On such a night – and there were plenty of them – I used to dismantle my Walther automatic pistol and meticulously oil the metal jigsaw of pieces. I’d seen too many misfires for the want of a well-oiled gun, and too many suicides gone badly wrong because a bullet entered a man’s skull at an acute angle. I would even unload the tiny staircase that was the single-stack magazine and polish each bullet, lining them up in a rank like neat little brass soldiers before selecting the cleanest and the brightest and the keenest to please to sit on top of the rest. I wanted only the best of them to blast a hole in the wall of the prison cell that was my thick skull, and then bore a tunnel through the grey coils of despond that were my brain.
All of this might explain why so many suicides go wrongly reported to the cops. ‘“He was just cleaning his gun and it went off,” said the dead man’s wife.’
Of course guns go off all the time and sometimes they even kill the person holding them; but first you have to put the cold barrel against your head – the back of the head is best – and pull the damned trigger.
Once or twice I even laid a couple of folded bath towels under the pillow on my bed and lay down with the firm intent of actually going through with it. There’s a lot of blood that leaks out of a head with even a small hole in it. I would lie there and stare at the suicide note that was written on my best paper – bought in Paris – and placed carefully on the mantelpiece, addressed to no one in particular.
No one in particular and I had a pretty close relationship in the late summer of 1941.
After a while, sometimes I would go to sleep. But the dreams I had were unsuitable for anyone under the age of twenty-one. Probably they were unsuitable for Conrad Veidt or Max Schreck. Once, I awoke from such a terrible, vivid, heart-stopping dream that I actually fired my pistol as I sat bolt upright on the bed. The clock in my bedroom – my mother’s walnut Vienna wall clock – was never the same again.
On other nights I just lay there and waited for the grey light to strengthen at the edge of the dusty curtains and the total emptiness of another day.
Courage was no good anymore. Nor was being brave. The endless interrogation of my wretched self produced not regret but only more self-loathing. To all outside eyes I was the same man I had always been: Bernie Gunther, Kriminal Commissar, from the Alex; and yet I was merely a blur of who I had been. An imposter. A knot of feelings felt with gritted teeth and a lump in the throat and an awful echoing lonely cavern in the pit of my stomach.
But after my return from the Ukraine, it wasn’t just me that felt different, it was Berlin, too. We were almost two thousand kilometres from the front but the war was very much in the air. This wasn’t anything to do with the British Royal Air Force who, despite Fat Hermann’s empty promises that no English bomb would ever fall on the German capital, had managed to put in irregular but nonetheless destructive appearances in our night skies. But by the summer of 1941 they hardly visited us at all. No, it was Russia that now affected each and every aspect of our lives, from what was in the shops to how you occupied your spare time – for a while dancing had been forbidden – to how you got around the city.
‘The Jews are our misfortune’ proclaimed the Nazi newspapers, But nobody really believed von Treitschke’s slogan by the autumn of 1941; and certainly not when there was the more obvious and self-inflicted disaster that was Russia with which to compare it. Already the campaign in the East was running out of momentum; and because of Russia and the overriding needs of our Army, Berlin felt more like the capital of a banana republic that had run out of bananas, as well as almost everything else you could think of.
There was very little beer and often none at all. Taverns and bars closed for one day a week, then two, sometimes altogether, and after a while there were only four bars in the city where you could regularly obtain a pot of beer. Not that it tasted like beer when you did manage to track some down. The sour, brown, brackish water that we nursed bitterly in our glasses reminded me most of the liquid-filled shell-holes and still pools of No Man’s Land in which, sometimes, we had been obliged to take cover. For a Berliner, that really was a misfortune. Spirits were impossible to come by, and all of this meant that it was almost impossible to get drunk and escape from oneself, which, late at night, often left me cleaning my pistol.
The meat ration was no less disappointing to a population for whom the sausage in all its forms was a way of life. Allegedly we were each of us entitled to five hundred grammes a week, but even when meat was available, you were just as likely to receive only fifty grammes for a hundred-gramme coupon.
