He saw the red face before him. “No, why? Who are you? Have we met before?”
“Yes.”
“When? Were we close friends? At Officers’ Training School, perhaps? I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember, Haake? It was not at Officers’ Training School. It was after that.”
“After? But you’ve lived abroad. I have never been out of Germany. Only in the last two years, here in Paris. Perhaps we drank—”
“No, we did not drink together. And it wasn’t here. In Germany, Haake!”
A barrier. Railroad tracks. A garden, small roses, phlox, and sunflowers. Waiting. A forlorn black train puffing through the endless morning. Reflected in the windshield, alive, the eyes that were now in the trunk jelly-like and filling with dust that sifted in through the cracks.
“In Germany? Ah, I understand! At one of the party rallies. Nuremberg. I think I remember. Wasn’t it at the Nuremberger Hof?”
“No, Haake.” Ravic spoke slowly into the glass of the windshield and he felt the black wave of the years coming back. “Not in Nuremberg. In Berlin.”
“Berlin?” The shadowy face broken by reflections showed a trace of jovial impatience. “Now let’s hear it, my friend, let’s hear the story! Stop beating about the bush and don’t keep me on the rack any longer! Where was it?”
The wave, up to his arms now, rising out of the earth. “On the rack, Haake! Just that! On the rack!”
A laugh, uncertain, wary. “Don’t make jokes, my friend.”
“On the rack, Haake! Do you know now who I am?”
The laughter, more uncertain, more wary, menacing. “How should I know? I see thousands of people. I can’t remember each individual. If you’re referring to the secret police—”
“Yes, Haake, the Gestapo.”
A shrug of the shoulders. On his guard. “In case you were ever questioned there—”
“Yes. Do you remember?”
Once more a shrug of the shoulders. “How should I remember? We have questioned thousands—”
“Questioned! Beaten into unconsciousness, kidneys crushed, bones broken, thrown into cellars like sacks, dragged up again, faces torn, testicles crushed—that was what you called questioning! The hot frightful moaning of those who were no longer able to cry—questioned! The whimpering between unconsciousness and consciousness, kicks in the belly, rubber clubs, whips—yes, all that you innocently called ‘questioning’!”
Ravic stared at the invisible face in the windshield through which the country landscape with corn and poppies and hedge roses silently glided—he stared at it, his lips moved, and he said everything that he had wanted to say and hadn’t said and had to say.
“Don’t move your hands! Or I’ll shoot you down! Do you remember little Max Rosenberg who lay beside me in the cellar with his torn body and who tried to smash his head on the cement wall to keep from being questioned again—questioned, why? Because he was a democrat! And Willmann who passed blood and had no teeth and only one eye left after he had been questioned by you for two hours—questioned, why? Because he was a Catholic and did not believe your Fuehrer was the new Messiah. And Riesenfeld whose head and back looked like raw lumps of flesh and who implored us to bite open his arteries because he was toothless and no longer able to do it himself after he had been questioned by you—questioned, why? Because he was against war and did not believe that culture is most perfectly expressed by bombs and flame throwers. Questioned! Thousands have been questioned, yes—don’t move your hands, you swine! And now finally I’ve got you and we are driving to a house with thick walls and we will be all alone and I’ll question you—slowly, slowly, for days, the Rosenberg treatment, the Willmann treatment, the Riesenfeld treatment, just as you have demonstrated it to us! And then, after all that—”
Suddenly Ravic realized that the car was speeding. He let up on the accelerator. Houses. A village. Dogs. Chickens. Horses in pasture, galloping, their necks stretched, their heads lifted high, pagan, centaur-like, vigorous life. A laughing woman with a laundry basket. Bright-colored laundry dangling on the lines, flags of secure happiness. Children playing by the doors. He saw all this very clearly and yet as if separated from it by a glass wall, very near and incredibly far, full of beauty and peace and innocence, painfully strong and severed from him and now unattainable forever because of this night. He felt no regret—it was this way, that was all.
