“It’s in the bedroom,” Sam replied weakly.
“So it is. Go in there. Keep the door open, so that I can see what you are doing. I am going to point the gun directly at dear Ruth here. If you try anything I will kill her.” Helga backed away from the coffee table to give him room to make his way to the bedroom.
The women watched him enter the bedroom and fumble about in the pile of clothing until he found his trousers, pulled out his wallet from the back pocket and came back into the living room.
“Put the wallet on the table.”
Sam set the wallet down and went back to sit next to Ruth.
“Uh-uh. Not so close. I need to see your hands.” Helga reached down and picked up the wallet. Peering inside, she pulled out a number of bills and threw them on the floor. Same with the credit cards and driver’s licence. “How interesting. No family pictures. The mysterious Mr Sam Schmaltzy. Oh wait, what do we have here?” Helga was folding the wallet in two now that it was empty, but the middle part felt hard, like a piece of paper or a card was wedged in there. Her fingers reached into the crevice and dug out a worn sepia photo that was so frayed it looked like it might disintegrate in her hand. “This is a nice photo. Mummy, Daddy, and in the middle, Mr Schmaltzy, except - well, well - you are wearing an SS uniform, I believe. Friedrich Becker, according to the writing on the back. That would be you, would it not, Mr Lying Shit-matzky?” She glared at him, flinging the wallet with such force that it made a slapping sound when it hit his face.
Ruth stopped shivering and cringed backwards with revulsion. “You are SS, Sam?”
“Yes, Sammy. Are you SS? Wait. Wait. I remember now where I recognise you from.” Helga flew out of her chair and raced over to the mantelpiece, grabbing the first object that came to her hand. It turned out to be a souvenir snow globe from the Opera House. Raising her arm, she flung it at Friedrich. The globe connected just below his right ear, leaving a thin gash that immediately started to bleed. “You were the bastard at the train station on that day when I travelled with her parents. Matter of fact, you welcomed her father with a nice round of kicking.”
Ruth, at her end of the couch, started to convulse, and at the last revelation belched and then threw up.
Helga’s gun hand was trembling violently. It looked to Friedrich as if she would fire accidentally at any moment.
“Why don’t you kill me, if that’s what you want? Let Ruth go. She has done you no intentional harm.”
“Shut your stupid mouth!” Helga screamed. “I don’t need advice from you on what I should or shouldn’t do. I have earned, you hear me, earned this moment. I waited for over fifty years not knowing if I would ever get my revenge. The last five years I began to doubt myself, thinking that maybe she went to the US or Canada. But no, I stuck with this backwater. Lived in a small house in a smelly suburb. Waited patiently. And then there it was, a small notice. Ruth Lipschutz. My heart swelled. My joy abounded. It was like my life suddenly had meaning. Do you understand, Mr SS Shit-matzky? Huh, do you understand?” With that she grabbed a small potted plant off the mantelpiece and hurled it violently at Friedrich, this time hitting him squarely in the chest. The impact knocked the wind out of him. He buckled over and gasped desperately to regain his breath.
“You are insane,” Ruth uttered, quavering, hunched deep inside her housecoat, fearing an equal reprisal.
“What did you say?” Helga lurched over to where Ruth had slumped, the colour drained from her face replaced by a sickly yellow pallor.
“Nothing.” She dared not raise her eyes to confront Helga, speaking unevenly. “I am feeling sick. I can barely breathe.”
“Oh, you poor thing. What you need is a few days in a concentration camp. The conditions are excellent: room and board, free meals. Every day some new adventure: hangings, killings, gassings, beatings. Ask your dear friend here. He can tell you all about it.” Helga walked over to where Friedrich was slumped over. With the toe of her boot, she kicked him in the groin. He let out a sharp cry, then rolled to the floor clutching his crotch in agony, lying in a foetal position.
Ruth’s colour was starting to turn from yellow to blue. Her shallow breathing reduced to wheezing and she started to hack and sputter sporadically. But she couldn’t take in enough air to relieve the strain. Her chest tightened and started to feel heavy as though someone had placed a large load over it.
