Death’s Head Page 24

  Grunwald was standing facing his uncle. It was odd to hear the old man talk as if he were a child again: the implicit acceptance of God’s will, the blind acknowledgement of inscrutable cosmic purpose. Momentarily Grunwald was embarrassed and then he realized that the prospect of death had caused in his uncle a mental regression of some kind, a clawing backwards at old and forgotten values.

  ‘God has spared you. You must accept that gift,’ Willi said. Because a cloud had crossed the watery morning sun the room became suddenly dark. Grunwald walked back and forth. His own religious faith in the past had been a matter of convenience: a social club that he visited frequently. Gradually what little belief there was had dwindled to the point of non-existence. Rejection of faith took place at an emotional level. Religion had perished somewhere between the ghetto and the crematorium: it had died piece by piece with every crystal of Zyklon B and with every new corpse shovelled out of the gas chambers; it had been demolished in anger and sorrow, fear and disbelief.

  ‘You have been spared, Leonhard. Grasp it with both hands.’ Willi, fingers clenched together, looked at Grunwald with his head to the one side, awaiting a reaction.

  ‘What are you suggesting, Willi?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Willi said. ‘But you are not an old man. And the ruins won’t last forever. Someday you’ll want to make a new life for yourself.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘Possibly? Possibly? Is that all you can say?’

  Grunwald was silent. Truth was like a fragile article in a shuttered and darkened room: if you brought it out into the light it perished. He wanted to tell Willi about Chelmno but there weren’t the words to describe what he had seen and done.

  Willi said, ‘Fräulein Strauss, for instance –’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘All right, I’m an old man, it’s no business of mine. I know that. But she’s a nice girl. You could do far worse for yourself. She’s been like a saint to me.’

  Grunwald stopped by the window and turned round to look at Willi. The old man was sitting hunched in his chair, silent now, seemingly engrossed in his own thoughts.

  ‘Are you matchmaking, Willi?’

  ‘Matchmaking? Me? Don’t be foolish.’

  ‘It sounds that way to me.’

  Willi shook his head. ‘Look, you’re lonely. She’s lonely. What could be more natural?’

  ‘More natural than what?’ Grunwald asked.

  ‘You and her getting to know one another better. That’s all.’

  Grunwald thought for a moment of the absurdity of his uncle’s suggestion. It was absurd. A relationship with a woman was far from his mind and besides if such a thing were to happen in connection with Elisabeth Strauss, how could he live with the knowledge that she was stronger than he was? He felt inexplicably feeble for a moment, drained of his energy.

  Willi said, ‘Forget it. Forget what I’ve said. Put it out of your mind. It’s none of my business whether you start afresh or not. It’s got nothing to do with me.’

  Grunwald answered: ‘I appreciate your concern.’

  In the early evening, just as it was beginning to get dark, he went walking with her in the direction of Schwabing. It had been her idea and he had complied reluctantly. For a long time they walked in silence along the Widenmayerstrasse, turning down the Prinzregentenstrasse and past the Englischer Garten. It had turned cold and the darkness was falling imperceptibly, and as it fell it seemed to accentuate the forlorn appearance of the streets and buildings around them. She had said nothing so far and he wondered what was going through her mind. Her silence seemed potentially explosive, as if she were gathering herself together to say something of profound importance. As they walked, time and again they passed squads of American soldiers and trucks parked along the sides of the streets. It was all vaguely unreal: it was as if – having inflicted such damage on the city themselves – they had come as interested spectators intent on assessing the extent of the wreckage.

  There were crowds of people on the Ludwigstrasse, which led up to Schwabing. She seemed suddenly alarmed to see so many people and she held his arm tightly, looking for comfort and safety. They passed beneath the Siegestor and into the Leopoldstrasse, and from there they walked down darkened side-streets. In the Giselastrasse she said, ‘There used to be a restaurant here. My mother and I used to come up this way about once a month and eat here. Do you remember Schwabing then?’

  ‘I remember,’ he answered.

  She was silent again. Schwabing had had enormous gaiety for her. Here, more than anywhere else in Munich, she had felt alive. She remembered music in the restaurants and beerhalls, tables on the streets, lights and sound, dancing everywhere. Interesting and intense people argued over their beers and thumped the tables and made passionate speeches in front of any audience that would listen.

  A solitary street lamp burned at the corner. They stood beneath it and for some reason Grunwald said, ‘Willi thinks we should get to know each other better.’

  She turned her face away. ‘Does he?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  Grunwald shrugged. He was being distant again. She felt him drift away from her.

  ‘Don’t you think anything?’ she asked.

  What did she expect him to think? He looked up at the pale light from the street lamp. He was conscious of noises around him, as if through the darkness people were scurrying silently away to secret conventions. She was staring at him and he felt nervous. Why did she have this effect upon him?

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be forced into talking.’

