Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

‘It takes great courage and endurance to have survived,’ she said.

  He looked at her again. It was impossible to be certain, but he had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that she was subtly trying to provoke him – as if his heroism were a blatant lie that she desperately wanted to puncture. But why did he think this? Why did he imagine hostility in her manner? She was half-smiling, her lips fixed, her eyes cutting into him.

  There was a moment of silence and Grunwald found that he could no longer meet the woman’s eyes: they were clear and sharp, piercing him in a way that he found troublesome. He turned away and went to the window. It was beginning to get dark and he realized he had no idea of time. Was it late afternoon?

  ‘Let’s hope that you can re-establish yourself,’ she said.

  Re-establish? It was a strange word: clinical and formal. Why had she chosen that? What did she mean?

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ he said. He wanted to shift the conversation and so he asked: ‘Are you a neighbour of my uncle’s?’

  ‘A neighbour?’ Willi interrupted. ‘She’s far more than that, Leonhard. She’s my lifeline. If it weren’t for Elisabeth, God knows what I would do. She fetches things for me because I don’t get around very much. She gets my rations. She picks up one or two things on the black market for me. Sometimes she even cooks me a meal –’

  ‘Whenever we can get any decent food, that is,’ Fräulein Strauss said. She was leaning now against the wall, her hands clasped in front of her. Her eyes had not moved from Grunwald’s face since he had entered the room. She seemed to be scrutinizing him, as if she were seeking the solution to an intricate problem. He turned to look at her, fascinated by her expression. He judged that she was about twenty-eight: she was thin, dark-haired, her eyes a peculiar shade of bright blue. Why was she staring at him? What was it that she wanted to understand?

  Willi said, ‘Elisabeth is a blessing to me.’

  Fräulein Strauss smiled. ‘We keep each other company,’ she said to Grunwald.

  Grunwald felt that he was imprisoned by her gaze: it trapped and encircled him, and yet he could not avoid the suspicion that she was examining him as she might have done any stranger who had survived the holocaust, and who was reluctant – for reasons that she could not obviously fathom – to tell his story. Was that it? Did she want to hear how he had coped with the concentration camps? Was he some sort of novelty for her? He tried to clear his mind: he was imagining things. There was nothing extraordinary in the way she looked at him.

  Willi said, ‘Elisabeth lives in the room along the corridor.’

  Grunwald said, ‘Does she?’

  ‘Sometimes she comes in and cleans up.’

  ‘When I have the energy,’ Fräulein Strauss said. ‘But energy, like any other commodity, is at a premium these days.’

  Willi sighed: ‘It can’t get any worse,’ he said. ‘Things are getting better all the time.’

  They were silent again, as if all three knew that this was a He. The woman began to move around the room, tidying up here and there in a casual fashion. Grunwald watched her a moment and wondered why she helped Willi: charity, pity. When she had finished, and had put the broom away, she said to Willi; ‘It’s time for your nap.’

  Willi groaned. ‘I’m not even tired –’

  ‘No complaints,’ she said. ‘You know that you need it.’

  ‘You’re like a nurse,’ Willi said. ‘She’s just like a nurse. Leonhard.’

  She clapped her hands together briskly. ‘Come on.’

  ‘You bully me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t look after yourself, would you?’ She helped him out of the chair. Willi was laughing, as if the whole thing were a joke they played out together every day at the same time. She led him towards the bedroom. Grunwald watched the door swing slowly shut and listened to the sounds of Willi climbing into the bed. He looked around the room. It was neat and tidy now. She had washed the dirty cups and swept the floor and had tidied the various papers that lay around, stacking them neatly on top of the cabinet.

  She emerged from the room a minute later, wiping a strand of hair from her forehead.

  ‘He always sleeps for a few hours at this time of day,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to, but it does him good.’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Grunwald said. ‘He’s changed so much.’

  She looked at Grunwald a moment, her head tilted to one side.

