Willie betrayed me, you see. When I touched her, she felt just like the Jew in the woodshed. Just like clay. I kept trying but I couldn’t feel any difference. Somehow I couldn’t stop myself. It seemed not to matter whether I did it or not. When I did do it, I felt a great calm peace all over me, you know, like when you’ve had a fever and then you wake in the morning and know that it’s gone, like magic . . .
Heinrich has been to see Gerd Kreiger in his cell. Kreiger read a two-week old newspaper. Didn’t bother saluting. Didn’t bother standing up. The cell was clean, but with an unpleasant smell, compressed and feral, as of a furiously alive rodent in a box no bigger than its body. Heinrich had insisted on going in alone. The bodyguard would have pistol-whipped Kreiger for his insolence – but how would that have helped? (Beyond, obviously, the minute addition to the wildly sculpted mass of the Reichsführer’s ego; astonishing, given the weight of power that already attended him, that Heinrich still noticed each new particle of another’s fear that increased it. He marvelled at it somewhat himself.) He went with the intention of questioning Kreiger, but found, when confronted with the youth’s recumbent body and mildly enquiring face, that he could not think of what to ask him. So the two had regarded each other in silence for a few moments, then the Reichsführer had turned on his heel and left.
There is also, gentlemen, a very grave matter about which I must speak. I mean of course –
Hoffman’s suicide bothers Heinrich, if possible, more than Kreiger’s murder, stirring up not just fear, but contempt. (One of the downsides of my work with the Nazi Party was that its evils threatened perpetually to become internecine, the brilliant by-products endangering the process as a whole. I felt like the parent of a gifted but hyperactive child: take your eye off it at the wrong moment – Stalingrad ’43, for example – and there was no calculating the damage it could do to itself.) He doesn’t know the cause of it, Hoffman’s suicide. He doesn’t know the particulars. (I do, obviously. I was there, believe it or not, on a flying visit, touching up details, checking loose threads, tensions, weights, contrasts – no rest for the wicked and whatnot.) Heinrich doesn’t know pins and needles killed Marcus Hoffman. An off-duty nap in his bunk. His left arm resting at an odd angle under his head. A cut-off blood flow. Pins and needles. He woke, as you do, with the sense that his arm was by his side, in some deadening pain – only to find, on investigation in the dark, as you do, that his arm wasn’t by his side at all, but in fact strangely elevated and seemingly possessed of a will of its own.
It was just that it had never happened to him before. It was just that he’d never touched his arm and not felt himself touching it. Manhandling it, in tingling increments, back to where it belonged, he was reminded of the Jew in the woodshed. Her arm had felt . . . Her arm . . .
Well. It’s a slippery slide, the imagination. Once you set off there’s no telling where you’ll end up.
Heinrich stands in front of the bathroom mirror washing his hands, scrupulously. The soap is good, and lathers as if with hyperenthusiasm. He is not satisfied with his hair. But against the odds – perhaps, perversely, because he has allowed his anxiety to take him through the two cases, the illuminated fear less potent than the one that still lurks in the dark – his addendum is finally starting to flow:
I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. I mean . . . the extermination of the Jewish race . . . Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written . . . It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must . . . cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear . . .
Yet still it bothers him, later that night under the lights and the blood red banner with the stage wings like two dark beckonings into eternity, that the after-image of languid Kreiger and Hoffman’s hungry ghost are slipping away from him, their meaning, these unique bookends to the danger . . . and on the run, ad libitum, so to speak, he takes a risky detour from his belaboured and beloved script:
. . . must be accomplished without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. The danger is great indeed, for only the narrowest way stands between the Scylla of their becoming cold-hearted brutes unable any longer to treasure life where it must be treasured (he thinks of Willie, the chignon, the Certificate of Excellence, the five boisterous nippers that will now never be) where it must be treasured, gentlemen, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft, enfeebled, nervously debilitated, or in danger of mental breakdown . . .
You lose even your golden earthly students, eventually. As I did Heinrich to suicide (after continual problems with nausea, stomach convulsions, tics and a whole range of physical and psychological irritations, bearing witness that even the Reichsführer had difficulty quite practising what he preached) in 1945. But you’ve got to appreciate the sheer effort he made to hold on. You’ve got to appreciate the commitment to civilizing brutality. Nothing fucks the Old Man off more, believe me. He can forgive the animal in you dragging you down to the trough. He can’t forgive you inviting the animal up for afternoon tea.
But the system petered out, you’ll say. The death camps were liberated. The fucking Nazis lost.
Well, yes, my darlings, they did. But their victory wasn’t my goal. (Obviously it was their goal, the morons.) Their victory, ultimately, was neither here nor there, as long as, after they’d done their thing, millions of people could no longer sustain the preposterous fallacy that the Old Man loved the world.
Heinrich, by the way, was awfully surprised to find himself screaming in agony – I mean sipping his complimentary arrivals cocktail – in Hell.
I have of late – wherefore I know not . . .