See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

of pleasing memory before attacking his duties once again, yet even without trying too hard to get to know Neigel, I’m sure his work doesn’t suffer in the least from these digressions. Anyone who has ever seen him at work (like Staukeh, for instance) will testify with envious regard that Obersturmbannführer Neigel is made of indestructible stuff; and even after a year and a half of the backbreaking work of running a camp, he is as tough and decisive as ever: relentless in the pursuit of duty, his own and that of his men, a dispassionate murderer, the very ideal delineated by Reichsführer Himmler (who is extremely fond of Neigel!), and now for the past few days, it seems, new strength has been steeling his limbs: you see him everywhere around the camp. It’s as if there were ten Ncigels, all brimming with energy and initiative and efficiency. He personally executes the two Ukrainian guards caught taking bribes; at the entrance to the gas chambers, he cold-bloodedly shoots four women with their children for creating a disturbance and throwing the guards into confusion; every night, the light burns long past midnight, and after that, at 2:00 a.m., he goes out to inspect the guards. Dr. Staukeh has been asked to advise the commander to take something for his insomnia. Staukeh dismisses the rumors of insomnia with a scornful laugh. Staukeh believes (I learned this from the memoirs he dictated to an American journalist visiting the mental institution in Lodz he had been committed to in ‘46, pending a court decision as to whether he was insane. This he certainly appears to have been, save during rare flashes of lucidity, one of which was the occasion of the interview) that no one anywhere in the Reich better exemplified Himmler’s ideal of a German officer than Neigel. “But he was also so boring!” Staukeh groaned. “Such a narrow-minded,deadly bore! There was no subject you could discuss with him for more than a few sentences, except maybe the battle at Lake Ilmen Shemaga and his childhood in Bavaria—Bavaria, where else? Did you think he came from the Rhineland? Listen, you’d better not print that—or about the horses, either. But he was a good officer. That yes. A little unimaginative maybe, but straight and loyal as a dog. And he was awfully serious, that Neigel. I’ve been thinking a lot about him at night lately. It’s hard to fall asleep here, because of the noise and the screaming. Do you hear them? It’s enough to drive you crazy … [irrelevant passage] Yes. He was too serious. He took life hard. I just remembered something else: he would laugh whenever someone told a dirty story, but it was plain to see he was embarrassed, or that maybe he didn’t even get the joke. No, he wasn’t sociable, if you understand my meaning. It’s possible that he had friends in the movement, I don’t know, but in our camp —no one. He never went drinking at the officers’ club, and naturally there was resentment, people said he was arrogant and all that”—Staukeh smiles his weird smile, the ghostly smile of a man who has experienced the indescribable—“but I think he was just shy and had childish, conservative notions about how a Nazi officer ought to behave, a lot of them were like that in the SS [irrelevant passage]; he—Neigel, that is—didn’t even know his driver’s Christian name for a year and a half! Only once did I ever see something really fillip him, that was around the beginning of ’42, a night in February or March, after an officers’ meeting, when he asked me to stay, much to my surprise. He waited for everyone else to leave, and then went to the cupboard for the bottle of 87 proof he kept for official receptions. He poured out two glasses and said, ‘My son, Karl Heinz, is three today! I promised him I would celebrate his birthday! To his health!’ And he raised his glass in a stiff toast, and nearly choked on it. He wasn’t used to drinking, you see. I nearly choked laughing, he was so—how shall I put it—dutiful! Of course, I tried to make the most of the situation by asking him about his wife and children, etc., but his laconic answers gave me to understand that our friendly visit was over.” Staukeh asks the American journalist to light a cigarette for him and put it between his lips; he is wearing a straitjacket after three attempts at suicide, a great embarrassment to his doctors, who are unanimous that Staukeh’s pathological lack of conscience, and the fact that he has never expressed remorse over his deeds, make his suicidal tendencies totally inexplicable.

And we also have to wait for Neigel’s monthly leave, and his return two days later. Meanwhile, we follow Wasserman at work in his new routine and let him ramble on about a subject which has been greatly preoccupying him of late—the importance of good food for creativity, with endless laments about his digestive problems and agonized guesses about the menu for the next supper and reminiscences of other meals. (“On an evening like this in Warsaw, ai, it seems a hundred years ago to me now, before I started eating at Neigel’s, I used to go to Feintoch’s, spread my paper out on the checkered oilcloth, red and white always, and old Feintoch would greet me with a smile and call out to the Pole in the kitchen, ‘Wasserman!’ They used the customer’s name instead of a menu …”) The prospect of a nutritious daily meal after a period of prolonged starvation is naturally very exciting to Wasserman.

Many days later Neigel returns to camp, but does not bestow a single glance on Wasserman hoeing in the garden, and Wasserman is worried that something has gone wrong, but nothing has gone wrong, and at night, when Neigel finishes his work and catches up on the backlog, he calls Wasserman in and with