The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
“A special demand? For a group. Say, a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five. Do you remember?”
“I just sewed the buttons on, that’s all. A hundred and fifty coats a day, on went the buttons, that’s all. Any fool could have sewn on buttons.”
“But no special demands?”
“No. Only—No, nothing.”
“Only what?” He paused. “Please. Who knows?”
“Kohl in early April I remember complaining about big shots and their special privileges. A German hero had his men here for special antitank training and demanded they be refitted with the coats as theirs had worn thin.”
“Hero. His name?”
“If I had it then, it’s gone now. So many things I forget. My boy was named David, my two girls Shuli and Rebecca. Them I remember. David had blond hair, can you believe it? I know the girls and their mother are gone. Everybody who went East is gone. But maybe the Germans spared him because his hair was their color. We thought it was a curse, his blondness, that they would take him from us. But maybe a blessing, no? Who could tell such things? A learned rabbi could maybe expl—”
“Mr. Eisner. The coats. The hero.”
“Yes, yes, forgive me. Thinking, all the time thinking. Hard to remember details.”
“Kohl. Mr. Kohl. He didn’t want to give up the coats.”
“Kohl. Yes, old Kohl. Not a bad sort, notions of fairness. He tried to say No. The boys at the front need the jackets. Not rear-echelon bastards. But the hero got his way. He had papers from the highest authority. Herr Kohl thought this ridiculous. From an opera. I heard him tell Sergeant Luntz that. Heroes from an opera a monkey wrench throwing into his shop. It was no good. My David, he’ll grow up to be strong. On a farm somewhere, in the country. He was only three. He hadn’t had any instruction. He won’t know he was a Jew. Maybe it’s better. Maybe that’s the best way to be a Jew in this world, not to know. He’s six now, David, a fine healthy boy on a farm somewhere in the country.”
Shmuel patiently let him lapse into silence. When he was done, Shmuel saw tears star the old man’s eyes and at the same time noticed that the old man wasn’t so old: he was just a man, a father, who hadn’t been able to do anything for his children. Better maybe that he’d died so he wouldn’t have to live with their accusing ghosts in his head. The Germans: they made you hate yourself for being too weak to fight them, too civilized to demand revenge.
“Opera?” Shmuel finally said. “I missed that.”
“What the fellow called it, the hero fellow. His plan. They name everything, the Gentiles. They have to name things. This from an opera, by Wagner. Herr Kohl hated Wagner. It made his behind doze, I heard him tell Luntz.”
“What was the name?” Shmuel asked, very carefully.
“Operation Nibelungen,” the old man who was not so old replied.
Shmuel wrote it down.
* * *
“It’s funny. Us. In this place,” he said.
She’d lit a cigarette. It had gotten dark now, and in the long still room with the mirrors and the hanging uniforms, he could see the orange glow.
“Why?” he asked. “Why did you come looking for me? You didn’t come for my theories on German evil surely.”
“No. I just wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay. So shoot. Tell me anything.”
“I’m divorcing Phil.”
“No kidding?”
“I wrote him. I said I wanted to go to the Middle East. He wrote back. ‘What, are you crazy, you think I spent all this time on a goddamned tin can to go live in some desert?’ So, that was it. I won’t see him again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Fischelson’s dead, I told you?”
“Yes?”
“And the money’s gone. It was all set up by this guy, this Hirsczowicz. A millionaire. But the money ran out. What little there was, most of it was lost somehow, in the early days of the war. So there’s nothing in London anymore. And there’s nothing back in the States. Not a goddamned thing but people talking about how they suffered without the meat.”
“I’m sorry you’re so bitter.”
“I’m not bitter at all. I’m going to go to Palestine. Nothing but Jews there, Jim. It’s the only place in the world where the Jews will be welcomed. That’s where I’m going.”
“Susan.”
“That’s where we’ll all have to go,” she said.
