Authors: Marcel Beyer
Our work was finally terminated when a special SS unit herded the unresisting test subjects into a corner of their ward, doused them in surgical spirit, and set fire to them, destroying the entire building as well. Stumpfecker felt sure he would be demoted several ranks in consequence. He owed it to his teacher and patron, Professor Gebhardt, that the opposite happened. Not long afterwards, in October of last year, he was appointed surgeon at HQ Eastern Front, where he often accompanied the patient on his daily walks.
And now, within the space of a few hours, he has had to familiarise himself with his patient's medical history by consulting the notes which Morell, in a very slapdash fashion, had kept over the years. Under present circumstances, however, the professional competence of his new personal physician matters less to the patient than his physical stature. Almost two metres tall, Stumpfecker is known here as 'the Giant'. Although he may not be able to administer injections as neatly and painlessly as Morell — Stumpfecker's own staff informed him of the patient's misgivings in this respect — his titanic physique would readily permit him, in the event of a dangerous bombardment, to carry the patient on his back to a place of safety. Laden with a rigid figure whose straining arms threatened to squeeze the air from his lungs, he could if need be hasten from room to room, dodging the chunks of concrete and steel girders that rained down on them both. His reserves of energy would enable him to scramble over rubble for a considerable period, upturned eyes forever focused on the crumbling Bunker ceiling and ears ignoring his human burden's stertorous breathing in favour of sounds indicative of where the concrete would be rent asunder or the next shell land.
At our session the next day Stumpfecker is once more filled with optimism. The patient has fully recovered from the exhaustion induced by yesterday's interminable tirade. He seems cheerful, relaxed, and in excellent voice. The needle quivers restlessly, leaving a silvery groove in the disc's matt wax surface. Every now and then the patient helps himself to a chocolate from a salver, a habit that struck me yesterday. It probably serves to lubricate his voice in a routine, unobtrusive manner.
I envy people who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. There are some here who exemplify this ability, for instance a courier who simply nodded off in the canteen as soon as he had delivered his dispatches: he sat down at the table, slept for a mere quarter-hour in the glare of the overhead light, and then woke up in a trice, ready once more to brave the perils of a city under siege. The same phenomenon can be observed in many of the visitors who come and go in the Bunker: doctors, sentries, senior army officers, Party officials. They lean against a wall somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes — indeed, often for only five — and wake up seemingly refreshed. I can't do that. I take at least half an hour to go off to sleep, if not an hour, and even then it's a painful process: my head rings with past, present and future voices that refuse to be silenced. There are times when any voice is too much to bear.
This has to do with the absolute darkness that prevails in my Bunker cubicle. I find it a trial, the lighting here below ground. There's no dawn light in the morning, no twilight in the evening, none of the gradual blurring of outlines that precedes the nocturnal evanescence of objects and human figures. Colours don't gradate from purple to the red of coagulated blood, from pale to dark blue, until, little by little, they're all reduced to shades of grey that eventually turn a blackish blue and envelop the whole world. There's not a glimmer now, no faint glow from the night sky, just an abrupt transition when I turn the light in my cubicle on or off. There are no light switches at all in the passages and communal rooms. The lights out there burn twenty-four hours a day. They must consume a lot of power — the generators on the lower level can barely cope. Strange that precious electricity should be wasted in this way, but I suppose it's official policy that every space apart from our sleeping quarters should be illuminated. No shadowy figures must encounter each other in the gloom and no one can be allowed to withdraw into even temporary seclusion. That may be why the sleeping courier presented such a singular picture: people are not, as a rule, illuminated while asleep; they retire into the darkness, where no one can see them. What kind of life do we lead in our ever-illuminated surroundings?
The artificial light in which we have now been living for so many days is not particularly bright. It flickers or even goes out under the effect of gunfire, thereby seeming to imitate nature, but it burns and stings the skin as soon as you turn it on. In time you perceive it less as a condition than as a substance. It diffuses an oily yellow glow over everything and defies removal, however hard you scrub. It even clings to your face, which looks cheesy, as if its original colour had imperceptibly faded and been replaced by a film of artificial light. Is that skin on my milk, or is it just the light? None of us swallows his ration of boiled milk without a shudder of distaste.