  ‘He’s dying,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder he’s lived as long as this.’ She was busy again, replacing the photographs inside the brown envelope.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Cancer,’ she answered.

  ‘Christ,’ Grunwald sat down: the old man was suffering from cancer.

  ‘Even if medical treatment was possible, it would do no good,’ she said. ‘And he knows it better than anyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Grunwald said. ‘To come all this way to see him, and then to find he’s dying –’

  ‘I understand. Everything seems so painful these days.’

  She had stopped in the middle of the floor. She looked sad. Her arms hung by her side listlessly. Staring at her, Grunwald was conscious of the fact that she was attractive: she was by no means beautiful, but her face – which was intelligent, pale, knowing – suggested something far removed from any mundane concepts of beauty. Had she suffered? The question needed no answer: everyone had suffered.

  She said, ‘I feel so sorry for him. I like to help as much as I can. It makes it a bit easier for him.’

  Grunwald felt like an intruder who has stumbled in on some intense personal grief: he felt clumsy and unhappy.

  ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of him dying alone,’ she said.

  She was standing in a peculiar fashion by the door now, as if yielding to some immense weight. Her shoulders sagged and her face had altered: the features seemed to have become blurred. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Grunwald offered her a chair and she accepted.

  He went to the window and looked down into the yard at the rear. It was empty now and silent: rain, falling softly, swept across the garbage heaps. He turned to the woman: ‘How long will he last?’

  ‘I don’t know. A month? Three months? He might die tomorrow. You can see how ill he looks.’ She paused a moment, closing her eyes, resting her head against the back of the chair. ‘He suffers great pain, although he never says anything about it. He hardly complains. This room – doesn’t it smell of death to you?’

  Grunwald looked round the room. It was impersonal and cold, as if Willi, in preparation for his death, had discarded almost all of his private possessions.

  ‘What do you do?’ he said.

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Do you work?’

  ‘No, I don’t work.’ She was twisting her fingers together in a tormented way. He was on the point of asking about her war years, when he decided against it. In the failing light she appeared improbably pale and bloodless. There were dark circles under her eyes and tiny lines around the corners of her mouth. What was she thinking?

  ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

  She held up her bare wrist. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d like to take a walk,’ he said. ‘Will you come?’

  He didn’t know why he had asked or even why he particularly wanted to walk. The room was stifling him.

  ‘It would make a pleasant change,’ she said and she smiled. She rose slowly from the chair. ‘I’ll get my coat.’

  When she went out of the room Grunwald washed his face and hands in the sink, and shaved with Willi’s razor. For the first time in months he had noticed that there was a distinct smell – from his flesh, from his clothes – of dirt and staleness. It had never bothered him before but suddenly he wanted to scrub himself clean.

  Fräulein Strauss reappeared in the doorway, wearing a navy blue raincoat.

  ‘It isn’t very glamorous, is it?’

  ‘It’ll keep you dry,’ Grunwald said, and watched as she turned round: after a moment he
followed.

  The Americans had entered Munich on 30th April: they had met no resistance. But the city around them had been flattened by damaging air-raids and Grunwald could see the signs of destruction everywhere. It was a sight he had become accustomed to in Berlin except that now, in Munich, it seemed far more personal, more painful, because these were streets and buildings he had known particularly well. Fräulein Strauss told him that between the summer of 1940 and the end of the war, there had been about a hundred air attacks on the city and that thousands of people had lost their homes. She also told him that someone had painted an inscription on the National Socialist shrine, the Feldherrnhalle, that said: ‘Concentration camps of Dachau, Velden, Buchenwald, I am ashamed of being German.’

  They walked as far as the Maximilianeum and from there they crossed the river to the Widenmayerstrasse. The Isar looked strangely green and swollen in the gathering darkness and they stood and looked at it together for some minutes in silence. They went on as far as the Luitpold Bridge where they could see the gardens of the Maximilians-Anlagen. Grunwald felt less and less that he had come home and more and more that he was a morbid tourist exploring the scenic grandeur of destruction.