Drive slowly. The only chance of being stopped lay in speeding through the villages. The clock. He had been driving almost two hours. How was that possible? He had not been aware of it. He had not seen anything. Only the face toward which he had spoken—
St.-Germain. The park. Black trellises against the blue sky, and then the trees. Trees. Avenues of trees, a park of trees, looked for, desired, and suddenly the woods.
The car ran more silently. The woods rose, a green and golden wave, they flung open on the right and left, they flooded the horizon and embraced everything—even the swift, glistening insect zigzagging into them.
The ground was soft and overgrown with underbrush. It was far from the road. Ravic left the car at a distance of about a hundred meters so that he could see it. Then he took the spade and began to dig up the earth. It was easy. If someone came by and saw the car, he could hide the spade and return as a harmless stroller.
He dug deep enough to have sufficient earth with which to cover the body. Then he drove the car to that spot. A dead body was heavy. Nevertheless he drove only as far as the ground was hard so as to leave no tire marks.
The body was still limp. He dragged it to the hole and began to tear off the clothes and to pile them in heaps. It was easier than he had thought. He left the naked body there, took the clothes, put them into the trunk, and drove the car back. He locked the doors and the trunk and took a hammer with him. He had to think of the possibility that the body would be found by accident and he wanted to prevent identification.
For a moment he found it difficult to go back. He felt an almost irresistible impulse to leave the corpse behind, to step into the car and race off. He stood for a while and looked about. A few yards away two squirrels chased each other on the trunk of a beech tree. Their red fur shone in the sun. He continued to walk.
Bloated. Bluish. He put a piece of woolen cloth soaked with oil over Haake’s face, and began to smash it with the hammer. After the first blow he stopped. It seemed to make a lot of noise. Then he immediately went on striking. After some time he lifted the piece of cloth. The face was an unrecognizable lump clotted with black blood. Like Riesenfeld’s head, he thought. He felt his teeth set tight. It was not like Riesenfeld’s head, he thought. Riesenfeld’s head was worse; he was still alive.
The ring on the right hand. He tore it off and pushed the body into the hole. The hole was a little too short. He bent the knees against the belly. Then he shoveled the earth on. It didn’t take long. He stamped the earth flat and covered it with squares of moss he had already cut out with the spade. They fitted in. One could not see the edges unless one bent down. He straightened the underbrush.
The hammer. The spade. The piece of cloth. He put them with the clothes in the trunk. Then he walked back once more, slowly, looking for telltale signs. He found almost none. Rain and a few days of growth would attend to what remained.
Strange: a dead man’s shoes. The socks. The underwear. The suit, less so. The socks, the shirt, the underwear—ghostlike, withered, as if they had died with the man. It was ghastly to touch them and to look for monograms and labels.
Ravic did it quickly. He cut them out. Then he rolled the things into a bundle and buried them. He did this more than ten kilometers away from the place where he had buried the corpse, far enough to prevent their both being found at the same time.
He drove on until he reached a brook. He took the labels he had cut out and wrapped them in paper. Then he tore Haake’s notebook into small pieces and searched the wallet. It contained two one-thousand-franc notes, the railroad ticket to Berli
n, ten marks, several slips of paper with addresses, and Haake’s passport. Ravic put the French money into his pocket. He had already found a few five-franc notes in Haake’s pocket.
He looked at the railroad ticket for a moment. To Berlin—it was strange to see that: to Berlin. He tore it up and put it with the other things. He contemplated the passport for a long time. It was valid for three years more and had a visa valid for almost two years. He was tempted to keep it and use it himself. It would have fitted into the kind of existence he led. He would not have thought twice except for the danger.
He tore it up. The ten-mark bill too. He kept Haake’s keys, the revolver, the ring, and the receipt for Haake’s suitcases. He wanted time to decide whether to call for the suitcases and thus wipe out every trace in Paris. He had found and torn up the hotel bill.
