The End of Law

by Therese Down

  Hedda and Karl sat together at a table, and Hedda removed her coat. Karl thought she was more attractive than ever. Her hair was not bobbed and precisely curled, smoothed and sprayed into place, nor were her eyes heavily made up or her mouth expertly glossed and pencilled, as they had been on the previous occasions of their meeting. True, she looked tired, but her loose, long hair, gripped back on one side to prevent the annoyance of stray curls, was thick and healthy; her blue eyes were remarkable, in spite of shadows beneath them. And although her face was thinner, her full mouth and high cheekbones ensured an unarguable natural beauty that Karl much preferred to that enhanced by artifice. But his appraisal of Hedda Gunther’s beauty was merely observational. Of far more concern was her identity. A waitress duly arrived and took their orders.

  “I have not seen you here before.” Karl’s tone was almost accusatory. He was fighting the paranoid thought that she was spying on him. He couldn’t think why, though. Unless Cardinal von Preysing of Berlin was a traitor and not at all the man Karl’s father believed him to be. If that were the case, then, yes, he might have alerted the Reich Committee to the fact that SS Obersturmführer Muller had written to him recently, asking for his help in bringing to the world’s attention what was happening in Sachsenhausen, in Sonnenstein, in Brandenburg, in Lodz, in Warsaw… Karl could feel panic rising in his chest. He put a shaking hand to his forehead.

  “Karl –” Hedda’s tone was insistent now, and quite familiar – “you are not well. Please – do you want me to get you a taxi? You should go home, perhaps?”

  Karl fought the rising fear, drew himself up straight in his seat and placed both hands flat upon the table before looking at her directly. “It’s nothing,” he began as levelly as he could. He thought her concern very genuine. Such a concern would be hard for a traitor to fake convincingly. It was so hard to tell! Change the subject. “Are you still in Berlin? I have not seen you here before. I, er, I come to this place quite a lot. I live in Berlin – on Potsdamer. This is quite local for me. The coffee is good.”

  Hedda decided not to pursue the topic of his apparent illness. “No, I don’t live in Berlin now. Walter was given a house in Oranienburg. Our house in Berlin was bombed last August. We lost it.”

  Of course! It all came back to Karl as she spoke: the little girl in hospital – she must be visiting her at… where was it? Rudolf Virchow. “I am so sorry,” he began. “Forgive me. How is your daughter? Are you visiting her?” Then it occurred to him that the meeting Gunther had left to see his daughter was months ago. Was the child dead? Karl felt himself colouring. How could he have been so gauche, so utterly caught up in his own preoccupations?

  Hedda was confused. “How did you know about Agnette?”

  “Your husband – I work with him. He left one day to go and see her. It is a tragedy. I am very sorry.” He could not ask how the child was.

  “You work with Walter?” It was Hedda’s turn to be incredulous. She composed her features, assumed a more characteristic, detached demeanour. Sat back.

  The coffee arrived. Neither spoke as the waitress placed the steaming cups before them, asked if they required anything else, was dismissed by a head shake and raised hand from Karl.

  Hedda’s surprise and evident displeasure at Karl’s declared professional association with her husband brought him instant relief. She could not be spying on him, then. He would make sure. And he would also make it as plain as he could without being obvious that he had nothing in common with her husband, the administrative director of Sachsenhausen and senior director of T4 operations, SS Oberführer Gunther.

  “Yes. I am sometimes in meetings with him. He is senior to me, of course. He makes decisions. I do as I am told, mostly.” He did not smile, did not look at her, lifted his coffee cup to his lips as best he could without removing his gloves. His head shook a little with the effort of not seeming unnerved. Damn it! He could not master this way others had of seeming calm. Were they calm? The doctors, the senior SS officers – the Reich officers? Did they look so in control because they were? He replaced the coffee cup too quickly. Coffee splashed over the rim and into the saucer.

  Hedda saw the tremor in his hands. Nothing he said could convince her more entirely than this did of his difference with Walter. The thought struck her: He is afraid of something.

