"No, if I'm honest I'd prefer someone free from the cynicism and coarseness of having a long service record. I've always been one for letting our youth get ahead Thomas. As a teacher I'm sure you too can appreciate that philosophy. Besides, his academic achievements suggests he will be equal to the task and pick-up the duties entailed in no time."
"It seems that you have gained a secretary, whilst I have lost a Private."
"I will certainly interview him to assess his suitability. I'd be grateful however if, in the same way that you have given him a reference, you could offer him a recommendation regarding the positives in accepting the post. Although of course he'll have no choice in the matter should he be officially ordered to transfer. That's check."
Jessica's weary face softened and radiated warmth and comfort. It was a beautiful but affected expression, put on for the eleven year old boy who lay peacefully in his bed - indeed the emaciated appeared so serene that Jessica thought for a moment that little Joshua could have already passed away. She clutched his hand to check for a response. Nothing. The trainee nurse took his pulse. Weak, slow. Natural causes they'd call it. At least the worst of it seemed to be over for the boy. No more palsy, coughing up blood, migraines. His countenance was yellow, snow white and grey all at the same time. His eyes, owl-like in his shrunken features, were closed. Joshua would die in his sleep. He would be one of the fortunate ones.
Death thickened the air of the hospital. Grotesque, unreal, commonplace death. Such was the rate of infection in the wards that it was perhaps safer to keep the sick at home. All the hospital could do was prolong people's suffering, grant false hope. Jessica mused that she had recently become more of a mortuary worker than a nurse. She sat transfixed beside the withered child, who Jessica had grown attached to over the past week or so, admiring his fortitude and taking it upon herself to make the orphan feel loved in his last days. But her inward eye was soon dragged back to the morning's events. She shuddered, as if someone had just opened a window and there was a sudden draught.
The cloakroom of the old newspaper offices, which was now a hospital, had been converted into an auxiliary delivery room. And it was the coats and rags of the dead which clothed and propped up the unmarried, wild looking woman who was about to give birth. Some said she had been raped by a Latvian policeman, but that the girl was determined to keep the baby. The doctors advised her that the unborn child - and the girl herself - would in all possibility not survive should she persist in going through with the pregnancy. The woman had been adamant though in her wish - and religious hope - to have the baby. "I'm not a murderer, I'm not a murderer," she had issued, "You cannot take my baby away.” Such was the hysterical scene she had made - and with the doctor being too tired to argue - he had allowed the girl go ahead with the pregnancy. Greta however remained pregnant for longer than anyone could have expected, through both blind fortune and the woman's own zealous devotion to her unborn child. Her whole life became centred on looking after herself - and the baby. She took on two, sometimes three jobs - from a water vender's assistant to being a seamstress. Yet, what she joyfully thought were labour pains after believing herself nine months pregnant, were not.
And so the farcical pregnancy approached its tragic conclusion. The woman underwent a caesarean. The baby was stillborn: bloody, blotchy, blue, veiny. Barely human. Awkwardness and silence overpowered the room, as well as the smell. They both knew of the fervour and history of the victim. The doctor shook his head at the pity and waste of it all - and at the folly of the girl.
"I'm sorry Greta, but the child is stillborn," the doctor announced with professional sympathy, coming out from behind the bloody sheet which lay between himself and the torso and head of his patient.
"Isn't there anything you can do? Are you sure doctor? I had a dream that he'd be all right. It is a boy, isn't it doctor?"
"Yes."
"I knew it would be a boy," she softly said, smiling to herself, her face slippery with sweat, her hair matted to her flushed cheeks and forehead.
"Can I see him, hold him? I named him David."
"Yes."
Jessica gave the doctor a hesitant look but he nodded as if to say it would be fine. Although the nurse had left her squeamish days behind her, Jessica still could not bring herself to pick up the awful child-corpse directly. She found a bloodied cream sheet, wrapped the baby in it and handed the stiff, fleshy bundle to the doctor who in turn carefully passed it over to the doting mother.
