Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  Schwarzenbach sat back, his head against a cushion. ‘He was going to do me a favour, you see.’

  ‘What favour?’

  ‘He was going to take a friend of mine down to Munich.’

  ‘A friend of yours?’

  ‘That’s right. A man called Grunwald.’

  The boy sat down beside Schwarzenbach. ‘They’ve gone. He took a man with him when he went this morning.’

  ‘A Jew?’

  The boy shrugged: ‘He might have been. How should I know?’

  Schwarzenbach felt a sense of despair. Neurer had betrayed him. There was a sickening feeling of loss. The Jew had eluded him. At this very moment he was on his way south in Neurer’s truck. Angry, Schwarzenbach rose from the couch. He wanted to break something, he wanted to take some fragile object and break it between his fingers. He stood in the centre of the room. He flexed his fingers. His mind seemed a flurry of violent colours and shapes. ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘A few hours ago,’ the boy said and picked up his book.

  ‘A few hours – how many hours?’

  ‘Three,’ the boy said.

  Schwarzenbach moved across the room and stopped in the doorway. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  The boy, engrossed once more in his book, didn’t answer.

  Neurer said, ‘There’s a checkpoint about a mile ahead. They always examine my dockets, but they never take the trouble to look at the cargo.

  He stopped the truck and opened the door. He jumped down into the road and looked both ways. The highway was empty.

  ‘You’ll have to get in the back, Grunwald. There’s a piece of tarpaulin there. Tuck yourself under that.’

  Grunwald stepped down from the cab. His limbs were stiff and sore. Neurer unbolted the panel at the back of the truck and Grunwald clambered inside. He found the tarpaulin and pulled it over himself.

  ‘Lie still and quiet,’ Neurer said. ‘You won’t come to any harm.’

  Grunwald lay under the tarpaulin. He had a strong sense of unreality, as if none of this were happening to him. He was detached from himself and quite suddenly indifferent: it did not really matter if he were discovered. The worst that could happen was to be sent back to Berlin. He heard the cab door slam shut and then the truck rattled forward, slowly at first, gathering speed as it moved along the highway.

  He listened to the sound of the truck slowing down again. In poor broken German he heard a voice ask for Neurer’s papers.

  Neurer said, ‘All in order, I imagine.’

  There was a long silence. He heard footsteps along the side of the truck. He lay perfectly still and repeated to himself that it did not matter if he were discovered, it did not matter if he were discovered.

  ‘Medical supplies?’ the voice asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Neurer said.

  Someone struck the side of the truck. ‘All right. Pass on.’

  There was a soft, whining sound. The truck lurched forward. He heard Neurer say, ‘It’s bloody cold.’

  The voice came back from a brief distance: ‘I’ve met worse than this.’

  Grunwald gripped the tarpaulin as the truck picked up speed. Some minutes later he felt it slow down, and then it stopped entirely. Neurer came round to unbolt the panel and Grunwald pushed the tarpaulin aside.

  ‘Easy,’ Neurer said. ‘I told you it would be.’

  Grunwald returned to the cab. He climbed back into the warmth and watched as Neurer let in the clutch.

  ‘They never ask questions,’ Neurer said. ‘They’re bored to tears. It can’t be much fun manning a checkpoint, can it?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Grunwald said.

  Outside the highway slipped past quickly. Fields stretched to either side. From time to time he saw workers in the fields or someone dragging a horse across pasture or people pushing hand-carts along the side of the road.

  Neurer asked, ‘What do you intend to do in Munich?’

  ‘Have a look round,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘It was hit quite badly. You know that?’

  ‘I had heard.’

  Neurer drove with one hand while he lit a cigarette with the other. ‘But they’re making progress in patching the place up. All I ever seem to see there are lorries going back and forward with rubble.’

  Grunwald was silent. Listening to Neurer brought home to him the destruction of the city.

