Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  The Politigården was a fortress, a four-storey castle built in the shape of a blunt wedge, like an ancient complex, overwhelmingly large and bright. I’d never seen anything like it before, and my first thought was: why here? I was overcome almost simultaneously with a kind of humility and solemnity. My knees went weak.

  I crossed to the other side of the street as if in self-defence. A few rusty cone lamps hung over the street. There were no trees and, oddly, no traffic either. I still couldn’t grasp the fact that they were lying there, there on the ground, in some basement, in the foundations of power on which this building was constructed, this concrete spaceship, that could swallow up all earthly things if it wanted, that was clear, even the dead, even death … That, or something similar, is what was going through my mind.

  ‘I have his phone number,’ Jesper had written in his last email. Jesper’s source worked in the Forensic Department of the Danish police force and was ‘one of three on these cases’ — ‘one of three’, he stressed, who should know, who should be informed about these things, ‘one of three’ in the ‘Missing Department’. Jesper’s translation of the words ‘Department of Missing Persons’ seemed plausible to me in every respect. That it was necessary to search in the Missing Department seemed, after so much back and forth, to be the decisive piece of information.

  Jesper had explained the organisation of the archive on the telephone: not only were cases of missing persons registered in the Missing Department, but also all the unidentified dead. Even if you knew or, like the harbourmaster of Møn with his knowledge of tides and conditions, could estimate with great accuracy that the human remains on the beach or in the fishermen’s nets had been refugees from East Germany, there would never have been a separate registry for them, no statement of origin, no special category — the GDR never existed in this archive’s classifications, in its depositions, exhibits, and death rolls. The date and location of discovery on Danish soil, those were the indications according to which the entire system was organised. In a certain sense, the dead were submerged once again, this time in the ocean of the unidentified, the missing, the unknown — Missing Department.

  According to everything I’ve learned and recorded in my Copenhagen notes (after a brief search, the notebook from my first trip resurfaced, and I continued it rather more conscientiously and, how should I put it, to a certain extent more responsibly than I had back then, twenty years before), the disappearance is threefold.

  First: the departure. The refugee is careful not to tell anyone. He also leaves nothing behind, no goodbye letter, no sign. He leaves his identification papers and wallet behind, all to protect those close to him, that is, to absolve them of charges of complicity or aiding border violators. It’s a matter of protecting mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers from the endless interrogations, chicaneries, and prison sentences. For his first disappearance, the refugee removes all the labels from his clothing, Malimo, Modedruck, etc., evidence that could betray his eastern origins in case the grey wolves (the border patrol boats of the East German Navy) catch him out on the sea. Hours later, the refugee is missed. He becomes a missing person. Many refugees skillfully erase all traces — giving rise to no suspicions even up to the present day. The so-called ‘dark figure’ — no one will ever know how many of the ‘missing’ were refugees.

  Then, the second disappearance. Diving into the sea, the escape attempt. High seas, the cold, a cramp, only water and waves, with no one informed. Therefore, no consolation and no one with them, just absolute solitude, ‘what an insult, what a goddamn insult it is’. Then come the stages of drowning (asphyxiation), five stages are differentiated. Stage 1: the refugee’s struggle to keep from sinking, panic reactions, most violent movements, head still above water (inspiration phase). Stage 2: apnea. The refugee is submerged and holds his breath. Stage 3: accumulation of CO2 in his blood, which triggers inhalation in response to respiratory stimuli. Stage 4: water is drawn into the airways with air, and mixes with bronchial mucous to form a thick, white substance with small bubbles (dyspnea). Closure of the epiglottis, little movement, relative calm. Only then, caused by the lack of oxygen in the brain, do the asphyxiation cramps set in, that is: hypoxic convulsions, laceration of the respiratory musculature, the fight to survive — the refugee loses consciousness. Stage 5: exitus. The dead body on the sea bed. His aerobic metabolism has been derailed, his circulatory system has broken down, his heart has stopped.