  Fräulein Strauss said, ‘People don’t have much to eat these days. We have ration cards, but sometimes the rations don’t seem to be available. It’s terrible. You remember what Munich used to be like and it’s terrible when you compare it with that.’

  Grunwald watched the river and the rain that fell along its surface. She would have been about fifteen years of age when the National Socialists had come to power, no more than a happy young girl, carefree, perhaps experiencing her first love affair: what had she done when the shadows had begun to fall?

  Someone was burning something in the gardens across the river. A few sparks rose up in the air, followed by a bright orange flame. He stared at this and then at the woman. In the reflected glow her face seemed to assume a different shape: her eyes, now blank, were directed inwards. Rain had soaked her hair and flat strands were plastered across her forehead. She looked impossibly young all at once, like a schoolgirl savouring the excitement of her first adult dance.

  ‘What did you do?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She didn’t turn to look at him. Her gaze was fixed in the direction of the bonfire around which the shapes of several people had materialized.

  Grunwald was silent. He had no right to ask her anything.

  ‘What did I do in the war? Is that what you mean?’

  Grunwald nodded his head. Beneath them a motor launch was going down the river and a man was shouting inaudible words through a loudspeaker.

  ‘I did nothing,’ she said. ‘Like Herr Gerber, I didn’t end up in a camp. I stayed in my room.’

  He imagined that she was being flippant. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what I say. I stayed in my room.’ She was moving away from him and he followed.

  ‘Which room?’

  ‘Oh – it was just a room.’ She seemed to want to tease him now: she appeared to enjoy a sense of being enigmatic. He followed her down the Widenmayerstrasse. She was walking quickly, as if she didn’t want him to catch up on her.

  ‘Where was this room?’ he asked.

  ‘In a house.’ She stopped by the side of the street and looked down at the Isar.

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Between the Kristallnacht and the surrender of Munich, I didn’t leave my room. Does that make sense?’ She saw his look of puzzlement. ‘I was sheltered. Protected. The people with whom I was living protected me. They brought me food. They concealed me. They put themselves in terrible danger for harbouring a Jewess. But they were opponents of the regime and they considered it an act of Christian charity to hide me and support me. Now do you see what I mean?’

  ‘You must have left the room sometimes,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘Never. How could I? It was an attic room with a tiny window that was partially boarded up. It contained a bed. It had primitive lavatory requirements. Twice a day these people brought me something to eat and books to read. They gave me cigarettes to smoke and newspapers so that I could keep in touch with what was going on. Except that the newspapers contained nothing but propaganda lies.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I understand you,’ Grunwald said. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t go out of doors between November 1938 and April 1945?’

  ‘Six and a half years,’ she said. ‘I stayed in the room all that time. How could I have left it? That would have involved the betrayal of the people who let me live there.’

  Grunwald was astonished: ‘But what did you do?’

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Yes, I believe you. But what did you do all the time?’

  ‘I told you. I read books. I read everything from Kant to German translations of cowboy novels.’ She paused a moment. ‘That wasn’t enough, of course. I had my fantasies as well. I devised games.’

  ‘What games?’

  ‘Paper games. I created amusements for myself. I devised a complex kind of chequers. I planned the assassination of Hitler. I amused myself.’

  She was talking flippantly and Grunwald wondered if she were telling the truth. How was it possible to live for six and a half years in an attic room without going out once? He imagined the murderous strain that such an existence would have imposed upon him.

  ‘It’s hard to grasp,’ he said.

  ‘It was more pleasant than Dachau,’ she said. ‘I was able to talk to people twice a day, when they brought my food upstairs. I ate reasonably well. I was bored much of the time, naturally, and I longed for the open fields. I used to dream that the war was over and that someone, a lover perhaps, would come and rescue me. I lived in my mind for six and a half years.’

