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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060923532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 09/09/1992 |
| Series: | Harper Perennial |
| Edition description: | REPRINT |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.59(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Guillotine
You'd think we've been told everything about those twelve years, but that isn't so. History, like any lover, is selective in the facts it reveals about its beloved. And so, though the French Revolution's guillotine is always noted, the Third Reich's is not. The Third Reich, of course, had other methods of execution; but, as I say) it also had guillotines. Eleven of them. Hardworking, swift, sharp, silent. The blades sliced through the necks not of innocent Jews or gypsies or homosexuals but of those who were then called Aryans. Germans. Only Germans. In eleven different locations around the country, often in the basement of a district police station, men and women were put to death, one by one by one. Probably the guillotine brought no more solitary a death than did any other method; still it was horrible, and even without a whisper campaign, lots of people knew that lives were being cut off in those basements, in that way. We didn't need to talk about it; we only needed to know it.
The authorities, such as they were, understood that.
"A little knowledge," Commander Terskan used to say, "is just enough." He was a swarthy, two-chinned, but not unattractive man. He'd sit at the main desk and bring the blades of his scissors together. The sound of those blue-tinged shears crossing each other raised the small hairs on the back of my neck, just as it did when I sat at the barber's.
Rolf Terskan understood that. It was his little joke in those first months when he knew that someone was scheduled below. "Torgood, you need a trim. Even Gruber's night clerk doesn't look this lax. How did your wife let you out of the house like this?Doesn't she inspect you?"
"I stand a good head taller than she does, Commander Terskan. She can't get, the necessary perspective."
"Yes, well, I'm the only inspector who matters, anyway," he'd say, as if I'd actually replied to his admonishment with anything approaching the truth. After all, Gerda did not see me only when we were standing. "Come here, day clerk Stella. Bend down."
Gently, his splay-fingered right hand would push my head forward. Then the shears' cool metal would seem to exhale again that shiver down in my collar-and the hairs would fall like insects in a pile of faint brown lines on the floor. Invariably, from below, one minute later or five, by which time I was already sweeping up, there would be a thump. Sometimes, preceding it, there would also be a shout: No! or I won't! But the cry was always quickly cut off. I hated to be on my knees when anything happened below. I could always feel it right through my bones. To take in some poor soul's death through your kneecaps makes you want to beg mercy for yourself, because you know when you stand, it's in you. A small tremor you can't shake.
This was at a time when the newspaper was filled daily with stories of violence. Many of the incidents took place in the center of Kreiswald--and many of them on Bergenstrasse. As the Kompass reported one incident: "The shopowners Edehnann and Rosenbaum were ordered to wait. Both of the so-called chosen foolishly disobeyed the order and tried to run." Even the letters in these words looked ugly-thin and slanted, pressed into formation. You think because we lived in the middle of those twelve years that we didn't see hate anymore? Not so. We saw it but we pretended, with that little whisper of knowledge-the same rasp that told us about the guillotine at work under the police station floor--that such slight awareness was good. The hairbreadth was what kept us safe. No more and no less. Any more awareness and we might be compelled into taking a dangerous stance; any less and we'd be screaming, Filth out! One people! One country!--the same phrases that blackened the pages of what once was simply a town newspaper.
Commander Terskan would brush the stray hairs off my shoulders. "Raise your head," he'd say. "Let me see my work." Then after a slight pause would come: "Yes, you're as good as new. When you go home tonight, see if your wife isn't thankful that I kept my hand steady."
But my face, those evenings, was no welcome sight,
"No." And, biting her lip, Gerda would turn away--to a table or stove or vase, seeking some task in which to bury her gaze.
I'd enter the door left open behind her. Because I still wanted the embrace we usually shared, I'd follow her back into the house. "It happened again, Gerda." I'd speak quickly. "Two of them. A man and a woman."
She paused at the hall table. Her hand went for the geraniums in the clay pot. "Commander Terskan told you that?"
"He didn't. But it was quiet and I heard."
"So you didn't see them." She examined the underside of the leaves for mites.
"Of course not. They were downstairs. I told you, that's where it happens."
"And you have no part in any of it?"
I came and stood next to her. "Gerda, I'm the file clerk. Surely you realize what little that means."
She plucked a dead bloom off one of the plants. She looked like she was going to cry.
"Rolf Terskan kept me busy upstairs. You can see that well enough! Here's the proof." I leaned in toward her.
"I saw. You have one of those haircuts again. It's a terrible job, too short at your ears."
"But it proves that I was upstairs the entire time. That nothing else happened to me. If you think of it that way, it's not terrible, is it? I'm sure that's why he does it. That has to be the reason."