Death’s Head Page 14

  At length he reached the final landing where he stood for a time in the harsh darkness and experienced a sense of desperation. The woman had been taking the piss, there was no doubt about that now. The building was uninhabited. He leaned against the rail and listened. There were muffled noises of distant traffic. But there was something else as well: a very faint ticking noise, as if someone were moving on the stairs below. And yet it wasn’t like that at all. Rather it was an after-noise, the tiny whisper you catch after something has taken place and there are only suggestions of echoes. He strained to hear but caught an unresponsive silence. Even so, he was convinced that something – if not someone – was moving below. He held his breath, waited, aware of his desperation increasing, if only he had a match, a torch, even a candle, some slice of light by which he could see – but he had nothing except the hostile, impenetrable dark around him. Gripping the rail hard, he leaned over and looked down blindly. He called out.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  His voice was caught in a muffled echo that reverberated briefly and then died. Christ: what was down there? Again, it seemed that he heard a shuffle, a kind of shuffle, as if someone were coming up very slowly. He leaned over to call down again but this time he was dumb. What could he do? The thought of going down the stairs and passing whoever was climbing upwards through the thick darkness was terrifying.

  Suddenly from behind there was the sharp flash of an electric light. He wheeled round quickly. A door had been opened some feet away from him. The woman, her features almost invisible, was framed in the doorway.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked.

  He moved towards the door and she saw him properly for the first time. She held the door back and allowed him to enter and then she slammed it shut.

  He followed her down a corridor that led into a large high-ceilinged room which was in a state of disarray. A mattress lay on the floor and there were a few old books scattered around amongst the dirt, the items of discarded clothing, the tattered newspapers and empty bottles, the bedsheets that seemed to have been ripped from the mattress in a moment of violence, and strewn across the room.

  ‘So von Ribbentrop has come for his bath?’ She sat down on the mattress and he looked at her. She was wearing a nightdress loosely covered with a dressing-gown and in her hand she held a burnt-out cigarette. She looked curiously tiny and he realized for the first time just how large the room actually was: it was overwhelming, its ceiling disappeared into shadow some way above the electric light, and yet he felt safe again, as if the mere act of being there behind a closed door had shut him away from whatever terror had existed outside on the darkened stairs.

  ‘You look pale. Is something wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered. He could not take his eyes from her: she presented a picture of such decadence that it seemed to him she symbolized in a small way the things that had overtaken Germany and ultimately destroyed it. But when he thought about it, he knew he could not pinpoint exactly why she seemed decadent. Was it something to do with her appearance, her broken appearance – especially here in this room which at one time must have been magnificently impressive?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘The bath will have to be cancelled.’

  He looked for a chair and sat down. He glanced along the corridor towards the door, wondering if it were securely closed.

  ‘The plumbing’s fucked itself up,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to come here so soon.’

  He said nothing. Why had she asked him to come anyway?

  ‘I must have underestimated your dilemma,’ she said. ‘You really don’t have anywhere to go, do you?’

  ‘I told you. I move around.’

  She got up from the mattress and came towards him. She stared at him curiously for a moment: ‘You were in one of those camps.’

  ‘For a time,’ he answered.

  An expression of pity crossed her face, as if she were genuinely sorry. But how was it possible for him to tell if she really meant it? The face – its features blurred, the make-up smudged and caked and beginning to crack – was like a mask that has been used in too many dramas: equivocal, blunt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how sorry I am.’

  Her hand brushed against his shoulder and then, slumping like someone wilting under intolerable pressures, she returned to the mattress and sat down.

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘I was once,’ he said, retreating from the subject, from the thought of discussing anything that lay in the past.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  He was silent again. And then he asked: ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘I told you my name. You told me yours. I’ll always think of you as von Ribbentrop.’ She leaned across the mattress to where an old gramophone lay. She wound it up slowly and put a record on the turntable. A dance band was playing a foxtrot.

  ‘Do you know that piece of music?’ she asked. ‘An American gave me that record. It’s Glenn Miller.’ She closed her eyes and clicked her fingers in time to the music. ‘It makes me feel very happy whenever I play it.’

  Swaying slightly, she closed her eyes. Grunwald watched her. She seemed to have transported herself and she opened her eyes again only some moments after the record had finished and the needle was ticking again and again in the last groove. She looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time, an expression of surprise in her eyes.

  ‘Why did you give me your address?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  Grunwald shrugged. Did it matter? Perhaps not; perhaps the only thing that mattered now was – for however brief a time – the end of his solitude. She got up from the mattress and went to the window. She drew the curtain back a few inches and stood there staring absently at the darkness.

  ‘I gave you my address because I felt sorry for you,’ she said. ‘Does that answer your question?’

  Grunwald wondered about pity: there were times when it seemed to him the most deceptive of all human feelings. ‘Why did you feel sorry for me?’

  She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe I felt sorry for myself.’ She dropped the curtain and stood in the centre of the room. ‘The way you see me now isn’t how I have always been. Does that surprise you? I haven’t always been a whore.’

