‘No, my home is like a Mombasa brothel, all races, all classes, all colours, all lines of business. And if you’re really coming, bring a bottle.’
He hung up. I put my other arm around Brigitte too. She leant back into my arms and looked at me. ‘And now?’
‘Now we take the bottle and the glasses and the cigarettes and the music over to the bedroom and lie down in bed.’
She gave me a little kiss and said in a bashful voice: ‘You go ahead, I’ll be right there.’
She went into the bathroom. Amongst her records I found one by George Winston, put it on, left the bedroom door open, switched on the bedside lamp, undressed, and got into her bed. I felt a little embarrassed. The bed was wide and smelled fresh. If we didn’t sleep well tonight, the fault would be all ours.
Brigitte came into the bedroom, naked, with only the earring in her right ear and the plaster on her left earlobe. She whistled along to the George Winston. She was heavy round the hips, had breasts which were large and couldn’t help but sag a little, broad shoulders, and a protruding collarbone which gave her an air of vulnerability. She slipped beneath the covers and into the crook of my arm.
‘What happened to your ear?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ she laughed in embarrassment, ‘combing my hair, I kind of combed the ring out of my ear. It didn’t hurt, I just bled like a pig. The day after tomorrow I have an appointment with a surgeon. He’ll make a clean wound of the tear and patch it together again.’
‘Would you mind me removing your other earring? Otherwise I’ll be afraid of tearing it out, too.’
‘You’re such a passionate guy?’ She took it out herself. ‘Come on, Gerhard, let me take off your watch.’ It was nice to have her bending over me like that, fumbling with my arm. I pulled her down to me. Her skin was smooth and fragrant. ‘I’m tired,’ she said in a sleepy voice. ‘Will you tell me a bedtime story?’
I felt relaxed. ‘Once upon a time there was a little raven. Like all ravens he had a mother.’ She pinched my side. ‘The mother was black and beautiful. She was so black that all the other ravens appeared grey next to her, and she was so beautiful that all the other ravens appeared ugly next to her. She herself didn’t realize it. Her son, the little raven, could see and knew it very well. He knew much more besides: that black and beautiful is better than grey and ugly, that raven fathers are as good and as bad as raven mothers, that you can be wrong in the right place and right in the wrong place. One day after school the little raven flew away and got lost. He told himself that nothing could happen to him: in one direction he’d be sure to encounter his father, and in the other his mother. Nonetheless he was afraid. Beneath him he could see a land stretching far and wide with small villages and large, gleaming lakes. It was pretty to look at, but frighteningly unfamiliar to him. He flew and flew and flew…’ Brigitte’s breathing had grown regular. She snuggled comfortably into my arms again and started to snore softly, her mouth slightly open. I carefully withdrew my arm from under her head and put out the light. She turned onto her side. So did I and we lay there like spoons in the cutlery case.
When I woke up it was just after seven and she was still asleep. I crept out of the bedroom, shut the door behind me, looked for and found the coffee machine, got it going, pulled on my shirt and trousers, took Brigitte’s set of keys from the bureau, and bought croissants in Lange Rötterstrasse. I was back at her bedside with the tray and coffee and croissants before she woke up.
It was a lovely breakfast. And lovely afterwards together again beneath the covers. Then she had to leave to take care of her Saturday morning patients. I wanted to drop her off at her massage practice in the Collini Centre, but she preferred to walk. We didn’t arrange another meeting. But when we embraced at her front door we could hardly pull ourselves apart.
9 Clueless for hours
It was a long time since I’d spent a night with a woman. Afterwards, returning home is like coming back to your own town after a holiday. A short period of limbo before normality kicks in again.
I prepared a special rheumatism tea, purely prophylactic, and lost myself in Mischkey’s file once again. On the top was the photocopied newspaper article that had been lying on Mischkey’s desk and that I’d shoved in the file. I read the connected commemorative piece entitled ‘Twelve Dark Yards’. It touched only briefly on the forced labour of Jewish chemists. Yes, these had existed, but the RCW had also suffered with the Jewish chemists in this oppressive situation. In contrast with other big German businesses, RCW had generously compensated forced labourers immediately after the war. Using South Africa as an example, the author portrayed how alien any kind of mandatory employment situation was to the character of the modern industrial enterprise. Moreover, employment in the plant had lowered the rate of suffering in the concentration camps; the survival rate of the RCW forced labourers was proven to be higher than that of the average concentration camp population. The author dealt extensively with the RCW’s participation in the resistance, remembered the condemned communist workers, and depicted in detail the trial of the general director-to-be Tyberg, and his erstwhile colleague Dohmke.
Memories of the trial came back to me. I’d led the inquiry then, while my boss, Södelknecht, the senior public prosecutor, had led the prosecution. The two RCW chemists were sentenced to death for sabotage and for some violation of the Race Laws, which I didn’t recall. Tyberg managed to escape; Dohmke was hanged. The whole affair must have been at the end of 1943, beginning of 1944. At the start of the fifties Tyberg returned from the USA after succeeding very quickly there with a chemical company of his own, came back to RCW, and soon thereafter was made general director.
A large part of the newspaper article was devoted to the fire of March 1978. The press had estimated the damages at 40 million marks, no deaths or injuries were reported, and statements from the RCW were printed, according to which the poison released from the burnt pesticides posed absolutely no danger to the human body. I’m fascinated by such findings of the chemical industry: the same poison that annihilates the cockroach, which is supposed to be able to survive a nuclear holocaust, is no more harmful to humans than a barbecue on a charcoal grill. In the Stadstreicher magazine I found documentation by the group The Chlorine Greens that the Seveso poisons TCDD, hexachloroethane, and trichloroethylene had been released by the fire. Numerous injured employees were swept off in hush-hush fashion to the company’s own treatment clinic in the South of France. Then there was a collection of copies and cuttings about the capital stakes of the RCW and about an inquiry by the Federal Antitrust Office, which dealt with the role of the plant within the pharmaceutical market and which went nowhere.
I sat for hours in front of the computer printouts, clueless. I found data, names, figures, curves, and incomprehensible acronyms such as BAS, BOE, and HST. Were these printouts of the files Mischkey had managed privately at RCC? I needed to talk to Grimm.
At eleven I started to call the numbers on the responses to Mischkey’s ad. I was Professor Selk of Hamburg University, wanting to pick up the contacts initiated by his colleague for the social and economic history research project. The people on the other end were dumbfounded; my colleague had told them that their oral testimony wasn’t of any use to the research project. I was puzzled; one phone call after the other with the same empty result. From some of them I gathered at least that Mischkey hadn’t attached any value to their statements because they’d only started work at the RCW after 1945. They were annoyed because if my colleague had put out an ad that referred to the end of the war they could have saved themselves the trouble of responding. ‘Reimbursements of expenses, it said, are we going to get our money from you now?’