Yes, Frick detests Frau Huber with a fury. How can he, an officer of the Third Reich who has taken an oath to eliminate its enemies, share anything in common with Ilse Huber, a warped civilian who kills prisoners, not because they are sub-humans, but simply because she takes pleasure in it?
“Ernst?” Huber has snared him like a rabbit. The last thing Frick needs at the moment is a chummy exchange with her husband.
Under the artificial light, Huber’s cheeks have turned a bilious olive green. “God, Ernst. What have we been doing? That is my wife out there, and our child.” Huber flinches at another ‘TWOU’ followed by two more. “Don’t you know what she’s doing now? She’s shooting through the wire at the prisoners in the camp itself.”
Then why the hell don’t you stop her? thinks Frick. You’re the Kommandant. Are you so totally blind to your own cowardice? But, of course, Frick knows that he is also a coward for not saying it aloud.
“What is the range of that weapon, Herr Kommandant?” he asks.
“I’m not sure, it’s just a toy – a hundred metres? Not always enough velocity to kill, but then she wounds them, so, of course, one of ours has to go and finish them off. That’s the woman I married, Ernst. What’s happening to us?” There’s a moment of calm, then he asks, “And you, Ernst, you have a daughter too. How old is she?”
“Cordula is four.”
Huber stares towards the balcony in horror. “Get out of all this, Ernst. I shall transfer to some Wehrmacht unit. They’re so desperate for more troops in Russia, they’ll be bound to let us go now. We’ll learn to sleep again.”
“I sleep very well, Herr Kommandant.”
“Do you? Really? I don’t believe you, Ernst. Be honest, you’re not one of them; it’s only automatons like Eichmann, Wirth and Globocnik that can do what we do and still sleep at nights. I’m going to Russia.”
Frick hears the tremor in Huber’s voice and glances at his flaccid paunch. “With great respect, Herr Kommandant, you won’t last the first month of the Russian winter.”
Huber smiles revealing a row of tobacco stained teeth. “Do you know something, Frick? I don’t really want to; I’m morally ruined, I’m damned. History will remember me for allowing Jewish babies to be chucked into the air as target practice for the Hitler Youth.”
Frick feels the blood leave his cheeks, but Huber gulps his schnapps like a man dying of thirst and carries on with hardly a breath. “You don’t know half of it. Back in February we had a Gestapo commissar in the camp who sliced a ten-year-old boy in half. One stroke with an axe. Frick, he used an axe! Can you guess why he did it? For a bet, Ernst, he did it for a bet. Then, afterwards, he had the nerve to blame the Führer. He said our Führer once remarked that, because nature is cruel, we can be cruel too. Of course, I don’t really know if Hitler had said it or not, but it’s all over for me. I’m a lost cause, but there might still be a chance for you, Ernst. Join me and let’s be real soldiers.”
Huber shakes his head vigorously as if to oust the vile memories from his brain. “Something else you should know, Ernst: the madness deepens. This so-called ‘course’ we are on is supposed to teach us how to dispose of corpses by the hundred, but we already possess an industrial plant at Auschwitz-Birkenau capable of processing five thousand a day. I’ve seen it in operation, Ernst. They extract eighty kilograms of gold teeth in a week, all from Jews. They stick hooks into their mouths to rip them out. Can you imagine how heavy the wooden crates are? This week they’re going to show us a film on how to make phosphate fertiliser from human ashes. Think about it, Ernst, the precious human form revered by Leonardo and Michelangelo converted into road ash and fertiliser. It’s all madness, Ernst. Madness. Dear, blessed God, first we rob them of their humanity, then what do we to them afterwards? We dump their corpses on an assembly line rolling towards the ovens and the whole process carries on with the ease of an elegant nightmare.”
On the second evening of the course Frick returns to the Chopin Hotel only to find Brigitte’s suitcase and hat box packed by the door. His wife is sitting on the bed, her arms around a weeping Cordula.
Frick’s mind panics, but he strives to keep his voice calm. “What is going on, whatever has happened?” he asks.
