Winter Men
Page 5
Gerhard’s eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness outside. At the edge of his vision he made out the tall, wide crown of the copper beech whose silhouette swayed threateningly in the breeze. It was a handsome tree. Its oval leaves had changed from summer’s purple-red to orange, then autumn’s bronze, before dropping away, leaving the tree in its current bare and scruffy state. He glanced toward Krugkoppel Bridge, whose streetlamps formed halos of light in the air like fireflies. The marina was behind the bridge. During the summer the place swarmed with children who covered every square foot of the Alster in their skiffs, but during the winter the harbor resembled a ghost town. All the boats were up on land, and everything was packed away. Only the mooring poles remained, like stalks on a stubbled field, and the ice lay like a solid cap across the entire lake. Gerhard returned to his seat. The two men said nothing for some time before Karl broke the silence.
“Weren’t you happy in the army?”
“The army wasn’t for me, and I’m glad I didn’t go to war like you.”
“You were lucky.”
Gerhard completed his military training in the late summer of 1918, but just before his regiment was ordered to the western front, he broke his leg in a training exercise. As he lay in a hospital bed, his leg in a sling, the Germans surrendered.
“I’m not like you. I can’t shoot at other people. I don’t have it in me.”
“I don’t have it in me, either. I just did it,” Karl said slowly, as if it were the first time he’d allowed himself to think about the war.
“Oh, that’s right. Sometimes you do things without thinking.” Gerhard smiled disarmingly at his brother before he went on. “What about your Nazi connections? Have you considered that? And now they’re even tighter.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re collaborating with them. Doesn’t that make you feel lousy?”
“Come on, Gerhard. We’ve talked about this.” Karl stood to fill his glass.
“Right, but the SS thugs were wearing your uniforms last night. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Just because their clothes come from my factory doesn’t mean I get to decide what they do. And besides, we don’t produce many SS uniforms.” He saw no reason to tell Gerhard about his disappointment at losing out on the order for more. He sipped his brandy. “If a man sells an ax to a lumberjack, is it his fault when the lumberjack plants the ax’s blade in another man’s back?”
“Nice parallel, but you’re taking money from the Nazis.”
“And I’m okay with that. You worry too much about something that’s out of your control. Do as I do and make the most of it. Try not to think too much about it.”
“We can’t all stop thinking. It’s bad enough that our leaders have,” Gerhard said, putting down his empty glass. “I won’t judge you, Karl. Just be sure not to get too mixed up in something you can’t control.”
Karl surveyed the chessboard that rested on a little table between the recliners. An unfinished game. If Ernst Grabner chose to move the black bishop from E7 to F6 in his next move—the most obvious choice—Karl would checkmate him four moves later. He knew Ernst well enough to be certain that his friend would overlook that detail. He studied the pieces to see if there were any possibilities he hadn’t considered. He picked up his remaining knight. It was made of heavy, hand-carved ivory. The more he studied the handsome pieces, the more he noticed their intricacies. He ran his index finger over the knight’s mane. It was a pleasure to touch—cold, but pleasant nonetheless. He . . .
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, of course.”
Gerhard stood and offered Karl his hand. “I should go home now. Thanks again for an exquisite meal.” He walked into the hallway and got his coat.
After Gerhard had gone, Karl stood in the large hallway, glancing around as though he might discover something new there. He looked at the stairwell leading to the upstairs rooms, where his family lay asleep, and the telephone. The black device that portended bad news. He’d been sitting in the wicker chair beside it when he’d gotten the call about his father.
He could still recall the stretch of time from when the telephone had rung to when he had entered the hospital at the Henneberg Hospital—the terrible medicinal odor in the hospital’s long hallways and the nurses’ white smocks with their indeterminate stains. The farther he’d gone into the building, the more the smell blended with the stench of illness, which hung like a nauseating mist beneath the cracked ceiling. The gloomy atmosphere radiating from that place was capable of smothering the last spark of hope in even the most optimistic patients and their families. He’d come to console and be consoled. His mother, Anna, had been confused and agitated, but she’d gradually settled down.
