The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  She always knew how to say the right thing. Bora stared at the floor.

  “Benedikta hasn’t told you this?”

  “No.”

  “I am sorry the two of you are no longer together.”

  Hearing it made Bora utterly grateful, and it nearly broke his resolve. To say that he was sorry about it, too, was impossible. The subject caused him physical discomfort; she noticed it, and fell silent. If he had been in a better condition of spirit, he’d have mentioned Mrs Murphy in Rome – his crush on a married woman who’d said no but understood, and he knew that she understood him, and this consoled him against all hope; although, rationally, he knew it was an infatuation that could have no future.

  “I also have to tell you, because you must have been wondering: before Stalingrad, her symptoms were so similar to Margaretha’s … and, well, Margaretha was pregnant. After Benedikta’s trip abroad with her mother, the symptoms had gone. Young women’s health is capricious; you understand that it was not enough to assume … and then Peter’s wife demanded most of our attention. While you were in Stalingrad, I simply could not …”

  “Thanks for not telling me then, Nina.”

  It was minutes before their attention was recalled by a discreet knock on the door. Not a bellhop, but the concierge himself, captain of the brave ship Adlon, cracked the door open to announce that a Frau Sommer was here for the Baroness.

  “Thank you,” Nina said. “I will be with her in a moment.”

  Bora sprang to his feet and offered to escort his mother to the car, to prolong their meeting for as much as he could. In the hotel lobby, about to walk out into the glare of day, she hesitated and turned to face him. In her native English, she said in a small voice, “Your father warned me not to ask, but – he did not suffer, did he?” Which meant: “Please tell me that Peter did not suffer.”

  How she must have longed to ask for the past half hour, but spoken about her living son instead … For her, Bora would have lied in the face of death.

  “He did not suffer, Nina. He really did not. You don’t suffer when such things happen.”

  She was careful not to glance at the gloved fist that had replaced his left hand. “But you must have, terribly.”

  “If I did, I forgot.” It was true that he did not recall the pain of the incident itself, but it’d been unbearable at the hospital, in the days that followed. Playing down personal hurt was something Bora had been taught at home, so she might not believe him.

  “Will I see you later today, Nina?” Which meant: Please, I need to see you again. We haven’t said everything yet.

  Nina came close to smiling, a way she had with her eyes rather than her lips.

  “I will be back before six.”

  Bora waited on the pavement until the Volkswagen motor car – provided by the Charité hospital and driven by Frau Sommer, his uncle’s trusted secretary for the past twenty years and more – had disappeared from view. He’d always been protective of his mother, but not nearly as demonstrative in his affection as Peter. His brother had been a hugger, which annoyed the General but probably made Nina glad. Inhibition was a mistake when life turned precarious, Bora realized: he couldn’t help his reserve, but looked forward to sitting with her before they parted ways again.

  The Adlon lift was out of order, so he decided to climb the stairs to his room after asking the concierge to place a phone call to the Beelitz sanatorium for him. “I’ll take it upstairs,” he told them. As he left the desk, he had the impression that the man had paused when he’d noticed the absence of a wedding ring, betrayed by a pale thin circle against his tanned skin. Or maybe not. Bora was self-conscious about it, because the last time he’d spent the night at the hotel with Dikta they were still married.

  The long flights of steps notwithstanding, the knee he’d injured during the partisan attack did not hurt. Bora gingerly climbed the stairs. The dry, distinct odour of freshly pressed sheets and towels hovered in the stairwell. Given the intermittence of the electricity supply, the luxurious hotel must have resuscitated the use of charcoal irons. It was the same toasty odour of the large room behind the kitchen at Borna, of the farmhouses in Trakehnen. A faint signal from the past, recalling that there had been peace once and, God willing, would be again. Bora was not in a recollecting mood and had no desire to consider the toll that peace would exact, being among those who had paid for it in advance. One more floor, and he had reached the hallway of his meetings with Dikta – for years her mother had kept a suite here, rarely occupied but always ready. It was here that she’d rendezvoused with SS Colonel Tilo Schallenberg before her divorce; it was here that Bora and Dikta had, God knows how many times … He blotted out the thought, hastening up the next flight of stairs.

