Warsaw (39 page)

End note.

Firstly, I would like to thank Matthew Lynn and everyone at
Endeavour Press for publishing this book. I started writing Warsaw whilst
working in a bookshop, many years ago. The following people provided
encouragement and support whilst I worked as a bookseller and tried to be a
budding writer all those years ago: Patrick Bishop, Saul David, Henry Porter
and Andrew Roberts. I would also like to thank Annabel Merullo for her
encouragement and advice once I had finished writing a half decent draft of the
manuscript.

I set out to write Warsaw as nineteenth century novel set during
WWII. If I have succeeded in my brief then thanks should go to the likes of
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov for furnishing me with a certain amount of
inspiration and direction. In regards to furnishing me with information, I can
recommend the following books as further reading. Ordinary Men, by Christopher
Browning. The Third Reich, by Michael Burleigh. The Holocaust, by Martin
Gilbert. Part of the purpose of a book should be to interest the reader enough
to make him/her want to read another book. I hope that Warsaw has been able to
achieve this small goal. To quote Aldous Huxley, “The proper study of mankind
is books.”

As well researched as some of Warsaw may be please also
recognise that it is a work of fiction and there will be some, both deliberate
and unwitting, errors in historical accuracy.

This book meant a lot to me throughout my time writing it.
It still means a lot to me now, for both artistic and personal reasons. Should
you have enjoyed Warsaw (although I’m not sure that enjoyed is altogether the
right word) and wish to get in touch then I would like to hear from you. I can
be reached via
 
[email protected]

Richard Foreman.

If you enjoyed this book, try A Hero of Our Time by Richard
Foreman, also published by Endeavour Press.

Chapter One

Captain Robert Fischer sat with his back to the window of
course so that the afternoon sun shone with spite into the eyes of all his
appointments. The jaundiced beams, like metal scraping upon glass, screeched
into the listless aspect presently of one Jakob Levin. A bovine, ursine-faced
Wehrmacht Private was also present in the musty room. The guard was ornamental,
but yet also deemed essential.

 
"You are Jakob
Levin, or rather 1556321?" the officer issued, following his statement up
with a weary sigh which seemed part affected, part sincere.

"Yes Herr Captain."

"You were a teacher I see?" the handsome officer
then lazily inquired, as if already bored by the interview.

"I am a teacher, yes Herr Captain," Jakob replied,
nodding his head and squinting in the light of the mustard sun.

"You were a teacher. Now you are, unfortunately,
mine," Fischer exclaimed, raising his eyebrows and pursing his pink lips
as he did so. If the directive, worded as a request, had come down from anyone
less senior in rank then Robert might have fought or bribed his way out of the
burden of nurse-maiding the prisoner. It was an inconvenience to say the least
for the bachelor, who valued both his privacy and life of leisure. But the
Wehrmacht officer had acceded to the order.

"Yes Herr Captain, I was an English Professor,"
Jakob calmly stated whilst vigorously fighting off the compulsion to scratch
his lice-infested scalp.

Although an English tutor and translator of David Hume,
Jakob Levin had learned to relegate the importance of quibbling over semantics,
especially if winning the argument meant receiving a rifle-butt in between the
shoulder blades by an ignorant Nazi (if ignorance is malevolence, as well as
bliss). Jakob often remembered, with mixed feelings as to the value of their
teachings, how the Rabbis and Elders would drill into their flock in the camp
that 'All that matters is survival, neither dwell on the past or dream about
the future. Concentrate on surviving the morning, then the afternoon, then the
night.' Rebellion or resignation brought one the same fate, Jakob concluded.

"But as misfortunate as you are Jakob, some might judge
you lucky. As inferior as you are our glorious state still considers you to be
an essential worker," the Captain remarked, his tone laced with a
harlequined irony – as well as a more obtuse mocking spirit. When the officer
pronounced these last two words, he couldn't help but survey the reaction upon
the old man's face. Robert Fischer was surprised at its lack of response. How
it had made the German half-smile in the past when they had responded to him as
if he were an angel, the voice of an angel, when he had delivered those words,
particularly of late. But this Jakob Levin had reacted with indifference,
perhaps too much indifference. Robert did not doubt the stories of veterans on
the Front suffering from a warped form of shell shock, oblivious to the tumult
of bullets scorching and zipping around their ears. Could this sallow-faced Jew
here be similarly desensitised to despair and hope? Certainly, in theory, the
once philosophical German held his life as but a word.

"Should you have had a conversation with any friends or
family, or your wife, just previous to your transfer here then it was,
unfortunately, your last."

Still the former lauded academic remained stone-faced. But
he was Jewish, 'too furtive to be dumb' the propaganda asserted. The prisoner
was receptive, if inexpressive.

"There is but one more grief-filled existence to that
of being a widow Jakob – that of being a widow who still believes she could be
a wife," the officer intoned, privately impressed with the swiftness and
originality of the cruel remark.

Jakob retained his squinting, almost gormless, composure to
the Captain's slight interest and annoyance. The fish did not appear to be
biting. But it was only a matter of time, or method, before Robert would pull
out the right lure from his box. It was a game to the Captain to uncover and
then squeeze someone's weak spot. Even Achilles had his heel, Robert posed to
himself, whilst at the same time believing in his own invulnerability.

"If you haven't already been told, you are to remain
now in this house, albeit in my basement. There you will work, eat and sleep. I
have been instructed from on high to employ you as a translator. I am to be
sent various works of English Literature, mainly poetry I gather, and you are
to translate them in to German."

