"Quite right." Onno nodded.
Here and there in the corners of the cigarette packet there were still some blackened remnants of tobacco. Max closed it and a little later watched it disappear into the envelope.
"Have you got a photo of my father, perhaps?"
Oud raised his eyebrows. "I ought to have," he said with doubt in his voice, and began looking. "In any case, in his passport. .."
"Do you know where your father's grave is?" asked Onno with feigned nonchalance.
"No," said Max, and looked at Oud.
The latter opened his eyes for a moment and made a brief apologetic gesture. Finally he found only a blurred newspaper photograph of the court, taken from a distance. Max saw an unrecognizable figure, flanked by a gendarme with a white lanyard. Perhaps the same one who had taken him out of school four years earlier.
Onno had an appointment with a couple of politicians, and Max went straight home. He felt tired and needed to talk to Ada. She knew nothing about any of this; she had been born in the year that his father had been shot. Of course, hearing the name Delius may have awakened a memory in her parents, since the name was rare in the Netherlands, but it was a long time ago, and there had been lots of trials in those days, most of which were more spectacular than his father's. She had to know now, partly because he had not behaved very elegantly that morning.
The moment he entered the room, he sensed that something was wrong. Her cello, which was always by the grand piano, had gone. On his desk lay her letter:
Dear Max,
When you get home, I shall have gone. Perhaps you won't understand immediately, but if you think a little, you'll be able to work it out. I've had a wonderful time with you, for which I'm grateful to you and which I will never forget. You meant a lot to me and perhaps I meant a little to you too. If we meet again, I hope that it will be as good friends.
Yours ever,
Ada
He slowly put the sheet of paper down. The unexpected tone of farewell, the finality of the sentences, sank deep into him, but at the same time he knew that he would not do anything to change it. So that was it; the episode was over. He sat down and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, in order to do what he had planned to do in her presence. All he had to do was take out what he needed, without looking: the order he created around himself gave him an extra year of life, which other people wasted in looking.
He placed an old-fashioned fountain pen and a glasses case in front of him. The fountain pen was thick, and made of flame-patterned, dark-blue ebonite, which had become matt and lifeless; the copper clip and the decorations were dull and rusty. He unscrewed it carefully and looked at the gold nib, which was blackened with ancient ink. He turned on the desk lamp and studied the pen carefully with his magnifying glass, and he saw what he had hoped for: among the traces of ink there was a faint deep-green glow, like algae in a stagnant pond. He put the top back on; the thread had gone, but still he felt a very slight resistance at the end.
The glasses case was made of cheap beige papier-mâché. He opened it and took out the glasses. The frames were made of light, transparent celluloid; the greasy, dirty lenses had been ground positively. He was going to try them on for a moment, but when he opened them, everything crumbled into pulverized fragments. The lenses fell out, and suddenly there was nothing but a little heap of rubbish on Ada's letter. He winced. Grabbing the wastepaper basket with his left hand, he swept everything into it with his right forearm.
12
The Triangle
Max could have asked Oud, because it was bound to be in the trial papers, but he did not want to set foot in that haunted house again. At the Ministry of Justice he discovered with some difficulty that his paternal grandparents had been married in Prague and that his father, with calendary discipline, had been born in 1892, in Bielitz, Austria-Hungary, on the same day that he died—June 21. Obviously, no one had remembered that it was his birthday when he was put against the wall. He had attended primary school in Katowitz, and later the high school in Krakau, before going to Vienna University at the age of nineteen.
Since his visit to the National Institute for War Documentation, Max had been pondering a suggestion of Onno's that this summer he should not spend his vacation at some stupid beach in France but in his father's native region—where he might finally be able to put it all into context. On the other hand, as far as the past was concerned, there would be as a massive silence surrounding such matters in those towns as there was in Brussels, where his mother had been born. However, when he consulted his atlas at home, he made a shocking discovery. The three place names from his father's youth, now situated in southern Poland, near the Czech border— Bielsko, Katowice, and Krakow—formed a pure isosceles triangle, which pointed due east like an arrowhead, while in the middle, precisely at the intersection, lay Oswiecim: Auschwitz.
