‘Why do you need to talk to me so urgently?’ Daumler asked, still driving and not looking back. ‘You’re putting me at tremendous risk. I was able to borrow this taxi for half an hour, cap included. Hurry up and tell me what’s going on.’
I told him that if the Führer wasn’t soon liberated from our clinic, he would probably suffer an accident, as we had been infiltrated by a Communist who was out for his life. In the mirror I saw Daumler screw up his eyes. The route he was following consisted almost exclusively of curves and he was driving so fast I was being thrown back and forth like a clapper in a bell. I could hardly refrain from adding: ‘Krantz has been trying to pass himself off to me as a Communist. I know it’s not true, that he’s only doing it to put a lie of Elena’s to the test, but I’m at my wit’s end. I don’t know how else to pit you against Krantz. You’re my only ally.’ But I didn’t say it.
Then Daumler said, ‘I don’t believe there’s a Communist alive who would want to kill the Führer.’
‘Maybe not, but his presence in our clinic will lead to an accident befalling the Führer. If we don’t do it, the Communists will kidnap him.’
I didn’t mention Elena.
But Daumler roared, ‘I’m sick to death of this nonsense! I know exactly who you’re talking about. It’s Krantz, isn’t it? Didn’t you get my message?’
I told him the date on which I had left the clinic. I couldn’t possibly have received Daumler’s letter. It contained the plan for an attempt on Krantz’s life, as I saw on my return when I did find it. Plan might be too strong a word. It was actually nothing more than an instruction for me to immediately liquidate Krantz.
Daumler now repeated this order out loud, gesturing so furiously that he kept inadvertently hitting the horn, accelerating and then suddenly braking. ‘Liquidate Krantz! Liquidate him immediately!’ It was like he was playing an organ that allowed him to give me a good shaking.
‘Liquidate Krantz immediately, make him disappear without trace! Otherwise they’ll say it’s his child, and it’s not his, it is not his! It’s the Führer’s! The Führer’s!’
He braked so abruptly that I flew against the roof of the taxi with my head and slumped back down on the well-padded seat. In the same instant the car door opened and a policeman started yelling at Daumler. I grabbed some money out of my pocket, threw it down on the front bench next to Daumler and got out of the car. With my head spinning, I crossed the large square from the place in the middle where Daumler had suddenly stopped for no reason. From all directions cars shot towards me, stamping on their brakes. When I was finally on the pavement, I could no longer see Daumler’s taxi. I didn’t know whether he had driven on, whether he was looking for me or whether the policeman had arrested him. I didn’t dare go back to the café owner I had been staying with. The safest thing for me to do was return as quickly as possible to the clinic, high in the mountains.
When I arrived there nothing had changed. The Führer’s condition was the same as when I left. I studied Elena without arousing her suspicions and it did seem possible that she was pregnant. I kept my fury to myself, but knew I wouldn’t be able to suppress it for long. I had gained some valuable information: Daumler was aware of her relationship with Krantz and had ordered me to liquidate him. Daumler was therefore unaware of my own relationship with Elena, otherwise he might have ordered Krantz to liquidate me. And what about the superintendent, who would also be counted as a possible father, once what I already knew for a fact had become general knowledge? Why hadn’t Daumler said anything about the superintendent? There were two possibilities:
1) He did not even suspect Elena of having a relationship with the superintendent.
2) He thought I did not suspect it.
Some reflection led me to conclude that the latter assumption had to be the correct one. And with that I immediately understood the plan Daumler and his cohorts had forged against me! Yes, I had to liquidate Krantz and after that the superintendent would be given the task of liquidating me, and when he had liquidated me, he himself would be liquidated by Daumler or a friend of his who was as yet unknown to me. If I wanted to save myself I needed to act quickly. But the outlaw existence that would await me afterwards was anything but appealing and so, until spring, I lived in hope that Daumler had been arrested during his escapade with the taxi and neutralized for ever.
