by Chris Petit
Then the brief freeze-frame of the double-take: the familiar figure, for a moment out of place and time, but so recognisable and somehow inevitable.
I ran and grabbed his elbow, blathering, wanting his explanation, hoping only for some pity.
He reacted as if he was being attacked, with a reflex backhand, without even a glance. As I fell, I consoled myself with the fact that I had seen Carswell’s fear. More than that, when he recognised me, he committed what was probably the only cardinal sin in his book and lost his cool. He shrieked and kicked at me and called me a stupid meddling fucker who should have gone home when he was told.
Carswell’s hysterics were followed by an exaggerated iciness. In any other circumstances he could have been dismissed as shrill and camp, but in those surroundings his histrionics could lead only to an authorised sadism.
He spoke Turkish to the guard, and I was taken away to a windowless hut where Carswell’s uniform was explained. In a gymlike room several men in fencing kit practised thrust and parry. While forced-labour gangs sweated through their shifts, and children were escorted God knows where, it seemed that Carswell indulged himself by training Turkish soldiers in the art of swordplay.
When Carswell returned he said to me, ‘If you stand perfectly still you will not get hurt. We are going to conduct an experiment in reflex action.’
Someone held a bladed sword against the back of my neck, while Carswell lunged again and again at my face. The unblunted point of his épée always ended up within millimetres of my eye. His self-control, in contrast to his outburst, was fully in command again. I believed in the precision of his skills, believed in his need to indulge in his grown-up games, trusted him not to hurt me, yet let myself down by flinching each time the point of the sword jabbed the back of my neck, however hard I willed myself not to move. Carswell was toying with me, a man who understood the dynamics of intimacy and violence.
Carswell sardonic, Carswell superior, taunting, ‘Can’t you do better than that?’ I stared him down. I no longer flinched. His blade stopped short, and this time I did not feel the jab of the sword in my neck. In that moment I knew what the real point of Carswell’s exercise was. To tell me that he had killed Bob Ballard.
I also saw for the first time his profound dislike of me and realised how tearfully hard it was—after the depersonalising regime of the camp—to be faced by someone who saw and hated me for myself. But my acceptance of his predatory nature was immediate and unquestioning. It was the absence of this knowledge that had previously made Carswell seem incomplete.
‘You just missed Dora,’ he said.
‘Did you send her to Viessmann?’
‘She needed to clear out her head. Do something—what was the word she used?—unselfish. Now she has gone back, which is what you should have done while you had the chance.’
That night I was taken out of the box, marched back to the secure area and left alone in a soundproofed room with a mirror that was almost certainly an observation window.
They fed me white noise. It was like having someone scratch your brains with a wire brush. I failed to smash the mirror with my hands. A console had been set up in the room with instructions that I transcribe the contents of a tape from a mini-recorder with headphones. I refused. They restored to simple cause and effect. They turned up the volume in the room to ear-splitting level. Once I put the headphones on the noise went away.
It shamed me to transcribe the tape, but I lacked the will to refuse. The keyboard arrangement was different from English ones, and I kept making mistakes. In the end, I just concentrated on typing the correct letter as a way of trying to distance myself from the spew of words being pulled out of van der Valden.
The tape was van der Valden’s interrogation by Carswell, who sounded arrogant but concentrated. He was accused of selling information to Karl-Heinz. He was accused of ‘negotiating with third parties’. He was told he was the victim of a sting by Vesco’s security. Van der Valden denied and denied, then broke and agreed to everything, confessing to make them stop, any pretence at truth forgotten. By what mental process does someone decide to write: Subject screams. Statement incomprehensible?
