Good People

by Nir Baram

  August Frenzel, one of the officers who had mocked him at the first meeting, apparently felt sorry for him and after one of his weekly visits saw him to the door and said that no one enjoyed harassing him here. But explicit instructions had been conveyed to Globocnik. ‘You acquired some very powerful enemies,’ Frenzel clucked in appreciation. Other clerks and officers, who had heard of the glorious reputation of the model, also treated him like a leper who carried with him lessons that were worth learning. ‘If you fell so hard, you must have been very high. Perhaps you could tell us your story one day.’

  ‘Of course,’ Thomas answered amicably. ‘We could meet one evening for a drink at the Deutsches Haus, and I’ll tell you everything. Such a long and complicated story might take a few evenings, but we have all the time in the world.’

  The panic that gripped Frenzel at the very idea that he might be seen in his company amused him.

  During the first months no one approached him. Not until December did he receive a letter from the German Munitions Company, which had recently been made responsible for the workshops on his street. The writer asked his advice about training Jewish workers who ‘until now were mainly employed as shoemakers and tailors’, and whom the company was interested in teaching how to use the most advanced equipment in Germany. The man had written to him because someone in the office of Walter Salpeter in Berlin had praised the training program at Milton, which Thomas had once directed.

  Thomas had some earlier acquaintance with the workshops in the Lindenstrasse camp. One night, during the first snow, he came home and stood at the window to watch the snowflakes falling on the city. Suddenly, about twenty metres from his window, a knot of naked bodies coalesced in the darkness. At first the sight was so strange that he supposed the whiteness of the snow must be deluding him, but then he understood that naked people really were standing in the snowed court, and the little hillocks around them were prostrate naked bodies. Dogs began to bark. Beams of light crisscrossed the snow, picking up a white foot, a withered buttock, a shaven scalp, a boyish chest, the nape of a man buried facedown in the snow. Some of the limbs quivered in the spotlight, others remained frozen. He realised that he was counting the dead and the living and the ones he couldn’t classify. In a few minutes the lights went off, the shapes of dogs moved among the bodies, their barking mingled with the whistling of the wind.

  After that night he no longer pushed aside that curtain. He regarded it as part of the wall. There was another window.

  That was why, when the man from the German Munitions Company offered to arrange a visit to the workshops in the camp, Thomas refused, saying he had heard stories about inappropriate treatment of the workers, treatment that was of no utility, especially because some of them were prisoners of war. The man admitted that such complaints had also reached him—apparently they referred to initiation ceremonies held by the guards for new groups. He would see to it that these contemptible practices stopped. Thomas replied courteously that it was clear to him that the intentions of his company were pure, but he himself had no relevant expertise and, by the way, conditions were decent at Milton, including professional training, social benefits and even the idea of profit sharing with workers who excelled. ‘To my great regret, nothing that I know from Milton can be applied to your Jewish slaves.’ He didn’t even try to conceal his disgust.

  ‘Your answer surprises me, Herr Heiselberg,’ the man exclaimed. ‘The expert opinion that the directorate of the Model of the Polish People submitted to us, signed by you, states that the initiative to employ Jewish prisoners from the Polish army in our munitions factory was welcome and useful.’

  ‘I don’t remember writing anything like that,’ Thomas grumbled. ‘And in any event I wasn’t referring to a camp like this.’

  He would get up in the late morning with no idea how he would pass the time. All the days of the week were fused into a single day: holidays or his birthday he remembered only weeks later. During the day he didn’t leave the house. Even after he planned his tasks in the evening for the next day, he put them off as the morning light spread out. In the afternoon he laid the table with a pale turquoise dinner set, a legacy from the evicted owners, and took supper in the small parlour, but went out at night to eat sausages in a beer hall or cabbage rolls in the restaurant near his house, where his custom of folding his napkin at the end of the meal and slipping it into a silver ring always aroused embarrassed smiles.

