The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  “You need it.”

  “Yes, but what is it?”

  “I’m sure they gave it to you after that.” Ybarri pointed at Bora’s prosthesis with his chin.

  “Does it have a name? I need to function in the next several hours.”

  The needle went in. “It’s pethidine, and you’ll function just fine.”

  Minutes later Ybarri, who wanted to step out for a smoke, escorted him out of the radiology ward. Before they left each other he asked Bora, using the confidentiality of their shared Spanish, “Dìgame, colega … have you heard anything about the little blonde we shared the car with – Staff Leader Pletsch?”

  “No.”

  “She’s a pretty one.” The Chilean tutted. “I was hoping … Bueno, I gave her my phone number, but she never called.”

  Bora answered in German, with a German’s stolid seriousness. “Well, she may be a good girl. There are some, you know.”

  The hospital dispensary was his next stop, to secure more aspirin. That was what Ybarri had advised, although Bora, of his own accord, also enquired about pethidine.

  “Dolantin?” the medic at the counter asked. “It’s an opium-based analgesic, Lieutenant Colonel. It works well, but I wouldn’t drive after taking it.” Was that really true? It meant that Bora had better get into the car before the medicine started to have its effect.

  4:55 P.M.

  Bora entered the Leipziger Hof doing his best not to limp. With a scowl, he silenced whatever question might have been on the hotel clerk’s lips. Lifts were unreliable in wartime, so he had to climb to his fourth-floor corner room, where he washed thoroughly, careful not to dampen his bandaged knee. Aside from the bruises on his hand, impossible to conceal, he was presentable; the welt behind his left ear, where Grimm had roundly punched him, would evade a cursory glance. The problem was that the pethidine would start working within minutes, and he was beginning to feel nauseous and numb. He put his head under the running cold water in the sink, if nothing else to wake himself up. His day was like a tightly woven piece of cloth, in the middle of which a ragged hole represented what had happened at the railway crossing. He couldn’t go there with his mind, if he wanted to avoid panic. More than anything, he had to avoid thinking altogether, because three unavoidable rendezvous still lay ahead. They would require every ounce of psychological energy that he had.

  I must be mad. Only this morning I was ready to impregnate a girl I’d barely met, to leave something of me behind. I will leave nothing behind.

  After changing, he spent almost half an hour monitoring his nausea (was it the painkiller? Was it fear?). It worried him that his clarity of mind was starting to wane along with the pain. He knew enough about the effects of mind-altering substances to realize that they varied greatly. In the next hour, he could fall asleep or turn hyperactive (or belligerent). He had to keep calm, to stop thinking about the day. He sat by the window, nervously leafing through his diary, until he stopped at a random page written nearly two years earlier, when things in Russia were still going well but he must for some reason have been homesick.

  In the photo of her first wedding, I remember, my eighteen-year-old mother looks like a little girl. But a serious, grave little girl. At forty-eight, my father looks like Tsar Nicholas II or King George V, Nicholas’s cousin. Thick, impeccable dark hair and beard. The picture taken five years later, at her second wedding, shows Nina still looking serious, and exceedingly beautiful in my eyes. My 47-year-old stepfather beams in his new uniform of a major general – he’d just been promoted. Bareheaded, his cropped hair is already grey. In both cases, a whole generation separates the bridal couple. I’m thinking of how Max Kolowrat might have fit into the intervening years; according to his biographic note, he was only five years older than Nina. When Dikta and I, on my parents’ insistence, celebrated our religious wedding eleven days after the civil one, war was already in the offing. My friend Bruno, who acted as my best man, took the only photograph of the ceremony – I have it before me – as we walked out of the army chapel: Dikta in a pearl-coloured gown, myself in my cavalry captain’s uniform (that, too, a recent promotion). Sunday, 27 August 1939. Although she is blonde, Dikta and I strangely resemble each other, as if we were brother and sister. I never noticed that before. We are apparently smiling for the camera, when in fact we’d just told each other something extremely intimate, which we were in a hurry to try out.