But in April the snow was gone from the slopes and it would no longer be easy to track a fugitive. Then I received the package Daumler had announced in his written orders as containing supplies to use when liquidating Krantz. By that time I had discovered, with great difficulty, where in the building Krantz was hiding. It was the small, bricked-in section of the cellar where the fuse boxes were located.
I announced that I was going to start an investigation into the possibilities for giving the Führer back his voice. I invited the superintendent to attend the first operation. I also made sure that Elena would be one of the nurses assisting. Once we were standing around the operating table, but before the Führer had been placed in position, I gave a brief account of what I was going to do. At the end of my speech I raised a large hypodermic syringe in my right hand – and pressed down with my foot on a button I had prepared in advance, causing a short circuit. After it went dark, it became apparent that the emergency lighting wasn’t working. I had disengaged it. I felt the superintendent turning towards me as he protested loudly about the incomprehensible failure of the emergency lighting, and stayed close to him while a nurse phoned the technical department. We waited. I looked at the clock, which had luminescent hands, but it was an electric clock. Two small explosions sounded below us, where I had fitted out the reserve fuses that were always kept there in case of emergency with small cartridges of dynamite, so that the stoker would be killed the moment he screwed them into place. Him and Krantz too, I hoped – and in that same moment I stabbed the superintendent in the throat with the needle, which I had filled with a powerful sedative and an extremely dangerous virus. Just as I withdrew the needle, the overhead lights flicked back on. I saw the superintendent staring with eyes like broken light bulbs, gazing down at the empty hypodermic in my hand. He swayed on his feet and tried to grab hold of something. Suffocating smoke began rising from the floor, which was crazed with cracks. Then the lights went off again. Screams were now coming from all sides. The nurses began running around aimlessly. I seized the gurney with the Führer and pushed it into the corridor. Then a third explosion shook the walls. I hadn’t known that flammable liquids like alcohol, ether and acetone were stored in that part of the cellar, but all the better. With a sense of triumph I pushed the gurney with the Führer down the corridor to the large ward to return him to his bed. I was now his sole owner, I who had respected and supported his life. My enemies had been eliminated. If Daumler wanted to combat me further, he would have to face me alone. He didn’t realize how well I had understood him. I had a chance of victory, albeit a small one …
‘So, making sure your child’s safe?’
Elena must have stolen along behind me. Without answering I pushed the gurney into the large ward while in the same instant the fire alarms finally began their wailing. A strong, cold wind met me. The explosion had shattered the glass of a great many windows and the moonlit curtains were streaming inwards. Perspiring in my white tunic, under which I wasn’t wearing anything, I immediately felt icy cold, but ignored it. Instead, I thought of the patients who suffered the most terrible agonies when the slightest breeze passed over them. I couldn’t imagine that, even if they had lost their vocal cords, they wouldn’t have some organ left with which to express what they were now suffering. But I didn’t hear a thing, although I kept listening, even after Elena had wrapped her arms around me.
‘Embrace me, otherwise we’ll freeze to death. Embrace me, or we’ll die of cold.’ She pulled me over to the Führer’s bed, the only one with blankets on it. And in that moment it occurred to me that she couldn’t be allowed to fall ill or die, that the child she was
expecting might not be the superintendent’s or Krantz’s or the Führer’s, but mine. And I rubbed her warm under the blankets.
Then the staff began to cover the windows with planks and cardboard. Workers came to repair the destruction the next day, but didn’t stay long. Half of the patients died that same night and the rest died in the course of the week, dozens at a time. I was coughing. By the end of the week I was delirious with a forty-degree fever. In moments of vague consciousness, I saw that I was in a small room with just two beds and the superintendent dying in the other. He hadn’t regained consciousness. I knew that my virus would do for him within a fortnight. I myself had a simple case of pneumonia.
After spending two days in bed, I no longer heard the workers. No hammering, no walking around, nothing. It was as if the whole building was deserted. Nobody came to check on me. Only when I was asleep did they place food and drink next to my bed.
