“Why aren’t you writing then,” he said, “instead of shooting people for money? That’s no way to earn a living.”
She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she’d heard him.
At last, she said, “Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he’s just past being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I’d seen him around the pubs; we had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in entropic economics, whatever that is.”
“I don’t think anyone can major in entropic economics,” Bourne said.
“Figures.” Petra was still sniffling. “I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated.” She shrugged. “I never was good with people; I’m better off communing with the dead.”
Bourne said, “You can’t take on the grief and rage of so many people without being buried alive.”
She looked off at the rows of crumbling headstones. “What else can I do? They’re forgotten now. Here’s where the truth lies. If you omit the truth, isn’t that worse than a lie?”
When he didn’t answer, she gave a quick twitch of her shoulders and turned around. “Now that you’ve been here, I want to show you what the tourists see.”
She led him back to her car, drove down the deserted hill to the official Dachau memorial.
There was a pall over what was left of the camp buildings, as if the noxious emissions of the coal-fired incinerators still rose and fell on the thermals, like carrion birds still searching for the dead. An ironwork sculpture, a harrowing interpretation of skeletal prisoners made to resemble the barbed wire that had imprisoned them, greeted them as they drove in. Inside what had once been the main administrative building was a mock-up of the cells, display cases of shoes and other inexpressibly sad items, all that was left of the inmates.
“These signs,” Petra said. “Do you see any mention of how many Jews were tortured and lost their lives there? ‘One hundred and ninety-three thousand
Bourne might have told her that nothing in life is as simple as that, except he deemed it better to let her fury burn itself out. Clearly, she couldn’t vent these views to anyone else.
She took him on a tour of the ovens, which seemed sinister even so many years after their use. They seemed alive, appeared to shimmer, to be part of an alternate universe overflowing with unspeakable horror. At length, they passed out of the crematorium and arrived at a long room, the walls of which were covered with letters, some written by prisoners, others by families desperate for news of their loved ones, as well as other notes, drawings, and more formal letters of inquiry. All were in German; none had been translated into other languages.
Bourne read them all. The aftermath of despair, atrocities, and death hung in these rooms, unable to escape. There was a different kind of silence here than the one on the Leitenberg. He was aware of the soft scuff of shoe soles, the whisper of sneakers as tourists dragged themselves from one exhibit to another. It was as if the accumulated inhumanity stifled the ability to speak, or perhaps it was that words-any words-were both inadequate and superfluous.
They moved slowly down the room. He could see Petra’s lips move as she read letter after letter. Near the end of the wall, one caught his eye, quickened his pulse. A sheet of paper, obviously stationery, contained a handwritten text complaining that the author had developed what he claimed was a gas far more effective than Zyklon-B, but that no one at Dachau administration had seen fit to answer him. Possibly that was because the gas was never used at Dachau. However, what interested Bourne far more was that the stationery was imprinted with the wheel of three horses’ heads joined in the center by the SS death’s head.
Petra came up beside him, now her brows knitted together in a frown. “That’s damn familiar.”
He turned to her. “What do you mean?”
“There was someone I used to know-Old Pelz. He said he lived in town, but I think he was homeless. He’d come down to the Dachau air raid shelter to sleep, especially in winter.” She pushed a stray lock of hair behind one ear. “He used to babble all the time, you know how crazy people do, as if he was talking to someone else. I remember him showing me a patch with that same insignia. He was talking about something called the Black Legion.”
Bourne’s pulse began to pound. “What did he say?”
She shrugged.
“You hate the Nazis so much,” he said, “I wonder if you know that some things they gave birth to still exist.”
“Yeah, sure, like the skinheads.”
He pointed at the insignia. “The Black Legion still exists, it’s still a danger, even more so than when Old Pelz knew it.”
Petra shook her head. “He talked on and on. I never knew whether he was speaking to me or to himself.”
“Can you take me to him?”
“Sure, but who knows whether he’s still alive. He drank like a fish.”
Ten minutes later Petra drove down Augsburgerstrasse, heading for the foot of a hill known as Karlsburg. “Fucking ironic,” she said bitterly, “that the one place I despise the most is now the safest place for me.”
She pulled into the lot outside the St. Jakob parish church. Its octagonal baroque tower could be seen throughout the town. Next door was Hцrhammer’s department store. “You see there at the side of Hцrhammer’s,” she said as they clambered out of the car, “those steps lead down to the huge air raid bunker built into the hill, but you can’t get in that way.”
Leading him up the steps into St. Jakob, she led him across the Renaissance interior, past the choir. Adjacent to the sacristy was an unobtrusive dark wooden door, behind which lay a flight of stone stairs curving down to the crypt, which was surprisingly small, considering the size of the church above it.
But as Petra quickly showed him, there was a reason for the size: Beyond it lay a labyrinth of rooms and corridors.
“The bunker,” she said, flicking on a string of bare lightbulbs affixed to the stone wall on their right. “Here is where my grandparents fled when your country bombed the shit out of the unofficial capital of the Third Reich.” She was speaking of Munich, but Dachau was close enough to feel the brunt of the American air force raids.
“If you hate your country so much,” Bourne said, “why don’t you leave?”
“Because,” Petra said, “I also love it. It’s the mystery of being German-proud but self-hating.” She shrugged. “What can you do? You play the hand fate deals you.”
Bourne knew how that felt. He looked around. “You’re familiar with this place?”
She sighed heavily, as if her fury had left her spent. “When I was a child my parents took me to Sunday Mass every week. They’re God-fearing people. What a joke! Didn’t God turn his face away from this place years ago?
“Anyway, one Sunday I was so bored I snuck away. In those days, I was obsessed with death. Can you blame me? I grew up with the stench of it in my nostrils.” She looked up at him. “Can you believe that I’m the only one I know who ever visited the memorial? Do you think my parents ever did? My brothers, my aunts and uncles, my classmates? Please! They don’t even want to admit it exists.”
Seemingly weary again. “So I came down here to commune with the dead, but I didn’t see enough of them, so I pushed on and what did I find? Dachau’s bunker.”
She put her hand on the wall, moved it along the rough-cut stone as caressingly as if it were a lover’s flank. “This became my place, my own private world. I was only happy underground, in the company of the one hundred and ninety-three thousand dead. I felt them. I believed that the soul of each and every one of them was trapped here. It was so unfair, I thought. I spent my time trying to figure out how to free them.”
“I think the only way to do that,” Bourne said, “is to free yourself.”
She gestured. “Old Pelz’s crash pad is this way.”
As they picked their way along a tunnel, she said, “It’s not too far. He liked to be near the crypt. He thought a couple of those old folks were his friends. He’d sit and talk to them for hours, drinking away, just as if they were alive and he could see them. Who knows? Maybe he could. Stranger things have happened.”
After a short time, the tunnel opened out into a series of rooms. The odors of whiskey and stale sweat came to them.
“It’s the third room on the left,” Petra said.
