‘No. But he did say something else.’
‘Yes?’ says Manfred.
‘He didn’t look like a Jew. His eyes were blue. The Bronstejns brothers have blue eyes.’
_ _ _
Shortly afterwards in Manfred’s office on the first floor, where Wäspli sat gagged the night before.
Manfred is on the phone.
He gesticulates to me, writing in the air, points and nods.
‘That’s it, Bronstejns with an s. No, I don’t know. Bronstejn, perhaps. About three months ago.’
I take my fountain pen from my inside pocket. He snatches it from my hand, twists off the cap with his teeth and writes.
‘Yes, got it. Thanks.’
He puts down the receiver.
‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘One of the heavyweights, he said.’
‘Heavyweights?’ I pick up the note:
Elias Bronstejns, Sjtjutjyn, behind kolkhoz dairy. Grave IV, at least 1500. Inquire R-F Müller.
Manfred stands with his back to me over by the sideboard. When he turns round he has a bottle of the Hungarian cognac and two glasses in his hands.
‘I really couldn’t be bothered making that long trip again,’ he says with a sigh.
He flops down in his chair and fills both glasses with the amber liquid, without asking if I want any.
‘Join me?’
At that same moment it begins to rain.
‘What have you done with Wäspli?’ I ask.
He knocks back the second glass.
‘Peculiar thing about you, Heinrich,’ he says. ‘You’re soft. But you’re not soft enough …’
‘What?’
‘You’re malleable. Like clay.’
‘Like clay?’
‘Yes, clay. Soon you’ll be like me.’
_ _ _
The rain has stopped.
The soil of the plain. I pick up a clod, crumble it between my fingers. It is dark, porous.
It fertilises itself, they say.
We are back in Sjtjutjyn, some fifty metres behind the charred remains of the Kolkhoz Vorosjilov’s dairy, Grave IV, Rottenführer Müller in charge of the excavation.
Goga’s twin is buried here among the thistles and rusting oil drums, the discarded caterpillar tracks.
A Jewish woman from the truck stands next to Manfred.
Her movements are stiff and silent.
The corpses in the grave are blackened and fusty. They lie top to tail and seem oddly jointless, already withered, amalgamated, without shape of their own.
Manfred is holding a handkerchief to his mouth. The Rottenführer is drinking schnapps and shouting at the Jews in the grave. I’m smoking. Piles of bodies next to the pit. Manfred swears, but Bronstejns is here somewhere, I checked the ghetto archive when I went for cigarettes.
Suddenly the woman stiffens, and nods. We have reached some four metres down, approximately the middle of the pit, about ten or twelve metres from where I stand.
She points down. A male body: jacket, trousers, one shoe missing. Manfred nods to one of the Trawnikis, who shouts out a command.
Two Jewish labourers cross the pit, recover the body. Its head bumps over the ground.
Manfred roars, they nod, making hectic, jerking movements, a hand underneath the neck as support.
I sit on my haunches.
The man’s head is rectangular, the skin dark brown, low hairline. Exit wound at the right cheek. The bullet has splintered the bone; the upper lip and the wing of the nose are gone. He must have lifted his head as the shot was fired.
The eyes are colourless and sunken.
The face is unrecognisable.
_ _ _
A black liquid runs from the throat as one of the Jewish labourers separates the head from the body with a spade and allows the corpse to slide back into the pit. It flops into place next to the woman from before, a shoulder upon her neck.
‘What now?’ I ask. ‘That face is no good for identification.’
‘Come on,’ says Manfred. ‘I know someone who can help us.’
Taxidermy
‘The specimen is no good, it’s ruined,’ he says in his Jewish German.
Davaj Manfred says, not good enough, and nods to Semjon, who strikes the man hard with the flat of his hand. The Jew recovers his spectacles and straightens up, head bowed and turned to the side. His hand trembles as he reinserts the bloodied dentures.
Manfred says something I fail to catch to Semjon, who goes and stands by the door.
I sit down in the far corner. Manfred has taken over the investigation – I just follow along. It was he who found the Jew in the hospital laboratories and drove us out here, to his workshop in a village bordered by wilderness, close to the puszcza. Now the area is cleansed of Jews, Judenrein, and is partisan country, but Manfred has us well protected: there must be a hundred and fifty men outside.
The Jew is back at his workbench and has begun to unpack the parcel; the newspaper is soaked from the ice and the dark oozing liquid that seeps from the head. I sense the stench that is suppressed by the coldness of the ice. In a moment it will fill the room.
He goes over to a glass cabinet; the panes are shattered, items lie scattered inside and on the floor.
His movements are small. Hands busy now, he jabs his bony head abruptly like a hen, now and then he bends down and picks something out of the mess on the floor. Then he is at the lathe, he puts down some bottles filled with liquids, removes the glass bungs and sniffs at the contents. He places a number of items on the worktop: pipette, scalpel, sharpening stone, brushes, gloves, wooden blocks of various sizes, tow, wood wool, wire, scissors.
‘Eyes,’ he says. ‘I need eyes.’
Manfred stands for a second, hesitating and speechless. He goes out through the door, into the sun.
The Jew returns to the head, studies it a while in silence, as though considering his approach. He picks up the scalpel and makes a sweeping incision behind both ears, continues down along the hairline at the nape of the neck, turns his wrist and folds the skin upwards. Gripping firmly with the right hand, adjusting with three fingers of the left, with small, meticulous tugs he draws the scalp from the back of the head: the crown, the upper forehead. He cuts away the ears with measured precision and arrives at the sockets, exposing them, placing an
