Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  He moved through the trees slowly, the revolver levelled in his hand. The Jew was around somewhere: like an habitual hunter, he knew instinctively – as if he could read signs into every infinitesimal movement created by the night – that the object of his search was nearby. The Jew was close at hand, about to die his necessary death.

  Grunwald froze against the tree. He heard the sound a second time. Someone was moving towards him. He had been holding his breath so long that he felt as if the cage of his ribs was about to crack. He put out his hand like someone trying to map the geography of a darkened room. He thought of his own death, which he felt was very near, drawing nearer with every sound that he heard. The thought scared him, and yet he wondered why it should: you feared only the unknown and death, by now, wore the mask of a habitual visitor.

  Turning round, he moved silently away from the tree. Slipping, he fell forward into the grass. It seemed to him that he had created a noise that could have been heard a mile off. He lay quietly with his face pressed to the ground.

  ‘Grunwald!’

  Schwarzenbach heard his own voice vanish among the trees. He paused a moment and listened.

  ‘Grunwald!’ He called the name a second time.

  Grunwald crept up the slope. He clutched the icy grass as if it were a rope supporting him on his climb up a treacherous mountain. He heard his own name echo around him in the darkness like the blank and fading after-sound of gunfire. He reached the top of the slope and wanted suddenly to be sick. The muscles of his throat tightened. Why didn’t he stop running? Why wasn’t it simple just to get to his feet, stand up, and offer himself as a target? But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t do it. The urge became stronger. It became more difficult to resist. He wanted to stand up. He wanted to get to his feet. It was as if he were standing at a great height and looking down, contemplating the dizzy possibility of throwing himself over.

  ‘Grunwald!’

  Schwarzenbach’s voice came through the trees like the sound of a night bird beating its wings in panic. He lay perfectly still while wave after wave of nausea surged through him.

  The revolver. The revolver. He imagined pressing it against Grunwald’s brain and pulling the trigger. He imagined the mechanism of the weapon functioning cleanly in a split second and the fraction of time it would take for the bullet to be forced out of the chamber, along the barrel, and into Grunwald’s skull. He pushed forward through the shrubbery.

  Again. The feeling Grunwald was near. Something moved to his left. Clearly defined against a tree. He raised the weapon and fired twice.

  Grunwald ran across a stretch of lawn. It was a minefield: at any second he expected to be blown up. He reached a clump of bushes and stopped. Behind him he heard Schwarzenbach crossing the lawn. There was another gunshot and a faint flash of light and he heard the bullet whip into the shrubbery. Disturbed birds rose out of the trees and filled the darkness with a desperate, hawking noise.

  Branches slicing his flesh, thorns tearing at his overcoat, he pushed his way forward and ran until he had reached the other fringe of the gardens. Beyond he could see a street of derelict buildings and the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he could hide amongst the ruins. Perhaps he could find safety there. He moved through the outer fringe of bushes and reached the shattered, upturned concrete that had once been the street.

  Schwarzenbach followed him across the wrecked street and saw him make his way across the piles of rubble. He put the gun into his pocket and started to run. Ahead of him, Grunwald was stumbling across the charred remains. He could see the Jew’s shape as it dodged between broken columns and fallen beams. He followed, running into the rubble blindly, aware of the dragging weight that the revolver made in his pocket. He saw Grunwald pass through an opening in a wall: seconds later he went through it himself.

  A place. A safe place. Somewhere there would have to be a hole in which he could hide. He kept running, drawing his strength from unknown reserves of energy. The ruins around him were endless: the whole area must have been completely devastated. Charred walls, shaped illogically, were still covered with faded patterns of wallpaper. Chimneys led up to nowhere. Window-frames were empty, wood twisted. It was a landscape of utter desolation. It was a landscape that might have been conceived in a flash of lunacy: it was somehow as if it had never been built but had been left this way, half-created, abandoned, its plans forgotten in the office of the municpal architect.

