Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  When the last scrap of burnt paper had vanished he went into the surgery to survey the wreckage.

  He found the prescription book lying on top of the desk amongst several sheets of paper that had been dragged out of the drawers. Someone had written on it the words: Chelmno Death Camp, Poland. He paused for a moment and then seized the pad and ripped off the top sheet. And then he stopped: this kind of erratic behaviour was pointless. He had to remain calm. He had to control himself. If he allowed himself to become harassed he was playing exactly as the Americans wanted him to play. Chelmno Death Camp, Poland. He crumpled the sheet of paper in his hand and threw it into the wastebasket. Eberhard was a fool. What had he hoped to prove by writing those words?

  Grunwald found the alley off the Rosenheimer Strasse without difficulty. Neurer was in his workshop fiddling with the engine of his truck and turned round as he heard Grunwald approach. Grunwald hesitated: what was he meant to say now? He drew his overcoat around him and said nothing for a time, staring at Neurer who in turn was scrutinizing him closely.

  ‘I’m busy,’ Neurer said, and returned to the engine. ‘I’ve got to get this fucking thing moving –’

  ‘You’re having difficulty, I see,’ Grunwald remarked.

  ‘Noticed, have you?’ Neurer spat into a dirty handkerchief he had taken from his overalls.

  Grunwald felt like turning round and leaving: why had he come here anyway? He knew nothing about Neurer; he had come only because of the woman’s recommendation. He lingered in the open doorway for a time. Neurer was whistling between his teeth while he fidgeted with the entrails of the vehicle. After some moments Neurer turned round again.

  ‘Do you want something? What is it?’

  ‘Are you Arnold Neurer?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Neurer stood upright, his hands on his hips in an aggressive manner. ‘Well? Are you going to tell me what you want? Or do we stand looking at each other all bloody day?’

  Grunwald opened his mouth: his lips were dry and heavy.

  ‘Well?’ Neurer asked.

  ‘I was told to come and see you,’ Grunwald said. Why did he find it so painful to come to the point? Was it because he wanted to ask a favour?

  ‘Who told you?’ Neurer asked.

  ‘The woman –’

  ‘Which woman?’

  ‘The woman in the Barbarossa Strasse –’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘Then I don’t know who you’re talking about, do I?’ Neurer bent over the engine again, probing with a screwdriver.

  Grunwald felt unaccountably faint. He leaned against the door and discovered that he was breathing with some difficulty. For a moment the workshop shimmered in front of his eyes. He massaged his eyelids with his fingers. Why had he bothered to come? Munich: it was an impossible prospect.

  Neurer looked up: ‘Describe the woman.’

  ‘Describe her?’

  ‘Go on. What did she look like?’

  Grunwald’s mind was a blank. He tried to reconstruct the woman from the sudden emptiness of his memories.

  ‘She’s a prostitute,’ he said. Neurer did not move. He continued to stare at Grunwald coldly. ‘I don’t know her real name. She called herself – it’s ridiculous, I know – but she called herself Eva Braun.’

  ‘Go on. How did she look?’

  ‘Blonde. She looked tired. She enjoyed playing a Glenn Miller record.’ Grunwald paused and realized there was nothing left to say. Beyond these bare facts, what else could he offer?

  ‘Anna. You’ve described Anna.’ Neurer said. He put his screwdriver down and wiped his hands on his trousers. Moving forward he held out his hand towards Grunwald and Grunwald accepted it.

  ‘You look tired yourself. I’ve got some coffee inside.’

  Grunwald followed him through a door at the other end of the workshop that led into a tiny square kitchen. The place was immaculately clean. On the gas-stove a pot of coffee was heating slowly.

  ‘Sit down,’ Neurer said. He poured the coffee and passed a cup to Grunwald who had taken a chair at the table.

  ‘So Anna sent you,’ Neurer said.

  ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t know her name.’

  ‘How is she? I haven’t seen her in weeks.’