He went by train—like his mother. She had probably taken a more southerly route, via Leipzig and Dresden; his transit visa for the GDR directed him first to West Berlin, Bahnhof Zoo, where he arrived early in the morning and deposited his suitcase at the left-luggage office. He strolled a little along the Kurfurstendamm in the morning sunshine, bought a Baedeker at a kiosk, and took a taxi to the ruined Reichstag, where they were hard at work on restoration. The building was bareheaded: the great central dome—Bismarck's helmet—had disappeared; but when he turned around, at the other end of the huge expanse he saw the new conference center, which had the exact shape of Hitler's cap. So that had been balanced out, too. He devoted a moment's thought to Van der Lubbe, who had celebrated their conception here with a bonfire, and walked through the park that skirted the Wall, silently screaming its multicolored messages. At the chaos of sausage stands, souvenir stalls, and parked buses, where once the Potsdamerplatz had been, he climbed onto a wooden platform and looked between the photographing and jostling tourists at the endless empty wastes on the other side, in which the octagonal form of the Leipziger Platz lay like the hoofprint of a huge monster. A few hundred yards further on, one could see the spot where the monster had taken his own life, as the last of many.
In the afternoon he collected his suitcase from left luggage and took the S-Bahn to East Berlin. He already felt as if he had been away from home for weeks. At Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse he was sent from one window to the next for an hour and a half by needling Vopos with forms and still more forms. Passport, visa, all his money on the table, take off those sunglasses at once! However, he realized that he was not just going from one half of the city to the other, not only from one country to another, but from one world to another. He looked at the fenced-off Brandenburg Gate and walked along Unter den Linden, where there was a refreshing calm. The difference between West and East Berlin was like that between the Amsterdam of 1967 and that of 1947. Everywhere on the unpainted housefronts there was nothing but ideological advertising slogans on red banners: ARTISTS AND CULTURAL WORKERS, INSPIRE THE WORKFORCE WITH YOUR ART TO ENSURE THE TRIUMPH OF SOCIALISM. Passers-by cast glances at his French summer suit, Italian shoes, American shirt, and English tie; now and again someone spoke to him, wanting to change marks at a rate of four to one.
The end of the avenue, opposite the recessed square where the book burning had taken place in 1933, he went into the Neue Wache: a small neoclassical building with a columned portico, where two motionless soldiers were resisting the giggling attentions of a group of curious onlookers. Inside, in a crystal cube, an eternal flame burned above the urns of the unknown soldier and the unknown resistance fighter, DEN OPFERN DES FASCHISMUS UND MILITARISMUS, it said in gold letters on the side wall, but he was given no time to meditate; the hall was gently cleared, and when he came outside, the relief guard was approaching along Unter den Linden with martial music and squeaking boots. The orders, the goose step, bodies that seemed to be joined together, the awesome Prussian precision with which fifty rifle butts slammed onto the pavement like a single butt, the whole unfathomable ceremonial elicited mainly giggling from t
he Berliners—and the only one who felt his eyes growing moist was himself, because though it was militaristic, it was nevertheless intended for the victims of fascism.
Guidebook in hand, he wandered on through the city and felt as if he were wading knee-deep through history. Finally, in the deserted Otto-Grotewohlstrasse, once the Wilhelmstrasse, he stared for minutes at a sunny lawn where the Reichskanzlei had stood. A swelling tumor indicated where the entrance to the bunker had been; below, deep in the ground, the monster had finally fired his first shot since the First World War: into his mouth. Max nodded in approval. Having a sweet tooth has its uses, he thought.
