Last Train from Kummersdorf Read online

  She took hold of his arm and he jumped. She laughed at him. ‘Have you got any more fags?’ she asked.

  He pulled himself together; he mustn’t let himself down in front of a girl, must he? ‘You can have this one,’ he said, and held it out to her. When she took it his hand vanished, all she could see was her own in the glimmer of heat in front of her face. She drew in smoke. That was good. The door was still open.

  He said: ‘I wanted to go to sleep. I’m tired.’ As if he had a right to a bed for the night.

  ‘I’ve got a gun as well as this knife,’ she said, lying, ‘and I can see you in the dark. I’ve got night eyes like a cat’s. You’ll sleep here if I let you.’

  She had to show him she was boss. Oughtn’t she to send him away? Supposing he was a deserter, and the military police came along? They’d both be strung up. There was a beam in the stable just the right height for the job. If the Ivans came – she had to stop thinking bad stuff. If the Ivans came she’d get away.

  The cigarette was burning her finger, there hadn’t been much tobacco in it. She stubbed it out on the wall and put the end in her pocket.

  ‘OK,’ she said in the end. ‘You can sleep here tonight. You go when I tell you to.’

  She could see he was relieved, too tired to think about anything except getting his head down. He had army boots on his feet, giving him away.

  She gave him a push.

  ‘This way, this stall.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s some hay here. And if you light a lamp, it can’t be seen from the yard. I’ve been out to make sure.’

  She lit her tiny lamp. His eyes were drooping half-shut, and yes, he was good-looking, if you liked that type. Blood on his civvy clothes.

  ‘Is that yours?’ she asked, pointing to it.

  He shuddered. ‘No.’

  He lay down on the hay, his eyes fell shut and he was asleep. Then there was the sound of engines in the sky. Bombers going to Berlin. She sat still, as if that would make her safer. Her heartbeat grew huge and loud, filling her chest, she felt her hands and feet grow small and cold. There was nothing new about that. Now she had to think about America. The lights on the stage and the music. It was all right. It was going to keep on being all right.

  When the planes had passed she poked a piece of hay at the boy’s hand, and listened to his breathing as carefully as if she was a doctor. He was flat out. She took the lamp and went into the other stall. Moving softly and still listening, she cleared away the straw in the corner – it was mucky on the floor, the hay next door had been up in the rack before she brought it down to sleep on. She laid bare the loose half-brick in the wall. She pulled it out and reached inside, then she noticed that her hands were dirty. She’d better wipe them on her clothes. She got them clean and felt for the bag. It was still there, it was all right. She set the bag on the straw and made to open it, but she mustn’t, not yet. She picked up the lamp again and went softly back to the stall where he was lying, his mouth open, his face turning gold with the faint light on it. He really was asleep.

  She got a handful of clean hay, took it back with her and spread it out on the straw next to the bag. Here were the cotton reels. She counted them as she turned them onto the crinkly hay, fingering their angled wooden shoulders. Twelve. All she’d been able to salvage from the hoard Aunt Annelie had made, that she’d said would be so useful when the war was over.

  Effi swallowed hard. Making it through, she told herself, that was still what mattered. And she had the cigarettes, ten packs of these, good cigarettes, Schulz’s Nazi fat cats’ cigarettes that had flown out of the car along with her when it crashed. Everything else had gone up in flames. They were good fags, but not for her to burn, they were what people were going to use when money was worthless – and it would be soon. Nice smart packages, shiny paper: the high-ups in Berlin were still doing themselves proud, they had plenty of good stuff to take with them when they got in their shiny cars fuelled with the petrol ordinary people couldn’t get hold of, and hightailed it out of Berlin before the Russians came. Schulz had meant to go to Argentina. Well, she’d been glad enough to get a lift with him when she needed it.

  She had to put the stuff back in the bag. Then the bag went into the hole, she slid the half-brick back in place, dirty straw against the half-brick. It was a work of art to put the straw back as if it hadn’t been disturbed, ruffle it up a bit. That looked OK. Then she gathered up every last piece of hay and took it back to the other stall. She put the lamp out and sat in the dark for a few minutes before she wrapped herself in the blanket and lay down on her side, cradling her front with her arms, curling her legs up to her chest. The Russian planes came over twice more in the night, and each time she woke up and felt her swollen heart thumping, and each time she went back to sleep again.

