What happened thereafter, I cannot report in any chronological order. I snatched the kitchen knife that was on the table and thrust it into her left breast, perhaps I pulled it out and stabbed her again, because she was moaning. I dealt her several blows with my fists, very probably before stabbing her, and in between the two acts of stabbing and beating — or perhaps it was even before stabbing, but in any case, before seeing all the blood — I busied myself with her sexually. Then I fell asleep. I am not sure how long I lay there next to her, nor am I sure what else I did. I have the vaguest memory of washing myself and using a brush to remove the blood from my body. I also tried washing my shirt, but gave up on that. In the morning, I covered the corpse with a sheet, switched off the light, and left the apartment. Then I took the first train to the police station, and having demanded to be put under arrest, I handed in my revolver and belt.
Looking back on that night’s proceedings, Erich Hagel could attest in the positive to the act of strangulation. When asked “What did you do next?” or “Did you also stab and beat her?” he described the moments of stabbing and beating in the order above. He could not recall any instances of biting. Only dimly could he remember feeling some resistance in his mouth. At the end of his report, when asked at what point he had attempted sexual intercourse, he stated that the precise memory of that moment eluded him.
The mortal shell of Ella Feigenbaum was released one week later, and put to rest quietly. Miss Feigenbaum’s mother saw to the funeral costs. Three weeks later she received a box by registered post. In it were her daughter’s diary, address book, three bundles of letters, and some photos. Scandalized by the police procedure — no one had informed her that her daughter’s intimate writings had been confiscated — Mrs. Feigenbaum demanded a detailed report on the course of the investigation. She learned that the discovery of a printing press in the bedroom had prompted a larger scale investigation of her daughter’s activities and circle of friends — an investigation that soon proved fruitful.
In a cellar Miss Feigenbaum rented, brochures and leaflets of subversive content were seized. Mrs. Feigenbaum was also informed of the constant stream of male visitors received by her daughter. In the case of such loose-living women, Detective Mehring took the liberty of adding, one could hardly be surprised by a violent form of death.
As far as the personal motive of her daughter’s murderer, Mrs. Feigenbaum reached no satisfactory conclusion. According to the doctor’s autopsy report at court, Ella Feigenbaum died from internal bleeding caused by stab wounds to the heart and lungs. The bruises on the neck, and the bite wounds on the breasts, calves, and thighs, along with the damage to the external genitalia — scratches, most likely — were of a superficial nature, and did not lead to death.
In spite of his memory lapses, Erich Hagel was declared accountable, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In May 1929, he was placed in solitary confinement, and was due to be transferred to a temporary institution. In August 1931, he was pardoned thanks to the persistent intervention of a member of the Reichstag from the Deutschnationalen Volkspartei.
The diaries and notebooks of the murdered woman led to the arrest of several communist agitators and the deportation of a Polish man. They were returned only in part to her mother.
The printing press was auctioned at a charity ball held by the police in 1934. It went, after a special permit had been obtained in writing from the Gestapo, to the local group leader, Dieter Walter, who had immediate plans for it.
The “mysterious murder” was written about in fifteen articles by the national press. Journalists reported the details of Ella Feigenbaum’s murder during the first week of the trial, but the story was dropped a few days later, just before Hagel’s sentence. Only one editor of a culture magazine, a certain Dr. Justus Bernstein, Ph.D., picked up the case again; a much-shortened version of his article appeared in the special spring edition.
All in all, two files were filled with the “Feigenbaum Case.” The files were forwarded to the attention of the State Court, the Court of Appeal, and to the High Command. The collected information was to prove most useful even years later.
Dry Earth
(Five Grams of Clock Parts)
A SHORT PASSAGE OF NO REAL PURPOSE, other than general relaxation.
Were the Fates feeling benevolent? Or was it the couple’s carelessness that allowed the door to yield with a soft sigh? The children darted, one after the other, into the barn with its aroma of hay and wood, and drew to a halt, listening out for a noise from the enemy ranks.
But nothing stirred. No “Who’s there?” no angry shout, not even a rustling disturbed the silence. Only their own quick breathing echoed off the walls. Cautiously they took another step, and another, another. And then they heard it, quiet, suppressed, but escaping nonetheless, oozing thickly down from the hay: the throaty laugh of a woman, exotic to their ears. Neither their mother nor their father, even during his evenings with his friend Bernstein in the study, laughed like that. Yes, the children had a feeling that this laughter hanging in the air over their heads, uncanny, was not meant for them. It was the sort of laughter that means one wants to be alone.
But now they simply had to know. One after the other, they clambered up the ladder to the hayloft. As always, curiosity won out over fear, for the children were determined not only to hear, but also to see what the tavern owner’s son was doing in the barn with the waitress, while outside the band hired for the evening struck up a cheerful polka.
One ought to visualize the scene as follows: The waitress and the owner’s son, not suspecting a thing, are up there — in what state will be revealed — in the hay. The waitress is laughing the aforementioned laugh, strange to the children’s ears. As to whether the owner’s son is also emitting noises, let us leave that one open for now. Meanwhile the children, about two meters below, are advising one another with hand signals or perhaps through whispers what they should do next. Then they climb up the ladder.
