Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  He felt Willi’s rough hands upon his face as he was clasped towards the other man’s body and held tightly against him. When Willi finally stepped back, Grunwald saw that his eyes were watering as if he were about to cry but could not find the capacity to weep. He stepped further back, framing Grunwald, like someone taking a snapshot: his expression was incredulous and yet grateful, in the manner of someone receiving a gift of the very thing he had thought irretrievably lost. He did not speak for some time and Grunwald noticed exactly how much he had changed since their last meeting. He was thinner, yes, but that was to be expected: what Grunwald found difficult to absorb was the nature of the thinness – as if his uncle were suffering from some incurable, wasting disease. His flesh had a certain transparency and his eyes protruded prominently, and his hands – with which he had worked all his life – were hardly more than bones at the ends of his emaciated wrists. His hair, always thick in the past, was now sparse and barely covered his skull.

  ‘Leonhard,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Leonhard …’

  Grunwald experienced a confusion of emotion. Seeing Willi again was delightful in itself, but there were so many areas of past experience it would be painful to touch. How could he talk to Willi about Poland? The sheer necessity for secrecy was something that Grunwald already felt had come between them, an invisible thing that would always hold him back from Willi. How could he say to Willi: Look, I am guilty …? It was impossible. Why couldn’t he accept the fact that they had both survived and that they were having an unexpected reunion? That should have been easy, and yet Grunwald felt an accumulating sense of desperation, as if he were deliberately depriving Willi of the most important thing of all – the true facts of the last few years.

  Willi was still standing in the middle of the room. His arms hung by his side and there crossed his face for a flickering moment a suggestion of some internal pain. But he smiled, raised his arms, and held them there in mid-air in an empty embrace.

  ‘Leonhard,’ he said. ‘This is impossible. How can this be? I feel that if I close my eyes and open them again you’ll have vanished.’

  Grunwald held his uncle’s hand. ‘I’ve been in Berlin,’ he said. ‘It isn’t very easy, travelling conditions the way they are.’

  ‘Leonhard,’ Willi said, and flexed his hand feebly around Grunwald’s wrist. ‘You will not believe me. But only yesterday I was thinking about you. Only last night. I still have some old photographs and I was looking at them, the way an old man does, ransacking his memory the way an old man does, and I looked at the one taken of you and Martha on your wedding day.’

  Not that, Grunwald thought. The old man was already plundering the past insensitively. Couldn’t it wait?

  ‘Changed days,’ Willi said. ‘Changed days, Leonhard.’

  ‘Everything changes,’ Grunwald said.

  Willi sucked in his breath and shook his head. ‘Too many ghosts, far too many ghosts.’ He went to his chair and sat down and a renewed expression of disbelief crossed his face. ‘I can hardly credit it, Leonhard. After all those years. I made enquiries about you. Do you know that? I filled in a form and told the authorities that I wanted to know what had become of you. I heard nothing, of course. One hears nothing these days. And so I thought that you were dead. I thought you must have been killed.’

  Willi smiled palely. He sat for a time in silence, shaking his head, as if he were pondering the terrible absurdities of life.

  ‘And here you are. My God, I can hardly believe it.’

  ‘I went to the bakery first,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘The bakery? They took that away from me in 1941 under one of their silly laws. Aryanization of businesses, they said. They stuck a notice in the window and told me I had to get out. I suppose I was lucky to have it as late as 1941. I used to imagine they had overlooked me, that’s what I thought, they’d forgotten about me, tucked away behind the Gabelsbergerstrasse. But they hadn’t. They forgot nothing.’

  Willi paused. He was perspiring. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘But I was too smart for them in the end. I knew they would arrest me eventually, so I cleared out. What they didn’t know was the fact that I had quite a bit of money tucked away in the bakery. I moved around from one place to another, keeping just ahead of them, just out of their reach. Who wants to bother with an old man anyway?’

  Grunwald looked at the room. There were one or two items of scrappy furniture: another door, to his right, was partly open and he could see a large brass bed.

