The End of the Most Beloved Possessions
On January 22, 1940, after night had fallen, Fred rapped at Mina’s bedroom window to inform her that I wanted to marry her, right then, that very hour.
Five minutes later, she was rushing down the main street after Fred, dressed in her wedding gown. She assumed she didn’t have to worry about Ludwig, that he was with me. And she wasn’t wrong about that. Only we weren’t waiting for her—we were asleep, tied together with a rope, at the other end of the village.
What with her nephew’s long legs, she had to make a considerable effort to match his pace. Her steaming breath vanished in the dark. As they passed the edge of the village, neither of them saw the wooden crate by the side of the road. In it was the new city sign that had just been delivered. It would be erected the following morning, hastening the secularization of the community—most Segendorfers still had no idea that, very soon, they would be Königsdorfers.
“Where’s Julius?” asked Mina, gasping for air. “Where are we rushing off to?”
Fred didn’t say a thing, and ran faster. Mina tripped and went down on the cobblestones, scraping her hands, and as Fred helped her up again, she saw the moon in the sky, but no stars.
Soon they were crossing one of the bleak fields on the outskirts of the village where stands of winter rye grew. Four dark-green cars were parked in a half circle. Their motors were idling and sounded impatient, and all of their headlights were on, throwing bright light onto a bus in the middle of the field. Shadows flitted between the vehicles.
“Where is Julius Habom!” Mina wanted to know, stopping short. Fred grabbed her arm—she couldn’t break loose, and fell to the ground.
“Don’t be so rough!” shouted Markus, coming closer and offering her his left hand. In the other, he held his pistol.
Men in surgical masks loomed behind him. The wintry ground crunched beneath their feet. As Mina screamed that she was here for her wedding, and began to thrash around, they gathered her up and carried her onto the bus.
“Are they going to hurt her?” asked Fred.
“No,” said Markus, checking his makeup compact to ensure that his toupee was properly situated, and thanked Fred, saying he’d done well.
From within the bus there was a rumbling, followed by a high, mechanical buzzing. Mina’s screams were smothered.
Fred covered his ears. “Where is Julius?”
“Probably afraid to get married.” Markus grinned. “Looks like we’ll have to postpone it.”
One of the masked men came back, passing Markus the bridal gown, which he in turn handed to Fred.
“That’s all of them,” said Markus.
The man in the mask gestured to Fred.
Markus shook his head.
Two more masked men stepped out of the bus, and advanced on Fred. One of them wore white rubber gloves, their fingertips red.
Fred flinched away.
“No,” said Markus, and lifted his pistol an inch or two.
Now it was the other men who flinched. The one with the red fingertips spread his arms as if to call for calm.
From the bus there came a dull thud, and the other two men vanished once more. Markus lowered his pistol. A rattling ran through the bus, it shook slightly. From within, a boy hollered—and went silent.
Markus rolled his eyes and nudged Fred: “Typical Klöble!”
Someone turned on the engine, and the bus shook. Then the two masked men stepped out again, opened a hatch in the vehicle’s side, pulled a lever, and the door shut. They inspected a hose that ran from the rear of the bus to its roof. One of the two gave a thumbs-up, at which the man with the red fingertips positioned himself at a distance from the bus, walking slowly backward with his eyes fixed on the windows.
Markus noticed that Fred was trembling. “Come,” he said, and they climbed into one of the cars. Fred sat in the passenger seat, and Markus tucked the bridal gown around him.
“Better?”
Fred nodded.
Markus put his pistol away, laid his hands on the steering wheel, and stretched out his arms. “A BMW 321.” He took a deep breath. “It’s a real speedster! Tomorrow I’ll give you a driving lesson.”
“Where is the bus going?” Fred asked.
“Far, far away.” Markus leaned back. In the rearview mirror he inspected his toupee, and nudged it a bit to the left.
They fell silent. The car vibrated.
“I want to go home.”
“You know what? I’m going to give you this speedster. It’s yours, it belongs to you. What do you think about that?”
“I want my mama!”
“Fred,” said Markus, laying his hand on the gearshift, “don’t be afraid. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’m here. Just be quiet and close your eyes.”
