The German House

by Annette Hess

  THE EXPANSIVE FOYER WAS NEARLY EMPTY, but for a few hall attendants. Eva came in, out of breath, her updo askew. Her chest ached. An electronic gong sounded three times. The doors to the auditorium were supposed to close at the tone, Eva could see, but several people hadn’t made it in and continued to block the opening. Two judicial officers pushed them back.

  “Now, would you please be reasonable? There is no more room! Clear the doors!”

  Eva joined the group, wedged herself in among the latecomers, and jostled her way to the front, something totally out of character for her. “Please, I would like to . . . can I please still get in?”

  The officer shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry, miss, every last seat is taken.”

  “It’s important. I have to be there!”

  “You and everyone else—”

  “Now, just a minute, young lady! We’ve been waiting here far longer!” Accusations whirred by Eva’s head. She now stood directly in the doorway, but the officer was slowly pulling the doors shut. Then she spotted the attorney general, who was conferring with two men not far from the door. Eva waved.

  “Hello! Sir . . . hello, you know me. . . .” But the gnarled man didn’t hear.

  “Step back, or I will close the door on you!” The officer had taken Eva by the shoulder and pushed her back. Eva ducked abruptly, dove under the officer’s arm, and slipped into the hall. She headed straight for the attorney general.

  “Pardon me, but I would like to hear the opening statements. I was at your office on Sunday, for the translation. . . .”

  The attorney general eyed Eva and appeared to remember. He gave the officer at the door a signal. “It’s all right.”

  The others waiting there protested in outrage.

  “Why her?”

  “Just ’cos she’s blond?”

  “I came all the way from Hamburg!”

  “And we came from West Berlin!”

  The doors closed. Eva thanked the attorney general, who seemed to have forgotten about her already. An usher directed Eva to the edge of the gallery and removed a piece of paper from a vacant seat. It read “Reserved—Press.” Eva sat down, caught her breath, and looked around. She was familiar with the auditorium. She had attended many theater performances here with her mother—the most recent had been The General’s Trousers, a ridiculous play that had nonetheless made them laugh. As usual, Edith Bruhns had criticized the female players’ acting as unbelievable and stilted. Eva knew how badly her mother would have liked to be the one onstage. Eva didn’t particularly care for the theater, herself; the actors exaggerated their speech and behaviors too much for her liking, as if they wanted to tell her something with violent force. She tried to get her bearings. Where did the judge sit? And the defendants? All she could see were dark heads, gray, bald, black, bluish black, or dark blue suits, muted ties. There was whispering, coughing, noses being blown. It seemed the air in the room was already stale. It smelled vaguely of damp coats, wet leather and rubber, cold cigarette smoke, freshly shaven men, eau de cologne, and hard soap. A hint of turpentine or maybe fresh paint mingled in the mix. Eva eyed her neighbor, a nervous woman in her early sixties with a pointed face and wearing a little felted hat. The woman was kneading her brown handbag, and her gloves dropped. Eva bent down and picked them up. The woman thanked her with a stern nod, then opened her bag and stuffed in the gloves. She closed the bag with a click. At that moment, the bailiff announced the entrance of the judges. All rose noisily and watched as the three men in robes—the chief judge and his associate judges—entered the hall through the side door, with the solemnity of a priest and his acolytes. Only thing missing is the incense, Eva thought. The chief judge—his face somehow paler and rounder, the contours of his black glasses more pronounced than before—reached his spot at the middle of the bench and raised his voice, which was carried over the public address system. His voice was clearer and quieter than expected from a man of his proportions. He said, “I hereby declare proceedings in the criminal case against Mulka and others opened.”