  ‘In one way it was lucky that they didn’t seize the bakery earlier,’ Willi said. ‘Alice was ill early in 1941 and she died two weeks before they took the business away.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Grunwald said. ‘I didn’t know she was dead.’

  ‘How could you?’ Willi made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘She died painlessly. At least I’m thankful for that.’

  Grunwald remembered Alice as a thin little woman who never uttered a word unless it had her husband’s complete approval. She lived and died painlessly: her existence had always seemed to Grunwald grey and monotonous.

  ‘So you see, I managed to escape the camps,’ Willi said. ‘In some ways a great blessing, Leonhard. But in others not. For example, sometimes I think of my old friends, all of whom were taken, and I wonder if I would have been better off if they had taken me as well.’

  There was a whine of martyrdom in Willi’s voice suddenly. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, as if he were trying to spark some mood of cheerfulness into himself. He turned to Grunwald and said, ‘I suppose I’ve been fortunate, especially when you compare me with all the others. Dead, all of them. I’m the only one left, apart from yourself, Leonhard.’

  He smiled to himself and rose uncertainly from the chair.

  ‘It’s good to see you, to know that you’re alive,’ he said, and put his hand on Grunwald’s shoulder. Suddenly he was weeping, his face pressed flat against Grunwald’s arm, his body moving up and down as he cried. Grunwald led him back to the chair and made him sit down: he didn’t know how to cope with the old man’s tears. His face was moist and the expression one of complete surrender to pain: Grunwald wished he had a handkerchief to offer.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, Willi,’ he said. He clapped the back of Willi’s hand comfortingly. After a moment the old man raised his head and tried to smile. He sniffed several times, cleared his throat, wiped his face with his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, Leonhard. Becoming a bit emotional in old age, that’s all.’ He smiled again and clutched Grunwald’s hand tightly.

  After a moment he said, ‘So tell me what there is to know about yourself.’

  Grunwald hesitated: it was the question he knew would come.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Willi said. ‘I understand your reluctance.’

  Do you? Grunwald wondered. He crossed the room to the window, which overlooked a tiny rear yard stuffed with garbage. What does Willi understand? In the yard a couple of children had appeared and they were sifting impatiently through the rubbish.

  ‘The last I heard of you, Leonhard, was that you had been taken. Nobody knew where. Nobody dared to ask questions.’ Willi spread his thin hands, like someone looking for warmth from a source of heat. ‘Not knowing, you see, that was the worst thing of all. You were dead. I knew that you were dead.’

  Dead? Grunwald turned from the window and looked at his uncle. By a peculiar trick of light, Willi seemed no more substantial than a sheet of flimsy paper. He carried the mark of death upon him, as surely as if he had been mortally wounded by a burst of gunfire: he had the appearance of a corpse. What keeps him alive? What drags him from one day to the next? What is he living for? Grunwald stood by the old man’s chair.

  ‘I was in Mauthausen,’ he said.

  ‘God help you,’ Willi said.

  ‘And then I was in Poland.’

  ‘Poland?’ Willi half-rose from his chair: ‘W
hat have they done to us, Leonhard? What have they done?’

  Grunwald looked at the old man. Years ago he had been energetic, strong, filled with an exuberant sense of life. Now, wasting away, it was as if the earlier man had not existed at all.

  ‘After Poland, I made my way back to Berlin,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘And you’ve been in Berlin ever since?’ Willi asked.

  ‘Until now,’ Grunwald said: a moment of embarrassment arose, conjured up out of seemingly nothing, as he studied the old man’s questioning face and realized that Willi wanted to hear more, he wanted as many details as possible.

  There was a slow silence. Cries from the yard below penetrated the room. A child was shouting.

  ‘In Poland,’ – Willi said, and then faltered. ‘In Poland, were you in one of those death camps?’

  Grunwald paused: he felt suddenly conspiratorial.

  ‘I was in one of the extermination camps,’ he said.

  Willi looked puzzled. ‘You were lucky then, you were lucky they didn’t exterminate you.’

