Johann didn’t argue, only poured himself some more vodka. It was some vicious Russian stuff, the sort that local women produced out of the aircraft fuel after distilling it in a way only they knew how. Crew chiefs sold it to them, sometimes in exchange for an hour of their favors. Everyone knew; no one court-martialed anyone. It was just how things were on the Eastern Front. Fair barter, is all.
“If I were Paulus, I’d have pulled out with my troops a long time ago, while there was still a chance,” Johann spoke with sudden emotion and repeated what he once heard from Rommel, “everyone knows that if a certain position cannot be held, it must be surrendered. The first thing you learn as a soldier.”
“He did want to pull out,” Rudi remarked casually. “The Führer didn’t let him.”
“How do you know?” Johann straightened suddenly in his seat – an overturned ammunition crate.
“Overheard some commanding-post talk. Don’t repeat it to anyone though. The official line is that our brave generals prefer death to surrender. It was all the same with Rommel in Africa. I heard Rommel said quite a few words to him, too. I won’t be surprised if they replace him soon. You know, with some Parteigenosse, the loyal one.”
“Rommel is the best commander a troop can wish for,” Johann snapped in sudden anger.
“I believe you. I believe that Paulus was a good one, too. That’s why both won’t last long. Only the dishonest survive nowadays.”
Johann sat in silence, which was disturbed only by the cards being thrown on top of the table and the snoring, coming from the pilot in the corner.
“Do you know what Willi told me just days before he died?” He finally spoke, his voice strained and hollow. “He said that he hoped to die before this whole war turns on us and we choke on our own blood.”
“My problem is, I want to live,” Rudi replied, his gaze concentrated on something invisible in the corner. “I want to live too much and I don’t care how this whole affair turns out. I just want to survive, Johann. That’s all I want.”
Eastern Front, Spring 1943
* * *
Johann was falling. Choking on the acrid smoke, pouring into the cockpit, cursing and yanking on a stick that positively refused to cooperate, he was heading straight to the ground, bright yellow with sunflowers right under his smoking belly. He plowed into the golden sea, his propeller chopping the flowers into a fine, sun-stained confetti until it too got buried in the ground and his bird came to a complete halt.
Johann quickly felt about his legs and chest to ensure they were still in one piece, undid his restraining belt and broke into a cold sweat at once at the sight of the instrument panel. In the heat of the battle, which was still in uproar above him, he didn’t realize where exactly he was landing. After consulting his knee-map in a rushed, feverish manner, he cursed loudly under his breath. Behind enemy lines.
He had just started undoing the retaining studs on the aircraft clock – current standing orders strictly prohibited one from leaving the clock inside a crash-landed fighter, for they were in short supply – he quickly abandoned the idea at the sight of the dust rising in the distance. A Soviet military truck, no doubt, to pick him up – alive and very much kicking.
Throwing the canopy open, Johann bolted out of the cockpit without as much as a second glance in the direction of the clock. To hell with it; his life – and freedom – was more important at the moment.
He threw himself into the sea of sunflowers and sprinted through it like he’d last done in basic flying school, where the drill sergeant was a first-class ass and tormented them to near death with exercise and verbal abuse. Johann suddenly recalled how he got punished for helping Wiedmeyer out, refusing to abandon him even after direct orders. The drill sergeant made him stand under the pouring rain for several hours until Willi had finally managed to fetch the Hauptmann who saved him from near collapse.
Now, Johann was a Hauptmann himself. Strange things a frantic mind starts recollecting in the heat of being pursued.
At the edge of the sunflower field, Johann fell on his hands and knees, his chest heaving from such a wild sprint. Damn Willi and his cigarettes – a habit that Johann had picked up from him. He wanted to run forward, charge straight across the open meadow and toward the frontline that he knew was there. With his wide-open eyes scanning the unfamiliar surroundings, Johann finally willed himself to calm down his frantic breathing and crawled back into the comforting embrace of the thick yellow forest around him.