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ Grunwald said. A slight noise made him turn his head towards the corridor: nothing more than a scrap of paper shifting in a draught.

  ‘Do you know why I’m a whore?’ she asked.

  Grunwald was embarrassed. He felt uneasy with the confessions of other people: they made him feel as if he were simply a deposit-box for vanities and anxieties that weren’t his own.

  ‘Hitler made me a whore,’ she said. She returned to the mattress and dropped there, very slowly, as if beneath an impossible weight.

  ‘How?’

  She picked up a comb and began to run it through her hair but it made little difference to her appearance. ‘At the age of eighteen I was selected for duty at the Lebensborn. In accordance with the biological dictates of the Third Reich, I was mated with a young SS officer – of the same racial type as myself – blonde, Aryan, and attractive. Yes, I was attractive then. You may find it hard to believe.’

  Grunwald looked away: what impulse had motivated her to tell him her history? They were both casualties – was that it?

  She said, ‘I became pregnant. I carried the child for nine months. They said we couldn’t keep the children. They said we had to resign any claims on them. That was the law of the Lebensborn. The babies became children of the Reich. At first I didn’t mind the thought. And as the months went past I knew I wanted to keep the child. It was growing inside me, it was mine, and I wanted to keep it …’ She lay down on the mattresss, curled in the foetal position. She lit a cigarette and let it burn down between her lips.

  ‘What happened?’ Grunwald asked.

  �
�I tried to keep it after it was born. But they took it away from me. What could I do? What could I have done? The child wasn’t mine by law. I had signed a document. But that didn’t alter the fact that I was the baby’s mother, did it?’ She turned over on her back and concentrated on the smoke that rose from her cigarette while it drifted and dispersed somewhere above the light.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Christ, I didn’t do anything. As far as I was concerned the child was dead. But I wanted it. It was a desperate physical need.’

  ‘And the father?’

  ‘A nothing in a black uniform. I can’t even remember his name.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Grunwald said, and the word seemed an empty gesture.

  ‘After I’d lost the child, I just drifted around. I went into one of those places where they kept girls for the SS officers. I suppose I was looking for another father for another child. Do you think that’s what I was doing?’

  Grunwald got up from his chair and walked about the room. When he closed his eyes it was as if a nightmare were about to set in; a sense of threat, of menace, impinged upon his consciousness. But why? Did it relate to the past? To the way human lives had been taken up and broken beyond repair? Or did it pertain to the future? He shivered suddenly. The future: there was a beautiful, artificial concept. What did the future hold? He opened his eyes. The room hadn’t altered, it was still there, it was around him and he could touch it, and the woman hadn’t moved from her position on the mattress; and yet he couldn’t rid himself of the strange sense of menace.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your baby,’ he said, and his eyes were drawn again along the corridor to the door as if in the knowledge that only the door prevented the menace from assuming a real shape. What was it? What was out there? What was moving in the darkness on the stairs?

  ‘Then we’re sorry for each other.’ She rose from the mattress and looked at him. ‘You must be hungry. Do you want something to eat? I’ve got some cheese and bread.’

  ‘I can’t remember when I ate last,’ Grunwald said.

  She went into the kitchen and returned a moment later with the bread and cheese and a half-bottle of wine. She put them on the table and watched while he ate. The food tasted strange to him and the wine made him slightly dizzy.

  ‘Have you any plans?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Munich originally. Poland more recently.’

  She looked at him sadly: ‘Why are you in Berlin?’

  ‘I found myself here when we returned from Poland,’ he said.

  ‘Have you any family in Munich?’

  ‘I’m not sure if they’re still alive.’

  He was silent for a time. He remembered that there had been several uncles and aunts and cousins, some on his own side, others on Martha’s. But what had become of them? Had they survived?

  ‘Don’t you want to find out?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re dead. They must be dead.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I feel it.’ He pushed the empty plate away.

  ‘How can you feel something like that? If there’s a chance that any of your relatives are alive, even if there’s only a slight chance, you must go to Munich and find out.’ She had become suddenly animated, as if she had just managed to solve a major problem.

  ‘Why should I go to Munich?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should you stay in Berlin?’

  Grunwald shrugged. He was tired all at once: fatigue seemed to hang around him, in the folds of his clothes, in his flesh. Munich. It was a city in which the memories of his life were endlessly trapped.

  ‘If you went to Munich you might be able to make a fresh start.’

  He said nothing. Martha and the boy, the apartment, the empty apartment, the long road leading to Dachau, Obersturmführer Mayer’s room at Gestapo HQ: even if it were true that Munich had been flattened by war, how could he return there with these memories in his mind?

  She touched the back of his hand and he was surprised at the smoothness of her skin. ‘Could it be worse than this, Ribbentrop?’

  He got up from the table restlessly and moved towards his chair. Munich was an impossible distance away. It was a part of his life that he had cut off, like a useless limb.

  ‘I won’t go there,’ he said.

  ‘You must.’

  ‘It holds nothing for me now –’

  ‘Your relatives –’

  ‘Dead. All of them.’

