He picks up a small folding knife, slits open the lips, removes the entire face and places it down on the worktop.
Then he begins to scrape the flesh from the skull.
When he has finished he fetches a hacksaw. The brain has collapsed inside the cranium. He places a pot of water on the stove. He boils the skull.
I find my matches while he prepares the solutions for the tanning.
He looks up at me as I light an Efka: Bitte …
Semjon steps forward, ready to strike, but I shake my head, pinch the glowing end from the cigarette and put the unsmoked remainder in my pocket.
‘Come on, Semjon,’ I say. ‘Let’s leave him to his work. This could take hours.’
_ _ _
The sun dazzles me, and for a moment I lose my bearings.
Our column extends several hundred metres along the dirt road and out of the village. The little square with the church and the burnt-out synagogue is jammed with vehicles: our six Sd.Kfz 222s, four lorries, six Kübelwagen and the RSO, a train of horse-drawn carts. The lorries’ exhaust fumes are blue, they pollute the hot air with their caustic smell. Troops scurry back and forth and yet there is a slowness about it all, an indolence about the spoils. Two Hiwis pull a cow by its nose from a shed, a Ukrainian holds his hand to the blazed muzzle of a mare, his movements abrupt as the horse nips at the fodder in the palm, foaming at the mouth.
Its flanks steam in the heat.
There are no inhabitants to be seen, but we know the village is not empty.
They are waiting inside, in their houses, just as they did when Steiner was here in ’41, when he led their Jewish neighbours into the woods only a kilometre away.
Sonderkommando 1005 is exhuming the bodies now. We saw the whole process on the drive here, the Jewish labourers loading the corpses onto the conveyors, tipping the porous, brittle cadavers into the burning pits. And at the edge of the old graves, shining white bathtubs, a shimmer of hydrochloric acid, H2O HCl for the extraction of metals, the stacks of fusty bones, jawbones, incomplete skulls. Jews toiling, heaving, wrenching at the heads with crowbars and tongs, SS standing about or lounging on the slopes, or supervising the filtering. One of them seated on the stub of a tree at the roadside, a finger prodding at the small lumps of dental gold in his palm. His hand slides back into his pocket as we pass, an exaggerated wave.
The last plunderings, the last traces.
By some stroke of luck, our taxidermist was still alive.
It strikes me, as I cup my hand against the wind to light my unsmoked Etka, that Manfred was here, at this place, in ’41, along with Steiner. It was Manfred who saved the Jew then. Of course. He pulled him out of the line after discovering the marvel of his workshop.
Did you feel sentimental all of a sudden, Manfred? Were you thinking of Dr Zeisler?
How many times had we visited Dr Zeisler’s basement shop together – with the snipes, plovers and greenshanks we found in the reeds at the mouth of the Elbe or at the Wadden Sea: sanderlings and turnstones, wings entangled in the trap wires? During our birding period in the Untersekunda, we were inseparable; in waders we set our traps and lines, glued to our binoculars in the early mornings in the dunes, noting down the migrations, numbering the nests, counting the eggs, smoking cigarettes, gazing out upon scenery of grey and green.
He was not a doctor at all, but we called him Dr Zeisler because he stuffed and mounted the birds and animals for the Gymnasium. Birds were his speciality. He had hundreds of them in drawers, pale and dusty in colour, and we fed him with specimens. He gave me a goldcrest, mounted in a nest with two red, speckled eggs, its faint green feathers a sheen. He had closed the holes in the eggs and painted them over in a slightly paler red.
A perfect still life.
I gave it to Eline. It was the only time I saw her cry.
‘I don’t know why I’m crying. Why you make me cry.’
‘Because it’s dead?’
‘No, because you’re cruel …’
I go over to the Kübelwagen, dig out a bottle of plum schnapps and sit down to wait on the footboard. I know Manfred will make us hang around until the Jew has finished.
A black cockerel with a fiery red comb comes running across the square, little clouds of dust kicked up in the air behind it. It stops, and turns its feathered head towards me.
_ _ _
Manfred eats in silence, broken only by the sound of engines and occasional shouts in the distance, his slobbering as he sucks on a wing or spits out a black feather that has not been plucked.
The light has already grown dim. Soon the dew will fall.
A Zündapp with a sidecar skids along the track, steering its way between horses and troops unwilling to move out of the way. It pulls up in front of us, a Feldwebel extracts himself from the sidecar and takes a glass jar from his leather satchel. He holds the top and bottom between his palms. It is full of eyes.
‘From the Central Infirmary,’ he says, and hands it to me.
‘Are any of them blue?’ Manfred asks, wiping his fingers.
‘No,’ I say. ‘They’re all green.’
‘Idiot!’ Manfred yells at the Feldwebel. ‘Green!’
He holds two green glass eyes in his hand, shuffles them around in his palm.
_ _ _
The first of the vehicles pulled away some minutes ago. The outskirts of the village are already in flames, the firing is scattered now, followed by the report of a handgun from inside the workshop. Manfred comes out with a wicker basket in one hand. Semjon glances back through the
