To Greet the Sun

by Claus von Bohlen

  ‘So he left it as a gift to you before he went to his death.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Before he committed suicide on the mountain,’ said Raposo.

  ‘No, no, that is not correct. He must have slipped near the summit. It was an accident.’

  ‘Then he did not go knowingly to his death?’

  ‘No.’

  Once again Ruben Raposo fixed me with his gaze. ‘So why did he leave the piece of amber on your pillow, if not as a parting gift? Or perhaps as a symbol of rejection?’ he said.

  ‘He left it because he did not want me to be angry that he was climbing alone, that he was leaving me behind. I was his climbing partner. And his friend. His best friend.’

  Ruben Raposo shuffled the pages in the file on his lap. ‘Senhor Eisinger,’ he said, ‘let me put the facts to you. Your friend Siegfried confides in you that your leader, Kurt Gruber, is making him do things he doesn’t want to do. Kurt Gruber sexually abused Siegfried – that is why they disappear off together leaving you behind, that is why Gruber insists on sharing a hotel room with Siegfried. Siegfried has no one to whom he can turn. His best friend has looked the other way. He refuses your gift of the talisman, and also your friendship. He sees only one way out of his predicament, but he does not wish to die a coward’s death – they moulded your minds well when it came to questions of courage. Siegfried thinks that by climbing the mountain alone, and by throwing himself off the summit with the Hitler Youth banner unfurled behind him, he would be escaping the abuse and the loneliness while at the same time displaying his attachment to the Hitler Youth values you all held so dear.’

  Dr. Raposo paused and looked at me. In that moment I realised what animal he reminded me of. He had the pointed features of a fox terrier.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not how it was. He slipped and fell. It was early in the morning, the rocks were slippery with frost–’

  Dr. Raposo leant further towards me. His pupils were tiny pinpricks.

  ‘Ruben, com calma,’ said the director who was studying the televisions at the back of the room. Next to him Pietro had taken a step forward and was shifting his weight from left to right.

  ‘Senhor Eisinger,’ said Dr. Raposo, ‘you told Pietro that Kurt Gruber later joined one of the SS Death’s Head regiments. Is that true?’

  ‘Doutor Raposo, you agreed–’ said Pietro.

  Dr. Raposo turned around and hissed something at Pietro, then he turned back towards me. ‘Did you tell Pietro that Kurt joined a Death’s Head regiment?

  ‘I may have told him that. I don’t remember,’ I said.

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘That is what I heard at the time. I’m not sure–’

  Dr. Raposo’s tongue flicked out to moisten his upper lip. ‘But you knew about the concentration camps?’ he asked.

  Again I saw Pietro shift his weight in the corner of the room.

  ‘No. I mean, we didn’t know what happened there,’ I said. ‘We knew that political prisoners were taken to different locations, that’s all.’

  ‘But you just admitted you knew about the Death’s Head regiments that guarded the camps? So how could you not know about the camps?’

  Dr. Raposo’s eyes flashed at me. He continued:

  ‘Perhaps you deliberately turned a blind eye to the massacre of millions? Perhaps you turned a blind eye in the same way you turned a blind eye to the abuse of your friend Siegfried? Despite your decorations and your much-vaunted heroism, perhaps you do not possess the courage to confront the truth? Perhaps, Senhor Eisinger, you are a criminal and a coward?’

  I felt my pulse quicken. How had this happened? Why was I being personally attacked?

  ‘Doutor Raposo, let me tell you the facts,’ I said.

  ‘Please,’ replied Raposo.

  ‘Siegfried climbed the Matterhorn by himself, that is a fact. He was an outstanding member of the Hitler Youth, that is also a fact. It is possible that he jumped from the summit, and it is possible that he was abused by Kurt Gruber. However, that is mere conjecture. It has no part in a discussion which attempts to uncover the truth.’

  ‘Senhor Eisinger, just because something is conjecture, that does not mean that it cannot also be true. You seem unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between possibility and probability. It is not just possible that Siggi was being abused and that he committed suicide. It is highly probable. Do you accept that?’

