Last Train from Kummersdorf Read online

  Aunt Annelie got Pierre a set of false papers and a ration book, Peter Sachs he was supposed to be called, her cousin from Bonn. Pierre was supposed to be a nickname. And he pretended to have a bad leg that had kept him out of the army – he got so used to limping he said he couldn’t walk properly any more. He helped her run the bar, which was on the ground floor of a big workers’ tenement in Prenzlauer Berg. Underneath it was a cellar, it was the air-raid shelter for the whole block, but once Pierre was there it became a jazz club too; they even managed to get a piano for it. There was Jochen Roth on violin – he was out of the fighting since he’d been burned and blinded in North Africa – and anyone else who was on leave with any instrument they happened to be able to play jazz on. Effi used to go, though she wasn’t supposed to, but kids weren’t supposed to be in Berlin at all; half of them had been evacuated. She used to keep quiet in a corner. It was a good place to exchange information when the music got loud and if any Nazis turned up, Pierre would change to sloshy square stuff like ‘I Know There’ll be a Miracle Some Day’. In the daytime, Pierre gave Effi music lessons there. She didn’t go to school any more. He even taught her the harmonica, though he said it wasn’t a girl’s instrument.

  Whenever the bombs came down the music had to stop. Pierre was an air-raid warden and Effi was a fire-watcher. If food was short for the U-boats, they’d skip over to the posh areas and do a bit of looting while the fun was going on. Once they got caviar. Aunt Annelie said it was very nutritious. Aunt Annelie had a false wall at the back of their living room and a little, secret space behind a cupboard. Once, before an action, she’d kept leaflets there, and sometimes U-boats – Jews and Communists – went to ground there, if they were on their way out of Berlin, or if the place they’d been staying had been wrecked, or people had got suspicious. Berlin was supposed to be empty of Jews but there were still a few hiding out. Also, Aunt Annelie kept food and useful things in there. She’d started to put those away after 20 July 1944, when the plot to kill Hitler failed. They’d had some bad days then, always expecting the Gestapo, but somehow they didn’t get arrested.

  Aunt Annelie had always said Hitler would make Germany fight till the end, so they’d need to last out a battle. She’d been right about the battle.

  The plan had been that Pierre, Aunt Annelie and Effi would stick it out till the Ivans came, then Pierre would show them his French papers, which he’d kept, and claim Effi and Aunt Annelie were French too. So the Ivans wouldn’t do anything bad to them and they could go west with Pierre. He wanted Aunt Annelie to go to Paris with him. They’d get married there and live happily ever after.

  Only then came the night of 18 April. When Hitler had called on the people of Berlin to die for him, and the left wanted to show him how many Germans didn’t agree. Everyone was to go out and paint NO on the walls. Aunt Annelie said there weren’t many walls left to paint and Pierre said, ‘We’ll find some.’ Aunt Annelie didn’t go, she wasn’t feeling well. Effi went with Pierre. And somehow Pierre went crazy, he wouldn’t let Effi check the streets first; he said it was blackout, no one would see him. It was as if he thought liberation had already come. But the police came round the corner and they got him.

  He shouted at Effi: ‘Run for it!’ The swine got their noose out straightaway. There was a lamppost nearby, they didn’t waste energy taking him anywhere else. She watched, it made her feel sick to remember it, she forced herself, she hoped they might go off at once and she could cut him down, but the swine made sure he was dead before they left. Effi ran back to Aunt Annelie’s and inside her the voice was wailing, No, not Pierre, he can’t have copped it. Only when she got there an incendiary had come down on the bar, the whole block was in flames and Aunt Annelie was inside there. Some arsy Hitler Youth – like that boy – was acting as air-raid warden and he wouldn’t let Effi go in to get Aunt Annelie. Afterwards they found her body, and later Effi found the cotton reels among the ruins. She’d been looking for Pierre’s harmonica but everything else was burned up.

