The Story of Henri Tod (11 page)

11

At Auschwitz, by the time Clementa got there in late January of 1945, the assembly line was running with feverish haste. The commandant had said he would settle for nothing less than one thousand “eliminations” per day, notwithstanding that the routine had been for just under five hundred. This meant all the obvious things—day and night sessions, lengthened duty hours, a general compression of the horror. But it also meant that the victims did not have the time to atrophy that their predecessors had, whose “elimination” often came only after a month or two or even three of near starvation. So it was that Clementa, on the day her execution was aborted by the Russian infantry division, though thinner than normal, had only the physical stress of one week's separation from her pastoral routine with the Wurmbrands at Tolk. Her complexion was healthy, her frame rounded. All the haggardness was concentrated in her eyes, which denoted that she had not only lost weight, she had lost all contact with reality. She went from the place in line which one hour earlier had been moving toward the gas chambers—a line whose links instantly dispersed when the commotion came—to another line outside the Revolutionary People's Club, designated as such within one hour after every German in the vicinity of the building, used for recreational purposes by the authorities who had administered the camp, had been either shot or stuffed into railroad cars headed for slower deaths. Clementa was separated from her dazed, and elated, companions and, with a half-dozen other girls, one or two younger, the others in their early twenties, was taken to a dormitory, and in the course of the evening raped a dozen times. Her body reacted spastically to the pain and the bullying, but she was for the most part without facial expression of any kind.

In eight days she had seen her foster parents executed without warning, been herded into a car and driven silently to Hamburg, then into a railroad car jammed with several hundred shivering human beings, some half her age, some four times her age, none of whom she knew; from them she vaguely learned that they were headed for a death camp. The thought of ceasing to live was the only bright prospect that came to mind, and so she carried out the orders given to her with exemplary docility, and when she was nudged by the old lady who had sobbed it seemed every moment of the five days and nights in the camp, to be told that this was the day designated for the extermination of everyone in that barracks, that the gruesome execution by gas would happen that very afternoon, Clementa felt nothing at all. And then, moments after the wailing company had lined up for their last farewell, there were the scattered shots, the sudden disorder, the flight of the guards, the blare of the radio, the howls from the prisoners. Clementa merely stood, as though commanded to stay in line, outside her barracks, head pointed to the right, toward the gas chamber one kilometer distant.

She had stood alone almost two hours when a Russian soldier grabbed her arm and led her to an improvised processing center at which the captain, looking up, asked her her name, her age, and where she had come from. She replied to none of these questions, whereupon the captain designated her for officer entertainment, in which capacity she proceeded to serve for the balance of that month, before being shipped first to an interrogation center, where she was pronounced dazed beyond the capacity of conventional therapy to extricate her, and then on to Vorkuta, a Soviet prison camp, where she was given menial work to perform.

She had not shown interest of any kind in her sentencing, no curiosity about her crime, whatever it was. She had merely done her work, mostly in the mess hall, cleaning, serving the officers. As the years went by, her status evolved toward a kind of indecipherability that seemed to bother no one in particular. She was sexually obliging to the commandant and to anyone else particularly importunate, but her nervelessness was a depressant to ardor, and after a few years it simply became a part of the accepted convention that Clementa (she had given that out as her name, and said she had forgotten her surname, so she had been given the name Wolf) was left alone. She never initiated a conversation, but she would now reply, giving brief, perfunctory answers as required. Her Russian had become fluent, and it was discovered about her, when she absentmindedly picked up a book in English from the officers' lounge she was cleaning, that she was apparently conversant with that language, because she did not conceal that she read the text without difficulty.

