Tonight Heinrich addresses an assembly of SS brass in Berlin. He has his speech prepared, but the cases of Kreiger and Hoffman won’t leave him alone. The cases of Kreiger and Hoffman are telling Heinrich that the speech as it is won’t do. He’s drafting an addendum mentally, now, combing his hair at the mirror of his mistress’s bathroom. The bathroom, like the rest of the grand, cavernous house, used to belong to someone else . . . Gentlemen, there is, in addition . . . no. In addition, gentlemen, I must draw your attention – no. There is no getting away, gentlemen, from the fact that – no. ‘The fact that’ is always redundant. If you feel yourself to be in possession of a fact, then state it. Gentlemen, there is something I would like you to consider. I mean of course – but the addendum falters at the intrusion of a slight colonic spasm and a sequence of soundless farts escaping in malodorous ellipsis that bring tears of something – humility, relief, joy – to the Reichsführer’s eyes. He must begin again with his hair. It’s not widely known that our Heinrich suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder, that actions as mundane as combing his hair were hung around with curious methods and rituals. The floor of the bathroom is tiled in pale blue with blinding white grouting. He wonders about the workman who laid them, where he is now, whether he’s alive, whether he was a Jew. What I mean, gentlemen, is that there is a serious risk of – no. Fucking concentrate. But Kreiger and Hoffman won’t let him. Scylla and Charybdis, Kreiger and Hoffman. No point in mentioning them by name, obviously, but . . . Perhaps through the Scylla and Charybdis motif – though half that lot won’t even – he is thinning, he knows. Under the overgenerous light (the bathroom is big enough for a small chandelier) the pink of his scalp shows through. It is a great, dark, burden, gentlemen, and it is for us – it is for me – I will bear this burden . . . Remembering her soaping his hair in the bath, sculpting it into a single tuft like the stem of an acorn almost makes him laugh. He’s been finding in laughter of late hidden precipices, sudden sheer drops into the conclusion that he’s lost his mind. Laughter – genuine laughter, not the political variety – has of late had him slithering down unexpected tilts, arms windmilling, only to grab a halt at some vertiginous edge beyond which emptiness offers him the pitch into madness as his own final solution. So he doesn’t laugh genuinely of late. Instead he laughs strategically, loudly, letting each metallic ejaculation form its brilliant armour around him.
It’s a great difficulty for the Reichsfiihrer to ponder the wording of the warning Kreiger and Hoffman have made plain, without now, at this very moment, mentally re-living the two cases themselves.
Gerd Kreiger had done eight months at Buchenwald. (Marcus Hoffman had been there only three.) In December he’d been granted leave to attend his father’s funeral in Leipzig. Gerd hadn’t been close to his father (perhaps that, thinks Heinrich . . .?) and it was no secret among his colleagues in the camp that this two-day sojourn was cherished not as an opportunity for the formal expression of grief, but as a chance for a highly informal expression of lust: fortyeight hours in Leipzig would take him (once the onerous business with the old man’s corpse was concluded) into the arms of his fiancée, the tediously rhapsodized Wilhomena Meyer, or, as both she and Gerd preferred, Willie.
Heinrich, against his better judgement (he suspects not sentimentality, exactly, but some kind of weakness) has photographs of both Gerd and Willie (but not of Marcus) in the top drawer of his desk. Gerd is in uniform facing the camera: monstrously high cheekbones and giant grey eyes, a fulllipped mouth and a slicked-back widow’s peak so blond it shows up white in the print. (Just the sort of hair Heinrich himself would prefer.) Not quite the ideal – there’s a lopsidedness to the face as a whole, as if its components have been shaken by something and not come into correct realignment – but certainly nothing to arouse suspicion.
