Spark of Life (31 page)

7105 raised his skull. “I’d like to know what they think of us.”

“What should they think? God knows how much they know about us. And they don’t look happy themselves now.”

“Now,” said 7105.

They began the steep climb to the camp. “I wish I had that dog,” said 7105.

“It would make a good roast,” answered Muenzer. “I bet it weighs thirty pounds net.”

“I didn’t mean for eating. Just to have it.”

The car couldn’t get through. The streets were blocked everywhere. “Drive back, Alfred,” said Neubauer. “Wait for me in front of my house.”

He got out and tried to continue on foot. He climbed over a collapsed wall which had fallen across the street. The rest of the house was still standing. The wall had been torn off like a curtain and one could see into the apartments and the naked winding staircase. On the first floor a mahogany bedroom had been perfectly preserved. The two beds stood side by side; only one chair was turned over and a mirror was cracked. On the floor above the kitchen, water pipes had been ripped out. Water flowed over the floor and from there in cascades into the open—a thin, glittering waterfall. In the drawing room a red plush sofa stood upright. Pictures in gold frames hung askew against a striped wallpaper. A man stood where the front wall had been torn off. He was bleeding and stared down
without moving. Behind him a woman ran to and fro with suitcases into which she tried to cram knickknacks, sofa cushions and soiled linen.

Neubauer felt the rubble moving under his feet. He stepped back. The rubble went on moving. He bent over and scraped away the stones and mortar. Out came a dusty hand and a length of arm, gray, like a tired snake. “Help!” shouted Neubauer. “There’s someone still here! Help!”

No one heard him. He looked around. There were no people in the street. “Help!” he cried to the man on the second floor. The man slowly wiped the blood from his face and didn’t react.

Neubauer pushed a lump of mortar aside. He saw hair and grabbed it, intending to pull it up. It didn’t give. “Alfred!” he shouted and gazed round.

The car was no longer there. “Swine!” he said suddenly in a senseless rage. “When you want them they’re never there!”

He went on digging. Sweat poured into the collar of his uniform. He was no longer used to such exertion. Police, he thought. Rescue squads! Where are all those crooks?

A chunk of mortar broke and gave way and under it Neubauer saw something which a short while before had been a face. Now it was a flat gray smeared mess. The nose had been smashed in. The eyes were no longer there; the sockets were filled with chalk dust. The lips had vanished and the mouth was a mass of mortar and loose teeth. The whole face was just a gray oval with hair over it through which blood was oozing.

Neubauer choked and began to throw up. He threw up a luncheon of sauerkraut, hard sausage, potatoes, rice pudding and coffee. It landed near the flat head. He tried to hold on to something but there was nothing there. He turned half round and went on throwing up.

“What’s going on here?” someone asked behind him.

A man had approached without his having heard. He carried a shovel. Neubauer pointed at the head in the rubble.

“Someone buried there?”

The head moved slightly. At the same time something began moving in the gray pulp of the face. Neubauer vomited once more. He had eaten a great deal for lunch. “He’s suffocating!” cried the man with the shovel, leaping close. He rubbed the face with his hands so as to find and free the nose, and with his fingers poked about where he imagined the mouth to be.

The face suddenly began to bleed more freely. The flat mask was now made more alive by the approaching death. The mouth began to move. The fingers of the hand scratched over the mortar, and the head with the blind eyes quivered. It quivered and then lay still. The man with the shovel raised himself. He wiped his smeared hands on a yellow silk curtain which had tumbled down with a window. “Dead,” he said. “Are there any more down there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you from this house?”

“No.”

The man pointed at the head. “Relative of yours? Acquaintance?”

“No.”

The man glanced at the sauerkraut, the sausage, the rice and potatoes, then looked at Neubauer and shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t seem to have much respect for a high-ranking SS officer. It had certainly been a copious meal, considering the year of the war. Neubauer felt himself blushing. He turned quickly away and clambered off over the rubble.

