Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  Göring’s bunker, Jodl’s bunker, Keitel’s bunker – they almost walked right past the historic spot where the bomb went off. There wasn’t much left of the barracks where Hitler, in steelrimmed glasses, had held his briefings; you could still make out the foundations. Jonathan thought of the photos of Hitler’s valet showing journalists the Führer’s tattered trousers, a general’s bandaged head, and the photo of Mussolini – Hitler picking him up from the station, telling him how lucky he’d just been, again, it had been Providence, and so forth. Bormann in the background, triumphant.

  Not far away: Hitler’s bunker. Fifteen tons of dynamite hadn’t managed to get the better of it – it had only listed slightly to one side, and thus it stood and would still be standing in a thousand years.

  A Polish boy ran up and beckoned to them: here, there was a hidden entrance around the back, he could lead them in, no one had ever been inside. None of the three had any enthusiasm for a dangerous tour of discovery.

  Jonathan photographed a few more curiosities. Graffiti – HITLER KAPUT! – and a few thin branches, propped up against the sloping concrete wall of a demolished bunker, as if forestalling its collapse. A school class must have arranged them at an art teacher’s behest: a joke, to show that mankind will always transcend history and may even do so with a light heart.

  Jonathan found it amusing that a state-owned plastic waste-paper basket had been installed right next to Hitler’s bunker.

  •

  Jonathan pocketed a lump of wall: he would take it home for his girlfriend, Ulla. A shame that the famous film Hitler had made of the conspirators’ strangulation was no longer extant. This document as part of the cruelty exhibition, showing non-stop on a loop in a black-curtained cabinet, for an additional admission fee? After all, the cameramen must have applied the aesthetic rules of their work in this film too: close-up, pan and zoom.

  The rain had stopped. They were almost at the exit when the omnibus fellowship came walking towards them, the ladies and gentlemen they had already encountered at the Marienburg and in Sensburg. Invigorated by the audio-visual presentation, they were now excited to be inspecting this place to which, back in the glory days, they would not have been granted access.

  The car was still there. The two Poles had joined the woman in the campervan; they could be heard laughing, and shortly afterwards the vehicle started rocking rhythmically from side to side.

  Outside, the bus driver had sat down on a bench with a vacuum flask and some cheese sandwiches. Hansi Strohtmeyer asked if he might take a look at the driver’s cab. He was even allowed to turn on the engine and drive a couple of metres forward and back, he who had roared across African deserts and been stranded in a South American river. This experience far surpassed the viewing of stacks of concrete. Quick, though, switch it off again – it would not be good if a militsiya man came along and asked to see his driving licence.

  •

  When they finally drove off, Jonathan thought he saw his father standing in the entrance to one of the bunkers. Had he taken shelter there? How much longer would this go on?

  18

  Late that evening they got back to Danzig, which already felt familiar to them somehow – ‘all those dear little alleyways’, as Anita Winkelvoss put it. The tourism general was waiting for them because of the stolen car; he was dreadfully sorry, he said, the whole thing was a terrible embarrassment for him. His motherland had suffered a blow to its reputation; but it was one eight-cylinder car the richer, just as it would be the richer for the twenty-six journalists who would soon be driving along its shaded country roads (which belonged to Poland, now and for ever) and spending lots of money.

  There was news of Herr Schmidt, the sophisticated gourmet: alas, he couldn’t come at all now. Wasn’t that just typical! Mess up all the arrangements, then make yourself scarce. Had Jonathan, perhaps, made any notes about the menus?

  Walking up the steps to the Pod Łososiem restaurant, they felt like extras in the nostalgic film The Punch Bowl. The atmosphere was dignified, with music from a band calling itself ‘Hot Chocolades’. A beggar who tried to follow them with an outstretched hand was turned away by the doorman.

  Bread soup with sausage, a portion of eel or fillet of zander – that was the question. Hansi stuck to piwo and Anita Winkelvoss to a yellow likier, namely Bananowy Havana Club at one hundred and fifty zlotys a glass. Once again she informed the baffled waiter that the dry wine was too sweet for her. Tomorrow they would be home! That put her in a good mood.