  *

  Hanno woke up, and looked for Wolfgang. He wasn’t in the stable. So where was he? Then he remembered. But it can’t be true, he thought. And how could he be alive when Wolfgang was dead?

  The girl was there.

  ‘You’re awake, are you?’ she asked, sitting down beside him.

  She didn’t seem quite real, though he could see her clearly enough, thin body inside a grey skirt and a grey cloth jacket over a shirt that used to be white. Huge hungry black eyes above high cheekbones, a snub nose and curly black hair down to her shoulders. And solid boots on her feet.

  She asked: ‘I suppose you want food?’ She had a Berlin accent.

  ‘You’ve got food?’

  ‘Would I promise it if I didn’t? It isn’t much. Just porridge.’

  She looked at him, narrowing her eyes and whistling for a few minutes, like a boy. Then she said: ‘Cold porridge. I don’t light the fire twice in a morning, once is dangerous enough.’ She pointed to the other side of the stall. ‘Look, it’s there, in the pot. You can borrow my spoon. Get up and help yourself – I’m not going to bring it to you.’

  He fetched the pot; it was black and encrusted on the outside but the inside was clean, and his nose caught the smell of food. He picked up the spoon.

  ‘I’ve had my share,’ she said, then: ‘There’s some water in my mug. It’s clean water, the pump’s still working in the yard.’

  He ate it quickly, licking the last little blob off his fingers, but he didn’t enjoy it. It stilled his hunger, that was all. There was a noise overhead. It was louder than the guns. The sky beyond the door was dirty with planes.

  ‘Ivans,’ yelled the girl against the racket.

  Hanno yelled back: ‘They’ll be Tupolev bombers. Or ground-attack planes, tank-busters.’

  ‘Expert, are you?’ she jeered.

  She doesn’t like me, he thought.

  The quiet was shocking after the planes had gone. He stood up.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ the girl wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She looked him over, biting her lip for a moment. ‘I’m going to the lake, to wash the pot and the spoon. There are fish in it. Mind, we can’t cook again till after dark, the smoke doesn’t show then.’

  ‘The lake?’

  ‘Just beyond the farm. It’s pretty.’ She laughed. ‘Do you think you could catch a fish in a flour bag? I forgot to go to the angling shop for a net.’

  He said: ‘I’ve got to piss.’

  Her lips puckered upwards at the corners of her mouth. ‘Is that where you were going? You could piss behind a tree on the way to the lake.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to the lake with you.’ He thought he might as well do that as anything else.

  She whistled again, a bit of a tune he thought he knew, but he wasn’t going to ask her. ‘Your choice, kid. If you want to crap, the earth closet’s behind the old cowshed. It smells. Don’t fall in.’

  ‘I don’t need to crap.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  The lake was pretty if you looked to the left. To the right, there was a big messy crater flooded with water. There were
white birch trunks floating in it like belly-up fish. Some of the stems had even burst out in little glossy leaves and gold catkins.

  ‘Look,’ he said, half to himself, ‘they don’t know they’re finished.’

  The girl ran to the tree-fringed beach on the other side, sat down and took her boots off. ‘You have to wade in to find the fish. They taste good, what there is of them.’

  She took her jacket off and rolled her skirt up so that he could see almost all of her legs. He looked away.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘If I catch a fish, I shan’t share it with you.’

  He asked her, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘No time,’ she said, going into the water.

  He followed her. The lake was cold; it was a fiddly hunt for fish that were small, as she said, and nimbler than his fingers with the clumsy flour bag. But he caught two. She didn’t catch any.

  ‘I don’t like to stay too long in the open,’ she said. ‘Might get spotted and bombed. You can take your fish and go if you like.’ She stared at him.

  No, he thought, I can’t yet. He said, ‘I’ll stay till tomorrow.’

  She didn’t answer, but turned round and started walking back through the wood. The birds were singing as if it was an ordinary spring. They reached the stable and another lot of planes came over. He laid the fish on the floor, but she shook her head at him.

