by Roy Jacobsen
“Which path?” Léon asked.
“Pretending to be mentally ill,” Blaskowitz said. “They hate the mentally ill here.”
Léon took this in, but then he had to tell Blaskowitz the truth about the fighting in Slovakia, which made him so strong and resilient, fighting in a German uniform, about the Ardennes Offensive and the bizarre days between Berl’s death and his arrest in the Elsens’ house – he was free then, wasn’t he? And the Leutnant was taken aback:
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this in Enscheringen?” he asked.
“I wasn’t afraid until I got to Enscherange,” Léon explained, using the Luxembourg name of the village. “I had never been afraid. But what I’m trying to tell you is that I didn’t desert. That was why I went into the town. I had just lost contact with my regiment…”
“You should have told me that, too,” Blaskowitz said.
“I did,” Léon insisted, by now seriously annoyed.
“That’s not how I remember it,” Blaskowitz said.
Some days later the Leutnant was found dead in his bed, strangled and with the name “Hünersdorff” daubed in soot on the front of his prison uniform, good in the service of evil, or the last hope gone when it is least expected. The camp commander set up an investigation, but had to let the matter drop due to insufficient evidence. However, the P.O.W.s were divided up: the so-called neu-deutsche – east Belgians, Luxembourgers, Lorrainians, Alsatians – were separated from the genuine Germans, the columns of blood in Hitler’s crooked temple, and the guards were reinforced, and Léon felt a growing aversion towards these smug arrangements whereby the neu-deutsche were treated better than the pure-blooded Germans and he began to hate the rainy climate – I can’t stand rain! – and also the endless mutton, the harsh diet of the Hittites and Pharisees, not to mention his own body, which was a law unto itself all winter, ravaged with fever and illnesses and fits of shivering that made him stammer and say irrational things until he lost all contact with the outside world.
“It’s not necessarily a bad sign,” a doctor told him in broken German. “You’re on your way back to normality.”
“Speak French,” Léon said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
The man repeated the sentence in German.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Léon said. “Don’t they teach you anything on this island?”
He couldn’t even visualise the Ardennes, he just saw these sloping, green, Scottish moors that surrounded the camp like the sides of a crater, a funnel to the sky greedily sucking up all its gory sorrow, in a maelstrom. Two winters or two summers, and where were the autumn, the seasons and the sense of time for a feeling human being?
But in late summer 1947 Léon could at last go down on his knees and thank his God. He had been pardoned “on account of his youth and for good conduct”, as it said in the papers he was handed and had translated by a fellow inmate, it must have been his terrible knee injury they had in mind – they had kept patching it up, only to demonstrate their ignorance with regard to medicine, too.
Léon grasped the duty officer’s hand and shook it ecstatically, thanking him for everything he had learned, here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and he wept like a baby. And less than a month later, on the afternoon of 16 September, 1947, he hobbled off the train in his hometown of Drauffelt after a journey of which he had no memory; in his knapsack he had a sundial, four ashtrays and a round jewellery box with an engraved lid, all made from brass cartridge shells. No state welcoming committee to receive Léon, no fanfares and flags, no post-war compensation or war pension. Léon was as innocent as a child, he was new-born and sentenced to death, he had been granted a life, as a gift or a punishment, who can say what’s what with this kind of thing?
He looked askance at the yellowing oaks that cast a faint shadow over the ground, at the horse and cart which his sisters had borrowed from a neighbour and at them, too, Leni and Gertrud in bright dresses, three and a half years older, mature women with summer painted all over their faces, white teeth and curly locks hanging down over their twinkling eyes. They told him that their father had trodden on an unexploded shell the year before and had succumbed to his wounds, but they had not wanted to darken Léon’s existence by telling him about this in a letter; they said Agnes had married a bookkeeper from Consthum and had moved to the capital, another thing they hadn’t wanted to tell him in a letter, mainly because Agnes had begged them on her knees not to do so. Those were the two pieces of news they had to give him immediately, they thought, otherwise they would probably never be able to do it, one piece of news each. However, they added that the farm was still standing, they had four cows, five calves and a pig, and it hadn’t been as difficult to recognise him as they had feared, even though he was limping and had lost a couple of front teeth.
On the road up the rolling hills to Dorscheid, Léon sat as quiet as a clam staring at the horse’s mane bouncing up and down, Leni’s head resting on his lap; it was a week before he said anything.
“It’s hot,” he said. “Shall we go for a swim?”
8
A few days before Christmas someone tried to set Léon and his sisters’ farm alight. One morning just before Lent he found the word “traitor” daubed on the cowshed wall. At Easter one of the cows died inexplicably.
“It’s the war raging in our forests,” Léon said as he put out the fire, whitewashed over the vile word and buried the cow. He never went out, neither to Dorscheid, nor anywhere else, he didn’t contact any of his old friends, he didn’t go shopping, not even for farm supplies, but sat inside reading the Bible, with mounting irritation, until he closed it for good, which, however, did not diminish the irritation. He didn’t tell his sisters anything about what had happened and didn’t care about anything except Leni doing her homework and keeping up at school. “That’s a good sign,” she whispered to her sister, and tried even harder to be good at school and patient with her brother.
