by Chris Petit
Morgen smoked for a long time. ‘Then our good doctor is not the quiet humanitarian he makes out. What did you think he was doing?’
Schlegel supposed he had been watching some kind of quarantine process.
‘No. Our friend Dr Wirths is a death selector.’
The commandant saw them in his office, wanting to know what visiting the crematorium had to do with Ingeborg Tanner. They were left to stand. The reprimand was inevitable. Morgen asked if what was going on was part of the same death programme he had learned about.
The commandant said, ‘It is not a legal matter, therefore no concern of yours.’
‘On whose authority—’ Morgen began, and the commandant shouted back it was none of his business, categorically.
Schlegel’s mind turned over like an engine refusing to fire. Death was everywhere. Armies annihilated each other. The world teetered on the brink. Civilians were no longer exempt. Roundups, towns and cities flattened, bombs falling from the sky. Who drew the line? Who said there were limits? Perhaps there were none. Perhaps it was what everything was moving towards. Remove the barriers of geography and people became cargo for export to waiting centres.
The commandant repeated that Morgen could do nothing. However, investigating the death of Tanner, they could arrest whomever they liked.
‘Whatever you come up with, I would respect your authority and not question your decision.’
‘And Dr Wirths?’ asked Morgen.
‘By all means,’ said the commandant, rubbing his hands.
‘He’s right,’ said Morgen afterwards. ‘We can do nothing. It is what happened next that we can, possibly, do something about.’
Schlegel listened to the words coming out of Morgen’s mouth. He hardly sounded like a man who believed what he was saying. It was like a slapstick farce where every time someone bent over and stood up they got whacked around the back of the head with a plank, the action repeated until the audience was sick with laughter.
‘What did happen next?’
‘Everyone grew corrupt. We weed out the corruption.’
Schlegel feared Morgen’s helplessness in the face of the larger annihilation would lead them to operate outside the law.
‘Of course, there is a big danger,’ said Morgen.
‘They will try and stop us or we’ll get it wrong.’
‘That and something else. This place is sick. The thinking behind it is sick, in terms of the monster it has become – no one imagined that an obscure penal colony would turn out the way it has. The place itself is physically sick – typhus, dysentery, starvation, one epidemic after another. Corruption is infectious. It is the epidemic. There are no moral coordinates. The danger is we ourselves become corrupt.’ Morgen lit up. ‘Knowing monstrous things will make us monstrous.’
Morgen spent his days half-drunk, smoked-out, in a state of myopia, trying to see the refraction between the surface and beneath. It was an absurd spectacle and a pointless labour, investigating one or two unauthorised murders in a place where thousands were being murdered daily.
Among staff the place was always referred to as the garrison. About eight hundred souls worked there: doctors, engineers, switchboard operators, nurses, clerks (huge paperwork), organisers, above all the administrators, then the guards and security police, cooks, orderlies, dog handlers, drivers, school teachers, librarians, specialist workers, from Hungary and Rumania, some from Italy, drawn by the overtime, and the local civilian workers from outside. The list went on.
He wasted hours looking at back-bulletins issued by the commandant’s office, courtesy of the central archive. These were exhaustive on the official life of the garrison, with not a hint of its secret, a testament to the pall of boredom that suffocated everything. Nowhere to go. The fantasy of collective enterprise. Demoralisation. Get smashed. He read dreary lists of petty admonitions, garrison social occasions, gardening competitions, discounts on theatre and opera tickets in Kattowice, marital engagements and weekly stalls, puzzles, quizzes, an anti-litter campaign, clean up after your dog, admonitions of public drunkenness and warnings against drinking and driving. On and on.
