Alphabet House

by Adler-Olsen, Jussi

  ‘May we see his case notes?’

  ‘You’re a doctor, Mr Scott. Would you allow that?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘You can see his identity card. It will give you his most important data.’

  Bryan asked Welles to skip all the psychiatric terms. Fricke was ill and was being treated as such. It was his history at the hospital that was of interest, not whether Fricke had a chance of being normal again.

  All the notes originated in March 1945. Not a word about where he had come from, or what had precipitated his illness. Freiburg was not even mentioned. Werner Fricke had simply turned up out of nowhere at a clinic outside Karlsruhe on 3rd March 1945. Having been reported missing for over a year, he’d been transferred from an interim SS camp in Tübingen. There was nothing about the past history of his illness. His army records revealed nothing about the year that had been torn from the almanac of Calendar Man’s life.

  Werner Fricke’s temporary quarters in Tübingen had been evacuated during the Allied advance and all the patients transferred to Karlsruhe. When the clinic was privatized at the beginning of the sixties most of the patients had to let themselves be transferred. Now he was the only original patient left. Calendar Man’s family had had the means to keep him where he was.

  The list of the other patients from that time was fairly short. Bryan couldn’t recognise a single name.

  Calendar Man was obviously the only one from the Alphabet House.

  Bryan’s sudden burst of emotion took him unawares. The intervening years vanished at the sight of this short-legged, stocky body and the gentle eyes. All other feelings were quelled by a surprising tenderness. ‘Ahhh!’ the man exclaimed, raising his bushy snow-white eyebrows as Bryan stepped between him and the television. Bryan nodded at Calendar Man and felt the tears welling up inside him. ‘That’s what he says to everyone,’ Dr Würtz interjected.

  Decades of inactivity may have crumpled the body, but had not destroyed this man’s dignity. Despite the sleeveless shirt and trousers with open fly, it was still an SS officer sitting in front of him, looking him curiously in the eyes. Bryan’s experiences in the hospital in Freiburg came strikingly alive. Here sat Calendar Man in the flesh, watching the Olympic Games in Munich on a tiny black-and-white screen. The date on the calendar pad hanging above the screen was of course correct.

  Montag, 4th September 1972.

  ‘What shall I say to him?’ asked Welles, squatting down beside the other two.

  ‘I don’t know. Ask him about all the names I gave you. About Sister Petra and Vonnegut. And ask him whether he can remember Arno von der Leyen, the man he was about to hurl out the window.’

  Their farewells had been brief. Even before they’d left the room Werner Fricke had lapsed back into his passive viewing of the 200-metre sprint finalists who were about to kick off from the starting blocks.

  ‘I know you’re disappointed, Bryan, but I don’t think it’s any use. I’ve already made so many enquiries about Vonnegut. I don’t think I’ll find him alive, if I can find him at all. You have to realise the name is not uncommon.’

  ‘And Fricke’s only reaction was to Vonnegut?’

  ‘Yes. Apart from the chocolate I gave him, naturally. I don’t think you should make too much out of it.’

  Keith Welles waited a long time for Bryan to speak. The car park had almost emptied while they sat in the Jaguar. Several people had peered in at them with surprised looks. Bryan sat motionless.

  ‘So, what now?’ Welles was the first to break the silence when the last car had left the car park.

  ‘Yes, what now?’ The answer was so inaudible as to be ambiguous.

  ‘There are still ten days left before I have to start work, Bryan. I’ll willingly give you five days extra. A lot can still happen.’ Welles had to force himself to sound optimistic.

  ‘You have to go back to Stuttgart, Keith, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. My notes, my car and my luggage are all there.’

  ‘Would you mind too much if I asked you to rent a car for the return trip? I’ll pay you, of course.’

  ‘OK. But why, Bryan?’

  ‘I’m wondering if I should drive to Freiburg. Right now.’