Her cigarette had gone out. Now, in the room, total darkness had arrived. He could hear her voice, disembodied.
“I’ll talk to him. To the Jew. Shmuel. Do you know he had quite a reputation as a writer in Warsaw? I’ll talk to him. He’ll go too. He has nowhere else to go.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes. I suppose I wanted to tell you I don’t hate you. I don’t want you to die. I never did. I remove the curse. I hope you get your man. The German.”
“I will,” he said. “Or he’ll get me.”
The old man was tired now. Shmuel wanted him to sleep in the room but he refused.
“A nap, not so bad. But the night? I have nightmares, you see, I wake up. It helps to know where I am. Besides, the barracks aren’t so bad now. They’ve moved the sick ones out. It’s what I know.”
“All right. It’s all right with me. You can walk?”
“Not so fast, but I end up where I’m going.”
He got the man up, and pulled the blanket around his thin shoulders against the cold. They walked in the twilight down the street to the Lager, the prison compound. It was warm, really too warm for the blanket, yet the old man clutched it around him with blue-veined fists. He leaned on Shmuel, shuffling along on frail legs. Shmuel felt the heart pulsing behind the thin bones of his chest.
A Jew, thought Shmuel. A living European Jew: the first he’d spoken to in months. It came as a shock. He’d been so long among the Gentiles. Not Germans, but still Gentiles. They didn’t know; they couldn’t share. Earnest, apologetic, efficient men: decent. Intelligent even, but it was as if a different kind of brain filled their skulls. They worshiped a man skewered by his hands on a lumber cross: pain and blood at the very center of it. Shmuel preferred this eternal sufferer, pathetic yet dignified, who leaned on him as they neared the guardhouse, the entrance to the compound.
When they reached it, a flashlight from an American sentry beamed onto them. It seemed to halt at their prison stripes as if those said enough and then blinked out.
“Go on,” said a voice.
They walked on through the familiar geography, across the roll-call plaza, down the street between the barracks.
“It’s over there,” said the old man, pointing.
“I know,” said Shmuel.
Shmuel helped him to the building.
“You needn’t come inside.”
“No, you helped, now I help you. That’s how it should be.”
“You, a Jew, a yeshiva boy, you are helping them fight the Germans?”
“A little. There’s not much I can do. They’ve got machines and guns. They really don’t need me. But I can do little things.”
“Good. We should have fought. But who knew?”
“Nobody knew. Nobody could have guessed.”
“Maybe so,” said the old man. “Maybe so.”
They went into the building. Faces peered down from the tiers of bunks and voices hummed. The smell was almost blinding; Shmuel remembered through the tears that welled into his eyes. There was room for the old man near the stove. He took him over and helped him lie down. He was light and dry and fell quiet quickly. But his hand groped out once, snatching at Shmuel’s wrist.
Shmuel drew back as the man’s breathing deepened into regularity. He was aware that a dozen gaunt faces stared down at him, death masks, and he didn’t care for the sensation. An undertang of DDT, from a recent de-lousing, hung heavy and powdery in the close air, causing his nostrils to flare.
Shmuel stepped to the door and out. Cool air flooded him, smooth and sweet.
There: a metaphor, drawn from the camps. “Like the eyes of the men in the bunks.” Only a Jew would see stars blurry and infinite in bands from horizon to horizon and think of the white eyes of men at the point of death. Would he continue to draw on the camps for metaphors, was that how deep they’d been driven into him? Did the Germans own his imagination, a final, subtler purchase, one that would seal him off from human company, the metaphorical Mussulman, forever?
Yet as he in despair realized the answer was Yes, he realized also that the problem was as much literary as psychological. And from that there followed immediately the recognition that he was, for the first time in many long years, thinking of literature again. He thought he ought to write about the camps, and that sometime, perhaps in a year or so, when one would not confuse zeal with excellence, passion with brilliance, he might in fact, if only as a private exercise.
