And then there is one final category. One which belongs to the happy few who, despite having had an extraordinarily pleasant weekend, look forward to getting back to work with the enthusiasm of a child.
Paul Hjelm belonged to this group.
It was time for him to return to Leonard Sheinkman’s diary from those awful days in February 1945. The diary was still at the police station – had he had it at home, Sunday wouldn’t have passed by in silence.
He managed to piece together rather a lot of things.
Though it had started slowly. Not that ‘slowly’ was really the right word. It started with self-contempt.
He felt like a rapist.
The ten or so yellowed pages of the diary were spread across his desk. Wherever the pencil had touched the paper, it had formed letters. Those letters weren’t simply a bank of information about an objectively reconstructable event from the past. They were words from the brink of death, and those words had reverberated through him and hurled him into the abyss. He had cried at those words, tears which had come from the very core of his being. The words had evoked a time and an experience that had started to pale away. They were almost holy, somehow.
He had the text in front of him now, splayed out like a victim, and he was planning on getting to work on it with the entire arsenal of rational structures which formed the basis of Western society: logic, analytical focus and stringent penetration.
He would, quite simply, be raping the text.
Like any good middle-aged, heterosexual, white, European man should.
To leave it untouched in its cocoon would be to shy away from the truth; it would be tantamount to renouncing knowledge, accepting a mystical and unchanging condition of fear, stepping back into a dark period of time and preparing the way for vague, inhuman forces.
Wasn’t there any way of analysing it soberly and critically and still – perhaps precisely by doing so – managing to keep the striking mystery alive?
That felt like the deciding question. And not just for Leonard Sheinkman’s diary, not just for this case in its entirety, not even just for Paul Hjelm’s entire working life, but for society as a whole.
What had Kerstin discovered?
Had she realised that without mystery we are all just empty shells?
At that moment, Paul Hjelm got the better of himself, as is often said when things return to the same old rut, and immersed himself in the text. Using logic, an analytical focus and stringent penetration, he took on Leonard Sheinkman’s diary from a week of decisive importance in 1945, not long before the end of the war.
Leonard Sheinkman hadn’t been in Buchenwald, Germany’s largest concentration camp, built on a desolate little hill named Ettersberg in 1937, just seven kilometres outside the cultured city of Weimar. A place where there definitely wasn’t a church just outside the window.
There were two possible explanations: either the church was just an image – something in which to ‘see time’, as Sheinkman had constantly written – or else it actually did exist, while simultaneously being an image used to ‘see time’. What spoke so clearly in favour of the latter was that the church had been described in such detail, and in combination with the Allied bombings, which had intensified in Germany during February 1945.
Everything pointed towards Sheinkman having been in a town, not on a desolate little hillside.
So why had he gone through life claiming to have been in Buchenwald? Why had he told his children that he had been held in Buchenwald of all places?
Once again, there were two possible explanations here: either whatever he had been subjected to in that town was so awful that even the nightmare of Buchenwald appeared a kinder and more manageable alternative, or else he had something to hide.
Paul Hjelm decided that could wait. The town could wait too – it was, at present, still seemingly unidentifiable. He took on the place itself instead.
It was clearly an institution. The prisoners were being kept in cells of some kind. There was a list, and when you reached the top of that list, you were subjected to something terrible. The result of whatever you were subjected to was that your personality was, in some way, erased. That was what had happened to his comrade Erwin. ‘When I speak to him, there is no one there. He is nothing but an empty shell. Over the spot where it has been running out of his head, an innocent little gauze dressing.’ That dressing appeared again. ‘Their bandages shine like lanterns on their empty skulls.’ And: ‘Soon, the little bandage will be pressed to my temple.’
Temple, Paul Hjelm thought, closing his eyes.
Of course.
A thin wall was separating Paul Hjelm from Kerstin Holm. On the other side of that wall, a conversation with Europe was currently under way. Or rather, a conversation with Professor Ernst Herschel from the history department at the University of Jena.
He was rather reluctant. A so-called challenge.
‘It was a mistake mentioning it to Josef,’ he said in academic-sounding English. Broken but grammatically sound.
‘Josef?’ asked Holm.
‘Josef Benziger in Weimar. He was a student here. A very promising student. I don’t understand how he could become a policeman.’
‘What was the context of you mentioning it to Josef?’
‘We met for a beer and I scolded him for not continuing his postgraduate studies. I was careless enough to mention my new research project. Mostly to show him what a titbit he was missing.’
‘So it’s your new research project?’
Silence from Jena. Kerstin continued.
‘What’s preventing you from talking about this new project?’
‘Several things, Frau Holm.’
‘Fräulein,’ Kerstin Holm said youthfully.
‘It’s an extremely sensitive project, Fräulein Holm. Within a few years, I hope that my research group will be ready to publish our results. But at this stage, the entire project is in quite an unsatisfying position, from a scientific point of view.’
The academic preserve, Kerstin Holm thought. It was obviously important to pick each word she said carefully here. Some well-paid American professor was probably hovering in the background somewhere, and Professor Herschel wasn’t ready to sacrifice him.
Not even to support an international murder investigation.
She could force him. She could take a hard line with him and get hold of a court order which would force him to talk. But there were two problems with that: firstly, it would take much too long, and secondly, most of the important information – the kind of thing people only told others in confidence – would be lost. She had no choice but to coax him.
‘We won’t reveal any of your research,’ she said.
Professor Ernst Herschel laughed.
‘Fräulein Holm,’ he said, ‘we are both employed by the state. We know how little we earn in comparison to every little errand boy in the private sphere. The world is, at present, incredibly unfair, and I wouldn’t hold it against you if you sold the information to Bild-Zeitung for a couple of million. We both know that public institutions leak like sieves. The police don’t know a thing that the press doesn’t also know within a few hours.’
‘You’re completely right,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘So what are we going to do now then? Do you have any suggestions?’
Yet more silence from Jena, though it felt different this time. A contemplative silence.
‘One more thing,’ said Herschel. ‘I know you think that this is just a case of academic preserve. I can hear it in your voice. But there is a more important aspect. Have you ever been to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin?’