"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

from directly above the hip. The quicklime had hit him in thirty other places. His back, hips, and lower abdomen showed traces of hundreds of lashes and cigarette burns, some of the scars years old. Only his face had been spared.
And this face moved not only Settiniaz, who was the first to see him, but also all those who were to see him thereafter. It wasn't that he was that handsome-his features lacked regularity-but he showed a dramatic, almost monstrous inner tension, together with total quietness. In no way was it, in a camp where expressions of death and hopelessness abounded, the face of someone who had given up. Mostly, you noticed the eyes, pale gray with green specks, looking at men and objects with a most impressive strength.
In the course of the next few days, he slept almost continuously. Yet he was the cause of an incident. A group of former prisoners came to Strachan to complain on behalf, they claimed, of all their comrades: they refused to share quarters with a "pansy of the SS." The word they used was much harsher. This demand did not stir the small red-headed major from New Mexico; he had other worries: the deaths continued at Mauthausen, hundreds each day.
As far as the boy was concerned, he told Settiniaz: "If not for you, I understand, he would be dead. Take care of him."
"I don't even know his name."
"Your problem," answered Strachan in his high voice. "From this point on, you figure it out."
This took place the morning of May 7. Settiniaz had the boy taken to the barracks where the Kapos, whose fate had yet to be decided, were assembled. He reproached himself for this. The very idea of attributing any wrongdoing to the young stranger revolted him. Three times he went to see him, finding him awake only once; he wanted to question him but was answered only by the serious and dreamy look.
"Do you recognize me? I pulled you from the grave No answer. "At least tell me your name." No answer. "You told me you were Austrian. You must have family you want to get in touch with." No answer. "Where did you learn to speak French?" No answer. "I only want to help you
The boy closed his eyes, turned toward the wall.
The next day, May 8, Captain Tarras arrived from Munich, along with the news of the German surrender.

Georges Tarras was a Georgian, not an American Georgian, but a Russian one. At Harvard, Settiniaz had learned that Tarras was an aristocratic Russian whose family had emigrated to the United States in 1918. In 1945, he was forty-four years old and had apparently given himself the task of convincing the maximum number of people from planet Earth to take themselves less seriously. He abhorred sentimentality, had a natural passiveness (or at least feigned it marvelously) when faced with the most extreme examples of human stupidity, and had sarcasm permanently on the tip of his tongue. Besides English, he spoke a dozen other languages fluently, among them, German, French, Polish, Russian, Italian, and Spanish.
His first task when he assumed command at Mauthausen was to cover the walls of his office with a selection of the most atrocious photographs taken by Blackstock at Dachau and at Mauthausen. "At least, when we question these gentlemen, who will lie to us through their teeth, we can show them the results of their pranks."
He quickly went through the few files that Settiniaz had started, leading the questioning himself.
"Small fry, Master Settiniaz. Anything else?"
Settiniaz told him about the boy who had been buried alive.
"And you don't even know his name?"
The information concerning the young man was sketchy. His name didn't appear on any German list; he had not belonged to any convoy dispatched within the last few months of 1944 and the early months of 1945, at the time tens of thousands of prisoners were being sent back toward Germany and Austria because of the Russian advance. As many witnesses had confirmed, he had been at Mauthausen for three months, four at most. Tarras smiled.
"The story seems simple enough. Some high-ranking SS officers-one officer could not have needed nine lovers, unless he was superhuman-turned back toward Austria to organize a last stand. They reached Mauthausen, where they gratuitously reinforced their garrison, and, at the approach of our Seventh Army, turned back again, this time in the direction of the
mountains, of Syria, even of the tropics. All this not without having previously, with the characteristic attention given to order by this admirable race, neatly, beneath a few mounds of quicklime and earth, disposed of their now burdensome sweethearts."
At Harvard, a Gogol expert had given Tarras the not illogical nickname of "Boulba." Far from disliking it, he gloried in it, and used it to sign reviews as well as his comments on exam papers. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his bright eyes turned to the horror on the walls.
"Of course, my young David, we can always, all other matters notwithstanding, take an interest in your young protщgщ. All in all, we don't have more than a few hundred thousand war criminals feverishly awaiting the demonstration of our concern. A mere trifle. Without taking into account these mulions of men, women, and children already dead, dying, or about to die."
He had a taste for peroration and a sadistic desire to nail in place with his sarcasm any person with whom he was speaking. Nevertheless, the young Austrian's story must have interested him. Two days later, on May 10, he went to see the boy for the first time. To the Kapos who were present, he spoke Russian, German, Polish, Hungarian. He cast a quick glance at the stranger.
It was enough.
He reacted as David Settiniaz had, with a sizable difference:
he was similarly struck by him, but he knew why. He discovered a striking resemblance of the eyes of the survivor to those of a man with whom he had spoken briefly at Princeton, during a luncheon at Albert Einstein's house: the physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer. Same pale irises, same impenetrable depth, opening onto a dream inaccessible to common mortals. Similar mystery, similar genius . . .
With the difference that this kid is at most eighteen or nineteen years old, he thought.

During the next few days, Georges Tarras and David Settiniaz devoted themselves to the task that had brought them to Mauthausen. Detective work most of the time, conducting investigations based on denunciations. They endeavored to make
a list of all those who had, at any level, had any responsibility for the running of the camp. And gathered evidence to be used later, before a court-martial dealing specifically with war crimes in Dachau and Mauthausen. As the American troops approached, many of the former Austrian camp guards sought refuge in the immediate area, without taking any particular precautions, keeping their real names, hiding behind the virtue of obedience-Befeh/ ist Befehl-an order is an order-which for them justified everything. Lacking means and personnel, Tarras recruited former prisoners. One of them was a Jewish architect, a survivor of several camps, Simon Wiesenthal.
After some time, urged by Settiniaz (at least, this was the reason he gave himself), Tarras thought again about the boy who had been buried alive, whose name he still did not know. The little group of prisoners who had come to complain about him to Major Strachan had not appeared again, and three of its more ardent members-French Jews-had left the camp and returned to France. So the charges had in effect been dropped. Nevertheless, a file had been opened, requiring a decision. Tarras decided to handle the questioning himself. Many years later, facing the gaze of Reb Klimrod, but in far different circumstances, he would remember the impression left on him by this first meeting.

3

The boy was walking now, without a limp. You could not say he had gained weight-the expression would be grotesque applied to this kind of survivor-but at least his coloring had improved and he seemed less emaciated.
"We can speak German," Tarras said.
The gray gaze met that of the American and, with a deliberate slowness, circled the room.
"Your office?"
He spoke in German. Tarras nodded. He felt strange, almost shy, and this new sensation amused him.
"Before," said the boy, "this was the office of the SS commander."
"And you came here often?"
The boy was looking at the photographs on the wall. He moved closer to them.
"Where were the others taken?"
"Dachau," said Tarras. "That's in Bavaria. What is your name?"
Silence. The boy was now behind him, still examining the photographs. He's doing this on purpose, thought Tarras suddenly; he refuses to sit across from me, and now wants to force me to turn around, to show me he intends to lead this discussion.
Fine. He said softly: "You didn't answer my question."
"Klimrod. Reb Michael Klimrod."
"Born in Austria?"
"Vienna."
"Date of birth?"