The Other Side of Silence (12 page)

“But whatever you think of summary executions, my dear, I can promise you that the Russians will do much worse than we are capable of. I think it's only now that it's beginning to dawn on people just what we've been fighting for all along. The decline of the West faced with Slav barbarism. I mean, the historian Oswald Spengler was right. If anyone ever wanted proof of that, it's right here. Or at least a hundred kilometers east of here. I fear for the whole of European civilization if the Ivans conquer East
Prussia.” He chuckled. “I mean, I could take you to my office and show you a Soviet newspaper, the
Red Star
, with horrifying editorials that you could hardly credit might have been written. One in particular comes to mind now: ‘Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. We cannot live as long as these green-eyed slugs are alive. Today there are no books, today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought. Kill the Germans.' That kind of thing. Really, it's quite shocking just how filled with hate for us these people are. One might almost think that they intended to drink our blood, like vampires. Or worse. I expect you've heard the reports about cannibalism. That the Red Army has actually eaten burger meat made of German women.”

After Hennig's earlier warning about defeatism I wasn't disposed to argue that the Russians had been provided with good teachers in barbarism. But I did try to moderate his language a little. “I see no point in upsetting Miss Schaper with talk like that,” I said, noticing that she had paled a little at the mention of cannibalism.

“I'm sorry,” said Hennig. “Lieutenant Gunther is absolutely right. Forgive me, Miss Schaper. That was thoughtless and insensitive of me.”

“That's all right,” she said calmly. “I think it's best to know exactly what we're up against.”

“Spoken like a true German,” said Hennig. He turned in his chair and snapped his fingers at a waiter. “Bring us some brandy,” he said. “The good stuff. Immediately.”

A bottle of ten-year-old Asbach Uralt arrived on the table
and Hennig threw some banknotes beside it as if money meant nothing; and given that he worked for Koch, it probably didn't. The splash around Paradeplatz was that, with the help of the institute's ruthless manager, Dr. Bruno Dzubba, the diminutive Koch had amassed a personal fortune of more than three hundred million marks, and it was clear from the fistful of cash in Hennig's hand and the expensively tailored uniform he was wearing that some of this money was coming his way, at least in the shape of a generous expense account. Hennig uncorked the bottle and poured three generous glasses.

“Here's to happier subjects,” he said and toasted Irmela's eyes. “Your beauty, for instance. I confess I am very jealous of Lieutenant Gunther. You will forgive me if I say I hope you have a friend who's a lightning maid, Miss Schaper. I should hate to be here for much longer without a charming young lady to spoil like Lieutenant Gunther.”

“It's she who's been spoiling me, I'm afraid,” I said.

“The mind reels at the very thought.” Hennig downed his brandy and stood up. “Well, thank you for a delightful evening, but I'm afraid duty calls. The governor has to address the representatives of the People's Storm Unit here in the city tomorrow morning. Governor Koch has been appointed as their local commander. And I have to write his speech for him. Not that I have the first clue about what to say to them.”

The People's Storm Unit was the new national militia that Goebbels had just announced—a home guard composed of conscripted men aged between thirteen and sixty who were not
already serving in some military capacity. With a keen sense of humor most Germans were already referring to the People's Storm Unit as the Father and Son Brigade or, sometimes—and even more amusingly—the Victory Weapon.

After he'd gone—but not before Irmela had promised to introduce him to some of her female friends—I breathed a sigh of relief and then downed my own brandy.

“I can't fault his taste in alcohol,” I said. “But I do hate that man. Then again, I hate so many men these days that I simply can't remember them all or exactly why I hate them, except to say that they're Nazis, of course. Which is as good a reason as any, I suppose. It's so much easier to know why you hate people now.”

“But why do you hate him in particular?”

“Take my word for it, there's a good reason in his case. It's a righteous, holy thing to be able to hate a man like that. Love thy neighbor? No. It can't be done. The fact is I really do believe that Jesus Christ would have made a special exception in the case of Harold Heinz Hennig. And if not, then it's clear to me that it's impossible to be a Christian. Just as it's impossible to believe in a God who would let a hundred children die taking shelter in his church.”

