“Is there no other picture of Nehle besides the one in Life?” Hungertobel asked.
“Three pictures from the Hamburg crime squad,” the inspector replied, took the pictures from the folder, and gave them to his friend. “They show a dead man.”
“There’s not much left to recognize,” Hungertobel said after a while, disappointed. His voice was quivering. “There really may be a strong resemblance. I could even imagine Emmenberger looking like this in death. How did Nehle kill himself?”
The old man directed a thoughtful, lowering look at the doctor, who sat helplessly by his bed in his white smock and had forgotten everything, Barlach’s drunkenness and the waiting patients. “With cyanide,” the inspector finally said. “Like most Nazis.”
“In what form?”
“He bit on a capsule and swallowed it.”
“On an empty stomach?”
“That’s what they determined.”
“That works on the spot,” Hungertobel said, “and on these pictures it looks as if Nehle saw something horrible before his death.” The two men fell silent.
Finally the inspector said, “Let’s go on, even though Nehle’s death presents a puzzle; we have to investigate the other suspicious factors.”
“I don’t understand how you can speak of further suspicious factors,” Hungertobel said, at once surprised and depressed. “That’s going too far.”
“Oh no,” said Barlach. “First there’s your experience as a student. I’ll touch on it only briefly. It helps me insofar as it gives me a psychological clue as to why Emmenberger might have been capable of the acts we are forced to presume he committed if he was in Stutthof. But I’m getting to another, more important fact: I am here in possession of the curriculum vitae of the man we know by the name of Nehle. His background is dismal. He was born in 1890, so he’s three years younger than Emmenberger. He’s from Berlin. His father is unknown, his mother was a maid who left her illegitimate son with his grandparents, led a vagrant existence, eventually wound up in a house of correction, and then disappeared. The grand father worked with the Borsig Corporation. He, too, was born out of wedlock. He came to Berlin from Bavaria when he was young. The grandmother was Polish. Nehle went to public school and entered the army at fourteen, was in the infantry till he was fifteen, and was then transferred to the medical corps, upon request of a medical officer. Here an irresistible attraction to the medical profession seems to have awakened in him; he was decorated with the Iron Cross for successfully carrying out emergency operations. After the war he worked as an orderly in various mental institutions and hospitals, and studied for his high school degree in his spare time, so he could go on to medical college. But he flunked twice. He failed in Greek and Latin and in mathematics. The man seems to have had no talent for anything except medicine. Then he became a naturopath and miracle doctor with clients from every social stratum, got into conflict with the law, was punished with a rather small fine because, in the court’s opinion, his medical knowledge was ‘astonishing.’ Petitions were drafted, the newspapers defended him. In vain. Then all the hubbub subsides. Since he never gave up his illegal practices, the authorities decided to look the other way. In the thirties, Nehle doctored around in Silesia, Westphalia, Bavaria, and Hesse. Then, after twenty years, the big turning point: he passes his matriculation exams in 1938. (Emmenberger emigrated from Germany to Chile in 1937!) Nehle’s performance in mathematics and in Greek and Latin was brilliant. The university passes a decree allowing him to take the state boards without a course of study. He passes this exam as brilliantly as the previous one, and receives his doctor’s diploma. But then, to everyone’s amazement, he disappears to work as a doctor in the concentration camps.”
“My God,” said Hungertobel, “what sort of conclusion are you aiming at now?”
“Simple,” Barlach said, not without mockery. “Let’s look at these articles by Emmenberger that appeared in the Swiss Medical Weekly and were written in Chile. These, too, add up to a fact that cannot be ignored, and that we have to examine. You say these articles are scientifically remarkable. I’m willing to believe that. But what I can’t believe is that they were written by a man who had command of a distinguished literary style, as you have said of Emmenberger. It’s hard to imagine a more awkward use of language.”
“A scientific treatise is not a poem,” the doctor protested. “Kant, too, wrote in a complicated way.”
