Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Germans and Russians,’ Grunwald said. ‘There’s not much difference.’

  Ursula looked at him angrily. She might have been pretty once, Grunwald thought. Her thinness had robbed her of her looks even if there was still a suggestion of beauty.

  ‘There’s a great difference,’ she said. ‘How can you say something like that?’

  Grunwald sipped the whisky. He felt that he was floating out on a dark ocean; a seabird that has lost the power of its wings.

  ‘It’s easy to say,’ Grunwald answered.

  ‘Adolf had the right idea,’ the girl said, and laughed.

  ‘He had hundreds of ideas,’ Grunwald said. ‘He was an ideas factory. He never stopped having them. I’d say that his last idea was the best he ever had.’

  ‘Which was that?’

  ‘To commit suicide.’

  The girl stared hard at Grunwald. He could not understand her open hostility. The American was laughing at their argument, like someone enjoying a hugely private joke. He passed the bottle towards Grunwald, who reached for it.

  The girl said, ‘Why should he come here? What did you bring him for?’

  ‘I told you. He’s a friend. I invited him for a drink.’

  ‘You never think of asking me first,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you shut up?’

  Grunwald poured himself a fresh drink. Ursula rose from the American’s lap and, moving across the room, sat on the edge of the bed. Watching her, Grunwald wondered about her past: he saw her as a schoolgirl with plaited fair hair and rewritten history textbooks, new biological studies compiled by the brilliant scientists of the Reich, Wagner played at regular interludes, compulsory study of how Bolshevism and World Jewry had combined to bring Germany to its knees like some out-of-condition boxer. The whole thing was odious to him – the great Teutonic myth, the grandeur, the Bund Deutscher Mädchen. It was the rhetoric of insanity. And this girl, this child, had been caught up in it like a scrap of paper in a hurricane.

  The American sat on the floor and lit a cigarette.

  ‘You should smile more. You look fucking ugly when you don’t smile.’

  The girl bared her teeth. ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘You’d soon care if I stopped coming, wouldn’t you? You’d soon begin to care then.’ The soldier reached for the whisky and filled his cup. ‘Jesus, I wish we had some ice. There isn’t a drop of ice in this whole lousy country.’

  Listening apathetically to their conversation, Grunwald closed his eyes. He thought of the dead Russian in the attic: fighting all the way across Poland to be murdered by a German girl – it seemed meaningless. How had she murdered him? When he was asleep had she taken his gun and shot him? He tried to imagine this young girl with her finger on a trigger and the mouldering body in the cupboard upstairs. Death scared him: he had seen so much of it, and yet it terrified him.

  When he opened his eyes, and realized with surprise that he must have fallen asleep, he saw that the soldier and the girl were lying on the bed. The American stared at him.

  ‘You talk in your sleep. Did you know that?’

  Grunwald was embarrassed. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Nothing I could understand. A lot of gibberish. It sounded like you were in pain.’

  The girl said, ‘You were probably having a nightmare.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Grunwald said, ‘I can’t remember a nightmare. I don’t even remember falling asleep.’

  The American passed him the whisky. Grunwald poured some into his cup and drank; he felt drunk now.

  ‘And you snore,’ the girl said. ‘Your mouth hangs open and you snore.’ She got up from the bed, climbing over the soldier, and lit a candle that sat in a dish near the window. The single point of moving light created shadows in the room. The faces of the soldier and the girl were alternatively yellow and white as the flame moved.

  The girl said, ‘What did you do in the war?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Grunwald said.

  ‘You must have done something. Everybody did something.’

  ‘Stop talking about the fucking war,’ the American said. ‘I’ve had it up to here with the war. It’s all I ever hear. Did you have a good war? Did you have a bad war? What did you do in the fucking war? It’s all I ever hear.’

  Grunwald watched the girl come closer to him. She stood in front of him: her expression was suddenly strange – like that of someone about to offer a piece of poisoned fruit.

  ‘Come on. You must have done something. Why don’t you tell us about it? What are you afraid of?’

