And then, just before I began to read the story of the hanging, I began, tentatively and queasily, to recognize the shattered building in the background. Behind the hangman, looking like a mouthful of broken teeth, was all that was left of the home of Werner Noth, of the home where my Helga had been raised as a good German citizen, of the home where I had said farewell to a ten-year-old nihilist named Resi.
I read the text
The text was by a man named Ian Westlake, and it was very well done. Westlake, an Englishman, a liberated prisoner of war, had seen the hanging shortly after his liberation by the Russians. The photographs were his.
Noth, he said, had been hanged from his own apple tree by slave laborers, mostly Poles and Russians, quartered nearby. Westlake did not call my father-in-law 'The Hangman of Berlin.'
Westlake went to some trouble to find out what crimes Noth had committed, and he concluded that Noth had been no better and no worse than any other big city chief of police.
'Terror and torture were the provinces of other branches of the German police,' said Westlake. 'Werner Noth's own province was what is regarded in every big city as ordinary law and order. The force he directed was the sworn enemy of drunks, thieves, murderers, rapists, looters, confidence men, prostitutes, and other disturbers of the peace, and it did its best to keep the city traffic moving.
'Noth's principal offense,' said Westlake, 'was that he introduced persons suspected of misdemeanors and crimes into a system of courts and penal institutions that was insane. Noth did his best to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, using the most modern police methods; but those to whom he handed over his prisoners found the distinction of no importance. Merely to be in custody, with or without trial, was a crime. Prisoners of every sort were all to be humiliated, exhausted and killed.'
Westlake went on to say that the slave laborers who hanged Noth had no clear idea who he was, beyond the fact that he was somebody important. They hanged him for the satisfaction of hanging somebody important.
Noth's house, said Westlake, had been demolished by Russian artillery, but Noth had continued to live in one undamaged room in the back. Westlake took an inventory of the room, found it to contain a bed, a table, and a candlestick. On the table were framed photographs of Helga, Resi, and Noth's wife.
There was a book. It was a German translation of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Why such a miserable magazine had bought such a fine piece of reporting was not explained. What the magazine was sure its readers would like was the description of the hanging itself.
My father-in-law was stood on a footstool four inches high. The rope was put around his neck and drawn tight over the limb of a budding apple tree. The footstool was then kicked out from under him. He could dance on the ground while he strangled.
Good?
He was revived eight times, and hanged nine.
Only after the eighth hanging were his last bits of courage and dignity gone. Only after the eighth hanging did he act like a child being tortured.
'For that performance,' said Westlake, 'he was rewarded with what he wanted most in all this world. He was rewarded with death. He died with an erection and his feet were bare.'
I turned the page of the magazine to see if there was more. There was more, but not more of the same. There was a full-page photograph of a pretty woman with her thighs spread wide and her tongue stuck out.
The barber called out to me. He shook another man's hair out of the cloth he was going to put around my neck.
'Next,' he said.
21: My Best Friend ...
I've said that I'd stolen the motorcyle I rode when I called on Werner Noth for the last time. I should explain.
I didn't really steal it. I just borrowed it for all eternity from Heinz Schildknecht, my ping-pong doubles partner, my closest friend in Germany.
We used to drink together, used to talk long into the night, especially after we both lost our wives.
'I feel I can tell you anything — absolutely anything' he said to me one night, late in the war.
'I feel the same way about you, Heinz,' I said.
'Anything I have is yours,' he said.
'Anything I have is yours, Heinz,' I said.
The amount of property between us was negligible. Neither one of us had a home. Our real estate and our furniture were blown to smithereens. I had a watch, a typewriter, and a bicycle, and that was about it. Heinz had long since traded his watch and his typewriter and even his wedding ring for black-market cigarettes. All he had left in this vale of tears, excepting my friendship and the clothes on his back, was a motorcycle.
'If anything ever happens to the motorcycle,' he said to me, 'I am a pauper.' He looked around for eavesdroppers. 'I will tell you something terrible,' he said.
'Don't if you don't want to,' I said.
'I want to,' he said. 'You are the person I can tell terrible things to. I am going to tell you something simply awful.'
The place where we were drinking and talking was a pillbox near the dormitory where we both slept. It had been built very recently for the defense of Berlin, had been built by slaves. It wasn't armed, wasn't manned. The Russians weren't that close yet.
Heinz and I sat there with a bottle and a candle between us, and he told me the terrible thing. He was drunk.
'Howard — ' he said, 'I love my motorcycle more than I loved my wife.'
'I want to be a friend of yours, and I want to believe everything you say, Heinz,' I said to him, 'but I refuse to believe that. Let's just forget you said it, because it isn't true.'
'No,' he said, 'this is one of those moments when somebody really speaks the truth, one of those rare moments. People hardly ever speak the truth, but now I am speaking the truth. If you are the friend I think you are, you'll do me the honor of believing the friend I think I am when I speak the truth.'
'All right,' I said.
There were tears streaming down his cheeks. 'I sold her jewelry, her favorite furniture, even her meat ration one time — all for cigarettes for me,' he said.
'We've all done things we're ashamed of,' I said.
'I would not quit smoking for her sake,' said Heinz.
'We all have bad habits,' I said.
'When the bomb hit the apartment, killed her and left me with nothing but a motorcycle,' he said, 'the black-market man offered me four thousand cigarettes for the motorcycle.'
'I know,' I said. He told me the same story every time he got drunk.
'And I gave up smoking at once,' he said, 'because I loved the motorcycle so.'
'We all cling to something,' I said.
'To the wrong things — ' he said, 'and we start clinging too late. I will tell you the one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe.'
'All right,' I said.
'All people are insane,' he said. 'They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.'
As for the kind of woman Heinz's wife had been: I knew her only slightly, though I saw her fairly often. She was a nonstop talker, which made her hard to know, and her theme was always the same: successful people who saw opportunities and grasped them firmly, people who, unlike her husband, were important and rich.