Strange Music (8 page)

Wednesday, 14 December 1949

That same evening Faith met Eric at the cottage door. ‘This documentary of Angela's isn't what I thought,' she said. ‘Not a
BBC
documentary. Something from the military. But it's not a big reel, so the most we'll risk wasting is twenty minutes. Are you still on?'

‘Military? What's it about?' he asked as he shook the rain off his umbrella and stamped his feet. ‘Twenty yards and I'm soaked.'

‘I don't want to say – in case I'm wrong – but it's something I've heard her talk about a time or two.' She led him into Felix's studio. ‘Angela? Eric wants to watch, too. You don't mind, I hope?'

‘The more the merrier.' Angela waved her hand toward the couch at one end of the studio. ‘Just make sure you can see the screen.' She was slightly breathless and her voice was more high-pitched than usual; the ‘screen' was a white sheet pinned to the crimson curtains that were normally drawn across the studio window after dark.

‘Where's Felix?' Eric asked. The quarter-size maquette for his
BOAC
sculpture was pushed over against the wall – a random lacework of bird wings forming a pierced sphere.

Faith nudged him and shook her head.

‘Sulking,' Angela said airily. ‘Eric, dear, can you reach that switch?'

The room was plunged into darkness. Simultaneously the projector clattered into life, projecting a countdown – 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . At five it started to show a clock-style timer, sweeping toward zero.

Then, as the hand reached two – darkness.

Then an institutional sort of room with bare floorboards, a dark gray wall up to waist height, and light gray above. The camera pans right toward the door. It opens to reveal two female sergeants in the Corps of Royal Military Police. A caption fades in:
Hamelin – former
SS
-Oberaufseherin Elisabeth Völkenrath – Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, 13 December 1945
.
It fades out as the woman herself comes into view – a thin, haggard female in prison drab, handcuffed behind, and shuffling in cloth slippers.

‘Bitch!' Angela shouted at the screen. ‘This is for Milena! This is for Margarete! This is for
me
!'

‘Dear God!' Eric whispered; Faith reached out and squeezed his wrist.

A German padre mouths words but the condemned woman waves him away.

‘“
Gott mitt uns!
”' Angela sneered. ‘
Das war ja eine L-ü-ge!
'

The camera pans left to follow the execution party and, when they shuffle to a halt, pans down to show she is standing in the centre of a trapdoor, painted white. The hangman stands at the far side; behind him are grouped a number of British officers and a couple of civilians, one in the wig of a court official.

‘That's Albert Pierrepoint,' Angela told them. ‘The hangman. I went to his pub up in Hollinwood but he's not allowed to talk about being a hangman.'

‘Where's Hollinwood?' Faith asked.

‘Near Manchester.' She went up to the screen and shouted again: ‘That's the sheet on which Felix Breit, late of Mauthausen and Angela Wirth, late of Ravensbrück, made their baby. Here we live! Here you die!' Her laughter was warm and melodious, as if she had just told the sort of joke you can tell to children.

One sergeant cuffs the condemned woman's ankles while the other places a black cloth hood over her head. The rope is lowered. Albert Pierrepoint takes one step forward, to the edge of the trapdoor and slips the noose around her head, tightening it slightly to one side at the back of her neck; in the same movement he pulls a lever. The white trapdoor turns suddenly black and the condemned woman falls with astonishing speed into the void. Three frames and she's gone. Pierrepoint steadies the taut rope – or is he feeling for twitchings of life? He stares down through the open door, gives a little nod of satisfaction. Nobody appears to speak. Nobody smiles.

Smiling, Angela froze the projector and walked up to the screen. ‘They took longer than that to die when you were in charge!' she shouted into the image of the open trapdoor. ‘Butcher!'

Then followed the almost identical execution – again conducted by Albert Pierrepoint but in a different execution chamber – of
SS-
Hauptsturmführer Johann Schwarzhüber – Deputy Commandant, Ravensbrück Concentration Camp
–
3 May 1947
.

‘This next group were tried and sentenced at the Curiohaus in Hamburg at almost exactly the same time as Willard was back there looking for Marianne,' Angela said. ‘Think! Their world ending – ours just beginning. Marianne should be here to enjoy it.'

