“I’ll tell them that I’ll refuse to accept it if they refuse to award you together with me,” he declared.
They flew to Germany as the frontline was rather close to it now. Ju-52 landed in a fortified military airbase not too far from Berlin and the two sat in silence in the back seat of an army transport that slowly navigated its way among the rubble, which was still being cleared after the last raid.
“Are there many raids here lately?” Johann asked the driver.
The driver glared at him through the mirror. “Didn’t they warn you there, on the front? You’re not allowed to ask anything about the raids and even more so you’re strictly forbidden from mentioning them when you return to your base. It’s punishable by court-martial.”
What is not punishable by court-martial in this new Reich, Johann smirked grimly to himself.
Instead of giving the driver his address, Johann asked him to leave them at Riedman’s house. To all Walt’s protests, he only replied calmly that Walt hadn’t seen his family for far longer than he, Johann, hadn’t seen his wife. It was only fair.
“Everything should be fair with you.”
“Yes. Everything.”
Riedman stood for some time in front of the apartment building, where his parents lived and stared at it as though seeing it for the first time. Finally, he took a deep breath, like an underwater diver and walked briskly inside, running even faster up to the third floor, where he came to an abrupt halt in front of one of the doors.
“I should have written to them that I was coming,” he muttered under his breath. “My mother will give me a fine dressing down for not warning her in advance. And I brought a guest with me, too and if she doesn’t have enough to put on the table before us…”
Johann grinned, nudging him forward. “We have our ‘leave rations’ with us. She can put that on the table.”
“Leave rations” were a laughable matter. Just as it was prohibited for the locals to mention any air raids, it was equally prohibited for the soldiers to mention the situation on the front. And therefore, the first ones were putting up a brave face and taking long detours to escape as many bombed-out areas as they could and the latter arrived with tremendous packages under their arms, with sausage and chocolate which they barely saw on the frontline but which they ought to put before their families to show how well they fared at the Front. A nation of blind men, led by the blindest of them all.
A small woman of about forty, with oily blond hair pulled into a tight bun and hands like a bird’s claws, opened the door and looked the couple over with suspicion.
“What do you want?”
“I’m looking for the Riedman family,” Walt mumbled, shifting his gaze from the number on the door to the woman and back.
She narrowed her eyes with even more mistrust. Johann noticed a Nazi Party badge pinned to her cardigan. “And who would you be?”
“I’m their son, Walter Riedman.”
“They don’t live here anymore.”
She was about to slam the door in their faces when Johann stepped forward and pushed it open with more force than was necessary. “Where are they?”
“How would I know? When I was given this apartment, it was empty already.” She pulled the ends of her cardigan closer, trembling with righteous disdain. “I don’t know where they are. Now, leave at once, or I’ll call the police.”
“We aren’t leaving anywhere until you tell us where the rightful occupants are!” Johann stepped even closer to the woman.
Walter pulled his sleeve, shaking his head. “Come, Johann. She doesn’t know. We’ll find out later… we’ll ask someone. Someone should know.”
Johann turned to him, started saying something but then saw Walt’s pleading eyes – please, don’t make it worse! – and gave up at last. Only outside did he make a gesture of exasperation with his hands, breaking into laughter that sounded hysterical. “Has the whole country lost it?!”
A man, wearing military trousers and civilian jacket, threw a glare in his direction. Riedman quickly pulled him even further away, searching for a U-Bahn entrance. Johann remained grimly quiet, biting down the words that were ready to tear away from his tongue and then there would be no stopping it, the torrent of everything that he had been holding inside for too long and that was ready to break the dam of carefully erected silence around it.
“It’s all right. We’ll find them. Maybe they have gone to the village,” Walt reassured him in his usual soft voice.
How it reminded him of the times when he, Johann, was pacifying Willi the same way… Willi was the most vocal of them all while Johann knew better than to speak his mind. Maybe that was his mistake though? He was quiet far too many times when he should have been screaming at the top of his lungs? Maybe if more of them were screaming the truth that their new Reich didn’t want to hear, it wouldn’t have gone so far? Maybe Willi had to die so that Johann would take his place and become the loud one, the unafraid one, someone who would put his very life on the line for others just because it was the right thing to do?
“We’ll find them,” Johann repeated after Walt.
Mina sat at the table, round and positively glowing, while Johann was helping Frau von Sielaff set the table for their guest. Walt was still in the shower; Johann had already taken his. Mina followed her husband with her eyes, loving and concerned at the same time, while her hand rested on top of her stomach peacefully.
“Your hair is too long,” Mina finally said. She wanted to say so much more but didn’t dare.
He swiped it, still damp and now wavy, off his forehead. “I’ll find a barber tomorrow.”
Frau von Sielaff brushed it with her hand, as she passed him, in a purely motherly gesture. “Wilhelm always said the same thing when he would come on leave.” She lowered the plate with the sausage from his ‘leave ration’ on top of the perfectly starched tablecloth. “Only, unlike with you, with him, it was almost always empty promises.”
