Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘But I don’t think you have a right to express opinions on something you don’t have first-hand personal experience of.’

  ‘I visited bloody Dachau!’ Peters shouted. ‘When I first arrived in this miserable, shitting country I got off the boat at Hamburg and I went to Neuengamme. From there I went to Bergen-Belsen and then to Ravensbruck. No personal experience? No fucking personal experience? You cold-hearted bastard – the things I saw would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. You – and all the others like you – just went about your private business, ignoring everything. Concentration camps? Never heard of them. Jews going to gas chambers? Impossible. Furnaces burning corpses? Uncivilized.’

  Peters caught Schwarzenbach by the lapel of his jacket and drew his head down level to his own. He whispered, ‘They were using bulldozers to sweep the bodies into mass graves. Did you know that?’

  Schwarzenbach shook his head: ‘I knew nothing,’ he said.

  ‘And you feel nothing?’

  Schwarzenbach turned round and walked across the bar.

  Peters shouted after him: ‘And you still feel nothing?’

  Schwarzenbach went to the stairs, climbed them slowly, and when he was back in his own room he locked the door and lay across the bed. He was sweating and there was an ache in his head. Peters was a bore, one of the new liberal bores, one of the chroniclers of victory authorized to probe around the ashes for the titillation of his readers. It made him feel sick. He took two pills from his jacket and drew a small amount of the dirty water from the sink. He swallowed both pills quickly.

  He stood for a while at the window, looking blankly out at the few lights flickering in the street. Below, he saw Peters stagger out of the hotel and into a waiting car. And then the vehicle had gone. He despised Peters: it was very fine and very noble of the man to preach and criticize and condemn – but his sentiments were hollow. They were soft-centred and somehow indecent. How could the man know? How could he know anything?

  He woke, fully dressed, in the early hours of the morning. He washed his face in the rust-coloured water and then dried it thoroughly. He felt somehow impatient now, as if conscious of the fact he had wasted too much time staying in the hotel, doing nothing, making no efforts, subjugating the real reason for coming to Munich to his own lethargy. The sense of impatience grew in him and reached proportions of panic. The room was shrinking around him: its bleak walls depressed him and the ancient black and white print of Hindenburg that hung askew over his bed unnerved him. There was no more time to waste. He had to go outside into the streets. Every second that passed had sudden significance: every minute was another point to Eberhard and Spiers in their search for the truth. He imagined that they might have discovered something in his absence: after all, if he had overlooked the medical textbook with his own initials in it, what else might he have forgotten? He searched frantically and hopelessly through his mind. He could think of nothing, yet somehow there were phantoms and shadows that rose in his mental images to disturb him. But he could not identify them: they lay like gaunt clouds shapelessly crossing a landscape.

  Behind the Von-der-Tann-Strasse he found the tiny office of the Jewish Agency in a building that looked as if it hadn’t been swept or cleaned since the outbreak of war. Dust lay heavily everywhere and the windows were grimy: on the outside wall an attempt had been made to scrub off a swastika painted in white, but the mark was still visible against the grey stone.

  In an inner office there were two desks, both occupied by Jewesses. Schwarzenbach took a chair by the desk near the window. The woman who sat behind it was about thirty years of age. She looked at him sympathetically, half smiling. Her attitude reminded him of a doctor’s receptionist and he almost expected her to enquire after his health. She picked up a pen from the desk and rolled it between her fingers.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s very important that I find someone. I imagined you might be able to help.’

  ‘We might,’ she said, taking a piece of paper from a scrap-pad.

  Schwarzenbach said, ‘He’s an old friend of mine, you see. A really old friend. And I’m very anxious to know if anything’s happened to him.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ the woman said. ‘Are you Jewish?’

  ‘No, does that matter?’

  ‘But your friend is Jewish,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. We were at school together. We were always very close, you understand. Nothing could keep us apart.’

  The woman was silent for a time. ‘When did you last hear about him?’

  Schwarzenbach closed his eyes, as if recalling a painful memory. ‘He was taken away. To Poland, I think. I had heard that he was taken in one of those transports to Poland.’

  She looked suddenly very efficient. She placed the tip of the pen against the sheet of paper. ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Grunwald. Leonhard Grunwald. From Munich.’

  She was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Will you please stay here until I check our files?’ She got up and went behind her and, turning round, Schwarzenbach could see her flick through a filing-cabinet. A moment later she returned.

  ‘I’m afraid we have no record of the whereabouts of the man in question,’ she said. ‘You must appreciate how difficult it is to keep track.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘But the name rang some kind of bell,’ she said after a pause. ‘According to our records, we have another enquiry for a Leonhard Grunwald who used to live in the Wendl-Dietrich-strasse of the Neuhausen district of Munich. Would that be the same Grunwald?’

  Schwarzenbach sat forward in his chair. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘It may be that the earlier enquirer has some new information. Sometimes such things happen without us knowing anything about them. People turn up, arrive back in the city, and frequently it happens that we are not informed.’