  Around the doorknob of the room next to the one assigned to him, a sign read “Do not disturb”, and a pair of officer’s riding boots of excellent workmanship waited nearby to be picked up and shined to a mirror. Japanese, Bora guessed, by their size and style. He noiselessly let himself into his room. Just inside, so close to the threshold that he stepped on it, a folded piece of paper (no envelope) lay on the floor. Even before sweeping it up and unfolding it, the certainty of its origin provoked him.

  In his punctilious solicitor’s language, Salomon was urging him to keep the evening free, “as agreed this morning”.

  I never agreed to anything. Bora seethed. In Russia, it’d been Salomon’s habit to demand his company for dinner or even late into the night, because he was bored and an insomniac and wanted to lament the loss of his family home in East Prussia. More than once, Bora struggled not to fall asleep while hearing the tale of Polish infamy during the Great War, because – unlike his commander – he had to be up and at the Russians at dawn.

  I’ll give a piece of my mind to the concierge for blabbing my room number to him. Bora prepared to jot down a note to have placed in the colonel’s pigeonhole, claiming previous commitments and the limited time he had in Berlin, all too aware that – whatever the time of his return from Kripo headquarters (assuming that he would return, though one never knew) – Salomon was likely to pester him into the morning hours. In a capital city where refugees huddled in every available space, he’d even have risked leaving his comfortable hotel quarters, if he hadn’t been so firmly set on seeing Nina off in the morning. Only the firing squad (or a carpet-bombing) could keep him from that commitment.

  It was only after taking out his fountain pen that he recalled that he had no ink left in it. Mindful that using his notebook pencil to write to a superior contravened military etiquette, he resolved to wait for the phone call and then borrow a pen at the desk downstairs.

  Within minutes, he was speaking to the head nurse at the Beelitz sanatorium. She confirmed that Major Bruno Lattmann was indeed still a patient there. “If time really represents such a constricting factor for the colonel,” she added, “a call outside visiting hours is possible.” Bora confirmed that he expected to leave Berlin by mid-morning the following day at the latest, and offered to come at once; how to accomplish it was another matter. Beelitz lay at a good distance from the centre of Berlin.

  Public transport was regular, but punctuality was not. Taxis were hard to come by, low on fuel and unlikely to commit to long drives. Bora had noticed that, in addition to ration books, people carried colour-coded cards for every facility and service – and this was not an occupied country, where you could commandeer what you needed. The front line spoils you, that way. It was true, as he had heard from the co-pilot, that ready cash gave access to most goods – from bottles of French wine jealously kept in the cellars of restaurants and hotels, to supplies stacked in military depots, all the way to the most exclusive brothels. And if, officially, army intelligence – the Abwehr – had melted like snow in the sun after its disbandment by the Gestapo months earlier, Bora still had a few friends in the “shop” he could count on.

  He set aside his concern about Salomon’s hysteria and the worrisome police summons; his next step w
as to call up the concierge and instruct him to secure a bouquet of roses (“Best if they’re red, at least twenty-four”) and have it arranged in his mother’s room. Also to dig up “a bottle of high-quality Russian vodka and blue Pelikan ink for a fountain pen” in the next half hour. The concierge expressed no surprise at the requests: this was the Adlon. Now came the trickiest part: Bora phoned an old Abwehr colleague presently serving as liaison officer in the Air Ministry: “How are you? It’s Martin Bora. If I make it on my own as far as Dahlem, what do I need to do to get hold of a quick transport to the Beelitz sanatorium?”

  That done, he again called the concierge. “Make it two bottles of high-quality Russian vodka.”

  2:40 P.M.

  Thirty-five minutes later – and although he hadn’t eaten since he’d grabbed a bite the previous night, before the last leg of his flight to Berlin – Bora decided to skip lunch in order to visit Bruno Lattmann. At the desk, he heard that all the requested items except for the blue ink were available.