  “Walter has never mentioned that he sees you at work,” she said softly. She took a cigarette case from her handbag, removed a cigarette and, placing it in her mouth, searched her handbag for a lighter. She lit her cigarette and contemplated Karl. “I had no idea.” Her voice sounded flat. She picked up the packet and lifted it towards Karl.

  He declined, shaking his head. He spoke again. “And your daughter?” Karl could still remember the pretty little girl with flailing plaits who ran around in the July sunshine at Goering’s party.

  Hedda sank in her chair and sighed heavily. She rubbed her forehead hard with the heel of the hand in which she held her cigarette, as though she would rub away the images in her head. She was not anxious to talk about Agnette. She long ago understood that no one really cared about her daughter except herself – and Anselm, in his way. Karl Muller was hardly going to be making more than polite conversation. What was the point? She shrugged. Inhaled, exhaled decisively. “Agnette is… well, she’s not really conscious yet – a light coma, they call it. She was in a deep coma for weeks. Lots of surgery. The doctors say that there is some evidence of reactive behaviour now, but she just lies there. Doesn’t talk. I think sometimes she recognizes me. I don’t know.” Hedda finished by shrugging again. She drank her coffee absently.

  Karl considered her words. His thoughts flashed to the little girl he had watched die from gas poisoning in Brandenburg. He often saw her, in dreams, in unguarded waking moments. When he again expressed his sympathy, his tone was sincere and Hedda was moved. It was a long time since anyone had spoken to her kindly.

  “And are you visiting her today? Is that why you are in Berlin?”

  “No, no…” Hedda balanced her cigarette on the lip of an ashtray, found a handkerchief in her bag and blew her nose as genteelly as she could. “Agnette is at a hospital in Brandenburg now – very close to where we live. I am going to see my mother. She has flu.” Hedda smiled briefly. “My mother is hopeless when she’s ill – positively a martyr. She sent me a card telling me she was terribly unwell but ‘not to worry’. I’m not worried, actually.” Hedda could not suppress an ironic laugh, less at the juxtaposed triviality of her mother’s illness with Agnette’s than at her mother’s own great concern for herself. Mathilde had not even sent a card to Hedda for the duration of Agnette’s hospitalization.

  But her expression changed from amusement to concern again when she saw the sudden horror on Karl’s face. “What on earth is the matter now, Karl?” she said, irritated anew at this man’s unstable temperament.

  “She is in Brandenburg? Which hospital?”

  “The big one in the town. Why?”

  “The new one? The one that used to be a prison?”

  “No! I think that is a… what are they, places for… insane people?” She remembered Karl’s wife was mentally ill, and relied on years of good breeding to recover without showing she was aware of a faux pas. “Something like that? No, Agnette is at the general hospital – on a children’s ward. Why? What is the matter?”

  “Please. Don’t be alarmed. It’s only that I have… worked at the big one, the one outside the town. It’s not very nice. No place for a child. They haven’t sorted it out yet – still too much like a prison.”

  “Why would they send a child there?” Hedda was curious and annoyed. Why was this man always so full of mysteries and half-spoken ideas? “Agnette is not well. Her brain was damaged, yes, but… that’s a physical thing.”

  “Of course. But there is a war. Casualties mean that some hospitals will be given military priority. They will send patients to wherever there are beds. That’s the only point, really. I don’t think there will be t
he resources soon to make distinctions between the insane and the injured or just sick.”

  “Oh.” Hedda seemed satisfied. She took a final drag on her cigarette; stubbed it out. “Anyway, I am just stalling in here before I see my mother.” She smiled again. “”And I have to admit it’s rather nice to be sitting in a coffee shop in Berlin again, without children or… anyone else to worry about. I don’t get much time to myself these days. I left my son with the maid. After all, you can’t take a three-year-old to a flu-ridden grandmother.” Hedda suddenly became animated, her eyes widening in mock drama. “And if I don’t visit my mother she will sulk and tell all her friends I don’t care about her so they will be sympathetic. I won’t give her the satisfaction.”

