by Chris Petit
Schlegel didn’t usually think about such matters. He didn’t have to.
He read on. ‘Better, please, if you go now. Thank you for your assistance. The dog has teeth. We have yet to see them. But we shall.’
The entries grew sparser, the doodles scratching through the page.
Towards the end the tone changed.
‘I have long ceased to exist, except as a husk, pausing only to note with heavy heart that suffering makes beasts of us all. Otherwise my days are filled with idle infatuation; the pathetic fantasies of an old man. Such beauty condemned. The nape of the neck. The turn of the hip. The delicate furrow between nose and lip (is there a name for that?).’
There were other mentions of this unnamed woman.
‘A vision of radiance that only saddens. I see her wearing too many different outfits; she should be careful not to get reported.’
The last entry, in a shaking hand, was barely legible. ‘I would rest my head on her bosom and die content. Other than that there is nothing to live for. Ten years of terror and we are dust already, waiting only for our bones to be ground, flesh reduced to the thinnest parchment, the spirit long departed. They have kicked the shit out of us.’
Schlegel didn’t care to think about the old man because it forced him to think about himself. His cultivated neutrality put a lid on everything and the commentary running through his head distanced him further. It said: always look outwards, never inwards. It told him: this is you being plausible; this is you appearing engaged; this is you laughing, as you are supposed to, with that idiot Stoffel, throwing back your head and baring your teeth.
Music drifted up from downstairs. They would be dancing; he didn’t.
He could not shake off a sense of personal crisis, as though within the morning’s events lay a message. The accident of his being called out, the evacuation, the old man putting a bullet in his head, the woman telling his fortune, all seemed to be saying he was so far adrift he may as well not be there.
Were they telling him it was time to go and the old man’s death was a sign to join him? He had thought about it, often.
Schlegel tested the barrel of his gun against the underside of his chin, in imitation of the old man. The fortune-teller had more or less told him his life wouldn’t be worth living.
Too serious about everything else, he always lacked the resolve to end it.
He threw the gun down in disgust.
The old man’s medal seemed both to berate him, for his funk, and to be telling him he should investigate the mystery of its owner’s suicide, as a way of bringing him back to life. Sometimes Schlegel thought of himself as a Lazarus figure. No one in the Bible had asked Lazarus how he felt on his return from the dead. What was the point when there was nothing come back for?
He picked up the gun again. His life teetered in the balance, between following the old man into the great nothing and asking that simple and most dangerous question: why?
7
The house lay deep in silence, the only sound the scuff of her cautious tread as she felt her way upstairs. None of the block’s communal lights worked. Sybil could not tell whether the building had been evacuated or some residents remained hiding. The enveloping darkness, blacker than outside, made it feel like her eyelids had been stitched shut.
On the third floor the moon came out briefly, bathing everything in a barely perceptible silver. The door to her apartment was wide open.
She felt her way inside, sparing her torch, and sat on her mother’s unmade bed, thinking about obligation, worry and how they didn’t get on.
She still couldn’t believe they had made a clean sweep. There were always exemptions. Her mother had important clients, top people, influential men who valued her service. In the current euphemism, she knew people and, unlike Metzler, was a survivor.
Sybil looked in pathetic secret spaces to see if her mother had left a message. Finding nothing, she went down the corridor to Metzler’s flat. She had never seen inside. It was like looking in a mirror: the same troubled rooms with their fusty residue of anxious sleeplessness and worn nerves, constant bickering and shame brought about by a demeaning lack of privacy. Clothes strewn around, half-packed suitcases.
The changing laws had taken away with remorseless logic until only the people were left; then they took them too.
Sybil stood in awe of the power capable of sucking them out of their lives.
When her torch died she stood in the dark, weeping. She wanted only to lie down and pretend there might be such a thing as a lazy afternoon, or holidays, with her and Lore lying around in bed then stuffing so much food into themselves that clothes had to be loosened.
Several vehicles pulled into the courtyard, followed by doors slamming.
Sybil daren’t leave now.
They worked systematically, starting downstairs, checking apartments. Somewhere in the distance a child gave a long wail. Sybil heard them move up a floor, followed by another set of vehicles arriving. A man with an overbearing manner shouted, demanding to know who was there. Boots clumped upstairs. The man announced the block was off-limits and they were sealing all apartments.
A woman told him to stop shining his flashlight in her face and said they were social workers, sent because mothers had been arrested at work and children left behind.
The man threw the women out, telling them any more children would be forwarded to the collection centres.
The night became full of the sound of hammering.
Sybil stood fearfully by Metzler’s front door. The building’s only exit was on the ground floor. The fire escape to the roof had long been nailed shut.
The banister guided her back down. Sybil was congratulating herself on her nerve and luck holding when the telephone rang and the block warden’s widow emerged to yell someone was wanted. Sybil watched the woman’s torch beam flashing around until it landed on her face and remained there, followed by an ear-piercing scream.
She launched herself, aiming for the torch, hit a cushion of flab, barged the woman aside, and, heart pounding, stumbled down the corridor as she had after the shooting, passing where she had been sick. She ran out of the building into the icy night, only to find her exit blocked by the arrival of another set of vehicles. Behind her men’s boots rang in the corridor as they gave chase.
