Diary of a Dead Man on Leave

by David Downing

  I was about to ask the shit’s name when I heard footsteps in the corridor. It was Erich and the doctor, a young man with a pleasant face who showed no sign of resenting the after-hours summons. I put a hand on the old man’s wrist, said goodbye, and left them to it.

  This family is full of surprises.

  Friday, May 20

  Ruchay’s sermon at breakfast was all about Göring’s latest project, the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, which is scheduled for completion in 1945. This new waterway, which will connect the North and Black Seas, was apparently dreamt up by Charlemagne, and is consequently being touted by the Nazis as the “culmination of a thousand-year-old dream.” The Third Reich has every intention of extending itself that far into the future, but I’ll be astonished if it’s here for the inaugural passage.

  At work this morning, everyone was talking about the rumors of troop movements in Saxony and Bavaria, and this afternoon we were busy clearing contingency paths for troop trains to the western frontier. Is this it? The papers are certainly preparing the ground—they are full of rabid Czech mobs hunting innocent Germans.

  On a much more cheerful note, I’ve been invited to Walter’s birthday party. It’s on Saturday afternoon, and Verena has already baked the cake.

  Saturday, May 21

  I spoke to Verena Hanssen today. She’s the woman who comes in six days a week to help Anna cook and clean, and the mother, it turns out, of the Negro boy I’ve seen waiting outside the house on more than a few occasions. He looks a year or so older than Walter, which makes it likely that he’s one of the Ruhr-occupation babies. Verena must have either had an affair with one of the African soldiers involved, or been raped by one of them.

  Marco seems a nice lad, and there are no obvious signs that he’s being persecuted or bullied on account of his color. Which is surprising. Either he has very independent-minded teachers at school, or the Nazis are so focused on the Jews that they lack the time to thoroughly persecute anyone else. The other boys at Walter’s birthday party certainly treated Marco like an equal, which verges on the miraculous in a state which classifies worth according to race.

  Verena is very like Anna. They look different—Verena is slightly younger, more obviously attractive, darker complexioned, and darker haired—but they have the same perpetually harassed air, as if they need to keep on running in order to stand still. And they probably do. For all the mother worship that goes on here, single mothers have a pretty hard time of it.

  Verena ended up standing beside me for a few minutes after she and Anna brought in the birthday cake. She asked me a few polite questions about Argentina and how I was finding things back home. I asked her what felt like an innocent question—how far away she lived—and saw fear in her eyes, if only for an instant. She told me but hurried back to the kitchen the moment a rather self-conscious Walter had blown out his candles.

  There were five other boys there, all of whom seemed like fairly ordinary eleven- and twelve-year-olds. I was glad I’d been invited and told Anna so when I got the chance. “Walter wanted you to come,” she said, leaving the impression that she hadn’t. Realizing this, she suddenly smiled and almost admitted as much. “I’m sorry about the other day,” she said.

  I told her that Walter was a clever boy, that he understood some things as well as many adults did, and that most of the time he was fully aware that some things were better kept to himself. “But he’s only a child,” I said. “And sometimes he just can’t help himself.”

  “And the teachers play on that,” she said bitterly. “They try to trap the children into betraying themselves.”

  They did, I agreed, conscious that I was being far more open than was wise and not really giving a damn. And if he wanted my help in the future, I told her, and if she was willing to let me give it, then I’d make sure that he knew the difference between what was true and what was sayable.

  She gave me a surprised look, as if she had suddenly realized that she was talking to someone she didn’t know.

  My false identity is beginning to feel like an itch I can’t resist scratching.

  Sunday, May 22

  The Nazis have apparently decided to up the stakes in their political war with Czechoslovakia. Their papers are full of outrages against the poor Sudeten Germans, all of whom, it seems, are hungry for the chance to swell the legions of the Reich. More significantly, there’s been a definite step-up in the preparations for military action. I and half a dozen others were called in to work this morning because the regular Sunday shift was insufficient to cope with the increase in military traffic.

  The local paper, which I read over lunch in the canteen, had nothing to say about Czechoslovakia, but contained a long piece on the “gang” Erich belongs to, the “Traveling Dudes.” Personally, I find it hard to criticize any group that lists beating up Nazis among its hobbies, but if I were Erich—or Anna—the tone of this article would worry me. It read like the opening shots of a crackdown.

  It occurs to me that a reader of this journal might conclude from recent entries that I’ve abandoned the job I was sent here to do. I haven’t. By briefly examining a few attendance cards each day, thoroughly perusing the various message boards, and innocently asking after long-lost colleagues, I have managed to place all but two of the nineteen names I memorized in Moscow. Nine are dead or have moved away, but eight are still working here in Hamm, and I’ve established some sort of contact with four of them.

  Dariusz Müller and Otto Tikalsky both work in the dispatcher’s office, and I’ve now had several weeks to ingratiate myself with the latter. I think I detect a faint undercurrent of irony in most of his pro-Nazi statements, but that may be wishful thinking on my part. Müller has been less available, which suits me fine—when I see my contact I’ll be asking if Moscow can dig up any more information about his activities in the year that followed the Nazi takeover.