  ‘They’re still rooting out all the old Nazis, of course,’ Neurer said. ‘That’s the sport now. You’d be surprised to hear how readily some of the old Party hacks denounce the Hitler regime.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Grunwald said.

  Neurer undid the window and spat over the side. ‘They’re a shower of bastards. All they were ever good at was crawling on their bellies. Well, they’re still crawling. Only the masters are different now.’ He slapped his hands against the steering-wheel. ‘Christ, I’d love to see them suffer for what they did.’

  Grunwald looked out of the window. The horizon lay in an autumnal haze like a scene from a rustic painting.

  ‘I’d love to make them suffer,’ Neurer said again.

  Schwarzenbach slept for less than an hour and when he woke he still felt tired. The room was cold and he rose quickly, dressed as fast as he could and made coffee in the kitchen. He then put on his overcoat and went downstairs. He found Herr Zollner in his room on the ground floor, toasting some pieces of bread by the gas-fire.

  ‘Herr Doktor, I was just having breakfast –’

  Schwarzenbach stood by the open door watching the man fuss with his toast. ‘I will have to go away for a few days,’ he said.

  ‘Oh? Far?’ The caretaker searched for his eyeshade, as though it were an essential part of his dress, and snapped it on around his head.

  ‘No. To Hanover.’

  ‘In this weather,’ Herr Zollner said sympathetically. ‘It’s so cold.’

  ‘I will be gone perhaps three or four days. Conceivably a little longer. It’s hard to say.’

  ‘What about your patients?’

  ‘You will tell them that I have had to go away, Herr Zollner. Tell them that Dr Scheunes in the Fansanerstrasse will attend to their needs. Perhaps if you pinned a notice to the door of my apartment –’

  ‘Of course, Herr Doktor. As good as done.’

  Schwarzenbach went into the hallway. The caretaker followed him to the outside door.

  ‘I hope your journey isn’t a sad one. A funeral or anything like that.’

  Schwarzenbach said, ‘No. No funeral.’

  ‘So much death,’ Herr Zollner said. ‘So many people have died –’

  ‘Yes,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘I haven’t been in Hanover for many years. Before the war it was. I well remember the Markt-Platz. And the Herrenhäuser-Allee. Yes, I well remember Hanover –’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘By the way, I have locked my apartment. We wouldn’t want any more illegal visitors, would we?’

  Schwarzenbach went down the steps into the street, and walked quickly away from the building. In the pocket of his overcoat he had folded a bundle of banknotes, all the money he possessed and that he had hoarded inside his mattress, as if he had known all along that the time would come when he would need it hurriedly. His papers were inside his jacket. He had not thought to take any clothes along: those that he needed he would buy wherever possible.

  One thought dominated him: one solitary thought circled again and again through his mind.

  PART FOUR

  Munich, November 1945

  16

  It was changed: it was different. He had expected the signs of destruction and the absence of familiar landmarks, and he had anticipated the monstrous heaps of rubble. But there was another change: in spite of the damage he detected an atmosphere that he could describe to himself only as one of freedom. People were starving and the city lay in ruins, and yet he sensed that even if these were terrible burdens worse ones had been finally and thankfully removed. T
he black uniforms of the SS, the outfits of the Hitlerjugend, the swastika flags and streamers – they had been obliterated forever, accidents of history, of no more significance than a casual occurrence.

  Neurer had parked the truck and they were standing beside it. Grunwald was silent. He felt strange: there was no sense of familiarity, of having returned to a city where he had lived for most of his life, there was no feeling of having come home. But had he expected that?

  Neurer said, ‘I want you to have this money.’

  ‘Money?’

  Neurer had taken some banknotes from his jacket. ‘You’ll need it.’

  ‘No, really, you’ve done enough for me,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘How are you going to exist?’ Neurer pressed the money into Grunwald’s hand. ‘That’s the money Lutzke gave me. You might as well have it.’

  Grunwald stared at the crumpled notes and wished that he could express his gratitude. But Neurer had already opened the cab door and was climbing back into his seat.