Despite his own condition, Friedrich could see that Ruth’s was critical. “Help her, you idiot. She is going to die if you don’t. She is going into shock,” he blurted from his position on the floor.
“You must be deaf, or maybe you don’t understand German as well after all these years. I told you from the beginning to not speak to me—”
Before Helga could finish, Ruth let out a sharp heave as though her chest had collapsed inwardly, and she fell to the floor, landing in her own vomit.
“Ruth!” Friedrich yelled, rising to his knees. Helga strode over the low coffee table and struck him with the butt of the gun over his right ear, just over the gash oozing blood. He heard a sharp whistling sound, then fell unconscious.
Friedrich didn’t know how much time had passed. All he could remember was that Ruth had been going into either cardiac arrest or shock. He tried to rise to his feet, but the pounding of blood in his ears kept him off balance. He opened his eyes to try and look around the room, but it was spinning so rapidly that he quickly shut them again so as not to get sick.
“You are with us again, Friedrich?” A wicked snarl reverberated somewhere in the room. He couldn’t quite tell where in the darkness.
“What’s happened?”
“I am afraid your dear friend didn’t make it. She had a heart attack. Not shock. Your diagnostic skills are as bad as your acting.”
“Oh God. Ruth.” He clasped his hands over his face and started to sob. “Dear God. What for? After all this time? What is the point? What is the point?”
“Your sentiments are wasted on me. Now get up!” Helga snapped from somewhere in front of where Friedrich was lying.
He tried to rise again, but the pounding in his ears increased. He reached out his hand to edge of the coffee table to steady himself and then fell back awkwardly on the floor.
“Now listen, Mr SS Shit-matzky. I don’t give a damn about your SS past and all that. That’s your problem. But if you so much as mention my presence here I will be calling every newspaper and sending them a copy of your lovely photo. I am sure that they will be very interested in how an SS man masqueraded as a Jewish Holocaust survivor.”
She waited for him to acquiesce. Friedrich remained mute.
“It is now just before midnight. So you have had a nice little nap. At two o’clock you will help me carry Ruth down to the dumpster and place her body inside. You can then come up here and clean up the mess. I will be gone and you will never hear from me again. Understood?” Helga’s voice was ice cold. There was no emotion in anything she said. It was as though she was reciting directions to a destination, not instructions on how to dispose of a body.
Again Friedrich remained silent.
“What, have you gone deaf?”
Friedrich could see her shadow in the corner, seated at the dining table, drinking impassively from a glass.
“I heard you,” he replied meekly. “Why do you want to put her in the dumpster? Isn’t it enough that you have killed her? Do you need to humiliate her too?”
“What do you suggest? That we leave the body outside her apartment? Or even in her apartment? That’s not very smart. This way there is a good chance that the garbage truck will collect her and dump her body somewhere far away. By that time all evidence will be lost.”
“Dump her?! Ruth is not garbage, you vile old wretch,” Friedrich hurled back at the impassive shadow.
“If I didn’t need your help I would get rid of you too, so I would suggest that you keep your mouth shut and leave the planning to me.” Helga’s voice cut like a razor blade, making Friedrich flinch at her words ev
en though she hadn’t moved from her position.
While they waited, the silence of the night gradually engulfed the room, leaving the ticking of the kitchen clock to fill the void. It ticked precisely in second increments, and at every minute interval they could hear the hand move. Once Friedrich heard Helga lift the glass up to her lips and take a sip. Then the ticking sound returned to fill the silence. Friedrich fidgeted on the hard wooden floor, a hundred questions burning in his mind, but he daren’t ask them for fear that she would kill him too. Twice he looked over to where Ruth lay bundled in her housecoat, immobile, the life gone out of her. When did she die? How soon after he passed out? Did she say anything? Did she forgive his deception? Did it contribute to her shock, regardless of what Helga claimed, which brought on the cardiac arrest?