  Jonathan didn’t stay for the end of the farewell party; he left to chase his phantom. That knee, sticking out from under the blanket: a sign, surely? ‘Come again’?

  But he couldn’t find the slip of paper on which he had noted the street; it had gone missing when the car was stolen. He wandered up and down the alleyways like an Italian tenor singing, ‘Maria, carissima Maria!’ But he failed to find the house. The alleyways made him feel even more as if he had strayed into a film, with the full moon and a steamer honking in the distance, and his adventurous spirit dissipated.

  What a pity, Jonathan thought as he got into bed. I really could have helped those people.

  And he went through all the things he could have sent them; and then he would have brought them to Germany and sat in Blankenese with Maria, a mountain of ice cream with a little paper umbrella on top, feasting on her amazement at the ships slowly sailing down the Elbe, and they would have sat there so comfortably, eating their ice cream – she would never have experienced anything like it.

  What would she think of him when the medicine didn’t arrive? ‘Typical Westerner,’ they would say. ‘Smug and selfish.’

  •

  After breakfast they got into an argument over whether they should drive on to Stutthof, a concentration camp that didn’t appear in any encyclopaedia.

  ‘Oh, no, that’s taking things too far,’ said Frau Winkelvoss, who had flown halfway round the world to get herself a child. She’d had a teacher who had talked incessantly, for years, about all that Jewish stuff, always showing those terrible pictures. That had been enough for her, thank you. And then she proceeded to talk about how the Germans had shot Jews in Poland and had even gone on to gas them in Auschwitz.

  But Hansi Strohtmeyer stuck to his guns: although the camp wasn’t directly on the route, they should at least ‘offer’ it to those who came on the rally. And to do that they had to drive there and check out the parking situation and whether you could go to the toilet or grab a snack. There were bound to be those journalists who would just be waiting for them to forget the concentration camp – and then they’d write in their newspapers that the Santubara Company with its automated vehicle-manufacturing plant was ignoring the Holocaust. No – he glanced at his black watch, which had two dials, was waterproof, and still showed the precise time even at a depth of thirty metres – he was going to drive to Stutthof now; she could stay in the hotel and settle up.

  That was fine with Frau Winkelvoss. She took her shoes off under the table, lit a cigarette and ordered a ‘citron natur’, as she called it, for which she was given fizzy lemonade. She sorted through the amber jewellery she had bought on their trip, even though she didn’t actually like amber, and watched the people from the homeland association crowd into the hotel shop to make a few last purchases. How extraordinary that they didn’t have plates with coats of arms on here either!

  The question now was whether Jonathan should go with Hansi. He was caught on the horns of a tricky dilemma: look for Maria or go to the concentration camp? He was inclined towards Maria, but he couldn’t risk skipping the camp. Five thousand marks, negotiable? This was an opportunity to find a totally unexpected angle for his article. There was no getting out of Stutthof.

  It was already nine o’clock – high time to get going, as they were supposed to return home that afternoon. So off they drove in their freshly washed vehicle – which, strangely, had been scratched by a nail all along its side. The technic
ians in their grey outfits waved to them, and this time Jonathan sat in front. Hansi Strohtmeyer set the route book aside; the road led straight on, pot-holes or no, and even a journalist who didn’t have the first idea about driving could figure that one out if he needed to.

  •

  They didn’t talk much. Whatever awaited them wasn’t going to be a picnic.

  They passed through places that had once had very curious names, as Jonathan could see from his old map: ‘Haystall’ and ‘Beansack’, ‘New World’ and ‘Squirefield’. They drove over a green-painted swing bridge, then had to take a ferry across the Weichsel. A Düsseldorf-registered Mercedes with tinted windows was already on board; a man and a woman, in tinted spectacles, elderly people dressed in pale grey and white who knew that this was a ferry from the German era and informed each other of this fact so loudly that everyone was forced to hear. The Poles couldn’t even manage to construct a new ferry!