By the time Karl walked into the room, his father had had another stroke. His hulking body shuddered, then fainted, as though life and death had met in a battle of gladiators. They fought over the poor figure caught in the center of the arena. Death lunged, and again his father’s body shuddered. Life parried the blow, and Reinhardt opened his eyes. Death struck again, and froth formed around his father’s gaping mouth. Doctors rushed in and shooed Karl and his mother out of the room. They stood in the hallway, blind to Reinhardt’s fate. A conversation with a doctor, waiting, another doctor. Good-bye, Father.
After several hours they were granted permission to see him. He was in a semiprivate room. A doctor stood writing notes in his file, which was fastened to the end of the bed when not in use. When he was done, a stout nurse pulled the curtain closed. The wall of fabric ensured that the room’s two patients could only hear each other’s pains, not see them.
The man in the other bed hadn’t moved since Karl arrived. His facial muscles had curled the corners of his mouth upward into an unnatural smile, and his eyebrows had settled about half an inch above their original position. Karl didn’t know what was wrong with him, but the way he lay there smiling, he looked like someone waiting for death to arrive. His father seemed no better; he looked exhausted and spent most of his time sleeping, occasionally grunting like a wounded animal. Now and then, after seeming far away, he would open his eyes and begin shouting incoherent sentences. Anna, who stood beside the bed holding her husband’s frail hand, watched him with pleading eyes. Then he’d doze off again, his sizable belly causing the blanket to rise and fall in rhythm with his breathing.
Reinhardt had been a shadow of his former self ever since his strokes in 1932. Once he’d been a hard man. A man who’d forged his own path from peasantry to prosperity and never felt that he owed anyone anything. A man a son would fear. They’d never said it aloud, but Karl knew Gerhard felt the same hatred toward his father that he himself did.
And yet Karl was dependent on Reinhardt, because what would he do if his father died? Reinhardt hadn’t really been in charge of the company these past six years, of course, but Karl always asked his advice and never opposed his father’s recommendations. Most people saw Karl as a confident man, but he wasn’t sure he could lead the clothing factory without his father’s assistance. Thank god he had Müller. He was probably the best thing Karl could inherit from Reinhardt.
He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there staring at the telephone on the little table below the mirror. Everything around him was quiet, an intense silence that was present only late at night when Ingrid and the children slept. This was his time. The time when he felt alive. In the living room he opened the lid of the gramophone and carefully removed a record from its thick cardboard sleeve. He held it between his index fingers as he placed it on the gramophone, then gingerly put the needle down on the shiny shellac disk. He poured himself another glass of brandy and relaxed into the soft recliner. He studied the expensive Telefunken apparatus, whose beautiful sounds always aroused his excitement. The piece was made of marbled walnut and had a loudspeaker shaped like a flower. Zarah Leander’s voice emerged from it:
I am alone in the night, my soul keeps watch and listens
The wind has told me a song of a fortune
that is impossibly beautiful
He knows what my heart is lacking, for whom it beats
and glows
He knows for whom. Come, come. Ah!
The wind has told me a song of a heart
that I am missing.
He couldn’t decide whether the song made him sad or happy, but Zarah Leander’s intimate voice moved him deeply. All Germans sang along to her latest hit, “Bei mir bist du schön,” though he suspected it would never have been so popular if they knew it was written by two Jews.
He massaged his fingers. They were swollen again, and his joints hurt. Dr. Strauss had told him that it was gicht, or arthritis. He’d explained that the word “gicht” was originally an old German word meaning “bewitched”; then he’d gone off on a tangent about how the medical appellation “rheumatism” came from Greek and meant something or other that Karl had already forgotten.
The seamstresses were often afflicted with arthritis, but he’d never worked with his hands, so why was he coming down with it? It disappeared for weeks at a time, only to return with renewed vigor. He cursed softly to himself.