  Grunwald sipped the hot coffee. It burned his dry lips. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘She’s never fine,’ Neurer said. ‘She’s more cut up inside than a lump of butchermeat.’

  Neurer lit a cigarette and held his cup between his hands as if he were seeking warmth from it. He gazed at Grunwald a moment.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Your name is Grunwald.’

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you know?’

  Neurer reached inside his top pocket and produced a scrap of paper that he placed in front of Grunwald. Grunwald picked it up: it was a garage bill. He turned it over in puzzlement. On the reverse side was written the name of Gerhardt Lutzke. Underneath the name was a telephone number.

  ‘Lutzke?’

  Neurer wet the end of his cigarette with his tongue: ‘He came here. He was looking for you. He asked me to tell him when you got here. Even paid me for the information. What do you make of that?’

  Grunwald pushed his chair back from the table, with the sudden feeling he had walked straight into a trap.

  ‘Relax,’ Neurer said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell him.’

  ‘But he paid you –’

  ‘Fuck that. He’s got more money than sense.’

  ‘You don’t mean to tell him?’

  ‘Why should I?’ Neurer paused a moment as though to reflect on something. ‘I’ve seen his sort a hundred times before. If you could get his head off his shoulders and shake it around you’d hear it rattle. Look at his eyes. He’d stab you as soon as piss on you.’

  Grunwald stared into his coffee. He could hardly believe that Neurer would not betray him: why was it impossible now for him to accept people at their face value?

  ‘I’m not interested in what there is between you,’ Neurer said. ‘If Anna sent you here, then that’s all right with me.’

  Grunwald said nothing. Neurer rose from the table and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. ‘Now, if I can get that bloody motor fixed we’ll be out of here in an hour.’

  ‘So soon?’

  Neurer clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You came at the right time, Grunwald. If you’d left it a bit later, you would have been right out of luck.’

  Grunwald looked at him in surprise. ‘You haven’t even asked where I’m going, have you?’

  Neurer laughed. ‘I only stop in two places. Stuttgart and Munich. And Munich’s the end of the line for me. Which is it to be?’

  ‘Munich,’ Grunwald said, and wanted to bite his tongue off for having said it.

  ‘Get some rest on the couch until I’m ready.’

  Neurer went back into the workshop. Alone, Grunwald finished his drink and lay down on the sofa. Sleep was impossible. He was going to Munich. He was going back to Munich. What would it be like? How much would it have changed? Would he see any faces from the past? Did he want to? He was suddenly scared the way a child might be terrified on its first day at school. He heard noises from the workshop. Neurer was revving the engine. Munich – for God’s sake. The place where his life had begun and ended.

  A boy was standing in the doorway watching him shyly. Grunwald felt immediately awkward lying on the sofa and made a move to get up.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ the boy said.

  Grunwald stared at the boy. He bore a superficial resemblance to Neurer and was presumably the man’s son.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘Karl.’ The boy stood at the end of the sofa, his eyes fixed to Grunwald’s shabby coat. ‘Are you going on a journey with my father?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is he taking you all the way to
Munich?’

  Grunwald nodded his head. The boy was around fifteen, but small for his age. It was years since Grunwald had spoken to anyone as young as this. What did boys of fifteen talk about in the claustrophobic climate of postwar Germany?

  ‘I stay here and look after things while he’s away.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘There are a few mechanical things,’ the boy said and brushed hair from his face.

  ‘Are you good at mechanical things?’

  The boy’s face brightened. ‘It’s the only kind of thing I’m really interested in,’ he said. ‘In a few years I should be a fully qualified mechanic. What do you do?’

  ‘I used to be in business,’ Grunwald answered.

  ‘What business?’

  ‘Oh, import and export.’

  ‘Import and export what?’

  Grunwald had to remember for a moment: ‘Jewellery.’

  ‘Real jewels?’

  ‘Imitations mainly.’

  ‘Oh.’ The boy seemed vaguely disappointed. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t look very well.’