  He took a seat. There was a stir in the auditorium as everyone sat back down. It took some time for the room to quiet, for the seat shifting, rustling, and whispering to abate. The chief judge waited. Eva recognized the blond man seated alongside other men in black robes at a table to the right. The attorney general was not among them. Eva scanned the crowd for David Miller. She thought she recognized his profile at a table behind the prosecutors. The chief judge again raised his voice. “The court will now present the charges.” An associate judge beside him got to his feet. He was young, very slight under his robe, and seemed nervous. He was holding several sheets of paper, and more documents lay before him on the table. He adjusted the papers, cleared his throat thoroughly, and took a drink of water. Eva was familiar with the painful feeling that struck when someone was about to give a speech and kept fumbling with their papers: a fear took root that one might shortly die of boredom. Her fear was different this time. Eva was suddenly reminded of the fairy tale in which Brother wanted to drink from the bewitched spring. Of those who from my waters take, shall I then a wild beast make. The young judge appeared to become lost in sorting his papers. A short, derisive laugh came from the left. Were those the defendants’ tables? Were those the defendants? Those men, so clean-shaven, polished, and civilized, looked no different from the men in the gallery at first glance. Some of them did, however, don dark glasses, like those worn for winter sports. And vertical signs with clearly legible numbers had been set up on the tables before them. Then Eva recognized the partially bald man who’d held up the rabbit in his photograph. There was a fourteen on his sign. He scratched his fleshy neck and gave a quick nod to a short man wearing dark glasses in his row. Number Seventeen returned the greeting. The young judge began speaking so suddenly that Eva and other spectators jumped. He read clearly and intently from the page. His voice was carried by the small black microphone that stood before him on the table. It reverberated in every corner of the hall. Eva could hear every word perfectly. She listened. She tried to understand what the young judge was saying. Seated to the left, she learned, were an importer-exporter, head cashier of a regional savings bank, two commercial clerks, an engineer, a merchant, a farmer, a building superintendent, a stoker, a medical orderly, a laborer, a pensioner, a gynecologist, two dentists, a pharmacist, a cabinetmaker, a butcher, a cash messenger, a weaver, and a piano maker. These men were allegedly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

  Eva folded her hands like she was in church, but immediately unfolded them. She placed them beside each other on her thighs and lowered her gaze, but that made her feel as though she’d been indicted, herself. She looked up at the ceiling, which was hung with spherical glass light fixtures. But then she might come across as inattentive. She allowed her eyes to slowly wander. The mousy-faced woman beside her sat up very straight with her handbag on her knees. She was fidgeting relentlessly with her gold wedding band, which had been worn thin from years of work. The man sitting in front of Eva had a thick neck covered in small red pustules. The woman to his left slumped in her chair, as though drained of all life. The young policeman guarding the door was breathing through his mouth—maybe he had a cold. Or polyps, like Stefan. Eva trained her gaze straight ahead at the map hung behind the bench, the chief judge’s face before it like the rising moon. It looked like a cemetery from above: a grid of grayish red tombstones laid out on a soft green lawn. Eva couldn’t make out the inscriptions from this distance. Her eyes wandered over to the left, to the wall of glass panes. A black silhouette teetered outside the building like a drunken giant, then abruptly dissipated like smoke, while the young judge’s voice continued to fill the hall with words. Eva grasped her wrists. She had to hold on to something. This can’t be true! Eva wanted to stand up and object, make a plea. Or leave—running away would be best. But she remained seated, like everyone else, and listened. The young judge was now reading the detailed allegations
against Defendant Number Four. It seemed the list would never end. The commercial clerk was charged with selecting prisoners, flogging, abusing, torturing, beating them to death, shooting them, killing them with a wooden board, killing them with a rod, killing them with the butt of a rifle, battering, trampling, kicking, crushing, and gassing them. In the barracks, on the streets of the camp, at roll call, at the execution site—known as the Death Wall—in his office, and in the medical block. In the lavatory of Block Eleven, he allegedly murdered a young prisoner secretary named Lilly Toffler with two shots, after days of summoning her to mock executions; the fifth time he called, she fell to her knees and begged him to finally shoot her. Eva searched for Defendant Number Four. He reminded her of Herr Wodtke, a regular at German House, who came in with his family on Sundays and always first made sure his wife and children were happy with their orders. He always treated his well-behaved children to an ice cream for dessert and tipped well—sometimes even too well. Eva didn’t want to believe that that haggard man with the face of a ferret could have done all of those things. He listened to the accusations against him without any discernible reaction, the corners of his mouth turned up and frozen. Like the defendants before him, he looked like he was being forced to pay attention to long-winded remarks on a topic that held utterly no interest for him. Bored, impatient, and irritated, but too well bred to just stand up and leave. The litany of accusations fell on deaf ears among the defendants’ tables, Eva observed. Here and there, one of the men would cross his arms, lean back in his chair, turn to whisper something to his lawyer, or make a note in his papers. The medical orderly, Number Ten, wrote feverishly in a thick little notebook. Before starting each note, he licked his pencil with the tip of his tongue.

