by Roy Jacobsen
“You know this area,” he mumbled. I must have nodded and said yes because he continued: “Get yourself home and find some civvies. I know that’s been playing on your mind.”
But I shook my head and said I had nowhere to go, “I’m a German,” I said, and added in that case Berl would have to die here on his own, because no-one was coming, and he yelled: “That’s an order!” He had his hand around his revolver and said “Herrgott” and pointed the gun at me, so I got up and rolled over the oak trunk and down into a ditch, where I found what was left of the Lorrainian as I heard the shot, and when I turned, Berl was lying across the tree trunk as though crucified, that was what happened, I don’t remember anything else, I can testify to that, I won’t put my name to anything else, as God is my witness.
4
Léon saw light. At first it was warm, then it went white and slowly sparkled into life, he dragged himself eastwards, found a branch and managed to walk a few metres, had a rest and went another hundred metres, stumbled through the night and home to Dorscheid, where three of the farms lay in ruins, one was still smoking. But his home was still standing, the windows in the end wall had been blown out, two cows were lying next to the stream, blasted to pieces by shellfire, but he couldn’t see any people, dead or alive, Dorscheid had been evacuated, or wiped out, no lights and no sound.
Léon walked the last steps up to the farm building, through the washroom and into the kitchen where dinner was on the table, the sitting-room door was open, a chair had been overturned and the stove was cold, the yellowing potatoes and coagulated gravy on the plates, a day-and-a-half old because there were the remains of some meat, too, and that was what they had on Saturdays, and the table was set for all four of them.
Léon shuffled round the house and noticed that the bedding and the family’s winter clothes were missing, that the binoculars he had got from his father on his eighteenth birthday had gone, as had two pans and some cutlery, and not least the horse and cart and the other animals, which suggested it had been an evacuation. But to his surprise he saw that several of the family photos were missing, as well as his father’s Bible and Leni’s favourite doll, while his gun was hanging in its usual place in the washroom.
He struggled up the stairs to his room, stuffed a pillow in the smashed window and slept in the bed he had slept in every single night up to May 27, Dear Agnes, there is fresh bed linen here, where on earth has it come from?
For four or five days, it isn’t so easy to know, because Léon doesn’t count, he lies there wondering who he is, or rather, who others will think he is, and he arrives at the wrong answer, at any rate an answer which no-one can agree with, since he puts off going to meet his family and friends on the old familiar paths, while the grandfather clock in the sitting room continues to tick and the time to make it back to his German regiment is running out, but he is not going back, that is for certain, though he can’t stay here either, even so he doesn’t go, the wound is not deep, but something must be broken in his knee joint, that is why he doesn’t go.
He reckoned no-one would notice the smoke in the sea of mist outside and lit the stove in the kitchen. He burned his uniform, cut up part of one of the cows and hung the meat in the washroom, and went on a few short recce expeditions in the neighbourhood, in a vain search for a human being or at least a radio, he heard the drone of planes and thought he heard the clanking of tank tracks down the road to Neidhausen, but then it went quiet again, he ate some tough meat, wolfed down Agnes’ jam, crusts of cheese, baked some bread and drank all of his father’s modest stock of wine. But his leg wasn’t getting any better, half a metre of snow fell and then the weather cleared up, and he still couldn’t decide what to do.
But then he heard the sound of voices and saw from the window that two civilians in a horse-drawn cart had stopped at a neighbouring house, it was his next-door neighbours, father and son, his best friend and playmate, who went in and carried out two suitcases and several sacks and were gone again. While Léon crouched at the window, unable to make his presence known, he was wearing the wrong uniform, even if he had burnt it long ago, and late that night he went out under the starry sky to see whether it was safe to light the fire, and outside he saw his own tracks, the tracks he had made that morning and realised that his neighbours would also have seen them and known he was there, and then they had chosen to leave again. That decided it.
Where should he go though, it must be December 23 by now, or maybe Christmas Eve? He followed his neighbours’ tracks, but they disappeared in the churned-up main road through Neidhausen, and he couldn’t see any smoke or light there, so he hobbled on westwards, sometimes through the forest, but no innocent civilian had any business there, so he took to the road again, down to Drauffelt where he walked slap into a column of prisoners, forty, fifty raggle-taggle zombies in American uniforms, under German guard, the motorcyclist at the front stopped, whereupon Léon took a deep breath and said unbidden in his best Letzebuergesch:
“I’ve just come from Hosingen and I’m looking for my family…”
As the Americans marched grimly past, the officer measured him with a sleepless gaze, but did not dismount from his motorbike.
“Your papers.”
“My mother has them. I was at work in Wahlhausen and we lost contact. They said in Bockholtz that they might be in Drauffelt…”
“Enscheringen,” the officer said after a short pause and suddenly lost interest. “There are some civilians there, also from Hosingen.”
He revved up and rejoined the front of the column while Léon waited until the procession had passed, a heavy lorry carrying wounded prisoners brought up the rear and a battered tank with “Hünersdorff” painted across its turret in yellow letters.
