucked into his palm the jagged edge of Anton Beer’s key. He pushed her away as though she had embarrassed him; listened angrily to the hooting of the men. Only then did it seem to dawn on him what he was holding. He excused himself and walked briskly out the room. Zuzka looked after him, shaking, while the youth leader next to her offered to escort her to a chair and, in the process, slipped a hand on to her inner thigh.
She let him do it. In the confusion that raged in her there were things that were soothed, not angered, by his clumsy touch.
10
Beer did not notice Otto’s entry until he marched past him down the corridor. It would not be accurate to say he ran: it wasn’t the gait of a man trying to catch the train before it pulls out of the station. He might have walked ten miles like this to good effect, the long, steady stride of a man who knew his destination. His tread fell at the centre of Beer’s sprawled-out legs. The doctor was sitting on the ground, covering both his ears: saw a shadow fall, followed by a much-worn leather sole. When Otto passed him, Beer looked after him as he might stare after a passing omnibus that had almost run him over. It took him far too long to get to his feet.
Otto walked into the bedroom. Beer wasted a moment looking back down the length of the corridor. He wanted to see whether the front door was closed. It was. When he finally stumbled after Otto, he was ten seconds off his pace. He expected the shouts of an argument, or the laboured breathing of two men engaged in struggle. Instead he heard nothing – the rush of his own blood – and was confused to find in his bedroom a scene of total calm. Eva lay there, uncovered and naked, her body frozen in her condition’s false composure. At the foot of the bed stood her brother, big hands dangling from his wrists. Teuben lay splayed in front of him, his feet towards the doctor, the upper part of his body hidden by the corner of the bed. His leg moved a little – the right, his foot scraping for a toehold – and Otto bent down to him without any haste, picked him up by his shirt collar and smashed his head into the radiator underneath the window. The leg’s movement ceased. It hardly took a second.
Confused, disorientated by how something so momentous could have happened so fast, Beer ran forward and fell to his knees right next to the detective. The man lay slumped on one side. His shirt was unbuttoned, as were his trousers, and he was no longer wearing his jacket or boots. At the top of his head two narrow furrows ran through the skull where he had hit the sharp-edged piping of the radiator’s front. A separate collision, also with the radiator (each impact had left a smudge on its white paint), had cut open the cartilage that connected his left ear to the side of his face: it had come loose and dangled darkly against his jaw. It was from this wound that most of the blood was flowing, staining his hair, his neck and the shoulder of his white shirt a vivid red. Beer bent down to search his throat for a pulse, but found none. As he turned the detective from his side on to his back, the blood-wet shirt gaped across the chest, revealing those large lopsided nipples that Beer remembered from his initial examination of the man.
‘You’ve killed him,’ he said flatly, and stared over to where Otto was tugging Teuben’s boots back on to his feet. He moved up the body, tucked the penis back into the trousers and stuffed the shirt inside the waistband, then did up its buttons one by one.
‘Did you hear me, Otto? He’s dead.’
The mime nodded absently, stepped to the window, opened the curtains and looked out. Whatever he saw seemed to displease him, but even so he hardly hesitated: turned back to the corpse, scooped hat and uniform jacket from off the floor and began threading first one arm, then the other through its sleeves. A bottle of beer fell out of the dead man’s coat pocket and rolled under the bed. Otto ignored it. He seemed to expect no help from the doctor. Otto’s features were absorbed by the most intense anger; and yet his body moved with peculiar precision and purpose, like that of an experienced soldier under fire. Beer, who had little experience of physical courage – he had never sat in a trench or faced a man intent on hurting him in earnest – recognised it now for what it was: not the laboured grappling of the soul with an act from which the body shrank, but action pure and simple, the doing of what needed to be done. In the same manner – wearing the same aspect, his face shaking, the movements calm – Otto might have led a bayonet charge, or carried a dying comrade out of trouble. Beer watched how he put the hat on Teuben’s head, then pulled it down to cover the mangled ear, which he tucked under. In the next instant he had dug his hands into the dead man’s armpits and begun turning him around so that the head faced the doorway rather than the window.
‘Take his feet,’ he ordered.
When Beer didn’t, Otto began to drag Teuben down the corridor on his own. He was halfway to the door before Beer found the composure to run after him and plead with him to stop.
‘We mustn’t move him,’ he said. ‘The police–’
Otto never even broke stride. ‘What are you, crazy?’ Only when he reached the front door did he set Teuben down.
