A Man Lies Dreaming (5 page)

In Munich in ’31 he never would have imagined the coming of the Fall. He was living with Geli then, the daughter of his older half-sister Angela. He was so taken with the child; she was like a bright butterfly.
Wolf liked his women cute, cuddly and naïve, or so he liked to say at his more expansive moments back in Munich: he liked little things who were tender, sweet and stupid
.

Geli was all that and more, she was young and she was powerless and she was malleable. He could be like a god to her, he could fashion her in the image he desired. Geli had depended on him, wholly and utterly.

And yet she had tried to rebel. When he found out about her affair with Emil, the chauffeur, Wolf was incensed. But he had loved her, too. Had loved her perhaps more than any other woman in his life, more than Eva, who he was also seeing at the time, lovely Eva who was such a simple creature, as comfortable as slippers.

Then came that fateful night. Strangely it was Hess who had rung him. Wolf had gone to Nuremberg for a meeting. Geli had used his own pistol against him, perhaps that was what had hurt most of all. His trusty .22-calibre, the No. 709 made by Messrs. Smith & Wesson of America. The pistol he had left in the apartment, loaded, in the middle drawer of the nightstand. He pictured Geli’s small hot hand enveloping the inlaid metal of the handle, her index finger with its manicured nail hesitating on the trigger. It was the ultimate betrayal. Frau Winter, his housekeeper, had found her. Geli had missed her heart and punctured her lung. It must have taken her hours to die, alone in the room. He imagined the sounds she made, the hoarse breathing, the whistle of air, the grunts and whimpers like a slaughtered pig.

Frau Winter had called Hess, and Hess had called Wolf. By the time he arrived in the apartment, the police had already been and gone.

Wolf took a breath of night air. He had failed so many times since Geli; and each failure was worse than the last.

Before him was a plain door set into a thick brick wall. It was the right place. He knocked on the door, three times.

A metal shutter he hadn’t noticed slid open at head height, revealing an iron grille. Glittery black eyes regarded him through it. ‘Yes?’

Wolf pushed the card Hess had given him through the iron grille. ‘Herr Wolf,’ he said. ‘Herr Hess sent me.’

The shutter slid shut. After a moment the door opened noiselessly. Beyond it he could hear a piano playing and the sound of laughter and conversation. The man in the doorway looked vaguely familiar but Wolf couldn’t place him. He had a boxer’s round face and a scar on his left cheek and his hair was cut short. ‘Have we met before?’

The man shook his head, unsmiling. ‘No, but I have seen you.’

Wolf shrugged.

The man said, ‘I am Kramer, sir. Josef Kramer.’

‘You work for Hess?’

At that the man did smile. ‘Not Hess,’ he said. ‘Though Herr Hess has a share in this club. Please, welcome.’

‘Thank you.’

Wolf stepped through into the hallway and Kramer shut the door behind him. It was a thick oak door on oiled hinges. It allowed no sound to escape.

‘Please, follow me.’

Wolf listened for sounds. Muted conversation. Faint music. The hallway was thickly carpeted.

‘I joined the Party in ’31,’ Kramer said. ‘The SS in ’32, sir.’

‘Good for you.’

If he was offended Kramer didn’t show it. ‘Through here,’ he said, leading Wolf into a large sitting room. Wolf stopped in the doorway. A man in a tuxedo sat at a grand piano, playing Beethoven. All around him were comfortable sofas and chaise longues, and men with ties loosened sat with drinks in their hands. Along one wall ran a walnut-coloured bar and behind it a barman was polishing glasses. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Kramer said.

‘I don’t drink,’ Wolf said.

The air was thick with the smell of expensive cigars. Wolf recognised several of the faces in the room. He had thought some of them dead. Around the men, shimmering through the room in their too-short sequinned dresses, were the girls.

They were an upscale version of the streetwalkers of Soho, Wolf thought. They were dressed like brazen flappers, in costumes that revealed more than they hid. He noted their diversity. He saw Slavic features and Aryan faces and a black girl who reminded him of Dominique. He eyed the girls and they eyed him back, but there was a vacancy in their eyes. He had seen such an expression before, in the eyes of a doped-up horse before a race. He saw the men look up at his entrance. He kept his face blank and watched them turn away.

‘Please, Herr … Wolf,’ Kramer said. His hand swept around the room. ‘You may have your choice of the girls. It is on the house, sir,’ he added.

