by Nir Baram
‘You mean the night when the treaty with the Soviet Union was signed wasn’t a great event?’ Weller asked.
‘More or less.’ Thomas was surprised by his own sincerity. ‘When we started to put together the models of national character for Poland, France and Italy, the first stage was a simple historical survey of those nations. Naturally we ran into problems from the start. For instance, when exactly does a nation come into being? But I’ll tell you a secret: all the surveys were boringly similar. Every period is dominated by some mighty power—that prince, king, empire, conqueror, et cetera—with endless wars and even more treaties. I instructed them to throw it all in the trash, and look at other details. What commerce took place between northern and southern Italians? How sweet and expensive were the grapes grown on the Cinque Terre hills that slope down to the coast at Genoa? How did the French adjust to secular schools? Every period has its own nuances, but the grand sweep of history is always forged from the same principles. The Roman Empire disappeared in the fifth century; it was no more than an episode in history. A long time before it, in the beginning of the twelfth century BC, the Mediterranean basin was destroyed, entire cultures were wiped out, and the region was relegated to darkness for centuries. Then different empires appeared: the Greeks, and the Romans, and the one after that. The Poles and Lithuanians once had an empire, and they defeated our ancestors in battle. And now’—he waved his hand at the horizon of Warsaw—‘look at us today.’
Weller had closed his eyes. He opened them. ‘Heiselberg, doesn’t the thousand-year Reich have any meaning for you?’
‘There won’t be a thousand-year Reich. That’s not a human timespan. In another thousand years perhaps there won’t be any snow in the world.’ Seeing Weller’s astounded face, he wondered whether he had gone too far. ‘Clearly my hope is that there will be a great empire in the lifetimes of as many generations as possible.’
‘I’d lose my sanity if I thought about the world that way,’ Weller protested.
‘On the contrary. Think of that night you missed in Moscow as a minor episode, like that tiny cloud. And Stalin, whom you want to meet so much, is, let’s say, a slightly bigger cloud, like one of the Hittite kings.’
They sat in silence. The sky turned grey, and a weak glow came from the streetlights that had survived the bombing. A rumble of thunder was heard.
‘I’m tired.’ Weller rose heavily. ‘Let’s go home.’
They reached the corner of Marszałkowska and Jerozolimskie, turned left and started walking rapidly towards Nowy Swiat. It started to rain, and there was more thunder. They sheltered under the awning of a café.
‘Look.’ Thomas pointed at a poster on the facade of a hotel. ‘It’s an advertisement for soap, see? There’s a running deer. But why is there a circle around it? What kind of dream are they selling people? Run fast, and you’ll always be trapped in a circle?’
Weller didn’t answer. He made a dash for the bakery next door. Through the window Thomas saw him buy a loaf of bread and a jar of mushrooms. When he came out, he smelled the bread and said to Thomas, ‘We’ll have a fine dinner. You’re going to have the best soup in Europe.’
His gloomy exhaustion seemed to have vanished. When they reached their building, Weller said, ‘From the way you spoke about the advertisement, I sense that you still think about your life in that American business.’
‘It’s hard to erase more than a decade invested in one company.’
For a month he hadn’t said that word. For years he had said it dozens of times a day: ‘Milton’, ‘the Milton company’, ‘we at Milton’. Could a man like Weller, who had jostled with bureaucrats of his own kind all his life—even Frau Tschammer had more intelligence than most of them—understand what real action was like? It was hard to be reconciled with the fact that everything you had achieved in one of the most difficult markets in the world had evaporated because of abstract struggles that had nothing to do with you. But the betrayal of the Milton people was worse. They had arranged another position for Carlson Mailer, but cut loose the man who had made the German branch and its sub-branches his lifework. He carried the cartons out of the office himself. And he, innocent as he was—he only understood how innocent when he started job-hunting in the newspaper—had always believed that Milton was also his company.
