I hadn’t moved. It was the first time I’d witnessed a murder. I felt empty. Empty of all thought. And my mouth was full of the bitterest bile. I couldn’t take my eyes off the old man’s body. His blood mingled with the snow. As soon as the big flakes touched the ground, they were tinged with red, like notched petals of an unknown flower. Once again, the sound of footsteps made me jump. Someone was approaching. I thought they’d decided to come back and kill me, too.
“Get the hell out, Brodeck!”
It was the voice of the student, the one who spent hours gazing at constellations and galaxies reproduced in large books with giant pages. I raised my eyes to him. He was looking at me without hatred but with a kind of contempt. He spoke calmly. “Get the hell out! I won’t always be there to save you.”
Then he spat on the ground, turned, and walked away.
XXVII
—
he following day, rumor put the number of corpses recovered from the streets at sixty-seven. It was said that the police had made no effort to prevent criminal activity even when it was in their power to do so. A new demonstration was scheduled to take place that very afternoon. The city was on the verge of going up in flames.
I rose at dawn after a sleepless night, during which my memory constantly recalled the faces of the murderous child and his aged victim; and I heard again the boy’s shouting, the old man’s droning, the dull thumping sound of the blows, and the sharper crack of breaking bones. I made a bundle of my few belongings, returned my room key to the landlady, Fra Haiternitz, who accepted them without a word, and whose only response to my few words of farewell was a sort of contemptuous, rotten-toothed smile. She was browning some onions and bacon in a skillet. Her cubbyhole was filled with greasy smoke that stung my eyes. She hung the key on a nail and acted as though I no longer existed.
I walked the streets quickly. There were few people about. Many areas still showed signs of the previous night’s vandalism. Some men with frightened faces were talking among themselves, brusquely snapping their heads around at the slightest noise. The doors of several buildings were painted with the inscription SCHMUTZ FREMDËR, and in many places the roadway was still covered with a glass carpet which crunched under my feet and made me shiver.
In case I failed to find Ulli Rätte in his room, I’d written him a good-bye letter, but the precaution was unnecessary. He was there, but he’d gotten so drunk he’d fallen asleep with all his clothes on. He was still holding a half-full bottle in his hand, and he stank of tobacco, sweat, and cheap grain alcohol. The right sleeve of his jacket was torn and marked with a large stain. It was blood. I thought my friend might be wounded, but when I bared his arm I could see that he was unharmed. Suddenly I felt very cold. I didn’t want to think. I forced myself to stop thinking. Ulli slept on, openmouthed and snoring. Loudly. I slipped my letter of farewell into his shirt pocket and left the room.
I never saw Ulli Rätte again.
Why did I just write that sentence, which isn’t the whole truth? I did see Ulli Rätte — or rather, I’m pretty certain I saw him — once again. In the camp. On the other side. I mean, he was on the side of those who guarded us, not on our side, the side of suffering and submission.
It was a frosty morning. I was Brodeck the Dog. Scheidegger, my master, was walking me. I was wearing the collar, and attached to the collar was the leash. I had to walk on all fours. I had to snort like a dog, eat like a dog, piss like a dog. Scheidegger strutted beside me, looking like a prim office worker. That day, we went all the way to the camp infirmary. Before going in, Scheidegger tied the leash to an iron ring embedded in the wall. I curled up in the dust, lay my head on my hands, and tried to forget the bitter cold.
That was the moment when I thought I saw Ulli Rätte. When I saw Ulli Rätte. When I heard his laugh, his very peculiar laugh, which sounded like a combination of high-pitched sleigh bells and gaily rasping wooden rattles. He was standing with two other guards a few meters away, and his back was turned to me. All three were trying to keep warm by pounding their hands together, and Ulli, or his phantom double, was speaking: “Yes, I’m telling you, it’s a little slice of heaven, but right here on earth, not two miles from this shitty place. They’ve got a lovely stove that purrs and whistles all the time, and they serve their beer cold, with a thick head of white foam. The waitress is round as a ham, and not at all shy! You can sit there and smoke your pipe for hours, lost in a dream, and forget all about this grubby vermin here, ruining our lives!”
He finished his speech with a loud laugh, which was taken up by the others. Then he started to turn around, and I buried my face in my hands. It wasn’t that I was afraid he’d recognize me. No, it wasn’t that. It was me. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to meet his eye. What I wanted was to preserve, deep inside my mind, the illusion that this tall, stout man, so happy in his role as torturer, this man who was standing so close to me but who actually lived in a different world from mine, the world of the living, could be someone other than Ulli Rätte, my Ulli, with whom I had spent so much time in former days, with whom I’d shared crusts of bread, dishes of potatoes, happy hours, dreams, and countless arm-in-arm promenades. I preferred doubt to the truth, even the thinnest, most fragile doubt. Yes, that’s what I preferred, because I thought the truth might kill me.
Life’s funny. I mean the currents of life, the ones that bear us along more than we follow them and then, after a strange journey, deposit us on the right bank or the left bank. I don’t know how the student Ulli Rätte became a camp guard, that is, one of the perfectly oiled and obedient cogs in the great death machine we were being fed to. I don’t know what trials he’d had to endure or what changes he’d had to go through in order to wind up where he was. The Ulli I’d known wouldn’t have hurt a fly. How could he have become the servant of a system that crushed people, that reduced them to the lowest form of existence?
The camp’s only advantage was its vast size. I never saw the guard who could have been Ulli Rätte or heard his laugh again. Was the frozen morning scene nothing but one of the many nightmares that visited me and not a memory at all? Perhaps so, but that particular nightmare seemed exceedingly real. So much so that on the day when the camp was liberated, I wandered all over it, going from one mound of corpses to another. There were many such piles. The dead were mostly prisoners, but there were a few guards as well. I turned their bodies over one by one, thinking maybe I’d come upon Ulli, but he wasn’t among them. I found only the remains of the Zeilenesseniss. I contemplated them for a long time, the way one contemplates an abyss or the memory of unspeakable suffering.
On the morning following what later came to be called Pürische Nacht, after I slipped my letter into the unconscious Ulli’s pocket, I hurried to Amelia’s. She was sitting calmly near the window of her room, absorbed in her embroidery. Her comrade Gudrun Osterick was similarly occupied. They looked at me surprised, both of them. They’d stayed inside for the past two days, just as I’d requested, working steadily in order to finish an important commission on time, a large tablecloth destined for a bridal trousseau. Across the white linen background, Amelia and her friend had scattered hundreds of tiny lilies mingled with large stars, and when I saw those stars, I felt my body go numb. Gudrun and Amelia had clearly heard the sounds of the crowd, the shrieking and howling, but their neighborhood was some distance from the Kolesh quarter, the scene of most of the murders and devastation. The two women knew nothing about the violence that had taken place.