Even our acoustics here are affected by the light. It suppresses natural sonic conditions: all voices sound a full tone lower, all noises muffled and indistinct. The brighter the light and the sharper the outlines, the more muffled the voices. This is an unreal acoustic environment, one in which everything loud and shrill stands out like a sore thumb. Does the wind still whistle? Do doves still coo? Do blackbirds still twitter as they hop from branch to branch? Is the air still alive with almost inaudible stirrings whose origin cannot be located? Down here, everything can be traced to its source with ease: a change of pressure simply denotes that someone has closed the heavy steel door at the end of the passage.
We no longer venture to cite the time of day or night with any certainty. When someone visits us from the outside world, he's promptly bombarded with questions about the time of day, the prevailing light:
'What are the clouds like, brilliant white against a grey background?'
'No, they're more on the hazy side.'
'So the sky's overcast, is it, as if all the light and colour had drained away?'
'No, not that either. It looks in places as if the sun may break through before long.'
'Did you hear that? Just imagine, he says the sun may come out soon. Lucky man, to have seen it with your own eyes.'
'Is there any warmth in the sun yet?'
'Are the nights getting milder?'
'What about that reddish glow the evening sky takes on in spring-time? Can you tell it from the reflection of the fires in the suburbs?'
'Whenever the smoke clears, sure, no problem.'
'And the gutted buildings overhead, do they reflect the light, or are they so black with soot they simply absorb it?'
It's hard on the constitution, a daily routine no longer governed by the sun: never to bed before three in the morning, up at noon, straight off to a recording session. Still tired out, I manipulate the controls in a kind of dream, observe my movements like a stranger: my hand, the rippling tendons, the curious way my forefinger bends when I extend it, and the half-moons I've never noticed before, the pronounced half-moons at the base of my fingernails.
The Bunker's entire ventilation system is on the verge of collapse. The stale air is no longer being fully extracted, so we filter the remaining oxygen from it by breathing faster than normal. Fainting fits are becoming more frequent. The ventilators themselves may be clogged with swarms of fruit-flies sucked in from the kitchen. The cook can no longer hold the little insects at bay, there's too much food lying around: ration packs of rusks and crispbread, honey by the bucketful, ketchup — comestibles for which no use can be found now that most of the staff are getting their meals from a big kitchen elsewhere in the Bunker.
'Look at this,' says the cook. 'Everything's going bad: fresh vegetables, cottage cheese, yoghurt, mushrooms. It hasn't occurred to anyone to cancel them — they're still being flown in daily from Bavaria, even though the Führer won't touch them any longer. I've never known a sadder day in all my time as his personal diet cook. For years I cooked him vegetarian meals on doctor's instructions, meals that took account of his weak stomach and his digestive problems, and now what? All my good work is undone in a matter of days because he abandons his diet and refuses to eat anything but pastries and chocolates.
'On getting up he has a bowl of chocolate-flavoured gruel or blancmange made from bars of bitter chocolate, but without milk. Vegetable matter only — that at least I can make sure of, being his diet cook. The Führer can't tolerate milk, unlike yoghurt or cream, so I use agar instead. Regular works of art in agar, I turn out. The main thing is to make them creamy and very chocolaty. He gorges himself on chocolates and chocolate-flavoured pastries all day long. The squares of nougat he mostly eats at night, during those tiring conferences of his: very sweet, good for the nerves. I'll see he goes on getting them to the last, provided our supplies hold out.
'We've just lost a whole roomful of milk chocolate — without nuts, of course. It was blown to bits, plus sentry, off a corridor on the top floor of the Chancellery — a risky location for a secret store-room, but ingenious. I mean, who would have dared to go looting on the top floor with all those shells falling?
