by Uwe Tellkamp
They loaded ammunition onto the tanks, they unloaded ammunition off the tanks. Did guard duty in the heat, listened to the rustling of the pinewoods when the wind got up. They slept in tents they erected on black sand. At night it was so hot the hands of the older soldiers slipped off the mouths of their victims and the whimpering, the cries, could be heard, panting and desperately relieved groans of relief. Christian kept his knife beside him. Musca drank Dur, Rogalla Tüff aftershave. The Russians, with whom their battalion was on manoeuvre, had vodka and coolant. They didn’t use the ramp to unload the tanks from the goods wagons but turned a steering lever until the tank was sideways on, stepped on the throttle and let it flop down backwards. Crash bang, went the axles. Eat dirt, went the Russians. Parni, they said to their GDR brothers-in-arms, spat and waved, a tank doesn’t need all its axles. Konechno. When they were drunk they took out their Makarovs, stuck them in a pile of sand and proved that they could fire even then. Ochen horosho! Then they sang, danced round the fire, tossed tracer bullets onto it, were delighted at the sparks flying up. There were problems with the local farmers, the Russians were starving, you could tell from the way they looked. They took food wherever they could get it. For example, from the field kitchen of their brothers-in-arms. They were very skilled at plucking chickens. They danced like crazy. One of them challenged Ruden. Ruden was good, but not as good as the Russian. He taught the German parni close-combat tricks from Afghanistan. How to bump off a guard with a knife when you were on reconnaissance. Christian was translating. He didn’t know the word for ‘bump off’. How to ‘take out’ a village, sparing the women as far as possible. A gesture was enough for ‘fuck’.
Talk to her.
They sang well and then all the bad words, the filth, simply vanished. Lots of them could recite Pushkin by the yard; afterwards it got dangerous; once one of them emptied the magazine of an anti-aircraft MG into a pile of ammunition boxes. The soldiers only managed to contain the forest fire that followed the explosion because they leapt into the tanks and flattened wide breaks round the blazing pines. At night, when the wind was calm or in the right direction, we could hear talking, then laughter, then sounds of intercourse from a nearby campsite by a lake. Musca said he reckoned he could get a bite of a cherry or two. The others said he should keep his trap shut, they couldn’t hear a thing. ‘Don’t let me catch any of you tossing off here, you goddamned filthy bastards,’ Ruden, who was mounting guard, bawled.
Ruden. Who wanted to study classical languages. Who knew Nietzsche. Praised be whatever makes us hard. What does not kill me makes me stronger. Ruden had a girlfriend who left him in the summer of ’85. He stood there looking at the photo in the ‘personal compartment’ of his locker, the tall, brawny discharge candidate, sergeant, possessor of the sports badge in gold and various shooting awards, holding the letter in his hand and saying nothing. He wanted to go on leave, there was an exercise coming, the company commander cancelled his leave. Ruden ranted and raved a bit, out in the corridor. The company commander kept his cool. To bawl out Ruden in front of the soldiers would have meant that all the other DCs would have immediately downed tools: farewell top mark for socialist competition. Ruden read Caesar and Xenophon, descriptions of battles. ‘What are you called?’ he asked Christian during ‘baptism’.
‘Christian Hoffmann, Comrade Sergeant.’
‘No. You’re no one. Nemo, that is. From now on you’re called Nemo.’
The drivers had prepared slices of bread for their earholes: one had been spread with mustard, another with shoe polish, Burre’s with excrement. When he refused to eat it, they held him and pushed the slice of excrement bread into his mouth. ‘Eat shit. You’re in the army now, comrade.’ They baptized him Nutella, after the spread from the West.
‘Baptism’: Irrgang was Aquarius. He was given a teaspoon. There was a bucket full of water on the ground floor of the battalion, an empty one on the second floor in headquarters company.
Christian’s turn came during the night, when he was already asleep. He was tied up in a blanket, dragged out into the depot and laid down in front of a tank. Popov started the engine and drove over Christian, who was unable to move. He watched the tank pass above him, saw bolts, the emergency exit flap. The game was called ‘hot dog’. Then Rogalla untied him, handed him a water bottle. ‘Have a drink, comrade, we all had to go through it. They made Ruden lick the company corridor and once almost knocked his eye out. And for me there was piss in the bottle. Oh, by the way, you get clean bedding in a fortnight’s time.’
Talk to her.
Lars Dieritz, known as Costa, the rib, was the saddest soldier doing his penultimate six months Christian knew. He was wretchedly thin, like a baby bird, though tough and with great stamina, only Christian was a match for him at the 3,000 metres. Costa, the rib, had all the privileges of his status but none of the higher ranks respected him. ‘You’re a milksop,’ Ruden said, ‘you’re not a warrior, you’re just a mummy’s boy. And something like that’s in the cavalry! We’re the vanguard of the army. I’d chuck you out if you were younger.’
