Last Train from Kummersdorf Read online

  For Jo, with love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  About Faber & Faber

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  It was the rain that stopped the boy running. It made the night too dark to see anything much. He thought: I’m thirsty.

  There should be some water left in his bottle. His hand went to his belt. The bottle wasn’t there. He’d left it behind.

  His hand went on past his belt, feeling the old knitted cardigan that was there instead of his scratchy uniform. The raindrops were coming right through to his skin. The trousers he had on were too short for him and his hair was getting soaked.

  He wanted to be at home. With Wolfgang and Heide, and Mother. He didn’t want to be standing shivering like this in the rain, in the middle of nowhere.

  He could just see that there was a broken tree where he was standing, maybe it had once been a lilac. He put his hand out and felt the smoothness of burned wood. The Russians had already been here, or maybe some bomber had dumped an incendiary as it flew away from Berlin. I’m hungry, he thought to himself, and remembered that he’d had a pack with one square of chocolate left in it, a bit of porridge, a mouthful or so of ersatz coffee, a bit of bread. Only he’d left his pack behind, as well as his water-bottle. He was all alone with nothing to eat and drink, and he’d stolen the clothes he was wearing. From a dead man, a granddad who was too old even for the Home Guard.

  You didn’t have time to think when you were in action, but now it was as if somebody else – like a teacher – was making him remember. Wake up, boy! Do you even know your name? Or what the date is?

  He thought, My name is Hanno Frisch and I really don’t know what date it is but it’s the end of April, maybe the twentieth, and it’s 1945. I’m in the army – no, I used to be in the army.

  He’d spent years looking forward to the army, hadn’t he? When he was younger, Wolfgang and he used to lie in bed at night and imagine themselves in a doorway, gun in hand, holding a position single-handed against a whole squad of the enemy. Maybe Wolfgang would get winged by a bullet but Hanno would knot an improvised bandage round his arm and they’d keep on fighting. Sometimes their mate Emil was part of it, sometimes he’d been taken prisoner and they had to rescue him afterwards. They tried to make it different every time. Sometimes they’d start arguing about who’d killed more enemy soldiers and end up fighting each other, then Mother would come in to tell them off, or she’d just come in because she’d heard them talking. The best times were when they reached the bit where they were the only pair of twins ever to get the Iron Cross together and the Führer decorated them himself and they were on the newsreel.

  Hanno wiped his eyes. The rain came down harder. If anyone saw him they’d think it was only the rain making his face wet, but he was still ashamed. He was almost fifteen – and a police captain’s son – he shouldn’t cry whatever happened.

  He groped his way forward and came up against some kind of ruined wall beyond the tree. He leaned his head on it. The wanting to be at home came over him again. He couldn’t stop it.

  He wanted this to be an April shower after school last year, he wanted Wolfgang to be running for the house door with him. He wanted Mother to come home at the same moment. They’d climb the two flights of stairs to their flat together and she’d be complaining: ‘Two hours I had to queue at the baker’s and the greengrocer’s and it kept pouring down, and where’s that Heide, she’s so scatterbrained, almost seventeen, you’d think she’d have some sense …’ but Wolfgang would make a face and Hanno would give her a kiss and she’d laugh after all and say: ‘I got the bread, though, I kept it dry in here, and look, potatoes and carrots, the rain doesn’t do the vegetables any harm – and did you smell that lilac downstairs, there’s nothing like the scent of wet lilac!’ Her face would light up when she talked about the lilac. Father wouldn’t be there, of course – he’d be at the war – but they were used to that.

  *

  It felt as if there’d always been a war – oh, he knew it had started when Wolfgang and he had been nine. He was too young to remember much what peace was like. They’d grown up with the war. At first the Germans had beaten everyone else – the French, the Poles, the Danes, the Norwegians. When they’d had to declare war on Russia they’d gone forging ahead there, too. It had been the usual thing of victory after victory coming over on the radio news. And then it all started to go wrong. There’d been sad music on the radio instead of fanfares of trumpets, because a whole German army had been wiped out at a place called Stalingrad. The Amis and the Tommies had landed in Normandy. Emil’s father was taken prisoner then. Bit by bit, the enemy had forced the German armies backwards, into their own country.