‘I am looking for this girl,’ Wolf said. He drew the little sister’s picture from his breast pocket. Isabella had given it to him before she had departed his office. Now he and the man Kramer studied it together. The girl was thin-faced and mousy, her features almost mannish. ‘A Jew?’ Kramer said.

‘Do you stock any Jews?’

A slow, unpleasant smile broke across Kramer’s crater-moon face. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘This is just the antechamber.’ He nodded his head as if some things had become clear to him. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

Wolf followed him, leaving the men behind to the attentions of their whores. He half-expected Kramer to lead him upstairs, to the rooms that no doubt waited there, beds and mirrors and perfumes and lace, a wardrobe for a gentleman to hang his coat in, a washbasin for when his sordid business was done. Instead Kramer led him through a second door and locked it behind him. They were in a corridor in marked contrast to the pleasant sitting room they had vacated. Here bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling and the walls were plain cold stone and so was the floor. There were scuff marks on the stone. He could hear faint sounds, cries and a scream cut short. Kramer led Wolf down a stone staircase, down below ground. Wolf’s fingers itched, and for one irrational moment he wished he still had a gun. But he no longer carried one.

It was cold in the basement, and the air was scented with a familiar tang: a mixture of blood and semen and shit. It was the smell of the camp they had kept him in, before he escaped, the smell of captivity and hopelessness and fear.

They stood in a wide corridor and to either side of the corridor were the metal doors to locked cells. Pinned to the wall like billiard cues were black leather whips. ‘Come,’ Kramer said. He reached for a whip, lashed it through the air. The sound was like a gunshot. Each door had a sliding metal shutter. Kramer slid the first one open and Wolf looked through. In the cell beyond a white girl no older than fifteen lay naked on a mattress, a worn one-eyed teddy bear held in her arms. Her ankle was chained to the wall. The room was bare but for a hook on the wall for a gentleman’s hat and, in the corner, an old-fashioned chamberpot to piss in. The girl was asleep.

‘No?’ If Kramer seemed disappointed he didn’t show it. He slid the shutter back. Wolf took a deep breath.

In the next room two lithe women lay back to back on the same mattress. ‘Identical twins,’ Kramer said, with some pride. ‘Prime specimens. The Marshall always makes sure to keep the cellars well stocked.’

‘The Marshall?’ Wolf said.

‘Göring, sir?’

Wolf nodded as some things became clear. ‘The fat oaf always did like to give himself a grand title,’ he said.

Kramer shrugged. In the next cell Wolf saw an elderly man hunched over a dwarf woman, his pale quivering buttocks rising and falling steadily. Wolf shook his head. Kramer shut the window. ‘This one’s occupied,’ he said, unnecessarily.

‘All Jews?’

‘What?’

‘Are they all Jews?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘You said Göring sends them over from Germany?’

‘The Marshall? Yes. There’s good money in people smuggling, these days,’ Kramer said.

‘And these ones?’

Kramer shrugged. ‘Jews,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Who will miss a Jew?’

‘This girl,’ Wolf said. He brandished the photograph again. ‘Where is she?’

‘I’ve not seen her,’ Kramer said. He seemed hurt. ‘I thought—’

‘You thought,’ Wolf said.

‘I thought your tastes ran into more … I mean, when you said Herr Hess sent you … Herr Wolf, I did not—’

Wolf grabbed the whip out of the man’s unresisting hand. He felt the familiar rage rise inside of him. ‘You dare?’ he said. He lashed the whip. It caught Kramer on the cheek and left an angry red welt. Kramer screamed. ‘You cavort with filthy animals, you, an Aryan, you deal in the flesh of Jews? What perversion is this?’ He was screaming, spittle was coming out of his mouth in long strings that hung from his lips. He was lashing Kramer with the whip, behind the cell doors the drugged specimens were whimpering and the copulating man could be heard banging on the metal door demanding to know what all the God damned ruckus was about, he was trying to finish his business.

‘Herr Wolf, enough!’ Kramer had half-risen and grabbed Wolf’s wrist in a painful grip. His coarse peasant face rose over Wolf. ‘I beg you.’

