A Man Lies Dreaming (6 page)

‘The money first,’ she said.

He took his hand out of his pocket, and she felt strangely relieved. He was holding a note. He passed it to her and she took it and tucked it in her brassiere. She took him by the hand. It was warm and dry. ‘Come on,’ she said.

He followed her meekly into the dark alleyway.

Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939

I woke up in pain. I was not lying down and yet I couldn’t move. I tried to shift my hand but it was held fast. It was dark but I was still in the club, I could tell; the smell of fear and shit was the same and there was blood and fragments of bone and brain on the front of my suit, which would cost me a fortune to clean. My vision swam in and out of focus. It was a warm room and a flame came alive as a dark figure lit a match and applied it to a large wax candle, and then another candle and another. In the light I could see the chains that were holding me upright. I was secured to the wall, arms and legs spread. The figure turned to face me. It was a woman. She was not an attractive woman. She had a peasant’s wide face and a petulant expression as if life had never failed to disappoint her. She wore black leather with the SS insignia on her armband, for all that there was no more SS. She wore thigh-high boots and black leather gloves and in one hand she held a horse whip.

‘I am so sorry, Herr Wolf,’ she said. ‘For the unpleasantness.’

‘I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, Fräulein …?’

‘Koch, sir. I am Ilse Koch.’ She gave a simpering little curtsey. She had a Dresdener’s accent.

‘What happened to Kramer?’ I said.

‘Josef?’ she shrugged. ‘He was remiss in his duties. He shall be replaced.’

‘And I?’

A small, cruel smile briefly illuminated her ugly face. I felt a sudden rising panic. Ilse Koch tested the whip. The crack it made filled the small hot room. I looked around, seeking escape. Instead, what I saw in that room were implements of torture.

Her gaze followed mine. ‘Yes …’ she said. Her smile again, like a deformed butterfly. She lashed the whip with a flick of her wrist, missing my face by inches. She came and stood close to me. I could feel the warmth of her body, the press of her soft heavy breasts against me. She reached out a gloved hand and ripped my shirt open, buttons popping. Her hand grabbed my jaw, her fingers digging into flesh. Her face was close and hot on mine, her breath sour with drink. ‘I know what it is you want, Herr Wolf,’ she said. Her other hand reached down and grabbed me painfully. Her smirk etched itself into my face. ‘You are a hard man, Herr Wolf.’

‘Let me go, you filthy whore!’

She slapped me. The sound rang through the room. My cheek burned. My eyes narrowed and my mouth opened and I licked my lips, tasting blood. Her hand was down below grasping me and moving with a certain rhythm.

‘I can stop whenever you want,’ she said. ‘Just say the word.’ Her smirk told me she understood. She reached beyond my vision and returned with a vulcanised rubber ball on a studded leather strap. She fitted the strap on my head but left my mouth free. ‘Well?’ she said.

‘Don’t stop,’ I whispered.

Ilse shoved the ball in my mouth then yanked a lever and suddenly my body was jerked from the wall and I hung suspended in the air before her. She pulled roughly at my trousers until they dangled around my ankles. I dangled there like a mounted butterfly, bare to her. She swung me round. I faced the wall. I felt her behind me, looming. My breath came short and sharp and I was stiff as a boy. I felt her gloved hands on my bare behind. She stroked my cheeks, first one and then the other, before she slapped me, hard, and I cried out. Her hand on my back, rubbing softly … ‘I will please you, mein herr,’ she whispered. I felt the weight of her against my back. Her lips against my ear. She pushed her finger deep inside me. Her other hand came round and took hold of me and stroked as she kept up a rhythm. A second finger joined the first, violating me. I shuddered with pleasure, hating her and all women, and thinking of Geli and the things I had taught her to do.

