Unforgiving Years (28 page)

As Brigitte returned downstairs, she met Frau Hoffberger coming up — a courageous woman, widowed during the first war, who liked to talk. “So where on earth were you, Brigitte? I was horribly worried about you. But it wasn’t too bad, was it? Did you hear our artillery! Herr Flatt, who was in the other war with my late husband, says we were attacked by a hundred planes, and they were all shot down or chased away, it’s a marvelous victory and our city can be proud, Brigitte, what a headache I have, and Frau Sachs, she fainted away as soon as our big guns opened up! And she’d brought her poodle down with her, I do think pets should be absolutely forbidden in shelters, I mean, I know animals are also at risk and they’re family for some people, but there’s hygiene and morale to be considered … Oh well, it’s all blown over, I don’t mind telling you I’m relieved, they won’t be back in a hurry after the hiding we gave them. You’ll see tomorrow, I’m sure those fire-crackers of theirs did far more harm than noise” (Frau Hoffberger meant this the other way around), “Herr Flatt says the Americans are the most incompetent flyers, they get a search beam in their eyes and down they go … Herr Jochsl didn’t agree, he was so jumpy I had to tug him by the sleeve and tell him, discreetly, don’t go on like that, Herr Jochsl, someone might turn you in, of course I know what a patriot you are, but … He was teary eyed as a girl, and a veteran too! They say he’s a Social Democrat! The electricity’s out, by the way, but it’s sure to be fixed tomorrow. Oh dear, how am I going to get through my day tomorrow, I’ve lost at least two hours’ sleep …”

“Good night, Frau Hoffberger,” said Brigitte. “Go right to bed.” In her own room, Brigitte ran her hands over her face several times, as though to remove an invisible veil and firm up her shaky features … The candle burned in the middle of its porcelain flower. How many flowers would be needed for this night’s graves, how many flowers? One enormous flower of light and fire, and of calm, for the city, for us all, Lord! For the world! She opened the old iron-filigreed casket containing His letters, in chronological order and tied with a ribbon. Some of these missives, delivered by the military postal service, contained only expressions of love, but there were others — so overwhelming and she could hardly read them — which had arrived after the notice of His Death on the Field of Honor for Folk and Fatherland: there were also photostats of the official report and the divisional order of His citation, and a photo of His Iron Cross, all forwarded to the fiancée by the fiancé’s parents.

Moments overlap, time is no longer continuous, but it was sometime later — which is to say, after the death notice but before the first heavy bombardment — that an olive-green private on furlough turned up, a shy, grim-looking young man who would only identify himself as Günther. He placed a parcel on the table and said, “Here are His letters. I have read them, at His request. The whole of Germany should read them. Good day, Fraülein.” “But you can’t just leave!” cried Brigitte despairingly. The crumpled forage cap came off again.

He had a receding hairline, pale sparse eyebrows, the face of a young athlete recovering from an illness. Overcoming his embarrassment he began, “Pardon me, Fraülein, I only …”

“You were his friend?”

“Yes.”

“You know how it happened?”

“Yes.”

“I want to know everything. I have the right to know everything.”

Maybe he was measuring her strength, and the anxiety at the bottom of the little strength he saw.
Frauenkind
, a child-woman; there are also
Männerkinder
, child-men, you see them on the firing line, despite their fear, because combat and unknown horrors frighten them less than the idea of letting their weakness show; they make good soldiers and excellent corpses (but not very good wounded: they tend to weep and moan and their misery aggravates their pain … ). Brigitte understood that he was going to hurt her, badly, unsparingly, out of a kind of pitiless kindness. She begged him: “Go on, tell me, I’m not afraid of anything …”

“He didn’t suffer … He died at once. A dozen bullets, chest, belly … They were experienced marksmen, shooting at almost point-blank range …”

Chest, belly — carnal words, they lacked for Brigitte their full human density. “I’m glad,” she said, “that his face was spared …” And she saw he was going to hurt her again, but what more could there be?

“On his face there was nothing but great astonishment.”

Brigitte smiled, as though half released. The astonishment of ceasing to be, mystery and mystery’s end, she too wanted that. Unintelligible words broke in on her. “What? What did you say? I didn’t quite …”

“I said he was killed by our own men, he and the rest of his tank crew.”

“Our own men? What men?”