  The distance travelled underwater also belongs to the second disappearance. The dead refugee is turned onto all fours. His body drifts like a tired, snuffling dog over the seabed, his head bowed down to the ground — scraping his forehead, his knees, his hands, abrasions down to the bone, the bones stripped clean. The extremities hang down and have the effect of a boat’s keel. The refugee is under way in the deep with its cold currents for some time. Then putrefaction, decomposition, gas, surfacing, disintegration: the furrows eaten away by eels, gnawing animals, creatures large and small, a constant degradation. More than a few corpses remain below and become one with the tides, part of the Baltic Sea, ‘the Sea of Peace’, terminus. Some are washed ashore — either on the desired or the hated coast.

  Then the third disappearance.

  Jesper was waiting for me under the arcades, a porch on the fortress’ south side. We had barely greeted each other when his source arrived and led us up a flight of stairs to the concierge. The source was thin, surprisingly young, and had an air of an office boy about him even though he undoubtedly had a high rank. As I entered my name and address into a book and received a plastic card in return, Jesper interviewed his source. They joked, but it was more out of embarrassment as far as I could tell, without understanding a word they said. The concierge in his hutch made of brown-tinted security glass also said something I did not understand, whereupon Jesper came up to me and pinned the card on my shirt pocket. Only then did I really take in his appearance; his head was clean-shaven, and something about it moved me — the unconcealedness of his skull that suited the openness of his character (as if people only wore hair as disguise or deception), at least that’s how it struck me at that moment. He wore his army-green parka zipped up to his chin; the hood stood high against his neck like a nobleman’s ruff. I pictured myself reaching out and stroking his head: thank you, Jesper.

  My card had the number fourteen on it, and Jesper explained that I had to return it before signing out in the concierge’s book and leaving. He added that I shouldn’t worry, just follow the course things would take. Only then did I realise he wasn’t coming along. For a moment, I felt weak. The source touched my arm, and I glanced at the name tag on his chest: a name I can’t recall, and under it the designation consultant.

  To my surprise, the consultant did not take me into the fortress, but to another building, diagonally opposite to it, which was part of the complex of the police-department buildings on this square. It was a five-storey brick building in the Hanseatic style. One of the entrances led, like a tunnel, to the inner courtyard, where we came to a narrow snow-white door. The courtyard made a strangely civilian impression. I saw laundry hung out to dry on the balconies and a string of lights in one of the windows.

  The consultant entered a code and said something to me in English. I made an indeterminate but inquisitive noise, and the door opened. In single file, we climbed down a very narrow, twisting staircase to the floor below. Then through a fire door that wasn’t locked. There were small steps in the floor that you had to look out for, with steel edges and marked with black and yellow like in a factory. Air-conditioning pipes ran along the ceiling; I heard the deep thrum of a cooling unit and involuntarily thought of Rebhuhn’s machine. Fear.

  The room was very large, like a factory work floor. Some distance off, a small, brightly lit cubicle rose above the shelves, like the cabin on a cutter. We walked without speaking between the shelves, and I calmed down. Black slipcases, sturdy cardboard, labelled by year. Like drawers, eac
h of these had a metal handle or a grey tab on the front, and each shelf had two or three of these cassettes stacked on top of each other. Again, I felt the urge to reach out my hand. The consultant glanced around and began calling.

  When we reached the cutter cabin, he immediately veered off into the half-darkness and disappeared. A man stood in front of me as if he’d been conjured up. He introduced himself right away and asked me to follow him. He wore thin brown coveralls, and in his front pocket he had a glasses case and a voltage tester, an instrument familiar to me from my father’s toolkit.

  No idea where Henri Madsen (Henri or Hendrik, Madsen or Mattson — the tension was too great for me to understand it all exactly) had appeared from so suddenly, maybe he’d been amongst the shelves the entire time, maybe he’d been standing there in secret, waiting for our arrival.