They stared at each other, motionless. Wolf saw Kramer’s eyes open wide at something behind Wolf’s back. His mouth opened, his lips beginning to form words. ‘Please, don’t—’

Wolf didn’t have time to turn. He felt something cold and sharp sting his neck. It penetrated his skin. His fingers opened. The whip dropped to the floor. His neck felt numb. The numbness spread, fast. His vision blurred and the last thing he saw was Kramer’s face blooming in a silent explosion of blood and bone.

*    *    *

In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming. In his blessed half-sleep he can pretend if only to himself that he does not hear the other men sleeping below him and the ones pressed against him so that when one wants to turn they must all turn. In sleep Shomer is not aware of Yenkl beside him shitting himself and the liquid shit dribbling down from their bunk onto the sleepers down below, and he can also pretend that it is not at all freezing cold, that it is in fact a lovely warm day and that this isn’t Auschwitz but some tropical beach, perhaps some South Seas paradise and that his belly is full and when he smiles his grin is a dazzling white and full still of all his teeth.

In his half-dream which he had begun some time ago on the train on the way here and continued through the selection process and the cleaving of his family, in that murky half-world which was once his novelist’s mind, there is a detective and a damsel in distress; there always are. He shifts and murmurs, instinctively trying to pull away from Yenkl. He feels lice crawling inside his striped prisoner’s pyjamas but he pretends that he does not. It becomes easier by the day.

Instead Shomer, this once upon a time purveyor of Yiddish
shund
, that is of cheap literature or, not to put too fine a point on it, of trash, dreams of a dark city and of dark deeds, and of a watcher in the dark: for in the camp there is always someone watching.

*    *    *

On Berwick Street Edith could feel the watcher, the way his gaze lingered on her body, and paid particular attention to her breasts, and then down to her inguen, where it lingered further. She had grown used to the attentions of men, wanted and unwanted both, since the moment she and her family had fled from Bregenz into Switzerland and the border official who had helped them claimed her for himself as part of the overall price. He had been her first and she remembered how he had buckled his belt afterwards, not his face but only for some reason his buckle; it was shaped like an iron eagle. They had made it to England at last, smuggling themselves across the Channel in a fishing boat, on a moonless night, with no lanterns or lamps. It was a miracle they hadn’t drowned. By then she had grown accustomed to her body being her currency. The fishermen each took their turn to fuck her, as her mother and baby sister sat huddled at the bow. Her mother never mentioned it. Perhaps she had no words with which to speak. Maybe there was nothing to say. It was just one of those things you did to survive.

But she could feel him out there, though no doubt he thought he was invisible, the watcher. He was back a second night in a row. None of the other girls saw him but Edith did. She knew he was there and she knew he was watching her.

At first she thought he was just shy, that he was watching in an effort to gather his courage and approach her. Many men were like that, requiring drink or darkness for their base natures to emerge, their desire to be made manifest. But after a while she did not think this was the case. The watcher disturbed her, though she could not say why. He wore the darkness too comfortably, as though he never intended to emerge from the shadows. A watcher – a
voyeur
, as the French girls said. Sometimes they got men like that, sad pathetic things with one hand twiddling away in their pocket, masturbating as they watched the whores. But the watcher was not like that, either. He got his thrills another way, she was sure.

She was busy that night, going first with a sailor off a Royal Navy ship docked in Greenwich, then with a proper gentleman whose English was as sharp as cut glass, like the King’s or the BBC man on the wireless. Lastly with a young Jew, a yeshiva boy with curly peyos, dressed all in heavy black, who thrust against her quickly but enthusiastically, against the wall of the alleyway they used as combined brothel and latrine. Now she was smoking a cigarette with quick inexpert jerks, stamping her feet against the cold, when the watcher came to her.

She saw him emerge across the road. It was late, and the other girls were all either working or had gone home and she was alone. She smiled at him. Her mother had always told her to smile.

There was nothing much very remarkable about him. His suit hung on him a little uncomfortably. It looked like a hand-me-down. He had good teeth, and the smile he gave her back was surprisingly charming. ‘You want to fuck?’ she said.

His hand was in his coat pocket. He didn’t take it out. He looked nervous and excited. ‘Where can we go?’ he said.

‘It’s ten shillings,’ she said. He agreed with a nervous jerk of his head. ‘In there,’ she said. The alleyway was empty, a fresh pile of shit against the wall where that fat pig Bertha had taken her evening constitutional. They wouldn’t be disturbed.