  The man Bryan knew as Calendar Man sat on a chair in a small room in a private clinic in Karlsruhe, rocking quietly to and fro. Reality, for him, was limited. The television was already switched off. It was growing dark. His lips moved slightly out of rhythm with his rocking. There was no one to hear him.

  Forty miles to the south Bryan had had enough of the traffic and turned off the autobahn. There were two possibilities. Either he took the beautiful route along the Rhine or else the main road at the foot of Schwarzwald.

  He took the main road.

  He couldn’t face the thought of passing the spot where he’d fled like a madman from Lankau and Schmidt.

  Not now.

  Chapter 32

  Before Bryan had completely recalled where he was, an unfamiliar sound rose from a deep rumbling to a brittle contralto. The trams had already welcomed him to the streets of Freiburg the previous evening and now they were bidding him good morning.

  The ceiling light in his room was still on. He lay on the bed with all his clothes on. And he was still tired.

  An unpleasant feeling like final-exam fever crept over Bryan before he even opened his eyes. Perhaps it would have been different if he’d had Laureen in bed beside him. He had a lonely task ahead of him.

  ‘Hotel Roseneck’ was the name on the sign. ‘Urachstrasse 1’ had been added onto the business card with which the receptionist had furnished him. Bryan had no idea where in the town he had found lodgings.

  ‘Is there a telephone?’ he’d asked the previous evening. The clerk had replied tersely, pointing at a pay phone opposite the steep flight of stairs.

  ‘Could you give me some small change?’ was Bryan’s final question.

  ‘Yes, early tomorrow morning!’ came the answer. So he hadn’t phoned Laureen yet.

  Now the streets awaited him. As did the mountains and the train station. Freiburg had a hypnotic effect on him. He’d clung to his fantasies during his months in the hospital outside the town. Fantasies about his life at home in Canterbury, about freedom and about this town, so close by.

  And here he was.

  The hotel lay on a corner facing a small oasis of whispering trees. The entrance to this pitted building with its ornate porch and dangling, wrought-iron lamps was in a small passageway leading to the little park. Urachstrasse was not a smart address but it was convenient, since it was a side street to Günthertalstrasse, which ploughed its way via Kaiser Joseph Strasse through the town gate, Martinstor, and into the heart of the city.

  Feeling unprepared, listless and unable to concentrate, he wandered randomly into the city’s bustle of walkers, joggers, cyclists and motorists – people in a hurry or waiting at tram stops. It felt like he was among fellow actors on a film set – a diverse crowd that included everything from fat, greying housewives to smiling boys with hands buried deep in their pockets.

  A prosperous city.

  Perhaps he had expected to see the buildings still scarred from the bombardments. Maybe he’d believed the nerves of the town’s past had been severed. But in fact Freiburg was lively and enchanting. Restored, rebuilt, varied and inviting.

  The department stores were filled with goods that people obviously could afford. This irritated Bryan. The debt to the past was still too great for frivolity, the costs not visible enough.

  In the middle of the entrance to a department store a crowd of women were grabbing clothes out of a bin that threatened to topple over. Summer shorts for next year. Fair price guaranteed. An elderly, swarthy man was hopping on one leg as he pulled a pair of shorts over his long, crumpled trousers to see if they fitted. This was a glimpse of the new peacetime.

  Brian kept wandering aimlessly.

  Bertoldstrasse led to the train station. The tram tracks in the cobbled street sho
ne in the clear sunlight and carried four lines up over the railway bridge, draped from twin towers in the distance.

  The crowds of people on the railway platforms were fairly orderly. A tour guide was trying to keep his flock together with admonitions that streamed endlessly from his ruddy-faced mouth. All the women were wearing backpacks, showing bare legs beneath their shorts. Laureen would be staring, Bryan thought.

  An alien world. He scanned the seven railway lines and seven platforms without recognising anything. The platform where he’d spent anxious hours in the icy frost almost thirty years ago seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Presumably obliterated by his buddies in the RAF.

