by JH Fletcher
Their unit disintegrated. The enemy was everywhere. With a scarecrow horde of others they wandered across a Gothic landscape of fire, shell and broken buildings. Rats in Ratland, Rudi said, and so it seemed. At night the fires cast their lurid shadows over the dead, over faces without hope, bodies close to starvation.
On the wall of a ruined building they came across a notice signed by a General von Blaskowitz.
Soldiers found away from their units will be shot.
Rudi spat, looked at Franz in disgust. ‘I’ve had it.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going home.’ Over the months they had grown closer than brothers. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
It was a journey out of nightmare. A dozen times in the first few days they came across the bodies of soldiers who had been executed, scrawled notes pinned to their breasts: He Betrayed The Fatherland.
‘Bastards,’ Rudi said.
They kept their weapons ready and took care never to sleep at the same time. Rats in Ratland, as Rudi had said. The world was in ruins. Shattered buildings, towns heaped with rubble, railway lines contorted by heat. People lived in the ruins. Old and young, men and women, all reduced to the point where it was impossible to tell which were which. Eyes like graves watched as they passed. At night the furnace glare of the burning land filled the sky with the shadows of blood.
They went south. There was no food, nowhere even to pillage for food. Somehow, emaciated, stumbling, they survived. They came across a staff car destroyed by rockets. Inside lolled bodies: an NCO driver, three staff officers in the back. They had been there some time and stank sickeningly. Franz and Rudi searched the car, found food. Bread, a smoked sausage, a bottle of schnapps, another of brandy. Found, too, a cache of gold coins.
‘Must be over a hundred of them.’ Rudi jingled some in his grimy palm.
‘Leave them,’ Franz instructed.
Rudi’s eyes widened. ‘Leave them?’
‘Catch you with them, they’ll shoot you for sure.’
‘They’d have come in handy after the war.’ But let them drop.
Now was what mattered. The future was too remote to risk being shot. They ate the food, though, tearing ravenously at the sausage, gulping the stale bread, fearful that someone might try to snatch it from them. They slugged a mouthful of schnapps, too, left the rest.
The food brought their brains back to life.
‘I reckon we’re no more than halfway to my place,’ Rudi said that night.
‘So?’
‘We could be picked up any day.’
‘By the SS?’
‘Or the Russkies.’ Something to think about, certainly.
‘Maybe we should head west and try to find the Yanks?’
Rudi asked, ‘Who are you going to tell them you are?’
‘What’s wrong with my real name?’
‘After that business in Gautier?’
‘I had no choice.’ Hotly.
‘We know that. But that mayor fellow could be looking for the men who shot his son. And you were in charge of the firing squad.’
‘I throw my papers away, they’ll be more suspicious than ever.’
‘Unless you’ve got other ones.’ Rudi took an army pay-book from his pocket, squinted at it. ‘What do you say to being Corporal Gunther Frey, eh?’
‘Where’d you get that?’
‘Driver of that staff car. Didn’t reckon he’d be wanting it any more.’
Franz turned the book in his hands, staring at it. ‘We don’t know what this Gunther Frey may have done, do we? Maybe he’s wanted by the Russians?’
Rudi shrugged. ‘Up to you.’
Eventually Franz decided to go along with it. Rudi was right; the French might well be looking for him. As for what Gunther Frey might have done … He’d have to risk it.
‘Where did he come from, anyway?’
The pay-book said Hannover. It gave Franz a strange feeling to see that name again. He’d heard it had been flattened by bombing. He often wondered what had happened to Heini’s sisters, to Eva in particular. They had corresponded for a time after Heini’s death but he had never gone back. He regretted it now it was too late.
‘You’ll have to remember not to call me Sarge any more.’
Two days later they were picked up by the Americans. For the first time they discovered that Hitler was dead, that Goebbels and Himmler were dead, that the surrender had been signed two weeks earlier. With thousands of others, they were shoved into a camp for interrogation.
‘Name?’
‘Rank?’
‘Place of birth?’
‘Service details?’
They were stripped, searched. When the Americans found no SS tattoos, when the names given failed to correspond with any on their lists of wanted men, they lost interest. There were so many of them. They kept them hanging around for a couple of weeks then gave them both what they called a clearance certificate.
‘On your way, bud …’
Once again they headed south.
It was mid-June when they reached Mittelwald. The further south they had come the better conditions had been. Most of the towns had some damage but none of the wholesale devastation they had left behind them. The sun shone, birds sang in the hedgerows, the hills were densely forested and to the south the mountains were a white blink in the sky. Everywhere streams ran ice-cold, flowers along their banks.
From time to time they ran into American patrols but their clearance certificates saw them through. They reached Mittelwald in mid-morning, ten days after leaving the camp. No damage here, no sign there had ever been a war. People looked at them as they walked down the main street but the war had made them cautious of strangers and no one spoke. Soon they were out in the country again.
‘Those people have known me all my life,’ Rudi said, ‘but no one recognised me.’
‘Why didn’t you speak to them?’
‘Time for that later. Now I just want to get home.’