‘And where are you taking him?’ Beer tried again. ‘The staircase is full of people.’
But Otto was already opening the door. He turned off the light and slipped out, leaning the door to behind him. Beer heard him run down the stairs. A minute later, he returned. As he stepped back into Beer’s hallway, he seemed to remembe
r something, turned on his heel and ran to the door across the landing, pressing his eye to the neighbour’s spyhole.
‘Nobody there,’ he grunted on his return. ‘Take his feet.’
It did not occur to Beer now to disobey.
And so they walked out into the stairwell. The lights were off, the space alive with far-off noises. Teuben’s big, ungainly body hung between them like a slackly rolled carpet: on the stairs, his backside kept brushing against the ground. From the first, it was clear that Otto knew where they were heading. Beer froze when their boots crunched upon the broken glass that lay scattered across the stairs. The flaxen-haired youth was still lying there rolled up into his stupor: blood on his nose, the knees tucked up underneath his chin, wedged into the corner of the foot-wide step. Otto seemed untroubled by the man’s presence. He gestured to Beer to set Teuben down in front of the empty window frame, then readjusted the detective’s hat, which had threatened to come loose.
It was hard work to haul him up and push his head and upper body over the window’s inch-wide ledge. Otto, it turned out, was as strong as a bear. Before them loomed the yard, looking dark and abandoned from this height. The chestnut branches shielded much from their view. At the last moment, when they were already bending down to take hold of Teuben’s ankles, the mime reached around to unbutton the detective’s fly again; tugged his penis through the Y-front of his underpants. They picked up his feet and calves until they were level with the window, then pushed. The dead man fell: silent, ungainly, head over heels. ‘We’ll never get away with it,’ the doctor whispered, but he pushed Teuben out the window all the same, then stood in the window frame, watching him fall. The body hit a tree branch, then the crossbar of the iron frame that stood in the yard to assist the beating out of carpets: grazed it, left a chunk of face in the care of its cold metal, bounced and rolled. It came to rest half-buried in the piles of dead leaves that had gathered underneath the chestnut tree. Nobody shouted, nobody screamed; magpies rustling in the branches. Beer looked across the courtyard at the rows of windows blinkered by their curtains: his white, ironed shirt gleaming like a flag hung out into the night.
He stood there half a moment before Otto yanked him back inside. He yanked him hard and by the collar: two mother-of-pearl buttons popped near the throat and fell, lightly clicking on the ground to scatter amongst shards of glass. Cursing, but moving calmly nonetheless, Otto bent to retrieve them, then marched Beer back towards his flat. They entered, locked the door, stood staring at one another without uttering a word. Wordless still, they spilled into the kitchen. The mime saw the bottles of beer grouped loosely on the table and reached for one, only to watch the doctor snatch them up in a sudden panic, and upend them in the sink. His movements were so hasty, his hands so unsure of themselves, that he broke first one, then a second bottle, and cut his finger open on its jagged neck. Otto watched him with dark wonder; turned to his left to search the larder, found a bottle of brandy, which he uncorked and then set quickly to his lips. He swallowed and swallowed, breathing deeply through the nose, until half the contents were gone. His eyes grew glassy, the angry flush that had marked his face began to clear. Without a word he stepped up to the sink where Beer was still rinsing out the bottles, pushed him aside and washed some blood off his now trembling hands. Then he turned, stepped into the corridor, and ran out the door, quietly, not turning on the light, leaving behind the brandy, and a crumpled tea towel that he had thrown on to the ground.
