by Steven Uhly
2
When they found him his eyes were staring straight up into the sky. He was soaked through and dark-red, sandy mud stuck to his black uniform. With the rainwater, his blood flowed down toward the church, and instead of the aroma of bread a heady stench of excrement and iron hung in the street. An old wooden cart soon arrived, a two-wheeler pulled by a couple of Poles. They hauled it up from the church until they reached the body, which they lifted and placed on the wet boards. Then two S.S. men, a stocky Hungarian who hardly spoke a word of German and a lanky Bavarian who nobody understood, flogged the Poles to hasten their progress to headquarters. Dusk gradually descended, but the rain refused to let up. This time they took the direct route from the church to the town hall.
The building was set in an attractive square that had seen better days. Apart from the town hall itself, the square, too, was bordered with rendered, half-timbered houses tightly packed together. The town hall, on the other hand, boasted generous proportions, a stylistic mixture of northern Renaissance and farmhouse, which was a feature of public buildings in this region. It looked a little like an intruder who had made themselves at home. The two Poles, exhausted and with backs aching, stopped by the outside steps. Another thrashing told them they had to take the Sturmbannführer from the cart and carry him into the building. One of them slipped on the steps, the corpse slid from his grasp and the head thudded onto the stone. The Bavarian flew into a rage and beat the Pole unconscious. He lay on the steps while the two S.S. men helped the other Pole bring the Sturmbannführer into the town hall.
News of the murder of his junior officer had already reached Obersturmbannführer Ranzner. In view of what had happened, he would assemble the troops on the square the following morning and deliver a speech. He considered his oratory to be one of his many strengths. But now, when the three men carried in the filthy, dripping body, when his nose took in the smell of blood and earth, feces and damp, he felt a faint revulsion bubble up inside him. He had reserved it as his privilege to close the eyes of fallen officers with his own hand, for all of them were like his own sons, as he used to say in his aloof manner. But each time it was an effort. When they were dead they ceased to be something, they were no more than a grave warning of life’s void, without pride or dignity, meaningless flesh, which was already starting to stink—of what he never knew, it was like rubber, like some women, peculiar.
The S.S. men shooed out the Pole and laid down the dead man in the vestibule. Imitation Arcimboldos from Bohemia hung on the walls, a delicate Jugendstil chest of drawers stood beneath one of them. The picture showed a face composed exclusively of vegetables, wearing a black helmet that looked a little like a soup dish. These and a few other items had been transported from Germany on Ranzner’s orders. They were to bring an element of civilization to this “subhuman architecture,” as he called it. Ranzner went over to the corpse. With his legs apart and arms behind his back, he leaned forward a little over the Sturmbannführer’s pale face and gazed into the dead man’s eyes.
“Seven shots at least, Obersturmbannführer!” the Bavarian barked in his distinct accent, as if he had been asked to provide a report. The presence of the two men made Ranzner nervous.
“Wait outside until I call for you!”
“Yes, Obersturmbannführer!” they shouted, before clicking their heels, thrusting out their chests and doing an about-turn.
When they had left Ranzner kneeled, overcame his feeling of disgust and looked the dead man in the eye at close range. Like a thief anticipating a robbery, he glanced around the vestibule before stretching out his hand and waving it over the dead man’s eyes two or three times, staring at him expectantly. When nothing happened, he bent further and whispered into the corpse’s ear, “Treitz? Sturmbannführer Treitz? Karl Treitz, are you still with us? If you’re still alive I command you to give me a sign. Did you hear me?” He looked him in the eye again and at that very moment thought he detected a fleeting twinkle in the left pupil. Was it possible? He had seen a twinkle like that in the eyes of other corpses, but had never known whether it was merely a figment of his imagination. He bent back down to Treitz’s ear: “Sturmbannführer, I hereby order you to seek out and apprehend your murderer. Do not forget—forget nothing!”
After waiting a while in vain for another sign, Ranzner slipped on a black leather glove and closed the Sturmbannführer’s eyes. He stood up, assumed a diffident expression of sympathy and called in the S.S. men. When they lifted the body, the right arm jerked briefly but wildly before coming to rest again a moment later. The S.S. men were unfazed, they had witnessed this and other phenomena in corpses all too often. Ranzner, however, turned away to prevent them from glimpsing his surprise and his satisfaction. That must have been a sign. The right arm! There was no doubt about it: Treitz had attempted the Nazi salute as a farewell gesture. Could the Reichsführer S.S. be right after all? At that very moment Ranzner decided two things. The following morning he would have thirty-seven Poles shot in the street where Treitz was murdered—one for each year of the Sturmbannführer’s life. He was not planning a massacre, just a symbolic act. And that evening he would also rehearse a speech. He called Anna, his housekeeper, to clean up the stain in the vestibule.
