Good People

by Nir Baram

  ‘You’re exhausted, Nikita Mikhailovich,’ said Heiselberg. ‘You’re talking nonsense. I don’t see the connection…’

  ‘You see it very well,’ Nikita Mikhailovich interrupted. ‘You’ve never had blood on your hands. Obtaining confessions, writing papers, triggering hidden sequences of events that cause other people to die? That’s what gentlefolk like you are so good at. But to give a direct order to kill someone? To kill a man close up, stab him in the heart, break his neck, shoot him in the head and see his brain explode, and then at home discover that brain fragments have splashed onto your ears: you’ve never done that. We’re standing here, and you wish you could bury me. But this time no one will do the dirty work for you. It’s almost absurd: you’ve both caused the death of hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and suddenly, because of one little death, you’re helpless.’

  Nikita Mikhailovich stood between them as though waiting for some action that would contradict his arguments. After a few seconds he walked to the door and kicked the basin over. Water began to spread over the floor and the clippings.

  Sasha looked at Thomas Heiselberg, still at the window, which was glowing with sunlight. He hadn’t moved. Really, won’t you do anything? Won’t you stop him?

  Nikita Mikhailovich approached her. His eyes were opaque.

  He’s going to hit me. She retreated to the wall and tensed. She was expecting Heiselberg to do something, but he stared at them in puzzlement, like a stranger who had arrived by chance. He was paralysed, but underneath he was writhing and screaming. Nikita Mikhailovich’s opposition had thrown him headlong into reality. He couldn’t even talk anymore.

  With an effort she forced herself to look at Nikita Mikhailovich, hoping that his aggression was only a product of her imagination. Through his moist glasses he was looking at her with contempt. ‘You are a diminishing unit of time,’ he whispered, then squeezed between the cupboard and the wall, and left, slamming the door.

  They stood stock-still. There was a flurry of footsteps in the apartment above, and a woman called out to her children to get dressed for school.

  ‘Now we will have to expose his true face,’ the German grumbled. But it was too late to say that—they both realised how useless his words were. ‘And maybe he won’t do anything. After all, he looks like a responsible person.’

  Don’t talk anymore, her eyes said, just as the ball of the sun burst into the window. You sound like a dead man.

  GERMANY

  1941

  Scanning the horizon lines of the cities he approached, he sometimes yearned to make one great leap back to life, an actor bounding to centre stage, shouting, Here I am! Don’t say you weren’t looking for me. You need someone to come up with a daring new plan, something inspired!

  But afterwards—among winding potholed roads, seaside villages and hamlets with a handful of houses—the surge faded. The lecturing voice that astonished people with flamboyant international plans fell silent.

  Towards the end of the summer he went to the village of Heiligendamm, where his mother had spent summer vacations in her youth. In the morning he would pack up a book, a broad-brimmed hat, a towel, sunglasses and a notebook, and sprawl on a beach chair facing the sea. Was Thomas devoting himself to writing? Recording his dreams? Several years too late, was he responding to Erika Gelber’s request that he keep a journal? Not exactly. Sometimes when an idea came to mind he was tempted to scrawl it down, principles he once believed in, impressions of a young family walking down to the shore, their hobbies, their origins and the future of their children. An abundance of time led a person to paths that once seemed superfluous.

  After a while he stuffed the book and notebook into the towel, and watched the people out among the waves. Should he join them? If he dived into the water, would he feel better?

  He felt like a nap. It had become too hot. He was sweating. He tried to brush the sand off his body. There was sand everywhere, even in his privates, making them itch. He rose heavily and returned to his room. People passed by him, flocking to the shore, their faces still sleepy, ready for the pleasure the day had in store for them. He closed the windows, drew the curtains shut and lay down in the darkness. Residual snatches of noise from outside emphasised his isolation. Naked between the sheets, he challenged memory to a duel—do your worst, show us some horrors. Memory spits fire: faces, events, pages of the model, the streets of Berlin, behind which Lublin and Warsaw split off—there were masses of images. He squirmed in the bed, lashed out at the images with his fencing sword from university days, until sleep fell on him.

