Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘You sound like Willi,’ he said.

  She threw her head back and laughed: ‘Do I sound pompous?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  She had stopped laughing and was looking at Grunwald intently, trying to place him in her mind, attempting to categorize him. She sat up on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs, never taking her eyes from his face. He felt again the sensation he had experienced on first meeting her, that somehow she was trying to cut her way into him, as if it were important to her to discover what lay beyond the façade and inhabited the mind. He found it uncomfortable.

  ‘Plans,’ she said. ‘People have to make plans nowadays.’

  ‘Do you have plans?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘As soon as it can be arranged, I’ll go to Palestine. Why should I stay in Germany? It isn’t the same for me here any more. Even the language sounds harsh because I can remember what it was used for and the kinds of things people said in German. That’s bad, isn’t it? That the language should have been poisoned for me forever.’ She thought for a moment and then added: ‘Do you remember when they used to broadcast Goebbels’s speeches? We sat huddled round the radio, shaking our heads. That’s when it started for me – the feeling that if the language could become so tainted, then it wouldn’t be very long before the people followed in the same direction.’

  She seemed suddenly to have become imbued with a new energy. She got up from the bed and walked about the room in a restless way.

  ‘And then they started to burn books. Who could ever forget that? Somehow that was the worst thing of all. When I heard about it, I was shattered. It was unbelievable that people could burn books. The twentieth century! It Was incredible. Didn’t you feel like that when you heard?’

  ‘I considered it the action of a few hooligans,’ Grunwald said, and noticed the look of disappointment that spread across her face.

  ‘How wrong you were,’ she said. ‘Then Kristallnacht. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. We were woken up, it must have been around midnight, people were running through the streets and some were being beaten up on the pavements, and there was this awful smell of burning. I woke up and I remember thinking: They’ve come to murder us. The building was on fire. I got out of my bedroom. The stairs were blazing. I heard my mother scream. And the awful thing is that I could see her through the flames and I couldn’t do a thing about it. She was trapped in her own bedroom, she was screaming, I was screaming, she was wandering up and down in a panic, like a trapped animal, and her nightdress was aflame. After that, she just disappeared.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I rushed through the fire on to the street and started to run. Buildings were burning. People were lying around covered in blood. A stormtrooper caught hold of me and forced me into a side-street. I struggled and eventually I got away. He didn’t bother to chase me. I ran until I reached the house of the Pastor and his wife.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I knew for certain that the position of the Jews in Germany was hopeless.’

  Grunwald looked at his hands and imagined that he must have known the same thing as well: why for God’s sake hadn’t he acted in time to save himself and his family? If there had ever been an answer to that question, it lay buried now.

  ‘Palestine,’ she said. ‘That’s where I shall go. There isn’t any other place on earth I want to go to so badly. I want to get away from all those memories. Wherever I turn nowadays I find that everything in Germany is stale and dead and utterly defeated.’

  Stale and dead and utterly defeated. For a moment Grunwald wondered if Palestine could offer him a new chance. He imagined sunlight and dust, blind white buildings sizzling in the heat, endless miles of scrubland. But the images were unreal, related to nothing he had ever seen or could hope to see.

  ‘Do you have plans?’ she asked.

  ‘Not especially,’ he answered.

  ‘You must. How can you live without grand schemes?’

  ‘How could I live with them?’

  She stopped walking around and stood just in front of him. She touched the back of his hand with her fingers. Puzzled, he looked at her, but she was staring at his hands. Folding her fingers, she caught his wrist gently and held it a moment: and then, stooping slightly, she pressed her mouth to the tips of his fingers. He drew his hand away abruptly as if something unbearably hot had been dropped there.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because I wanted to think you might be happy.’

  ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘I still don’t like it if you’re miserable.’

  ‘Why did you want to touch me?’

  ‘You seem lonely.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘It wasn’t pity, if that’s what you’re thinking. You must have a very low opinion of yourself if you suspect people of pitying you.’

  He got up from his chair: he had to get out of her room. He went in the direction of the door.

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Are you staying with Herr Gerber?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  She smiled at him: ‘Then we’ll meet again tomorrow.’

  Closing the door behind him quietly, he left. He stood for some time on the landing, thinking of the woman. He drew his hand from his pocket and stared at it: what had she been trying to tell him? What had her gesture meant? He imagined that he detected in it an expression of humility: she had put her lips to his fingers as a person with incalculable wealth might wash the feet of a beggar.

  Willi was still sleeping. The sound of his snoring filled the tiny apartment. Grunwald went into the bedroom and looked at his uncle for a time. Mouth open, arms thrown back behind his head, the old man was breathing with some difficulty. He would be dead before long: and after he was dead, who else would be left?

  Grunwald went into the other room and pushed two chairs together and lay uncomfortably between them. Fatigue settled on him like a heavy stone and he fell sharply into an undisturbed sleep.

