Death in Rome (4 page)

What was he to wear? He had a full wardrobe, he had suits of fine English cloth, tailored by nimble Arab fingers, he had become a cosmopolite, he put on perfume before going to the brothel for a relieving poke, the sheikhs had taught him that; but in whatever garb, he remained unmistakably the old
Judejahn,
an infantile type, a grim Boys' Own hero, unable to forget that his father, a primary schoolteacher, had beaten him for being bad at school. What about the dark suit? The reunion should be kept formal. But leave the perfume out. People didn't reek of musk where he was going. They kept the wild man out of sight. The Germans had recovered themselves. Were respectable people once more. Would they be able to tell where he had been? Once knee-deep in blood, and now, in the final frame, the desert sand?

There were jackals where he came from. Nights they howled. Unfamiliar stars pricked the sky. What did he care? They were orienteering aids. Otherwise he didn't need them. He couldn't hear the jackals, either. He slept. His sleep was tranquil, peaceful, dreamless. Every night he dropped into it like a stone into a deep well. No nightmares plagued him, no remorse, no skeletons. The sleeper woke when reveille sounded. That was welcome, familiar music. There was a storm blowing in the desert. The sound of the cornet wavered and died. The fellow was a slacker; he wanted bringing up to the mark. The sand clattered against the barrack walls.
Judejahn
rose from his narrow camp bed. He liked hard beds. He liked the whitewashed room with the metal wardrobe, the folding table, the washing unit, the rattle of rusty ewers and basins. He could have lived in a villa in the capital, highly paid, sought-after expert that he was, put in charge of reorganizing and training the king's army. But he preferred the barracks. It gave him confidence and a feeling of security. The barracks were home, comradeship, security and order. In fact it was words that held him together. Whose 'comrade' was
Judejahn
really? He liked the view of the desert. It wasn't its endlessness that drew him, more its barrenness. For
Judejahn
the desert was a great exercise ground, a front, a continual challenge that kept him in trim. In the capital, tiptoeing servants would have hovered at his elbow, he would have fornicated with warm-bellied girls, wallowed between their thighs, he could have bathed in aromatic waters like a pasha. But in camp he soaped himself, scrubbed himself down with a stiff brush till his skin was raw, he shaved with the old German pocket razor that had accompanied him all the way from the
Weidendamm
Bridge to the desert. He felt good, like a scorched wild boar, he thought to himself. He heard man sounds: water splashing, buckets clanging, whistling, oaths, jokes, orders, boots scraping, doors banging. He smelled the barracks smell compounded from detention, service, leather polish, gun grease, strong soap, sweet pomade, sour sweat, coffee, heated aluminium dishes and piss. It was the smell of fear, only
Judejahn
didn't know it: after all, he didn't know what fear was. He told himself so in front of the mirror; naked, thick-bellied, he stood in front of the fly-blown glass. He did up his belt. He was old school in this. The belt held in his paunch and hitched up his buttocks. An old general's trick.
Judejahn
went out into the passage. Men flattened themselves against the walls, dutiful shadows. He ignored them. He was going outside. A blood-red sun floated on the sandstorm.
Judejahn
inspected the front. The wind tore at his khaki uniform. Sand cut into flesh like shards of glass, and rattled against tanks like hailstones. The sight amused
Judejahn.
See the sons of the desert on parade! He looked them over and saw dark, moist, treacherous almond eyes, brown skin, burned faces, blackamoor countenances, Semitic noses. His men! His men were dead. They lay buried under grass, under snow, under rock and sand, they lay near the Arctic Circle, in France, in Italy, in Crete, in the Caucasus, and a few of them lay in boxes under the prison-yard. His men! Now that meant these here.
Judejahn
had little appreciation of the irony of fate. He did the old troop-inspector's strut and looked firmly and severely into the moist, treacherous and dreamy almond eyes.
Judejahn
saw no reproach in those eyes. He saw no accusation.
Judejahn
had taken the animal gentleness from these men. He had taken their pride, the natural dignity of these male harem children. He had broken them by making them obey. He had planed them down, by the book. Now they stood in front of him, upright and braced like tin soldiers, and their souls were gone out of them. They were soldiers. They were troops. They were ready for action and expendable.
Judejahn
hadn't wasted his time. He hadn't disappointed his employers. Wherever he went was
Grossdeutschland,
where he was in command it was Prussia's old glory. The desert sand was no different from the sand of Brandenburg.
Judejahn
had been forced out, but he hadn't been uprooted; he carried Germany around with him in his heart, Germany still one day the saviour of the world. The flagstaff soared in the storm, it soared up alone towards the sand-occluded sun, it soared alone and tall into a godless void. Orders were given. Shouts ran through the ranks of soldiers like electric shocks. They stood up even straighter and stiffer as the flag climbed once more! What a majestic symbol of meaninglessness! The red morning star glowed on a green ground. Here you could still flog used goods, nationalism, fealty and hatred for the Israelis, those perennially useful people through whom
Judejahn
had once more come to money, position and respect.

