by Heinz Rein
Kiepert is embarrassed, but he tries not to let it show, in the Third Reich pity and compassion are only to be granted to state-authorized objects, if one doesn’t want to attract suspicion. Kiepert knows Mrs Wiegand and has often secretly admired her attitude, he has always treated her very correctly in an official capacity, and sometimes let her know with apparently chance remarks that he was acting not on his own initiative but on orders from above, which he by no means approved of.
‘I’ll get her to open that mouth of hers,’ Siering rages again, ‘you can rely on that.’
And what will I be doing? Kiepert thinks miserably. If he plans to do it on his own I want no part of it.
Siering stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘You wrap yourself completely in silence,’ he says, and looks at Kiepert through narrowed eyes. ‘A very eloquent silence, most esteemed one.’
‘How … how am I supposed to understand that?’ Kiepert asks.
Kiepert rests his hands on the desktop and leans far forward. ‘You understand me very well, my dear chap,’ he says sharply. ‘Don’t you like us coming down hard on the rabble?’
‘I must ask you, Comrade …’ Kiepert begins.
‘Oh, don’t talk nonsense,’ Siering interrupts him brusquely. ‘Do you think I can’t see what’s going on with you? It’s all down to your damned pansy politics if that mob start crawling out of the woodwork again, thinking their time has come.’ He slaps the tabletop with the flat of his hand, making the pens clatter. ‘But I’ll make it hot under their arses.’
What a lovely chap, Kiepert thinks, appalled. ‘Of course I will fully support you in your fight against hostile and defeatist elements,’ he says.
‘Extraordinarily sweet of you,’ Siering sneers. ‘I am greatly obliged!’
Kiepert’s features tauten and he gets to his feet. ‘I would ask you not to doubt my loyalty to the state,’ he says firmly.
‘Sit down,’ Siering says in a calm voice and gives a broad, sarcastic smile. ‘You don’t need to tell me that you are a Party comrade, I see it that way too.’
Kiepert resolves not to be cornered any further, and to go on the attack. ‘But that’s enough now, Comrade,’ he says resolutely and props his fists on the desk. ‘I must ask you …’
Siering waves him casually away.
‘Calm down,’ he says, ‘I will decide when it’s enough, not you, and now let’s get to the matter at hand. My instructions are as follows: Wiegand’s house is to be put under the strictest surveillance immediately. Where is the property located?’
Kiepert sighs with relief. Moving on to the discussion of factual matters not only puts an end to the vulgar insults, it grants him a kind of rehabilitation, in that he is able to demonstrate eagerness and a set of beliefs. For a moment he thinks about Mrs Wiegand, whose small, delicate form he sees in front of him for several seconds, and is not quite able to suppress a certain regret, but in parallel with that sensation he also loses that justification that our lives are what we make of them, and that we must take the consequences of our own actions.
‘The property abuts the administrative district of Zeuthen,’ he replies, picks up a sheet of paper and draws a sketch, ‘on the left there’s a vacant lot, on the right and immediately opposite there are detached single-family houses.’
‘And the entrance to the house on Wiegand’s property?’ Siering asks. Kiepert thinks for a moment. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he says after a short pause, and adds to his sketch, ‘it is on the side, which faces the house next door, which is here.’
‘That is a good situation,’ Siering goes on, letting a cigarette slip into his hand from the blue pack. ‘Take one,’ he adds, and passes Kiepert the pack.
‘If I may,’ Kiepert says, and quickly strikes a match to light a cigarette for the SD man, then he too takes a cigarette from the pack and lights it. The pressure that lay around his head like a steel band a moment before has now made way for a cheerful sense of excitement, he has plainly been able to erase his initially unfavourable impression of the Untersturmführer. Would he have offered him a cigarette otherwise? And an English one at that? He smokes the cigarette, which not only tastes spicily of real Virginia, it also tastes sweet because he is inhaling the benevolence of the donor along with the taste of the tobacco.