  Two and a half hours later, the young judge reached the end of his final document. His face was white as a sheet above the jet-black robe. “The accused are sufficiently suspected of committing these offenses. Upon request by the prosecution, proceedings for the jury’s consideration of the charges against the defendants are now open.”

  The young judge sat down. His voice cut out abruptly, unexpectedly, and was followed by absolute silence. No one cleared his throat, no one coughed. They all sat there, as if life might end at any moment here too. All it would take was for someone to extinguish the big light. Eva felt a drop of sweat running down the middle of her back and into the crack of her bottom. She didn’t feel she could ever speak again or draw another breath. The moment did not last long. Whispers erupted throughout the room. The chief judge leaned in to confer with one of the associate judges. The prosecutors discussed with one another in low voices. The defense lawyers quietly answered their clients’ questions. The radiators whistled and sang. In one of the front rows, a man was crying—it was inaudible, but his shoulders were trembling. From the back, he looked like the bearded Hungarian man. Only the hat was missing. But maybe it’s in his lap, Eva thought. The man then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and Eva briefly caught sight of his profile and realized it was someone else.

  The chief judge now spoke into his microphone. “Defendants, you have heard the charges. How do you plead?” The spectators all leaned forward slightly. Some tilted their heads to the side, and several opened their mouths to listen. David watched as the main defendant, Defendant Number One—a highly regarded Hamburg businessman, dressed in dark gray with a tasteful tie, who was the most important man at the camp, after the commandant—slowly got to his feet. David knew that this hawk-faced man was staying at the Steigenberger Hotel. In a suite, where he had surely taken a hot bubble bath that morning. The trim defendant looked the chief judge in the eye and said, “Not guilty.” At the same moment, there came a whisper in the gallery that only Eva could hear: “Not guilty!” She turned quickly toward her neighbor. The woman in the little hat now had red blotches on her face. She had stopped spinning her ring. She smelled slightly of sweat and vaguely of roses. Out of nowhere, Eva thought, I know her. But that was impossible. Eva felt hysterical. It was no wonder after those monstrosities. After everything she had just heard. After everything those twenty-one men sitting up there with an air of detachment were said to have done. Although they now each stood and pleaded, “Not guilty.” One after the other. Defendant Number Ten, the medical orderly, the only one who—to Eva’s eye—looked like a murderer, with his flattened nose and close-set eyes, stood up and yelled toward the gallery, “I am well loved by my patients! They call me ‘Papa’! Ask anyone! These accusations are based on mistaken identity and lies!” He sat down. Several of his fellow defendants applauded him by rapping their knuckles on the table. The chief judge called sharply for order and signaled one of the hall attendants, who then scurried over to the wall of glass panes. There was a contraption that allowed some of the windows to be tipped opened a crack. The attendant operated the mechanism, and cold air crept into the room, while the defendants continued to rise, one after the other.

  “Not guilty!”

  “Not guilty!”

  “Not guilty as charged!”

  Even the youngest defendant, who—according to investigations conducted by the prosecution—had killed countless people with his bare hands, expressed his innocence. But his face turned red as he spoke. And when he sat back down, he leaned forward, as if trying to devour the microphone on his table, and softly uttered a short sentence. His words rustled over the speakers and were hard to understand.

  “I’m ashamed of myself.”

  Several defendants shook their heads in scorn, and the following suspect, who was second to last, stood up and droned, all the more emphatically, “I have not done anything wrong!”