‘Is it much further?’
‘Five kilometres.’
Now they were so near five kilometres seemed endless but they trudged along, Rudi limping but his pace increasing with every stride. There was the occasional farm, small houses and barns set back from the road, a cow or two in the fields. They came over a rise and Rudi stopped.
‘There,’ he said.
A house like the others. Tiled roof, a barn and what was probably a milking parlour. A haystack stood in one corner of a field. Cows grazed. For the first time, looking at what they had come so far to find, Franz was apprehensive, wondering what Rudi’s parents would have to say about a stranger being foisted on them at such a time.
‘Will it be all right? For me, I mean?’
Rudi slapped his shoulder, boisterous for the first time in months. ‘They’ll love you. You’ll see.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘And did they? Love you, I mean?’
It was late. The hotel had acquired that weighty silence that comes only with the small hours of the morning. At some point during Franz’s story Ruth had ordered coffee and brandy; now she tipped her glass and felt the last of the spirit trickle burning down her throat.
‘They welcomed me, certainly. They were overjoyed to see Rudi, of course. The post was terrible towards the end; I think they’d given him up long before.’
‘And now you’re a wheelwright?’
‘The farm was too small for both Rudi and me. The local wheelwright had lost his son. He agreed to take me on.’
‘A far cry from mathematics.’
‘After everything that happened it feels good to be doing something with my hands. Creating instead of destroying. There’s something therapeutic about it.’
She watched him. His face was shadowed by sadness or perhaps the residue of the suffering he had undergone during the war. She, too, had suffered; it strengthened her sense of kinship with him. Now he had sought her out. She was unsure what that might mean.
‘Did you ever find out what happened to Marie?’
‘The only address I had was her parents’ place. If I’d written there it would only have caused her trouble.’
‘Are you happy?’ she asked him.
He smiled wryly. ‘For years I’ve had this dream. A river with a great tree on top of a hill and the Outback beyond it. Those Aboriginal paintings that I saw when I was a boy … I never thought of Australia as home, you know that, but there are times now when I wonder.’
His words contained too many shadows. Those of the past she could understand but the future … They made her uneasy. ‘I have also seen the tree,’ she offered.
‘What does it mean?’
‘For me it means grace. The tree of grace. Sometimes I call it the tree of battles, because it’s been through so much.’ She smiled. ‘Like all of us. Some of its boughs are broken. Leaves and branches fall but the tree itself endures forever.’
‘As long as we live?’
‘No!’ Sharply. ‘Forever. All of us are part of life. Humans, animals, trees. Each person who dies is like a leaf falling but the tree itself goes on.’
‘There were times in the war when I might have argued with you about that.’
He had asked nothing about herself or her own experiences. She remembered his old arrogance, would tolerate no hint of it now. ‘You weren’t the only one in the war,’ she told him tartly. And then, to change the subject, ‘Are you married?’
He hesitated. ‘I have a friend.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Lotte. Lotte Stumpf.’
What an ugly name, she thought, and was pleased, surprised how much she resented this unknown girl. Perhaps she was as ugly as her name, she hoped.
‘Does she also live in Mittelwald?’
‘Her father’s the butcher.’
‘Are you thinking of marrying her?’
He shook his head. ‘She thinks I am Gunther Frey from Hannover.’
‘Why should that stop you? I’ll bet you’re not the only one who changed his name after the war. Or go back to your own name if you’d rather.’
‘It wouldn’t be safe. They’re still looking for what they call the Butchers of Gautier. You’d think it was another Auschwitz, the way they talk. There were hundreds of incidents like that but Rudi was right. The mayor’s an important man nowadays and wants revenge for what happened to his son.’
‘What are you going to do, then? Stay here for the rest of your life?’ The old Franz would never have been happy on such a small stage but the war had changed so much.
He answered her question with another. ‘When are you leaving?’
‘In the morning.’
‘Can you put it off? Just for a day?’
It was certainly possible but Ruth hesitated, unsure whether she wanted to get involved in whatever Franz had in mind. ‘Why?’
‘There’s something I want to show you.’
It was a wonderful morning of fresh air and sunshine. There was no haze and when she went out of the hotel Ruth could see the mountains in the distance, ramparts of rock and ice gleaming in the sun. Franz was waiting with bicycles. They rode between meadows bright in the sunshine, the dust of the lane white upon their feet. The road grew steeper until at last they had to walk. Eventually they came out on the summit, one of several hills extending south to the mountains.
Ruth gazed at the view. ‘It’s wonderful.’
‘Very wonderful.’
She heard the note in his voice; looked at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I told you last night. It’s not mine.’
‘Perhaps with time it might be?’
‘Never.’ He shook his head fiercely, determined to remain apart from the beauty that surrounded them.
She was unsure why he had brought her here. ‘What are you telling me?’
‘You’re right. It is beautiful. Not only in summer. In winter, too, all snow and ice-blue wind. The people are friendly. I’m one of them, as much as anyone can be who wasn’t born here. I could marry Lotte and settle down here for the rest of my days. It’s what she wants.’