  Jonathan had looked it up. This Weichsel crossing had been a bottleneck in those January days in 1945. This was where the Wehrmacht’s wood-gas cars had given their all and farmers had whipped their horses. And this was where British bombers had carried out their mission to finish off the remaining refugees, people already under fire from Red Army tanks as they tried to escape to the opposite bank with their chests of drawers and their grandfather clocks. The gentlemen had sat in the cockpits in their smart leather outfits, smoking Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, nice and warm and dry, Dunkirk still fresh in their minds. They’d pointed down below: how many bombs have we got left? Come on, let’s fly over one last time and show the rabble down there what comes of voting for a criminal like Hitler. Ninety-eight per cent for Germany? Here you go. And the best of it was, they didn’t even hit the ferry.

  Hansi Strohtmeyer took the route book and made an entry saying that although there was no bridge here a ferry shuttled back and forth, and there was no need to get annoyed if it was just setting off when you rushed up, drenched in sweat, because it would come straight back again – if it was running, that is.

  The Vistula Spit. Ah, the curved lines of spume foaming incessantly towards the shore, the storm-tattered pines. The things they could do with tourism here, said Hansi Strohtmeyer – they could be raking it in without even getting their hands dirty. Forget about the shipyard in Danzig. Cafes, hotels, restaurants, horses for hire to gallop along the beach . . . And he made some notes about where you might build such a hotel, and (more quietly) started totting up his savings to see whether he had enough to do it someday.

  Jonathan had thought the spit was at least ten kilometres wide; that was what it looked like on the map. Now he saw that it was just a single road with a strip of land on either side. And here, on this narrow spit, the refugees had trotted up and down after the death march over the frozen lagoon, all escape routes blocked. They hadn’t been able to get through to Danzig or Pillau. And so they stood packed together, day after day, night after night, staring up at the sky.

  •

  In Stutthof they had a pleasant surprise, as Hansi Strohtmeyer put it: the concentration camp was shut. A sign on the door said CLOSED TODAY, which was something of a godsend, they both thought. No need to look around these barracks and the torture bench in the museum as well and then be picked on by the museum guide because, as Germans, they were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

  Hansi Strohtmeyer rattled the gate and squinted through the bars. Nothing to be done about it. He was peering into the compound the way people back then must have yearned to get out.

  The Düsseldorf Mercedes with the tinted windows pulled up nearby, and the man and woman got out. God knows what they were doing here. Perhaps the man had been with the SS and had ridden along the beach back then, with the prisoners doffing their caps.

  No, the situation was quite different. The woman was the focus here. She’d been a prisoner and had worked in the laundry; that was how she’d escaped with her life. They’d made the long trip specially, she told Hansi Strohtmeyer, from Connecticut to Germany. Couldn’t they, between them, persuade the camp to make an exception? She talked and talked while the man circled the Japanese Santubara car, inspecting it with a disagreeable expression. He traced the tip of his finger along the scratch.

  ‘No, it’s closed today,’ said a Pole who came shuffling up the path. A delegacja from Hungary had wanted to survey the remains of the camp in peace and quiet, so they couldn’t visit or make notes about anything. Five marks didn’t get them anywhere either. He had a few German banknotes, the Pole said: they looked very odd to him; were they still legal tender? No, they weren’t; they were so-called ‘Rentenmarks’, issued in 1934, and could be thrown away with a clear conscience; not even a homeland museum would take them. The couple in their tinted Mercedes couldn’t have helped either. They had already driven off.

  When the man realized there was nothing he could do with the money – that he’d been conned – he uttered a quite disgusting curse, which they could only assume was directed at them. There was nothing to be done.

  •

  ‘You know what?’ said Hansi Strohtmeyer. ‘If we can’t get in here, at least let’s drive to your father.’

  Jonathan responded firmly in the negative. He couldn’t ask that of him; and why rake up all the old stories? Anyway, wasn’t it far too late already? Would they still make the flight?