  At that, a woman in the gallery began sobbing loudly. She stood up, forced her way through the seated crowd, and stumbled out of the hall. Eva heard voices growing louder. It was Polish.

  “Kłamiecie! Wszyscy kłamiecie!” You’re lying! You’re all lying!

  “Tchórze!” Cowards!

  “Oprawca!” Murderers!

  The chief judge pounded on his table and cried, “Order!! Order in the court, or I will clear the gallery!”

  Everyone fell silent. The final defendant, the pharmacist, now stood and turned to face the court. But before he could break the silence, suddenly a bell sounded, grating and drawn out. It came from outside. Now a jumble of excited, high-pitched voices, screams, screeches, squeals. Eva remembered that behind the municipal building was a grade school. She checked the clock: it was probably their second recess. It was children playing.

  “Not guilty,” the pharmacist, in his expensive suit, echoed and sat down.

  IN THE NURSES’ LOUNGE at the hospital, Annegret was taking her second coffee break of the early shift. She sat at a white Formica table and drank her coffee black as she leafed through a fashion magazine. The magazine was tattered—it had served as the nurses’ break time entertainment for more than a year now. This style has already gone out of style, Annegret mused. The closely tailored waistlines on those dresses and suit jackets would look ridiculous on her body anyway. In her free time, Annegret wore stirrup pants and long, shapeless sweaters, and that was that. At work, the blue-and-white nurse’s apron was tight around her hips, and the white cap perched on her large, round head seemed tiny. But she looked smart. While Annegret took little sips of coffee, which always tasted bitter and she never particularly enjoyed, the small portable radio atop the tin storage cupboard holding cloth diapers buzzed with the day’s news. There was a man speaking about an important day for all Germans. About a trial of the century. About a turning point. Annegret stopped listening. She turned the page and started reading the June love story, although she knew it by heart. A homely secretary with ponderous eyeglasses and ill-fitting clothing is in love with her boss, a rakish bachelor. While out one day, she bumps into an old school friend, who has always dressed to impress, and goes shopping with her, then to the beauty salon, and finally to the optician’s. The secretary transforms from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. The twist, howe
ver, is that her rakish boss doesn’t even recognize her the next day—but the messenger who delivers the office mail does. A young man with a good heart, who comforts her as she sits crying in a corner of the corridor. Annegret didn’t know whom she despised most in this story. The idiot secretary who couldn’t dress herself, the overbearing friend with the perfect hair, the rakish boss who didn’t cotton on to a damn thing, or the dopey mailman who was too afraid to speak to the woman till she was crying. Annegret thought of her sister and that filthy rich snob. She was sure the two had not yet slept together. She considered that a mistake. Everything about a person was revealed in the act. Ample and difficult though she may be, Annegret had had several sexual encounters. All of the men had been married. Nurse Heide appeared at the door, a reserved older colleague who sometimes wheeled screaming infants into the broom closet and left them there till they fell asleep from exhaustion.

  “Here she is. This is our dear Nurse Annegret.”

  A younger woman in a winter coat entered the nurses’ lounge alongside Nurse Heide. She was smiling from ear to ear and took a large step toward Annegret. In the hall was a dark blue baby carriage, which rocked gently and emitted happy babbling.

  “I wanted to thank you!”

  Now Annegret understood, and she got up.

  “Bringing Christian home today?”

  The young mother nodded happily and handed Annegret a flat parcel wrapped in reddish tissue paper.

  “It’s nothing, I know, compared to what you’ve done.”

  Probably pralines. Or brandy beans. Sometimes they gave a pound of coffee or air-dried mettwurst as a thank you for good care. Of all the nurses, Annegret received by far the most gifts. But she was also the one who truly sacrificed herself for the problem cases, the one who ignored her schedule and didn’t sleep until the infant was back on the path to recovery. In the five years Annegret had worked in the nursery, she’d had only had four children die. It had been best in those cases, too, she thought, because after an initial recovery, these patients would have led sad lives as cripples or halfwits or both.