On the fourth day I spent lying there, the sanatorium priest came by. He told me that they were busy clearing out the building as all the patients had died. I asked how the superintendent was, and he told me that he wouldn’t last much longer. I asked if the mysterious explosion had claimed any direct victims and he told me that they had dug two bodies out of the cellar. One was the stoker who had screwed in the fuses, the other was unidentified and most likely the terrorist who had carried out the attack. I slumped back down on the pillows, closed my eyes and said, ‘Peace be on their immortal souls.’
He then asked if I was sure I would survive my illness and if I had anything else to confess. I said I was convinced I wouldn’t die, but that I wanted to confess everything to him anyway, and I confessed everything, including never having done the penance he had given me. He said he hoped I would recover and regain my strength enough to do it after all. I then asked him about the Führer and he said, after some hesitation, that the Führer too had died. I said, ‘I looked after him out of respect for life, for no other reason, but others wanted to misuse him.’ He replied that he knew that.
Then I asked, ‘Where is Elena?’
‘She’s gone and it wouldn’t be good for you to know where. She was a part of your past, yes, of that same past (he stood up and pointed at me threateningly), that same past you always forget! You forget that you burned two hundred Jews alive in search of a treatment for burns! You forget that you yourself were one of the Führer’s most fervent followers! But we know, and it’s something we’ve never forgotten!’
I answered that I had only sought my burns treatment out of respect for life, but now realized I should never have let it get out of hand like that. I would never do it again, now that Krantz and the superintendent were dead.
‘Take care,’ he said, ‘don’t forget it again and, above all, don’t forget that we know. That might be irrelevant, but, if it comes down to it … maybe not.’ He said the last words in a whisper, almost at the door.
A month later, when I was able to leave my bed, I managed to convince him to tell me where Elena had gone. Elena was in Spain, in a convent in Seville. The police were looking for me and I couldn’t get a passport. The priest took me across the Swiss border himself. From Switzerland I made my way to Genoa, where I concealed myself on a ship and pondered how to enter Spain. But the ship sank just off the Spanish coast. Three people were rescued and brought to shore near a small fishing village that had neither a police station nor a custom house. I was one of the three and managed to escape before the police could arrive. I crossed the snow-covered mountains on foot, travelling with gypsies and scraping together enough money for food and bus tickets by begging. In this way I finally arrived in Seville.
That afternoon two guardias civil armed with sub-machine guns were posted at the convent gate. They are the most terrifying policemen in the world. They scarcely move, only their eyes flash back and forth, and they are lean and emaciated, their walrus moustaches angled down parallel to the straps that cross on their chests on their way to their full ammunition belts. They look cruel and dejected at the same time, so much so that nobody could ever hope to appease them. I thought I was done for when one of them approached me. But he only asked if I had come to visit the convent. I gave him some money. Then he opened one of his bullet cases, pulled out a small bottle of wine and let me have a couple of swigs.
An elderly nun led me in. First to a courtyard lined with three floors of windowless, barred cells where the madmen and women they looked after were lying on straw. ‘These are the poor suffering souls,’ the elderly nun said. ‘We feel great compassion for them. That’s not the problem.’ Lost in thought, she rattled her keys and led me to the waiting room. Every now and then I felt the membranes inside my body trembling and I knew that, somewhere far away, someone was playing an organ. Another nun came to fetch me and showed me the way to the parlour. I could hear the organ too now, though I was not yet able to make out the melody. Behind thick iron mesh sat a woman who could only be Elena, but I had the sun in my eyes and couldn’t make out her features. I had nothing more to say to her and only ran my hand over my head a couple of times to signal to her that she was now shaved in the right spot. Thinking that she might not entirely comprehend the meaning of my visit, I said, ‘Krantz is dead, the superintendent is dead and the Führer, too, is dead.’
‘You have nothing to fear,’ she replied, ‘I’m staying here. I’ll never come back.’