“The East is a very big colony,” says Brigitte slowly. “But there are so very few German colonists. I think we Germans are trying so hard to be like the English in India that we get together in evil little clubs where no one has a private life.”
His voice trembles with apprehension. “Brigitte, what is it?”
“Be silent!” As she raises her voice, their child jumps with alarm, but Brigitte holds her closer. “Today, in one of our ‘clubs’, I met your Ilsa Huber.”
“My Ilsa Huber? Frau Huber? That woman is—”
“Will you not listen to me? What a fool I was to actually believe that my husband was an honourable soldier. I must be the only SS wife who never guessed the truth.” Brigitte fumbles with a cigarette. He offers to light it for her, but she swings away from him and with trembling fingers strikes a match herself.
She inhales rapidly, and when she speaks again her voice is low; the words sound flat. “Ilsa Huber told me what men like you are really doing to the Jewish men, women, and even their little children and old people. Hans Frank keeps telling us they are just being resettled. Resettled? Oh yes, Frau Huber got so much pleasure from telling me what’s really happening. She went into all the details.” Brigitte’s voice falters, and he moves towards her and Cordula.
“Don’t you dare touch either of us. Do you hear me? You are the monster in every child’s worst dream. You even stink of death; it sticks to you like paint and you will never scrape it off. And what are they teaching on your course, isn’t it all about ashes? Ashes, for Christ sake, ashes. How appropriate in your case, when everything in your life, everything you touch, Ernst Frick, turns to… ashes.”
Like a fool he still tries to approach them.
“Keep away. Don’t you understand? We don’t want to see you ever again.” At this, Cordula covers her face with her hands and sobs.
There is a rap on the door and Brigitte pulls herself together. “Enter,” she says, her voice like steel. The porter comes over to grab the luggage and she steps back to let him leave the room. As she moves to follow him, she turns to her husband. “Monster,” she hisses, then she grasps Cordula’s hand and drags the distraught child out of his life forever.
*
Over the years, her words still hang in the air like the chimes of a distant bell. “Everything you touch, Ernst Frick, turns to ashes.”
8
“Everything you touch… turns to ashes,” He sits in the stationary Land Rover, hunched over the steering wheel, his cheeks wet and his eyes smarting.
At last, he straightens up and turns the ignition, but only drives a few hundred yards before he abandons the vehicle on the shoulder of the road and tramps off towards a broken knoll strewn with frost-split outcrops and stunted trees. His back is bowed as though it can no longer bear the burden of his body, and the wind wails about him like an unhallowed spirit. He climbs until he finds a place where, in the lee between two boulders the size of elephants, an ancient snow gum has twisted itself away from the freezing southerly gales. Between the boulders and the tree there is just enough space for him to find shelter.
Across the valley, the pendulous lights of Island Bend shed auras of dirty yellow over the cabins and tents, but here, among the rocks of the High Country, the world is clean and without any creature, apart from himself, that does not belong. In his solitude, Brandt bellows out his anguish over the loss of his wife and child, beating his head against the tree trunk, beating it so hard and so repeatedly that the hot blood seeps through his hair and runs down into his eyes until he collapses, weeping, onto the freezing earth.
Half an hour later he gets up. He is dizzy and his body’s core feels deathly col
d. It is so tempting to lie down again, just to stretch out and sleep, but he won’t give in to it. The wind has eased and he can hear the putt-putt of the camp generator. A pocket of snow has survived the early spring. He gathers it in both hands and smothers his bloodied face in it, recalling that the last time he’d done this was when he killed the fox woman. The horrible coincidence makes him lose balance and he grasps an arm of the snow gum for support.
As soon as Brandt returns to Island Bend, he takes a shower to cleanse the abrasions on his head. A kind of normalcy returns as he changes his clothes and goes across to the mess hut.
As always, he is obsessed with news from Europe and he goes to the bulletin board. On the German language page there is a brief story about a double suicide near Soviet-occupied Weimar.
