'I hope that's a compliment I deserve,' I said.
'It's a compliment you didn't come by very easily,' he said. 'You broke my heart when you married my daughter. I wanted a German soldier for a son-in-law.'
'Sorry,' I said.
'You made her happy,' he said.
'I hope so,' I said.
'That made me hate you more,' he said. 'Happiness has no place in war.'
'Sorry,' I said.
'Because I hated you so much,' he said, 'I studied you. I listened to everything you said. I never missed a broadcast.'
'I didn't know that,' I said.
'No one knows everything,' he said. 'Did you know,' he said, 'that until almost this very moment nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy, to see you shot?'
'No,' I said.
'And do you know why I don't care now if you were a spy or not?' he said. 'You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we're talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?' he said.
'No,' I said.
'Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,' he said. 'I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler — but from you.' He took my hand. 'You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.'
He turned away from me abruptly. He went to the oyster-eyed woman who had almost dropped the blue vase. She was standing against a wall where she had been ordered to stand, was numbly playing the punished dunce.
Werner Noth shook her a little, trying to arouse an atom of intelligence in her. He pointed to another woman who was carrying a hideous Chinese, carved-oak dog, carrying it as carefully as though it were a baby.
'You see?' Noth said to the dunce. He wasn't intentionally tormenting the dunce. He was trying to make her, in spite of her stupidity, a better-rounded, more useful human being.
'You see?' he said again, earnestly, helpfully, pleadingly. 'That's the way to handle precious things.'
19: Little Resi Noth ...
I went into the music room of Werner Noth's emptying house and found little Resi and her dog.
Little Resi was ten years old then. She was curled in a wing-chair by a window. Her view was not of the ruins of Berlin but of the walled orchard, of the snowy lace that the treetops made.
There was no heat in the house. Resi was bundled up in a coat and scarf and thick wool stockings. A small suitcase was beside her. When the wagon train outside was ready to move, she would be ready to board it.
She had taken off her mittens, laid them neatly on the arm of the chair. She had bared her hands in order to pet the dog in her lap. The dog was a dachshund that had, on a wartime diet, lost all its hair and been all but immobilized by dropsical fat
The dog looked like some early amphibian meant to waddle in ooze. While Resi caressed it, its brown eyes bugged with the blindness of ecstasy. Every bit of its awareness followed like thimbles the fingertips that stroked its hide.
I did not know Resi well. She had chilled me once, fairly early in the war, by lispingly calling me an American spy. Since then, I had spent as little time as possible before her childish gaze. When I came into the music room I was startled to see how much she was coming to resemble my Helga.
'Resi — ?' I said.
She didn't look at me, 'I know,' she said. 'It's time to kill the dog.'
'It isn't anything I want to do very much' I said.
'Are you going to do it,' she said, 'or are you going to give it to somebody to do?'
'Your father asked me to do it,' I said.
She turned to look at me. 'You're a soldier now,' she said.
'Yes,' I said.
'Did you put on your uniform just for killing the dog?' she said.
'I'm going to the front,' I said. 'I stopped by to say goodbye.'
'Which front?' she said.
'The Russians,' I said.
'You'll die,' she said.
'So I hear ' I said. 'Maybe not.'
'Everybody who isn't dead is going to be dead very soon now,' she said. She didn't seem to care much.
'Not everybody,' I said.
'I will be,' she said.
'I hope not,' I said. 'I'm sure you'll be fine,' I said.
'It won't hurt when I get killed,' she said. 'Just all of a sudden I won't be any more,' she said. She pushed the dog off her lap. It fell to the floor as passive as a Knackwurst.
'Take it,' she said. 'I never liked it anyway. I just felt sorry for it.'
I picked up the dog.
'It will be much better off dead,' she said.
'I think you're right,' I said.
'I'll be better off dead, too,' she said.
'That I can't believe,' I said.
'Do you want me to tell you something?' she said.
'All right,' I said.
'Since nobody's going to go on living much longer,' she said, 'I might as well tell you I love you.'
'That's very sweet,' I said.
'I mean really love you,' she said. 'When Helga was alive and you two would come here, I used to envy Helga. When Helga was dead, I started dreaming about how I would grow up and marry you and be a famous actress, and you would write plays for me.'
'I am honored,' I said.
'It doesn't mean anything,' she said. 'Nothing means anything. You go shoot the dog now.'
I bowed out, taking the dog with me. I took the dog out into the orchard, put it down in the snow, drew my tiny pistol
Three people were watching me. One was Resi, who now stood at the music-room window. Another was the ancient soldier who was supposed to be guarding the Polish and Russian women.
The third was my mother-in-law, Eva Noth. Eva Noth stood at a second-story window. Like Resi's dog, Eva Noth had fattened dropsically on wartime food. The poor woman, made into sausage by unkind time, stood at attention, seemed to think that the execution of the dog was a ceremony of some nobility.
I shot the dog in the back of the neck. The report of my pistol was small, cheap, like the tinny spit of a B.B. gun.
The dog died without a shudder.
The old soldier came over, expressing a professional's interest in the sort of wound such a small pistol might make. He turned the dog over with his boot, found the bullet in the snow, murmured judiciously, as though I had done an interesting, instructive thing. He now began to talk of all sorts of wounds he had seen or heard of, all sorts of holes in once-living things.
'You're going to bury it?' he said.
'I suppose I'd better,' I said.
'If you don't,' he said, 'somebody will eat it.'
20: 'Hangwomen for the Hangman of Berlin ... '
I found out only recently, in 1958 or 1959, how my father-in-law died. I knew he was dead. The detective agency I had hired to find word of Helga had told me that much — that Werner Noth was dead.
The details of his death came to hand by chance, in a Greenwich Village barber shop. I was leafing through a girly magazine, admiring the way women were made, and awaiting my turn for a haircut. The story advertised on the magazine cover was 'Hang-women for the Hangman of Berlin.' There was no reason for me to suppose that the article was about my father-in-law. Hanging hadn't been his business. I turned to the article.
And I looked for quite a while at a murky photograph of Werner Noth being hanged from an apple tree without suspecting who the hanged man was. I looked at the faces of the people at the hanging. They were mostly women, nameless, shapeless rag-bags.
And I played a game, counting the ways in which the magazine cover had lied. For one thing, the women weren't doing the hanging. Three scrawny men in rags were doing it. For another thing, the women in the photograph weren't beautiful, and the hang-women on the cover were. The hangwomen on the cover had breasts like cantaloupes, hips like horse collars, and their rags were the pathetic remains of nightgowns by Schiaparelli. The women in the photograph were as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress ticking.