This morning, before attending to his seventeen men from the bath-salts factory, Willi went to the market and came back with a newspaper someone had dropped in a bus shelter. What a find! Twenty-five centimes of fresh news! He also had a piece of stewing beef and a marrow bone, and he unfolded an old journal to reveal four carrots and two leeks. The grocer weighed the vegetables and the journal together, so that Willi was cheated, but he was grateful to be allowed to purchase any vegetables at all. The only vegetables on public sale that morning were frozen Brussels sprouts.
“It is like wartime,” says Willi, not displeased that it is like wartime. He might enjoy the privations of another war, without the killing. He thinks privation is good for people. If you give Willi a piece of chocolate, he gives half of it away to someone else and puts the rest aside until it has turned stale and white. Then he eats it, slowly and thankfully, and says it is delicious. Lying on the floor, Ernst has watched Willi working — typing translations at four francs a page. His blunt fingers work rapidly. His eyes never look up from the paper beside the machine. He has taught himself to translate on sight, even subjects about which he cares nothing, such as neon tubes and historical principles. They have come only a short distance from their camp in 1945, where someone said to Ernst, “You have lost the war. You are not ordinary prisoners. You may never go home again.” At the other end of the camp, on the far side of a fence, the Foreign Legion recruits played soccer and threw leftover food into garbage cans; and so Ernst left Willi with his bugs, his potato peelings, his diseased feet, his shorn head, and joined the Legion. Willi thought he would get home faster by staying where he was. They were both bad guessers. Willi is still in Paris, typing translations, guiding visiting businessmen, playing S.S. officers in films about the last war. It is a way of living, not quite a life. Ernst teases Willi because he works hard for little money, and because he worries about things of no consequence — why children are spoiled, why girls lose their virtue, why wars are lost, won, or started. He tells Willi, “Do you want to go to your grave with nothing but this behind you?” If Ernst really believes what he says, how can one explain the expression he takes on then, when he suddenly rolls over on the floor and says, “Girls are nothing, Willi. You haven’t missed much. You’re better off the way you are.”
This is a long day without daylight. Ernst’s duffelbag is packed. He has nothing to do. He has forgotten that Willi asked him to put the marrow bone and stewing beef in a pan of water on the electric plate no later than four o’clock. In the paper found at the bus shelter Ernst discovers that because of the hard winter — the coldest since 1880 — the poor are to be given fifty kilos of free coal. Or else it is one hundred and fifty or one hundred kilos; he cannot understand the news item, which gives all three figures. Gas is to be free for the poor (if consumed moderately) until March 31st. Willi’s gas heater flames the whole day, because Ernst, as a civilian, is sensitive to weather. Ernst will let Willi pay the bill, and, with some iridescent memory of something once read, he will believe that Willi had free gas — and, who knows, perhaps free rent and light! — all winter long. When Ernst believes an idea suitable for the moment, it becomes true. He has many troubles, and if you believe one-tenth of anything he tells you, he will say you are decent.
Once, Ernst was a Werewolf concealed in civilian clothes. His uniform was gone, and his arms and identity papers buried in the mud outside a village whose name he cannot remember. It begins with “L.” He lay on the ground vomiting grass, bark, and other foods he had eaten. He had been told to get rid of the papers but not the arms. He disobeyed. He walked all one night to the town where his mother and stepfather were. The door was locked, because the forced-labor camps were open now and ghosts in rags were abroad and people were frightened of them. His mother opened the door a crack when she recognized the Werewolf’s voice (but not his face or his disguise) and she said, “You can’t stay here.” There was a smell of burning. They were burning his stepfather’s S.S. uniform in the cellar. Ernst’s mother kissed him, but he had already turned away. The missed embrace was a salute to the frightening night, and she shut the door on her son and went back to her husband. Even if she had offered him food, he could not have swallowed. His throat closed on his breath. He could not swallow his own spit. He cannot now remember his own age or what she was like. He is either thirty-four or thirty-six, and born in Mainz.
Willi is always reading about the last war. He cuts up newspapers and pastes clippings in scrapbooks. All this is evidence. Willi is waiting for the lucid, the wide-awake, and above all the rational person who will come out of the past and say with authority, “This was true,” and “This was not.” The photographs, the films, the documents, the witnesses, and the survivors could have been invented or dreamed. Willi searches the plain blue sky of his childhood and looks for a stain of the evil he has been told was there. He cannot see it. The sky is without spot.
“What was wrong with the Hitler Youth?” says Willi. What was wrong with being told about Goethe Rilke Wagner Schiller Beethoven?
Ernst, when he listens to Willi, seems old and sly. He looks like a corrupted old woman. Many of the expressions of his face are womanish. He is like the old woman who says to the young girl, “Have nothing to do with anyone. Stay as you are.” He knows more than Willi because he has been a soldier all his life. He knows that there are no limits to folly and pain except fatigue and the failing of imagination. He has always known more than Willi, but he can be of no help to him, because of his own life-saving powers of forgetfulness.
It is the twentieth anniversary of Stalingrad, and the paper found at the bus stop is full of it. Stalingrad — now renamed — is so treated that it seems a defeat all around, and a man with a dull memory, like Ernst, can easily think that France and Germany fought on the same side twenty years ago. Or else there were two separate wars, one real and one remembered. It must have been a winter as cold as this, a winter grey on white and full of defeat. Ernst turns on the radio and, finding nothing but solemn music, turns it off. From the court he hears a romantic tune sung by Charles Aznavour and is moved by it. On an uncrowded screen a line of ghosts shuffles in snow, limps through the triumphant city, and a water cart cleans the pavement their feet have touched. Ernst, the eternally defeated, could know the difference between victory and failure, if he would apply his mind to it; but he has met young girls in Paris who think Dien Bien Phu was a French victory, and he has let them go on thinking it, because it is of no importance. Ernst was in Indo-China and knows it was a defeat. There is no fear in the memory. Sometimes another, younger Ernst is in a place where he must save someone who calls “Mutti!” He advances; he wades in a flooded cellar. There is more fear in dreams than in life. What about the dream where someone known — sometimes a man, sometimes a woman — wears a mask and wig? The horror of the wig! He wakes dry-throated. Willi has always been ready to die. If the judge he is waiting for says “This is true, and you were not innocent,” he says he will be ready to die. He could die tomorrow. But Ernst, who has been in uniform since he was seven, and defeated in every war, has never been prepared.