  He scampered over the rubble, unaware of the fact that his ankles were bleeding from where he had collided with the sharp edges of stones. He was beyond panic and fear now. He was running – not for his life, his survival – he was running because he had become involved in some insane competition that made it necessary for him to spring across these ruins without once stumbling or falling. In blind moments he seemed to forget that he was being pursued by Schwarzenbach. In fragments of seconds he seemed to realize that survival had nothing to do with this endless race, that he was running because he was suddenly insane, deluded into thinking that if he finished this obstacle course he would be decorated with medals.

  He paused a moment to catch his breath. His lungs were burning and his heart hammering insanely. There had to be some way out, some way to win the race, the race, there had to be a finishing-tape he would break through before Schwarzenbach. He looked anxiously through the dark and then upwards at the splintered remains of a chimney.

  Clutching the harsh brick face he started to climb, forcing his fingers into crevices for holds, shuffling his feet against the flaking edges of bricks. His breath was coming in short snatches, mist frozen on the air. A way to win. A point where he could stop and claim victory. The darkness was filled now with sound. Voices? he wondered. Voices of acclaim? Was he in front?

  He stopped, hanging to the chimney like a drowning man grabbing chunks of vacant air in sheer desperation. He clung to the fragile brick, eyes shut, the light in his mind suddenly black, snuffed out like a candle in a draught. He could hang on forever. He knew he could. A matter of strength. I have great strength, reserves that the war could not touch, that the concentration camps could not violate. I can wait here, suspended above the world, forever. Dizzy, he forced his eyes open. Somewhere below he could hear Schwarzenbach.

  Schwarzenbach stopped. The Jew had disappeared. Somewhere between the last opening and the wall that lay ahead. Where was he now? Where? Seized with the impossible realization that the Jew had slipped away somewhere, he took the revolver from his coat and began to pick around the rubble as if the object of his search were something small enough to hide beneath stones. The darkness was difficult. He wished he had a torch, Meticulously he continued to probe around and then, with a feeling of desperation, he sat down. Where was Grunwald?

  He listened. He concentrated all his strength on listening, straining hard. Silence surrounded him. He felt the weight of the revolver in his hand and realized that – without the target – it was a remarkably futile instrument.

  He called Grunwald’s name, the first time quietly, almost in a whisper, the second time so noisily that the sound reverberated mockingly around him. He wished that he could see Grunwald – not to kill him immediately, not simply to thrust the weapon against the Jew’s skull and pull the trigger – but to talk to him. To converse with him. To hold a brief conversation before the event, the inevitable event, took place.

  What might they say to one another? What could they talk about now? Conditions in post-war Germany? Politics? The past? The dark of the past?

  Schwarzenbach shook his head. The silence was getting through to him, causing his mind to wander and his concentration to dissolve. Conversation! The absurdity of the prospect struck him. There was nothing to say, he realized: there was nothing.

  I can wait here until daylight, until dawn, in spite of my fingers bleeding. I can wait until the darkness vanishes and my sight returns. Until then I will not move. I will not shift an inch. I’ll hold my breath, freeze myself. Nothing can make me move now. />
  Grunwald. Grunwald!

  From a point below, from the bottom of the world. Can Elisabeth be dead? Can it be? But how? The gunshots on the darkened stairs. Willi fell first. If I remember rightly, Willi fell first.

  Grunwald!

  He looked down. How far was it through the dark? Thirty feet? Forty? His fingers were stiff and sore, his legs ached. But he could wait for as long as it was necessary.

  Schwarzenbach walked through the broken slabs of concrete. For some reason he remembered the expression on the Jew’s face on that day in 1935 in his surgery. How could that look be best described? Dumb? Numb? Unbelieving? He clenched his fist around the revolver and realized that even then, so many years ago, he had been struggling with the powerful urge to destroy the Jew. To destroy and obliterate. Had he experienced a premonition on that day? A foretaste of the future?

  He leaned against a wall, suddenly weary. When all this was over he would sleep. He would crawl into bed and close his eyes and then there would be nothing.

  He stiffened. There was a sound, a scraping sound, followed by a sharp cry.

  The fall surprised him. One minute he had been there, gripping the side of the chimney. The next he had been dropping in a shower of bricks. Why had it given way like that? Why had the cement split and the brick crumbled? It seemed almost a perversion of nature, an abortion. He fell swiftly through the dark, conscious not of the fact that he would strike the ground with some force but of the realization that his strength had finally deserted him.

