“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t lie to me, Sergeant. Don’t compound your mistake. There’s no limit to how hard I can make it for you to die.”
“What do you want?”
For a moment Christiansen seemed to have lost the power of movement. And then, as if something had just occurred to him, he shook his head and laughed—or, at least, made a sound that was something like laughter.
“Do you remember Kirstenstad, Sergeant? And you can ask me what it is I want?”
“I wasn’t there. I thought you were. . . Oh my God. you have to believe me—I wasn’t there!”
“You were there.”
Christiansen lit another cigarette and waited. He had been through it all before. Three times in the last two years he had looked into a man’s face, pronounced the name “Kirstenstad,” and been witness to the change that was like a fall from grace. And it was never simply a matter of some poor hunted wretch realizing that his time had come, that he was finally in the power of his deadliest enemy—that was a part, of course, but not the whole. It was a kind of moral terror. No one who had been at Kirstenstad that Sunday morning, who had had eyes to see what had happened there, could fail to know that he had been delivered over to the purest evil. Christiansen had learned as much as that.
“I want Colonel Hagemann, Sergeant. And you can tell me where to find him.”
“I was only his orderly—I was. . .”
“Then you would have been standing beside him that morning, wouldn’t you, Sergeant.” Christiansen’s face was without expression. Only his eyes, cold and blue, like ice in the sun, showed that he was still a man, with a man’s hatred. “You would have seen the mayor of Kirstenstad, wouldn’t you, Sergeant. He was a tall man, in late middle age, with a white moustache—quite a dignified figure, Sergeant. Surely you must remember him. As the trucks rolled up. he came out of his house to see what the disturbance was, to see what the Waffen-SS could possibly want with his little village, and your Colonel Hagemann had him shot down on his own doorstep. It was one of those heroic moments destined to live forever in the myths of the German people, Sergeant, so surely you must recall the scene.
“And perhaps you remember his wife as well, how she knelt in her husband’s blood, unable to understand what had happened, and how the Colonel, that fearless paragon, doubtless to set an example for his men, himself put a pistol to the back of her neck and pulled the trigger. Did you clean the pistol for him that night, Sergeant? Wouldn’t that have fallen within the scope of your duties?”
The muscles in Christiansen’s jaw were working rhythmically as he stared at his captive, precisely as if he had never seen such an exotic creature before. For all its calm, there had been something wild in his voice as he talked about that morning in 1942. But when he spoke again, his tone was once more empty, without inflection, almost dead.
“You soldiers of the Fifth Brigade, you killed nearly everyone In the village that day,” he went on, like a man reciting a story learned by heart. “Hardly a soul escaped. I wish I could claim that I wanted to avenge them all, but I can’t. I just want the man who murdered my parents.”
The cigarette in Christiansen’s hand had burned down almost to his fingers—he seemed to have forgotten it was there. Finally he put it out, grinding out the ember under the point of his shoe. Becker watched the whole performance with a kind of morbid fascination.
The strain was beginning to tell on him. It had been three years since Becker had worn a uniform. He had lost his soldier’s bearing, he looked faintly ridiculous standing there at attention on top of a kitchen chair. His nose was beginning to run, although he hardly seemed to notice it, and every so often, to keep from falling, he would have to catch himself as he swayed a few degrees to one side or the other. And now he was trembling—just slightly, just enough that he couldn’t keep his shoulders still.
“I can tell you how to find him,” he said finally, his voice thick, as if the noose were choking him already. His eyes cast about the room; he seemed to be looking for a way to escape. “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t owe him anything—I thought you were from him, come to clean me away. Maybe if you kill him, I can start to sleep at night”
“Then tell me where to find him.”
“Not where—I have not seen the Colonel in a long time and he keeps his movements a secret. But I can tell you how to find him.”
He forced himself to smile. His lips drew back from his teeth in a grotesque manner. They were in each other’s confidence, he seemed to be suggesting. Hagemann was the common enemy.
