‘2 or 3 months?’
He turned to me, and I saw what was unusual about his face. Not the eyes (his were the usual Sonder eyes), but the mouth. I knew then, up on the rise, that Szmul, immediately after the successful completion of the present measure, would have to be dealt with, by the employment of the apt procedure.
Have garnered some further information on the sugary Herr Thomsen (despite his record, I think, deep down, he is ‘1 of those’). His mother, Bormann’s much older half-sister, made an advantageous match, ne? She married a merchant banker — who also collected modern art of the most degenerate stripe. Does the mould seem familiar — money, modern art? I wonder if that ‘Thomsen’ wasn’t once something like ‘Tawmzen’. Anyway, both parents, in 1929, died in an elevator plunge in New York (moraclass="underline" set foot in that Hebrew Sodom and you get what you so ‘richly’ deserve!). So then this only child, this princeling gets himself unofficially adopted by his Uncle Martin — the man who controls the appointment book of the Deliverer.
Now I’ve had to slave and sweat blood, I’ve had to kill myself to get where I am. But some people — some people are born with a silver… Now that’s funny. I was about to employ the usual phrase — but then an improvement popped into my head. And it’s perfect for him. Yes. Angelus Thomsen was born with a silver Schwanz in his mouth!
Nicht wahr?
I was bent over my desk at home, deep in weary meditation, when I heard footsteps; they neared and paused. They were not Hannah’s footsteps.
And I was thinking: I am someone caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the one hand, the Economic Administration Head Office is always after me to do everything I can to swell the labour strength (for the munitions industries); on the other, the Reich Central Security Department presses for the disposal of as many evacuees as possible, for obvious reasons of self-defence (the Jews constituting a 5th column of intolerable proportions). I swiped my fingertips across my brow in a kind of reflexive salute. And now, I see (the teletype lay before me), that that moron Gerhard Student at EAHO is floating the bright idea that all able-bodied mothers should be worked till they drop in the boot factory at Chełmek! Fine, I’ll tell him. And you can come to the ramp and try separating them from their children. These people — they just don’t think. I said loudly,
‘Whoever’s out there may as well come in.’
At last came the knock. Looking very penitent and stricken, Humilia crept into the room.
‘Are you just going to stand there and tremble,’ I muttered (I was thoroughly out of sorts), ‘or do you have something to convey?’
‘My conscience is upset, sir.’
‘Oh really? We can’t have that. That would never do. Well?’
‘I was obedient to Miss Hannah when I shouldn’t have been.’
I said quite calmly, ‘When I shouldn’t have been, sir.’
*
It’s the fire, do you see, it’s the fire.
How to make them burn, naked bodies, how to make them catch?
We started with very modest accumulations, using wooden planks, and we were hardly getting anywhere, but then Szmul… You know, I can see why the Sonderkommandofuhrer leads a charmed life. He it was who made a series of suggestions which, as it happened, proved key. I lay them down, for future reference.
1) There must be but a single pyre.
2) The pyre must burn continuously, on a 24-hour basis.
3) Liquefied human fat must be used to aid combustion. Szmul organised the run-off gutters and the ladling squads, which moreover resulted in considerable economies in gasoline. (Reminder: impress this saving on Blobel and Benzler.)
There is at this stage only one technical difficulty that periodically confronts us. The fire’s so hot you can’t get near it, nicht?
Now I ask you, this is really priceless, this is, this really ‘takes the cake’. All of a sudden the phone’s jumping off the hook: Lothar Fey of the Air Defence Authority, angrily complaining, if you please, about our nocturnal conflagrations! Is it any wonder I’m going out of my mind?
Whilst Humilia saw fit to tell me that my wife has written and dispatched a personal communication to a proven debauchee, she was unable — or unwilling — to enlighten me as to its contents. This has ruined my concentration. Of course, the entire thing could be perfectly innocent. Innocent? How could it be innocent? I have no illusions about the hysterical carnality of which Hannah has shown herself to be capable, and besides it is common knowledge that once a woman loosens the sacred bonds of modesty she quickly descends to the most fantastic depravities, squatting, squelching, squeezing, squirming—
Hannah briskly knocked and entered and said, ‘You wanted to see me.’
‘Yes.’ Biding my time, for now, I said, ‘Look, there’s no point in you going to Abbey Timbers. The Projekt’s going to take months so you’ll just have to get used to it.’
‘I didn’t want to go anyway.’
‘Oh? What’s this? Have you got a Projekt of your own by any chance?’
‘Maybe,’ she said, and turned on her heel.
… I raised my hands and rubbed my eyes. This spontaneous action, the like of which any tired schoolboy might reflexively perform over his homework, was quite painless — for the first time in I don’t know how long. In the downstairs toilet I consulted the mirror. Ja, those martyred orbs of mine are still very slightly bloodshot, and slack and pouchy what with all the smoke and the late nights (it’s not as if the trains don’t keep coming). But my black eyes are no more.
There are the flames and the fumes; even the clearer air ripples and wriggles. No?
Like a sheet of gauze pulsating in the wind.
Now the Sonders, under Szmul’s direction, have rigged up a kind of ziggurat of warped railway tracks. It is the size of the cathedral in Oldenberg.
The scene is I suppose on the very crest of the modern, but when I watch from the mound I keep thinking of the slave-built pyramids of Egypt. Using the wide ladders and the hoists they load the great lattice, then they withdraw to their wheeled towers and feed the fire, do you understand, by tossing in the pieces, sometimes by the bucketful. These towers rock like dark-age siege engines.
At night the tracks glow red. I keep glimpsing a gigantic black toad with illuminated veins even when I close my eyes.
*
Communication from the Geheime Staatspolizei in Hamburg: the widow Seisser is on her way back, but she returns to us with her status revised. Alisz is now an evacuee.
The Sonderkommandofuhrer was right about the best way of counting. Not skulls. Almost all the pieces were dispatched by the standard Genickschuss but often clumsily or hastily, thus splintering the crania. So skulls are hopeless. The most scientific procedure, we have established, is to count the femurs and divide by 2. Nicht?
In response to the domestic emergency I have activated the criminal Kapo I maintain in the coal mine at Furstengrube.
3. SZMUL: WITNESS
It would infinitesimally console me, I think, if I could persuade myself that there is companionship — that there is human communion, or at least respectful fellow-feeling, in the bunkroom above the disused crematory.
A very great many words are spoken, certainly, and our exchanges are always earnest, articulate, and moral.
‘Either you go mad in the first ten minutes,’ it is often said, ‘or you get used to it.’ You could argue that those who get used to it do in fact go mad. And there is another possible outcome: you don’t go mad and you don’t get used to it.