The Violent Century (32 page)

The old woman lets them in. The same smell of cabbage, maybe a few pieces of meat in there, not too fresh. The same two children hiding behind the old woman’s dresses. Her face is impassive. She does not acknowledge their presence. They go up the rickety stairs to the upstairs landing and the smell of defeat, the smell of cabbage and bad meat, follows them up there. At the end of a dark corridor, a door. Schneesturm pushes it open and they go in.

No electric light. Schneesturm, with an embarrassed air, reaches for a box of matches on the bedside table. Takes three attempts to light a match and, when he does, he sets it to two candles, one on the table, the other on the windowsill. In their wan light Fogg sees the room: the single cramped bed, the mattress as thin as any survivor; the dresser, a pre-war marvel of Teutonic engineering, and the side table, and some clothes on the floor, the clothes of a refugee, a far cry from Schneesturm’s white Übermensch uniform that he still wears, even now, but it is no longer white, Fogg notices, it is a faded grey, holes have formed in the material, it is held together by nothing much more than desperation. Tiny black droppings on the floor, rats, or mice, they look like question marks. Schneesturm shrugs. Sit down, he says, awkwardly. Fogg sits down on the bed, next to Schneesturm. There is nowhere else to sit. Schneesturm reaches for the bedside table and pulls open a drawer. He brings out a bottle, half full, and two grimy glasses. Puts the glasses on the table, opens the bottle. Vodka. He pours. Stoppers the bottle. Places it back on the table. Picks up the glasses, hands one to Fogg.

– This war, he says. This fucking war.

They clink their glasses and drink. Erich, Fogg says.

– Do you think I asked for this? the other says. To be this … this
Schneesturm
?
Germany for the Übermenschen
.
Ja
. The Master Race. Look where it got us.

He gestures around the room. Laughs. Stops. I want out, Herr Fogg, he says.

– Why didn’t you go to the Americans?

– Ah, yes, Erich says. The
Americans
. Laughs a short, bitter laugh. Refills the glasses. For their famous Zoo, no? So they could put a collar on my neck and give me treats when I’m good? No, Herr Fogg. I want
out
. I want out for good.

Raises his glass. Fogg raises his in return. The war, he says. They both drink. There is sweat on Erich Bühler’s forehead. The blue in his eyes is flecked with white. I want a small house in the Alps, he says suddenly. Where the snow blankets everything, and it is so quiet. Do you know what I mean? he says.

Fogg lets him talk. The other is drawn into the silence, the words come pouring out, they fall like snow. Here in this boarding house there is sound all the time, Erich says, I can hear them all around me, groaning, farting, crying, shouting … never laughing, Herr Fogg. Laughter has left Germany, now. I wake up to gunshots and sirens and wonder if they’ve come for me. I do not want to be Schneesturm anymore. I want to go back to being Erich. I want out. Of the war, of Berlin.

Fogg listens: to the sound of Erich’s voice, to the footsteps down below, to a siren calling far away; to the snores in the next room, and someone else crying in their sleep, and the gurgle of pipes, and above their heads the scrabble of tiny rats’ feet as they scuttle unseen.

– Wish in one hand, shit in the other, Fogg says. An expression he picked up from the Americans. Schneesturm – Erich – smiles. You can do it, Herr Fogg, he says. He leans towards him. Puts his hand on Fogg’s shoulder. Leans in close, his breath in Fogg’s face. Vodka fumes. Desperation. You will tell them I am dead, Erich says. Searches Fogg’s face for a clue, an answer. Fogg says, And in return?

– I will give you Sommertag.

He pulls back. Tension seems to ebb out of the set of his shoulders. He reaches for the bottle again but this time Fogg stops him with a gesture.

– Where is she?

– She’s safe.

Fogg stands up. Let’s go, he says. Erich looks up at him, shrugs, fills up his glass again and knocks it back. I will take you to her, he says, but then we are finished. Schneesturm dies tonight.

– If she’s not there,
Erich
, that’s something you can be sure of, Fogg says.

Schneesturm smiles, and touches his fingers to his forehead in a mock salute. He gets up and follows Fogg out of that small, dismal room, closing the door behind them softly.