  ‘Perhaps the Bavarian climate will make me better.’

  The boy sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘My father often takes people with him on his trips. Do you know why he does it?’

  Grunwald shook his head. ‘Why?’

  ‘He says that we have a duty to help the casualties of war.’

  ‘Does he? And was he a casualty?’

  The boy examined his fingers in a bored fashion. ‘He didn’t fight.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was in prison for five years.’

  Grunwald felt that he should not pursue the point, but the boy continued. ‘They put him in prison in 1940 because he was distributing anti-Hitler pamphlets. They said he was a communist. He refused to fight Hitler’s war. At school, some of the boys boast about what their fathers did during the war. Some of them fought on the Russian front, one or two were in the desert. One boy’s father was a high-up in the Waffen-SS.’

  ‘What do you say about your father?’

  The boy was silent a moment. ‘I keep quiet,’ he said.

  Grunwald sat up. ‘Aren’t you proud of him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the boy said.

  Neurer came in from the workshop, cleaning his hands on a rag.

  ‘I’ve got the bugger going at last,’ he said. ‘Are we ready?’

  Grunwald rose from the sofa with some trepidation. He shook hands with Karl and followed Neurer into the workshop. Neurer embraced his son a moment, until the boy withdrew in an embarrassed fashion, and then climbed into the driving seat. Grunwald swung himself into the other seat and watched as Karl opened the workshop doors. Neurer released the handbrake and the truck rolled forward into the alley. Swinging the large wheel round quickly, Neurer turned the vehicle towards the Rosenheimer Strasse. Karl shouted something, his hand raised in the air, but his voice was whipped away by the noise of the engine.

  At the end of the alley Neurer said, ‘Here we go, Grunwald.’

  Go where? Grunwald wondered. And why? And what was likely to happen at the ultimate destination? There were so many questions and he had the answers to none of them. The truck lurched into the Rosenheimer Strasse and turned right. This was the start of the journey.

  15

  The landscape amazed Grunwald. Drowsy from the stifling heat inside the cabin, his eyes barely open, he watched it stutter past like the images of an incoherent dream. Sometimes when Neurer spoke to him he did not catch the words, partly because of the noise of the engine but mainly because he was so absorbed by the things he saw. People were working in the fields. In small towns and villages there were bulldozers clearing whatever rubble the war had imposed upon them. There was an atmosphere of purpose such as he had never encountered in Berlin, there was a sense of having aims and goals to pursue: it was as if the war had intervened only as some minor inconvenience that had left behind a certain amount of superficial damage which now had to be cleared away so that the business of living could go on. Accustomed to the sight of Berlin, Grunwald realized for the first time that while he had spent many months in the capital another sort of life was going on elsewhere. People were picking up the broken pieces and trying to weld them once more into an acceptable whole. There were soldiers everywhere, of course, but even they seemed a natural part of the landscape, as if they had always been there and nothing could shift them.

  He fell asleep sometimes, dreamlessly, but would awake puzzled until he realized where he was and where he was going. A new life: was that what he was going to? Sometimes he tried to imagine this idea, he tried to frame the concept of starting anew, but it eluded him tantalizingly. And yet he felt – in spite of himself – the stirrings of hope. But what could he hope for? Forgetfulness? The cancellation of his memory? He looked through the dirty cab window: wintry morning sunlight flooded the landscape with cold colours. Whenever he opened the window he was aware of how deceitful the sunlight looked. Outside it was clawingly cold. Wind swept the fields. Men and women wore heavy overcoats and scarves. Could he hope for a new life? He thought of Munich and it was like thinking of a haunted city: ghosts flitted back and forth through his brain like people walking endlessly up and down dusty corridors as if they were seeking the one door that would lead them out.

  Neurer stopped the truck once by the side of the road and produced a paper bag from his rucksack. He took out some sandwiches.

  ‘Not very inspiring,’ he said, as he passed one to Grunwald. ‘But they’ll fill your belly.’