But he didn’t do that, he couldn’t look away, he didn’t even blink. Fred stared and stared.
Hours later, after Markus had driven up and down Reichsstrasse 11 for so long that Fred had finally been able to nod off, the dark-green BMW rolled into Anni’s garden and stopped with a soft wheeze. Markus shut off the headlights and glanced over at Fred, sleeping heavily beside him, wrapped in the wedding gown.
Anni knocked at Markus’s window. Her greasy hair gleamed, her eyes were bloodshot.
He took his pistol and got out. “Were you over at the Moorsee again? It doesn’t agree with you.”
She asked him where he’d been and what he’d done with her son and where the car had come from.
Markus bent forward and whispered it in her ear.
Anni exhaled, met his glance for a moment, then looked away again. With a single lunge she grabbed his toupee and tore it from his head.
“I’m exhausted.” Markus sighed, scratching his bald spot with the barrel of the Walther. “It was a long day. Really, all I wanted was to bring Fred home. Best to leave him here as he is. I can fetch the car tomorrow.”
Anni looked warily at his pistol.
“Oh, I see.” He laid it down before her in the grass. “Can I have my hair back now?”
She held the toupee out to him, and as he went to take it, she snatched the pistol and aimed it at him.
Markus arranged his toupee with the help of the mirror. “You have to pull back the hammer.”
Anni looked for it.
“It’s inside. There,” Markus said impassively, pointing it out with his index finger, and Anni cocked it.
“Onto the moor,” she ordered, and Markus didn’t protest, but tucked the makeup compact away and marched off. She followed at a distance. For a while they went in lockstep, silent. Whenever the pistol grew too heavy for Anni, she switched hands.
“You seem exhausted,” said Markus, as they reached the wooden planks that led across the moor. “Fred’s worried about you. I worry about you myself. I’m sure it’s tough. Your pain must be unimaginable. First your parents, then your husband. But if you pull that trigger, neither of us will be able to take care of your son anymore. They’ll come to get him. And don’t claim he doesn’t mean anything to you. He’s all that remains of your Arkadiusz. He’s your Most Beloved Possession.”
Anni was holding the pistol with both hands now.
“I think that in some strange way I like you because you don’t like me. Your head-shaking is more generous than most people’s love. Don’t lose the habit. I see so much potential in you. When you consider who Fred’s father was, it’s amazing how he’s turned out. He has you to thank for that. You’re a good, a healthy influence. That’s why you won’t shoot. Because it isn’t in you. You’re innocent, you dance, you sing, and you could never—”
Anni shook me awake as dawn was breaking. I was sleeping, tied to Ludwig with a rope, beside the main street. She asked me what she should do. Markus’s pistol in her hand, and the splatter of blood on her face, answered my first question. Anni said she’d believed Markus was going to kill them, going to kill them all, but then, when he was lying facedown on the moor, she hadn’t been so su
re anymore, and she’d gotten scared, scared of herself, because she hadn’t thought she’d be able to do it, and now, she said, now that it was over, she was surprised by how easy it had been.
I hugged her without speaking. I held her as tightly as I could, for all the hugs I’d never be able to give her from then on, and when we let go of each other and Anni stood there looking as beautiful to me as only a Most Beloved Possession can, I didn’t kiss her little mouth, round as a fish’s—even though I sensed that she would have allowed me—because I didn’t want to have to miss her kisses, too. Then I took the pistol from her, stuck it in the pocket of my coat, in which the gold was also hidden, and told my sister what had to be done.
Anni ran to the BMW and woke Fred and forbade him to leave the house. Anni stripped off all her clothes and burned them in the oven. Anni washed her body and her face and her hair and got dressed again. Anni locked Fred in the house. Anni found Pastor Meier and told him that during the night she’d secretly seen her own brother shoot Markus, which she couldn’t reconcile with her Christian conscience, no matter how much I meant to her, and that was why she was here, to make sure that justice was done. Anni crossed herself and whispered that her brother had fled south. Anni brought the wedding gown to Master Baker Reindl, and didn’t need to use many words, because the mother’s look showed that she understood immediately. Anni let her know how sorry I was, and that I trusted she would destroy this white scrap of misfortune. Anni raced to the deer stand in the forest, where she and I and Josfer had gone so often together (and from which I’d once been dunked into a bowl of sewage), and asked herself, while she was waiting there for me, exactly where in the North I’d hide myself and when we’d see each other again and if I’d be gone for as long as last time and, not least, how you were supposed to say good-bye to someone who’d never actually returned.