  Grunwald caught her by the arm. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she said, ‘You can’t imagine how much I longed for fresh air and wide spaces. Every day seemed the same as the one before, except for the fact that the room was getting smaller. It was dwindling around me. It was choking me. I couldn’t have survived much longer without going insane. Do you know? When the war ended, when Munich had surrendered to the Americans, I was afraid to step outside and put my foot on the ladder. I was afraid to leave the place. Can you imagine that? The one thing I really wanted to do, and I was scared to death of doing it. It was incredible.’

  Grunwald took his hand from her arm.

  ‘Six and a half years,’ Grunwald said. ‘Who were these people?’

  ‘A Protestant pastor and his wife whom I had known since I was a child. They took me in after the Kristallnacht. My mother, she was a widow, was burned to death that night. I was alone. I had to turn to someone. And they protected me.’

  Grunwald looked down at the Isar. The rain had stopped now, but darkness had fallen over everything. He felt a sudden desire to protect the woman, as if she were a child abandoned in a dark place, but the desire was bound up with the sense of pity that he felt. To touch her would be to contaminate her: she had far more courage than he could ever have possessed.

  ‘I would have gone mad,’ he said, and the remark lay between them feebly.

  ‘Would you?’ She turned round to face him. ‘It’s surprising how much strength we find when we’re afraid. Don’t you think that’s true? Didn’t you find that?’

  Grunwald shrugged. They had now come as far as the Steinsdorfstrasse, which led to the Ludwigsbridge. Rain began again, blowing out of the darkness in a squall.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘six and a half years isn’t much out of a lifetime, is it?’

  People moved through the darkness. Grunwald watched their wretched shapes shift through the shadows of buildings: they had the air of predators in a season of famine. They reached the other side of the river and crossed the Mariahilfplatz. He found that he did not wa
nt to talk to her, that he had nothing to say to her, nothing to contribute: he had become surprisingly bitter within himself, as if her courage and stoicism were a deliberate affront to him. But how could he be affronted? He had no sense of his own dignity left, and found something curious in the idea that some people did have dignity: Elisabeth Strauss, for instance, could live with herself comfortably. Thrusting his hands into his overcoat, he suddenly wished that she would go away and take her courage with her. He had never been anything other than a coward, afraid of decision, terrified of action and conflict, scared of death.

  They returned in silence to the house in the Schumannstrasse. As they climbed the stairs she asked him if he wanted to come into her room. He followed her inside, saying nothing. It was smaller than Willi’s room. In one corner there was a bed upon which lay a pile of freshly laundered clothes. She moved them, placing them neatly inside a chest, and then she sat on the bed.

  Looking at Grunwald, she asked: ‘Why are you so sad?’

  ‘Am I sad?’

  ‘You have a sad expression.’

  Grunwald shrugged: ‘Your story has upset me perhaps. I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll make coffee. Would you like that?’ She filled a pot with water and put it on the gas-stove. She said nothing until the water boiled, and then she passed him a cup. ‘You’re an unhappy man, Leonhard. Why are you unhappy?’

  Grunwald sipped his coffee. He looked at her: her damp hair hung down untidily in thick strands, but her face was shining from the rain. He had an urge to touch her, as if by the very act of laying his fingers upon her face he could understand something of her courage.

  ‘Your experiences have made you unhappy, haven’t they?’

  ‘They weren’t exactly filled with joy,’ he answered.

  ‘You know I didn’t mean that.’ She looked upset and he realized that his reply must have seemed needlessly sarcastic and bitter. ‘Why can’t you accept the fact that you are alive? That you have a life to lead? You can’t go around in such a miserable –’

  ‘Am I miserable?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me. I can only tell you how you look.’ She put her empty cup on the floor and lay across the bed propped up on one elbow. She stared at Grunwald for a time and then she said, ‘I know terrible things have happened to everybody. You can’t meet anyone nowadays without colliding with some tragedy or another. But they aren’t important any longer. Don’t you see that? It’s history. Life has to be a process of going forward, and forward again.’