Self's punishment (18 page)

23

Do you have a tissue?

Brigitte had prepared beef stroganoff with fresh mushrooms and rice. It tasted delicious, the wine was at a perfect temperature, and the table was lovingly set. Brigitte was chattering. I’d brought her Elton John’s
Greatest Hits
and he was singing of love and suffering, hope and separation.

She held forth on reflexology, acupressure, and Rolfing. She told me about patients, health insurers, and colleagues. She didn’t care in the least whether it interested me, or how I was.

‘What’s going on today? This afternoon I scarcely recognize Korten, and now I’m sitting here with you and the only thing you have in common with the Brigitte I like is the scar on your earlobe.’

She laid down her fork, put her elbows on the table, rested her head on her hands, and began to weep. I went round the table to her, she nuzzled her head into my belly, and just cried all the more.

‘What’s wrong?’ I stroked her hair.

‘I . . . oh . . . I, it’s enough to drive me to tears. I’m going away tomorrow.’

‘Why the tears about that?’

‘It’s for so terribly long. And so far.’ She raised her face.

‘How long, then, and how far?’

‘Oh . . . I . . .’ She pulled herself together. ‘Do you have a tissue? I’m going to Brazil for six months. To see my son.’

I sat down. Now I felt ready to weep, too. At the same time I felt angry. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I didn’t know things would turn out so nice between us.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She took my hand. ‘Juan and I had intended to take the six months to see whether we couldn’t be together after all. Manuel misses his mother all the time. And with you I thought it would just be a short episode and over anyway by the time I left for Brazil.’

‘What do you mean, you thought it would be over anyway when you left for Brazil? Postcards from Sugar Loaf Mountain won’t change a thing.’ I was quite bleak with sadness. She said nothing and stared into space. After a while I withdrew my hand from hers and got up. ‘I’d better go now.’ She nodded mutely.

In the hallway she leaned against me for one last moment. ‘You see, I can’t go on being the raven mother that you never liked anyway.’

24

She’d hunched her shoulders

The night was dreamless. I woke up at six o’clock, knew I had to talk to Judith today and thought about what I should tell her. Everything? How would she be able to continue working at RCW and hold on to her old life? But that was a problem I couldn’t solve for her.

At nine o’clock I phoned her. ‘I’ve wrapped up the case, Judith. Shall we take a walk by the harbour and I’ll fill you in?’

‘You don’t sound good. What have you found out?’

‘I’ll pick you up at ten.’

I put coffee on, took the butter out of the fridge, and the eggs and smoked ham, chopped onions and chives, warmed up milk for Turbo, squeezed three oranges for juice, set the table, and made myself two fried eggs on ham and lightly sweated onions. When the eggs were just right I sprinkled them with chives. The coffee was ready.

I sat for a long time over my breakfast without touching it. Just before ten I took a couple of gulps of coffee. I set down the eggs for Turbo and left.

When I rang the bell, Judith came down straight away. She looked pretty in her loden coat with its collar turned up, as pretty as only an unhappy person can be.

We parked the car by the harbour office and walked between the rail tracks and the old warehouses along Rheinkaistrasse. Beneath the grey September sky it all had the peacefulness of a Sunday. The John Deere tractors were parked as though they were waiting for a field chaplain to begin the service.

‘Will you please finally start to tell me?’

‘Didn’t Firner mention my run-in with plant security on Thursday night?’

‘No. I think he’d gathered I was with Peter.’

I started with the talk I’d had with Korten yesterday, lingered over the question of whether old Schmalz was the last link of a well-functioning chain of command, had crazily set himself up as the saviour of the plant, or had been used, nor did I spare the details of the murder on the bridge. I made it clear that what I knew, and what could be proved, were leagues apart.

Judith strode along firmly beside me. She’d hunched her shoulders and was holding the collar of her coat closed with her left hand against the north wind. She hadn’t interrupted me. But now she said with a small laugh that cut me even further to the quick than her tears would have done: ‘Do you know, Gerhard, it’s so absurd. When I took you on to find out the truth I thought it would help me. But now I feel more at a loss than ever.’

