“You must look nice for the judges,” he said, pushing a loose strand of hair back from her face. “You want to make a good impression.” He kept glancing around, as if afraid of being overheard.
When the door opened, he took her roughly by the arm and marched her through it. Suddenly she was standing in the center of the floor, facing a long table behind which sat three men in uniform and a woman in a khaki blouse. The woman was taking notes, which seemed odd because for a long time no one spoke so much as a word.
The presiding officer, who sat in the center, directly in front of her, was a captain of artillery—she could tell that from the cannons on his collar patches. He seemed about fifty, hard-faced and completely bald. He didn’t even look up from the papers on his desk when Filatov saluted crisply and stepped back to stand at parade rest by the door
“You are Polish?” he asked finally. He was holding a typed sheet in his hand, as if he wanted to make certain that he had the right prisoner. After a few seconds his eyebrows lowered into a frown. “We are informed you were born in Kaliningrad—is that not correct?”
“I was born in Königsberg, sir. In East Prussia. I don’t know what it is called now. I was a German until 1935, and after that I was a Jew.”
“Then you are Polish. All of that is Poland now. You will be repatriated to Poland when your sentence is completed, where you can work to build socialism and make amends for your crime. What is that on your arm?”
He pointed with his pencil and, without thinking, Esther brought her hand up to cover the tattoo just under the curve of her right elbow.
“Is that a number? Where did you get it?”
“At Waldenburg, sir,” she answered, her voice hardly above a whisper.
“Waldenburg. eh? Then you are lucky to be alive.” His expression betrayed no sympathy, nothing beyond a mild, disinterested curiosity.
And then, suddenly, something seemed to occur to him.
“Isn’t it on the wrong arm? I always thought the Germans tattooed the left arm.”
When she didn’t answer he appeared to lose interest. His eyes fell as if by gravity to the papers on the desk in front of him.
“You are accused of currency smuggling,” he said after a long silence, just managing to glance up at her as he finished the sentence. “You were arrested trying to pass the checkpoint into the International Zone with twenty thousand rubles sewn into your clothes. How do you answer the charge, innocent or guilty?”
He had already made up his mind, of course. Esther had been told during her first week in prison that if one tried to plead innocent they merely doubled the sentence. She kept her eyes on the floor.
“Guilty, sir.”
“Fifteen years. Take her away.”
The floor outside in the corridor was smooth hardwood, but she would stumble. If Filatov had let go of her arm she probably would have forgotten to keep walking.
“Now, you see?” he whispered. “This is what you get for being so regal with everyone. You made a bad impression. You will have to learn to be a nicer girl.”
But she could hardly make out what he was saying. She was too stunned. She had no will for anything. Fifteen years.
She would be an old woman by the time they let her out, dried up and good for nothing. No, she would never be able to live through fifteen years. She would die. One day she would run her head against a stone wall and crack it open like an eggshell. She would die or go mad.
They came to a plain wooden door with a number painted on it in white at eye level. The number was “263.” The paint was chipped away with age along the bottom. She had assumed she was being taken to an isolation cell—that was what happened here after sentencing, perhaps they were afraid a prisoner might kick and scream or try to harm herself—but the cell doors down here were all made of iron. She merely noted the neutral fact. It didn’t mean anything to her. She had stopped caring about things like that.
Fifteen years. She wished they would kill her instead.
Filatov took a bundle of keys out of his pocket and began fumbling with them until he found the right one. His fingers closed over her shoulder and he pushed her inside.
When the light clicked on she saw at once that this was a broom closet. There were shelves overhead and in one corner a collection of shiny zinc buckets. What was she doing here?
Then she noticed that someone had spread a blanket out on the floor beside the rear wall. There was even a pillow.
Esther turned around as she heard the door slam shut behind them. There was a brassy taste in her mouth and she felt as if she were being smothered, but she told herself not to scream. It would do no good to scream. It would only make it worse.
Filatov was grinning at her, no longer afraid of anything. He was already undoing the buttons of his coat.
3
Munich, Germany: February 26, 1948
From the window of his hotel room, Inar Christiansen could look out on an undulating sea of rubble. Here and there part of a broken wall would rise a foot or so out of the piles of shattered brick, like the crest of a wave, but mostly the devastation was so complete that you might have imagined you were looking at some harsh, stony landscape where no man had ever lived. The bombing planes had done a pretty good job.
But then there was the hotel itself, which had come through without even a broken windowpane. The lobby was filled with potted palms and red velvet love seats, and if you ordered a drink a waiter in morning coat and white gloves would bring it to you on a silver tray. Before the war, when it was still safe, the place had been very popular with middle-level Nazis in town for November Putsch anniversaries or a little patronage for the wife’s brother—Party headquarters had been just a few streets away. Now the paying guests all seemed to be the families of American military officers. You hardly saw a German who wasn’t in livery.
That, at least, hadn’t changed. Germany was still a country where you had to be wearing a uniform if you wanted people to believe you weren’t just hanging around to see what you could scrounge. That was why Christiansen had packed his army greens.
He had worn them only one other time since demobilization, to watch General von Goltz hanged at Rebdorf. Now he needed information, and information was always easier to obtain if people imagined you had some official reason for wanting it.
