16mm of Innocence

by Quentin Smith

  “Well…” Krause scratched his eyebrow on the left side as he lowered his head to study the papers. “Basically the testator explicitly forbids inheritance to be paid to any surviving family member, or descendants, with any Jewish ancestry.”

  Otto felt Krause’s eyes studying each of them in turn. He now understood why Krause had quizzed him about Sabine and he felt as if they were on trial, himself and his family being scrutinised for acceptability, just as Father and his Nazi colleagues had done in Neuengamme. History was repeating itself. How excruciatingly ironic, Otto thought.

  “I don’t see how this affects us,” Otto said, sweeping his arm to include Dieter and Ingrid.

  Ingrid squirmed in her seat, pulling at her dress with fingers hungry to be active.

  “Your father was a very specific man; he must have had someone in mind,” Krause said, with not a flicker of emotion on his face.

  “Did he never tell you?” Otto asked. “You were his friend for nearly thirty years.”

  Krause blinked a few times. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Is such a thing even legal?” Ingrid blurted. “It’s obscene.”

  “Well it’s not what we term contra bonus mores – in other words, contrary to public policy – and it’s not illegal or criminal, so yes… it has to be legally upheld.”

  Ingrid hugged herself even tighter, her chest rising and falling with each deep breath, staring at her feet. The room descended into silence, broken only by the self–conscious creak of leather as Otto moved in his chair. Then came a light tapping on the door.

  “Come!” Krause said, startling Otto.

  Miss Meyer entered with a tray, cups and a white porcelain pot emitting the delightful aroma of Arabica. She placed this on Krause’s desk subserviently.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Krause said.

  She left wordlessly.

  “Who makes the final decision on eligibility to inherit?” Dieter asked.

  “I do,” Krause said, “but if that is challenged, the courts of course.”

  Otto leaned forward, propelled by a sudden notion. “Look, it’s obviously not any of us, so was Father perhaps protecting himself – his estate – against claims from a possible love child?”

  Ingrid shot an intrigued look across at Otto, her fidgeting fingers suddenly motionless in anticipation.

  “Love child?” Krause repeated, frowning.

  “An illegitimate child, somewhere out there, born of a Jewish mother perhaps?”

  Krause almost spat out his cigar. “Your father? Never! He was a dignified and honourable man and would certainly not have consorted with any Jews.” He paused. “Those were his beliefs, a man of his generation.”

  An uncomfortable silence embraced the room. Otto met Ingrid’s searching stare.

  “But if no Jewish person is identified, and we know of no such person, then there is no contention of the will, surely?” Ingrid said, looking at Otto but turning to face Krause right at the end.

  Krause opened and then clasped his hands again. “Yes, of course you are right. The only thing troubling me is the matter of the child’s body… yet to be identified.”

  “If they identify it,” Ingrid said.

  “Yes,” Krause conceded. “If they identify it.”

  Otto suddenly felt hollow inside. How this body in the ground had crept into every aspect of their lives in the past week: Mother’s funeral, Mother’s will, Father’s past and now the spectre of unknown relatives with ancestry evidently abhorrent to him.

  “How can the body possibly influence the execution of Mother’s will?” Dieter asked in cautious tones.

  Krause made a small hand gesture. “In all probability, not at all. But, if there has been a crime…” he paused for effect, “the law must be satisfied that no parties have been unfairly or criminally advantaged.” He plugged his mouth with the cigar once more, eyes confident and small. “I doubt it will come to that.”

  “Is that it?” Ingrid asked. She looked pasty suddenly.

  Krause closed the folder on his desk. “More or less. As I said, it is essentially not a complicated will.” He looked at Ingrid, then Otto, then Dieter.

  Otto rapped his fingertips on the armrest of his chair, wondering how long they would have to wait for the investigation surrounding the body to be concluded.

  “Any questions?” Krause asked, rising behind his desk.

  “No,” Otto and Dieter said simultaneously as they stood.

  Krause looked at Ingrid.

