The Other Side of Silence

“Please, Bernie. Let’s not talk about that anymore. I want to kiss every centimeter of you before I go to sleep tonight. And then I want you to do the same to me.”

But I still had an itch that I needed to scratch. “That’s another thing,” I said. “I hate that he knows about us. That there’s something between us now. It worries me. For a man like that, all knowledge is something to be used like a loaded pistol.”

Irmela sighed and put down my hand. “You’re crazy to worry about him, Bernie. Think about it. What possible harm could he do us? Besides, he’s just a captain.”

“Not just any captain. He’s an extension of Erich Koch. Did you see the way the waiters in here fawned over him? The quality of his uniform? That amber cigarette case? Besides, the man used to be a blackmailer. Possibly still is, for all I know. The leopard doesn’t change his spots. So maybe he’s got something on Koch. Perhaps Erich Koch is the lemon who’s being squeezed now. You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. There must be a hell of a lot to get on a bastard like Erich Koch.”

“You’ll have to explain some of that. Why is Koch a lemon? I don’t understand.”

I told her all about the von Frisch case, to which Irmela very sensibly replied:

“But he’s got nothing on you, Bernie Gunther. Or on me. Neither of us has anything to hide. Nor do we have any money to give him. Do we? Besides, there’s a war on and there are more important things to worry about, wouldn’t you say? You’re worrying about nothing. If you’re going to blackmail someone you only do it when there’s a profit in it, surely?”

“Why is he here now?” I asked.

“It was a coincidence, that’s all.”

I sipped my brandy and then bit my fingernail.

“There’s no coincidence with him. He doesn’t arrive in your life without there being a reason. That’s not how it works with a man like that.”

“So how does it work? Tell me.”

But I could not. After the wine and the brandy, it was beyond my powers of speech to explain to her the sense of foreboding I had about seeing Harold Hennig again. For her to have understood how I felt about Hennig it would probably have been necessary for her to have returned with me to 1938 and seen poor Captain von Frisch’s battered body lying in a pool of blood and urine on a cell floor. Looking back on it now I might have said it was like that picture by Pieter Bruegel popularly known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: I imagined an ordinary day in Konigsberg-if such a thing was even possible; Irmela and me walking by the sea, hand in hand, enjoying the view and looking at the ships with innocent smiles on our windswept faces, but as oblivious to what is really going on in the picture as Bruegel’s plowman or the lumpish shepherd staring up at the now empty gray sky. Meanwhile, somewhere in the corner of the canvas a tragedy unfolds, unnoticed by almost everyone. Hubris knocks us from the sky and we are both drowned in the freezing northern sea.

That’s the thing about blackmail. You don’t understand how it could ever happen to you until it does.

Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope as the Russians tightened their cold, iron grip on the miserable, beleaguered city. Water froze in the bedroom ewers and condensation became ice on the inside of windowpanes. Some mornings I woke up and the bottom of the iron bedstead I shared with Irmela looked like the edge of the roof outside, there were so many icicles hanging off it. Defeat was staring us in the face like the inscription on a new headstone. Christmas came and went, the thermometer dropped to an unheard-of level and I more or less forgot about Captain Harold Hennig. Matters affecting our survival demanded more attention. Fuel and food ran short, as did ammunition and patience. The general opinion was that we could last for another three or four more months at most. Unfortunately, this opinion was not shared by the great optimist who had quit his wolf’s lair in Rastenburg and was now safely back in Berlin. But Irmela and I had other things on our minds than mere survival, not least the fact that she was pregnant. I was delighted, and when she saw my own reaction so was Irmela. I promised, faithfully, that if by some miracle I survived the war I would divorce my wife in Berlin and marry her; and if I didn’t survive, then something of me might, which would be some consolation at least for a life cut short, if not tragically-I could hardly claim that-then for a life that had been cut short of meaning. Yes, that was how I thought about the prospect of having finally fathered a child. Something of me would remain after the war. Which is all part of the butt-fuck that is life’s grotesque comedy.