The dark suit wasn't right, either. It made
Judejahn
look like a chubby confirmand and it enraged him as he remembered how his father, the primary schoolteacher, had forced him to dress up like that and walk up to the altar of the Lord. That was in
1915
and he had had enough of school, he wanted to fight, only they wouldn't take little Gottlieb. But then he had his revenge on them, they gave him his leaving certificate in
1917,
and he got a place on the officer training course, not the battlefield, but later there were bullets aplenty whistling round the ears of
Judejahn,
the
Freikorps, Annaberg
battles, Spartacist uprising,
Kapp
Putsch,
Ruhrmaquis,
and finally the assassination squad in the woods. That was his seed-time, his
bohème
(Youth, sweet youth, said the song), and he never got another. In Hitler's service
Judejahn
became respectable, he made it, he put on weight, he got fancy-sounding titles, he married and acquired a brother-in-law: that opportunist
Kapp
comrade-in-arms, camp follower and carpetbagger, the
Oberpresident
and
Oberbürgermeister,
the
Führers
money man, denazified and now once again top dog, the old mayor re-elected by the people, by strictly democratic procedures. That was his way of doing things, that was his brother-in-law
Friedrich Wilhelm
Pfaffrath, who in his opinion was an asshole, and to whom, in a weak moment, he had written a letter: they weren't to shed any tears over him, he had landed on his feet. And then he had agreed to this idiotic reunion in Rome. His brother-in-law wrote that he'd fix everything. Fix what? His return, his decriminalization, his pardon, and then a little job at the end of it? The man was a windbag. Did
Judejahn
even want to go home? Did he require a certificate of acquittal, the freedom of a pardon? He was free anyway, here was his shopping list to prove it. He had weapons to buy, tanks, guns, aeroplanes: leftover gear that was no longer suitable for the next global dust-up, but pretty handy for a little desert fighting, for use against palace coup or popular uprising.
Judejahn
was accredited with banks, he had powers of attorney. He was meeting arms dealers from two hemispheres. There were old pals to try to recruit. He was in play. He enjoyed it. What did family matter against that? Shitty lot. You had to tough it out. Eva had been faithful to him, a faithful German woman, the type of womanhood one said one lived and fought for; and sometimes one even believed it. He was afraid. He was afraid of Eva, her unmade-up face and her hair-knot, the
SA
woman, the believer in Final Victory: she was all right, certainly, but nothing drew him to her. Besides, she was probably spent. And his son? That rat. What was going on behind that weird dumbshow? The letters he got hinted at changes.

