The Other Side of Silence

“No, we certainly wouldn’t want that.” I smiled as gamely as I could manage. “Especially not after the awkward scene we’ve had tonight. You know, you should have telephoned the Villa Mauresque, left a message, and saved me the journey up here. I know you’ve got the number. I saw it on one of those neat files of yours in the office. Then again, maybe you thought it was kinder to do it in person, to spare my feelings.”

I went downstairs and walked through the lush garden back to the car in a silence that was already roaring in my ears like the sea hitting the beach on the Cap. In a way I’d seen it coming and been stupid enough to ignore what my keener senses had already told me. Not that it really counted for very much in the scheme of things. It was nothing more than just another tragedy, in a long line of tragedies of the kind Bernie Gunther was already well used to. If anyone had the constitution to take it on the chin, that person was him, I told myself. Maybe that’s what all ordinary human life amounts to. One tragedy heaped on top of another like sharp gray layers of shale. What did it matter anymore than the death of the lobster I’d eaten for supper or the leaf of tobacco now burning in my cigarette? Not a damn thing. If ever you stopped to think of just how much pain there was in any one life it would surely kill you, just as surely as if someone had put a bullet through your heart at close range with a little automatic.

TWENTY-SEVEN

There were two bottles of twenty-year-old Schinkenhager I’d been saving for a special occasion, and as soon as I got home I knew instinctively that this was it. The special occasion. Deep pain creates its own singularity. I opened one of the bottles and stared at the first brimming glass, feeling nothing less than a categorical imperative to get drunk: an absolute, unconditional requirement that had to be obeyed and was justified as an end in itself. There’s a central philosophical concept for you. I drank one whole bottle before I went to sleep, and the other almost as soon as I woke up again. And somewhere in the middle I called the hotel to say I was sick. Not that I really was sick. Nobody calls that being sick except the poor nurse who has to pump the alcohol out of your stomach and even then her pity for your illness is alloyed, rightly, with a strong sense of disgust. Well, I was almost as sick as that. I hadn’t drunk like that-with real malice aforethought-since the day I learned the Wilhelm Gustloff was lying at the bottom of the cold Baltic Sea.

A while after I made the call to the Grand Hotel, I awoke with the vague idea that the doorbell rang. A stupid, drunkenly deluded, childishly eager part of me thought it might be Anne French come to apologize and say she’d made a dreadful mistake, and thinking that I might just find it within myself to forgive her, I persuaded myself to pick myself off the floor. Of course I would forgive her. I was drunk.

With two bottles of good schnapps inside me it was all I could do to crawl across the tiny bedroom in my lobster pot and stumble downstairs to open the door. I have no idea what time it was but it must have been the late afternoon or early evening of the next day. I opened the door to brilliant sunshine, which dazzled me painfully, or at least that’s what I thought. Instead it was a fist on the end of a very strong, red-faced Englishman’s arm and it hit me more quickly than the schnapps, squarely under the chin, dumping me on my backside like a puppet that was suddenly and stupidly without any strings. I sat on the stairs, legs splayed in front of me, with my ears singing a very loud tune, and thought hard about puking. I was still thinking about it when the same Englishman picked me up, bounced me off the wall a couple of times, and then punched me again.

“If there’s one thing I’ve always liked,” he said-I think it was probably the last thing I remembered hearing for a while-“it’s hitting fucking Germans in the face.” He laughed. “And to think I get paid for this. Fuck me, I’d do it for free.”