The Human Pool (7 page)

ZURICH

BEATE VON HEIMENDORF SPOKE
as she wrote, in perfect, formal English. She was waiting at the head of the platform, as she said she would be, a tall, supple-looking woman in her late fifties, wearing a Burberry raincoat. Her handshake was firm. I liked her immediately. She was somewhat distant, with a precise air that I suspect had been hard won and at the expense of trust. It could not have been easy growing up as Betty Monore's daughter, and she looked as though she was only now emerging from the shadow. She said I was the first of her mother's agents she had met and left it at that. We drove to the clinic in a Mercedes estate, the last word in understated luxury.

Seeing Betty, shock as it was, didn't tell me anything I didn't know. We are all due out pretty soon, and time does the cruellest things to those who don't deserve it. Such a fine woman reduced to a husk. She was sticklike and frail. Even her cardigan sat on her like a topcoat, weighing her down. She gave no sign of recognising us, just as I had been warned. Betty had once been what life and intelligence were all about. The biggest shock was that she didn't look like she missed it. In contrast to her physical deterioration, the eyes were clear and serene.

How an old man's mind works: it works the way it always did, except it gets more selective and can operate on several levels at once, more than it used to. The here-and-now has become the least important aspect of any dimension.

It can get you pretty frisky, this long walk down the last corridor to that green door at the end (believe me, it's green), and I ended up wanting to bed the daughter and one of the nurses (squeak of rubber shoes on polished wooden floors). I knew this was a desperation measure, know, too, that I panic about all the things I won't do again. Who's to kid? Ejaculations reduced to a tearful flutter. When was the last time that Mary and I did it?

Betty was in what I could only describe as a Swiss room. The Swiss design fixtures and fittings for sickness better than anyone else. I'm sure you pay, but I kept thinking it would be a privilege to be ill in such surroundings.

For someone whose brain is still too active, and given to morbid thoughts, I almost envied Betty her serene blankness, and would be curious to know from her how it feels to find chunks going missing, whether it is scary or like watching snow fall. Better that way than the full invasion my body might soon be undergoing. Memo: Go out leaving as many loose ends as possible. Resolve nothing!

Icebergs are among the most beautiful and mysterious things I have seen. Being with Betty reminded me. I can't describe it any better. Perhaps there is a poetic justice to her condition. We were in a business where memory was too often a curse.

I told Beate I was interested in anything Betty might still have on Willi Schmidt. (Why? I asked myself, when I had been telling everyone, myself included, that Willi was dead.) Beate was familiar with the name from her mother's papers. They had been sorting old documents and letters together before Betty's deterioration.

By then we were in a café drinking coffee and eating cake with sour cream. For the first time I fully appreciated that I was back in Switzerland, perhaps because everywhere so far had looked like it belonged to the same consumer state. Europe had become a landscape of convenience.

I asked if she thought Betty would object to my seeing any of her papers relating to Willi. Beate said she could think of no reason, as it was all so long ago. She gave a brief smile of embarrassment, and apologised for her tactlessness. We arranged I would stop by after seeing Frau Schmidt, on my way back to the station.

FRANKFURT

IT IS ALWAYS A SURPRISE
finding out who's listed in the phone book. Idle curiosity prompted the search. There was a telephone directory by the bed in my hotel room. Still hungover, I talked my way into Strasse's place by claiming that he had agreed to the appointment at the end of dinner.

The old Nazi hung out with young men from the Middle East rather than the Nordic types you would expect—young men who looked like street toughs, although Strasse himself was a cultivated man, clear from his taste in furniture.

One of these acolytes answered the door. There was a shouted exchange with Strasse upstairs. I wondered why Nazis old and new seemed to cultivate Middle Eastern connections.

There were another two men upstairs with Strasse speaking a language I didn't recognise. He was worked up about what looked like an amateur tape on the TV. I recognised the football riot and the burning hostel. Siegfried featured in many of the shots, including infrareds of him sitting in his BMW. The sight of Siegfried angered Strasse. To me: ‘Tell your friend he is not as clever as he thinks.'

Strasse seemed to regard me as Siegfried's messenger. I wondered if they were enemies in spite of Siegfried's deference.

The men left suddenly. I asked who they were, but was ignored. I decided Strasse's problem was loneliness, so I played housemaid, fussed over him, made him tea, got his pills, acted the polite young fascist, then hit him with the pitch. We wanted to make a film about his past that would be sympathetic, proper, and respectful.