There were certain facts he had had to face about himself, and one of them was that appearances were against him. Big Nordic men weren’t terribly popular in Europe just at present. Everyone had spent the last fifteen years listening to Nazi propaganda about the Master Race, and they had a natural tendency to jump to conclusions.
It had happened to him before. “I’m looking for information about possible survivors of the Waldenburg concentration camp” says the blond-haired, blue-eyed civilian with what is obviously a shrapnel scar across the back of his left hand, and the little clerk at the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Office is already thinking, Sure. You want to finish the job you started on them there? Suddenly no one knows anything about anyone.
But in a Norwegian army uniform you were Norwegian, and it was all right to be Norwegian. Why shouldn’t a Norwegian be blond? What else should he be?
When he had been hunting down Colonel Hagemann’s loyal subordinates from the Fifth Brigade, he hadn’t minded looking like someone who still carried his NSDAP membership card next to his heart—it had worked to his advantage, more than once. But he wasn’t trying to win over old Party boys anymore; he wanted to find one of the victims now, if she was still alive, and he needed to appear trustworthy to people who had spent the last couple of years listening to horror stories. He would wear his uniform.
In the first few months after the war, while everything was still a chaos, men and women who were fresh out of Auschwitz and Mauthausen had been moving back and forth across Germany in great unorganized herds. They would trudge along the roads, from one Displaced Persons camp to another, hoping for word of some relative or friend who might also have survived. They w
ould hitch rides with soldiers when they could, or else just drag themselves over the ground, sometimes so sick and frail that you wondered they could manage a hundred yards, and they would leave little penciled messages on bulletin boards or the sides of buildings: “If anyone knows the whereabouts of Cyla Rawicz, wife of Dr. Henryk Rawicz of Biesko, Poland, please leave word with the Jewish Committee in Linz.” It was all most of them had.
Europe had been a madhouse in those days. Nobody was where he belonged, and the DPs. for the most part, had little enough reason to want to return to the places that had once been their homes. “I don’t want to live under the Russians—they’re as bad as the Nazis, almost.” “Everybody I knew in Lodz went up the smokestacks at Treblinka. Why should I care anything about Lodz?” People had to be clothed and fed and housed. Something had to be done about them. It was a long time before any coherent, organized attempt was underway to find out who had lived and who had gone into the incinerators.
It wasn’t as bad as that now, but it was bad. Finding Esther Rosensaft wasn’t going to be easy.
Because a lot of peculiar things were happening. People were disappearing into Russia without leaving a ripple, a lucky soul here and there had relatives in England or the United States who were willing to take them in, and the Jewish organizations were running a regular underground railroad for illegal immigrants to Palestine. The fact that Miss Rosensaft was Jewish complicated things considerably. It meant she could decide to go almost anywhere. And it meant that she might simply have vanished into the Bricha escape pipeline. Christiansen could talk to the U.N. people or the Quaker relief organizations, but the Jews had their problems running the British blockade and weren’t disposed to be trusting. If she had gone that route, it might even be necessary to travel to Palestine and look for her there.
But first things first. There were still a lot of rocks to be turned over in Europe.
As he buttoned the tunic of his uniform, Christiansen’s eyes settled on the black leather cello case that was resting on its side next to the closet door. He had sold his double bass in Havana to help pay for the ship tickets to Le Havre. That part of his life was over—he was through playing in fifth-rate jazz groups just to make enough money to keep moving—but nothing on God’s earth would get him to part with his cello, even if he didn’t have the fingers to do it justice anymore. If there was anything left in him worth saving, it had something to do with that cello.
Perhaps he should have checked it with the concierge, just to make sure no one nipped in and stole it while he was gone. Perhaps he would yet. Yes. Safe was safe.
“Your honor is a musician?”
Plump, well-cared-for hands reached out to take the case from him and set it down beside the great grid of key boxes that took up most of the wall behind the front desk. There was something reassuring, almost caressing, about the way the man allowed his fingers to slide over the shoulder of the lid, as if he understood all about the romance between owner and instrument.
“I try.” Christiansen lit a cigarette, more out of nerves than anything else. He felt as if he were in disguise. “Could you just put it somewhere out of the way, so nobody will bump into it?”
“Certainly. Of course. The walls here, by the way, are very thick, so your honor would be disturbing no one if you wished to practice later in your room. Is your honor, by the way, familiar with the Saint-Saens concerto? A beautiful piece, very moving.”
Christiansen smiled—the man hardly even expected an answer—and started on his way across the lobby to the big revolving front door. Saint-Saens. The Germans always assumed they were being excessively diplomatic and cosmopolitan to admit that any foreigner, let alone a Frenchman, was fit to write anything except exercise pieces for children.
With his hands in his pockets and the cigarette pushed into the corner of his mouth, Christiansen began making his way along the side of the street— only the streets were clear; the sidewalks were still covered with rubble—in the general direction of the Marienplatz. It was a cold morning. The sky was the color of lead, and patches of frost sheltered against the broken stone. It must have rained the night before because pools of dirty water had collected between the cobblestones. Almost no one else was out.