He needed to distract himself from that overpowering desire to run which made him dig his fingers into the soft ground. It looked so safe, so deserted – that emerald idyll in front of him. All instincts shrieked inside for him to charge forward, away from his pursuers. Only, Johann knew better; the enemy was in front of him too, invisible so far, but just as deadly. He lay on his back and stared at the sky, looking for a distraction. He needed to think of something before he went mad from that animalistic fear.
Willi. The sunlight, pouring through the sunflowers, was the exact shade of Willi’s hair – golden and impossibly bright. It was always Johann who picked the fellow up after he had crashed yet another fighter. It was always Johann who reprimanded him for being far too impulsive and reckless, to which Willi, of course, only laughed.
“Well, someone ought to be impulsive and someone ought to be clear-headed,” he would reply with a careless air about him. “Someone ought to be tall, and someone – short. Someone ought to be black, and someone – white. That’s the beauty of the world about us. We’re all different. I don’t quite fancy the Führer’s fantasy where we’re all uniformed, blond warriors, marching to our deaths to his brassy march. Different is much more interesting.”
So, he ought to be the clear-headed one. Survivor’s guilt overwhelming him with its force, Johann covered his face with his hands and burst into tears – for the first time since Willi’s funeral. He cried himself to sleep until the sun came down and the long shadows covered him entirely, hiding him away from the prying eyes.
He woke up at dusk, sultry, humid, and gray. It was time to go home.
With infinite patience, he crawled on his stomach across the endless meadow deciding against running across it – a move that would have certainly saved him a couple of hours but would probably make his life much shorter for his liking. Just as he thought, a Soviet patrol, or scouts perhaps, strode a mere few yards away from him, talking in their strange language and acting quite relaxed and at ease. Johann froze in his place, smelling the remnants of their makhorka cigarettes and the faint odor of their uniforms. He buried his head in the tall grass so that the glimmer of his eyes wouldn’t betray him by some horrifyingly unlucky chance. The men’s guffaws faintly fell on his ears, west of him this time. Still far from the front then. Johann kept crawling, determined and relentless. You’re the clear-headed one, Willi’s reassuring voice sounded in his mind. You’ll survive.
Yes, he would.
He took his respite only when the sun had made its appearance above the woods, looming up ahead. He buried himself among the branches and dirt and slept through the day to continue his way through the night. He crawled around the village with Soviet troops; around the foxholes – thank God, empty, unmanned – until the black muzzle of a very familiar German Mauser poked him in the back.
“Ruki vverkh, Ivan,” Hands up, Ivan, the infantry fellow, who stood above him, calmly said, as though the occasion was nothing new to him.
“I’m a downed German pilot—” Johann had tried to explain but a pair of hands had already yanked him upward, the same muzzle now digging into his stomach.
“Yeah, yeah; whatever you say.” The fellow turned him about and led him forward not bothering with any further replies to the rest of Johann’s pleadings and explanations.
It took quite some time for the local landser company commander to verify his name and identity. At last, after making a call to Johann’s headquarters, he handed Johann back his papers and shook his hand vigorously.
After a bumpy ride home, a mere hour after, Johann was shaking the outstretched hands of his beaming comrades. He laughed when the Gruppe commander brought in a pie, God alone knows where they got it from, with a monstrosity of a candle protruding from its middle.
“We drank to your heroic death last night,” the commander explained, smiling in spite of the tears that shone in his eyes. “So, after the landser gave us a call, we figured we owed you a birthday party.”
He blew the candle and wiped a tear too. He did feel like he had just been reborn. The heavy burden that lay across his heart had been suddenly lifted. He felt as though it was his friend’s invisible hand that led him out of that certain trap. He finally felt Willi near, his guardian angel, who would look after him for as long as he needed him.