  Once a week he submitted a short progress report to SS headquarters, bought groceries, went to the barber, and that was as far as his contact with daylight went. At SS headquarters they always asked him whether he felt well. Frenzel, who was somewhat closer to him than the others, decided he was sick and urged him to consult a doctor. Even the women who sold meat and vegetables pointed at his pasty colour and volunteered advice. These small acts of kindness caused a strange paralysis in him; the impression he wanted to give, that Thomas Heiselberg was an energetic person with tricks up his sleeve, was wearing thin. He was an amiable pest who still didn’t grasp that his life’s work had collapsed.

  He noticed that his movements were becoming sluggish, as if his body understood that it was best to stretch out time so he wouldn’t sink into complete lethargy. He would sit on the sofa with the charcoal stove at his feet—when he moved away from it and got cold his only desire was to warm himself up again there. Sometimes for a whole week he would sleep in the morning and doze off in the afternoon, or keep turning over a single idea which contained the solution to all his troubles: he would walk around the apartment, lie on his bed, lean forwards on the sofa, scrape the red lacquer from the desk, mutter instructions to his memory, trying to grasp all the unravelling threads, and in the evening he would give up, realising that he had succumbed to a new kind of attack. If he felt calmer, he would sit at the peeling desk and type page after page about the Model of the Belorussian People—but his ideas were just abstract thoughts and were not founded on evidence. In fact he was drawing conclusions from the Polish, French and Italian models, and jumbling them together with snippets and theories from books. Dozens of pages piled up on his desk. He had always loved models. There was no distress that didn’t have a model, and now he was enjoying the tangle of his sentences:

  The Belorussian yearns for the past glory of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, influenced by Soviet Communism to the east and, from the west of Belorussia, by the ideas of French democracy. A reactionary tendency is also interwoven in his essence, the source of which is in forced religious conversion, as well as the shells of religion and morality. Materialism as a form of oppression can ignite in him the aspiration for freedom, given that new structures…

  Indeed, ideas from the French model, slightly modified, would fit in here. Grind the formative experiences of the Polish national type and stir them into the history of Belorussia: didn’t everyone’s desires ultimately conform with a few simple trends? Sometimes, in flashes of clarity, he suspected that his handiwork was a kind of secret code comprehensible to him alone, and that he should be worried about the consequences when Weller read the report. But worrying about Weller and his gang only made his mind cloud over.

  This unrelenting shriek of panic, waking and in dreams, proclaimed to him that from now on his life would always be like this. Whatever had gone wrong in his soul could not be repaired. He should bury his old dreams and hopes and be content with his grey future in which he sat day after day in his good clothing by the charcoal stove piling up mountains of pointless words.

  He had never imagined how murderous defeat could be. And now something in his soul sought it, rushed upon it with ferocious power, and used it to obliterate his contact with the world. He had always flourished in the company of others, and now any human connection demanded a huge effort. Even remembering people in Berlin allowed him only to imagine the look they would give him when they saw him again, a look of simple recognition: this man was lost.

  BREST

  DECEMBER 1940

  ‘W
e’ve done wonderful work here,’ exclaimed Nikita Mikhailovich Kropotkin before adjourning the morning meeting. Sasha’s report about new schools in the city had encouraged him. ‘Seventeen schools and professional colleges, excellent education. When the Poles ruled here, most of the schools were private. Every day I receive letters of gratitude from people who couldn’t afford tuition.’

  ‘Nikita Mikhailovich, there are no more social divisions here. Now every child in western Belorussia can get free education,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly!’ someone agreed.

  ‘The people here are smart. They understood from the beginning that it was a good thing for them to be part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belorussia,’ declared Nikita Mikhailovich, signalling to all of them to leave the room. As usual, she remained.

  He removed a thread or two from his Charleston jacket, which clung to his hips and restricted his movement. Today was the first time he had dressed up in his suit, a fiftieth-birthday present from his wife, made by ‘Zhurkievitz, the finest tailor in Moscow’. He claimed it was too bourgeois for his taste, and only wore it because his wife begged him.