To his delight, the night train to Katowice was still pulled by a hissing and shuddering locomotive with an archaic whistle. They were kept waiting for hours at the Polish border. A succession of new officials in different uniforms walked down the corridor and slid open the compartment doors; the train moved backward, forward, bumped into other carriages, left the station, came back into the station, while outside one could see watchtowers, searchlights, jeeps full of soldiers, a boot sticking halfway out of a car. He felt utterly content. Finally, everything was different. In the sparse light he tried to read an article by some English colleagues on the discovery of a new kind of radio source, a "pulsar"; they had been rash enough to admit that they had even considered the possibility of an extraterrestrial civilization. But he could not concentrate on the technical details. Up to now he had been facing the engine; now he entered Poland with his back to it, so that he had the feeling of returning home. The guard kept returning with blacker and blacker exchange rates for the zloty, but he thought it advisable not to accept; the peasant woman on the seat opposite, with a scarf around a snorting piglet in a basket on her lap, seemed to hear nothing. Near Gliwice everyone began getting up and collecting their things—Max knew that this was the former Gleiwitz, on the former German-Polish border, where Hitler had staged an "incident" as a pretext for invading Poland the following day. This was where it had all begun.
He booked into a run-down family hotel in the center of Krakow. Had Lysenko been right after all? Were even experiences hereditary? It felt like coming home. When he opened his balcony doors overlooking the quiet, overgrown courtyard, he was surrounded by a strange, indescribably familiar smell of brown coal, linked to a temperature which must be exactly the same as that of his skin: it was as though his body were expanding as far as the walls of the surrounding buildings. Afterward, in the town, he tried to take in the thought that his father had also walked around here, with a stiff leather satchel on his back; but it would not come into focus. The high school looked like all high schools, with Ionic columns and a pediment over the entrance. In a cafe, where he was given a glass of water with his coffee, he looked in the telephone book to see if there was still a Delius living in the town, a male or female cousin perhaps; but of course all the German-speakers had left for the rump of Austria immediately after the First World War. Perhaps there were still Deliuses in Prague, Vienna, or Budapest, where he was planning to go next. He spent the rest of the day as a tourist— admired the cathedral, stood at the tombs of Polish kings, walked in woollen overshoes across the parquet floors of hundreds of pointless rooms in Wawel Castle.
The following morning at the crack of dawn, he took the local train back along the north side of the triangle to Katowice. Flat fields, bleak and deserted under an overcast sky, impoverished villages, children waving at the train from the courtyards of wooden farmhouses, gloomy woods, gradually changing into a black industrial landscape of mines and factories and then an endless railway yard full of goods trains. He wandered aimlessly through the silent streets for a couple of hours, inhaling the heavy, damp smell of coal and sulfur, and looked at the woman street sweepers.
Would his own child ever walk through Amsterdam and Leiden like this? He found himself thinking immediately of Ada. Did this mean that he should go back to her? Since she had left, he had had no further contact with her, had in fact half forgotten her. Imagine her ringing him up to announce that she was pregnant with his child. What would he do? But that was impossible; the pill took care of that. He put these thoughts aside and went back to the station. The train took him along the base of the triangle to Bielsko-Biala, thirty miles farther south. But in that town, too, where his grandmother had screamed at his father's birth, he heard no echo. The feeling of familiarity, which had originally inspired him, had receded. Perhaps Lysenko had not been entirely right. An hour later he traveled back along the southern side of the triangle to Krakow, looked at the crows in the fields, at the horses and horsecarts on the country roads, and wondered whether he ought to have listened to Onno.
On the third day he again took the train to Katowice; he had to change in Trzebinia and with his heart pounding traveled into the triangle to Oswiecim, at the intersection of the bisecting angles. Here too, under a misty white sky, there were extensive railway yards with shunting trains, train drivers leaning out of their shuddering locomotives and looking back along the endless rows of closed cattle trucks. A taxi took him to the camp entrance in less than five minutes.
Rust-brown buildings, looming between the trees. The tall, square chimney of the crematorium, ARBEIT MACHT FREI. He looked grimly at the wrought-iron slogan above the gate; was this National Socialist cynicism, as he had always supposed, or had it already been there when this was an Austro-Hungarian cavalry barracks, situated on the former border of the Habsburg empire and that of the Hohenzollerns? Maybe his father had been in the garrison stationed here.