He was a coward. That much was clear in his mind. If he had to trace a thread through his life, the one prominent attribute that he could point to throughout would be cowardice. Fear of not belonging; fear of belonging; fear of being captured; hiding shamelessly in the skin of the very people that he committed to persecute at the start of his career. Then the tide turned. He hadn’t sensed it so much as refused to be its vanguard. But then he got lucky when his fear parlayed into an escape from judgement, and once again when it provided him with the opportunity to shield himself behind a mask, that had now fallen, killing the very person that he thought he would spend the rest of his life with.
And now again. Instead of getting up and strangling this insane person, he sat calmly on his haunches, waiting to carry Ruth down to the dumpster from where her body would eventually end up in a massive trash heap and be picked clean by scavengers. And afterwards? He would keep quiet. Go on about his life, carrying his awful secrets with him to his grave.
How could he die like this? How could he die? Alone. There was no one left. The thought of dying with these awful secrets haunted him. Maybe that was hell. Dying with horrible secrets and having to be buried underground in a box and have your secrets as your constant companions for infinity.
“I can’t die like this.”
“What are you mumbling over there?” Helga was alerted to his distinct muttering.
Realising that in his feverish state he had spoken out loud, he quickly corrected himself. “I was asking what time it is?”
“Time to go. Get up and tie the belt around the housecoat so that the body doesn’t fall out.”
Helga stood at a distance without moving, probably expecting him to heave the body over his shoulder and carry it out. She is not only crazy, but impractical, he thought to himself; there is no way that I can carry the body out on my own.
Without asking, Friedrich fetched a hand truck that he had kept in a storage locker which the movers left behind. He wheeled it out to the hallway, laid it on the floor and rolled Ruth’s body onto it, making sure that her back lay flat against the curved support brackets, and rested her legs over the lip. Holding her firmly by the shoulder with one hand he tilted the hand truck upwards, keeping it at an angle, making sure that she did not tumble head forward, and started wheeling the body out. Helga opened the door, took a look out at the hallway and signalled him to go, keeping a close watch from behind as she followed him. They had to stop twice: once when the lift rose from the ground floor to the top floor, and another time when Helga thought she heard a door opening - it was a false alarm, someone had just secured the lock before turning in. They took the lift down to the basement level. As soon as the door slid open, Helga peered out again, making sure that the coast was clear, and they proceeded to make their way to the rubbish room. A single weak light illuminated the immediate area. Helga went through the red-lidded wheelie bins - reserved for common garbage, not recyclables - until she found one that was nearly empty. This time they lifted the body together off the hand truck and heaved it over the edge. At first it plummeted in with the legs sticking out, so they had to drag it out, fold it in half and wedge it in. It still stuck out a little, so Helga gathered a discarded quilt from a nearby yellow bin and spread it over the top, shutting the lid.
It was done.
Helga straightened and brushed herself down. Adjusting the kerchief over her head, she looked up at Friedrich with contempt. “You are a disgrace. A shameless coward. I am counting on that, plus the photo that is in my possession.” With that she walked out of the rubbish room, over to the nearby hedge bordering the building, crawled through a hole in the shrubbery and disappeared into the cold and wet night.
Friedrich looked up at the building to see if any lights were on. All the windows except his were dark. He wheeled the hand truck out of the basement, back over to the lift, and pushed it inside and up. By the time he returned to his apartment it had started to rain again. He went about methodically sweeping up the broken pieces of the snow globe, cleaning the vomit and straightening up the dishevelled room. By 3am it was as neat as it had been before the madness erupted.
He looked over the room carefully, picked up Helga’s glass off the table, emptied it over the sink and then went to the bedroom. He lay down on the bed that was still unmade and smelt of Ruth.
I am what I am. If I had courage I wouldn’t be here. I would have died years ago. So many times I could have died. But I didn’t. So maybe it is my fate to be a coward and stay alive after all the heroes have died.
With that silent pronouncement he reached for the lamp and clicked the switch, plunging the room into darkness. He soon fell asleep.
