“There is said to be a common bond between two men who have had the same woman,” he said coolly. “Would you agree?”
I said nothing and he smiled slightly.
“If you had been a man like myself, you would have found her remarkably responsive. But you were not a man like myself.”
I said nothing.
“When I first saw you,” he said, “I realized something that does not seem to have occurred to you, Herr Doktor. Our features are quite similar. Our expressions, of course, are not. And fortunately that is the great difference.”
I looked at him and realized that he was right. The bone structure of our faces was remarkably alike, but his mouth was wider and in repose it was a hard, straight line. His eyes were a hard, cold gray.
“You know, Professor, I’m beginning to have a slight respect for you. You almost got away with it. You can thank your father for your failure. If he hadn’t joined those imbecile generals who tried to kill the Führer, we’d never have caught you. Did you know what he was up to?”
“I knew nothing of it.”
“If I’d believed you had, I wouldn’t have asked you the question. Well, they bungled it. Fools and snobs.” He stared at me calmly. “Your father was hanged two days ago. Slowly. Do you know what happens to the sphincter muscle when a man is hanged?”
“I received instruction in the ss.”
“Their braces and belts were removed from their pants and their pants fell down to their ankles. Their pants caught it. Do you wish to know about your mother?”
I kept my mouth shut and he smiled slightly once more.
“She has been put away,” he said quietly, his eyes steady on mine.
“Is she dead?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m sure Mother knew nothing.”
“As you’ve already told me that you knew nothing about it yourself, how dare you tell me your mother knew nothing?”
“If my father was involved – and I can’t believe he was, though some of his friends may have been – he would never have told my mother.”
“A matter of no importance. The Führer has ordered the disappearance of every man, woman, and child connected with those fools!”
I made my last play for Mother. “Herr Obersturmbannführer, there is – or was – my brother Siegfried. You must know of his service to the nation and the Führer. Can’t that be considered in my mother’s case?”
“You underwent training with us and you ask such a stupid question?” He suddenly barked, “Strip!”
I stood there stupidly.
“Take off your clothes!” he shouted. “All of them!”
I stumbled when I took off my first shoe, but finally I stood naked before him. He rose from his chair, looked over my body, felt the muscles of my shoulders and arms, and flicked my penis lightly with his whip.
“In that, at least, there is no resemblance between us. You didn’t even know Eva well enough to know she only responds when she is being hurt.” He sat down again and crossed his legs, the overhead light shining on his polished jackboots. “Now you will tell me where is the Jew Erlich and his daughter.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t insult your own intelligence, to say nothing of mine.”
His body seemed to spring from the chair in a single piece and he slashed my face with his whip. My nakedness shuddered.
“Do you deny that you knew this Jewess, Hanna Erlich?”
“I knew her in London before the war, but I left London after the Führer took power.”
“We know that, of course. When did you next meet her?”
He sat down again and once more crossed his legs, though his whip kept flicking nervously against his boots.
“I never saw her again.”
“This becomes tiresome. Permit me to move the enquiry more quickly. An ss lieutenant was seen driving Erlich and his daughter from that village where they were living. They went in the direction of Munich. The local people thought he was arresting them. A few days later two genuine officers came for them and were told about what you did there. Sturmbannführer Krafft told me the rest. He also told me the story you trumped up about your mother’s illness.”
“She did have cancer,” I said. “You can prove it by speaking with the doctor who treated her. I can give you his name. I can –” I stopped, because I knew it was hopeless to continue.
“I’ve no more time to waste,” Heinrich said. “Where are Erlich and his daughter?”
“In Switzerland.”
“Can’t you think of a better lie than that? We know about that banker-brother of this Dr. Erlich. They’re not in Switzerland. They’re some place near Freiburg. Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You fool. Now we must waste more of our time with you.”
EIGHT
The torture sessions went on for the rest of the day. During them I fainted several times. The tortures were resumed after I came to. I still marvel that I lasted as long as I did. I didn’t know day from night so I can’t tell at what time I finally broke. But I did break in the end and told them where Hanna and her father were and told them also that if they found an old man with them he was innocent and knew nothing. Then I became unconscious again. I came to in my cell and the only realities were the pain and the horror and the shame. I expected to be taken out and shot and remembered that during the tortures I had begged them to kill me, just as had hundreds of thousands of others in those years.
How much time passed while I was in the cell I don’t know, but a day came when I was dragged out once more and found myself in a room with Heinrich and two of his assistants. My brain was functioning badly. Hanna and her father were also in the room but at first I was not sure whether they were real or images in my mind.
They were real. Heinrich smiled in their direction and pointed to me with his whip.
“He’s the one who told us where you were hiding. What do you think of him now?”