As I typed I knew that I too was being turned into someone’s dossier, clean words on a page, documenting my regression from arrival to capitulation. I ceased to think of myself as an entity, only as a receptacle. I thought about the wire. I wondered if breaking me would take less time than calculated. In rare moments of lucidity, I understood that I was now so far undercover I was lost to myself. I no longer recognised the person looking back at me in the observation mirror. Somewhere in all of this I understood the secret of Viessmann’s looks, a combination of surgery and whatever anti-ageing products his company was testing. Viessmann using his own body as an experiment site, in the vanguard of a new science, using tomorrow’s high-street product on himself today. I told all of this to the mirror. I spoke to it as though it were a person, which in some ways it was, because I knew people were on the other side taking it all down. I felt my mind shutting down, the wiring starting to short.
I was kicked awake by two men who dragged me outside. It was still dark. Floodlights were on. Prisoners were being loaded onto two big container trucks like you see on every highway.
The scene was ghost quiet. There was no shouting or yelling orders. The dogs were out, but they were silent, too. Everything seemed inevitable. Everyone was docile as they were herded on board.
The insides of the containers had been adapted so we sat sideways in long rows in separate stalls. It was another kind of box, this time with a steel rod across, to which one wrist was chained. Several head counts were taken, and there were delays to check that everyone was properly locked in. I noticed the Chinese woman I had seen round the back of the kitchens.
We could hear the other truck, its big diesel engines revving for a long time. From time to time a palpable ripple of fear went through our container. We were made to wait long enough for everyone to grow impatient for the journey to begin, whatever it might bring.
Our container was at last locked, and we left. We travelled in the dark, with no light inside. The road was poor. Disorientation soon made people vomit, and it became necessary to breathe through the mouth. Some started praying aloud, others began an intense keening. There was the dark, the motion of the container, and the babble of frightened voices, which gradually stopped. Then there was only the dark and the motion.
The explosion seemed to lift the truck right off the ground, a tremendous bang that filled the air with screams. I braced myself, thinking we were toppling over the edge of one of the ravines I had driven along with Hoover. But the truck settled, and there was a brief lull followed by the steady stitch of gunfire on metal. The panic in the container was contagious. We all knew we were about to die, a hundred minds united briefly in the same certainty. The only question was how.
We could hear the back door to the container being worked open, even over the yelling and the gunfire. The shrieking rose to a crescendo, then stopped quite suddenly as everyone realised that this was our deliverance.
The truck had been attacked by rebels. But the joy was short-lived. A new anxiety quickly took over that the security forces would counterattack before all the handcuffs could be broken.
Outside was still dark. The truck’s cabin was burned out and twisted from the explosion. The dead driver was half hanging out and the rest of the guards were dead except for one standing with his arms in the air.
The prisoners had no hesitation in turning on the guard. Rebel soldiers stood by laughing as dozens of prisoners chucked rocks at the guard, who staggered around, stunned, arms out in front like he was playing blind man’s bluff, his faltering steps those of a drunk until his balance went and he lurched over.
The death seemed as manufactured in its clumsy, graphic violence as a cartoon and I half-expected him to get up so they could all do it again. Instead he lay there, like an old bundle of rags, in a widening pool of his own bl
ood, which, in the last of the night, stained the ground black. I watched dumbly, mindful of Karl-Heinz’s belief that violence would revert to a Biblical cruelty.
Nobody seemed in any hurry now despite the earlier panic about a counterattack. The destroyed truck had become a symbol which everyone seemed reluctant to abandon, a sign of victory.
Eventually three military-type lorries came, low-sided and with metal skeleton frames for the canvas, which was missing.
Everyone crammed on, hanging on to the frame for support. We drove a mile or so in convoy and then separated. We travelled for several hours. I slept standing, held up by the squash of bodies. Whenever I woke, people were scanning the skies anxiously for the security forces’ planes.
Beate von Heimendorf
ZURICH
MOTHER RALLIED BRIEFLY and seemed to recognise me.
I took Vaughan. He had said he wanted to meet her. I agreed. Hoover had explained to him how Mother had brought him to Switzerland in 1942. He looked at her a long time, then turned to me. ‘What could any of that have to do with me? Yet it’s all still going on.’
