Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  Hanno remembered Mother crying into the potato peelings. It was hard to control himself.

  Effi made a triangle out of the handkerchief and tied it round her face.

  ‘Now I’m an outlaw in a Wild West film,’ she said, giggling. And whispered to Hanno: ‘No. Don’t get angry.’

  A plane came over and there was a series of explosions not far away. The stable wall shook and the farm cat came down out of the hayrack.

  ‘A pussy cat,’ said Effi quickly. ‘Puss, puss!’

  The cat walked round Effi, wanting a taste of the meat.

  Otto had his gun out. ‘Animal gets on my nerves.’ Hanno thought he was going to shoot the cat, then: ‘Out,’ he snapped, suddenly. ‘Out into the yard, you two.’ The cat kept on miaowing, it didn’t know about guns. Otto pointed the gun at Effi. ‘Get a move on, girl.’

  Effi stood up. She was white as chalk, but she kept hold of the half-plucked duck.

  ‘You too, boy,’ said Otto.

  ‘The Russians might come,’ said Effi.

  ‘If the Russians come,’ said Otto, ‘d’you think they won’t find you in here and make you wish you were dead? Out!’

  He gave Hanno a shove with the gun. They stumbled out into the yard. The sun was shining out there. There were no planes, but they could hear the sound of fighting coming closer.

  The cat had come out with them. ‘Miaow,’ she said, gooseberry-green eyes fixed on the duck. ‘Miaow!’

  Otto herded Effi and Hanno into the cook-place. The cat came too. Effi was still holding the duck.

  ‘Turn round,’ Otto said. ‘Face the wall.’

  He was going to shoot them. No, thought Hanno. No.

  ‘Bernhard Frisch’s son,’ said Otto like a judge passing sentence, ‘and a little tart from Prenzlauer Berg. Scum, both of you. You can tell as many lies as you like, trying to save your skins, but you don’t fool me. Now which of you shall I shoot first? No – why should I make it so easy for you both? Come here, girl. You, boy, stay where you are.’

  Effi went from beside him. He thought Otto grabbed hold of her.

  ‘Herr Braun,’ Hanno heard her pleading, ‘we’re Germans, your own people –’ then she cried out, gasped, and shrieked.

  ‘What are you doing to her?’

  Otto laughed. It was a bad laugh. ‘I’m twisting her arm, boy. I’ve even made her drop the duck. You can turn round now, I want you to see her arm go out of its socket.’

  Hanno turned round and saw the cat dart forward to get the duck. It ran right between Otto’s legs.

  ‘What?’ Otto shouted.

  All at once Effi was free. She’d yanked herself out of Otto’s grip and nipped round the corner out of sight. Otto went after her but Hanno jumped forward and stuck his foot in Otto’s way. Otto stumbled. His gun went off and the bullet hit the ground. There was a spray of earth. Now suddenly the fighting was much closer, there were soldiers coming and shooting. Otto was running away, right out of the farmyard, and the cat was running too with its tail hooked in fright. Hanno was round the corner before he thought about it, but he couldn’t see Effi. There was just the chimney poking into the sky and the broken beams all around it, and the rubble.

  ‘Hanno!’ It was Effi’s voice. ‘Down here.’

  There was a hole in the ground; you couldn’t see it very easily because a beam had fallen half-across it. There were wooden steps going down into the old cellar. Hanno felt carefully with his feet as he went down them, but only one was missing. It was very dark.

  ‘Effi? Where are you?’

  Her hand touched his shoulder. ‘Here.’ She moved up to him. They stood still, close to each other, hearing guns and then something came driving through: an armoured car, maybe, he didn’t think it was big enough for a tank but it made the roof shake and debris came down on their heads. After that everything went quiet.

  ‘I’ve got the duck,’ said Effi. ‘I never noticed I’d picked it up till I wondered what I was holding.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Hanno. ‘I was a fool. How’s your arm?’

  ‘Don’t do it again, kid, that’s all. I’m OK; I started making a noise before he hurt me. I got away from him nicely, didn’t I? He thought I was too silly to know the trick. P – my uncle taught me. My aunt’s husband. I just untwisted myself, there he was holding the air.’

  ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m OK. Where did the swine go?’

  ‘He ran when the soldiers came. Right away. I don’t know if he’ll come back.’

  ‘Maybe they killed him. I hope they killed him.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Why does he hate your father so much? And you, now.’

  ‘I don’t know. He used to be in Sternberg, but the police regiment went to Czechoslovakia in ’thirty-nine and he was moved to a different unit. He came back visiting the year before last, when Father was on leave. We’d gone to the bakery and we met him on the street.’

  Wolfgang had been there, but he couldn’t mention Wolfgang.

  ‘They talked about the war, they were both fighting partisans, Otto was in Yugoslavia, Father was in the Ukraine. There was something – I thought Father was wary of him. And when we came home he didn’t tell Mother we’d met him.’

  ‘Did you tell her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It felt as if I mustn’t. He was lying about my father, you know. Father never did anything wrong.’

  She didn’t answer. Then she said: ‘I can get the feathers out of this thing by feel. Better to stay down here till I’ve plucked it, what do you think? Then we can cook it.’