Two Russian officers, one of them elderly—indeed, he had been recalled to duty notwithstanding that his retirement had come in 1939, and now he was nearly seventy—had taken a personal interest in her. The first, a colonel, had told her that there was really nothing in her dossier that presented serious difficulty and that if she wished him to do so, he would attempt to arrange for her release. She thanked him, but said she had no place to go, and would therefore remain where she was. Ten years after she had got to Vorkuta she caught the eye of the second, a spirited Ukrainian captain, a widower, apparently something of a war hero, now attached to the KGB and doing duty in a prison camp because of an informed suspicion in Moscow that three or four of the camp's inmates had histories much more interesting to the KGB than the prisoners had let on at the time they were interrogated and sentenced. This required the captain to preside over extended interrogations that kept him in Vorkuta for almost three months, in the course of which he fell in love with Clementa Wolf.

She treated him like everyone else, but Captain Gouzenko persevered, even as with the prisoners. It did not discourage him that for over two weeks he appeared to be making no headway whatever. But then, on that third Sunday, she suddenly began to go beyond the entirely perfunctory talk to which she was given. What she said was greatly disjointed, but the captain encouraged her to reformulate her thoughts and her sentences. He invented a game they played together, designed to stretch “their” memories. He would supply one datum, on his side of the board, relating to his early childhood, and she would do the same. Gradually there came a reconstruction of sorts. She knew now that she had a family, and knew their names. But the memory of them was purely factual, as if they had been the mother, father, and brother of friends. She remembered that she and Henri had played games together, and remembered some of the practices of those games, but nothing of what once they had signified to her. In a month, he knew her story; and she herself knew it, for the first time in a decade. She remembered the Nazis coming and putting her on the train. She remembered the liberation, and—on this point the captain questioned her most diligently—expressed no resentment at her treatment by the liberators. She had supposed that that was how the Russians were supposed to be; at least that was the impression she had always got—savage and rapacious, like all soldiers who had suffered. She had no complaints to make against those who had rescued her from the Nazis, the murderers of her parents and her foster parents.

On this matter Captain Dmitri Gouzenko showed a most relentless curiosity, probing as to why she did not resent the raping, the imprisonment, the forced labor. Clementa said she had not really reflected on the matter; she assumed that they were men carrying out orders and obeying instincts, which instincts were certainly preferable to those exercised by the people who had dominion over the society in which she had been brought up.

There was here, finally, the beginning of an analytical intelligence, even if there was nothing left of an emotional memory. Dmitri spent many engrossing hours with his beautiful dark-skinned protégée, whom he patiently, with the help of the commandant's wife, instructed in basic cosmetic literacy. At one point late in the evening, when he had taken much vodka (Clementa consented to taste the vodka, as an act of docility, but did not finish the little jigger glass), Dmitri had led her quietly to his quarters. She knew what was expected of her, addressed no complaint, and in the dim light Dmitri Gouzenko looked down on the body of a girl not quite thirty, whose eyes' glaze he had known; but he saw now, for the first time, something else: a rising sense of keenness, of self-recognition other than as merely a vehicle of others' convenience. He approached her thoughtfully, patiently, tenderly, and he felt for the first time, as indeed it was the first time she had so responded, that there was latent passion there. The following night he knew it, and she knew it. By the end of the week she had experienced passion, and Dmitri marveled at it and at her surprise at finding that she had feelings she could at first just experience, and then begin to express.

One week later they were married, in the office of the commandant, both wearing overcoats because the coal heater was working only fitfully. It proved no problem for Mrs. Dmitri Gouzenko to leave the home she had known the longest of any she had frequented and follow her husband to Moscow, where he was pursuing with such success his career in Soviet intelligence. By the end of the decade he was able to show off his gifted wife, who also spoke German and English and read French, to his little company of intimates. He took pains not to conceal her story, and she got around to listening with stoic resignation to his telling it. People were as people were, was what she had learned; and the Nazis were the worst. The Russians were also bad, but at least one could say about them that their society was at the service of a great social ideal. Dmitri had talked to her about that ideal, and although she had never really studied Marxism-Leninism in any detail, she accepted it, if only because Dmitri did, and as far as she knew, Dmitri's patience, his resolution, his great love of his country and of its ideals, were exemplary.

