by Ben Pastor
“Ha! Get off your high horse, Colonel. Regimental commanders with the Knight’s Cross are a dime a dozen in Berlin. They won’t even miss you. You know the routine: start by handing me your gun.”
Bora’s plans were less fully elaborated than he cared to admit. He could only try to gain some time.
“That gauze plastered to your head,” he demanded to know, “is there really a cut under it, or was the bomb hitting the house merely an excuse to spy on me unseen for a couple of days? I think you were at headquarters, manhandling Glantz so that he’d confess, and that you struck him in the jaw just as you did on the day of his first failed suicide – only more violently. That deadly gold ring of yours does plenty of damage and draws blood … just like the blow you inflicted on Niemeyer before shooting him.”
“Hand me your gun! By God, if I can waste a fake Jew with millions in the bank, I can waste a crippled army fuckwit. But not in the goddamn service car.”
It was just like a Party minion not to want to mess up a service car. Bora slowly edged his hand towards his holster and unlatched it.
“No, wait. I’ll do it.” Grimm’s thick fingers lifted the Walther P38 by the grip and tossed it on the back seat. With the stubby barrel of his PPK, he gestured for Bora to get out of the Olympia. “And don’t try to run.”
Bora did as he was told. The brightness and heat of day dazzled him. Unknown as the place was – an ordinary rail crossing, along an ordinary gravel road – there was something familiar about it that he tried to recall. He had no idea what. Grimm kept the gun on him as he came around the car, squinting in the sun. If he drove all the way here to shoot me, it’s because he understood that I was on to him. For all I know, he foresaw that I would be on to him even before I was. Is that what I’m trying to remember?
“Do you have any notes on you?”
Obviously Grimm meant material about the murder case, in addition to what he expected to find in Bora’s briefcase afterwards.
He could just search my body after shooting me, Bora thought. It has to be that last scrap of respect for uniform and rank that makes him ask me to hand them over myself. I have no notes on my person. It’s all in my diary, or in my head.
“Yes,” he answered nonetheless. “In the inside pocket of my tunic.”
Grimm did not trust him. Chest and armpit were the perfect place for a hidden holster. He approached Bora without letting go of his gun. “Unbutton your tunic,” he ordered him. “And now take it off.”
A moment’s delay on Bora’s part caused Grimm to change his mind: after all, even without a holster, a handgun can be easily stored inside one’s clothes. He lunged at the officer to prevent him from trying anything while he removed the garment.
There was no hidden gun, but it was the opportunity Bora had waited for. He struck Grimm’s wrist with the edge of his right hand, a blow from below violent enough to send the small, ugly PPK flying. They both dived and scrambled for it, where it had fallen on the tracks to the left of the crossing, where the rails were slightly raised above the road. They crashed hard onto the rock-filled trackbed. Bora came down on his left knee, which had been wounded months earlier and never quite healed. Such blinding pain shot through him that he came close to blacking out, and in the dimness of things he wondered how anyone could be hurt so much on the tracks of a German line, groping for a gun. He clung on to consciousness to keep Grimm from getting past him, because nothing would keep Grimm from opening fire.
They rolled around, bruising themselves on the merciless spikes and edges anchoring the rails, driving each other face down on the splintered sleepers and the sharp rocks piled up between them. His build and height usually spared Bora from having to play the role of the underdog, but Grimm was heavier; Bora could not gain the upper hand. He struck and was struck back, and was viscerally enraged by the pain, as if what depended on this scuffle was not the solution of a crime (what did he care about Walter Niemeyer? Less than nothing) or even his life, but the destiny of a whole generation, his generation of disciplined yet rebellious young men. He and Grimm didn’t want the same thing: Grimm wanted to seize the gun so that he could fire it, while Bora merely wanted to wrest it from him. I must remember, I must remember … Excitement and numbness alternated, made worse by the ringing in his ears brought about by the quinine. He wanted to grab a rock and smash Grimm’s head with it, but had to use his right arm in an effort to avoid being killed. Before, too, during other frantic moments of extreme duress, there would come to him the sense that there was something he urgently had to remember, yet there hadn’t been always actually been something for Bora to recall. He caught sight of the PPK, wedged barrel-down in the ballast, where Grimm could easily reach for it, so he strained to turn the policeman over on his back like a gigantic insect. In so doing, he fumbled for, found and grasped his obscenely loud tie. It was a risky move, because his left arm, hindered by the prosthesis, could only keep Grimm at bay, not restrain him. Hastily, Bora wrapped the artificial silk around his right fist, at the same time pulling at it with a jerk that would break any man’s neck.
