Free Strange Music by Malcolm Macdonald

‘Sorry, Angela, darling, but . . . well . . .’
    â€˜I don’t mind,’ Angela assured her cheerfully. ‘I was all set to enjoy the feast alone. Eric?’
    â€˜It’s not exactly what I watch as a rule, either,’ he replied. ‘But what are rules if we can’t break them, eh?’ He dry-soaped his hands. ‘I’ll stay if it’s all the same to you?’
    There followed the execution rituals of fourteen more former SS warders, wardresses, doctors, and officers, all hanged with gravity (and by it) at the hand of Albert Pierrepoint. Angela gave Eric a brief biography of each: this one pulled teeth containing gold from living prisoners and kept the proceeds . . . that one let a vicious dog loose on prisoners, at random, whenever she got bored, and if you resisted the dog, she shot you . . . another ran a lethal regime in the solitary confinement cells in the infamous punishment Bunker . . . another did medical experiments on children, making friends of them because if they were afraid, the experiments wouldn’t work. In between, Angela whooped for joy and shouted curses at each pathetic prisoner as he or she underwent the sentence of the court.
    When the reel ran out – going flip-flip-flip in the take-up reel – she let out a great sigh of satisfaction and turned to Eric. ‘D’you know a story by Franz Kafka called – in English – In the Penal Settlement ?’ she asked.
    He nodded. ‘A friend lent it me – round about the time Belsen was liberated.’
    â€˜You remember the punishment machine in it? With needles that pricked the skin, writing the prisoners’ crimes in blood, all over their bodies, from head to toe? And the companion needles that puffed a little squirt of acid into each pinprick? Well, if such a machine existed, I would gladly operate it myself on each and every one of those criminals.’
    â€˜Does it annoy you . . . oh, would you like a whisky, by the way?’ He went through to the kitchen – to his raincoat – and extracted a half-bottle of Haig.
    â€˜Use the glasses on the second shelf of the dresser,’ she called out to him.
    â€˜They’re rather large.’
    She laughed. ‘That’s why I picked them. No water in mine.’
    She swallowed a good slug and gasped at the fire and the afterburn. ‘Does what annoy me?’
    â€˜Oh. These hangings – these deaths. They’re all so unheroic. They just shuffle in like zombies and let it happen. D’you think they learned how to die from watching you prisoners dying?’
    Angela drew breath, sharply, and opened her mouth to protest . . . but no words came.
    â€˜Mmm?’ he prompted.
    â€˜Damn you,’ she said quietly.
    â€˜Not really an answer.’
    â€˜They took away everything from us. Everything . . . except . . .’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Our ability to respond. They could enforce an outward response – eyes down . . . passive . . . but they could never know what was going on behind those eyes. That was our ultimate victory. And now . . .’ She gestured toward the projector. ‘The same with them.’
    â€˜So there is no ultimate victory. You’ll just have to settle for their deaths. Cut your coat according to your cloth – they must have taught you that lesson, too.’ He grinned. ‘The other thing I was going to ask – do you resent it that Felix won’t share in this Schadenfreudefest ? Is he annoyed that you didn’t get film of Pierrepoint at work on the butchers of Mauthausen?’
    She took another, calmer, slug and gazed evenly at him. ‘That’s actually none of your business, Eric.’
    â€˜What a very bourgeois reason for not answering. I thought you communists were—’
    â€˜I’m not a communist. I’m a Marxist.’
    â€˜Ah! That explains it. Few of the great men of the nineteenth century were more bourgeois