When Wolf re-emerged onto Leather Lane it was early morning and the market was already being set up with vegetables and fruit and bright materials and cloths. He made a sorry sight, and he wrapped his coat tightly around him and hunched his shoulders and drew the hat low over his face. In the old days he had Emil to chauffeur him around, men to do his bidding, a comfortable apartment to return to and his library and, after Geli, there was Eva, sweet good-natured Eva of the blonde hair and pleasant disposition and soft white flesh.

Now he had to trudge through early morning mist, on foot, in order to return to a cold unfriendly room rented out to him by a Jew.

‘It’s on the house,’ Ilse Koch had told him, before he left, refusing his offer of payment.

‘Is it Hess?’ he asked her, the same question he had asked Kramer before her. She shook her head. ‘Who is it?’ he had said and she shook her head with finality and said, ‘It is better if you do not come back here again, Herr Wolf.’

But Kramer had been indiscreet, that much was clear. The Marshall, he had said. Wolf remembered Göring, a fat ruthless man with a great many appetites, who had built the storm troopers from a ragtag collection of misfits into an efficient paramilitary organisation in the ’20s. A decorated air-force pilot, a flying ace in the Great War. Wolf did not trust pilots; they changed course with the wind. Last he heard, Göring had survived the Fall and even thrived, changing allegiances once again. Now he was Comrade Göring, working for the communists he once despised, and trading in human flesh on the side. The hero of the skies had become a simple pimp.

The Jew girl, this Judith Rubinstein, could have been smuggled out of Germany by this same network. Her father, the banker, would have paid dearly to take his only daughter out of the communists’ grasp and bring her to the relative safety of London. But then, why would she disappear? The women in the cells were disposable; no one would be looking for them. But the Rubinstein girl would be valuable cargo. Unless there was someone willing to bid even more for her …

He was deep in thought, calculating possibilities and avenues of inquiry, and wincing slightly as he walked. So when, at last, he approached Berwick Street he did not at first notice the presence of policemen all about until they stopped him. They crowded Walker’s Court holding sausage rolls and steaming mugs of tea, as if they were at a picnic.

‘You can’t go through here, sir.’

‘What happened?’ Wolf said.

‘Police matter, sir.’ The policeman took in Wolf’s rough appearance, paused with a bacon roll halfway to his mouth. There was brown sauce on the ring of his lips. ‘Is that blood on your shirt, sir?’ he said.

Wolf was aware of the other policemen’s attention all turning to him. He began to back away. ‘This is a misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘I live here.’

‘Would you mind coming with me, sir?’ the fat policeman said. The tea and roll disappeared from his hands to be replaced by a nightstick. Wolf looked around. He was surrounded by the policemen. His shoulders slumped.

‘This is all a misunderstanding,’ he said.

‘I am sure it is, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘I am sure it is.’

A second policeman grabbed Wolf; he did not resist. The first one placed handcuffs over Wolf’s wrists and called out, ‘Inspector! I have something for you.’

A man in a worn suit appeared. He had a thick moustache and short thinning hair and there was a light scattering of dandruff covering his shoulders. He took one look at Wolf and shook his head. His eyes were brown, soft and mournful, as if he had already seen all of the evil that men can do to each other. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Take him to the station.’

‘Hear that, precious?’ the fat policeman said. ‘You’re nicked, my son.’

‘Go to hell,’ Wolf said. The policeman just smiled. He led Wolf to a waiting car, and then they took him away.

*    *    *

In another time and place Shomer is no longer sleeping.

The guards raise them for roll-call with their usual charm and rubber truncheons. Yenkl won’t move and the guard roars until Shomer and another prisoner carry his inert form outside and leave it in the snow, where he lies as fat and peaceful as a snowman, with his eyes closed and his hands like twigs. At roll-call they stand in the cold in their wooden clogs and striped pyjamas as the guards entertain themselves until such time as an SS officer arrives to take count of the living and the dead. At last the ordeal is over and the boys of the Sonderkommando take Yenkl away, and Shomer is assigned to a work unit: today they are digging graves. ‘Lovely weather we are having,’ he remarks to Yenkl. Yenkl is beside him now, smiling and looking at ease. ‘Fresh air and physical labour,’ Yenkl says and rubs his hands together, ‘what’s not to like, eh, Shomer, old friend?’