He couldn't fathom them. He spread out a map of Rome in front of him, like a general-staff map. He had to go up the Via Ludovisi, then down the Spanish Steps, from whose height he could control the city with a single cannon, yes, and then to the Via Condotti, to the middle-class hotel where they were all staying, waiting for him. They had supposed he would be staying there too, in the German
auberge,
as the guide books called it, with its cosy atmosphere of back home. And
Friedrich
Wilhelm Pfaffrath,
the sensible advocate of sensible and realistic national policies, Pfaffrath who had made a comeback, and maybe even thought he was the cleverer of the two, because he was back at the tiller, and was in position for a new career in the new Germany, brother-in-law Pfaffrath,
Oberbürgermeister
and respected West German citizen, had wanted to take him under his wing, him, the supposed fugitive. That was probably how he'd sketched it out, he wanted to hold the vagabond in his arms, with all his past misdeeds and evasions forgiven him. But
Judejahn
would tell him where he could stick it, he'd been through too much for this idyll to charm him: dead or presumed dead, the bombed-out Berliner, the man who went missing in the cleaning-up operation, condemned at Nuremberg
in contumaciam
.
But the High Court that passed judgments on fate, human destiny and the blind actions of history, was itself reeling about in a maze of its own, was not a Justice with blindfolded eyes, just a silly woman playing blind man's buff, who, since she administered justice where there was no justice, had herself sunk in the morass of events that were without moral. The High Court had no evidence as to whether
Judejahn
was alive or dead, and so the High Judge had carefully donned the black cap and condemned to death
Judejahn,
accused before all the world as a monster,
in absentia,
with the result that the accused man avoided the rope, which was as well because people in those days were far too quick to reach for it, and for the Court, ultimately, the fact that
Judejahn
escaped hanging was just as well because the monster
Judejahn
had been earmarked for re-employment, war being a dirty business. The
Oberbürgermeister
had probably gone to Rome in his own car, he could probably run to a Mercedes again by now, or maybe the city had provided him with the vehicle for the scenic ride, Italy, land of longing, land of Germans, and Pfaffrath the German had his leather-bound Goethe on his shelves, and tax-commentaries well-thumbed next to the man from Weimar, a dubious type, what good ever came out of Weimar, and it irritated
Judejahn
having to imagine his brother-in-law with his snout in the trough again—it was treason, the fellow had committed base treason and should have swung for it. But
Judejahn
had a car at his disposal also, it wasn't that he had to walk, no, but he wanted to, he wanted to make the pilgrimage to bourgeois life on foot, that was appropriate here, appropriate in this city and this situation, he wanted to gain time, and Rome, they said, Rome where the bishops had settled and the streets crawled with surplices, Rome, they said, was a beautiful city, and now
Judejahn
was going to see it for himself. He hadn't been able to hitherto, he'd been here on duty, given orders here, gone on the rampage here. Now he could stroll through Rome, could pick up what the town had to offer by way of balmy air, historical sites, sophisticated whores and rich food. Why stint himself? He'd been in the desert a long time, and Rome was still standing, not in ruins. The eternal city, they called it. That was professors' and priests' talk.
Judejahn
showed his murderer's face. He knew better than that. He'd seen plenty of cities go under.

She waited. She waited by herself. No one helped her to wait, no one shortened the time by talking to her, and she didn't want the time to be shortened anyway or for them to concern themselves with her, because she alone was in mourning, she alone was distressed, and not even her sister Anna understood that Eva Judejahn was not weeping for lost possessions, or rank or respect, still less was it grief over Judejahn, whom she had seen as a hero entering Valhalla, that paled her countenance; she was grieving for Grossdeutschland, she was shedding tears for the Führer, lamenting the fact that treachery and betrayal and unnatural pacts had brought down the Germanic idea of world-salvation, the millennial Third Reich. The sound of laughter came up from the lobby through staircases and corridors, in at her window from the courtyard came the smell of cooking and an American dance tune sung by an Italian kitchen boy; but she wasn't reached by the laughter or the lively new nigger song embellished by bel canto, she stood in her widow's weeds in the stone cage of her room, madness, incomprehension and fleeting time, she stood wolf-throated, pregnant with vengeance, in the delirium of a myth she'd helped to concoct, prey to her innermost fears, her greying straw-blonde hair, sheaf of wheat left to stand when the frightened farm hands fled at the approach of a thunderstorm, her hair tied in a stern womanly knot over the pale face, long-skulled face, square-chinned face, sorrow face, terror face, ravened, burned out, a death's head like the insignia Judejahn wore on his peaked cap. She was like a ghost, not a Eumenide, but a northerly ghost, a foggy ghost that a madman had brought to Rome and locked into a hotel room.