‘How many bucks did you bag?’
‘Me? None. I fired in the air. It’s an appalling pursuit. You see a beautiful animal nibbling on a rosebush, and what do you do? Chew it up with two barrels’ worth.’ He took off his spectacles, breathed on the glass, and applied his crumpled handkerchief (he did this every three or four minutes). ‘Quite nice countryside. Even a decent hotel on the lake. It’s not all hovels and yurts. But why did I say yes? Wolfram Prufer. I had two dinners with him à deux. A remarkably stupid young man. Mr Thomsen, Dr Seedig tells me there’s no ethyl acetate. I don’t know what that means. Do you?’
‘Yes. No colorimetric measurements. We have the acetic acid. But there’s no ethyl alcohol.’
For a while we talked about the shortage, or the non-existence, hereabouts, of ethyl alcohol. We then moved on to the sorry state of the hydrogenation plant.
‘Well, tell that to Berlin. Mr Thomsen, have you thought about my proposal?’
‘I have. The modifications you suggest sound quite sensible. On the face of it. But you’re forgetting something, Mr Burckl. For the most part we’re dealing with Jews.’
Burckl’s large brown eyes lost all their light.
‘I can assure you’, I went on, ‘that in the office of the Reichsleiter there’s no disagreement about this. The entire upper echelon is unanimous on the point.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Let me summarise. And here I’ll actually be quoting the very words of the Reichsfuhrer… Genetically and constitutionally, the Jew is averse to all work. For centuries, for millennia, he has lived very happily, thank you very much, off the host nations of the diaspora. Work, hard graft, is the preserve of the guileless Gentile, while the Jew, chuckling happily to himself, grows sleek and rich. Physical work — it simply isn’t in them. You’ve seen the way they skive and malinger. Brute force is the only language they understand.’
‘… Get on with it, man.’
‘As for the idea of increasing their rations — that’s laughable, quite frankly. Put a square meal inside a Jew and you’ll never get a stroke out of him. He’ll lie back thinking of milk and honey.’
‘I say again — Szmul.’
‘Szmul is a false analogy, Mr Burckl. Szmul works towards no foreseeable goal. Here at Buna, the Jews’ll be well aware that the moment we’re on line their usefulness will come to an end. So they’ll impede us at every turn.’
This gave Burckl pause. He said grumblingly, ‘Until six or seven years ago there were plenty of Jews at Farben. High up, too. Excellent men. Notably diligent.’
‘Saboteurs. Either that or stealing patents and selling them to the Americans. It’s well known. It’s documented.’
From the yard came a series of screams — unusually piercing and prolonged.
‘“Documented”. Where? At the Ahnenerbe? You’re boring me, Mr Thomsen.’
‘You’re disconcerting me, Mr Burckl. You’re flying in the face of one of the cornerstones of Party policy.’
‘Produktive Vernichtung,’ said Burckl with cold resignation. ‘But Vernichtung isn’t produktiv, Mr Thomsen.’ He turned his head sideways. ‘I’m a businessman. I understand that here we have a people that it is opportune to exploit. How to do it ergonomically, that’s the thing. Anyway. I won’t be needing your Uncle Martin. We’ve got another route to the Chancellery.’
‘Oh?’
‘Not the Reichsleiter, not the Reichsmarschall, not the Reichsfuhrer. The Reichskanzler himself wants a meeting with an IG delegation — on quite another topic.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Weaponised poison gas. Mr Thomsen, I’m going to go ahead with my reforms, inasmuch as I can without your support.’ He held my eye. ‘You know, with the Jews I’ve never seen what all the fuss is about. In Berlin, half the time, I couldn’t even tell a Jew from an Aryan. I’m not proud of saying this, but I was personally quite relieved when they brought in the Star. Otherwise how can you tell?… Go on, delate me. Have me burnt at the stake for heresy. No. No, certainly not. I’ve never seen one good reason for all this fuss about the Jews.’
On Friday, as I walked from the Old Town to Kat Zet I, I found I wasn’t being followed; so I turned east and made the trek to the Summer Huts, without the least expectation that I would have company there. Swift and sticky rain, thin and cold, and smoke-soiled low-hanging clouds; the playground deserted, the sodden chalets all shuttered up. Everything answered to my mood, and to my hopes of Hannah. I pressed on through the sand and the scrub.
‘Well it’s all off now,’ Boris had said the night before. ‘Golo, I’d’ve liked nothing better than to see you put the horns on the Old Boozer. But it was always stupidly dangerous.’
And this from a colonel of the Waffen-SS (with three Iron Crosses) and a wild philanderer, who adored all danger… I said,
‘It’s good about the pyjama bottoms, isn’t it.’
‘Yes. Very. Here’s a husband who tries it on with his wife and gets smashed in the face. And then falls over with his cock out in the garden. But that makes it all worse, Golo. Even murkier. The brew’s too thick.’
‘Maybe just once in the Hotel Zotar. I went down there and it’s not that dirty and there’s only one—’
‘Don’t be a moron, Golo. Listen. All the things that are laughable about the Old Boozer — they make him more of a menace, not less. And he has the powers.’
One did not make such an enemy in the concentrationary universe, where the pressure of death was everywhere; all Doll would need to do was nudge it in the direction he chose.
‘Think,’ said Boris. ‘You — you’d probably survive it. You’re a scion of the New Order. But what about her?’
Hugging my coat, I walked on. Realsexuellpolitik. All’s fair in love and… Yes, and look how Germany waged it. The Commandant’s erring wife could expect no help from the provisions of the Hague and Geneva Conventions; it would be Vernichtungskrieg — to-nothing war.
… I reached a coppice of decrepit birches where the smell of natural decay blessedly overwhelmed the circumambient air. Natural decay, unadulterated, and not the work of man; and a smell thick with memories… After a while I defeatedly dragged my thoughts elsewhere: to Marlene Muthig, the wife of an IG petrologist, with whom I often bantered in the market square; to Lotte Burstinger, a recent addition to the ranks of the Helferinnen; and to Agnes’s eldest sister (the only unmarried one), Kzryztina.
Up ahead, just in front of the high hedgerow that marked the Zonal boundary, someone or other had started erecting a pavilion or gazebo — and then run out of time and timber. A planked backing, two side walls of different lengths, and half a roof. It looked like the shelter of a rural bus stop. I came round the front of it.
Paneless windows, a flat wooden bench. And Hannah Doll, in the corner, with a blue oilskin spread over her lap.
And she was dead to the world.
The hour that followed was marked by great stillness, but it was far from uneventful. Every few minutes she frowned, and the frowns varied (varieties of puzzlement and pain); three or four times her nostrils flared with subliminal yawns; a single tear gathered and dropped and melted into her cheek; and once a childish hiccup briefly shook her. And then there was the rhythm of her sleep, her breath, the surge of her soft insufflations. This was life, moving in her, this was the proof, the iterated proof of her existence…