He burned everything. It took longer than he had thought, but he had newspaper with which to burn the pieces of cloth. He threw the ashes into the brook. Then he examined the car for blood stains: there were none. He washed the hammer and the monkey wrench carefully and put the tools back into the trunk. He washed his hands as well as he could, took a cigarette, and sat for a while, smoking.
The sun shone obliquely through the high beech trees. Ravic sat and smoked. He was empty and did not think about anything.
Not until he turned again into the road that led to the château did he think of Sybil. In the bright summer, the château stood white under the eternal sky of the eighteenth century. Suddenly he thought of Sybil and for the first time since those days he did not try to resist the memory, to push it aside and suppress it. He had never got further in his recollection than the day when Haake had her called in. He had never got further than the expression of horror and mad fear in her face. Everything else had been wiped out by that. And he had never got further than the news that she had hanged herself. He had never believed it. It was possible—but who knew what had happened to her before? He was never able to think of her without feeling a spasm in his brain that turned his hands into claws and compressed his breast like a cramp, making him incapable for days of escaping the red fog of powerless hope for revenge.
He thought of her now, and the circle and the spasm and the fog suddenly left him. Something had been released, a barrier had fallen, the rigid image of horror began to move, it was no longer frozen as it had been all these years. Her distorted mouth began to close, her eyes lost their fixity, and the blood gently returned to her chalk-white face. It was no longer an eternal mask of fear, it became again Sybil whom he had known, with whom he had lived, whose tender breasts he had felt, and who had moved through two years of his life like a June evening.
Days rose up—evenings—like distant, forgotten fireworks suddenly seen beyond the horizon. A bolted, locked, and bloodstained door of his past now opened easily and quietly and a garden was once more behind it—and no longer the cellar of the Gestapo.
Ravic had been driving for more than an hour. He did not drive back to Paris. He stopped on the bridge which crossed the Seine behind St.-Germain and threw Haake’s keys, his signet ring, and the revolver into the water. He then put down the car top and drove on.
He drove through a morning in France. The night was almost forgotten and lay decades behind him. What had happened a few hours ago had become indistinct—and what had been repressed for years arose enigmatically and came close to him as if no longer separated from him by a chasm.
Ravic did not know what was happening to him. He had thought he would feel empty, tired, indifferent, agitated; he had expected a feeling of disgust, silent justification, a craving for liquor, for getting drunk, forgetting—but not this. He had not expected to feel easy and released as if a padlock had fallen from his past. He looked about. The landscape was slipping by, processions of poplars lifted on high their torchlike green jubilation, fields with poppies and cornflowers lay outspread, from bakeries of the small villages came the smell of fresh bread, and children’s voices in a schoolhouse rose to the scraping of a violin.
What had he been thinking before while passing here? Before, a few hours, ages ago? Where was the glass wall, where was the feeling of being excluded? Evaporated like mist in the rising sun. He saw the children again, playing on the stoops of the houses, he saw sleeping cats and dogs, he saw the bright-colored laundry hanging in the wind, and the woman was still standing in a meadow with clothespins in her hands, hanging up long rows of shirts. He saw it and he felt that he belonged to it, more so now than he had many years ago. Something in him melted and arose again soft and moist, a burnt-over field began to turn green, and a far distortion gradually swung back into a great balance.
He was sitting in his car, very quietly, he hardly dared move, not to frighten it away. It grew and grew around him, it circulated downward, and upward, he was sitting still and did not believe it yet; nevertheless he felt it and knew that it had come. He had expected Haake’s shadow to be sitting beside him and staring at him—and now his own life was sitting beside him, it had returned and was looking at him. Two eyes that had been wide open for many years in silent and inexorable entreaty and accusation were closed, a mouth had gained peace, and two arms stretched out in horror were finally lowered. Haake’s death had freed Sybil’s face from its look of death—for a moment it came alive and then began to grow indistinct. At last it could have peace and it sank back; it would never come again now; poplars and linden trees buried it gently, and then all that remained was summer and the buzzing of bees and a clear, strong, overwakeful tiredness, as if he had not slept for many nights and now would sleep very long or would never sleep again.
