Winter Men

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  The horse turned and trotted after the dapple gray with the others. The warm smell of the horses wafted toward him across the stony ground and the interim fence, the same warm smell as the stagnant air inside the tent he and Gerhard had pitched on their parents’ front lawn one summer. He remembered the fresh-cut grass and the light summer rain that had drizzled down on them all morning, intensifying the odor. They were going to sleep outside. That night, they had crawled into their sleeping bags and read about Old Shatterhand and his blood brother Winnetou. They loved the popular German writer Karl May’s Wild West stories, which Karl read out loud. Karl quickly realized that Gerhard regretted their little adventure. When it was time to go to sleep, Gerhard lay terrified, staring up at the tent canvas. Karl told jokes to relax him, and Gerhard laughed tensely, but at the first hoot of a horned owl, his little brother bolted upright and rushed into the house. Karl stayed put, but Gerhard’s fear soon spread to him. He heard scary noises and saw terrifying shadows on the tent walls. A werewolf howled in the distance, a vampire stood right on the other side of the thin canvas, and he heard a monster stomping through the flowerbeds. The sound drew closer and closer. He refused to be overpowered by his fear; he wouldn’t give up. He chased the shadows off with his pocket flashlight and stifled the noises by pulling his sleeping bag over his head. He was eventually so exhausted that sleep overcame his fear. The next morning he strolled triumphantly to the breakfast table.

  A shiny black stallion charged across the parched field, swirling up a cloud of dust that soon settled and dissolved to nothing. Free of their burden, their equipment, and their riders, these animals must have felt pure, unadulterated joy. He sensed from their friskiness that they hadn’t been with the battalion long. They had a higher calling; they weren’t born to pull supply wagons and carts across Russia. But these beautiful creatures belonged to Jan-Carl Tortzen’s supply column, and tomorrow they would toil once again.

  Only now did Karl notice that all of the vehicles from Tortzen’s company stood at the far end of the enclosure. There were several HF.7 Stahlfeldwagens, which were steel-mounted vehicles drawn by two horses, small IF8 infantry carts sheltered by tarpaulins, some double MG Wagen 36s—which had room for three soldiers up front and a machine gun sniper in the back—and a traditional wooden horse-drawn carriage called an HF.1. They all stood together in a neat row; a well-thrown grenade could easily have hacked off one of the company’s limbs, leaving it to limp around Russia in the months to come.

  “Goddamn Tortzen,” Karl cursed. “Doesn’t he know the vehicles should be scattered?” That was one of the disadvantages of his promotion to major. He had more responsibility now, and he would be blamed if the inexperienced Tortzen committed a blunder.

  Thomas Remmel nervously cleared his throat behind him. Karl and Thomas had gone through quite a bit together, but nothing was the way it had been before Piroska died. Back then they had been able to laugh. They couldn’t do that anymore. Thomas had distanced himself from Karl—from everyone, really—and he’d stopped laughing. But what was there to laugh about? Rommel’s troops were in retreat in North Africa, Field Marshal Paulus’s Sixth Army had surrendered in Stalingrad, Voronezh had fallen, Kursk had fallen, Rostov had fallen, Kharkov had fallen, and with each defeat, the mood among the soldiers had fallen, too.

  Remmel picked nervously at his uniform collar. “We’re running out of morphine.”

  “Then talk to Werner.” Major Werner was the division’s commanding doctor.

  “I already have. We’re running out of everything.”

  “Then we’ll have to make do with what we have. Do we have enough sulfates?”

  “I need morphine, goddamn it!” Remmel now stood very close to him. “Morphine!”

  Karl had never seen the easygoing doctor so agitated. Normally Remmel spoke slowly in a flat, slightly nervous tone of voice. Even when blood was flowing in battle and he was fighting to keep entrails and limbs in place, he maintained his stoic calm, but now he seemed completely frayed. Karl had seen him lose his composure only once before. That was when Paul Piroska died.

  Karl studied the doctor. Perspiration covered his entire face like a thick film, and tufts of blond hair jutted out from under his cap and clung to his forehead. His pupils were enormous, nearly eclipsing the blue in his eyes.

