Diary of a Dead Man on Leave

by David Downing

  When the agenda was officially exhausted, Frau Wosz appeared, as if by magic, with a tray of tea and biscuits. By this time everyone was standing, stretching their limbs, and as I circled the room, I noticed the framed family photograph on one wall. Joachim Wosz was in it, and next to him was another young man, presumably his older brother, with a face which I recognized from the Moscow files. Matthias Wosz had been a leading member of the Hamm KPD in 1933, but had been left off my list because he was known to be fighting in Spain with the International Brigades.

  I felt someone at my shoulder. It was Joachim. “Your family?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, and changed the subject. “Did you find our discussion interesting?” he asked.

  I said I had and offered the additional bait that I had been involved in union activities in Argentina.

  “You didn’t mention that in your talk,” Müller said jovially, looming over my other shoulder.

  I told them that I’d been unsure of my ground, that unions in today’s Germany were probably very different from unions in Argentina, and as I was speaking, my eyes fell on the Wosz family wireless, a large and powerful-looking set that sat on a small cupboard in the corner. I had noticed it when I arrived, but only then saw that it was tuned to 29.8 on the shortwave. In January 1937 the Spanish Republican government had placed a powerful transmitter and this particular wavelength at the disposal of German anti-Nazi exiles for broadcasting back to the fatherland. Listening to it was the sort of criminal offence that earned you a stay in a KZ.

  Sitting here in my room, I feel certain that Wosz leaving his radio tuned to this signal was mere carelessness. But at the time I had the sudden—and probably ridiculous—feeling that I was being tested. If I was who I said I was, this radio frequency would mean nothing to me, but if I showed any signs of recognition, I would betray myself, in their eyes, as a Gestapo informer. At best, I would receive no more invitations to meetings. At worst, I might meet with one of those serious accidents at work we had all discussed earlier.

  “That’s a wonderful radio,” I said. “Do you know any good stations for dance music?” I asked, adding that that was one of the things I missed most about Argentina.

  They didn’t. I don’t think dancing figures highly in their list of priorities, but then I can’t claim that it has ever figured very highly in mine.

  Müller insisted on walking part of the way home with me. It was dark by this time, the streets almost deserted but still warm. After we parted with a comradely smile, I had to remind myself that his resurrection remains unexplained, and suspicious. Then again, people like Joachim Wosz would have known him five years ago and must believe they have reason to trust him.

  When I reached the house, I found Anna sitting on the steps outside, staring into space. She was smoking, something I hadn’t seen her do before and something that testified to her state of mind—the regime officially frowns on women smoking in public. I asked her if there was any news of Erich, and she told me, as if surfacing from a great depth, that his court appearance has been set for next Monday. I left her in her angry solitude, a woman whose every instinct is to scream defiance but who knows that such defiance is a luxury she cannot afford.

  Wednesday, June 1

  The Nazi news machine continues to churn out uplifting entertainment for the masses. Ruchay was delighted to tell us this morning that the Warburg bank has been “aryanized”—three Warburgs and a Spiegelberg have been retired, and replaced by Germans with more acceptable racial ancestry. I innocently asked what had actually happened to the Warburgs and Spiegelberg, but Ruchay’s search for an answer proved—rather annoyingly to him—fruitless. “They’ll probably live abroad on the profits they have squeezed out of ordinary Germans” was his guess, but I wonder. You can usually rely on falling bankers to provide themselves with a soft landing, but Jewish bankers in Nazi Germany may be the exception that proves the rule.

  Another of today’s stories—as on any other day recently—concerned a fresh outrage in the Sudetenland. Yesterday two of Henlein’s thugs were shot and seriously wounded in a Sudetenland café. The paper admitted that Henlein’s men had attacked the Czechs, but claimed that they had been irresistibly provoked—the Czechs had requested that the café’s band play a popular Czech number!

  Ruchay read this bit out, but as I discovered later, there was more. A bed in Varnsdore that Henlein once slept in has become a place of pilgrimage for young girls. The sheets have not been changed since their encounter with the heroic Sudeten leader, and the girls are allowed to lie between them for a few seconds, sniffing as they do so for his lingering scent.

  This kind of hysteria seems peculiar to the Reich and its minions—on the wireless you can hear the women screaming as Hitler drives by in his Mercedes, and most of them would probably kill for a sniff of the Führer’s sheets. Where does this come from? What strange void is being filled here?

  Walter came up to see me after supper. He seemed subdued, much like the rest of the house and, indeed, the rest of Germany. The country is bracing itself for a war that only the government wants, but that everyone else believes is inevitable. Walter is also bracing himself for bad news about Erich and his mother’s reaction to that news. Last week he was full of the football World Cup, which, if I remember correctly, begins this Saturday, but there was no sign of that enthusiasm this evening. I hope Anna has been reminding Erich that judges appreciate remorse.