There was a clammy, windless heat. At a stall he ate a spicy sausage on a slice of black bread, bought some brochures from another stall, and went in. He felt as if in some way he was trying to catch up with himself—as if his body were already walking over the raked gravel but he himself were still not here, as if it would take decades for him to arrive. Watchtowers. Double lines of bent concrete posts with barbed wire strung between insulators. Skulls and crossbones. Halt! Stoj! It was smaller than he had expected, a silent village of thirty-three brick buildings, in three rows of eleven, where tens of thousands of people had been beaten to death, shot, given fatal injections, and tortured, where there had been experiments with gas on wounded Russian prisoners of war and patients from surrounding hospitals; but it was still not the actual place.
Stones, moldy cellars, dark caves, iron rings on walls, chains, rusty operating tables. A couple of blocks had been turned into a museum. He looked at an infernal terrarium, twenty yards long and three feet deep, filled with women's hair, which had gone a uniform dull-gray color. Was his mother's hair in there? Another terrarium contained discarded children's shoes, with spectacles, toothbrushes, artificial limbs. There it was. Was the truth perhaps, he wondered, that it ultimately made no difference? Was everything possible and could anything be done, since it would one day irrevocably be cast aside? Even in heaven eternal bliss would be possible only by the grace of a criminal loss of memory. Should the blessed not be punished with hell for this? Everything had been wrecked for all eternity—not only here, but by thousands of earlier and later occasions, which no one remembered. Heaven was impossible; only hell might perhaps exist. Anyone who believed in God, he thought, looking at the huge display case full of toys, should be executed—put up against the black tarred wall of execution that he had seen next to Block II.
He could feel that he was working himself into a state. At the stall outside the camp he drank a glass of lukewarm mineral water, leafed through the brochures, peered at the figures and diagrams, and set out toward a hamlet a few miles further on, where the extermination camp Auschwitz II was situated. He could have rung for a taxi, but because countless thousands had been driven to their deaths along this road, he felt that he had to walk, like a Christian taking the Via Dolorosa. The deserted narrow road stretched away through the fields of stubble with occasional birchwoods, behind which loomed the towers of mine shafts and factory chimneys. The day was muggy; sweating and stooping slightly, he looked at
the cobblestones over which he was walking, while around him not only the landscape, but gradually everything that tied him down—Amsterdam, Onno, his girlfriends, his colleagues, and also his work, the observatory, the absurd depths of the universe—sank into oblivion. All that remained was himself, walking at that moment over the cobbles between Os'wiecim and Brzezinka, in the center of his diabolical triangle. Without thinking about anything in particular he became increasingly filled with the sense that he was there, that he existed, here and now, that he, here and now, was who he was. Why? Was he perhaps that question, that secret itself? Was the question the answer and the answer the question?
He saw his shoes advancing in turn, and suddenly he was aware of the rotation of the earth; he had to keep walking to remain in the same place, but after a while the rotation began gradually to increase, so that he had to walk faster to compensate for it, and a little later he had the feeling that he was about to fall forward.
He stopped dizzily and looked up. He was standing at a crossroads with a sandy country road full of cart ruts. A few hundred yards farther on there was a bridge over a railway line—and less than a mile beyond it, a low and large expanse in the misty sunshine, lay the entrance building of Auschwitz-Birkenau: anus mundi.
He stared at it numbly. There it was. With its small tower above the gate it was like a monstrous bird of prey, which had landed there with outspread wings. And above it the sky had glowed day and night with the burning men, women, and children; all around there must still be traces of their ash in the fields. There was no traffic; the silence was filled only with the twittering of birds and whistling locomotives in the distance. There was a smell of warm grass, mixed with an indefinable chemical smell. Motionless in its relentless symmetry, the building looked at him. As he began to walk toward it, he saw a small statue of the Virgin on the other side of the crossroads, mounted in a kind of bird box. The Madonna had a few withered branches in her hands and her eyes were turned upward with the look that he had seen so often—when he sat up in bed—on the pillow beneath him. At the same instant he was overwhelmed by rage. Without a second thought and without even looking around, he ran toward it, grabbed the wooden statue off its pedestal, took it by the head, and flung it as far as he could into the bushes.