The old doorman pulled his hands out of his coat pockets and stood to attention. He opened the creaking iron gate, and they walked down the dark tunnel that led to the courtyard. The two upper floors of the right-hand building had been smashed by the bombing of the Luftwaffe. Only the galvanised downpipe remained erect, like a mast. Someone had hung a flag from it. They turned to a white building whose first floor was decorated with frescoes, sgraffiti and a niche sheltering a statue of the Virgin. Lights glowed from the windows. A tango could be faintly heard.
They climbed the steps. Thomas urged Weller to give him his first Russian lesson now.
‘Uspokoytyes, vy slishkom uvlekayetyes,’* Weller answered and hummed the first line of the anthem: ‘Poland has not yet been lost.’ Both of them had a weakness for childish humour that reversed the order of things. Just a week ago they had visited a church as part of their initiative to speak with moderate priests, and when they walked between the wooden pews, they chuckled together. Weller sang, ‘Jesus, I live for you,’ and Thomas intoned, ‘Oh, Mary, save me.’
Outside the doors on the first floor hung grey military shirts caked with mud, dry leaves and thin red streaks.
It wasn’t until Weller gripped his sleeve and started to pull him upstairs that Thomas noticed he was frozen to the spot. He was dragged along, dizzy, until Weller relaxed his grip. They climbed the stairs, and he saw the mud stains on the wall. One of the soldiers had probably cleaned his boots there. Dry red flakes dotted the floor.
On the second floor stood a row of four pairs of boots. The boots on
the right were brown. The leather at their tips was black-violet. Mud, leaves and pine needles were stuck to the soles. A brown shirt with buttons, spotted with bloodstains, was hanging on the door handle. Thomas had a strange urge to turn the boots over and inspect the soles.
‘Are you coming?’
When he raised his eyes, Weller had already disappeared. Thomas raced after him to the third floor. On the landing he encountered two pairs of upside-down boots. Thomas stared at them and stifled a scream. A thick layer of dried blood clung to the soles. He felt a thump in his chest; he took a groaning breath. The black veils descended around his face. For the first time in his life he wanted to wrap himself up in them, in the darkness.
He muttered something and sat down on one of the steps, gripping the rickety banister. In his imagination he saw Clarissa leaning on the door while he was standing in the stairwell, the valise in his hand. With a smile she whispered, ‘You’re not moving from here.’ Her face was flushed, she approached, pressed against him and he—something stuck in his mind like an annoying leaf to a shoe, a sentence that Fiske once quoted out of a book: ‘The right proportion for a woman’s head? About an eighth of the length of her body.’
The banister swayed, and his hand scraped against the rust encrusted on it. He was filled with shame, as though summoning an image of Clarissa to pull him through his weakness had polluted her.
‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’ Weller sounded flat. ‘I could call Dr von Wirsch on the first floor.’
He looked up at Weller. The idea that one of them might go back down to the first floor produced a ghastly shared laugh-yawn, which begged to be released. Damn it, that was the best joke the man had ever made.
Weller came downstairs and stood between him and the boots, one hand holding the bag of bread, the other reaching out. ‘Heiselberg,’ he ordered. ‘We’re going to our apartment.’
He imagined bodies and faces spinning round, drenched in blood, the parade of souls, coughing and panting, that had come down these stairs in the last month. These were the tenants who had been driven out—university lecturer
s, a former member of parliament, a journalist, clutching coats and blankets, loaves of bread, sausages and cheese, big squares of butter melting into the blankets—and the young German officer making them hurry. Afterwards the officer had joked to the new tenants, ‘You only need one sentence in Polish: “He’s off to work, he’ll be back in the evening.”’
Thomas tripped on the steps. Weller pushed him up. When they reached the top floor Weller sat him down on an armchair in the parlour. The room was redolent with the warm smell of meat and bay leaves. Thomas saw him pick up a silver ladle near the wood stove, and stir the big pot.
‘Eight hours on a low fire, and you’ll see how great it is,’ he called out. ‘My grandmother made me swear to cook this stew only on a wood fire.’
Thomas watched the goldfish in the aquarium. In the light from the streetlamp the fish looked like an orange serpent, spitting fire. A little red scratch twisted on his palm.
