Oskar behaved as if it were all news to him, as if the idea of venality among the Reichführers was a painful assault on his provincial Sudetendeutsch innocence which had caused him to forget himself and caress a Jewish girl. At last Philip, worn out by his outrage, took a nap.
Oskar wanted a drink. A certain measure of liquor would help speed time, make the Standartenführer better company if he was not a plant and more fallible if he was. Oskar took out a 10-zł. note and wrote down names on it and telephone numbers; more names than last time: a dozen. He took out another four notes, crumpled them in his hands and went to the door and knocked at the Judas window. An SS NCO turned up—a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn’t look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture: you didn’t expect it from a man whose features were those of someone’s country uncle.
Was it possible to order five bottles of vodka? Oskar asked. Five bottles, sir? said the NCO. He might have been advising a young, callow drinker uncertain of quantities. He was also pensive, however, as if he were considering reporting Oskar to his superiors. The general and I, said Oskar, would appreciate a bottle apiece to stimulate conversation. You and your colleagues please accept the rest with my compliments. I presume also, said Oskar, that a man of your authority has power to make routine telephone calls on behalf of a prisoner.
You’ll see the telephone numbers there… yes, on the note. You don’t have to call them all yourself. But give them to my secretary, eh? Yes, she’s the first on the list.
These are very influential people, murmured the SS NCO.
You’re a damn fool, Philip told Oskar. They’ll shoot you for trying to corrupt their guards.
Oskar slumped, apparently casual.
It’s as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said Philip.
We’ll see, said Oskar. But he was frightened. At last the NCO came back and brought, together with the two bottles, a parcel of clean shirts and underwear, some books, and a bottle of wine, packed at the apartment in Straszewskiego Street by Ingrid and delivered to the Montelupich gate. Philip and Oskar had a pleasant enough evening together, though at one time a guard pounded on the steel door and demanded that they stop singing. And even then, as the liquor added spaciousness to the cell and an unexpected cogency to the Standartenführer’s ravings, Schindler was listening for remote screams from upstairs or for the button-clicking Morse of some hopeless prisoner in the next cell. Only once did the true nature of the place dilute the effectiveness of the vodka. Next to his cot, partially obscured by the pallet, Philip discovered a minute statement in red pencil. He spent some idle moments deciphering it—not doing so well, his Polish much slower than Oskar’s.
“‘My God,’” he translated, “‘how they beat me!’ Well, it’s a wonderful world, my friend Oskar. Isn’t it?”
In the morning Schindler woke clearheaded. Hangovers had never plagued him, and he wondered why other people made such a fuss about them. But Philip was white-faced and depressed. During the morning he was taken away and came back to collect his belongings. He was to face a court-martial that afternoon, but had been given a new assignment at a training school in Stutthof, so he presumed they didn’t intend to shoot him for desertion. He picked up his greatcoat from his cot and went off to explain his Polish dalliance.
Alone, Oskar spent the day reading a Karl May book Ingrid had sent and, in the afternoon, speaking to his lawyer, a Sudetendeutscher who’d opened a practice in civil law in Cracow two years before. Oskar was comforted by the interview. The cause of the arrest was certainly as stated; they weren’t using his transracial caresses as a pretext to hold him while they investigated his affairs. “But it will probably come to the SS Court and you’ll be asked why you aren’t in the Army.”
“The reason is obvious,” said Oskar. “I’m an essential war producer. You can get General Schindler to say so.”
Oskar was a slow reader and savored the Karl May book—the hunter and the Indian sage in the American wilderness—a relationship of decency. He did not rush the reading, in any case. It could be a week before he came to court. The lawyer expected that there would be a speech by the president of the court about conduct unbecoming a member of the German race and then there would be a substantial fine. So be it. He’d leave court a more cautious man.
On the fifth morning, he had already drunk the half-liter of black ersatz coffee they’d given him for breakfast when an NCO and two guards came for him. Past the mute doors he was taken upstairs to one of the front offices. He found there a man he’d met at cocktail parties, Obersturmbannführer Rolf Czurda, head of the Cracow SD. Czurda looked like a businessman in his good suit. “Oskar, Oskar,” said Czurda like an old friend reproving. “We give you those Jewish girls at five marks a day. You should kiss us, not them.”
Oskar explained that it had been his birthday.
He’d been impetuous. He’d been drinking. Czurda shook his head. “I never knew you were such a big-timer, Oskar,” he said. “Calls from as far away as Breslau, from our friends in the Abwehr. Of course it would be ridiculous to keep you from your work just because you felt up some Jewess.”
“You’re very understanding, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” said Oskar, feeling the request for some sort of gratuity building up in Czurda. “If ever I’m in a position to return your liberal gesture…” “As a matter of fact,” said Czurda, “I have an old aunt whose flat has been bombed out.”
Yet another old aunt. Schindler made a compassionate click with his tongue and said that a representative of chief Czurda would be welcome any time in Lipowa Street to make a selection from the range of products turned out there. But it did not do to let men like Czurda think of his release as an absolute favor—and of the kitchenware as the least that the luckily released prisoner could offer. When Czurda said he could go, Oskar objected.
“I can’t very well just call my car, Herr Obersturmbannführer. After all, my fuel resources are limited.”
Czurda asked if Herr Schindler expected the SD to take him home.
Oskar shrugged. He did live on the far side of the city, he said. It was a long way to walk.
Czurda laughed. “Oskar, I’ll have one of my own drivers take you back.”
But when the limousine was ready, engine running, at the bottom of the main steps, and Schindler, glancing at the blank windows above him, wanted a sign from that other republic, the realm of torture, of unconditional imprisonment—the hell beyond bars of those who had no pots and pans to barter—Rolf Czurda detained him by the elbow.
“Jokes aside, Oskar, my dear fellow.
You’d be a fool if you got a real taste for some little Jewish skirt. They don’t have a future, Oskar. That’s not just old-fashioned Jew-hate talking, I assure you. It’s policy.”
CHAPTER 13
Even that summer, people inside the walls were clinging to the idea of the ghetto as a small but permanent realm. The idea had been easy enough to credit during 1941. There had been a post office; there had even been ghetto postage stamps. There had been a ghetto newspaper, even though it contained little else than edicts from the Wawel and Pomorska Street. A restaurant had been permitted in Lwówska Street: Foerster’s Restaurant, where the Rosner brothers, back from the perils of the countryside and the changeable passions of the peasants, played the violin and the accordion. It had seemed for a brief time that schooling would proceed here in formal classrooms, that orchestras would gather and regularly perform, that Jewish life would be communicated like a benign organism along the streets, from artisan to artisan, from scholar to scholar. It had not yet been demonstrated finally by the SS bureaucrats of Pomorska Street that the idea of that sort of ghetto was to be considered not simply a whimsy but an insult to the rational direction of history.