  Grunwald said, ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’

  The girl laughed. Grunwald had a sudden impulse to reach out towards her and touch her. She seemed all at once so insubstantial that she might have been only another shadow in the room. He dropped his hands to his side. It had been a long time since he had touched a woman. Turning away from him, the girl went back to the bed and sat beside the American. But she continued to look curiously at Grunwald.

  ‘It doesn’t matter a damn what people did in the war,’ the American said. ‘All that’s finished. If you survived, you’re pretty lucky. And the dead don’t have any complaints. It doesn’t matter a shit.’

  The girl turned away from him and looked at Grunwald. ‘I wish I could get one of the windows open. This place stinks.’

  Grunwald stared at her. Her mouth hung open. She seemed acutely vulnerable all at once, as if the change in her expression made her look like a child again. But no; she wasn’t a child. She was a woman, she had been raped by the Russian, she was visited regularly by the American – and how many others? Grunwald thought of the things one had to do to survive. Rising from the chair he went to the window and drew the curtain back a couple of inches. In the street below several people were moving back and forward with a kind of aimless furtiveness: they were like creatures carrying unimportant secrets to destinations they knew they would never reach. The girl approached him. He was conscious of her breath against his face.

  ‘Everything was happier before the war. Didn’t you think everything was much nicer then?’

  He could not tell if she was deliberately trying to provoke him. He said nothing. She touched him on the elbow and continued, almost in a whisper, to speak.

  ‘I was only a child then, of course. But I felt a certain kind of atmosphere in Germany. What’s the word? Jubilance. Everybody was jubilant. Nothing could happen to the Reich. Didn’t you feel like that?’

  What was she trying to do? Did she genuinely imagine that he hadn’t suffered even during those halcyon days before the destruction of Europe? He turned to look at her. She was smiling slightly. Before he could interpret her expression she moved away.

  The American, who hadn’t been listening to her, said, ‘Know what my trouble is? Know what it is? I’m fucking homesick. I want to go home.’

  ‘Why don’t you have another drink? It’s the only damn thing that keeps you happy.’ The girl gave him the bottle. He ignored it and caught her by the waist. She pulled herself free, laughing softly. The soldier rose from the bed. He spilled the bottle. Reeling, he lost balance and struck himself hard against the wall. He moved towards her again. A chair toppled over and, catching his legs against it, he fell to the floor. He sat there for a time, dazed, more drunk than he had realized.

  Grunwald picked up the empty bottle and looked at the puddle of liquid on the floorboards.

  ‘I’m fucking homesick,’ the American said. He got to his feet with surprising agility and snatched the empty bottle from Grunwald’s hand. And then, as if berserk, as if something in his mind had suddenly broken, he lunged after the girt. Still laughing, she moved quickly away from him. She stood by the window, her hands on her hips, and when the soldier threw the bottle at her head she ducked. Grunwald expected to hear the noise of broken glass but the bottle, trapped in the curtain, dropped intact to the floor.

  ‘You’re drunk out of your mind,’ the girl said.

  The American sta
red hollowly at her for a second and then looked at Grunwald. ‘Sometimes I’d like to kill the bitch. I’d like to throttle her.’

  Grunwald asked, ‘Why?’

  The American shrugged. ‘No reason. No real reason. She just makes me feel violent sometimes. That’s all.’

  The soldier returned to the bed where he lay down. Within minutes he was snoring. The girl went towards him and, as if the earlier scene had never happened, began to stroke his hair. Grunwald looked from the window into the street. Everything, even now, fell into patterns of random violence. It made no sense. But then nothing did. The great war should have seen an end to violence.

  He watched the figures that moved in the street below. A couple of military policemen had stopped a soldier and were asking to see his papers. Everyone, in uniform or out, had to have papers. Without them, you might just as well be dead.

  He was walking up the Neuhauserstrasse again with the sun killing him. Martha and the boy. Martha and the boy. A couple of SS men were walking in his direction. Involuntarily he moved into the doorway of a shop and pretended to be looking at something in the window. He emerged again only after they had gone past.