  “What is there to say?” she said, rubbing her forehead.

  “Good. Then I will begin instructions. Shall I proceed to have the properties valued and place them on the market… or auction?”

  “Market,” Dieter and Otto replied together.

  “Auction,” Ingrid said emphatically. “We all have lives to get back to.” She sounded resentful.

  Krause smiled thinly. “Let me know when you have a decision.” His eyes settled on the refreshments. “Would anyone like coffee?”

  “No thank you,” Ingrid said quickly, rising from her seat.

  Otto and Dieter shared a bemused look and they moved en masse towards the door. Otto paused with his hand on the ceramic doorknob and turned to Krause.

  “So, my mother knew about this… condition?” Otto asked.

  Krause was standing with both hands in his trouser pockets, cigar clenched between his teeth. He returned Otto’s intense gaze for several moments before plucking the cigar out of his mouth.

  “As I said, she would have had to accept the fideicommissum when she inherited from your father. I cannot of course be certain that she was aware of every sub–clause and proviso, or that she read them carefully, but…” Krause raised his index finger in the air, “she could not alter any of them.”

  Otto stopped. “She couldn’t?”

  “No.”

  He became aware of Ingrid and Dieter’s increasing interest in the conversation as they hovered closer, like iron fragments drawn to a magnet.

  Krause stepped forward two paces. “But your mother and father were always very close, and I think it very likely they would have wanted the same thing.”

  Ingrid inhaled sharply, straightening. “You cannot possibly know that.” Her tone was bristling, accusatory.

  Krause seemed to retreat slightly. “No, I suppose not.”

  Thirty–Nine

  They stood in the blazing sunshine outside Krabbenhöft und Lampe in a momentary daze. Advancing ominously over the navy–blue ocean was a solid wall of fog; grey, impenetrable and unrelenting. The wind before it heralded the approaching Atlantic odours of kelp and salt.

  “What the hell did you make of that?” Dieter said, pushing his hands deep into his trouser pockets.

  Otto met his brother’s eyes but remained silent. His mind was still spinning from the rush of revelations over the recent days, as though a sluice–gate restraining the Adermann family history had been opened, releasing a tidal wave of surprises and anguish.

  “We need a taxi,” Ingrid said.

  “Don’t be silly, the house is just there,” Otto said, indicating with an outstretched arm. “Five minutes on foot.”

  “Do you think Dad might have had an illegitimate child?” Dieter said.

  “I don’t know. He certainly did spend a lot of time away from home,” Otto replied.

  They began to walk up Bismarck Street, gently helped by the onshore breeze bringing the coastal fog ever nearer. Ingrid pulled her fur coat around her neck.

  “What about Inez?” Dieter said.

  “Yes, Inez,” Otto reflected. “Her boyfriend was Jewish…

  “How do you know that?” Ingrid said sharply, her eyes dark and narrowed.

  “He’s buried in the Jewish cemetery,” Otto said, waiting for Ingrid to make eye contact.

  She walked on, tight–lipped.

  “Dieter uncovered an old newspaper article about Inez’s death in the Lüderitzbuchter. We found her boyfriend’s name – Neil Solomo
n – and traced him back to Keetmanshoop,” Otto explained.

  “You went to his grave?” Ingrid said incredulously, looking up momentarily at Otto.

  “Frans took us.”

  Ingrid looked flabbergasted.

  “But… if Inez had a child, then where is it?” Dieter said, making a face.

  Ingrid stopped walking and turned. Behind them the fog was beginning to blur the demarcations of Robert Harbour, engulfing the fishing fleet moored at the quayside. She opened her mouth to speak, and then seemed to change her mind.

  “Is that perhaps why Dad sent Inez to Otjiwarongo?” Otto said. “The old guy, Dr Abert, he couldn’t remember, or possibly didn’t know why he took her there for Dad.” He turned towards his sister. “Ingrid?”

  She seemed startled to be singled out and looked up, eyes wide. “What?”

