by Nir Baram
At first the comment sounded amusing, but seeing his face relax with complacency she understood that he was making oblique fun of her work: Nikita Mikhailovich had asked her to sit on the committee that recommended new street names in Brest. Moscow Avenue had been her idea, and she was particularly proud of the streets that bore the names of two people her father admired, Mikhail Lermontov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze.
But how could the German know that? Her letters had been official, and the representatives of seven different institutions had read them before they were sent to Lublin; nowhere had she mentioned the matter of the streets. Very well, perhaps German intelligence had prepared a report about her. Now she understood that nothing she had said about the history of the fortress was new to him—and it was almost certain he knew she wasn’t Mademoiselle Weissberg but rather Madame Podolsky—and perhaps his comment about the street names was a response to the insult of the tourist’s survey of history she had recited to him.
Here was something familiar, being pushed into the shadow realm where she looked at the world through another person’s consciousness, wallowing in his intrigues and fears. Who was he really? Was he as obstinate as he looked? As eager to satisfy his ambition? Someone who would stop at nothing to get back at his enemies? Would a little sympathy mixed with implicit threats be enough to make him write a confession? Or shouting and a week without sleep? Every day in interrogation she had stripped back dozens of people—suspects, colleagues—and now him.
She refrained with all her power from staring at the grey sacks of skin beneath his eyes. His glance was cushioned with friendliness, and now and then he let it rest on a certain part of her body. When she spoke he nodded generously. She decided that not looking around at the fortress had cost him an effort, because the agitation in his eyes revealed his sensitivity to impressions. Well, she could teach him a thing or two; Styopa always said that her gaze didn’t waste any time. The German clearly believed his mask was impermeable, his real face safely concealed. A lot of people laboured under that delusion until they met the NKVD.
They climbed the stairs to the meeting room, where a light meal awaited them, and she described her admiration for the actions of the Luftwaffe in Coventry, an action that history would fondly remember! He responded that he was no less impressed by the achievements of the ‘Red Army of workers and peasants’ in their battle against the great power of Finland. They began to swoop across the expanses of history, showering compliments: the wonderful work of the Red Army in the battle on the Vistula, the military genius of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the great achievements of Russia in the war against Japan in the first decade of the century (‘You really covered the Japanese in your hats’), Bismarck the benefactor, the firm way that Germany repelled Napoleon, and Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (‘Never did the eminent conqueror encounter an enemy more lethal’). They were so amused by this game that they couldn’t stop interrupting each other, but as soon as they sat at the table their joy disappeared.
‘As for Coventry,’ he said, ‘you know the British bombed our cities. Mönchengladbach was the first, and they killed hundreds of Germans before our planes came close to Britain. To be precise, they attacked our cities for months while the German government was making peace proposals.’
Too bad he had shaken himself out of their amusing game and rushed to defend Germany like a stern propagandist. Perhaps his zeal for his country’s honour was stronger than it appeared. He played with a pencil, leaned over the table and sipped his tea. His face and neck had turned red.
‘Do you feel well?’ she asked. ‘Do you need to rest?’
‘No,’ he answered and straightened up.
They didn’t touch the food. She exploited her chance and presented the first position paper, which had been translated into German, on the Germano-Soviet parade, and suggested that they set the date for the spring, because a military parade was a popular festival, and it was fitting to hold it on a sunny day. Then she asked how they could also include German citizens in the parade. It could be divided between Brest and Lublin, and perhaps it would be good to hold two small solidarity parades: the Pioneer Youth would march in Berlin, and the Hitler Youth in Moscow. He instantly responded that the idea would not be accepted by either government, and in any event the people of Berlin and Moscow wouldn’t identify with strange youths wearing uniforms they still considered revolting. He surveyed the position paper with a bored face, as if the matter didn’t concern him at all, and he had no desire to have anything to do with it.