  “Are you all right, Thomas?”

  “Fine,” he said, pursing his lips. “But we can’t get by without morphine.” He was practically whimpering.

  Karl considered. “Didn’t we get a delivery five days ago? We haven’t been in battle since.”

  The doctor shook his head dismissively. Then Karl understood. Thomas Remmel was a morphine addict, and he was using the unit’s own supply. He should yell at Thomas, make him understand this was unacceptable. It was Karl’s duty as his superior officer and friend to make sure this kind of thing didn’t happen. Karl was furious as he thought of the wounded men. But as he studied the doctor’s wretched appearance, Karl’s anger began to subside. In a way he understood Remmel, who saw only death and mutilation all day long and was rarely able to perform his job successfully. Still, it was unforgivable.

  He put a hand on Remmel’s shoulder, and the doctor looked up at him with a guilty expression, like a schoolboy who had gotten into mischief. As Karl clasped his shoulder, he felt Remmel’s body trembling beneath his touch. Together they headed toward the tents.

  A screeching sound, sharp as the edge of a knife and growing louder by the second, stopped them in their tracks. Like a siren it pierced a hole in their hearing, becoming a low whistle. Suddenly everything went quiet. Then the ground vanished. The air was ripped to tatters. The sky was a swirl of dirt and gravel, darkened by shards of metal raining down on them. There was something almost spectacular about it.

  Gravel, rocks, and body parts came to rest all around Karl and Remmel, who’d been knocked off their feet by the blast. A canvas tent billowed down slowly from the sky, and like Pegasus—or perhaps more accurately, Icarus—a horse plummeted to the ground with a loud, hollow thud.

  Remmel was the first to stand up, and he pulled Karl to his feet. They staggered, holding each other up as they stared at the enormous crater that had suddenly appeared between the tents. Two men crawled from the large, smoking hole, looking like infants who were still uncertain whether their bodies were up to the challenge. A trail of blood followed one of the men, who hadn’t realized that the muscle in his left leg was gone.

  The smell of cordite and gunpowder spread. Remmel ran toward the wounded men, and Karl admired the doctor’s courage and energy. Just then, he felt overcome by a surge of pain, but he couldn’t place it, had no idea where it was coming from.

  Behind him, a horse expelled a long moan and whickered in pain. Karl turned and stood as still as stone, watching the golden-brown mare writhe in agony. For some reason, the horse’s suffering made a greater impression on Karl than all the wounded and dead people he’d seen up until then. Observing the animal’s death struggle, hearing its despair, he headed slowly toward it. Maybe by putting a hand on its muzzle he could ease its pain; maybe he could say a few words to calm it down. Just like Remmel, he now felt a calling. He had to help the horse; he had to help it die.

  A screeching sound, sharp as the edge of a knife and growing louder by the second, stopped him in his tracks. Like a siren it pierced a hole in his hearing, becoming a low whistle, and suddenly everything went quiet. The ground vanished.

  Neuengamme, Germany, March 4, 1943

  Gerhard struggled out of bed. His head was pounding. His legs were stiff and uncooperative, and the rest of his body was just as off-kilter. He looked himself over. His belly had expanded and now bulged over the edge of his pants, and he noticed that his skin had grown slack. It startled him. In his mind he was still a slender man. He quickly buttoned his uniform shirt to hide what he didn’t want to see. Then he put on pants and a jacket. Beneath one of his boots was a piece of paper, yet another rejected transfer request. He got down
and peered under the bed. His hand fumbled across the wooden floorboards and finally located what it was looking for. He lifted the bottle up and eyed it fuzzily.

  He didn’t do it because he wanted to, but he drained the rest of the contents in one gulp, then grimaced at the aftertaste. He’d long ago realized that the best way to keep his hangovers at bay was to keep drinking the next day, but every day was now the next day. The alcohol muted his thoughts. And that was important because they could make his head pound even worse than his hangovers.