‘So I want Mrs Wiegand to be put under strict surveillance,’ Siering says now, ‘of course I don’t want a sentry traipsing officially back and forth on his great flat feet. Put two men each in the house next door and the house opposite. Everyone who leaves or enters Wiegand’s house is to be arrested and immediately taken to the Reich Security Head Office, no exceptions. You are to ensure the rigorous enforcement of this measure. Is that clear?’
‘Entirely,’ Kiepert confirms with a nod. ‘Except …’
‘Except what?’ Siering snaps immediately.
‘We have only four policemen in the whole town,’ Kiepert goes on.
‘Then use auxiliary policemen or town guards, but young, active men, not Muselmänner.fn1 Are your men reliable?’
‘I think so,’ Kiepert answers.
‘You think so, you think so,’ Siering says irritably, ‘leave thinking to the horses, their heads are bigger. You have to know something like that. Good God, man, have you been fast asleep for the last twelve years, if you don’t know who’s a hundred per cent reliable and who isn’t? Aren’t you aware of Gauleiter Stürtz’s decree concerning the surveillance of national comrades for the sake of internal resolve?’
‘Of course I am,’ Kiepert defends himself, ‘but this isn’t a police decree, it’s a Party decree, so the Local Group Leader is responsible for it.’
‘Responsible, responsible,’ Siering shouts again, ‘that way you always shift the burden onto others. Who is the Local Group Leader around here?’
‘Mayor Rutz, but he’s …’
‘Mayor and Local Group Leader in one and still a total mess?’ Siering yells. ‘You should smell some gunpowder in the air, you’ve had your arse behind a nice comfortable desk for too long, Christ, the things I would have to say …’
Thank God you don’t, Kiepert thinks, and finishes smoking his cigarette. It no longer tastes right, the conviviality with which it was offered has rapidly fled.
‘So put the necessary measures in place,’ Siering orders, ‘and then let’s take a look at Mrs Wiegand and loosen that little tongue of hers. Come with me, Lieutenant!’
Kiepert hadn’t expected that, he almost recoils and has difficulty controlling himself. ‘Is my presence absolutely necessary, Comrade?’
Siering leaps to his feet and stands firmly in front of Kiepert, his arms pressed firmly to his sides. ‘Do you feel sorry for this bitch? Can’t bear to see blood, is that it?’ he says menacingly and looks at Kiepert with a frown through half-open eyes.
‘Of course not,’ Kiepert reassures him, ‘I only asked because I have a lot of office things to get through.’
‘Leave your paperwork,’ Siering says contemptuously, ‘you’re all a bunch of ink-pissers rather than men of action. Right, so let’s get a move on and pay a visit to our little sweetheart.’
XIX
16 April, 6.30 p.m.
Lucie Wiegand is standing by the chopping block behind the house, splitting wood, her hand lifts wearily, her blows fall at long intervals, without much force. Now and again she glances across the garden. The first buds are opening on the shrubs, the earth smells fresh, a cloudless, bright-blue sky stretches above her, the air is gentle and mild.
Lucie Wiegand sighs. Incomprehensible that nature should remain eternally the same, untouched by human misery. It contains comfort in its spring-like resurrection, but at the same time it fills us with despair that as civilization develops man moves further and further away from it, pointlessly crushing and stamping out the core of life, tearing open and ploughing up the maternal womb of the earth with bombs and shells, shredding and scorching the forests.
Lucie Wiegand stands there for a while with her arms d
rooping. There are moments when life is almost impossible to bear, and this is one of those. She got up at half past five this morning, she spent nine hours at the drilling machine at Schwartzkopff in Wildau and has just come home, now she has to do the housework, the garden needs attention, because not a single clod of earth has been turned, and there is an enormous sense of weariness that leaves her feeling hollow and makes every moment a torment and cannot drive her from her bed even when there is an air raid. When that happens she lies there holding her breath, but without any inner excitement, fatalistically surrendering, she gives a start when the anti-aircraft guns in Schulzendorf thunder or the waves of night-time explosions come drifting in, but mostly she just goes back to sleep again, before the three long notes of the sirens indicate the end of the raid. When a bomb fell on Zeuthener Strasse months ago, the roof tiles clattered down and the windows rattled against their bars, she got up and waited for the next shock to come, but it didn’t, the engine noises fell silent again and exhaustion forced her immediately back to sleep.