  One day this February he’d found his mother at the kitchen table with her head down among the potato peelings and the knife lying on the floor at her feet.

  ‘Mother?’ he said. ‘Mother?’

  He might as well not have been there; she cried and cried, there was dirt on her wet face from the potato peelings so he tried to clear them away, but she just shrieked, ‘Leave me alone!’

  ‘Mother?’ he said again, and then he saw the telegram. It said his father had been killed fighting for the Fatherland.

  He stood still, he didn’t know how the world would go on if Father wasn’t in it. In spite of everything, he’d felt safer for knowing he had his father.

  Then Wolfgang turned up and Hanno showed him the telegram. Wolfgang put his arms round Mother and kissed her face, dirt and all. Now Hanno put his arms round both of them, and Heide came in and saw the telegram and they were all crying together. After that the other police wives started arriving, Frau Schroeder and Frau Knop came in first from upstairs – of course the word was going round the house: ‘Frau Frisch has had a telegram, let’s go and see what’s happened,’ and it was: ‘Ah, dear God, how can it be? When the Captain was only home at Christmas time?’ Hanno caught Wolfgang’s eye. Wolfgang knew what he meant. They went downstairs into the yard and started chopping wood for the stove. They didn’t talk. But they hacked at the wood, making the chips fly, and then Wolfgang dropped his hatchet and grabbed Hanno. They fought, rolling on the ground. As if they were fighting off Father’s death.

  Two days after the telegram both of them were drafted into the Home Guard. Mother went white when Becker came round to tell them.

  ‘They’re too young,’ she said.

  ‘We’re not,’ said Hanno.

  ‘You are,’ she said. ‘You’re only fourteen.’

  ‘Almost fifteen,’ said Wolfgang.

  She said, ‘Oh, God, yes, almost fifteen! What have we come to? Herr Becker, they’re supposed to be sixteen for the Home Guard, you know that.’

  Becker gave her a teacher’s threatening stare through his steel-rimmed glasses. He said: ‘We don’t have enough sixteen-year-olds in Sternberg. Too many brave lads are already in the Regulars. I’ve got permission to draft boys born in 1931 and earlier. You’re not trying to undermine the war effort, are you, Frau Frisch?’

 
; Undermining the war effort was treason, you could be sent to prison or worse. Mother knew that, the boys knew that.

  Unpleasantly, Becker added: ‘You needn’t think, Frau Frisch, that you can move mountains this time.’

  Mother didn’t answer. After Becker had gone, the boys asked her what he’d meant. She didn’t answer them, either.

  *

  The uniforms were faded grey and patched because they’d been cut off wounded soldiers in the dressing stations. There were twenty old men and thirty lads from school. Old Becker lined them up and went on about how lucky they were to have uniforms; they could thank him for that, he said, he had connections. Then he said: ‘This is the proudest day of all your life.’ And started off about the last war, when he’d got the Iron Cross for knocking out an English trench single-handed, and old Rettig the baker wheezed and muttered, ‘The Tommies were all dead before he got there.’ That made everyone snigger because Rettig knew, he’d been in the same regiment, and Becker shouted: ‘What was that? The next man to show disrespect will be shot!’ That shut them up, but it didn’t make anyone respect Becker. He was their Latin teacher as well as their Home Guard captain, they’d always known he was a self-important brute.

  Rettig had terrible asthma: it was the flour, he always said, on top of the gas from the last war. He kept wheezing while Becker reminded them what the Ivans were like – ‘You all know what happened at Nemmersdorf,’ Becker ended.

  They’d seen the newsreel pictures. The Russians were even worse swine than Becker, they’d killed everyone, but the worst thing was what they’d done to the women and girls before they killed them. Only Rettig muttered something like ‘What do you expect? We all know –’ and then he shut up because Becker was looking at him. Becker barked out, trying to sound like the Führer: ‘We can stop the Russians. Never mind how old or young we are. The Führer has said we can. We must have faith. The German people will be telling our story for hundreds of years. How we made this last stand and saved the German people from the Asiatic hordes.’