‘I can think of worse fates,’ Ruth said.
‘I shall never be at home here. It’s not my place.’
‘There was a time when you thought it was.’
‘I thought a lot of things. But those times are past. I want to come home.’
She was enraged that he should call it so after everything that had happened. ‘How can you? If you’re wanted for war crimes? Besides, what about Lotte? Will you abandon her, too?’
His face was white. ‘Is there no redemption, then?’
‘Redemption has nothing to do with the landscape. It’s inside us or it’s nowhere. Just because you’re homesick —’
‘It’s not a question of being homesick. Australia is so clean.’
She did not understand. ‘Clean?’
‘Untouched by everything that’s happened in the rest of the world.’ He looked out at the expanse of meadow and rock, the blue sky and icy mountain peaks. ‘Even here the air has been tainted by all the horror. Whereas Australia, perhaps because it’s so remote …’ He paused. ‘It’s important that somewhere should remain untouched.’
‘Important?’
‘For our souls’ salvation.’
They remounted their bicycles and rode back down the hill. For most of the way she said nothing. Finally, as they entered the town, she asked the question that had been troubling her.
‘Why did you come to see me?’
‘I wanted to hear your accent.’
‘Just that? My accent?’
‘And see you, too, of course.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you remind me of home.’
She was furious; worse, she was bitterly hurt. ‘Because I remind you of home,’ she repeated. ‘And I was thinking you’d come to see me. Not for my accent. Not because I remind you of the country you chose to turn your back on. To see me. I’m sorry I was so wrong.’
The hurt and anger accompanied her all the way home to Australia yet later she reconsidered. If I am to preach forgiveness and reconciliation between nations, she thought, how can I deny it to my friends? Although it was harder, always, with people you knew.
A month after she got home she wrote to Franz care of the post office in Mittelwald.
I am sorry if I seemed to judge you when we met. We have all been through such trauma it is not for any of us to criticise the rest. If you truly feel that your soul’s salvation — to use your own phrase — is dependent upon coming back to this country then perhaps that’s what you should do. Whatever you decide you have my thoughts and blessings and the hope that one of these days we shall meet again.
Two months later Ruth received a message, unsigned, scrawled in pencil on a scrap of paper.
I have decided to follow your advice.
After which, nothing. Slowly the memory of their meeting faded. The past became what it had always been, something present yet inaccessible, like the face of someone she had once known seen from the window of a passing train.
Ruth came across something written by Thales, a Greek philosopher from the seventh century BC.
Of all things that are, the most ancient is God, for He is uncreated. The most beautiful is the Universe, for it is God’s workmanship. The wisest, time, for it brings everything to light.
Will time really do that? she wondered. I would like to think so. There is so much I need to know. She remembered the shattered cities of Europe, the mutilations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hanging by the victors of those held responsible for the atrocities of war. Wondered whether the human race had in fact regressed, that not only lives but wisdom itself had been destroyed in the holocaust. I shall not believe it, she told herself. Because if I did I would have to write the finale of humanity and that I will never do.
Franz remained an ambiguous memory tucked away in a remote corner of her mind. In the meantime she had books to writ
e, a life to lead.
TWENTY-TWO
Matlock beach.
They had finished lunch. Ruth surveyed the wreckage, piled plates, glasses puddled with the residue of wine, the bits and pieces of what had been a very good meal. In a few minutes the world would reclaim her with its neverending demands upon her time and energy. She would have it no other way yet for the moment it was pleasant to sip coffee, savour its fragrance and think …
Of nothing.
Getting old? she told herself. Senile, more like.
David and Louise had slipped away to the beach. She had planned to get them to clear the table but had taken pity on them. She could see them now, sitting cross-legged on the sand at the edge of the sea, their backs to the land, their faces to each other as they talked …
Of whatever the young talk about these days, she thought.
You couldn’t stay in touch. It was sad but seemly, too. You couldn’t remain adolescent forever. Those who tried only made fools of themselves. Remain sympathetic by all means but to go on as though you were still one of them … No. You had to leave it behind as in time you had to leave everything behind. It wasn’t easy. The cult of youth was everything. The cosmetic companies encouraged it, the magazines sold endless copy on the strength of it. How to avoid wrinkles. How to stay young, stay glamorous, how to look twenty when you’re fifty. What is the matter with us? Ruth thought. Let youth go; it goes anyway. Old men playing up to girls. Harridans in skin-tight leotards, trying to fool the world and in the end fooling only themselves. Sad, sad, sad.
She had been afraid Barbara Getz might be like that, had been immeasurably relieved to find she was not. I have become a fan of Barbara Getz, she thought.
She had feared a battery of questions, bruising and intrusive, yet so far it had not been like that at all. The questions Barbara had asked had been couched in such a way that it had been a pleasure to answer them. Ruth suspected she had disclosed more of herself today than she had done for a very long time, perhaps ever, but did not mind. It was a measure of Barbara’s skill that she could extract information without pain or regret, even with a trace of pleasure, perhaps.