"He's beautiful, beautiful. And he's just sleeping" an altered Greta confidently exclaimed, nuzzling the baby's slimy face into her own. Her drawn countenance suddenly brightened. Next she clasped the tiny, shrunken baby by his hand, moving his arm up and down as if to animate the dead infant. Tears of joy and pride, not grief, moistened the would-be mother's eyes. Jessica passively took in the pathetic, gruesome scene. Compassionate. Sickened.
"We must thank the doctor and nurse for what they've done," Greta next expressed, speaking in the ubiquitous, silly, high-pitched voice one naturally adopts when talking to children. She turned the small horrific child towards Jessica and her kind doctor as if he were a plastic doll. Such had been Greta's desire to have these fond, maternal moments with her baby that her dream subdued the gory reality.
"He'll grow up to be a soldier I think, like his Grandfather."
With a hundred and one other things to do the two staff here left the patient, neither indulging nor destroying Greta's derangement and macabre role-playing. When the doctor returned however, half an hour later or so, he found the baby carefully wrapped up - with a Star Of David upon his chest - and his mother dead, drenched in a pool of syrupy blood from where she had slit her wrists. The doctor had called her - with a certain distaste laced in his tone - "another holy fool". Jessica dealt with both of the bodies.
Will I ever become as delusional about my fate? - the nurse asked herself, Joshua's hand growing cold and stiff in hers. There was a cheekiness and bravery in his humour which had reminded Jessica of Kolya. The parallel between the two - and Jessica's alignment with Greta - could not help but instil into the nurse a chilling, contemplative air. Unless something happened - or she did nothing - why shouldn't she and her brother share the same end as Greta and little Joshua? Warm tears seeped from her puffy eyes - tears salted with injustice, pity, confusion, abandonment. But not helpless resignation. If it was not that end it would be another, similarly doom-laden. But no. Thomas. Jessica would see him again. He would save them all. Or she would.
Christian Kleist stared intently at the board, populated now with only a dozen or so pieces. He believed, from the way that his opponent's pieces were grouped together, that he had the Corporal on the back foot. The Lieutenant needed to deliver one more attack, take one more significant piece, to seal a gratifying victory. Although no one openly mentioned the fact but as well as being a match between Thomas and Kleist the game was also an unspoken contest between the SS and Wehrmacht. The match throughout had been close. For a time, after occupying the centre of the board and picking off some of his opponent's pieces with some aggressive play from his queen, it had looked like the game might be getting away from the Wehrmacht Corporal. But Thomas, sacrificing his own queen, took the Lieutenant's own most potent attacking piece and evened the odds. Yet still the officer seemed to possess the upper hand with his numerical superiority. Such was his concentration that Christian even cessated his gamesmanship by refraining from questioning and trying to distract his opponent. Kleist then saw it. In ten moves, he could win.
Believing victory to be comfortably in his sights Christian again began to chat to his opponent.
"Do you still fence? You're in a rare position, having been a poet also, as to judge which is the mightier, the pen or the sword?"
"Unfortunately we've now designed far greater weapons as to make the argument appear redundant."
"I dare say you could be a politician Thomas. You have a natural talent for never giving a straight answer."
"Politicians pretend to have all the answers, I'm afraid I don't have a single one."
During this brief exchange each player traded three moves apiece, with neither of them even glancing at the board. Christian was confident and quickly played out the moves which would bring him checkmate. Thomas kept his attention, and that of his opponent's, away from the board as he knew the placement of every piece upon it - and the strategies of the players. It was too late, for Christian. The Corporal's pawn, insignificant and dormant for most of the game, would inch its way across a couple more squares and become a queen. The game could then be over in ten moves or so in the Corporal's favour. Thomas afforded himself a smile upon witnessing his arrogant opponent's reaction when he realised that he had all but been defeated. The Lieutenant's handsome features tightened in sourness, yet his nostrils flared as if he were about to snort fire. He felt sick, cheated. The self-disciplined officer reined himself in however.