Sybil thought of the bins as the only possible hiding place, then remembered the boiler room. It had been a common trysting space. A key was kept hidden behind a loose brick.
She felt her way along the wall. The vehicles’ cowled lights were like angry slits, too dim to reach her. The men in pursuit ran out into the yard.
Darkness masked Sybil as she fumbled for the key, cursing inwardly until her shaking hand found the lock and she cracked open the door and slid into pitch-black.
Feeling awkward and foolish, stuck alone in his apartment after deciding not to blow out his brains, Schlegel felt compelled to go downstairs to the dancehall where he drank one beer, listened to a tinny combo, saw sad people guiding each other around the floor and watched a woman sitting on her own. She was not so young but still beautiful and looked around as if waiting for someone, in between accepting invitations to dance. He would have asked, had he been capable.
The whole thing should have been plain, yet wasn’t.
The old man’s diary also made reference to a palm-reader who told the fortunes of senior Party members, who must be the woman he had encountered.
And the old man’s vision of radiance, was she the daughter mentioned, whose name had not been crossed off the arrest list?
The puddle of vomit at the scene of crime suggested the shootings had been witnessed. That much he’d told Stoffel. Was this witness the old man’s mystery woman?
Todermann. Schlegel did not recall any first name.
The palm-reader had said he was different. Not in any interesting way. If he were honest with himself, he found the world a bewildering place.
One side of him decided nothing was worth th
e bother.
Yet back in his rooms he wrote: Murder is a single-minded business.
And next to it: Suicide is a single-minded business.
And after that: The two don’t usually go together.
Schlegel looked at the medal again, then the book. Some pages had been removed, so neatly sliced that their absence was almost undetectable.
That night he dreamed of sheep’s bells and dusty roads, somewhere he had never been, a biblical landscape, he decided, even as he dreamed. The sheep moved in comfortable formation, led by a goat. In these days of hunger, he often dreamed of animals. Hogs. Bullocks. Pheasant. Plump turkeys. Horses. Perhaps his stepfather ate his knackered mares. He dreamed of the knife slash to the throat of the sacrificial offering and woke in the night with a start, to find himself drenched in blood, then woke again properly, aware of being famished before even fully awake, soaked from his own sweat.
When the men came and searched, Sybil squeezed herself into the narrow space between the cold boilers, hardly daring to breathe, until they made themselves nervous with talk of rats and left.
Listening to the relentless hammering coming from the block, Sybil drove herself half mad imagining it was her own coffin being nailed shut.
A few people found hiding were brought down and made to stand in the freezing cold until there were enough to fill a vehicle. Sybil listened to cries of despair and the occasional blow, followed by a scream of pain.
She hugged herself in an effort to preserve her body heat and reviewed her dwindling options. She was supposed to see Franz’s forger but still had no idea where, or if the arrangement still stood after yesterday’s arrests. According to Franz, the man had some kind of job with the Jewish Association, which meant he was probably protected, though who could say any more.
She needed Franz. The gamble seemed worth the risk of crossing town, as he was their only hope.
Sybil sensed dawn as an almost imperceptible grey under the line of the door. Her exhausted body gave no indication of having slept, though she must have because the hammering had stopped. She cracked the door open, her joints so stiff she could hardly stand. The yard was empty.
The warden’s apartment was silent. The man’s blood was still on the wall, dried to brown. Sybil left by the back way. Reaching the street, she experienced such giddy relief she thought she might keel over.
At the station there were telephones. Sybil called the hospital switchboard, which put her through to the night orderly room. She was in luck. Franz was there.
She spent the journey fighting panic, however much she told herself patrols wouldn’t operate so early on the week’s one day of rest. At Westkreuz a returning night-shift piled in and fell into a collective stupor. At Kaiserdamm two soldiers with rifles got on and Sybil had to make an instant decision about whether to get off. When one smiled she saw they were little more than boys. When she reached her stop they stepped aside. Their greatcoats smelled of mothballs. The walk to the hospital took ten minutes. Empty streets played havoc with her mind. There were only main roads, which left her exposed. She imagined patrols appearing from nowhere. She heard police sirens she was certain were coming for her.
Franz was waiting at the back by the kitchens. He gave her a salute like they were old comrades, which they were, in a way, although they had not kept in touch. He looked exhausted and wore scruffy overalls when he had always been such a sharp dresser. Sybil had once made him a double-breasted suit of which they were both especially proud, with a nipped waist and flattering trousers. He was thinner now, sallow, cheeks hollow, the spark dimmer.
She confessed she was at a loss to know what to do about his forger. She had spoken to the man once, the day before the roundup, on the direct number Franz had given her, along with a name so common she thought it almost certainly false.
‘What did you say?’
‘What you told me – that our mutual acquaintance Rosamund Hecht wished to invite him to her birthday party.’
‘And?’
‘He said he had heard. It was at two o’clock on Sunday and it was necessary to bring a large present as it was an important birthday. I said I wasn’t sure where to come or how large the present should be. He said that was for me to work out.’