It was a lie, of course. There was a network that kept the survivors of the Fifth Brigade safe and solvent. There was money to procure new identities for men still hunted by the Allied War Crimes Commission, money to finance new lives—how else had “Herr Bauer” come by his tobacco shop?
But what difference did any of that make? Gerhart Becker wanted to live.
“What can you tell me. Sergeant?”
“There is a girl. . .”
His sentence trailed off as he heard Christiansen’s dry, mocking laughter.
“No—really—there is a girl I’ve heard he’s looking for. He—”
“Half the men in the world are looking for a girl, Sergeant. And you know as well as I that the Colonel’s is not precisely a romantic disposition. I’ve heard all the stories. There were probably hundreds of girls.”
But something in the way Becker kept twisting his head from side to side, as if he were trying to saw through his neck with the catgut noose, made him stop laughing.
“Go on then, if you must. Tell me about this girl.”
“She is a Jewess. She was his mistress—in the camp.”
“Waldenburg?”
“Yes. She was the General’s before that. The General gave her to him. My colonel was obsessed by her.”
“If she was at Waldenburg, she’s probably dead.”
“No.” Becker swallowed hard. He seemed to be telling the truth. He wanted to be believed. “The General made sure she got away alive. She is alive somewhere—you have only to find her and Hagemann will come to you. Even if he has to follow you into hell itself.”
“Why? What’s so special about her?”
“I don’t know.”
Egon Hagemann in love? Christiansen didn’t believe it. But he believed Becker’s story. A girl. A girl who had probably lost herself somewhere in Europe, who could be anywhere. Who could be dead, for all Becker knew.
Still, it was more than he had had that morning. He was perhaps a step or two closer to the Colonel Hagemann who had butchered his family, who had. . .
“What is her name, this girl?”
“Esther. . . Rosensaft, I think. Esther Rosensaft”
“You think?”
“That was her name. Esther Rosensaft. He called her ‘Saftag,’ though she was a little stick of a thing. It was his joke.”
“I will strip the flesh from your bones, Sergeant—a piece at a time if you lie to me.” Christiansen showed his strong white teeth in a fierce grin, although he never moved from the steamer trunk. “Nothing in the world will be as hard as your death if you don’t tell me everything you know. Believe me, Sergeant, I would enjoy making you die by inches.”
“There is nothing else!” Becker gasped and sweated and told the truth. He was just a little man after all—he wouldn’t have had the courage to lie in the extremity of his life.
“I’ve told you everything. God, don’t do it to me—please let me down. I’m no one. I never killed anyone.”
“You were there. You let it happen without a word. You helped your colonel—you’re helping him still. Don’t plead your innocence to me.” Christiansen stood up slowly, giving the impression that his legs had grown stiff from disuse. “But I won’t make it too bad for you—I won’t leave you here to linger in agony. I’ll merely carry out the sentence of the court.”
When Becker saw what was coming, his chest heaved wildly and
his neck seemed to swell as he rocked his head back and forth. He tried to speak, but at first only a strange gurgling sound came out.
“No!” he screamed—the tiny basement vibrated with the word. “No! You can’t—I thought you were from Hagemann! Hagemann was going to—”
But the words stopped with a jerk as Becker kicked his legs in the empty air. His back arched and the catgut ground against the sewer pipe as he trembled and twitched and tried to open his mouth wide enough to let in a breath.
Christiansen had pulled the chair from under him.
2
Vienna, Austria: February 24, 1948
Esther woke up with a start, followed at once, even before the first surprise had worn off, by a wormy feeling of anxiety. It was happening more and more, almost every night now. She had been dreaming about the guard.
The wooden bunks in Cell Block West were four tiers high and as narrow as coffins. A prisoner lying in her bed could hardly see two meters in any direction—one closed one’s eyes and the thought came of its own bidding: this is what it will be like in the grave.