Weller spread a cloth on the table in the dining alcove and put deep soup bowls onto white plates. On either side he arranged silver forks and knives and soup spoons with gold-plated handles, the legacy of the previous owners. Weller surveyed the table with satisfaction and returned to the pot. Now he hurried towards Thomas with the ladle. ‘Taste, Heiselberg, you have to taste, it’s a delicacy.’
Thomas felt the heat of the stew. He sipped from the spoon. The liquid burned his tongue, and the taste was thick and rich. His breathing settled. Weller came to the table holding the steaming pot, and again he complained that in Germany, in all Europe really, they hadn’t yet understood the potential of root vegetables. ‘I believe that this time I prepared a wondrous meal, worthy of honourable diplomats like us,’ he grunted with pleasure. ‘My dear friend, I beg you to learn to enjoy a fine meal at last.’
Thomas remembered that he was hungry.
…
The days passed swiftly. Thomas worked harder than he had ever done at Milton, beginning at 8 a.m. and finishing late. They participated in meetings full of idle chatter, with dozens of people, and whole days were frittered away—a phenomenon that Thomas called ‘the Germans’ chronic shortage of time’. They provided evaluations of the situation to the Foreign Office; they wrote dozens of letters every week, and they had to keep the model of the Polish national character up to date. Von Ribbbentrop wanted a new edition by March 1940, and this time it would be bound as a book. Von Ribbentrop proposed removing the word ‘national’ from the title, and his associate Martin Luther announced that this would make the new edition glow with precious light in many people’s eyes.
‘In 1940 we’ll erase “national”, in 1941 we’ll erase “Polish”, and in 1942, the word “man”,’ Thomas laughed.
Weller did not appreciate humour of that kind. He believed that cultured people should exercise irony rather than cynicism, and that black humour was the province of nihilists.
Before long, at least in the view of some who consulted it, the scientific approach of the model endowed it with the power of prophecy, and they began to ask questions that implicitly required the delegates of the Foreign Office in Warsaw to predict the future. Thomas and Weller resisted such inquiries, but a predictive tone nonetheless sometimes crept into their answers. They took care to offer these forecasts with a bundle of reservations, of course: while certain events were likely to occur, so were others.
Inquiries were received from every conceivable quarter, ranging from the highest levels of the Reich to a minor intelligence officer from Lublin. One question that gave Thomas particular satisfaction was received in early 1940 from the office of Carl Krauch, chairman of the board of I. G. Farben; the company, in cooperation with the government, intended to build gigantic factories at a cost of 800 million Reichsmark in Upper Silesia, near the city of Oświȩcim. Would the honourable representative of the Foreign Office analyse the composition of the population in the region and recommend a strategy to enlist the Poles in support of the project? Thomas devoted a week to a report that would impress Krauch, and attached a personal letter in which he implored Krauch to consult his office on any matter.
Someone from the Gestapo asked whether the Poles, as a group that had been oppressed for many generations by foreign conquerors, had developed manipulative techniques to arouse empathy. Their men complained that they found it hard to behave with sufficient severity towards the Poles. Weller claimed that the model could not answer such a cruel question, and Thomas accepted his opinion. Weller was also the one who insisted on responding to the inquiry of the Foreign Office in Berlin about the lies being circulated by the Poles regarding atrocities committed by the occupying Germans: were there precedents for this ‘Polish tendency to exaggerate’? Surely these accusations had been directed against other occupiers—the Russians, or the AustroHungarians. From a historical perspective, was it possible to characterise the Poles, like the Jews, as chronic exaggerators?
Many officials—including Goebbels, Rosenberg, the gauleiters of Reichsgau Wartheland, Danzig and West Prussia—completely ignored the model and forbade their subordinates to send questions to them. Krüger, the commander of the SS and the police in the Generalgouvernement, was contemptuous, but the district governor admired it. Hans Frank, the governor-general of Poland, had limited respect for it. Heydrich regarded it as ‘a harmless project of the Foreign Office, which is begging for a bit of involvement in Poland’, and therefore SS men were permitted to address questions to them.
