Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  Crossing the street, he turned his collar up against a thin rain that had suddenly begun to fall.

  2

  Munich: which was where the barbarism had begun. When Grunwald thought of Munich he remembered less the empty apartment and the holiday snapshots in their thin frames than the sight of broken windows and desecration – the great worm that slithered over the city dressed in brown, a marching worm that carried its swastika like a prize insect it was about to devour. He remembered the boycott and the emergence of the SS. The martyrs of the Feldherrnhalle. The crowds in the Königsplaz. The Braun Haus in the Briennerstrasse. It seemed to him, recalling the city now, that wherever he looked people had altered: their faces had changed and they had become hard and hardness was a new sort of ideal. But it entailed suffering. Those who had been woken in the night and disappeared in the direction of the Dachauerstrasse in dark cars were the natural victims of the new social order. For Grunwald, until early 1940, it had meant not only fear but a profound emptiness in his life, a feeling that no matter what happened after the end of the barbarism nothing could ever be the same. And how could it? How was it possible to go back and erase the shapes and shadows of the past? But Grunwald did not think of Munich often. If he was to survive in Berlin, the past was nothing more than an irrelevant encumbrance. The burning synagogues, the yellow stars, the identity papers with the statutory J, the transports and the empty echoes of machine-guns – these were disorientated images in no way connected with each other.

  He walked towards the Wilhelmstrasse. Goebbels’s Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda: where were they now, all those Germans who had been enlightened? You did not simply switch off a light that had burned with such intense power for so many years simply because the Minister himself was no longer in residence.

  The Wilhelmstrasse. It was here that they had thrived, crazy conductors leading a mad orchestra into a complex and incomprehensible piece of music. It was here that they had planned the new Europe.

  Now, where they had once ruled, another army existed. Grunwald watched a crowd of Russians, their rifles strapped to their shoulders, looking for all the world like a band of sightseers. They called out to each other, laughed, made jokes: they were like men sniggering at a funeral.

  He moved forward and drank some water at a hydrant, washing it around in his mouth before spitting it out. Above him was a huge portrait of Stalin nailed to what had once been the entrance to a building; the building itself was mostly destroyed but the face, hard as granite, seemed to work upwards and away with an expression of contemptuous distaste for so much destruction. The Russians were moving off down the Wilhelmstrasse in the direction of the Unter den Linden where, at the Brandenburg Gate, hung even more portraits of Stalin. It seemed to Grunwald that there was little difference between these blurred photographs and the crucifixes hung in Bavarian Catholic homes: how did you choose between the intentions of those who had taken the trouble to nail such things to walls? Talismanic devices, whether political or religious: there was nothing to choose. Turning away, he went back in the direction of the Alexander-Platz.

  Martha had said to him one morning in August 1939, ‘I don’t think I can go on.’

  He had been dreading these words. They meant that she had reached the end of something and that he would have to make a decision. It was still possible to leave. A vast sum of money could buy a passage to America but America seemed so distant and the decision such a momentous one. And there was something else besides: blindly, without real reason, he had refused to accept as a permanent state of affairs the anti-Jewish measures taken by the National Socialist government. Somehow he had always imagined that these were temporary stipulations, created for simple propagandist purposes. It was nothing more than that. In a few more months everything would be normal again.

  Martha had argued against this blindness. He was a coward, he was blinkered. If he thought things were ever going to improve, then he was stupid. Every day she had watched the Jews being stripped of yet another segment of their dignity; even now it was impossible for her to speak to her German friends without putting them in some kind of danger. Fraternization had been forbidden. They were living in a prison. Had he ever heard of Dachau?

  Grunwald recognized an element of truth in her arguments and yet still managed to convince himself that they were not in immediate danger. He did not think of himself as a Jew in any case. First and foremost he was a German.

  Martha had spoken of the Night of the Broken Glass. What had happened then? Grunwald agreed that it had been a terrible thing – but was it really anything more than the actions of a few extremists?

  And Martha had said, ‘I don’t think I can go on.’