  From the expression on his face, she tried to enter his thoughts. But it was hopeless. He was surrounded by barbed wire. For a moment she held his hand between her own and was surprised at the icy feel of his flesh. Why was he so cold?

  ‘You’re freezing,’ she said.

  He took his hand away. What was the point? He had to protect himself: to drift into a relationship with her would ultimately entail having to tell her the truth, and he couldn’t face the prospect. He stared at her face. Her expression was expectant, but more than that she looked as though she were prepared to wait, with infinite patience, for as long as it was necessary.

  ‘You’re strange,’ she said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘If you were a house, you would be haunted.’

  ‘Willi’s a fool. His mind is going.’

  She didn’t want to talk about Willi. She felt that time had become concentrated on a single pinpoint, that the time they had between them was already dying: why waste it talking about Willi? But she didn’t understand the sensations she experienced. Why should there be a sense of urgency? And why in any case should she allow Grunwald to affect her?

  He said, ‘Elisabeth, what’s the point?’

  ‘The point in what?’

  ‘You’re always asking for definitions.’

  ‘The point in what?’ she asked again.

  He didn’t answer her question and she felt that she was on the edge of losing something: but it was a peculiar sense of loss – as if she had never possessed the missing object in the first place.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  He shook his head. They moved away together from the circle of lamplight.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand you. Ever since I saw you I’ve wanted to understand you. I’ve wanted to get inside your head. Oh, Christ, does that make sense?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. He wondered why he couldn’t find it in himself to say something warm, something that would make her smile.

  ‘I can’t talk to you. I don’t get through to you.’ She felt conscious of her own desperation. The world had become focused on this single thing: getting through to him.

  ‘Why do you want to? Why do you want to?’

  She looked at him
vacantly. Why couldn’t she find an answer to that? ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I wish I did.’

  He felt unaccountably sad all at once. He sensed her despair and knew that he couldn’t help her. They began to walk again, a fresh silence constructed around them. They reached an area that had been heavily bombed, where the houses had been crushed into the ground. Even though it was dark the job of clearing the rubble was still going on. Arclights had been erected and they burned against the shadows of the men who were piling the shattered concrete into trucks. Around the lamps were other people, idly watching what was taking place because they had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. More victims, Elisabeth thought: everywhere she turned she experienced the brutal wounds of the age.

  ‘I don’t like looking at this,’ she said to Grunwald.

  Grunwald hesitated. One of the clearance workers had cried out and several of his colleagues moved across slowly to the place where he stood. They grouped together and looked down at something in the rubble. After some moments they pulled out the body of a man and dragged him towards the trucks. Elisabeth noticed his face as he came into the direct glare of the lights. It was expressionless and grey: congealed blood covered his skull and ears and she thought that one of his hands was missing. The corpse was dumped beside one of the trucks and a blanket thrown across it.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  She started to walk away and Grunwald followed her. He thought of the dead baby he had discovered in the ruins of Berlin months ago. He thought of the cold blue lips and the shut eyes. Catching the woman by the arm, he said, ‘I’m sorry that you saw it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  She was shivering. Again a feeling of sadness overwhelmed him. He was still holding her arm and he tightened his grip. Her softness surprised him. He had forgotten how soft it could be to touch another person.

  She turned to him: ‘Don’t ask me for an explanation, please. But all I want to do is to get near to you.’

  ‘Why? Tell me why.’

  ‘No explanations.’

  ‘What do you mean by near?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  She was staring at him. He said, ‘I used to know.’

  ‘Then you must try to remember.’

  They had reached the Luitpold Bridge where for a moment they stopped. Looking at his face, she was surprised by its thinness, by the way the cheekbones were high and seemed to protrude and the eyes were sunken and distant. She put her hand to his face and left it there a second, as if she were trying to transmit a message to him that could not be conveyed in words. He thought of the corpse that had been disinterred from the rubble and of the arclights burning mercilessly in its face: he imagined that death was nothing more than the absence of expression – was that what he had been afraid of? Conscious of the woman’s hand against his cheek, he experienced a sense of sorrow: it was as if he knew that he was destined forever to be trapped inside himself with no possibility of release, no chance of freedom.

  ‘You’re cold. Your skin’s like ice,’ she said, aware that he was slipping away from her again. She wanted to hold him, to hold his face tightly against her body and to possess him, as if the mere act of possession would entail the knowledge that she was seeking. Yet she could not overcome the feeling that he was a stranger, growing outwards with every minute that passed in a direction she could not possibly follow.

  They crossed the Isar. She said, ‘Willi told me you were married once.’

  He said nothing: the bare fact – stated like that – might have been an entry in an encyclopaedia.

  ‘Let me ask you something,’ she said, and then paused for a time. ‘Do you still love your wife?’

  ‘Do I love her memory?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps that’s what I mean.’ She waited for his answer. It was suddenly important to know if all his emotions had been buried in the past.