Shomer nods enthusiastically. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ he agrees. Shomer and the other prisoners are given shovels and dig in the hard ground while Yenkl walks around quite at leisure, his hands behind his back as he pontificates.

‘What is a man!’ he says. ‘What is a man but mended cloth, hastily worn and discarded?’

But it is a rhetorical question. He does not expect an answer. ‘What makes a man?’ he ponders. ‘What makes a hero, Shomer? Is it simply to live when there is nothing left to live for, when all you knew and loved is gone? Is it, simply, to survive? For like the threads of an intricate shawl, we have been pulled at and torn, Shomer. We have been unravelled.’

A great barren sky, in which the sun is distant, spreads above Shomer’s head. And he closes his eyes against the glare.

‘Invigorating!’ Yenkl says, and rubs his hands again. And to Shomer he seems suddenly transparent, and through his friend’s outline he sees the chimneys belching soot, black soot and ash, flakes of black snow falling.

‘For what is a man,’ says Yenkl, ‘if not ash? And did not Rabbi Akiva say—’

But Shomer doesn’t hear what Rabbi Akiva, God rest his soul, ever said, for the overseer at that moment shoves his boot in Shomer’s ass and Shomer falls flat on his face on the hard ground the better to amuse the SS guards. And so Shomer returns to the twilight world which is the writer’s mind and in which, though he has no pen or paper, he is nevertheless concocting another shund, a cheap little tale for amusement and a little elucidation, for did not Rabbi Akiva say—

But the guard is screaming, ‘Get on with work, you filthy little Jew!’ and Shomer digs, he digs for all the dead: those that are and those who are yet to come.

Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 –
contd.

They brought me down to Charing Cross nick and took my blood-soiled clothes and gave me woollen slacks and shirt instead and left me in a cell and locked the fucking door.

My head throbbed and my mouth tasted of vulcanised rubber. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I had been incarcerated before, in Bavaria in the ’20s. Hess had been with me then, he was as close to a friend as I had ever come to having beside Gustl.

Did they think they could intimidate me by incarcerating me in a prison? Childhood is a cell. The happiest day of my young life was the 3rd of January 1903: my father on his last morning visit to the Gasthaus Wiesinger for his last glass of wine. I was not there; later, I could only imagine it, his face turning red, the breath growing faint in his throat. Did he gurgle? Did his hands reach to his neck in incomprehension? Did he feel his last breath departing from his lungs with none to follow, ever again?

His last breath; a key to my freedom. Do not threaten me with jail cells. And I held my mother that day the way a man, not a child, would. I held her, my mother’s delicate loving flesh that no young boy could protect, as she cried, the way she had held me when he came home and the drink was upon him and he took to the belt and the boot. My mother looked after the household and lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children.
I respected my father, but I loved my mother
.

I will give him this, though: the old man looked after his books.

But I did not wish to think just then of my poor dead mother, nor of other cells in other times. What were they holding me for? That was what had me worried. I had done nothing wrong.

I must have dozed off for when I came to, the cell door was open and the same fat policeman was standing there, smiling his greasy smile. He said, ‘Detective Inspector Morhaim will see you now.’

I followed him without comment. Down a corridor busy with the cries of drunks and the thud of policemen’s boots and into a small interview room with a large desk and the plain clothes policeman I had last seen on my approach to Berwick Street. He gestured to me civilly. ‘Please. Sit down.’

From somewhere he brought forth a meerschaum pipe and became busily engaged in the ritual of such men with such things, stuffing it with foul tobacco. At long last when all was to his satisfaction he lit a match and applied it to the pipe’s bowl. ‘Sit!’

The fat policeman pushed me into the chair. I sat with my back ramrod straight. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘I drink neither.’