The Lady from Zagreb

Forty-four

While I drove the car I rehearsed some of the explanations I might give to Dalia for lying to her so egregiously. “I was only obeying orders” wasn’t going to do me any good, that was obvious. It was also obvious that Goebbels was right: if the colonel was already with Dalia, then no amount of special pleading was going to change her opinion, which was that I had deceived her, cruelly. Trying to justify what I had done in the name of her feelings simply wasn’t going to alter things for the better. Perhaps later on I might get a chance to offer an excuse for my behavior, but the nearer I got to the house on Griebnitzsee, the more I realized that if Dragan was there already, then the best thing I could probably do would be to withdraw quietly and leave them to their reunion. It was also becoming clear to me that, while I might have had the best of intentions, it had been very wrong of me to lie to her. Dalia was an adult, after all, not a child; she ought to have been given the opportunity to make up her own mind about what kind of man her father was. Protecting a grown woman from the truth was no kind of solution in a world that was already ruled by lies. That’s the thing about breathing the same air as the minister of Truth; after a while, truth is just another Paschal holy day you can move to suit the calendar. I felt disgusted with myself.

I parked the car on Kaiser-Strasse and walked along to the big creamy house. There was no sign of a bicycle in the garden or leaning by the front door. It looked as if I had succeeded in getting there before Colonel Dragan. Dalia’s bedroom window was open and a net curtain was spilling out of the castellated turret as if a damsel were in there, signaling to her knight with a handkerchief to come and rescue her. Everything looked exactly as it did when I’d left the place a couple of hours earlier. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked up the street to see if I could see an approaching bicyclist but there was no one in sight, not even a gardener.

I went around the back of the house to the kitchen door, which was rarely ever locked. Dalia preferred to leave it open to get a current of cool air through the house. There wasn’t a lot of crime in that part of Berlin and I couldn’t blame her for wanting some fresh air. It was almost thirty degrees and, at the bottom of the garden, I could see several boats moving up and down the river in the sunshine. It was a perfect day. Goebbels was right about that, too. The sky felt so big and blue and the few clouds looked so shapely I half expected to see the edge of a gilt frame over my head. Instead I saw a bicycle lying on the lawn under the lowest leaves of a weeping willow tree.

I moved quickly to the kitchen door and went inside. White plates and saucers occupied the slots on a wooden draining board like the skeleton of some fossilized animal. A coffeepot stood on the cooker. It was cold to the touch. The tap was dripping cold water into the butler’s pantry sink. I started slowly up the creaking wooden stairs. For a few seconds I heard raised voices in a room above my head and then the sound of a single shot. The shot brought me up short; then I heard seven more.

Gun in hand, I bounded up the rest of the kitchen stairs and into the hall. An officer’s peaked cap with a letter U around the Croatian flag lay next to Dalia’s unopened post on the table. A strong smell of gunpowder was drifting through the house. After eight shots, someone was dead. But who? I caught sight of my own reflection in the big mirror on the hall tree where the hat she’d been wearing in Munich was hanging next to some of her many handbags. I was wearing an anxious, puzzled look. Where was she? Was she all right?

“Dalia?” I yelled. “It’s me, Gunther. Where are you?”

I heard something hard fall on the floor. It might have been a gun. I ran into the drawing room.

The black lyre-shaped clock on the mantelpiece was ticking loudly, as if to remind me that time could not be turned around and that in the ten seconds it took to fire eight pistol shots everything had changed forever. I hadn’t minded the paintings by Emil Nolde before, but there was one in particular that now seemed sinister: grinning, garishly colored grotesque masks that looked more Halloween than African. And it struck me now that they were laughing at me. What were you thinking? How could you have been so foolish? This is where your carelessness gets you. How did you think that this could end well?

Wearing a plain white summer dress that accentuated her tan, Dalia was sitting on the piano stool with her back to the piano and facing the white leather Swan Biedermeier sofa where she and I had first kissed. She was lighting a cigarette with a fireside match. The P38 I’d left in her bedroom now lay empty but still smoking on the floor about a meter away from Colonel Dragan’s dead body. His light gray dress uniform was covered in blood from the several shots she’d fired at his body, although the one through his right eye would by itself certainly have killed him. The whole eyeball was hanging off his cheek like a carelessly served poached egg.

She saw me look at the picture and smiled a sad smile. “I’m not so sure that Hitler wasn’t right when he told Joey to get rid of these paintings,” she said. “It’s not that they’re degenerate. I don’t know what that means in the context of something like art. It’s that the artist’s colors feel like they’re a part of the human soul. They feel as if they’re so much more than just colors. You know what I mean? But for that picture, I don’t know that I would have shot him. You see, it reminded me of who and what he was. I know that doesn’t sound like much of an explanation to a man like you. To a policeman. It’s not very logical, I’ll admit that. But looking at that picture now, that’s how I feel. Somewhere on the color spectrum between heaven and hell.”

Her approach to art appreciation was more convincing than mine.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said. “About your father. When I told you he was dead I only meant to spare you the knowledge of who and what he was. To protect you from the truth.”

“He’s dead now,” she said. “At least, I hope he is. I mean, that was certainly my intention. To kill this evil bastard.”

I supposed she had shot him because she’d believed exactly what I’d told her, which was that her father was dead, and that she’d assumed the man in her house was an impostor. He must have scared her. Something like that. I don’t know. People have been murdered for a lot less than that. I knelt to the side of the body with the least amount of blood on the carpet and pressed my fingers against the dead man’s neck, which was still warm to the touch. The hot metal grouped in his chest was making the shirt under his tunic smolder a little. Dark arterial blood was spreading quickly underneath him, like he was an animal lying on the floor of an abattoir.

“He’s dead all right,” I said, standing up again.

I had to admit that she’d made an excellent job of it. Colonel Dragan had cut his last throat and placed the last human head on his rockery at Jasenovac. If I was at all sad about what had happened it was only because no one should ever find themselves in a position where they end up killing their own father, no matter how terrible he might have been. You don’t ever get over something like that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I could see that I now had the awful task of telling the woman I loved the unpalatable truth: that the man she had just shot and killed really was her own papa.