In the other photograph, Willie Meyer, Gerd’s intended, is bright-faced with dark eyes and her coppery hair wound up in an elaborate chignon. Her cheeks are on the heavy side, as is her jaw, and Heinrich suspects she would have thickened undesirably with age, but her throat is a pearly column of some loveliness, and you can see there’s a pair of formidable Teutonic Titten beneath the close-fitting blouse. The photograph shows her at twenty-two, seated at a piano but not playing, clutching, rather, her framed Certificate of Excellence from one of Leipzig’s private colleges of music. She looks genuinely happy, relieved, shyly proud of herself. Whenever the Reichsführer places their images side by side on the varnished oak of his desk he feels sure they would have had a good, stodgy, tolerably unhappy marriage and four or five clumsy children. He feels sure everything would have been all right.
Afterwards, he had sent officers to interview Gerd and Marcus’s crew at Buchenwald. A good poker player, they’d said of Kreiger. A practical joker, of Hoffman. The prisoners? What’s to say about that? They felt as we all do. It’s a headache, you know, a constant headache. Jews, Jews, Jews, fucking endless shivering Jews. Kreiger used to complain the whole thing was going too slowly, maybe that they were coming out of the ground at night like mushrooms! What? No, no, of course not. What’s this all about anyway?
The bathroom radiator shudders and clanks. Difficult to do this in your head, Heinrich thinks. Heated bathrooms are the hallmarks of . . . The point I want to bring to your attention, gentlemen, is that our destiny places us on a knife-edge . . . Yes but then you lose the Scylla and Charybdis image. They won’t even be paying attention, half of them. Too many of them don’t realise even now what we’re . . . what we . . .
Gerd got his night alone with Willie. It was a big night for both of them. A big night for Willie because she knew her mother didn’t believe her story of staying at Lisle’s, and though she didn’t quite wink at her daughter, there was a curious movement at the corners of her mouth that indicated some new and shocking female complicity, brought on by the war, Willie thought, with feelings of liberation and betrayal queasily mixed. (It must be said here that it was by no means a small night for Marcus Hoffman, either, since round about the time Gerd and Willie were getting down to business, young Marcus was putting the pistol in his mouth, pulling the trigger, and blowing most of his brain out of the top of his head.) A big night for Gerd, because sometime shortly after entering her (standard issue condom) he stabbed Willie through the stomach with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors that were lying on the bedside table. Then he stabbed her through the kidneys, then the lower bowel, then the heart. Then he had a bath. Then he dressed. Then he went out to a nearby café and had a drink. He was still there six hours later when the Gestapo came to arrest him.
Heinrich demanded the transcripts.
I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now so I’ll tell you. There was a woman in the camp. These things don’t matter to me now so what do I care? I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know about Marcus. He came in on us. I don’t know if it had ever occurred to him before. It soon did! She worked up in the kitchens most of the time, but sometimes I saw her. I’ll tell you, it’s a strange thing, sergeant, but I knew, you know, that it would be a defilement to let her touch me, to touch her . . . but it’s difficult to explain. What does it matter me saying this now? A strange thing. Really a strange thing. My mother took me to see my grandfather one time in Weimar, and he had a huge turd in his pocket, his own turd, you know? The nurse said it was common in the old. Not that I’m old. Touching something like . . . whereas you know . . . What? Yes. You know I can say these things now because it doesn’t matter. And what can it matter to Marcus, that idiot? They ran short of fuel up at the house and she came down to our shed. Franz was on duty and Dieter was playing solitaire – but they didn’t see her, you know. I went by myself. Marcus only came in by chance, I think. It was all very simple. The odd thing was neither of us said a word. What can I tell you? I remember her body was cold. She didn’t do anything, just let me move her arms and legs where I wanted. What is there to say? She felt like clay. Bits of clay from my old school in Leipzig, but a bit harder. She made barely a sound even when I stuck her. Couldn’t believe I got away with it. Well, I guess I didn’t, did I? Heh-heh! I don’t think the commandant believed a word. But what did he care? She never made a sound. Afterwards, I remember Marcus lifting up her arm and letting it flop back down. It had become dislocated – I don’t know how, she didn’t put up any kind of fight. Lifting it up and flopping it down. It was like he had a fixation or something. If you ask me he should never have been in the camp in the first place. No backbone.