  Those were the last words she had spoken to him. He left the house and went to his office in the Kaufinger-strasse, thinking how difficult life and work had been in the last few years. It was only just possible to survive but the commercial restrictions against the Jews made anything other than the barest living difficult. Martha was probably right: life had become a burden, a constant struggle against a system that had denied them almost every human right. Why not leave? Why not?

  When he returned home that evening both his wife and son had gone. He never saw either of them again.

  The man in the cellar, who had been eating something, hastily covered the food with his coat when Grunwald entered. A little surprised, Grunwald said nothing: he hadn’t seen the man before but in these days strangers came and went, saying neither where they had come from nor where they were going. Grunwald stood against the wall. The man, shading his eyes as if afflicted by the brightness of an electric light, shrugged apologetically and then removed the food from beneath his coat and started to eat again. When he had finished, he wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve. He was, Grunwald supposed, in his middle forties. It was impossible to be sure. Everyone seemed ravaged by war and appearances were no longer a safe indication of age. The man got to his feet.

  ‘I came in out of the rain,’ he said and shuffled around the cellar. Stopping by the gap in the masonry, he looked out across the expanse of rubble. And then he shook his head in disbeleif. ‘Are you a Berliner?’

  Grunwald said, ‘I come from Munich.’

  ‘I hear things are bad there now. Even worse than here.’ The man was still shaking his head as if to say that nothing could be worse than Berlin. He turned to look at Grunwald.

  ‘You’re a Jew.’

  Grunwald did not reply. The statement still had another shade of meaning; more than a fact, it was an accusation. The man stumped around the room, avoiding slabs of fallen brickwork.

  ‘You’re a Jew. I used to be able to smell a Jew from forty yards.’

  ‘A keen sense of smell,’ Grunwald said. ‘It must have been useful.’

  The man laughed: a brief, emaciated sound. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have anything to do with any of those camps. That was bloody stupidity.’ And he laughed again, so that Grunwald did not know whether to take him seriously.

  Grunwald sat down. The man came close to him and it was only then Grunwald realized he had been drinking heavily; his breath was stale and alcoholic.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Grunwald.’

  ‘Mine’s Schoen.’ He sat beside Grunwald and crossed his legs. His face, Grunwald noticed, was scarred in two or three places and the little finger of his right hand was missing. ‘Have you got a woman?’

  Grunwald shook his head. ‘I don’t.’

  Schoen took a small knife from his coat and began to pick at his fingernails. He removed the dirt from beneath the nails as though it were important to keep up some standard of hygiene. ‘I had a woman until last week. Know what she did? She chucked me out because she took up with an Ivan. He brings her presents. I suspect he’s got a bigger prick than me. That’s what I suspect.’

  Grunwald felt suddenly hungry. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘She wasn’t a bad sort. I met her at one
of those bloody rallies at Bad Harzburg or some such place in 1937. Or was it ’36? Then I bumped into her again just after the Russians got here. Nostalgia, that’s all. Sheer nostalgia.’

  Schoen slumped down with his head against the wall. He talked for some moments and then, almost imperceptibly, he was asleep. It was a solid, drunken sleep and when Grunwald was sure that he wouldn’t waken, he slipped his hand into the pocket of Schoen’s coat. There were two squares of dark chocolate wrapped in a scrap of newspaper. He ate them hurriedly and then went outside, feeling like a robber.

  ‘I can’t go on. I don’t think I can go on.’

  Only the night before last Herr Schumann had been taken away by the Gestapo. Nobody knew where. What harm had Herr Schumann done? By any standards of orthodoxy, he wasn’t really a Jew. A man of mild manners, reserved, civilized – what had Herr Schumann done? What was happening in Germany?

  ‘I don’t think I can go on.’

  Only last week, when Herr Kramer protested to his landlord about the inordinate rise in his rent, he was visited by someone from Gestapo HQ who accused him of treachery through his unwillingness to contribute to the Reich economy. Herr Kramer was made to walk up and down the Maximilians-Platz wearing a placard round his neck. I am a Jewish swine.