Robert wondered if this brittle, gummy remnant of a man, still
dressed in his threadbare camp uniform, also knew of the project by the
Ministry Of Propaganda entitled 'Death of the Author', to Germanise Europe's
finest works of literature and art? Robert was intrigued because he too had
shown a similar outward resignation to the crime that the Jew here exemplified.
When asked some weeks ago as to how Robert knew he had gold in his soul, the
officer had dryly replied, "Because gold my dear, does not react to
anything."

Rhythmically and nonchalantly, as if reciting a shopping
list, the Captain further informed the prisoner of his brief.

"If you refuse to do what has been requested of you,
you will be shot. If your work proves unsatisfactory you will be shot. And (and
here Robert looked straight into, almost behind, his appointment's aspect) if
you bore me you will be shot."

Jakob raised a black, wiry eyebrow. The absurdism, horror
and aphasia of the grotesque times outside were compounded by a statement at
which the ageing Jew did not know whether to smile or be sick from. If Jakob
could have perhaps seen the playful glint in the Captain's expression through
the abrasive light, then he might have shared a wry smile.

"Do you understand Jakob? Then congratulations, you
have got the job. Do you have any questions? If you want to know whether you
can see your wife or not, you can't. Besides, absence makes the heart grow
fonder does it not? And if you want to know when you start then I can tell you.
There's no time like the present. Christian, would you please escort our guest
to his quarters," the officer remarked, as if suddenly wanting to be rid
of his charge.

"Yes sir. Heil Hitler!" the rough-voiced Private
ejaculated whilst saluting. As he did so Jakob could not fail to notice how the
soldier owned a stump, where his right hand should have been. His rifle was
ornamental also.

"Yes, quite," Robert Fischer glibly replied, not
even bothering to look up at the guard as he prodded the Jew out of the door
with the barrel of his unloaded Karabiner Kar 98K.

Pinkish-grey clouds smeared themselves across the sky
outside. Robert Fischer felt a slight draught, rather than the massaging rays
of the sun, upon the back of his neck. More than one commentator had called the
thirty-five year old 'devilishly handsome'. His cropped hair was light-brown,
though it would grow fairer, like a child's, in the summer months. Robert was
just short of six foot, broad shouldered and strong-jawed. His blue eyes could
at once prove striking, but then prove unreadable but they were always
engaging. The officer's sun-kissed complexion had harvested the good life and
his mouth could express either a sensuousness or sarcasm at the curl of a lip,
depending on what mood possessed the changeable Captain, or rather which mood
Robert chose to possess. Such were his piratical good looks that Robert Fischer
could have been one of the town's most famous, or infamous, womanisers even
without the added attraction of his princely personal fortune.

Yet the officer's body of late had increasingly become a
temple in ruins. His face was still symmetrical, but had grown a little
rounder, plumper. He was a thirty-five year old who suffered from shortness of
breath and but for the skill of his tailor Robert would have had a more
pronounced stomach for all the world to see. His hair too this summer would
recede as well as grow fair. But the retiring officer had no need to be fit for
military duty. He was but a Captain in name who had purchased a promotion to
Superfluous Man. Bribes and favours cemented his privileged position and
freedom from active duties. Often he fancied that he could be a real officer,
whatever that meant, fighting at the Front; he might have wished it now as he
drew the curtains on another withering day and poured himself a large Napoleon
brandy. But yet the mock-officer would have whisked his self off to battle not
out of a love for his country, which he loved but scarcely recognised nowadays,
but for the simple reason that it would be just something to do. Robert Wilhelm
Fischer was a coward only in the respect of him not being a hero.

 
Brandy after brandy
was absorbed until oblivion hung over the horizon like the setting sun. It was
an hour or so before the party. Nobody expected him to be sober for the
occasion so the least Robert could do was be accommodating and live up to his
social circle's predictable expectations. Strauss waltzed in the background
upon a gramophone as Robert killed time by carving sketches of faces and trees
into his already scarred desk with his letter knife. I say his knife, but the
initials "A.S" were engraved into the silver handle. The knife
belonged in truth to a Doctor Abraham Solomon. Robert had converted his surgery
into a reposeful study when he had acquired the house a couple of years ago.
Was he nothing but a common thief? Robert gently rubbed the initials under his
thumb and told himself that all he felt was an engraved piece of silver; to
feel anything else involved too much idle, discomforting conceit for the
officer. It represented nothing.

"Am I to cut myself with this knife and wash the guilt
from my hands in blood like some melodramatic twit? Or am I to use this letter
opener to open some letters?" the officer drunkenly, drolly posed. Robert
briefly, wryly half-smiled to himself also as he opened some mail. There was a
letter from his young cousin on the Eastern Front. Unable to get past the first
paragraph, without experiencing either a slight awkwardness or an enervating
torpor, Robert tossed the correspondence aside and drained the remaining
warming elixir from the bottle.

"Ah, Napoleon Brandy. One of the few things French,
along with Balzac and their natural inferiority towards us of course, that I
can tolerate. I wonder if in fifty years time there will be such a tonic as
Hitlerian Brandy? I warrant it would be dark, dense, with a bitter and
strangely fruity taste. The plebs would doubtless drink them selves stupid with
it also. Drown them selves. Did you even invade Russia on the same day as the
Corsican? Did History not tell you something? History tells us that history
repeats itself. Now for that remark Robert you should reproach yourself. I do
believe that statement had the air of a conclusion. "I hold the world as
but the world, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine is a sad
one" the half-soused officer muttered to himself, chuckling a little after
he did so – but sorrowful.