A Man Without Breath

The Glinka was a fussy-looking white building with more architecturally effeminate flourishes than a courtier’s lace handkerchief. On the roof there was a short castellated spire with a weather vane; on the street was an archway entrance with thick, pepper-pot columns that put you in mind of a cut-price Philistine temple, and I half expected to find some muscular Ivan chained between them for the amusement of a local fertility god. As it was, there was just a bearded doorman holding a rusty sabre and wearing a red Cossack coat and an unlikely chestful of cheap medals. In Paris they might have made something out of a doorway like that, just as they might have made the interior of the place seem attractive or even elegant, with plenty of French mirrors, gilt furniture and silk curtains – the French know how to run a decent brothel in the same way they know what makes a good restaurant. But Smolensk is a long way from Paris and the Glinka was a hundred thousand kilometres from being a decent brothel. It was just a sausage counter – a cheap bang house where simply walking through the dirty glass door and catching the strong smell in the air of cheap perfume and male seed made you think you were risking a dose of drip. I felt sorry for any man who went there, although not as sorry as I felt for the girls, many of them Polish – and a few of them as young as fifteen – who’d been taken from their homes for ‘agricultural work’ in Germany.

A few minutes of conversation with a selection of these unfortunates was enough to discover that Ribe and Greiss had been regulars at the Glinka, that they had behaved themselves impeccably – or at least as impeccably as was required in the circumstances – and that they had left alone just before eleven p.m., which was just enough time for them to get back to the castle in time for the midnight roll-call. And I quickly formed the impression that the ghastly fate that had befallen the two soldiers could have had little or nothing to do with what had happened in the Glinka.

When I had finished questioning the Polish whores of the Glinka I went outside and drew a deep breath of clean cold air. Colonel Ahrens and Lieutenant Voss followed and waited for me to say something. But when I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned against one of the entrance pillars, the colonel interrupted my thoughts impatiently.

‘Well, Captain Gunther,’ he said. ‘Please tell us. What impression have you formed?’

I lit a cigarette and shook my head. ‘That there are times when being a man seems almost as bad as being a German,’ I said.

‘Really, captain, you are a most exasperating fellow. Try to forget your personal feelings and concentrate on your job as a policeman, please. You know damn well I’m talking about my boys and what might have happened to them.’

I threw my cigarette onto the ground angrily and then felt angrier for wasting a good cigarette.

‘That’s good coming from you, colonel. You wake me up to help out the local field police with an extra set of cop’s eyes and then you put on your spurs and try to get stiff when the cop’s eyes see something they don’t like. If you ask me, your damned boys had it coming if they were in there. I feel bad enough just going through the door of a wurst-hut like that, see? But then I’m peculiar that way. Maybe you’re right. Sometimes I forget that I’m a German soldier.’

‘Look, I only asked about my men – they were murdered after all.’

‘You got stiff with me, and if there’s one thing a Berliner hates it’s someone who gets stiff with him. You might be a colonel but don’t ever try to push a ramrod up my ass, sir.’

‘Captain Gunther, you have a most violent temper.’

‘Maybe that’s because I’m tired of people thinking that any of this shit really matters. Your men were murdered. That would be laughable if this whole situation in Russia wasn’t so tragic. You talk about murder like it still means something. In case you hadn’t noticed, colonel, we’re all of us in the worst place in the world with one boot in the fucking abyss, and we’re pretending that there’s law and order and something worth fighting for. But there isn’t. Not now. There’s just insanity and chaos and slaughter and maybe something worse that’s yet to come. It’s only a couple of days since you told me that sixteen thousand Jews from the Vitebsk ghetto ended up in the river or as human fertilizer. Sixteen thousand people. And I’m supposed to give a damn about a couple of off-duty Fritzes who got their throats cut outside the local sausage counter.’

‘I can see that you are a man under strain, sir,’ said the colonel.

‘We all are,’ I allowed. ‘It’s the strain of constantly having to look the other way. Well, I don’t mind telling you, the muscles in my neck are getting tired.’

Colonel Ahrens seethed quietly. ‘I’m still awaiting an answer to a perfectly reasonable question, captain.’