It took him almost an hour to reach the Friedrichs Allee. It was undamaged. He walked hopefully along it. If the houses in the
next street were not destroyed, then his office building would also be standing, he thought superstitiously. The street was intact. The next two also. He took courage and walked faster. I’ll try it once more, he thought. If the first two houses in the next street have not been destroyed, then I too have been spared. It worked. Only the third house was a heap of rubble. Neubauer spat; his throat was dry with dust. Confidently he turned the corner of the Hermann Goering Strasse and stood still.

The bombs had done a thorough job. The upper floors of his office building had completely collapsed. The corner front was missing. It had been flung over to the other side of the street, into an antique shop. The counterblast had thrown an iron Buddha from there into the middle of the street. The saint sat alone on a chunk of undamaged plaster. He held his hands in his lap and stared, smiling calmly, across the occidental devastation in the direction of the demolished railroad station, as though waiting for an Asiatic ghost train to take him back to the simple laws of the jungle where man killed in order to live rather than lived in order to kill.

For a moment Neubauer had the silly sensation of having been let down by fate in the most infamous manner. The streets he had crossed had all been intact—and now this happened! It was the deep disappointment of a child. He felt like crying. To him, just to him this had to happen! He gazed down the street. Several houses were still standing. Why not those? he thought. Why should this happen just to me, to a decent patriot, a good husband, a responsible father?

He walked around the crater in the street. Every window in the dress shop was blown out. The splinters lay everywhere like ice. They crunched under his feet. He came to the section: L
ATEST
F
ASHION FOR THE
G
ERMAN
W
OMAN
. One half of the sign hung down. He stooped and entered. There was a smell of burning but he didn’t see any fire. The mannequins lay all over the floor. They
gave the impression of having been raped by a horde of savages. Several lay on their backs, their dresses blown up, their legs raised; others lay on their bellies, their wax behinds sticking out. One was nude but for her gloves; another stood in a corner, one leg broken off, wearing a hat and a veil over her face. All, in their various positions, were smiling—which made them look gruesomely obscene.

Finished, thought Neubauer. Finished. Gone. What would Selma say now? There was no justice. He went out and waded through the glass and debris round the building. On reaching the corner he saw on the other side a figure which, hearing him, ducked and ran away.

“Stop!” shouted Neubauer. “Stand still! Or I’ll shoot!”

The figure stood still. It was a small crumpled man.

“Come here.”

The man drew nearer. Neubauer recognized him only as he stopped in front of him. It was the previous owner of the office building.

“Blank!” he said, surprised. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Pardon, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
. I—I—”

“Talk sense, man! What are you doing here?”

Seeing the effect his uniform made, Neubauer had quickly recovered his authority and himself.

“I—I—” stuttered Blank. “I’ve just come over, to—to—”

“What, to—to?”

Blank gestured helplessly towards the rubble.

“To gloat over it, what?”

Blank almost jumped back. “No, no, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
. No, no! Only—it’s a pity,” he whispered. “Pity.”

“Of course it’s a pity. Now you can laugh.”

“I’m not laughing! I’m not laughing, Herr
Obersturmbannführer!
”

Neubauer eyed him. Blank stood fearful before him, his arms pressed tight to his body. “You got off better than I,” said Neubauer bitterly. “Been well paid? Or not?”

“Yes, very well, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
.”

“You received cash, I a rubble heap.”

“Yes, Herr
Obersturmbannführer!
Regret—regret immensely. This incident—”

Neubauer stared in front of him. He was now actually convinced that Blank had made an excellent deal. For a moment he wondered whether he couldn’t sell the rubble heap back to him for a lot of money. But this was against the principles of the Party. And in any case even the rubble was worth more than he had paid Blank at the time. Not to mention the building ground. Five thousand he had paid him. The annual rents alone had come to twenty thousand. Twenty thousand! Lost!

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you fumbling about with your arms?”

“Nothing, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
. I fell down years ago—” Blank was sweating. Large drops ran down his forehead into his eyes. He blinked more with the right eye than with the left. In the left, which was made of glass, he didn’t feel the sweat so much. He feared Neubauer might interpret his trembling as impudence. Things like that had happened before. But at this moment Neubauer wasn’t thinking anything of the kind; nor of the fact that Blank had been interrogated by Weber in the camp the day before the sale. He was thinking only of the rubble.