  ‘I can’t honestly remember,’ he said. ‘I had forgotten her face until Willi showed me an old photograph. I remember now what she looked like. But I don’t recall anything else.’

  ‘Don’t you remember how you felt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any feeling left?’ Why did it always seem that she was interrogating him? Questions and questions: she wished that she could stop asking them and accept Grunwald on his own terms. Each question he answered seemed to cause him pain, seemed to expose yet another area of agonizing sensitivity. She thought of herself: an impoverished Jewess in the shabby wreckage of what had once been Munich. Well, unlike Grunwald, she at least had feelings left even if they baffled and perplexed her. She was alive, she was aware of each new mood and sensation that passed through her mind, conscious of her own body and the nerves and pulses that operated every time she performed a simple physical act. This was what war had done: it had created for her a penetrating new awareness of herself as an entity in the world. Suddenly she wished that she could get some of this feeling across to Grunwald. If she could shake him, change him, erase from his mind whatever memories remained there and reconstruct him afresh. And then she realized this was impossible. Whatever it was that haunted him could only be exorcized by him. She was powerless to act, she was weak and useless: she felt like a sea-wall that can no longer contain the force of a tide.

  ‘You don’t need to answer my question,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer your question,’ he said. ‘So even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ she said.

  ‘You can ask whatever you want,’ he answered.

  ‘Are there such things as unanswerable questions?’

  They had reached the Schumannstrasse and they paused on the corner. She reached out and took his hand and held it a moment: momentarily she wondered if the only thing she could offer him was a fragment of hope. The little she knew of his past had created an overwhelming impression of darkness in her mind. Against that, could she give him something to hope for? A transfusion of optimism?

  They entered the building and climbed the stairs. She found that she was breathing heavily and perspiring as if in anticipation of some momentous event. What could she do? If she wanted to offer him hope, if she wanted to reach the foundations of his despair, what could she do?

  He followed Elisabeth into her room. She looked nervous and uneasy. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them and her flesh was pale. She sat down on the edge of the bed and clasped her hands together. The feeling of ridiculousness had not left her. Why did she think she could offer this man some salvation? Why did she even want to? Could this be the extent of her pity?

  She had never had a lover in her life. The fact of her virginity sometimes startled her. It surprised her now. She wanted Grunwald to have her body and yet she felt curiously detached from the possibility. She imagined him lying across her, his breath against her face, his eyes open. Her own lack of experience frightened her suddenly. But nothing was going to happen anyway. Nothing was going to take place. He wasn’t interested, she could tell that he wasn’t interested in her body. He was standing by the sink, gazing at the print of the Café Helbig that hung beside the mirror.

  ‘Do you want some coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not thirsty,’ he said.

  ‘Come over here. Sit beside me.’

  He moved towards the bed and sat down beside her. She reached for his hand and took it, pressing it tightly in her own.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he asked.

  ‘I could ask the same question of you.’ His face: how could she erase the sufering that seemed to have been inscribed upon his face?

  She waited a moment. She felt stiff and tense. ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ When he saw that she wasn’t going to answer, he said, ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I think I do.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s hopeless.
Can’t you see that?’

  ‘What’s hopeless? What is it, Leonhard?’

  ‘Involvement. Why should we become involved with one another?’

  ‘Leonhard, what is it? Why can’t you tell me what’s troubling you?’

  He got up from the bed. Looking round the tiny room, he realized that she had created a life for herself. All the incongruous trappings of normality were evident: the clothes that lay on top of the wooden cabinet, the framed photograph of a woman who was possibly her mother, the prints on the walls, the toilet items neatly arranged on a ledge beside the sink, two pots hanging from nails, the kettle on the gas-stove. This was her life: how could he contaminate it?

  ‘Shall I tell you something?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never had a man. A lover, I mean. I don’t know why I feel slightly ashamed of the fact, but I do. I had boy-friends in the past, but never a lover. Some of them were kind, and nice, but there was none of them I ever particularly desired. Do you suppose I was saving myself for you?’

  He turned to look at her: ‘You’re imagining things. You’re playing games, Elisabeth. It’s understandable. You’re lonely. You want to construct love out of nothing but the pity you feel for me.’

  ‘That isn’t true. It just isn’t true.’

  ‘It has to be true,’ he said.

  ‘Christ – it’s not true. Not in any way.’ She rose from the bed, suddenly feeling that she had humiliated herself. Her mind was turning over and over in a bewildered way. ‘Leonhard, please listen to me. I can’t explain what I feel about you, or even why I feel it. All I know is that I don’t want you to reject me like this. I’m not playing games, I’m not imagining things. I swear to you that I’m hot.’

  She had followed him to the window. She felt that somehow she was begging now, imploring him to give at least something of himself. And the more she begged, the more exposed she felt and the further away she seemed to drive him.

  ‘I don’t want anything from you,’ he said.

  She placed her hands on his shoulders and made him turn round to face her. ‘Please, Leonhard, why won’t you accept what I’ve offered?’