BERLIN
WINTER 1945
In May 1945 Germany surrendered. The defeated Third Reich rose from the ashes of World War I promising a thousand years of prosperity, might and glory. But it soon became all too clear that the vehicle on which it had risen was Icarus. A regime built on hate, murder and oppression. Hitler’s promise fell short by 987 years, and he committed suicide in his bunker rather than face the disgrace of defeat.
In the new reality, the victors of World War II, the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and, by special dispensation, the French, divided Germany into four zones of occupation and its capital, Berlin, into four sectors. Those who had remained steadfast in their defiance of and opposition to Hitler and his murderous henchmen, if they were fortunate to still be alive, were vindicated by the defeat of the Nazi regime; whereas its fervent supporters hastily severed their affiliation to avoid the hand of justice that went scouring for the perpetrators.
In the aftermath, those on the home front disbelieved the eyewitness accounts of concentration camps and factories of death. It sounded positively medieval, something that could not happen in twentieth-century Germany. Yet the picturesque cities and towns all throughout Germany from which Jewish inhabitants had been wrested bore testimony to the obliteration of the erstwhile vibrant communities. In a spate of blind madness, few in Nazi Germany had the prescience to grasp that annihilating Jewish existence was tantamount to eliminating the progenitors of the New Testament, the spiritual backbone of German and European thought and culture. And in so doing, ultimately cheating believers out of the Second Coming: indeed, had the Messiah and saviour Jesus Christ had the misfortune to return during the reign of the Third Reich he too would have been rounded up and exterminated.
There were exceptions, though few they were, like Helmut. As he sat huddled with his wife Magda and daughter Anna in the darkness, waiting for the light to return, strangely, despite the misery of destruction and death, an inner peace and contentment filled him. Hitler was gone. Too late, perhaps, to save the Lipschutzes, but not too late to set about the work of rebuilding Germany, which Hitler had brutally mangled and destroyed with his sick madness. Helmut had heard the stories like everyone else and disbelieved them. It was not possible.
There was little point in discussing it with Magda. She would say something infuriating like “Jewish lies; they are segregated in East Germany or somewhere else, where the Nazis put them for their own protection.” And Anna? Well, he did not want Anna to know of such horrors so soon. There would be time enough
for that one day, but not now.
The power had been out for a week. Running water was intermittent at best. Social services were at a standstill, other than the constant wail of ambulances and fire trucks. Above the din, Helmut thought he could hear knocking at the front door.
He was weighing up whether to get up and open it. They had meagre amounts of food and almost none left to share. But there was shelter over their heads, clean water and some clothing. He could spare that.
He got up warily, taking his torch, and followed its beam to the door. He waited. The soft knocking sound repeated. He stood still, hoping that the stranger would give up and leave. But the knocking intensified; the caller uncertain if the occupants had heard them.
He unlatched the chain, turned the key and pulled back the heavy door. A man in dishevelled civilian clothes stood looking at him in the darkness. Helmut couldn’t make out his face clearly, but he could tell the man was gaunt and leaning wearily against the doorpost.
“We can’t offer you much in the way of food; just some drink, clothing and shelter.”
“It’s me, Helmut. I need somewhere to hide.”
He recognised the voice immediately. “Martin?”
“Yes, can I come in?” He was already resigned to being told no.
Helmut extended his hand eagerly to the broken man across the threshold. As they moved into the vestibule, Helmut grabbed his brother-in-law around the shoulders and hugged him warmly. “It’s good to see you, Martin. I was not sure where you were, or even whether you were still alive. Come in. Magda will be thrilled to see you.”
As soon as Martin stepped into the dark living room, Magda leaped out of her chair and came over to hug him tightly. “I was so worried. I did not know who or where to contact. I wasn’t able to contact anyone. There is no one anywhere to speak to. I am so very happy to see you.”
“Believe me, I am happy to be here.” The worry started to lift from his expression as he took in the warm faces of his remaining family. He nodded towards Anna. “Your friend made it safely to Switzerland.”
THE MADNESS LOCKER Page 28