  “As for the bouquet, the best that could be done was twelve ‘Crimson Glory’ rosebuds, Lieutenant Colonel, greenhouse-raised here in town. I took the liberty of requesting the addition of twelve red peonies.”

  The concierge laid a sealed envelope, bearing his name and rank typewritten in red ink, on the counter. “And this came for you, sir.”

  Bora stepped away from the desk to open the envelope, angry at what he assumed was a second message from Salomon. “Did you give my room number to any of the guests?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “Why no, sir.”

  But the Gestapo had up-to-date lists of the hotel residents, of course, as well as informers among the waiters, valets and chambermaids. Names and indiscretion were other things ready cash could buy.

  The note, on a sheet from which the upper segment containing the letterhead had been removed, consisted of two typed lines, simple but enough to cause concern: It is necessary. At least come to terms with it philosophically, and good luck. The signature was only a capital G. Bora folded the sheet and replaced it in its envelope with pretended unconcern. Has to be Goerdeler, he told himself. What’s got into his head, that he should first approach my mother and then send an obscure note of this sort? What is supposed to be “necessary”? For me to undergo police interrogation? Thank you very much; it’s a blow on the chin as far as I’m concerned, and anything but necessary.

  “Who delivered the message?” he asked the concierge.

  The man shook his head. “I am mortified. It must have been posted by hand in your pigeonhole while I was personally checking the quantity and quality of the flower arrangement before sending it up.”

  Bora’s friend at the Air Ministry was better than his word. In the habit of considering out-of-the-blue requests by colleagues as indicative of urgency, counter-intelligence officers went out of their way to anticipate the callers’ needs. Bora was walking to the underground stop with two vodka bottles wrapped in tissue paper inside his briefcase, when an unprepossessing grey-blue car with a young airman at the wheel pulled in alongside him. “Lieutenant Colonel von Bora, bound for the Beelitz Heilstätte? Please climb in, sir.”

  The road to the sanatorium was the same as the old route that led to Leipzig, leaving to its left the Wannsee villas and the citadel of the film studio at Babelsberg, the lakes and artificial rivers formed by the Havel. Flies, gnats and other small insects flew to their deaths against the windscreen, leaving streaks of yellow and red. South of the city, the countryside had for decades been honeycombed by artillery ranges, army training grounds, landing strips and convalescent homes, now joined by High Command offices relocated from the bombed-out Berlin quarters. The army, and until not long ago the Abwehr, lay in the relative safety of parks and leafy copses, disguised as rural holiday homes and farms.

  When the driver, who was voluble for a private, informed him that he would have to return the vehicle to the ministry by 6:30 p.m., Bora answered that he understood. He recognized the excited, empty chatter as a side effect of amphetamine use – Pervitin or another brand – common fare among flyers for the battling of fatigue from long hours in the air, and of fear. It made him indulgent, though in other circumstances he’d have confronted the airman over his drivel. He lent an uninterested ear to the man’s pointing out of this and that villa, owned by film actresses, members of the government, high-ranking officers. In its uselessness, the prattle had a calming effect on his nerves. Occasionally, craters that spoiled the young woods and were readily filled with rainwater marked the spots where bombs had missed their target or were discharged by enemy planes returning to their bases.

  At Michendorf they turned off the highway and headed west.

  2

  He who enters the smokestack should not mind the smoke.

  GERMAN PROVERB

  BEELITZ SANATORIUM, 3:45 P.M.

  In his striped pyjamas, Lattmann did not look well; he’d lost weight, the tendons showed on his once bull-like neck, and freckles stood out like stains on his fair skin. His foul-mouthed sense of humour, however, was unchanged. When Bora asked about his wound (“Fucking sniper bullet through the lung on my last day in Russia”), he described in detail how “close to kicking the bucket” he’d come: “They clung on to me by my red hair, Martin, and with my cropped head it wasn’t easy. Thank you so much for coming. What are you doing here in Berlin? How long are you staying?”

