Филип Керр - Greeks Bearing Gifts

This would seem like the worst story ever told if it had not happened, all of it, every detail, exactly as I have described.

That’s the thing about real life: it all looks so implausible right up until the moment when it starts to happen. I have my experience as a police detective and the events of my own personal history to confirm this observation. There’s been nothing probable about my life. But I’ve a strong feeling that it’s the same for everyone. The collection of stories that make us all who we are only looks exaggerated or fictitious until we find ourselves living on its stained and dog-eared pages.

The Greeks have a word for this, of course: “mythology.” Mythology explains everything, from natural phenomena to what happens when you die and head downstairs, or when, unwisely, you steal a box of matches from Zeus. As it happens Greeks have a lot to do with this particular story. Perhaps with every story, when you stop to think about it. After all, it was a Greek called Homer who invented modern storytelling, in between losing his sight and probably not existing at all.

Like many stories this one is probably much improved by taking a drink or two. So go ahead. Be my guest. Have one on me. Certainly I like a drink but honestly, I’m not a hopeless case. Far from it. I sincerely hope that one night I will go for a drink and wake up as an amnesiac on a steamer that’s headed for nowhere I’ve ever heard of.

That’s the romantic in me, I guess. I’ve always liked to travel even when I was quite happy to stay at home. You might say that I just wanted to get away. From the authorities, most of all. Still do, if the truth be told, which it seldom is. Not in Germany. Not for me and quite a few others like me. For us the past is like the exterior wall in a prison yard: chances are, we’ll never get over it. And of course we shouldn’t be allowed to get over it, either, given who we were and everything we did.

But how is one ever to explain what happened? It was a question I used to see in the eyes of some of the American guests at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat where, until recently, I was a concierge, when they realized I was German: How was it possible that your people could murder so many others? Well, it’s like this: When you walk through a big fish market you appreciate just how alien and various life can be; it’s hard to imagine how some of the fantastic, sinister, slippery-looking creatures you see laid out on the slab could even exist, and sometimes when I contemplate my fellow man, I have much the same feeling.

Myself, I’m a bit like an oyster. Years ago — in January 1933, to be exact — a piece of grit got into my shell and started to rub me up the wrong way. But if there is a pearl inside me I think it’s probably a black one. Frankly, I did a few things during the war of which I feel less than proud. This is not unusual. That’s what war’s about. It makes all of us who take part in it feel like we’re criminals and that we’ve done something bad. Apart from the real criminals, of course; no way has ever been invented to make them feel bad about anything. With one exception, perhaps: the hangman at Landsberg. When he’s given the chance, he can provoke a crisis of conscience in almost anyone.

Officially, that’s all behind us now. Our National Socialist revolution and the devastating war it brought about is over and the peace we have since enjoyed has, thanks to the Americans at least, been anything but Carthaginian. We stopped hanging people a long time ago and all but four of the several hundred war criminals who were caught and locked up for life in Landsberg have now been released. I do believe that this new Federal Republic of Germany could be a tremendous country when we’ve finished fixing it up. All of West Germany smells of fresh paint and every public building is in a state of major reconstruction. The eagles and swastikas are long gone but now even the traces of them are being erased, like Leon Trotsky from an old Communist Party photograph. In Munich’s infamous Hofbräuhaus — there most of all, perhaps — they’d done their best to paint out the swastikas on the vaulted cream-colored ceiling, although you could still make out where they’d been. But for these — the fingerprints of fascism — it would be easy to believe the Nazis had never even existed and that thirteen years of life under Adolf Hitler had been some dreadful Gothic nightmare.

If only the marks and traces of Nazism on the poisoned, bivalve soul of Bernie Gunther could have been erased with such facility. For these and other complicated reasons I won’t go into now, the only time I’m truly myself these days is, of necessity, when I’m alone. The rest of the time, I’m obliged to be someone else.

So then. Hallo. God’s greeting to you, as we say here in Bavaria. My name is Christof Ganz.

There was a murderous wind raging through the streets of Munich when I went to work that night. It was one of those cold, dry Bavarian winds that blow up from the Alps with an edge like a new razor blade and make you wish you lived somewhere warmer, or owned a better overcoat, or at least had a job that didn’t require you to hit the clock at six p.m. I’d pulled enough late shifts when I’d been a cop with the Murder Commission in Berlin so I should have been used to bluish fingers and cold feet, not to mention lack of sleep and the crappy pay. On such nights a busy city hospital is no place for a man to find himself doomed to work as a porter right through until dawn. He should be sitting by the fire in a cozy beer hall with a foaming mug of white beer in front of him, while his woman waits at home, a picture of connubial fidelity, weaving a shroud and plotting to sweeten his coffee with something a little more lethal than an extra spoonful of sugar.

Of course, when I say I was a night porter, it would have been more accurate to say that I was a mortuary attendant, but being a night porter sounds better when you’re having a polite conversation. “Mortuary attendant” makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable. The living ones, mostly. But when you’ve seen as many corpses as I have you tend not to bat an eyelid about being around death so much. You can handle any amount of it after four years in the Flanders slaughterhouse. Besides, it was a job and with jobs as scarce as they are these days you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, even the spavined nag that had been bought for me, sight unseen, outside the doors of the local glue factory by the old comrades in Paderborn; they got me the job in the hospital after they had given me a new identity and fifty marks. So until I could find myself something better, I was stuck with it and my customers were stuck with me. I certainly didn’t hear any of them complaining about my bedside manner.

You’d think the dead could look after themselves but of course people die in hospital all the time and, when they do, they usually need a bit of help getting around. It seems the days of patient defenestration are over. It was my job to go and fetch the bodies off the wards and take them down to the house of death and there to wash them before leaving them out for collection by the undertakers. In winter we didn’t worry about chilling the bodies or spraying the place for flies. We didn’t have to; it was just a few degrees above freezing in the mortuary. Much of the time I worked alone and, after a month at the Schwabing Hospital, I suppose I was almost used to it — to the cold, to the smell, and to the feeling of being alone and yet not quite alone, if you know what I mean. Once or twice a corpse moved by itself — they do that sometimes, wind usually — which, I’ll admit, was a little unnerving. But perhaps not surprising. I’d been alone for so long that I’d started talking to the radio. At least I assumed that’s where the voices were coming from. In the country that produced Luther, Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler, you can never be absolutely sure about these things.