“Finally,” Barlach said. “There you are, Gulliver,” and he turned on his night lamp.
In the room, with the red glow of the lamp upon him, stood a gigantic Jew in an old, spotty, and torn caftan.
The old man lay back in his pillows with his hands behind his head. “I half expected a visit from you tonight. And I could imagine you’d make a good cat burglar, too,” he said.
“You are my friend,” the intruder replied, “so I came.” His head was bald and powerful, his hands were refined, but everything was covered with horrible scars, bearing witness to some inhuman abuse, yet nothing had succeeded in destroying the majesty of this face and this man. The giant stood motionless in the middle of the room, slightly bent, his hands on his thighs. His shadow hovered, ghostlike, on the wall and the curtains, his diamond-clear, lashless eyes gazed on the old man with imperturbable clarity.
“How could you know of my need to be present in Bern?” The words came from a mangled, almost lipless mouth, in an awkward, overly anxious manner of talking, as of one who moves in too many languages and now can’t easily find his way in German; but his speech was without accent. “Gulliver leaves no trace,” he said after a brief silence. “I work invisibly.”
“Everyone leaves a trace,” the inspector replied. “Yours is this, I might as well tell you: When you’re in Bern, Feitelbach, who hides you, puts an advertisement in the Gazette saying that he is selling old books and stamps. I conclude that at such times Feitelbach has some money.”
The Jew laughed. “The great art of Commissar Barlach consists in discovering the obvious.”
“Now you know your trace,” said the old man. “There is nothing worse than a criminologist who spills his secrets.”
“I’ll leave my trace for Commissar Barlach. Feitelbach is a poor Jew. He will never learn how to make money.”
With these words the mighty ghost sat down by the old man’s bed. He reached into his caftan and pulled out a large dusty bottle and two small glasses. “Vodka,” said the giant. “Let us drink together, Inspector. We have always drunk together.”
Barlach sniffed the glass. He liked an occasional schnapps, but he had a bad conscience, for he knew that Dr. Hungertobel would be shocked if he saw all this: the liquor, the Jew, and the time of night, when decent patients should be asleep. He’d have a regular fit: You call this being sick?
“Where’s the vodka from?” he asked after taking the first sip. “My, it’s good.”
“From Russia,” Gulliver laughed. “I got it from the Soviets.”
“Have you been back in Russia?”
“It’s my job, Commissar.”
“Inspector,” Barlach corrected him. “We don’t have commissars in Bern. Don’t tell me you wore that awful caftan in the Soviet paradise. Did you ever take it off?”
“I am a Jew and I wear my caftan—I made a vow. This is the national costume of my poor people, and I love it.”
“Give me another vodka,” Barlach said.
The Jew filled the two glasses.
“I hope climbing the wall wasn’t too much for you,” Barlach said, frowning. “That’s another breach of the law, you know.”
“Gulliver can’t afford to be seen,” the Jew replied.
“But it’s dark around eight, and I’m sure they would have let you in for a visit. There are no police here.”
“Then I can just as well climb the wall,” the giant replied, laughing. “A child could have done it, Commissar. Up the rainspout and along a ledge.”
“It’s a good thing I’m going into retirement.” Barlach shook his head. “I won’t have something like you on my conscience any longer. I should have had you locked up years ago. What a catch! I would have been applauded all over Europe.”
“You won’t do it because you know what I’m fighting for,” the Jew replied impassively.
“You could at least get yourself some sort of papers,” the old man suggested. “I personally don’t care much for that sort of thing, but for God’s sake, there has to be some kind of order.”
“I am dead,” said the Jew. “The Nazis shot me.”
Barlach was silent. He knew what the giant was referring to. The light of the lamp encircled the men with a calm glow. Somewhere a bell struck midnight. The Jew refilled the glasses. His eyes gleamed with a strange kind of gaiety.
“When our friends from the SS accidentally left me lying in some miserable lime pit among fifty men of my poor race whom they had shot on a beautiful day in May forty-five—I particularly remember a little white cloud—and when, hours later, covered with blood, I was able to crawl into a lilac bush that was blooming nearby, so that the troops who shoveled the whole thing under overlooked me, I swore that from that moment on I would lead the existence of an abused and defiled animal, since in this century it appears to have been God’s pleasure to have so many of us live like beasts. From then on I lived only in the darkness of graves, staying in cellars and places like that. Only the night has seen my face, and only the stars and the moon have shone on this pitifully torn and tattered caftan. And that’s as it should be. The Germans killed me, I saw my death certificate, it came through the Reichspost to my former Aryan wife—she’s dead now, that too is as it should be, it was all very correctly filled out, a tribute to the good schools where this nation is raised in the spirit of civilization. Dead is dead, whether you’re a Jew or a Christian, forgive the sequence, Commissar. For a dead man there are no papers, you have to admit that, and no borders either. He comes to every country where there are still persecuted and martyred Jews. Prosit, Inspector, I drink to our health!”