  Grunwald said nothing. He was conscious now of the way his blood seemed to race through him, as if it were frantically trying to elude some impending menance. Lucky? For a moment he wanted to open his mouth and make a confession and tell Willi what he had done to survive the camp and the life he had lived, but he could not bring himself to unlock the nightmare, he could not force himself to cross the fragile line that marked the end of the deception.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was lucky. I was fortunate. They could only exterminate a certain number every day. Working at full capacity, they still didn’t have time for everybody.’

  Willi sighed. ‘There’s nothing one can say, is there? It baffles the imagination. It bewilders me. How could they have done it? How could they have murdered so many people? It’s strange, isn’t it? I never used to think of myself as a Jew. I was always a German, a good German citizen, I have medals from the First War, I never thought of myself as being a Jew. And then they forced me to think of myself in that way. But I used to say to myself that it couldn’t happen to me, because I was a German.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘I hate them now. I hate all Germans now.’ Willi began to cough and wiped mucus from his lips. ‘I’m ashamed of them.’

  Grunwald was silent. He walked up and down the room, the feeling that he should never have sought Willi out beginning to grow: everything was changed: a volcano had erupted and everything was dressed in ashes and darkness. He looked down at the ragged children in the yard below. They reminded him of the skinny, taciturn children he had seen in the camps. So much human garbage. So much junk. He pitied himself and the world. There was a tight, jagged sensation in his chest and throat. Sickness everywhere. Something healthy – would he ever see something healthy again? He pressed his face to the glass, aware that Willi was rambling on and on about what had happened to Munich. Knappertsbusch, having been banned by the Nazis, had returned to conduct the Philharmonic: a new newspaper, the Münchener Stadtanzeiger, had appeared: Hansel and Gretel had been performed in the Prince Regent Theatre: the Rathaus bell was ringing again: it was said that the statue of Patrona Bavariae was to be re-erected in the Marienplatz: ten former inmates of Dachau had been elected to the City Council. But Grunwald was barely listening to these snippets: they were insignificant to him, even if for Willi they were the stuff of his daily life.

  ‘I used to love this city,’ Willi said. ‘But not now.’

  Grunwald turned away from the window. The children were gone. The yard was empty.

  He shuffled towards the gas-stove and lit the ring under the kettle.

  ‘You can’t get real coffee these days except on the black market,’ he said. ‘So we use this powdered rubbish. But at least it will heat you up.’

  Grunwald watched as the kettle began to boil. Willi took two cups from a wooden cabinet and brewed the coffee. He handed one to Grunwald. The liquid was dark and tasteless. They sat for a time in silence, drinking.

  And then Willi said, ‘I take it you’ve heard nothing about Martha and the boy –’

  ‘Nothing,’ Grunwald answered. ‘It’s hopeless. They’re dead. I know it for a fact.’

  Willi shrugged. ‘We mustn’t give up hope, Leonhard.’

  ‘Hope?’ Grunwald failed to recognize the word: could Willi conceivably have some tiny reserve of optimism even now? It was hardly credible.

  ‘They’re dead,’ he said. ‘I know they’re dead.’

  Willi sipped his drink. ‘You have to look forward, Leonhard. Forward, not back.’

  Forward, not back. Grunwald stared at his uncle in surprise. What gave the old man his banal philosophical strength? How had he managed to retain his platitudinous shell in the face of everything?

  ‘What’s gone is gone,’ Willi said.

  Grunwald turned his face away. It was more than he could stand to listen to the old man. Willi got up suddenly and went to the wooden cabinet by the stove. He took out an envelope and returned with it to his chair. Opening the envelope, he produced some photographs.

  ‘Have a look at these,’ he said. ‘They should cheer you up.’

  ‘Please,’ Grunwald said. ‘I don’t like old pictures –’

  ‘Go on,’ Willi said. ‘It won’t do any harm.’

  Grunwald stared at the photographs in the old man’s hands with a sensation of mounting horror. Photographs. Pictures of the dead. Snapshots of the damned. He closed his eyes, aware of the inconsistency in the old man’s approach. If one were to look forward and not back, what good did it do to scrutinize old photographs? He felt the envelope being pushed into his hands. Opening his eyes he stared at the blurred snapshot that lay in front of him.