  ‘Are you leaving?’

  ‘I still have a delivery to make. And it’s a long way back.’

  ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

  Neurer shrugged. ‘Who knows? You might do the same for me some day.’ And then, laughing, he pulled the door shut. He started the engine and Grunwald watched as the truck edged slowly forward. At the end of the street it swung to the right and passed out of Grunwald’s sight.

  Alone, Grunwald experienced a sense of dislocation. Munich. Of all places. Why had he come back to a place where he didn’t belong? Did he belong anywhere?

  He was in the area around the Hauptbannhof: whole streets had been severely bombed and places he might have recognized no longer existed. People wandered around aimlessly, like sleep-walkers, as if the confusion and chaos that surrounded them were too much to accept at a conscious level. He hesitated, not knowing which way to turn. His immediate impulse was to walk in the direction of Neuhausen. But that would have served no purpose. It was enough to have returned to Munich without also seeking out the very place where he had once lived. Neuhausen and the Hirschgarten, the Steuben-Platz and the Rotkreuz-Platz – did they still exist? Or had they been shattered too in the war?

  He felt despair. His indecision seemed to have paralysed him. Which way to turn? Was there anyone left alive he could contact? Did he want to contact anybody? Lost, like a child abandoned by its parents, he moved away slowly. Around him Munich seemed like a web spun by a crazy, destructive spider. This was the place where he had been born, where he had worked, lived and married, fathered a child: why then was it so hostile?

  The bakery shop behind the Gabelsbergerstrasse was still there although it was closed now. Its windows were dusty and dark and the name – Gerber – which had once been written in gold paint over the doorway had been removed. He paused in front of it, catching his reflection briefly in the filthy window. Moving forward, he held his hand to the glass and tried to look inside. It was empty so far as he could see. The shelves, streaked with dirt, had been removed from the wall and stacked on top of the counter. He shouldn’t have come here: what had he hoped to find anyway? That at least one part of the past was intact? He dropped his hand from the window. No, he should never have come here. For a moment or two he leaned against the wall and realized the sheer futility of it all. Beyond doubt, the Gerbers had been taken. Why should they have survived anyway? A sixty-year-old Jewish baker and his wife? They hadn’t a chance.

  He crossed to the other side of the street: it was just possible to make out the name of Gerber where the gold paint had been removed. Where were they now? Buried in some Polish grave? Perhaps they hadn’t even got as far as Poland; perhaps they had died here, in Germany. He went back across the street again and tried the door, which was locked. He rattled the handle hopefully but without success.

  As he was turning away he heard a voice from inside.

  ‘Hold your horses. I’m coming.’

  It was a man’s voice, gruff and unfamiliar. Grunwald waited, suddenly tense. He heard footsteps and then the noise of a bolt being slid back. The door opened a couple of inches. He had never seen the man before. He wore an open waistcoat and was in his shirtsleeves: his clothes looked as if they had been slept in. His spectacles nipped the end of his nose.

  ‘What is it?’ the man asked.

  ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘Mistake? I was having a nap, just getting my head down for forty winks –’

  ‘I was looking for somebody.’

  ‘Nobody lives here except me,’ the man said. ‘Who were you looking for?’

  ‘Herr Gerber and his wife,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘The old baker?’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  The man opened the door wider and scratched at his belly. ‘I used to know Herr Gerber slightly. A nodding acquaintance, you might say. But it’s years since he lived here. Let me see – I’ve been here since 1941. It’s as long ago as that.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ Grunwald asked.

  The man removed his spectacles. There was a white band at the end of the nose where the spectacles had been pinching.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard that he lives in the Schumannstrasse. At least that’s the information I’ve got –’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘Who told me?’ The man stroked his face and concentrated a moment. ‘Wait, it’ll come to me. Yes – it was Frau Heinrich, who used to help out in the bakery before the war. She said that she had heard Herr Gerber was living in the Schumannstrasse. But I couldn’t swear to it.’

