Yeah, well…I’d like to see that.
Serious accidents—never fatal—are frequent at the Napola. A month ago, a guy tried to escape and they organised a manhunt. Every student in his class joined in wholeheartedly. When they found him, they threw him naked into the river behind the school, then they thrashed him with their leather belts. A few weeks earlier, a guy was denounced for stealing money. His punishment was to jump into the courtyard from the fourth floor, without a net. He broke his pelvis. He’s still in hospital.
Gunter did well. He didn’t just settle for being seriously wounded, he checked out in the process. He excelled himself there, at least.
‘You’ve grown, Skullface.’
Obviously I’ve grown, I’m nearly eight. And same to you. You look a lot older than fourteen. You look like a man.
Lukas sits down next to me, after giving Manfred the order to clear off and wait somewhere else. Manfred was quick to obey, Lukas being one of those Jungmannen respected and feared by the younger kids. Despite the circumstances, I can’t help feeling proud.
Lukas lays his broad, strong hand, the nails impeccable, on top of my letter. I can smell some kind of perfume on him, like eau de cologne. Where could he have got hold of that? Is that how he masks the stink of the RIF he soaps himself with every day?
I give a quick ‘Hi’. Cool, detached, as if I had just seen him last night, when it’s been ten months since we arrived at the Napola. I push his hand away to grab my letter, which I intend to keep writing. But he takes it from me and reads it.
His smile stretches from ear to ear, that interminable mocking smile that has the knack of making my blood boil. ‘Rubbish!’ he shouts, throwing the letter on the table.
I give him a furious look. He snatches my pen and turns over the sheet of paper. ‘I’m going to help you write this letter,’ he tells me.
‘No way! I’m not letting a dirty Jew like you dictate what I have to say to our soldiers.’
Manfred and another student in my class, also sitting in the study hall, turn around and burst out laughing. They find it funny because calling someone a ‘dirty Jew’ is either the latest joke, or an insult as trivial as ‘bastard’ or ‘stupid idiot’. They don’t know, they can’t know, that, coming from me, it is not a joke.
Lukas laughs too—it’s a bit forced all the same; I recognise that characteristic twitching of his lips—then, after making sure that Manfred and Kaspar have settled back to work, he puts his index finger on my mouth to stop me from replying and then beckons with it for me to come closer. He writes on the paper, one word.
Gunter.
There you go, just what I thought. Saddened by the death of his alter ego, he’s come to talk about it with me. I manage to refrain from telling him that he can go and cry on Herman’s shoulder. His smile, that glimmer of jubilation in his shining eyes…It’s odd. Lukas does not seem at all sad. But, during the wake, his eyes filled with tears, he received the condolences of his classmates as if he were Gunter’s brother. Something is not quite right.
Do you know how he died? Lukas writes.
‘Of course I do, everyone knows, he…’
Again he silences me with his index finger, and glances suspiciously at Manfred and Kaspar.
How he actually died?
I shake my head. Lukas stares at me for a long time, no longer smiling. He’s tense. He picks up the pen again and starts writing, quickly, without stopping.
The night before the exercise, Gunter got hold of some schnapps. He asked me to drink with him, like we often did. Not such a great idea, given what we had to do the next morning. But he didn’t have the slightest idea what we had to do the next morning. He didn’t know that a very dangerous exercise was scheduled for dawn. But I did…It’s always possible to bribe an instructor…I pretended to drink, to get drunk with him. It was just the two of us; Herman played it safe and went to sleep. Gunter passed out at 2 a.m. and, at 5.30, when the wake-up bell dragged us out of bed, he was in a shocking state. He had a raging hangover. I had to help him get dressed, put on his underpants, trousers, button his shirt, like a baby. Then, so he wouldn’t topple over, I had to support him while we stood to attention during roll call. In the truck, on the way to the parade ground, he spewed up his guts. If he hadn’t been the son of Obergruppenführer Lübeln, I’m sure the guys in the section would have lynched him. When we got down from the truck, the Scharführer on duty threw us some spades and lined us up opposite three tanks, stationary in the fog, their motors firing. Three Panzers. Metal mastodons: each one seven metres long and fifty-five tonnes.