Afterwards we were a long time in a café, sitting outside, at Vaughan’s insistence, even though it was cold. He drank wine, as always.
At least he goes out now. At first he sat doing nothing all day, staring into space. I let him stay at Mother’s. He will tell me nothing of his experiences. The doctor has ordered full rest. His spell as my guest looks to become an extended one. All he has asked is that I don’t tell Dominic. So far I have not. But Dominic is in Basel, and is suspicious. In the case of Hoover, I was able to answer truthfully that I did not know.
Vaughan had called from Turkey, asking me to wire money which he would pay back. He returned looking like a man who had taken leave of himself and to whom too much had happened in too short a time. It rendered him more or less mute. He said he had nowhere else to go. For the best part of three days he slept, and when he wasn’t sleeping he was in tears, a silent crying unlike any I have ever seen. I think it was utter exhaustion. He didn’t talk or read or watch television or go for walks. He didn’t want to see anyone. I came in the evening to cook him pasta or an omelette, which he put aside after a couple of mouthfuls.
He drank instead, red wine, at first only in the evening, until he was drunk enough to go to bed, then all day, borrowing money from me. He sat in cafés at first, he told me, then started taking bottles into parks, wearing an old coat of Adam’s which I had lent him. However much he drank, he never got noisy or uncoordinated or made an exhibition of himself, just got quieter and sadder.
A man from the American Embassy has called on several occasions, the first time to say that Uncle Konny’s place had been found evacuated. Hoover’s whereabouts are unknown, as are Bob Ballard’s. There has been no news of him since before everyone left. Still, it was in the nature of his job to have to move quickly.
I don’t know if Dominic spoke to Bob Ballard. It was one of my conditions for helping him obtain the museums contract that he did. The other was that he send Vaughan home. Now Vaughan is back. Soon I will have to tell him to make other arrangements because he is becoming an embarrassment, stumbling around town. I know he is suffering the after-effects of trauma, and that he wishes to offend my bourgeois sensibilities, but my patience and generosity are not limitless, nor are my manners. And Dominic is persistent.
Mother’s house has become almost like the old days, with people coming and going. The man from the American Embassy has turned up to talk to Vaughan, and an Englishman, who says he is from his embassy. The Englishman is handsome. I was at Mother’s house, ostensibly working on a paper, when he called round. My real reason for being there was to keep an eye on things. I suspect Vaughan will soon start stealing to pay for his drink. Today he stuck his tongue out at me. It is quite black. Whether he did it to show me or because he was being rude, I cannot say. Such behaviour seems entirely in keeping with his present state of mind.
That night we talked more than usual. Vaughan said he had been ‘debriefed by a couple of desks’. They had been incredulous and sceptical about what he had told them, though too professional to show it.
What Vaughan went on to tell me made no sense—such things don’t go on today—and perfect sense. I understand the principle of vested interest. I am aware that my, and my country’s, security is at the expense of others’ freedom. The equation I find hard to accept, but will, if pushed. I did not expect to find myself being so thoroughly stripped of any illusions.
One reason for Willi Schmidt’s change of identity at the end of the war was, Vaughan said, because he had swindled Jews by organising false escape routes. Konrad Viessmann’s first job had been to provide a safe haven for Nazi doctors involved in the extermination programme, and the clinic used had been the foundation of his later empire.
I wish to talk of my own confusion but cannot. I am not ready to accept Konrad Viessmann as my biological father, and certainly not Willi Schmidt. I rejected Vaughan’s link of a collection of jazz records as tenuous.
Vaughan wanted Carswell, he said, and he wanted me to get Carswell for him. I shook my head. It was unthinkable.
Vaughan wouldn’t let me rest. He worked his story backwards, starting with the rivers. The enormous dam project would give Turkey control over the flow of Iraq and Syria’s two main rivers. The project also allowed the Turks to move the problematic Kurdish population around at will. The Syrians were retaliating by harbouring Kurdish rebels, Vaughan said. ‘The links go back to Bern and Zurich and further, and back to 1942, and maybe even before.’
