The One from the Other

SEVENTEEN

I ought not to have smelled so bad. I knew I had wet myself. But it ought not to have smelled so bad. Not as quickly as this. I smelled worse than the filthiest tramp. That cloying, sickly-sweet ammonia smell you get off people who haven’t bathed or changed their clothes in months. I tried to wrestle my head away from it, but it stayed with me. I was lying on the floor. Someone was holding me by the hair. I blinked my eyes open and found there was a small brown bottle of smelling salts being held beneath my nose. The general stood up, screwed the cap on the bottle of salts, and dropped it into the pocket of his jacket.

“Give him some cognac,” he said.

Greasy fingers took hold of my chin and pushed a glass between my lips. It was the best brandy I ever tasted. I let it fill my mouth and then tried to swallow but without much success. Then I tried again and this time some of it trickled down. It felt like something radioactive traveling through my body. By now someone had taken away the handcuffs and I saw that there was a large and bloody handkerchief wrapped around my left hand. My own.

“Put him on his feet,” said the general.

Once more I was hauled up. The pain of standing made me feel faint so that I wanted to sit down again. Someone put the glass of brandy in my right hand. I put it to my mouth. The glass clattered against my teeth. My hand was trembling like an old man’s. That was no surprise. I felt like I was a hundred years old. I swallowed the rest of the brandy, which was quite a lot, and then dropped the glass onto the floor. I felt myself sway as if I had been standing on the deck of a ship.

The general stood in front of me. He was close enough for me to see his Aryan blue eyes. They were cold and unfeeling and as hard as sapphires. A little smile was playing on the corner of his mouth, as if there was something funny he wanted to tell me. There was. But I didn’t yet get the joke. He held something small and pink in front of my nose. At first I thought it was an undercooked prawn. Raw and bloody at one end. Dirty at the other. Hardly appetizing at all. Then I realized it wasn’t anything to eat. It was my own little finger. He took hold of my nose and then pushed the upper half of my little finger all the way into one of my nostrils. The smile became more pronounced.

“This is what comes of sticking your fingers into things that ought not to concern you,” he said, in that quiet, civilized, Mozart-loving voice of his. The Nazi gentleman. “And you can think yourself lucky we decided it wasn’t your nose that got you into trouble. Otherwise, we might have cut that off instead. Do I make myself clear, Herr Gunther?”

I grunted feebly. I was all out of impertinence. I felt my finger start to slip out of my nostril. But he caught it just in time and then tucked it into my breast pocket, like a pen he had borrowed. “Souvenir,” he said. Turning away, he said to the man in the bowler hat, “Take Herr Gunther to wherever he wants to go.”

They dragged me back to the car and pushed me into the backseat. I closed my eyes. I just wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Just like Hitler and the rest.

Car doors closed. The engine started. One of my comrades elbowed me properly awake. “Where do you want to go, Gunther?” he asked.

“The police,” said someone. To my surprise it was me. “I want to report an assault.”

There was laughter in the front seat. “We are the police,” said a voice.

Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn’t. I hardly cared. Not anymore. The car started to move and quickly gathered speed.

“So where are we taking him?” someone said after a minute or two. I glanced out of the window with half an eye. We seemed to be heading north. The river was on our left.

“How about a piano store?” I whispered.

They thought that was very funny. I almost laughed myself except that it hurt when I tried to breathe.

“This guy is very tough,” said the big man. “I like him.” He lit a cigarette and, leaning over me, put it in my mouth.

“Is that why you cut my finger off?”

“’S right,” he said. “Lucky for you, I like you, huh?”

“Friends like you, Golem, who needs enemies?”

“What did he call you?”

“Golem.”

“It’s a soap word,” said the bowler hat. “But don’t ask me what it means.”

“Soap?” I was still whispering but they could hear me all right. “What’s that?”

“Jew,” said the big man. And then he jabbed me painfully in the side. “Is it a soap word? Like he said?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t want to provoke him anymore. Not with nine fingers still on my paws. I liked my fingers and, more importantly, so did my girlfriends, back in the days when I had had any girlfriends. So I backed off telling him that the Golem was a big, stupid, only vaguely human monster that was as ugly as it was evil. He wasn’t ready for that level of honesty. And neither was I. So I said, “Means big guy. Very tough guy.”

“That’s him, all right,” said the driver. “They don’t come much bigger. And they sure don’t come any tougher.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

At this the big guy grabbed the cigarette out of my mouth, opened the window and threw it out, then pushed me toward the cool night air rushing past the car. “You need some fresh air is all,” he said. “You’ll be all right in a minute.”

“Is he all right?” The driver glanced around nervously. “I don’t want him throwing up in this car.”

“He’s all right,” said the big man. He unscrewed a hip flask and poured some more brandy into my mouth. “Aren’t you, tough guy?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” said the bowler hat. “We’re here.”

The car stopped. “Where’s here?” I asked.

They got me out of the car and dragged me into a well-lit doorway where they propped me up against a pile of bricks. “This is the state hospital,” said the big man. “At Bogenhausen. You rest easy awhile. Someone will find you in a minute, I expect. Get you fixed up. You’ll be all right, Gunther.”