Maybe it’s best not to say it at all, thought Anni, once the sun had passed the zenith and there hadn’t yet been any sign of me. The fear that they might have captured me left her when she reappeared in the village. Men in uniforms led her away.
She was interrogated for seventy-two hours, given no sustenance, nothing more than a glass of water once in a while, but didn’t stray a jot from her story. In the end not even the police were a match for her tenacious head-shaking.
When she returned home, Fred seemed more dead than alive. Whole hanks of hair had fallen from his scalp, his skin was as gray as lead. When she forced him to swallow a gulp of milk, he threw up. His first words were “I own a speedster!”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever you want with it,” she said. “But I’m never going to touch that thing.”
“Where were you?” he asked her, and Anni looked him in the eye and asked, “Where were you?”
“Here.”
“And before that?”
“There.”
“And what did you do there?”
He blinked. “Nothing.”
“You have to tell me everything, Fred. It’s important. Very important. Otherwise I won’t be able to protect us.”
He didn’t answer.
“Frederick!”
He leapt to his feet, and at first Anni thought he was going to run away, but he snatched up a sheet of paper and a charcoal pencil, an early present from Markus for his ninth birthday, and began to draw. Anni watched him, her eyes following each line. She didn’t intervene when she realized what Fred was drawing, she let him go on, because she’d decided that this was going to be Fred’s last sketch. If they were going to have a chance at survival, he’d have to give it up, he mustn’t ever draw a picture again, especially not of what had happened that night in Segendorf. Anni would do anything to drive it out of him, and she’d manage it, if it was the last thing she did. She’d give him something else, a replacement, something to fill his mind and time with instead, words from the encyclopedia, maybe, or some simple task, something he’d do every day, something that would never come to an end, and that’s how they’d be able to live, live safely, and she stroked the top of Fred’s head and said, “That’s going to be good.”
Paris
Anni sent me Fred’s drawing with her first letter because, as she realized, she could neither keep it nor throw it away. Her handwriting was oddly angular, and many of the words she’d set down she’d made incredibly tiny—perhaps in an effort to render them less threatening.
After unfolding the picture, I’d laid my hand against Mina’s, so that our fingertips touched, and said good-bye to her. By now I was good at not crying when I felt the need to. Then I placed the gold in the palm of her hand, and wrapped it up in the paper. Mina would look after it for me.
Anni’s first letter reached me two weeks after my arrival in a military hospital on the western front. It was addressed to Ludwig Wickenhäuser, the name I’d assumed for my own safety. Julius Habom was wanted in the German Reich for the murder of a local official, and didn’t have much of a life expectancy.
Not that my chances on the front were any better. They’d drafted me, but I told myself, now that I’d never be able to see Anni again, it was all the same to me how the rest of my life, from which I had little to hope for, played out—just as long as I didn’t have to spend it alone.
I immediately found myself back among old acquaintances. Since I was a former undertaker, a shovel, rather than a rifle, was placed in my hands, and I reported for duty, disposing of the fallen. Once, just after I’d arrived at the hospital, I asked my superior for coffins. He laughed me out of the room, and pointed to the bins where the quicklime was kept. The ragged, scorched, and mutilated corpses disturbed me less than they did my colleagues. I could see what they were thinking as they worked: That’s a son. That’s a brother. That’s a father. That’s a child.
They’d soon get used to it, understanding that death comes in many shapes, and that some are simply more unambiguous than others. I’d already passed that stage long, long ago. I didn’t see dead men, only ears and feet and shoulder blades. When there were just too many, we had to bury them with backhoes under tons of sand and soil. Sometimes, if I happened to come across a few daisies, I’d lay them on the graves. The only thing that troubled me was the dead soldiers’ fear, which didn’t drain from their eyes when their hearts finally stopped beating; that fear reminded me of the look in Anni’s eyes the last time I’d seen her.
