Graham Swift - Out of This World

I still do it. But I won’t for much longer, will I? They’ll shut the bathroom door on me. Facts of life. I’ll open it and they’ll have slipped through the window, out into the world.

I wanted a private life, that’s all. From then on. A simple, comfy, domestic life. But it’s all dissolving.

Warm and steamy and pink-smelling. A cocoon.

Put one of those sweet hands there again. I mean here, on my forehead. (But put it anywhere you like, anywhere you like.) You know, when you do that, just that, it’s better than anything. Better than all your clever words, surrogate amnesia and professional letters after your name. A cool, calm, neutral hand on my brow. Worth eighty dollars an hour, just for that. And why can’t Joe do that? That’s just what he wants to be : a calm, firm, comforting hand on my brow. But he can’t do it. And I don’t want him to do it.

And so he pays for you! For us!

Keep your hands there. Tell me I’m attractive. Say: Sophie, you’re an attractive woman. You’re a beautiful lady. That’s how I’ll always see her, you know. Clear, fresh, always. On the lawn, under the sun umbrella. Her big black eyes, laughing lips. Making Grandad laugh. One strap of her summer dress falling over her lovely olive shoulder. That’s how I always wanted to be. To make him happy too. To be like her in his eyes. That last time, on the terrace, with the glasses of champagne …

Sure, I’ll tell you anything. I’ll turn myself inside out for you. Self-respect and modesty haven’t exactly been my forte just recently. You watch, you sit back and enjoy the show. It must be good to be you. It must be great to be you.

Should’ve ended, shouldn’t it? Should’ve split before it got too involved. Goodbye Sophie — you’re your own woman now. But it’s gone on, hasn’t it? (As long as you like, Sophie, as long as you want.) And it’s going to go on. Because you see — yes, I really do have something to tell you — he’s written this letter. Harry has written this letter. And you’ll never guess, you won’t believe, what it says.

I haven’t shown it to Joe. I haven’t told him I’ve got it. Because I think if he knew I’d heard from Harry, he’d be, I don’t know — angry? Hurt? Afraid? And if he knew that I wanted — If he knew that, after all, I really wanted — Then I think he’d know too: that I don’t — Haven’t for years. Not any more.

He’s going to get married. He’s going to get fucking married . To some fucking girl . And he wants me to — He’d like me — He wants me.

Small worlds. Big worlds. The one can eclipse the other. When the moon blots out the sun and makes the world go dark, it isn’t because the moon is bigger than the sun.

When I went to Nuremberg in 1946 to cover the end of the war trials, on my first foreign assignment as a fledgling news photographer, I was looking, as my employers were looking, as the whole world was looking, for monsters. Goering, Hess, Keitel, von Ribbentrop … Capture in their faces the obscenity of their crimes, capture in their eyes the death of millions, capture in the furrows of their brows the enormity of their guilt. Jodl, Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner …

But I didn’t find monsters. I found this collection of dull, nondescript, headphoned men, thin and pale from months in prison, with the faces of people in waiting rooms or people co-opted into some tedious, routine task. Only Goering rose — if this is the right phrase — to the occasion, and with a smart line in sarcasm and courtroom repartee, played the part of stage villain. But that too was wrong. As if we should get to love him, be amused by him. As if he should become some celebrity, a story-book figure, and we would say: We forget the others, but that Goering, now he was a character.

Where was the horror? And where was the sense of the suspended weight of the sword of History, which, if it should have hung over any point on earth in September 1946, should have hung over that courthouse in Nuremberg. Beneath the rows of white-helmeted military police, the lawyers and officials fidgeted in their seats, scratched their chins, looked at watches, stifled yawns. The testimonies, the evidence, the statistics that must have been, when the trial opened, the object of terrible attention, were repeated now, almost a year later, with a kind of laborious matter-of-factness. Yes, we have heard all this before, but shall we go through it once again, try to approach it from a fresh angle?

I thought: So what is there to capture? And then I realized. It is this ordinariness I must capture. This terrible ordinariness. The fact of this ordinariness. I must show that monsters do not belong to comfortable tales. That the worst things are perpetrated by people no one would pick out from a crowd.

Rosenberg, being marched from prison to courthouse. He squints, he seems distracted. He looks like a man with a headache, a morning hangover, that’s all. He has nicked himself shaving.

People cannot comprehend large numbers or great extremes. They cannot comprehend a thousand deaths, or routine atrocity, or the fact that there are situations — they arise and spread so quickly — in which life becomes suddenly so cheap that it is worth next to nothing, less than nothing, and killing is as casual as being killed. These things are pushed to the remote borders of the mind, where perhaps they will be wafted into someone else’s territory. But they can contemplate one death, or one life. Or a handful of deaths or a handful of lives. And they watch, almost with glad relief, when the unthinkable facts of a decade are unloaded on to the figures of twenty-one men who are placed, as it were, on a stage with the entire world as audience, and the whole thing takes on the solemnized aspect of ritual. Nothing is more edifying than a courtroom drama. Nothing is more conscience-cleansing than an exhibition of culprits. Nothing is more cathartic than the conversion of fact into fable.

Save of course that no fable, no drama can sustain itself indefinitely. By the eighth or ninth month of the Nuremberg War Trial the audience had wearied. They felt free to let their attention wander. But now, in September 1946, drama was returning to what seemed to have descended into mere bureaucracy. Judgement was nigh, the denouement was due.

Outside the courtroom, in the autumn sunshine, the rubble of Nuremberg was still being cleared. Two years before in the calm of an Air Force Intelligence establishment I had gazed on frozen, monochrome images of Nuremberg being destroyed from the air. The city that was progressively laid waste right up until the early months of ’45 was the old medieval capital of Franconia, a city of churches, towers, merchants and craftsmen — clock-makers, gold-beaters, silversmiths. Since 1946 this intricate product of the centuries has been rebuilt. It is not real, of course. It is a modern reconstruction, but it has been painstakingly done — so I am told — as if to re-conjure a world before certain irreversible historical events had happened. Now, Nuremberg is one of the chief tourist towns of Germany. People go for these picturesque reconstructions, mixed with genuine remnants of the old, for the fairy-tale spires and gables. The one-time site of Nazi rallies and the scene of the War Trials are of secondary interest.

After the executions were carried out in the prison gymnasium in the early morning of October 16th, I took photos of the crowd which had gathered in the first light of day outside the prison walls. It consisted of members of the Allied occupying forces and administration, but among them were a few, less assertive, German faces. They were gathered to experience a momentous communal thrill which they felt, plainly, was theirs by right and which would be intensified, as if by some physical charge, by their proximity to its source. They were waiting for some sign, some revelation, a display of corpses, perhaps, at which they might cheer and raise their fists; and their faces wore a look of murderous exultation. These too were the faces of ordinary people.