The two men emptied their glasses; the man in the caftan poured new vodka and said, his eyes tightening into two sparkling slits, “What do you want of me, Commissar Barlach?”
“Inspector,” the old man corrected him.
“Commissar,” maintained the Jew.
“I need some information,” Barlach said.
“Information is good,” laughed the giant. “It is worth its weight in gold, if it’s solid. Gulliver knows more than the police.”
“We’ll see. You were in all the concentration camps, you mentioned that once. Though you don’t talk much about yourself,” Barlach said.
The Jew filled the glasses. “There was a time when I was considered so extremely important that they dragged me from one hell to the next, and there were more than the nine of which Dante sings, who himself was in none. From each one I have brought some hefty scars to this postmortem life that I lead.” He stretched out his left hand. It was crippled.
“Maybe you know an SS doctor named Nehle?” the old man asked intently.
The Jew looked thoughtfully at the inspector for a while. “You mean the one from the camp at Stutthof?” he asked then.
“That one,” Barlach replied.
The giant gave the old man a quizzical look. “He took his own life in a fleabag hotel in Hamburg on the tenth of August, nineteen forty-five,” he said after a while.
“Like hell he knows more than the police,” Barlach thought, a little disappointed, and he said, “Was there ever a moment in your career—or whatever one should call it—when you came face to face with Nehle?”
Again the ragged Jew gave the inspector a searching look, and his scar-covered face twisted into a grimace. “Why are you asking me about this perverted beast?” he replied.
Barlach considered telling the Jew about his suspicion, but then he decided not to mention Emmenberger.
“I saw his picture,” he said, “and it interests me to know what became of a man like that. I am a sick man, Gulliver, and I’ll be lying here for quite a while, you can’t keep on reading Molière, sooner or later you start following your own thoughts. So I end up wondering what sort of man he might be, this mass murderer.”
“All human beings are the same. Nehle was a human being. So Nehle was like all human beings. It’s a nasty syllogism, but it’s a truth we can’t alter,” the giant replied, keeping his eyes fi
xed on Barlach. Nothing in his powerful face betrayed his thoughts.
“I assume you saw Nehle’s picture in Life, Commissar,” the Jew continued. “It is the only picture that exists of him. They searched all over this beautiful world, but that was the only one they found. Which is embarrassing, because on that famous picture there’s not much you can see of the legendary torturer.”
“So there’s just one picture,” Barlach said thoughtfully. “How is that possible?”
“The devil cares better for the elect of his congregation than Heaven does for the saved—he arranged for propitious circumstances,” the Jew replied sarcastically. “Nehle’s name is not listed in the SS membership files that are kept in Nürnberg these days for the uses of crime-fighters, and it’s not listed anywhere else either; he probably wasn’t in the SS. The official camp reports from Stutthof to the SS Headquarters never mention his name. It’s left out of the personnel registers too. There is something about this man, who has countless victims on his quiet conscience, something legendary and illegal, as if even the Nazis were ashamed of what he did. And yet Nehle lived, and no one ever doubted his existence, not even the most hardboiled atheists; for we all believe readily in a god who contrives the most fiendish tortures. That’s why in other camps that were no better than Stutthof, we always talked about him, even though that talk was more like a rumor about one of the most evil and pitiless angels in this paradise of judges and hangmen. And that talk continued even after the fog started to clear. There was no one left from Stutthof whom we could have asked. Stutthof is near Danzig. The few inmates who survived the tortures were mowed down by the SS when the Russians came, and the Russians meted out justice to the guards and hanged them. But Nehle was not among them, Commissar. He must have left the camp earlier.”
“But there was a warrant out for him,” Barlach said.
The Jew laughed. “For him and a million others, Barlach! The whole German population had turned into a criminal affair. But no one would have remembered Nehle, because no one would have been able to remember him, his crimes would have remained unknown, if at the end of the war Life hadn’t published this picture you’ve seen, the picture of a skillful and masterly operation with just one little flaw, that it was performed without anesthesia. Humanity felt an obligatory indignation, and so a search began. Otherwise Nehle could have retired into private life, unmolested, and transformed himself into a harmless country doctor or the head of some highly expensive spa.”
“How did Life get that picture?” the old man asked innocently.
“The simplest thing in the world,” the giant answered calmly. “I gave it to them!”