The human being is such a selective animal, thought Morgen, and highly developed in what it chooses to consider and ignore. The place stank. Dog shit everywhere. The endless burning and pillars of smoke. The finest ash that fell all over. Sickness that verged on catastrophe. And that all-pervading stench, not how you would expect burnt flesh to smell, more reminiscent of tallow candles in a church. For all that, the appearance of the garrison remained orderly: cars and lorries came and went; corridors smelled of polish and disinfectant; barriers went up and down; the various factories on site maintained productivity. Even the risk of epidemic was barely referred to, beyond health posters issued by the medical office, and the occasional stray remark along the lines of they had dropped like flies.
Flies were the garrison’s commonest enemy, along with wasps, lice, mosquitoes and a particularly vicious kind of horsefly. A frequent sight was jam jars full of dead insects attracted to their fate by some sweet sticky liquid. The weapons were extensive: sprays, swats, sticky traps, the deadly jars. It was generally agreed few sounds were more satisfactory than a fly swat hitting its target.
And there in the black hole of the middle, hiding in plain sight, the negative reverse of all that order and scurry. He must have been blind. Devastatingly simple, beyond comprehension, thought out every step of the way. They walked voluntarily into the building, took off their clothes and left by the chimney.
Knowing solved nothing, only raised questions about organisation, authority, purpose, sanity, cold logic (with a hint of glee) and folly. There was a euphoria, he suspected, at behaving like gods, and enjoying the cleverness of the trick that let tens of thousands go unprotesting, as sheep to the slaughter.
The secret became its own weight. Schlegel sided with the quietness of Schulze, partly out of cowardice, based on a realistic appraisal. Morgen’s enquiry was too fantastic; he admitted as much himself. The more Schlegel tried to direct him back to matters in hand – Tanner, corruption in the camp, searching for Sybil – the more stubbornly Morgen persisted they were inseparable.
‘Even Sybil?’ asked Schlegel.
‘I suspect she may yet lie at the heart of the mystery.’
Schlegel couldn’t see how.
Morgen snapped, ‘Then ask yourself how she came to be spared.’
Rules of procedure applied even less. Investigation presupposed enquiry; yet what could they ask?
It marked the start of their split.
Schlegel sought refuge in the leftovers of the action parties, hard drinking and available women, in floating venues announced by word of mouth. He went with Ilse, more as a friend, as she was now keen on a spotty young man who was deep into the whole business of the camp. She introduced Schlegel to other young women and teased him for doing nothing about them.
One night she left early and he wasn’t sure why he stayed. He had an intense conversation with a woman who nodded vigorously, grinned tipsily, friendly as they clinked bottles, understanding each other perfectly. Her green brooch, pinned to an enviable bosom, was jade like Tanner’s. Schlegel admired it while fingering Tanner’s in his pocket, thinking the sight of another was a sign. That was how it was. Superstition and chance. Working anything out seemed meaningless if the path of fate was already decided.
The woman pulled a face at her brooch. ‘A bit passé. Last year’s craze.’
‘What happened?’
‘Craze over.’
She lost interest and moved on. Schlegel used Tanner’s brooch as an excuse to approach a haughty woman with an aquiline nose that she used to look down. She asked why his hair was white.
‘A fright in the night,’ he said, and she didn’t laugh. She was an officer’s wife and ‘slumming’ as she put it.
He asked if she thought Tanner’s brooch was worth something.
‘Not as much as last year. Prices were through the roo
f.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t see why. There was much more of it about last year. Now you hardly see any at all you would expect it to be worth more.’
‘Because rarer?’
‘Obviously. What do you do?’
New faces turned up. The laughter got too loud. Schlegel ended up maudlin. Which of these people did what exactly? Which were the knowers and which the hangers-on? He remained incapable of processing what Morgen had told him, except in the most bathetic terms.
He woke up in a ditch, staring at a grubby moon, thinking about the great harvester and how it would flatten them if they stood in the way. The machine was the beast and the beast was the machine. That was what he worked out lying in the ditch.
To Morgen’s mind, the subject was difficult to broach with Schulze but he cornered her when they were alone. There was little chance of Schlegel turning up. The man seemed to be in the process of abandoning all responsibility, which he could understand; perhaps there would be method to his waywardness. Schlegel worked best on a long leash, scaring himself half to death by wandering too close to the edge.
