Good People

by Nir Baram

  He stared at her. ‘They say that recently you rose to great heights in Leningrad.’

  ‘The smaller a person is,’ she said, ‘the more he needs wild rumours.’

  He cracked his knuckles, enjoying her answer. Hope blazed up in her that the memory of their nights would grow warmer.

  ‘Last week,’ he said, ‘when you were still in Leningrad, did you by chance read Leningradskaya Pravda?’

  He knew something. ‘It’s been two years since I read that paper.’

  ‘So you didn’t read the long poem, ‘See, Soldier Dmitry’?’

  ‘No.’ She felt like slapping him, peeling off that insolent expression. Everything between them was spoiled.

  ‘Too bad. You would have enjoyed it. It’s been years since Nadyezhda Petrovna published a new poem.’

  ‘They let Nadya go?’ she asked.

  ‘They don’t publish poets in the gulag.’

  ‘She returned to Leningrad?’

  ‘She came back.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Not long ago.’

  Now she understood. The plain began to whirl before her eyes, along with the brass trees to the north—are those Germans, or is it us?—dancing and rejoicing in her downfall. Nadyezhda, with a throng of admirers, recounting amazing tales about the gulag in her raucous voice. She had been dead for a long time, and that was fine. The disappointment at hearing that Nadyezhda was alive weakened. When had Sasha become someone who regarded death as a worthy revenge? There was Morozovsky lying with his head shattered. Lots of questions buzzed: did they know about that evening? Had anyone else been freed? Why hadn’t her husband told her anything?

  On his nose and moustache there were still blood-soaked hairs.

  ‘You have rabbit on your face.’

  He didn’t answer. After causing such an upheaval in her soul, maybe he didn’t have anything else to say. She was filled with black despair: he would never understand that she had sacrificed everything for him. ‘Do you understand that it would have been easier for me to die?’

  ‘Me, too, and we’re both still here, maybe the only ones.’ He took a dry plug of tobacco from his pocket, cut slivers of it with his knife, rolled it in newspaper, and lit it.

  ‘Don’t say that. They’re alive.’

  ‘I mean that we always played with talk about death, and envied people who loved life, and now most of them are dead or as good as dead, and we’re here.’

  ‘You’re saying that we liked being alive?’

  ‘More than we thought.’

  ‘I haven’t liked being alive since you disappeared,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you have, more than you thought.’

  He handed her the cigarette. She puffed the smoke. The taste was nauseating, like sticking your head in a chimney. Styopa-Podolsky was shouting from the stage, ‘The Revolution needs you, body and soul, everything.’

  ‘When did you start smoking?’

  ‘At school.’ He chuckled. ‘I was afraid to tell you.’

  The tumult in her head died down a little: it wasn’t clear how much he knew, maybe not much. ‘Nadya contacted you?’

  ‘Yes. She sent me a long poem and a letter.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Not much. She told me that the NKVD made a wunderkind out of you, that you hadn’t been in Leningrad for a long time, that Brodsky died in Kolyma.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘Last month.’

  ‘I thought he’d make it.’

  ‘You were wrong.’

  ‘Is the poem good?’ she asked.

  ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘Nadka wrote a poem about the heroism of soldiers? Now she’s a Party poet?’

  ‘Dmitry isn’t a soldier. He’s a seven-year-old boy dressed in his dead father’s uniform.’ He said the last words without any triumph, even with sadness. Most likely he understood that as soon as she returned to the office, she would find the poem. Where was Boris Godunov in the bookshelf?* On top. All six volumes of Pushkin were on top.

  Now only one thing remained. A film veiled his eyes. Apparently he no longer wished to hurt her. She decided to be generous and say it for him. Anyway, the moment she realised what accusation had been fabricated against her, she swore to escape from this stinking plain: Nadyezhda had dedicated the poem to the dead soldier Vlada.

  LUBLIN

  JANUARY 1941

  Keeping to the shadows, avoiding the streetlamps, hugging the buildings, Thomas walked along the main street, then turned left down an alley that opened into Adolf Hitler Square. He felt his way around the small craters made by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. Beyond the corner he was dazzled by the light blazing from the second-floor windows of the SS headquarters. How imposing the building was. There was a cold, sharp burning in his throat, and his tongue licked icy teeth. He pressed against the wall, passed his hand over the bricks, looked away from the building: he would always remember the humiliation he had suffered here in the SS headquarters of the Lublin District.

  From the windows tongues of fire assailed him, contorting his features into a grimace of fearful malice. Perhaps he still offered an ingratiating smile, but his eyes revealed his acceptance of fate. His was the face of an acrobat who had fallen from the trapeze. Erika Gelber’s techniques had long since stopped helping him: there was no spark of life to concentrate on, either around him or in his memory. Maybe he would write to her, in the labour camp at Ravensbrück: Dear Frau Gelber, I hope you are enjoying your work in the service of the Third Reich. Because of a certain deterioration in my situation, I would like to ask you to refresh my memory regarding the Four Stage System for dealing with attacks.