  Had he really written such things? The firm, quick handwriting read like the last will and testament of a bygone world. Everything, everything falls apart.

  Bora felt better after throwing up in the toilet bowl. He then turned to the first available blank space (he could not afford to waste even half a single page in a nearly full diary), and wrote:

  16 July 1944, 5:58 p.m. I’ll keep any comment about the case entrusted to me for later. Most importantly, even if everything else falls apart, I cannot; I have to remember that. I reproach myself all the more for seducing Emmy, in a fit of male egotism – a poor girl who was too embarrassed to open her legs and had to have a couple of drinks to muster her courage before coming up to my room. It’s not surprising that she fell fast asleep afterwards, which is generally the post-coital prerogative of the callous male. I only hope that she will give herself to someone who is worth it.

  This morning, back from the Osthafen and wandering among the ruins, I discovered several lumps of white phosphorus, which had leaked from incendiary bombs. It’s surprising how harmless they seem, resembling amber. There’s a lesson in all this. I carefully stored a couple of them inside the small medicine bottle I’ve been carrying since my last visit to Uncle’s clinic.

  And as for taking “something”, I’ll be damned if the pain in my knee is not coming back. I’m alert, but running at 50 per cent of my normal lucidity.

  At 6:15 p.m., he had the boxes containing Niemeyer’s papers loaded into the boot of the Olympia. At 6:30, as requested by Bora during his call from the phone booth that morning, Namura stopped by to return the letter he’d entrusted to him. They parted ways wishing each other good luck, without believing in it. By 6:40, Bora was ready to sketch a first draft of the report for Arthur Nebe. At 7:00, he phoned downstairs for a typewriter. He refused the hotel typist (not only because of the nature of the report, but because the last person he wanted to see was some girl who’d remind him of Emmy Pletsch). He typed the text himself, quickly enough, but in his haziness making mistakes and having to start over again.

  At 8:16, he was done. Grimm usually came off duty at 8 p.m., so it’d be some time before they missed him at Alexanderplatz. Surely, his wife had no ready access to a telephone; accustomed as she must be to his absences and delays, she would not ask his colleagues about him until the following day. When Bora rang Nebe’s office, his number was busy. At the switchboard, one of his assistants answered. Instead of forwarding the call to the chief, he walked away from the phone, so that for several minutes Bora had good reason to fear all sorts of dramatic consequences.

  He was, on the contrary, given an appointment for 9 p.m., as on his first evening in Berlin. No advice on what precautions he should take or which entrance he should use. Bora slipped the report inside an unused folder he found among Niemeyer’s papers, and left the hotel.

  Outside, the sultriness had not given way, despite the evening hour. In Italy, under this arcing light, cicadas refined their chirring calls and scents intensified. Here, the city air smelled of soft asphalt and quenched fires. In the clear, dry, paper-white western sky, anvil-shaped clouds rose vertically to a great height. Who knows where they came sailing in from. Before nightfall a violent rain might pour down from them, onto the western quarters.

  A surprise awaited him at Kripo headquarters. General Nebe was still busy, no interviews with him were possible before one in the morning. One in the morning? Well, there was a war going on. Bora was glad to walk away without having to answer questions about Florian Grimm. Only after he got into the Olympia with his stiffening, sore leg,
did it occur to him that at this very moment Nebe might be ordering raids on the workplaces and homes of defiant officers and politicians. A terrifying prospect, yet nothing he could avert or control. He would plod along until someone stopped him. Spreading along the western horizon, the tall clouds covered the sinking sun, in an anticipation of dusk that dissolved shadows only to create a deeper twilight.

  Bora went back to his hotel, reopened the folder with his final report, and then restlessly dozed until the time he had to go and meet Benno von Salomon.

  CORNER OF LUTHERSTRASSE AND AUGSBURGER STRASSE, 11 P.M.