Strasse knew he was being courted and didn't want to make it easy. Each time I nudged him towards the past he returned to the present. He thought he was a player, with his maps of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, aerial photographs, and arrowed diagrams like in historical documentaries on the TV. ‘What's this,' I asked, ‘the next invasion of the Middle East?'

Strasse coldly informed me that the region's next big war would not be over its most obvious commodity, oil. ‘But what?' he asked impatiently, snapping his fingers. It wasn't hard to guess, given several pictures on the wall of a huge hydroelectric project. Water.

‘Precisely,' said Strasse. The pictures were of part of a huge dam project which would flood a massive area of southeast Turkey and turn the region into what he called the bread basket of Europe. ‘A land of plenty,' he said, his mouth turning down. He made me fetch another VHS tape, and another pair of spectacles to read the label. He held the tape at arm's length, breathing through his mouth, sounding raspy. Close up, his skin was shiny and transparent, and looked even older than the rest of him. He wore Turkish slippers and no socks. The veins on his feet had come to the surface and looked like deltas.

The new tape showed a female TV reporter with a microphone, behind her a snowy landscape—more mountains, obviously European—and the remains of a burned-out commercial building. It was the news item Strasse had been talking about in the restaurant, the arson report. When the reporter tried to interview a very tall man with silver hair dressed in a smart overcoat, he ignored her. Strasse froze the image with the remote and shuttled it back and forth. The chill of the man's gaze, invisible to the naked eye, was revealed in slow motion. The reporter referred to him as Konrad Viessmann. Strasse shouted her down: ‘It's Willi Schmidt, you stupid cow!' He bellowed Willi's name at the man on screen, adding, ‘Listen, cocksucker, I know who you are!'

The man on screen looked too young to be a contemporary of Karl-Heinz's—he appeared sixty-five at most—but Strasse was in no mood to be contradicted. Here was a man he had walked beside many times, he said. The walk and the height went together.

Strasse: The factory had been attacked by Kurdish rebels, the PKK, because the company had been dumping inferior pharmaceuticals on Kurdish refugee camps in Turkey. As for Willi Schmidt, Strasse went on, his tone more hectoring, no one could appreciate how dangerous his reappearance was in relation to his own mission. Which was? Strasse ignored the question and ordered me to go to a drawer on the other side of the room. In it were several old photograph albums. He made me hold each one up until I found the one he wanted.

‘Look,' he said, jabbing his finger at an old black-and-white photograph. It was very small with a crinkled border. It showed three young men standing in a field, one of them with a horse. ‘See?' prompted Strasse. The photograph was tiny and faded. I peered closer. Strasse was the one in the riding jacket holding the horse. The man on his right was the American from the restaurant, Hoover. The third man, on Strasse's left, was a head taller and looked like a younger version of the man on television.

The photo album finally got Strasse onto the past, sort of. He talked me through his album—every picture a story, which he would allude to but refuse to elaborate upon. Strasse laughed, in a good mood all of a sudden, leading me a dance, playing the canny tease. Today he wasn't interested in the past, he told me, because big things were going on and about to happen. ‘But tomorrow when we meet I will be able to tell you more because my agents will have reported in.'

ZURICH

FRAU SCHMIDT IS IN EVERY
respect the opposite of Beate von Heimendorf. She is tiny and doll-like, slow-moving, and apparently timid, except for her eyes as sharp as knitting needles. She lives in an apartment block in one of those dreary residential quarters, mildly surreal in their banality, that cluster around European railway stations.

She had sounded breathless and surprised on the phone. We spoke in German, and an elementary grammatical error of mine prompted a nervous giggle. I told her I had been a friend of her husband and was calling on Karl-Heinz Strasse's behalf. ‘Ja doch?' she said with an air of wonder. Frankly, she sounded soft in the head.

Conveniently for her story, she has spent much of her life abroad, first in Uruguay, then Peru, where her second husband, Friedrich (Fredi) Kranz, deceased, worked for Volkswagen. Strictly speaking, the widow Schmidt is the widow Kranz. Kranz is the name on her bell. She is alone in the world, with no children and no living relatives.

I tried to imagine her with Willi Schmidt, tried to picture them in the same room. She would have been attractive enough. Willi surrounded himself with good-looking people. It was almost a condition of entry into his circle.