Léon waved briefly at the soldiers sitting on top and limped on, in the middle of the road now, like a man who has passed muster, he’d had enough credibility to deceive a German, the credibility only a truthful lie could lend him, and as he was approaching the River Clerve he bumped into two elderly women and a girl who said they were going “home” to Munshausen and that the Germans were in Drauffelt, he also spoke to them like a real local, he deceived them too and realised how simple it was as he gave Drauffelt a wide berth and made his way south through the forest, waded across the Clerve late in the evening and gave Enscherange a wide berth as well, in order to enter the town from the west.
In a bar he was told which people had taken in evacuees and was received with open arms at the very first house by a stout elderly couple by the name of Elsen, who had over twenty evacuees under their wing, on mattresses and camp beds. His host showed Léon around as if he were a guest of honour – eight children between the ages of three and ten were romping about on the sitting-room floor, a middle-aged couple from Clervaux were sitting on a bench by a majestic cabinet, him blind, her with downcast eyes and a rosary on her lap, and two girls, presumably their daughters, with their dainty heads bowed over their knitting, arms tucked into their sides; in the kitchen two girls from Hosingen were making a racket, to the enormous irritation of an old man from Wiltz, whom the host maintained they’d had to constrain by force because he wanted to “go home”. The other part of the house had been requisitioned by three German officers, so Léon repeated the tale he had told the officer on the motorbike, but this time he replaced Hosingen with Stolzembourg as his hometown.
He was given a hot meal and a glass of wine, and when silence had settled over this wartime Noah’s Ark, he told the farmer his story, that he was who he was and therefore didn’t know what the hell to do, and the man became both pensive and annoyed, especially when Munshausen was mentioned, whereupon he took his guest down to the cellar, through the damp stench of mould and cheese and earth and in behind a potato bin where all types of discarded agricultural implements and old tools were piled up on wide shelves, swept one of them clean and turned it into a pallet with blankets and mumbled something about it being a pity the others in the house had seen him, but tomorrow he wou
ld have to get up before daybreak and move on as though he had never been there.
Léon thanked him and went to sleep. But he didn’t wake until well into the day, with one leg just as stiff although the pain had eased, and upstairs in the house all was quiet, he heard someone moving about in the attic, but didn’t see anyone, neither there nor in the kitchen nor in any of the other rooms, except for the blind man, who started in surprise when he went in.
“Who’s that?” he said, craning his head.
“Just me,” Léon said evasively in an attempt to merge into the background, for blindness affects not only the person who has lost his sight, but also those the blind cannot see, so Léon blushed at having been caught red-handed and gave up any idea of creeping out unseen. Instead he asked:
“Where are the others?” and scuffed his feet so that the blind man would turn his face in the right direction.
“At Mass. The Wehrmacht, too,” he added with a wry smile. “It’s Christmas…”
“Ah, I see…”
“You didn’t know that, did you? I thought not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. There’s a medicine cabinet in there. I think you might be able to have a bath here, too.”
The blind man flared his nostrils and laughed affectedly. Léon stared at his black pilot’s goggles, or tank goggles, and wondered why he didn’t think of washing in the days he was in Dorscheid, then he began to laugh as well, but this was a harrowing experience, so he stopped and went to the kitchen to wash and bandage his wound, but he was filled with a mounting unease, the blind man had spoken High German even when Léon answered in Letzebuergesch, he had to continue on his way towards his undefined destination, to heaven, there was no room for him on earth, but God led him back to the blind man who was sitting in the same chair, his face turned towards the sunlight which fell through the window on the south-facing wall, still with an enigmatic smile on his deeply lined features.
“It’s a nice day,” he said immediately after Léon had scuffed his foot. “The Allies have full control of the skies, so it won’t be more than two or three weeks, four maybe? You were in Munshausen, weren’t you?”
Léon started.
“Can you see things?” he asked.
“No, but what I have seen has made me blind. I’m Belgian,” he added, as if to explain his High German and his psychic powers, and Léon was only just able to compose himself sufficiently to pose an important question:
“What happened in Munshausen?”
“Surely you know, don’t you?”
“No, you don’t see anything in battle, not that I was frightened, but I didn’t see anything, we fell into an ambush, I reckon…”
The blind man smiled again.
“Something happened which neither the Germans nor the Allies are very proud of. But I think all the civilians were evacuated…”
“The Kompanieführer handed over the command to a Stabsfeldwebel,” Léon mumbled.
“This is not a war they’re going to win. I think it’s best if you go now. The girls here are partial to the German officers.”
Léon got up. He heard the roar of cannons.
“I have to find my family,” he said distractedly.
“They’re safe,” the blind man said. “On your way now, before anyone starts asking questions…”
“I saw a tank east of Drauffelt,” Léon said. “With ‘Hünersdorff’ written on it …what does that mean?”
“Good in the service of evil,” the blind man muttered, turning his face to the sunlight again. “The last hope gone. It’s not a good sign. Or maybe it is a good sign, I don’t know, be off with you now.”
A door slammed, and the host came in, red-faced with cold.
“Are you still here?” he said petulantly. “I told you to get going. Come back tonight if you absolutely must, but it would be best for you to find somewhere else. Look, I’ve scraped a few things together for you.”