  His eye glided southward under the bridge towards where the town petered out. A massive, dark and strikingly different building stood far off in the background. Bryan gasped.

  So the old railway’s superstructure was still standing.

  The distance from the train tracks to the wall of massive bricks was scarcely ten feet. Bryan remembered it as having been at least twice as much. This was the platform on which he’d lain. Bryan closed his eyes and could clearly see James’ silhouette lying a couple of yards further up the platform. Where were they now, those lifeless figures that had been lying on stretchers, shivering? Were they buried long ago, or were they at home with their loved ones, absorbed in a no man’s land of oblivion?

  The range of hills in the distance was soft and faded green, spatial and layered like the scenery in a puppet theatre. A rusty track switch pointed towards the hills, recalling the time he saw a railway worker running down these tracks, clutching an iron rod. The soldiers with their dangling gas masks, the happy, relaxed youths on their way home on leave – they too emerged from the capricious labyrinth of remembrance. The old goods wagons, the building’s indestructibility, the colours and the silence – just as they were then, when the snow softly covered the platform. It all served to stimulate the part of Bryan’s mind that was usually almost impossible to reach.

  Then he collapsed and wept.

  He let Hotel Roseneck’s porter see to his needs for the rest of the day. A neighbouring café supplied him with nondescript ham-and-faded-lettuce sandwiches. The hotel had no restaurant of its own. The porter had a hard time smiling, despite a generous tip. Bryan didn’t manage to phone home that evening, either. He had no appetite, no needs. It was all simply a question of whether he’d be able to pull himself together and get up the next day.

  And the next day came. Several of the children stared at the Jaguar as Bryan passed Waldkirch to be swallowed up by Schwarzwald’s foothills, over which Hünersedel peak towered. Had he driven west around the mountains he would most certainly have been distracted by details instead of concentrating on his goal: to find out where the hospital had been. Bryan’s experience told him that he would best accomplish this from above, where the Ortoschwanden plateau would presumably provide an open view downwards towards the west.

  It took a long time, but Bryan found the spot. A constant, mild breeze swept up through the valley before him, exuding humus vapours and ozone. There lay Kaiserstuhl. The stream formed by the narrow draining canals cut downwards across the landscape a few hundred yards further on.

  To the south was a minor road that ran northwest down through the hills. Over on the opposite ridge there was only forest as far as the eye could see. Ditches lined the road and behind them flowed the small streams through which he had fled.

  It was a moving sight. Grandiose, beautiful – and what he’d been looking for.

  After trekking along the forest trails for a while the woods became dense. Bryan looked around, trying to recall the terrain. There was no trace of what he was looking for. The trees here were younger and only half as high as those he had just passed. Not a single sign or relic to bear witness to the presence of the large buildings and all the activity that had once filled the area. The undergrowth was thick. Only a small game trail indicated the presence of any life other than botanical. Bryan pulled his socks up over his trouser hems and fought his ways into the scrub, half stooping, half stumbling. Some old, solitary fir trees towered above him in the middle of a small opening. Then straight in front of him, less than thirty feet away, the moss-covered rock rose six feet above the ground. Bryan squatted down and looked around slowly.

  Everything was gone, and yet this was where it all had stood. The kitchen building, the nurses’ quarters, the security guards’ barracks, five several-storey buildings, the chapel, gymnasium, garages, the execution pole.

  And now it was completely razed to the ground.

  As he drove back down, villages popped up and acquired names. He slowed the car during the last few miles before the swamp. In flashes he sensed the coldness of naked feet, the rumbling of guns and the anguish. And suddenly it lay before him, Europe’s last primeval forest, Taubergiessen. The wilderness in which he had nearly lost his life. And the slopes, the mire, the sandbar in the river, the thicket on the opposite shore. It was all there. Except for the explosions, the corpses, and the broad-faced man and his thin accomplice.

  These were all long gone.

  It was here he knew for certain he had killed a man.