It emerged from her letters that no one suspected her of Markus’s murder. She phrased it thus: “No one here in the village believes that I’ve slaughtered a pig.”
She’d succeeded in weaning Fred from his drawing by giving him other tasks to keep him busy. Every day she sent him to the bus stop to count cars the same color as his beloved Speedster; she spurred him on to search the sewers for Arkadiusz; she read to him from the encyclopedia and reported that by now, at least, he could read and write one letter: A.
When Paris was taken and I marched with the army along the Champs-Elysées, impressed by the city, and by how quickly it had fallen, I thought of Wickenhäuser and his dream of having a frock coat cut for himself here. I didn’t believe that, as someone as keen on men as on women, and known as he was as the Jew of Schweretsried, he could still be among the living. It was only years later that I learned he’d hidden himself away in Else’s log cabin in the forest, and had died there of the cold at the war’s end, too terrified of uniformed monsters to venture from the house in search of firewood.
In France, even I had trouble with the women. I couldn’t speak to them. And if they understood German, it was worse: for obvious reasons, my mother tongue wasn’t particularly attractive to Frenchwomen. Which is why I used hand signals, instead, to convey to them that I was deaf and dumb. My most convincing arguments, however, were little crumbly chips from the gold nugget. Some of them I invested, naturally, in foodstuffs—above all, milk, and whenever I was able to scare some up, bacon—but those hours I spent in the company of lovely women silenced, if only briefly, an entirely different hunger, one not to be u
nderestimated. In bed the Frenchwomen were much more particular than their German counterparts, they seemed to know exactly what they wanted, and I was always freshly impressed with the intensity of their lovemaking, as if it were the last time.
I didn’t tell Anni about any of them. I didn’t want her to think there were any other women in my life.
So my letters to her became brief. My daily work was the disposal of the dead. The numberless eyes I couldn’t shut—I could hardly write to her about those.
On my final night in Paris—I’d just been assigned to the eastern front—I breathed for the last time the perfume of a pair of French girls and tried to engrave in my memory every detail of their bodies: the color of their nipples, the shapes of their belly buttons, the fluttering of their eyelids, the way their toes curled as they came. I wanted to savor Paris as much as I possibly could. In the Ukraine, so the rumor ran, a soldier who had potato peels to eat could count himself lucky.
That the hands of both girls were cold should have been a warning to me. Their smooth black and brunette hair hid their faces as I lay undressed on the bed and they explored my body with their tongues and lips. I closed my eyes. The weight on the mattress shifted, one of the two rising while the other settled herself on top of me. She bit my neck; first it stung, then grew warm. I brought my hand to my throat, opened my eyes, and saw blood. In her right hand, she held a jackknife. She lunged at me, shouting something in French. I tried to grab her arm, but she was too fast. At the last moment I twisted onto my side, and she struck me in the back. The pain knocked the breath out of me. I managed to grab the hand with the knife, and held it tight with both of my own. She raised herself behind the blade. The bathroom door swung open—the other French girl, the brunette. On the bathroom floor behind her lay my clothing and bag, which she’d been rummaging through. Luckily, I didn’t have the gold with me; I kept it at the hospital, never carrying it with me in the city. Instead of helping her accomplice, the brunette scooped up her things and ran from the room. That threw the black-haired girl long enough for me to buck her away, and the knife tumbled from her hand. Immediately she grinned, giggled, wrapped her legs around me, and reached for my cock. As if it had all been merely foreplay. Blood dripped from my throat onto her cheeks. I shook her off, and went to pick up the knife. My legs gave way, and I fell to the ground. The knife lay just in front of me, I reached for it, wrapped my hand around it. The French girl leapt from the bed, pulled on her clothes; all I could see were her slender feet. Within seconds she’d left the room. I concentrated on breathing calmly, pulled the bedsheets to me and pressed them against my throat, crawled to the chair where my own clothes lay, and knocked it over. As I attempted to pull on my pants, I could feel the weakness growing. I was getting cold. I dropped the pants and crawled naked to the open door, the red sheets wrapped around my neck. Blood was flowing from the wound in my back, I was leaving a trail behind me as I went. I felt more and more exhausted. In order to gather strength, I shut my eyes.
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