The speed with which their office became a well-known agency of the Third Reich didn’t surprise Thomas: any new organisation, whether a regime of soft-brained bullies or a company that sold the inner organs of corpses, would gradually adopt jargon, ceremonies, departments and nicknames testifying to its acceptance, though it had at first glance seemed totally monstrous.
As expected, Weller rejected opinions of that kind and called those who held them ‘degenerate and pathological’. In his opinion, the rise of the model was a tribute to devoted work, clever strategy, to the disorder that prevailed in Poland, which forced confused government agencies to seek advice.
Despite the accelerated pace of work, Weller did not change his habits. He read all the newspapers, and took an hour and a half for lunch. Sometimes, out of personal interest and a sincere desire to help his country, he devoted himself to tasks that had nothing to do with his duties. In response to the venomous criticism by Britain—the object of Weller’s deep hatred—of the German bombing of Poland, he spent two weeks making a list of all the places where the Royal Air Force had bombed and killed civilians from the end of the Great War until the present. He roamed around the office as though possessed: ‘In India—endless, of course. And in Yemen, Palestine and Iraq. And in Africa—in Uganda and Kenya, and nowhere did they face a threat like Poland’s threat to us, so how do they dare?’ To clinch his point he would quote Tacitus. ‘Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.’* The way officials from the Foreign Office could waste precious hours chattering about things beyond their control amused Thomas.
Weller, though wasting time was a matter of principle for him, constantly complained about how much he had to do. Thomas preferred days when he was in the grip of work fever, when he had no time to think, to yearn, to confront the knowledge that another lonely day had passed. Only when he lay in bed at night, hearing music and laughter in the apartments of young officers, did he imagine a blank sheet of paper, and on it, a letter to Clarissa.
‘In my childhood, I hoped, just like U, to become a great man. He was enchanted by the natural sciences and modern engineering, and I, who belonged to the next generation, was drawn to the world of merchandise and sales. From my youth I was attracted to it, and that was the world I knew and studied. Until recently I had no reason to see that choice as a mistake. On the contrary, it seemed that the spirit of the age tended in that direction; even Lenin, the great Communist, instructed his people to learn to trade. U was disappointed when he understood that he wouldn’t find answers in the paths of knowledge he had pursued, and I was p
arted from my calling by fate. In a way both U and I were confronted with a moment when the certainties of our lives collapsed. We were forced to start from scratch. To acquire new qualities…’
There was something amusing about it: he wrote to her only in his head, not leaving a single incriminating page behind, but he disguised Ulrich, Musil’s hero, as U. He had taught even his imagination a lesson or two in caution, and remembered not to mention the hero of a banned novel.
One night he wrote again in his head: ‘The inability to act on love is a curse that has been cast upon me. Recently I realised that she was right, the woman who told me that I would always be alone if I didn’t do something about it. Perhaps these nights in Warsaw, in which I lie in a strange bed in an apartment that isn’t mine, sharpen the dread of loneliness I have always known. Feelings of longing, possibly exaggerated, rage in my soul, and I think of you, my dear, on the day when you removed from the mantelpiece the brass-plated rifle shells that my father had collected on the battlefield, along with his Iron Cross, and the picture of nine young men in uniform, and reserve officer Werner Heiselberg in the Forest of Argonne at sunrise. Seven of them were killed, another lost an arm and a leg, and the ninth lost his brother, his young wife and his money, and committed suicide. Only my father survived. Even my mother, who casually kicked him out of the house, didn’t dare remove those items from the mantel. And you? You didn’t say a thing, and two days later they had disappeared.
‘Allow me to remind you of at least two sun-drenched mornings in Grünewald and the laughter in your eyes after you had bargained down the cost of the ticket on the Stadtbahn, and how, after you scolded the conductor, he reduced the fare because you were a member of the NSV. And I insist on adding several other Sundays in the ice-cream parlour in Olivaer Platz, where the counter staff took such a liking to you that they prepared a special platter of mixed flavours so that you could decide which was strongest. I think of those days, and how wonderful you were; remember Rilke’s lines: Liebender, euch, ihr in einander Genügten,/ frag ich nach uns. Ihr greift euch. Habt ihr Beweise?’*