As he walked down the street, between the mute rows of barracks, he realized what an awesome task he’d so slightly just evoked; perhaps even an impossible one. It was enormous in a thousand ways: had any man the right to try and spin stories from a tragedy so huge? What of people of ill spirit who would read such accounts purely for the extreme sensations they caused, which of course was not the point at all? What was the artist’s responsibility to the gone, the lost, the unheard, the forgotten? And he saw also that in a certain way the imagination had been forever altered. The boundary of evil had been pushed back beyond the horizon on the one hand, but on the other, the capacity of the individual to withstand and triumph over the murderous intentions of the State had also been pushed back. A new form would have to be found, something that would encompass these new boundaries and at the same time convey the immensities of the act of Murder: a new esthetic for the post-atrocity world. Again, the problem of metaphor thrust itself upon him. In the camps, metaphor was everywhere: life was a metaphor, death was a metaphor. How could art be spun from a reality already so charged with elemental symbolism, the vision of hell the Germans had labored so mightily to construct on this earth: satanic sparks, the flames, the awful stench, the dogs straining on their leashes, fangs glistening? Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the artist.
You’d have to concentrate on something small: a parable; panoramas were incomprehensible. Concentrate on one man: how he lived, with as much dignity as the times permitted, and how he died, senseless perhaps, one more sliver of ash in a whirlwind dank with clouds of ash, but convinced somehow that his life had had some meaning.
No, he thought, I could never write that. I simply am not good enough. Face it, as a writer you weren’t much, a few pitiful essays in long-forgotten Yiddish journals in a city that no longer existed. What positions had he attacked, what had he defended? He could not even remember.
Had he been a Marxist, a poet, a historian, a novelist, a philosopher, a Zionist? No, not a Zionist, not even in the last days before the war had come, that hot August of ’39 when Zionism flared like a contagion through the Quarter, and even the richest of them, the most assimilated, had been consumed in its vision. But that had been dreams, absurd, out of scale, the problems so immense. Next year in Jerusalem! Insane! The British, the Arabs, thousands of miles to travel. He hadn’t bought it then—just more dreamy Jews getting on with their own destruction.
But now he saw the dream wasn’t so outsized. It was prosaic, a necessity. For where else was there to go? Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Home of the Jews. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? That would be worth—
An immense pleasure spread through him. Look at me, he thought, I am thinking again.
He did not see them until they were quite close and then he had not time to display surprise. They seemed to materialize from nowhere, though in a splinter of a second he realized he hadn’t been able to make them out against the looming bulk of the guardhouse. And yet there was a familiarity about them, as though old fears had taken on a familiar guise, and so he absurdly was not frightened and if there was to be any mercy in the next several seconds it was that one: that Shmuel was not frightened as the rushing forms closed on him and held him down.
“SS shit,” he heard in Polish, “SS shit.”
“I—” Shmuel started and then something enormous crashed into his skull. He felt his head inflate in pain and it seemed the abundance of stars had come down to crush him and they hit him again and again and again.
22
He expected trouble at the Rheinbrücke and hid in a stand of trees a few hundred yards down the road. The guards on the bridge appeared to be regular Army troops, not Waffen SS men, loafing in the sun. Repp studied them for some time, wishing he had binoculars to bring them up, see their procedures and moods. He tried to keep himself calm and his mind clear: only the bridge, its sentry post, and three lazy soldiers stood between him and safety. Once across, he had only a few blocks or so through the city to negotiate.
He’d feared a massive jam-up here, a refugee column, farmers’ carts heaped with furniture, frightened children; officers’ staff cars honking, the wounded hanging desperately on the backs of tanks; grim SS men patrolling for deserters. Instead, only this pleasant still scene, almost traffickless—occasionally a truck crossed, and once a sedan, but mostly farmers’ wagons heaped with hay, not furniture, and pedestrians. From his vantage point, Repp could also see the Bodensee over the rail of the bridge, stretching away, glinting in the May sun, its horizon lost in a haze: the Lake of Konstanz, a true inland sea. There seemed no war here at all. Was he too late? Since Tuttlingen, he’d traveled mostly by night, staying away from main roads, moving south, always south, across fields and through scraggly forests: out of touch, on his own, fugitive from his friends now as well as his enemies.
