concentration camp cemetery. Through most of Dachau’s life, the corpses of the Jews
were piled up and burned in ovens, but toward the end when the camp ran out of coal, the
Nazis had to do something with the corpses, so they brought them up here.” She spread
her arms wide. “This is all the memorial the Jewish victims got.”
Bourne had been in many cemeteries before, and had found them peculiarly peaceful.
Not KZ-Friedhof, where a sensation of constant movement, ceaseless murmuring made
his skin crawl. The place was alive, howling in its restless silence. He paused, squatted
down, and ran his fingertips over the words engraved on a headstone. They were so
eroded it was impossible to read them.
“Did you ever think that the man you shot today might have been a Jew?” he said.
She turned on him sharply. “I told you I needed the money. I did it out of necessity.”
Bourne looked around them. “That’s what the Nazis said when they buried their last
victims here.”
A flash of anger momentarily burned away the sadness in her eyes. “I hate you.”
“Not nearly as much as you hate yourself.” He rose, handed her back her gun. “Here,
why don’t you shoot yourself and end it all?”
She took the gun, aimed it at him. “Why don’t I just shoot you?”
“Killing me will only make matters worse for you. Besides…” Bourne opened up one
palm to show her the bullets he’d taken out of her weapon.
With a disgusted sound, Petra holstered her gun. Her face and hands looked greenish in
what light filtered through the evergreens.
“You can make amends for what you did today,” Bourne said. “Tell me who hired
you.”
Petra eyed him skeptically. “I won’t give you the money, if that’s what you’re angling
for.”
“I have no interest in your money,” Bourne said. “But I think the man you shot was
going to tell me something I needed to know. I suspect that’s why you were hired to kill
him.”
Some of the skepticism leached out of her face. “Really?”
Bourne nodded.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said. “You understand that.”
“You walked up to him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.”
Petra looked away, at nothing in particular. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“Then you’re no better than anyone else in Dachau.”
Tears spilled over, she covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. The
sounds she made were like those Bourne had heard on Leitenberg.
At length, Petra’s crying jag was spent. Wiping her reddened eyes with the backs of
her hands, she said, “I wanted to be a poet, you know? I always equated being a poet with
being a revolutionary. I, a German, wanted to change the world or, at least, do something
to change the way the world saw us, to do something to scoop that core of guilt out of
us.”
“You should have become an exorcist.”
It was a joke, but such was her mood that she found nothing funny in it. “That would
be perfect, wouldn’t it?” She looked at him with eyes still filled with tears. “Is it so naive to want to change the world?”
“Impractical might be a better word.”
She cocked her head. “You’re a cynic, aren’t you?” When he didn’t answer, she went
on. “I don’t think it’s naive to believe that words-that what you write-can change things.”
“Why aren’t you writing then,” he said, “instead of shooting people for money? That’s
no way to earn a living.”
She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she’d heard him.
At last, she said, “Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he’s just past
being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I’d seen him around the pubs; we
had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in
entropic economics, whatever that is.”
“I don’t think anyone can major in entropic economics,” Bourne said.
“Figures.” Petra was still sniffling. “I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated.” She
shrugged. “I never was good with people; I’m better off communing with the dead.”
Bourne said, “You can’t take on the grief and rage of so many people without being
buried alive.”
She looked off at the rows of crumbling headstones. “What else can I do? They’re
forgotten now. Here’s where the truth lies. If you omit the truth, isn’t that worse than a
lie?”
When he didn’t answer, she gave a quick twitch of her shoulders and turned around.
“Now that you’ve been here, I want to show you what the tourists see.”
She led him back to her car, drove down the deserted hill to the official Dachau
memorial.
There was a pall over what was left of the camp buildings, as if the noxious emissions
of the coal-fired incinerators still rose and fell on the thermals, like carrion birds still searching for the dead. An ironwork sculpture, a harrowing interpretation of skeletal
prisoners made to resemble the barbed wire that had imprisoned them, greeted them as
they drove in. Inside what had once been the main administrative building was a mock-up
of the cells, display cases of shoes and other inexpressibly sad items, all that was left of the inmates.
“These signs,” Petra said. “Do you see any mention of how many Jews were tortured
and lost their lives there? ‘One hundred and ninety-three thousand people lost their lives
here,’ the signs say. There’s no expiation in this. We’re still hiding from ourselves; we’re still a land of Jew-haters, no matter how often we try to stifle the impulse with righteous anger, as if we have a right to be the aggrieved ones.”
Bourne might have told her that nothing in life is as simple as that, except he deemed it
better to let her fury burn itself out. Clearly, she couldn’t vent these views to anyone else.
She took him on a tour of the ovens, which seemed sinister even so many years after
their use. They seemed alive, appeared to shimmer, to be part of an alternate universe
overflowing with unspeakable horror. At length, they passed out of the crematorium and
arrived at a long room, the walls of which were covered with letters, some written by
prisoners, others by families desperate for news of their loved ones, as well as other
notes, drawings, and more formal letters of inquiry. All were in German; none had been
translated into other languages.
Bourne read them all. The aftermath of despair, atrocities, and death hung in these
rooms, unable to escape. There was a different kind of silence here than the one on the
Leitenberg. He was aware of the soft scuff of shoe soles, the whisper of sneakers as
tourists dragged themselves from one exhibit to another. It was as if the accumulated
inhumanity stifled the ability to speak, or perhaps it was that words-any words-were both
inadequate and superfluous.
They moved slowly down the room. He could see Petra’s lips move as she read letter
after letter. Near the end of the wall, one caught his eye, quickened his pulse. A sheet of paper, obviously stationery, contained a handwritten text complaining that the author had
developed what he claimed was a gas far more effective than Zyklon-B, but that no one at
Dachau administration had seen fit to answer him. Possibly that was because the gas was
never used at Dachau. However, what interested Bourne far more was that the stationery
was imprinted with the wheel of three horses’ heads joined in the center by the SS death’s
head.
Petra came up beside him, now her brows knitted together in a frown. “That’s damn
familiar.”