religious grandeur of it all: swastika, slashing SS collar tabs, flags, vivid unit patches, the stylized Deco Nazi eagle, wings flared taut, preying, on shoulder tabs. Leets prowled edgily through this museum, trying to master its lesson, but could not. At one point he came upon a boxful of the silver death’s-head badges that went on SS caps. He jammed his hand in, feeling them heavy and shifty and cool, running out from between his fingers. They felt in fact like quarters. He looked at one closely: skull, leering theatrically, carnivorous, laughing, chilling. Yet the skull was no pure Nazi invention; it was not even German. The British 17th Lancers had worn them on their trip to the Russian guns at Balaklava, last century.
He moved on to a bench on which the tailors had abandoned their last day’s work, the sleeve bands worn on dress uniforms. These, strips of heavy black felt, had been painfully and beautifully embroidered in heavy gold thread, Gothic letters an inch high, with the names of various Nazi celebrities or more ancient Teutonic heroes; it was a German fashion to commemorate a man or a legend by naming a division after him or it: REINHARD HEYDRICH, THEODOR EICKE, FLORIAN GEYER, SS POLIZEI DIVISION, DANMARK, and so forth. The workmanship was exquisite, but by one of history’s crueler ironies, this delicate work had been performed by Jewish hands. They’d sewed for their own murderers in order to live. A few, like Eisner, actually had survived.
Leets passed to a final exhibit — a long rack on which hung five uniforms for pickup. He hoped their owners had no need of them now. But they loved uniforms, that was certain. Perhaps here was a lesson, the very core of the thing. Perhaps the uniforms were not symbolic of National Socialism, but somehow
Yet the uniform signified only one face of it. He’d seen the other elsewhere. Another spectacle was intractably bound up with this one. Standing there alone in the dim stuffy room, the black uniform before him, he remembered.
The weather had turned cold, this three days earlier, but the gulf between then and now seemed like a geological epoch.
They were in an open Jeep. He sat in back with Shmuel, and pulled the field jacket tighter about himself. Tony was up front, and where Roger should have been, behind the wheel, another glum boy sat, borrowed from Seventh Army. They’d just bucked their way through the crowded streets of the thousand-year-old town of Dachau, quaint place, full of American vehicles and German charms, among the latter cobblestones, high-roofed stone houses, gilt metalwork, flower beds, tidy churches. Civilians stood about and American soldiers and even a few clusters of surrendered
And then they were beyond and then they had stopped. But feeling the Jeep bump to a halt, he looked up.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.
“Welcome to KZ Dachau,” said Shmuel.
Seemed to be outside a yard of some sort. A wall of barbed wire closed it off, filthy place, heaps of garbage strewn all over, smelled to the heavens. Had some toilets backed up? He couldn’t figure it out. The Germans were usually so tidy.
A rail yard, was that it? Yes, tracks and boxcars and flatcars standing idle, abandoned, their contents probably looted, tufts of hay and straw and the cars seemed full of … what, he couldn’t tell. Logs? Pieces of wood perhaps? The thought of puppets came suddenly to mind, for in a peculiar way some of the forms seemed almost shaped like small humans.
He finally recognized it. In the picture Susan had forced him to look at in London so long ago, it had all been blurred, out of focus. Here, nothing was out of focus. Most of them were naked and hideously gaunt, but modesty and nutrition were merely the first and least of the laws of civilization violated in the rail yard. The corpses seemed endless, they spilled everywhere, tangled and knitted together in a great fabric. The food spasmed up Leets’s throat and he fought against the gag reflex that choked him at that instant. An overwhelming odor, decomposition shot with excretion, those two great components of the Teutonic imagination — death and shit — blurred the air.
“You think you’ve seen it all,” said Tony.
The driver was out vomiting by the tire of the Jeep. He was sobbing.
Leets tried to soothe him. “Okay, okay, you’ll be okay.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said the boy.
“That’s okay,” Leets said. But he felt like crying himself. Now he’d seen what they were doing. You could look at it in pictures and then look away and it was all gone. But here you could not look away.
Leets in the tailor’s shop reached out and touched the black uniform. It was only cloth.
“Jim?”
He turned.
It was Susan.
20
Repp awoke when the sun struck his eyes. The sudden dazzle decreed into his head an edict of confusion: all he could feel was the raw scratch of straw against his skin. As he moved a leg experimentally, a high-pitched piping protested; he felt the scurry of something warm and living nestled in close to him.
Rat.
He coiled in disgust, rolling away. The rat had gotten under him, attracted by the warmth, and worked its way into his pack. He stared at it. A bold droll creature, cosmopolitan and fearless, it stood its ground, climbing even to its haunches, eyes peeping with glittery intelligence, whiskers absorbing information from the air, pink tongue animate and ceaseless. There had been rats in Russia, huge things, big as cows; but this sophisticated creature was Swabian and sly and mocking. Repp threw his rifle at it, missing, but the clatter sent the rat scampering deeper into the barn.
Repp pulled himself out of the straw and collected his equipment. The rat had gnawed through the canvas and gotten to the bread. A chunk was left, moist and germy, but Repp could not bring himself to put it to his lips. Revolted, he tossed it into the shadows of the barn.
He’d come upon this place late last night, an empty farm, fields fallow, house deserted and stripped, livestock vanished. Yet it had not been burned — no scorched earth in the path of the advancing Americans — and, desperately tired, he’d chosen the barn for refuge.
Repp had decided to move across country these days, avoiding the roads until he was as far from the site of the unpleasantness with the “Das Reich” Field Police as possible. In the desolate countryside, along muddy farm lanes, there was less chance of apprehension — either by SS or, worse, by the Americans.
Yet now, thinking of them, he became nervous. How close were they, how long had he slept? He checked his watch: not yet seven. Looking outside, he saw nothing but a quiet rural landscape. He’d heard cannon and seen flashes last night after dark: the bastards had to be close.
In the barnyard, Repp took a compass reading, and set himself a southward course. He knew he was already below Haigerloch, but just how far he wasn’t sure. But south would take him to the great natural obstacle of the Danube, and he thought he’d cross at the little industrial town of Tuttlingen. Though the prospect of a bridge frightened him as well: for bridges were the natural site for the SS to establish checkpoints.
The fields were deserted under a bright sun, though it remained chilly. No planting had been done and the careful plots of farmland in the rolling land lay before him dark and muddy. He strode on, alone in the world, though keeping alert. At one point he made out two fast-moving low shapes off the horizon and got into some trees before