  ‘Last December I spent a few days with the Fourth Army, a small supervisory job. We got to the Pruzhany region. You won’t believe how we were greeted: they threw flowers and sugar at us, the whole city was red flags, dancing night and day. After they drank all the vodka, they brought out the cologne that the Polish police had left. We drank everything and danced on the tanks. With my own eyes I saw how it was possible to do good in the world.’

  ‘Happy days, without doubt,’ she replied and moved to the door. Nikita Mikhailovich could blather for hours about those beautiful days, about books that dealt with education and morality, educational methods from sixteenth-century Amsterdam, Alfonso the Wise of Toledo, Baghdad in the tenth century, or, even worse, his great project: ‘Education of the Future: Diminishing Units of Time’.

  ‘Alexandra Andreyevna, one more thing,’ Nikita called out. ‘We’re receiving complaints about the NKVD’s soft treatment of Jewish parasites in the flea market. They say the place is full of peddlers and cheats. If those people don’t want to work here, we’ll teach them what work is in the forests of Arkhangelsk.’

  ‘They’re mainly refugees from Germany,’ she answered. ‘We’ve heard nothing about any complaints.’

  ‘By the end of the month we’re going to deport at least two hundred parasites, and the rest will learn their lesson.’ His bored tone indicated that the matter was closed. ‘I’m only telling you because the Jews are close to your heart.’

  She didn’t answer. All week long he had been scattering obscure hints about imminent changes. But when she asked delicately whether she should prepare for new initiatives, he played innocent and claimed that nothing was afoot, at least for the moment. At first she suspected that some plot had been hatched against him, as with Styopa, but his energy dispelled her suspicion that he was in trouble.

  Every morning she sat next to the office window that looked out on the Mukhavetz River, and she waited for the sun to rise. While she strode to the office, except for weak lights from house windows, the city was enveloped in darkness. But now a tiny spark of fire began to burn above the river—there you are, her heart sang. In a little while the spark would form an orange-grey ball. In Leningrad it was hard to see the sunrise—smoke, bridges, gilded steeples and factory chimneys—but Brest was the clearest city she had ever seen.

  The ball of fire rose from the river, still gripped by it, and ascended to the height of the bare trees along the banks. Sasha looked at it through the thin curtain: four golden arms were stretched from the sun like a cross. Sasha played with the curtain: she pushed it aside, pulled it back. A strange light poured onto the river, hiding the water behind a glowing fog, and the small ball swelled, its boundaries burst, the eastern part of the city brightened, it was dawn.

  Two hours remained before the meeting of the senior NKVD officials of the district. At these meetings the representatives of the various district committees presented cases requiring special discussion: subversive talk in the wood cooperative in Pruzhany, eighty candidates for expulsion, eight workers to prison, seventy-two children to Siberia; a Pole, an agent of the Suchard chocolate company, made negative comments about the alliance with the Nazis and claimed that it was a betrayal of Stalin’s firm positions.

  They had a procedure for the boring parts: she would write a private note to Nikita Mikhailovich, and he would rework the comment until it was vague enough to be said aloud. ‘We have to remember,’ she wrote to him now, ‘that the strength to change a strong decision is a rare display of strength.’

  Nikita Mikhailovich called out with pleasure: ‘Please state your opinion about this proposition: a person transfers his strength from one position to another. The position may change, but his strength remains.’

  She perused the papers on the table: Nikita Mikhailovich had put her in charge of the agenda so they wouldn’t waste hours on nonsense: the investigation of the chairmen of the collective farm and village councils; lists of those arrested in Pinsk in 1940; expediting the treatment of residents of Brest who had not paid the culture tax. Nothing new. Here was a case that might wake the meeting up: four citizens had caught a man who had worked in their police force under Polish rule. First they chopped off his arms with swords, leaving him standing. Then they peeled off his skin from the shoulder to the waist, on both sides. It sounded like a Cossack legend.

