by Chris Petit
‘How many of these Jews work here?’ Stoffel asked.
About a dozen, Baumgarten replied, counting on his fingers.
They even had their own foreman.
‘A dozen working here at one time with axes and knives!’ exclaimed Stoffel. ‘Whose bright idea was that?’
‘The penpushers. They wouldn’t listen.’
‘You had better go and fetch these Jewish butchers.’
‘They were taken away this morning.’
Stoffel gave a hoot of disbelief. ‘In the roundup?’
Baumgarten said he’d heard it was happening all over. The least they could have done was warn them. Now they were short again. Over two thousand personnel used to work there before the war. Barely a hundred were left.
‘Where were the Jews taken?’ asked Stoffel.
They hadn’t been told.
‘Well, go and find out.’
The man lumbered off. Stoffel turned to Schlegel.
‘Thirteen suspects, including the foreman. Take a look around while that shirker finds out where they are, see if anything comes to mind.’
Schlegel passed through huge separate compounds, the length of three S-Bahn stops.
He was given a map by the main reception in the central building on Eldenaer Strasse, where the talk was of that morning’s arrests. The desk was staffed by three roguish old women who flirted clumsily as a matter of course. One marked for him where she thought the Jewish dormitory was.
‘We didn’t really know anything about them until they were taken away this morning.’
The dormitory was back up the end he had come from.
Outside, he rotated the map, using the towers of the ice factory as a marker. The dirty boundary wall he remembered from his one trip there with his stepfather, a dozen years before, to see a vet about a lame racehorse. He had been an impressionable age. The high wall didn’t prevent those passing from hearing the bellowing of animals about to be slaughtered. It was, his stepfather laconically stated, where the animals went in and the meat came out.
The Jewish butchers’ dormitory was a temporary wooden barracks like those crammed into every bit of city wasteland to house the growing army of foreign workers. Schlegel stepped straight into the sleeping area, with double bunks and a tiny cubicle which he supposed was for the supervisor. The building was freezing cold, without heating, and windows covered with tar paper. The space told nothing about its inhabitants. If they had been shipped out that morning taking nothing, then they had left nothing behind. When they were there it must have been like they had already gone.
The side of the barracks was overshadowed by a substantial hangar whose flank wall was blank, with low dormer windows set above. Ahead in the distance was Stoffel’s parked car, and the clumsy figure of the foreman, Baumgarten, was shambling down the street in Schlegel’s direction.
The smell in that part of the estate was a mixture of refuse and sewage, the full strength of which only hit Schlegel as he was confronted by a stench he thought came from some kind of septic tank until he saw the large slurry pit. There was no fence around it. Anyone stumbling into its black sludge on a dark night wouldn’t get out in a hurry. Overcome by the fumes, he had to steady himself.
He became aware of a snorting and shuffling coming from inside the hangar. The first entrance he tried was locked. At the end of the building he found another set of doors, which gave at the shove of a shoulder. The place was awash with urine, which added an astringent layer to the general stink. The grunts and squeals sounded so human that Schlegel at first thought the mass of writhing, grimy pink flesh was people engaged in a bestial orgy. The pigs were rammed on top of each other, three or four emaciated animals wedged into stalls meant for one, which even then were too small to turn around in. Many were scabbed or had running sores. In one pen a mother had squashed her litter. In another, two pigs were eating a third which had expired. One pig chewed the tail of another too weak to resist. It paused and fixed Schlegel with its gaze. He noted pale lashes and blue eyes whose active intelligence appeared to find him wanting.
He saw at the far end of the hall, up in the roof, a suspended room with a large window. He could not say why he went up. He had already decided to leave. Perhaps it was the way the stairs ran up the outside of the building, inviting inspection.
It was a large empty room where the smell from downstairs was less evident. Schlegel stood before the big window and watched the herd squirm. At a distance it looked more like an army of maggots.
He grew dimly aware of another smell, coming from the corridor to one side.
The putrid odour reminded him of pus-ridden gauze and the sticky smell of butchers’ shops. He should go. He had done what he had been asked. Yet he felt compelled.
The corridor was in the angle of the roof. The stench came from the room at the end. Its door stood ajar. Schlegel stepped into what looked like an old laundry. Tiled cream walls, a large sink with a long wooden draining board above an open gutter. An improvised shower had been fixed up above the sink, attached to the tap by a hose, which was tied to a high pipe with rope and a stick. The window was covered with brown paper. He peeled a piece away. It overlooked the Jewish barracks, which seemed almost close enough to touch.
A trolley like in a hospital stood in the middle of room, which was surprisingly warm.
His heart beat faster. The pill had made him focused and reckless, excited almost, in a hurry to take everything in. The shiny set of knives. A chain. Pen and ink. Stationery cards. A fat book, its pages open. A strange, crude drawing scratched into the plaster on the wall of a herd of animals throwing itself over a cliff into a broiling sea. And above all that stench. Slops in the tin bucket. That was the smell. What looked like offal floated in blood.
The lettering in the open book appeared to be Hebrew. His illogical thought was this was a room where the Jews performed their butchery in the traditional way.
A voice was calling.
