The Other Side of Silence

TWENTY-SEVEN

There were two bottles of twenty-year-old Schinkenhäger 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 Hôtel, 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.”

For a moment or two I felt light-headed. I was back up on the roof of the Villa Mauresque, eavesdropping on the two spymasters. The next I was falling backward down the chimney with all sense of self-awareness left behind alongside the gene-deep certainty that life was actually worth the struggle. It wasn’t. That much was obvious. The light at the end of the tunnel that was the sun framed by the chimney grew smaller by the second until it was no bigger than a dim and distant star in some remote galaxy. I’d gone missing and it was likely that I was going to be missing for quite a while, perhaps permanently. Back in Berlin, even before the Nazis, looking for missing persons used to cost the city millions of marks a year. Did any of it ever matter? Perhaps it was even possible that I would never be found, as those before me had not been found. When the darkness of the chimney closed around me I had the strong sense that life was over as surely as if I’d sat in my car once again and tried to asphyxiate myself with carbon monoxide. I took a deep breath of my present oblivion and hoped my useless, tired mind was no longer required. I didn’t want to know anything anymore. What difference did it make anyway? There was no need to hold on to life so tightly. So I let go. I let go. The Englishman had done me a favor. I welcomed the darkness as a child welcomes Christmas morning.