  At noon he woke up, taut with fury, cursing the holiday-makers whose voices rang out like alarm clocks banishing him from the kingdom of sleep as they walked to the dining room. He had no choice but to drag himself to the window, to watch the other guests cheerfully passing the time according to routines established on earlier vacations.

  Now, lacking any all-consuming project, he was left with fragments of the past to fill up his days and keep at bay the void, the boredom, the terrifying silence. He jumped from stone to stone: the quicksand around him was all memories. His new mission was to discover strategies for shrinking their influence: ‘the Heiselberg technique for no-memory’. He already had a rough idea: since it was impossible to drive the images out of his mind, since he could not make them disappear, he had in fact to summon more and more of them until their colours, dates and contexts all blurred, and he could exile them to a space where they could recur, but with less force. They became like a horror story that you read once, but on second reading wasn’t so frightening anymore.

  After a week he was nauseated by the smell of the sea and the naked bodies, with their pallid skins, wandering between the shore and the card games in the lobby, and there they were again, eating lunch, drinking beer, retiring for a nap. Wherever he turned, he heard only vanity, fussing, banal chatter about the war in the east, and saw only rich complacent faces closed over with pride. To calm his spirit, he tried to moderate his disgust at these types with their lazy movements, their soft foppish speech. At dinner he was surrounded by dozens of bespectacled, shiftless Wellers, all singing the praises of the Wehrmacht.

  He caught a train and decided he would get off at a station close to the Belgian border. Perhaps Aachen. Someone he had met in Lublin was born there. Two hours later the train stopped, and the passengers were told to evacuate. Enemy planes circled, casting shadows on the fields. In panic the passengers clambered down, clutching their belongings, and lay under the carriages. Thomas spread out on the warm earth next to the tracks. His cheek rested on a stone that was as smooth as a pillowcase—he wasn’t going to die because of some stupid bomb. He listened to the fading roar and comforted a young mother who was crying, huddled over her infant. He didn’t reboard the train, didn’t feel like hearing the passengers’ frightened whining. He took his suitcase and walked a few kilometres through the fields until he reached a small village near Hanover.

  Frau Gruner, whose house was next to the village cemetery, was the first person he met. She offered to rent him her top floor, which was reserved for important city people, and to cook his meals. The only thing she expected in return for her generosity—aside from money, of course—was his learned opinion regarding the future of the war. He would understand it better than the stupid peasants here. Her grandsons Hans and Franz had been sent to the east, and she and her daughter couldn’t sleep at night for worry.

  ‘Sleep in peace, Frau Gruner. I am completely certain that Hans and Franz will return by the end of the year.’

  For a few days Frau Gruner was satisfied and treated him with the greatest of respect. At six-thirty in the morning she would prepare a rich breakfast for them both. Afterwards she would do her job of tending the cemetery, which she did with the devotion of a peasant working his soil. Every day she asked Thomas for ‘the tiniest bit of help’—a little exercise never hurt anyone, and he looked so low. Here were gloves for weeding, it would be nice if he could mix the whitewash
for the wooden fence, here’s where we want to clear away the rubbish and level the earth. She dreamed about an entrance path strewn with fine gravel and told him there were misers in the village who refused to pay for upkeep of the cemetery—they’d have to look elsewhere to be buried.

  In the afternoon, after she had bathed, applied perfume and tied a blue ribbon in her white hair, Frau Gruner served him egg liqueur in his room and pestered him with questions. Why wasn’t he married? Had his girlfriend married someone else? It happened to the best people. She too, out of all her suitors, chose the failure; love was blind. She was a cheerful woman, Frau Gruner, even when telling the saddest stories.

  At night Thomas would cut across the cemetery and lose himself in the fields beneath a starry sky, going further into the darkness, feeling that he was vanishing along with the world itself, becoming nothing more than an assemblage of memories fading out over Germany. He forgot that Hanover was nearby: darkness now shrouded all the places he had passed through, and the places he had yet to reach.