‘Oh, shut your trap.’ Costa just wanted to get it over with, just wanted to go home. He couldn’t stand Ruden and Rogalla’s muscleman boasting, he had no time for playing the hero.
‘So why did you sign up for three years, then? Nemo did it to get to university, me too. But you? No one was forcing you.’
‘I believed their promises. I had a soft spot for the state, can you imagine? And no idea how lousy things are here.’
‘Hey, Rogi, when we’ve gone, everything will collapse here. Costa in his final six months …’ Ruden made a dismissive gesture. ‘Can’t imagine how he’s going to maintain the proud tradition, the rights and privileges of the discharge candidates. Ah well, Wanda’ll sort things out.’
Costa liked music, best of all Leonard Cohen’s melancholy ballads; since he was in his final year of service he was allowed a record player. ‘My God, Ruden, you are limited. Aren’t you going to go to university? Always coming out with bits of Latin and Greek … I’m just an electrician but it could be I’ve got more candlepower in my upper storey than you.’
In political education they were told about the clear ideological position of socialist members of the army, the danger of an atomic war threatening the existence of humanity caused by imperialism, of the tasks facing them, the comrade NCOs and privates. Socialism needed class-conscious, well-trained and steadfast men who were ready to fight for it and to fulfil their military duty at any time, thus assuring the peaceful future of mankind and victory over war even before it broke out through the strength of socialism. They sang. Sang ‘The Song of the Foe’. The Political Officer had asked who could play an instrument. Costa and Popov could strum a guitar a bit. ‘Soldier, you hold a gun in your hand, / And a worker it was who gave it you. / You carry your gun for the Fatherland, / So the workers’ life stays safe and true. / Our foe is ruthless, crafty, vile, / He took some comrades from us through the years, / He has no thought for love, for wife and child, / Nor for the tears they shed, such bitter tears …’
In their free time they sat in the company recreation room for a communal viewing of TV News, made tanks out of matches for the solidarity bazaar for a Pioneer group the company was sponsoring, wrote letters. Musca had to stand in posture with all his gear for one of the soldiers to do his portrait for the battalion diary: ‘The Tanker’. In the Free German Youth group the achievements of the comrade army members were evaluated. Christian, who was still inexperienced and couldn’t control the tank properly yet, was delegated to the technical circle run by his platoon leader. After their duty was over, the technical circle went out into the depot. ‘There’s only one guarantee / The aggressor can be contained / To be better equipped than he, / Better armed and better trained.’
Staff Sergeant Emmerich, known as Nip, swayed as he distributed the mail and when he read out the names, when he gave out orders, he didn’t articulate correctly, his voice scraped over the outlin
es of the words, grunted out the short ones and stirred the polysyllabic ones into a linguistic mush, out of which the soldiers’ attuned ears fished what he, the sergeant, wanted. Nip had the dull, lifeless hair and stretched-looking skin of heavy drinkers and the blackheads in his large, slanting pores sat deep and inaccessible as wasp-grubs in their breeding cells. He had been in the army for fifteen years and been given an honourable discharge but he hadn’t known what to do with himself at home, in a flat in a new development in the little town of Grün. The company had been his empire, the soldiers the charges in his care, and morning, noon and night he had dealt with clean underwear, requests for leave, repairs, had the boilers heated, organized tea and sandwiches for his men when they came back, tired and filthy, from field camps to the barracks. He could no longer say how many field exercises he’d taken part in. He’d been at the legendary ‘Comrades-in-Arms’ manoeuvres, he knew Kapustin Yar in Kazakhstan, where battalions of Tank Regiment 19, ‘Karl Liebknecht’, in which Christian was serving, were going with artillery units of other regiments; he knew all the training areas of the Republic, knew about the little difficulties of their shooting and driving ranges. He handed out the wax for polishing the corridors, he sanctioned radios, he had the cassette slots on cassette recorders sealed, he marked with felt tip the tuning for the permitted radio stations. Subordinate to him were the duty sergeant and his assistant, whose attention he personally drew to ‘crud’ in the rooms (Christian learnt that that was what dirt was called, another word was ‘gunge’), whom he personally instructed as to how the two stoves in the battalion staff office – when the trees along the roads turned yellow – were to be stoked; he carried out the inspection of rooms and lockers personally, searching for alcohol, magazines from the West or secret radios; when the day’s work was done he personally pressed the aluminium seal into the crown corks filled with modelling clay on the doors of us soldiers, the bearers of secrets. And he personally saw to it that before the visit of any bigwig even the trunks of the birch trees outside the battalion building were washed. At morning roll-call he checked the tunic collar binds and gave a look of disgust when he found a dirty one. He, as did the officers, knew very well how the young soldiers were treated; complaints dragged on and on until they fizzled out or were dismissed, Nip believed the unofficial privileges exercised by the senior recruits were part of the men’s psychological training. One of his favourite amusements was to come into the barracks secretly at night. When Christian was on duty he could smell the reek of schnapps before Nip came stomping up the steps. According to regulations he should have reported his arrival but Nip would put his finger to his lips and pat a bag that was hanging from his shoulder. In the bag was the ‘drake’, Staff Sergeant Emmerich’s personal hand-siren. Drunk and happy, Nip staggered along the unlit corridor, and after having unlocked the armoury turned the handle of the ‘drake’ like a hurdy-gurdy man and bawled out, ‘Comp’ny Four – action stations!’