  He struck the rubble and cried out in pain. Somewhere in his leg there was a sharp sensation, a razor drawn across his muscles. Yet the pain was an abstract thing, experienced by a ghost, something outside of himself. He lay for a moment flat on his face and then crawled forward towards an opening in the wall.

  Schwarzenbach groped along the wall to the source of the noise. A sense of excitement rose inside him. The revolver was smeared with perspiration from the palm of his hand and had become slippery, difficult to hold.

  ‘Grunwald.’ He called the name like someone calling in his pet cat at nightfall. He followed the wall as far as it went and then he stopped.

  ‘Grunwald.’

  There was a slight, blurred echo.

  An opening in the wall. He lowered his head and, hearing a faint noise from below, went inside. A flight of stairs led downwards.

  A cellar. The smell was terrible. It was as if something had lain trapped inside for months and was now in a state of putrefaction. He couldn’t breathe. The air that he managed to take into his lungs was stale and poisonous. The place was flooded with several inches of water on the surface of which floated a thin scum that adhered to his hands as he crawled forward. He reached the far wall and lay there, unconscious of the discomfort of his sodden clothes. Exhausted, he closed his eyes. Was he safe here? Safe from what? he wondered – as if he could no longer recall why he had been running so fast and so hard. His mind was blank and empty and all his energy had been sucked from his body. He felt that he had never existed – or that he was just about to exist for the first time. He wondered what it would feel like to be born again: would he be trapped again, destined to travel the same route that he had already come along? He opened his eyes suddenly, realizing that he had almost fallen asleep. He couldn’t sleep. He felt the water against his legs and arms and the smell seemed to crush him. When his strength returned he would get up and leave the cellar. And then?

  He thought of the house in the Schumannstrasse and it seemed very important to him that he discover what had happened to Elisabeth. She wasn’t dead: he had imagined that because he had been afraid. She had fallen because she wanted to get out of the way of Schwarzenbach’s gun. That was it. His fears were utterly irrational. Elisabeth was alive. Together they would go to Palestine after Willi was dead – Willi? What had happened to Willi? Had Willi been shot? But he couldn’t cope with both Willi and Elisabeth: his brain couldn’t emcompass them both simultaneously. She wasn’t dead. It had been foolish of him to think that. Why was he so damned tired? Why couldn’t he keep his eyes open? It was very important not to fall asleep and yet sleep was just out there, circling him in its own deep shadows.

  He splashed some of the filthy water on his face to keep himself awake. As he did so, he heard the sound on the steps.

  ‘Grunwald?’

  Schwarzenbach was up to his ankles in water. He waded forward into the cellar.

  ‘Grunwald?’

  He heard his own voice, a muffled echo.

  He raised the revolver. There was a faint splashing sound from the other side of the cellar.

  Grunwald rose slowly to his feet. The water that had seeped through his coat and shirt was cold against his skin. The fact that Schwarzenbach was in the cellar somehow didn’t scare him now: he was more frightened by the prospect of not seeing Elisabeth again. Had he come all this way to be shot in a bloody cellar by Schwarzenbach? It seemed almost pitiful. His back to the wall, he tried to move towards the steps. He stumbled against a heavy, wooden object. In surprise he cried out.

  There! Just there!

  He wheeled the gun round between his fingers and fired quickly. After the echo he heard a low moan and he moved towards it, splashing through the water.

  Grunwald felt the pain somewhere in his side. He put his fingers to the wound and when he raised his hand it was covered with blood. He undid the buttons of his coat, aware of the need to make some kind of bandage and put it over the wound. It was the most natural thing to do. Somehow he had to stop the flow of blood. And yet, as he considered this, he felt that such an action would be ridiculous. His body was broken and punctured, and therefore no longer important. He became detached from it. He was thinking of something else, a strange thought that eluded him although he pursued it through the shadows of his mind until eventually he found it: if Hugo was alive, how old would he be today? How old would the child be? He imagined that Hugo was in a refugee camp somewhere, waiting for his parents to collect him and take him home. Every night, he had kissed the child’s eyelids: it became a habit – the boy wouldn’t sleep until his father had kissed him.