  At this hour, there was no one loitering in front of Otto Horcher’s famous restaurant. In the narrow glare of the headlights, Salomon stood in the same civilian clothes he’d worn at the restaurant days earlier, as well as a boater which, from its tight weave and buttery colour, was evidently Italian. With him, he had a small and seemingly brand-new suitcase. For some reason, although they’d agreed to meet alone, he hesitated when he saw Bora on his own in the car. No witnesses, he was probably thinking, which would make him apprehensive. Bora motioned to Salomon to climb into the back seat, but as soon as he had placed his suitcase there, Bora reprehended him with a sharp politeness: “No, Colonel. Get into the front, with me.”

  A jittery Salomon obeyed. He was sitting where, for days, Bora had ridden at Grimm’s side. He immediately rolled up the window, as if fearful that someone might grab or hit him from outside. A scent of blooming trees, deeper now that it was night and a gentle rain was starting to fall, continued to flow in from the wide-open window on Bora’s side.

  Starting out, he had the itinerary clearly in his mind; having travelled the route only once before, years ago, he was nevertheless sure that he had to get to Tegel and cross the Fliess to head north, skirting the city limits. Aside from the damage wrought by bombs on the city streets, for his purpose it was best to avoid the main thoroughfares, which were more likely to be patrolled. An alternative – unlikely because of its length – was to follow the old army route to Döberitz, south of the Olympic Village, take the state highway in Staaken to the crossroads north of Spandau, and head north-north-east. In the less populated periphery of the city, Lattmann said, it was possible to run into shady characters, escaped prisoners, or fully armed individuals who took it upon themselves to make the rounds of their neighbourhoods. None of them alarmed Bora in the least. Being pressed for time did.

  “Where are we going?” Salomon tried to sound confident, but his voice was barely above a croaky whisper.

  “Trust me.”

  “Yes, but where are we going?”

  Bora would not say. He was in pain and had no time to lose, and did not feel like pandering to his passenger. There had been other times – the last time was outside Rome, at the end of March – when he’d found himself driving at night with a terrified man at his side. It all came down to creating an emotional distance between himself and his actions.

  “Take a tranquillizer if you wish.”

  Salomon’s heart must have sunk at the contemptuous words. He gloomily searched his pockets, then kept mum for ten minutes or so, trying to make out familiar landmarks outside his window. When he lost his sense of direction, he could no longer contain himself.

  “We’re definitely leaving Berlin. We’re leaving Berlin, aren’t we?”

  In fact, it was one of the suburban woods, although it resembled open country. No more pavements or street corners marked with phosphorescent paint. Their reasonably smooth progress was the only thing that suggested that they were still following a well-maintained gravel road. Bora stubbornly kept himself to himself. He would not allow any questions. What he’d do next, he himself hadn’t really decided yet, save the fact that he would not take Salomon back.

  “We’re leaving town – definitely. Definitely.” A short pause, and then the colonel removed his boater. “My good-luck hat,” he mumbled, as if by way of an apology, and carefully placed it in the back with his suitcase. Whatever he added was inaudible, a mere attempt to fill the agonizing silence between them. Bora knew Salomon was afraid of him, and ignored him. Focused on keeping to the route in the dark, he thought of things very remote from here. He thought he’d emerged from his drug-induced numbness, but his sense of direction was severely affected. Fragmentary recollections floated inside him, impossible to make out. The slaughterhouse cars speeding on, Grandfather’s forbidden books, light and shadow contraposed in the room where Stauffenberg stood … Emmy, who left without having a chance to make a son with him. Would I be feeling better tonight, if we had done it? Probably not. Probably – no, surely – I would start worrying about her already, and God knows I have no need of that. When, at the tail end of a convoluted series of unspoken thoughts, Salomon muttered, “I was joking when I said that I was on to you in Ukraine: I know nothing about you, nothing about what you might have done,” Bora slammed on the brakes. Although they were not travelling at high speed, the sudden halt jerked the colonel forwards, so that his forehead struck the windscreen.

  If he had ever considered pitying him, Bora now confronted a demented urge to kill. He physically ached with it, pain on top of the pain he already felt. For a moment, he needed to kill just to stop hurting.

  “Hand me your papers,” he ordered him. “You furlough papers, your travel passes, your pay-book – everything. Do not make me ask twice.”