  17

  He was fortunate to find a hotel room since – as the manager so hastily pointed out – the world was full of homeless people and soldiers of the Allied victory, and somebody had to provide shelter for them. It was only when he was in the room that Schwarzenbach realized how dangerous it was for him to have come to Munich. People had long memories: a chance acquaintance on the street, a face glimpsed across a room – he might be recognized by almost anyone. And yet he felt that this would not happen. He had changed: he was not the same person who had left this city to journey to Poland. There were his papers, for one thing. And if anybody looked at him curiously, with flickers of recognition, he would say that they were mistaken. His name was Lutzke. He had surrendered to this fact long ago.

  The room was miserable and depressing. The chairs were made of gold wicker, dragged out of the hotel ballroom because they were no longer needed. In the corridors of the hotel he saw American soldiers – captains and majors mostly – who occupied an entire wing. He felt contempt for them. When they walked past him, he imagined that they were scrutinizing him closely and coldly. When he saw them in the hotel dining-room where they invariably managed to eat well – certainly better than the few Germans in residence – he was acutely aware of how much he hated them. They laughed, they stuffed themselves, they were insensitive to the state of chaos around them. He wished sometimes that they would leave, go home, vanish forever. The only people who knew how to repair Germany were the Germans themselves: the Americans and their friends were ignorant of the nature of German life and feelings.

  The bed in his room was narrow and had a padded headboard, a luxury from the past. Beside the bed was a telephone that didn’t work and above it a lamp that had no bulb. When he turned on the taps of the wash-basin the hot-water faucet gave out a st
range rust-coloured liquid that was lukewarm and the cold water one emitted a gushing liquid that he was loath to drink because it carried particles of dirt. The wall by the window was black and charred because there had been a fire in the room at one time. He despised the place and yet he felt secure there. From his window he could look down into the street and see the ruins of buildings across the way: military jeeps – a whole line of them – were parked in the shadows of the ruins.

  On his second day in the hotel the chambermaid tried clumsily to seduce him. He found her making the bed as he came in from the lavatory in the corridor, a thin, scraggy girl with tiny breasts. She caught him by the elbow as he walked past, and like someone offering a free sample undid the top button of her blouse. He gazed at her a moment and then turned away.

  She asked: ‘Why not?’

  ‘You don’t interest me.’

  ‘Are you a German?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shook her head: ‘I should have known. The Americans are more sociable.’

  He watched her a moment longer.

  ‘You don’t have to look at me like that,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to live somehow.’

  She finished making the bed and then she went to the door.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Do you want to make some money?’

  She paused by the door. ‘I’m interested.’

  He took some notes from his pocket and passed one to her.

  ‘Can you give me some information?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘I want to know a little about the black market in Munich.’

  She clenched her hand around the money. ‘What do you need?’

  He sat down on the bed. ‘I have an old revolver from before the war. I want to get rid of it. Do you know of anyone who deals in such commodities?’

  ‘You want to sell it?’ She thought for a time. ‘I wouldn’t have much use for a black market in weapons, would I?’

  ‘Not personally, no.’

  ‘But there is a dealer in the Marienallee, near the Isar. He has a shop there. I don’t know the name. But I believe he has a reputation for dealing in almost anything.’

  Schwarzenbach gave her some more money. ‘Weapons too?’

  The girl smiled: ‘Perhaps. But I wouldn’t know, would I?’

  She went out, closing the door quietly behind her.

  At the end of his second day – during which he had left his room only once to procure a copy of a scandalous newspaper called the Süddeutsche Zeitung (financed, no doubt, by American money) – he felt curiously lethargic, as if he were in a state of suspension and time had ceased to exist. In two days he had accomplished nothing: time had drifted away, he had allowed it to slip through his fingers like worthless grains of dirt. The thought of going out in the broken streets appalled him. He felt that his mind had become a sieve through which important things were allowed to filter and that his purpose in coming to Munich was receding with every second into the past. He stared at the charred wall or at the useless electric lamp for hours on end and sometimes he gazed down into the street in the manner of a man expecting a sensational occurrence. His thoughts drifted out towards the Jew: how easy would it be to find the Jew? The question tantalized him for a time until he realized, with a detached awareness, that he felt more rational than he had done for many weeks.

  The American – a journalist called Peters – said to him in the hotel bar, ‘I suppose you feel resentment against us for being here, don’t you?’

  ‘Why should I?’ Schwarzenbach said. The bar was crowded and Peters had a loud voice that he found slightly embarrassing. He was a big man with a brown moustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. Incongruously, Schwarzenbach thought, he was wearing a spotted bow-tie that hung from a band of elastic under his collar.

  ‘Well, I guess I would have resented it if your people had invaded the United States. I guess I wouldn’t have liked that very much.’ Peters was drinking scotch in liberal measures. When Schwarzenbach had asked for beer the barman had told him that there wasn’t any: most of the barley these days was being used for bread.

  Peters said, ‘Would you resent it if you knew we had come here to stay?’