135.
NEVADA
1976

The Zoo, Fogg thinks. Wondering once again why Schneesturm didn’t choose the Zoo. A memory plucked out from all the others. We watch. We examine it in our hands like a stone, Fogg in that cheap motel, why is he there, we no longer recall, a mission or a private arrangement, anyway waiting for someone or something, there on the edge of the desert, watching the television when the adverts come on.

Or perhaps – no. He was looking for her.

There was the thing about Operation Paperclip: those Nazi rocket scientists just … disappeared. And new men with kosher new identities appeared instead, in America, men who had nothing to do with the war. Kosher identities, Fogg thinks, a little drunk on cheap American bourbon, nothing else to do there in that cheap motel, drink and watch the telly, but still it makes him laugh. Then the adverts come on, shiny wholesome women with shiny impossibly white teeth promoting shiny kitchen appliances, a man smoking a pipe extols the virtues of Ford cars, and then it comes, an inevitable cereal advert, America’s Breakfast of Champions, and it reminds Fogg, in his drunken maudlin state, of a joke from the war:

A Russian general and an American general argue about their troops’ food. I give my soldiers
one thousand
calories a day! the Russian general boasts. The American says, Yeah? I give my soldiers
two
thousand calories a day. That, the Russian general says, is impossible! No one can eat
two
sacks of potatoes in twenty-four hours!

Not, admittedly, a very
funny
joke, Fogg thinks, and then another commercial comes on and there is something, almost like déjà vu, or a sense of wrongness, somehow, but he can’t, at first, identify its source:

Light rises over gentle hills cut out of cardboard; a scenery in bright primary colours, a yellow sun over green hills, blue skies, white clouds, children – real ones amidst the fake shrubbery, and a lake in the distance – what does it remind him of? For a moment a twinge of pain curls like smoke around Fogg’s heart, that place where it is always summer, that place he cannot, can never go back to, his paradise lost, replicated here, so garishly on the television screen – the children sit around a picnic cloth spread on the ground, singing happily, warbling in some alien childish tongue, but their happy voices turn sad, their enormous eyes look upwards and their hands rub their tummies, signalling to all of us watching at home: they’re hungry.

But trumpets blare, big band martial music out of the air and there! The children look up, they raise their little hands to point at something approaching from the sky, from the air, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s—

Captain Cherry-Crush!

And this oh-so-American hero swoops down from the skies, from the clouds, materialising over the children, who welcome him with squeals of intelligible delight. Captain Cherry-Crush opens his mouth and grins at the children, so many teeth, so white and clean, an American’s teeth, his ugliness is charming, the leathery skin and the bald elongated skull and it begins to rain, it begins to rain Cherry-Crush soda cans and the children all grab them from the sky and so does Captain Cherry-Crush and he bites a can with his impossibly sharp teeth and the dark blood-coloured liquid stains his lips and runs down his chin as he grins, then he links hands with the children and they dance, singing the Cherry-Crush Song.

And Fogg, slumped there on the bed with the faded covers and the cigarette burn in the pillow case, stares at the small screen and the monstrous figure dancing there with the children and he remembers, suddenly and with aching clarity, of the sort we only ever get for those moments we wish most dearly to forget: Transylvania, hiding in the bend on the mountain, and watching the Gestapo convoy down below, which stops, and they get out: the
Wolfskommando
.

Blutsauger. The name crystallises in Fogg’s mind. The Blood Sucker. Details from the man’s dossier: a Ukrainian, like the infamous Demjanjuk who was a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp and nicknamed Ivan the Terrible. But Blutsauger was one of the changed, one of Hans von Wolkenstein’s hand-picked men, his Übermenschen. Never captured after the war, missing presumed – what, exactly? Gone on the ratline to Argentina like his one-time comrades? Blutsauger, who wasn’t there when they had stormed the Sighișoara citadel … ancient history that gives Fogg heartburn.

On the screen this new, improved, white-toothed version of Blutsauger dances hand in hand with the laughing, shrieking kids, Cherry-Crush cereal loops now leaping into the air like purple popcorn, and Fogg, clutching his bottle of cheap bourbon, stares in morbid fascination until the advert’s finished and
Happy Days
comes back on the television screen.

136.
THE OLD MAN’S OFFICE
the present

But the Old Man is not interested in television ads, for cereal or soda or anything else, or in any Nazis legitimately and lawfully repatriated to the United States by the United States government; the Old Man frowns and looks at Fogg the way a teacher looks at an errant pupil, perhaps; or as a disappointed father; drawing this back to Berlin, in forty-six, drawing it back to Bühler, Erich, codename Schneesturm, and he says, So you lied to us, Henry.

