Eichmann's Executioner

by Astrid Dehe

  Nagar turns his head, looks over at his colleague behind the cell door, nods to him, returns to his guard position. The now-complete silence in the room penetrates him, in a way that is so familiar to him. A silence that is timeless, that transcends time. Time for thoughts of things beyond work, time for questions that no lawyer asks.

  The prisoner sleeps almost silently, his square shoulders rise and fall almost imperceptibly. Confused, Nagar notices that he is breathing in time with the prisoner; he adjusts his own rhythm to match this man’s sleep, his peace.

  Can such a man find peace?

  In sleep, it is said, people wear no masks. In sleep, people cannot check themselves, expressions are removed like a pair of glasses or a shirt. What would Nagar see if he walked the three steps over to the bed, bent over the prisoner, as quietly as possible, as far as his stoutness allowed?

  Nagar remains seated. He does not trust sleep and does not want to believe that the prisoner, that familiar person, is a mask, he is afraid of looking into the face of a mass murderer, contorted with anger and the thirst for revenge, he is even more afraid of seeing calm features, a face that reveals nothing other than devotion and fatigue.

  Nagar remains seated. What is Ora doing now? Reading newspapers? The child will long since be sleeping, dreaming. Sometimes he calls out in his sleep, to whom they do not know. Nagar thinks about the fact that the prisoner has sons, too, the youngest just a few years older than his own. Stops thinking. Little by little, his breathing falls back in line with the prisoner’s. Hours pass.

  At some point he starts, there is a disturbance in the other room. Changing of the guards. Nagar hears murmurs, stifled laughter, they will have exchanged jokes in the corridor, obscenities perhaps, or more unbelievable facts about the prisoner’s life. Over the last few weeks, the chicken story had been spread around. The prisoner, they said, tried to make it as a poultry farmer after the war. At first he had no success at all, the animals ran wild, laid their eggs where he could not find them, and ignored his attempts to lure them out by calling “chick, chick, chick.” So he built a small pen, locked the chickens in, and trained them until he could order them around by whistling. If he whistled with two fingers, the chickens lined up in rank and file. And they only laid their eggs in the place he had marked out specially.

  The key is passed through the door hatch. Nagar stands up, tries to stop the chair from creaking, he succeeds in this but the key jolts in the lock, the bolt scratches over the metal, the heavy door crunches on the hinges. Everything is too loud. Someone is sleeping here! When the door finally opens the murmuring outside stops, his colleague enters, too loudly, nods to him, and because Nagar does not react, his colleague takes the key out of his hand, grips his arm, pushes him gently but firmly out of the room.

  Nagar feels as though he has been reprimanded, is ashamed of the closeness between himself and the prisoner, is ashamed that he should feel ashamed.

  Behind Glass

  At the same time, twelve thousand kilometers away, a woman is boarding a passenger plane. It is her first ever flight. In the large handbag that she keeps pressed to her side lie the documents that she has been sent, passport and visa, in a false name. Instructed to avoid contact with the other passengers, the woman closes her eyes and surrenders herself to her plummeting thoughts. She is allowed to stay for one afternoon, one night. By the next morning she will already have left this foreign country. When the plane lands she has to wait for all the other passengers to disembark. She is alone in the plane for a few minutes before two officials come down the aisle, stand in front of her, and one of the two quietly says her name. She stands up, the men escort her to a car. She remembers nothing of the journey, barely looks out of the window; she is not interested in the people out there, the landscape, the houses that pass by.

  Nagar sits in the cell, both hands resting on his thighs. The prisoner sits opposite him at the table and does what he has spent the last few weeks doing. He writes. Nagar hears the door in the hall, then voices, someone gives an order that the colleague passes on through the barred hatch: Aquarium.