  I’ve discovered that two other names on my list—Hans Derleth and Alfred Neubecker—belong to the pair with the Marxist analytical skills that I noticed on my second visit to the Social Club. I’ve been keeping an eye out for both over the last few days, but so far without any luck. Over the coming days and weeks, I hope to track down the remaining four, and to find out what I can about all eight. I may casually run into them on their way to work, or happen to find myself sharing their tables in the canteen or Social Club bar. I will take note of the men they choose to mix with at work and introduce myself to the latter, whenever the opportunity arises. In this way, I hope to sit in on conversations involving my actual targets and get the chance to work out where they stand without inviting the risks inherent in a more direct approach.

  I will of course avoid saying anything even vaguely political in the first few encounters, and put my toes in the water, so to speak, only once some sort of trust has been established. And I will be just as interested in their unconscious reactions as in anything they choose to say. Things as simple as a reluctance to make eye contact or, even worse, a determination to do so. I’ll be expecting wariness, hoping for a sense of inner stillness.

  Tuesday, May 24

  My avoidance of Müller has had the opposite effect to that intended. He approached me at lunch today and said he’d been waiting for a chance to have a chat with me. Reckoning that there was nothing to be gained from a refusal, I allowed myself to be steered to one of the side tables for two, wondering how I was going to respond to an announcement that he’d recognized me.

  But he said no such thing. He asked me how I was getting on, how I was finding the new Germany, how I found the work conditions, and how I thought they could be improved. And as the questions got more political, I sensed him weighing each answer—he was testing me in much the same way I’ve been testing others.

  But for whom? I tried to pitch my answers somewhere between faint encouragement and polite rejection—to hint that I might be more forthcoming with him if he was more forthcoming
with me. I was still getting acclimatized, I said, and I liked leaving politics to the politicians, but I was interested in union work. What did he think of the government’s Labor Front?

  He neatly deflected that question with a similar one of his own, and so on. Since both of us were trying to size up the other’s true allegiance without revealing our own, it was a somewhat surreal conversation. I don’t know what impression he went away with—the impression that I am who I claim to be, I hope. If so, and he remains loyal to the party, that may induce him to try and recruit me. If he’s working for the Gestapo, it should persuade him to leave me alone. If he doesn’t know quite what to make of me, then, whomever he’s working for, I can expect more such conversations.

  Which is hardly an enticing prospect. One of the two comrades from the concentration camp in the Thuringian Forest was captured yesterday. He was found hiding in a brickworks oven near Stendal and was immediately executed. He’d been in the KZ for two years, so they knew he’d told them all he was going to.

  Wednesday, May 25

  It seems that Anna has decided to trust me. When I returned from work, she invited me into the family parlor, where Walter was sitting, pen poised over a blank sheet of paper. Herr Skoumal, Anna said, had returned from sick leave and immediately started picking on the boy. Walter butted in with the details: he had been given question after question until he got one wrong and had then been given extra homework. He has until tomorrow to write a short essay under the title: “Is There a Place for Jews in the Third Reich?”

  “If Walter says yes,” Anna said, “Skoumal will denounce him as a degenerate. If he says no, then Skoumal will have his victory, and he’ll no doubt make the most of it. But it’ll all be forgotten in a few days.”

  “Not by me,” Walter said indignantly. “Lots of Jews fought for Germany in the last war. There was a place for them then.”

  “Who told you that?” Anna asked. “No, don’t tell me—it was your grandfather.” She sighed and looked to me for help.

  “You can’t win this one, Walter,” I told him. “If you challenge this teacher, it’ll only make him more determined—”

  “But how can he argue with the fact that all those Jews gave their lives for the fatherland?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’ll say they had no choice. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes being right—and you are right—doesn’t help. Sometimes you just have to survive to fight another day. And if you’re interested in truth, that’s what living in Germany is about right now—survival. Just write what he wants to hear. Make him think he’s convinced you. The truth is always important, but sometimes you have to keep it hidden.”

  During this speech of mine, Walter’s face went from argumentative to thoughtful to downright surprised. I didn’t want to look at Anna, but I knew I’d crossed a bridge with her.

  “Josef’s right,” she said to Walter, and he sighed his acquiescence.

  A little while ago, he brought up his finished work to show me. He’s done a wonderful job—Goebbels could find him a job in his propaganda ministry.

  He also had an invitation from downstairs. “My granddad would like it if you came to see him again sometime, to have a beer perhaps. He says you were in the war?”

  I said I had been, and Walter settled back in my armchair as if preparing himself for the whole story. I told him I’d spent four years on the eastern front, had never won a medal, and had never even been wounded.

  “But you did have friends who were killed?” he asked, as if he needed convincing that I’d fought in the real war.

  “Yes,” I told him. Every last one of them, I reminded myself.

  “Was it hard to get used to peace again after all that?” he asked, switching from child to youth as only those who are stuck between the two can.

  “I suppose so,” I said. The truthful answer was that I never got the chance to find out—my war just slipped into another form, became a war that transcended borders, in which the battlefield could be anywhere. Even here in this room, answering the innocent questions of a twelve-year-old boy. “But I emigrated to Argentina,” I said. “And Europe seemed a long way away.”