One day Nip ordered Christian to come to his room. He ran his thumb over a bundle of postcards. ‘This letter is confiscated, Hoffmann. It has marks from a non-socialist country. From the class enemy! In a facility of the National People’s Army!’
Christian recognized Ina’s handwriting on the envelope. ‘Cuba is a socialist country, Comrade Staff Sergeant. My cousin was there on her honeymoon.’
‘It’s been franked in Hamburg. There are two alternatives. We make a fuss about it, you complain … or the letter disappears. You should be grateful. According to regulations …’
Christian stared at Nip’s collection of pot plants. Anne would have advised him to let the matter drop. Meno, with his coolly observant scientist’s manner, would presumably have waited to see what his nephew would do. Robert would have said, Sell him the letter, you can see how keen he is on it, the poor slob. Try to get something out of it. Only Richard would have lost his temper.
Richard, from whom Christian had inherited his mania for justice, as Barbara put it. But his father wasn’t there. Christian was certainly interested in what would happen if he insisted on having the letter. The Hoffmanns’ daredevil recklessness. Spin the ball and see what turns up on the roulette wheel. ‘Yes, Comrade Staff Sergeant.’
48
ORWO black-and-white
Chug-chug-chug and put-put-put, rumbling and grumbling, baboom, baboom,
‘Something’s rattling, shut the door, Robert.’ – ‘It is shut.’ – ‘I said something’s rattling’, baboom, baboom,
crawling (the traffic jams on the Berlin ring road) and jolting (the hot Pneumant tyres over asphalt bulging out of the joins in the concrete slabs) lip-smacking (hard-boiled eggs, liver sausage on bread, Golden Delicious, peeled cucumbers and carrots at the concrete tables of the autobahn picnic areas) pissing (as Niklas said, there was no other word for it when you had to go into the scraggy pine trees beside the picnic areas where plastic bags, empty bottles, swarms of flies round the traces left by your predecessors – for the women there was a path leading deeper into the little wood – tons of toilet paper all seemed to say, Oh God, how happy we were) baboom, baboom,
Plastics from Schkopau baboom,
Faster – higher – further baboom,
Plastics from Schkopau babang (pothole),
Forward to the XXth Party Conference baboom,
Plastics from Schkopau badong (deep pothole),
fill the tank (VK 88 the fuel that takes you further) boom
(bomb crater – Niklas drove onto the shoulder and checked – the bumper was still attached),
and give thanks (survived it once again, Gudrun groaned in Stralsund, as we straightened ourselves out):
thus one drove away on holiday across the German Democratic Republic.
Stralsund was a sad town. No proud Hanseatic flags any more, no noble regattas. Störtebecker, the pirate, was dead. After being beheaded he walked until he stumbled over the leg of one of the officials. Crumbling brick, dilapidated roofs. The sun was grey, enveloped in clouds of rubbish, hung low over the Sound. They parked the car but left Meno’s luggage in it. He was going to travel on alone. There were a few hours before the ferry for Hiddensee left. Gudrun suggested they wander round the town; Anne and Niklas wanted to go and see the churches; Christian, Robert and Richard were hungry; Meno wanted to go to the Museum of the Sea. The market square was belly-up like a dead fish, gleaming in the fatty air rancid with kitchen fumes; all that was left of the light was some brownish dross that stuck to the walls like traces of tartar. The few people in the market square, which no longer seemed to be the centre of town, kept their heads down and disappeared hurriedly along side streets, as if they were being pursued. The town hall with its pointed Gothic gables seemed glaringly alien; the town was being eaten away by mould and acid discharge from brown coal. There was a long queue at an ice-cream stall offering vanilla ice in a wafer for fifty pfennigs and a cone for a mark; those queuing had the poor, pale skin of holidaymakers from inland before their holiday. Christian and Robert joined the queue. Meno, who had last been in the town as a student – youth hostel, excursions to the Museum of the Sea – wanted to go round by himself.
‘Back at the car in two hours,’ Anne, who seemed to distrust his sense of direction, told him.