Good People (54 page)

‘I'm the first one to admit to my deeds,' said Nikita Mikhailovich earnestly. ‘I make a spiritual accounting every night, and it isn't always flattering. I am aware that my position enables me to do what I do. In other words I accept the authority of the Party. You might doubt the methods, but all my actions have a purpose. Your plan…it's simply inconceivable. It achieves nothing except my survival, even if I decide to trust a woman whose character you describe so well, and a Nazi official, who is hatching all sorts of cosmopolitan plots with a Jewess against her direct commander.'

‘There's no plot,' Heiselberg protested, trying to conceal his despair. ‘It's the right action for everyone's good.'

‘You really are a gentleman,' bellowed Nikita Mikhailovich. ‘It's great to see you concerned for a woman whom you wanted to have replaced on the parade committee.'

‘We've already discussed that,' Sasha said at once, ‘and resolved our differences of opinion.' When, she thought, had the bastard managed to do that?

A thin strip of light crawled into the room. Heiselberg laughed, and maybe he even winked at her, as if a fraction embarrassed. She smiled at him as though to hint that this was a trivial matter and he should concentrate on the main thing. She wasn't insulted by the news that he had sought to replace her—there was no obligation of loyalty between them, nor could there be. Was she insulted because he, unlike other men, remained indifferent to her charms and intelligence? She remembered something Kolya had said on the plain: ‘Nadka says that the NKVD has made a wunderkind out of you again.' Now she understood what Nadka meant: None of us saw you as a poetry wunderkind,
so you looked for another way to star, and in your ascent you erased us all. How could that be correct? Was there a place in your soul where all the little ruses melt, where denial caves in and the truth is revealed?

‘Nikita Mikhailovich,' she said. ‘You don't understand Herr Heiselberg. He's the man who wrote the Model of the Polish People. He gave advice about deportations and arrests, executions, labour camps, the treatment of the Jews. I believe that he's committed to the parade because he sees it as a noble event for peace. Maybe he has a yearning for personal redemption. It's impossible to know how a man feels who was responsible for such criminal behaviour, for persecuting people simply because of the blood that flows in their veins. In any event, good deeds won't clean our hands of the blood. Who knows better than I? If you act against me, you'll jeopardise the parade, and I know you would rather we struggled for peace than war.'

She hoped Heiselberg had missed the pleasure she had taken in condemning his model. Like a beloved song, the accusations had rolled off her tongue, and she regretted she hadn't expounded further about the crimes committed under his inspiration.

‘God help us,' declared the German. ‘A man has no more secrets.' She lowered her eyes—she didn't dare look at him once the information they held against each other had been laid bare in ugly sentences, for the benefit of Nikita Mikhailovich.

‘I must leave you now,' said Nikita Mikhailovich. ‘I have a busy day ahead of me.'

Heiselberg gave him a wild look. Now there was no recourse for him. By the light of dawn she saw his spreading pallor. Perhaps it cost him an effort to stand, and that was why he was leaning against the window. ‘You understand that we can't allow that?' he said. ‘I've never met anyone so stupid in my life! Do you believe we'll allow a self-righteous nun to endanger the most precious thing of all?'

‘You'll allow it,' Nikita Mikhailovich chuckled. ‘And how! Comrade Weissberg, you said, I recall, that noble actions won't wipe the blood off your hands. Show us your bleeding hands, please.'

Heiselberg slumped. He appeared to acknowledge his defeat and
lose interest in the whole event. She linked her fingers behind her back. ‘The only thing you'll find there is the bandage that she never takes off,' Mikhailovich said to the German. ‘Did she tell you how it happened? It seems that one of her defendants poured hot tea on her hand. When was that, Comrade Weissberg? Late 1939? A small burn, and since then: the bandage. Our doctor changes it for her every two months. He tells her: It's almost completely healed, Comrade Weissberg. You don't need a bandage at all.' Nikita Mikhailovich took pleasure in imitating Dr Zimyatin's high voice. ‘But she stubbornly orders him to change the bandage, and keeps her eyes on the ceiling. A little burn—she can't look at it. So blood? And of dead people?'