‘You’d better dig fast, you bunch of shits! And deep! Now we separate the smart-arses and degenerates from the real soldiers, the ones with balls!’
We got started. In these situations, it’s each to his own. There’s no time to look out for your neighbour. We all knew that the sadistic Scharführer, who was swearing and shouting at us as we dug, could decide at any moment to give the signal for the Panzers to start moving. Like the others, I just kept digging, without worrying about Gunter. I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, his hands clamped by the cold onto his spade handle; he hadn’t even managed to make a dent in the layer of ice covering the ground. The tanks started up. I jumped in my hole. Gunter was still standing, motionless, terrified. I screamed at him to get in next to me. I told him there was enough room for two, that I had dug deep. He believed me. He jumped. He almost broke my back when he fell on top of me. The moment he realised that the hole wasn’t deep enough, that the top of his head stuck out, the tank was only a metre away; he didn’t have time to climb out. He started hammering me, kicking me, stomping on me, to crush me into the ground. He was yelling, sobbing. At one point, I felt a slimy liquid running over me. He had pissed himself. But it was so cold in that fucking frozen hole that the piss was almost welcome. In any case it gave me the necessary strength not only to resist his blows, but to push him up from the hole, at the very instant the tank rolled over us, so that it took off his head.
Lukas stops briefly. I’m reading as he writes. He’s writing fast, his hand trembling. It’s hard to decipher his scribble. And it’s hard to believe what I’m reading, so I re-read a sentence here and there. When I put my hand over his to make him slow down, I can feel the tremor.
In the Scharführer’s report on the ‘accident’, he pointed out that Gunter had not dug a hole and had jumped in mine, thus endangering both our lives. (He didn’t know that I had got Gunter drunk the night before. And the noise of the tanks prevented him from hearing me tell Gunter to jump in with me.) Schmidt summoned me and asked me, for the school’s reputation, and for Gunter’s parents, if I would corroborate another version of events, an ‘official’ version. An unfortunate set of circumstances, the caterpillar tracks of the tank had jammed…a whole pile of rubbish. I agreed and Schmidt was extremely grateful.
I raise my head. I open my mouth as if I’m going to scream, but nothing happens. There’s definitely a scream inside me, but it’s stuck in my throat. It won’t come out, it’s choking me. I turn to Manfred and Kaspar. Still busy with their homework, they don’t notice me. Help!
‘What? What’s the matter?’ says Lukas out loud. ‘Do you think my letter is too tough? You’re wrong, Konrad. You have to see things as they are: your correspondent, our brave soldier Harald, knows very well that he could die at any moment at the front. Your duty is to explain to him that his death is necessary, perfectly justified. That will give him courage. Here you go, I’ll add this:
When Gunter carked it, squealing like a pig, I thought about my father’s death. My little brother’s death. And I thought about my mother, too, who has probably died at Treblinka…That’s one against three. Not a fair deal. But it’s just the beginning. Do you know that old Jewish saying: ‘Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.’ I intend to avenge the death of my family. I strike right where I am. From the inside. That causes more pain. When Gunter’s mother held me in her arms, sobbing, I said to mysel
f: ‘You dirty bitch, now can you imagine what thousands of mothers have gone through? When her bastard of a husband shook my hand, I said to myself: ‘That’s for every one of them shot under your orders.’
I still can’t react. I’m dumbstruck.
You haven’t denounced me as Jewish. Thank you. One day I’ll repay you. But you could still denounce me as a murderer. Up to you.
Lukas looks at me, smiling. He’s no longer trembling. He’s pulled himself together in no time at all. He picks up the piece of paper he’s been writing on, waves it under my nose for a second, then gets up and throws it on the coals of the wood stove.
Once the paper has been reduced to ashes, he comes back over to me. ‘What did you think, Skullface? That I was going to write your letter for you? Too easy! I gave you some ideas to inspire you, but there’s no way you can content yourself by copying out mine; you have to find your own words. See you soon!’