She asked Franz how well he knew the man.
Franz gave a dismissive suck of his teeth. This is going badly, Sybil thought.
‘It doesn’t work like that. People keep everything separate now.’
‘What should I do?’
The blatant way he stared left her uncomfortable.
‘Go to the Association’s headquarters in Oranienburger Strasse at the time he told you. Ask at the main desk if there are any messages for Fräulein Hecht.’
Sybil thought she should have been able to work that out for herself.
‘Even so, you can’t walk in there without a pass.’
‘It’s a lesson. You are on your own. I know only what I have told you. If you want to find him so badly you will work out a way. That’s how it is. He knows that too. No one can afford to make it easy any more.’
On the train back, she realised her mother’s suitcase had not been in its usual place by the chest beside the bed. The luggage left in Metzler’s apartment indicated that their owners had been forbidden to pack. Only now did it strike her that her mother’s possessions, including her Tarot cards, were gone.
8
Schlegel spent Sunday at his mother’s, for the sake of a hot bath and a couple of square meals. It was a kind of normality he detested, but never enough to stop taking advantage of its comforts. This is you being hypocritical, said the voice in his head. Why not; everyone else was.
His mother was by contemporary standards horribly rich, with a big house in Westend. She drove herself around in a Hispano-Suiza, claiming that managing without a chauffeur was her contribution to the war effort. Schlegel’s stepfather came from a family that manufactured ball bearings, fitted into almost every conceivable moving part, on top of which he had made a fortune on the stock market.
Schlegel’s real father had been a Roman Catholic. His earliest memories were of being taken to Mass in Shanghai. His mother was English. It was an unusual alliance at a time when Germany and Great Britain had been at war for three years. Schlegel was the single result of the union, born 1918.
His mother was what she called English aristo, her mother half-German, a reflection of the complex intermingling of Anglo-German minor royalty. His father had been a civil official. Schlegel remembered only bay rum in jet-black hair, a pair of monogrammed brushes in a dressing room, cheeks that smelled of shaving soap, and polished shoes, black in the week, brown otherwise. His mother was always vague about what he did. ‘Something terribly boring, darling.’
His father’s subsequent whereabouts were almost never discussed, apart from his mother claiming he had gone to Argentina and was possibly dead. There was no death certificate, only a report of him having drowned, which had been passed on by the embassy in Buenos Aires.
‘In a river,’ his mother said, as though such an end were somehow vulgar. ‘And not even fishing.’
Schlegel could not decide to what extent his mother and stepfather were really married: the separate bedrooms; her society life; his racehorses, which took him away most weekends. He was a strange man, rather anonymous, not unlikeable, who rarely ventured an opinion. Unusually he was at home that Sunday, closeted in an enormous study where he spent a lot of time on the telephone.
Schlegel was sitting with his mother in the morning room. She had got up late and was eating breakfast and sucking a sugar lump – a luxury in itself – for a hangover.
They were briefly joined by Schlegel’s boss, Arthur Nebe, head of criminal police. His mother pulled a face when he was announced.
Under normal circumstances of rank and order, Schlegel would never have had to address Nebe, being so far beneath him, but Nebe was bound to acknowledge Schlegel because his stepfather was one of his oldest friends.
Nebe wore his uniform even though he was off duty. He ostentatiously kissed Schlegel’s mother’s hand.
‘Dear Arthur,’ she said.
Nebe smoothly made excuses to join Schlegel’s stepfather. Once he was gone and over cups of Darjeeling, which was brought in by a complicated smuggling process involving Japanese diplomatic immunity, his mother told him that Nebe had a reputation as a playboy, which he knew; that Frau Nebe remained invisible, which was certainly true as no one had ever seen her; and that Nebe was referred to behind his back as Top Dog, which Schlegel hadn’t known.
‘Why?’
‘Pedigree looks and attention to grooming.’ She took another sugar lump from a silver bowl. ‘Arthur has a very large nose, what one might call in certain circles a real Jewish conk.’
Schlegel conversed with his inner voice, which said, this is you stuck with your mother who always insists you behave more like friends.
She subjected him to her full range. The sniggers. The smut. The gossip. The peals of laughter. The risqué. That bitch Riefenstahl. Wallace Simpson as a sexual contortionist. Those ghastly Mitfords. His mother’s breakfasts were like runway rehearsals for her in later full flight. If nothing else, she always turned up immaculate and fully rehearsed. Even in a dressing gown she made sure her hair and make-up were perfect.
Schlegel pointed out how she had kept the English habit of putting her butter on the plate first rather than spread it directly on the toast.
‘You can hardly call this toast. They barely seem to know what toast is.’
Schlegel knew Nebe had a fondness for summoning underlings by telegram, usually to the Adlon, and stiffing them with extortionate drinks bills.
‘I do find his style rather too American,’ his mother said. ‘All that eating out, staying in hotels, even here in town, with rooms taken by the hour for his secretarial flings.’
Schlegel added that Nebe was known to go to the Fatima club, whose novelty feature was interconnecting telephones on all the tables.