– Yes.

A silence. An expectation. Fogg shrugs. Yes, he says again, I did.

– You were conspiring, the Old Man says, with an enemy agent. With a Nazi, Henry.

Silence.

– A Nazi, the Old Man repeats. To protect another Nazi.

–
She wasn’t a Nazi!

Fogg, without realising it, has stood up. And is shouting. Oblivion looks over to him, concern written on his face. A silence settles again. The Old Man makes a ‘sit down’ gesture. Fogg sits down. She wasn’t a Nazi, he says again, but quietly. And: She was one of us.

– One of us, the Old Man says, softly. You were forgetting which side you were on, weren’t you, Henry?

Tilts his head and regards Fogg like a bird examining a worm. You would have been court-martialled, the Old Man says. And executed as a traitor.

– I knew the risk I was taking.

– Did you? the Old Man says. And you still went ahead with it. Why, Henry?

– Why? Fogg says. As if the question makes no sense. As if the answer is so clear, so obvious, it fills the room with its light.

And it is as if the Old Man senses it, too. Why did you do it? the Old Man says. Did you do it for
love
, Henry?

Fogg stares at him, as if he’s mad. Love? he says. As if it is a new and unfamiliar word; or perhaps, he seems to be implying, instead, it is one the Old Man has never heard and never known. The word, like a dirty secret, hangs in the room. Oblivion moves uncomfortably in his chair. Come on, Old Man, he says.

– Stay out of this, Oblivion, the Old Man says, sharply. But Oblivion isn’t willing to let go. Not just yet. And perhaps there is anger there, not sudden, but long-suppressed, because, for the first time, he rises, he raises his voice, even.

– Do you want to know why he did it? Oblivion says, it is impossible to mistake the anger, the hurt, in his voice. She was the mystery he needed, the enigma that kept him going. Something to believe in. Something precious and non-corrupt and good. Holier-than-thou
bloody
Sommertag. As perfect and unchanging as a summer’s day.

Fogg looks at Oblivion. Misery in his eyes.

– I never believed she was an innocent, Oblivion says. That she didn’t know what was going on around her. The war. The camps. She
knew
. She wasn’t a little girl: she just played at being one. For herself. For Henry. He lifts his arms up and lets them drop. Deflated, after this unaccustomed speech. But I suppose that sometimes, everybody needs to believe in love, he says.

– Goddamned stay
out
of this, Oblivion! Fogg says. Angry now, too. Oblivion settles back in the chair, his expression unreadable. What do you know about love, Fogg says. Oblivion looks away. Fogg takes a deep shuddering breath.

– You want to know why I did it? Fogg says. They’re both watching him, the Old Man, Oblivion turning. But Fogg is looking at neither of them, he is looking far away, somewhere he has not visited in years. You use the word ‘love’ like you’ve never known it, Old Man, he says. But that’s not why I did it.

At that, for just a moment, Oblivion’s face turns, an unreadable expression – surprise? hope? – etched on it for just a moment before it disappears. The Old Man is silent, waiting.

I did it because she
was
innocent, Fogg says. Stares at Oblivion. Dares him to argue back. Oblivion minutely moves his head. Because Klara, alone in that damned war, was an innocent, Fogg says. He spreads his arms as though appealing to the Old Man. When Vomacht activated the device, the quantum wave hit her the hardest, Fogg says. It fused into her, somehow. It kept her
pure
. She was
never
like the rest of us.

Don’t you
understand?
he seems to say. Like he could reach across and somehow explain, somehow justify, what happened all those years before.

– We don’t grow old, outwardly, do we, Fogg says. But we age inside. We corrupt. She never did. Somehow, she is still there, in one perfect summer’s day. You want to know why I did it? he says. This is why. And I would do it again, Old Man. I’d do it again if I had to.

– I’m sure that won’t be necessary, the Old Man says. Seems almost embarrassed. Fogg leans back. Lets out a breath of trapped air. The Old Man shuffles papers on his desk. Straightens them. Tell me, Henry, he says. Do you remember when we first met? When I took you out of Cambridge and brought you here?