‘Our task,’ she said, ‘is to present creative ideas, not to decide whether they are practical. We don’t have representatives of all the branches of the army here. The committee is just the two of us, and our assistants. Therefore I suggest that we free our imaginations to put together ideas for a parade that will astonish the world and be remembered as one of the most impressive events of the twentieth century.’
He stroked the tabletop with dry-skinned fingers. The prominent veins on his hands betrayed early signs of ageing. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘All my life I’ve been a practical man. I directed one of the largest market research companies in the world. I dealt with projects that demanded vision, but I always made sure to have a clear plan for implementing my ideas.’
He was so used to polishing his sentences with conceit that he didn’t notice he was mourning the memory of his achievements, rather than glorying in them.
‘Even though you have a capitalist world view’—she had to move him from implementation to the realm of planning and theory—‘you’re not working in the private sector now. Other forces govern our task. Maybe we should adopt a different point of view: our job is to write a story about a grand military parade in the Brest region in the spring of 1941. If we believe in it, maybe others will too. Even if they don’t—can anyone deprive us of the act of creation?’ She had said it to steer him onto the right course, but the idea actually pleased her; a few days in the fortress had convinced her that planning a great potential event was one of the best activities these times had to offer.
‘They can take the creation away, but not the time we believed in it,’ he said.
So she hadn’t fired his imagination but, as their discussion went on, he gave her precise and rich answers, and the occasional brilliant idea: the parade had to avoid making artificial gestures or depending on the good will of the masses, or spreading over large areas. It wasn’t a national holiday. The spectacle had to be concentrated in one place, making an emphatic impression. These principles were self-evident, like saying ‘amen’ in church.
His decisive tone suggested he had devoted time to thinking about the parade, but it was clear to her that these ideas had occurred to him just now. His initial intention had been to oppose some of her suggestions so as to pretend to be involved in the project.
She glanced at the trays, and he looked at her as though he didn’t understand. Then she reached out towards the golden pie crust. She stopped; her hand slid down to her hips. If he wouldn’t approach the food, she wouldn’t either. Instead she told him about Star, the owner of one of the largest estates in the region, who used to eat a roasted, stuffed turkey at the end of each meal. In a military exercise, Star broke the back of the horse he was riding, and the czar, also a large man, patted him on the shoulder. ‘Bravo,’ he said, ‘you beat me.’
Did she tell him that story to stimulate his appetite? She didn’t know.
The rumble of motors could be heard. Her limbs, crammed between the table and the wall, had stiffened. However she tried to extricate them would seem clumsy. Of course he was the reason, but how could his influence on her have been so great?
They had already been sitting there for hours. Monsieur Heiselberg? He tore through the position paper, stripping paragraph after paragraph of meaning—not because he opposed them but because his monotonous voice, with all the good will in the world, was enough to nullify them.
Sometimes she imagined that several versions of his face were ta
lking to her together. The version of despair that scolded her: Girl, can’t you see all this is futile? The cold, clinical version that mocked the entire situation, her devotion to it, her miserable ideas, her very existence. The condescending, compliant version that cried out: Very well, my dear, I’ll volunteer my talents to fulfil your little dream.
Every sentence that escaped her lips sounded like a quotation of an idea they had already discussed. A strange feeling gripped her: she couldn’t stay in the same room as him any longer; a spell had been somehow cast on her. Her buttocks had risen slightly, and she pressed them down to the chair. The desire to get rid of him was greater than any professional duty, no matter how practised she was at stifling her will.
She looked at his gold watch. It was twelve-forty. She gave a fluttering smile. That couldn’t be. His watch was wrong.
‘You look amused,’ he said, perplexed, and his face came to life.
‘I remembered a story my parents used to tell me.’
‘Would you like to share it?’
‘No. It’s too personal.’
‘My mother died not long ago,’ he offered, ‘in very sad circumstances. She was at home with our Jewish housekeeper, Madame Stein.’