  They turned into Bülow Street, the imposing footprint of their family home looming above them a short distance away – threatening, as ever, to slide down the angled black rock upon which it was built.

  “You must know what happened to Inez?” Otto said.

  Ingrid forced a contemptuous laugh. “Why me?”

  “You were old enough to remember.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t know.”

  “Perhaps you just don’t want to tell us,” Dieter said.

  Ingrid shot a look that could freeze lava at Dieter. “I warned you to shut it,” she hissed.

  Otto observed the icy exchange with curiosity. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Ingrid said quickly.

  “If you know something you need to come clean, Ingrid. There’s no more time for pissing about. Frans will know who the body is in a day or two and there’s this will thing hanging over us as well,” Otto said, studying his sister’s face closely.

  “What would you like me to tell you, Otto?” Ingrid challenged him, looking straight through him.

  Otto hesitated. “Let’s simply have the truth so we can get back to our lives and put this behind us.”

  Ingrid laughed coarsely, like a witch tending her cauldron. “The truth,” she said sarcastically, mocking Otto.

  They stopped at the foot of the long flight of steps up to the house. Otto scuffed the sandy road with his shoe. “Just tell us what you know,” he said.

  Ingrid looked away, left and right, hands on hips. She bit her lip.

  “Please,” Dieter said softly.

  Ingrid looked at him, and Otto thought he could discern something in her eyes: sadness, regret, perhaps even fear.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking,” she said, her eyes beginning to fill with moisture.

  “Will it implicate you?” Otto asked.

  Ingrid breathed in deeply and shrugged. She had that look about her that Otto had seen many times before: she didn’t want to be there.

  “We are a family, Ingrid. We will deal with this as a family,” Dieter said.

  Ingrid looked at Dieter, her estranged brother of many years who was now reaching out to her. She sniffed and wiped her nose. “You guys have no idea.”

  “We too have seen things that defy comprehension, Ingrid,” Otto said. “We have seen Inez’s boyfriend’s grave in the Jewish cemetery and we know how Dad despised Jews; we have seen images of Dad dressed in a Nazi uniform, consorting with people who were in all probability tried and executed after the war.” He stared into her eyes, frightened eyes yearning for escape. “We need to talk about what you remember, about what happened.”

  Otto was beginning to think that Ingrid was relenting, finally softening to their familial embrace.

  “I should never have come back,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew it would be a mistake.”

  Dieter sighed and began to climb the steps. Otto was losing patience and trying very hard to contain his mounting irritation and frustration with Ingrid’s lack of co–operation.

  “Why don’t you watch the film we found, and then make up your own mind?” Otto suggested, turning his back on her and following Dieter up the stairs.

  Forty

  Ingrid watched the flickering images on the screen. She recognised Father’s sharp features beneath his SS cap, remembered being up close to his neck when he had held her as a little girl, the neck that was now partially covered by a black and silver SS tunic lapel adorned with the sig–rune and insignia. The bold and proudly worn Nazi symbols diminished both his credibility and his pre–eminence as a father in her eyes.

  She pressed clammy palms together as she read the names of his comrades in arms – Trzebinski, Pauly, Heissmayer – names familiar to her in a chilling and yet indeterminate way. Why did she recognise them? Glancing to her right, she saw their ghostly images reflecting off the faces of Otto and Dieter, whose eyes were glued to the screen, engrossed yet simultaneously horrified, but seemingly unable to look away.

  Ingrid felt nauseous. She could not halt the tide of disclosure revealed on the screen; she could not deny its authenticity nor claim ignorance of the evident facts. A tightness was enveloping her, restricting her breath, accentuating her growing unease. History was catching up with her. It was catching up with all of them. As she stared at images of Father helping to administer arsenic to prisoners she began to doubt that her waning resolve to keep their past at bay could endure much longer.

  Seeing Father turn the prison labourer over to the guards because he was missing several fingers was a chilling reminder of his brutal capabilities. She had observed that icy disaffection at first hand, witnessed its calculated destruction as it tore into her beloved sister. Instinctively she covered her mouth with one hand, biting down on a knuckle.