  ‘Remember that?’ Willi asked, suddenly alive and animated. ‘Hilda and Josef in the foreground, you and Martha at the back, and Alice and myself to the one side. 1932. Autumn. That time we all went for the weekend to Josef’s cabin at Friedrichshafen. Do you remember that?’

  Grunwald looked at the photograph. Her eyes screwed up against the sunlight, a straw hat on her dark hair, a white dress hanging on her loosely, Martha had a frozen appearance. He realized he had forgotten how she had been: the eyes crinkled in that characteristic way of hers, the incongruously large straw hat he had purchased for her in Ravensburg that seemed to eclipse her face, the slight forward thrust of the lips as if she were about to launch into an argument. And then the photograph seemed to melt away as he looked at it and he turned it over: Willi had written on the back the words Friedrichshafen, 1932.

  ‘Here’s another,’ Willi said, and thrust a second picture forward. It showed a group of people sitting in a field in front of an outspread tablecloth that lay across the grass. ‘The time we drove down towards Rosenheim for a picnic. Funny, I can’t remember the year. It must have been 1931.’

  Grunwald studied the photograph closely. He had no recollection of a picnic near Rosenheim and so far as he could see he wasn’t amongst the group of people on the grass. But Martha was there, seated at the back, half-hidden. Her head thrown slightly back, she seemed to be laughing about something. But a shadow lay across her face and it was difficult to make out the features. Grunwald held the picture a moment longer, his finger moving across Martha’s face as if he were trying to impose reality and texture upon the flat surface of the photograph. Willi should never have produced these snapshots: what good did they do? What was the use of stirring up so much dust? Of producing impossible longings? He pushed the photograph back inside the envelope.

  ‘There’s plenty more,’ Willi said. ‘Look –’

  ‘Not now, Willi. Please.’

  ‘You’re tired. You’ve had a long journey.’

  ‘Yes. I’m tired.’

  ‘Then you must get some rest. You must wash and shave. Get some fresh clothes. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about things, Leonhard. We’ll have lots of time.’ He suddenly clutched Grunwald, as if he were afraid of letting him out of
his sight. ‘Go into the bedroom and lie down. Rest for as long as you like. You need it.’

  Grunwald went into the bedroom, hardly more than a boxroom that was crowded by the large brass bed, and lay down. He pulled the covers over his body. Willi sat on the edge of the bed a moment. And then, leaning forward, he pressed his lips against Grunwald’s forehead.

  He got up from the bed, slightly embarrassed by his own display of affection, and left the room. Grunwald watched the door shut and then wiped the moisture from his forehead with the palm of his hand. He should never have come: it was more than he could possibly tolerate.

  Some hours later he woke and heard the sound of voices from the other room. For a moment he could not remember where he was. The bed was strange to him and the room, with its tiny barred window, threw him momentarily off balance. He pushed the covers back and stood up. Brushing his hair from his face, he went towards the door. The voices had stopped now. He hesitated a moment and then pulled the door open.

  In the other room Willi was sitting by the gas stove, the envelope of snapshots still in his hands. At his side there was a woman: she must have been in her late twenties. As Grunwald entered, she turned round. Willi rose from his chair, one arm extended in a greeting. Grunwald stopped: he had not expected to find a woman there.

  Willi said, ‘Leonhard – let me introduce you to Fräulein Strauss.’ The woman held out her hand and Grunwald accepted it. It was curiously cold and as he touched it he shivered imperceptibly.

  ‘My nephew, Leonhard,’ Willi said to the woman. ‘I’ve just been telling her how you’ve come back from the dead, Leonhard.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ the woman said. ‘Herr Gerber has told me that he had given up all hope for you.’

  Grunwald was embarrassed a little: it was as if his uncle had turned him into some kind of hero. He looked down at the floor. There was something about the woman’s eyes. He had the odd sensation that she was mocking him. Was it just his imagination? Was it his guilt? Did he assume automatically that he was transparent?