“Yes indeed, Herr Hofstadter,” Otto replied. “Everything will be conveyed precisely, don’t you worry, Herr Hofstadter… And please don’t forget to give Fräulein Elsa our best regards—from both of us, and especially from Herr Heiger…”
They carried on droning this duet all the way to the door of the shop, where Andrei took the massively heavy bag from Otto—it was stuffed full with robust, clean carrots, firm beets, and sugar-white onions, from beneath which protruded the neck of a bottle sealed with wax, while a jumble of leeks, celery, dill, parsley, and other green stuff bristled on the top.
When they turned the corner, Otto put the basket down on the sidewalk, pulled out a large checkered handkerchief, and started wiping off his face, panting for breath and intoning, “Wait… I need to take a rest… Pheeew…”
Andrei lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Otto.
“Where did you get those carrots?” asked a woman walking by in a man’s leather coat.
“They’re finished, all gone,” Otto told her hastily. “We took the last ones. The shop’s closed already… Damn, that bald old devil’s exhausted me,” he told Andrei. “All that nonsense I spun him in there! Fritz will tear my head off when he finds out. And I don’t even remember now exactly what nonsense it was…”
Andrei didn’t understand a thing, and Otto explained the situation to him in brief.
Herr Hofstadter, a greengrocer from Erfurt, had been filled with hope all his life, and all his life he had been unlucky. When in 1932 some Jew made a beggar of him by opening a large, modern greengrocer’s shop across the street from his, Hofstadter realized that he was a true German and joined a brigade of storm troopers. In the storm troopers he was on the point of making a career, and in 1934 he personally pummeled the face of the aforementioned Jew and was about to close in on his business enterprise, but then came the disaster of Röhm’s denunciation and Hofstadter was purged. And by that time he was already married, and his charming little blonde-haired Elsa was already growing up. He managed to get by more or less for a few more years, then he was called up into the army and was about to embark on the conquest of Europe, but at Dunkirk he was bombed by his own side’s planes and received a massive piece of shrapnel in the lungs, so that instead of ending up in Paris, he found himself in a military hospital in Dresden, where he lay until 1945 and was on the point of being discharged when the Allied air forces made their famous raid that destroyed Dresden in a single night. The horror he experienced made all his hair fall out, and he went a bit crazy, according to the way that he himself told the story. So after finding himself back in his native Erfurt, he sat out the most hectic period, when it was still possible to decamp to the West, in the cellar of his little house. When he finally plucked up the courage to emerge into the light of day, everything was all over. Admittedly, they did allow him to run a greengrocer’s shop, but any kind of expansion of the business was out of the question. In ’46 his wife died, and in his clouded state of mind he yielded to the blandishments of a Mentor and, without really understanding the choice that he was making, moved here, where he had improved a bit, but to this day he still seemed to suspect that he had ended up in a large, specialized concentration camp somewhere in Central Asia, to which all the Germans from East Germany had been exiled. His brainbox still hadn’t been restored to completely normal functioning: he adored genuine Germans and was convinced that he had a special nose for detecting them, and he was mortally afraid of Chinese, Arabs, and blacks, whose presence here he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, but above all he worshipped and adored Herr Heiger. The point was that during one of Heiger’s first visits to Hofstadter’s, while the greengrocer was filling the bag, the brilliant Fritz had briefly flirted, soldier fashion, with blonde-haired Elsa, who had been driven to a frenzy by the lack of any prospect of a decent marriage. And from that moment a blinding hope had been conceived in the heart of the insane, bald Hofstadter—the hope that this magnificent Aryan, a staunch supporter of the führer and scourge of the Jews, would at long last escort the unfortunate Hofstadter family out of turbulently heaving seas into some quiet backwater.
“What’s it to Fritz!” Otto complained, constantly changing the arm that was stretched out of shape by the basket. “He only goes to Hofstadter’s place once, maybe twice a month, when we’ve got nothing to eat—he paws that little fool a bit and that’s the end of it… But I come here every week, even two or three times a week… Hofstadter’s a fool all right, a fool, but he’s a businessman, you know—the contacts he’s built up with the farmers, his food’s first class and it’s not expensive… I’ve turned into a hopeless liar. I have to assure him of Fritz’s eternal affection for Elsa. I have to assure him of the inexorable demise of international Jewry. I have to assure him of the implacable advance of the forces of the great Reich to his greengrocer’s shop… I’ve got totally tangled up in it all myself, and I think I’ve driven him completely insane. I feel guilty, after alclass="underline" I’m driving an insane old man into total insanity. Just now he asked me, What are these baboons supposed to mean? And without even thinking, I blurted out, ‘It’s an Aryan assault force, a cunning trick.’ You wouldn’t believe it—he hugged me and smooched me like he was sucking on a bottle.”
“But what does Elsa think?” Andrei asked curiously. “She’s not insane, is she?”
Otto flushed bright crimson and started wiggling his ears. “Elsa…” he cleared his throat. “I’m working away there too, like a horse. It’s all the same to her: Fritz, Otto, Ivan, Abraham… The girl’s thirty years old, and Hofstadter doesn’t let anyone but Fritz and me get near her.”
“Well, you and Fritz are bad bastards!” Andrei said sincerely.
“As bad as they come!” Otto agreed sadly. “And you know what’s most terrible about it: I absolutely can’t imagine how we’re going to extricate ourselves from this business. I’m weak; I’ve got no character.”
They stopped talking, and all the way back Otto merely panted as he changed the hand holding the basket. He didn’t walk up the stairs.
“You take this up and put on some water in a large saucepan,” he said. “And give me some money, and I’ll run over to the shop—maybe I’ll be able to get some canned stuff.” He hesitated, turning his eyes away. “And don’t you… tell Fritz. Or he’ll shake the life out of me. You know what Fritz is like—likes to keep everything buttoned up and under wraps. Who doesn’t?”
They parted, and Andrei lugged the basket and the bag up the back staircase. The basket was incredibly heavy, as if Hofstadter had loaded it with cast-iron cannonballs. Yes, brother, Andrei thought bitterly. What sort of Experiment is it if there are things like this going on? How much experimenting can you get done with this Otto and this Fritz? Would you believe it, what bastards—no honor and no conscience. Where would they get them from? The Wehrmacht. The Hitlerjugend. Trash. Yes, I’ll have a word with Fritz! I can’t leave this the way it is—the man’s decaying morally in front of my very eyes. But he could be a real human being! He must! When you get right down to it, you could say he saved my life that time. They could have just slid a knife under my shoulder blade, and that would have been it. Everyone shit their pants, everyone all went belly-up. All except for Fritz. No, he is a human being. I have to fight for him…
He slipped on the traces of baboon activity, swore, and started watching where he put his feet.