  The next morning there were plenty of NOs painted on the few walls the bombers had left standing. It hadn’t been worth Pierre losing his life for. Then Schulz had turned up like the fairy godfather. Or something. ‘My God,’ he said – as he did every time he saw her, ‘you’re so much like your mother. I’m leaving Berlin. I want you to come with me.’ She’d said, ‘Nothing worth staying for, Herr Schulz.’

  She made herself think about her father. He was coming back to Germany. He’d sent word, he was a US citizen now and he’d joined the army. When the war was over she’d go to the Amis and ask for him. Bruno Mann. ‘You know,’ she’d say, ‘he wrote that hit song: “Raindrops Shining in Your Hair”. They even play it in Germany, only with a different name.’

  She’d know him when she saw him. Aunt Annelie had a photograph and she’d learned it by heart.

  *

  The planes had gone. She glanced at the boy.

  ‘What are you staring at?’

  He hesitated. Then: ‘There are some buttercups there.’

  ‘You can’t eat buttercups.’

  He said, ‘They’re so yellow.’ As if it was amazing to see yellow buttercups. And she looked at them, trying to see what he saw.

  ‘They look sticky. Like wet paint.’

  He gave her a sudden grin that surprised her. It was the kind that made you grin back, you couldn’t help it.

  ‘My mother used to put them under my chin,’ she said. ‘I thought the yellow really came off on me.’

  He asked, rather hesitantly: ‘Is she alive, your mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. As if he meant it. Then: ‘If we went down to the lake again we could catch more fish.’

  ‘Too dangerous. If you’re always trotting around the place, someone might notice. We’ll go back to the stable.’

  His friendliness faded. He looked out at the world as if he hated it.

  ‘I’m going to fight tomorrow,’ he said, as if he thought she’d be sorry.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve been wanting a bit of time to myself.’

  In the stable she took her boots off, stretching her bare feet and long toes, slipping her fingers between her toes to flick the dirt out. She told him: ‘You should take yours off. Or your feet’ll rot.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, but he kept his boots on.

  Suddenly she wanted to make him laugh again, so she pulled the comic schoolmistress face. Pierre used to love that.

  He was trying not to laugh, but he couldn’t stop himself. Then he stood up.

  ‘OK, watch,’ he said. ‘Who am I?’ He walked about doing the goose-step, it was good; he doubled his chin and made his stomach poke, he looked so fat and yet mean at the same time. Now it was her turn to laugh.

  ‘You’re fat Reich Air Marshal Göring,’ she said. She liked him for making fun of the stinking Nazi.

  He dropped down beside her again, and they went on laughing, leaning back against the splintery wooden wall. But they were making much too much noise.

  ‘We shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘You don’t know who’s listening outside.’

  He fell silent at once, and started undoing his bootlaces.

  She thought she’d get some information out of him. ‘So your mother’s in Frankfurt. What about your father?’

  ‘He was killed in February.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he do before he was in the army?’

  ‘He was a policeman.’

  The boy was a policeman’s brat?

  Sharply, she said, ‘What kind? Detective? Or –’

  ‘Not a detective. Not Gestapo, either.’

  ‘Military police then? Or just on the beat?’

  ‘He was in a police regiment. In the Ukraine, and then he had to retreat with the rest. He was a police captain.’

  Effi interrupted. ‘Shut up. I heard something.’ She hadn’t, but it gave her the chance to calm do
wn.

  Pierre used to say: ‘Look, kid, don’t get angry. Angry makes you careless.’ Now she wouldn’t think about Pierre’s own carelessness. She’d think about keeping safe, that was what he’d wanted. She whistled under her breath, ‘Body and Soul’, nice and slow. It did calm her.

  She’d have to get rid of the boy. Police had killed Pierre, and she knew what the police regiments had done out in Russia. Killings. Just as bad killings as the SS. Probably he was proud of what his father had done. Imitating Göring didn’t mean anything, people were always making jokes about the Nazis, even about Hitler. It was just like kids poking fun at the schoolteacher. It didn’t mean they’d rebel against them. Anyway, it was all right, he wanted to go off and fight again, get killed with the rest, good riddance. She’d encourage him.