Anna Stirnweiss was young, strikingly tall and slim. Ranzner had spotted her two years earlier amongst a consignment of Jews at the Ostbahnhof in Berlin. Since then she had been his factotum. Anna’s face would have been beautiful had it not at some point taken on an expression of untold world-weariness, as if for her everything were too heavy, not just the battered water pail or the wringer with the dark-gray rag, but also the tatty shoes, which must be far too big for her dainty feet, her shoulders that were hunched forward, as if trying to shield her breasts, and finally her head which, even shorn of its once magnificent hair, hung with a permanent droop as if too weighty for her brittle-looking neck. Although Ranzner was keen on Anna, he banished all thoughts that strayed too far, for he was only too aware of his superiority.
He watched her kneel and wash away the bloodstains, the water that had run from the dead body, the memory of the disgust it had generated, disgust and hope. Ranzner could make out the contours of Anna’s buttocks beneath her black skirt. His cheek muscles twitched briefly, then he turned and left the vestibule via a large wooden double door, decorated only by two round, brass knobs. Beyond the door was a generous stairwell with astonishingly white marble steps. At the bottom, the staircase had the same semi-oval form as the steps outside the building, but after ten or eleven stairs it forked left and right, both sides leading up to a gallery. Here, too, hung pictures from the Prague Renaissance between tall, Gothic-looking windows, while Biedermeier furniture from Germany stood rather forlornly against the walls. The entire stairwell was set with dark paneling which, in combination with the hefty stone pillars, lent it a rather ponderous air. The building work had clearly been carried out in several periods, giving the faint impression that each new style had rebelled against its predecessors. The result was a peculiar confirmation of just how provincial the town hall was.
Ascending the staircase with the confidence of a king, Ranzner chose the left fork and walked around the gallery to the far side. His rooms were directly above the vestibule.
3
Anna was in her bedroom, taking off her apron. She looked in the mirror on the wall, a plain old object without a frame, full of dark spots and a crack running from the bottom, which now cut through the middle of her face. Anna moved her head so the crack wandered the length of her nose, between her eyes and up to her forehead. Ranzner had called for her. Wrenching open the door, Fritz, his adjutant, had gazed at her with relish from head to toe and announced curtly, The chief wants you, hurry up. She had put on her skirt while Fritz ogled from the doorway before letting out an exaggerated sigh and walking away without closing the door.
It was a very fine crack, and yet the two halves of her face were slightly offset. Anna focused on the black spot that exactly covered her right eye.
Now it was time to play the game. Ranzner’s game, his invention. But he was unaware that she played it in her own way. Time for me to play the game now, she announced to the face in the mirror, attempting to instill a measure of resolve in her weary eyes.
Turning around, she bumped into the bed that practically filled her tiny room. It was an iron-framed dinosaur of a thing, with tall head- and footboards and a saggy straw mattress. The room had no window. Located in a side wing of the town hall, it must once have been used as a storeroom. Or pantry. Anna had learned to ignore these external details of her current existence as an individual deprived of all rights.
She must not let Ranzner wait too long. She had wanted more time to get ready, but she also knew that her game would not work unless the pressure was sufficiently high. So she left her room and went down a long, narrow corridor toward another door. Behind this lay the large stairwell. Anna walked slowly, as if measuring each step with precision. Outside she could hear the deep rumbling of a diesel motor ticking over. Anna concentrated. The game had begun. She was the subhuman. She went up the stairs, choosing the right fork when she reached the landing, and was soon at the door. She knocked—Come in!—and opened. He, Obersturmbannführer Josef Ranzner, was already standing there in his favorite role, a weekly performance, wearing his gray uniform and eyeing her expressionlessly from his Red Indian features. Beneath his gaze she, the subhuman, winced. She did this every time, just like a whore who moans as if she were climaxing, to make her punter climax. Ranzner was her punter. She knew what turned him on: fear. Just like a whore, deep inside her was another woman, an unattainable woman who observed everything that happened, calculating, focusing exclusively on the payoff. This woman had a secret name and her payoff was life. And hidden even deeper—something Anna had discovered only recently, to her relief and horror—was a little girl oblivious to all of this. She was sitting in a meadow, picking flowers and smiling, lost to the world. She was five years old and still unaware that on this very day her mother would tell her, Your father’s never coming back, we’ll have to get along on our own now. The last happy day in Anna’s life. At some point she would repeat this day, she would sit in the meadow by her village in Brandenburg and pick flowers and everything would be fine again, her father would not have gone away and returned three years later with that alien look on his face, a look she would never be able to forget. Her mother would never have had to say, You’ve come, as if prior to that her family had not existed. The crack in the mirror would merely be the crack in the mirror, nothing else.
“Sit over there, Anna!” Ranzner said, pointing to a chair in the middle of the room. He stood behind and grabbed her gently by the shoulders. The whore flinched submissively, the secret woman assessed the situation. The little girl paused and waited.