Léon put on his coat, grabbed the shabby suitcase and had a canvas bag thrust into his other hand. He crept out the back of the house and made his way across the neighbouring garden, to the south, in the opposite direction to the church spire, without meeting a soul, and took a path up the hill, west towards Eschweiler, but he had no more reason to be there than here, so he left the path and sought the cover of the forest, stopped and stared disapprovingly at his tracks, gave a shrug and continued until he reached a ridge with a view of Enscherange, his starting-out point.
There he lit a fire beneath a towering beech tree which had kept enough of its rust-brown foliage to make him invisible from above. The pounding of artillery came from every direction, but how would the Americans receive him? – “Good in the service of evil”, those words applied to Léon, a Luxembourger in a Wehrmacht uniform, and also the next ones, “The last hope gone”, as he hadn’t sided with the Americans at Munshausen, God was my witness, he wished them dead and buried, even though he hadn’t fired a shot, but then he discovered that Berl was unable to hold his machine gun, that he had to fight for Berl’s life and at one point he was on the verge of going down to the nearest German sentry post and telling them he had lost contact with his company in the heat of battle in Munshausen, and then he had tried to find his way home and had put on these civvies because his uniform was in tatters …they would receive him with open arms, five or six days – what was that? – it would also benefit his family, no matter what the outcome of the war, because being forced to join the German ranks gave you some kind of protection against guilt, he knew that, yes, the German uniform was his only refuge, a sacred no-man’s-land, and here he was in civilian clothes, by God, Agnes, how could I be so blind?! And spurred on by this born-again insight he set off and plodded down the snow-covered hillside back to Escherange, but there for some reason he preferred the Elsens’ house to the German command post; the kids were playing on the floor as on the previous day, while a plump, middle-aged woman rose from her chair near the door and looked at him shyly.
“I’m cold,” Léon said. There were no other adults in the room, but a moment later the host came in and dragged him resolutely through the kitchen and down the cellar stairs.
“What on earth’s up with you?”
“I’m German,” Léon said wearily. “I need to find my company again, the regiment…”
“Nonsense. They’ll grill you alive, it’s the death penalty for deserters, regardless of whether you’re a Luxembourger or a German, or a Bantu tribesman for that matter…”
“I’m not a deserter. I lost contact with—”
“Listen here, young man,” the host said, before suddenly assuming a more concerned tone. “What’s up with your leg?”
Léon looked down at his troublesome leg. Blood had soaked through his trousers and turned them black from the knee downwards, one dark and one light leg, like those of a circus artiste, and the very next moment he sank to the floor.
But he was aware that the host was dragging him through the cellar passageway and manoeuvred him onto the same “shelf” and that somebody came to tend his wounds, a woman, perfume, but his body began to shake, he was given some brandy and saw Berl’s smile when he relieved him of the blood-streaked machine gun, Berl’s contented smile, the one a proud father bestows on a successful son, or a condemned man on his saviour, unless the gunner was only acknowledging some good old Prussian fighting spirit. A rearing horse, contorted and screaming between the wooden shafts of a half-buried cart, a rain of splinters, the wound to my hand, he looked at it, saw that it had closed like a clam around a pearl – “That means you’re dead,” the blind man had said, and not “Good in the service of evil” – “You’re dead.”
“Leave him there,” he heard. “He’s one of us!’
In Léon’s own language – and he was aware that several other young men had occupied shelves in the cellar, above him and on the opposite wall, young men of his own age.
“I’m from Dorscheid,” he said defiantly, and saw the sm
ile on the face above him broaden, a blond fringe over a lean baby-face with wide-open eyes.
“What did I tell you? It’s not a trap.”
Léon wasn’t cold anymore, his feet weren’t floating, his eyes didn’t ache, the wound wasn’t throbbing, he wasn’t even hungry, and now he recognised two of the faces from the Wehrkreiskommando in the capital in May, or from the trip to the training camp in Bohemia, Luxembourgers who, like himself, had deserted during the offensive, as they had planned in Slovakia, God had brought them together again on the Belgian border, when the German troops had been ordered to retreat; they had ditched their weapons and uniforms, found help from civilians and travelled on foot, like Léon, all they could do now was lie low until the Americans came, in a week or two, maybe three…
“What day is it?” Léon asked.
“Saturday,” said the blond fringe above him. “The thirtieth of December.”
5
Ortskommandant Heinz Blaskowitz, the local commanding officer, hadn’t been stationed in Enscherange for more than twenty-four hours when one of his Truppenführers came and informed him that “three or four deserters were staying at a house with the Elsen family”.
“What do you mean by three or four?” Blaskowitz growled. “Can’t you count?”
He didn’t like this war, he didn’t like Hitler, his regiment or the much overrated soldier’s life, either, which he called filthy, boring and stultifying, Blaskowitz was an aristocrat, a philologist, a Mozart expert, well-dressed and a lover of literary classics. But neither did he like turncoats, partisans, resistance fighters or whatever they were called, all of those who in the final throes of a meaningless war wanted to save their meaningless skins, and leave the purgatory to others, so he gave the Truppenführer orders to clarify what he meant by “three or four deserters” without delay.