He parked the Talbot in the Rue Poncelet. The moment the motor was silent and he stepped out, he felt how tired he was. It no longer was the relaxed fatigue he had felt during the ride; it was a hollow empty craving for nothing but sleep. He walked to the International and it was an effort for him to walk. The sun lay like a beam on his shoulders. He remembered that he must give up his apartment in the Prince de Galles. He had forgotten about it. He was so tired that he wondered for a moment if he might not do it later. Then he forced himself to walk back and drive in a taxi to the Prince de Galles. He almost forgot to ask for his suitcase after he had paid his bill.
He waited in the cool hall. To his right, at the bar, a few people were sitting and drinking Martinis. He almost fell asleep before the porter came. He gave him a tip and took another taxi. “To the Gare de l’Est,” he said. He said it loud enough for the doorman and the porter to hear it distinctly.
He had the taxi stop at the corner of the Rue de la Boëtie. “I’ve made a mistake by an hour,” he said to the driver. “It’s too early. Stop in front of that bistro.”
He paid, took his suitcase, went to the bistro, and saw the taxi disappear. He went back, hailed another, and drove to the International.
There was no one downstairs except a sleeping boy. It was twelve o’clock. The patron was having lunch. Ravic carried the suitcase to his room. He undressed and turned on the shower. He washed himself long and thoroughly. Then he rubbed himself with alcohol. It refreshed him. He put the suitcase and the things which it contained away. He put on fresh underwear and another suit and went down to Morosow’s room.
“I was just coming to see you,” Morosow said. “Today is my day off. We could eat at the Prince de Galles—” He fell silent and looked more closely at Ravic.
“No need now,” Ravic said.
Morosow looked at him. “It’s finished,” Ravic said. “This morning. Don’t ask questions. I want to sleep.”
“Is there anything more you need?”
“Nothing. Everything is done. Luck.”
“Where is the car?”
“Rue Poncelet. Everything’s in order.”
“Nothing else to do?”
“Nothing. All of a sudden I have a terrific headache. I want to sleep. I’ll come down later.”
“Good. Are you sure there’s nothing else to be done?”
“No,” Ravic s
aid. “Nothing more, Boris. It was easy.”
“You didn’t forget anything?”
“I don’t think so. No. I can’t go over the whole thing again now. First I must sleep. Later. Are you going to stay here?”
“Of course.”
“All right. Then I’ll come down.”
Ravic returned to his room. He stood by the window for a while. The lilies of the refugee Wiesenhoff shone in the window box below. Opposite the gray wall with the blank windows. Everything had come to an end. It was right thus and good and had to be this way, but it had come to an end and there was no longer anything to do. Nothing was left. Nothing before him any more. Tomorrow was a word without meaning. Outside his window today fell sleepily into nothing.
He undressed and washed once more. He held his hands in alcohol for a long time and let them dry in the air. The skin around the joints of his fingers was taut. His head was heavy and his brain seemed to roll loosely inside it. He got out a hypodermic needle and sterilized it in a small electric boiler on a chair by the window. The water bubbled awhile. It reminded him of the brook. Of the brook only. He knocked off the heads of two ampules and drew their contents, clear as water, into the syringe. He made the injection and lay down in his bed. After a while he got his old bathrobe and covered himself with it. He felt as though he were twelve years old and tired and alone in the strange loneliness of growing and of youth.
He woke up at dusk. A pale pink hung above the roofs of the houses. Wiesenhoff’s and Mrs. Goldberg’s voices came from below. He could not understand what they said. Nor did he want to. He was in the mood of someone who has slept in the afternoon without being accustomed to it—severed from all connections and ripe for a sudden unmotivated suicide. I wish I could perform an operation now, he thought. A severe, almost hopeless case. It occurred to him that he had not had anything to eat the whole day. Suddenly he felt desperately hungry. The headache had disappeared. He dressed and went downstairs
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