  Later in the evening, when Herr Kramer called, Grunwald had at last accepted a simple fact: in the Third Reich certain people were no longer human beings. They had no rights. Their fates depended on nothing more substantial than the casual whims of an insane regime.

  Herr Kramer took off his spectacles and polished them as was his habit on the cuff of his shirt. He said, ‘Maybe you would like a glass of wine. A cognac’

  Grunwald moved his hands in a tired fashion. ‘I don’t feel like anything, thank you.’

  Restlessly he rose and walked up and down the room.

  Herr Kramer said, ‘I feel a great sense of doom, Leonhard. And I am afraid for all of us.’

  Grunwald began to search for his cigarettes. Anything, anything at all, that would prevent him from having to listen to Kramer. But Kramer continued, his voice rising and dropping with predictable regularity.

  ‘We could argue that these times will pass. But what sort of argument would that be? It’s like saying that some day in the distant future the sun will no longer rise. No, Leonhard. I think we are doomed. Everything we have seen happening, and everything that I fear is going to happen, only adds weight to what I already feel.’ He began to tap his fingers on the arms of the leather chair. He was silent a moment. ‘We are already dead.’

  Grunwald looked at him. The late evening sun touched the bare flesh of his scalp, suddenly and comically seeming to transform him into a visionary. Herr Kramer had nothing more to say. Soon he would return to his apartment and sit there pontificating to himself, meditating the wild injustice of everything even when his door was being hammered down.

  Grunwald said, ‘Why did they take Martha and the boy?’

  Herr Kramer shrugged: ‘I am not a psychiatrist, Leonhard. You have my deepest and sincerest sympathies and my heartfelt hope that they will be returned to you. But you cannot expect me, a simple schoolmaster – forcibly retired – to understand the labyrinthine workings of the National Socialist mind.’

  Later, when Herr Kramer had gone out into the night, Grunwald opened a bottle of cognac and drank himself into a hollow state of oblivion. He crawled into his empty bed and slept immediately, dreamlessly.

  It was almost dark. Grunwald woke with a headache. The room was silent except for the sound of someone breathing. The candle, now almost burnt down, gave out a spluttering flame. He looked around. The girl, Ursula, was sitting upright on the bed, staring at him. The American had gone.

  ‘Jake had to leave. He was due back at his base hours ago.’ She lit a cigarette from the candle. ‘He insisted that you stay here until morning. If you want to stay, that is, I don’t care either way. If Jake hadn’t specially asked, I would have thrown you out.’

  Grunwald shivered and drew his coat around him. He could barely see the girl now because the light from the candle was dying rapidly. The room appeared to shrink. He felt too tired to leave and begin the search for somewhere to sleep.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ he said.

  ‘That’s up to you. You’ll have to sleep between the chairs. Or on the floor.’ She started to take off her clothes. She crossed her arms over her breasts, a gesture of curious modesty, and pulled the blanket towards her body. Grunwald watched her for a time, aware of the way her eyes seemed to burn against him.

  She was silent for a minute. And then she asked, ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’

  Grunwald shook his head.

  ‘You want to sleep with me, don’t you? You want to get in beside me. Don’t you?’ She crushed her cigarette out on the floor. ‘When did you last have a woman?’

  Grunwald said nothing.

  ‘The way you looked at me before. I could tell what was in your mind. I knew what you were thinking.’

  Grunwald said, ‘You’re wrong. You’re quite wrong.’ He lay on the floor, his coat drawn tightly around him.

  ‘You don’t even understand your own motives, do you? You want to fuck me.’

  He turned on his side. The sudden pain in his head was like a burning needle.

  She said, ‘I only want you to know that I couldn’t stand you near me. I couldn’t bear to let you touch me. I’d die before I’d let you come within an inch of me.’

  Grunwald sat up. ‘Why? I don’t understand why.’

  She was silent for a long time. The candle was finally dead. The darkness around him was hostile and indifferent. They had done their job well, the propagandists and the teachers of the Third Reich. They had proclaimed a new biological order in which certain species were unfit to survive; they had created a new order of vermin. It didn’t sadden him now to realize this, or to remember. It angered him.