I envied Judith the purity of her grief. My sadness was pervaded by a sense of weakness, of guilt, because I’d delivered Mischkey to the dogs, albeit unwittingly, a feeling that I’d been used, and a strange pride at having come so far. It also saddened me that the case had initially connected Judith and myself then entangled us so much with one another that we’d never be able to grow closer without a sense of awkwardness.

‘You’ll send me the bill?’

She hadn’t understood that Korten wanted to pay for my investigation. As I explained this to her, she retreated even further into herself and said: ‘That fits perfectly. It would also fit if I were to be promoted to Korten’s personal assistant. It’s all so repulsive.’

Between warehouse number seventeen and number nineteen we turned left and came to the Rhine. Opposite lay the RCW skyscraper. The Rhine flowed past, wide and tranquil.

‘What do I do now?’

I had no answers. If she managed tomorrow to lay the folder of letters in front of Firner to sign, as though nothing had happened, she’d come to terms with it.

‘And the terrible thing is that Peter is already so far away, inside. I’ve cleared out everything at home that reminded me of him, because it hurt so much. But now my loneliness feels tidied away, too, and I’m getting cold.’

We walked along the Rhine, following it downstream. Suddenly she turned to me, seized me by the coat, shook me and said: ‘We can’t just let them get away with it!’ With her right arm she made a sweeping gesture encapsulating the Works opposite. ‘They shouldn’t be let off the hook.’

‘No, they shouldn’t be, but they will be. Since the beginning of time, people with power have got away with it. And here perhaps it wasn’t even the people with power, it was a lunatic, Schmalz.’

‘But that’s exactly what power is, not having to act yourself, but getting some lunatic to do it. That can’t excuse them.’

I tried to explain to her that I didn’t want to excuse anyone, but that I simply couldn’t pursue the investigation.

‘Then you’re just one of the somebodies who does the dirty work for those people with power. Leave me alone now, I’ll find my own way back.’

I suppressed the impulse to leave her there, and said instead: ‘That’s mad, the secretary of the director of the RCW reproaching the detective who carried out a contract for the RCW, for working for the RCW. That’s rich.’

We walked on. After a while she put an arm through mine. ‘In the old days, if something bad happened, I always had the feeling it would all be okay again. Life, I mean. Even after my divorce. Now I know nothing will ever be the same again. Do you recognize that?’

I nodded.

‘Listen, it really would be best if I go on walking here on my own for a bit. You needn’t look so worried, I won’t do anything silly.’

From Rheinkaistrasse I looked back. She hadn’t moved. She was looking over to the RCW at the levelled ground of the old factory. The wind blew an empty cement sack over the street.

Part Three

1

A milestone in jurisprudence

After a long, golden Indian summer, winter started abruptly. I can’t remember a colder November.

I wasn’t working much then. The investigation in the Sergej Mencke affair advanced at a crawl. The insurance company was hemming and hawing about sending me to America. The meeting with the ballet director had taken place on the sidelines of a rehearsal, and had taught me about Indian dance, which was being rehearsed, but otherwise only revealed that some people liked Sergej, others didn’t, and the ballet director belonged to the latter category. For two weeks I was plagued by rheumatism so that I wasn’t fit for anything except getting through the bare necessities. Beyond that I went on plenty of walks, frequented the sauna and the cinema, finished reading
Green Henry
– I’d laid it aside in the summer – and listened to Turbo’s winter coat grow. One Saturday I bumped into Judith at the market. She was no longer working at RCW, was living off her unemployment money, and helping out at the women’s bookshop Xanthippe. We promised to get together, but neither of us made the first move. With Eberhard I re-enacted the matches of the world chess championship. As we were sitting over the last game, Brigitte called from Rio. There was a buzzing and crackling in the line; I could barely make her out. I think she said she was missing me. I didn’t know what to do with that.

December began with unexpected days of sultry wind. On 2nd December the Federal Constitutional Court pronounced as unconstitutional the direct emissions data gathering introduced by statute in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate.