“The others!” the soldier said with hatred. “The killers. Oh yes. They exist. Maybe they have to … That tank crew was noted for its bad attitude, do you understand? Well, I didn’t understand, but I did afterward. They’d been sacrificed; they weren’t supposed to come back. But they did come back, that sometimes happens. So an elite squad shot them down between the lines …”

These words burned slowly and unforgettably into Brigitte’s mind. There was no astonishment.

“Fraülein, it’s even happened to generals …” “Yes, yes, I understand, and I am very grateful you told me the truth … The truth …” Our own men, the others, the killers …

* * *

Time is in shreds and the soldier’s letters were in shreds. Brigitte could reread only some torn fragments.

“ … We were working back through villages burned out during the retreat. As though the land had been killed off. A few people were still living in cellars, they were afraid of us and kept their raped women hidden, but sometimes they’d come out and scrounge for food; and creatures who once were women were still offering themselves. S said we ought to put them out of their misery, but he threw them some bread … The bread fell into the mud, where they scrabbled for it. A desert is what we have made — that may not be the truth, but that’s what I saw. M explained the strategy behind the retreat. He’s the only one who thinks and speaks; he tells us that next we’re going to beat America, now that the Führer’s goals have been met in Russia … And how are we going to beat America, I ask? He’s counting on secret weapons, scientific warfare. He talks about the stratosphere without knowing what it is — as though it were some sort of magical immensity set aside for the most devastating weapons. He’s obstinate and brave, with an unformed intelligence inside a rather noble skull. No experience upsets him. The Führer knows what he’s doing, and thus our defeats become transmuted into brilliant feints. M is aware of my ‘doubts’ and said to me: I hope you will be killed for the Fatherland because I respect you.

“ … Once my tank ran over some living men. They were hiding under the snow, lying in wait for us perhaps, the machine swerved as it accelerated and they screamed like mice being crushed. Our treads were clogged with bleeding flesh and we left a red trail on the snow. I had to see it all, since I’m the observer. I’ve seen them finish off wounded men — our men — for lack of stretchers to take them away. The important thing was that they shouldn’t be able to disclose anything about our units’ movements. In any case, that’s how M explained it, approving orders he deems harsh but wise. ‘War,’ he said, ‘lifts man above himself.’ ‘Would you like such an end for yourself?’ I asked. ‘And why not,’ he replied, ‘better than falling into the hands of Jews and Jew lovers … ’ He means it too. I respect him; I think I hate him. I’ve seen prisoners lined up to be shot one by one by a
Feldwebel
because they wouldn’t tell what they could not know about enemy plans. Some of them got down on their knees and talked, making things up. M said laughing: ‘We’ll liquidate these liars a little later … ’ He loves to remind us that the Russians never signed the Geneva convention regarding POWs, too bad for them. Then what about our prisoners? M has an answer for that too: I’ve no pity to waste on cowards, I have pity only for the unlucky ones, but they must face up to the law of nature: Vae victis! The powerful races will only triumph by accomplishing nature’s law. His logic is seamless, like a paranoiac’s.

“ … We directed a concentrated barrage on a small infantry tank whose motor had conked out forty yards away. It was a pitiful box of cardboard and steel with three men inside, one of them waving a dirty white rag. The sublieutenant was beside himself because we’d had a terrible attack of jitters as we were pulling back, one of those uncontrollable panics that comes over even the best soldiers now and then, like an electric shock to the nerves. G was yelling, ‘Ha, so they surrender do they, the dirty dogs, the cowardly curs!’ He wouldn’t listen to me, he looked completely out of his mind; normally, he’s a decent fellow, a flower gardener by trade. He ordered us to fire and we watched the tin can burn, the magazine blow up, I watched a blond twenty-year-old burning, half out of the turret. I told myself: Look at what you’re doing, you must look without blinking, you’re not allowed to close your eyes. I watched the flames leap to his blond hair, I watched his face twist like a paper mask tossed onto a bonfire. And I said to myself, When I’ve been killed, I want my pure Brigitte to meet this youth — because he will live again — and to love him for love of me …

“ … I was thinking that there’s no natural law for mankind, whose natural law is human law. The tiger and the termite obey their natures; we must be true to ours, which is divine, that is to say a thinking, merciful nature …