She wondered, though in ways altogether detached, about Henri. She remembered him, in an abstract way, as having been the light of her life. She remembered this only as an objective fact, as she remembered the feelings Juliet had for Romeo. It was their life together that she remembered, but not the experience of it; a life that had been totally extinguished one dark day. She had not seen him for nearly twenty years, since the night he went away to England, and she remembered even wondering why he had not written to her, though she knew that there had been difficulties. She more or less assumed that—of course—he had been killed, fighting alongside the English, or by a bombing during a raid, or however; her own rescue from disaster was surely unique in her family. When the Nazis came, and the Wurmbrands were made to stand before the riflemen—hands clenched, Uncle Hans holding a Bible in the other hand; all this in front of her, in the garden, at high noon—everything that came before receded in concreteness, and although she could remember scattered details without difficulty (her mother, the last day she had seen her, was wearing a red evening gown, and smelled of lavender), she was in no way involved in her former life. It might have been someone else's. Dmitri had roused her from her traumatic lethargy, and now she had feelings again. But feelings only for what happened now, what happened to her, to Dmitri, to their two-year-old girl, Nina, whom she named after the wife of Chairman Khrushchev, and to the twenty schoolchildren aged fourteen and fifteen to whom she taught German history with emphasis on the terrible reign of the Nazi Party, whose followers continued to dominate the western half of the country. So that when Dmitri came home that afternoon and told her that her brother was in fact alive, she felt only a twinge of curiosity—not, really, much else.

Where did he live? she asked, and what was he doing? Dmitri replied that, unhappily, he had to report to her that her brother was in league with the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, with headquarters in Berlin, and that it was now Dmitri's assignment to track him down. If indeed he is helping the Nazis, Clementa remarked, then he should be tracked down, indeed her very own mother and father would hope that the Russians, and Dmitri in particular, would be successful in any such enterprise. Yes, she said matter-of-factly, patting her little girl on the face to stop her crying, yes, she would cooperate; what was she supposed to do?

12

Henri Tod met with Stefan Schweig at the cellar of Number 12, as they designated this particular meeting room of the Bruderschaft, though meeting room was perhaps inappropriate to describe Number 12, inasmuch as not more than five or six people could with any comfort convene there. It served primarily the function of a mini-armory, where the paraphernalia of the uglier face of covert activity were collected, provided they were small—large machines, suitable for reproducing ugly pictures of Ulbricht, were kept in the roomier quarters of Number 22. Number 12 had the basic lethal weapons, plus a very few that served special purposes—silencers in particular, and telescopic sights. And a cabinetful of this or that drug or opiate or poison, useful but only provided that Sophie was there. As trilingual secretary to an American general who liked to go out and review the troops and other delights, there were times when Sophie, whose father had been a pharmacist, was simply not there, and if one of those times was also a time when the Bruderschaft required some Prussic acid, why, her absence worked to the advantage of the designated consumer.

Indeed, Number 12 was, so to speak, the launching pad for terminal operations. It was not used regularly; but neither was it used stingily. Henri Tod had attracted his disciples around one basic proposition plus another that he described as a corollary to it, in language that might have been expected from a man formally trained in philosophy. The basic proposition was that when the alternative modes of living were apparent, human beings would choose freedom. He came to this social conclusion, which he believed to be profound, and profoundly believed, as a very young scholar freshly arrived from extensive training in Great Britain. And he had come back to Germany with the end in mind of planting in the public consciousness a second proposition, namely that the Communists were Nazis. And that therefore any apostolic attention given to Communist ideology other than as social filigree was sheer frivolity, a form of autohypnosis exercised by either philosophical naïfs or charlatans. The awe and esteem in which Tod was increasingly held was fortified by the swelling number of Germans who, given the alternative, indeed proceeded to choose freedom. It was that enormous human traffic, westbound, that brought on the crisis everyone knew was now coming to a head.