Pili had opened the door just enough to enable him to peer around it. “They’re out. I’m finishing my picture.”
“Out where?”
“Rehearsing for the parade. I’m in charge. They said so.”
“I bet. Can I come in and talk to you?” He had expected resistance. Instead, the boy stood aside without a word and March found himself crossing the threshold of his ex-wife’s house for the first time since their divorce. He took in the furniture -cheap, but good-looking; the bunch of fresh daffodils on the mantelpiece; the neatness; the spotless surfaces. She had done it as well as she could, without much to spend. He would have expected that. Even the picture of the Fuhrer above the telephone — a photograph of the old man hugging a child — was tastefuclass="underline" Klara’s deity always was a benign god, New Testament rather than Old. He took off his cap. He felt like a burglar. He stood on the nylon rug and began his speech. “I have to go away, Pili. Maybe for a long time. And people, perhaps, are going to say some things to you about me. Horrible things, that aren’t true. And I wanted to tell you…” His words petered out. Tell you what? He ran his hand through his hair. Pili was standing with his arms folded, gazing at him. He tried again. “It’s hard not having a father around. My father died when I was very little -younger even than you are now. And sometimes, I hated him for that…” Those cool eyes…
“…But that passed, and then -1 missed him. And if I could talk to him now — ask him… I’d give anything…”
“…all human hair cut off in concentration camps should be utilised. Human hair will be processed for industrial felt and spun into thread…”
He was not sure how long he stood there, not speaking, his head bowed. Eventually he said: “I have to go now.” And then Pili was coming towards him and tugging at his hand. “It’s all right, papa. Please don’t go yet. Please. Come and look at my picture.”
THE boy’s bedroom was like a command centre. Model Luftwaffe jets assembled from plastic kits swooped and fought, suspended from the ceiling by invisible lengths of fishing-line. On one wall, a map of the Eastern front, with coloured pins to show the positions of the armies. On another, a group photograph of Pili’s Pimpf unit — bare knees and solemn faces, photographed against a concrete wall.
As he drew, Pili kept up a running commentary, with sound effects. “These are our jets — rrroowww! — and these are the Reds” AA-guns. Pow! Pow!” Lines of yellow crayon streaked skywards. “Now we let them have it. Fire!” Little black ants” eggs rained down, creating jagged red crowns of fire. The commies call up their own fighters, but they’re no match for ours…” It went on for another five minutes, action piled on action.
Abruptly, bored by his own creation, Pili dropped the crayons and dived under the bed. He pulled out a stack of wartime picture magazines.
“Where did you get those?”
“Uncle Erich gave them to me. He collected them.”
Pili flung himself on the bed and began to turn the pages. “What do the captions say, papa?” He gave March the magazine and sat close to him, holding on to his arm.
“ ‘The sapper has worked his way right up to the wire obstacles protecting the machine gun position,’ ” read March. “ ‘A few spurts of flame and the deadly stream of burning oil has put the enemy out of action. The flame throwers must be fearless men with nerves of steel.’ ”
“And that one?”
This was not the farewell March had envisaged, but if it was what the boy wanted… He ploughed on: “ ‘I want to fight for the new Europe: so say three brothers from Copenhagen with their company leader in the SS training camp in Upper Alsace. They have fulfilled all the conditions relating to questions of race and health and are now enjoying the manly open-air life in the camp in the woods.’ ”
“What about these?”
He was smiling. “Come on, Pili. You’re ten years old.
You can read these easily.”
“But I want you to read them. Here’s a picture of a U-boat, like yours. What does it say?”
He stopped smiling and put down the magazine. There was something wrong here. What was it? He realised: the silence. For several minutes now, nothing had happened in the street outside -not a car, not a footstep, not a voice. Even the lawnmower had stopped. He saw Pili’s eyes flick to the window, and he understood.
Somewhere in the house: a tinkle of glass. March scrambled for the door, but the boy was too quick for him -rolling off the bed, grabbing his legs, curling himself around his father’s feet in a foetal ball, a parody of childish entreaty. “Please don’t go, papa,” he was saying, “please…” March’s fingers grasped the door-handle but he couldn’t move. He was anchored, mired. I have dreamed this before, he thought. The window imploded behind them, showering their backs with glass — now real uniforms with real guns were filling the bedroom — and suddenly March was on his back gazing up at the little plastic warplanes bobbing and spinning crazily at the ends of their invisible wires.
He could hear Pili’s voice: “It’s going to be all right, papa. They’re going to help you. They’ll make you better. Then you can come and live with us. They promised…”
THREE
His hands were cuffed tight behind his back, wrists outwards. Two SS men propped him against the wall, against the map of the Eastern front, and Globus stood before him. Pili had been hustled away, thank God. “I have waited for this moment,” said Globus, “as a bridegroom waits for his bride”, and he punched March in the stomach, hard. March folded, dropped to his knees, dragging the map and all its little pins down with him, thinking he would never breathe again. Then Globus had him by the hair and was pulling him up, and his body was trying to retch and suck in oxygen at the same time and Globus hit him again and he went down again. This process was repeated several times. Finally, while he was lying on the carpet with his knees drawn up, Globus planted his boot on the side of his head and ground his toe into his ear. “Look,” he said, “I’ve put my foot on shit” and from a long way away, March heard the sound of men laughing.
“WHERE’S the girl?”
“What girl?”
Globus slowly extended his stubby fingers in front of March’s face, then brought his hand arcing down in a karate blow to the kidneys.
This was much worse than anything else — a blinding white flash of pain that shot straight through him and put him on the floor again, retching bile. And the worst was to know that he was merely in the foothills of a long climb. The stages of torture stretched before him, ascending as notes on a scale, from the dull bass of a blow in the belly, through the middle register of kidney-punches, onwards and upwards to some pitch beyond the range of the human ear, a pinnacle of crystal.
“Where’s the girl?”
“What…girl…?”
THEY disarmed him, searched him, then they half-pushed, half-dragged him out of the bungalow. A little crowd had gathered in the road. Klara’s elderly neighbours watched as he was bundled, head bowed, into the back of the BMW. He glimpsed briefly along the street four or five cars with revolving lights, a lorry, troops. What had they been expecting? A small war? Still no sign of Pili. The handcuffs forced him to sit hunched forward. Two Gestapo men were jammed on the back seat, one on either side of him. As the car pulled away, he could see some of the old folks already shuffling back into their houses, back to the reassuring glow of their television sets.
HE was driven north through the holiday traffic, up into Saarland Strasse, east into Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. Fifty metres past the main entrance to Gestapo headquarters, the convoy swung right, through a pair of high prison gates, into a brick courtyard at the back of the building.