The dead man looked like he’d been given a front row seat in some reserved circle of hell where he’d been chewed up by a very angry Minotaur before being torn to pieces. His jiving days were over, given that his legs were hanging off at the knees and he was badly burned, too; his corpse gave off a lightly barbecued smell that was all the more horrifying because somehow it was also, vaguely and inexplicably, appetizing. Only his shoes remained undamaged; everything else—clothes, skin, hair—was a sight. I washed him carefully—his torso was a piñata of glass and metal splinters—and did my very best to fix him up a bit. I put his still shiny Salamanders in a shoe box, just in case someone from the deceased’s family turned up to identify the poor devil. You can tell a lot from a pair of shoes but this couldn’t have been a more hopeless task if he’d spent the last twelve days being dragged through the dust behind someone’s favorite chariot. Most of his face resembled a half kilo of freshly chopped dog meat and sudden death looked like it had done the guy a favor, not that I’d ever have said as much. Mercy killing is still a sensitive subject on a long list of sensitive subjects in modern Germany.
It’s small wonder there are so many ghosts in this town. Some people go their whole lives without ever seeing a ghost; me, I see them all the time. Ghosts I sort of recognize, too. Twelve years after the war it was like living in Frankenstein Castle and every time I looked around I seemed to see a pensive, plaintive face I half-remembered from before. Quite often these looked like old comrades, but just now and again they resembled my poor mother. I miss her a lot. Sometimes the other ghosts mistook me for a ghost, which was hardly surprising, either; it’s only my name that’s changed, not my face, more’s the pity. Besides, my heart was playing up a bit, like a difficult child, except that it wasn’t so young as that. Every so often it would jump around for the sheer hell of it, as if to show me that it could and what might happen to me if it ever decided to have a break from taking care of a tiresome Fritz like me.
After I got home at the end of my shift I was extra-careful to turn the gas off on my little two-ring cooker after I’d finished boiling water for the coffee I usually had with my early-morning schnapps. Gas is just as explosive as TNT, even the splutteringly thin stuff that comes squeaking out of German pipes. Outside my dingy yellow window was an eighty-foot-high heap of overgrown rubble, another legacy of the wartime bombing: seventy percent of the buildings in Schwabing had been destroyed, which was good for me, as it made rooms there cheap to rent. Mine was in a building scheduled for demolition and had a long crack in the wall so wide you could have hidden an ancient desert city in there. But I liked the rubble heap. It served to remind me of what, until recently, my life had amounted to. I even liked the fact that there was a local guide who would take visitors to the summit of the heap, as part of his advertised Munich tour. There was a memorial cross on top and a nice view of the city. You had to admire the fellow’s ingenuity. When I was a boy I used to climb to the top of Berlin’s cathedral—all 264 steps—and walk around the dome’s perimeter with only the pigeons for company; but it hadn’t ever occurred to me to make a career out of it.
I never liked Munich all that much, with its fondness for traditional Tracht clothes and jolly brass bands, devout Roman Catholicism and the Nazis. Berlin suited me better and not just because it was my hometown. Munich was always a more compliant, governable, conservative place than the old Prussian capital. I got to know it best in the early years after the war, when my second wife, Kirsten, and I were trying to run an unfeasibly located hotel in a suburb of Munich called Dachau, now infamous for the concentration camp the Nazis had there; I didn’t like it any better then, either. Kirsten died, which hardly helped, and soon after that I left, thinking never to return and well, here I am again, with no real plans for the future, at least none that I would ever talk about, just in case God’s listening. I don’t find he’s nearly as merciful as a lot of Bavarians like to make out. Especially on a Sunday evening. And certainly not after Dachau. But I was here and trying to be optimistic even though there was absolutely no room for such a thing—not in my cramped lodgings—and doing my best to look on the bright side of life even though it felt as if this lay over the top of a very high barbed-wire fence.
For all that, I took a certain amount of satisfaction in doing what I did for a living; clearing up shit and