  ‘This other person –’

  She interrupted him: ‘I was about to suggest that you contact the other person and see if he has any new information.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. That’s a possible idea.’ Schwarzenbach put his hands into his pockets: they were perspiring heavily.

  ‘It’s worth a try anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ll write the name and address on this piece of paper for you. It’s a Herr Willi Gerber who lives in the Schumannstrasse. Grunwald’s uncle, according to this form. He was concerned about the fate of his nephew.’

  Schwarzenbach accepted the piece of paper, aware that his hands were now not only moist but also shaking noticeably.

  The woman said, ‘You mustn’t build your hopes up too high. It’s a long chance. But worth following up.’

  He folded the piece of paper into his pocket and stood up.

  ‘How can I thank you?’

  She smiled at him: ‘There’s a donation box as you go out. The organization badly needs capital, both for overheads and for the purpose of raising funds to send displaced Jews to Palestine. If you don’t have any money, don’t worry about it. If you have any to spare …’

  ‘Thank you again,’ he said, and turned, walking towards the door.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  He stepped outside. He could not express the jubilation that he felt. Taking some coins from his pocket, he placed them inside the box and started to go down the stairs. It did not follow that he would find Grunwald at the address in the Schumannstrasse, but at least he had some information. At least, he had a point of departure.

  18

  Fräulein Strauss had lived in the room in the Schumannstrasse since the end of May. Isolated at the end of a corridor, but still sufficiently near to Willi Gerber’s rooms for her to feel confident of reaching him quickly in an emergency, it suited her and she felt fortunate that at a time when there were so many homeless people and thousands of refugees living in bombed-out cellars she had a place of her own. By any pre-war standards it was inadequate: dampness, a faulty gas s
upply that lived an irregular existence of its own, a lack of carpeting and loose floorboards by the window – these had ceased to irritate her. She was thankful instead, accepting the room’s faults as one might the flaws in the emotional structure of a much-loved person. It sometimes surprised her she was not claustrophobic, remembering her life in Pastor Neumann’s house and the endless days she spent in the attic.

  There were a couple of prints on the wall that she had found by accident amongst a pile of rubbish being cleared from a derelict house. One depicted the Old Rathaus on the east side of the Marienplatz; the other the Café Helbig in the Hofgarten. Both reminded her of more pleasant times and there were occasions when she would stare at the prints and be unconscious of time passing. Yet at other times she was acutely aware of how her life seemed to be slipping away while she chased it, finding it as elusive as her own shadow, pursuing it foolishly as one might chase the wind. With this disturbing awareness came another scrap of self-knowledge: that in Germany her own life was an impossible concept, something she could neither envisage nor imagine, like some creature out of mythology. Leaving Germany was the only important thing now. Obtaining information on Palestine, enquiring about the possibility of making the voyage and the chances of establishing herself there, these were her preoccupations. But it wasn’t easy: the more she pursued Palestine the further it appeared to recede, like a piece of seaweed being sucked back by the tide.

  Much of her time was given to caring for Willi Gerber. He was pathetic, sick, dying, and yet she did not help him for those reasons. Rather she helped him in the manner of someone labouring under a debt of great gratitude. She owed him nothing, certainly, in the sense that she had never received gifts from him that she felt bound to repay: instead, in some oblique way, she felt that she was somehow clearing off certain moral arrears – the six and a half years, perhaps, when she had been protected by Pastor Neumann and his wife. She was giving as much back as she possibly could. If Willi Gerber were to survive for as long as six and a half years – even longer – she knew that she would still be there to look after him. Because of this responsibility her dreams were continually being shoved back and away from her and there were days when she felt that she might never see Palestine. But it remained, it persisted, a mirage that sustained her.

  She never thought of the war years nor of the years of terror and persecution before that. They lay firmly embedded in the past, sometimes dancing across her memories as an image might flit across a mirror: but for the most part these were disjointed recollections and were therefore irrelevant. What did it matter to her now if she might recall her own tears and awareness of isolation when she discovered that she could no longer sit in the same classroom as her friends? Or when she observed stormtroopers marching under their anti-semitic banners? Or when she was accused of putting Christ to death and had therefore to expect punishment? None of these mattered. If they surfaced in her mind at all, they did so at a level where they entailed no painfulness. Part of her had always been conscious of anti-semitism anyway and she had accepted it as a fact of nature: some people, for irrational reasons, hated the Jews. When she saw it grow, when she saw what it had led to and the dark corridors of misery down which it prowled, she had given up hope but she had never accepted despair – which she could not allow was a part of the human condition. Bonfires of books, her mother’s death, everything engulfed by flame – all of this seemed unreal now, acts perpetrated in some mythical past. Her six and a half years in Pastor Neumann’s attic were also a blur: the days were sucked one into the other and every day was the same as the one before. The world was static and dreary. But out of all this she had constructed – if not a sense of joy – then at least a realization that nothing could ever be as bad again. The thought made her happy. When the war ended, and she had taken her first tentative step on the ladder down from the attic, helped by the pastor and his wife, it was as if a happy silence had suddenly descended on the world. No guns. No noise of bombs and anti-aircraft fire. No more destruction. And when she had looked round Munich for the first time since the Kristallnacht, she knew that there could never be any more destruction. Peace: the battling nations had stopped, and like infinitely tired men, had closed their eyes to sleep. She had looked at the battered houses and the homeless, gaunt faces and she wondered at the fact that she had managed to survive it all. Like a child discovering the seasons for the first time, she had wanted to run and leap and clap her hands and say: I know, I understand now. But to have done so would have been tantamount to laughing at somebody’s funeral. She had survived, but beneath the ruins and buried crudely in the rubble there were thousands of dead.