Barlach shot up to a sitting position and stared, astonished, into the Jew’s face. Gulliver knows more than the police after all, he thought, dismayed. This tattered giant, to whom countless Jews owed their lives, himself led an existence in which the most monstrous crimes and vices were threaded together. A judge with his own laws sat before Barlach, a man who acquitted and condemned according to his own discretion, independent of the criminal codes and jurisdictions of the glorious fatherlands of this earth.
“Let us drink vodka,” said the Jew, “a stiff drink is always a help. You have to believe in that, otherwise you’ll lose every last sweet illusion on this godforsaken planet.”
And he filled the glasses and shouted, “Long live man!” Then he poured down the glass and said, “But how? That is often difficult.”
“Don’t shout like that,” the inspector said, “you’ll alarm the night nurse. This is a well-run hospital.”
“Christianity, Christianity,” said the Jew. “It produced good nurses and some equally competent murderers.”
For a moment the old man thought this was enough vodka for an evening, but then he had himself another drink.
For a moment, as the room spun around, Gulliver reminded him of a huge bat. Then the room settled back into a slightly tilted, but reasonably stable, position.
“You knew Nehle,” Barlach said.
“I had occasional dealings with him,” the giant replied, still occupied with his vodka. Then he began to talk again, but no longer with his former cold, clear voice, but in a strangely singing tone that intensified with inflections of irony or sarcasm, but that also softened at other moments, as if muted. And Barlach understood that everything in this man’s speech, including the wildness and the mockery, was just an expression of an immense sorrow over the incomprehensible fall of a once beautiful world created by God. And so this gigantic Ahasuerus sat at midnight next to the old inspector, who lay in his bed close to death listening to the words of this man of sorrows whom the history of our age had shaped into a gloomy, terrifying angel of death.
“It was in December of forty-four,” Gulliver reported in his singsong voice, his pain spreading out on the sea of his drunkenness like a dark sheet of oil, “and still in January of the following year, when the glassy sun of hope was just rising far away on the horizons of Stalingrad and Africa. And yet those months were accursed, Commissar, and for the first time I swore by all our venerable sages and their gray beards that I would not survive. And yet I did survive, thanks to Nehle, about whose life you are so eager to learn. Of this devotee of the medical arts I can tell you that he saved my life by pushing me down into the bottom-most pit of hell and then pulling me up by the hair again, a method that, to my knowledge, only one person survived, namely yours truly, whose curse it is to survive anything; and in the tremendous overflow of my gratitude, I did not hesitate to betray him by taking his picture. In this upside down world there are good deeds that can only be repaid with villainies.”
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” said the inspector, who wasn’t sure how much of what he was hearing had to be attributed to the effects of vodka.
The giant laughed and drew a second bottle out of his caftan. “Forgive me,” he said, “I’m making long sentences, but my torments were longer. What I’m trying to say is simple: Nehle operated on me. Without anesthesia. I was the recipient of this extraordinary honor. Forgive me again, Commissar, but I have to drink vodka and drink it like water when I think back on that, because it was awful.”
“Damn,” Barlach exclaimed, and then again into the silence of the hospital, “Damn.” He had raised himself up to a half-sitting position. Mechanically he held out his empty glass to the monster by his bedside.
“All it takes to hear this story is a little nerve; less nerve than it did to live through it,” continued the Jew in his old musty caftan in a singing tone. “It’s time to forget all these things, they say, and not just in Germany; there’s cruelty in Russia too, and there are sadists everywhere; but I don’t want to forget anything, and not just because I am a Jew—six million of my people the Germans killed, six million!—no, it’s because I am still a human being, even though I live in basements and cellars with the rats! I refuse to make a distinction between peoples, I refuse to speak of good and bad nations; but I do have to make one distinction between human beings, this was beaten into me, and from the first blow that cut into my flesh I distinguished between the torturers and the tortured. I don’t deduct the new cruelties of other guards in other countries from the bill I present to the Nazis, I add them to it. I take the liberty of not distinguishing among those who torture. They all have the same eyes. If there is a God, Commissar, and my desecrated heart hopes for nothing more, then there are no nations in his sight, but only human beings, and he will judge each one by the measure of his crime and the measure of his justice. Christian, Christian, listen to the tale of a Jew whose people crucified your savior and who was then nailed to the cross with his people by the Christians: There I lay in the agony of my flesh and my soul in the concentration camp of Stutthof, in a death camp, as they are called, near the venerable city of Danzig, for whose sake this criminal war was unleashed, and there, radical measures were taken. Jehovah was far away, preoccupied with other worlds, or maybe some theological problem was claiming his sublime intelligen
ce, in any case his people were enthusiastically hounded to death, gassed or shot, depending on the mood of the SS, or on the weather: the east wind meant hangings, and the west wind meant now was the time to set dogs on Judah. And so we had this Dr. Nehle, whose fate you are so eager to know, a man of the civilized world. He was one of those camp doctors that proliferated like tumors in every camp: blowflies devoted to mass murder with scientific zeal, who injected prisoners by the hundreds with air, phenol, carbolic acid, and whatever else was available between heaven and earth for this infernal entertainment, or who, if the need arose, performed their experiments on human beings without anesthesia—a necessity, they said, because their fat Reichsmarschall had forbidden vivisection of animals. So Nehle was not alone. And now I shall have to speak of him. In the course of my travels through the various camps I took a close look at the torturers, and you might say I know the type. Nehle excelled in his field in many ways. He did not participate in the cruelties the others indulged in. I have to admit that he helped the prisoners as far as possible, and to the extent that such help could serve any purpose in a camp that was designed to destroy everyone. He was a monster in a completely different sense than the other doctors, Commissar. His experiments were not outstandingly cruel in the way of physical torture; there were others under whose care Jews died of pain, and not of their medical art. His devilry was that he did all this with the consent of his victims. Improbable as it may be, Nehle only operated on Jews who volunteered, who knew exactly what awaited them, who even, this was his condition, had to watch operations to see the full horror of the torture before they could give their consent to suffer through the same thing.”