“Leave Kant out of this,” the old man grumbled. “His writing is difficult, but not bad. The author of these contributions from Chile, however, writes not just awkwardly, but ungrammatically. The man obviously didn’t know the difference between the dative and the accusative case, a fairly common problem among Berliners. It’s peculiar, too, that he often confuses Greek and Latin, as if he didn’t know a thing about either language; for instance, in number fifteen from the year forty-two, the word gastrolysis.”
There was deadly silence in the room.
For minutes.
Then Hungertobel lit up a “Little Rose of Sumatra.”
“In short, you believe that Nehle wrote this treatise?” he finally asked.
“I consider it probable,” the inspector calmly replied.
“I have no arguments left,” the doctor said gloomily. “You have proved the truth.”
“Let’s not exaggerate,” said the old man, closing the folder on his blanket. “All I have proved is the probability of my hypotheses. The probable is not necessarily the real. If I say it will probably rain tomorrow, it doesn’t mean it will rain. In this world, idea and reality are not identical. If they were, we’d have it a lot easier, Samuel. Between idea and reality we still have the adventure of this existence, and by God, that’s a challenge.”
“It makes no sense,” Hungertobel moaned, looking helplessly at his friend, who was lying with his hands behind his head, motionless, as usual. “You’re running a terrible risk if your speculation is right, because that would mean Emmenberger is a devil!”
“I know,” the inspector nodded.
“It doesn’t make sense,” the doctor repeated softly, almost whispering.
“Justice always makes sense,” Barlach insisted. “Arrange for me to see Emmenberger. I want to go tomorrow.”
“On New Year’s Eve?” Hungertobel sprang to his feet.
“Yes,” the old man replied, “on New Year’s eve.” And then his eyes glittered with mockery. “Did you bring Emmenberger’s treatise on astrology?”
“Certainly,” stammered the doctor.
Barlach laughed. “Then hand it over. I’m curious to see if there’s anything about my star in there. Maybe I have a chance after all.”
ANOTHER VISIT
The terrifying old man, who spent the rest of the afternoon laboriously filling a long sheet of paper with his small script and making phone calls to his bank and a notary, this sick man with the inscrutable demeanor of a stone idol, to whom the nurses came with more and more reluctance and who spun his threads with unshakable calm, like a gigantic spider, imperturbably joining one corollary to the next, received another visitor in the evening, shortly after Hungertobel had informed him that he could enter the Sonnenstein clinic on New Year’s Eve. It was hard to tell whether the short, skinny fellow with the long neck had come voluntarily or whether Barlach had summoned him. The pockets of his open raincoat were stuffed with newspapers. More newspapers were stuck in the pockets of the torn gray clothes he wore under his coat. A lemon-colored spotty silk scarf was wound around his dirty neck, a beret clung to his bald head. His eyes sparkled under bushy brows, the strong hooked nose seemed too large for this dwarfish man, and the mouth underneath was pathetically sunken, for he had lost his teeth. He was talking to himself, in verse, it seemed, and in between, separate words appeared like islands in the drift, such as “trolley bus … traffic police …”—things he seemed to find boundlessly annoying. He was swinging and shaking a cane in a wild and erratic fashion. This cane was quite out of keeping with his shabb
y clothes: it was elegant, if old-fashioned, with a silver handle, obviously made in another century. At the main entrance he collided with a nurse, bowed, stammered an effusive apology, wandered off into the maternity ward and got hopelessly lost there, nearly burst into the delivery room, which was bustling with activity, was chased away by a doctor, stumbled over one of the vases full of carnations that stand in front of all the doors there. Finally he was led into the new hospital wing (after being captured like a frightened animal), but just before he stepped into the old man’s room, his cane got between his legs and he slid down half the corridor and slammed against a door behind which an extremely ill man was lying.
“These traffic policemen!” the visitor exclaimed when he finally stood in front of Barlach’s bed. (Praise the Lord! thought the student nurse who had accompanied him.) “Wherever you look, they’re standing around. A whole city full of traffic police!”
For safety’s sake, the inspector took up his excited visitor’s topic. “True, Fortschig, but there is a need for traffic police. There has to be order in the flow of traffic, otherwise there’ll be even more deaths than we already have.”