  That means they must go to the meeting room. Since the sentence was given the guards have begun passing on the prison director’s orders to each other in a casual way, as if form no longer matters. The meeting room is a separate area from the hall, it measures two by three meters wide and is divided into two bulletproof, soundproof chambers by a piece of solid glass reaching all the way up to the ceiling. Microphones and headphones sit on the narrow tables that have been fixed to both sides of the wooden base. Unless the intercom system is switched on, visitors and prisoners are unable to communicate, silent as the grave.

  As Nagar leads the prisoner into the room, the afternoon light falls through the narrow ventilation shaft on the back wall, it scatters over the glass and is reflected as if by a mirror. Only a silhouette looms behind the glass. The prisoner starts, stands still, stares. Is he disobeying the order? No—when he feels Nagar’s hand on his shoulder he walks the two steps to the glass wall. Now it is clear: The visitor is a woman, in a plain dark dress, small and plump, a motherly type. Quickly, as though trying to recover the lost moment, the prisoner sits on his chair and places the headphones on his head. As he moves closer to the microphone and bends over it, words fail him. For the first time since Nagar has known him. Pity? Perhaps. Yes, indeed, Nagar feels pity in this moment. Two years of loneliness lie behind the prisoner, two years under the scrutiny of official, at most correct, often hostile eyes. Two years without an unintentional, unthinking, tender touch. Two years without his wife, who now sits opposite him, for who else could this visitor be?

  No one here knew she was coming, even the prison director had only just heard about her arrival. From Argentina. Two people, two continents, oceans apart. Now she sits opposite the prisoner, close enough to touch. His desire for a handshake, a hug, a kiss, even under the eyes of the guards, must be overwhelming. But he cannot fulfill this desire. Her plane has crossed the waters of the ocean, but here they sit up straight as though before the pharaoh and his chariot, become crystallized in the middle of the glass that divides the room. This time the glass hurts.

  When the couple do eventually begin to talk, Nagar studies the condemned man’s voice in order to try and follow the conversation. No officer tone like the one he uses in the courtroom, just a regular rise and fall—soft, calming, reassuring sounds. The conditions are relatively good, he seems to say, he is healthy and has not given up hope for a change in his fate. If he does say that then it must be for her, thinks Nagar.

  The woman nods and kneads the leather strap of her handbag. After a while she opens her bag, takes out a stack of photos. A questioning glance over her shoulder, the guards behind her have no objections. One after the other, she holds the photos up to the glass. Nagar bends down so he, too, can see what she is showing him. A house with a flat roof, half plastered, as if it is still being built, a somewhat wild-looking piece of land. Three young men, surely the prisoner’s sons. They look like their father, Nagar thinks. Finally, a young boy.

  He sits on a piece of wall sticking out behind a wire mesh fence, which he is holding on to, looking through it at the photographer with wide eyes. In the background is the house; the woman stands in front of it, holds up a hand, perhaps as a greeting or to call the child back. Between the fence and the house is a patch of deep terrain filled with water, what looks like a swamp, part of which has been drained. The woman has to hold up the photo for a long time. The prisoner studies it carefully. He hardly recognizes his youngest son anymore.

  Toward the end of the visit the woman turns around once again, asks something, gestures with her hands, points to the trousers and the shoes of one of the guards. It takes a while before the guard understands, then he goes to the microphone, points at the prisoner’s headphones, at Nagar. The prisoner gets up, gives Nagar the headphones, the guard repeats the request: She wants to see her husband from top to bottom, wants to be sure that his trousers
and his shoes are all right. For a moment Nagar is not sure what to do, then he pulls the chair back a bit, to the middle of the room. The prisoner has already understood, he stands on the chair, laughing awkwardly. Lets her look at him from head to toe. Sees the indignant look on his wife’s face when she notices the slippers on his feet. Checked felt slippers, with a zip. Of course, she had not expected boots, the times of the Obersturmbannführer are over, but slippers? Slippers are only worn by men—if at all—in their own living room, after work, not in public, where others can see them. This is not his home, and this is not the evening after work. Or perhaps it is, thinks Nagar.