  One day the owner of the beer hall remarked to Thomas that his eyes were red. Apparently he wasn’t sleeping well—no wonder, if he was living in the house of that Gruner woman, a terrible person who wandered about the village with her sinister, deathly smile. When Thomas returned home, he made some casual remark about the grim future of the war to Frau Gruner.

  All that night he heard panting and snorting, as though of a tired bull, from the ground floor. Finally her shoes pounded on the steps, and she knocked on his door brandishing a smoking candle. She complained that he had promised her grandsons would return safely. Those were exactly the words that had been said to her in 1914, and two years later her husband had been killed.

  ‘I didn’t say they would return safely, Frau Gruner. I said they would return.’

  He immediately packed and left. Where would he go? To Heidelberg? Perhaps he would sit in the university library, do some research. Aachen? The week before he had planned to take a train to the Belgian border. Now he wandered among the platforms, heading first, as always, for the Berlin train before remembering those regions—far from the bright city lights, which he had always held in a kind of contempt—where he had decided to stay. Maybe you’ll learn to enjoy the little things, he sometimes mocked himself: Carlson Mailer, Rudolf Schumacher, Frau Tschammer, Weller all wanted him to have a holiday.

  He wondered whether he was being pursued. Was the Foreign Office looking for him? His discharge was the direct consequence of his actions. In the first week of June, Frenzel had summoned him to his office. Adopting an official manner, as though they had only ever been colleagues, he informed him that his delay in presenting the Model of the Belorussian People had aroused great resentment in the Foreign Office.

  Thomas replied that he hadn’t managed to finish it because of his workload regarding the Germano-Soviet parade.

  Frenzel interrupted him and said frostily that to the best of his knowledge it had been two months since anyone had talked to him about the damn parade. The bureaucratic junkyard, as Thomas well knew, was overflowing with initiatives that had come and gone, and his parade was just another one of them. But Thomas insisted on annoying everyone, sending letters, travelling to Warsaw and Cracow to all sorts of questionable meetings, revealing details to people who weren’t supposed to know them, arousing anger in the highest circles. ‘The party is over,’ declared Frenzel. His severe tone sounded forced, as if imposed from above. ‘Indeed, in early May they were already urging you to finish the Model of the Belorussian People.’

  ‘Does this mean that war with the Soviet Union is close?’

  ‘No,’ said Frenzel. ‘The Belorussian model interests us for philosophical reasons. Please don’t ask me questions that I’m not permitted to answer. All I know is that you have been asked to deliver the model or bear the consequences. The Foreign Office is complaining about your negligence and suggesting you have been deceitful. After all, you received a salary to do a certain job.’

  ‘I was asked to work on the Germano-Soviet parade, too.’

  ‘True, you were asked to do both things together, but, with all due respect, one meeting in Brest-Litovsk and an exchange of letters is not exactly a full-time job.’

  Thomas couldn’t help admiring Frenzel’s official manner, in which no trace of doubt or discomposure was evident. As if he truly believed they had never shared anything but a working relationship.

  ‘There is no Model of the Belorussian People,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Do you understand the implications of saying that?’ Frenzel asked, and his tone softened. He leaned towards Thomas. ‘Look, even if lots of the material still needs to be written up, I have no doubt that within a week you can prepare an excellent report. Maybe it won’t be as impressive as the Model of the Polish People, but you can easily explain that.’ ‘You may inform the Foreign Office that I haven’t completed the work.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go home and reconsider your reply,’ proposed Frenzel, straightening his papers, as though hinting that the meeting was over.

  ‘I’ve thought about it more than enough.’

  ‘So your answer is final?’ asked Frenzel, rising.

  ‘Absolutely final.’

  A week later Thomas was discharged, and received a letter ordering him to leave Lublin immediately, advising that the Foreign Office was considering prosecuting him for fraud. He was invited to supply a detailed answer explaining his conduct. He didn’t reply and left Lublin in the middle of the night.