Riedman joined them, smelling of lilac soap and aftershave. Like a civilian, he beamed at Johann, catching the same bright smile in return. That’s what they longed to be now. Civilians. Not doctors, farmers, lawyers, and athletes like before, but civilians. War truly made some matters so very simple.
“I didn’t know you had a son.” Walt wiggled his fingers at little Willi, whom Frau von Sielaff brought down for dinner as well. He just woke up from his nap and observed the two unfamiliar men at the table with a scowl.
“It’s Wilhelm’s. We adopted him. Wilhelm’s wife, Lotte, died during the air raid,” Johann explained and winked at the boy. The child turned away, hiding his face on his grandmother’s shoulder. “He doesn’t remember me.”
“Children have a short memory,” Mina said softly, navigating a spoon into her nephew’s mouth. “He’ll have plenty of time to get used to you once you return from the front.”
“He’ll be too big by then.”
“No, he’ll still be a small child.” Mina met his gaze and shrugged calmly. “We know what’s going on despite all that brassy propaganda that they’re pouring down our poor throats daily. I work in the hospital; I see all the injured. They talk a great deal too.”
“Isn’t it prohibited?”
“One isn’t afraid of a court-martial when one is on his deathbed,” followed another dispassionate reply.
“I suppose,” Johann agreed.
They put Walter in Willi’s old room for the night. It started snowing; a good thing, Mina noted with a knowing look about her. Bad night for bombers. They’ll sleep soundly tonight. There won’t be any air raids.
Johann watched her undress, still and mesmerized, hardly breathing from the sight of her body that was life itself – strong, lean, and proud – which still could carry life in it despite the death around.
“I’m a veritable cow, aren’t I?” she grinned at him, undoing her hair.
Johann slowly shook his head and put his hands around her belly.
“You’re a mother,” he whispered,
taking her into his arms. “Mothers are the only hope this world has left. I touch you and I feel as though I touch life itself. I feel, when I’m with you, nothing will ever happen to me.”
“Nothing will ever happen to you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I love you,” she said simply. “You can’t die because I can’t lose you. You must promise me that you will survive and come back to me from the war.”
“Not fair. I can’t promise you something that doesn’t depend on me.”
“Just say the words and try your best to stand by them. That you can promise.”
Yes. That he could promise when all else was lost.
We don’t have any more information.
It was the fifth office, but the response was still the same. It seemed as though Riedman’s parents simply disappeared off the face of the earth. The fact that everyone thoroughly pretended that they didn’t know the family at all didn’t help matters. Only an elderly neighbor who took pity on her former neighbors’ son, finally shed some light on their fate. Behind closed doors and whispering, of course. That’s how everything was done now, in this new Germany.
“Frau Riedman was summoned to the Gestapo office. When she didn’t come back, Herr Riedman went to ask after her and returned very shaken. He gave me his money for saving and his wife’s jewelry, in case something happened, he said. He wanted to write to Reichsmarschall Göring, he told me. He did send the letter from what I understand, but he disappeared before anything could have been done to help him… If Herr Reichsmarschall received his letter at all, that is.” The elderly woman shuffled towards the bureau and extracted an envelope from between the stack of letters. Johann glimpsed a picture of a young uniformed man next to the older one. Both bore a striking similarity. “Here, Herr Riedman. Your father asked me to give this to you when you come back… if he wasn’t here to receive you.”
Walt took the letter out of her hands, staring at it oddly. Johann noticed the woman’s nervous glance that she stole at the clock in the corner and thanked her profusely before leading Riedman outside. The latter moved as though in a trance, following his leader blindly like many times before in flight.
“I don’t know if I want to open it,” he admitted at last when they sat on a bench in a small square outside, after clearing it from a thin film of snow. He suddenly shoved the letter into Johann’s hands. “You read it. And tell me later… Or don’t tell me at all. You will know what to say.”
Steadying his breath, like before a dogfight, Johann tore into the yellowish paper, read it carefully, folded it again and patted his pocket looking for a smoke.
“They moved to the village,” he said finally, slowly and deliberately. “Like you thought. Your mother was summoned to the Gestapo because one of the neighbors reported her as a communist. She was so afraid that they would arrest her that she bought a ticket on the first train that was going to the country. Your father wanted to write to Göring because he thought she was detained. She wrote to him from the country with her new address and asked him to come and join her there. So he did. It’s better there, less risk of air raids. He doesn’t give their address here because he’s afraid that it will fall into the wrong hands. You shouldn’t write them, either. After the war they’ll find you, he says.” He held out the letter to Walter without looking at him. “Do you want to read it yourself?”
Riedman stared ahead of him, his forehead creased with intense thought. At last, he took the lighter out of Johann’s hands, lit his cigarette and the letter right after. “No. I like your version better.”
He cupped his hands and blew on them as his father’s last words burned in front of his eyes.
He did receive his Knight’s Cross a week later; from Göring’s hands though, not the Führer’s – for the obvious reasons. Göring received them in his Carinhall and stared at Johann long and hard after the latter inquired if he had received the letter that he had sent him.