  He clutched his side. Millions of miles away something was splashing through the water in his direction.

  Schwarzenbach fired the revolver again: from a distance of roughly five feet. He heard Grunwald cry out and saw him – a dim shape – slip down into the water.

  There was an ache above his heart. He felt the water circle his mouth and nostrils and the texture of the liquid so disgusted him that he pushed himself up into a sitting position. Why wasn’t he dead? He had been shot twice, perhaps more than twice, and he wasn’t even dead.

  ‘Why don’t you kill me, Doctor?’

  His own voice sounded hoarse and incomprehensible. His blood had mixed with the water: it swirled into the film of dark scum.

  Schwarzenbach cursed the gun: the mechanism had jammed. He fumbled with the chamber and rejected the last cartridge into the water. Shaking, he took the box of cartridges from his pocket and forced four of them into the empty chamber.

  ‘Why don’t you kill me, Doctor?’

  Schwarzenbach could barely make out the words. The Jew was sitting up against the wall, staring at him. For Christ’s sake, he should be dead. He should be dead by now.

  Grunwald felt the water around his fingertips and it seemed that his fingers themselves had turned to liquid: how absurd it was to be talking to the man, like two people greeting each other in a restaurant or a beerhall. After all, I have nothing to say to him. He is destroying me and I have nothing to say to him.

  Schwarzenbach slammed the chamber shut and raised the gun. Do it! Do it! His index finger circled the trigger and he hesitated. He loathed himself for the fact that he was suddenly trembling.

  It was like taking a walk through the grounds of a hospital after a long convalescence. A fresh awareness. Sunlight flaming on everything, Burning, burning. Palestine was like that. He had visited the place. He had been to Jerusale
m and stood at the Wailing Wall. He remembered how deeply the sun had burned him. Beside him a woman was walking and the landscape was yellow with wheat and the season was summer, it was summer, and the woman held an umbrella that shadowed her face darkly. Who was she? Her name was unimportant. He touched her arm and saw her mouth move into the shape of a smile and inside the smile were several shared secrets. Everything was so clean. He saw the future as clearly as if it were a detailed map laid out in front of him. They were purchasing boats. Refugee ships. Shifting all the casualties of Europe off to the Holy Land.

  He had been standing on the deck for hours now and the boat was anchored in unbelievably blue water and the deck was crammed with refugees staring at the shores of the promised land. He saw Hugo coming towards him and he clasped him in his arms. He kissed the child and then turned his face back to the shore. Suddenly a cloud went over the sunlight like a hand drawn across a candle. He felt a sense of panic. What was he doing here? Why was he lying in a cellar? Why was he surrounded by water? He had to get to his feet, away from this place, he had to shed his flesh to rid himself of this awful pain. But he couldn’t move and then realized that there wasn’t any real pain and that the flooded cellar existed somewhere else, miles away, far away from him. He was drifting through a series of old pictures, like ragged snapshots taken from the past, torn from some dilapidated family album. Holding a hand. Holding a hand. A woman’s hand. Looking into somebody’s eyes. Face shielded. Faces shimmered and changed. Little Hugo was wandering along the deck. He mustn’t get lost. Must he, Martha? Coffee and cakes in the Café Fürstenhof on the Neuhauserstrasse. A glass of Zitronenwasser in the Wintergarten. Cold beer in the Spatenbräu of the Bamberger Hof. He mustn’t get lost. Why were they smashing all that glass? Glass being shattered and fires being lit. Somewhere, somewhere at the back of everything, an awful sense of pain. And then the snapshots again. Holding somebody’s hand. Suddenly important. Holding somebody’s hand. Gänsebraten in the Schwarz, the Jewish restaurant on the Schlösserstrasse, a treat, Gänsebraten served with Spargel and followed by Erdbeeren. A treat. Someone’s hand. Suddenly very important. Martha and Hugo smiling at him across the table. The empty plates. The empty apartment. Martha’s hand reaching out towards him.