  A bunker overlooking the water, right by Kahlberg; that was what he’d been told. A single bomb: ‘Your father knew nothing about it, he died instantly . . .’ And Jonathan didn’t want to go there, but he had no say in the matter. Hansi Strohtmeyer wouldn’t be talked out of his idea, which had come to him the previous night. He turned the big car around, and they slowly drew closer. God knows, it wasn’t far. These few extra kilometres wouldn’t make any difference; the excess barely registered on the test vehicle’s digital display. And whereas before he had been almost silent, Hansi Strohtmeyer now started talking in detail about races in which he had taken part. It had been in Africa that he’d heard of a black farmer who had planted nothing but melons in the year of the rally because he’d thought the racing drivers and journalists passing through his village would be eager for refreshment. The man had put all his money and a year’s work into the melon field, had set out his tables – and then? Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, and it was all over. Half an hour of thundering, not a single melon sold.

  •

  In Krynica Morska, or Kahlberg, there were a few pretty little houses with green-painted verandas facing the street and gladioli next to the fence. Germans had lived here once, ordinary people; they were little German houses with German verandas, painted green. Perhaps the corner house had been the commandant’s office, where wireless operators had sat at drop-leaf tables receiving the final orders. Perhaps a German lieutenant had sat there, wondering whether he still had any chance of getting away.

  It wasn’t hard to get their bearings. At the crossroads they turned left down to the water. They could already hear and smell the Baltic Sea. Hansi Strohtmeyer used to zip across it in a speedboat if he happened to have time between one race and the next. Jonathan had no memories of the Baltic. When he was a child he and his uncle used to go to the North Sea, year after year, to Langeoog, with kite, bucket and spade. Then, years later, he had met Ulla Bakkre de Vaera there, early one morning at the bookshop where he’d gone to buy his newspapers. She had been the one who initiated their relationship; and those had been good times, so unaccustomed and easy. He thought of his girlfriend’s black shorts with their split side-seams, but they aroused no feelings in him.

  The only constant in life is chance, thought Jonathan.

  Yellow- and blue-painted fishing boats lay on the beach; men were loading them up with nets. Their ultrasound had registered a few fish swimming twenty degrees north-northwest. The fishes’ gills would catch in the nets; small and big fish would be plucked out, bellies slit, guts removed, and the pretty ladies in spotless fish shops would want their f
illet fresh, and they’d be fried up in butter.

  Hansi Strohtmeyer let Jonathan walk ahead of him like a diviner; he kept a close eye on him to make sure he didn’t break off and say something like, ‘This is pointless, you know.’ They hadn’t made this detour for him to do that. Hansi Strohtmeyer wasn’t assuming Jonathan knew the exact location of the bunker his father had been sitting in when it occurred to him to step out into the night: smoke a cigarette, flick the lighter and it was all over. He was following Jonathan to make him go on searching. Surely instinct would lead him to the spot where his father had perished.

  Jonathan really didn’t know where it was. He heard the water and the seagulls, saw the fishermen. He’d never listened properly when he was told: a bunker in the dunes, right at the water’s edge, that’s where your father was killed. What had been more interesting was that there hadn’t been much of him left: they’d picked up the silver Wound Badge, and a shoe lying in the marram grass.

  Jonathan forced himself to think of the Wehrmacht lieutenant who was his father: field cap with fold, breeches. A stranger, yet so close, still here – here again. A hard, unshaven cheek against his cheek, and the suitcase full of diaries and letters in Uncle Edwin’s attic in Bad Zwischenahn, unopened to this day. His father was a dead man who sensed that, right here and now, someone was gathering up his final seconds on this earth; a dead man who rose now out of the warm mud where he had lain, had slept for so long. A soul now looking across to see: was it him they meant? Or was it, perhaps, a mistake? What was his connection with the young man down there, hair blown forward by the wind, now striding up to the spot where it had happened all those years ago, where the lightning flash had torn off his head and atomized his limbs.

  Jonathan was prepared to shout, ‘It was here!’ just to put an end to the traipsing through the sand, but that wouldn’t have worked; Hansi Strohtmeyer wouldn’t have accepted it. He was growing more watchful by the minute. He wanted to know, precisely.