Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  They were getting on swimmingly.

  Over the next hour or two they made their arrangements. The boys in the room relaxed, broke into groups and played cards, swapped jokes and stories, competed at push-ups, squats, the wrestling of arms. Before long, Pavel was offered a second bowl of soup – it was Christmas after all – and a swig of corn schnapps from a ceramic jug. The first of the services he paid for, on credit, was the passing on of information about S৞ldmann, the midget who’d been stabbed in the back. Paulchen gathered what little he knew of the man and fashioned it into a yarn: grandiloquent truths grown out of unsubstantiated rumour; pissoir banter blown up into character study. His gang gathered at his feet to hear it all, lapping it up with no less an appetite than, in some other story expertly told, cats had been said to lap at a dead man’s blood. Paulchen, too, told his story well. As he was listening, Pavel cast back his mind to how they had washed the body, Sonia and he, and carried it up to the attic’s darkest corner. In retrospect it seemed to him like he must have loved her even then.

  But this won’t do, having a boy tell Söldmann’s story. It’s not that Paulchen was short on wits or minced his words – quite the contrary. His horizon, though, was limited by age and lack of education. As a narrator, he was liable to render as mere biography a subject that clamoured after history. Nor was Paulchen in the best position to be free of bias, Greater Germany pining away on his wall and a box full of Nazi insignia. You do better listening to me; have I not guided you thus far, with no major hiccups? Besides, I was much better informed, having been ordered to sniff out Söldmann’s story many months before, at a time when the Colonel had first taken an interest in the midget’s affairs. A few deft questions to former associates and neighbours, some well-placed food parcels and the occasional threat of investigation, and the rudiments of a life began to manifest, in crude brushstrokes to be sure, though not devoid of a certain suggestiveness. The thing, of course, was that nobody knew anything for certain. Söldmann’s was a war story, disarticulated and liable to distortions and falsehood. Events only become clearer towards war’s end, when he turned into a crook and a fence, dealing in stolen information, primarily, with a sideline in narcotics.

  In any case, people say that Ernst Rainer Söldmann was born on the eve of the Great War – the last but one, which dug itself into trenches – to a respectable greengrocer’s wife somewhere on the outskirts of the beautiful city of Dresden, before, that is, it was reduced to rubble and glassy pools of molten sand. There had been no hereditary taint in the family, but a circus by the unlikely name of ‘Rancini’ had passed through the area some months previously, so naturally there was talk when he turned out a midget and his hair much darker than Mr Söldmann’s chestnut curls. Little is known about Ernst’s childhood, or whether he was apprenticed and to whom. One imagines that the humiliations of school and a puberty devoid of prospects left their mark upon his fledgling soul; in any case he left home at the tender age of seventeen, a knapsack over one shoulder and a maternal kiss on his cheek.

  Söldmann’s itinerant years are hard to reconstruct. Once upon a time Germans had made a tradition of them – the Wander-years described in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister –but by the time young Ernst took to the road he would have been perceived as little more than a vagrant. He washed up in Berlin around the autumn of 1932, just in time to become inspired by the noxious invective of the moustachioed chancellor-to-be and his brown-shirted flock of devotees. After the Machtergreifung (a phrase only imperfectly rendered into English as the National Socialists’ ‘seizure of power’), Söldmann attempted to join their ranks. The Party wouldn’t have him. It prided itself on being a racial vanguard and would not have its ranks diluted by degenerates, turncoats or opportunists. It certainly had no truck with swarthy midgets, Goebbels’ pre-eminent position not withstanding. Söldmann tried the party headquarters in Charlottenburg, then Kreuzberg, those in Wedding and finally in Berlin-Buch, on the northern outskirts of the city. Not one registrar even handed him so much as the application form. Instead they laughed in his face and made jibes familiar to Söldmann since his earliest childhood. At the Buch headquarters they sent him on, not entirely in jest, to report at the famed psychiatric clinic that had made its name by investigating homosexuals and other deviants since the middle of the previous century. Voluntary sterilization was heartily recommended.