  This time they both laughed. Karl was aware as he did so that it was a very long time since he had had anything to laugh about. But the anxiety was creeping back even before he stopped.

  Why did he have to bump into Hedda Gunther now and learn of her child’s removal to Brandenburg? Another huge weight on his shoulders! How could he tell her that no children’s ward in a Brandenburg hospital was a safe place; that the new Gorden paediatric wing that had been opened at Brandenburg general hospital was a euthanasia centre? It had been constructed simply because the staff at the converted Brandenburg prison hospital were not happy to gas infants and children under eight years old, so more “humane” methods of despatch by specialized personnel had been devised for the purpose in a general hospital paediatric unit. How could he tell her that he was personally responsible for the imminent delivery of a drug consignment from IG Farben, via T4 offices, made up of three kilogrammes of Luminal barbiturate and two of morphine-scopolamine suppositories, to the Gorden paediatric wing, Brandenburg hospital?

  Hedda noted the change in his eyes again and wondered anew what made this man so odd. “And what about you?” she questioned him. “How is your wife? I’m sorry – I can’t remember her name – in Leipzig, I think?”

  Karl frowned and nodded, as if mention of Greta was a natural progression to the conversation. “She – Greta – is still quite unwell. But she will be fine,” he said, tipping his now empty coffee cup on the saucer and rolling it from side to side on its base. He looked up and into Hedda’s eyes, found them soft and concerned. What he wouldn’t do to be able to scream his torment, spill the filth from himself in confession to her right now. If it were just his own life he would endanger by doing so, he would do it in an instant. He had contemplated suicide many times. The very possibility was a comfort, as was the thought that there was still at least one aspect of his life over which he had control: his continued existence. But who would protect Greta? “I saw her at Christmas,” he found himself saying. “She is still with her parents in Leipzig.”

  “That must be hard for you. Do you get home often?”

  “No. There is much to do and Leipzig is far away. There’s a war on, after all. Men at the front don’t get home. I am lucky. At least I can go every few months or so. And you? You are lucky, I think; you can see your husband every day.”

  Hedda could not disguise the expression these words prompted and which denoted how very much less than fortunate that made her feel. “Walter works here, in Berlin, and also in Sachsenhausen prison,” she replied. “He is at home about two nights a week. When he needs to work in Berlin, he prefers to stay in the city. It makes sense.”

  Karl recalled his own traumatic journey to and from Sachsenhausen just a couple of weeks before. “Absolutely,” he agreed.

  “Anyhow, Walter and I…” She stopped. He looked at her quickly, but she was careful not to meet his eye. “Well, we don’t mind being apart. Put it that way.”

  Karl nodded. He was not surprised she did not love Walter. So why had she married him? Karl studied anew Hedda’s languid blue eyes, remembered the stunning young girl he had escorted on a night out in Berlin long ago, in another life.

  “What does he do all day, anyhow?” Hedda was probing, genuinely curious about Walter’s work, not least of all because Karl worked with him. How could such totally different men do the same thing? Karl closed his eyes and put his hands to his face. Hedda took the gesture for embarrassment at her probing and an inability to discuss with her such things. “I’m sorry,” she said in a sing-song voice. “I know I’m not supposed to ask such questions. Top secret, right?”

  Karl, tired and suddenly wishing more than ever that he could just go to sleep, just lose consciousness completely for at least a while, pursed his lips and nodded. Said nothing.

  “Well, I hope whatever it is that you end this stupid war quickly. I don’t think I like Germany very much any more.”

  “Me neither.” He couldn’t resist saying it, but added quickly, “I’m working on it – promise.”

  They paid their bill, left the coffee shop, emerged once more onto the street. Then they embraced amicably, smiled at each other and wished each other well. An officer from the Tiergarten 4 office passed them, tipped his cap and met Hedda’s eyes. “Frau Gunther,” he said in greeting before walking on without slowing his pace.

  “I know his face, but I can’t remember his name,” remarked Hedda. “He came to dinner once – must be more than a year ago.”