When another cow was struck down by the virulent epidemic that followed in the wake of the war, the sisters began to nag Léon to get out and about, mix with locals at the morning Frühschoppen, go to the market in Clervaux, at the very least attend church, but he just asked them if they had gone out of their minds, and presumably they had, because when he removed all the mirrors he could find in the house, they put them back, for Léon wasn’t alone and he had to understand that. He also removed his photos from the family album, but he didn’t burn them, and Gertrud pasted them back in. Léon couldn’t make up his mind. But the following autumn he sold his father’s old wall clock to an antiques dealer in the capital and bought himself a camera and a tripod and developing equipment, set up a dark room in the barn and began to photograph birds of prey. Once a year he went away, by train, without telling anyone where, and returned after three or four days in a slightly more cheerful mood, his sisters thought, but only to sink into despondency a few days later and become absorbed in biblical texts – for the Lord would not release His grip on him – and peregrine falcons and buzzards.
But Gertrud did not shun her sisterly obligations, and now she stressed even more the necessity of her brother having contact with God in the Lord’s own house. Léon had to listen to rapturous reports of how lovely the Mass had been today, about the new priest who had arrived from France with a high-pitched voice, joie de vivre and encouraging words. One Sunday morning – almost three years after his return home and the day after Leni had finished school in Clervaux with some of the best exam grades ever recorded at the local lycée – Léon suddenly appeared in the kitchen wearing his father’s best suit and declared that now he was ready to go to church in Munshausen.
He walked through the sparse congregation with a sister on each arm and only now discovered – all too late – that this idea of Gertrud’s was not about coming closer either to God or abandoned neighbours but about invoking general sympathy for his tragic figure, so Léon’s family could be spared the blighting effect
s of war.
He stopped, looked from Gertrud to Leni, then down his abject person and at the congregation who avoided his gaze, or turned away, or smiled tentatively, or inquisitively, dressed in clothes that seemed cleaner than Léon remembered, newer and brighter, as though a new era had made its small mark, even in arch-conservative Ösel, and he started to laugh, he kept chuckling all the way through the service and what was more he embarrassed Gertrud by sitting at the front with the women.
He was still laughing on the way home, but this time he was met by his sister’s fury, although it wasn’t his stupid laughter she berated him for.
“What do you think we actually live off?” she railed.
This caught him by surprise. He answered:
“I don’t know, but it must be something.”
“Oh, yes, it must be something,” Gertrud retorted, stomping up to her room while Léon continued to chuckle and Leni sent him grave looks.
“That was the worst Mass I’ve ever attended in my whole life,” he said irritably, and went to bed.
After that he didn’t go to church until he met a German priest whose parish was in the village of Rodershausen a bit further to the west and who had a similar history to his own, either something to hide or something to forget, in other words, probably both. But he continued to chuckle and when the time for him to go away on one of his trips was approaching and he dropped a hint about travelling expenses, Gertrud once again brought up the subject of their parlous finances, their “unnecessary poverty”, he should put his brains to some use, earn them some money instead of taking off on mysterious expeditions and otherwise wasting his time – where was he going by the way?
“Nowhere,” Léon said, with respect to these short meetings he had with four ex-conscripts, among them Benjamin, who sobbed every time he saw him and always gave him money which he earned from a garage he had established on the outskirts of the capital, because Benjamin did not want to return to Ösel, he also employed two of his old comrades. “I’ll do everything you ask.” Léon smiled to his sister. “As long as you give me the money. We can call it a loan.”
She snorted but complied.
While Léon was away this time Agnes reappeared, with a large suitcase, two nicely dressed boys and a spider’s web of tiny wrinkles over her still beautiful face. She was on her way to Hosingen, “home”, but wanted to stop here in Dorscheid first, where she had spent her “happiest years”. Leni gave her an effusive and tearful welcome and produced her exam certificate almost before the embrace was over, while Gertrud was more restrained. But coffee appeared on the table, the boys were allowed to play with the calves and eventually it came out that Agnes was very unhappy living in town, farmer’s wife that she was by habit and disposition, and things were not so good between her and the bookkeeper, she had left him, if the truth be told.
“What!”
“Yes,” she said quietly, running her hand slowly over her knee.
“Are you divorced?”
“…”
Gertrud became sharper and sharper while Leni became softer and softer. It degenerated into a confused mixture of war and peace negotiations, which lasted until after the onset of darkness, which meant that Agnes had to stay the night. She did not move on the following day either, this time because Gertrud said that she may as well do something useful now she was there, at least while Gertrud was working at the hospital in Clervaux. And that turned into another night, because there was a lot to do, and a new day …So that when Léon returned, driving up the hill in a little dust-grey Triumph, and spotted Leni in the yard, busy hanging out the washing, he immediately realised that something was afoot – his sister hurried in, and the next moment Gertrud came out, leant against the house and crossed her arms, without gracing the car with a glance.