This morning, the bodies of two Weimar residents, Helmut and Christa Frick, were discovered hanging in the Thuringian Forest. It is believed that Herr and Frau Frick had been suffering from depression since 1946 after their son’s posthumous indictment for crimes against humanity.
So, his parents are dead. He cannot grieve for them; he is already too drained, but, in any case, he would never grieve for his father, that terrifying autocrat in his pin-stripe suit and shiny shoes who insisted on always wearing a stiff, white collar even when he was cleaning out the chicken yard.
He remembers the time when their church had just affirmed its allegiance to the National Socialist German Christian League. His parents were in limbo, like fish in a glass tank, neither moving forwards nor backwards merely quivering their gills. But had he ever seen them put up the slightest resistance to the assault on their Christian faith? Two kingdoms had reigned in Germany: the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Hitler. However unintentionally, his parents had sided with the Kingdom of Hitler, or rather his father did. Married to a man like that, his mother probably didn’t have a choice. In the narthex of their church, the pastor had erected one of Himmler’s favourite dictums. Carved in yellow beech wood with heavy Gothic script, it read as this:
‘The swastika in our breasts, the cross in our hearts.’
In 1945, like all adult residents of Weimar, his parents would have been forced by the Americans to witness Buchenwald after its liberation. After seeing the camp, the mayor of Weimar and his wife hanged themselves, and now, seven years later, he learns that his parents have followed their example.
The newspaper had referred to them as simply Helmut and Christa Frick. How strange the Christian names look when they are chained together in a news column. Despite a sepia wedding photograph on a shelf above the hearth, he had never once pictured them as a couple.
Brandt yearns to find his umbilical connection to innocence once more, and to flee backwards to childhood, to the beech woods and the singing brooks, and to his story books, the fairy tales his mother used to read to him.
No, perhaps not the books, definitely not the books. Their authors nearly always included a forest with a witch’s house in it – an evil, crooked dwelling. God protect all children from the horrors that lurk in every fairy tale. There is always horror. If there is no horror, how can it be a fairy tale?
*
On his free Saturday morning, Brandt tries not to think of his parents and goes out to the mechanics’ shed to rotate and balance the wheels on his Land Rover. Driving and maintaining the vehicle is the one hobby that helps him to suspend the relentless passage of time. If he were another kind of man, he might occupy himself with gambling, visiting the prostitutes up from Sydney or adding his pennyworth to the pooled ignorance of the pub.
Yesterday, one of the Czech kitchen hands in the canteen accused him of not owning what she called ‘weekend clothes’, so, today, with his work on the ute complete, he is setting off for Cooma to buy some elastic-sided boots, a wide leather belt and some American blue jeans. He parks outside the nineteenth-century gaol and walks down to Sharp Street.
He only has to go to William’s Emporium and afterwards to the milk bar, so it doesn’t take him long. He returns with his purchases, which include a cheese-and-salad roll in a brown paper bag. As he fumbles for his keys, he gazes up at the gaol and sees the barred windows above the high grey wall.
This is only the second real prison he has ever seen. The first was Landsberg, when he was on a compulsory SS pilgrimage in 1936 to see the prison where the Führer wrote Mein Kampf. Brandt remembers a monstrous three-storied edifice with red tiles that looked like slabs of meat and an entrance façade straight from the canvas of Hieronymous Bosch. If, after the war, the Americans had deliberately chosen Landsberg as a terrifying execution site for war criminals, they couldn’t have found a better venue. The thought makes him light-headed and he reaches out to a lamp post for support. Someone touches his shoulder. “Are you all right, mate?”
Brandt opens his eyes to the blue uniform of a prison warder. “I celebrated a bit last night,” he says, “I think I overdid it.”
“Okey doke, mate. Take care of yourself. Too roo.”
The warder goes on shift through a side gate.