  ‘No,’ she shouted against the racket, ‘safer up there,’ pointing to the hayrack. ‘Though the rats’ll come for it anywhere.’

  When the planes had gone, she said, ‘Nothing to stop them. No Luftwaffe heroes.’

  ‘They said there was a secret weapon.’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot about that. It’s going to go up into space and come back and set New York alight, isn’t it? Pull the other one.’

  ‘My name’s Hanno,’ he said. ‘You can have one of my fish.’

  She narrowed her black eyes and stared at him.

  ‘I’m Effi,’ she said at last. ‘Do you mean it about sharing the fish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More fool you.’

  He heard the guns in the distance. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ll go back and fight again.’

  ‘What’ll you tell the military police?’

  She thumbed at the beam: in a flash he saw himself hanging there. He felt as if someone had kicked him, hard, in the stomach, and now he knew what he was: a deserter.

  ‘Cheer up,’ she said, ‘do you think you’re the only one to run away?’

  A squad of bombers flew in, not far away, but not directly overhead either. Suddenly he knew he was listening, all the time, for sounds outside, for footsteps or approaching engines. The girl – Effi – must have listened like that, last night. The rain came down on the roof.

  There was an explosion somewhere. He said, ‘My mother went to my aunt’s in Frankfurt. The Amis are coming there.’

  There was a second explosion, further away, and a plane flew right overhead. It was gone before he could be afraid of it. Now the girl made a comic face. That made him laugh, whereupon she stared at him with an expression of ludicrous, teacherish outrage. He kept laughing, though it felt wrong to laugh when Wolfgang was dead.

  She said, ‘Let’s cook that fish. The rain hides the smoke, and I’m hungry.’

  ‘I thought you said not till dark?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ she said. ‘If a bomb’s got our names on it –’

  Chapter Three

  There was something wrong with the boy. His eyes were too wide open, and when he laughed he was out of control. Oh, well, thought Effi, a lot of things are war-damaged nowadays. She took him through the rain into the wreckage of the farm kitchen. The huge chimney was still standing, and a bit of roof round it, though they had to duck under a fallen beam to get there. The big range was battered and pitted, several of the doors hung open at crazy, useless angles.

  ‘I stayed here because of the chimney,’ she told him. ‘And the stable.’ (And the sack of swedes she’d found in the wreck of the cowshed.) ‘Good if you can cook.’

  They’d done a brisk trade with electric hotplates in Berlin after all the gas mains were broken. Aunt Annelie had got one and cooked black-market stew on it; there’d been enough for them and six of the U-boats. Effi shook herself: there she went again, thinking about things that would trip her up. And why had she decided to make the smoke? Well, now she’d got going, she wasn’t going to stop. She was really hungry.

  The boy said, ‘We used to have carp on Christmas Eve. And poppy-seed dumplings. My mother used to let the carp swim in the bath. My sister always wanted to let it go.’ He smiled but looked worried at the same time.

  Effi had a little heap of firewood on the other side of the range. She broke it into small pieces, calculating how much heat it’d take to cook the fish. Then she reached into her pocket and got a match. She had two boxes of matches. What was his family life to her?

  ‘Can’t we cook those nettles?’ he asked. ‘There, behind the ruined wall.’

  ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Pick them.’ He walked over and set to, using his finger and thumb. Fish, she thought, nettles – he’s quite useful.

  She lit the fire. She’d been baking the fish in the embers: the skin got black but that didn’t matter.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  He was lying, of course. ‘So am I,’ she said at once. She thought he was fourteen, like her. Maybe fifteen. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Sternberg.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘About forty kilometres south-east of Berlin. It’s only a small place. There’s a big wireworks there, though.’

  ‘You’ve come quite a trek, haven’t you?’

  She wasn’t quite sure where they were now, but Schulz had meant to drive south-west, towards Wittenberg, and had been forced to take the Zossen road south-east instead when he’d found the road blocked by Home Guard tank traps. He’d sworn a lot. About an hour later, the Ivan plane had opened fire on the car. She guessed they were somewhere round Zossen. That could be bad, because the army headquarters was at Zossen, or maybe good, because the Ivans might home in on Zossen and leave the countryside alone. She thought it was probably best to wait here till the shooting stopped. Probably.

