Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“No, we certainly wouldn’t want that.” I smiled as gamely as I could manage. “Especially not after the awkward scene we’ve had tonight. You know, you should have telephoned the Villa Mauresque, left a message, and saved me the journey up here. I know you’ve got the number. I saw it on one of those neat files of yours in the office. Then again, maybe you thought it was kinder to do it in person, to spare my feelings.”

I went downstairs and walked through the lush garden back to the car in a silence that was already roaring in my ears like the sea hitting the beach on the Cap. In a way I’d seen it coming and been stupid enough to ignore what my keener senses had already told me. Not that it really counted for very much in the scheme of things. It was nothing more than just another tragedy, in a long line of tragedies of the kind Bernie Gunther was already well used to. If anyone had the constitution to take it on the chin, that person was him, I told myself. Maybe that’s what all ordinary human life amounts to. One tragedy heaped on top of another like sharp gray layers of shale. What did it matter anymore than the death of the lobster I’d eaten for supper or the leaf of tobacco now burning in my cigarette? Not a damn thing. If ever you stopped to think of just how much pain there was in any one life it would surely kill you, just as surely as if someone had put a bullet through your heart at close range with a little automatic.

There were two bottles of twenty-year-old Schinkenhager I’d been saving for a special occasion, and as soon as I got home I knew instinctively that this was it. The special occasion. Deep pain creates its own singularity. I opened one of the bottles and stared at the first brimming glass, feeling nothing less than a categorical imperative to get drunk: an absolute, unconditional requirement that had to be obeyed and was justified as an end in itself. There’s a central philosophical concept for you. I drank one whole bottle before I went to sleep, and the other almost as soon as I woke up again. And somewhere in the middle I called the hotel to say I was sick. Not that I really was sick. Nobody calls that being sick except the poor nurse who has to pump the alcohol out of your stomach and even then her pity for your illness is alloyed, rightly, with a strong sense of disgust. Well, I was almost as sick as that. I hadn’t drunk like that-with real malice aforethought-since the day I learned the Wilhelm Gustloff was lying at the bottom of the cold Baltic Sea.

A while after I made the call to the Grand Hotel, I awoke with the vague idea that the doorbell rang. A stupid, drunkenly deluded, childishly eager part of me thought it might be Anne French come to apologize and say she’d made a dreadful mistake, and thinking that I might just find it within myself to forgive her, I persuaded myself to pick myself off the floor. Of course I would forgive her. I was drunk.

With two bottles of good schnapps inside me it was all I could do to crawl across the tiny bedroom in my lobster pot and stumble downstairs to open the door. I have no idea what time it was but it must have been the late afternoon or early evening of the next day. I opened the door to brilliant sunshine, which dazzled me painfully, or at least that’s what I thought. Instead it was a fist on the end of a very strong, red-faced Englishman’s arm and it hit me more quickly than the schnapps, squarely under the chin, dumping me on my backside like a puppet that was suddenly and stupidly without any strings. I sat on the stairs, legs splayed in front of me, with my ears singing a very loud tune, and thought hard about puking. I was still thinking about it when the same Englishman picked me up, bounced me off the wall a couple of times, and then punched me again.

“If there’s one thing I’ve always liked,” he said-I think it was probably the last thing I remembered hearing for a while-“it’s hitting fucking Germans in the face.” He laughed. “And to think I get paid for this. Fuck me, I’d do it for free.”

For a moment or two I felt light-headed. I was back up on the roof of the Villa Mauresque, eavesdropping on the two spymasters. The next I was falling backward down the chimney with all sense of self-awareness left behind alongside the gene-deep certainty that life was actually worth the struggle. It wasn’t. That much was obvious. The light at the end of the tunnel that was the sun framed by the chimney grew smaller by the second until it was no bigger than a dim and distant star in some remote galaxy. I’d gone missing and it was likely that I was going to be missing for quite a while, perhaps permanently. Back in Berlin, even before the Nazis, looking for missing persons used to cost the city millions of marks a year. Did any of it ever matter? Perhaps it was even possible that I would never be found, as those before me had not been found. When the darkness of the chimney closed around me I had the strong sense that life was over as surely as if I’d sat in my car once again and tried to asphyxiate myself with carbon monoxide. I took a deep breath of my present oblivion and hoped my useless, tired mind was no longer required. I didn’t want to know anything anymore. What difference did it make anyway? There was no need to hold on to life so tightly. So I let go. I let go. The Englishman had done me a favor. I welcomed the darkness as a child welcomes Christmas morning.

I stared at the yellow lightbulb on the dark green ceiling for a long time. It never went out. The yellow wasn’t just yellow but orange and sometimes green and perhaps more than just a simple lightbulb. It looked like the evil eyeball of some almost invisible Cyclops that was trying to stare into my soul in order to decide if I was worth devouring. Once or twice I tried to stand, thinking to smash it, but the ceiling must have been at least twelve feet from the bare wooden floor on which I lay. The room was as big as a ballroom, but stiflingly hot and oppressive with the smell of vomit-my own-and the sound of flies now enjoying this unexpected repast. I was covered in sweat and my salt-stained shirt stuck to my back like a butter wrapper. If I’d been wearing any shoes I would have thrown one at the bulb because I couldn’t see a light switch anywhere. Louvered shutters as big as the garden gates at the Villa Mauresque were closed, and even without opening them I knew the windows were barred and that I was a prisoner. Not that I had energy for doing anything as strenuous as throwing a shoe or opening a window. Besides, my hands were tied painfully behind my back. My jaw ached as if I’d tried to chew my way out through the skirting boards below the blood-red walls. Even the hair on my scalp seemed painful. Most of all I was desperately thirsty. I shouted for water but no one came.

There was an old French clock on the dusty marble mantelpiece and, as time passed, I realized it was permanently stuck at ten past twelve, like my life, it seemed. I guessed I was in some disused or vacant villa close to Villefranche-sur-Mer. I could hear the sound of the ocean, which helped to calm me, and I imagined all of the places I would go if I’d been given a ship and my freedom. Scotland? Norway? Kaliningrad? The Cape of Good Hope? Good hope was something in very short supply, and so that felt like a good place to go. Beyond the louvered shutters it seemed to be dark, but with the pain behind my eyes I couldn’t be entirely sure. I’d stared at the bulb for so long most of my vision was just a negative afterimage. Something negative, anyway. Like everything else. At ten past twelve I heard a key in the lock on the doors and the two Englishmen from Portsmouth walked heavily in and hauled me to my feet.

“Pissed himself,” said one, his nose wrinkling with disgust.