  They’d drunk heavily the night before, he, Erwin Borg, Udo Pankow, and a few other officers. Turek had been there, too. Since they didn’t have anything else to do in the evening, they’d begun throwing parties every night in what they called the Führer’s Lodge. They’d wrapped up a couple hours past midnight, and the last thing Gerhard saw before stumbling to bed was Turek’s back as he stood pissing in the little fountain outside the Führer’s Lodge.

  He felt claustrophobic. The air was like sandpaper. He had to find someplace to breathe where the air reached his lungs. Not the way he breathed in the camp, where he inhaled and exhaled only in small, fitful gasps. There was no fresh air here, just the stench of decay and death. He had to get himself onto the other side of the fence, out where the world wasn’t insane. Or at least less so.

  To avoid drawing attention to himself, he ran down the stairwell and sauntered briskly through the camp. Beyond the barracks, two prisoners were collecting the night’s dead. The corpses were tossed on a flatbed truck, on top of eight to ten others that were already there. A head hung upside down over one side of the flatbed, looking as though it had discovered that the entire world was flipped on its end, and stared vacantly at him. A fly buzzed around its gaping mouth, and the dead man’s eyes resembled glass orbs. Gerhard covered his mouth with his hand; he wouldn’t vomit. Not that it was anything he hadn’t seen before, but every sensation felt stronger, harder, and louder this morning.

  He was to blame whenever the emaciated prisoners perished. He was the only one responsible for their dying of hunger. As administrative director he was tasked with purchasing foodstuffs for the kitchen, but his budget was ridiculously low, and they were more or less forced to starve. He was aware that prisoners kept the dead in the top bunks—where the people who distributed food could not see that the bodies no longer required sustenance—so that they could get their food rations as well. In the beginning it had tormented him, kept him awake at night. They didn’t die by his hand but by what he didn’t put in their mouths. But he soon discovered that there was nothing he could do regardless, and that understanding—combined with alcohol—improved his nights.

  The two prisoners had reentered the barracks and now dragged out the body of an elderly man. The one in front complained loudly about the weight of the dead man; the other didn’t seem to want to participate in the conversation and bowed his head as if he hadn’t heard. The first one nevertheless continued to jabber about why the dead were heavier than the living, since this old man was so small and shrunken.

  Gerhard covered his ears and hurried toward the camp’s main gate. The cloying reek of the crematorium smokestacks, which billowed day and night, brushed the lining of his nose, filling his cheeks and sinuses. The guard greeted him amiably. Behind him, a kapo shouted at a prisoner, and Gerhard turned his head instinctively. The prisoner had exited one of the barracks and started running. The capo screamed even louder. The man’s steps were unsteady and wobbly, without substance or strength.

  The prisoner was heading straight toward Gerhard and the guard post. Glancing back over his shoulder in terror, he caught sight of the capo closing in on him. The capo swung his cane threateningly, but the emaciated man clanked on. Gerhard could tell the prisoner was trying to pick up his pace, but his legs wouldn’t obey him. The capo’s blow struck the man in his lower back, and he nearly fell. When he was only a few yards from Gerhard, he wheeled around abruptly. The capo came to an abrupt halt so as not to knock Gerhard down. There was a loud crackle as the prisoner threw himself against the electric fence. The smell of burned flesh and hair was instantaneous. The guard looked at Gerhard and shrugged apologetically before turning away.

  When Gerhard was outside the camp, he began to run. His feet pounded the asphalt, sending jolts up his legs and back, but he kept running in spite of his pain. When he was a good distance from the camp, he fell to his knees in the grass and threw up. His stomach churned, and he felt an urge to cry, but not from the pain. He had an inexplicable desire to open himself up, to let all the horrible things he’d experienced come gushing out of his eyes like rivers; he felt the pressure building within him and knew that it would take so little to let it flow. If he relaxed for even a moment, his body would give in. But he knew he had to suppress those feelings, to pull himself together. He’d succeeded in repressing the facts until now. Before he’d felt like a spectator, but now it was as if everything had suddenly become real. He vomited again. When he was completely empty, he fell on his side.