“ … The bodies of hanged men were dangling from telegraph poles, there were more swinging from the porch of the church. There were too many, they no longer frightened anyone. Fear results from a surprise inflicted on the imagination. Once the surprise has worn off, a hanged man seems perfectly simple, getting hanged becomes quite natural, you realize it’s only a few painful moments and that there are worse ways to die. We were talking about a rabbi. ‘He was lucky to swing so soon,’ says M, who is not personally cruel but accepts that others should be, so as to surmount their instinctive cowardice and face up to responsibility. The average man, in his view, has gone soft, domesticated by an ailing civilization, and will benefit from being trained to cruelty. (M does not consider himself an average man; he regards himself, so he told me, as a normal Aryan.) I questioned this, playfully, just to rile him a little — evoking the Aryans of India, who profess detachment from material things and nonviolence even toward animals. M broke out laughing: ‘If that’s what they teach you at the university, then the universities are overdue for disinfection, and the professors of Aryanism belong in Buchenwald, cleaning the latrines.’ That was mostly to annoy me back, I think, for then he was patient, explaining how the decadence of the Aryan races, weakened by Semitic infiltration, was the root cause of all historical calamities. The Aryan renaissance began with the Party. The more I talk with him, the more I have the impression of a dialogue with a systematic psychopath, and yet I have a humiliating compulsion to converse with him. Of the dozen men who constitute my circle of hell, he’s the only one who talks; I don’t know whether he thinks or merely repeats a series of memorized formulas. I am obsessed by the awful possibility of our souls being imprinted with a whole system of notions designed to prevent us from becoming conscious, smothering thought beneath ersatz thought.

“ … There were more children than adults, probably as a result of earlier waves of deportation. The little girls were carrying their dolls, pitiful dolls. In the pathos of their silence and the pathos of their wailing lamentation these Jews exhibited two contradictory characteristics. I remained very calm, I wanted only to understand the victims. To understand means to identify. To understand rather than surrender to suffering, which amounts to no more than a carnal, emotional communion. I sought a communion of the spirit. At first, the silence seemed to me to be nobler than the wailing. Women tearing at their hair, old men chanting their prayers and pulling their white beards … I observed that the blows of rifle butts did not interrupt the rhythm of their lamentation. I understood that this was the rhythm of a lamentation echoing down through the centuries; that it is a community’s song of consent. I saw myself: a calm, rigid onlooker, like a disciplined lunatic. They were being herded into the boxcars. M assures me they will be destroyed in the most painless way possible, with cyanide gas, and recalls the Gospel’s injunction to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then he moves on to eugenics and human selection, look how stunted, sniveling, anemic, and infirm they are, how weepy the old men, how ugly the women! At this point F and W broke in, talking about the beautiful girls in Serbia and Holland … I’ll never forget the asphyxiated howls that came from inside the boxcars … The troops were in a good mood because a ration of brandy had been distributed. Many men felt that it was necessary to evacuate the populations of these little towns to make room for the folks from our bombed-out cities.

“ … Brigitte, I only have tonight to write you the truth of my soul. I know I am hurting you, but I have no one else in the world with whom to share the bitterness of a cup I must drink to the dregs. And since you are my wife in spirit, you must find the courage to drink this cup with me, even if your reason is shaken, as mine often is. The single absolute duty of those alive today is to drain the bitter cup to the last drop, overcoming our shaking limbs and minds, perhaps in order to be able to say afterward: Everything is accomplished. Here I am.

“ … I can’t tell you all of it, it’s impossible to tell it all, even more to see it all and to understand it all. We are moving through the banality of chaos and I can only recall minor, episodic things, poor simple things that sometimes enlighten me. I am a man without grandeur, a humble man unable to take in big events … But don’t doubt me, Brigitte, I am a very good soldier who fulfills his duty at every moment, conscientiously, as if I had no conscience. They’re going to put me up for another decoration, which would mean a few days’ special leave to see you, and then they’ll make me a noncommissioned officer. I’m not especially eager, having no wish for personal responsibility, but do I have the right to abandon it to others? If I’m chosen, I will obey. My body and my will obey, my spirit remains free and refuses. What more can I do? If it weren’t for you, I would consent to be shot. Through you, I perceive a living world for whose sake the survivors must live. They alone will know, will reflect unceasingly upon what must never happen again, upon that which must be excised from mankind. I live in remorse and apprehension because I dread betraying our people’s cause in my thoughts, but I also fear to betray the universal principle of which our people is just one moment, one face. Maybe that’s the truly unpardonable war: between a people and its universal homeland …