It censured the violation of constitutional rights of business data privacy and establishment and practice of a commercial enterprise, but eventually the statute was annulled for lack of legislative authority. The well-known columnist of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
celebrated the decision as a milestone in jurisprudence because, at last, data privacy had broken free of the shackles of mere civil rights protection and was elevated to the rank of entrepreneurial rights. Only now was the true grandeur of the court’s judgment regarding data protection revealed.

I wondered what would become of Grimm’s lucrative sideline. Would the RCW continue to pay him a fee, for keeping quiet? I also wondered whether Judith would read the news from Karlsruhe, and what would go through her head as she did. This decision half a year earlier would have meant that Mischkey and the RCW wouldn’t have locked horns.

That same day there was a letter from San Francisco in the mail. Vera Müller was a former resident of Mannheim, had emigrated to the USA in 1936, and had taught European literature at various Californian colleges. She’d been retired for some years now and out of a sense of nostalgia read the
Mannheimer Morgen
. She’d been surprised not to hear anything back about her first letter to Mischkey. She’d responded to the advertisement because the fate of her Jewish friend in the Third Reich was sadly interwoven with the RCW. She thought it a period of recent history that should be more widely researched and published, and she was willing to broker contact with Frau Hirsch. But she didn’t want to cause her friend any unnecessary excitement and would only establish contact if the research project was both academically sound and fruitful from the aspect of coming to terms with the past. She asked for assurances on this score.

It was the letter of an educated lady, rendered in lovely, old-fashioned German, and written in sloping, austere handwriting. Sometimes in the summer I see elderly American tourists in Heidelberg with a blue tint in their white hair, bright-pink frames on their spectacles, and garish make-up on their wrinkled skin. This willingness to present oneself as a caricature had always struck me as an expression of cultural despair. Reading Vera Müller’s letter I could suddenly imagine such a lady being interesting and fascinating, and I recognized the wise weariness of completely forgotten peoples in that cultural despair. I wrote to her saying I’d try to visit her soon.

I called the Heidelberg Union Insurance company. I made it clear that without the trip to America all I could do was write a final report and prepare an invoice. An hour later the clerk in charge called to give me the go-ahead.

So, I was back on the Mischkey case. I didn’t know what there was left for me to find out. But there it was, this trail that had vanished and had now re-emerged. And with the green light from the Heidelberg Union Insurance I could pursue it so effortlessly that I didn’t have to think too deeply about the why and wherefore.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and I figured out from my diary that it was 9 a.m. in Pittsburgh. I’d discovered from the ballet director that Sergej Mencke’s friends were at the Pittsburgh State Ballet, and International Information divulged its telephone number. The girl from the exchange was jovial. ‘You want to give the little lady from
Flashdance
a call?’ I didn’t know the film. ‘Is the movie worth seeing? Should I take a look?’ She’d seen it three times. With my dreadful English the long-distance call to Pittsburgh was a torture. At least I found out from the ballet’s secretary that both dancers would be in Pittsburgh throughout December.

I came to an understanding with my travel agency that I’d receive an invoice for a Lufthansa flight Frankfurt–Pittsburgh, but would actually be booked on a cheap flight from Brussels to San Francisco with a stopover in New York and a side trip to Pittsburgh. At the beginning of December there wasn’t much going on over the Atlantic. I got a flight for Thursday morning.

Towards evening I gave Vera Müller a call in San Francisco. I told her I’d written, but that rather suddenly a convenient opportunity had arisen to come to the USA, and I’d be in San Francisco by the weekend. She said she’d announce my visit to Frau Hirsch; she herself was out of town over the weekend but would be glad to see me on Monday. I noted down Frau Hirsch’s address: 410 Connecticut Street, Potrero Hill.

2

A crackle, and the picture appeared

From the old films I had visions in my mind of ships steaming into New York, past the Statue of Liberty and on past the skyscrapers, and I’d imagined seeing the same, not from the deck of a liner, but through the small window on my left. However, the airport was way out of the city, it was cold and dirty, and I was glad when I’d transferred and was sitting in the plane to San Francisco. The rows of seats were so squashed together that it was only bearable to be in them with the seat reclined. During the meal you had to put your seat-back up; presumably the airline only served a meal so that you would be happy afterwards when you could recline again.