Two aspects dominated Morgen’s thinking: Why there and how?
Schulze flinched as if knowing what to expect. Distraught, she said she was not qualified to speak of such things.
‘You must have known what you were building.’
She lowered her head and addressed the desk, claiming she was responsible for organising labour, which involved endless squabbles with the works office, nothing to do with planning.
She looked up, composed herself and rallied. ‘I deployed workers, including many civilians, to dozens of sites. It was a matter of daily logistics and it took up all my time and more. My job had nothing to do with what they were building.’
‘Give me an example. Forget about the civilians.’
‘Site six might require twenty unskilled labourers and five skilled workers on one day and a different number the next, and site twelve two hundred unskilled and forty-five skilled. Most of the day was spent haggling with the works office about why these numbers were impossible. It was a desk job. We never saw the builds, during or after.’
‘And what were sites six and twelve?’
‘The numbers were used more than once. When a site was completed the number was reallocated to another.’ She added rather helplessly, ‘We dealt only in numbers. It was a numerical system. Even the prisoners were catalogued by number.’
He was surprised when she later volunteered, ‘Like everybody else, I know what I chose not to know. We don’t see the trains coming. We don’t see what happens or where they are taken.’
‘You see the smoke.’
‘It’s a smoky town; lots of factories, lots of chimneys.’
Morgen noticed how most talk broke off before its natural end, out of an instinctive wariness.
He asked if she was prepared to type up her own account, based on her experience, and in confidence.
‘As there is no official record,’ he said.
‘It would be punishable if I were found out.’
‘Not by me.’
Picking up women was easy, Schlegel finally worked out, for the simple reason that everyone wanted drunken sex on the edge of oblivion. Its availability was a novelty, not based on the usual codes of society and attraction but primitive urge. He decided he had been naïve about Sybil. There was no such thing as love, only gratification.
It took the shortest time before he could not live without these nights. The struggle of the morning hangover was followed by the agonising transition into a state of nervous anticipation as to what the next night might bring. Schlegel had no idea what Morgen got up to but to judge by the state of him their hangovers matched.
And all this time he was doing what – other than stumble through the job – he barely knew. The hangovers made him slower, creating a different kind of space and level of insolence. He grew less afraid. The night’s reckless transgressions became the next day’s storehouse. It all made sense, even the sight of a young woman throwing up and laughing about it as they fucked. They were, he supposed, in the belly of the beast, and the nightly purges were the whirling pagan feast that countered the crawling nightmare of the day.
He woke in someone’s garden, stiff and aching, above the beginnings of a mackerel sky. Damp air; winter not so far away. He went to the night canteen and sopped up as much grease as he could. Afterwards, he loitered and found himself gravitating towards the commandant’s house. He selected a spot over the road where he could doze under the shade of a tree and dumbly watch the comings and goings. Staff started to arrive for work. He supposed he was there because it was where Sybil had worked and he was keeping a vigil.
A garrison vehicle drew up and the driver fetched the commandant, who came out in a hurry, still eating and nearly colliding with arriving staff. He hopped around in a pantomime of apology and hurried off, looking in a good mood for once.
Schlegel supposed he ought to go back to his room and wash. He was aware of smelling the sex on him. He was about to when he saw Frau Hoess leave, smartly turned out, get in the Opel, parked beside the house, and drive off in the opposite direction to her husband. Schlegel thought. The front door was open. The staff had just walked in. He rather urgently wanted to be inside, snooping, an act of wilful penetration, leaving his spoor, haunting the same space as Sybil. He was still drunk, at the top of the slide down. His fuzzy thinking receded and he saw clearly the reason to look was because answers lay in the house.
The owners absent, only staff; he suspected the nature of the household was such that servants didn’t volunteer information to their employers.
