“Hanna asked me to. She could not part with the child herself.”
“So why did she part with it at all?”
“My dear Assistant,” Banaszak bit his tongue at the last instant so as to not say “my dear Anwaldt”. He was angry at himself for having agreed to Anwaldt’s strange request to introduce him under a fictitious name. “Please forgive me, but this question has nothing to do with the case. Firstly, it should have been addressed to the deceased; secondly, the answer won’t give you what you’re looking for: the son’s address.”
“I’m not, sir, going to come to Poznan again in order to ask something you’ve not allowed me to ask.”
Anwaldt examined the books through the yellow glass and admired the large collection of Greek literature in translation. A verse from Oedipus the King roared in his ears: “Terrible though it is, Sir, while the witness/ Does not the truth confess, hold fast still to your hope.”
“She was young. She still wanted to get married.”
“Which orphanage did you take the child to?”
“I don’t know. Definitely a Catholic one.”
“How’s that, were you in Berlin or not? You went there at random with the child, not knowing where you were going to leave it? How did you know they would take him in anywhere?”
“Two nuns were waiting for the child at the station. It had been decided by the family of the child’s father.”
“What family? Name!”
“I don’t know. Hanna kept it absolutely secret and never told anyone. I expect she was generously rewarded for her silence.”
“Had anything else been decided?”
“Yes. The family paid in advance for the boy to be educated at a secondary school.”
Anwaldt suddenly experienced a painful spasm in his chest. He got up, strolled across the room and decided to put an end to the pain by means of its cause. So he lit another cigarette. But the effect was such that he was gripped by a dry cough. When it had passed, he quoted Sophocles: “Terrible though it is, Sir, while the witness/ Does not the truth confess, hold fast still to your hope.”
“I beg your pardon?” Anwald and Banaszak asked simultaneously, looking at the Breslau policeman as if he were mad. The latter walked up to Mieczyslaw Anwald’s armchair and whispered:
“What name did they give the child?”
“We christened the boy in Ostrow. The kind-hearted priest took our word that we were married. He only asked to see my passport. The godparents were some chance people who got paid for it.”
“Tell me, dammit, what was the child’s name?!”
“The same as mine: Anwald. We gave him the name Herbert.”
POZNAN, THAT SAME JULY 17TH, 1934
TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
Herbert Anwaldt sat comfortably spread out on the plush couch in the saloon carriage. He was reading Oedipus the King and not paying the slightest attention to the crowded Poznan platform. Suddenly, the conductor appeared and politely asked what the gentleman would like to eat during his journey. Anwaldt, not taking his eyes off the Greek text, ordered pork knuckle and a bottle of Polish Baczynski vodka. The conductor bowed and left. The Breslau train moved off.
Anwaldt got up and looked at himself in the mirror.
“I’m doing well with my money. But what the heck. Did you know,” he said to his reflection “that my daddy has a lot of money? He’s very good. He paid for me to go to the best Berlin secondary school specializing in the Classics.”
He stretched out on the couch and covered his face with the open book. He drew in with pleasure the faint odour of printer’s ink. He closed his eyes so as to bring to mind more readily the blurred future, an image persistently knocking at the threshold of consciousness, stubbornly jumping like a photograph in a peep-show which does not want to slip into the correct frame. It was one of those moments when the humming in his ears and dizziness announced an epiphany, a prophetic dream, a flash of clairvoyance, a shaman’s transformation. He opened his eyes and looked around the delicatessen with interest. He felt a stinging pain. The wounds left by the bee-stings were pulsating. The portly shopkeeper in a dirty apron laughed as he handed him some onion peelings. The smile did not leave his face. You pig, shouted Anwaldt, my daddy’s going to kill you. The shopkeeper threw himself across the counter at the boy hiding behind his tutor, who had just entered the shop. (Sir, please look at the tower I’ve built with the bricks. Yes, you’ve built a lovely tower, Herbert, the tutor patted him on the shoulder. Again. And again.) “Here you are, sir, your vodka and pork knuckle.” Anwaldt threw the book aside, sat up and uncorked the bottle. He shuddered: a child was shouting. Little Klaus in Waschteich Park, like an upside down, poisoned cockroach, was thrashing his legs against the ground. “He’s not my daddy!” The wheels rumbled rhythmically. They deafened Klaus’ cries. Anwaldt tipped the bottle. The burning liquid had an almost immediate effect on his empty stomach, clarified his mind, calmed his nerves. The policeman dug his teeth into the trembling pink meat with relish. A few moments later, only a thick bone lay on his plate. He stretched out comfortably on the couch. The alcohol conjured up an image in his mind of a dark green forest and the crooked figures of Soutine’s exiled children. Not all are exiled, he explained to himself. That little Pole from the train to Rawicz, for example, will never be expelled anywhere by anyone. You’re a Pole, too. Your mother was Polish. He sat up and drank two glasses of vodka in a row. The bottle was empty. (Scorching desert sand is settling on the stone floor. Into the ruined tomb peers a hairy goat. Hoof marks in the sand. Wind blows sand into zigzag gaps in the wall. From the ceiling fall small, restless scorpions. They surround him and raise their poisonous abdomens. Eberhard Mock tramples them methodically. I’ll die just like my sister died. Sophocles: “Unfortunate one, may you not know who you are.”)
† ‘Schlossarczyk’ is the German form of the Polish surname ‘Slusarczyk’.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME TUESDAY, JULY 17TH, 1934
SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
Eberhard Mock sat shirtless in his apartment on Rehdigerplatz, resting after a heavy and nerve-racking day. He spread out the chessboard, positioned out the pieces and tried to immerse himself in Uberbrand’s Chess Traps. He was analysing a particular master hand. As usual, he put himself in the defence’s position and, to his satisfaction, found a solution which led to stalemate. He looked at the chessboard again and instead of the white king, which was not being pinned down in check but which nevertheless could not move, he saw himself, Criminal Director Eberhard Mock. He stood retreating, under fire from the black knight, who bore the face of Olivier von der Malten, and the black queen, who resembled the Chief of Gestapo, Erich Kraus. The white bishop, looking like Smolorz, stood useless in one corner of the board, and the white queen, Anwaldt, was curled up somewhere on his desk far from the chessboard. Mock did not answer the telephone which rang persistently for the fourth time already that evening. He expected he would hear the Baron’s cold voice summoning him to give a report. What was he to tell von der Malten? That Anwaldt had disappeared who knew where? That the owner of the tenement and his new tenant had entered Maass’ apartment and found Smolorz there? Yes, he could of course say that he had identified the murderer. But where was that murderer? In Breslau? In Germany? Or maybe the mountains of Kurdistan? The telephone rang persistently. Mock counted the rings. Twelve. He got up and crossed the room. The telephone stopped ringing. At that moment, he threw himself at the receiver. He remembered von Hardenburg’s principle regarding telephones: wait until the twelfth ringing tone. He went to the kitchen and took a piece of dried sausage. Today was the servant’s day off. He tore a fair piece of sausage with his teeth, then ate a spoonful of hot horseradish. As he chewed, his eyes watered abundantly — the horseradish was hot — and he thought about the young Berliner who, humiliated and maltreated in the Gestapo cells, had surrendered under his torturers’ threats and left this over-heated and evil city. The telephone rang again. (Where can Anwaldt be?) A second ringing of the telephone. (I’ll sort that cursed Forstner out yet!) Third. (A nerve-racking