‘Who was this Schwarzhüber johnny?' Eric asked.

‘Deputy commandant – like it said just now. He was in charge of the big gas chambers at Auschwitz, so when the
SS
knew they were going to lose the war and Ravensbrück had to start killing prisoners much more quickly than just slave labour and starvation was managing, he was the man who built the gas chamber there. The Swedish Red Cross was actually in the camp while it was working – that's how well disguised it was and how desperate they were. Who's next?'

Faith stood up. ‘I don't think this is quite my cup of tea,' she said. ‘Sorry, Angela, darling, but . . . well . . .'

‘I don't mind,' Angela assured her cheerfully. ‘I was all set to enjoy the feast alone. Eric?'

‘It's not exactly what I watch as a rule, either,' he replied. ‘But what are rules if we can't break them, eh?' He dry-soaped his hands. ‘I'll stay if it's all the same to you?'

There followed the execution rituals of fourteen more former
SS
warders, wardresses, doctors, and officers, all hanged with gravity (and by it) at the hand of Albert Pierrepoint. Angela gave Eric a brief biography of each: this one pulled teeth containing gold from living prisoners and kept the proceeds . . . that one let a vicious dog loose on prisoners, at random, whenever she got bored, and if you resisted the dog, she shot you . . . another ran a lethal regime in the solitary confinement cells in the infamous punishment
Bunker
. . . another did medical experiments on children, making friends of them because if they were afraid, the experiments wouldn't work. In between, Angela whooped for joy and shouted curses at each pathetic prisoner as he or she underwent the sentence of the court.

When the reel ran out – going flip-flip-flip in the take-up reel – she let out a great sigh of satisfaction and turned to Eric. ‘D'you know a story by Franz Kafka called – in English –
In the Penal Settlement
?' she asked.

He nodded. ‘A friend lent it me – round about the time Belsen was liberated.'

‘You remember the punishment machine in it? With needles that pricked the skin, writing the prisoners' crimes in blood, all over their bodies, from head to toe? And the companion needles that puffed a little squirt of acid into each pinprick? Well, if such a machine existed, I would gladly operate it myself on each and every one of those criminals.'

‘Does it annoy you . . . oh, would you like a whisky, by the way?' He went through to the kitchen – to his raincoat – and extracted a half-bottle of Haig.

‘Use the glasses on the second shelf of the dresser,' she called out to him.

‘They're rather large.'

She laughed. ‘That's why I picked them. No water in mine.'

She swallowed a good slug and gasped at the fire and the afterburn. ‘Does what annoy me?'

‘Oh. These hangings – these deaths. They're all so unheroic. They just shuffle in like zombies and let it happen. D'you think they learned how to die from watching you prisoners dying?'

Angela drew breath, sharply, and opened her mouth to protest . . . but no words came.

‘Mmm?' he prompted.

‘Damn you,' she said quietly.

‘Not really an answer.'

‘They took away everything from us. Everything . . . except . . .'

‘What?'

‘Our ability to respond. They could enforce an
outward
response – eyes down . . . passive . . . but they could never know what was going on behind those eyes. That was our ultimate victory. And now . . .' She gestured toward the projector. ‘The same with them.'

‘So there is no ultimate victory. You'll just have to settle for their deaths. Cut your coat according to your cloth – they must have taught you that lesson, too.' He grinned. ‘The other thing I was going to ask – do you resent it that Felix won't share in this
Schadenfreudefest
? Is he annoyed that you didn't get film of Pierrepoint at work on the butchers of Mauthausen?'

She took another, calmer, slug and gazed evenly at him. ‘That's actually none of your business, Eric.'

‘What a very bourgeois reason for not answering. I thought you communists were—'

‘I'm not a communist. I'm a Marxist.'

‘Ah! That explains it. Few of the great men of the nineteenth century were more bourgeois than the Old Karl. I'm sorry. I wouldn't have asked if I'd realized. Cheers!'