  I remembered Gruber by the campfire after the climbing competition, telling the story of Siegfried and the dragon. I remembered the times when the three of us had been climbing roped together, depending on each other for our lives.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Do you accept that the Hitler Youth manipulated you, turning you into deranged young fanatics? Do you recognise that one of the ways it achieved this was by creating a culture of fear and secrecy in which sexual abuse was encouraged?’

  ‘No, that is completely untrue.’

  ‘Again, I must ask myself why you cannot see the truth. Is it perhaps because you too were taking advantage of the system? Because you too were taking advantage of your best friend Siegfried?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Senhor Eisinger, you have never married. Indeed, it seems that the most significant relationship you have formed in recent years is with the handsome young journalist who has been interviewing you. A journalist who, I might add, reminds you of Siggi. An erotic transference, perhaps?’

  I could not believe what I was hearing. My pulse began to race.

  ‘As a homosexual, it is not surprising that you defend the Hitler Youth. The organisation provided you with the cover you needed to indulge your urges.’

  I felt the blood course through my veins. If I’d had the mobility, I would have leapt out of my seat and struck Raposo. The frustration of not being able to do so just fuelled my rage.

  ‘I have never indulged any urges,’ I shouted. ‘The idea that I might have abused Siggi is… is…’ I couldn’t think of a word strong enough.

  ‘The truth?’ said Raposo.

  ‘No! You have no idea of the truth!’ I was shouting now. ‘You will never understand, because you don’t want to understand. You want me to say that we were all sadistic, child-abusing little Nazis? Fine, we were sadistic, child-abusing little Nazis! We just wanted to abuse each other and kill all the Jews! Are you happy now?’

  ‘Cut!’

  Raposo sat back in his chair. He did look happy.

  I wiped the spittle from my lips and tried to get up. Pietro stepped forward to help but I pushed him away with my stick. Then I left the room.

  Chapter 27

  IN THE kitchen, Anna-Maria is preparing my evening meal. I take a seat at the kitchen table and watch her dicing the vegetables. She pauses briefly to fill a glass of water for me. When I try to pick up the glass, I notice how much my hand is shaking. So much, in fact, that I spill a fair amount of water onto the table.

  I am shocked at what happened in there. How did I get so angry? All I had wanted to do was to stick to the truth. Instead, I ended up stating a complete falsehood just to spite Raposo. Except it didn’t spite him at all.

  Also, I have the feeling that, on some level, Raposo may be right. He said that I fail to distinguish between possibility and probability. Maybe he has a point. If I take the facts as I know them and examine them carefully, is it not indeed probable that Kurt was abusing Siggi? For sixty years I have not allowed my thoughts to go in that direction because, well, because I chose to bury my head in the sand. I was happy in the Hitler Youth, happier than I have ever been. I wanted to believe that we were all happy. I had to believe that. But my wilful ignorance makes me complicit. Maybe that is true of us all.

  At the time, I believed I was doing the right thing. But somehow I got it all wrong. What does that make me? Certainly not the hero of Sambaqui, as I have recently allowed myself to believe. At best, it makes me a deluded old fool. But if Raposo is right, then I am a sadistic little Nazi. I
hope he is not right. But I am no longer sure about anything.

  My hands are still shaking. I look up from my glass and see Anna-Maria. She is moving around the kitchen in the same solid, dependable way she always has. It calms me to watch her.

  Anna-Maria is also getting on in years. There are little wrinkles around her mouth and her hands are the hands of an old woman. Often she irritates me with her constant attention and meddling. And yet sometimes, on certain rare occasions, I feel that she understands me. On these occasions she seems to know what I am feeling, no matter how hard I try to hide it, and once in a while she will say something that, for no reason at all, will bring tears to my eyes. This is one of those occasions.

  ‘Seu Otto, you are not a bad man,’ she says.

  *

  I stayed in the kitchen for a long time. At the other end of the house I could hear the sound of voices and of things being packed and carted and slid across floors. From the noise of the front door I could tell that people were still trampling their way in and out. After an hour or so the sounds of activity began to diminish until there was just the occasional human murmur.