  “A relative’s state funeral; it’s a few hours’ stay.”

  About himself, Bora added nothing. He handed the vodka to his friend and sat down across from him in the great turn-of-the-century hall. In other days, the smell of cleaning fluids and alcohol and the quality of screened daylight would have affected him. Now he acknowledged them with a level-headed lack of reaction, convinced as he was that showing nothing might eventually become feeling nothing. Lattmann looked him up and down, stood the vodka bottle up on his knee and turned it slowly. His eyes fixed on Bora’s prosthesis. He wouldn’t let him get away with silence. “So, what else are you keeping from me?”

  Bora kept mum. He turned to the windows overlooking the garden. There, in a wheelchair, sat a man whose legs had been amputated above the knee. The man was staring grouchily in this direction, as if envious of a physical loss that must seem minor to him, so Bora returned his attention to Bruno Lattmann.

  “Dikta left five months ago.”

  “Ah, blast. That’s too bad.” Trying not to appear too intrusive, Lattmann pretended to read the Cyrillic label on the bottle. “I suppose it’s indelicate to ask how it came about.”

  “You know we never even set up house together.” Bora stretched his legs and crossed them at the ankles. “We told each other we weren’t made for domesticity, but perhaps in the end we were happy with what we gave each other.”

  “Well, did you ever do anything together, aside from shagging?”

  “When there was time. But it’s true that we essentially remained lovers. Dikta reminded me of it in Rome, when she came for the annulment in February.”

  “Is she stupid, or what?”

  “She’s not stupid, and I have my faults. When we met nine years ago, we were young.”

  “You were too young. You’re barely thirty now.”

  “Thirty-one in three months. Anyhow, we kept taking and leaving each other. It was only after my return from Spain that we became serious about it. She grew tired of me, I think.”

  “And you of her?”

  “I don’t know. Look, Bruno, I’ll tell you about it some other time.” Bora smirked as casually as he could. “Would you believe that this morning a Berliner actually got up to offer me his seat on the tram? I couldn’t blow my top because the gentleman was twice my age and meant well, but Christ almighty, I’m not crippled.”

  Nurses were within earshot, so they didn’t engage in conversation of a more serious nature.

  “You tell me,” Lattmann groaned. “I sit here all day. Doctors won’t let me as much as walk around, because a
fragment of the bullet is still there, too near the heart for comfort. Sooner or later they’ll operate. From now on, at best it’s home service for me, and not necessarily in a uniform. Bothers me a little. But I’m not like you, I’ve had enough of the front line. The wife, of course, is ecstatic — Oh, sorry.”

  “No, no. I’m glad to hear about Eva. Your two children …?”

  “Three. We finally got the little girl she wanted. All well. Out in the suburbs, the only real problems are those arsehole refugees who fill your home and don’t even know how to flush a toilet, and those who roam at night – escaped POWs and other runaways, plus your horny foreign workers. I’m teaching Eva how to use a handgun.”

  Bora sympathized. Dikta and I too would have three children now, if things had gone the right way. But would that have been the right way? He was surprised to find that the pain was no longer lacerating, like that of a fresh wound – more like the lingering pain from a hard blow. Ever since Dikta had left him, his soul had felt bruised.

  Once the nurses moved away, the superficial chat between colleagues was no longer necessary. Jealously cradling the bottle, Lattmann said, “This liquor must have cost you. The last one we shared – where was it? Borovoy? I’m sorry we lost sight of each other. Lots of water under the bridge, in the span of a year.”

  “Especially as far as the ‘shop’ is concerned.”

  The sentence officially opened the way for a frank exchange.

  “Right.” Lattmann sighed. “The hare-brained defection of our man in Istanbul to the Brits couldn’t have done a better job of ruining us. The ’Stapo was just waiting for a chance to put us out of business. After they shut down the Abwehr, there weren’t too many in our outfit who were retained by the new management. Luckily that fucking Russki sniper spared me the choice, in case I was offered one. And you?”