When at length they stepped out of the bath it was to find their clothes had disappeared. The attendant stepped forward and Mengele explained that the clothes had gone, as he put it, for the burning. The attendants offered towels. They were shown the row of saunas, the Turkish baths and the Turkish showers which were followed by the freezing plunge bath one reached by climbing a steep steel ladder and then dropping into, breaking a film of ice. They were shown a choice of soaps, the hairdriers, the pomades, creams, colognes, razors, sponges, scrubbing brushes, loofahs, and invited to make use of some or all of these. The waters in which they had been bathing were highly effective for oto-laryngological ailments, said Bormann, radioactive of course and slightly odorous, and so showering was advisable after taking the waters. They might feel rather tired a little later, said Mengele, but this was quite usual. They should go and lie down if they felt tired. There would be a place for them to lie down.
After their showers they were directed to the relaxation room, a chamber of the utmost modernity carved into the rock, glass-walled, softly and luxuriously furnished with leather loungers and a variety of ultraviolet sunbeds. There was also on offer, it seemed, among the many therapies: massage, electric roller-beds, acupunture, aromatherapy, colonic irrigation, physiotherapy, meditation and drinks, both hard and soft, as well as mud baths, a gymnasium, and, for those who felt they needed them, a valuable course of rejuvenating, fresh-cell injections. At short notice, the attendants also offered to arrange for inhalations and osteopathy.
These offers were declined. And as he stepped into the shower I heard Blanchaille put it with simple dignity, ‘to be clean is enough.’
Afterwards, with their hair clean, freshly shaved, deodorised and shining, they were dressed in soft and fluffy cream towelling robes with the golden letters B.K. prominently blocked above the breast pockets. I saw them led back up the stairs and through the corridors and arcades and then up a further flight of stairs into the dining room.
Kipsel could not help trembling in his towelling robe as he stood in the doorway of the crowded dining-room feeling, as he confessed to Blanchaille with a half-apologetic, rueful smile, that he really hadn’t believed that he’d ever see the light of day again when the attendants marched them into the sunken bathing hall. This notion of washing before entry is a bit bloody quaint, not so? I mean, you know Blanchie, it reminds me of going swimming, when they used to have one of those freezing foot baths with disinfectant you had to slop through. I hated that. I always hopped it.’
‘There is no hopping here,’ said Blanchaille briskly. ‘Here I get the feeling that they do everything by the book. Unless you go into the baths you can’t join the others.’
‘It reminds me of Lynch’s thoughts on salvation. Do you remember his Clean Living Fallacy?’ Kipsel said.
Who could forget it? This was Lynch’s answer to the morbid teachings of the Margaret Brethren on sudden death and inevitable damnation. The Margaret Brethren taught them that by going about in a state of sin knowing not what the day brought forth they risked the wrath of God: a motor car accident, a sudden electrocution, asphyxiation, choking, or one of the hundred hidden ways in which God might strike and send the sinner to judgement unshriven, unprepared and irredeemable. Death in the state of mortal sin would deprive the sinner of any chance ever again of heavenly bliss, and even a venial sin would plummet the sinner to purgatory where sufferings were just as bad and the period of confinement so vast that by comparison all the time which had passed since the creation of the cosmos to the present day seemed no longer than a millionth of a second. Lynch savaged this doctrine by pointing out that precisely the same fear possessed people who hoped, if knocked down by a motor car, to be wearing clean underpants. In the eschatology of the Margaret Brethren, Lynch explained to them, God was reduced to a bad driver, the human being to a hit-and-run victim and the soul to the status of an article of underwear.
This mere mention of Lynch made them both wonder and look around them as if hoping that they might spy the little priest lurking about. Perhaps they might ask him whether he thought people here lived by the book and if so whether the book was any good and life lived by it worth the trouble?
They were in the dining-room now, a magnificent iron and glass pavilion which looked rather like a huge bird cage. There were many tables and many diners. Obligatory portraits of President Kruger hung on the walls. In the centre a fountain kept its awkward watery balance in a great stone basin shaped like a giant baptismal font. All the diners wore the same creamy towelling robes and all looked freshly scrubbed. A short, square, capable looking woman in a dark blue uniform which gave her the look of a nurse, though there was also something vaguely military about her, stepped forward. There were black epaulettes on her uniform and silver stars that served as buttons and her bearing was upright and disciplined. Clearly someone not to be trifled with. But her smile was open and genuine and her welcome warm. She was smoking a short, thin black cheroot.
Though there were none of the faces they half-hoped, dared perhaps, in their wildest imagination to find, there were all around them familiar countenances. Surely that grey-haired old gentleman was a former prime minister who was said to have retired to his farm in Swellendam to raise bees? And was that a necklace of golden coins he was wearing threaded on a piece of string around his neck? (As they were to discover it was not string, but fishing tackle that served best for this purpose.) Here surely was the origin of the legend of the golden crowns which all who reached the last refuge would receive. Some of the women, with considerable ingenuity, had designed jewellery, elaborate harps or butterflies made entirely of gold coins, and some of the rougher looking men, perhaps farmers or rugby players in former lives and who could hardly be expected to go in for bodily decoration or for fancy jewellery, had fashioned their coins into large gold rings, chains, and chunky medallions which nestled in the thick black hair of their chests. A few held golden flutes and some played on them, rather badly but with great enthusiasm.
The matron followed their glances. ‘Patience. We have such a wide variety of people in Bad Kruger. We are many things to many people — a club for retired gentlefolk, an old folks’ home, an old boys’ reunion, a retirement village, a sheltered accommodation scheme, a hospital, a shelter for the incurably desolate and an asylum for patriots. You are perhaps looking for people you know? It will take a while to recognise all those who are here, and not everyone comes down to dinner. Some stay in their rooms. You’ll have time enough to look for them. Bad Kruger was never built to hold our present numbers. We must arrange two or three sittings for each meal — just as they did on the trains.’
The food was served and the wine went round. The meal was good, if rather heavy. Soup, followed by veal in a thick cream sauce, fried potatoes and solid wine which they took from a carafe at the table. The waiters wore black trousers and rather grubby white bunny jackets fastened with a single brass button, their black bowties were scruffy and they lounged against the walls and muttered things among themselves in the manner of waiters the world over, bored between courses. They looked as if they had once worked on the trains, Blanchaille thought. They had that characteristic air about them, a truculent and a rather rough bonhomie. Also there was a slight roll to the way they walked, as if the room were moving.