  He climbed steps blocked by piles of snow and wandered into a small grove of trees: the branches leaned over the red tiles, from whose edges pointed icicles hung, while smoke curled from chimneys like tree limbs. In the background a frozen city dozed, its sounds muted, its barren streets wrapped in fog; from here it was possible to imagine it as a huge void. The trees restored his strength of spirit—the courage of cowards. Only from another continent do you fire arrows at the god Wotan and his wild army.

  At night, among the small stone houses that had become an entertainment district with beer halls, a casino and a brothel, they didn’t ask who he was. He would sit on a leather armchair leaning against the wall, drink schnapps, Okocim beer and cognac on the weekends, and listen to the music that was played all night. Cigarette smoke rose, young women dashed back and forth with trays of sausage and cabbage, bread and beer, or sat in men’s laps and let them press their lips against their necks. It was as if they were in uniform: a blue-black line around their eyes, shiny cheeks, off-the-shoulder dresses, small bones, black silk stockings.

  At the far end of the hall was a small wooden stage, lit with a few coloured lanterns and the bluish-orange flame of a kerosene stove. Sometimes short performances were presented there—choruses of drunken officers, a young soprano who sang arias from Don Giovanni, voices humming ‘Der Sennerin Abschied von der Alm’* and mournful songs of childhood. A bespectacled officer in a dress uniform with starched cuffs, decked out with medals, read parts of a speech by von Alvensleben from the SS that pierced the heart: ‘Nothing has ever been constructed out of delicacy and weakness. New worlds are cast in stone, in lead, in blood and in men as tough as Krupp steel.’ Then the officer added words of his own: ‘In a democracy the government needs the people’s love, and we too need it, but we can also manage without it. Sometimes the people will love us, then they won’t, and then they will fall in love with us again. We will retain power.’ His fiery expression annoyed Thomas. He would have gladly thrust a spear down his throat.

  A proud voice rose from a smoke-filled table. ‘Have you heard what they call Globocnik at the SS-Führer Headquarters?’

  ‘Globus,’ Thomas muttered. That was one of Himmler’s old jokes that Wolfgang had told him. Sometimes he hoped that Wolfgang would be sitting among the officers: he was the only one Thomas
liked among those who had laid a trap for him in Warsaw. He had made great plans for both of them. He forgave Wolfgang because, from the moment the young officer encountered the Kresling-Hermann-Weller triumvirate, his only choice was to do their bidding with good cheer and fighting spirit. Truly loyal men, who would have acted differently, had never crossed his path. There were too many characters, Thomas felt, in religion, folklore, art and even in public discourse—the inventions of popular morality—who were merely theoretical, who behaved irrationally in unrealistic scenarios; and under the influence of these stories, poor children were filled with guilt because they couldn’t live up to such exalted ideas.

  A stocky man, one of the district governor’s assistants, stepped up to the stage. He closed his eyes and swayed to the tune of the piano:

  My beloved in Nuremberg has fallen in love with a count.

  He showers her with lavish presents.

  I write to her: Flowers from the front

  Are stopped at the border.

  The song was greeted with cheers and a jumble of drunken shouting: ‘Hans-Hans-Hans.’ No doubt, stocky Hans, who had studied acting in Reinhardt’s theatre, was everyone’s beloved romantic tenor.

  Late at night Thomas watched the couples dancing to melancholy French love songs. Was Clarissa dancing now? Every evening he imagined a different suitor for her, the two of them dancing all over Berlin. Once she confided to him that some of her friends secretly listened to swing, and now he imagined her dancing like in American movies.

  He hadn’t written to her since he was sent away from Warsaw. What news did he have for her now? That his career had been blocked again? That the Foreign Office had stolen his model and handed it to his enemy, while he had become a miserable warehouse worker in Lublin? She had seen him defeated once, and that was enough.

  For weeks he sat in the beer hall pretending that no one here could know him until one day, during a poker game, a Gestapo officer asked whether he was Thomas Heiselberg of the ‘Model of the Polish People’. He nodded, and said nothing, but the officer, who had annoyed Thomas earlier by shuffling the cards with excessive skill, went on, ‘There was great interest in your model when we arrived in Lublin. We had rather shitty intelligence lists then. Okay, the President of the Regional Court and the Vice-President for Appeals were simple cases: a bullet in the head, and no more appeals. But there were school principals, Catholic professors, music lovers…And then the order came down to pay attention to archaeologists. We liquidated people because they had pottery bowls at home.’

  As they were leaving, the officer grabbed his arm, breathed beer fumes in his ear and said, ‘Sometimes we wonder, Mr Model—you know, even the little guys with their fingers on the trigger have a few thoughts—whether everything that we did was so necessary.’ The ghost-fingers of the officer pinched his flesh for a long time afterwards.

