work. Personally, I don't much care to be even this close to large deposits of uranite. Apparently they turn it into this yellow powder that glows in the dark. God only knows what it does to people.'
'Thanks, but I'm not interested.'
'We haven't told you what we're offering yet,' said Weltz. 'A job. As a policeman. I would have thought that might appeal to a man with your qualifications.'
'A man who was never a member of the Nazi Party,' said Lieutenant Rascher. 'A former member of the Social Democratic Party.'
'Did you know, Captain, that the KPD and the SDP have joined together?'
'It's a bit late,' I said. 'We could have used the support of the KPD in December 1931. During the Red Revolution.'
'That was Trotsky's fault,' said Weltz. 'Anyway. Better late than never, eh? The new party – the Socialist Unity Party, the SED – it represents a fresh start for us both to work together. For a new Germany.'
'Another new Germany?' I shrugged.
'Well, we can hardly make do with the old one. Wouldn't you agree? There's so much that we have to rebuild. Not just politics, but law and order, too. The police force. We're starting a new force. For the moment it's being called the Fifth Kommissariat, or K-5. We hope to have it up and running by the end of the year. And until then we're looking for recruits. A man such as yourself, a former Oberkommissar with Kripo, with a record for honesty and integrity, who was chased out of the force by the Nazis, is just the sort of principled man we need. I think I can probably guarantee reinstatement at your old rank, with full pension rights. A Berlin weighted allowance. Help with a new apartment. A job for your wife.'
'No thanks.'
'That's too bad,' said Lieutenant Rascher.
'Look, why don't you think it over, Captain?' said Weltz.
'Sleep on it. You see, to be perfectly honest with you, Gunther, you're at the top of our list in this camp. And, for obvious reasons, we'd rather not stay here longer than we have to. I'm already a father, but the lieutenant here has no wish to damage his chances of having a son if and when he marries. You see radiation does something to a man's ability to procreate. It also affects the thyroid and the body's ability to use energy and make proteins. At least, that's what I think it does.'
'The answer is still no,' I said. 'May I go now?'
The major adopted a rueful expression. 'I don't understand you,' he said. 'How is it that you, a social democrat, were prepared to go and work for Heydrich? And yet you won't work for us. Can you explain that please?'
It was now I realised who the major reminded me of. The uniform might have been different but with the white blond hair, blue eyes, high forehead and even loftier tone, I was already thinking of Heydrich before he mentioned the name. Probably Weltz and Heydrich would have been about the same age, too. If he hadn't been murdered, Heydrich would have been about forty-two now. The younger lieutenant was rather more grey- haired, with a face as wide as the major's was long. He looked like me before the war and a year in a POW camp.
'Well, Gunther? What have you to say for yourself? Perhaps you were always just a Nazi in all but name. A Party fellow traveller. Is that it? Did it take you this long to understand what you really are?'
'You and Heydrich,' I said to the major. 'You're not so very different. I never wanted to work for him either, but I was afraid to say no. Afraid of what he might do to me. You, on the other hand, have shot your bolt there. You've already done your worst. Short of shooting me there's not much more you can actually do to me. Sometimes it's a great comfort to know that you've already hit rock bottom.'
'We could break you,' said Weltz. 'We could do that.'
'I've broken a few men myself, in my time,' I said. 'But there has to be some point to it. And with me there isn't, because if you break me then you'd be doing it just for the Hell of it and what's more I'd be no good to you when you were finished. I'm no good to you now, only you just don't know it, Major. So let me tell you why. I was the kind of cop who was too dumb to act smart and look the other way, or to kiss someone's behind. The Nazis were cleverer than you. They knew that. The only reason Heydrich brought me back to Kripo was because he knew that even in a police state there are times when you need a real policeman. But you don't want a real policeman, Major Weltz, you want a clerk with a badge. You want me to read Karl Marx at bedtime and people's mail during the day. You want a man who's eager to please and looking for advancement in the Communist Party.' I shook my head wearily. 'The last time I was looking for advancement in a party a pretty girl slapped my face.'
'Pity,' said Weltz. 'It seems you're going to spend the rest of your life dead. Like all of your class, Gunther, you're a victim of history.'
'We both are, Major. Being a victim of history is what being a German is all about.'
But I was also a victim of my environment. They made sure of that. Soon after my meeting with the boys from K-5 I was transferred off the sorting detail and into the mine.
It was a world of constant thunder. There was the rumble of underground explosions that broke the rock into manageable chunks; and there was the crash of the cage doors before it slid down the guides and into the shaft. There was the din of rocks we split with pickaxes and then threw into the wagons; and the continual barrage as these moved backwards and forwards along the rails. And with each detonation there was dust and more dust, turning my snot black, and my sweat into a kind of grey oil. At night I coughed great gritty gobs of saliva and phlegm that looked like burnt fried eggs. It all felt like a high price to pay for my principles. But there was a camaraderie down the shaft that wasn't to be had anywhere else in Johannesgeorgenstadt, and an automatic respect from the other plenis who heard our coughing and recognised their own comparative good fortune. Pospelov had been right about that. There's always someone worse off than yourself. I hoped to get a chance to meet that someone before the work killed me.
There was a mirror in the washroom. Mostly we avoided it for fear that we'd see our own grandfathers, or worse, their decomposed bodies, looking back at us; but one day I inadvertently caught sight of myself and saw a man with a face like the pitchblende rock we were mining: it was brownish- black, lumpy and misshapen, with two dull opaque spaces where my eyes had once been, and a row of dark grey excrescences that might have been my teeth. I'd met a lot of criminal types in my life, but I looked like Mister Hyde's black-sheep brother. Acted like him, too. There were no Blues down the shaft and we settled our differences with a maximum of violence. Once, Schaefer, another pleni from Berlin who didn't much like cops, told me that he'd cheered when the leaders of the SDP had been chased out of Berlin in 1933. So I punched him hard in the face and when he tried to hit me with a pickaxe, I hit him with a shovel. It was a while before he got up, and in truth he was never quite the same again after that – another victim of history. Karl Marx would have approved.
But after a while I stopped caring about anything very much, including myself. I would squeeze into tight spaces in the black rock to work in solitude with my pick, which was the most dangerous thing to do, since cave- ins were common. But there was less dust to breathe this way than when they used explosives.
Another month passed. And then one day I was summoned to the office again and I went along expecting to find the same two MVD officers and hear them ask me if my time down the mineshaft had helped to change my mind about K-5. It had changed my mind about a lot of things but not German communism and its secret police force. I was going to tell them to go to Hell and, perhaps, sound like I meant it, too, even though I was ready for someone to come and put some plaster of Paris on my face. So I was a little disappointed that the two officers weren't there, the way you are when you've worked up a pretty good speech about a lot of noble things that don't add up to very much that's important when you're lying in the morgue.
There was only one officer in the room, a heavyset man with receding brown hair and a pugnacious jaw. Like his two predecessors he wore blue breeches and a brown gimnasterka tunic, but he was better decorated; as well as the veteran NKVD soldier badge and Order of the Red Banner there were other medals I didn't recognise. The insignia on his collar tabs and the stars on his sleeves seemed to indicate that he was at least a colonel, or perhaps even a general. His blue officer's cap with its squarish visor lay on the table alongside the Nagant revolver in its bucket-sized holster.
'The answer is still no,' I said, hardly caring who he was.
'Sit down,' he said. 'And don't be a bloody fool.'
He was German.
