Europa Blues

20

HE SAT QUIETLY in bed. Something swept by in the darkness, taking him with it.

Perhaps it was an icy wind.

Perhaps it was the Erinyes.

His fingers touched the yellowed paper. He could feel the distance between the barely legible pencil letters. Ice was growing between them. Between the letters. It would never melt.

Paul Hjelm took off his new reading glasses and placed them on the bedside table, switched off the lamp and stared out into the darkness.

So, he thought, groping for Cilla’s warm body. His hand snaked beneath the blanket, coming to rest between her shoulder blades. She murmured. A sign of life.

So, that was how things could have been. Things could have turned out that way for him, too. If he had been born at the wrong time, to the wrong parents. His own thoughts could have been exactly like Leonard Sheinkman’s during those bleak February days in 1945. Disjointed, loose, but still with great and terrible repressed emotion.

Leonard Sheinkman had been convinced he was going to die back then, but he hadn’t. A few months later, the war had ended. He came out on the other side. He had been utterly, utterly empty, and now faced a choice: stay put and go under or move and make a new life for himself. Become someone else. He had chosen the latter, it had been a possibility for him. But what kind of end had he met? Being hung from a tree in the Jewish cemetery fifty-five years later? How was that possible? What had happened?

At that moment, Paul Hjelm was powerless to go through what he had read and draw any rational conclusions. He was much too moved. That was roughly what he had been expecting – and yet it was completely different. A different tone. Sorrow beyond all sorrow. As though it had been written from beyond the grave.

A weighty German-Swedish dictionary was resting on his stomach. In his left hand, he was holding the pages he had read; in his right, those he hadn’t. The piles were roughly equal in size, meaning he still had half left to read. He was looking forward to it – but he was also dreading it.

Paul Hjelm felt completely destroyed. As though he had been ransacked. In a way, that was what had happened.

Buchenwald, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp, was seven kilometres outside Weimar in the former DDR. The city had been the European Capital of Culture just one year ago; the place in which Goethe had changed the face of world literature. In 1919, the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, had been founded there. In 1926, the Hitler Youth had been formed there. That same year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSDAP, had held its first party meeting in Weimar’s national theatre. Then, between 1937 and 1945, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand people had been held prisoner in Buchenwald; there had been no gas chambers, but there had been a centre for ‘medical research’. In total, fifty-six thousand people had lost their lives in Buchenwald, practically within sight of Goethe’s Weimar. Between 1945 and 1950, it had also served as a Soviet detention camp for Germans. A further seventeen thousand people had died.

It was the cradle of the European paradox.

Paul Hjelm turned over to turn off the light.

Only then did he realise it was already out.

He fell asleep late that night.