He hadn’t told Ingrid. There was no reason to worry her. He believed she should be shielded from ailments and troublesome news. That’s why he’d never told her anything about the war. He preferred not to ruminate on it—however impossible that was—but Gerhard had brought it up this evening. He was still bitter about the way the war had ended. Frontline soldiers had been left in the lurch by the military’s leadership, and when they were told it was over, no one in the trenches believed that they’d lost the war. That’s why he’d joined the reserves. If another war came, he would fight for his country. And this time they would win. He tried to guide his thoughts elsewhere, but like an unwelcome guest, the war kept knocking on the door of his memory. Though he rejected it politely but firmly each time, it returned day after day and knocked again. If he invited it inside, it would remain for the rest of the day and then usually stayed the night.
Amiens, France, August 8, 1918
It was bitterly cold when the regiment arrived in France at the beginning of November 1916. The winter’s unavoidable chill had already set in, and the battle at the River Somme had entered its decisive phase. Karl had joined the army when he’d turned eighteen late that summer, and after basic training, the Seventy-Sixth Infantry Regiment had been sent to northern France. At the train station in Altona, his father had shaken his hand and said, “Good luck, my boy,” while his mother bade her elder son good-bye with tears running down her cheeks. Gerhard had been silent and withdrawn, but Karl understood, and the two brothers had parted without unnecessary words.
Two weeks later the regiment was sent to the front. The sudden transition from childhood to manhood had been like a religious confirmation, albeit without all the Christian rituals. He hadn’t initially noticed the change, but one day all of his childhood innocence was gone, replaced by something that he couldn’t define: the western front. This was where Karl had met Ernst Grabner. Although he was an officer cadet, and Ernst only a private, Karl looked up to him because he’d already spent two months on the front line. They’d been born on the same day in the same year—July 28, 1898—and they quickly discovered that they had even more in common. Both were sons of well-to-do manufacturers—Karl of a clothing manufacturer and Ernst of a boatbuilder, whose firm had been bought many years ago by shipping giant Blohm & Voss. Ernst was assured of a good position with them as soon as he returned from the war. They soon became each other’s confidantes, and they helped each other get through the war as best they could. Afterward Karl often said that he would have gone mad in France without Ernst. Early on, their conversations were mostly about family, friends, girlfriends, and Hamburg, but before long they moved on to whether the British Vickers machine guns went ta-ta-ta or te-te-te and which type of artillery grenade they would rather be struck by.
No one thought much about the new recruits when they arrived. The tacky slop at the bottom of the trenches made each step a challenge, and suddenly they couldn’t even walk. They were as helpless as newborns. Which was precisely how the others regarded them. They were new, and until they proved otherwise, they were of no use to anyone.
The day after they arrived, Karl stood in one of the trenches surveying the last vestiges of a forest. Every single tree had been blown away, and splintered stumps were all that remained. He imagined how an officer might start barking orders once he discovered a cluster of trees trying to hide in the morning mist. Suddenly the dead trees became too much for him, and Karl was overcome with emotion. It was then he realized that he had a lot to get used to if he was going to survive this war. But he also discovered that there were some things he would never get used to: the stench of urine and all the lice that had taken up residence in his crotch, his armpits, and the elastic of his pants, robbing him of sleep because of the constant itching. And the fat, well-fed rats that seemed to thrive in the trenches. Karl noticed how the others hung their rations in the shelters so the rats couldn’t reach them, and he was soon following their lead.
He spent his days with Ernst, Alois Konrad, the Blacksmith, and Jochen Weber, who was never called anything but Weber. They drank a sour, brown liquid that was supposed to be a coffee substitute, while their breakfast consisted of day-old bread. The Blacksmith was big as a house, but his skull and brain had been arrested in development. As a result, his head was disproportionately small, and there was something similarly infantile about his behavior. He was a replacement, and either you had to teach that kind of person to behave or you had to ignore them. To pass the time, Weber used to entertain the men with jokes and raunchy stories about a wild female variety singer he knew, but he was suffering from shell shock, so he was nothing more than a uniform without content now. His hearing was gone, and he sat like an invalid, his eyes open and vacant. They’d urged the lieutenant, Kleist, to send him to the field hospital several times, but the lieutenant insisted that Weber was just faking it. Those suffering from shell shock were seldom taken seriously, but Karl had seen too many cases to believe they were all faking it.