Lukas left the hall. After he’d gone, Manfred came back to sit next to me.
‘You are so lucky to have a big brother like Lukas,’ he said. ‘He’s such a great role model for you.’
I punched him in the face.
Number two on Lukas’s list: Herman.
Obviously.
Should I warn him? How? By slipping an anonymous note under his pillow? By confiding in his brother, Ludwig, who is in my class? To warn Herman would reveal Lukas as Gunter’s murderer. To warn Herman, I would reveal myself as an accomplice. The events are all connected now; they’re snowballing. I didn’t denounce Lukas the Jew, the Jew who disguised himself and who, under the veil of the perfect Jungmann, intends to stir up conflict in the Napola by killing some of its students. (How many, exactly?)
I hated Herman before; now I feel sorry for him. Every time I see him, laughing, eating, drinking, running or bullying a classmate, I want to say: ‘Enjoy yourself! Pretty soon, you’ll be kaput.’ If only I had an idea of how Lukas was going to commit this second murder. I haven’t the faintest idea when he’s going to strike. Not immediately, in any case.
Several weeks go by without an incident. And if the threat of losing his big brother hangs over Ludwig, it seems as if, on the contrary, my big brother has been restored to me.
Things are changing. Lukas visits me whenever he can. Often in the afternoon, when we sort out our personal belongings. The first time was two days after his confession. Just when I thought he’d given me the cold shoulder, he turned up in my dorm. I was at the sink, washing my singlets.
‘Hi, Skullface! So we’re doing our handwashing? How sweet. Hey, while you’re at it, wash this!’
He threw his bag of dirty laundry at my feet, lay down on my bed and, completely at ease, started to flip through a magazine.
I saw red. I threw the sopping wet singlet at his face. Straightaway he took off one of his muddy boots and threw it at me. In turn, I chucked the whole pile of soaking clothes from the sink at him. Then he threw his other boot at me, then his belt, and his pants. Now I went for the heavy artillery: from the bottom of the wardrobe I grabbed my dirtiest underpants, the ones from the time when I couldn’t get used to the RIF and I couldn’t work out how to wash them with the school’s ersatz washing powder. I bombarded Lukas with these impressive weapons.
It was like a starting signal. All the other students, who had been on the sidelines until this point, now joined in a mighty dirty-clothes battle. Stuff was flying everywhere. (And I noticed that I was not the only one to hide items of my dirty washing. I saw underpants as stiff as cardboard, so impregnated were they with dried urine. Others displayed evidence of more significant deposits. When they hit the bull’s eye, it must have been a tasty mouthful. The victims rushed, screaming, to the sinks to douse themselves with water.) When we ran out of dirty laundry, we pounced on the sheets and pillows. What a hoot! It was great to unwind, to flout the basic rules of discipline by ransacking this damn dorm, turning it into a pigsty, making one hell of a mess.
Alerted by the uproar, the section leader soon turned up. He almost had an apoplectic fit when he walked into the chaos. The floor drenched in water, soiled with mud, the beds torn apart, the pillows ripped open, feathers everywhere, underpants full of dry shit strewn all over the floor. He immediately threatened us with a collective punishment for defacing the premises. But Lukas—who in the meantime had taken off all his clothes—stood in front of him and, with every centimetre of his 1.7 metres, stared him down, full of scorn. The other wimp, who barely reached Lukas’s chest, understood immediately that it would be in his interest to keep the incident a secret and to forget his threats of punishment. Defeated, he lowered his gaze. And clapped eyes on Lukas’s dick—do I need to remind you that it is uncircumcised?—and the two huge testicles framing it. Red as a beetroot, he turned on his heels and disappeared without further ado.
Lukas also comes to visit me in the dining hall after lunch and we head off for a walk before the afternoon activities, far enough away for him to smoke a cigarette. (Jungmannen smoke on the sly and tobacco is one of the items most frequently traded on the black market.) Sometimes he offers me a drag. The first time I thought a grenade had exploded in my chest. Little by little, I’m getting used to it. I like it, it makes me seem like a Jungmann. But I prefer the jam Lukas gives me once in a while. Real jam, not the disgusting beetroot puree they serve up to us these days. Sometimes Lukas even gets me chocolate. He manages to get his hands on a whole lot of food that’s not available. I’m glad because the meals are getting worse at the Napola and my stomach is often rumbling when I leave the dining hall.