So, we have three children standing on the ladder, jostling one another, for they do not want to miss a thing, and two adults in the hay. So, we have three pairs of children’s eyes, perhaps also a nose or two, but certainly no mouths as they are keeping themselves hidden as far as possible. They strain forward, a couple of inches above the floor, intending to watch from this unusual angle, from below, a reclining couple. But what they see — just to mention it briefly before introducing the characters — is something quite different.
Let’s not do it by age, or alphabetically, but rather by pecking order.
That would make Vera Lipmann first: a contrary girl with pale freckled skin. Her brother Hermann, older by two years: top of the class, gentle, a Karl May expert. Oswald Blatt: he is beaten into submission once a week, wears checked shirts, and is expected to follow in his father’s (the village schoolteacher) footsteps. Franzi Zink, the tavern owner’s son: an only child, he will inherit the bar one day. The waitress, Berti: chubby, good-hearted, and lazy.
We should refrain from adding any further defining features here. For this example of childlike curiosity is not supposed to explain or prove anything. Nor do we want to claim any right to investigate the personal motives in detail. The reader can breathe a sigh of relief. He or she will be spared the economic, political, psychological, biological, legal, and ideological specifics.
So what do the children see? They see a kneeling man and a woman standing with legs wide apart like a goddess, her head bent back as though challenging the invisible stars. A woman, then, and the outline of a man, who, judging by his checked bottom half facing the spectators, is none other than the owner’s son: only he sports pants of such tasteless material.
The children see his bottom half, then — red and white checks with dark stripes running through — they also see his arms, stretched upward, and his sizable torso, but not his head. In other words, they see a headless man, and this prompts an interesting philosophical question: whether reality is what our senses take in, or rather
recognition based on experience and knowledge.
Yes, the children did not realize immediately, only after their initial shock (they had expected something, but not this), that his head had not come off, that the owner’s son had not been beheaded by a waitress consumed by madness. Instead, quite simply, his head was nestled into the cozy hollow between the waitress’s enormous breasts, as though he were taking a rest.
But no peace reigns supreme for long. The waitress, feeling her neck start to stiffen, turned her head to the left then to the right, and, when her gaze wandered over the hay and landed on the heads of the three children, she almost toppled over with astonishment.
“There, look there, there,” she stammered, pushing the owner’s son aside, and drawing her blouse over her breasts, trembling. She pointed to the ladder, and tried to explain with these clumsy words what had disturbed her.
“What’s wrong?” asked the owner’s son, getting up heavily.
Thinking of saving their skin and of the powerful fists of the owner’s son, the children took flight, and climbed helter-skelter down the ladder. And since despite their urgency they could only use the ladder one after the other — the man was now standing threateningly above them — Hermann, who had dared go highest, simply jumped the last few rungs and sprained his foot. Limping to the door, he was the only one to catch an earful of angry words from the owner’s son.
The owner’s son could avenge himself only with words, for any physical punishment to the children would have necessitated his confessing that he had been in the barn with Berti, and under no circumstances did he want that. And as he should not have been in the barn, certainly not with Berti and certainly not at this time of day, he had therefore not been in the barn, and thus he could not have seen children trespassing on someone else’s property, who in their turn could not have seen him, because he, as already mentioned, had never been there.
Therefore, and not through lack of wanting it on the part of the owner’s son — oh, how he would have loved to have beaten up just one of the children — the adventure came to its dramatic end with the chaotic retreat and, as a result thereof, Hermann’s sprained ankle.
After four or five days the swelling went down, and with it the fear of retaliation, for no one knew about the owner’s son’s domineering mother, his Achilles’ heel, whose connection to his feet was the fact that he still did not stand on his own. Yes, when not a bruise or scratch remained as proof of the incident, it became a memory. Memory as fragmentary as dry earth in the heat of summer. Soon, no trace survived other than as entries in Vera’s diary and a geometrical drawing completed the very next day. It was of a dark-colored circle hemmed in by two long flesh-colored ellipses, and seemed to rest on a bulging rectangle, a checked cube. To make it three-dimensional, Vera had stuck on a winding coil and some cogs that had come out of an old broken watch of her mother’s. For our heroine simply did not have words for such an experience.
The Story of Little Lowy
(A Single Postage Stamp)
I WILL NOT INTRODUCE MYSELF. You may call me W. or E., as you wish. I am a child of my time. No better or worse than many others. Men of my stamp inhabit this world rather successfully. We eat too much meat, smoke too much tobacco, and lend too much importance to the female physique. Every fifty years or so we engage in war in the name of some interchangeable truth, so that our world, overpopulated in some places, thins out a bit. In between, we pour our energy into creating families. We are herd animals, cannot live alone, and look for a suitable partner early on.
I was born in 1918. I had my first erection when I was ten years old, and the first hint of downy male hair at twelve. The first time I looked at a naked woman, with an, as yet, untrained eye, I was six. My smooth upper lip opened to a wide “Ah” (nothing down below moved yet). It was, by the way, one of those harmless little pictures, which were enormously popular back in my youth, a picture of a busty siren stretching her pink buttocks toward the beholder.