Turkey’s Kurds were not a humanitarian issue for European governments, he said, because those governments needed Turkey to act as a stabilising force in the Middle East. ‘Most of this comes out as isolated news stories. They never show you how the shadings go all the way from white to black, as a matter of course. When there is some scandal they make out it’s an aberration, a one-off. They isolate. They personalise. And if we are going to get personal, Carswell and Viessmann are both way in the black as far as shadings go.’
I argued back. His stubbornness gave me a glimpse of what he had managed to survive. He had told me little of what had happened except to say that he had no real proof, other than what he had seen, and his own speculation to put two and two together. He was sure people were being killed, certain there was a secret medical programme.
I said if he could prove what he was saying, I would help him in any way he wanted, though I did not reasonably see what I was supposed to do. My upbringing demanded you protect those closest to you, whatever they might have done. Circles are there to remain closed. My previous attempt to break it, with Hoover, ended in humiliation.
I don’t particularly like Vaughan, but we understand each other. He knows I am, essentially, without a voice. Vaughan laughed a weary laugh, and said, ‘Even now your mother’s dumb, look at the hold she has.’ He said that what I took for love and obedience was fear.
I was forced to accept his description of Dominic as a cruel man. Tyranny in the bedroom is a good enough indication of a man’s personality. Yet perhaps I still wanted him as a friend because I was intrinsically scared of him, too. It gave me a certain power to maintain civilised relations with Dominic, and as a result our collusion runs deep.
After I had agreed to help Vaughan he told me what Dominic had done to Mr Ballard. I don’t know why he had held back, perhaps because he thought I would have resisted believing him. If only he knew! My instruction to Dominic had been ‘to take care of Mr Ballard’, and only now do the full and terrible implications of that phrase strike me.
Does Vaughan want to ‘take care of Dominic’? He is not saying, and I am not asking. My help is conditional upon not knowing what he intends to do. I pray this will help excuse my own role in Mr Ballard’s gruesome end. As for Dominic, he would never fail to act on his desires. Once I saw him slap a woman in such a way that left me in no doubt of his murderous instincts. That woman was me, seen in the full
-length mirror in front of which we were standing at the time. Afterwards he had cried—crocodile tears, no doubt—and apologised, which was probably more than he did to Mr Ballard.
Mother was a keen gardener; Dulles was not. Mother used to tend his garden for him—she describes doing so in her diary. Part of the slope had been turned over to a vegetable allotment. Mother had arranged a regular gardener for Dulles, but when she was there, she liked to do some herself. The bank was sunny and included a vine which produced sweet grapes. Her diary describes how her times alone in that secluded garden were among her happiest. She writes: ‘The garden is wasted on Allen, who appreciates it only for its secret entrance. He fails to see the beauty and magic of it, especially in spring, when it starts to conceal itself again after the winter. The summer view from Allen’s bedroom window is of an impenetrable canopy of green.’
Mother died, at five o’clock this morning. She was gone by the time I arrived. I felt nothing. No release, relief, or regret. I could not bring myself to kiss or touch her goodbye. The sceptical side of me thought that I had not heard the last of Mother. Actually, I felt rather giddy and lightheaded.
I called Dominic to tell him. My ex-husband was always sincere at condolences. He wanted me to know he was there for me should I need him. I was tempted to ask exactly how he had taken care of Mr Ballard. I was eager still to share Dominic’s secrets. He asked if I needed anything. Not yet, I said, but I might do soon. The call was a test of nerve. It would have been easier to tell him everything.
Mother had been very Swiss in the arrangement of her death, organising for her letter to be delivered from the lawyer by courier on the morning of her demise.
It arrived at about eleven, as Vaughan was opening his first bottle of wine. I went to her room to read it. It was blunt and formal, and dated from the onset of her illness.