  ‘I’m going to get some kip,’ she said. ‘Got to do something to pass the time.’

  *

  Mother had darned Hanno’s socks with yellow and pink wool from a couple of her old jumpers. Hanno had said, ‘I’m meant to fight the Russians with pink and yellow socks?’

  ‘The Russians won’t look inside your boots,’ said Wolfgang.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ Hanno had said crossly. ‘She used up all the grey wool on yours.’

  ‘OK,’ said Wolfgang. ‘Dye them.’

  ‘What am I meant to dye them with?’

  Wolfgang had gone to Father’s desk and come back with a bottle of black ink. He’d dribbled it over the socks. ‘You see,’ he’d said. ‘I’m saving our soldiers’ honour, making sure you have decent socks.’ Then he’d put them on the stove to dry and the ink had run down and Mother had come in from queuing for bread and she’d been angry. Heide thought it was funny.

  He couldn’t understand why he’d done that imitation for the girl. Maybe just because he was so used to being one of a pair, having someone to laugh and clown with. Wolfgang was the funniest, though. Once he’d made Hanno and Heide spit water all over the table at Sunday dinner. Then they all got into trouble. ‘You shouldn’t encourage them,’ Mother said to Heide. ‘You’re two years older – you should set a good example.’

  Wolfgang could even get out of a fight by making faces at the other boy. Pity the Russians hadn’t been able to see his face.

  He was tired, but he couldn’t sleep. He had an odd feeling of lightness and pain, as if a limb had been hacked off him. His chest ached; he told himself he didn’t know why – he didn’t want to admit it was the tears he needed to shed. He wasn’t going to cry.

  One of the girl’s bare feet was poking out from the blanket: she had nice feet. He stared at the lines of her foot as if he had a pencil and was working out how to draw it. But really, he thought, it ought to be a carving in wood. Wolfgang wasn’t interested in carving, he liked making model aircraft, but Hanno had used to whittle wood, he’d done animals and birds and faces. Mother said once it was as good as the carvings at Oberammergau but that was the kind of thing mothers always said about their kids’ stuff. Hanno was never really pleased with what he did, he thought he’d need a lot more time, and time to think, too. Anyway, in the last while they’d needed every little bit of wood for the heating stove.

  *

  In the evening, the girl brought out swedes from somewhere. They ate them with more nettles, taking turns at the spoon and the pot. She said they had to put the lamp out as soon as they’d eaten, to save the oil.

  ‘When did you last eat a potato?’ she asked him.

  ‘In the army.’

  ‘The good breakfast before you’re hanged, hey? Crazy, really. When a pig’s to be killed, they starve it. Only nowadays,’ she went on in a singsong comedian’s voice, ‘they just string people up, no food. Can’t have people fiddling themselves extra rations that way. Still, the number of people there are hanging around in Berlin, you’d think no one had spread the word.’ Her face twisted up for a moment, but she passed her hands over it and came out the other side grinning. ‘Your turn to eat, Hitler Youth.’

  ‘Is that where you come from, Berlin? Don’t call me Hitler Youth.’

  She glanced at him, whistled again, and said, ‘Yes. I was with my two aunts. We were trying to get to Leipzig, where my grandfather lives, and I lost them.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He died,’ she said. ‘At Stalingrad.’

  Now there were tears in her eyes, and he didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Are you going back to the war?’ she asked.

  He told himself that he ought to revenge Wolfgang’s death.

  ‘They told us things we could do. Werewolf actions. Sabotage behind the enemy lines. They showed us how to unscrew a tank’s petrol cap and pour sand in.’

  ‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘the soil’s all sand round here so that’s easy – now all you have to do is find an Ivan tank; plenty of those round here, too.’

  Suddenly he saw how stupid the whole idea was. ‘An Ivan tank on its own with no soldiers guarding it?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m not the werewolf. You are.’