We made small talk over coffee. The apartment was typical of a modest European standard, with a white linen cloth covering the dining table we sat at, the ubiquitous spider plant, and a generally dust-free environment that told of too many hours to fill. (I know this because my own empty hours since Mary died have been spent doing anything but housework.)

When I explained that Willi and I had knocked about together during the war, she responded with platitudes of her own: ‘Willi was a fine man.' ‘Willi always brought me proper chocolate from Switzerland.'

Frau Schmidt had worked for a German company which had become a subsidiary of Willi's firm—that was how they had met. She proudly showed me the only souvenirs of their time together, several boxes of children's party shoes. She opened one to reveal the shoes still wrapped in their original tissue paper. They were red and shiny patent leather. Her hands shook as she unwrapped them.

They had married in the late summer of 1944, but no record survived because the Rathaus had later been destroyed by shelling. Her copy of the marriage certificate was lost, along with all their photographs and Willi's letters, when American planes had bombed the wrong side of the Swiss border in error. She had returned to their lodgings from the canning factory where she worked to find her building reduced to a large crater. After the war, she said, the Swiss had extracted an enormous compensation from the Americans.

I still couldn't picture Willi married, but I believed her account of the empty years waiting for him to come home, her reluctant return to Germany, the hardship of the postwar years, her gradual acceptance of the fact that he would not come back, and the realisation that, rather than live in the shadow of his memory, she had to make a new life. This she did by remarrying and moving to Uruguay, then Peru, a period well documented by albums which showed her with a stout, round-faced man who resembled Al Capone. His name was Kranz, she reminded me. I apologised for calling her Frau Schmidt. It was all right, she said. It was good for the memory of Willi. She snuffled a few tears into a handkerchief which she produced from up her sleeve, and said that sometimes Willi felt like a dream. They had met only twelve times before they married, and were together eleven weeks. Sometimes it seemed better to leave the past alone, she said. Still, it would be nice to have a little money, because Switzerland was expensive and Fredi's policies didn't go very far.

When I asked how she had tracked down Karl-Heinz, she said she had hired a private detective to find him. ‘A private detective, at my age! As if I could afford one!'

Karl-Heinz's was one of the few names she remembered Willi mentioning. I thought Willi would have been more discreet. When I expressed my surprise, she gave a sly smile. ‘You are quite right. Willi kept secrets like the grave. To tell the truth, I was jealous. Jealous and suspicious! Willi could travel. Willi was handsome and there were plenty of lonely young women in Germany. He could have taken his pick. Willi had his little book. I'll fetch it.'

She came back with a pocket-sized book, with flimsy ruled pages. It was empty apart from a few scribbled names, or initials, and some timetables. On one page I read: ‘VH (Josef) [??]', and on another what looked like a further reference to myself: ‘VH—Buda??' My full name was written on its own on one page. Karl-Heinz's appeared several times. The last page contained nothing but mathematical equations in pencil so faded they were impossible to read. I couldn't remember Willi's handwriting, wondered if I had ever seen it.

I asked why there was nobody who had known about their marriage. No one was still alive, she said simply. What of Willi's family? There must have been some relatives who knew. Frau Schmidt shook her head. Willi had never informed them, because he wished to protect her from their disapproval.

I told her that hardly seemed a good enough reason. From what I remembered of Willi, he enjoyed flouting convention.

Frau Schmidt agreed, but then dropped her big surprise. ‘They would have just about tolerated Willi marrying beneath himself but never to a Jewess.'

‘Jewish!' Frau Schmidt nodded. ‘Working in Germany in 1944?' Germany's Jews had all been deported or killed by then, and the few left were in hiding.

Seeing my scepticism, Frau Schmidt said that she had believed herself sufficiently assimilated until warned by a friend who was a typist for the Gestapo that her case was on file, with an investigation pending. She had confided this to Willi, whom she happened to see the next day. He insisted she leave Germany immediately and drove her to a farm near the border where he said she would be safe until he arranged the paperwork. What she had not realised was that this would mean their getting married. Willi proposed only on the morning of the ceremony, and straight afterwards drove her across the border to Switzerland.

Willi had married her to get her out of Germany.

If the story is true, then Willi never ceases to surprise me. How to reconcile this unexpected humanitarian side to the party animal I remember? Willi and me in 1943, both of us drunk, pretty women all around, his jazz records on the turntable: ‘Marriage is for the birds!'