I arrived at midnight. A cab took me into the city via an eight-lane motorway, and to a hotel. I was feeling wretched after the storm the airplane had flown through. The porter who’d carried my suitcase to the room turned on the television; there was a crackle, and the picture appeared. A man was talking with obscene pushiness. I realized later he was a preacher.

The next morning the porter called me a cab, and I stepped out into the street. The window of my room looked out onto the wall of a neighbouring building, and in the room the morning had been grey and quiet. Now the colours and noises of the city exploded around me, beneath a clear, blue sky. The drive over the hills of the town, on streets that led upwards and swooped down again straight as an arrow, the smacking jolts of the cab’s worn-out suspension when we crossed a junction, the views of skyscrapers, bridges, and a large bay made me feel dizzy.

The house was situated in a peaceful street. Like all the houses it was made of wood. Steps led to the front door. Up I went and rang the bell. An old man opened the door. ‘Mr Hirsch?’

‘My husband’s been dead for six years,’ she said in rusty German. ‘You needn’t apologize, I’m often taken for a man and I’m used to it. You’re the German Vera was telling me about, right?’

Perhaps it was the confusion or the flight or the cab ride – I must have fainted and came to when the old woman threw a glass of water at my face.

‘You’re lucky you didn’t fall down the steps. When you’re ready, come and I’ll give you a whisky.’

The whisky burned inside me. The room was musty and smelt of age, of old flesh and old food. The same smell had suffused my grandparents’ house, I suddenly recalled, and just as suddenly I was seized by the fear of growing old that I’m continuously suppressing.

The woman was perched opposite, and scrutinizing me. Shafts of sunlight shone through the blinds onto her. She was completely bald. ‘You want to talk to me about Weinstein, my husband. Vera thinks it’s important that what happened is told. But it’s not a good story. My husband tried to forget it.’

I didn’t realize straight away who Karl Weinstein was. But as she started to talk I remembered. She didn’t realize she was not only telling his story but also touching upon my own past.

She spoke in an oddly monotonous voice. Weinstein had been professor of organic chemistry in Breslau until 1933. In 1941, when he was put in a concentration camp, his former assistant Tyberg put in a request for him to be sent to the RCW laboratories, which was granted. Weinstein was even quite pleased that he could work in his field again and that he was working with someone who appreciated him as a scientist, addressed him as Professor, and politely said goodbye in the evening when he was taken back to the camp along with the other forced labourers of the Works. ‘My husband didn’t cope well with life, nor was he very brave. He had no idea, or didn’t want to know, what was happening around him and what was coming for him, too.’

‘Were you with Weinstein at this time?’

‘I met Karl on the transport to Auschwitz in nineteen forty-one. And then again only after the war. I’m Flemish, you know, and could hide in Brussels to begin with, until they caught me. I was a beautiful woman. They conducted medical experiments on my scalp. I think that saved my life. But in nineteen fortyfive I was old and bald. I was twenty-three.’

One day they’d come to Weinstein, someone from the Works and someone from the SS. They’d told him how he must testify before the police, the prosecutor, and the judge. It was a matter of sabotage, a manuscript that he’d supposedly found in Tyberg’s desk, a conversation between Tyberg and a co-worker that he’d supposedly overheard.

I could picture Weinstein, as he was led into my office, in his prisoner’s clothes, and gave his testimony.

‘He hadn’t wanted to at first. It was all false and Tyberg hadn’t been bad to him. But they showed him they would crush him. They didn’t even promise him his life, only that he could survive a little longer. Can you imagine that? Then my husband was transferred and simply forgotten in the other camp. We’d arranged where we would meet should the whole thing ever be over. In Brussels on the Grand Place. I came there simply by chance in the spring of nineteen forty-six, not thinking of him any more. He’d been waiting there for me since the summer of nineteen forty-five. He recognized me immediately although I’d become this bald, old lady. Quite irresistible!’ She laughed.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I was the one Weinstein had delivered his testimony to. I also couldn’t tell her why it was so important to me. But I had to know. And so I asked, ‘Are you certain that the testimony your husband gave was false?’

‘I don’t understand. I’ve told you what he told me.’ Her face turned cold. ‘Get out,’ she said, ‘get out.’