Mother Night (2000)
“I FOUND OUT only recently, in 1958 or 1959, how my father-in-law died. I knew he was dead. The detective agency I had hired to find word of Helga had told me that much—that Werner Noth was dead.
The details of his death came to hand by chance—in a Greenwich Village barber shop. I was leafing through a girly magazine, admiring the way women were made, and awaiting my turn for a haircut. The story advertised on the magazine cover was “Hang-women for the Hangman of Berlin.” There was no reason for me to suppose that the article was about my father-in-law. Hanging hadn’t been his business. I turned to the article.
And I looked for quite a while at a murky photograph of Werner Noth being hanged from an apple tree without suspecting who the hanged man was. I looked at the faces of the people at the hanging. They were mostly women, nameless, shapeless ragbags.
And I played a game, counting the ways in which the magazine cover had lied. For one thing, the women weren’t doing the hanging.
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