  Chapter Four

  Hanno woke up and again he turned round to look for Wolfgang. Only Wolfgang was dead. He kept having to realize that. It hurt so badly.

  There was a bright thin wedge of yellow light lying on the stable floor beyond the grey wood of the stall. He lay still, watching the dust dance in the air. Somewhere there were big guns pounding outside, but there was a bird singing too, really close. He shut his eyes again.

  It seemed wrong that he could just lie there. Every morning, for as long as he could remember, there’d been work waiting for him and Wolfgang as soon as they woke up. Wood to chop, wild mushrooms to pick, jobs for Mother, scrap metal and rags to collect for recycling, labouring jobs, school. Fire-watching at night. Sometimes you couldn’t keep awake in school. Some of the teachers would let you sleep in class if you’d been up all night. Becker wouldn’t. Once he’d crept up on Emil and woken him up with a massive clout round the ear hole, then he’d started yelling about superhuman efforts.

  The sun was really warm, and his clothes were steaming. Hanno remembered that there was a job waiting for him. Becker used to say to the lads: ‘You were born to die for Germany.’ Wolfgang wasn’t there because he’d done that job already.

  His eyes wandered aimlessly round the stable and he saw that the girl had left the porridge for him in the hay. It was still warm, and he was hungry. For a few minutes it tasted really good. Then he started to think again, and the taste went away. He ate it all, though, and licked the pot out. His belly wanted it.

  Mother had said both of the boys must come to Frankfurt. He imagined himself coming through the door. She’d say, ‘Where’s Wolfgang?’ There could only be one thing worse than knowing Wolfgang was dead – having to tell Mother about it. And Father had done his duty for his country. Who was Hanno to shirk it? He thought, but it’s finished. Frau Hamm knew that. Then: Frau Hamm was only an old woman. What did she know?

  A cat came in through the open door, a scrawny miaowing tortoiseshell. He put his hand out to her. She purred, then clawed at him. He pulled his hand away and licked the blood off. The cat started to rub her cheek against him. He scratched her behind the ears. She loved it, twisted her chin round for him to scratch underneath it, rubbed and caressed him. Suddenly she bit him and shot up to the hayrack, where she sniffed and miaowed again. She must be able to smell that there’d been fish there. She kept miaowing now, a loud, demanding call.

  ‘I don’t have anything,’ he told her.

  The cat shot him a disgusted look and started to wash. Hanno didn’t want to stay still any longer. He got his boots on and went out to ferret around the buildings, looking for Effi. She wasn’t anywhere, so he thought he’d try the lake. He went back to the stable to get the pot and spoon to wash. The cat had gone away.

  He went through the wood. The smell there was clean and sweet, quite different from the musty smell of old animal mess and broken buildings at the farm. Every now
and then his face brushed the yellow, tasselly birch flowers. It was as if these things were shouting for his attention, like the cat, like the loud yellow buttercups yesterday and the birds singing their heads off. Half of him said, I don’t want to – but he started to run to the lake.

  Effi was standing by the shallow water. She was pulling her jacket on and her hair was wet. She heard him come, stared at him with her black eyes wide.

  ‘Have a swim, Hitler Youth,’ she said. ‘I won’t look when you get to the interesting bits.’

  He found himself answering in the same teasing voice. ‘So you think I’m interesting? That’s nice.’

  ‘Here.’ She threw him a thin, damp greyish towel. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I won’t look at all. Don’t want to see how dirty the war has made you.’

  He took the old man’s cardigan off, and the shirt, and washed his face and neck. Then he made sure Effi really wasn’t looking, stripped his trousers off and went into the lake. The water shouldn’t feel colder than it had done yesterday, when he had his clothes on, but it did. He remembered how the Hitler Youth group had had to swim in the frozen lake at home to harden themselves.

  A duck splashed down into the water. The drake came next, with his blue-green head, and they looked round them smugly, taking possession of the lake. About five more pairs followed them, ha-ha-ing at each other.