Death’s Head Page 8

  Schwarzenbach sat stiffly on the edge of his mattress. He experienced a curious sensation of numbness, as if a part of his brain was suddenly afflicted with a paralysis. He lay back across the bed. He felt strangely naked: it was as if an operation were being performed upon him and his flesh, layer by layer, were being pushed painfully back from the bone.

  8

  The woman was dying. She was suffering from an incurable cancer. Even with the best medical supplies and the most delicate instruments Schwarzenbach could never have saved her. The cancer had afflicted her liver and in all probability had spread to other parts of her body as well. It was hardly worth finding out. The fact of her death stared him in the face; the sad eyes that caught his own, as if she were under the impression that he was a priest, a worker of miracles, who could snatch her back from death. He washed his hands, dried them on a towel, and for a moment enjoyed the sensation of helplessness that he experienced. Would he tell her that she was dying?

  ‘It’s painful when I pass water,’ she said. Her head was wrapped in a grubby scarf. The part of her skull that was visible was covered with thin hair; but tufts of hair had fallen out and areas of naked white scalp could be seen.

  ‘You already said that,’ Schwarzenbach answered. ‘There’s nothing I can give you.’

  ‘Nothing to ease the pain?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Schwarzenbach went to his desk. He picked up his pen and drew a series of interlocking circles on his scrap-pad. Ripping the sheet from the pad, he threw it into the waste-basket. ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do to help.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Her thin hands were working together. If he were to explore her, to analyse her complaints, what number of diseases might he find? He wondered about that academically and realized that treating the sick had begun to bore him. It lacked excitement and challenge; it was a deathly game, played out in the dark tedium of what was left of Germany. There wasn’t a point to it.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you tell me what it means?’

  ‘Do you have relatives?’

  She looked at him in horror. ‘A son. Yes. I’m a widow. I only have the boy.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Can he look after you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Look after me? What do you mean?’

  He felt suddenly callous and powerful. He had only to tell her the truth. After all, wasn’t that what she wanted to hear? Those grim, imploring eyes – weren’t they asking for truth?

  ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said. ‘It’s a matter of time.’

  ‘A matter of time? How?’

  ‘You are going to die.’ He experienced a brief sense of triumph.

  Strangely, she remained unemotional. He had only told her what she had feared all along. She was going to die. And when he realized this, he wondered why he had cared to be truthful. The woman closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘I’m not afraid. I’m not scared,’ she said. ‘It’s just that the thought makes me sad, that’s all. I find death a sad thought.’

  Schwarzenbach looked at her. Her ugliness, the wastage induced by the sickness, repelled him. He turned his eyes away. He had always preferred beauty and order.

  ‘It makes me quite sad,’ she said. ‘But I had to know.’

  She sighed, as if at the thought of her own life ebbing away like some precious liquid spilled. Her stupidity amazed him: what was sad about death? He had to get her out of the surgery quickly now. He stood up.

  ‘There’s nothing more I can say.’

  ‘Of course, I understand.’ She tied the ends of her headscarf together and, rising slowly, shuffled towards the door. Half-smiling, she went out. He watched as the door swung shut behind her and then he went into the kitchen to finish what little remained in the bottle of cognac. So she would go away, like an insect crawling beneath a stone, and she would die: it puzzled him always that people could not accept death unemotionally, regard it for what it was – an historical fact. They tied it up in mumbo-jumbo and religion, and they tried to defeat it with medicines and drugs, but it remained a constant thing. You could not cheat it. You could not do anything but ultimately accept it. It irritated him now to think of the incredible fuss that was being raised about the millions of deaths that had taken place all over Europe – as if it were possible to differentiate between those who had fallen in battle and the rest who had perished under other circumstances. In reality there was no difference. An enemy was an enemy. There wasn’t one sort of enemy that you gunned down between some muddy trenches or blew to shattered pieces with bombs, and another that you gassed in a concentration camp and burned in an incinerator. All were casualties of war, no matter how they had died.