  First, there was a small wooden staircase with a bannister. The cutter cabin was much more spacious than I’d expected. A long desk stood under the bank of windows. It looked like a workbench. Strictly speaking, it was a workbench. Two work lamps and a computer screen. Strangely, there were also tools on it, good, clean tools, a variety of pliers, wrenches, a drill, some wire. There was another, smaller room attached to the back, without lights; his berth, I thought nonsensically.

  Henri was tall and had the physique of an aged heavyweight boxer. He must have weighed over a hundred kilos. He offered me a stool next to his workbench and asked me what region I came from. Because my heart was beating in my throat, I didn’t notice at first that he spoke German without the trace of an accent. When I told him, he just nodded.

  ‘In 1945, my grandmother fled Germany with my mother, who was still a child. They were on one of the last boats to leave East Prussia and cross the Baltic Sea to Copenhagen. Lots of refugees died here after the end of the war, especially children. Some are buried in military cemeteries with names and dates whenever possible, one year, two years old, even less than a year. You’ll find these graves wherever there were German soldiers, virtually all over the world. The German War Graves Commission, Mr Bendler, that means lots of money and good contracts — your dead can only dream of that, isn’t that right?’

  I had no idea what Madsen thought of me, how he judged me, or what he knew of my motives. He didn’t smile, his expression remained closed. Nevertheless, I immediately felt I could trust him, maybe because of the tools, because he was a man of tools. And he had begun speaking without any hesitation. As if the course the next hours should take had long been clear to him.

  In his family (in the German branch, he continued), there was a distant relationship to Friedrich von Hardenberg. His immediate ancestors had also worked in mining, as had Hardenberg, the poet. ‘Our sort have always been drawn to depths,’ Henri said. He began to tell me about his family. I could see that he was surprised (and delighted) that I knew who Hardenberg was, and he immediately recited a few lines from ‘Hymns to the Night’: ‘Are you also pleased with us, dark night? What is it you hide under your mantle …’

  Hearing verses of Novalis in this basement hall from the lips of an archivist in the Missing Department was so unearthly that I had to grab onto the wood of the workbench. It was smooth and rounded, or worn away on the edges, but most importantly: it was there. I looked out over the rows of shelves that extended into the darkness beyond the range of sight, and answered that my parents still owned a garden plot right where Hardenberg had intended to drill his last geological bore holes, namely between Zeitz and Gera.

  ‘Unfortunately, I hardly know East Germany,’ Henri said. He opened a drawer under the workbench and pulled out a sheet of paper. (He only reached for it once, he had everything ready.) The paper was filled with signatures in several columns, written neatly one under the other. He tapped it and looked at me. His thick, blond hair was greying at the temples.

  ‘To be honest, no one here believed that you’d come. I mean that anyone would come. After all this time.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy to find you.’

  Henri shook his head slowly.

  ‘This is an enormous building, in the centre of Copenhagen. And we were always here.’ He pressed his hand onto the table to mark the spot again.

  I felt a sense of irritation return: Missing Department of the Kingdom of Denmark. But no one in Denmark ever missed these dead (Madsen had called them ‘your dead’). No one in this country would ever claim their bodies, no missing-person report would be filed here, no trace of anything that could lead to the refugees of those years. For them, there was nothing but this archive, Missing Department. The third disappearance.

  Before I could say anything in reply, Henri stood up and turned on a light in the rear section of his cabin. ‘I set up a workstation here back then, for research purposes. A reading device and a computer, a Commodore, now out of date, of course.’ He touched the small grey screen and we returned to the workbench. ‘When the Wall fell, I got additional capacity and drew up a list of regulations for using it. There was discussion of setting up a small reading room.’ He looked out into the hall. ‘Please excuse any grammatical … My German has become rusty over the years.’ He pushed a sheet of paper across the table, Rules of Use.

