“Schiller. . what bastards?”
“The Russkis, the Yanks, the Engländer, the backstabbing French cunts and those vermin the Yids. Can you believe it, there were still some left? The old man had a rough time, what with Nakam and the fucking Jewish Agency who exploited all the upheaval to get their hands on Palestine and France, and then there was Mossad and that bastard Wiesenthal who was lining his pockets. . and that’s not counting all the people who turned traitor overnight, some of them members of the 92. We didn’t know what was going on, we had to keep tabs on what they were planning, tell the Kameraden, set up the networks, protect the lines, raise money, forge papers. . I can tell you, I worked like a dog. . I miss it, really. Back then, people were prepared to go to any lengths for the sake of honour. . These days. . ”
I listened without really listening. I knew a hundred times more than he did about all this. But seeing him, hearing him, smelling him, squelching with him through this fetid mire, I experienced what it was like after the war, that end of the world unlike any other, the ruined wasteland stretching to the horizon, the scrawny hordes of dazed, half-dead people, bulldozers clearing the towering heaps of corpses, madmen wandering through the ruined countryside, surreal scenes, the wind carrying the stench of rotting flesh, the feckless already haggling, wheedling, testifying, making provisions for the future and, over this bedlam and confusion, excruciating, maddening, this haunting silence, this fog that chokes me even now.
“So. . what’s the story now, uncle Adolph?”
“It’s all over now, Jugend, the Jews have won.”
“But Hitler will come back. . or someone else, someone more p. . someone as powerful.”
“Yeah, yeah. . Dream on.”
“It could be a Frenchman, someone like us. . ”
“Don’t make me laugh. You ever see a Frenchman with balls?”
“Pétain had balls, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t have Hitler’s genius. The sort of guy we need can only come from Germany.”
“But what about Stalin and Pol Pot, Ceaus¸escu, what about Mao, Kim Il-sung, Idi Amin and. . the other guy, you know, with the moustache, the one who gassed all the. . ”
“Scum, the lot of them, nothing but Commies and niggers and gooks, they don’t count.”
“An American would be good, I mean they exterminated the Indians — though I admit they didn’t do such a great job with the Blacks. And they dropped a couple of atomic bombs on the Japs.”
“Bullshit! They’re all Jews in America, they should be wiped out, the whole lot of them.”
“Maybe the Arabs. . what do you think? I mean they’ve got the rhetoric. . ”
“The what?”
“The spiel, the shtick, they’ve got a coherent ideology. . ”
“Fucking Yids just like the rest of them, they’re only good for making charcoal, and not even decent charcoal.”
“Hey, maybe that would solve the energy crisis they’re always busting our balls about — we’d get a cheap renewable source of energy out of burning them, we’d never have to worry again. . ”
“Ha, ha, ha! You’re your father’s son all right! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!”
In other circumstances I would have been only too happy to wander through his brain, I’m sure I would have found charming grottos and ravines the bastard didn’t know he had, there’s clearly no end to cretinism, what I had seen was only the tip of the iceberg. I felt like. . like. . nothing. You don’t kill madmen, you don’t exterminate the mentally handicapped, you pray for them. But for all his madness, his sickness, he managed to hurt me with that line: “You’re your father’s son all right!” It was like an electric shock to my heart. I thought of him as his father’s son, offspring of Jean 92, good Samaritan to Nazi fugitives, saviour of murderers, and he had reminded me that I was my father’s son, offspring of SS Gruppenführer Hans Schiller, the angel of death.
On the train back to Paris, the phrase ran through my mind—I am my father’s son. . I am my father’s son. . — over and over, to the steady monotonous clacking of the train, until it deafened me, devastated me, until I fell asleep. I think I might have said it aloud, might have shouted it. I was caught between two nightmares, two spasms, two impulses: to die here where I sat, or later, when I had drained the cup to the dregs. I thrashed about in darkness. But I know I heard a voice from somewhere in the carriage whispering to his neighbour, “The fact he needs to say it means he must have doubts,” and another voice reply, “The question is, does his father know?” And suddenly all these good people, the tourists and travellers, started laughing, giggling behind their hands, chuckling behind their newspapers, others snorting half-heartedly. I laughed myself. It was a good joke, these were good people, but just as the laughter petered out into hopelessness I got to my feet and, addressing the assembled company like a prophet of doom, I whispered, “Let he who knows where his father is raise his hand.” A chill ran through the carriage. It brought me back to life.
I don’t know why, but I thought about that Jewish joke: Moishe is lying on his bed kvetching, tossing and turning like a devil in a baptismal font. It’s after midnight and he has promised to pay back the money he owes his friend Jacob by noon. Moishe hasn’t got any money. He imagines himself disgraced, thrown out of the merchants association, vilified by the rabbi. His tossing and turning wakes his wife and she asks, “Moishe, what is it?” “I owe Jacob twenty roubles,” he tells her, “but I have no money. What shall I do?” “Is that all?” his wife says then gets up and bangs on the wall and shouts for all the neighbours to hear, “Jacob! My Moishe still owes you twenty roubles? Well, he isn’t giving them back!” then climbs back into bed and says to her flabbergasted husband, “Now go to sleep, let Jacob stay awake!”
The rest of the journey passed without incident. I picked up the newspaper and caught up on what was happening in the world: everywhere, with giant steps, war was gaining ground.