“Order in the flow of traffic!” Fortschig cried with his squeaky voice. “Great. I’m all for it. But for this you don’t need a special police force, what you need is more faith in the decency of people. The whole city of Bern has been turned into one big encampment for the traffic police, it’s no wonder everyone using the streets is going crazy. But that’s what Bern has always been, a nice little hole in the wall for policemen to nest in. This place has been one infestation of tyranny from the beginning. Lessing already wanted to write a tragedy about Bern when he heard of Henzi’s miserable death. A pity he didn’t write it! Fifty years I’ve been living in this fat sleepy hick town of a capital, I can’t begin to tell you what it means for a writer, a man of words (not of letters!), to starve and vegetate in this place where all you get for mental food is the weekend book review section in the Bund. It’s awful, really awful! For fifty years I’ve been closing my eyes as I walk through Bern, I was already doing that in my stroller. I didn’t want to see this wretched town where my father was going to the dogs as some useless adjunct, and now that I open my eyes, what do I see? Traffic policemen, wherever I look.”
“Fortschig,” the old man said energetically, “we’re not here to talk about the traffic police,” and he fixed a stern gaze on the squalid, moldy little man who had sat down on a chair and was swaying to and fro with huge owl eyes, shaken by misery.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” the old man continued. “Damn it, Fortschig, you’ve got brains, you used to be a hell of a guy, and the Apfelschuss you published was a good newspaper, even though it was small; but now you’re filling it with all sorts of indifferent stuff like traffic police, trolley buses, dogs, stamp collectors, ballpoint pens, radio programs, theater gossip, tram tickets, movie ads, councilmen, and card games. The energy and the pathos with which you go tilting at these things—each time like a scene from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell—is worthy of better causes, God knows.”
“Inspector!” the visitor squawked. “Inspector! Beware of the sin of offending against a poet, a writer who has the infinite bad luck of having to live in Switzerland and, what is ten times worse, to live off Switzerland.”
“Now, now,” Barlach tried to appease him, but Fortschig became wilder and wilder.
“Now, now!” he screamed and leaped up from his chair, ran to the window, from there to the door and back again, to and fro, like a pendulum. “Now, now, that’s easy to say. But what does it excuse? Nothing! By God, nothing! All right, I’ve become a ridiculous figure, almost like one of our Habakuks, Theobalds, Eustaches and Moustaches, or whatever they call themselves, whose adventures with collar buttons, wives, and razor blades fill the columns of our dear boring dailies—in the entertainment section, to be sure; but tell me someone who hasn’t sunk to that level in this country, where poets still muse about the stirrings of the soul while the world all around us comes down with a crash! Inspector, Inspector, you have no idea what it’s taken out of me, just trying to make a decent living with my typewriter. I earn less than your average villager on the dole. I’ve had to give up one project after another, one hope after another, the best plays, the most fiery poems, the most sublime stories! Houses of cards, that’s all it amounted to, houses of cards! Switzerland turned me into a fool, a space cadet, a Don Quixote who fights against windmills and herds of sheep. You’re supposed to stand up for freedom and justice and all those other nice little items the fatherland puts up for sale, and show proper respect to a society that forces you to live like a bum and a beggar if you dedicate yourself to the mind instead of to business. These people want to enjoy life, but refuse to share the tiniest fraction of this pleasure, not a crumb and not a penny, and just as, in the Thousand Year Reich, they’d cock their revolvers the moment they heard the word culture, here they tuck away their wallets.”
