Death in Breslau (13 page)

BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 8TH, 1934
A QUARTER TO EIGHT IN THE EVENING

Maass sat in his three-roomed apartment on Tauentzienstrasse 14, listening to the crackling gramophone record and reconstructing the Hebrew words by ear. He dipped his nib in the round-bellied inkpot with enthusiasm and marked the paper with strange, slanting signs. He was lost in his work. He could not allow himself any hesitation, any doubt. The doorbell painfully tore his attention away from the Biblical language. He turned off the light, deciding not to open, then heard the grating of a key in the lock.
(The inquisitive owner of this tenement no doubt. He thinks I’m not at home and wants to snoop around a bit.)
He got up and made his way furiously to the hall, where – he supposed – he would see the cunning hypochondriac with whom he had already managed to argue on the first day about rent. Maass, to be sure, did not pay a fenig towards the rent from his own pocket but had accused the landlord of extortion on principle.

The men he did see were no more to his taste. Next to the terrified owner, three men in S.S. uniform stood in the hall. All three were baring their teeth at him. But Maass was in no mood to smile.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 8TH, 1934
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

Returning home in a droschka, Anwaldt lay on the seat and anxiously regarded the tops of the tenements. He thought the parallel lines of the roofs opposite met and merged over him in an undulating ceiling. He closed his eyes and, for a while, repeated in his thoughts: “
I am normal, there is nothing wrong with me
.” As if to negate this creed, Chaim Soutine’s painting of “Exiled Children” swam before his eyes. A boy in short trousers was pointing something out to a little girl with a deformed leg. She could barely walk and held tightly to her companion’s hand. The yellow path cut the blue-black of the azure vault in the distance and met the teasing greenery of the forest. On the meadow burst red ulcers of flowers.

Anwaldt instantly opened his eyes and saw the enormous, bearded, weather-beaten face of the cabby looking suspiciously at his passenger.

“We’re on Zietenstrasse.”

Anwaldt slapped the cabby gruffly on the shoulder.
(“I am normal, there is nothing wrong with me.”)
He grinned broadly:

“And do you have a good brothel in this town? But it’s got to be, you know, first rate. Wenches with backsides the size of a horse. That’s the kind I like.”

The cabby narrowed his eye, retrieved a small visiting card from his breast pocket and handed it to the passenger: “Here the respected gentleman will find all the dames he wants.”

Anwaldt paid and went to Kahlert’s corner restaurant. He ordered the
elderly waiter to bring him a menu and, without even looking at it, pointed randomly to an item. He wrote his address on a napkin and handed it to the polite head waiter.

At home, he found no shelter from the heat. He closed the south-west-facing window and promised himself to open it only late into the night. He undressed to his long johns and lay down on the carpet. He did not close his eyes – Soutine’s painting might otherwise have floated in again. The knocking on the door was insistent. The waiter passed him a plate covered with a silver lid and left after receiving his tip. Anwaldt went into the kitchen and turned on the light. He leaned against the wall and groped for the bottle of lemonade which he had bought the previous day. His diaphragm jerked, he felt his throat cramp up: his gaze fixed on a large cockroach which, alarmed by the current of air, disappeared as fast as it could somewhere under the iron sink. Anwaldt slammed the kitchen door. He sat at the table in his room and swallowed half the bottle of lemonade, imagining it to be vodka.

A quarter of an hour passed before the image of the cockroach vanished from his eyes. He glanced at his supper. Spinach and fried egg. He quickly covered the plate so as to chase away yet another image: brown panelling of the orphanage dining-room, nausea, the pain in his nose as it was being squeezed, the sticky gunge of spinach being tipped down his throat with an aluminium spoon.

As if playing a game with himself, he uncovered his plate again and started to rummage thoughtlessly in his food with a fork. He split the thin coating of the yolk. It spilt over, flooding the egg white. Anwaldt recreated a familiar landscape with his fork: the slippery path of the yolk meandering through the greasy greenery of spinach. He rested his head against the edge of the table, his arms hung languidly; even before he fell into a sleep, the landscape from Soutine’s painting returned. He was holding Erna by the hand. The whiteness of the girl’s skin contrasted
vividly with the navy blue of her school uniform. A white, sailor’s collar covered the small shoulders. They were walking along a narrow path in a dark corridor of trees. She rested her head on his shoulder. He stopped and began kissing her. He was holding Lea Friedländer in his arms. A meadow: kindly beetles crawling up grass stalks. She was feverishly unbuttoning his clothes. Sister Dorothea from the orphanage was shouting: you’ve shit yourself again, look how nice it is to clean up your shit. Scorching sand pours on to torn skin. Scorching desert sand is settling on the stone floor. Into the ruined tomb peers a hairy goat. Hoof marks on the sand. Wind blows sand into zigzag gaps in the wall. From the ceiling tumble small, restless scorpions. They surround him and raise their poisonous abdomens. Eberhard Mock throws aside his Bedouin headgear. The sinister creatures crunch under his sandals. Two scorpions, which he had not noticed, dance on Anwaldt’s belly.

The sleeping man shouted and thumped himself in the stomach. In the closed window hung a red moon. The policeman staggered to the window and opened it as wide as he could. He threw the sheets on the carpet and lay on the pallet, soon soaked in sweat.

Breslau’s night was merciless.

†
Necessary condition (Latin).

†
Mass for the Dead (Latin).