  Karl had not taken notice of the man. He shrugged. “Well, I must be getting back to work,” he said.

  “And I to my dear mother. Can’t put it off any longer.” And they parted.

  It seemed to Karl, as he walked away from Hedda in the direction of Voss Strasse and his office on that slushy February afternoon, that everything had become a lot worse since he had started praying again.

  A few days later and Walter was working from his T4 office in Berlin. It was ten a.m. and he was sifting through the post. Requisitions for supplies, responses to his letters announcing his intention to inspect various premises. He put these to one side for his secretary; she would need to compile a schedule. Bills for supplies – mainly from IG Farben; an invitation to drinks and dinner at a function being organized by Ribbentrop at the embassy for senior T4 personnel – a little morale booster and opportunity for the tedious ambassador to hog a microphone and announce T4 programme statistics as if he were personally responsible for them. Tedious, but given the likely prestigiousness of the guests, he would go. Who knew: perhaps even the Führer might be there this time? Walter still had not spoken with Hitler, and that prospect was one of the very few things he was living for.

  The final envelope he opened was one addressed to The Reich Committee, Post Box 101, Berlin W9. This was the code address for requisitions from the child euthanasia team. It contained duplicates of several closely typed sheets of children’s names and accompanying justifications in medical terms for their imminent euthanasia. Walter had to sign off the requisition in duplicate, then have his secretary send back one to the originating doctor at whichever institution. The copy was kept on file. He had to put his signature next to each child’s name to show he had read the medical record, just in case anyone should try and query the death later and things became legal. So, sighing, he sat back, pen poised to flick and tick his way through the list of thirty or so names of children deemed unworthy of life at Brandenburg hospital.

  When he saw Agnette’s name he instinctively sat up and frowned. His heart skipped a little at the significance before his thoughts caught up. He could not at once understand fully the name as his daughter’s. This was partly incredulity and partly that he couldn’t place her in his working context. She belonged to a box in the attic of his mind marked “unsuccessful”, in which resided his family and his marriage. At last he was able to focus on the words before him.

  Gunther, Agnette Marie: Severe head trauma following injuries received in bombing raid August 1940. Comatose four weeks following surgery to remove subdural haematoma; follow-up surgery to relieve intracranial pressure. Prolonged coma. Aphasia. Seizures. Prognosis poor.

  Walter sat back once more and stared into space. He saw Agnette smiling, mixing cake ingredients in a large bo
wl while the cook looked on in benign encouragement; Agnette, sullen because she could not have some toy or sweet; Agnette, younger, an unsteady toddler, fluffy blonde hair and face serious in concentration as she sought to preserve her balance; Agnette, at five years old already beautiful, the chiselled beauty of her mother detectable beneath the chubbiness of childhood. But Agnette did not have Hedda’s moon blue eyes; she had her father’s eyes, ice-blue and Aryan. She had been a Teutonic ice maiden of rare beauty in the making. She had been perfect. Walter put his head in his hands. Now, she was hideous. The last time he had seen her, her eyes were dull. Her hair had begun to grow back in tufts. The tufts seemed darker than before, as though trauma had turned off some inner light. The scars from her operations were livid and criss-crossed cruelly over her skull. They would be hidden by her hair when it eventually grew back, a nurse had said, but at that moment, Agnette looked like something Dr Frankenstein might concoct.

  As far as he was concerned his little ice maiden was long dead. There was, though, which was curious to Walter as he sat, head in hands, trying to think it through logically, a difference between his “objective” definition of his daughter as dead and actually decreeing the termination of her cardiovascular and respiratory system by lethal drug overdose. He had watched hundreds of children die in gas vans and had remotely decreed the deaths of thousands more. It seemed that Walter’s hestitation in authorizing the termination of this “unworthy” was that the child was his own. Not logical. He decided to wait until after lunch. As long as the requisition was signed and sent back by the end of the day, the child euthanasia programme for Brandenburg would be on schedule. He just needed time to adjust.