“How was this possible?” Barlach asked breathlessly.
“Hope,” laughed the giant, and his chest rose and fell. “Hope, Christian.” His eyes sparkled with an inscrutable, wild depth, like an animal’s, the scars on his face stood out, his hands lay like huge paws on Barlach’s blanket, his mangled mouth greedily sucked new quantities of vodka into his brutalized body and moaned with a world-weary sorrow. “Faith, hope, and charity, these three, as it says so beautifully in Corinthians, thirteen. But hope is the toughest of them all, that’s written right into this Jew’s flesh with red letters. Faith and charity, they went to the devil in Stutthof, but hope, hope remained, and with it you went to the devil. Hope, hope! Nehle had hope in his pocket, all fit and ready, and he offered it to anyone who wanted it, and there were many who did. It’s not to be believed, Commissar, but hundreds allowed them- selves to be operated by Nehle without anesthesia after standing by, shivering and pale as death, as their predecessor screamed out his life on the operation table, and while they could still say no, all for the mere hope of acquiring the freedom Nehle promised. Freedom! How great must be man’s love of freedom, that he should willingly suffer anything for it, even the flaming depths of hell in Stutthof, just to embrace that pitiful bastard freedom offered him there. Sometimes freedom is a whore, sometimes a saint, she’s different for each person, one thing for a worker and another for a priest, another yet for a banker, and different again for a poor Jew in a death camp like Auschwitz, Lublin, Maidanek, Natzweiler, and Stutthof: There, freedom was everything that was outside that camp, but not God’s beautiful world, oh no, in our bound- less modesty all we hoped for was to be transferred back to so pleasant a place as Buchenwald or Dachau, which now looked like golden freedom itself, a camp where you didn’t run the danger of being gassed but just of being beaten to death, where you had a thousandth of a thousandth particle of hope to be saved by some improbable accident, as against the absolute certainty of death in the extermination camps. My God, Commissar, let us fight for a world where freedom means the same for everyone, where no one has to be ashamed of his freedom! It’s laughable: the hope of getting into another concentration camp drove masses of people, or let’s say large numbers of them, onto Nehle’s flaying bench; it is laughable” (and here the Jew actually broke out into a laugh of derision, rage, and despair) “and I, too, Christian, I, too, lay down on the bloody trestle, saw Nehle’s knives and pliers move shadowlike in the spotlight above me, and then sank down into the infinite gradations of agony, those brilliant rooms where we see ourselves mirrored in endless revelations of pain! I, too, went to him in the hope of escaping this camp after all, this place cursed by God. Because, you see, this marvelous psychologist Nehle had proven himself helpful and reliable in other respects, so we believed him on this score, that’s how people are, we always believe in a miracle when the need is greatest. Verily, verily, he kept his word! When I, the only one, survived a senseless stomach resection, he had me nursed to health and sent back to Buchenwald. That was in the first days of February. However, I never reached Buchenwald, because after endless transports, there came that beautiful May day near the town of Eisleben, when I ended up hiding inside a blooming lilac bush. These are the deeds of the far-traveled man sitting before you at your bed, Commissar, his sufferings and navigations through the bloody oceans of absurdity of this age. And still the wreck of my body and soul is being swept along through the whirls of our time, which are swallowing millions and millions into their depths, guilty and innocent alike. But now the second bottle of vodka is empty, and Ahasuerus must take the highway along the ledge and down the rainspout and back to the damp cellar in Feitelbach’s house.”
The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion Page 3
