Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

Without Anesthesia by Maceias Nunes

Translated from the Portuguese by Cliff Landers

Maceias Nunes is a graduate of the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, where he has lived for fifty years and where he is a community organizer in the poor areas of the city. In his free time he is a prolific creator of challenge-level crossword puzzles in Portuguese. “Without Anesthesia” is his first published work of fiction, so it also qualifies for our Department of First Stories. It was one of the finalists in a contest run by O Globo Rio de Janiero’s, leading newspaper.

Eichmann had been captured just two weeks earlier, and that added to the astonishment that sent a chill through me when Herr Weber began fishing through the trunk of objects that would establish his true identity. Herr Weber was more than just the gringo who lived with his wife and daughter in a masonry house in the Jacarezinho favela and worked as a machine mechanic at the nearby textile factory. Frau and Fraulein Weber would be away for a couple of hours before returning from their Friday outing, which would allow enough time for the ritual that the German was executing with an economy and precision of gesture characteristic of his six-foot three-inch frame. Next to the trunk, on the cheap wooden table, were three bottles of red wine.

He placed on the table a blackletter copy of Mein Kampf, with a brown cover, and said in a neutral tone, “I’ve read it three times, but I didn’t need to. The Fuhrer’s ideas were telepathic.”

He took from the trunk a yellowed copy, also in blackletter, of the “Horst Wessel Song.” And he lined up on the table other items — an aluminum mug with a swastika in bas-relief on its sides, a Parabellum, and a red banner with the inscription in yellow: Deutschland uber alles.

His hand trembled slightly as he took out a photograph. In it, Heinrich Himmler was smiling discreetly and benignly. Beside him, tense and martial, was Herr Weber.

He left the photo on the table, his eyes now bloodshot from the wine that he sipped straight from the bottle, then plunged his hand into the trunk again and emerged with a black velvet sack, spilling part of its contents onto the table.

“Gold teeth taken from the dirty mouths of those Jews that Himmler and Heydrich did the favor of annihilating. Bergen-Belsen. I was a guard there. Pulled without anesthesia, some of them from the living. A lovely sight. From the dead it wasn’t necessary.”

He exploded into harsh, cold laughter, humorless and joyless. I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. He saw my anguish, picked up the Parabellum, placed the barrel against my forehead, and said, “My name is Wilhelm von Gutwelt. Frau Brunhilde is actually Lina Knupp von Gutwelt. Fraulein Elke is Gudrun, the name of Himmler’s daughter. What matters from now on is your future, Herr Gabriel, with Elke.”

The ironic emphasis on Herr served as preamble to the torrent of insults that he proceeded to pour out, saying that he’d chosen me because I was dark skinned and would serve as alibi; that I was a nobody, incapable of refusing the offer he was about to make me; that Brazil was the end of the world and a favela in Rio de Janeiro was the end of the end of the world; that he felt revulsion at the thought of seeing Gudrun married to a maggot such as me, but the hell of it was that she seemed to like me; that women are like that: The less something is worth, the more they value it; that, to terminate the conversation, this was the deal: two kilos of gold, a house to live in outside the favela, a job at the textile factory to learn the trade of machine mechanic, twenty thousand dollars in cash, plus everything that he and Frau Lina would leave their daughter as inheritance. In exchange, I’d keep my mouth shut for the rest of my life.

“I’m not a fool. It’s no good trying to hide using the traditional methods. Where Eichmann and the others went wrong is that they didn’t succeed in being average enough.”

He picked up the mug, filled it with wine, handed it to me, and said, “We have a pact. I give you the future you could never have on your own and you give me the chance to acknowledge my past openly. At least with you.”

I drank the wine in the mug in a single swallow and left through the maze of alleys with the sensation of having taken a beating. Even today I still struggle to understand why a small-time Nazi, whose obscurity could have guaranteed his safety, would reveal himself so readily. I conclude that he used me to play a kind of psychological Russian roulette. I was the bullet.

But it could be that he was merely displaying the Nazi megalomania — to conquer the world at any cost. After all, Eichmann had done that. His name was in all the headlines. Or maybe he’d spoken just to vent, trying to appease the fury of guilt reawakened by Eichmann’s capture. It’s possible that, thinking himself on the verge of being caught, he was attempting to put his affairs in order. Or might it be a test whose final result would prove the mixed-breed’s inferiority, whether in petty tasks or in lacking the courage to denounce a confessed criminal? Could it be just a psychotic display by a half-mad Nazi?

The first time I saw Elke afterward, I told her that her father had been a guard at Bergen-Belsen and had offered me happiness in exchange for silence. Her eyes brimming with tears, she corrected me.

“It was Auschwitz, and he was responsible for burning the bodies.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Because I love you and thought the subject need never come up between us. I don’t want to lose you. Let’s run away. My mother won’t leave my father. She was a member of the Nazi party, like him.”

I began to think running away was a good idea. We would go somewhere far away, to the end of the world. Then I remembered Herr Weber’s words: “The end of the world is here.”

If he could have seen me hanging from the door of the Central Station train heading to work next day along with the other lunch-pail carriers from the Baixada Fluminense and the outlying districts, Herr Weber would have had even more reason to say that he had sought refuge at the end of the world. And if he’d seen me shouting “I know a Nazi!” at a messenger who worked in the office next to mine on Churchill Avenue, he would have concluded that even at the end of the world there was no refuge for him.

“I can’t hear a thing!” my acquaintance said.

After we got off the train and won the race that guaranteed us a seat on the Francisco Sobus, I resumed the attempt at dialogue: “I said on the train that I know a Nazi.”

“What’s a Nazi?”

“A man who likes to kill Jews.”

I knew that he worked for a couple of Jewish businessmen named Klein, father and son, who handled the importation of gourmet foods. He said that if there was some Nazi trying to kill his bosses it was best to warn them right away.

When I spoke to them about the matter, they asked for details about the German’s daily routine. He was arrested near the factory at seven-thirty in the morning. Half an hour later they took Frau Brunhilde away, after her husband, without being forced to do so, pointed out the way to the house in Jacarezinho. I never heard anything further about the couple, nothing in the papers. Eichmann, the big fish, dominated the headlines. He was enough for the world not to forget the lesson of the annihilation of the Jews.

I denounced the Gutwelts because of the German’s laughter when he spoke of extracting teeth from the Jews. In my experience, at that time, the greatest possible cruelty was pulling teeth with the worthless anesthesia with which the fake dentists in the favela would try futilely to desensitize my inflamed gums. Even the thought of extraction without anesthesia was too much for me.

The Jews kept their promise not to touch Elke. When I told her, at the house in the favela, that her parents had been arrested, she hugged me and sobbed for a long time, softly. Then she told me that for them the Nazi party, Hitler, and especially Himmler, came before her. After we got married, we moved to Santa Teresa. The Kleins also moved from their office on Churchill Avenue, but first they called me in and handed me a package containing twenty thousand dollars, saying that they had kept the trunk and the other things as proof. I replied that I needed to consult Elke about whether to accept the money. She said I should.

We were happy for the forty years we were together. Every month I visit her tomb at the Sao Francisco Xavier cemetery. The Jews never forgot what they considered an act of courage on my part and Elke’s. In reality, if not for the fake dentists I’m certain I would’ve accepted Herr Weber’s offer and never have done that favor for the cause of the Holocaust.

We never had children because Elke didn’t want to, and the decision came on the day I told her that I had asked the Jews to spare her because she was an angel, and one of them had commented, bitterly and without irony, that the incredible thing about life is that devils can engender angels. There was no way I could disagree with that.

©2009 by Maceias Nunes; translation ©2009 by Cliff Landers