chapter twenty

Buchenwald

 

Boys not much older than fifteen marched along the Ringstrasse in the cool March evening. Their legs and arms bare, stiffly mechanical in the brown shorts and shirts, their faces, pale from the long winter, blotched now with a flush of exertion. Their commander, hardly a year senior, carried the only gun, bearing it like a sceptre as the pedestrians gave way, mostly silent but occasionally moved to clap, salute or even offer a “Heil Hitler!” Frank waited a discrete few seconds and then sank into a chair outside one of the few cafés to have survived the fierce economic depression of the preceding years. He ordered a tiny coffee in the popular Italian style and a slice of apfelstrudel. Such a snack would have cost him a penny or so in Ireland, could he have obtained it there, but here he found himself handing over a large sheet of paper with more zeroes printed on it than even he could count at a glance.

 

Of course he had a good job in a protected industry and a strong connection to the local National Socialist leadership. He had impressed them last week; given them enough to suggest that he could help them engineer the qualities of The Race in exactly the way they wanted; that he had skills in biological chemistry that would impress even the chancellor himself. He brushed a few crumbs of pastry from his charcoal pleated trousers and looked for a newspaper, the patina of coffee drying on his teeth. As he reached to the table beside his for a tissue a leather gloved hand impeded his action, plucked the tissue from the dispenser and failed to muffle its owner’s almost flatulent nasal eruption.

 

“Herr Kørner, you will come with me.” It was not a request. Frank knew enough about survival to take in his surroundings without letting his eyes move from the face of his abductor. There were two others in addition to the speaker and the black Mercedes, one the driver and the other a senior member of the SS. His holster was empty, so Frank knew he had the Luger primed in one of the two hands held behind his back. Thanks to the cerebral contribution of Professor O’Connell, an early expert on the dominance of brain functions by hemispheres, he also knew by observation that he would shoot with the left hand. Frank assessed the odds; not just of escape but of how his greater plan might need to be modified in the context of his becoming an enemy of the state and decided to be polite, elegant, but not exactly docile.

 

“I am delighted to accompany you,” he replied in perfect formal German, “but to whom do I owe the honour?”

 

“Herr Von Schröder is awaiting you. It is a fairly long journey, so we must not delay, yes?”

 

Frank noticed that the troop of Hitler Youth had paused at the turn of the Ringstrasse and were showing an interest in this quiet drama. He knew where that could lead, so he nodded gracefully and slid into the spacious backseat of the saloon. Herr Luger sat to his left and Herr Handkerchief to his right. An oppressive silence filled the cabin, separated from the driver by a glass and mahogany partition. The man with the gun said nothing, glancing from time to time at the bare spring trees or fields full of sheep and their young. The kilometres were otherwise punctuated by the ritual of the snuff tin and the disgusting explosive sneezes from the right. Should he get the opportunity, and he sincerely hoped he would; Frank resolved to liquidise the brain of this offensive oaf: not because he needed the cerebral foam, but because it would be a way of fatally fucking him up the nose. He smiled involuntarily at his vulgarly phrased thought and immediately froze his facial muscles.

 

He swallowed the saliva of his mounting anxiety as the car turned East: Göttingen, Buchenwald. He had heard rumours about what went on there. How could they know? He had been meticulous about his behaviour ever since O’Connell had tried to blackmail him by threatening to unmask his homosexuality. He now possessed O’Connell’s talents in understanding behaviour. Not even Freud could spot the slightest homosexual tendency from his behaviour. Did they think he was a Communist? Jewish? The paranoia of the times was getting to him, he knew it; but sitting in a car heading for Buchenwald with the SS and no choice tended to maximise the paranoia. He decided to gently test the waters.

 

“I need to find a bathroom… the coffee you know.”

 

Luger looked at Handkerchief. Handkerchief tapped the lid of his snuff tin twice. “We do not stop, Herr Kørner.” Frank felt the urine crystallise within his bladder. He had seen the freight trains pulling their human cargo to the camps, seen the piss run under the slats as the trains took the bend near his apartment. He could imagine the prisoners, stained with excrement, stripped of their clothes and sent to a shower block from which they would never return. He knew people in the party, knew about the gas and the ovens and the trenches full of toothless pale carcasses.

 

An infancy conducted below zero degrees Celsius and between his father’s intellectual zeal and mother’s pagan terror had many benefits for Frank; not least of which was an ability to suppress his anxiety and formulate a clear, if rather desperate plan of action. Unfortunately he lacked a detailed knowledge of the degree of security afforded to the concentration camps, and so was unable to prevent himself being driven within three rings of barbed wire fencing and ushered from the saloon with at least two hundred rounds of ammunition primed to cut him down should he make the slightest unexpected move.

chapter nineteen

Tiny Tim

 

It had only taken his mother a few hours of pacing to draw the compass. She had tied a ten metre length of rope to an ice-axe embedded in the ground and had then begun the long walk. Frank had rather uncharacteristically failed to take note of the exact number of revolutions she performed, but he estimated it to be between fifty and seventy five, and had therefore covered a distance of between 3141.59 and 4712.39 metres in stepping the circle into the frozen earth. She then retired to the central point and waited for the moon to rise. As it leaked the smallest arc of reflection across the black chord of ocean she laid the rope as a radius to the distant light and placed the logs where it touched the circle. This representing a lunar north she crossed the circle and placed other logs at the cardinal points.

 

The incantations had begun. Frank’s father joined him at the window; the boy not yet six years of age perched on a cushioned ledge below the sill, the man leaning across him and letting his huge forehead rest on the condensing glass. Neither of them could hear the Sámi words from within the house, but the ritual was familiar in two ways; because it was repeated at every winter solstice and because it touched some prehistoric unconscious, some unremembered memory of shared beliefs.

 

 

Oscar Kørner returned to his maps and more conventional compass points. Frank picked up his book, an illustrated edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Since his father’s library was eclectic in topic and language the five year old Frank could read well in French, German, Russian and Latin as well as his native Norwegian. He allowed it to fall open and of course found himself looking at his favourite page, one carrying a plate of the Cratchit family celebrating around the Christmas tree with the invalid child on a three-legged stool, content in the bosom of his family.

 

Frank’s father was an enthusiastic reader of Dickens, approving of his egalitarian views and Hard Times had been Frank’s nightly story when he was not yet able to read for himself. Oscar Kørner had even met the author in Switzerland in 1846 and claimed, not without justification that the characters of Florence Dombey and Captain Cuttle were based upon himself and his new bride Sylvia; “a wandering princess and a good monster in a story book”.

 

His absorption in the illustration was disturbed now by the same wandering princess producing a wild ululation and stamping as she lit each of the four piles of logs around her lunar circle. He felt the pagan energy, and looking up he saw that his father felt it also, but it was a cold energy; an energy born of the vacuum that was before Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. It was of the same ethereal stuff as Tiny Tim’s empty chair. He looked again at the plate and saw the frigid heart of his own family exposed utterly by contrast. He closed the book forever and gazed with numb disinterest as his mother screamed her terror into the longest night.