“Do you know what happens when one of your lot murders one of our soldiers?”
“No, no, I don’t.”
“Oh, I think you do. You know how livid I get, and then I have a whole bunch of you executed, for one of us is worth thirty-seven of you.”
“Thirty-seven?”
Ranzner offered a supercilious smile.
“Sturmbannführer Treitz was thirty-seven years old. Tomorrow morning I shall tell my men that thirty-seven Jews must die. I wonder whether you aren’t in cahoots with the rest of them.”
“No, absolutely not.”
Ranzner smiled. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and circled Anna.
“What else could you say, Jewish woman? You’re up to your neck in it.”
“Why do you hate us?”
“I don’t hate the Jews, you silly little thing. I’ve never hated the Jews. If I hated your sort then how could I possibly suffer your presence here? No, I’d have killed you long ago. Do you know why I might have to have you killed?”
“No.”
“For purely tactical reasons. Plenty of officers keep Jews, Poles or other creatures. Officially, of course, no one’s to know, but everyone does. Those up there,” he said, gesturing with his right index finger, “turn a blind eye so long as our work is efficient. But these are critical times we’re in, my troops are not what they used to be. In the past,” he continued, stopping to look at the night sky through a tall window, “in the past we were an Aryan army, the very best. My God, the young men I saw back in those days: tall, strong, handsome, fearless and smart. Reincarnations of Siegfried.” He sighed, turning back toward Anna. “But nowadays I have to incite a horde of foreigners and criminals to fight against the Russians. Do you imagine that’s an easy task?”
Anna was at a loss as to what to say. She had never seen Ranzner work particularly hard. He spent his time being driven around, drinking his fill of wine and schnapps, and enjoying long lie-ins. He also masturbated a lot, as Anna knew from washing his clothes.
“Answer me! Do you think that’s an easy task?”
“No.”
“No. You’re right, Anna. It’s not easy. The soldiers out there,” he said, pointing to the window, “now come from Lithuania, Sweden, Hungary, Holland. Many of them know less German than you do, Anna.”
“I understand.”
“Really? Yes, I think you do. I think you understand very well. You see, if I’m fighting against subhumans with foreigners who themselves are partly subhuman, and on top of that I’ve got a Jew for a housekeeper, then we might as well stop killing right now and just forget the war. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me, Anna, or at least do it in such a way that I don’t realize you’re lying. Of course you’d rather we just called the whole thing off, like one calls off a football match when the rain gets too heavy. But it’s not like that.” Ranzner paused and went to his desk. “I’ve prepared a little speech. I’d like you to hear it. Tomorrow morning I’m going to address my men and,” he added in a softer tone, “I’d like at least one person to have understood it. Ready?”
Anna nodded. Ranzner took up position three meters away and stood there, his eyes closed. He concentrated hard, he could hear the birds twittering, see the roofs of the houses shining gently, smell the fresh morning air. He watched the fog lift, looked down at his men who filled the square, maybe three thousand of them in all, his brigade had swelled in size. Peering at their faces he saw their Aryan features, purely Aryan features, and he allowed himself to indulge in this view for a few minutes while Anna sat there, waiting, concentrating hard herself. As well she knew, the truth was that this was no rehearsal for a speech, Ranzner had no need of that. She had known from the outset that the pieces of paper in his hand were documents of some sort. The truth was that Ranzner improvised, the truth was that these speeches were for her ears only. Like a whore she sensed that her punter was secretly in love with her, however much he pretended to despise her. And like a whore she preferred the contempt, to escape his love. When he stood there with his eyes closed, with his long, hooked nose and taut skin, he resembled a Red Indian deep in ritual. Anna thought of how a few hours earlier he had crouched and spoken to the dead body of his Sturmbannführer in the vestibule. She had watched from the stairs.
“Men!” Ranzner bellowed suddenly. Anna flinched. He opened his eyes and stared at her; his face had assumed a feverish look.
“Men! Every one of you knows why you are here.” Once more he paused briefly, before smiling and raising his hands. “We are about to embark on a delousing campaign!”
This was one of the jokes Ranzner always cracked at the beginning of his speeches. He had explained to her once what they were all about, their purpose was to leaven the atmosphere. It was imperative his men felt that he, Ranzner, was never nervous, no matter how close the Russians were. Anna had listened attentively: the Russians were close. Without knowing it Ranzner had given succor to her hopes.
But now both of them in their inner ear heard three thousand raw voices in unison emit throaty, adulatory, manly sounds. Ranzner heard this in his head and Anna heard it in hers, imagining Ranzner’s head.
“But lice, as you know, hide in every corner, and with one, single aim—to avoid their own eradication! Sometimes, friends, they attack one of us, when we’re quiet and inattentive, for that is the only way in which lice dare to attack human beings!”