“I did. And so? What do you want me to do?” He rested his cheek on his fist as they sat at the lavishly served table, suddenly uncharacteristically grim and stern. “I’m no better off than you, as of now. Do you know the hysterics that I have to listen to every time the Yanks make another raid on the city? Do you know that it’s all my fault now? The whole damned war is my fault now. What else can I do besides issuing such orders? Shoot myself?”
On their way home, Walter toyed pensively with the Cross on his neck. “So, even Göring, the almighty Göring is now in disgrace. He won’t help us…”
Johann had just held Mina in his arms for the last time and was too preoccupied with his grief to think of Walter’s. The latter wandered around the base the next few days like a soul lost and then, during the very first dogfight, rammed the soviet Sturmovik, after a short, “live for us all, Johann. Thank you for everything.”
Twenty-Eight
Berlin, Germany. Spring 1944
* * *
The man was mad; Harald was certain of it. Harald stared at him, mute and motionless, as the man went from weeping to shouting and back to weeping again. When Harald first saw him, in his blue Luftwaffe uniform, with his blond hair and the Cross at his neck, he mistook him for his brother for a moment.
No. Of course, it wasn’t him. Johann was calm and collected and knew better than throw tantrums in the middle of the street and swipe at the SS after they’d warned him against such hysterics.
Harald thoroughly pretended not to remember how his brother and his friend Willi got into a fight with the said SS back in flying school. Johann was a war hero and a good German; not like this one. Johann would never tear the Cross off his neck, throw it on the ground and stomp on it in helpless ire, shouting, “here’s what I think of your Führer’s awards!” in the astounded SS men’s faces.
And the day started out so well, so warm and dewy. The thunderstorm washed away the stench of the burning which had seemed to be forever imprinted into the city walls and now the street smelled clean, fresh, electric, and green. The corpse carriers had already taken away all the bodies from the side of the road and now there were only the digging brigades left – the prisoners of war this time – and Napola students who were already used to supervising their work.
Harald was sitting on the single padded chair out of the dining set, which had somehow miraculously escaped the bombardment unscathed and munching on his lunch while squinting against the bright sun. It was a simple sandwich and the coffee was ersatz, but his dark uniform was already warm in the sun and even the POWs moved energetically today, without any commands from his side. Harald decided to allow them their quiet chatter and didn’t reprimand them for it like he usually did with others. If the jawing didn’t interfere with their work, he didn’t mind it.
He appeared out of the blue, the Luftwaffe officer, in his disheveled uniform and with a wild look in his eyes. He threw himself on top of the rubble and started digging wildly at the concrete and stone under the stunned prisoners’ glances. The two of the SS officers from Harald’s school were already trotting in his direction; he must have slipped right past them into the restricted zone. Harald jumped to his feet at once, shaking the crumbs off his trousers and almost dropping the cup with coffee to the ground. By the time the SS officers caught up with the Luftwaffe fellow, Harald had dutifully snapped to attention.
“Herr Leutnant, we told you already that you can’t be here—”
That’s when the shouting started. My entire family! My wife! My three children! My mother! My father, the hero of the war…
Then came the weeping. Then digging. Then fighting, when Harald’s superiors attempted to pull him out of the rubble. And then – the treason.
“…all buried here because of your Führer! Will this replace them all, I ask you?” He tugged and pulled on the ribbon of his Cross until he tore it off his neck completely. “Will this greet me when I get home from the war? Will this damned thing call me Vati? Will this thing hold me at night? Will this thing love me and ho
ld my hand in my dying hour? Well, will it?!”
The prisoners watched him with sudden compassion on their gaunt, unshaven faces. They understood him without understanding his language, for grief and desperation didn’t require an interpreter and they were too well-versed in it by now – the ones, who’d lost it all as well.
Harald’s instructor, who taught them political education, clasped the pilot’s elbow – Harald had never seen him do it before, even with students. The students were always the picture of obedience; words, not even shouts, were enough with them.
The pilot tore himself away. To hell with you. To hell with your Führer. To hell with your Germany. To hell with your war…
Slipping on minced stones and rubble, he was backing away from them slowly; not out of fear but to say as much as he could before they would get hold of him again.
“Traitor of the Reich!” A shrill, still childish voice suddenly broke the spell, in which even the SS were ready to release him. He’d come to his senses eventually; even they understood that. But the boy, their own student whom they taught blind obedience, was already screaming far too loud for something of this sort to go unnoticed. “You ought to hang for treason! Ungrateful pig! The Führer gave you this!” The boy was shaking a fist, with the pilot’s discarded Cross clasped in it, like a judge of the People’s Court. “And how do you repay him?! Swine!”
“Stop it,” Harald muttered, feeling a sudden guilty blush burning him from inside out like a cleansing pyre of the inquisition. Even for him, this was too much, too shameful. “He’s a war hero…”
“He’s a treacherous swine that needs to be hanged!” The young boy turned to his superiors and clicked his heels. “Allow me to fetch the rope, Herr Untersturmführer?”
Of Knights and Dogfights Page 27