‘You're exhausted, Nikita Mikhailovich,' said Heiselberg. ‘You're talking nonsense. I don't see the connection…'

‘You see it very well,' Nikita Mikhailovich interrupted. ‘You've never had blood on your hands. Obtaining confessions, writing papers, triggering hidden sequences of events that cause other people to die? That's what gentlefolk like you are so good at. But to give a direct order to kill someone? To kill a man close up, stab him in the heart, break his neck, shoot him in the head and see his brain explode, and then at home discover that brain fragments have splashed onto your ears: you've never done that. We're standing here, and you wish you could bury me. But this time no one will do the dirty work for you. It's almost absurd: you've both caused the death of hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and suddenly, because of one little death, you're helpless.'

Nikita Mikhailovich stood between them as though waiting for some action that would contradict his arguments. After a few seconds he walked to the door and kicked the basin over. Water began to spread over the floor and the clippings.

Sasha looked at Thomas Heiselberg, still at the window, which was glowing with sunlight. He hadn't moved. Really, won't you do anything? Won't you stop him?

Nikita Mikhailovich approached her. His eyes were opaque.

He's going to hit me. She retreated to the wall and tensed. She was
expecting Heiselberg to do something, but he stared at them in puzzlement, like a stranger who had arrived by chance. He was paralysed, but underneath he was writhing and screaming. Nikita Mikhailovich's opposition had thrown him headlong into reality. He couldn't even talk anymore.

With an effort she forced herself to look at Nikita Mikhailovich, hoping that his aggression was only a product of her imagination. Through his moist glasses he was looking at her with contempt. ‘You are a diminishing unit of time,' he whispered, then squeezed between the cupboard and the wall, and left, slamming the door.

They stood stock-still. There was a flurry of footsteps in the apartment above, and a woman called out to her children to get dressed for school.

‘Now we will have to expose his true face,' the German grumbled. But it was too late to say that—they both realised how useless his words were. ‘And maybe he won't do anything. After all, he looks like a responsible person.'

Don't talk anymore, her eyes said, just as the ball of the sun burst into the window. You sound like a dead man.

GERMANY

1941

Scanning the horizon lines of the cities he approached, he sometimes yearned to make one great leap back to life, an actor bounding to centre stage, shouting, Here I am! Don't say you weren't looking for me. You need someone to come up with a daring new plan, something inspired!

But afterwards—among winding potholed roads, seaside villages and hamlets with a handful of houses—the surge faded. The lecturing voice that astonished people with flamboyant international plans fell silent.

Towards the end of the summer he went to the village of Heiligendamm, where his mother had spent summer vacations in her youth. In the morning he would pack up a book, a broad-brimmed hat, a towel, sunglasses and a notebook, and sprawl on a beach chair facing the sea. Was Thomas devoting himself to writing? Recording his dreams? Several years too late, was he responding to Erika Gelber's request that he keep a journal? Not exactly. Sometimes when an idea came to mind he was tempted to scrawl it down, principles he once
believed in, impressions of a young family walking down to the shore, their hobbies, their origins and the future of their children. An abundance of time led a person to paths that once seemed superfluous.

After a while he stuffed the book and notebook into the towel, and watched the people out among the waves. Should he join them? If he dived into the water, would he feel better?

He felt like a nap. It had become too hot. He was sweating. He tried to brush the sand off his body. There was sand everywhere, even in his privates, making them itch. He rose heavily and returned to his room. People passed by him, flocking to the shore, their faces still sleepy, ready for the pleasure the day had in store for them. He closed the windows, drew the curtains shut and lay down in the darkness. Residual snatches of noise from outside emphasised his isolation. Naked between the sheets, he challenged memory to a duel—do your worst, show us some horrors. Memory spits fire: faces, events, pages of the model, the streets of Berlin, behind which Lublin and Warsaw split off—there were masses of images. He squirmed in the bed, lashed out at the images with his fencing sword from university days, until sleep fell on him.

