Mother Night (9 page)

“Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,” he said. “I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.” He took my hand. “You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.”

He turned away from me abruptly. He went to the oyster-eyed woman who had almost dropped the blue vase. She was standing against a wall where she had
been ordered to stand, was numbly playing the punished dunce.

Werner Noth shook her a little, trying to arouse an atom of intelligence in her. He pointed to another woman who was carrying a hideous Chinese carved-oak dog, carrying it as carefully as though it were a baby.

“You see?” Noth said to the dunce. He wasn’t intentionally tormenting the dunce. He was trying to make her, in spite of her stupidity, a better-rounded, more useful human being.

“You see?” he said again, earnestly, helpfully, pleadingly. “That’s the way to handle precious things.”

I
WENT INTO
the music room of Werner Noth’s emptying house and found little Resi and her dog.

Little Resi was ten years old then. She was curled in a wing-chair by a window. Her view was not of the ruins of Berlin but of the walled orchard, of the snowy lace that the treetops made.

There was no heat in the house. Resi was bundled up in a coat and scarf and thick wool stockings. A small suitcase was beside her. When the wagon train outside was ready to move, she would be ready to board it.

She had taken off her mittens, laid them neatly on the arm of the chair. She had bared her hands in order to pet the dog in her lap. The dog was a dachshund that had, on a wartime diet, lost all its hair and been all but immobilized by dropsical fat.

The dog looked like some early amphibian meant to waddle in ooze. While Resi caressed it, its brown
eyes bugged with the blindness of ecstasy. Every bit of its awareness followed like thimbles the fingertips that stroked its hide.

I did not know Resi well. She had chilled me once, fairly early in the war, by lispingly calling me an American spy. Since then, I had spent as little time as possible before her childish gaze. When I came into the music room I was startled to see how much she was coming to resemble my Helga.

“Resi—?” I said.

She didn’t look at me. “I know,” she said. “It’s time to kill the dog.”

“It isn’t anything I want to do very much,” I said.

“Are you going to do it,” she said, “or are you going to give it to somebody to do?”

“Your father asked me to do it,” I said.

She turned to look at me. “You’re a soldier now,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you put on your uniform just for killing the dog?” she said.

“I’m going to the front,” I said. “I stopped by to say goodbye.”

“Which front?” she said.

“The Russians,” I said.

“You’ll die,” she said.

“So I hear,” I said. “Maybe not.”

“Everybody who isn’t dead is going to be dead very soon now,” she said. She didn’t seem to care much.

“Not everybody,” I said.

“I will be,” she said.

“I hope not,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I said.

“It won’t hurt when I get killed,” she said. “Just all of a sudden I won’t be any more,” she said. She pushed the dog off her lap. It fell to the floor as passive as a
Knackwurst
.

“Take it,” she said. “I never liked it anyway. I just felt sorry for it.”

I picked up the dog.

“It will be much better off dead,” she said.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

“I’ll be better off dead, too,” she said.

“That I can’t believe,” I said.

“Do you want me to tell you something?” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“Since nobody’s going to go on living much longer,” she said, “I might as well tell you I love you.”

“That’s very sweet,” I said.

“I mean really love you,” she said. “When Helga was alive and you two would come here, I used to envy Helga. When Helga was dead, I started dreaming about
how I would grow up and marry you and be a famous actress, and you would write plays for me.”

“I am honored,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “Nothing means anything. You go shoot the dog now.”

I bowed out, taking the dog with me. I took the dog out into the orchard, put it down in the snow, drew my tiny pistol.

Three people were watching me. One was Resi, who now stood at the music-room window. Another was the ancient soldier who was supposed to be guarding the Polish and Russian women.

The third was my mother-in-law, Eva Noth. Eva Noth stood at a second-story window. Like Resi’s dog, Eva Noth had fattened dropsically on wartime food. The poor woman, made into sausage by unkind time, stood at attention, seemed to think that the execution of the dog was a ceremony of some nobility.

I shot the dog in the back of the neck. The report of my pistol was small, cheap, like the tinny spit of a B.B. gun.

The dog died without a shudder.

The old soldier came over, expressing a professional’s interest in the sort of wound such a small pistol might make. He turned the dog over with his boot, found the bullet in the snow, murmured judiciously, as though I had done an interesting, instructive thing. He
now began to talk of all sorts of wounds he had seen or heard of, all sorts of holes in once-living things.

“You’re going to bury it?” he said.

“I suppose I’d better,” I said.

“If you don’t,” he said, “somebody will eat it.”

I
FOUND OUT
only recently, in 1958 or 1959, how my father-in-law died. I knew he was dead. The detective agency I had hired to find word of Helga had told me that much—that Werner Noth was dead.

The details of his death came to hand by chance—in a Greenwich Village barber shop. I was leafing through a girly magazine, admiring the way women were made, and awaiting my turn for a haircut. The story advertised on the magazine cover was “Hang-women for the Hangman of Berlin.” There was no reason for me to suppose that the article was about my father-in-law. Hanging hadn’t been his business. I turned to the article.

And I looked for quite a while at a murky photograph of Werner Noth being hanged from an apple tree without suspecting who the hanged man was. I looked
at the faces of the people at the hanging. They were mostly women, nameless, shapeless ragbags.

And I played a game, counting the ways in which the magazine cover had lied. For one thing, the women weren’t doing the hanging. Three scrawny men in rags were doing it. For another thing, the women in the photograph weren’t beautiful, and the hangwomen on the cover were. The hangwomen on the cover had breasts like cantaloupes, hips like horse collars, and their rags were the pathetic remains of nightgowns by Schiaparelli. The women in the photograph were as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress-ticking.