  I was staring out of the kitchen window and watching the sun sink behind the clouds that shrouded the mainland. I could see bright, triangular rays of light emerging from behind the cloud; they looked like the blocky sunrays in a child’s drawing. The fisherman usually waded out to check the mussel beds at this time; sure enough, I spotted a bowed figure all by himself in the middle of the bay. I wondered if he had performed that very act since earliest childhood. What a blessing to be able to trace so pure a line to one’s past.

  As the sun sank lower, so the light gained in colour and intensity. Anna-Maria’s hands, which had appeared so aged and pale, now seemed to glow with orange warmth.

  There was a knock on the kitchen door and Pietro came in.

  ‘Seu Otto, the crew have tidied everything and left. Do you want to have a look?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do not trust them.’

  I left the kitchen and followed Pietro in the direction of the study.

  ‘Seu Otto, I am so sorry,’ said Pietro. ‘Doutor Raposo promised me that he just wanted to talk about Siggi. I didn’t know he would–‘

  ‘He wasn’t wrong about everything,’ I said.

  Pietro turned round with a look of surprise on his face.

  ‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I am not the man you think I am.’

  Pietro was about to say something but I raised my hand to silence him. We were in the study now. The orange light filtered through the slatted blinds and held the mites of dust that still hung in the air. I looked around the room. It was very tidy; the crew had put everything back where it had been. It was eerily quiet, as if the room itself were withholding some secret.

  Pietro walked towards the bookshelf behind my desk and pointed to the rows of antique snuff boxes that were lined up there.

  ‘I wasn’t sure about these snuff boxes,’ he said. ‘They are all here – I counted them – but perhaps you had them in a different order? This one, for instance…’

  He leant over and picked up the smallest and most beautiful of the boxes. As he did so the base fell away and the tiny box spilled its contents onto the wooden floor. Pietro stooped to one knee to pick up the base and the object which had been spilt. He rose slowly holding a small piece of amber between thumb and forefinger. Then he turned towards the window and lifted the amber to his eye. From where I was standing I could just make out the delicate tracing of a fly’s wing trapped in the resin.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Pietro continued to hold the piece of amber up to the light. There was a long silence, then Pietro asked:

  ‘Is this the piece you gave to Siggi? The piece you said you threw into the water at Porto Alegre when you first arrived in Brazil?’

  I didn’t reply. Pietro fixed me with his gaze. His eyes were glassy.

  ‘Is it the same piece?’ he asked again.

  I nodded.

  Pietro continued to hold the piece of amber up to the light, twirling it slowly between thumb and forefinger. Then he replaced it on the shelf and made his way to the door.

  When he reached the door he turned back round.

  ‘Goodbye, Seu Otto,’ he said, and he looked at me with an expression I had never seen before. Or rather, I had seen it before, only not on Pietro. It was exactly the way that Siggi had looked at me when he told me he was going to greet the sun, just before he slipped out of the door of the Hörnli hut.

  Chapter 28

  RUBEN RAPOSO, that bastard, screened the show about Seu Otto under the subheading, ‘Otto Eisinger: Heir of Eichmann?’ It’s a sensationalist title and the viewing figures were correspondingly high. I really hope Seu Otto didn’t see it. It twists the truth beyond recognition. The bit of the interview which gets the most airtime is when Seu Otto shouts, ‘Fine, we were sadistic, child-abusing little Nazis!’ Then there’s a bit about other famous Nazis who fled to South America – Eichmann, Mengele and Barbie. At least Raposo doesn’t deny Seu Otto’s bravery in striking the gunman in the shop. However, he does suggest that it was Seu Otto’s attempt to atone for the crimes he committed in his youth.

  I am sure that the episode made a lot of money for Raposo, but I didn’t receive any of it. Raposo claimed that Seu Otto had broken off the interview. The contract, drawn up by Raposo’s lawyers, stipulated that if Seu Otto broke off the interview, there would be no payment. I didn’t read the contract carefully enough. But actually, I don’t mind all that much. I feel pretty bad about the way things turned out, and I don’t want to make money off the fact that Seu Otto was goaded into saying some things which he really didn’t mean. I should have paid more attention to Dr. Monteiro’s warning.