MALRICH’S DIARY, 31 OCTOBER 1996
I don’t understand Rachel. He really pisses me off. He talks like papa was a murderer or something, he bangs on about it, it’s insane. So what if Papa was in the SS? So what if he was posted to extermination camps? There’s no proof that he actually killed anyone. He guarded prisoners, that’s all. Not even that, they had the Kapos to do that — German convicts and deserters, Rachel says himself they were dogs, they’re the ones who guarded the prisoners, who beat and robbed and raped them, forced them to work, clubbed them to death and dragged them feet first, tossing them into the furnaces. Papa was a chemical engineer, not an executioner. He worked in some laboratory way outside the camp, he oversaw the preparation of chemicals, that’s all. He didn’t know what people were planning to do with them, how could he know? The gas chambers were run by the Sonderkommando, the death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, not the laboratory. Papa’s responsibility ended at the point of delivery. The trucks showed up, picked up the canisters, the paperwork was signed and the drivers drove off to God knows where. How could Rachel, who was so impressed by the way the Germans organised things, possibly think that the Bonzen would have had a scientist like papa working as a common killer, stoking furnaces, fuelling gas chambers, locking doors, turning levers, watching dials? Rachel and me are Hälfte-Deutsch, he knew as well as I do Germans are sticklers for regulations.
That’s what Papa was like, you didn’t joke around with him except when it was time for joking around. Rachel lost it, he forgot everything we learned. He was angry and upset and he let his imagination run away with him. He was sick to his stomach like I am whenever I think about us, about the Islamists slitting our parents’ throats in their sleep, about our godforsaken rathole of an estate, the people living there constantly harangued by the imam, surrounded by jihadists in djellebas and black jackets, with Kapos snapping at them like pitbulls, when I think about uncle Ali wasting away like a prisoner in a concentration camp and aunt Sakina who just waits, never surprised at anything, when I think about poor Nadia burned to death by the Emir. I think about my father. How did you get mixed up in this shit, papa? Did you know what was happening? You had to know something. In the camp, everyone eats together, the officers all in the officers’ mess, you talk about work, about the things that go wrong, brag about the stuff you’ve got done. Then there’s the meetings, you listen to the Führer’s speeches, read the official communiqués from Himmler himself, you talk deadlines, figures, technical problems, you bawl out the slackers, praise the high achievers, get this week’s orders. And there are the loudspeakers, those awful megaphones hanging over the prisoners’ heads, tormenting them, driving them insane, the unemotional voice drowning out the howling wind, forever ordering them to assemble, to submit, to surrender, spelling out the horror line by line, verse by verse, transforming a monstrous crime into the simple implementation of a policy. And in the evenings, after dinner and the obligatory toast to the Führer, everyone sits around the stove, relaxing, listening to music, playing cards, drinking, daydreaming, thinking about their families, talking about hunting trips and fishing trips with friends, about the battles being fought elsewhere. Eventually, they get round to talking about the camp, the stories, the jokes, the racketeering, the gossip, the horrible diseases, the pitiful scams, the prisoners who arrived that morning welcomed with full military fanfare, still clinging to hope, to their dignity, to their battered suitcases, apprehensive but not scared, still believing in God, in reason, in the impossibility of the incredible. Everything is fine, they’re thinking, as they line up outside the camp. They cling to the idea — as old as the world — that submissiveness will save them, will make their masters think well of them; the Bonzen look so powerful, so impressive that it’s impossible to imagine they could lack nobility, compassion. The sight of the pristine camp, the disciplined Kapos running it, reassures them, persuades them that death is not the certainty some pessimists predicted during the long, agonising journey in the cattle trucks, it is merely a possibility that can be evaded with a little luck, a little cunning, if they swallow their pride. The worst is over, they have been quickly separated into groups: men, women and babies, children, the old and the crippled, the beautiful girls like Nadia. They will not hold out for long. In a little while or maybe tomorrow at dawn, after disinfection, the worthless, the Lebensunwertes Leben, will be sent to the gas chambers. The able-bodied will be assigned to the Arbeitkommandos and the Strafarbeitkommandos, the brothels for the Kapos and I don’t know what else. The camp is just like our estate — everyone knows what’s going on, what people are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re hiding. People gossip, they watch each other, they get together for parties, funerals, marches on the town hall, campaigns to clean up the stairwells, patrol the car parks. We all know who the Islamists are and what they’re planning, and we know the people who aren’t and what they’re afraid of. We know everything there is to know about each other. And at the same time we don’t know anything, we’re strangers, we think we know each other but we’re all living inside our own heads, we know what we think, but other people’s thoughts are vague or hearsay. On the estate, just like in the camps, people speak fifteen different languages and at least as many dialects, we can’t possibly understand all of them. We fake it, we mumble. Besides, we’ve got nothing to talk about except the weather, we say the same things we said yesterday, the same shit we’ll say anther thirty times by the end of the month. The people who live on the estate know where Paris is and the people who live in Paris know that the estate is somewhere in the suburbs — but what do we really know about each other? Nothing. We’re just shadows and rumours. Between us there’s a wall, barbed wire, watchtowers and minefields, fundamental prejudices, unimaginable realities. In the end, papa knew and didn’t know, that’s the truth of it. Rachel was my brother but I knew nothing about him and his diary is like a shield that stops me seeing him. Poor Rachel, who are you? Who was papa? Who am I? I get so fucking angry I want to scream, to cry. I’m trapped, the whole world disgusts me, I disgust myself. I’m losing my mind just like Rachel did. I hardly set foot outside the house anymore, I spend all day reading and rereading his diary, his books, or slumped in front of the TV, I go round and round in circles, cramps in my stomach. At night I go out and I walk and walk as far as I can. Alone. More alone than anyone in the world. Like Rachel. Like poor Rachel.