It was Baumgarten, sent by Stoffel to find out where on earth he had got to.
Stoffel said it was clearly the murder room. Whatever had been done to the flayed body had been committed there.
‘You have running water, the instruments, the table . . . I would say we are dealing with something more like ritual sacrifice, we’re talking beyond normal murder.’
His voice sounded awed.
Baumgarten said, ‘Fuck me, I’ve seen some stuff but nothing like this.’ He stood with his fists clenched and face contorted. ‘They probably placed the victim on all fours and cut her throat kosher-style, bashed the brains out afterwards, if you could find the head, then gutted her. That must be them in the bucket. Yids, for sure. All “yes sir, no sir” on the job but turn your back and they stick a knife up your arse.’
‘What makes you say it’s a woman?’ asked Stoffel.
‘They wouldn’t do it to a man. They’re animals. They can’t even kill like men. They probably fucked her afterwards while she was still warm and rolled around in her blood before they got down to work.’
The rest in the room that had come to see looked spooked, including Stoffel. One remarked that all over soldiers were dying honourably in battle and now someone went and did this. Baumgarten was right. It wasn’t natural. It was the work of savages.
Stoffel addressed the room and said what they had seen was not for talking about and should be kept between themselves. If he found anyone blabbing he personally would eviscerate them.
He told the local police he wanted the area searched for missing body parts. He turned to Schlegel.
‘You’ve got a long day ahead of you, son. Go and find where those Jewish butchers are, because, as the man just said, we know what we’re dealing with.’
5
It was the fourth winter of blackout. The city was shrouded in darkness for twelve hours. A lack of moon that night made the edifices of buildings indistinguishable from the sky. Sybil stuck close to the kerb where there was enough definition to guide her.
<
br /> She had left Lore in the attic, calculating it would be safe there over the weekend, with no one around, while she went back to her block to find out what had happened and if anyone was left. Lore suffered from night blindness. She had lost her job because of it. Walking to and from work in the dark, Lore grew easily disoriented. After she punched in late again at the paint factory where she worked, the personnel officer told her it was impossible to argue with the clock.
Jobless, it was only a matter of time before Lore was deported. They both knew that. It was not a situation for which Sybil had been prepared. Were she caught sheltering Lore she too would be packed off. Lore affected insouciance, saying she could look after herself. Sybil considered life precarious and risky enough as it was, but a corresponding selfishness had overtaken everything, which amounted to a kind of death, and the wish to give beyond herself had played a part in her decision. Perhaps she was growing up.
Earlier that afternoon, Sybil had loitered in Savignyplatz, near the cutting rooms, not risking going in, in case anyone had reported her. At least one of the girls was reputed to be an informer. Everything had changed, irrevocably. Until then she had been protected. The company she worked for made clothes for export, listed as essential war work, and Sybil had a flourishing and unofficially endorsed black-market sideline tailoring couture copies for rich wives. The extra earnings from that she had calculated were enough, just, to accommodate Lore’s survival.
After the other staff had gone, Sybil spoke briefly to her employer, Frau Zwicker, who knew nothing of the arrests and had assumed Sybil was ill and unable to telephone.
Sybil said she wasn’t sure if she could come to work any more, until the authorities’ position was clear.
Frau Zwicker was sympathetic but cautious, older, not given to demonstration. She had a political husband locked up somewhere. Sybil had already tested her goodwill with Lore, which had translated as asking if she could leave some things upstairs for a few days.
Now for the second time in a week she had become a source of uncertainty.
Frau Zwicker said, ‘Those things you left in the attic. Regrettably . . .’
The workshop was in a low, old building, formerly stables, at the back of which was a cobbled cul-de-sac. The attic was reached by a rickety outside staircase. Hiding Lore there could only be temporary because the place was not secure. The door had only a latch and no lock.
Sybil found Lore sleeping peacefully. The image exasperated her, however unfair she was being. In hiding, Lore had little to do except sleep and read. The irony was had she not been fired she would almost certainly have been arrested that morning.
Lore’s only false identity was a fake press pass, years out of date. Her official card named her as Hannalore Sara Dorfmann. Both she and Sybil had been forced by the State to take Sara as a middle name. Both their cards were stamped with a large ‘J’. They had by order to wear their star at all times in public. Neither did. Lore made a point of flouting the rules, insisting they dress up so she could take them to the Kaiserhof hotel, where Sybil sat timid among the black uniforms, lost in admiration as Lore chatted up two young bucks, saying they were secretaries at the housing ministry, and accepting their invitation to pay for tea. Afterwards Sybil’s legs were so wobbly she clung to Lore for support.
Sybil considered Lore the cradle of her soul. Being reticent about expressing herself, she had carried the phrase in her head for a long time. Lore affected a coolness about anything so obvious as stated feelings. For Sybil life was something that happened to people and most had no say. Lore was her say.
Sybil thought of her as a butterfly about to be crushed. She worried too that Lore would grow bored of her, until she decided her reliability was probably what appealed in such uncertain times. In a freer life Lore wouldn’t have looked at her twice.
Sybil was aware of Lore’s inviting smell of fresh sleep compared to her own sour sweat when she arrived in the attic. Lore wasn’t frightened on being woken, as she would have been.