  It was because of the Russians that Mother and Heide had gone away in March – the police wives all managed to get train tickets to the west, where the British and the Americans were coming. Mother and Heide were going to Aunt Lisi in Frankfurt. Mother had thought she’d be able to take Hanno and Wolfgang with her: they could go to the Home Guard in Frankfurt, she said to Becker, but he wouldn’t let them go, he didn’t want his Home Guard under strength. Hanno couldn’t forget her leaning out of the train, crying and kissing them each one more time: ‘I wouldn’t go if it wasn’t for Heide. But you’ll come to me in Frankfurt, when the war ends. Both of you. Do you hear?’

  Old Frau Hamm came in to stay in the flat with them and cook. But the first night Mother left them a meal. Frau Hamm didn’t care what they did, she just fell asleep in a chair after dinner. They talked about how they’d fix the Russians, then they fought each other, just fooling around. Frau Hamm stirred enough to say: ‘Boys, don’t fight,’ then she nodded off again. She was tired because there’d been four air-raids in the last week. That was bad for Sternberg; it wasn’t like Berlin where the planes came day and night. Tonight they were glad when the sirens went off and they had to go and fire-watch in town. It felt better to have something to do. It was better four days later too, when Mother’s telegram came to say they’d arrived in Frankfurt. Then there’d been a time when they’d fallen into a spooky kind of normality. They’d gone to school, and Becker had lectured them, they’d fire-watched, they’d dug tank traps and fortifications and Becker had lectured them again. It had been strange when they heard that the Americans were in Frankfurt. They hadn’t known what to feel, but Frau Hamm said, ‘Better than the Russians.’

  ‘Becker reckons we’ll drive them all back,’ Wolfgang said.

  ‘The Home Guard?’ said Frau Hamm. She bit her lip.

  It was almost a relief when the orders came for them to go to the Front. There’d been that mess-up with Becker and the map and the compass; that had been funny – but three days later they were still wandering around the woods and getting on each other’s nerves. Rettig kept saying they ought to go home. Till they’d met the SS unit and there was no more chance of going home. They’d fought the Russians.

  Rettig had died first. Then Becker. It had been grim. All the old men and most of the boys had copped it. The next morning, the SS officer had put the last nine of them down in a ruined village with a Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon and a new lot of ammo for their guns. Wilke was in charge. He was sixteen. The Russians didn’t come till the afternoon. Hanno and Wolfgang were together in a doorway, almost like their fantasy. They emptied their guns at the Ivans, and Wilke and Schroeder knocked out a tank with the Panzerfaust before the Ivans blew them up. Hanno and Wolfgang tried to reload but the new ammo didn’t fit the guns. Then Wolfgang fell down.

  Hanno shook him. ‘Get up,’ he shouted. ‘Get up!’ The Ivans fired again, but Hanno didn’t get hurt. This is the bit where I put the bandage on him, thought Hanno. Only Wolfgang had no pulse and his chest had been ripped open. But how could he be dead? They’d always been together.

  Wolfgang’s dirty face was grinning, as if he was trying to reassure Hanno. Hanno thought: If I take him somewhere safe, maybe he’ll wake up after all. Somehow he managed to pick his brother up and lift him over the remains of the house wall. When he put Wolfgang down he saw the old man lying there too; he hadn’t been dead for long, by the look of him. Maybe half a day. The Ivans were firing shells and bullets and their tanks were grinding on, but behind the wall Hanno knelt next to Wolfgang. ‘Wake up!’ he said. ‘Wake up!’