  “Granddad was at Verdun,” Walter said. “And Passchendaele. That’s where he was blinded by the gas.”

  I was surprised. He seemed older than that.

  Walter must have read the thought in my face. “He was in the landsturm,” he explained, “but he still had to lie about his age. You had to be under forty-five, and he was forty-nine in 1914.”

  I suddenly realized I didn’t know the old man’s name.

  “Andreas,” Walter replied when I asked him. “Andreas Biesinger. That’s my mother’s maiden name,” he added somewhat unnecessarily.

  “I’ll visit him tomorrow,” I promised.

  Thursday, May 26

  I wasn’t sure what to expect from Walter’s grandfather in this second encounter. What I got was a much more coherent man than the one I’d met just after his fall. He may be bedbound and blind, but there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with his brain.

  We talked—mostly, he talked—about the war. He has no interest in why it had happened or why Germany had lost—his stock of anecdotes all seem to revolve around an essential disbelief that men could do such things to one another. And not just the cruel and violent things. In such conditions he finds man’s humanity to man even harder to credit.

  Over the last twenty years, I have met many men who refuse to talk about their experiences in the war, and a few, like Andreas Biesinger, who have found it hard to talk about anything else. Twenty years on, he still can’t believe what he saw, heard, felt, smelled, in those years, and that disbelief has colored his every waking moment since. Listening to him, it’s hard to disagree with those who say that something fundamental died in the trenches, something most people still haven’t learned to do without. I don’t know what you’d call it—a faith in progress, perhaps, or trust in humanity, even belief in God. Many of us filled that void with the revolution, but for those who didn’t, the present and future must sometimes seem unimaginably bleak.

  One thing is clear—he dotes on Anna. If it’s possible for blind eyes to light up, his did when she brought us both some hot chocolate. I’d been waiting for an opening to ask about her first husband and did so as the door closed behind her, despite a strong feeling that I shouldn’t. “What happened to Erich’s father?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “The Spanish flu,” the answer came back like an unwanted coin from a slot. I knew he was lying.

  “So Erich never knew his father,” I went on, moving the conversation to safer ground.

  “No. And he didn’t like Ernst—Walter’s father. But he has a good heart, that boy.”

  I came back to my room with my curiosity unsated. Had Anna’s first husband—the Communist—just left her? Or had he died in the struggle? I told myself it was none of my business, but of course that’s exactly what it is.

  Friday, May 27

  I’ve made some progress over the last few days, picking up three further firsthand impressions of men on Moscow’s list.

  On Wednesday I managed to insert myself into a canteen conversation between Alfred Neubecker and a man I didn’t know and was again impressed by Neubecker’s essentially Marxist insights into the nation’s fragile economy. And this time I also noticed the passion behind the analysis, which bodes even better as far as my mission’s concerned. I suspect, like me, he saw his views of life and politics transformed by the war and its aftermath, and has hardly looked back since. Neubecker’s at least a decade older than I am, but despite the thinning grey hair, he still looks reasonably fit, and advancing age has not dulled his mind. Strength of will is of course another story, and on that I’m reserving judgment.

  This evening at the Social Club, I ran into two more of the men on my list, Horst Franke and Richard Opatz. They were part of a l
ong and scurrilously amusing discussion of Field Marshal Göring’s personal habits, both known and imaginary, which somehow turned into something more somber as closing time approached. Horst Franke is around my age, plump, round faced, with longish brown hair and a generous mustache. At first sight he seems slightly clownish, but his serious purpose soon becomes apparent—a lot goes on behind his eyes. The man is parsimonious with words, but when he does say something, it’s usually to the point. As yet I know nothing about his homelife, but he feels like a possibility.

  So does his friend Richard Opatz. The two are clearly good friends and, as is often the case, seem like polar opposites. Opatz is wiry, prematurely bald, and serious looking, but someone who talks to fill silences. He works as a shunter in the freight yards and is probably ten years younger than Franke. Aware that he’s less intelligent, Opatz almost always defers to the other. It looks as if they come as a pair, which is usually good news—personal and political loyalties tend to be mutually reinforcing.

  Saturday, May 28

  Today was the last Saturday of the month, the prearranged date for my first clandestine meeting in Germany. After breakfast I told my fellow lodgers that I was off to look up a distant relative in Dortmund, walked down to the station, and caught one of the frequent local trains. The ten-mile journey must have taken about half an hour, but I was too preoccupied by the imminent meeting to more than notice the parched countryside. Over the years I must have made a hundred such assignations, but the process never gets easier. The feeling of helplessness, of being so completely at the mercy of someone else’s competence, luck, or good will, seems to speed and amplify the heart, to dry the throat, to leave that shrinking feeling in the stomach that a Chinese doctor once explained to me as a lack of communication between the heart and the kidneys. As I sat on that train this morning, I was acutely aware of the unknown comrade traveling toward Dortmund on another train, a comrade who might already have been compromised in one of half a dozen ways. If so, I told myself, I would soon be talking to the Gestapo. And all the horrors of memory and imagination filled my head, as they always have, as they doubtless always will.