  He walked back toward the camp. In the commandant barracks Gerhard nodded silently to Herbert Asner, his scribe, who sat behind his desk. Behind the reception area was a larger office with a desk, filing cabinets, and shelves. Gerhard sat down and lit a cigarette. He heard Asner shuffling papers on the other side of the door and hoped that the lanky prisoner wouldn’t disturb him. Flies circled around a glass that had caught their interest. He waved them away, then poured some schnapps in the glass. He held the first gulp in his mouth, meticulously swishing the liquid into every crevice to rid himself of the awful taste of vomit. He gazed through the window and saw Turek and Erwin Borg talking in the distance. Turek always carried on as though he were a king or tribal god. There wasn’t a single prisoner who didn’t quiver at the sight of him. Near the factory, a section of the electric fence was missing. If a prisoner drifted outside the observable border, it was the guards’ duty to shoot him. Turek had a habit of chasing prisoners he didn’t like out into the open area, where the guards had no choice but to shoot them. It had become a form of entertainment, a deviation from the everyday routine in the camp, but Gerhard knew the guards didn’t enjoy the game.

  He hated Turek. Normally he didn’t think of himself as the sort of person who hated others, but Turek had earned his contempt. He didn’t hate the others. Erwin Borg, the camp’s doctor, was a pleasant man. Although Lorenz kept his distance—he had his family with him, after all—Gerhard had actually come to like him.

  Another swig of the schnapps pained his stomach. It happened quite a lot. He would ask Borg about it one of these days. He drained his glass and poured himself another. He picked up a stack of papers from the table and briefly studied the figures in the right column. He quickly calculated the numbers and confirmed that Asner’s results were correct. This work was so easy, so straightforward. It was the very core of his profession—a simplification—which had now been reduced to its very essence: numbers. It didn’t get any purer than this. He played with the numbers and brought them to life. Subtracted and added at a speed that made him smile. But then he stumbled across the number zero. He didn’t like zero because the number created nothing. It was a dead number. If you multiplied something by it, you lost everything. He himself had become the number zero. He was nothing. The pain returned.

  The door swung open, and Erwin Borg’s cheerful face appeared. Borg was frequently bored because Turek had taken on many of the doctor’s tasks. Although Turek had been employed as a construction worker before the war, he was now the one who determined which prisoners were physically capable of doing the work in the subcamps, while Borg was the one who determined who would be sent to the subcamps. Borg could only shake his head at Turek’s attempts to master this new profession, but there was nothing he could do, and Lorenz stayed out of it.

  “You look like shit. Are you all right, Gerhard?” Borg asked as he entered the room.

  Gerhard didn’t reply until the doctor closed the door behind him. “I can�
�t handle all the booze.” He tried to grin, but Borg held his gaze and studied him closely.

  “You’re not well, are you?”

  He wanted to tell Borg that he was falling apart, but he changed the subject instead. “I’m sorry, Erwin, but I’m busy,” he said, rifling around in the stack of papers on his desk.

  The doctor left the office looking downcast. Through the half-open door, Gerhard watched Borg give Asner a pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes were the camp’s leading currency, worth as much as gold or precious gems. How typical of the kind doctor, he thought. Gerhard also tried to treat Asner with respect, even though he was a prisoner—unlike Schmidt, who could barely write his own name but flogged his scribes all day long. He was now on his fifth.

  His headache had evaporated, and Gerhard threw himself into his work. During the night they had cleared an entire barrack in the camp to make room for new prisoners from Holland. The Russian and Polish inhabitants had been sent to Bergen-Belsen. He knew they were heading to their deaths. But he was glad there would be more food for the rest of them until the Dutch arrived.

  Konstanz, Germany, March 14, 1943

  A barely audible whisper reached him. It came from above, as though uttered from a tower and reduced by the wind to a whistling stream of air. It was a sound so muffled that it could hardly be called a sound, except that right behind it skulked silence. It approached, but slowly, as though it feared him, as though it knew that he and only he could make it disappear.