  “But – I can’t get around without them.”

  “You will not get around.”

  Bora hadn’t taken into account the possibility that Salomon would try to fling the door open and jump out into the night. It was by accident that, sliding on the wet road as it braked, the car had come to a halt at the edge of the road, where a large tree blocked the passenger’s escape. Salomon kept pushing at the door in vain.

  “Hand me your papers.”

  Dejectedly, the colonel took out a batch of documents held together by a rubber band. Bora told him to hold them up one by one. He shone his torch on them to make sure none was missing.

  “I’m a dead man without them,” Salomon protested.

  “You’re a dead man with them, Colonel. You’re a deserter.”

  Until now, they’d avoided this indisputable fact. At any roadblock or railway crossing, a uniformed man driving after curfew with a colonel in civilian clothes, whose furlough papers indicated a destination different from the one they were following, would raise immediate suspicion. Depending on those manning the block, it could mean immediate arrest or being hanged on the spot, for both travellers. Salomon sank into his seat. As for Bora – under the lingering effect of the medication he was angry and lacking the lucidity he needed. But it’s because I’m not lucid that I’m doing this in the first place.

  Following country lanes, through a lonely spot he assumed was somewhere in the Tegel forest, he realized he’d taken a wrong turn. Twice already he’d had to back out of side streets, having missed the turn-off. Outside it was pitch-dark; the headlights caught the rainfall in a weepy, reduced field of vision, as when you’re squinting. Bora engaged the reverse gear, without knowing whether they’d fall off the side of the road, into a ditch or the Havel, in this moist flatland criss-crossed by canals, ponds, sparse woods.

  Whatever concoction Salomon had gulped down, it seemed to have made him fall asleep, but when the car trundled over a rocky swell in reverse he sat up with a start. He looked right and left, but he couldn’t see anything. A clump of pale, dripping young trees swung in front of the car when Bora veered off course. A few insect sounds came faintly through the open window. They could be a hundred miles from the closest inhabited place. Not a home in sight. A wooden fence surged like a set of long teeth from the shadows.

  Further on, a solitary road sign alerted Bora that they would soon come to a bridge, certain to be patrolled at this hour. Once more he reversed. Salomon buried his face in his hands: a motion desolate enough to arouse compassion, had Bora not known him in Russia only a year earlier, with his shot nerves and a
bsurd superstitions. The man now acting so helplessly was the same commander who had made him oversee the hanging of partisans and saboteurs. Onegin, one of them was called. Bora still begrudged the day. Summer of ’43, his brother had just died, and the unwelcome order of executing a Russian peasant had soiled his bereavement and his grief with a redress not his own.

  Hermsdorf. At last, they were travelling once more towards their destination. Bora confidently navigated the suburban lanes and byways in the wooded landscape, until the time came to reduce the speed; he proceeded slowly, as if on the lookout for a special spot, slowing down more and more, and then came to a complete stop.

  Salomon was too unsteady to control the pitch of his voice. “Where are we? Bora, where are we?”

  “Get out of the car,” Bora instructed him. When there was no response, he alighted and walked around to open the passenger door. “Now, then, Colonel. Out of the car with you.”

  “No.” Salomon baulked. “I will not get out. I will not.”

  “I’ll pull you out if you don’t.”

  Salomon refused to budge. Crumpled and stiff in his seat, it’d take two men to drag him out.

  Bora said, “As God is my witness, I will count to three.” What he meant to do then, Salomon understood when the muzzle of the P38 met his ear. Petrified, at this point he would not even fight to save his life. He slumped there, feeling horribly sorry for himself.

  Bora yanked him out by the arm. “Do not make a spectacle of yourself.” With his left shoulder, he pinned Salomon to the car so that he could not sprint away, took out his torch and switched it on.

  Above them, out of the wet, scented night, stone spirals and bizarre animal shapes floated into view, marking an archway both exotic and monstrous, the entrance to a ghoulish graveyard. From the dark beyond the gate, high up as if suspended in air, a second torch winked back. Then both were turned off.