Karl dipped his stale bread into his coffee to help ease it down his throat. “Put your socks against your skin so they can dry out,” he said to the Blacksmith, who’d removed his boots.
“No way. You’ll just laugh at me again.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“You ever hear of trench foot?” Ernst asked. When the Blacksmith shook his head, he continued. “If you have cold or wet feet all the time, you’ll get trench foot. At first you won’t be able to feel a damn thing on your feet, then they’ll swell up, and soon you can forget all about wearing boots.”
The Blacksmith looked down at his stocking feet.
“Maybe you’ll wind up with gangrene, and the only cure for that is a doctor sawing off your feet,” Ernst said, clawing at his mustache.
“Then you’ll be hopping toward the enemy on stumpy legs with a bayonet in your hand. Picture that, Strangl!” Konrad grinned.
Karl shrugged. He didn’t think the Blacksmith would last more than a week or two. Men like him might be big and strong, but many of his ilk ended up cracking like dry twigs. The Blacksmith wouldn’t be the first. Before him there had been Wangelin, and before Wangelin, Lauth.
“Shut your trap or I’ll saw your feet off,” the Blacksmith said angrily. “Then you won’t be able to escape with your stolen merchandise.”
Nobody knew exactly what Alois Konrad had done before the war, but the widespread belief was that he was a common thief or a professional conman, an appellation he’d given himself one evening.
“Is it going to rain?” Karl asked, hoping the question would put an end to the two men’s bickering.
“I think it’s going to be a fine day,” Ernst replied.
Weather was a frequent topic in
the trenches because it marked the thin demarcation between a bearable and a horrible day.
They’d been promised more replacements in two days, but out on the front line two days could seem like a lifetime. He looked forward to being relieved, to removing his boots and eating a warm meal. The soldiers alternated between the trenches on the front line, the reserve position—which was far more peaceful—and a rest position well behind the front line where they could regain their strength. But how much rest they got depended on the enemy.
Karl knew for certain that he’d killed two people. He didn’t recall the precise dates, but both occurred a few months after the regiment had arrived in France. The first time, he’d had the late watch that night. Convinced it would be a quiet night, he’d begun to meticulously rearrange the sandbags stacked on the edge of the trench so that they would provide better cover. The soldier who’d put them there couldn’t possibly have ever stood sentry because they’d been tossed down heedlessly. Afterward he’d felt well protected and relatively safe. He had a view of no-man’s-land and mulled over that term, unable to determine whether it was called that because no one occupied that chunk of ground or because no man made it out alive. The merciless strip of land had been transformed into a wasteland of sludge. No one—not the Brits, the French, or the Germans—had been able to bury the dead who lay between the two trenches, because anyone who ventured out there was mowed down. A thick stench of rot and decay hung over the entire area, a smell that no one ever got used to. It was nearly impossible to find a wedge of earth for the few bodies that could be buried because everywhere they dug, they came across arms, legs, and other body parts.
Karl loathed the birds. Though they’d once been satisfied with nuts, insects, and larvae, they’d morphed into ferocious scavengers, and his dead mates had become exquisite meals. The larvae were still there—more than ever—and species of birds that Karl had never even heard of circled like vultures over the beleaguered terrain. All other animals had long since retreated to more hospitable places, and you could hardly blame them. Even the landscape itself had been drained of color—except for an occasional burst of blood red, which then washed away in the rain or sank into the mud. About a quarter mile away, on the other side, the British sat in their trenches keeping an eye on them and the same depressing sight.