The great square of the Marienplatz was now simply a cleared space surrounded by ruins. Only the church and the Rathaus had survived total destruction; everything else had been bulldozed. Life, however, was beginning to return to normal. Around three sides men and women were doing a brisk business from stalls and pushcarts. There were even a few tourists standing about to watch the reconstruction of the clock tower. For almost the first time since he had arrived yesterday morning from Nuremberg, Christiansen had the sense that he was in a city instead of a wasteland of shattered buildings.
In five or six years, he thought to himself, this will all be back the way it was. And that was all right. He harbored no ill will toward the Germans. The score he had to settle didn’t take on such grandiose proportions as that.
“You can’t bring either of them back.” his aunt had told him “Your father and mother at Kirstenstad, my son Carl at Iwo Jima—the family has been thinned out enough by this war. Let it rest, Inar. Men with nothing to lose are more dangerous than all the armies in the world. Your parents wouldn’t have wanted you to risk getting killed in this vendetta. You don’t owe this to them.”
“I think maybe I do.”
Auntie Inger, who was almost his mother, already getting old, her blond hair turning whiter almost from month to month. To her the war had been like a natural disaster, just something that had happened, terrible and guiltless. All she wanted was to go back to the way things had been—or as close as three deaths in the family would allow. After von Goltz’s arrest, Christiansen had come home to the little house in White Plains where he had grown to manhood, expecting to be understood.
“This isn’t right, what you want to do. Even if you succeed, you’ll never be the same again.”
“I’ll never be the same again anyway.” He smiled and got up from the overstuffed living room chair. He loved his old Auntie, who had raised him up like her own son, but it had been a mistake to come back here. The life he had lived within these walls had nothing to do with him anymore. He was a stranger now. It was time to leave.
“I’ll keep in touch.”
“No, don’t do that,” she had said, shaking her head sadly. “I don’t want to wait for the letters to stop coming. If you come back and the thing is finished, fine. If not, then you will have died for me right here, now.”
And that was how he had severed his last contact with the past, so he would be free to settle his score. No, he didn’t have anything against the Germans. He just wanted to kill Egon Hagemann.
He bought a plate of sausage from a formidable gray-haired old woman with the neck and jowls of a bulldog.
“Amerikanishes Geld, bitter?” she asked, in a surprisingly sweet voice. Christiansen fished around in his pocket until he found a fifty-cent piece and when she began to make change for him he waved his hand and smiled. They were good sausage, worth the money, and he too wasn’t interested in collecting pocketfuls of the cheap little aluminum coins the new German government in Bonn was trying to convince everybody were legal tender. The woman offered him a fork, and he stood beside her portable charcoal grill eating and watching the crowd.
He had the uncomfortable feeling that somewhere or other he had attracted somebody’s notice.
It wasn’t much more than an impression, a discordance so close to the limits of his senses that it would have been the easiest thing to talk himself out of believing it was there at all. He just felt edgy without knowing quite why.
Back before the war, when he had been just a kid in New York City with nothing more on his mind than learning the Bach C-minor Courante and how to speak English like an American, he used to walk the twenty-six blocks between his boarding house and Juilliard twice a day, listening to the traffic noises and trying to arrange them int
o sequences so they would sound like twelve-tone or Haydn’s Creation or the corridor outside the practice rooms, where, if you stopped to notice, little wisps of what everyone was playing would squeeze out under the doorways and blend together into a chaotic but somehow strangely integrated and comforting symphony. It was a kind of game that had something to do with the scribbled-over sheets of music paper he kept in his desk, with those first hesitant steps toward learning how to write something that didn’t sound like a bad parody of Brahms, and also with learning to be in this strange city, so far from home, and to think of it as his own place.
Anyway, he had come to recognize, on some level or other, when the harmony had been broken. Sometimes, for no reason he could have explained to anyone, he would know that something was wrong, turn around, and see a fistfight starting under the shadow of a restaurant awning, or a woman lying on the sidewalk where she had fainted of sunstroke. Once, when some drunk in a taxicab had come lurching right up over the curb at him, it had probably saved his life.
He had listened even harder all during the war, and it had saved his life more than just once.
And now, in the Year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-eight, standing in the Marienplatz, eating a sausage amidst the ruins of conquered Germany seven years and ten months after the whole wonderful experience of his student days in New York had suddenly become as remote and unreal as the court life of ninth-century Japan, Inar Christiansen, late of the Juilliard Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Norwegian Army, and the human race, was wondering where he had heard the sinister little grace note that quavered out its warning.
Well, he decided, all things would be revealed at the proper time.
. . . . .
The man at the United Nations office was very cordial, asked no probing questions, and conducted Christiansen back to a file room where the case histories of several thousand Displaced Persons filled up shelf after shelf of file boxes. There were six or seven other people searching through the same material, and tables had been set aside for the sleek, complacent-looking lawyers who were researching reparations claims and the anxious men and women who still, after all this time, were trying to track down the mother or husband or daughter they fancied might still be alive somewhere. This office, and all the other places just like it Christiansen had been to, seemed haunted by ghosts.
The Linz Tattoo Page 5