The prison lights were never turned out, and the windows were too small and too high up to make a difference. So inside it was always the same murky gray, in which even the guards—even the guard who haunted her, who was sometimes one man and sometimes another, who was real even when she was awake—even the guards hardly seemed to cast a shadow.
It was like being dead. They were shadows themselves.
She had been inside only four months, and already Esther was quite sure she would go mad if she had to stay locked up here much longer. There wasn’t even the fear of death to remind one that there might be some value in living. There was only poor food and cold and not enough sleep—never enough sleep—and the terrible grayness of everything. It was worse than the ghetto at Lodz, where she had still had her family, or even the camps. In the camps she had been alternately pampered and terrorized. Everything a human being can lose, she had lost there—parents, innocence, belief in God, the right to think of herself as a human being. Everything except life and the will to keep it. But now she was at the end of her strength. She was no longer afraid of death. That was what made this place so terrible.
For two years and eight months, she had been free. She couldn’t face going back behind locked doors—not now, not after relearning that there was such a thing as freedom. She had been eleven when they walled up the ghetto, and then it had been five years of scratching out enough to stay alive and trying to keep from being swept into oblivion when the Germans came looking for people to work to death or shoot in batches or send to the ovens. For five years she had prayed for the war to end, but this time there would be no American soldiers in strange uniforms to hand out rice and milk and tell everyone it was safe to think of going home. No one was going to drive the Russians out.
But perhaps it was only her own wickedness that made prison so impossible to bear—it was wicked to think that anything could be worse than the camps. At Chelmno her mother and father had been gassed, and at Waldenburg there had been Hagemann.
Esther lay in her bunk, her eyes closed, waiting for the sound of footsteps. One never knew the time here except by the orders one heard—five-thirty a. m., wake up and wash; ten a.m., assemble for first meal; six p.m., assemble for second meal; sometime between eleven and midnight, go to bed. The rest was filled with roll calls, work, punishment, roll calls, interrogations, roll calls. . . It was an endless treadmill.
And always there was the guard. Sometimes he was gone for hours, even days at a time, but always he came back. Sometimes he would merely watch her—she could feel his eyes on her everywhere—and sometimes, quite suddenly, he would be beside her, talking in that low, insinuating, faintly threatening voice of his. And sometimes he was not content merely to talk. She could put up with being mauled, but of course it wouldn’t end there. He was just nerving himself up for the inevitable. She knew perfectly well where it would end.
But at least this one was no Hagemann to strip her clothes off in handfuls and shoot at her with his pistol as she tried to run away. She could still hear the smack of the bullets hitting the trees, spattering her with pieces of pitchy bark. Once he had found an abandoned quarry and she had cut and bruised her feet until she could hardly stand, but each time she stopped scrambling over the broken stone Hagemann would open fire, the bullets burying themselves in the ground between her legs or ricocheting off unpredictably. And finally, when none of that mattered anymore, when she was too exhausted even to be afraid, when she would have liked to die, she would look up and there he would be, standing over her, laughing.
“I love to see you willing to be reasonable, Esther,” he would say. And, with the pistol still in his hand, he would begin unbuttoning his trousers.
And when he was finished, and she was allowed to limp back to the camp, she would wonder why it had to be this way. Why did she have to be hunted down and shot at and frightened to the verge of madness before he would allow her to yield to him?
Nothing could be worse than that. This was like death, this prison, but death must be worse. And the discovery that one is capable of anything if only it will keep death off, that was the worst of all. The Russians could turn life into death, but nothing they would do could match the horror of what Hagemann had made of her at Waldenburg.
But now the morning was close at hand—or what passed for morning in this place. The guards would come soon. A shout and the sound of a truncheon banging against the door frame, and everyone would scramble numbly to attention in their cotton nightdresses. They would stand there like that, half awake, blinking stupidly, their feet bare against the icy floor, for perhaps three quarters of an hour while the roll was taken and retaken. It was the invariable routine of the place, its purpose unknown, it having perhaps become a purpose in itself.