  Söldmann, with what in retrospect appears as characteristic persistency, found a tailor to fashion him his very own SA uniform cut from two and a quarter yards of coarse brown wool. The day he received it, he proudly dressed before a penny mirror that he propped up against one dirty flophouse wall and found the uniform’s colour to harmonize pleasingly with his hazel eyes. All morning he stood by a window, until he finally spied a pack of brownshirts pass with boisterous swaggers, then raced down to join them. Somewhat surprisingly he was soon accepted into their ranks. He even became a particular favourite with one or two of the more amiable comrades who took to his wit and Saxonian accent, and begged Ernst, time and again, to show them his Peter, which was disproportionally large for his frame. In an attempt to improve the quality of his lodgings, Söldmann put up, with the help of deftly placed pins, a dozen newspaper photographs of his namesake, Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA, whom nature had favoured with a face like a potato, and a body like a sack of them. Little Ernst spent his nights in dialogue with his beloved leader until, on the thirtieth of June, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives put an end to their intimacy. Röhm was executed, along with some seventy-odd others, for high treason and, it was rumoured, contrary sexual instincts. The following morning, holding a magazine image of a dapper-looking Heinrich Himmler, Söldmann announced his wish to join the SS. His flophouse brethren broke out in laughter, and took to saluting him as Obersturmgruppenführer whenever he entered the communal kitchen. Söldmann was unabashed. He had learned long ago that all humour was – what’s the word? – cruel.

  It is unclear how Söldmann paid his way in these eventful years prior to the war. Spiteful tongues place him in the cabaret scene, as announcer, clown, or sexual novelty act. More charitable perhaps is the claim that he survived on the hand-me-downs of an ageing, and somewhat curmudgeonly, Jewish lover. Others still describe him as a pimp with a stable of clapped-out whores who treated him as much as their mascot as their employer. Whatever he did, he must have made the acquaintance of some well-connected people at some point or other, for by the spring of 1938 he had made real his dream. Not only had he joined the Party that had so long refused him entry, but his membership was backdated to 1926, that is, into the years of struggle before Herr Hitler’s rise to respectability. As such his credentials became unimpeachable, and he soon commenced upon a remarkable transformation from flophouse clochard to businessman. The precise nature of his business is, unfortunately, a matter of significant dispute, though it is clear that he managed to get hold of some property and run an Aryan dancehall for some few months prior to the war, before it was shut down over a dispute (quickly hushed up) that there had taken place an illegal performance of syncopated jazz music. In the course of the war, it seems, Söldmann gradually became a supplier of rare and mislaid items: anything from banned modernist art for which some party dignitaries displayed an unfortunate taste, to the more mundane needs of what I have heard an American GI describe as ‘booze and cooze’. Unfit for service on grounds of congenital smallness, he was free to make his fortune on the home front. As the years crept by, he increasingly kept himself in the background, self-conscious perhaps about his diminutive stature in this age of giants, or else because he had a former puppet’s fascination for running his operation from behind the scenes.

  War’s end found him in a right pickle. As Hitler’s Reich collapsed militarily, morally as well as financially, and new powers took over its erstwhile capital, Söldmann tried to hold on to his organization, while at the same time evading Allied scrutiny into his much advertised dedication to the Nazi cause. At the business end of things he nee
dn’t have worried. It turned out that a broken, war-ravaged city awaiting its first winter of peace had need of men like Söldmann. Occupiers and locals, they all yearned for the help of those who ‘could get things done’; there was an opportunity here to become a veritable pillar of the post-war community, and Söldmann was not one to pass up the cup, as it were, when proffered.

