After a bit he reached his destination. The place was off limits of course, for the liberators had seen immediately that such a spot would become a souvenir hunter’s paradise and in fact some elementary looting had occurred, but Leets had a necessary-duty pass that got him by the glum sentry standing with carbine outside the building.
It was a popular stop on the Dachau tour, a must along with the gas chambers and the crematorium and the pits of corpses and the labs where the grisly human experiments had been performed. Usually it was crowded with open-mouthed field-grade officers, reporters, VIP’s, of one sort or another, all eager for a glimpse into the abyss — somebody else’s abyss, as a matter of fact — but today the shop was empty. Leets stood silent at one end of the room, a long dim chamber lined with mirrors. Bolt on bolt of the finest gray-green material lay about and bundles of silk for flags and banners and wads of gold cord for embroidering, and reels of piping in all colors and spool on spool of gold thread. Tailor’s dummies, their postures mocking the decaying dead outdoors, were scattered about, knocked down in the first frenzy of liberation. The odor was musty — all the heavy wool absorbed the peculiar tang of dust and blood and the atmosphere was tomb-like, still.
Leets found himself troubled here. The tailor’s workshop was packed with the pomp of ideology, the quasi-religious grandeur of it alclass="underline" swastika, slashing SS collar tabs, flags, vivid unit patches, the stylized Deco Nazi eagle, wings flared taut, preying, on shoulder tabs. Leets prowled edgily through this museum, trying to master its lesson, but could not. At one point he came upon a boxful of the silver death’s-head badges that went on SS caps. He jammed his hand in, feeling them heavy and shifty and cool, running out from between his fingers. They felt in fact like quarters. He looked at one closely: skull, leering theatrically, carnivorous, laughing, chilling. Yet the skull was no pure Nazi invention; it was not even German. The British 17th Lancers had worn them on their trip to the Russian guns at Balaklava, last century.
He moved on to a bench on which the tailors had abandoned their last day’s work, the sleeve bands worn on dress uniforms. These, strips of heavy black felt, had been painfully and beautifully embroidered in heavy gold thread, Gothic letters an inch high, with the names of various Nazi celebrities or more ancient Teutonic heroes; it was a German fashion to commemorate a man or a legend by naming a division after him or it: REINHARD HEYDRICH, THEODOR EICKE, FLORIAN GEYER, SS POLIZEI DIVISION, DANMARK, and so forth. The workmanship was exquisite, but by one of history’s crueler ironies, this delicate work had been performed by Jewish hands. They’d sewed for their own murderers in order to live. A few, like Eisner, actually had survived.
Leets passed to a final exhibit — a long rack on which hung five uniforms for pickup. He hoped their owners had no need of them now. But they loved uniforms, that was certain. Perhaps here was a lesson, the very core of the thing. Perhaps the uniforms were not symbolic of National Socialism, but somehow were National Socialism. Leets paused with this concept for several seconds, pursuing it; a religion of decorations and melodrama, theater, the rampant effect, the stunning. But only a surface, no depth, no meaning. There were four of the gray-green Waffen SS dress uniforms, basically Wehrmacht tunics and trousers, dolled up with a little extra flash to make them stand out. The fifth was different, jet black, the uniform of RSHA, the terror boys. It was a racy thing, the uniform Himmler himself preferred, cut tight and elegant, with jodhpurs that laced up the legs. With shiny boots and armband it would form just about the most pristine statement of the theology of Nazism available. Hitler had been right about one terrible thing: it would live for a thousand years, if only in the imagination. Leets felt its numbing power to fascinate and not a little shame. He was embarrassed that it mesmerized him so. He could not look away from the black uniform hanging on the rack.
Yet the uniform signified only one face of it. He’d seen the other elsewhere. Another spectacle was intractably bound up with this one. Standing there alone in the dim stuffy room, the black uniform before him, he remembered.
The weather had turned cold, this three days earlier, but the gulf between then and now seemed like a geological epoch.
They were in an open Jeep. He sat in back with Shmuel, and pulled the field jacket tighter about himself. Tony was up front, and where Roger should have been, behind the wheel, another glum boy sat, borrowed from Seventh Army. They’d just bucked their way through the crowded streets of the thousand-year-old town of Dachau, quaint place, full of American vehicles and German charms, among the latter cobblestones, high-roofed stone houses, gilt metalwork, flower beds, tidy churches. Civilians stood about and American soldiers and even a few clusters of surrendered feldgraus.
And then they were beyond and then they had stopped. But feeling the Jeep bump to a halt, he looked up.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.
“Welcome to KZ Dachau,” said Shmuel.
Seemed to be outside a yard of some sort. A wall of barbed wire closed it off, filthy place, heaps of garbage strewn all over, smelled to the heavens. Had some toilets backed up? He couldn’t figure it out. The Germans were usually so tidy.
A rail yard, was that it? Yes, tracks and boxcars and flatcars standing idle, abandoned, their contents probably looted, tufts of hay and straw and the cars seemed full of … what, he couldn’t tell. Logs? Pieces of wood perhaps? The thought of puppets came suddenly to mind, for in a peculiar way some of the forms seemed almost shaped like small humans.
He finally recognized it. In the picture Susan had forced him to look at in London so long ago, it had all been blurred, out of focus. Here, nothing was out of focus. Most of them were naked and hideously gaunt, but modesty and nutrition were merely the first and least of the laws of civilization violated in the rail yard. The corpses seemed endless, they spilled everywhere, tangled and knitted together in a great fabric. The food spasmed up Leets’s throat and he fought against the gag reflex that choked him at that instant. An overwhelming odor, decomposition shot with excretion, those two great components of the Teutonic imagination — death and shit — blurred the air.
“You think you’ve seen it all,” said Tony.
The driver was out vomiting by the tire of the Jeep. He was sobbing.
Leets tried to soothe him. “Okay, okay, you’ll be okay.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said the boy.
“That’s okay,” Leets said. But he felt like crying himself. Now he’d seen what they were doing. You could look at it in pictures and then look away and it was all gone. But here you could not look away.
Leets in the tailor’s shop reached out and touched the black uniform. It was only cloth.
“Jim?”
He turned.
It was Susan.
20
Repp awoke when the sun struck his eyes. The sudden dazzle decreed into his head an edict of confusion: all he could feel was the raw scratch of straw against his skin. As he moved a leg experimentally, a high-pitched piping protested; he felt the scurry of something warm and living nestled in close to him.
Rat.
He coiled in disgust, rolling away. The rat had gotten under him, attracted by the warmth, and worked its way into his pack. He stared at it. A bold droll creature, cosmopolitan and fearless, it stood its ground, climbing even to its haunches, eyes peeping with glittery intelligence, whiskers absorbing information from the air, pink tongue animate and ceaseless. There had been rats in Russia, huge things, big as cows; but this sophisticated creature was Swabian and sly and mocking. Repp threw his rifle at it, missing, but the clatter sent the rat scampering deeper into the barn.