  ‘Where is the Schumannstrasse?’

  ‘It runs off the Holbeinstrasse,’ the man said. ‘Are you related to Herr Gerber?’

  ‘I’m his nephew,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘Well, I hope you find him,’ the man said, looking up and down the street absently. ‘I hope he’s in good health.’

  Grunwald turned away. Was Gerber really alive? Or was it simply a rumour? He felt suddenly excited, without knowing why: it was as if the possibility of Gerber being alive somehow created a bridge, a frail link, with the better past. He walked to the end of the Gabelsbergerstrasse and paused there, trying to remember his way. It was amazing how quickly one could forget directions that not so long ago were effortlessly brought to mind. He began to hurry, like someone rushing to a death-bed before the sick man expires.

  In the Schumannstrasse he realized that he did not have the house number. He stopped the first person he saw, a woman carrying a tattered umbrella. She looked at him curiously when he asked if she knew Herr Gerber: shaking her head, she hurried away. He walked to the end of the street and then, crossing, went down the other side. He had a feeling of quiet panic: what if Gerber didn’t live here and he was wasting his energy? What if it were simply a piece of false gossip passed on by Frau Heinrich to the man in the bakery shop? He stopped on the corner: it was suddenly important to see Gerber, to talk to him, to remind himself that once upon a time there had been a different world. Two teenage boys came round the corner.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Grunwald said. ‘Do you happen to know if a certain Herr Gerber lives in this street?’

  The boys looked at one another. ‘Couldn’t say,’ one of them remarked. ‘What’s he look like?’

  Grunwald searched his mind for a description, but it was like fumbling for a forgotten word that seems to lie half-formed in the recesses of the mind. How could he describe Willi? Years had passed and Willi must have changed.

  ‘He’s old, over sixty,’ he said. But it was hopeless.

  One boy said, ‘That could describe any of hundreds.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you might know the name.’

  He watched the boys go and then he stood for a time on the corner and wondered what to do. If Willi lived in this street then he would find him, he had to find him. But where to begin? How to look? He could go into the houses one by one, he supposed, and ask for W
illi, and by a process of elimination find him that way. It was a small street and it wouldn’t take him long but the prospect overwhelmed him. Talking to strangers in doorways, knocking on doors, asking the same question endlessly: when he considered this he rejected it – somehow such a course of action seemed in a way to be an exposure of himself. He turned and walked back down the street again and when he reached the opposite corner, the junction with the Geibelstrasse, he crossed to the other side.

  A man had emerged from a doorway, an elderly man with a brown paper bag clutched under his arm as if it contained his every possession. When he saw Grunwald approach he tightened his hold on the bag like someone who expects to be accosted by bandits on every street corner.

  ‘I’m looking for a certain Herr Gerber – do you know where I might find him?’ Grunwald asked.

  The man looked suddenly secretive: ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m his nephew. I haven’t seen him for some time. I’d like very much to get in touch with him –’

  ‘Nephew?’ The man put his hand into the bag and brought out a piece of bread which he placed in his mouth and began to chew. ‘Are you really his nephew?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘I know where you can find him,’ the man said.

  ‘Where?’ Grunwald put out his hand to touch the man’s sleeve, but he recoiled from the contact.

  ‘Herr Gerber doesn’t see many people, you understand. He likes to keep himself to himself. You know what I mean?’ The man winked then, like someone betraying a confidence light-heartedly. ‘I’m not sure if he’d want to see you –’

  ‘I’m his nephew.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, does it? He likes to live his own life.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d like to see me,’ Grunwald said, exasperated.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ The man scrutinized Grunwald for a moment. ‘Herr Gerber lives in the top flat of this very building,’ he said. ‘That’s where you’ll find him.’

  Grunwald moved towards the doorway.

  The man said, ‘I sometimes play card games with him. It whiles away the hours.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ Grunwald said and went through the door.