Somewhere in the house: a tinkle of glass. March scrambled for the door, but the boy was too quick for him -rolling off the bed, grabbing his legs, curling himself around his father’s feet in a foetal ball, a parody of childish entreaty. “Please don’t go, papa,” he was saying, “please…” March’s fingers grasped the door-handle but he couldn’t move. He was anchored, mired. I have dreamed this before, he thought. The window imploded behind them, showering their backs with glass — now real uniforms with real guns were filling the bedroom — and suddenly March was on his back gazing up at the little plastic warplanes bobbing and spinning crazily at the ends of their invisible wires.
He could hear Pili’s voice: “It’s going to be all right, papa. They’re going to help you. They’ll make you better. Then you can come and live with us. They promised…”
His hands were cuffed tight behind his back, wrists outwards. Two SS men propped him against the wall, against the map of the Eastern front, and Globus stood before him. Pili had been hustled away, thank God. “I have waited for this moment,” said Globus, “as a bridegroom waits for his bride”, and he punched March in the stomach, hard. March folded, dropped to his knees, dragging the map and all its little pins down with him, thinking he would never breathe again. Then Globus had him by the hair and was pulling him up, and his body was trying to retch and suck in oxygen at the same time and Globus hit him again and he went down again. This process was repeated several times. Finally, while he was lying on the carpet with his knees drawn up, Globus planted his boot on the side of his head and ground his toe into his ear. “Look,” he said, “I’ve put my foot on shit” and from a long way away, March heard the sound of men laughing.
“WHERE’S the girl?”
“What girl?”
Globus slowly extended his stubby fingers in front of March’s face, then brought his hand arcing down in a karate blow to the kidneys.
This was much worse than anything else — a blinding white flash of pain that shot straight through him and put him on the floor again, retching bile. And the worst was to know that he was merely in the foothills of a long climb. The stages of torture stretched before him, ascending as notes on a scale, from the dull bass of a blow in the belly, through the middle register of kidney-punches, onwards and upwards to some pitch beyond the range of the human ear, a pinnacle of crystal.
“Where’s the girl?”
“What…girl…?”
THEY disarmed him, searched him, then they half-pushed, half-dragged him out of the bungalow. A little crowd had gathered in the road. Klara’s elderly neighbours watched as he was bundled, head bowed, into the back of the BMW. He glimpsed briefly along the street four or five cars with revolving lights, a lorry, troops. What had they been expecting? A small war? Still no sign of Pili. The handcuffs forced him to sit hunched forward. Two Gestapo men were jammed on the back seat, one on either side of him. As the car pulled away, he could see some of the old folks already shuffling back into their houses, back to the reassuring glow of their television sets.
HE was driven north through the holiday traffic, up into Saarland Strasse, east into Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. Fifty metres past the main entrance to Gestapo headquarters, the convoy swung right, through a pair of high prison gates, into a brick courtyard at the back of the building.
He was pulled out of the car and through a low entrance, down steep concrete steps. Then his heels were scraping along the floor of an arched passage. A door, a cell, and silence.
THEY left him alone, to allow his imagination to go to work — standard procedure. Very well. He crawled into a corner and rested his head against the damp brick. Every minute which passed was another minute’s travelling time for her. He thought of Pili, of all the lies, and clenched his fists.
The cell was lit by a weak bulb above the door, imprisoned in its own rusty metal cage. He glanced at his wrist, a useless reflex, for they had taken away his watch. Surely she could not be far from Nuremberg by now? He tried to fill his mind with images of the Gothic spires — St Lorenz, St Sebaldus, St Jakob…
Every limb — every part of him to which he could put a name — ached, yet they could not have worked him over for more than five minutes, and still they had managed not to leave a mark on his face. Truly, he had fallen into the hands of experts. He almost laughed, but that hurt his ribs, so he stopped. *”