We also see each other at the farm, when we engage in ‘experience in agricultural labour’. More and more, students have to muck in to make sure we still get provisions from the farm, and to look after the few remaining animals. Lukas is by far the best at catching chickens. Even when he demonstrates his technique to me, I can’t do it. Filthy creatures, they’re so fast when they smell danger. They slip through my fingers and I end up flat on my face, my nose in their bird shit.
‘Just think of them as Jews,’ Lukas said to me one day with a forced smile. ‘The only difference,’ he added under his breath, ‘is that at least the chickens don’t allow themselves to be led to the abattoir without putting up a fight.’
Lukas let the last surviving chicken on the farm go free. I didn’t stop him because I knew it would never end up on our plates but on those of a few teachers and the Heimführer.
‘I anoint you head of the Jewish resistance,’ pronounced Lukas ceremoniously, as he let the chicken go behind the outer wall of the school. Earlier, he had filled a little bag with grain that he tied around the chicken’s neck, so it would have something to live off for a while.
We also had to milk the cows, which was getting really difficult. They were so thin and underfed that they only pissed out a trickle of milk.
‘You know what? I’ve had enough! I’d rather pull on something else than the udders of these fucking cows.’
Without a second thought, Lukas headed to the other end of the stable and pulled his pants down. He had his back to me but I could see the movement of his right hand going up and down without stopping, really fast, as he groaned ‘Oh!’, ‘Ah!, ‘Aahh!’ I knew he was fondling his dick. He was masturbating.
‘But you’re not allowed to!’ I called out, furious. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’re Jewish and a murderer? As well as the yellow star and the green triangle, do you want them to stick a pink triangle on you? Are you trying for the full collection of geometric shapes?’
‘Shut up, Skullface. Watch and learn.’
He showed me how to do it, but it’s not easy—my dick is too small. Sometimes, it sort of works; I manage to rub it against my pants and it feels funny, like heat spreading through my lower belly. It’s kind of nice, but it doesn’t work often. I reckon smoking is easier.
Lukas also sometimes takes me to the carpentry workshop. We don’t talk a lot, not freely in any case, because we’re hardly ever alone, carpentry b
eing more popular than farm work. Lukas is working hard at making a wooden object, a sort of statuette. He told me it was a toy, for me, that he’ll give me when it’s finished. I can’t wait.
All that doesn’t stop the two of us from fighting a lot. It’s in Lukas’s temperament to blow hot and cold.
‘You son-of-a-bitch-whore Kraut!’
It comes over him all of a sudden, like he wanted to piss from his mouth.
‘Filthy Jew!’
‘Nazi!’
‘Polack dog!’
‘Reich’s sprog!’
‘Subhuman!’
‘Bastard!’
‘Parasite!’
‘Your parents fucked in Nazi fornication factories!’
‘Yours will never fuck again!’
I don’t mind it when we argue and insult each other. That’s supposed to be normal between brothers: we love each other and and at the same time we hate each other to the point of sometimes wanting to kill each other. What I can’t stand is when, just when I least expect it, in a really creepy way, Lukas’s poisonous magic potion infiltrates me, drop by drop.
Movies are important teaching tools at the Napola. They show us a lot of films, at least one a week. In the beginning it was mostly films of the huge mass demonstrations organised by the Reich: the singing, the crowds, the public speeches by our Führer—it was all wonderful. Now, we watch films about the war, which is also wonderful: we’re kept up-to-date with the new weapons developed by the Reich. We saw, for example, demonstrations of the Panzer V and the Tiger. The commentator explained—in his deep, warm melodious voice and with perfect diction—that the Panzer is the tank most feared by the Allies, who can only put up their inferior Sherman against it. The Allies themselves acknowledge that three of their armoured vehicles will be destroyed before a panzer can be overtaken.
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