Fatherland

focus.
    "What is this?" Krebs's mouth was saying. "What does it mean?"
    The Gestapo man was breathless, as if he had been running up and down stairs. With one hand he grasped March's chin, twisting his face to the light. In the other he held a sheaf of papers.
    "What does it mean, March? They were hidden in the front of your car. Taped underneath the dashboard. What does it mean?"
    March pulled his head away and turned his face to the darkening wall.
    Tap, tap, tap . In his dreams. Tap, tap, tap.

    Sometime later—he could not be more accurate than that, for time was beyond measurement, now speeding, now slowing to an infinitesimal crawl—a white jacket appeared above him. A flash of steel. A thin blade poised vertically before his eyes. March tried to back away, but fingers locked around his wrist, the needle was jabbed into a vein. At first, when his hand was touched, he howled, but then he felt the fluid spreading through his veins and the agony subsided.
    The torture doctor was old and hunchbacked, and it seemed to March, who brimmed with gratitude toward him, that he must have lived in the basement for many years. The grime had settled in his pores, the darkness
    hung in pouches beneath his eyes. He did not speak. He cleaned the wound, painted it with a clear liquid that smelled of hospitals and morgues, and bound it tightly in a white crepe bandage. Then, still without speaking, he and Krebs helped March to his feet. They put him back into his chair. An enamel mug of sweet, milky coffee was set on the table before him. A cigarette was slipped into his good hand.

4

    In his mind March had built a wall Behind it he placed Charlie in her speeding car. It was a high wall, made of everything his imagination could collect—boulders, concrete blocks, burned-out iron bedsteads, overturned tram- cars, suitcases, prams—and it stretched in either direction across the sunlit German countryside like a postcard of the Great Wall of China. In front of it, he patrolled the ground. He would not let them beyond the wall. Everything else, they could have.
    Krebs was reading March's notes. He sat with both elbows on the table, his chin resting on his knuckles. Occasionally he removed a hand to turn a page, replaced it, went on reading. March watched him. After his coffee and his cigarette and with the pain dulled, he felt almost euphoric.
    Krebs finished and momentarily closed his eyes. His complexion was white, as always. Then he straightened the pages and laid them in front of him, alongside March's notebook and Buhler's diary. He adjusted them by millimeters into a line of parade-ground precision. Perhaps it was the effect of the drug, but suddenly March was seeing  everything so clearly—how the ink on the cheap pages had spread slightly, each letter sprouting minute hairs; how badly Krebs had shaved: that clump of black stubble in the fold of skin below his nose. In the silence he actually believed he could hear the dust falling, pattering across the table.
    "Have you killed me, March?"
    "Killed you?"
    "With these." His hand hovered a centimeter above the notes.
    "It depends on who knows you have them."
    "Only some cretin of an Unterscharführer who works in the garage. He found them when we brought in your car. He gave them directly to me. Globus doesn't know a thing—yet."
    "Then that's your answer."
    Krebs started rubbing his face vigorously, as if drying himself. He stopped, his hands pressed to his cheeks, and stared at March through his spread fingers. "What's happening here?"
    "You can read."
    "I can read, but I don't understand." Krebs snatched up the pages and leafed through them. "Here, for example—what is 'Zyklon B'?"
    "Crystallized hydrogen cyanide. Before that, they used carbon monoxide. Before that, bullets."
    "And here—'Auschwitz/Birkenau.' 'Kulmhof.' 'Belzec.' Treblinka.' 'Majdanek.' 'Sobibor.'"
    "The killing grounds."
    "These figures: eight thousand a day . . ."
    "That's the total they could destroy at Auschwitz/Birkenau using the four gas chambers and crematoria."
    "And this eleven million?"
    "Eleven million is the total number of European Jews they were after. Maybe they succeeded. Who knows? I don't see many around, do you?"
    "Here: the name 'Globocnik' . . ."
    "Globus was SS and police leader in Lublin. He built the killing centers."
    "I didn't know." Krebs dropped the notes onto the table as if they were contagious. "I didn't know any of this."
    "Of course you knew! You knew every time