‘No,’ said Holm.
‘Very few have. And that is the point. On no condition can it be allowed to become a place of pilgrimage for the emerging neo-Nazi groups. History and scientific truth must be weighed against experience. It is a pragmatic question. Which is of most benefit to democracy? The truth or silence?’
‘So we’re talking about a potential new shrine for neo-Nazis?’
‘Yes,’ said Ernst Herschel.
‘I understand,’ said Kerstin Holm.
Another moment’s silence. Herschel was thinking about the rapid rise of neo-Nazism in the undemocratically schooled former GDR. Holm was thinking about the Erinyes. She wondered whether her image of them was changing.
Eventually, she said: ‘I really do understand your concerns, Professor Herschel. It’s an entirely justified worry for the future. But surely the future also has to be weighed up against the present. And your professional secrecy against mine. What I’m about to tell you is highly classified.’
Again, silence from Jena. Yet another kind. A listening silence.
Kerstin Holm continued.
‘I’m currently working alongside a few other European countries within the framework of a joint investigation. So far, in just over a year, seven people have been murdered in Sweden, Hungary, Slovenia, England, Italy and Germany. Each was killed by being hung upside down from a rope, and having a very particular kind of sharp wire driven into their temples and wiggled around in the pain centre of their cerebral cortex.’
Silence from Jena. Gradually accepting, gradually becoming more willing.
‘I see,’ Ernst Herschel said finally. ‘The future is already here.’
‘You could put it that way, yes.’
‘Who is behind it?’
‘We don’t know, but we’ve been calling them the Erinyes.’
More silence from Jena. The silence of preparation. Then the floodgates opened.
‘Weimar was a dilapidated GDR city when the Wall came down,’ the professor began. ‘Ten years later it was – with sixty thousand inhabitants – the European capital of culture. It was where Cranach, Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, Liszt, Nietzsche, Strauss, Böcklin and the Bauhaus architects lived and worked. It was the cradle of the first German democracy. It was where the Nazis held their very first meeting. It was where the Hitler Youth was born. It was where Buchenwald was built – initially Nazi Germany’s biggest concentration camp, and then the Soviet Union’s. The best and the worst of European culture has taken place here.’
The professor paused.
‘A few years after the Wall fell, some people entered a dilapidated and bombed-out building not far from the heart of Weimar, in Weimarhallen Park. It had been boarded up since the war. In the basement, they found the remains of a medical research institution. It was obvious that it had been abandoned in a hurry but that they had tried their utmost to remove all traces of themselves. The remaining archives had been torn up and some of them had been burnt. There were cells with extremely thick windowpanes and a couple of soundproofed research rooms. I was called in immediately and made sure that not a word got out to the press. I gathered together a small group of researchers. We went through every single inch of that place in minute detail; it took several years. What we are now working on is processing the results. The building was completely renovated a few years ago.’
‘What kind of institution was it?’ Kerstin Holm asked breathlessly.
‘It was called the Pain Centre,’ said Ernst Herschel.
On the other side of the thin wall, Paul Hjelm was reading on in Leonard Sheinkman’s diary.
It was all becoming much clearer.
The people in the building were in a queue, waiting to be subjected to an experiment which robbed them of their souls through a tiny hole in their temples, small enough for a dressing to cover the wound.
‘Erwin died of pain.’
At the same time, the Allies’ bombs were falling just round the corner. Leonard Sheinkman was coming closer and closer to the top of the list. Eventually, he reached it. The diary ended just as he was about to be taken away. Instead, he was liberated. He was saved by the bell. He emigrated to Sweden and obliterated his terrible past.
Two things of note were mentioned, Paul Hjelm thought with razor-sharp Western logic. Firstly, the church. Secondly, the tormentors.
There seemed to have been three of them. Sheinkman wrote about them on 19 February. They seemed to have had different characters. ‘I do not know their names. They give no names. They are three anonymous murderers. They are not alike. Not even murderers are alike.’
Sheinkman had had a kind of connection with one of them. ‘The kindest of them. He is less German than I, and very blond. He looks so sorrowful. He kills with sorrow in his eyes.’ That was the first one.
‘Not the other two. One kills out of curiosity. He is not cruel, simply cold. He watches, observes, writes.’ That was the second of them.
And then the third. ‘But the man with the purple birthmark on his neck, a mark in the shape of a rhombus, he is cruel. He wants to kill. I have seen that look before. He wants you to suffer. Then you can die. Only then is he happy.’
Paul Hjelm made notes, systematising it all.
Tormentor 1: Very blond, not German, sorrowful.
Tormentor 2: Ice cold, dedicated scientist.
Tormentor 3: Cruel, sadistic, purple rhombus-shaped birthmark on throat.
He couldn’t get anything else from it.
On to the church, then. Where had Leonard Sheinkman’s wife and son been killed? It was a camp. ‘They were being taken to their deaths at the execution spot.’ In all likelihood, that really was Buchenwald. And following that, he had been moved. ‘And I ended up here.’
Sheinkman had told his children it was in Buchenwald he was kept prisoner. If he wasn’t moved particularly far, then it could reasonably be assumed that he still considered himself to be in Buchenwald. An annexe of Buchenwald.
In other words, in Weimar.
The church. 18 February. That peculiar description of the physical appearance of time. ‘Time has a white base. That base may well be quadrangular. Then comes the black. The black is made up of three parts. The lowest of these is hexagonal. On three of these six surfaces, every other one, there are two windows set one above the other. The lower window is slightly larger than the upper. And immediately above the upper window, the next section begins; the middle. It is just as black and shaped like a small, domed cap. This is where the clock sits. Finally, the spire. The spire is black and looks to be needle-sharp.’
Paul Hjelm went online and searched for Weimar. Sure enough, Allied bombs had rained down on the city in February 1945. He found an overview of its churches. There were pictures of each of them.
The cathedral, Stadtkirche, was a big structure which had been destroyed during the war. It wasn’t the one. It wasn’t right at all. The city’s other big church was slightly further to the north. Jakobskirche. It was a white church with a black tower divided into three segments – first a hexagonal section with two windows above one another on each side, the lower one slightly bigger than the higher one. The next section was shaped like a little domed cap with a clock. At the very top, the spire, which looked as though it were needle-sharp.
There was no doubt.
It was Jakobskirche in Weimar that Leonard Sheinkman had been able to see from his window, likening it to time itself.
On the other side of the thin wall, Kerstin Holm’s increasingly worthwhile – and increasingly awful – conversation with Ernst Herschel in Jena was continuing.
‘The Pain Centre?’ she said.
‘They called it the Pain Centre. They experimented with the brain’s pain centre. The cerebral cortex. The objective was for their research subjects to feel the most acute pain possible.