  Perhaps his wife thinks the same. Nagar sees she is crying now. She turns around to hide her sobs. The prisoner has climbed down from the chair and is standing in front of the glass wall. His wife wipes her eyes again, then she, too, stands up, silently places her palm on the glass. She must be hoping he would return the gesture, must know that he will not do it.

  See you soon, he says. He says it with emphasis. Gives her the future she needs.

  Ben says you’re writing again, Moshe?

  Yes.

  What are you writing?

  I’ve just written about the day Eichmann’s wife came to the prison.

  I saw her. The woman. I felt sorry for her.

  Because her husband was going to die?

  No, because Eichmann loved another woman.

  One? You said he had lots of lovers, Shalom. The white lady, the young widow, the land owner, the cook.

  I don’t mean them, Ben. Not his mistresses. They meant nothing. I mean his true love. The desert princess.

  Desert princess! True love! Are you telling fairy tales now? Have you heard about Eichmann’s desert princess, Moshe? No? Moshe doesn’t know the story either, Shalom. And he knows what Eichmann wrote.

  Eichmann didn’t write the story down, Ben. It was a personal affair. He only told me.

  When?

  I don’t know. At some stage.

  Where? In his cell?

  No. Not in his cell.

  Well, it can’t have been when he was in the bathroom. He always turned on the tap. You wouldn’t have heard a word.

  Not in the prison. It was after that.

  In your dreams, then?

  This is a true story, Ben. It was after the war. Eichmann was living by himself, without his family—

  In Argentina?

  He calls it the district. It was in the desert. Eichmann lived alone, he had his horse with him, a white horse, but that was it. The district had been occupied, but when Eichmann got there, the soldiers were gone. He didn’t meet anyone, no one alive, no one dead.

  What about the princess?

  If she was real.

  What else could she be? A ghost?

  I’m telling you. Eichmann rode through the desert from one fortress to the next. These were palaces the soldiers had built in a row like pearls on a string, each one a three-day ride from the next. Mighty houses, Eichmann says, forbidding and stately, with tall windows dulled by sand, and sand in the corridors and great halls, sand up to your ankles on every floor. I usually left the palaces—

  You!

  Eichmann!

  Why did you say “I”?

  Because I’m telling the story the way Eichmann did! These are his words. Usually, I left the palaces as soon as I had inspected them, he says, rode on again and slept out in the open, with all my senses attuned, the horse beside me and the cosmos above in perfect equilibrium like nothing on Earth.

  But on that day, I got lost in the corridors, staircases, and wings of the building. It was a huge estate, hardly damaged, and in some of the rooms, I imagined I could still sense the breath of the occupiers, the officer taking off the coat and jacket I saw hanging on a hook, rubbing the sand out of his eyes as he sits down at the desk and stretches his legs out under the table. I had set up camp in the inner courtyard beside a well that had almost seemed to beckon to me. The deep, calm water mirrored a sky that I could not see above me, that was no longer there, that had never existed, perhaps. And as I undressed and washed, the woman came. All at once she stood there without making a sound, watching me with deep, dark eyes. She untied her hair and dried my body with her long dark tresses. She stayed with me all night. When the morning dawned, she disappeared.

  She came back the next day, then failed to appear for several days, then she was there again, and so it continued. I never understood what rule she was following, or if there even was one. But I waited for her to return and stayed in the palace courtyard, which seemed to attract her, where she might have lived at one time, whether to serve or rule, I did not know.

  The only thing for sure was that she would have an animal with her when she came. The animals followed her, as if carried on the wind and bound to her light quick step. Animals from the woods, a little owl with gray feathers and black wing tips flew silent circles around her, she had draped a weasel over her shoulders like a shawl, and a fox licked the heels of her feet and rubbed its tail across her slender legs.

  That is how he tells the story? He’s a poet, your Eichmann.

  It’s his most important story, Ben. He excels himself when he tells it.

  And you know it off by heart?