  Thursday, June 2

  Jakob and I went for a drink at the Social Club this evening, and one of his driver friends had a fellow driver in tow, the seventh of the eight men left on my list. Artur Zerbe is around my age, with fair hair and a thin mustache. On first sight, he looks muscular enough for a Nazi sports poster, but there’s too much amusement in his eyes. He gives the impression of enjoying life, which is hardly a political recommendation in the here and now, but nothing he actually said set my inner alarm bells ringing. He was not wearing a wedding ring and, if the way he flirted with a passing member of the kitchen staff is anything to go by, seems to fancy himself with the ladies. Having no responsibilities often makes men more prepared to take risks, but first one must know why they’ve chosen that sort of life.

  I have the opposite problem with Alfred Neubecker, who was also down at the club. I’ve discovered quite a lot about him recently, and none of it good. His wife is chronically ill, but she insists on sending him out for his Friday drink while a neighbor stands guard. They have no children to look after her if anything happens to him. I have few doubts about his political integrity or loyalty to the party, but as I talked to him tonight, I reached the conclusion that he’s not an acceptable risk. His wife is dying, and his faith in life and the future is dying with her—you can see it in his eyes, in the way he looks at people. If he’s forced to choose between her and us, he won’t think twice, and I’ve reluctantly crossed him off my list.

  As usual I walked home with Jakob. I spend more of my time with him than anyone else, but he doesn’t make many appearances in these pages. Some people are like that—comfortable to be with, fundamentally decent, unambitious, and uninspiring. I like Barufka. I think I could rely on him in a crisis, even if it meant a risk to himself. And that’s more than I could say for some comrades.

  I don’t know if he’s always been the way he is now, or whether, as with Neubecker, something happened to flatten him out emotionally. An obvious guess would be the war—nothing deadens like a surfeit of death. I suspect he came back from the trenches looking much the same, but diminished in a way his wife either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. And when she left and took the child with her, he was diminished still further.

  He loves Anna in a quiet, hopeless sort of way. He knows she simply likes him, and he would never do anything to upset or embarrass her. He’s good to Walter, who repays him with largely unconscious disdain—Barufka is about as far from Tom Shark as one can get. He’s one of those kind
men living in an unkind world who even doubt their right to be here.

  Friday, June 3

  Over the last few days, I’ve belatedly come to realize that Jakob isn’t the only lodger quietly obsessed with Anna. Ruchay is neither kind nor courteous to her—in fact he’s often unkind and downright rude—but there’s a personal edge to his behavior that goes beyond the regrettable manner in which single men often treat their landladies. And this evening at dinner I caught him looking at her in a way that was impossible to misinterpret.

  An hour or so later, enjoying a beer with Anna’s father in his room, I mentioned what I thought I’d seen.

  Andreas grimaced. “He’s always been mean to her, and we all know why. He wants her, and he can’t work out why or what to do about it. So he takes it out on her by being mean and ill-mannered. I’ve told her to throw him out, but she says we can’t afford to.”

  Saturday, June 4

  When I woke up this morning, the sun was streaming in through a gap I had left in the curtains, and I just lay there in bed for the better part of an hour, luxuriating in the light and the fact that it was Saturday. Days off are one of the great joys of an ordinary working life, perhaps especially for those, like myself, who are unaccustomed to the continuous grind of days on. I flung open the curtains just in time to see the first Berlin train of the morning steam by on the far side of the yards, its locomotive belching a picture-book pattern of white smoke into the blue sky as it eased up the incline toward the works.

  The atmosphere around the breakfast table was considerably less sunny. Ruchay read his paper with lips pursed and for once found nothing he wanted to share with the rest of us. Gerritzen was just as uncommunicative. He ate with his customary gusto, but mechanically, his brows furrowed with worry. A row with his girlfriend perhaps, or maybe a promotion denied. Only Jakob seemed his normal reliable self, neither cheerful nor depressed, just there. As usual, his eyes followed Anna when she entered the room and mirrored the anxiety in hers.

  Later that morning, while shopping with Jakob for a fishing rod, I caught sight of her across the street, deep in conversation with Dariusz Müller. There was nothing conspiratorial about the meeting—the two of them were standing in front of a shop on a busy street—but it was clear that both were taking their talk very seriously, which suggested more than a passing acquaintance. When I mentioned later that I’d seen her with my boss, she explained that she was asking about possible workplace support for Erich. This explanation would have seemed more reasonable if I hadn’t seen the instinctive flash of alarm that preceded it.

  Germany’s World Cup match against Switzerland was a big disappointment. This time it was only Jakob, Walter, and I listening to the common-room wireless; Ruchay and Gerritzen either had other business to attend to, or had decided that one humiliation on the soccer field was enough for the spring. The game ended in a draw, a result that seemed to suit the mood of the house. It will be played again on Wednesday, during school and work hours. Walter seemed unconcerned—he is, unsurprisingly, more worried about Erich’s fate than that of his footballing heroes.

  The match was hardly mentioned at the Social Club, where everyone wanted to talk about the continuing rumors of war. The latest has it that Hitler has penciled in June 12—a week from tomorrow—as “The Day” for military action against the Czechs. Lots of men had pieces of evidence to support the rumor, ranging from the latest disposition of armor-carrying trains to their mother’s intuition, but I can’t see it myself. Hitler may be evil incarnate, but he has shown no sign of being a political idiot, and fighting for something he can get through peaceful means would be the act of one. The obvious lack of Anglo-French interest in an alliance with Moscow is a clear signal that they are unwilling to fight for Czech rule over the Sudeten Germans, and once Hitler has their mountains, he can roll over the rest of Czechoslovakia at any time he wants. I could be wrong, of course. He may be so eager for a military triumph that he throws political wisdom to the winds.