I paused for a moment and she kissed my fingertips again.

“Please, Bernie. Let's not talk about that anymore. I want to kiss every centimeter of you before I go to sleep tonight. And then I want you to do the same to me.”

But I still had an itch that I needed to scratch. “That's another thing,” I said. “I hate that he knows about us. That there's
something between us now. It worries me. For a man like that, all knowledge is something to be used like a loaded pistol.”

Irmela sighed and put down my hand. “You're crazy to worry about him, Bernie. Think about it. What possible harm could he do us? Besides, he's just a captain.”

“Not just any captain. He's an extension of Erich Koch. Did you see the way the waiters in here fawned over him? The quality of his uniform? That amber cigarette case? Besides, the man used to be a blackmailer. Possibly still is, for all I know. The leopard doesn't change his spots. So maybe he's got something on Koch. Perhaps Erich Koch is the lemon who's being squeezed now. You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised. There must be a hell of a lot to get on a bastard like Erich Koch.”

“You'll have to explain some of that. Why is Koch a lemon? I don't understand.”

I told her all about the von Frisch case, to which Irmela very sensibly replied:

“But he's got nothing on you, Bernie Gunther. Or on me. Neither of us has anything to hide. Nor do we have any money to give him. Do we? Besides, there's a war on and there are more important things to worry about, wouldn't you say? You're worrying about nothing. If you're going to blackmail someone you only do it when there's a profit in it, surely?”

“Why is he here now?” I asked.

“It was a coincidence, that's all.”

I sipped my brandy and then bit my fingernail.

“There's no coincidence with him. He doesn't arrive in your
life without there being a reason. That's not how it works with a man like that.”

“So how does it work? Tell me.”

But I could not. After the wine and the brandy, it was beyond my powers of speech to explain to her the sense of foreboding I had about seeing Harold Hennig again. For her to have understood how I felt about Hennig it would probably have been necessary for her to have returned with me to 1938 and seen poor Captain von Frisch's battered body lying in a pool of blood and urine on a cell floor. Looking back on it now I might have said it was like that picture by Pieter Bruegel popularly known as
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
: I imagined an ordinary day in Königsberg—if such a thing was even possible; Irmela and me walking by the sea, hand in hand, enjoying the view and looking at the ships with innocent smiles on our windswept faces, but as oblivious to what is really going on in the picture as Bruegel's plowman or the lumpish shepherd staring up at the now empty gray sky. Meanwhile, somewhere in the corner of the canvas a tragedy unfolds, unnoticed by almost everyone. Hubris knocks us from the sky and we are both drowned in the freezing northern sea.

That's the thing about blackmail. You don't understand how it could ever happen to you until it does.

—

W
inter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope as the Russians tightened their cold, iron grip on the miserable, beleaguered city.
Water froze in the bedroom ewers and condensation became ice on the inside of windowpanes. Some mornings I woke up and the bottom of the iron bedstead I shared with Irmela looked like the edge of the roof outside, there were so many icicles hanging off it. Defeat was staring us in the face like the inscription on a new headstone. Christmas came and went, the thermometer dropped to an unheard-of level and I more or less forgot about Captain Harold Hennig. Matters affecting our survival demanded more attention. Fuel and food ran short, as did ammunition and patience. The general opinion was that we could last for another three or four more months at most. Unfortunately, this opinion was not shared by the great optimist who had quit his wolf's lair in Rastenburg and was now safely back in Berlin. But Irmela and I had other things on our minds than mere survival, not least the fact that she was pregnant. I was delighted, and when she saw my own reaction so was Irmela. I promised, faithfully, that if by some miracle I survived the war I would divorce my wife in Berlin and marry her; and if I didn't survive, then something of me might, which would be some consolation at least for a life cut short, if not tragically—I could hardly claim that—then for a life that had been cut short of meaning. Yes, that was how I thought about the prospect of having finally fathered a child. Something of me would remain after the war. Which is all part of the butt-fuck that is life's grotesque comedy.