He stood up, picked the loose grass off, brushed himself down and crossed the road. The door was open. He stepped inside and shut it softly. He heard a man’s laugh coming from the kitchen, then a pause before several women joined in. While the cat’s away, he thought. They sounded like they were sitting with their feet up, gossiping.
Schlegel stared at the parquet in the hall, wondering what his excuse would be if discovered. He inspected the visitors’ book open on the table. No guests for several days. He flicked through the pages, and saw the name of the commandant’s boss on several occasions, Pohl, signed with a fat flourish and complimentary remarks. Pohl was a frequent visitor.
Schlegel supposed this list told the story of the garrison and if the reasons for the visits were understood . . .
Himmler’s signature, angular and spiky compared to Pohl’s plump, comfortable one.
The commandant and his wife looked like they had been big entertainers the previous year, not so much now.
Schlegel wasn’t expecting the number of visits by Fegelein. He counted nine. Using the visitors’ pen he noted the dates on an old receipt.
He went exploring, trying to appear casual. The hall gave on to a windowless corridor with three doors. To the right he could hear the man continuing to joke with the women. The mood was lethargic and bewitched.
The door on the left opened into a dining room dominated by a mahogany table and sideboard, with a corner cupboard displaying silver and crystal. The paintings looked good quality. It was altogether much more last century than he was expecting. Perhaps the commandant’s wife was a secret antiquarian. Schlegel had the impression the room wasn’t much used now.
The next one was where the commandant’s wife had taken him: black leather and bespoke furniture including the giant walnut desk, its surface covered with family photographs whose loving assembly reminded him of the sterile pinning of butterflies. The drawers were leather-lined, which he presumed was Groenke’s touch. He had never come across anything like it. Even his mother, who was no slouch, made do with lining paper. A large safe stood in the corner, flanked by glass-fronted cases, floor to ceiling, full of what looked like unread books.
The room smelled of the commandant, a combination of stale tobacco, cologne and something else. If rage had a smell, thought Schlegel . . .
A door between the bookcases to
ok him into a sitting room, again black leather and a wooden floor with exotic rugs, less formal than the dining room. How settled it all seemed. He supposed the project was entirely Frau Hoess’s. The house had an air of opulent secrecy, quite at odds with the woman’s modest everyday appearance.
He went back into the corridor. The house was quiet apart from chattering in the kitchen. He wondered about upstairs, knowing it would be harder to talk his way out of being found there. He went up anyway, feeling his nerve was holding.
He glanced in a bathroom, then came to the master bedroom, with separate beds, his-and-her wardrobes, one with glazed doors, and boxed radiators as well as a tiled stove. A large oil painting of wild flowers above the beds. A leather chair of a sort whose name Schlegel couldn’t remember, with opposite joined seats so the parties could face each other. He suspected it was a long time since the occupants had used it. The room felt sterile. The wallpaper – beige with a leaf pattern – continued next door, the children’s bedroom, with brightly coloured furniture.
The room beyond seemed to be for guests, yet felt more lived in than the bedroom. Schlegel looked in a carved oak bureau and realised the wife used it as a secretaire.
In contrast to the general order, the desk was a mess. A cursory search revealed letters, statements, bills, cheque books and paperwork, interspersed with children’s notes and drawings that invariably said, I love you, Mummy. In her bureaucracy, Frau Hoess was not organised. The contents looked like they hadn’t been sorted in an age, beyond a rudimentary system of stuffing papers in pigeonholes, several of which were devoted to a considerable correspondence.
He picked out a pile of letters. They seemed to be entirely gossipy notes from female friends. An exception was a formal thank you from Fegelein for her hospitality. He flicked through more: different examples of flowery handwriting, varieties of coloured writing paper. Then he saw Pohl’s signature. He presumed another thank you note. It was, but more.
He read: ‘My deepest appreciation and gratitude for your recent gifts of the stone of heaven. Such fine examples! If this is the product of your enterprise such bounty indeed. To think, our very own mine!’