"Now, it seems, we have a contest on our hands. Excuse me while I take off my jacket. I really must invite you - or order you if needs be - to the next party I arrange. You should by rights be an officer by now anyway Thomas, no? You are sufficiently intelligent and are from the right stock. Indeed I'm a little bewildered and disappointed that you haven't chosen to rise through the ranks - although I fear you may be too old to start now."
Before Thomas owned a chance to answer one of the Lieutenant's entourage re-appeared and informed him that he had received an urgent phone call. "Can it not wait?" Christian reluctantly replied, but the soldier dutifully responded that it couldn't.
"Unfortunately I'm going to have to go. Hopefully we'll be able to have a re-match, or finish this game off some time in the future."
"I'll be happy to make a note of the pieces if you like?"
When the Lieutenant and his SS subordinate left the room a couple of men from Thomas' platoon approached their Corporal.
"You must have been about to beat him Thomas. I reckon that the sly taking off of his jacket was a signal, the cheating bastard. As soon as he done it one of his lap-dogs woke up and darted over to you from his look-out over near the door."
"It's okay, it's only a game" Thomas wryly replied, more uncertain of the conviction (especially on Kleist's part) than his tone might have suggested.
10.
"It could be a blessing in disguise that he pulled that stunt and you didn't get to beat him. He's a nasty piece of work that one. I've seen them before. He actually believes in what he's doing - and he also does it because he enjoys it. He's a fanatic," Oscar expressed to his Corporal over a cup of hot weak tea. "You don't want to make an enemy of him. He could do you just for talking to that Jewish girlfriend you see on the sly. If you really wanted to be clever you should have lost to him. I'm bloody glad you didn't though."
"How do you know about her? She's not my girlfriend as well. I'm just someone for her to talk to," Thomas said defensively, blushing a little.
"Just be careful, that's all I'm saying," the Private replied with his hands up and palms facing towards his friend, as if to convey that he wasn't judging him - and don't shoot the messenger.
"Yes - Mum. I still don't know exactly why I had the pleasure of his company this afternoon though."
"I thought you said something about him wanting to recruit young Klos to his staff."
"He did seem keen on the idea."
"I think the lad could do with a clip round the ear now or then, but I wouldn't wish a transfer on him to the Russian Front - which'll probably happen to him if he doesn't get a desk job of some sort or join the SS. It'll probably happen to all of us the way things are going there."
"I know, that's why I'll have a word with him about taking the position. But that can wait till the morning. I'm going to bed. Good night."
Thomas drained the cup - and then shook his head in minor revulsion at what he had just poured down his gullet. He walked behind a couple of giant grey sheets in the corner of the room which acted as walls to his quarters. His bed consisted of a worn mattress and a couple of blankets. His kit bag, stuffed with an old uniform, served as a pillow. A dusty black and white picture in a frame of his wife and child was propped up next to it. A foot high stack of books leaned against the wall, a Bible half-way up the column.
Abendroth chided himself but thought of Jessica, not Maria. He gazed upon the photographs that the girl had given to him. Jessica said that should she suddenly disappear she wanted the photos to remind the Corporal of her - and also it brought her comfort to know that, if a picture of her and her family survived, they could not totally be erased from History. So too, whilst not saying so, Jessica wanted to give the Corporal a photograph of her before the war, to impress upon him how attractive she once was - and could be again.
The colour photograph might've been taken by an old boyfriend such was the intimate but flirtatious way in which the subject gazed directly at the photographer. Jessica had said that she was eighteen when the picture had been taken. Such was the proliferation of plump, pink blossom upon the tree in the shot that one would have posited that it was spring, but such was the girl's honey-skin and lustrous fair hair that Thomas reckoned it must have been summer when the photograph was taken. Jessica was wearing a lightly pleated cotton dress, scarlet with white poker dots; the black leather belt clasped her hour glass figure in such a way as to accentuate her contours. Her shoulder-length golden hair framed a face that could enslave and inspire in any age.