  The Ivans went away and everything was quiet. Then something went cold inside Hanno because he knew Wolfgang was really dead. He laid him out carefully on the ground, arms by his side, he even went back over the wall and found the gun to lay beside him. He walked round the ruins of the village. He found five dead boys. Richter, Langer, Mai, Kolbe, Thoma. That was everyone then. There was nothing left of Wilke and Schroeder. He went back to Wolfgang and looked at his still-grinning face. It was very like Hanno’s, though they weren’t identical. Wolfgang’s hair was a bit darker blond, and wavy where Hanno’s was straight. Hanno was a bit taller. Had been a bit taller.

  He stayed there till dusk, sitting on the ground beside Wolfgang, but Wolfgang’s face was getting less and less like him, somehow. There was a sound of more tanks in the distance, German or Russian, Hanno had no idea. Anyway, they were coming closer. Now he seemed to hear his brother’s voice: ‘There’s nothing to stay for. Get out of here!’ And Hanno knew what he had to do: he took his uniform off and took the granddad’s clothes off him, but he left the long underpants and the longsleeved vest. There were no wounds on the old man’s body. Maybe he’d died of heart failure. It didn’t seem right to leave the old granddad in his underwear; Hanno put his own uniform on him. There was blood on the uniform: it looked as if the granddad had died a glorious death fighting for the Fatherland like Rettig and Becker. And Father and Wolfgang. Wolfgang. Wolfgang. Then he heard how close the tanks were getting, and he ran for it.

  *

  He didn’t know how far he’d run. He couldn’t go any further tonight, that was all. He leaned on the wall and put a hand into his pocket – the old man’s pocket, he thought, my pocket, it’s all the same. There was a thin, hand-rolled fag. There was even a single match. The granddad had died before he could have his last fag, now Hanno would have the smoke for him. In his memory. Not Wolfgang’s yet. He’d thought about Wolfgang as much as he could bear now.

  Hanno sat down on the ground. He took the match and struck it on the wall, shielding it with his hand so that no one would see it and the rain wouldn’t put it out. It flared: he lit up and took a drag. It was good tobacco, not civilian tobacco; the old man must have got it on the black market. You weren’t supposed to smoke under eighteen. In the army, you got a sweet ration instead of fags, but Rettig the baker gave them his. ‘If you’re old enough to fight, lads,
you’re old enough to smoke.’ He used to like grumbling, Rettig: ‘Look at these potato-flour cakes, will you? Stiff as dried glue, and when the Ivans arrive we won’t even have that muck.’ You’d think the Red Army had come all the way from Moscow just to eat Rettig’s dinner. But he handed out the fags. ‘Don’t thank me,’ he said. ‘You’ve none of you anything to thank anyone for.’

  The clouds parted in the sky above him and the moon was there. Hanno forced himself up to look about him; the clouds would be over the moon again in a moment and he needed to find some shelter to sleep under, out of the rain. He was in the middle of a ruined farm: a bomb or a shell had hit one of the barns and knocked the other buildings down. No smell of dead bodies, probably the family had run away already. There was a stable or cowshed or something that seemed to have kept its roof.

  He picked his way across to the building, still shielding the warm cigarette with his palm. The farmyard had been paved with cobbles, and the blast had ploughed up half of it and left the rest untouched: those cobbles gleamed silkily in the moonlight and the wet. A bat flittered round his face; he shuddered, and it was gone. There was a roof on the building, a door even. He pushed it open, careless with relief, and saw a movement. Then someone grabbed his arm.

  Chapter Two

  All you have to do, Effi told herself, is grab whoever it is from behind, put the knife in the right place and stab or cut. You mustn’t think it’s a person, just think it’s meat – it’s a kitchen knife after all. Listen, out there they’re killing God knows how many people every second, surely you can manage it once, Effi? And if it’s an Ivan you can get his gun and work out how to use it.

  Only it wasn’t an Ivan. It was a boy with fair hair and long thin wrists poking out of a cardigan sleeve. A boy who was shivering. Oh, yes, she thought, we’ve both got something to shiver about. She could see him quite clearly in the moonlight. He was quite nice-looking, but moonlight was flattering, wasn’t it? And he had a lit fag in his hand. The clouds went over the moon and shut the light off. Now all she could see of him was the glow from the fag shining red through his fingers.