  Every word. I know every word. This really surprised me, he says. I could not fathom where the animals had come from or how the desert had created them, as there were no woods in the district, or even anything remotely resembling a wood. But when we lay together, the woman and I, when she slid into my arms and I buried my head in her hair, I discovered the answer. The scent of the forest wafted through her hair: Spruce and cedar needles, moss, the rooted earth, and rays of golden green shimmered across her body like sunbeams breaking through the branches of leafy trees and conifers. I realized then that the forest was within her and so were the animals, and not just them, I thought. She carries all landscapes within, coasts, lakes and plains, the deepest valleys and the stoniest peaks.

  A poet, who’d ever have thought it? I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Shalom. I have no idea who told you that story, but it certainly wasn’t Eichmann.

  He did tell it to me! Again and again.

  Eichmann was a Nazi, Shalom. Not a poet. He forced Jews into trains to be gassed.

  During the war, yes. But he was in the district after that!

  And he changed that much?

  Change? He didn’t change. He was German, he was evil. He was just as evil when he was in the district.

  The way you’re telling it, he was simply lonely, Shalom. So lonely that he imagined a woman who would dry him off with her hair and lie beside him. And whose body meant the whole world to him.

  Not imagined! The woman is real.

  The desert princess who loved him even though he is evil?

  When Eichmann reaches the part I just told you, when he says that the woman had the woods within her and all the other landscapes, too, he pauses every time, Ben. He looks at me like this, from the side, and waits. I think he wants me to see the woman. He wants me to sense and smell her, to recognize that she is all women.

  Eve?

  I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe someone else. One day, Eichmann said, the woman arrived with a young wolf that stayed by her side from then on. She carried it in her arms at first because it was sick or injured, too weak to walk, and when it was able to stand by itself, it swayed and limped whenever it tried to follow her. She nursed it tenderly and allowed it to sleep beside her at night, cuddled up close, while I had to stay away. And she talked to it, gently and lovingly, kept repeating the same word: Habibi. Habibi, Habibi, which sounded like bells tinkling. I was surprised and, I must admit, I felt slightly jealous as she had never uttered a word before. I had simply assumed that she was deaf and dumb, and had been content because we would never have been able to understand each other, the language of the district was alien to me and my own language was alien to her, too.

  Habibi. I tried to work out what it might mean. Perhaps it was
just the word for wolf, but the soft intonation the woman used when she pronounced the word suggested it might mean “little wolf” or, and here was another thought, “darling.” I did not want the woman to talk to a wolf that could not understand her and could not answer, I wanted her to caress me with her words, me, the man she had chosen of her own accord.

  Eichmann had whispered German words to her then, as they lay together, but all she did was smile, he says, and put her finger on his lips.

  Eichmann was jealous? Of a wolf?

  Not jealous. All living things must obey a certain order, he says. There are higher and lower beings, humans and animals, there are lines drawn that must not be breached. The wolf didn’t stick to them. It laid claim to the woman, Eichmann says, guarded her and would not let me come near, not during the day and not at night. The woman let it have its way, but this was too much for me, Eichmann says. And then one day his anger got the better of him, he says, and he lost his temper. The wolf had followed him to an outer wing of the palace, had growled at the door and bared its teeth. So he kicked it with his boot, not a hard kick, he says, though it was aggressive. But the wolf fell to the ground and ceased to move, lying lifeless on the dark stone tiles, which were covered in a thin layer of sand. And suddenly the woman was in the room, Eichmann says, kneeling beside the animal, whispering “Habibi,” covering its eyes with kisses. He says her lament sounded like a call, the cry of man to his fellow animals, a raw endless tone that grew and wavered. Maybe it was the lament of life, I thought, and that thought cut me to the quick, maybe life itself was lamenting within this woman, the lament for a lone wolf and thus for all living things that had failed to achieve their goals, or come into their own. I had become the tool of doom, he says. He left the woman with the wolf, saddled the gray, and rode away.