Not Grimm’s. His bulk resisted both the yank on his throat and Bora’s attempt to overturn him; it was like trying to subdue a bull intent on destruction. Bora suddenly found himself in even greater difficulty when the policeman shifted the massive load of his right leg over him, nailing him to the ground – the situation seemed desperate, and fatal. Holding on to the tie as to an animal’s leash was all that Bora could do. He inched his hand up the twin lengths of cloth, twisting them together, closer and closer towards his adversary’s gullet. Still, he was unable to prevail. Winded, drenched in sweat, Grimm crushed him with all his weight, all the while creeping closer to the gun. Bora could only hang on to him and try to slow down the policeman’s crawl. I must remember … He found it hard to breathe; a well-placed kick would send him tumbling down the railway embankment. Were it not for the excruciating pain in his left knee, he’d already have slipped into a semi-conscious state, and then anything could happen. A blow on his temple made his head ring; blood droned in his ears; he felt the heat of the steel track under his cheek, the nauseating odour of grease, dirt, metal, wood. Crawling over him, Grimm came within a hair’s breadth of the gun.
It was then that Bora let go of the tie. The sudden release made Grimm recoil enough for Bora to beat him to the gun with a thrust of his right arm. He could only just reach the gun, but it was enough to enable him to toss it away. He didn’t know if it had landed on the other side the railway crossing, or perhaps somewhere else behind him. He only knew that he’d snatched it from under Grimm’s fingers and thrown it.
Numb, fatigued by the heat and the pounding they’d given each other, they collapsed to a stop. But Bora was younger and – if that were possible – the angrier of the two. I must remember, I must remember … He rummaged for and finally got hold of a rock from the trackbed, the most primitive of weapons. The action of raising himself on his knees to strike triggered such agony in his left leg that the blood drained from his head. For an instant he went cold, and everything turned black; when he could see again, Grimm had raised himself to a crouch, holding another such weapon in his powerful fist.
Both, however, wanted to get hold of the pistol, rather than stone each other. I must remember something … Severed from all that had been until this morning, and all that ever would be, Bora hazily understood – as if it mattered, at a time like this – that only if we grasp everyday reality can we truly perceive ourselves. Without it, we’re incoherent and adrift, filled with pain and anger, and we wouldn’t even know what it is that they are filling. He knew that his left knee would give way the moment he attempted to put his weight on it. Helplessly, he watched Grimm skulk along on the tracks searching around for the gun, sniffing with his bleeding nose and sucking on his bloodied lips, until at last he sighted it, on the other side of the tracks.
Bora crawled after him. He despaired of being able to outdo him this time, when he couldn’t even overcome
the pain enough to pull himself up. He perceived neither landscape, nor sky, nor anything else around him – only the deafening roar of his blood pumping in his ears, and a complete indifference to anything other than Grimm. Grimm rose to a crouch again, letting go of the rock, and stretched towards the place where the gun lay.
I must remember something … Bora made a frantic effort to stand, and stumbled back.
The pressure wave and the ear-piercing racket of the train barrelling past a few inches from him knocked him down again.
Flying rocks, dust, heat, the shock of hitting the ground at the foot of the bank – Bora would have wept with the pain, if he could have. In a hallucinatory flash, he imagined that he saw the fluttering of the variegated American tie disfigure the air; but there was nothing there. He slumped down by the trackbed, whimpering through his teeth while the terrible butcher’s cars from the Ukraine, laden with animals bound for the abattoir, took Grimm away, leaving him alive.