  And so the apartment was empty one day. The photographs in their tin frames beaming at him from the shelf. Everything neat and tidy. And empty. His life could never be so empty again. In a panic, his mind turning over and over, questions and fears racing through him, he had asked the neighbours. Only Frau Lindmann had seen anything. The truck, as if it were some ambulance of terror, had finally called. Yes, Frau Grunwald and the child had been taken into the truck. Yes, the people who had taken them were from the Gestapo.

  At Gestapo HQ, Grunwald had been kept waiting for more than three hours. His fear, like the sequence of dread in some hostile nightmare, had increased with every minute; not simply for Martha and the boy, but also for himself. Would he ever walk out of this place again? SS-Obersturmführer Mayer, a little man in a uniform that was too large for him, had eventually invited Grunwald into his office. Trembling, shaking with a rage he knew was ineffectual, Grunwald asked to see his wife and son. Mayer smoked a pipe which he lit with deliberate slowness, spoiling match after match. He blew a cloud of smoke upwards at the ceiling and when he spoke he gave the impression of someone deeply concerned – he was a cultured, civilized human being: as were all members of the Gestapo. Reports of atrocities were exaggerated. Germans did not behave like that. Being a member of the Gestapo was a great responsibility. The security of the Reich depended on the Gestapo. And Obersturmführer Mayer, like all his colleagues, did not wish Herr Grunwald to think that the Gestapo had been instrumental in the disappearance of his family. Why would it do such a thing anyway? Admittedly, measures against the Jews were strenuous; but these were difficult times. Just the same, Frau Grunwald and the child had not been taken by the Gestapo. For what purpose would they have been taken anyway? It amounted to the old story, in Obersturmführer Mayer’s opinion: Frau Grunwald had a lover, and, in the natural course of these things, had left her husband. That was all. He hoped he had set Herr Grunwald’s mind at ease. He was the unlucky victim of an unfaithful woman. Nothing more.

  Grunwald waited, as if he were waiting for the truth to be revealed all of a sudden. But Mayer’s mask remained unaltered. It did not even change, when the distinct sound of a human scream, muffled from several rooms away, penetrated the air. Mayer rose. He was extremely sorry.

  Outside, in the burning sunshine of the street, Grunwald was confused. He felt suddenly all hope had been drained away from him. He walked up the Neuhauserstrasse, the sun hammering down at him. He did not want to go back to the empty apartment. He was afraid now for his own life. And he realized that if Mayer, or someone like him, chose to append his signature to an arrest order made out in the name of Leonhard Grunwald, he was utterly powerless to act.

  He had to wait almost a year for his own arrest.

  Cautiously he returned to the cellar where Schoen was still asleep. His head to one side, his hands clasped together over his groin, he was snoring. His mouth hung open. Except for the noise he might have been a corpse. Grunwald moved towards him. It was ridiculous that war had brought him to this – and yet there had been much worse. He searched quickly through Schoen’s pockets. He found some money in a small leather purse and he took the purse as well. Then he left the cellar, wondering why he cared so much, in such an instinctive way, for his own survival.

  3

  The American soldier, who had come out of a cellar bar, said that his name was Jacob: Grunwald could call him Jake, if he liked. His uniform was crumpled and he had been drinking heavily for the last twenty-four hours, or so he claimed, sleeping only in snatches, drinking himself sober and then back through various stages to drunkenness again. He put his arm around Grunwald’s shoulder and spoke in poor but comprehensible German. He was sorry for the German nation: a proud people, who had contributed much to civilization and Christ, look at them now. He was sad that they had swallowed old Adolf’s medicine, a blood tonic that had turned into an unpalatable poison. That was the trouble with politicians and dictators – they spoke a load of bullshit and the great mass, like cattle lining up at the trough, had devoured it wholesale. Still, he was having some fun. You could get a fräulein for the price of a few cigarettes or a bar of soap. And he’d been doing just that, screwing his way across the whole damn city. He gave Grunwald a cigarette and offered him a drink from the flask of whisky he carried. Grunwald accepted both. They were in the Kurfürstendamm and Grunwald, after so much walking, was tired.

  ‘I oughn’t to be talking to you,’ the American said. ‘They don’t like it. They don’t like to see us talking to the – what is it called? – the remaining population. Fraternization is out. Right out.’