  The town drifted past Bryan like fog. The morning’s events ought to have satisfied years of pent-up need. In the wake of his abrupt decision to go to Freiburg, a sudden flood of expectations had arisen as well as the hope of finding peace of mind. Now he had to face the facts. It wasn’t that easy. The past was an entity unto itself and the images inside him would never fade, no matter how much they were distorted by the march of time. Further progress would be difficult.

  There were hardly any people on the streets of Freiburg. Everyone in the post office was acting strangely. The woman who showed him to the long-distance phone box looked clearly distressed. Several people waiting at the counter were staring into thin air. Bryan let the telephone ring for quite a while. Sometimes Laureen took a long time putting down her crossword puzzle.

  ‘Yes?’ was all she said, when she finally answered.

  ‘Laureen? Is that you?’

  ‘Bryan!’ Bryan immediately noted the rage in her voice. ‘Why the bloody hell haven’t you phoned? You must damn well be able to understand how worried I’ve been!’

  She hadn’t sworn in years.

  ‘I haven’t been able to call, Laureen.’

  ‘Has something happened to you, Bryan? Have you got mixed up in something?’

  ‘What do you mean? What should I have got mixed up in? I’ve just been busy, Laureen.’

  ‘Where are you, Bryan?’ The question came precise and matter-of-fact. ‘You’re not in Munich, are you?’

  ‘No, not just now. I went to Freiburg yesterday.’

  ‘On business?’

  ‘Yes, possibly.’

  For a moment it was quiet at the other end, but not time enough for Bryan to gauge the consequences of his lie.

  ‘How can it be that you don’t know why I’ve been worried?’ The voice was quiet, she was trying to control herself. ‘Everyone knows! You don’t even have to open the newspaper, Bryan. It’s on the front page all over the world!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Have we been cheated out of a gold medal, or something?’

  ‘Would you care to know?’ The tone was curt. Laureen didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Yesterday lots of Israeli athletes were taken hostage in their Olympic quarters. It was the Palestinians. We’ve all been following it. It was repulsive and disgusting, and now they’re dead. All the hostages and all the terrorists.’ Bryan was incapable of cutting in, even when she paused. He was speechless. ‘Everyone’s talking about it, can’t you understand? The whole world is grieving! How come you know nothing about it, Bryan? What’s going on?’

  Bryan tried to keep a hold on reality. He felt limp. Perhaps now was the time to tell Laureen about his real purpose for being in Germany and Freiburg. As wife and friend Laureen had taken Bryan as he was, without any prying or mistrust. She knew he had b
een a pilot and that he had been shot down over Germany. That was all she knew. And now that was long ago.

  She wouldn’t be able to understand his need to seek out the past, even if she knew the story about James. What was done could not be undone.

  That was how she looked at things.

  Perhaps he’d tell her everything when he got home.

  And so the portentous moment passed.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Phone me when you’re yourself again,’ she said quietly.

  As Bryan followed Bertoldstrasse back over the railway lines, he again began succumbing to lethargy and flights of fancy. A brief conversation with Keith Welles hadn’t shed any new light. Calendar Man was turning over the pages of his calendar in a blind alley.

  The inner city neighbourhoods gave room to breathe. The lakeside park beside Ensisheimer Strasse was almost devoid of people. The boats were moored. Only the benches bore any sign of life, overflowing with old men engrossed in their newspapers. A fleeting glance at one of the front pages would have instantly told him something was wrong. So that was what he had sensed in the post office. People were in shock. ‘16 TOTE!’ it said in bold capital letters. ‘ALLE GEISELN ALS LEICHEN GEFUNDEN!’ Das Bild had presumably always known how to make itself easily understood. Words like ‘blutbad’ demanded no great knowledge of languages.

  Bryan didn’t find the events in Munich unnatural, considering the past. Just an example of what happens when hate breeds hate in a predictable chain of unpredictability. Today the citizens of Munich were bearing the mask of sorrow, along with the rest of the world. In another time the same faces had borne the mask of terror.