Then, one day in late January, and quite out of the blue, Captain Hennig arrived in a government car with an order for me to report to Gauleiter Koch on his estate in Friedrichsberg
and neither I nor my senior officers in the FHO had any option but to comply since the order was signed by Erich Koch himself. Not that I was in any way indispensable to my superiors. Only the most dimwitted intelligence officer could have failed to notice that the Russians were winning. But no one at FHO HQ ever looked at me the same way again; it was assumed among my fellow officers, not unreasonably, that I was another of Koch's larval spies.

We drove west out of the city, on the Holsteiner Damm, along the northern shore of the Pregel River and, after about seven miles, where the black river flowed into the even blacker Vistula Lagoon, we saw the house, which bordered one or two other palaces of lesser grandeur. Hennig had not told me why I had been summoned there by the gauleiter, about that he remained infuriatingly silent, but usefully he did explain that the house had been built by King Frederick III of Prussia in 1690 as a lodge for elk hunting, although as soon as I caught my first sight of it I formed the conclusion that a place of that size might more plausibly have been used as the base for a yearlong expedition to hunt woolly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers. Prince Bismarck would have scorned the place as too grand and, perhaps, too Prussian, but judging by the pretensions of Gross Friedrichsberg, I expect it was just right for the eldest son of Frederick the Great—who must have been justifiably worried how else he was going to live up to the enormous reputation of his father—and Erich Koch, of course. Given that the place was the size of Potsdamer Platz station, I imagine Koch must have
thought it was the perfect house for a former railway employee like him.

Immediately prior to my leaving FHO headquarters with Hennig I'd been told that the Schloss Gross Friedrichsberg, as it was known to all who worked there—and it was indeed a huge estate, being several hundred hectares—was now owned by the East Prussia Land Company, lest there be any suggestion that Koch was enriching himself at the expense of the German people; the fact that Koch was owner of the East Prussia Land Company was probably just an unfortunate coincidence.

An immaculate butler ushered us through the front door and straight into the castle library, where Koch was waiting beside a coal fire that could have powered a class 52 steam locomotive for the DRG. To be fair, it was a very large room and it probably needed a big blaze in the grate to prevent the glacier ice from encroaching past the farthest sections of the bookshelves. The gauleiter was seated in a Louis XV–style gilt wingback chair that was as tall as a giraffe and only served to make him even smaller than he certainly was. With his toothbrush mustache and smart party tunic, Koch looked like a ration-book Adolf Hitler, and meeting him in the flesh, it was difficult to take seriously his very public assertions in the
Völkischer Beobachter
that the lowliest German worker was racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than any Russian. I'd seen smaller Nazis but only in the Hitler Youth. And he looked about as racially valuable as the onanistic contents of a schoolboy's
handkerchief. He stood up but not noticeably and then we saluted each other in the time-honored way.

“Thank you for driving out here,” he said.

I shrugged and looked at Hennig. “Hennig did the driving, sir. I just admired the view. It's a nice place you have here.”

Koch smiled sweetly. “No. It's not mine, you know. Would that it were. The East Prussia Land Company owns this lovely house. I just rent it from them. God knows why. These old Prussian houses cost a fortune to heat in winter, you know. I'll probably bankrupt myself merely trying to keep this place warm.” Koch waved at a drinks tray. “Would you like a drink, Captain Gunther?”

“I've not often been heard to say no to a glass of schnapps,” I said. “And it's Lieutenant Gunther now.”

“Yes, of course, you had a difference of opinion with Dr. Goebbels, didn't you?”

“I was wrong about something. Made a mistake. I'm probably quite lucky to be a lieutenant, sir.”

“That's all right.” Koch grinned and poured us a glass of schnapps. “The doctor and I have never exactly seen things eye to eye. Prior to my appointment as the East Prussian governor I'm afraid he rather suspected me of having been implicated in the publication of a newspaper article that made fun of his physical handicaps.”