Hanna saw the condition I was in and suddenly she screamed, “It doesn’t matter, Conrad, it doesn’t matter! They arrested us two days after the attack on the city. They killed the forester. So it doesn’t matter what you said.”
The whip slashed across her face. They were both taken away and I never saw them again. Heinrich looked at me and said in an indifferent voice, “It won’t be necessary to torture you again. However, you will not die quickly.”
I was shipped to the Belsen camp, where I was to be starved and worked to death along with the other inmates. If the British had been a week later I don’t believe I would have survived, for in the end we had nothing to eat at all.
I never told you any of these details, Stephanie. I just couldn’t do it. Now that I have written all this down, I don’t think I should ever show it to you. what happened to me happened to hundreds of thousands of others and many of them were much braver than I was.
The whole world knows in a general way what happened in those years, but even now, who can really understand why it happened? Modern medicine has easily explained the Black Death and Dr. Erlich explained why Hitler became a psychotic. But as time passes I’m not sure that even he explained how it was possible for a man like Hitler to become our master.
So why have I written this? To sound a warning? To suggest that if such things happened in one civilized country, they may happen in others? But thousands have sounded the same warning before me.
Those years seem an eternity ago except when I have nightmares. The Hanna I loved so greatly has become unreal, though the Hanna I saw for a few minutes in the presence of Heinrich will never leave me. Since then I have studied and worked and have known what contentment and happiness are, and nearly all of it I owe to you, dear Stephanie. But what should have been the prime of my life was blighted by the place and the time where I spent it. It was the same for nearly all Germans of my age, and for hundreds of millions of others. We were robbed of our youth, of the best years of our lives, and this may
explain why so many of us have failed the youth of today.
Now the storm signals are flying again and the world may easily go out of control once more. Some psychopaths are sure to come to power because no age has ever been immune to them. But if a breakup comes, and quite possibly it won’t, the cause of it will at least be more impressive than a miserable little creature like Adolf Hitler. It will come out of the vastest explosion of human energy this little planet has ever known. It will come because our political habits and institutions will prove incapable of controlling this energy. The entire world is screaming for freedom and is sincere about it, but they don’t understand what freedom is. The most violent screamers are really screaming for release from freedom’s discipline, which means they are screaming for somebody to return them to slavery.
Is even this correct? Will men ever understand the meaning of the things they do, or why they do them?
____________
PART NINE
TIMOTHY WELLFLEET’S STORY
as told by
JOHN WELLFLEET
I began with my cousin Timothy and now the time has come to end with him. But first I must summarize a long period in the life of Conrad Dehmel.
After his release from Belsen, he spent several months in what was called a Displaced Persons’ Camp before he was restored to health. He was entirely alone in the postwar world, as were millions of others whose lives had been uprooted by the war. Almost every city in Germany had had its heart blasted into rubble and the survivors were living like cavemen in holes in the ruins.
A British officer in the occupation army happened to recognize Conrad during a tour of inspection and Conrad recognized him. They had met several times during Conrad’s London days and this officer wished to recruit him into the rehabilitation program. But Conrad could not endure the prospect of working in a land where everyone he had known and loved was dead, so he wrote to Professor Rosenthal in America. Nine years had passed since their brief meeting in Berlin, but Rosenthal remembered him. An American visa was arranged and Conrad sailed to the New World. He spent a week in Princeton as Rosenthal’s guest and was introduced to Einstein. Later, he was offered a post in the History department of another American university.
He returned to his historical studies and though his old dream of creating a grand design of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy had not vanished, it had been greatly modified. He did a prodigious amount of research and published many articles in learned journals. Rapidly he acquired a modest international reputation in the university world. About his personal life during these years I know nothing whatever. Were there other women in his life? More important, was there a single woman? I don’t know, for there is no record. But he was not an anchorite and he was certainly a man who needed and appreciated women.
After more than fifteen years in this American university, Conrad resigned on account of some stupid academic squabble and came to us. In his third year in Montreal he met my mother and a year later he married her.
For Mother, alone with two so-called illegitimate children and with her father dead, this marriage was certainly a release from a frightful insecurity, but financial security could have had nothing to do with her decision to marry him. My mother was truly a lovely person, rarer than I ever guessed when she was alive and I was very young. She was so honest she was often bewildering. On the whole, Conrad’s last years were happy ones, though like everyone else with experiences like his, there was an underlying sadness in him that in bad moments came close to despair. He and Mother probably had some stormy times, but there is no doubt of their devotion to each other. He made many friends in our city among both our own people and the many European scientists and professional men who had come to live among us. When I myself went to the university he had been dead for some time, but one of my professors told me that he had been regarded as a great teacher as well as an international scholar. Valuable people had respected him. He was several times consulted by one prime minister and was a personal friend of his successor.