  But now he could hear the voices that were being raised all across Europe and they were clamouring after their revenge. It wasn’t enough for them that Germany had fallen, and her land savaged, they had also to root out those responsible for the acts now described as war crimes. And it was the logic of this that he couldn’t accept. Was a general of the Wehrmacht, who had lined up his troops against the advancing Russians and in so doing had probably caused thousands of deaths, any less responsible than the SS man who had ushered thousands into gas chambers? Was the arms manufacturer to go unpunished, while those who had made Zyklon B were to be incarcerated?

  Schwarzenbach found this astonishing: he had been taught, and he had learned, that the enemies of Germany were to be destroyed, that the means of destruction were irrelevant. And the enemies were plainly visible to all concerned. Bolshevism, international Jewry, and the monolithic structures of capitalism raised by international Jewry. He had accepted this. The Reich, before 1933, had been a sick man, suffering an illness that could be cured only by the removal of the poison. And so, in 1934, along with millions of others, he had joined the National Socialist Party. He hadn’t agreed with everything immediately, of course. Some measures taken by the new regime seemed extreme and offended a large number of intellectuals and he had found himself, in those early months, looking disapprovingly at some of the acts taken by the Government.

  But slowly, inexorably, impressed by the weight of propaganda and the new mood in Germany, he realized that he had to look at National Socialism from the standpoint of history: the Reich, after all, was designed to last for a thousand years. What were a few harsh acts against the judgement of history? What did it matter that blood was spilled when something unique was happening?

  Besides, the voices of the intellectuals were fading to whispers, and many of the former opponents of the regime began to appear at Party rallies. They had realized that democracy was a false concept that held out impossible promises; only National Socialism was real. He discovered in himself a new sense of purpose that sometimes rose to a frenzy. You had only to attend a Party rally to realize that here was something real and lasting. You had only to stand with a hundred thousand others to recognize that what you were saluting and shouting about had nothing to do with the little man with the moustache – it was a belief in blood and in the purity and supremity of the German people. The rest of Europe might perish, but Germany would not sink under the pressures of communism or Jewry. It would destroy those evils. And he found himself actively supporting their destruction. He could remember the torrent of enthusiasm that had swept the country like rain after several seasons of drought, he could remember the way in which it suddenly meant something – an intuitive pride, a nationalistic ambition, feelings he surrendered to with all the bliss of a man who discovers love after years of indifference and hopelessness, feelings that were – for the first time in his life – intangible, almost irrational, and that at the same time flooded him, breaking down the dams of futility and absurdity, lending to everything a blinding sense of purpose. He could recall the masterly arguments of the Führer and the frenzied speeches of Goebbels and the way the mass rallies – burning like a monstrous ocean of light – stirred and moved him as he had never be
en touched before. He was caught up by, and ensnared in, the fervour of the new mood, the approaching brilliance of the new Germany that had risen like some hungry animal fed for the first time. Transported, discovering within himself hidden depths of what he took to be passion – and it was passion of a kind – in 1937 he put his professional services at the disposal of the SS during one of their frantic and energetic recruiting campaigns. It was a pinnacle: it was a mark of his belief and faith. He understood for the first time a new kind of pride: the stiff black uniform, still smelling of newness, the runic SS on the lapel, the sense of belonging to something more important and in its way more tangible than even the frenetic gatherings at Nuremberg. It was as if his natural intelligence were totally subjugated to an utterly different concept of himself, to a shining ideal of what man might become. He became deaf to the fading arguments of resistance and blind to the various aspects of inhumanity required by the new order: Jews streaming to travel agencies, people rounded up in the streets and shunted off like bundles of waste-matter, the sight of a bonfire of books and synagogues flaring – these were merely the passing symptoms of cleanliness. A house was being put in order. What were these minor acts against the prospect of the ultimate victory? There was the uniform; there were the badges. People looked at you when you walked in the street in your uniform. A sense of power was released, and, once released, you could never be the same man again. You learned to live in a new way. The professional skills you had acquired were no longer your own, but had been placed at the service of the Reich. Everywhere there was the hoarse sound of acclaim, a sound that carried upwards, always upwards, amongst the flags and banners that announced the death of yesterday’s Germany.