‘Your Judaism didn’t prevent me from choosing you,’ Nikolai Mikhailovich said to her. ‘On the contrary. Let those fascists know that we’ll never be like them.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Yes,’ he answered and stretched his arms behind him. ‘Madame Stein was a Jew but different from the other Jews that I knew. She didn’t have the talents that characterise Jews.’
He was like an actor practising sincerity. Or was he really speaking from his heart, and her suspicion was distorting her vision? She told herself that he had noticed her disgust and wanted to win a little Jewish sympathy.
The room was getting stuffy. The cheese and fish on the trays gave off a sharp odour, but he, who sat closer to the refreshments, didn’t seem disturbed by it at all.
‘I think we need some air,’ she stammered.
Never in her life had she met a person who responded so quickly. From the first word he knew what she wanted, was already standing up and buttoning his coat.
‘Now you’re the one who looks a little tired, Mademoiselle Weissberg,’ he said, making it clear that he remembered how she had earlier provoked him.
This man was one of the most horrible and odd people she had ever met. All morning long he had behaved like a man in despair, and in the last hour, when he noticed that his tactics—some of which had been devised spontaneously—were wearing her down, and that, as tiny as it might be, a victory was in sight, he was like a man reborn.
LUBLIN
FEBRUARY 1941
Her eyes were reflected in every window of the railroad car, a gaze without a face, which had disintegrated long ago. He remembered the delicate rounding of her cheeks, lips that up close surprised him with their fullness, but all these impressions were as meaningless as newspaper clippings: she was a disembodied gaze, accusing him.
Suddenly the gaze began to fly from face to face: Clarissa, Weller, Frenzel, the young Hermann Kreizinger, his history class, they all passed judgment on him in the form of Fraülein Weissberg’s gaze. Gooseflesh wrinkled his skin. While he struggled to get rid of the boys from the history class, he heard them shouting: ‘Doctor, you made a mistake in the lesson! Didn’t you hear that the archaeologists are dead? Here is the production line of the future!’
At a certain point, in the conference room in the citadel, he wanted to protest: Mademoiselle Weissberg, Madame Podolsky, Comrade Weissberg, Jew W., whatever they call you. With all due respect, your gaze gives me the shivers. Gradually he understood that he wasn’t petrified by the horror that her gaze stirred in him but by the revulsion he created in her. During the hours that they sat there he struggled against that look: he refurnished the room with items from the parlour in Berlin, he calculated the height of the snow between the spires of the citadel, he counted the slices of bread, and suddenly he stared at her, like a predator surprising its prey—but her gaze was steadfast, stubborn and condemning. From what darkness did this woman emerge? Why was she doing this to him? ‘Tell me, what do you see?’ he silently mouthed.
Dread seized him. He was watching Thomas Heiselberg, composed of scraps of paper and pasted together with old glue, come apart beneath her gaze. From a distance the picture seemed intact, but close up his nakedness was exposed, or was it scraps of another picture?
Comrade Weissberg’s eyes shone, asking Thomas: My dear friend, do you really want to defend yourself? What did you sow with your tricks? It’s true that people change disguises, but underneath a solid foundation, a home port in their soul makes them aware of the masquerade. And you? Every morning, when you open your eyes, you are flooded with the terror of rebirth. There’s no prepared matrix. You slap at the scraps and paste them onto yourself, adopting a disguise that suits the tasks at hand. And you don’t even know the man you were yesterday, who did all sorts of things to prepare this day for you. And now? More disguises and lies? I’ve already seen them all. The gaze kept whispering. Thomas shouted at it to shut up. He hollered childhood songs into the empty railroad car. Mother used to invent them:
My beloved child lies half-asleep
My heart is devoted his soul to keep.
To join the army Father did depart
If we lose the war, home he’ll come
Bringing a present for his precious son.
When he sang, the gaze stopped whispering.
Hoopah, hoopah, rider
When he falls—he shouts.
If he falls into the ditch
The crows will eat him alive.
