Not a sound.
I go back down and lock the door, find some candles, then return upstairs to my bedroom. The flame provides only a flicker of light; everything else is dark and silent.
I blow out the candle and undress.
A noise.
I lunge for the chair where I hung my holster, and am lit up in the beam of a torch.
‘Heinrich!’
‘Who’s there?’ I blurt. ‘Is that you, Manfred?’
‘Yes.’
‘For Christ’s sake, you frightened the life out of me!’
‘Etke,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Your little girl …’
‘What about her?’ I say, furious now.
‘I have only one question for you, Heinrich. Did you know?’
‘Know what? What are you talking about?’
_ _ _
Manfred’s car was parked in the alley behind the house. They’ve sat me in the back, between the two Schwabenland brothers, Hans and Michael. I know where we are going. Manfred’s domain: the white hospital.
We pull up in front of the shining building, another of Stalin’s showcases, by the main road to Vilnius. Manfred seized the place on the very first day, 28 June ’41, while the rest of them were busy plundering, arguing over their command cars, the sleek Mercedes, the Kübelwagen outside the country mansions, party headquarters and Izvestija’s brown skyscraper; the yapping morons of the Ostministerium, the Reichskommissariat, the Four-Year Planners, paper tigers, army command, Gestapo, Ministry of the Economy, the agricultural experts, all with documents in hand, leather shoes already spattered with mud – all squabbling over the spoils, each with his own stick to draw a line in the dirt, to declare a kingdom, sandcastles, huffing and puffing to no avail. Manfred took the hospital, made one half an SS hospital and kept the rest for himself. Everything was there: operating rooms, wards, crematoriums, basements, where the mortuary is, as well as Manfred’s special room with its steel hospital bed and white tiles, where one day I stumbled upon his book of instructions: One prisoner had for instance made valuable confessions, but since he had swallowed a number of nails, precious time and resources had to be used on medical help and medicine. Such allocation of resources is inappropriate.
We go in through the glass doors, the rotund brothers at my sides, not physically touching me, but close enough for me to feel their presence. We reach the great echoing hall, the staircase with its faded red carpet, the place humming with activity even though it is deepest night, a clatter of typewriters, a woman in uniform passing us as we proceed. My teeth are not chattering, but it is as if an electric current is running through my jaws, making them tremble. Are we going up or down? Office or basement? Am I, too, to be taken to the basement?
Michael nudges me on, up the stairs.
We come to a gallery that leads all the way round the area of the entrance hall. We stop at the fourth door. Manfred’s office.
‘Did you know he was a clarinettist before the war?’ Manfred says.
‘Who?’
‘Wäspli …’
‘What?’
‘Your adjutant, for Christ’s sake!’
_ _ _
Wäspli expels air from his nose. His mouth is gagged.
Blood trickles from his ear. He tosses back his head as Manfred opens the door and enters.
A woman is seated in the room too, a nurse, dressed in white.
‘What’s going on?’ I demand to know, striding up to Wäspli.
Manfred grabs my shoulder, but I wrench myself away, and immediately both the brothers are upon me, a hand grips my neck, I don’t know which of them takes my legs.
‘Herr Oberleutnant der Polizei,’ says Michael.
‘I want to know what the hell is going on here!’ I shout into the room.
‘Put him down,’ says Manfred. He has seated himself at the desk, a toothpick of bone protruding from his mouth.
I twist myself free of the Schwabenland brothers, am immediately in his face. Manfred holds up his hand and I halt in mid-movement.
‘The Führer says, as you know, that conscience is a Jewish invention … one must be strong in order not to attend to its voice. But this little shit here …’
He nods towards Wäspli.
‘This little shit almost got away with it. Which is why I find it difficult to believe it was his own idea. Rather clever, actually, albeit simple …’
‘What are you talking about, Manfred? What is this?’
‘Do you know Dr Elswanger?’
‘From the RKFDV?’
‘That’s right. The Reich’s Commission for the Strengthening of the German People, nothing wrong with that, but the Fourth Office is one of the Reichsführer-SS’s less fortunate ideas if you ask me, sending a bunch of old ditherers in here with their skull-measuring calipers and vapid theories, separating the genuine from the false …’
‘An important job, I’d say …’ I mumble, sensing that Manfred’s awaiting a response.
‘But Elswanger! That fat old fool, myopic as a mole and pushing eighty, you should see the way his hands shake. When I put it to him, all he could do was shuffle his papers and drop his glasses on the table. Crack! They broke in two! A truckload of Israelites and half-castes could wander past him and he’d still be engrossed in the Aryan convolutions of an auditory canal!’
‘Manfred.’
‘Yes?’
‘What are you on about? You drag my adjutant over here, it’s not your jurisdiction!’
‘Jurisdiction! All their parlour games and commissariats and circulars. It all boils down to one thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘The SS calls the shots, and here that means me! I must say, though, that I have learned a great deal from you, Heinrich. The methodical approach …’
He steps over to Wäspli, stands beside him, slightly to his rear, his blind spot, grabs his hair and yanks his head back.
‘This bastard was sending your little girl to Lebensborn …’
‘Lebensborn?’
‘He went to the dressing station and picked out a dead Volksdeutsche, one Paul Steiger, Waffen-SS, filched his papers and discovered Steiger had a daughter the same age as your little girl …’
‘She’s not my little girl …’
‘So you