  Grunwald accepted gratefully. ‘How far have we come?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve got a long way to go,’ Neurer said. Chewing on his bread, he stared from the window out across the open fields. Grunwald felt suddenly secure inside the cab: some of Neurer’s strength and certainty seemed to have affected him.

  Grunwald said, ‘I don’t have any money. I can’t pay you.’

  Neurer looked insulted. ‘I didn’t ask for payment.’

  ‘Why are you taking me?’

  ‘Do you always think in terms of the profit motive?’ Neurer opened the window and threw the paper bag outside.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Neurer was silent a moment: ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to thank you,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘We aren’t there yet.’

  ‘The boy – Karl – mentioned that you spent the war in jail.’

  Neurer lit a cigarette that he had rolled himself from a tin he kept in his jacket. Everything he did was invested with a sense of purpose and economy: his speech, his movements – nothing about the man suggested excess.

  ‘That’s right,’ Neurer said. ‘Until the end. They took me out of jail and stuck a rifle in my hand and told me I had to defend Berlin.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Neurer said. ‘I wanted to welcome the Russians. I didn’t want to shoot them.’

  Grunwald finished his sandwich. ‘Why didn’t you go to war?’

  ‘I didn’t make any secret of my contempt for Hitler,’ Neurer answered, and then laughed as if at some hidden memory. ‘If they’d stuck me in the army I would have been a bloody bad influence.’

  Grunwald slumped back in his seat. He could not recall when he had last felt so secure. Neurer affected him like that: he would willingly have placed his life in the man’s hands.

  ‘I was an active member of the outlawed communist party until they imprisoned me,’ Neurer said. ‘I was a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. How could any reasonable man comply with the Hitler regime?’

  Compliance. Grunwald opened the window and pushed his face out into the chill morning air. Neurer’s simple courage upset him: he was sitting beside a man who had risked life and liberty because of his morality. Jesus Christ: it was more than he could bear to think about. What had he done? What had he done?

  Neurer said, ‘There just wasn’t a choice.
We weren’t blind. We knew what was going on. Not just in Germany but in Poland as well. We were in contact with the communists there. We knew it wasn’t just propaganda.’

  Neurer threw his cigarette from the window and shivered.

  ‘It’s damned cold.’ He started the engine and the truck rolled forward. ‘But it’s all in the past. Why think about it now?’

  Grunwald stared at the landscape. The countryside looked icily beautiful, created out of violent extremes of light and shadow and the dead colours of approaching winter. He retreated into himself: Neurer made him feel ludicrously feeble. And guilty. He loathed his own guilt. How could any reasonable man comply with the Hitler regime? He pressed the palms of his hands hard and flat together, as if he were trying to crush an object that he held between them. Neurer had risked everything because he was honest and because he had dignity. Grunwald knew he had risked nothing and that he had no dignity left.

  Neurer asked, ‘Are you married?’

  ‘I lost my wife,’ Grunwald replied.

  ‘The same for me.’ Neurer turned his eyes back to the road. ‘She died of natural causes. At least that’s what the medical report said. There’s only myself and the boy now.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Grunwald said. He watched the road slip away, seeming to judder beneath the constant reverberations of the truck.

  The workshop door was closed. Pushing it open quietly, Schwarzenbach went inside. The truck had gone. Where it had stood there were oil-stains on the floor. He paused a moment listening. There was complete silence. He went towards the door at the other end of the workshop and again he stopped.

  He opened the door and found himself in a small kitchen. The boy, Neurer’s son, was dozing on the couch, a book open on his lap. Schwarzenbach moved silently.

  The boy opened his eyes, startled. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Schwarzenbach sat down on the couch. ‘I’m looking for your father.’

  ‘He’s gone. He won’t be back for a couple of days.’

  Schwarzenbach looked at the concrete floor. Long ago an attempt had been made to cover it with red varnish. He smiled at the boy. ‘I came to ask you father something,’ he said.

  ‘What did you want to ask him?’