Good People (46 page)

‘I think we need some air,' she stammered.

Never in her life had she met a person who responded so quickly. From the first word he knew what she wanted, was already standing up and buttoning his coat.

‘Now you're the one who looks a little tired, Mademoiselle Weissberg,' he said, making it clear that he remembered how she had earlier provoked him.

This man was one of the most horrible and odd people she had ever met. All morning long he had behaved like a man in despair, and in the last hour, when he noticed that his tactics—some of which had been devised spontaneously—were wearing her down, and that, as tiny as it might be, a victory was in sight, he was like a man reborn.

LUBLIN

FEBRUARY 1941

Her eyes were reflected in every window of the railroad car, a gaze without a face, which had disintegrated long ago. He remembered the delicate rounding of her cheeks, lips that up close surprised him with their fullness, but all these impressions were as meaningless as newspaper clippings: she was a disembodied gaze, accusing him.

Suddenly the gaze began to fly from face to face: Clarissa, Weller, Frenzel, the young Hermann Kreizinger, his history class, they all passed judgment on him in the form of Fraülein Weissberg's gaze. Gooseflesh wrinkled his skin. While he struggled to get rid of the boys from the history class, he heard them shouting: ‘Doctor, you made a mistake in the lesson! Didn't you hear that the archaeologists are dead? Here is the production line of the future!'

At a certain point, in the conference room in the citadel, he wanted to protest: Mademoiselle Weissberg, Madame Podolsky, Comrade Weissberg, Jew W., whatever they call you. With all due respect, your gaze gives me the shivers. Gradually he understood that he wasn't
petrified by the horror that her gaze stirred in him but by the revulsion he created in her. During the hours that they sat there he struggled against that look: he refurnished the room with items from the parlour in Berlin, he calculated the height of the snow between the spires of the citadel, he counted the slices of bread, and suddenly he stared at her, like a predator surprising its prey—but her gaze was steadfast, stubborn and condemning. From what darkness did this woman emerge? Why was she doing this to him? ‘Tell me, what do you see?' he silently mouthed.

Dread seized him. He was watching Thomas Heiselberg, composed of scraps of paper and pasted together with old glue, come apart beneath her gaze. From a distance the picture seemed intact, but close up his nakedness was exposed, or was it scraps of another picture?

Comrade Weissberg's eyes shone, asking Thomas: My dear friend, do you really want to defend yourself? What did you sow with your tricks? It's true that people change disguises, but underneath a solid foundation, a home port in their soul makes them aware of the masquerade. And you? Every morning, when you open your eyes, you are flooded with the terror of rebirth. There's no prepared matrix. You slap at the scraps and paste them onto yourself, adopting a disguise that suits the tasks at hand. And you don't even know the man you were yesterday, who did all sorts of things to prepare this day for you. And now? More disguises and lies? I've already seen them all. The gaze kept whispering. Thomas shouted at it to shut up. He hollered childhood songs into the empty railroad car. Mother used to invent them:

When he sang, the gaze stopped whispering.

Afterwards fatigue descended, and he fell into a troubled sleep. He woke up with a shout. Outside the train: rusted branches of trees. He dozed off and woke up again. His lips burned, drenched in the waterfalls of his dreams. The trip went on and on. He was surrounded by snowy expanses that the night painted blue, and they swallowed the small peasant houses.

His line of sight plunged to the rutted earth. He imagined leaping into the foam of the snow. ‘Jump, Manfred, jump!' A shout rings out in the university corridor, the new slogan for a tedious lecture. While the professor was droning on about Byron's Manfred, standing on a mountaintop and not daring to choose death, a girl stood up and shouted, ‘Jump, Manfred, jump. We're dying of boredom.' What was her name? Elsa. He fell in love with her on the spot. A year later they were married.

‘Actually, you fell in love with the shout.' Wolfgang laughed when he told him the story. They were drunk and amusing themselves with ideas for seducing the Negri sisters in Warsaw.

The train braked, and he slipped onto the floor of the car. He didn't want to move. His head was thrown onto the edge of the seat. He heard whispers again. An attack. Let it be. There was no reason to fear attacks. Fear of disguise was the most real thing in him. Embrace the attack, be a man in attack.

If people saw him, he wasn't bothered. Let them either help or choke on their criticism. He lay on the floor until Lublin station. Good people brought him home. Strong hands held him when he tripped on the stairs. The burning in his body made him laugh. He took some pills and lay on his bed.

He slept for two days, plagued with nightmares. Once he woke to the shouts of guards from the camp, lights that struck the thick curtain, the cracking sound of exactly four shots.

In his dreams children stood on the sides of the road, waved flags and drummed on cardboard boxes. Tens of thousands of soldiers, arranged in little rectangles, flowed in one huge motion from the fortress to the centre of Brest-Litovsk. He woke up. The heat of the sun in his dream remained on the back of his neck. He stumbled to the desk and started to sketch, reconstructing the picture from his dream. Then he slept again.

In the morning he realised that he had drawn more pictures of the parade: a swarm of soldiers splitting to the right and left, surrounding a city that he was seeing for the first time, a small city, but the size didn't matter, what mattered was the brilliant planning of the parade.