“You’ve come off better than I. Maybe you didn’t quite believe it at the time. But now you would have lost everything. Instead, you have hard cash.”

Blank didn’t dare to wipe his sweat away. “Yes, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
,” he murmured.

Neubauer threw him a searching glance. A thought had crossed his mind. It was a thought that had recurred more and more frequently during recent weeks. It had first occurred to him when the Mellern newspaper building had been destroyed; he had dispelled it, but it had returned again and again like a bothersome fly. Could it possibly happen that the Blanks would one day return? The fellow before him didn’t look like it; he was a wreck. But the rubble heaps around him were that, too. They didn’t look like victories. Least of all when they belonged to oneself. He thought of Selma with her prophecies of doom. Not to mention the newspaper reports. The Russians were at the gates of Berlin. One couldn’t get away from that. The Ruhr was surrounded; that, too, was a fact.

“Listen, Blank,” he said cordially. “I’ve always treated you decently, eh?”

“Exceedingly so! Exceedingly!”

“You’ve got to admit that, what?”

“Most certainly, Herr
Obersturmbannführer!
Most certainly!”

“Humanely—”

“Very humanely, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
. I’m deeply grateful—”

“Well, then—don’t forget that! I’ve risked quite a number of things for you. What are you doing here anyhow? In town?”

Why haven’t you been thrown into a camp long ago? he nearly asked. “I—I—”

Blank was drenched. He didn’t know where this might lead. He only knew from experience that Nazis who were affable invariably had a particularly gruesome joke up their sleeves. This was how Weber had talked before he had squeezed his eye out. He cursed
himself for not having been able to resist leaving his hide-out to have a look at his old firm.

Neubauer noticed his confusion. He made use of the opportunity. “The fact that you are free—you are aware to whom you owe that, eh?”

“Yes—thank you—thank you very much, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
.”

Blank did not owe it to Neubauer. He knew it and Neubauer knew it, too. But faced by the smoldering rubble old notions suddenly began to melt. Nothing was certain any longer. One had to take precautions. Crazy as it seemed to Neubauer, one could never be quite sure whether there might not come a day when a Jew like this could be made use of. He pulled a Deutsche Wacht from his pocket.

“Here, take this, Blank. Good stuff. That trouble years ago was harsh necessity. Always bear in mind how I protected you.”

Blank did not smoke. After Weber’s experiments with burning cigarettes it had taken Blank years not to become hysterical at the smell of tobacco. But he didn’t dare to refuse. “Thanks very much. Very kind, Herr
Obersturmbannführer
.

Cautiously he withdrew, the cigar in his crippled hand. Neubauer looked round. No one had seen him talk to the Jew. That was a good thing. He promptly forgot Blank and started figuring. Then he began to sniff the air. The smell of burning had increased. He walked fast to the other side. The fashion department was now in flames. He ran back, shouting, “Blank! Blank!” And not seeing him, “Fire! Fire!”

No one came. The town was on fire in many places and the fire brigade had long since been incapable of coping with it. Neubauer dashed back to the fashion windows. He leapt in, seized a bale of material and dragged it out. At the second attempt he no longer
got through. A lace dress he had grabbed flared up in his hand. The fire shot over the materials and dresses. He just managed to escape.

Paralyzed, he watched the fire from the other side of the street. It caught the mannequins, shot over them and devoured the dresses, and suddenly—melting, burning—they acquired a strange life. They twisted and arched themselves. Arms were raised and bent, it was a waxen hell—then everything was submerged and the fire closed over it—as over the corpses in the crematorium.

Neubauer retreated from the heat until he ran into the Buddha. Without glancing back he sat down on it, but at once jumped up again. He hadn’t realized that the saint’s headgear had a bronze point. He stared furiously before him at the bale he had saved; it was a light blue material on which flying birds were printed. He gave it a kick with his boot. Damn it! What was the good of it? He lugged the bale back and threw it into the flames. Might as well all go to the devil! Damn it! He stamped away. He didn’t want to see any of it any more! God was no longer on the side of the Germans. Nor Wotan, either. Who then?