Twenty-Five
Germany, Summer 1943
* * *
The sun blinded him as Johann stepped down onto the platform of the unfamiliar train station – a different one from the one on which he and Willi always arrived. To his initial question as to what happened to the old station, a bearded civilian – one of the construction workers – only spat and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.
“The old one? The old one is done for. The Yanks took care of the old one. We are just finishing this one for the people to use.” He measured Johann with his glance and scowled. “Are you from the Luftwaffe or something?”
“Yes, I am,” Johann admitted, lowering his gaze for some reason.
“What of your chief commander Göring then, eh? Shall we call him Meyer now?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Didn’t he say it back in 1939 that if only one bomb falls on Berlin, we can call him Meyer?” The bearded fellow squinted his black eyes slyly.
“I don’t know,” Johann quickly mumbled and rushed past him.
“It’s a sad state of affairs if the Luftwaffe arrives on trains now.” The man’s voice still followed him like a long, spiteful shadow. “Do you fight the war on trains, too? It appears so, judging by the way it goes…”
Johann climbed into the back seat of a taxi cab almost in relief. He looked away from his own shamefaced reflection in the driver’s rearview mirror and pulled on his Knight’s Cross with Swords at his throat in a nervous gesture, much like a lawyer tugging on his tie when he’s losing his case. The driver fixed his eyes on him; Johann could feel their scrutinizing curiosity yet positively refused to turn away from the window. He didn’t need to hear the same taunts from the driver as well. He just wanted some peace and quiet on his leave that was long overdue.
“You’re Hauptmann Johann Brandt, are you not?”
He almost felt like saying no.
“I thought it was you,” the driver continued. His blue eyes crinkled in the corners. “You look much younger than in the pictures. How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three! My son is seventeen. He’ll be drafted soon. I told him to go to the Luftwaffe. Much better than the infantry, isn’t it?”
Johann was suddenly back in Russia, with over forty Ratas charging at him, like a hungry horde, while almost entirely ignoring his squadron. Someone in their Stavka had given them strict orders to eliminate the one that they knew as the Black Knight and whose rudder now sported over two hundred victories – their chief nemesis. They tried; he still won, by the skin of his teeth but he’d won. He took his fighter back to the base flying on fumes only and once he landed, he discovered that he couldn’t undo his restraining straps because his hands trembled like those of a bad drunkard. Lutter, his crew chief, pulled him out of the cockpit and almost carried him to his tent. Commander Körner walked in and asked what happened. Nothing. Jumped on him all at once, the louts. Körner lit a cigarette, offered him one; Johann refused absent-mindedly. Should they give him a different fighter? You know… one without any victory bars on it perhaps? Johann shook his head deliberately. He deserved every one of those victory bars and that cross and those swords. He wouldn’t forfeit them so easily. They were all he had left to show for his empty, miserable life; to prove to himself that it wasn’t all in vain…
“Yes, I suppose it is better,” he conceded at last.
“That’s what I told him,” the taxi driver went on. “How’s the front? Holding?”
Johann nodded stiffly.
“That’s good. You’re waiting for the secret weapons, aren’t you? You wait a bit more. The Führer said, he’ll send them to you very soon and we’ll win the war. Who knows, maybe my boy will be flying with you in peacetime already?”
Perhaps, Johann thought. After the armistice. No, after the armistice they won’t be flying. They’ll all be lying dead in the ground. Is there really such big difference between the Luftwaffe and the infantry then?
“Yes, he’ll see the world as a pilot, I told him. He’ll go to France, and to Holland, and to Spain, and to Italy, and to Africa perhaps. Didn’t you serve in Africa before the Eastern Front?”
“Yes, I did. In France, too. In Greece…” Johann’s eyes didn’t see the streets in front of them anymore. Only the airbases where he’d been stationed. And instead of the driver’s face, the faces of his comrades who had died.
“You saw the world.”
“Yes. Only not like I thought I would.”