  I didn’t say any of this. The old Comintern adage—“Listen for an hour; speak for a minute”—has become almost second nature. I can remember first hearing the adage from one of my instructors in Moscow, a man named Piakov who could never stop talking.

  Sunday, June 5

  When Anna went to see Erich this afternoon, Walter and I took ourselves off to the cinema. The main picture was a military drama set in the 1813 War of Liberation. It was well-made, up to Hollywood standards, I would guess, and seemed to satisfy the audience. The hero, a Prussian officer much given to stirring speeches and staring into the distance with a visionary glint in his eyes, was clearly intended to evoke thoughts of the Führer. Everyone poured scorn on his insistence that French spies were at work in the area, but he was of course proved right in the end. I found myself wondering whether the many children in the audience would draw the obviously intended conclusion and place their trust blindly in Hitler or draw what seemed an equally valid but clearly unintended conclusion, that they should follow their own hearts and brains.

  The American newsreel that preceded the main film was also strangely bereft of reality. It was subtitled “The Land of Unlimited Possibilities,” but made no mention of those, such as racial harmony or health care for the poor, that a modern Jefferson or Lincoln might wish to realize. Instead we watched men walk tightropes strung between skyscrapers and survive being packed into barrels and washed over Niagara Falls. The impression left behind—of a nation that couldn’t be serious—was rendered starker still by the main feature and its hero’s inability to be anything but.

  Walter gave it all his rapt attention, but as we walked home, I could feel his anxiety build. Anna, back before us and working on the evening meal with Verena, said Erich was fine, but she looked worn out with worry. Over supper, Ruchay and Gerritzen looked no happier than they had at breakfast. The whole house seemed sunk in gloom.

  Back in my room, I half expected a visit from Walter, but for once he failed to appear. I spent an hour reading Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, a book that Ruchay thinks “inspirational.” It’s how an overexcited Nietzsche would have described the Great War, all bloodred sunsets and delirious heroism. Jünger can write, but I wish he couldn’t. I hate to think how many boys will march off to the next war expecting a religious experience only to find themselves caught up in the usual circus of useless pain. One old comrade, long since dead, told me the worst days of his life had been the four that followed the beginning of the Somme battles in 1916. During those days he had listened, whenever the guns were silent, to the howling, moaning, and piteous pleading of the hundreds of wounded British soldiers left behind in no-man’s-land. With the ending of each artillery bombardment, this ghastly chorus grew thinner, fainter, until finally, on the morning of the fourth day, a blessed silence hung over the churned-up fields. My comrade was fond of repeating a line from an American poem he’d read somewhere: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

  Monday, June 6

  Erich received his sentence this morning—six months in a hard labor camp. The news was all over the canteen by lunchtime, and there were a lot of sympathetic noises: the older men don’t have much time for youth gangs like the Dudes—even those who share their hatred of the Nazis—but Erich never brought his gang life to work, and he’s known as a good worker. Some thought the sentence rather harsh, considering that no real crime had been committed, but others thought he’d been lucky, and I agreed with the latter. He’s not going to a concentration camp, or even a regular prison, and provided he keeps his head, the experience won’t do him any lasting harm.

  Anna announced the outcome over supper. Erich realized he’d behaved badly, she said, and had no complaints about his punishment. Barufka said, with his customary awkwardness in her presence, that we all felt sorry that this had happened and hoped that Erich would be none the worse for the experience. Ruchay opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again.
/>   When Walter came to see me later, he wanted to know what sort of hardships his brother was in for. I said I didn’t really know—I have, in fact, never been locked away in the land of my birth—but that I thought he’d be sharing a barracks rather than sitting alone in a cell and that his days would consist of a lot of hard physical labor. “They don’t want to break him,” I said; “they want him to see the error of his ways.”

  Walter thought about that. “I don’t think Erich will ever see the error of his ways,” he said glumly.

  I agreed he might not, but said I thought him clever enough to make them believe that he had.

  “I hope so,” Walter said with his usual earnestness.

  After he’d gone down, I had the sudden, sobering thought that I would probably not see Erich again. One way or another, my work in Hamm should be over before six months have passed.

  Tuesday, June 7

  The atmosphere in the house seemed very different this evening, as if a load has been lifted. And in a way, I suppose it has. Erich still has his six months to serve, but twenty-four hours ago Anna and Walter were waiting for doom to fall, and now they can start looking forward to Erich’s release.

  I envy them. I have nothing to complain of in the present, but the future looks bleak, and the past keeps grabbing me from behind. Canton was in the papers again today: the Japanese have been bombing the city for eleven days now, and over eight thousand people have died. The Völkischer Beobachter reports, with scarcely concealed admiration, that hospitals have been deliberately bombed. Last week the same paper was hailing the German bombing raids on Republican-held Valencia.