  The first time she received the lists of those to be expelled, it took her twenty minutes to mark the main subjects. She realised that the hundreds of people whose names appeared there would be banished with no further discussion, and that some young woman in Leningrad, exactly like her, had moved a piece of paper across her desk, and that’s how they exiled her parents to a gulag and sent Kolya and Vlada to an orphanage. In any case, Sasha’s work changed nothing; tens of thousands of people had been expelled from the district before her arrival, and now the stream had slowed. At her request, Nikita Mikhailovich had made her responsible for supervising the establishment of schools; she helped with the new archive that had been set up in the city to obtain secret documents of the Polish regime, and she persuaded Nikita Mikhailovich to declare war against workers at the cooperatives who gave service only to wealthy people.

  She no longer traded in the souls of the accused.

  Sometimes a week would go by and only at the end of it would she realise that the meeting with Kolya on the plain had left no trace in her consciousness, not even when she thought about him. Tricks were apparently being played in her heart to separate her from her despair at understanding that he had determined her fate during the years they hadn’t seen each other. The memory of Kolya in his uniform came back, along with the accusations he had made. She had wanted to hit him, to grab his neck and to shout, How could you believe that horrible woman? But even then her imagination insisted on placing them in her childhood room. She was horrified by the possibility that he might dim the clarity of the love that bound them together; without it, there was no point in anything she did, no point in surviving.

  Strangely, after that encounter, she began to forget whole areas of Leningrad. In her mind’s eye she could see Nadyezhda wandering among mouldy apartments, reading her long poem, ‘See, Soldier Dmitry’, and everybody understood who the heroine of the poem was and condemned her. Then the buildings and streets and the people she had known began to blur, and apart from her childhood home there was no longer any Leningrad.

  Soon she would be called upon to provide a reckoning for her actions. Everyone, the dead and the living who spoke in their name, would demand an explanation: How is it that you worked for the NKVD? How did you survive, flourish even? She imagined the defiant answers she would toss back at them: Apparently I was better than you, apparently I refused to accept the fate you intended for me. Do you hear, Mother? I’m washing my hands before you and saying: I am innocent of those saints’ blood. You accuse me of Vlada’s
death? You’re calling me Boris Godunov? Nadyezhda didn’t understand anything about history—you all said that her historical allusions were like a blind man leafing through the thousands of pages of The History of Russia. And admirers like Brodsky, who edited her poems and rescued her from humiliation, are now sitting in prison or dead. It would be more logical to call me Shuysky, who cleared Boris Godunov and determined that the crown prince fell on his sword by mistake. We both understood that our masters demand the truth. We both worked hard to survive. And if you had a bit of magnanimity, you would praise the survivors: it took an effort to survive.

  She sat two seats away from Nikita Mikhailovich, already tired of amusing him, but he still passed notes to her with jokes and gossip, and she answered with as much wit as she could muster. But it was all becoming tiresome. She didn’t like Nikita Mikhailovich, nor did she hate him: he was another patron whom she had managed to please. For a long time she had been bestowing affection on and even seducing men whose deaths wouldn’t have aroused a thing in her except the question, ‘Who will replace him?’ But sometimes all she wanted were simple gestures: to caress a dear face, to link eyes with a beloved person.

  Moving her arms like a conductor, she invited someone to raise a certain subject, gave the floor to someone else, allotted time with her fingers and silenced them—all for Nikita Mikhailovich. Occasionally her memory would retain a detail: Vasili Abgostinovich, a pig breeder, was sent to prison, a woman and eight children were exiled to Siberia. In the break they complimented the way she ran the discussion, usually flattering Nikita Mikhailovich through her, because the man found it hard to remember names and faces, and even officials with whom he had shared an intimate secret got a blank look a week later. They all tried to coax her to join them for lunch. She fobbed them off, showering them with promises of visits instead, and adding sexual innuendos: things the women of Brest would do for bread and lard. When the meeting was adjourned and the group rose, Nikita Mikhailovich remained in his place and glowered at her. She responded with an irritating smile: Aren’t you pleased, Nikita Mikhailovich? So what will you do to me?