It was an illusion, that previous life. A damned illusion that they had put before their innocent eyes and filled their heads with lies which they had sold for truth. They’d promised them the riches of the world, the greatest feats, the wonders, and eternal youth; charlatans from the state-fair dressed in the state officials’ clothes.
“They’d promised us we’d see the world. For free,” Johann spoke slowly, his fingers tracing the lines of the invisible map on the taxi cab window. “They didn’t lie. We got our free board and foreign travel. They didn’t mention anything about a state funeral though; I suppose it was a surprise bonus.”
The driver stopped at Willi’s family’s house – Johann knew nowhere else to go in Berlin – and had refused to take any money from the war hero. Johann nearly choked on the sudden bitter emotion; he was no war hero. He didn’t know what he was anymore.
Thrusting a pack of cigarettes into the driver’s hands as a payment, Johann stepped outside into the blinding afternoon. He hadn’t laid his eyes on it for almost a year and now he stared at it as though seeing it for the first time. He didn’t know what he’d expected – to find it bombed out, in a shambles perhaps? But it was as eternal as summer itself, proud and untouched, without as much as a scratch on it; a suspicious mirage after all the devastation that Johann had seen in the past eleven months.
He stood on the porch for what felt like an eternity; knocked on the door. Frau von Sielaff opened it, broke into a tearful, delicate smile and pulled him close at once, to bury her face in the same uniform that her son had worn.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you personally after…” Johann couldn’t finish the sentence. Something hard, hot, and unbearably hurtful was blocking his throat all of a sudden.
“It’s all right; it’s all right.” Willi’s mother’s gentle hands pulled, bent his stiff and unyielding neck after all, in the eternally motherly gesture and he wept on her shoulder as she rocked him softly in her arms, repeating like an ancient chant, “my poor boys… you poor, innocent babies…”
Poor innocent babies… Wasn’t that what they called the new replacement pilots at the front, already pitying them for they wouldn’t survive for too long and they knew it? The doomed generation, all of them.
A door burst open on the second floor and Mina appeared at the top of the stairs, straight as an arrow, her hand slowly moving to her quivering lips. She r
ushed down the stairs and caught him in her arms as he was falling onto his knees before her, for she was the only deity left for him to worship; for all the other ones, in which he had been made to believe, had turned out to be false.
“Forgive me, please…”
“For what, you silly thing?”
“For everything.”
She let him cry over everything – her brother, their life, the future lost – and only then took him upstairs. “I must introduce you to someone very important.”
Johann stood, silent and uncomprehending, in front of the wooden crib, from which Mina took a fussing wrap, with two pink fists and a small face he could see wrapped in the blanket in the crook of her arm.
“You didn’t write to me…” he stumbled upon the words, staring at the child blankly. “Is it a boy? He looks like you.”
Mina shook her head with a soft smile. “I did write to you. It’s not ours. Willi’s and Lotte’s. I have him now. I guess, the letter didn’t reach you in time.”
“Why do you have him?”
“Lotte died.” Stunned, her husband waited for an explanation. Mina wetted her lips, parted them as though to say something, something about the hospital and their former BDM leader Erika and Lotte blaming Willi’s death on the damned Nazis and tearing the portrait of Der Führer and hurling the tear-stained, hate-filled remains of it into Erika’s face. Something about the summons to the Gestapo headquarters, Charlotte’s red eyes and pale mouth pursed into a hard line after she made Mina promise to take care of her son. Something about formal adoption and having to sit through hours of interrogations by a narrow-faced, chinless official wearing glasses in a metal frame whom she had to persuade that hers was a suitable family to raise a child; something about parroting familiar postulates of National Socialism which she had learned by heart during her BDM days. Something about managing to get good flowers for the funeral – they did allow Mina and her mother to collect the body from the morgue; something General von Sielaff pulled despite not being present in Berlin but on the Eastern front instead. Some old friend owed a favor as ordinarily the Gestapo frowned upon convicted enemies of the State being buried like decent citizens.
Of Knights and Dogfights Page 24