  Before leaving the apartment he took a last look at his desk, which was piled with typewritten pages. He had come to think of the apartment as a kind of factory for assembling models, but now the machinery had shut down, and whatever left his hands was stunted and ugly, a bloody stump without shape, inspiration or spirit.

  The last thing he did in Lublin was send a letter to Viktoria Sovlova, a resident of Brest, in which the writer, Ewa Pushchinska, regretted to inform Viktoria of the death of her beloved aunt: the funeral had already taken place. Everyone was brokenhearted. She urged her dear friend to leave Brest at once, to return home to console her widowed uncle, who, left alone even for a week, might die of sorrow. She must return to him right away!

  As soon as he got back to Berlin, he sold his mother’s apartment. On the morning of 22 June, when the German invasion of the Soviet Union was announced, he signed the contract. He packed his clothes in two suitcases, having already donated everything else in the apartment to the NSV. He even received a letter of thanks for his generosity.

  He didn’t see Clarissa. Her parents had gone on holiday, and the concierge, the only acquaintance he met in the city, didn’t know where. The concierge had heard from Clarissa that Thomas had received a lofty promotion in the Foreign Office; he congratulated him. It was regrettable that Herr Heiselberg was leaving, but nothing had been the same since Frau Heiselberg had died. ‘She’s engaged, our little Clarissa,’ added the concierge. ‘Maybe she’s even married by now. Her mother told everyone that she was engaged to a young man with a bright future.’

  ‘And where is that bright future going to be?’ Thomas asked.

  The concierge didn’t remember. The fiancé’s father was something in the film industry. He recalled only that Clarissa’s mother said the young man was finishing a doctoral dissertation.

  Thomas didn’t leave a forwarding address. If the Foreign Office decided to take him to court, they’d have to take the trouble of finding him.

  The summer passed. He went to Heidelberg (and did indeed spend a few hours in the university library), visited Aachen, too, the Swiss Alps and quite a few villages and towns. He didn’t go near Munich, of course. It didn’t matter whether he went to the Ruhr district or Bavaria, to Schleswig-Holstein or Hesse. There would always be fields and orchards, tall bushes, a blacksmith shoeing a horse beside a smoking chimney, and a steeple and a church bell, a barn piled with hay, peasants’ houses painted yellow, and a forest not far away, as in Rettenberg, for e
xample, where the men used to hunt quail in those lovely days. But now most of them were hunting and being hunted on the Russian front.

  He crashed into mornings when everything seemed unreal, and his banishment from life was like a cruel punishment, incomprehensible, a story with no moral. On mornings like that he stayed in bed, prayed not to be, but when his imagination smashed his head against the wall or sent him another unbearable attack, he was so ashamed of such images that he burrowed under the sheets, and the sound of every step from outside made him shudder. When he saw his face reflected in a train window, in a mirror, in a glass bowl of fruit, it seemed expressionless. Something had been laid upon it that would neither expand nor contract. He decided to choose certain expressions, but none of them stuck, there was always a hollow space. He grew a small neat beard, but that only made the situation worse. Like a little demon, the beard jumped on his face and shouted: Look, isn’t something missing? Or, after attaching the requisite facial expression, he went out determined to make people pay attention to it, to believe in it so they would ask him: Why, dear fellow, are you so sad, so happy, so tormented?

  He didn’t feel lonely. Among strangers he was calm, and could chat about ordinary matters or prospects for the war. Contact whose meaning he never understood, loyalty as insubstantial as a soap bubble, the pursuit of vague associations, describing encounters at work in terms of friendship, revealing aspects of his personality that he had never in any case hidden—the demands of social connection finally disappeared.

  He didn’t try to conceal that he didn’t have any schedule, status or position. If people asked him his field or his plans, he answered with total sincerity that he had no notion where he was heading. He was offered ridiculous jobs managing small businesses, supervising a distillery, in a watch factory, and he respectfully refused them all. He didn’t intend to settle anywhere. The urge to wander was like a spiritual command that he scrupulously obeyed.