  She recalled searching Father’s eyes for signs of humanity, acceptance and forgiveness, hoping to be able to convince him of tolerance and persuade him towards absolution for her sister’s sake. But she never found what she so desperately hoped to evoke in him, and consequently she never saw Inez again.

  Father’s unyielding face, his poised, self–assured eyes, so confident of his own moral righteousness, shone out of the screen images and impaled Ingrid in her heart. Seeing Father inhabiting a world that she had never known, never imagined, participating in medical crimes so heinous that most of those onscreen beside him were hanged soon after the war ended, left Ingrid gasping for air, realising that the father she had struggled to know and failed to love was in reality an unlovable beast. History had finally judged him.

  Otto and Dieter never once took their eyes off the screen. Ingrid felt a sudden inexplicable pang of empathy for them, caught up in Father’s conspiratorial web of congenital evil when they were still so young and impressionable, oblivious to the extent and depravity of his fervour. What a shock this must have been to them.

  By the time the images of young boys and girls being probed and painfully injected by sadistic hands glared at her from the screen, Ingrid’s eyes were swimming with tears, blurring the monochrome images of unimagined savagery that glimmered before her. Droplets soaked into her silk dress, forming craters of deepening anger.

  Twenty lifeless souls, still dressed in threadbare and ill–fitting coats and trousers, suspended barefoot like puppets by their murderers in the shadowy retreats of yesterday’s oblivion. But it had surfaced to haunt them yet again.

  Ingrid rose suddenly and rushed to the bathroom, retching her anger and shame into the toilet. She was not of such stock, not capable of such heinous acts and to demonstrate this she had tried to put distance between herself and her parents, those who had been accomplices to unimaginable injustices.

  So why had she colluded? She cried out and vomited more, trying to expel the demons from her soul.

  Forty–One

  The phone rang and Dieter answered it in a few strides. He was expecting it to be Jim, and could not hide his disappointment.

  “Oh, hello Frans.”

  “Dieter?” Frans sounded unsure.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “How did it go with Willem Krause today?�
�� Frans asked.

  Dieter made a face. “OK, I guess; nothing earth–shattering. Mum’s estate is left to the three of us.”

  “OK, that’s good then,” Frans said. “Listen…”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve had a call from our forensic division to say that the scientists in England are having difficulty with the quality of the DNA in those bones. They were in the ground a long time, you see.”

  “Meaning?” Dieter asked, cradling the phone against his shoulder.

  He could hear Frans sucking air through his teeth. “Well, at best it’s going to take longer.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know. Days, weeks.”

  “I’ve got to get back to Hong Kong, Frans. I’ve got a business to run,” Dieter said.

  “I know, I know. We can’t expect you all to hang around here – I mean, we may not get any answers.”

  Dieter switched the phone from one ear to the other. “Really?”

  “I guess it’s possible.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Dieter asked.

  “Just tell Otto and Ingrid. Is she there?”

  “Yes.” Dieter nodded.

  “I’ll need to speak to her again. Maybe tomorrow. Tell her, please.”

  “OK, Frans.”

  Forty–Two

  It was evening, the setting sun ingested by a shroud of fog that threatened to consume the very fabric of Lüderitz. Ingrid said that she had to get out of the house, unable to be surrounded any longer by the symbols of a family past that she abhorred. They walked three abreast, Otto separating Ingrid and Dieter, down Nachtigall and Diaz Streets to reach the rocky and menacing esplanade beside the bay. Visibility was less than ten yards and the waves breaking onto the shoreline could be heard but not seen.

  Otto spoke first. “Did you know about any of that?”

  He glanced at Ingrid, her eyes still puffy and pink, staring ahead emptily, raw from what they had been watching.

  “I suspected that Dad had a military connection, even wondered years later about whether he was in the SS because he was always so secretive about his past at home.” She pushed her hands into her mink coat pockets, shuddering slightly. “But I never dreamt…”