  In 1939, Helmut Broszat had said to him, ‘There will be a war before the year is out.’

  They were drinking together in a beerhall in the Neuhauserstrasse in Munich. Schwarzenbach had desperately tried to remain sober, but in trying to keep up with Broszat, who drank quickly and hungrily, he realized that he was in the first stages of drunkenness. The hall was filled with men in SS uniforms. There was a great deal of noise, coming as if from a distance.

  ‘I want a war,’ Broszat said. ‘Regardless of the enemy, I don’t doubt that we are stronger.’

  ‘I agree,’ Schwarzenbach said. And he did agree. The idea of guns lined up against guns and planes bombing cities seemed for some reason suddenly pleasing. A conceptual destruction, drunkenly created; he hadn’t envisaged the reality.

  ‘I want to fight,’ Broszat said. ‘I haven’t fought for a long time.’

  Schwarzenbach felt slightly sad that in the event of war his own services would not be required on the battlefield. For a second he experienced a sensation of great warmth towards Broszat and the urge, the terrible urge, to confide in the man. ‘Did I ever tell you what I’ve been doing lately?’

  Broszat shook his head. ‘It’s a mystery to me. I haven’t a clue what you get up to, Gerhardt.’

  ‘It’s meant to be a secret.’

  ‘You couldn’t keep a secret from me, Hauptsturmführer.’ Broszat was mocking him slightly, using the rank lightly because Schwarzenbach had a place in the hierarchy only on the basis of his profession.

  ‘I’ve been helping to devise something.’ Schwarzenbach wondered for a moment if he should continue. He drank more beer and then leaned closer to Broszat. ‘I’ve been devising something.’

  ‘Devising what?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  ‘Don’t tell me then.’ Broszat, uninterested, turned away.

  ‘I’ve been killing people.’

  ‘Killing people? What people?’

  Schwarzenbach felt guilty; he knew he shouldn’t have begun to mention this to Broszat. But he continued, as though it were impossible to stop himself. ‘Criminals. Old people. A few Jews.’

  ‘There’s no harm in that, is there?’ Broszat, cold sober, asked the question harshly.

  ‘It’s like this.’ Schwarzenbach began to trace a diagram in the pool of beer on the surface of the table. ‘They want to devise a programme – euthanasia. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  Schwarzenbach realized with a sense of horror that his vision had become blurred and his speech thick. He stabbed Broszat with his finger. ‘Easy ways of killing. They tell me to choose someone, you see. So I choose. Usually somebody old. Or a political. Even a Jew now and then. And I try different ways to see which is the quickest. Am I making myself clear?’

  Broszat laughed. ‘There’s nothing quicker than a bullet in the skull.’

  ‘No, that’s messy. That makes too much mess.’

  ‘But it’s quick.’

  ‘I’m not going to dispute that, Helmut.’ Schwarzenbach tried to light a cigarette and wondered why he had begun to smoke so much recently. He dropped the cigarette into the pool of beer and when he picked it up again the paper had become unstuck, releasing the tobacco. He sat back in his chair. Somewhere beyond him, the room was spinning round and round.

  Broszat said, ‘A gun in the skull. A bullet through the brain. That’s the best way.’

  ‘You might be right,’ Schwarzenbach said, realizing that Broszat had lost interest in the subject.

  ‘More interesting is the fact that I fancy a woman. Right now.’

  ‘Your appetites are appalling, Helmut. You’re like an animal.’

  Broszat struck the table with his fist and stood up. ‘Are you coming with me? Or are you too pissed?’