  She threw her hands up in exasperation as if – having offered him the solution to the dilemma of his life – he were rejecting it entirely.

  ‘I know someone,’ she said. ‘He sometimes runs a truck down to Munich. You would only have to mention my name to him and he’d take you down there.’

  Grunwald refused to listen. She approached him where he was sitting and caught hold of him by the shoulders. ‘Don’t be so obstinate. I want to help you. Don’t you see that? You should go back home –’

  ‘I don’t have a home! For God’s sake!’

  ‘Arnold Neurer,’ she said. ‘You’ll find his garage in the alley that runs off the Rosenheimer Strasse. You only have to mention my name, tell him that I sent you –’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He’ll help. He’ll take you to Munich.’

  ‘I don’t want to go. Can’t you understand that?’

  Suddenly she was silent. She took her hands from his shoulders and went to the mattress where she sat down. She looked at him for a long time, puzzled by what she saw in his face.

  ‘Why won’t you go? All across bloody Germany people want nothing more than to get back to their home towns. Especially those who’ve been in your kind of situation –’

  ‘You’re wasting your time.’ Grunwald slumped further into the chair as if to defend himself against her. ‘Look, you’ve been kind to me. You’ve given me food. You asked me to come here. But I am not going back to Munich. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Please yourself then. It’s your fucking life, not mine.’

  Grunwald watched her as she went first to the window and then to the table, where she stood with her hands on the wooden surface, spreading the fingers as if to catch at something spilled.

  ‘The expression on your face reminds me of the faces we used to see before and during the war. That look of hopeless fear. Not knowing what was going to happen. Always listening for the bad news. Always waiting …’ She crushed her cigarette on the table, pushing the stub this way and that through a trail of bread crumbs. ‘That’s what you remind me of: the man who is always waiting for the bad news.’

  She shrugged. ‘I thought I could help you. I really thought I could help.’

  Shutting his eyes, he was suddenly conscious of the heavy sound of her breathing in the silent room. So she wanted to help? She wanted to send him home, turn the clock back, make him feel that nothing had happened, that the events he had lived through were as unreal as the dread of a nightmare? She was holding out a hand towards him, offering him a point of contact, because she saw in him – what? exactly what? – the open wound of the victim. How could it help to go back to Munich where every sight he might see would be a punishment?

  ‘The time when you might have helped is over.’ He felt indescribably weary all at once, as if tired of searching for an object he had misplaced, as if having looked everywhere for it he had resigned himself to the fact of the loss.

  She played the Glenn Miller record again like someone who finds comfort in constant repetition. The music threw up a barricade that protected her. He listened to the sound with growing annoyance, shifting around in his chair, restlessly. When the music had finished she took the record from the gramophone and held it a moment between her hands. And then, with a deliberate gesture, she snapped the record in two pieces and dropped them to the floor.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not?’ She stared at the broken pieces as
if she were regretting her impulse. She lit a cigarette and, holding it between her lips, smiled at him. ‘I can help you in another way,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trained to help men. That’s what I do best of all.’

  Grunwald looked away. ‘I don’t need it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with need.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ he said, embarrassed by the sudden change in her behaviour, yet thinking at the same time of her body under the nightdress. There had been no one since Martha and his memories of Martha’s flesh were like recollections of events that had never taken place: except that somewhere, buried now under the rubble of his mind, there existed the smallest memory of love. What would it be like to take this woman? To lie beside her on the mattress and feel her body moving against him?

  He rose from his chair and crossed the room to the mattress. He sat down beside her and touched the back of her hand. She was crying quietly: tears lay on the thick surface of her make-up.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said.

  She covered her face with her hands and he put an arm around her shoulder. Why was she crying? It seemed to him so totally irrational that explanation was impossible. Why was she suddenly crying? He was embarrassed: the confession, the offer of help, and now this.

  ‘Please stop,’ he said.

  She turned her face away. He did not know how to cope with tears: whenever Martha had wept it had seemed to him a statement about his own uselessness. He rose from the mattress and went back to his chair.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  She raised her face from her hands and shook her head: ‘I don’t know. It sometimes happens. I can’t explain it to you.’

  There was a whine of self-pity in her voice. Grunwald imagined her rummaging through her mind for past acts that she could regret now, turning over and over again the items of her conscience as if they were pieces of soiled laundry. And suddenly, without reason, he felt a sense of hostility towards her: she had tried to involve him in her life and in turn had tried to become involved in his – and yet there was an element of theatricality in her behaviour, like someone auditioning for a minor role in an obscure play. She wasn’t real: the room, the broken record, the pity and the self-pity, the tears, even the joke name she had assumed so readily – these suddenly seemed to him like fragments of a half-written drama. But how could he have expected her to be otherwise? How could he have imagined her to be sincere? And now that he thought about it he realized that nothing was real in the post-war world: there were times when the broken buildings and the armies of the invasion seemed to him like pieces of poor stage scenery, erected for some interminable theatrical event. And this woman, playing her emotional charade, was using him as her audience.