†
“Women are most excited, men most sleepy” (Greek).

V

BRESLAU, MONDAY, JULY 9TH, 1934
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

The morning proved a little cooler. Anwaldt went into the kitchen and inspected it closely: no trace of cockroaches. He knew that, during the day, they hide in various gaps, cracks in the walls, behind skirting-boards. He drank a bottle of warm lemonade. Not worrying about the sweat which had coated his skin, he began a series of swift moves. With a few drags of his razor, he tore away the hard stubble, then poured a jug of cold water over himself, put on clean underwear and a shirt, sat down in the old, tattered armchair and attacked the mucous membrane of his stomach with nicotine.

Two letters lay under his door. He read Mock’s warnings with emotion and burnt the letter over the ashtray. He was pleased with the news from Maass: the learned man dryly informed him that he had translated Friedländer’s cries and was expecting Anwaldt at ten in his apartment on Tauentzienstrasse 14. He studied a map of Breslau and soon found the street. Carried away, he burnt that letter too. He felt an enormous surge of energy. He had not forgotten anything; he gathered the plate with his smeared supper from the table, threw its contents into the toilet on the half-landing, returned the crockery to the restaurant where he consumed
a light breakfast, then sat down behind the steering-wheel of the black, gleaming Adler which Mock’s chauffeur had parked outside the building for him. As the car pulled away from the shade, a wave of hot air poured in. The sky was white; the sun barely penetrated the mush which hung heavily over Breslau. So as not to lose his way, Anwaldt followed the map: first Grübschener Strasse, then – on Sonnenplatz – he turned left into little Telegraphstrasse, passed by the Telegraph Office, the Hellenistic mansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, and parked the car on Agnesstrasse, in the shade of the synagogue.

Bank Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt was housed in Tauentzienstrasse 14. The residential part of the building was reached from the yard. The caretaker politely allowed the new tenant’s – Doctor Maass’ – guest to pass. The policeman’s irritation, provoked by the heat, increased when he found himself in the spacious, comfortable
en suite
apartment rented out for Maass by the Baron. Anwaldt was accustomed to difficult conditions. He could not, however, suppress his irritation when he compared this beautiful apartment to his cockroach-infested hole with its toilet on the landing.

Maass did not even pretend to be happy at seeing his guest. He sat him behind the desk and threw down a few sheets of paper covered in regular, legible writing. He himself strode around the room drawing on his cigarette greedily as if he had not smoked for months. Anwaldt swept his eyes over the elegant desk and the luxurious objects on it (the pad of green leather, the ornamental sand-box, the fanciful, round-bellied inkstand, the brass paper-press in the shape of a woman’s leg), and found it hard to hold back the bitterness of envy. Maass paced the room, clearly excited. Thirst was drying out Anwaldt’s throat. A wasp furiously pounded between the window panes. The policeman glanced at Maass’ bulging cheeks, folded the sheets, and put them away in his wallet.

“Goodbye, doctor. I’ll examine this in my study,” he emphasized
the word “my” and made to leave. Maass leapt towards him, waving his arms.

“But, my dear Herbert, you’re on edge … It is the heat … Please, do read my expert opinion here … And forgive my vanity, but I’d like to know what you think of my translation right away. Please do ask questions and give me your comments … You’re an intelligent man … I implore you …”

Maass circled around his guest, pulling out cigarettes, cigars and his hissing cigarette lighter in turn. Anwaldt thanked him for the cigar and, not caring how strong it was, inhaled several times, then began to study Friedländer’s apocalyptic outbursts. He looked cursorily through a detailed description of the method used and comments on Semitic vowels and concentrated on the translation of the prophecies. The first of them read:
raam –
“noise”;
chavura –
“wound”;
makak –
“to spread/melt, to fester”;
arar –
“ruin”;
shamayim –
“sky”; and the second:
yeladim –
“children”;
akrabbim –
“scorpions”;
sevacha –
“grille”;
amotz
– “white”. Further on, Maass shared his doubts: “Due to the unclear recording, the last word of the second prophecy can be understood as being either
chol
(10 –
) – ‘sand’ or
chul
(IV –
) – ‘to wriggle, dance, fall’.”

Anwaldt relaxed, the wasp flew out through the open gap in the casement window. Maass’ hypothesis was as follows: “… it seems that the person indicated by Friedländer in the first prophecy will die of a festering wound (
death, wound, to fester
), caused by the collapse of a building (
ruin
). The key to this person’s identity lies in the word (
shamayim
– ‘sky’). The future victim may be somebody whose name is composed of the sounds
sh, a, m, a, y, i, m
, e.g. Scheim or somebody with the name Himmel, Himmler or such like.

“We believe that the second prophecy has already been fulfilled. It concerns – in our opinion – Marietta von der Malten (child, white shore – that’s
the name given to the island of Malta), murdered in a saloon carriage furnished in checks (grille). In her abdominal cavity were found wriggling scorpions.”

The detective did not want to show what a great impression this expertise had made on him. He diligently stubbed out his cigar and stood up.

“Do you really have no comments?” Maass’ vanity demanded praise. He glanced stealthily at his watch. Anwaldt was reminded of an incident in the orphanage: he exhausted his tutor urging him to look at the tower of bricks built by little Herbert.

“Doctor Maass, your analysis is so precise and convincing that it’s hard to find any questions. I thank you very much,” he held out his hand in farewell. Maass seemed not to notice.