  As for his ‘denazification’ – issued in the formof a coveted piece of paper that the Germans took to calling their Persil-pass, after the popular washing powder manufactured by one Hugo Henkel (Party Membership No. 2266961) of Henkel & Son – well, that took some doing. Through luck and a civilian’s courage to procrastinate when decisive action had been demanded, the Central Registry of the National Socialist Party had survived the order that it be summarily pulped by a Bavarian paper mill. The Seventh US Army was thus put in a position to liberate some eight and a half million membership cards, Söldmann’s amongst them. In the spirit of allied co-operation we Brits, in whose sector Söldmann lived and then plied his trade, were given full access to the documents. The denazification hearings asked all Germans to fill in a preliminary questionnaire fully disclosing their involvement with Hitler’s regime. The data was then compared against the Party registry. Proof of membership did not necessarily spell out the end of the denazification process. In the spirit of English fair play we accepted opportunism as a valid reason for having joined up – after all, one had to live. Having joined before Hitler’s 1933 electoral victory, however, was considered a not inconsiderable faux pas, as was lying on one’s questionnaire. Unfamiliar with the concept of opportunistic backdating, the officers in charge of the investigations understood the membership date found on the Central Registry’s cards to represent the absolute, that is to say the bureaucratic, truth. Continuous membership from 1926, therefore, coupled with a number of letters by party functionaries testifying to one’s racial value for Germany despite a certain physical malformation, was liable to be interpreted as sufficiently damning to put denazification out of the question. A formal trial, economic sanctions and, worst of all, close scrutiny of all one’s activities beckoned. All this, of course, conspired to place Söldmann rather deeply in the above-mentioned pickle.

  For the first time in his life his stature came to his aid, although I daresay it would not have done him much good had it not been coupled with wile. Rather than waiting for the British authorities to approach him, Söldmann scoured the sector for his brethren. He found a full score and extras when he walked through the tent flap of Karli Schäfer’s Circus that, with grim determination, had set down only months after the war upon a pockmarked field not far from Schloss Charlottenburg. They were practising their trampolining at the time, and as little Ernst stepped onto the arena sands some ten dwarves and midgets could be seen breathlessly suspended in mid-air. They floated in the middle distance between star-studded ceiling and the giant blue-rimmed device that lent them their wings; turned over themselves in slow, precise movements, and whooped for joy when they came crashing down again upon the canvas. There were women amongst these aeronauts: legs like potato mashers, their short skirts flaring in mid-air to reveal shiny, taut knickers in the colours of the Italian flag. Söldmann had no inkling that, due to some perversity of fate which, for the whole of the past decade, had made a mockery of the science of probability, Karli Schäfer’s Circus had only recently acquired its new name. Not so long ago it had flown its brightly embossed flag under the heading of Rancini; it was, in short, the very same outfit that had passed through Dresden more than thirty years previously, and had given rise to such unflattering rumours concerning Mrs Söldmann’s matrimonial virtue and baby Ernst’s patrimony. Its change of name dated from that brief sliver of time when the Italian war effort was running headlong into the wall of its own ineptitude, whilst in Germany the authorities’ promise of final victory – that elusive Endsieg – remained a tolerably believable lie. Söldmann was thus robbed of any motivation to study the faces of the assembled elder statesmen amongst the midgets for signs of family resemblance. Instead, what he saw in the flurry of leaps and turns and aerial handstands was this: tall, blonde Fräulein Persil – the iconic representation of Henkel’s miracle powder, made famous on a thousand German advertising billboards – dressed in a white summer dress that only subtly suggested the firmness of her bosom, coyly proffering him her hand for the gentlest of shakes. Hell, thought he, before he was done with her, he’d give her reason to give her clothes a good scrubbing. Inadvertently, looking on at the weightless dance of the midgets, Ernst Rainer Söldmann’s sizeable Peter grew erect.

  From then on in it was only a matter of money and a dash of audacity. Söldmann approached the circus’s director, one Mr Schäfer né Rancini, and negotiated a price. The very next day, sixteen midgets and seven dwarves made their way down to the British ‘Information Services Control’ at Schlüterstrasse 45, once the seat of Goebbels’ Reichskulturkammer and as such one of the epicentres of the regime’s programme of nazification. The midgets’ number included a new signing, a Dresden lad with little artistic talent, whose employment papers indicated that he had been a member of their troupe ever since he’d tumbled from his mother’s womb. Spirits were soaring on account of some black beer Söldmann had bought and distributed over a hearty breakfast of bread and sausage. The midgets and dwarves swarmed into the ISC’s waiting area and demanded blank copies of the questionnaire in order to ‘get things over and done with’. They quickly filled the few available chairs, then spread out across the carpeted floors where they lay upon their stomachs, pen in hand, answering questions on their Wehrmacht past and their years of service in the ‘General or Waffen SS’. The NCOs in charge of the operation had a great time, of course, and were not opposed to being entertained by the juggling of office equipment, some routine vanishing tricks and the deft erection of a human pyramid. The completed forms were filed without a second glance and twenty-three clean slates issued virtually on the spot. It seemed inconceivable to the authorities that a bunch of degenerate clowns could be anything other than the most natural of democrats.