Brandt slumps into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover. For some minutes, he watches the residents of Cooma going about their lives. Women form the majority, their string bags full of newspaper-wrapped parcels from the butchers and delicatessens, bright orbs of fruit bulging out as if intent on escaping and rolling down the road to Cooma Creek, and onto a fruit nirvana. There are so many children about too, with the youngest peering out from their strollers, and the toddlers on tricycles or tin scooters. The post-war baby boom is on the lips of every politician, manufacturer and school head. There is music in the walk of most of the adults and especially the young, what the newspapers call ‘teenagers’. Brandt, the outsider, tries to identify the moods of most of the passers-by according to the swing of their arms, the thrust of their chins, and whether their mouths lift or droop at the corners.
His mind turns to the ‘waifs’ from the Syrenia and, in particular, Alan Gilbert. Alan must be at least ten by now. How is Australia treating a boy like him? From what Father Coffey had told him, he imagines Alan somewhere out in the back of beyond stuck in some religious institution. Alan is bright; will they be giving him a decent education?
And, now, of course, he thinks of Cordula. If she were alive, what would she have been doing today? Ballet, gymnastics or riding her own horse? He cannot bear to think of her, so he turns the ignition, clenches the steering wheel as though it is a lifebuoy, and takes the Jindabyne road out of Cooma.
Six miles from the town, he parks under a pepper tree and sits on a stump in the shade to eat his roll, but here the mosquitoes sting his ankles and he finds the stump is infested with angry red ants. At his feet, something with numerous legs is fumbling through the dried leaves. He leaps up and steps away from the stump, deciding now to eat in the sun. The roll is as tasteless as blotting paper, but still he manages to bolt down another mouthful of the soggy white bread, squashed tomato and limp cheddar.
Kra-ro-lon warbles a dark bird with a flat fruit-eater’s beak.
Kra-ro-lon, Kra-ro-lon warble four other birds all strung along a single bare branch of the pepper tree. The sound becomes a dissonant clanging, like empty glass bottles being carted along a potholed road. Brandt tosses the remains of his lunch into the grass and the birds swoop down on it and threaten each other with their ungainly beaks, all of them shrieking like harpies.
*
The next morning is sullenly normal. He wakes up at Island Bend, and the blackness rises with him and he wants to die; a perfectly normal morning. Fear of the victors may have kept him alive in the Tyrol, but here, amid so much living human energy and purpose, raw existence is not enough, his deception is unendurable and he cannot go on like this. Now that his parents are dead he sees no moral imperative to keep alive for their sakes, and his own responsibilities as a parent were destroyed long ago when Brigitte took Cordula away from him. Who would miss an unknown
engineer who skids out of a bend at high speed and hits a tree. Just the other day, he spotted a colossal peppermint gum not far from Adaminaby, standing barely twenty yards off the road on a lethally suitable bend, rounded like a sickle and tailor-made – finish, kaput.
But it is not through cowardice that he hesitates, it is only because he has a perverse desire not to disappoint the few people he has collected around his life here in the Snowy Mountains. His little team of tunnel men, of course, but he also feels a professional compulsion to honour his contract with the Authority. And, let’s not forget, he tells himself, that at the bush wedding he had promised to ‘make a go of it’. The German newspapers had asserted that his parents hanged themselves when they heard he was a war criminal. If this is true, he owes it to their memory to live with his desolation and try to make something of what is left of the life they had given him.
“I must finish the race,” he mumbles to himself. He repeats it, this time more distinctly, “I must finish the race.”
There’s a sound of hammering in one of the work sheds and Brandt wanders over. Three of his own team are building an enormous toboggan out of sheet iron and crate slats.
“G’day, Otto,” they shout as he grabs a brace and bit, some wood screws and an awl, and sets to work. Next winter there’ll be the annual toboggan race down to Crooked Hand Creek near Cabramurra. It’s held at night and no doubt they’ll stick him right in the front of the toboggan before they all go hurtling down the side of a mountain in utter darkness.
*
A month later, Brandt is in Cooma again, this time sitting in front of the mahogany desk of Tom Henty, the branch manager of the Commonwealth Bank whose face looks habitually glum, despite the fact that his comfy leather upholstered chair is in such close proximity to a framed photograph of a smiling, plumpish woman and two little boys. Henty wields his fountain pen like a conductor about to commence an overture.
Orphaned Leaves Page 8