And then, just before I began to read the story of the hanging, I began, tentatively and queasily, to recognize the shattered building in the background. Behind the hangman, looking like a mouthful of broken teeth, was all that was left of the home of Werner Noth, of the home where my Helga had been raised as a good German citizen, of the home where I had said farewell to a ten-year-old nihilist named Resi.

I read the text.

The text was by a man named Ian Westlake, and it was very well done. Westlake, an Englishman, a liberated prisoner of war, had seen the hanging shortly after his liberation by the Russians. The photographs were his.

Noth, he said, had been hanged from his own
apple tree by slave laborers, mostly Poles and Russians, quartered nearby. Westlake did not call my father-in-law “The Hangman of Berlin.”

Westlake went to some trouble to find out what crimes Noth had committed, and he concluded that Noth had been no better and no worse than any other big city chief of police.

“Terror and torture were the provinces of other branches of the German police,” said Westlake. “Werner Noth’s own province was what is regarded in every big city as ordinary law and order. The force he directed was the sworn enemy of drunks, thieves, murderers, rapists, looters, confidence men, prostitutes, and other disturbers of the peace, and it did its best to keep the city traffic moving.

“Noth’s principal offense,” said Westlake, “was that he introduced persons suspected of misdemeanors and crimes into a system of courts and penal institutions that was insane. Noth did his best to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, using the most modern police methods; but those to whom he handed over his prisoners found the distinction of no importance. Merely to be in custody, with or without trial, was a crime. Prisoners of every sort were all to be humiliated, exhausted and killed.”

Westlake went on to say that the slave laborers who hanged Noth had no clear idea who he was, beyond
the fact that he was somebody important. They hanged him for the satisfaction of hanging somebody important.

Noth’s house, said Westlake, had been demolished by Russian artillery, but Noth had continued to live in one undamaged room in the back. Westlake took an inventory of the room, found it to contain a bed, a table, and a candlestick. On the table were framed photographs of Helga, Resi, and Noth’s wife.

There was a book. It was a German translation of
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
.

Why such a miserable magazine had bought such a fine piece of reporting was not explained. What the magazine was sure its readers would like was the description of the hanging itself.

My father-in-law was stood on a footstool four inches high. The rope was put around his neck and drawn tight over the limb of a budding apple tree. The footstool was then kicked out from under him. He could dance on the ground while he strangled.

Good?

He was revived eight times, and hanged nine.

Only after the eighth hanging were his last bits of courage and dignity gone. Only after the eighth hanging did he act like a child being tortured.

“For that performance,” said Westlake, “he was rewarded with what he wanted most in all this world.
He was rewarded with death. He died with an erection and his feet were bare.”

I turned the page of the magazine to see if there was more. There was more, but not more of the same. There was a full-page photograph of a pretty woman with her thighs spread wide and her tongue stuck out.

The barber called out to me. He shook another man’s hair out of the cloth he was going to put around my neck.

“Next,” he said.

I’
VE SAID
that I’d stolen the motorcycle I rode when I called on Werner Noth for the last time. I should explain.

I didn’t really steal it. I just borrowed it for all eternity from Heinz Schildknecht, my ping-pong doubles partner, my closest friend in Germany.

We used to drink together, used to talk long into the night, especially after we both lost our wives.

“I feel I can tell you anything—absolutely anything,” he said to me one night, late in the war.

“I feel the same way about you, Heinz,” I said.

“Anything I have is yours,” he said.

“Anything I have is yours, Heinz,” I said.

The amount of property between us was negligible. Neither one of us had a home. Our real estate and our furniture were blown to smithereens. I had a watch, a typewriter, and a bicycle, and that was about it. Heinz
had long since traded his watch and his typewriter and even his wedding ring for black-market cigarettes. All he had left in this vale of tears, excepting my friendship and the clothes on his back, was a motorcycle.

“If anything ever happens to the motorcycle,” he said to me, “I am a pauper.” He looked around for eavesdroppers. “I will tell you something terrible,” he said.

“Don’t if you don’t want to,” I said.

“I want to,” he said. “You are the person I can tell terrible things to. I am going to tell you something simply awful.”

The place where we were drinking and talking was a pillbox near the dormitory where we both slept. It had been built very recently for the defense of Berlin, had been built by slaves. It wasn’t armed, wasn’t manned. The Russians weren’t that close yet.

Heinz and I sat there with a bottle and a candle between us, and he told me the terrible thing. He was drunk.

“Howard—” he said, “I love my motorcycle more than I loved my wife.”

“I want to be a friend of yours, and I want to believe everything you say, Heinz,” I said to him, “but I refuse to believe that. Let’s just forget you said it, because it isn’t true.”

“No,” he said, “this is one of those moments when somebody really speaks the truth, one of those
rare moments. People hardly ever speak the truth, but now I am speaking the truth. If you are the friend I think you are, you’ll do me the honor of believing the friend I think I am when I speak the truth.”

“All right,” I said.

There were tears streaming down his cheeks. “I sold her jewelry, her favorite furniture, even her meat ration one time—all for cigarettes for me,” he said.

“We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of,” I said.

“I would not quit smoking for her sake,” said Heinz.

“We all have bad habits,” I said.

“When the bomb hit the apartment, killed her and left me with nothing but a motorcycle,” he said, “the black-market man offered me four thousand cigarettes for the motorcycle.”

“I know,” I said. He told me the same story every time he got drunk.

“And I gave up smoking at once,” he said, “because I loved the motorcycle so.”

“We all cling to something,” I said.

“To the wrong things—” he said, “and we start clinging too late. I will tell you the one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe.”

“All right,” I said.