‘Double damn you!' She laughed and accepted the toast. ‘Cheers! Felix has not yet . . . what would the word be . . . assimilated? digested? . . . his time in Mauthausen. He was plucked from the staircase of death by a communist who knew of his pre-war support of workers' rights in Paris. He was taught carving – a masonry sort of carving – by a Nazi who knew he was a fine artist and thought that was more important than being a quarter-Jew. And he was taken from there to the diet experiment by another Nazi who wanted to save Felix for the same reasons, even though he was an
SS
doctor. Artist Felix thinks those actions were his by right, but human Felix cannot accept that he had any right to be saved when so many good friends were murdered, especially as he was so indifferent to the fate of the Jews before the Gestapo told him he was one himself. He just says, “We survived. They didn't. It's over. Look forward. Get on with it.” That's Felix.'

‘And what's so wrong with that?'

‘What's wrong is that he doesn't know which life to get on with – the life of nineteen thirty-six or the life of nineteen
forty
-six. And if you want to know something that
really
is none of your business – he's thinking of becoming a practising Jew.' She slumped. ‘Damn! This was going to be such a jolly evening!'

Upstairs, Pippin began to cry.

Faith knew exactly where to find Felix – up in the Johnsons' at the top of the house. Even when he and she had been lovers, he had always gone to Marianne for ‘an impartial opinion,' as he called it. Willard called it ‘touching base with Europe.' She didn't think there was any sort of sexual, or even romantic, element in their relationship; in a way, it was too deep for either sort of involvement – more like kinship than desire.

She paused at the first-floor landing, outside the door to Chris Riley-Potter's and Nina's. Here the choice was to go directly up the new flight of stairs to the Johnsons' or take the old way, which led through the Palmers'.

She chose the Palmers', with some vague hope of buttonholing Nicole on the way up. Standing there in the passage, irresolute, she heard Nicole singing that lullaby Willard had taught the whole community:
Don't wander away love
. . . She stood outside the nursery door, entranced, for Nicole had a strangely compelling singing voice, with all the femininity of Josephine Baker but edged with the stridency of Edith Piaf.

Nicole was jealous of life – her own life. She never lingered to gaze fondly at her little darling if her singing had already sent him – and young Tommy – to sleep; instead, as now, she backed away toward the door, singing the final line again and again until she was out on the landing.

‘Oh!' she cried out in surprise, catching Faith on the threshold.

‘That was just so beautiful,' Faith told her. ‘Actually, I was on my way up to see if Felix was with the Johnsons, but I wanted first—'

‘He's with Marianne, I think. Willard's in town, closing some big deal, Marianne says.'

‘But I wanted to ask you first about . . . well, what sort of mood he's in – Felix, that is. He didn't want to watch these films of Angela's – and having seen them, I can quite understand—'

‘You
saw
them?' Nicole was aghast.

‘I saw two – and that was more than enough. Eric's still there, in case . . . you know?' She wound an imaginary handle beside her head. ‘I just wonder if you saw Felix on the way up . . . and whether he said anything?'

Nicole shrugged. ‘I've been bathing Andrew and Tommy and putting them to bed. Lena's gone to the village – her mother's not well.'

‘But Felix . . .?'

‘I should think Felix is livid.'

‘D'you think he has a
right
to be livid?' Faith asked.

Nicole stared blankly at her for a moment and then said, ‘Come downstairs and have a glass of wine –
vin ordinaire,
nothing special.'

When they were seated – before a roaring log fire that cast massive shadows in that huge drawing room – Nicole said, ‘Why would he need a
right
to be angry with Angela? He thinks what she's doing is self-destructive. So do I. And I'll bet Marianne does, too.'

‘It's just this,' Faith replied. ‘You risked your life in the war. You must have woken up on many mornings wondering if today was the day when you'd be betrayed and then shot. The same was true of Marianne. Maybe you and she still have those nightmares – and please, I don't want to know, I'm not poking my nose in there, but the point is: you don't
seem to
. You both have new lives and you both get on with them, whatever nightmare memories—'

‘I think I know one reason why he might be angry, or not want to take part this evening,' Nicole said. ‘I joined the resistance, so did Angela. So did Marianne. And we all know why Felix couldn't possibly do the same – why it was far better for him to try to carry the news to America . . . with his reputation. He knows it, too, but there's still something in there' – she tapped her skull – ‘that wishes it could have been different.'