“Fortschig,” Barlach said sternly, “I’m glad you’re bringing up Don Quixote, because that’s a favorite subject of mine. Every one of us would be a Don Quixote, if he had his heart in the right place and just a grain of common sense in his head. But we’re not up against windmills, my friend, like that shabby old knight in his tin suit of armor, we have dangerous giants to contend with, monsters of brutality and cunning, and sometimes genuine dinosaurs, the kind who have always had brains like sparrows: these creatures exist, not in fairy tales or in our imagination, but in reality. And that is our job, to fight inhumanity in all its forms and under any circumstances. But it’s important how we fight, and that we do it with some intelligence. Fighting evil should not be like playing with fire. But that is what you are doing, Fortschig, playing with fire, because you are waging the good fight foolishly, like a fireman who squirts oil at the flames instead of water. Anyone reading the magazine you publish, this pitiful little paper, and taking it at its word, would have to conclude that all of Switzerland should be abolished. I know very well this country’s not perfect—to put it very mildly!—and frankly it’s turned my hair gray; but then to throw everything into the fire, as if we were living in Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s not right, and it’s not good manners either. You almost act as if you’re ashamed of still loving this country. I don’t like that, Fortschig. No one should be ashamed of his love, and love of one’s country is still a good love—only it has to be stern and critical, otherwise it’s just idolatry. So when you find dirty spots on your fatherland, you should start sweeping and scrubbing; like Hercules when he cleaned out Augeas’ stable—of all his ten labors, that one’s my favorite; but to tear the whole house down is senseless and not very smart; because it’s hard to build a new house in this poor wounded world; it takes more than a generation to do that, and when it’s finally built, it won’t be better than the old one. What’s important is that it’s possible to tell the truth, and to fight for it without being put in a madhouse. This possibility exists in Switzerland, so let’s admit it and be thankful that we don’t have to be afraid of senators and state councillors, or whatever they’re called. True, there are more than a few who are forced to wear rags and live somewhat uncomfortably from one day to the next. That is an outrage, I won’t deny it. But a true Don Quixote is proud of his skimpy armor. The struggle against stupidity and egotism has always been difficult and costly, it has always entailed poverty and humiliation; but it is a holy struggle, and it should be fought with dignity and not with wails and lamenting. But you thunder and curse into the ears of our good Berner folk what an unjust fate you are suffering among them, and you wish for the nearest comet-tail to whip our old city to smithereens. Fortschig, Fortschig, you are subverting your fight with petty motives. You can’t talk about justice with a capital J and have an eye on your breadbasket at the same time. Stop complaining about your own misfortune and the torn pants you have to wear, give up this petty sniping at worthless things. For God’s sake, our world has bigger problems than the
traffic police.”
The scrawny little man crawled back into the armchair, pulled in his long neck and drew up his legs, the picture of misery. His beret fell behind the chair, and the lemon-yellow scarf hung sadly on his concave chest.
“Inspector,” he whined, “you are stern with me, like Moses or Isaiah with the people of Israel, and I know how right you are; but I haven’t had a hot meal in four days, I don’t even have money for cigarettes.”
“I thought you were eating at the Leibundguts,” the old man said, frowning and suddenly a little embarrassed.
“I had a fight with Mrs. Leibundgut about Goethe’s Faust,” the writer whined. “She is in favor of the second part and I am against it. So she stopped inviting me. Her husband wrote to me. He says the second part of Faust is his wife’s holy of holies, and that he can no longer do anything for me.”
Barlach felt sorry for the poor fellow. “Maybe I’ve been too tough on him,” he thought. Finally, out of sheer discomfort, he grumbled, “What the hell does the wife of the president of a chocolate company have to do with Goethe? And whom are they inviting now? That tennis teacher again?”
“Botzinger,” Fortschig replied meekly.
“Well, at least he’ll have a decent meal every three days for a couple of months,” the old man said, feeling somewhat reconciled. “A good musician. Except for his compositions. I’ve heard some godawful noises in my time, especially in Constantinople, you’d think I’d developed an ear for cacophony, but this is beyond me. But no matter. However, I’m sure he’ll end up disagreeing with the lady of the house about Beethoven’s Ninth. And then she’ll go back to the tennis teacher. They’re easier to dominate intellectually. As for you, Fortschig, I’ll recommend you to the Grollbachs, you know, the ones from the Grollbach-Kuhne clothing store; their cooking is good, a little too greasy. I think you’ll last longer there than with the Leibundguts. Grollbach is unliterary and has no interest either in Faust or in Goethe.”
The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion Page 5