Just as Lucie Wiegand is raising her arm to split the log, she hears three short rings on the bell inside the house, walks around the side and sees two men standing at the gate.
Police Lieutenant Kiepert, she thinks. What does he want? It must be something special if he has come in person, and he’s also brought someone else, in grey. A soldier? Then she gives a start. Kiepert’s companion isn’t wearing the usual grey. And the black collars? SS? She hesitantly walks along the garden path to the gate, having for a moment considered retreating back behind the house and not answering, but it’s too late for that, the two men have probably seen her already.
‘Can I help you?’ she asks without opening the gate, she looks only at the police lieutenant, whom she knows, and who has always been relatively considerate towards her.
‘Heil Hitler, Mrs Wiegand,’ Kiepert says. ‘We would like to have a word with you.’
Siering has taken a step back, not out of modesty or embarrassment, which are both properties that he does not possess, but because he likes observing people from the background first of all, spotting their weak spots, detecting their level of resilience from their movements and their posture, and from their faces the degree of their intellectual concentration. Admittedly his main weapon is brutality, but there are different ways of applying that, you can plunge down on your victim suddenly like a bird of prey and pierce their body fatally with your claws, but you can also grab your victim like a cat, let it go again to smell a crumb of hope before striking even harder, you can also lull and weaken your victim’s attention like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, before launching an even more devastating attack from nearby.
‘What’s it about?’ Lucie Wiegand asks.
Kiepert waves his hand vaguely and turns half-way back towards the Untersturmführer.
Siering is still standing there motionless. So this delicate little woman with her strawberry-blonde hair, the fine, weary, pale face, is Wiegand’s wife. When he saw her appearing from behind the house in skiing trousers and a light-blue pullover with a polo neck that makes her look even slimmer, he thought at first that she was a young girl. Siering is surprised, he doesn’t know whether he is disappointed or glad, he doesn’t know how he imagined Wiegand’s wife, but one thing is certain: it wasn’t like this.
Lucie Wiegand looks at the SD man for the first time. ‘Won’t you tell me …’ she says, turning to him.
‘We can’t discuss it over the garden fence,’ Siering says and looks frankly into the woman’s face. He is barely impressed by her beauty and her delicate charm, he has always seen the people he is to interrogate as his adversaries, sometimes deliberately and sometimes inadvertently withholding from him secrets that must be torn from them by every available means, and helplessness or innocence, strength of character or conviction have never led him to soften his procedures even slightly, but have in fact spurred him on to yet harsher methods. And suddenly Siering knows how he imagined Wiegand’s wife: as a tall, thin woman with an angular way of moving and a flat chest, with cool, probing eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a half-masculine woman.
Lucie Wiegand feels his cold, enquiring eyes on her as she opens the garden gate, her heart thumps in her throat as she walks towards the house and hears the firm footsteps of the two men crunching in the gravel, she feels a weird, terrible apprehension welling hotly up inside her and then turning into an ice-cold rigidity.
What’s happened to Fritz? she thinks. Have they found him? And in that case what do they want from me? To arrest me? If that’s it, they need only send one policeman, it’s a bad sign that Kiepert has come in person and even brought an SS officer with him.
‘Please, come in,’ she says and opens the door to one of the rooms.
Kiepert has taken off his light-green cap upon stepping into the hallway, and now stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, while Siering has looked all around and immediately sat down, propped an elbow on the table and crossed his legs with their long, gleaming black boots, keeping his cap on.
Lucie Wiegand stands where she is. ‘Please, Mr Kiepert, have a seat,’ she says.
Kiepert turns down her offer and leans against the windowsill, he is determined only to play the part of the spectator, but at the same time he thinks to himself with bitter recognition that his decision is not crucial here, and that he will be called upon to provide active help if the SS man requires it.