'We're all fervently hoping that fresh supplies will continue to arrive from Switzerland every morning. Red Cross flights are still getting through, but the situation is critical. The members of the chocolate squad are scared of becoming embroiled in the fighting outside when they have to leave here and escort the daily chocolate consignment. As for the confectioner, who's working around the clock, he's afraid he'll be for the chop if the day ever comes when he can't produce a salverful of chocolates.’
*
The killer dogs have been trained to attack enemy soldiers lying asleep on the ground. They know their victims are defenceless because they can hear their quiet breathing from a long way off. They can hear every snore, every breath, and when they find a man asleep they sneak up on him and nuzzle his bare throat — very gently, so as not to tickle him and wake him up. It's his Adam's apple they're after, the killer dogs. They close their teeth on it very gently, and then, without warning, they bite it as hard as they can — so quickly that their victim can't scream with pain because they've already ripped his throat out. The killer dogs make sure that anyone they attack can't utter another sound. Their eyes glow in the dark, and they've got wolf's blood in their veins.
I can't stop thinking up Werewolf stories. I don't even know whether they're nightmares, or whether they come to me when I'm awake and can't sleep. Papa was horrified when he saw the exercise book with the Werewolf stories the others had made up: it escaped him how they could have invented such grisly tales. He stopped smiling, just for a moment, and let his mouth hang open. It was as if he'd suddenly stopped believing in his Werewolves. He wasn't thinking about final victory, he was simply staring at the exercise book. He didn't care how he looked, he'd forgotten we could see him.
Papa was against the Radio Werewolf idea at first, because it meant finally admitting that the enemy had invaded our country. Then he got all enthusiastic and pushed it as hard as he could — in fact he sometimes forgets the idea wasn't his in the first place. He dreams up one imaginary act of sabotage after another, so why should he be surprised when his children do the same? He used to smack me sometimes in the old days, when he caught me lying. Grown-ups are convinced you can't tell when they're lying, but all you can't tell is how they decide whether to let you know something or lie to you instead.
Why do they tell us some things but keep us in the dark about others? Papa used to talk about his Radio Werewolf reports when we were in the room. He often bragged about other ideas of his and asked if we found them convincing. Propaganda campaigns, for instance. He'd try out an announcement about a cut in food rations, and we had to help him decide which phrases would make the situation sound less serious — in other words, hush it up. Then there were the pictures of naked women we dropped over the French soldiers' trenches to undermine their morale. Papa chose those pictures himself and thought up the captions for them. He kept wondering how best to convince the enemy soldiers that their womenfolk were having affairs with other men back home. We weren't supposed to know about that campaign, but when Papa gave it away he acted as if it didn't matter too much. He also let us in on his plan to write a book about films when it was still a secret. But there are other things we aren't supposed to know, and Papa still believes we don't have a clue about them — like how he once had Mama's telephone tapped because she kept making calls to a Norwegian gentleman.
When Papa lies he takes his time about it. He knows just how to answer a question wrongly or dodge it altogether, for instance when I overheard Mama asking him if he was having an affair with that singer. He didn't blink or turn away, didn't show how much he disliked the question, didn't hesitate before he answered. 'No,' he said, straight out, just 'No', as if he hadn't had to decide whether to lie or tell the truth — as if there were no two ways about it.
Yes, Papa's a good liar on the whole. It's easier to tell when Mama's lying. Either she sounds as if she can't get the lie out quick enough, or she pretends she's thinking of something else and answers quite casually, as if the answer doesn't matter. But I can tell she's found it awkward, having to answer, because I've asked her an awkward question.
Grown-ups have this idea that children can't think for themselves or make up their own minds about a situation. For some strange reason they're convinced that children only ask a question once and leave it at that when they get an answer. It never occurs to them that they aren't the only people I ask — that I hear other grown-ups talking and can see things for myself.
They smile at you with their eyes, but the eyes aren't everything. You can often tell when people are lying by their voices, by the special way they breathe. Lately I can tell for certain when Papa's lying. I can almost smell it on his breath, no matter how many pastilles he sucks to disguise it and however often he squirts himself with cologne.