‘Resi ĄX ?’ I said.
She didn’t look at me, ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s time to kill the dog.’
‘It isn’t anything I want to do very much’ I said.
‘Are you going to do it,’ she said, ‘or are you going to give it to somebody to do?’
‘Your father asked me to do it,’ I said.
She turned to look at me. ‘You’re a soldier now,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Did you put on your uniform just for killing the dog?’ she said.
‘I’m going to the front,’ I said. ‘I stopped by to say goodbye.’
‘Which front?’ she said.
‘The Russians,’ I said.
‘You’ll die,’ she said.
‘So I hear ‘ I said. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Everybody who isn’t dead is going to be dead very soon now,’ she said. She didn’t seem to care much.
‘Not everybody,’ I said.
‘I will be,’ she said.
‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ I said.
‘It won’t hurt when I get killed,’ she said. ‘Just all of a sudden I won’t be any more,’ she said. She pushed the dog off her lap. It fell to the floor as passive as a Knackwurst.
‘Take it,’ she said. ‘I never liked it anyway. I just felt sorry for it.’
I picked up the dog.
‘It will be much better off dead,’ she said.
‘I think you’re right,’ I said.
‘I’ll be better off dead, too,’ she said.
‘That I can’t believe,’ I said.
‘Do you want me to tell you something?’ she said.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Since nobody’s going to go on living much longer,’ she said, ‘I might as well tell you I love you.’
‘That’s very sweet,’ I said.
‘I mean really love you,’ she said. ‘When Helga was alive and you two would come here, I used to envy Helga. When Helga was dead, I started dreaming about how I would grow up and marry you and be a famous actress, and you would write plays for me.’
‘I am honored,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘Nothing means anything. You go shoot the dog now.’
I bowed out, taking the dog with me. I took the dog out into the orchard, put it down in the snow, drew my tiny pistol
Three people were watching me. One was Resi, who now stood at the music-room window. Another was the ancient soldier who was supposed to be guarding the Polish and Russian women.
The third was my mother-in-law, Eva Noth. Eva Noth stood at a second-story window. Like Resi’s dog, Eva Noth had fattened dropsically on wartime food. The poor woman, made into sausage by unkind time, stood at attention, seemed to think that the execution of the dog was a ceremony of some nobility.
I shot the dog in the back of the neck. The report of my pistol was small, cheap, like the tinny spit of a B.B. gun.
The dog died without a shudder.
The old soldier came over, expressing a professional’s interest in the sort of wound such a small pistol might make. He turned the dog over with his boot, found the bullet in the snow, murmured judiciously, as though I had done an interesting, instructive thing. He now began to talk of all sorts of wounds he had seen or heard of, all sorts of holes in once-living things.
‘You’re going to bury it?’ he said.
‘I suppose I’d better,’ I said.
‘If you don’t,’ he said, ‘somebody will eat it.’
20: ‘Hangwomen for the Hangman of Berlin … ‘
I found out only recently, in 1958 or 1959, how my father-in-law died. I knew he was dead. The detective agency I had hired to find word of Helga had told me that much ĄX that Werner Noth was dead.
The details of his death came to hand by chance, in a Greenwich Village barber shop. I was leafing through a girly magazine, admiring the way women were made, and awaiting my turn for a haircut. The story advertised on the magazine cover was ‘Hangwomen for the Hangman of Berlin.’ There was no reason for me to suppose that the article was about my father-in-law. Hanging hadn’t been his business. I turned to the article.
And I looked for quite a while at a murky photograph of Werner Noth being hanged from an apple tree without suspecting who the hanged man was. I looked at the faces of the people at the hanging. They were mostly women, nameless, shapeless ragbags.
And I played a game, counting the ways in which the magazine cover had lied. For one thing, the women weren’t doing the hanging. Three scrawny men in rags were doing it. For another thing, the women in the photograph weren’t beautiful, and the hangwomen on the cover were. The hangwomen on the cover had breasts like cantaloupes, hips like horse collars, and their rags were the pathetic remains of nightgowns by Schiaparelli. The women in the photograph were as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress ticking.
And then, just before I began to read the story of the hanging, I began, tentatively and queasily, to recognize the shattered building in the background. Behind the hangman, looking like a mouthful of broken teeth, was all that was left of the home of Werner Noth, of the home where my Helga had been raised as a good German citizen, of the home where I had said farewell to a ten-year-old nihilist named Resi.
I read the text
The text was by a man named Ian Westlake, and it was very well done. Westlake, an Englishman, a liberated prisoner of war, had seen the hanging shortly after his liberation by the Russians. The photographs were his.
Noth, he said, had been hanged from his own apple tree by slave laborers, mostly Poles and Russians, quartered nearby. Westlake did not call my father-in-law ‘The Hangman of Berlin.’
Westlake went to some trouble to find out what crimes Noth had committed, and he concluded that Noth had been no better and no worse than any other big city chief of police.
‘Terror and torture were the provinces of other branches of the German police,’ said Westlake. ‘Werner Noth’s own province was what is regarded in every big city as ordinary law and order. The force he directed was the sworn enemy of drunks, thieves, murderers, rapists, looters, confidence men, prostitutes, and other disturbers of the peace, and it did its best to keep the city traffic moving.
‘Noth’s principal offense,’ said Westlake, ‘was that he introduced persons suspected of misdemeanors and crimes into a system of courts and penal institutions that was insane. Noth did his best to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, using the most modern police methods; but those to whom he handed over his prisoners found the distinction of no importance. Merely to be in custody, with or without trial, was a crime. Prisoners of every sort were all to be humiliated, exhausted and killed.’
Westlake went on to say that the slave laborers who hanged Noth had no clear idea who he was, beyond the fact that he was somebody important. They hanged him for the satisfaction of hanging somebody important.
Noth’s house, said Westlake, had been demolished by Russian artillery, but Noth had continued to live in one undamaged room in the back. Westlake took an inventory of the room, found it to contain a bed, a table, and a candlestick. On the table were framed photographs of Helga, Resi, and Noth’s wife.
There was a book. It was a German translation of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Why such a miserable magazine had bought such a fine piece of reporting was not explained. What the magazine was sure its readers would like was the description of the hanging itself.
My father-in-law was stood on a footstool four inches high. The rope was put around his neck and drawn tight over the limb of a budding apple tree. The footstool was then kicked out from under him. He could dance on the ground while he strangled.
Good?
He was revived eight times, and hanged nine.
Only after the eighth hanging were his last bits of courage and dignity gone. Only after the eighth hanging did he act like a child being tortured.
‘For that performance,’ said Westlake, ‘he was rewarded with what he wanted most in all this world. He was rewarded with death. He died with an erection and his feet were bare.’
I turned the page of the magazine to see if there was more. There was more, but not more of the same. There was a full-page photograph of a pretty woman with her thighs spread wide and her tongue stuck out.
The barber called out to me. He shook another man’s hair out of the cloth he was going to put around my neck.
‘Next,’ he said.
21: My Best Friend …
I’ve said that I’d stolen the motorcyle I rode when I called on Werner Noth for the last time. I should explain.