How would the Wehrmacht soldiers cross the border? On the bridges, of course. There were still bridges over the Bug River. Would the Soviets allow German planes in their air space for a joint flyover? These were matters for military people. The more questions arose, the clearer the burden of the task became. They didn't give such responsibility to nobodies. The way the Wehrmacht was portrayed in the parade would project onto the entire image of Germany. In fact, he had to decide which Germany to represent in the parade.

Every minute he luxuriated in bed was a shameful waste of time. To hell with that Jew woman Weissberg and her gaze. The days of weakness would not return. For the sake of the parade he would treat her like the dearest person in the world to him, and in time he'd force her to like him. In the past he had specialised in such strategies. People who wanted no connection with him became his fans. He had to show everybody that Thomas Heiselberg was worthy of heading the committee for the Germano-Soviet parade.

He leaped out of bed. His moist shirt and underpants smelled of old sweat. He tottered over to the desk again. The room spun around him: he slipped a blank sheet of paper into the typewriter:

He kept writing. An image flickered in his imagination: he was standing on a mountaintop in a white suit, wearing the striped fedora he had bought in Paris. Beside him stood Clarissa in a bright red dress, a ribbon in her hair, holding a parasol. The parade was spread out below them, all the way to the river, and Clarissa was astonished by the movement of the soldiers, who, instead of lining this earth with their bodies, were marching across it with impressive ceremony. White trails of celebratory cannon fire swirled in the blue sky. Clarissa pointed at them, and there was a golden halo around her finger. The sky became a gigantic mirror reflecting their faces: his had a purity it had never possessed before, that of a man who serves an exalted purpose. He said to Clarissa, You see, now they're cheering for me. A few months ago they wanted to bury me alive. She brought her lips close to his ear, her tongue brushed it lightly, she whispered, How could you have imagined such a silly thing? Think about Siegfried, and the ups and downs in his career. History, remember, clings to greatness like iron to a magnet. The moment I first saw you, Thomas Heiselberg, it was clear to me you were destined to be a great man.

…

Thomas sat in a new suit—a wine-coloured jacket and a striped silk tie—in Frenzel's office, and told him his impressions of the first meeting of the parade committee. Their friendship had grown closer: Frenzel needed his help with questions connected with the deportation of the Jews. In fact Frenzel was amazed at his good fortune—here was the man who had devised the Model of the Polish People. Questions to the offices of the model in Warsaw might take a month or more to be answered, but he could enjoy the services of the inventor as often as he liked.

Naturally he helped Frenzel as much as he could. Both of them kept the matter secret, because Dr Weller, over there in Warsaw, wouldn't look favourably upon such use of the model. After Frenzel had read several excellent memorandums, not a day passed when he
didn't sit with Thomas for at least an hour in his office. He accepted most of the advice Thomas gave him.

Frenzel was smoking a pipe. His polished boots rested casually on the desk. He perused the papers and listened without interest as Thomas went on in praise of the parade and the international reverberations it would have: ‘It's exactly the type of idea that you have to pounce on when only a few people understand its potential, but when the fog is dispersed—and the German people cheer for those who steered Germany into peace rather than war—our seal on the parade will be an established fact.'

Frenzel wasn't impressed. Thomas was surprised, since Frenzel wasn't someone lacking in imagination. Maybe he was one of those men eager for war with the Soviet Union, or maybe he was too busy to be interested in the parade. In March thousands of Jews would be driven out of Lublin under the auspices of the
freiwillige Umsiedlung,
the voluntary transfer program, and by mid-April the ghetto was supposed to be closed, with just a few Jews remaining in it. This was one of the largest undertakings ever planned in the Lublin district. Frenzel complained about its complexity. In France, for example, they had solved the Jewish problem more simply. Anyway, he had a lot of work now. Globocnik believed in young Frenzel and had presented him to Himmler as one of his chosen young men.

‘Listen, friend.' Thomas moved on to stage two, replacing the chatty tone that had driven their rise to greatness with one of sincere concern. ‘I'm giving you valuable information now. The Soviet representative for the parade is Jewish.'

Frenzel took his feet off the desk and stuffed the documents into a folder. He passed his hand through his hair and gave Thomas a blank look: the last thing he needed now was a new task. Thomas had no choice but to frighten his young friend a little: ‘You understand that this would be useful to our enemies. Rumours can run an unlikely course.'

‘You do know a thing or two about getting mixed up in things,' Frenzel growled, as though trying to figure out Thomas's true
intention. ‘I hope you learned something from your antics in Warsaw. Such things aren't going to happen here.'

‘You're right,' Thomas reassured him. ‘The main thing that I learned is to respect the chain of command. The matter of the Jewess Weissberg apparently escaped the notice of the Foreign Office, and my suggestion is that we inform them. That's all. In the past, when the Communists wanted to approach us, they replaced that Jew in their Foreign Office with Molotov. And, believe me, replacing this Jewess will advance our goal. Regrettably she's a little girl who should be skipping rope and not getting mixed up in historical events.'

‘It sounds like the Jewess didn't please you,' Frenzel grumbled.