  Schwarzenbach looked round the bar. Why did Peters have to talk so noisily? ‘I’m not sure if I would,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it might be better if you did what you have to do, and then clear out.’

  ‘You think so, eh?’ Peters prodded Schwarzenbach with the index finger of his right hand. ‘You mean you want us to clear out?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I?’

  ‘It was your tone of voice.’

  ‘Look, that’s not what I meant. Perhaps the German nation could protect its own destiny a little better than your people could –’

  ‘That’s a laugh. You made a great job of it the last time.’

  Peters sipped his drink and indicated to the barman that he wanted another. Schwarzenbach could not help noticing how quickly Peters was served.

  ‘There were mistakes,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘That’s a joyous understatement.’

  ‘There were errors of judgement –’

  ‘Hey, you’re really on the ball.’

  Schwarzenbach was silent. Peter’s aggressiveness disturbed him. He looked into his scotch and Peters, as if noticing that he had offended Schwarzenbach, clapped him on the shoulders in a friendly manner.

  ‘Don’t get sore. This is just a little discussion, that’s all. A little democratic discussion.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Peters lit a cigarette with a gold-plated lighter. ‘The thing I really hate is the way you people have just bowed down. You all seem to have died. You let us walk all over you. You don’t have any get-up-and-go qualities about you, do you?’

  ‘What do you expect? A defeated nation – should we have carnivals every night?’

  ‘I’m talking about spirit. There’s no spirit left in this whole damn country.’

  Schwarzenbach shrugged. He felt uneasy: other faces in the bar were turned in their direction and Peters appeared to enjoy the attention he received.

  ‘Know what I would do in your position?’ Peters said. ‘I’d get a bit of good old-fashioned resistance going. I’d hand out a few pamphlets: Americans go home. Fuck the Americans! What right have they got to be here? Fuck the war! Let the Germans get on with their own lives.’ Peters drew on his cigarette and laughed: ‘Instead, you let them take your women, your cars, your hotels, your houses. They’ve only got to snap their fingers and you people come bowing and scraping. No, it’s too easy. You’ve surrendered everything.’

  Schwarzenbach finished his drink. The talk wearied him. His head was spinning from the effects of the alcohol and from the constant rattle of Peters’s voice.

  ‘No offence,’ Peters said. He appeared drunk now: his eyes were cracked and bloodshot. ‘No offence intended.’

  Schwarzenbach was jammed into a corner by Peters and another scotch was thrust into his hand.

  Peters said, ‘I’m writing an article on the survival of the Jews.’

  ‘Yes?’ Schwarzenbach asked, and looked up from his drink. Now there was music somewhere, a recording of someone playing Bach on an organ.

  ‘Maybe you can help.’

  ‘Help? How?’

  ‘You were here during the Hitler period?’

  ‘I was in Germany,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘Our readers are interested in what happened to the Jews. Do you know how many Jews there are in New York alone?’ Peters smoked another cigarette and frowned slightly: ‘Did you see any persecution personally? How did you feel?’

  Persecution: it was the most fashionable word of the moment. Everywhere people were screaming about persecution. Schwarzenbach shook his head.

  ‘I saw nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Like one of the brass monkeys, eh?’ Peters’s face vanished a moment behind a cloud of smoke, but the earlier aggression of his manner was present still. ‘I don�
�t understand. I talk to people, and I ask them the same questions. But I don’t get it: Dachau is about eighteen kilometres outside this city. There’s even a street going up that way called the Dachauerstrasse. And yet every damn person I talk to saw nothing, heard nothing, and didn’t raise a single fucking whisper –’

  ‘I saw nothing,’ Schwarzenbach said again.

  ‘All right. All right. So you saw nothing? Didn’t you know what was going on?’ Peters stabbed his cigarette forward, as if he meant to burn Schwarzenbach’s hand. ‘There was a newspaper called the Völkischer Beobachter. There was a rag called the Stürmer – didn’t you ever read those? You can’t expect me to believe you didn’t read in one of your newspapers of the measures that were being taken?’

  ‘I tended not to read the papers you’ve mentioned,’ Schwarzenbach said, profoundly irritated now.

  ‘So you deliberately took the easy way out, did you?’

  ‘If you mean to ask whether I ignored things, the answer is yes. They weren’t interesting me, don’t you understand that? So far as I was concerned, the acts perpetrated by the National Socialist regime were undertaken in the name of German strength. I neither agreed nor disagreed. I went about my business. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘I makes me puke,’ Peters said. He was leaning for support against the bar, the cigarette stuck between his lips, his eyes half-closed against the smoke that rose upwards from his mouth.

  ‘Then we have nothing more to discuss,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘You are prejudiced –’

  ‘I’m disgusted.’

  ‘You are prejudiced because you know nothing of the conditions under which we lived –’

  ‘I’m disgusted. You make me sick. What have you got inside you for a heart? What do you feel? You’re a cold bastard, you feel sweet fuck all –’