Afterwards fatigue descended, and he fell into a troubled sleep. He woke up with a shout. Outside the train: rusted branches of trees. He dozed off and woke up again. His lips burned, drenched in the waterfalls of his dreams. The trip went on and on. He was surrounded by snowy expanses that the night painted blue, and they swallowed the small peasant houses.
His line of sight plunged to the rutted earth. He imagined leaping into the foam of the snow. ‘Jump, Manfred, jump!’ A shout rings out in the university corridor, the new slogan for a tedious lecture. While the professor was droning on about Byron’s Manfred, standing on a mountaintop and not daring to choose death, a girl stood up and shouted, ‘Jump, Manfred, jump. We’re dying of boredom.’ What was her name? Elsa. He fell in love with her on the spot. A year later they were married.
‘Actually, you fell in love with the shout.’ Wolfgang laughed when he told him the story. They were drunk and amusing themselves with ideas for seducing the Negri sisters in Warsaw.
The train braked, and he slipped onto the floor of the car. He didn’t want to move. His head was thrown onto the edge of the seat. He heard whispers again. An attack. Let it be. There was no reason to fear attacks. Fear of disguise was the most real thing in him. Embrace the attack, be a man in attack.
If people saw him, he wasn’t bothered. Let them either help or choke on their criticism. He lay on the floor until Lublin station. Good people brought him home. Strong hands held him when he tripped on the stairs. The burning in his body made him laugh. He took some pills and lay on his bed.
He slept for two days, plagued with nightmares. Once he woke to the shouts of guards from the camp, lights that struck the thick curtain, the cracking sound of exactly four shots.
In his dreams children stood on the sides of the road, waved flags and drummed on cardboard boxes. Tens of thousands of soldiers, arranged in little rectangles, flowed in one huge motion from the fortress to the centre of Brest-Litovsk. He woke up. The heat of the sun in his dream remained on the back of his neck. He stumbled to the desk and started to sketch, reconstructing the picture from his dream. Then he slept again.
In the morning he realised that he had drawn more pictures of the parade: a swarm of soldiers splitting to the right and left, surrounding a city that he was seeing f
or the first time, a small city, but the size didn’t matter, what mattered was the brilliant planning of the parade.
How would the Wehrmacht soldiers cross the border? On the bridges, of course. There were still bridges over the Bug River. Would the Soviets allow German planes in their air space for a joint flyover? These were matters for military people. The more questions arose, the clearer the burden of the task became. They didn’t give such responsibility to nobodies. The way the Wehrmacht was portrayed in the parade would project onto the entire image of Germany. In fact, he had to decide which Germany to represent in the parade.
Every minute he luxuriated in bed was a shameful waste of time. To hell with that Jew woman Weissberg and her gaze. The days of weakness would not return. For the sake of the parade he would treat her like the dearest person in the world to him, and in time he’d force her to like him. In the past he had specialised in such strategies. People who wanted no connection with him became his fans. He had to show everybody that Thomas Heiselberg was worthy of heading the committee for the Germano-Soviet parade.
He leaped out of bed. His moist shirt and underpants smelled of old sweat. He tottered over to the desk again. The room spun around him: he slipped a blank sheet of paper into the typewriter:
Beloved Clarissa,
For a long time now I haven’t given you any sign of life. I behaved coarsely and didn’t answer your letters. That was because of certain difficulties I found myself in, which led me to keep a distance even from the people most dear to me, so that I wouldn’t entangle them in my affairs. Recently, however, my work has received the respect it deserves, and I have accepted an appointment that represents a huge challenge. Clarissa, from the moment I first knew myself, I have worked for Thomas Heiselberg, I admit it; to increase his power in the world, to extend his wingspan. Now I feel responsibility of a different sort in my bones, responsibility for people in general, and I’m talking about the masses, whose lives are connected to the project that has been entrusted to me. I have to do everything I can so that these people won’t be a small spot in the blood-soaked history of Europe. I can’t say any more, but, please, believe me, this is work on behalf of the good name of Germany.