Here you could sense the peculiar excitement which always grips builders and fitters when a new installation is about to be tested. Some labourers were washing down the floor with hoses. A middle-aged chemist in a white coat was measuring the pressure. Reineke gave orders for the door to be opened. As they entered the vast chamber with its low concrete ceiling, several of the engineers took off their hats. The floor consisted of heavy, movable slabs in metal frames; the joints between these frames were close and perfect. A mechanism operated from the control-room allowed the slabs to be raised on end in such a way that the contents of the chamber were evacuated into a hall beneath. Here the organic matter was examined by teams of dentists who extracted any precious metals used in dental work. Next, a conveyor-belt leading to the crematoria themselves was set in motion; there the organic matter, already without thought or feeling, underwent a further process of decomposition under the action of thermal energy and was transformed into phosphate fertilizer, lime, cinders, ammoniac, and sulphurous and carbonic acid gas.
A liaison officer came up to Liss and handed him a telegram. They all watched Liss's face darken as he read that Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann was to meet him not in Berlin, but at the site that very evening: he had already set out by car down the Munich autobahn.
So much for Liss's trip to Berlin. He had counted on spending the night at his country house, together with his sick wife who missed him very badly. He'd have sat for an hour or two in his armchair, in warmth and comfort, wearing his fur slippers, and forgotten about the harsh times he lived in. It would have been very pleasant to go to bed in peace, listening to the distant rumble of the anti-aircraft guns in Berlin.
And during the quiet period before the air-raids, before he left for the country after the meeting on Prinz-Alberstrasse, he had meant to visit a young student at the Institute of Philosophy. She was the only person who understood how difficult his life was, what confusion reigned in his soul. At the bottom of his briefcase, ready for this meeting, lay a bottle of cognac and a box of chocolates. Well, so much for that.
The engineers, chemists and architects all looked at him, wondering what anxieties could be troubling a man of Liss's importance.
There were moments when they felt the chamber might already have broken free of its creators, might already be about to live its own concrete life, feeling its own concrete hunger, secreting toxins, masticating with its steel jaws, beginning the long process of digestion.
Stahlgang winked at von Reineke and whispered: 'Liss has probably only just been told that the Gruppenfuhrer wishes to hear his report here and not in Berlin. I heard this morning. And he'd hoped to visit his family – and probably some pretty young lady as well!'
29
Liss met Eichmann that night.
Eichmann was thirty-five years old. His gloves, cap and boots -embodiments of the poetry, arrogance and superiority of the German armed forces – were similar to those worn by Reichsfuhrer Himmler himself.
Liss had known the Eichmanns since before the war; they came from the same town. During his years at Berlin University, working at the same time first on a newspaper and then on a philosophical journal, Liss had made occasional visits to his home town and had heard what had become of his contemporaries at school. Some had been carried up on the wave of success, only to be cast down when Fame and Fortune smiled unexpectedly on others. The life of the young Eichmann, however, had been monotonously drab and uniform. The guns of Verdun, the seemingly imminent victory, the final defeat and ensuing inflation, the political struggles in the Reichstag, the whirl of leftist and extreme-leftist movements in painting, theatre and music, the dizzying changes of fashion – all these had left him untouched.
He worked as an agent for a provincial firm. He behaved with moderate rudeness and moderate attentiveness towards his family and towards people in general. He was cut off from all avenues of advancement by a noisy, gesticulating, hostile crowd. Wherever he went, he saw himself pushed aside by brisk, lively men with dark, shining eyes, men of experience and ability who looked at him with condescending smiles.
After leaving school, he had found it impossible to get work in Berlin. The owners and directors of the different firms and offices informed him that the post had already, unfortunately, been filled -and then Eichmann would hear on the grapevine that the job had been given to some putrid little man of obscure nationality, a Pole perhaps, or an Italian. He had wanted to enter Berlin University, but the same discrimination had prevented his application from being accepted. He had felt the examiners lose interest the moment they set eyes on his full face, his blond crew-cut, his short straight nose, his light-coloured eyes. They seemed interested only in people with long faces, dark eyes, narrow shoulders and hunched backs – in degenerates. Nor had he been alone in being rejected by the capital; it had been the fate of many.
The particular breed that held sway in Berlin could be met with at every level of society, but they were to be found most plentifully among the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, now bereft of any national characteristics and incapable of distinguishing between a German and an Italian, a German and a Pole. They were a strange breed, a strange race. Whoever tried to compete with them in the realms of culture and the intellect was crushed with mocking indifference. The worst thing of all was the feeling one got of their intellectual power – a lively, unaggressive power that showed in their strange tastes, in the way they respected fashion while seeming indifferent or careless towards it, in the way they loved animals yet followed a totally urban life-style, in their gift for abstract speculation that was somehow combined with a passion for everything crude and primitive in both life and art…
It was these men who were responsible for Germany 's advances in dye chemistry and the synthesis of nitrogen, who researched the properties of gamma rays and refined the production process of high-quality steel. It was to see them that foreign scientists, artists, philosophers and engineers visited Germany. And yet these were the men who were the least German of all. Their home was anywhere in the world. Their friendships were not with Germans. And their German origins were exceedingly doubtful.
So how could a mere office-worker in a provincial firm hope to make a better life for himself? He could count himself lucky not to be going hungry…
And now here he was, leaving his office after locking away papers whose existence was known only to three other men in the world -Hitler, Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. A limousine was waiting for him outside. The sentries saluted, the orderly flung open the door and Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann was on his way. Accelerating quickly, the powerful Gestapo limousine made its way through the streets of Berlin, passing policemen who saluted respectfully as they hurriedly changed the lights to green, and sped onto the autobahn. And then rain, mist, road-signs and the long smooth curves of the highway…
Smolevichi is full of quiet little houses with gardens; grass grows on the pavements. In the slums of Berdichev there are dirty hens running around in the dust, their yellowish legs marked with red and violet ink. In Kiev – on Vassilievskaya Avenue and in the Podol – there are tall buildings with dirty windows, staircases whose steps have been worn down by millions of children's shoes and old men's slippers.
In yards all over Odessa stand tall plane trees with peeling bark. Brightly-coloured clothes and linen are drying on the line. Pans of cherry jam are steaming on cookers. New-born babies with swarthy skin – skin that has yet to see the sun – are screaming in cradles.