I could now hear without interruption the final chorus of St Matthew’s Passion being played extremely poorly on the organ. The significance of that was not lost on me, but suddenly I refused to submit and asked to speak to the mother superior instead.
I was accompanied back to the waiting room, and half an hour later the mother superior came. Her rustic face was incomprehensibly young and, with her stolid eyes constantly turned up to the heavens, she most resembled the Virgin in Ribera’s Adoration of the Shepherds.
Her answers sounded as if I had submitted a petition in advance listing all the points I wanted to discuss.
I said that I had come to talk to her about Elena. Wasn’t she aware that Elena was pregnant?
‘Of course we are. The little treasure.’
‘Please help me, use your influence to convince Elena to leave the convent. I am the father of the child.’
‘Are you the father of the child? You poor man, if only you knew how many fathers of children turn up here.’
‘Not in this case,’ I said, ‘this is not like other cases.’
‘The nameless have an infinite number of fathers,’ she replied. ‘What is not yet written, shall be written.’
‘Fine!’ I raged. ‘Fine! I’m not the father of the child! The father of the child is the Führer!’
She laughed softly and took her rosary between her fingers. ‘We knew that, we have always known that. The sweet babe! The Führer’s child! The dear treasure!’
I was overcome with despair that this whole story with the Führer would never come to an end, that it would always start over again, that nobody in the world was serious about wanting to end it, nobody, nobody; if he wasn’t dead, he was alive yet and if he had died, he had reproduced, and that was why I asked, ‘If you know it’s the Führer’s child, what are you planning to do with it?’
‘Oh,’ she said, smiling at the heavens, ‘we don’t know yet. We will look after it well if the Lord wants it to stay alive. It can always turn out to be useful! The dear child, the little treasure!’ And with that she stood up and left.
The nun who had led me to the room came back to show me out. ‘Aren’t you hungry and thirsty?’ she asked. ‘Travellers who come here are always exhausted from hunger and thirst. If you like, you can get a meal and a bed for the night at the monastery.’
I thanked her for the offer and followed her. I could still hear the final chorus of St Matthew’s Passion and the clearer the music became, the more obvious it was how poorly it was being played. The nun went through a gate in a high wall and knocked on a heavy door with a knocker. An elderly brother opened
the door and let me in. Lighting my way with a candle, he led me down several steps to a room that must have been half underground. The final chorus of the St Matthew’s Passion finally stopped. ‘You can wait here,’ the brother said, holding the door open. ‘We have heard that you still have some penance to do. I’d just make a start if I were you. Then you won’t get bored.’
I entered a very spacious, empty, but low-ceilinged room, whose barred windows looked out over the pavement of a street. A brother in a brown habit was standing at one of those windows, next to a small organ. He didn’t turn towards me, but sat down at the keyboard again and carried on with his wretched music, holding his head so far back that I could clearly see eternity approaching on the clock face of his tonsure. I didn’t want to disturb him further and plonked down on a wooden bench at the back of the room.
The organ the brother was playing so abysmally was extremely dilapidated. The pedal keyboard had been almost entirely replaced by loops tied in lengths of all different kinds of cord: white sisal, grey twine, coloured ribbons like the ones people tie around presents, home-made rope of twisted cellophane. Many of the organ pipes were gone too, replaced with glass tubes that didn’t gleam and were almost invisible in the dark. But they were still audible and horribly out of tune, like an elephant’s trumpeting.
The brother’s back was moving furiously to the rhythm of what he wanted to play, not what he was playing.
From the street came the sound of a mechanical piano playing a paso doble in competition. A gypsy squatted at the window, gripped a bar with one hand and used the other to extend a chipped saucer as far as possible into the room. There were a few coins on the saucer and he made them clink while calling out, ‘La perrita, la perrita!’ But the monk took no notice of him and I didn’t dare to stand up. I found it hard to tear my thoughts away from the brother’s back, a back that made me feel as if I had been here before, long ago.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 24