  Within a week Söldmann had moved his operations into the US sector, brandishing his Persil-pass like a family crest. He had no further dealings with Karli Schäfer’s Circus, with the sole exception of a bought night of love with one of the diminutive trampoline girls. Like so many men, he just wanted to know, for once in his life, what it was like to fuck a midget. He liked it well enough, but stuck with fully grown women thereafter. There was more kudos in it, and he found he had gotten used to the dynamic possibilities that the difference in size afforded to his erotic sport. Over the months that followed he steered his business focus towards the supply of information, dealing with all four of the Allied powers. The Russians, he found, made his best customers. They had voracious needs, and Nazi coffers from which to pay for them.

  In the weeks prior to his death, Söldmann was said to be working on a major business transaction concerning the sale of some highly sensitive material. The price, it was rumoured, was astronomical, and the risks involved considerable. But there is no time now to unravel that particular riddle. It slumbers, safely wrapped in a pair of Nordic socks, down a defunct teapot’s gullet. Any day now it will wake, and take measures to crawl forth from its protective shell. You and I, we will be there to greet its early-morning yawn. Söldmann, on the other hand, won’t have another morning. He lies, frozen solid, upon an attic’s bumpy plank, and a knife-point’s hole within his back.

  But enough about Söldmann. Let us return to the living, those who speak and love and, consequently, can still be hurt.

  The Colonel came to her not ten minutes after Pavel had left. Sonia spent the time in front of the mirror, gazing at herself in wonder. It occurred to her to open a window in order to change the air in which she was living, but the frame was frozen shut and would not budge. She lit a cigarette, resumed her position in front of the looking glass and blew smoke at herself. She found that, if she held the cigarette betw
een the last but one joint of her middle and index fingers, and let her hand droop loosely from an upraised wrist, she very nearly looked a lady.

  The Colonel was in buoyant spirits, perhaps too much so. He greeted her with a hearty kiss on the lips, lovingly picked up the monkey by the scruff of its neck, and poured himself a generous glass of brandy. Sonia thought she could detect something in his eyes other than gaiety, some mild discomfort that he was at pains to conceal. She wondered whether it had to do with Christmas; the season did funny things to people. He lowered his bulk into one of the sofa cushions and motioned for her to join him. Just then he made her gag: the roll of fat that leapt up from chest and neck to swallow the chin, and those plump infant’s hands that she knew had broken bones. She drew closer gingerly, watching him undo his fly.

  Taking care of his needs proved awkward. Sonia protested stomach cramps – wind – and he benevolently let her mouth do the work, a hot-water bottle spread against her abdomen. While she sat there at his feet, feeling the cold of the floor under her buttocks and his wedding ring against her scalp, Sonia studied the Colonel from under hooded lids. She was musing about what it was like to be Fosko; marvelling that, only days ago, she had thought them alike, one paw cupping her breast like a butcher weighing his meat, the other in her hair, guiding her motions. The thought crossed her mind that the war had done this to him, made him what he was. How did he behave with his wife? Had he wooed her, brought her flowers? Been shy on his wedding night, a boy of twenty, sheepishly lifting her nightdress to the glow of a blushing candle? She pictured his astonishment when the maiden wife grabbed his manhood with knowing hands. Sonia stopped herself short. She did not know this woman, and already she made her out a tramp.

  When he was done he sent her away to clean herself up and had another brandy. The phone rang while she was in the bathroom. Fosko answered, and she could hear his distemper at whatever news he was receiving. Then his voice mellowed and took on a peculiar sweetness.