  The girl, as if quoting from the scriptures, said, ‘The Jew is not a human being. He is a symbol of putrefaction.’

  Grunwald closed his eyes. The girl’s last statement, like a relentless echo, rebounded again and again through his brain.

  4

  He was alone in the room. Even though the curtains still covered the windows he was aware of a fine light filtering through. It was early morning. From the street below came a variety of sounds: someone was revving up an engine and a radio was playing a song in a foreign language he couldn’t recognize. When he sat up he saw that the girl’s bed was empty. Rising, he moved towards the bed as if he wanted to be certain that she wasn’t there. The blanket was twisted untidily. On the floor lay an empty pack of American cigarettes. A tattered pair of stockings hung from the mantelpiece: they were damp, dripping slightly, and had been placed there to dry. He touched them. And then he withdrew his hand. He went to the window and pulled a curtain back. Outside, the morning was bleak and grey and touched by the approach of winter.

  The light that fell into the room revealed things he had not noticed before. There was a framed photograph on the wall: the girl Ursula, aged perhaps about eight, smiling into the camera. Her fair hair was coiled on the top of her head. A front tooth was missing. A child of the Reich, he thought: what had they done to her? Beneath the snapshot, pinned to the wall with a rusty tack, hung one of those lapel badges people used to wear, depicting a swastika on a strip of black cloth. Grunwald put out his hand to it and ran his finger down the length of the cloth like a blind man feeling for an unfamiliar object. And then he ripped it from the tack and crumpled it between his fingers. It dropped from his hand to the floor and lay there, unrecognizable and black, a dead insect.

  In a cupboard he found some biscuits which he ate slowly. They were dry and stale and tasteless. When he had finished them he wondered about the girl. Where was she? If she never left the apartment, as the American had said, why had she suddenly chosen to leave it now? He took one of her cigarettes and lit it, coughing badly: it was a habit he had given up years ago. It must have been in 1940 when he had last smoked a cigarette. After 1940 there hadn’t been much opportunity to continue
the habit and little emotional energy to suffer the symptoms of withdrawal. Now, smoking for the first time in so many years, he wondered where the girl had got to.

  He was taken, as were so many others, in the summer of 1940. It seemed an absurd exercise, a day’s outing at the expense of Reichsführer Himmler, a trip to a holiday camp in some remote part of the countryside. But there was a distinct absence of gaiety about those who were pushed into the trains and the trucks; and as those SS men who were supervising the whole operation began to detect this attitude of insolent ingratitude amongst the travellers, so their acts of brutality seemed to increase. A young man of about eighteen had his face split open with the butt of a revolver. A girl of fourteen, in an old school uniform was dragged into a siding and silenced behind a row of rotten, derelict railway trucks. And so these savageries had continued as the train moved towards Mauthausen; and Grunwald could only think how extraordinary it was that he had never visited Austria before and how stupid that his first visit should be under such restrictive circumstances.

  Someone said to Grunwald, ‘They tell us nothing. They haven’t said where they’re taking us.’

  ‘A pleasant Austrian resort, I believe,’ Grunwald said – wondering why he felt such an intense sense of freedom. Packed amongst a hundred other prisoners, how was it possible to feel like this? He could only suppose that it was because the thing he had long expected was at last actually happening. Until then, he had been imprisoned by his own dread, by his own fear of the unknown. Now, at least, he knew where he was being taken.

  Finishing the cigarette, Grunwald decided that it was time to leave. It hardly mattered if he saw the girl again or not. It was pointless to wait in her apartment; what was he waiting for anyway? He had a last look round and then went to the door. Outside, he stopped on the landing. The building was silent. Above him there was a great gash in the roof where the masonry had collapsed. He made his way between the ruined items of furniture that cluttered the stairs and he began to walk down. Somewhere, perhaps in the street, a radio was playing American dance-band music. On the landing below he found the girl.