For a few seconds the stillness is oppressive. There are three people in a room, two men and one woman. But they have nothing in common with one another apart from the fact that they are people, a product of the meeting of a sperm and an ovum, consisting of a particular kind and quantity of protoplasm, gifted with the ability to form emotions, affects and thoughts into sounds, called language, through their thorax, vocal cords and tongues, and to represent these with visible signs, called writing. The difference between people lies in the nature of this ability and the way in which it is used, raising barriers between them which, in spite of all their similarities, the identical nature of their biological functions and their dependency upon the same conditions of civilization, are impossible to overcome.
Here is a man in whom all the barbaric instincts that seemed to have been overcome by 2,000 years of Christianity, humanist education and fear of the law have erupted once again, turning him back with surprising swiftness into homo primigenius. Here is a woman who has not made life more comfortable for herself by closing herself away from the wretchedness of humanity, but who instead continues to fight to eliminate ancient injustices. And last of all, here is a man who does not belong to either of these two extremes and who allows himself to drift within a dualism produced by these two forms of conscience, the private and the public. He is the species of homo sapiens most widely present in the Third Reich. It is true that his sense of humanity has not been entirely extinguished, but he – he believes – has been forced to yield to the pressure of the barbarians who hold the power. He doesn’t realize that he himself is only practising a form of barbarism mitigated by politeness.
Siering studies his fingernails for a while and then looks up. ‘We arrested your husband yesterday, Mrs Wiegand.’
Hang on, Kiepert thinks, he told me he’d got away.
Lucie Wiegand turns white as a sheet. So they’ve got him, she thinks, so close to the end of play. ‘And you have come here to give me that message?’ she asks, struggling to control her voice.
‘Of course not,’ Siering asks and takes the blue pack out of his pocket again. ‘May I smoke?’
‘Be my guest,’ Lucie Wiegand says dismissively.
Kiepert purses his lips to keep from laughing. So this man can be polite, he observes, but it’s only one of his tricks, he’s trying to win the little woman’s confidence first.
Siering awkwardly lights his cigarette and takes a few puffs in silence, but while he is devoting himself entirely to the pleasure of the cigarette he steadily observes his adversary, his eyes circle her like a
hawk waiting for the ideal moment to swoop on his prey. It’s a tried-and-tested piece of criminological knowledge that unexplained silence makes people more insecure and often makes them speak more quickly than penetrating questions.
Lucie Wiegand still stands expectantly between door and desk, she has some experience of dealing with the Gestapo, and therefore knows that gentle preliminary questions with polite phrases and silence are only ever the lull before the storm.
‘So, Mrs Wiegand,’ Siering says at last, ‘we have come to ask you some questions.’
Of course, this is where things are going, Lucie Wiegand thinks.
‘We haven’t been able to get very much out of your husband,’ Siering goes on, ‘even though his situation would definitely improve if he spoke openly, and we thought you might wish to help him.’
Him, Lucie Wiegand thinks, you’re the ones I’m supposed to help, but you’ve made a big mistake, you won’t learn anything from me. ‘I can’t help you,’ she says.
‘You haven’t let me finish, my dear Mrs Wiegand,’ Siering says calmly, taking a few drags on his cigarette. ‘I don’t want you to tell me anything about your husband, we don’t demand that of you, we aren’t the monsters you probably take us for. Lieutenant Kiepert here will confirm that I was very reluctant to come and see you. Isn’t that right, Comrade?’
No, you bastard, Kiepert thinks.
‘Yes, that’s true,’ he says and nods.
‘Then listen, Mrs Wiegand,’ Siering says amicably. ‘I only want to know in which pubs or other meeting places your husband met with his colleagues, that is all.’
That’s a lot, Kiepert thinks, and looks tensely at the delicate little woman standing like a statue in the middle of the room. Will she talk?
‘I don’t know,’ Lucie Wiegand replies, ‘I have no idea where my husband is or where he has been.’
‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Siering says with a hint of impatience. ‘I don’t want you to say anything about your husband, quite the contrary, I want you to help him, I promise you that he will get away scot-free if we catch the others, after all, it’s each man for himself. Isn’t it?’