  I seized the opportunity and, almost in a counteroffensive, handed him the file with Sonya’s photograph and the information I had collected. He opened the file and looked at the picture for a long time.

  ‘As I said, Mr Bendler, you’re not authorised.’

  He had not said this before.

  ‘First, I’d need an official notice and a search request registered with the police department in your own country, ideally with government officials who would then get in touch with Danish government officials who, in turn, would contact my colleagues in Forensics in Vanløse. In addition, a request for access requires extensive documentation, more precise information about the presumed date of escape, serviceable photos, descriptive details if possible, and so on.’

  He slowly closed my file and rested two fingers on it.

  ‘It’s a very long, very complicated way, Mr Bendler. And not everyone is suited to it, you know what I mean?’

  He cleared his throat, and we looked out at the shelves for a while, together, side by side, like officers on a lost boat, standing on its useless bridge.

  ‘What I mean is that you’re the first one here in twenty-four years, who would have thought? As if no one had missed them, our dead.’

  He added that of course that wasn’t the case, on the contrary, not at all the case. And, in fact, it was a matter of fifty-two years, since the Wall was built. And in any case, he himself had only been down here for thirty years.

  Madsen had got to his feet.

  My visit was over.

  I wanted to stand up, too, but his hand prevented me. More: it lay heavily on my shoulder, two or three long seconds, as heavy as a rock.

  He began a brief speech, which he evidently needed to deliver standing. His head almost touched the cabin ceiling. ‘Thirty years and never any cause for complaint, Mr Bendler!’

  Point by point, Madsen recounted the variable history of the Department of Missing Persons, which had, as he put it, three full-value co-workers, three good, indeed, excellent policemen with offices in Vanløse. There was no archivist. They never had one, just him in his role of technician. Monitoring all the spaces, especially the ventilation and air conditioning, required a great deal of attention, which is why he set his workroom up down here, with the dead, from the very beginning, at least that was the main reason back then. Over the years, he gradually got used to the circumstances. Through the evacuations, renovations, installation of new storage racks, reordering the files in boxes made of acid-free cardboard, and so on, he had, more or less perforce, acquired proficiency in the organisation and contents of this peculiar collection, and he had been under its spell — there was no other way to put it — ever since, to that very day, in fact.

 
‘The nameless seem suspicious simply because of their anonymity — is that not unjust, Mr Bendler? Earlier, seamen wore complicated tattoos and rings so they could be identified if they washed ashore. Even back then, people knew how bleak it was to be one of the unknown dead in this world. A person without a name is not trusted, worse, he or she is considered repellent and ugly. No name means no origins, no family, neither mother nor father, and so they lie here on the shelves like links severed from a chain. They’re still here, but they’re lost. This basement is now their only homeland, Mr Bendler, their final home. And in a certain sense, I’m all they’ve got, the only one who still knows them not by name, but from photographs, reports, a few objects.’

  Madsen cleared his throat and paused. His silence wasn’t coincidence, but rather a moment of silence. I was neither embarrassed nor nervous, the silence did me good. There was a rumble of thunder from somewhere, perhaps a truck driving by on the street that circled the blunt wedge of the fortress.

  In order to better understand what he as caretaker had been entrusted with, Madsen continued, he had secretly and on his own initiative begun to educate himself in all associated areas, criminology, forensics, examination of evidence. He used his time well and — not to make himself seem as important as a caretaker could possibly be in this world — now it was he who had the most exact and thorough knowledge of this archive and its contents.

  Madsen reached for the voltage tester in his coverall pocket (for his heart, I thought) and glanced at the instrument as if he had to quickly make sure everything he needed was at hand.

  ‘Twenty-four years, fifty-two years, that’s simply too long a period of time. No set of usage rules lasts that long, I mean — without users. That’s what I mean, Mr Bendler. But I’m just the caretaker here. I, too, am unauthorised, you understand?’

  I nodded. I understood that he saw me as a kind of envoy, a delegate, a man for all his dead.