He averted his face so as not to see the train thundering by. Not because it was running over Grimm, but because it was carrying innocent animals to slaughter, as millions of human beings had gone to slaughter in the past five years. I’m a witness – I’m a witness – I’m a witness … said the din of the train, scraping along the steel tracks, drowning out everything else.
He dragged himself back into the Olympia. He couldn’t estimate the seriousness of his knee injury. The joint wasn’t broken, he knew that much. The tendons? The ligaments? It hurt like hell, and as his tension relaxed his left arm also began to ache. It will pass, he told himself. It has to pass.
Handfuls of dust and an unbearable heat entered the car from the open windows, from the open door. Sitting in the passenger seat, Bora was embarrassed to find that regaining his breathing was proving such a challenge, and also about the anguish that came upon him. The tracks up ahead seemed like the edge of a world, upon which Death had literally placed its seal. Whose bloody wax was what remained of Florian Grimm, chewed up and dragged along the tracks that led to Berlin.
Providing a nearly unbearable contrast, delicate wild flowers grew at the edge of the trackbed. Wild chicory, hawkweed. The same blooming weeds also grew in Poland and Russia, along mass graves that Bora had photographed unobserved, sinking to his ankles into the soft earth, where taps and roots were intertwined with human hair. Beyond, like a sight inconceivable until this moment, lay the landscape in which he found himself: a serene, undulating horizon, sparsely dotted here and there with houses. He made no effort to try to understand which villages they might be, or which outer suburbs on the city’s furthest periphery.
He closed his eyes. While at the sanatorium, sitting across from his friend Lattmann, the blinding glare had been benign, but now there was no comfort in not being able to see. His next moves, crucial as they were, seemed as out of this world as this sunlit, green area of cottages and fields. I could remain on this side, and not cross over. But going beyond things was what he’d always done, not caring about boundaries.
When he looked up at the sky again, a high, cottony cloud lazily approached the sun; soon it would conceal it, obfuscating for a moment the splendour of the day. The tips of the wild flowers barely vibrated; his breathing, though not the pain, was under control.
Only now did Bora realize that his cap was lying on the gravel road, where he’d lost it earlier. It seemed miles away, but once he was able to bear the pain, he would reach it in four or five steps. Now that the train was speeding indifferently on to its destination, silence fell like an enormously heavy tent collapsing. From the car, Bora detected shreds of red mush and cloth, a shoe, and a more recognizable tattered something ten or so yards further along the railway crossing. He was ready to wager that the conductor, a Ukrainian prisoner of war or ethnic German, dog-tired after the endless trip, hadn’t noticed that he had killed a man. He fought against crying out as he got out of the car. Once he had retrieved his cap, he hobbled around the Olympia to reach the driver’s door, tossed the sweaty cushion on which Grimm had sat into the back, and took his place behind the wheel.
Wearily, he buttoned his tunic. He felt around for and recovered the P38 from the back seat; he then removed this and that object from the glove compartment, pocketing one and tossing the other out of the car.
God help me, he thought, the 2:30 westbound train was what I was trying to remember. Did I count on it, subconsciously? There was nothing else I could count on. Ever since Kupinsky’s neighbour told me about her boyfriend working overtime at the slaughterhouse, I’ve been thinking of those daily trainloads of Ukrainian cattle, at seven and at two thirty … Bora was suddenly horrified by all this. Does Nina know that there are moments like these in my life? How can she not loathe sitting across from me? But maybe Nina loves me because I am bad, loves me only because I need to be loved.
Clenching his teeth against the pain, he started the engine and drove across the railway crossing, and followed the road signs for Berlin. It is by no means certain that I will live through the night, he admitted to himself. Not certain at all. However, the thing must be brought to a head.