They had to get out, Sybil said. It was too dangerous to stay.
Lore remained lying with her head propped lazily, as though what Sybil was telling her didn’t affect them.
A train rattled past as it left Savignyplatz, enough to make the floor vibrate. The bare wooden boards were littered with shimmering buttons dropped by seamstresses in another age. They crunched underfoot.
‘Look, I have started a collection.’
Lore scooped up those she had saved. The prettiest and the best, she said. Veined, milkily opaque, some mother-of-pearl, like sea shells. Sybil started to cry.
She had not been looking to complicate her life by loving a woman. Lore said it was about seizing the moment, not least in the war against men.
‘Look where they have got us.’
6
Schlegel lived above the old dancehall, Clärchens, in a small walk-up apartment on the top floor of a rundown building in the old Jewish quarter. Its angled windows looked down on a chestnut tree he had yet to see in leaf. He had two tiny rooms assigned through the housing ministry; he suspected his stepfather of string-pulling. The novelty of having his own place was wearing thin. At this time of year every freezing return was unwelcoming.
His day had been spent searching for the missing Jewish butchers, starting at the main processing centre in the old synagogue in Levetzowstrasse, where Schlegel discovered everyone in a state of shock, from the arrests and the size of the task in hand. He witnessed chaos and incomprehension, a crush of desperate people like frightened animals, and just one German, a bored Gestapo man standing on an upturned packing crate in a huge and crowded hall, pointing to the left or right. When Schlegel used his badge to speak to a senior organiser, a completely overworked older female Jewish clerk, he had to wait for her to answer a stream of telephone calls, dealing with provision of food or medical emergencies.
‘This is a murder inquiry,’ he said.
There was no authority to his voice. Why should there be when it wasn’t his job and the lot of them were being sent off anyway?
‘They leave us in the dark then make us sort it out,’ she said.
He showed a list of the butchers’ names and presumed they were being held together.
She gave a look of exhausted disbelief. ‘You want professions? We don’t even have names.’
They had been ordered to house the thousands being held until they compiled new deportation lists from scratch.
Stoffel’s pill had made Schlegel alert and unpredictable in a way that left him seconds from shouting. Its buzzing gave an accelerated clarity that was like running ahead of himself, a not unpleasant feeling, on top of which he was dizzy from not eating.
He annoyed himself thinking about the old man’s motive when Stoffel had made it clear any old write-up would do.
In fact there had to be two motives. One for the shooting, and one for the suicide.
His irritation was increased by the compulsive fingering of the medal in his pocket.
At Rosenstrasse, a short walk from where he worked, the lobby was crowded with belligerent German women complaining that their Jewish husbands had been taken away when they should not have been.
One woman, louder than the rest, shouted, ‘I am a citizen and my husband is protected by that!’
It was true, another said. There was a law.
The staff on the desk were unable to cope. One broke down.
Schlegel saw everyone was afraid, including the strident ones.
When he left others were starting to gather outside the building, forming a small but angry protest. Such things were unheard of. Schlegel wondered how long before troops were sent in.
The last centre he went to was in the street next to his. He walked past most days on his way to work without a second thought. He saw now there were bars on the windows.
He drew another blank on his butchers.
A male clerk, feistier than the rest, looked at him askance for even asking.
&nb
sp; ‘It’s a murder investigation.’
The man gave an incredulous hoot.
‘A flayed body,’ Schlegel insisted, knowing how unbelievable that sounded. He annoyed himself again by blushing. With his hair and pale complexion it was very obvious. The clerk appeared confused on his behalf.
He was fingering the medal again.
It was long dark by the time he got back to the apartment. The communal heating was off. He had no food but lacked the energy to go out, despite his growling stomach. Stoffel’s pill was wearing off, leaving him listless and fuzzy.
Four dead bodies in one day, including the woman who had jumped from a balcony in the music hall on Mauerstrasse, one of dozens of temporary assembly centres, lying in the foyer, with a coat hastily flung over, stringy legs sticking out, one shoe missing.
The old man in his hat. The warden with his coat half-on. The flayed torso devoid of any human aspect. Five corpses, if he counted the one not seen, reported during the roundup. It was unbelievable, considering he shouldn’t have been called out by Stoffel in the first place.
File the reports, have done and on Monday go back to his safe desk job.
He emptied his pockets, removing the old man’s medal, notebook and key. He took off his gun, which he hated.
He picked up the notebook for want of anything better. The handwriting was cramped and tiny, the arrangement of the letters tight and sinister, as though the man had allowed the angriness in his brain to spill directly onto the page. Doodles filled the margins, black scribbles, angry crossings-out, strange fractures, skulls. They were a mess, yet strangely professional and abstracted, making them hard to read. Like the handwriting, they contrived to be both meticulous and explosive.
‘They give us nothing,’ he read. ‘Everything is filtered through our own associations and community organisations, which leaves us nagging and quarrelling among ourselves. They kicked us out of our homes. The revised tenancy laws certainly did their job. They register us. They rehouse us in impossibly overcrowded conditions where we forever squabble for the slightest advantage and space.’