The family had changed even more than the captivating daughter since the time when the photograph of them all was taken. Albeit appearing to be a holiday snap, with a crystal coastline in the background, the picture and poses were quite formal. Doctor Rubenstein - stylish linen summer suit, smiling, patriarchal - stood with a Bromberg hat in his hands, his barrel-chest thrusting out. His elegant and proud wife consciously posed for the camera, though she would have denied she had ever done so. The boy, lively and colourful even in black and white, carried a trowel and bucket for making sand castles. The impish expression on Kolya's face reminded Thomas of his own precious son and the soldier briefly put down the picture for a moment or two. Jessica naturally attracted one's attention in the picture, standing at the centre between her proud parents. Thomas had an erection beneath his blanket. Uncomfortable and guilty the middle-aged Corporal turned his inward eye onto the last figure in the photograph, Betti - Jessica and Kolya's Grandmother. The innocent and happy expression upon her squinting countenance gave credence to the argument that old age is a second childhood. Jessica had unwittingly echoed Duritz, in both tone and phrasing, when she had told Thomas that she was glad that her Grandmother had passed away before the occupation. The Corporal recalled the passion and animation in Jessica's aspect when she talked to about her Grandmother. She was quite a character. In her early twenties Betti would sometimes dress up as a young man to infiltrate some of the men only clubs in the district. She was intelligent, eventually becoming a schoolteacher, and married, for love, a handsome piano tuner. Betti miscarried four times but eventually had a boy, Saul (who grew up to be diplomat, but chose to fight defending the city instead of accepting a post abroad) and a girl, Halina. Funny, generous and, as Betti grew older, a deeply religious woman, Jessica remarked how people always compared her to her spirited Grandmother. The confession only fuelled the attentive Corporal's interest in the sweet-faced old lady in the resonating photograph.
Night rippled across a cotton sky. On a whim, to kill time, Oscar Hummel decided to polish his boots. Morbidity began to weigh upon his thoughts again.
Oscar Hummel was born in an impoverished neighbourhood in Hamburg to an equally impoverished family. Yet they had each other. Mother and father gave their children love but also, more importantly, they provided them with the foundations for a good education. The hardy six foot teenager was an apprentice bricklayer at the time when he was called up to fight in the Great War. His youthful sense of romantic duty and patriotism blinded him to the cause and horror of the confl
ict initially. But Verdun soon tempered his zeal and educated Oscar in life's golden rules of cynicism and the anti-climax. He learned that the higher one went up the chain of command, the further they became removed from the realities of war. Yet the Private, who eventually rose to the rank of Corporal (by virtue of the deaths of his comrades), served his country well. He won the Iron Cross leading his platoon into a machine-gun nest and capturing it. Oscar returned to post-war Germany however not to a hero's welcome - not that he expected or felt he deserved one - but with a feeling of bitterness and betrayal in the back of his throat.
Anti-Semitic, but not virulently so, and anti-Communist Oscar Hummel voted for Hitler and the National Socialists, perhaps as a protest vote at first. His loyalty towards the Party and the Reich increased however. Prosperity and a sense of order, nationhood, grew under the Fuhrer. Oscar Hummel had nothing to fear from the more unseemly aspects of the Party as long as he kept his head down. He was suitably intelligent to see the propaganda as such, but was there not a grain of truth in their arguments? The Jews were insular. They did seem to possess too much power and influence. They thought themselves better than everyone else. As much as he frowned upon certain episodes of violence and undemocratic legislation his opinion was "let them emigrate". Oscar married. Mary Tarnat was a devout Christian and florist. The woman started off as Oscar's part-time housekeeper - but an affection and sexual relationship developed between the two middle-aged, lonely people. She was kind, generous and devoted to the good natured labourer as if she were his mother. They were happy enough together as husband and wife, happier still when Oscar began to secretly visit prostitutes and then in turn spoil Mary out of a sense of guilt. Just before the war Oscar and his wife saved up enough money for him to go into business for himself, as a landscape gardener. War broke out however and - although he managed at first to avoid being called up - the veteran was ordered into the militia and then into the Order Police, where Oscar was duly posted to Poland and Josefow.
Warsaw Page 12