  The boy said: ‘We went to fight the Russians but our captain – Becker – he was old and he lost his reading glasses so he couldn’t read the map. We were going round in circles.’ For a moment he almost grinned. ‘We tried to tell him, but he kept shouting that he’d been in the Great War, he had the Iron Cross, how dared we? Then we met an SS unit and the officer made Becker own up. He slapped his face. They found us somewhere to fight.’

  ‘Pity you met them, isn’t it? Or you could have carried on being lost till it was all over. Did Becker get killed?’

  His face went quite blank. She didn’t like to see that.

  ‘Put those nettles down,’ she said. ‘Go to the pump, get me some water to cook them with. It’s round the corner there, by the door hole.’ She passed him the pot.

  He said, ‘The first lot of ammunition was all right, but the second lot didn’t fit the guns.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, wanting to shut him up. ‘Germany’s finished. When you’re finished, you make a mess of things. So they gave you the wrong ammo, so what? Look, boy. What you’ve got to realize is that you’re lucky. You’re still alive.’

  Hanno went away to the pump. He walked out through the gap in the wall and stood in the rain outside the shaky wall working the iron handle till a spurt of water came out. He hated himself for telling the girl things. He wasn’t going to tell her about Wolfgang.

  When he came back, the girl picked the nettles up and swore. However carefully you took hold of a nettle it’d whip round and sting you somewhere, Hanno had three throbbing spots on his fingers. He was glad she’d got stung. She was a bad girl, anyway. Heide didn’t even know that word. She put the pot on the stove and threw
the greens in to boil. She didn’t look at him.

  *

  Eating the fish was a performance. You needed all your wits about you to separate the scraps of sweet flesh from the bone and keep from choking. Effi took her time over it. The nettle leaves were slimy and strong to taste. Aunt Annelie used to say they cleaned the blood.

  Suddenly the sun came out and the wet on the black fallen beams glittered like snail-tracks. Effi jumped up with the fish still on her tongue, and put the fire out with sandy soil she had ready beside the wood; she’d been too careless already, and now she felt a wildness howling inside her, she wanted to let go, she wanted to be careless.

  Pierre must have felt like that in the end, tired of hiding and taking precautions, so they caught him.

  There were planes coming, swarms of little planes like insects going to a dead horse. The sun warmed her side as she and the boy crouched in the shelter of the chimney. She put her hands across her belly, comforting it. Potatoes or bread would be better comfort. Pierre used to go on about French bread, long white sticks, crisp on the outside, soft as butter on the inside. It only kept a few hours, he said. She’d asked him what the point of that was. She’d have liked to taste it now, all the same. It wouldn’t need to last: she’d eat the lot. When all she had to look forward to was tonight’s turnips and some nettles, and porridge again tomorrow morning. Fish if she was lucky.

  She was thinking about Pierre now, and Aunt Annelie. She could see them both in her mind, as if they were looking at her. Pierre pushing his floppy brown hair out of his eyes, and needing a shave – there were more important things to buy on the black market than razors. Aunt Annelie with her blonde hair tied back with a blue ribbon; she’d always liked little bows. But she’d kept a big red flag in the cellar for when the Russians came.

  When it was safe, Pierre liked to talk German with a French accent, though he didn’t have any problem passing for a German, because he came from Alsace and talked Rhineland. He’d been in Paris, playing jazz piano and harmonica in a bar, when the Germans picked him up and brought him to work in the munitions factory in Berlin. ‘Volunteers,’ they called them. There were Dutchmen and Belgians, too. Pierre had worked night-shifts underground; he was used to that, he said, but he didn’t like putting shells together in a factory as much as he liked playing jazz in a cellar. He said the conditions were worse for the slave labourers from the East; he hadn’t suffered much. Still, when the camp was bombed he got out smartly enough. And was clever enough to find his way to Aunt Annelie’s bar, and Effi, and the German Resistance. Such as it was.