“Very thoughtful,” I said, and tried to collect my thoughts, enough to focus on the registration number of the car. But I was seeing double and then, for a moment, nothing at all. When I opened my eyes again the car was gone and a man with a white coat was kneeling in front of me.

“You’ve been hitting it rather hard, haven’t you, mister?” he said.

“Not me,” I said. “Someone else. And the ‘it’ was me, Doc. Like I was Max Schmeling’s favorite punch bag.”

“You sure about that?” he asked. “You do stink of brandy.”

“They gave me a drink,” I said. “To make me feel better about cutting off my finger.” I waved my bloody fist in his face by way of an affidavit.

“Mm-hmm.” He sounded like he had yet to be convinced. “We get a lot of drunks who injure themselves and come here,” he said. “Who think we’re just here to clean up their mess.”

“Look, Mr. Schweitzer,” I whispered. “I’ve been beaten to a pulp. If you laid me flat on the ground you could print tomorrow’s newspaper on me. Now, are you going to help me or not?”

“Maybe. What’s your name and address? And just so I won’t feel like an idiot when I find the bottle in your pocket, what’s the name of the new chancellor?”

I told him my name and address. “But I have no idea what the name of our new chancellor is,” I said. “I’m still trying to forget the last one.”

“Can you walk?”

“Maybe as far as a wheelchair, if you can point one out.”

He fetched one from the other side of the double doors and helped me sit in it.

“In case the ward matron asks,” he said, wheeling me inside. “The new German chancellor is Konrad Adenauer. If she gets a sniff of you before we’ve had a chance to remove your clothes, she’s liable to ask. She doesn’t like drunks.”

“I don’t like chancellors.”

“Adenauer was the mayor of Cologne,” said the man in the white coat. “Until the British dismissed him for incompetence.”

“He should do nicely then.”

Upstairs he found a nurse to help me strip. She was a nice-looking girl, and even in a hospital, there must have been more pleasant things for her to look at than my white body. There were so many blue stripes on it I looked like the flag of Bavaria.

“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed the doctor when he returned to examine me. As it happened, I now had a better idea of what he had felt like, after the Romans had finished with him. “What happened to you?”

“I told you,” I said. “I got myself beaten up.”

“But by whom? And why?”

“They said they were policemen,” I said. “But it could be they just wanted me to remember them kindly. Always thinking the worst of people. That’s a character defect of mine. Along with not minding my own business and my smart mouth. Reading between the bruises, I’d say that’s what they were trying to tell me.”

“That’s quite a sense of humor you have there,” observed the doctor. “I’ve a feeling you’re going to need it in the morning. These bruises are pretty bad.”

“I know.”

“Right now, we’re going to get you X-rayed. See if there’s anything broken. Then we’ll fill you full of painkillers and take another look at that finger of yours.”

“Since you ask, it’s in the pocket of my jacket.”

“I guess I mean the stump.” I let him unwrap the handkerchief and examine the remains of my little finger. “This is going to need some stitches,” he said. “And some antiseptic. Having said all that, it’s a nice neat job, for a trauma injury. The two upper joints are gone. How did they do it? I mean, how did they cut it off?”

“Hammer and chisel,” I said.

Both doctor and nurse winced in sympathy. But I was shivering. The nurse put a blanket around my shoulders. I kept on shivering. I was sweating, too. And very thirsty. When I started to yawn, the doctor pinched my earlobe.

“Don’t tell me,” I said, through clenched teeth. “You think I’m cute.”

“You’re in shock,” he said, lifting my legs onto the bed and helping me to lie down. They both heaped some more blankets on top of me. “Lucky for you you’re here.”

“Everyone thinks I’m lucky tonight,” I said. I was starting to feel pale and gray about the gills. Agitated, too. Even anxious. Like a trout trying to swim on a glass coffee table. “Tell me, Doc. Can people really catch the flu and die in summer?” I took a deep breath and let out a mouthful of air, almost as if I’d been running. Actually I was dying for a cigarette.

“Flu?” he said. “What are you talking about? You haven’t got the flu.”

“That’s odd. I feel like I have.”

“And you’re not going to die.”

“Forty-four million died of flu in 1918,” I said. “How can you be so sure? People die of flu all the time, Doc. My wife, for one. And my wife for another. I don’t know why. But there was something about it I didn’t like. And I don’t mean her. Although I didn’t. Not lately. In the beginning I did. I liked her a lot. But not since the end of the war. And certainly not since we got to Munich. Which is probably why I deserved the hiding I took tonight. You understand? I deserved it, Doc. Whatever they did, I had it coming.”

“Nonsense.” The doctor said something else. He asked me a question, I think. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand anything. The fog was back. It rolled in like steam from a sausage kitchen on a cold winter’s day. Berlin air. Quite unmistakable. Like going home. But just the smallest part of me knew that none of it was true and that for the second time that evening I had only passed out. Which is a little like being dead. Only better. Anything is better than being dead. Maybe I was luckier than I thought. Just as long as I could tell the one from the other everything was more or less all right.