  Grunwald, handing back the flask, said, ‘I’m a Jew.’

  Jake held out his hand. ‘Shake. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was a Jew. I guess that gives me a fair percentage of the old blood.’ The American took the flask and, without wiping it, held it to his lips. He was about thirty and his hair was cut close to his head and Grunwald thought that if you changed his uniform for the one of the young Russian officer there would be very little difference.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘Boston,’ Jake said.

  ‘I almost went to America once,’ Grunwald said, pronouncing the name as if it were some fabled land across impossible seas.

  ‘You’ve had a hard time, I suppose,’ the American said. He returned the flask to Grunwald.

  Grunwald shrugged and drained the flask. ‘I’m sorry. It’s finished.’

  ‘Plenty more of that. I’ve got my hands on a whole supply of the stuff.’ The American was silent for a time. It was hard not to form the impression that he was some kind of tourist, travelling at his government’s expense; and Grunwald felt, rightly or wrongly, that he himself was simply an item of local colour.

  The American said, ‘I’ve got to go to Nuremberg next month. The trials. I’m on duty at the trials.’

  ‘Why bother to try them?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘Search me. There’s got to be some sort of face put on the whole show.’ He slapped Grunwald on the shoulder. ‘Look, let’s get some more whisky. It isn’t far from here. I’ve got the address written down somewhere.’ He searched in his tunic and produced a small notebook. Between its pages there was a scrap of folded paper. ‘Augsburgerstrasse. That isn’t far from here. Maybe you better lead the way. I can’t get the hang of the directions around here.’

  They walked towards the Augsburgerstrasse and the American hung on to Grunwald like someone whose fear of losing his way is almost desperate. As they went down the Augsburgerstrasse, the American started to laugh.

  ‘I like you!’ he said suddenly. ‘I like you. You’re the first local I’ve come across who isn’t out to screw me.’

&nbs
p; Grunwald smiled. The soldier’s large arm was like a dead weight on his shoulder.

  They climbed a flight of stairs and Grunwald noticed the various pieces of furniture littered around the place. Mattresses, old sofas, chairs. The smell of excrement was strong. The American said that it was like a shithouse and there was a touch of shame in his voice, as if it were his personal responsibility to keep the place clean. At the top of the stairs they went into a corridor that led off from a strong wooden door. The corridor ended at another door. The American took the key from his trousers. Beyond was a large room sparsely furnished. The light was poor because curtains had been drawn across the windows. When his eyes had become accustomed to the dimness, Grunwald saw that there was a young girl asleep on a bed in the corner. The American touched her lightly on the shoulder and she woke. She seemed alarmed to see Grunwald in the room.

  ‘Who is he?’

  The soldier silenced her by placing his fingers gently on her lips. ‘A friend of mine. It’s all right. We’ve come for a drink.’

  The girl sat up, smoothing her hair from her face. Grunwald saw that she was very young, probably little more than sixteen or seventeen. Her body was thin and the bed upon which she had been lying was dirty. She stared at Grunwald and then, touching the soldier’s face, placed her lips against the side of his neck.

  ‘You know where the stuff is,’ she said.

  The American went to the other side of the room. He removed a threadbare rug and then a couple of loose floorboards. He put his hand into the space below and took out an unopened bottle of scotch. Breaking the seal, he said, ‘Plunder. From an officers’ mess by kind courtesy of the Wehrmacht.’

  The girl found some cups in a cabinet and gave one without a handle to Grunwald. He drank slowly. Alcohol, which he had never consumed regularly in the past, seemed to befuddle his thoughts. The girl, the American, the room – they were receding from him at an alarming rate as if he were witnessing them down the wrong end of a telescope. The girl sat on the soldier’s lap. Her name was Ursula and she never left this room because in May she had murdered a Russian soldier who had raped her. The American explained all this in a dry, factual way and the girl listened to him without expression. The Russian soldier, Anatole, had been dragged up to the attic and shoved in a cupboard. The cupboard had been locked and the key lost. The body was still there.