Later, I collected a whole album of those pictures. I got them with my pocket money from a dealer on the run, and sold them at double the price at school. From an early age I understood the laws of the market. I offered my schoolmates the old, tatty ones, ones that had already served their purpose for me, in order to stock up on new, more daring positions.
My mother discovered my collection in a box under my bed during her big annual cleanup. With a great hue and cry she confiscated them. My father did not let this opportunity slip through his fingers, and gave me one of my last spankings, turning my bottom a rosy red color. I saw the pictures again one day while carrying out some research in my parent’s living-room cupboard. The liquor was kept next to the playing cards, and, as I was taking out the good brandy tucked away behind the crystal glasses in a corner, I saw them. They were in the same bashed-up shoe box and belonged now, it appeared, to my father. I felt hurt, and wanted to ask my mother why what was considered dirty in one place was allowed in another, but following a gut feeling I let it go.
I would have had to explain what I was looking for in the liquor closet, and would probably have been awarded a smart slap on the ear. That is when I understood that there are different levels of justice: one for the strong, and a more diluted version for the weak. But my formative years are not the subject at hand. By the time I am going to talk about now, I had moved on from still life to living models and had taken to bending over and squinting through various keyholes. Those little pictures had lost all charm for me. By the way, a few years after rediscovering them I sold the pictures to the younger brother of a school friend. I had got him hooked on this hobby by giving him his first picture free. Neither my mother nor father ever asked for them back.
But let us skip this interesting chapter of my biography. Following the strict rules of selection, we ought to leave the erection and all the rest of it behind. For, although I could not answer “how,” or “why,” I do know “when” it all began. And now I will tell the story of Little Löwy.
I am fifteen and have been given a hunting knife on which two words are engraved, which could leave no young boy cold: blood and honor. I think of the words as I proudly polish the blade until it shines. Blood and honor, and I believe I know the meaning of them: honor I know, or think I know, and blood belongs to knife, as salt does to bread.
And what of Little Löwy at this time? He must have been fourteen or fifteen years old, not so little, I admit, but he was stuck with the name as he was smaller than his father the watchmaker. So he was always called Little Löwy, even when he was fourteen or fifteen, except when he was taught a lesson — but that belongs to the next chapter — when he was known simply as Jewish Pig.
He will have done what all boys of our age did. He will have compared airplanes and racing cars, stolen something in the shop next door, smoked his first cigarette in the school toilets or in the playground, collected little pictures — he was not one of my clients, but there were several sources, for where demand is high, business flourishes. Some scratches and grazes, wet dreams, torn trousers, faded shirts, maybe a broken leg: just the normal bill of fare.
But let us begin at the beginning and indeed, as in every novel that considers itself as such, with the description of a building:
Our house was a modern building. I do not say that to brag in any way, rather to set the scene properly. We had a front garden, complete with a lilac bush, lawn, and a paved path. The lilac bush had not blossomed properly for quite a few years, but had managed to retain the respect of the tenants in spite of its feeble old age, and that says something about its former splendor. There were double-glazed windows on the second floor; a balcony with decorative railings for each apartment; a backyard; a rod for beating the carpets; a shed; gray detachable shutters chosen, after a long and hard search, from the firm Hinkel and Sons (my mother was very conscientious about such things); and, coming to the point, a central hot water heater down in the basement, which was operated solely by me.
So one day I’m down t
here again, shoveling in more coke. I’ve taken off the sweater that my mother knitted me for Christmas, and pushed up my shirtsleeves. It is Friday, and I’m sweating. My mother does the washing for the house, and earns a little extra that way. I help her like the good son I am, and shovel so that she has enough hot water.
I heap in a hefty shovelful, and because it’s tiring work, but not intellectually challenging, I decide to take a look out of the basement window to see what’s going on up there in the yard. Of course, I do not expect to see anything other than the carpet rod and the washing line, attached to it: various items of clothing belonging to the tenants are on display already, including, far be it from me to hide anything, a battalion of flesh-colored bras.
So I open the hatch, more out of boredom than real interest, raise my head in anticipation of those blown-up upper raiments, and instead see two short legs which I recognize immediately. No one other than Löwy has legs like those. I ask myself what he’s doing there in our yard, thinking that he is really asking for it, when his two trotters start trampling on the ground so fast it almost makes me dizzy. Then I hear one of our tenants giggling. Her name is Vera and she is three years younger than me.
Now I am intrigued. What on earth can the second-floor tenant want with that lardball? I gather from the giggling and the wiggling of legs that something important is afoot.
I interrupt my Friday afternoon role of water-heater-upper for a moment and go upstairs, but not directly to the yard: he will get his face smashed in later, I think to myself, but first I just want to take a look, to size up where best to step in. I go to a strategic post, one I have often used because of its wide view of the whole yard almost — our kitchen. The window there is useful for a second reason, too: from here you can see everything while not being seen.
The Inventory: A Novel Page 3