  A month has now passed since the interview, and I’m back to dj-ing. Tonight I have a gig at Inferno, the only club in Cancupe. The club is beside the road that runs next to the bay; it faces due west and is a great spot from which to watch the sun set over the mainland.

  I have also had time to think about the interview, and I now realise that I must take some responsibility for what happened. Seu Otto had expressly asked for me to interview him. I had promised him that I would – even though, after the meeting in São Paulo, I knew Dr. Raposo would never allow it. However, I really didn’t think it would be a big deal. I thought Dr. Raposo would ask the same questions; I couldn’t see that it might matter who was doing the asking.

  Doutor Raposo made Seu Otto feel nervous. As a result, Seu Otto did not want to tell him what he had told me in the hospital. He did not wish to share these intimacies with someone he barely knew, and also, at some future date, with a viewing public.

  I also think that Hitlerjunge Otto Eisinger could not accept that Kurt Gruber, the Hitler Youth itself, and all those values with which he identified so fiercely, could possibly be wrong. Or could possibly lead to the abuse of his best friend or, further down the line, to the murder of millions of innocent people. And I can see the difficulty. Many of the Hitler Youth values were noble and admirable. Loyaly, courage, honour… who can argue with them? But Seu Otto is an extremist. Not in the activist sense – although his boyhood act of bravery would certainly qualify him for that category too – but rather in the sense that he cannot see shades of grey. It is all or nothing. Seu Otto did not want to admit that Siggi committed suicide because, in his eyes, that admission would require him to reject all the values of his childhood, the good as well as the bad.

  After Raposo and his crew had left, I went to go and look for Seu Otto. I found him sitting hunched in the corner of the kitchen. His face was very pale and his hands were shaking. I felt sorry for him: he looked like a man who had lost all his confidence. But when the piece of amber fell out of the box, I felt as if the ground had been pulled from under my feet. It suddenly seemed possible that everything Seu Otto had told me was a lie. I remember holding the piece of amber up to the light, but really I was just trying to steady myself in the face of
that frightening groundlessness. It seemed to me in that moment that Seu Otto lived in a fantasy world. I had allowed myself to be drawn into it, but now the spell was broken. As I left the room, Seu Otto looked very small. A sad, lonely, delusional old man.

  I no longer see things quite the same way. Seu Otto did lie about the piece of amber, but he never lied to me about it. In fact, we never talked about what happened to it after he found it on his pillow in the Hörnli hut. He lied to Dr. Raposo, but the lie was really a sort of wish fulfilment: he wished he had thrown the piece of amber into the water. Or rather, he wishes he could have left the past behind and made a completely fresh start here in Brazil. He desperately wanted to make a fresh start. And yet maybe we always carry the past with us. We can try to put it into boxes, but it is still going to be there, awaiting the moment to spill out.

  For my part, I only thought about how this interview could help my career, and how it could get me out of my difficulties. I was not just selling a story; I was selling Seu Otto himself. I was prepared to offer up his values, his history, his identity in exchange for money. I never thought about what it would be like for him, what his feelings might be. I now also understand that Seu Otto’s time in the hospital was something entirely out of the ordinary: the shock of the accident, the hospital ward, the morphine… it is no wonder that things were shaken up inside him. When he returned home, maybe he felt that he had said too much, that he had opened the lid of the box too far. He wanted to press it back down again, but I wouldn’t let him.

  I haven’t spoken to Seu Otto since the interview. Perhaps I should call him. Perhaps I should apologise. Jorge thinks it would be a good idea. He rung me the other day. He wants me to accompany him to visit my grandfather’s grave in Pomerode. He drives up there once a year with Anna-Maria. He asked me whether I had spoken to Anna-Maria, and I had to tell him that no, that I had been avoiding both her and Seu Otto. Then the whole story came out. Jorge even suggested that I invite Seu Otto to visit Horst’s grave with us. I said I would think about it.