  They went to a house in the Kaufingerstrasse where, in an upstairs room, Schwarzenbach was given a seventeen-year-old girl called Madeleine. Plump and fair-haired, wearing only the black underwear of the brothel, she was sitting crosslegged on the bed. Behind her, as if in imitation of an oriental whorehouse, strings of coloured beads hung across a recess in the wall. Above the fireplace was a swastika shaped out of cheap clay. Schwarzenbach absorbed his surroundings without being entirely conscious of them; he staggered towards the bed and fell face down. His brain, seemingly severed from his skull, was elsewhere – floating somewhere, cut adrift. The girl put a record on the phonograph; a love song about an SS man who has had to leave his girl behind him. The female voice was harshly sentimental and the background music thin and dull. He raised himself to a sitting position and tried to fix his eyes on the girl who was dancing slowly – submerged in her own thoughts – around the room. It was difficult. His vision was warped. Sometimes he saw her as two separate shapes, sometimes as one figure from whom another ghostly shadow seems about to emerge. He felt sick.

  When the music stopped, the girl approached the bed and undid the buttons of his tunic. He allowed her to undress him and watched as she folded the uniform neatly, lovingly, over a chair. She placed his boots beneath the bed. He lay back, his head propped against a pillow, and noticed a crucifix on the far wall, hanging directly opposite the clay swastika. The figure of Christ seemed absurd and banal. The tortured expression reminded him of a clown he had once seen in a circus, the seat of his coloured trousers belching black fumes of smoke.

  ‘Let me make love to you,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I’m sick. I’m drunk.’ Schwarzenbach covered his face with his hands. The electric light was suddenly blinding.

  ‘I love your uniform. I love it.’ She was standing by the chair running her fingers over the cloth. ‘Black – it’s a beautiful colour. When I saw you come in, I felt – well, weak. It’s the uniform. It makes me feel weak.’

  ‘Leave it alone,’ he said. He was wondering why some means of execution were more efficient than others. It seemed a simple algebraic problem: find the value of x, and you have the solution. But his brain would not carry the matter a step further. What was he doing, lying there in a whore’s bedroom? There was work to be done. There were problems to be solved. From somewhere, a distance away, he heard Broszat’s loud laughter and the sound of something falling down the stairs outside the room.

  ‘Don�
�t I please you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you like me?’

  ‘I’ve nothing against you,’ he answered. Drunkenness was an ocean: the drunk man was like a tiny slab of timber carried far out to sea. He felt abandoned suddenly, forlorn, as if he had been swept up on a deserted beach.

  ‘I’m only here to please you,’ she said. ‘I’m only here to please the men of the SS.’

  What was she doing now? She was pulling on his boots and marching up and down the room. She was wearing his cap on her head and had one arm upraised in a salute.

  ‘Do you like me like this?’ she asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak but his tongue was dry and swollen. He felt strangely weightless and wished, with a sickening stab of guilt, that he hadn’t drunk so much. It was all right for someone like Broszat who had the constitution of an ox. He watched her approach the bed. She placed her hand between his legs.

  ‘Are you impotent?’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing’s happening. Why isn’t anything happening? Is there something wrong with you?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, leave me alone.’

  ‘Do you want to sleep?’

  He didn’t answer. What was the quickest way of killing efficiently? The question made him conscious of the irony in his position. All his life he had been working on the problem of saving lives, devising ways and means of keeping the human machine functioning. Now he was concerned with death; with short-circuiting the mechanism in the easiest way. He was aware of a strange roaring sound in his ears; it was like a million voices pitched on the one monotonous note. And there was an image: the old woman, with a name like Tritzschke, into whose naked arm he had pushed the hypodermic needle and who had died, in less than forty-five seconds, twisted in pain. She had been a subversive type, an anti-social element, and consequently her life had been unimportant. The only significant thing was the time element: forty-five seconds.