"I know nothing of that."
"You cannot claim to know nothing. You can say that you did this thing, or that you didn't. You cannot just forget."
Was it a camellia or a gardenia in the buttonhole? I couldn't see from where I sat.
"It was twenty years ago."
"It was twenty years ago for the witness too, but he hasn't forgotten."
I watched the spectators. The voices droned.
"You say these people went willingly into the gas-chambers on that occasion?"
"Yes. We had told them they were de-lousing rooms."
"So they left all their clothes in the changing-room, hanging on pegs, and followed one another into the gas-chamber, peacefully?"
"Yes. There was no persuasion."
"But the evidence has it that some of them knew they were going to die. Several women left their babies hidden under the clothes in the changing-room, hoping to save them. The evidence has it that you personally, Herr Stroebling, led a hunt for such infants, and that you spitted them on bayonets when they were found."
It was too warm in here, too wearisome to lie.
"They were only Jews. I keep telling you."
A man among the spectators, an official of some sort with a peaked cap, broke down, and his sobs were embarrassing; an usher led him out. It was common enough.
The good-looking girl in the black Russian hat watched him go. She never looked in my direction so that I couldn't see her expression. She stared mostly at the accused, with her pale face.
The voices droned.
"… But I was given full and legal power, absolute power to treat these prisoners as I thought right!"
"And you thought it right to mutilate the body of this ten-year-old boy with every instrument of torture known to man, for the amusement of your friends?"
"For their instruction! They were not my friends, they were my junior officers, some of them just out of training college! They had to be hardened, and I had explicit orders to harden them!"
A woman was moaning, rocking on the bench, moaning with anger, her teeth chattering, staring at the accused. She was led from the court on the judge's instruction. I had not ever seen, in six months, a woman sob. It was always the men. The women moaned or cried out in their anger.
"… It was ordered me by Standartenfuhrer Goetz!"
"He is not here to confirm that."
He was still in Argentina, where the Bonn Ministry Justice had asked for his extradition. He was also in my memory, out of the burned memorandum. Goetz, the goitre.
"… And all the time you were on these 'administrative duties', Herr Stroebling, you say you did not know of any deaths taking place among your prisoners?" A fingernail now bitten to the quick. "A few. I knew of a few."
"A few? Out of three million five hundred thousand done to death at this single camp? A few?"
The young prosecutor was drinking water again. Three times they'd refilled the glass jug. He drank in gulps, breathing as if he'd been running hard. All the time he drank he didn't take his eyes from the accused.
I watched the spectators, but there was no one I could recognise. Sometimes these people, just as with ordinary man people, returned to the scene of their crime, re-enacted in these places by verbal witness and film projected on to the roll-up screens. I'd got five of them that way.
But it was the one man I wanted now, out of all this city. Zossen. Of the many faces in my memory I could recall only a dozen that I'd seen in that man's company; of that dozen, none were here.
Dark came before the session was ended. I waited my turn at the doors. People left this place looking drugged, as if awakening from a nightmare under anaesthesia. I new that three of the lay jury were under the constant observation of their doctors to avert a breakdown before the trial ended.
They shuffled into the vault of the main hall. The girl in the black fur hat was ahead of me. The big doors were fastened wide open, framing a rainbow of colours on the snowy street. The air tasted of metal in the mouth. I began walking. The others had nearly all turned in the other direction because they made for the inter-urban stop. There were only three people anywhere near me: a man signalling a taxi, a man going into the pharmacy next to the hall we had left, and the girl in the fur hat.
Directly facing the steps of the Neustadthalle is a narrow street forming a T-section with the Wittenau-strasse, along which I was walking. There are no standards for the lamps at this place: they're suspended from overhead cables. There is a stretch of blank wall for twenty yards, concealing a cemetery.
They missed.
The car came from the narrow street and swung in a curve to smash the rear end against the wall so close that brick-dust stung my face as I threw myself clear and fell, rolling at once to get my prone body in line with the car feet first in case they risked the sound of a shot. None came. I heard the diminishing exhaust-note and the strange wailing of the girl. I got up and found her in an odd crouch against the wall, shivering and staring at the distant car. I hadn't troubled to get the number: it would have false plates.
I called in German: "Are you hurt?"
There was no telling what she was saying; it sounded like soft cursing; she stared after the car; she didn't even hear me. There was no snow on her coat; she hadn't fallen. A great gouge ran along the wall and brickdust and chippings coloured the snow.
No one had come up. You heard it all the time in this weather, cars coming unstuck. This one had slid of course or it would have been dead on target, to pin me and drag me along the wall like a paintbrush dipped in red. The operation needed judgment but was easier than it looked. I'd done it with sandbags in training, because we were required to know the mechanics of it in case we were ever the target. It went: get up speed as far away as feasible, then slip the clutch with the gear still in low and go in silently, freewheeling until you're lined up at ten or fifteen degrees with the wall and a few yards to the rear of target. Then clutch in and gun up hard to get the back end round in a power-slide that brings the target between the rear wing and the wall. Keep the foot down and get clear.
I'd burst four sandbags out of five. It wasn't the training that saved me, but the snow.
She had said something intelligible.
"What?" I asked.
"They were trying to kill me," she said. She spoke brittle Berliner German. I assumed that normally her voice would be less harsh than now.
"Really?" I said. She was walking half-running along the pavement. She obviously hadn't meant to say that. When I caught up with her she swung round like a slim blonde tiger and stood her ground. A man sized us up and said:
"Can I help you, Fraulein?"
She didn't look at him, but stared at me. "No." The man went away. She faced me with a cat's undivertibility.
"I'm not one of them, Fraulein Windsor." We both stood perfectly still.
"Who are you?"
"Not one of them."
"Leave me alone." The pupils still almost filled the blue, dilated in anger.
"Would you care for me to call a cab?" She hadn't taken ' Windsor ' but I persisted because she was shocked and might not have got it.
"I'll walk." No go with the C-group either. It was a thin bid anyway: the bastards had been after me all right but she believed they'd been after her, which could mean that she was with the Bureau. She wasn't, because she didn't respond. The Z Commission used several women; she might be one of them.