The sergeant in the sentry booth watched him come, but said nothing. Repp recognized the type, tired veteran, laconic of speech, economical of gesture, face seamed with hard knowledge. No need to yell when Repp was already approaching.
“Say, friend,” the sergeant finally said, unlimbering himself from the stool on which he sat. He picked up his MP by the sling, toting it with the easy motions of over-familiarity.
“And where might you be headed? Switzerland, I suppose. Don’t you know that’s for big shots, not little fishies like you or me?”
Repp smiled weakly. “No, sir,” he said.
“Then what’s your sorry story? Running to, or running from?”
Repp handed him his papers.
“I was separated from my unit,” he explained as the sergeant scanned them. “A big American attack. Worse than Russia.”
“And I suppose you think your unit’s on the other side of the bridge?” the sergeant asked.
Repp had no answer. But then he said, “No, sir. But my mother is.”
“You’ve decided to go on home then, have you?”
“I’ll find an officer to report to after I’ve seen my mother,” Repp said.
The sergeant chuckled. “I doubt there’s a sober one left. And if you find one, I doubt he’ll give a damn about you. Go on, damn you. To mother. Tell her you’re home from the wars.”
Repp drew in a deep gulp of the cool air and tried to keep himself calm as he walked across the great Romanesque bridge between the Lake of Konstanz’s two basins, the vast Bodensee to the east, and the Untersee, the more picturesque with its steep wooded shores, to the west. At the end of the structure, he passed under a medieval tower and stepped into the old city. It was a holiday town, cobbled and quaint, exactly the kind of place Repp didn’t care for. It had no purpose beyond pleasure, with its casino and boat tours and green lakeside park. It had never even been bombed and seemed uneasy in a military role, as if it were wearing an outlandish costume. The soldiers who clustered in its narrow streets seemed wildly out of place against the cobbles and arches and turrets and timbers and spires. Repp slid anonymously among them; they paid him no attention, shouting instead at women, or loungin
Repp turned off the Münsterplatz and headed down Wessenbergerstrasse. Here, in the residential sector, there were no soldiers, only an occasional old woman or man whose questioning eyes he would not meet. He turned up Neugasse, where the houses were shabbier still, looking for No. 14. He found it soon, a two-story dwelling, dirty stucco, shuttered. Quickly, without looking up or down the street of almost identical houses, and without hesitating, he knocked.
After a time, the door opened a sliver.
“Yes?”
He could not see her in the shadow. But he knew the voice quite well. She sounded tired. Unlike the other times.
“It’s me.”
The door closed, a chain was freed, and then it opened.
He stepped into the shadowy foyer, but she was not there. He went into the living room beyond. She stood against the wall, in the dark.
“Well, at last I’m here,” he said.
“So I see. They said a man. I should have known.”
“Ah,” he said, haltingly. The truth was, he felt a little unsure of himself.
“Sit down, sit down,” she urged.
“I’m filthy. I’ve been sleeping in barns, swimming rivers. I need a bath.”
“The same Repp: so fastidious.”
“Please—a bath.”
“Yes. Of course.” She led him through a shabby living room, hushed in draperies and blinds, flowers grimy on the wallpaper, and up some decrepit stairs. The house stank mildly of must and disinfectant.
“I’m sorry it’s so awful. But they said it had to be a house, definitely a house and this is all that was available. It’s outrageously expensive. I rented it from a widow who’s said to be the richest woman in Konstanz. It’s also said she’s a Jew. But how can that be? I thought they took all the Jews away a long time ago.”