At noon he woke up, taut with fury, cursing the holiday-makers whose voices rang out like alarm clocks banishing him from the kingdom of sleep as they walked to the dining room. He had no choice but to drag himself to the window, to watch the other guests cheerfully passing the time according to routines established on earlier vacations.

Now, lacking any all-consuming project, he was left with fragments of the past to fill up his days and keep at bay the void, the boredom, the terrifying silence. He jumped from stone to stone: the quicksand around him was all memories. His new mission was to discover strategies for shrinking their influence: ‘the Heiselberg technique for no-memory'. He already had a rough idea: since it was impossible to drive the images out of his mind, since he could not make them disappear, he had in fact to summon more and more of them until their colours, dates and contexts all blurred, and he could exile them to a space where they could recur, but with less force. They became like a
horror story that you read once, but on second reading wasn't so frightening anymore.

After a week he was nauseated by the smell of the sea and the naked bodies, with their pallid skins, wandering between the shore and the card games in the lobby, and there they were again, eating lunch, drinking beer, retiring for a nap. Wherever he turned, he heard only vanity, fussing, banal chatter about the war in the east, and saw only rich complacent faces closed over with pride. To calm his spirit, he tried to moderate his disgust at these types with their lazy movements, their soft foppish speech. At dinner he was surrounded by dozens of bespectacled, shiftless Wellers, all singing the praises of the Wehrmacht.

He caught a train and decided he would get off at a station close to the Belgian border. Perhaps Aachen. Someone he had met in Lublin was born there. Two hours later the train stopped, and the passengers were told to evacuate. Enemy planes circled, casting shadows on the fields. In panic the passengers clambered down, clutching their belongings, and lay under the carriages. Thomas spread out on the warm earth next to the tracks. His cheek rested on a stone that was as smooth as a pillowcase—he wasn't going to die because of some stupid bomb. He listened to the fading roar and comforted a young mother who was crying, huddled over her infant. He didn't reboard the train, didn't feel like hearing the passengers' frightened whining. He took his suitcase and walked a few kilometres through the fields until he reached a small village near Hanover.

Frau Gruner, whose house was next to the village cemetery, was the first person he met. She offered to rent him her top floor, which was reserved for important city people, and to cook his meals. The only thing she expected in return for her generosity—aside from money, of course—was his learned opinion regarding the future of the war. He would understand it better than the stupid peasants here. Her grandsons Hans and Franz had been sent to the east, and she and her daughter couldn't sleep at night for worry.

‘Sleep in peace, Frau Gruner. I am completely certain that Hans and Franz will return by the end of the year.'

For a few days Frau Gruner was satisfied and treated him with the greatest of respect. At six-thirty in the morning she would prepare a rich breakfast for them both. Afterwards she would do her job of tending the cemetery, which she did with the devotion of a peasant working his soil. Every day she asked Thomas for ‘the tiniest bit of help'—a little exercise never hurt anyone, and he looked so low. Here were gloves for weeding, it would be nice if he could mix the whitewash for the wooden fence, here's where we want to clear away the rubbish and level the earth. She dreamed about an entrance path strewn with fine gravel and told him there were misers in the village who refused to pay for upkeep of the cemetery—they'd have to look elsewhere to be buried.

In the afternoon, after she had bathed, applied perfume and tied a blue ribbon in her white hair, Frau Gruner served him egg liqueur in his room and pestered him with questions. Why wasn't he married? Had his girlfriend married someone else? It happened to the best people. She too, out of all her suitors, chose the failure; love was blind. She was a cheerful woman, Frau Gruner, even when telling the saddest stories.

At night Thomas would cut across the cemetery and lose himself in the fields beneath a starry sky, going further into the darkness, feeling that he was vanishing along with the world itself, becoming nothing more than an assemblage of memories fading out over Germany. He forgot that Hanover was nearby: darkness now shrouded all the places he had passed through, and the places he had yet to reach.

One day the owner of the beer hall remarked to Thomas that his eyes were red. Apparently he wasn't sleeping well—no wonder, if he was living in the house of that Gruner woman, a terrible person who wandered about the village with her sinister, deathly smile. When Thomas returned home, he made some casual remark about the grim future of the war to Frau Gruner.