If one listened, it was possible to hear the guards’ boots outside on the tile corridor. It was better to be awake and listen, so as not to be caught completely by surprise. It was horrible to be jarred out of sleep by the barking guards—it was like awakening into a nightmare.
All the guards here were men. It was a women’s prison, but the guards were men. The first officer of her cellblock was named Filatov.
Sometimes, while she stood at attention beside her bunk, Filatov would walk by, stop, take off his glove, and run his hand over her body, slipping it inside the neckline of her nightdress or along the sides of her flanks, touching her with his hard fingers in all her private places—if a prisoner could be said to have any private places. If she, Esther Rosensaft, Jewess and harlot, hadn’t lost all right to think of this body as belonging to herself.
In her dreams sometimes she would become confused and Filatov would become Hagemann, or the two would blend together. She would be standing at attention and all at once it would be Hagemann there beside her and the finger that was running over the curve of her breast would become the muzzle of a pistol. It was because of this, more than anything he had done to her himself, that she hated Filatov.
But, of course, that was ridiculous because Filatov was merely a man taking advantage of his position, and Hagemann had been something altogether different. Filatov might have a wife who was a shrew, or perhaps no wife at all. All he wanted was a little sex—and not to sacrifice his position of authority. So he threatened, in a way that was almost like pleading, and watched her, and. sometimes, took off his glove. The day would come when he would feel that he was powerful enough—or she sufficiently overawed—to claim more, but for the moment he was content merely to slip his hand inside her dress.
It was best not to look at him, not to smile, but to stand quietly like a shadow, not to resist or yield, and finally he would lose interest and pass by. She had not been raped yet—it happened sometimes here, so she had been told, but so far not to her. She had been here four months, and she had not been raped. If she ever was, she would not resist—it was pointless to resist. She would not weep or even cry out. She would kee
p the rage inside, where it would not show. She would hate Filatov in the privacy of her heart, and for the rest pretend she was made of marble. It was easier that way, as she had learned from the Germans.
But four months were four months, and still Filatov had not summoned up the slight courage it would require to do as he liked. So perhaps the Russians were better than the Germans.
But it was better to let them do as they wished—no matter what it was—better than to starve and die.
. . . . .
At Chelmno she had dug potatoes—that was the work that permitted her to live while others died. Every morning, through the summer mud, in the icy, lightless winter, they would march out to the fields—five kilometers in each direction—and work for fourteen hours. Some girls had to carry stones until they dropped to the ground and the blood bubbled at their lips as they tried to catch their breath. Those died quickly. The others were worn down, month after month.
And one day, on the march back to the barracks, she had dropped her hoe and, when she reached over to pick it up, had fallen down herself. She couldn’t get up. She tried and tried, but she couldn’t. She had been at the camp long enough to know what that meant. A couple of her friends managed to drag her back in time for the evening roll call, but the next morning she was part of a line of women threading their way to the gas chambers. In the morning they called your number, and you were condemned.
It had been that way with her parents—one, after the other, they had disappeared into the shuffling columns of the doomed. She would hear about it a week, two weeks later. So now it was her turn.
She was so weak she hardly cared. She could remember some of how she had felt that morning, too dumb with hunger and exhaustion to have much room for fear. Just once every so often the idea would flicker through her mind. I will be dead soon. They will lock us up in a shed until our turn comes, and then they will herd us inside one of the death chambers. A day from now, or an hour, and the Sonderkommando will be hauling my corpse around with hooks, looking for gold in my teeth and washing the filth off my legs with a hose. But in order to be afraid one needed some imaginative grasp, and suffering was a great killer of the imagination. She could see herself dead, but the picture in her brain seemed to be about nothing. She merely stumbled forward with the others, dully aware that soon this would stop and something else would begin.
The Linz Tattoo Page 3
