Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey

Author:Catherine Chidgey [Chidgey, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2021-03-11T22:00:00+00:00

FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH FORMER SS STURMBANNFÜHRER DIETRICH HAHN

16 October 1954

[tape corrupted in places]

I don’t think I was quite clear about the dental gold. It’s important to be clear: do you know, in his final plea at the Dachau trial, Prinz zu Waldeck said please judge me, but the interpreter translated it as please sentence me? And the American prosecution said it made no difference. So, to clarify, it wasn’t because of greed that I kept a few little scraps of gold: rather, I wondered at the painstaking work such miniature casts demanded, and how they so perfectly matched the shape of the things they replaced. That was my primary motivation. They were quite beautiful to me, and a reminder of man’s ingenuity; that he can fix the body when it fails. I wished I could bring such precision to the animals I made for Karl-Heinz: I imagined a whole procession of creatures fashioned from gold like tiny idols.

One evening, when I was running my fingers through my collection – it relaxed me at the end of a long day – I lifted out a large premolar crown. Something in its bulging fatness made me think of a beetle, its wings raised like blades, and I lifted out another – a molar crown – and found a cat in its contours, sitting with its paws tucked away and its ears pricked, and in another I saw a fish twisting back on itself when it has just been caught. I tipped the whole collection out on the desk and considered each piece, nudging them with the nib of a pen until I discovered the animals they contained. Bees and toads, gorillas and boars, hedgehogs and houseflies and swallows, no two ever the same. It became a kind of memory game: I’d close my eyes, plunge my fingers into the box and choose a piece at random, then see if I could remember which beast I’d assigned to it. I came to know them so well I could call them up at will throughout my working day, their every curve and dip, their hollowed insides. I hadn’t shown the collection to Greta – I would have liked to know if she could see what I saw in the little lumps of gold, and perhaps they would have provided a diversion for her too, taken her mind off her illness – but as the months passed, and the box grew heavier, and I still hadn’t said anything about it, it seemed better not to mention it at all. She was retreating more and more into herself, spending more and more time in bed, though she told me she wasn’t sleeping well.

‘I thought perhaps we should have our own rooms,’ she said one day.

Her proposal took me by surprise – it was the kind of thing a wife who no longer loves her husband says. The kind of thing a woman having an affair might suggest. I said, ‘As if we’re not even married?’ and her face fell.

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