“Prepare yourself for a shock,” she said sourly, going into the house before him.
Agnes had got to her feet and was standing next to their father’s old armchair, staring down at her hands, stroking her knee with one, though not too obviously. From the kitchen came the voices of children, the clatter of cutlery and Leni’s laughter.
“Hello,” Léon said, and the next moment the guest fell to the floor. He rushed forward to help her but was stopped by Gertrud, who poked at the unconscious woman with the tip of her shoe.
“Don’t worry. She’s just putting it on.”
Léon went outside again and round to the back of the house. He thought this might have had something to do with his clothes, but they were the finest travelling apparel there was, even though they had been his father’s, and he only wore them once a year. He went for a walk in the woods, taking care not to get his shoes dirty. A summery warmth hung over the country. The sky was a deep blue, dense and unwavering, as though it had come to stay. He walked up the little hill – with a view of Munshausen and the River Clerve and the hills beyond – where he had placed the sundial he had brought with him from Scotland and watched the narrow shadow fall between the numerals 3 and 4, compared it with the time on his new wristwatch, twenty-five to four, and smiled with satisfaction.
Agnes had recovered, and now she was sitting in their father’s armchair looking straight at him.
“Hello,” Léon said again.
“Hello,” she said.
“Stop that nonsense,” said Gertrud.
Leni was leaning against the kitchen door eating an apple. Her brother turned and smiled at her. In the kitchen a plate hit the floor.
9
If anyone had been tactless enough to ask the sisters what they thought had changed most about Léon when he came home, they would at first have been embarrassed and have tossed their heads in irritation, but then they would have said that he seemed so much smaller than they remembered him, almost shrivelled, the way a childhood home seems shockingly small when you return after a longish stay abroad, and Gertrud might have added that he had shrunk in many other ways as well, without being able to define precisely what she meant, except that it was something he could rectify but had no wish to, a form of contrariness. While Leni would not have dared to say that in so many words, and maybe she didn’t agree, either. As for Agnes, she wouldn’t have answered the question at all, for Léon was not the only man to fight the war on the wrong side in his own country and later be imprisoned by his allies.
After Agnes had been on the farm for three weeks, walking on eggshells, like a timid slave of her former ward, Gertrud, who had never taken a wrong turn in the labyrinths of life, one evening during a conversation over a few too many glasses of wine it slipped out that Agnes had not in fact been divorced by the bookkeeper, he was dead, he had died in a train accident, which they may have read about in the newspaper, this spring …and he wasn’t insured.
You could have heard a pin drop.
“So you didn’t come back because you missed us,” Gertrud said, the truth slowly dawning on her, “but because you needed us, once again. You have betrayed us not once but twice!”
“Everyone’s done something stupid at some time in their lives,” Agnes began to explain, but she was rudely interrupted.
“Everyone else, yes! The country’s full of traitors, but in this house there are none! There never has been and there never will be!”
Léon said nothing.
Agnes made no move to go. And nobody tried to chase her away, either, she fitted in, without fitting in, like Léon, now and then she had to suffer some snide comments but otherwise she worked like a horse to free the farm from the shadow of the war. And she retained her beauty and did her utmost to ensure that her sons did not cause trouble, while adapting to the invisible rules of the house, month after month, until the new roles were so set and ingrained and well-oiled that not even a new war would have been able to dislodge them, for if there is a limit to how far a human being can carry their own cross, then Agnes was not aware of it, she had suffered such pain, now she was home again.
The Baker’s Two Lives
Markus told a story. It was
about one of five brothers from the East Cantons of Belgium who were all conscripted into the Wehrmacht and sent to more or less exposed posts on the Eastern Front: one ended up in Romania, one in Poland, one in the Sixth Army, one in Hollidt’s Army Detachment in the Don Basin, while the last of them was lucky enough to be deployed as a quartermaster in Kharkov. Only two of them survived, the youngest and the next-youngest, the Sixth Army conscript and the quartermaster. In the post-war years they and their wives both had as many children as it is God’s wish to bestow upon a good Catholic family: four and six. Their parents also had many siblings, who in turn had children, who eventually married and produced grandchildren, and all these people lived in and around the same small village in the German–French-speaking part of Belgium, close to the Luxembourg border.
But none of them ever asked the two war veterans about their experiences during the great martyrdom, and the brothers were in no hurry to tell them, either. The war was not talked about in this family, the memories were too complex, people had been on the wrong side, whether pressure had been put on them or not, and furthermore they looked upon the Germans with the same deep, engrained mistrust as they looked upon those of their fellow countrymen who had boycotted the Wehrmacht or deserted – as cowards and traitors who were not willing to share their forced burden, suffering or that strange schizophrenia of theirs with their closest neighbours; silence alone could deal with history in a decent manner.