  At night Lublin was as dark as a small village. The warm lights of Berlin, for which he was partly responsible—‘Burners of the Night’ was his name for the advertising people who understood the potential of an illuminated aerial display—seemed like a figment of memory. The dark city made him ill at ease, an uneasiness that was muffled in other people’s company, but which burst out in a deafening scream when he was alone. That’s why he used to wander the city in the wee hours. He would walk along the dimly lit main street, approach the twisting wall of the old town—he became used to showing his documents to policemen, who dubbed him ‘the sleepwalking officer’—and would descend into the Jewish area, which stank of sewage and fish, a kind of valley of densely packed wooden houses. Above them, as though in a different kingdom, rose the castle; the Jews’ houses below it looked like the talons of a monster from a fairytale. He didn’t understand why all the governors of the city—Russian, Polish and now German, too—wasted such a fine castle on criminals.

  The buildings, headquarters and labour camps that he saw in his wanderings in Lublin breathed life into the various inquiries that used to reach the offices of the model in Warsaw. An SS doctor, for example, who took care of prisoners in the castle, complained that Gestapo headquarters in the ‘house under the clock’ were sending sacks of corpses to him and asking him to state ridiculous causes of death such as heart failure, throat infection and influenza. ‘My question: is there a group of diseases typical of the Poles that we can indicate in the forms without further details?’ Naturally they had not answered that ignominious question, and joked that an alarming number of madmen now wanted help from the model.

  Lublin was so small—it was ten minutes from the ‘house under the clock’ to the castle, and along the way you passed by most of the Reich institutions in the city. Here, the elaborate recommendations that he had formulated in Warsaw and sent off into the unknown took on simple forms: stone, house, roof, wall. There he was, walking along the path taken by the sacks of corpses.

  About an hour before dawn he would wander back to his house. He was fond of the darkness in the stairwell, would grip the loose banister, the wooden steps would creak under his boots and sometimes the moonlight would coat the rusty mailboxes. Climbing the stairs, he couldn’t help remembering his apartment on Nowy Swiat and the fine buildings on Krakowskie Przedmiescie. During his first week here, disconcerted by his isolation, he had sneaked into a party in a splendid apartment with a fine balcony, a large parlour and a high ceiling. The new landlord made a proud display of a silver Hanukkah Menorah, decorated with a handsome relief of two lions.

  Many apartments on that street had become vacant after the Jews were evicted. He submitted several fruitless requests to be given one, and was at last allocated this mouldy apartment on the top floor of an antiquated building on Lindenstrasse, formerly Lipowa Street. He wondered whether instructions had been sent from Warsaw and Berlin to annoy him in little matters as well.

  Two weeks passed after his arrival in Lublin before he was summoned to SS headquarters. In those idle days he submitted a request to meet Odilo Globocnik, commander of the SS and the police, mentioning their cordial exchange of letters while he was the director of the office of the model in Warsaw. He received a negative answer, which implied surprise at his very request. When he asked to meet the district governor Ernst Zerner he also alluded to his ‘correspondence with my former office’ and was answered with a polite letter stating that the governor, being very busy, might find some free time in April.

  One morning an officer had appeared at his apartment and announced that he must report immediately to SS headquarters. He pushed open the heavy wooden doors, took in the marble columns, the small light fixtures, and stepped down the broad corridor. The stairs reminded him of the Four Seasons Hotel. He hoped that here, on the second floor, he would be given an office, and perhaps he might still rise again. After all, Lublin could be a place to recover, out of sight, to reflect on things before beginning to struggle once more for his position.

  But his hopes were dashed: the two minor officials whom he met lorded it over him and explained that they knew all about ‘his tricky manoeuvres in Warsaw’. They told him straight out that the Foreign Office did not like him. He asked whether he was still employed by the Foreign Office and was told that he had not been discharged. Apparently somebody there must still believe he could be useful. But here in Lublin, since all the agencies tried to keep the Foreign Office out of their business, he would be under SS supervision.

  ‘But in Warsaw I was under the district governor’s authority,’ Thomas protested. ‘Why will I be subordinate to the SS in Lublin?’

  ‘Because the district governor doesn’t want anything to do with you,’ they told him.

  The powers that had joined together to bring him down in Warsaw and exile him to Lublin, as if it were a kind of penal colony, were still conniving to direct his life. He was asked in a dismissive tone to draft a report about the Belorussian man, in accordance with instructions he would receive from Dr Georg Weller, the director of the offices of the model. He was stunned by the contempt shown for him
by these two little bugs, but remained businesslike and asked what resources for research would be at his disposal. When writing the Model of the Polish People, he had made use of ten years of comprehensive research, but he didn’t know Belorussia at all.

  ‘You can write to institutes in Germany. Not far from here, in Cracow, you’ll find the new Institute for the Study of the East, and there’s also a library in the city,’ the officer answered.

  ‘With those scanty means I can’t write something equivalent in detail to the Polish model,’ Thomas protested.

  ‘You aren’t expected to come up with such a brilliant achievement.’ The officers exchanged looks. ‘Just do the best you can.’

  Thomas asked no more questions. After a few cold parting words, he left the room. The instructions from Warsaw never came, of course, but a week later he was summoned to SS headquarters again, and ordered to begin work, and since for the time being there was no office for him, he could surely write at home, and submit a progress report every week. ‘Dr Weller,’ they said, ‘expects you to do the best possible work. Remember that the time allocated for completion of the project is not unlimited.’ As he expected, the reports he submitted received no response.