But he was nervous. Who could have been otherwise than nervous with his knowledge and experience in what he always called an innocent country? The differences between our country and the Germany of his youth were very great, but there were resemblances that were alarming to all the Europeans who had elected to live among us. Chiefly, that a young generation had lost all confidence in the very meaning of our civilization and had begun to run amok, with foreign influences stirring the revolts. In his old-fashioned way, Conrad felt it his duty to speak out, just as he did on Timothy’s show, and as there was an open season on any public man over fifty, he became a target for the neo-Marxists and the separatists.
It was soon discovered that none of them had anything to do with his death, but Timothy certainly did, though unwittingly. The death remained a mystery, though if Conrad had told Mother about his experience with the Gestapo there would have been no mystery at all. As I have said several times, and forgive me if I repeat it, the time of my youth was bewildering to everyone who lived in it. We were in the grip of enormous forces we could not understand. I was accurate when I told André that for ordinary people this was the most exciting time in the history of the world. That was the trouble with it. The prosperity was incredible, even though anyone who thought about it knew it could not last indefinitely. So many exciting things happened that we lived from one crisis to another and our brains were so battered by them that we could not grasp what they meant.
So now I will return to that rare symptom, my cousin Timothy. His story begins in the immediate aftermath of his television performance with Conrad Dehmel.
TWO
When Timothy came to himself, he knew that Esther Stahr had been right when she told him the government would never surrender to the kind of demands the terrorists were making. The very next morning, in the small hours when he was asleep, troops moved into the city and the police began arresting a number of people under some legislation that was supposed to be applicable only in wartime. Timothy was one of the few journalists who attacked the government for this: “Everything I hated in authority, armies, police, establishments, and my father’s generation surfaced when I saw those soldiers and heard about the arrests.”
He studied the first lists of the names of arrested people. There was Emile Chalifour, just as Chalifour had expected. Timothy imagined Chalifour in a prison cell raging at him. However, the police soon discovered that he was insignificant and released him before the week was over. But Timothy was still upset about Esther Stahr and the next morning he telephoned her.
“Just who was right and who was wrong?” he shouted at her over the telephone. “Didn’t I tell you that war is the health of the state? Look at what they’ve done now. They’ve declared war on the kids. They’ve turned this country into a police state.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Did you hear what I said?” he shouted at her.
“You and I can’t go on like this,” she answered and hung up on him.
Two days after Timothy’s performance with Conrad, just as Esther had predicted, the kidnapped cabinet minister was strangled and the news of it went around the world. A few years later the murder of hostages became so frequent that it was hardly newsworthy, but this one was the first to happen in what we used to call a civilized country. The night following, Timothy’s Pentagon show appeared and this is Timothy’s note on it:
“According to my standards it was a minor masterpiece. General Sprott played a beautiful obbligato to the horror clips Réjean and Jacques had spliced together, but the whole show was wasted. Barely a tenth of my usual audience looked at it. They were glued to the radio and the other TV stations for news about the kidnappings and the manhunts.”
Immediately letters and phone calls had poured into the studio protesting Timothy’s behavior to Conrad Dehmel and his general treatment of the news. For the first time they began to worry him. A day came when he was sitting in his office planning
the next program with Réjean Roy when the telephone sounded. He picked it up and heard a hard male voice.
“Are you Wellfleet?”
“Yes.”
He heard heavy breathing before the voice came on again.
“I’m just letting you know that you’re not going to live much longer. We’ve had enough from bastards like you.”
He heard the caller’s phone click down and told Réjean what the man had said.
Réjean shrugged, “Like I said, things are bad around here.”
“Anyway, you and Jacques did a beautiful job. That show was just about perfect.”
Once more Réjean shrugged. Timothy recorded that he felt totally alone, that there was nobody he could talk to any more.
THREE
The attacks on Timothy’s style of journalism grew more numerous and he became even more resentful. “It was all very well for Esther Stahr to tell me I was debasing the profession by making the news a part of the entertainment business, but what else could anyone do? What real news did the pols and the power men give to any of us? What else could we do but guess and be indignant? All you boxwatchers who tuned in to The National, just what did you expect to get? Now under the emergency legislation they gave us nothing. My private opinion was that they had nothing to give, but we were supposed to fill our columns and air spaces, so we jabbered in a vacuum for weeks. Quite a few columnists and media men jabbered against me, and one of them virtually accused me of being responsible for political kidnappings and murders. He listed twenty-seven shows of mine over a period of three years in which he said that I had invited terrorists onto my programs. I thought of suing him for libel, until I checked back and realized that it wasn’t worth while. He had exaggerated, of course; I had not had twenty-seven terrorists on twenty-seven occasions, but I had certainly had them on seven.”
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