Three
When Elvira Hempel was a girl of three or four there lived near her parents’ house a scrap-metal merchant who owned a clapped-out circus horse called Lotte. Lotte had very large and frightening teeth. On command the horse would throw itself down on to the ground and play dead. Then it would jump back to its feet. Elvira and her elder brother picked through the rubbish at the local tip, then sold it to the merchant. It seems he overpaid: he gave them soup to go with the pennies, in exchange for rusty tins and wire hangers; bent, broken spokes of worn-out umbrellas. There are some other childhood memories, from before the hospitals, asylums, orphanages, but not very many: how her father stole a goat and chickens, and a coffin for his deceased son; how her mother tied the youngest siblings to the legs of the kitchen table when she left them at home unsupervised. One day her father caught a dog in a wash basket. They ate it for supper. It was a sheepdog, that; he slaughtered it himself. It might have been 1935. In the 1990s, some fifty years after her sister was gassed, Elvira published these memories, along with those others: the years of eczema and bed-wetting, the cold showers and the beatings, the day she stood naked next to a pile of shoes and clothes, and waited for her turn to pass the metal door ahead. She writes how she dreamed of owning a doll. She was six then, maybe seven, and needed something to beat up. In the end she made do with her little sister, Lisa, who, too, had been diagnosed and apprehended. There were other children on the ward: one was one-eyed, another had a pinhead; some were epileptics, and some had fathers who were vagabonds or thieves. There is a document that attests to Elvira’s ‘debility and psychopathology’, signed by a Professor Fuenfgeld on the 6th of September 1938. In a separate document her parents, too, were declared feeble-minded though neither was examined nor threatened with incarceration. In the early 1940s, after several years spent in a borstal, her middle brother was inducted into the Waffen SS. Examination of his family tree had revealed him as a pure-bred Aryan; he served guarding prisoners in Magdeburg. Lisa was killed on the day before her fifth birthday. Elvira walked free after six years of institutionalisation. She was eleven. She does not know why she survived. She wasn’t even sterilised. After the war, in the first year of occupation, she lived for some time with her father. They ate dog meat again. So did many others. She wrote it all down, a document of anger. There is a photo at the front of her book of Lisa looking at the camera. The child is two. She does not smile.
1
On the night of the 4th of November, at 11.03 p.m., a body fell from the stairway window between the second and third floor of the apartment building at —gasse 19. It hit a number of branches of a chestnut tree, which – without themselves taking much damage – contrived to turn the falling body and redirect its face into the path of the carpet-beating frame’s iron bar. The impact shattered parts of the left frontal, parietal, and malar bones; it ripped open one cheek and knocked off the falling man’s hat, which came to rest, crown down, not far from his right hand. The man himself ended face down, arms outstretched, one knee raised in a near-ninety-degree angle, that is to say, in an aspect reminiscent of a crawling toddler who has lost his balance and has fallen flat on his face. The man’s thick hair and the inch-deep heap of fallen leaves that surrounded his head served to mask the severity of the injury from casual observation.
For a good few hours yet, there was to be little such observation, casual or other. At the moment of the man’s fall, the yard had but a single occupant, a burly, forty-seven-year-old Japanese male with a pockmarked exterior whom his neighbours routinely, if not maliciously, identified by a racial epithet pertaining to the Chinese. We know him as Herr Yuu. He had stepped into the yard from the narrow door leading to the apartment building’s side wing (of which he was a resident) with the express purpose of recovering a bow tie that he had removed – and subsequently forgotten – during his performance at a festive gathering hosted by Professor Josef H. Speckstein on the first floor of the building’s front wing. Yuu entered the yard at eleven sharp. It was not yet raining, despite the dense cloud cover that had gathered in the city’s skies in the hours after dusk, and he, surprised to find no other guests of said festivity out in the yard, had lingered a moment to smoke a cigarette. His stomach was full, and he was dyspeptic, the result of consuming too hastily too great a variety of rich and sugary foods. The noise he heard was slight. The branches gave a rustle, some twigs were snapped off, and the metal bar sang out a ringing note that his musician’s ear registered as a B flat. Of the man himself, Yuu saw nothing apart from hi
s prone shadow. Confused by the noise, slight as it was, and the lumpen outline of the man, Yuu looked up and attempted to trace the trajectory and origin of what his ears had witnessed. What he saw was the white breast of a dress shirt leaning out the empty window frame above. It lingered for a breath or two, then withdrew with considerable haste. In the face of this event, Yuu, trumpeter, did not persevere in his intention of retrieving the missing bow tie, but turned on his heel instead, and retreated into the side wing, at the top of which he was renting a garret room decorated with an unusual number of mirrors. There were no other witnesses.
At 11.19 that night, driven out by an urgent call of nature, a young, handsome Rottenführer SS emerged into the yard and parted with his water not two feet from the corpse. He was in an advanced state of inebriation. As he struggled with his trousers’ fly, a bout of nausea overcame him. He fell to his knees and vomited up a mixture of tripe soup, roast beef in cream sauce, and apple strudel in custard; then, unable to keep his balance, he fell face down into the leaves and was soon overcome by sleep. Within minutes, two magpies swooped down from the higher branches of the tree and began pecking through his sick. A third magpie found a separate source of food clinging to the metal bar some yards away from them. Several other birds would join their efforts in the course of the night.