  Forgetting the past, or suppressing it because it was no longer significant, tending to Willi Gerber’s small demands in the knowledge that one day soon the demands would cease, she had created a kind of life for herself. The room was an anchor. She had things to do. She had plans to make. There were dreams she had to mould into the substance of reality. And with all this had come a certain contentment and peace of mind.

  Why then had the sight of Leonhard Grunwald shattered all this?

  The sick, the maimed, the homeless, the hungry, the returned survivors of the death camps – she had seen them all at one time or another. They were the intrinsic personae of the new world, mutants, the grotesques spewed up by the war. But Grunwald was different in a way she could not entirely fathom. He was thin and weary and lost, all of which were predictable. He was afraid and his life revolved around his fear – how could she expect otherwise? None of these things about Grunwald surprised her and yet the sight of him, the awareness of him, had suddenly upset the delicate balance of her life.

  At first, as if she had had a sudden attack of dizziness, she had attributed his difference to the workings of her own imagination and allowed the matter to settle there. But the feeling of strangeness persisted. She could not get close to him, she could not understand him, she could not see in his expression any betrayal of what he was really feeling. She felt like a nurse trying to take a fevered patient’s temperature with a broken thermometer: he frustrated her because he remained constantly detached, as if he were outside himself, circling and wheeling around the real nature of his own existence like a bird of prey surveying a small, dying animal.

  To get near him she had kissed his fingers, a futile gesture that seemed to express her own failings. Why had she done that? He accused her of pitying him and although she denied it, she knew it was partly true. But it was a pity of a kind she had never felt before. Pressing her mouth to his hand had been like some numb conversation, a language of signs, a way of breaking down barriers. Yet he remained aloof, afraid of speech, perhaps even afraid of her affection. And this strangeness had disturbed her: it had become a kind of light that suddenly threw into relief the inadequacies of her own life. All because of Grunwald and the impossibility of getting near to him. All because of the expression she had glimpsed in his face – a concentration of pain – when they had been looking at the bonfire in the Maximilians-Anlagen. For a second the expression had terrified her. And then she felt that she wanted to understand it, she wanted – if such a thing were possible – to get inside it and see it from a different point of view. What had been going through his mind? What was going through it now?’

  That morning, after his first night in Munich, he had come to her room dressed in some of Willi’s clothes. For a long time he stood in the doorway, as if afraid of entering her room properly, and said nothing. Staring at him, she resolved not to speak until he did.

  After some moments he said, ‘I want to apologize to you.’

  ‘Oh? Why?’ She held her breath, for some reason very tense.

  ‘I was abrupt last night.’ He turned his hands over and looked at them.

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ she said. ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Please let me say I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, you’ve said it. Are you happier now?’

  He didn’t answer. Wanting for
some reason to justify herself, she said, ‘It was impetuous. I should apologize to you. I don’t normally behave that way.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  She shook her head: ‘I just felt – and still feel – that something is troubling you. I wanted you to smile. I did what I did because I imagined it might make you feel happier.’

  He gazed at the window, recalling something. ‘You find me cold, don’t you?’

  ‘A little.’

  He put his hands into his jacket, as if they were the offensive objects under discussion. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been in the world of living people,’ he said.

  ‘I understand,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all I want to say.’

  She found his sudden relapse into silence unnerving. To break it, she laughed. ‘Look don’t you think we’re making something out of nothing? It was an innocent gesture. It wasn’t a prelude to my seducing you. I didn’t intend that –’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He turned away from her. ‘I didn’t imagine that for a moment.’

  When he had gone she sat on the bed for a time staring at the vacant space in the doorway. Her mind had become blank. She didn’t know why she had acted as she had done. She didn’t know why her inability to pin him down or communicate with him should leave her so puzzled. There were many people with whom she couldn’t communicate and yet they never troubled her. But Grunwald did. Grunwald troubled her. She shrugged the thought aside and a little later she went out. The room had become suddenly narrow and restricting.

  On the morning of his third day in Willi’s small apartment, Willi said to Grunwald, ‘You must think of making a new life for yourself. You have been given a chance.’

  Grunwald looked at his uncle curiously: a chance of what?

  Willi said, ‘I’ve never been a religious man, Leonhard. You know that. I haven’t been a bad man, at least I don’t think so, but I was never one for the claptrap of worship or prayer. But it strikes me that if you have survived death, God must want you to go on living. He must want you to make something of your life.’