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to bring her into—into all that. Not everyone can take it. And most German civilians don’t know anything. It’s better that way. All Tina knew was that I had some important post. She didn’t know where. And in my letters home, I wrote only … love things … I write beautiful letters, Herr Wasserman, with a lot of feeling, almost like poetry sometimes. Actually it was Tina who gave me the idea of writing her a story in myletters. A few weeks ago, when I told her you’d arrived here, she started to cry. She cries so easily … like Otto … She said she was sorry about you. You’re the only Jew whose name she knows who was going to die in the camp. That came as a shock to her, I guess. She also said exactly what she thinks of your writing. She’s like that, Tina always says exactly what she thinks, that’s her problem, there’s no nonsense with her, yes, and when I tried to defend you, Herr Wasserman, she said that even the letters I used to write before I became a ‘murderer’ were better than your stories. And then suddenly I came up with this strange idea: I thought that if I wrote her a story, that is, a bedtime story for Karl, but something more than that, because since Karl is too young to understand it, maybe she would begin to understand—you see?” “See what? For God’s sake, Neigel, stop beating about the bush.” “Well, it’s just that I can … that I can be a loyal, obedient party member and still be a human being.” And he struck his fists together with sudden excitement. “Yes! That’s what she has to realize! That’s it!” He sighed, straightened himself up, and smoothed his sweat-stained uniform. Now he looked strong again and full of fighting spirit. “That’s exactly what I’m going to tell her!” He glanced at his watch. Only a few moments to go. “Listen, Herr Wasserman,” he said raptly, “you don’t know the hell I live in. She won’t let me touch her. She says I scare her. That there’s death on my hands, and other female nonsense … She says she’ll consider taking me back only if I leave everything here behind! She’ll consider! Ha! She doesn’t even know what she’s saying! Like a child she wants the impossible! Me leave everything behind? Now? In the middle of a war? And what will I have left? But she says, ‘Remember how much we had to suffer before we could bring Karl into the world? So much pain and SUFFERING [q.v.] for the life of one child, one child, while in your camp dozens of people every single day, you …’ She has no idea how many people I really … every day …” (Wasserman: “The overgrown Nazi, the crude beast, he sits with me on the floorboards, hollow as an empty sack, trying to persuade himself, trying to persuade her, begging her, so weak and foolish, so human, that I, nu, well, I am forced to admit, at such times he touched my callused heart.”) Neigel: “Don’t judge me, Herr Wasserman. Don’t despise me. She and the children are more precious to me than anything in the world. I have no friends, I have no kin—” (Wasserman: “And now he’s going to sing, ‘Have mercy on me, Jews, I have no father and no mother!’”)“And I’m not the type who makes friends easily. I’m happiest when I’m with her and the children. And maybe you won’t believe this, but the kind of thing I have with you here, the way we talk, everything I told you and the story we made up together, that’s new for me. No. Here and there in the army, at night sometimes, before a major battle, somebody’ll come over and start talking to you, and you tell him things … never too much, because you can’t trust anyone nowadays, or sometimes it happens on long train journeys … but then you never see them again … and I couldn’t tell them about Tina, because they’d be sure to talk and she’d be taken away from me. But with you, Herr Wasserman, it’s different. Yes.” Wasserman: “And so you sent her my story, and never gave yourself away?” (It seemed Wasserman was finally grasping the significance of the situation. Perhaps what angered him was that Neigel had deprived him of his day of glory and “vindication” in Christina’s eyes. Wasserman: “Dear Lord, if there were any way to kill me, Neigel had surely found it: he robbed me of my story!”) Neigel confessed his crime again. He explained: On his return to camp he had written Tina a letter asking permission to send her a story, the final unwritten story of Scheherazade. “A debt of honor to a dead writer,” he wrote slyly, with malicious cynicism, but—he said to Wasserman—“my intentions were good. It must be a great compliment to any writer that his stories have such a strong impact on reality, no?” Wasserman thought this over briefly. It was an appealing idea, but he still took care to look furious. Neigel had promised his wife the most beautiful and exciting episode yet, and in the same letter began to describe the aging children and their lives in the lepek mine. Wasserman: “And then I shifted the story!” “Yes. And then you changed it again, if I may remind you, and you drove me crazy, because I was totally dependent on you. But Tina wrote back that she liked the story, that she keeps my letter by her bed, on her stack of favorite books, you know the ones I mean. Yes, Herr Wasserman, this was my first letter from her in over a year with more than three lines about Karl and Lise. In her next letter she wrote something about my imagination, that it might be a source of hope for us both. I remember those words.