The impending storm whose threat he had felt even before landing at Schönefeld stifled the afternoon air. Caught up in all too concrete matters, Bora had tried to ignore it during the last few days. Now, heading for a hospital to have his injury checked, the sensation surged back again. What in God’s name would he tell Nebe? Until this morning, he’d been able to visualize how he’d begin, once he was standing before the man who’d charged him with the investigation: “I have come to the conclusion …” Now, try as he might, the necessary report refused to yield even a first word.
Before re-entering the city limits Bora stopped by a farmhouse, because he spotted a soldier in the yard, an old-timer in the Emergency Corps’s blue-grey uniform. The fatherly type, with a second worldwide war under his belt. Boldly, Bora told him that he needed to clean himself up and straighten out his uniform. Whatever excuse he came up with (“an accident” covered a multitude of credible scenarios when you wore a lieutenant colonel’s collar badge), his appearance spoke for itself. The old man let him in and supplied him with water and towel, and even volunteered to brush his sorry-looking tunic for him.
While he stood by a rickety washstand, washing himself thoroughly with home-made laundry soap, Bora overheard the wife tell the farmer-soldier in the other room, “Poor lad, think what the war has already done to him.”
The earnest words hit home, without offending him. It’s not defeatism when they feel sorry for you. If these folks only knew where I was half an hour ago! In the same day, I have gone from being a crippled army fuckwit to being a poor lad. It has to mean something. The wife made ersatz coffee, which Bora drank gratefully, remaining on his feet. His knee was beginning to swell, and sitting down to drive the rest of the way would be a challenge. Before leaving, he asked the old man to help him transfer some of the extra fuel from the jerrycan into an empty water bottle, so that he could use it later to remove grease and grass stains from his uniform.
Crossing Friedenau, a police patrol stopped him in Schillerplatz, only to let him go again at once. They’d seen him with Grimm before – the licence plate might be known to those guarding the roadblocks and have been given special clearance. His papers and passes did the rest.
Although it was Sunday, at the Red Cross hospital on Landhausstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, Dr Ybarri was on duty. The only sign of his Latin hedonism were a couple of young nurses, better-looking and more sociable than nurses usually were. When he heard that the officer who gave him a ride a few days earlier was waiting outside his door, the Chilean immediately let him in.
Even more than by his frazzled appearance, he was surprised by the fact that Bora addressed him in Spanish. The Germans who had fought in Aragon and Castile during the Civil War had seldom learned to speak it.
He replied, in Spanish, “Que pasò? What on earth happened to you?”
Bora gave him a somewhat modified account of what had
happened, describing it vaguely as an accident. Without adding any details, he said that he’d got hurt in a fall, which to a certain extent corresponded to the truth.
Ybarri studied the bruises on his knuckles. Looking him directly in the eye, he said, “That ecchymosis on your thigh …”, hinting – though he wouldn’t say so explicitly – that he doubted the ridiculous excuse of a fall. “What were you carrying in your pocket?”
Bora was not about to tell him that he’d stored the PPK magazines and chamber rounds there, to hide them from Grimm.
The radiologist didn’t insist on knowing more. He personally radiographed Bora’s left arm and leg, after which he gave him the usual talking-to physicians had reserved for him ever since September: “Don’t tax your knee; there’s a limit to what you can do while you’re convalescing …” – things Bora knew already, and advice he ignored as soon as he could.
He gathered that he had a bad contusion on his left elbow (“But if it goes back to hurting in earnest, it’ll be because of the mutilation”) and a battered and sprained knee.
“It will hamper you for a while, colleague. Ice packs and rest is what you need. I’m going to inject you with a painkiller, and apply a bandage that will allow you to function as best you can. But when you go back to your command, or wherever it is that you work, make sure you see a specialist.”
Nodding in agreement, Bora was already thinking of his regimental surgeon, whose speciality in civilian life was gynaecology.
“Thank you.” The need he had for something to make the pain abate did not keep him from asking, “What’s in it?” when Ybarri readied the hypodermic needle.