  ‘Don’t you want to go, in case he comes back?’

  She hesitated. ‘Maybe. Only – I’m so hungry. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. More than I’d have thought.’

  ‘And there’s a good place to cook it here. We’ll eat some, then we’ll go.’

  She’d said ‘we’ll go’ as if she wanted them to be together.

  ‘Do you want to go to your grandfather in Leipzig?’

  She said: ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I can start off with you. If you want me.’

  She didn’t say anything. Maybe she didn’t want him after all? Then she said: ‘We’d better go together and share the rest of the duck.’

  There were two dead German soldiers in the yard when they came up. Effi didn’t say anything about them, neither did Hanno, but they walked round the farm to see if Otto was there. There was no sign of him, dead or alive. Effi put the duck in the pot and cut up chunks of swede to roast with it.

  The cat was sitting about a metre away, still miaowing.

  ‘Puss,’ said Effi, ‘you almost got both of us killed back there.’

  There was one thing, though, the time she’d spent practising her fairytales had paid off, she’d got them out pat – it was a mistake to admit to Prenzlauer Berg, though. Another time she could say Aunt Annelie kept a teashop in Wannsee. That didn’t sound so subversive.

  The cat kept her eyes fixed on the pot.

  ‘Miaow!’ said Effi to her. ‘Miaow!’

  But she was listening all the time, taut and frightened in case Otto came back. Maybe it was stupid to roast the duck, but she’d started now. Had she been right to tell the boy he could come with her?

  He’d come back from the lake with the duck, he hadn’t needed to do that. And he’d said he was sorry. So what if he was a policeman’s kid? You judged people by what they did – Pierre and Aunt Annelie always said that was what it was all about. Suddenly she was really happy he was there, but: Effi, she said to herself, just remember to mind your tongue with him.

  She said: ‘Aunt Annelie used to like duck.’

  ‘One of the ones you lost?’

  ‘Yes.’ She’d kept a lot of the truth in her story, it came out naturally then. ‘Come on, we’d better pack up while the duck cooks.’

  ‘There’s nothing to pack, is there?
’

  She hesitated, then said, ‘I’ve got some stuff.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s in the stables. You can get some swedes, only a few, we can’t carry them all. The porridge is finished.’

  The sun was sinking. She went into the stable, got the bag from its hiding place, hung it on her front and buttoned her jacket over it. Lucky that the jacket had always been too big for her, it had been Uncle Max’s before the Nazi storm troopers killed him in 1933. Aunt Annelie had cut it down for Effi. The buttons strained a bit, but this wasn’t a fashion parade.

  Hanno came out of the ruined cowshed with the swedes. He stopped and stared at a heap of soil beside one of the dead soldiers. What was he staring at, Otto couldn’t be in there, surely, waiting to jump out?

  ‘There’s a milk can,’ he said.

  You could just see its shoulder shining faintly in the red evening light. Hanno got down on his hunkers and dug the can out with his hands and nails. He moved quickly and cleverly, the strangeness that there’d been about his movements before had gone, but when something exploded a kilometre or so away he jumped. Then they both laughed. It was jittery laughter.

  The can wasn’t very big, probably held about a litre and it was battered and dented but there was even a lid.

  Hanno said: ‘We can fill it up with water before we go.’

  ‘Smart,’ she said. He went off to the pump.

  When he came back, he said: ‘I used to get so excited when we went away, when I was a kid. I could never sleep the night before.’

  ‘Where did you used to go?’

  ‘To the Baltic.’

  ‘I used to go to the Wannsee Lake.’

  ‘With your aunts?’

  ‘With my mother. She died of tuberculosis and then I went to live with Aunt Annelie’

  ‘Was your father in the army then?’

  ‘Yes.’ Effi, she thought, you’re a smart liar.

  *

  The duck’s skin was crisp and brown round a thin layer of fat. A curl of fat sneaked out when Effi put the knife in. They gobbled it up, oh, God, the taste of it, something you could lay your tongue round and get your teeth into! The swedes were soaked in gravy and more fat. Only potatoes with it would have been better still.

  They ate a breast each and didn’t give anything to the cat. They’d agreed to save the legs and wings and the carcass. They knew they’d both be glad of food later on.

  As soon as they’d finished they went away from the farm together. They walked all the way through the wood. It was dark by the time they came out the other side, but the moon was up. There was a field of sandy soil that they had to cross.

  ‘It’s like the beach,’ she said. ‘Your feet sink in. I hope that swine Otto doesn’t turn up, it’d be hard to run here.’

  Hanno didn’t answer. They kept walking. It was scary, out in the open, with their long moon-shadows floundering across the field ahead of them. Cheer up, Effi, she thought. You’re on your way to the Americans and Papa.

  Chapter Six

  Effi spoke English well enough to talk to the Americans when she found them, maybe she didn’t speak it as well as she used to when she was at school in London – after all, she’d only been eight when she’d left. But Mama and she had used to speak to each other in English and she’d practised it with Pierre.

  Pierre would say in English: ‘You lived in Paris when you left Germany first, and you say you don’t know French bread – don’t you remember anything about Paris?’

  ‘Pierre,’ she’d say, ‘I was only two and a half when we went away from there to Amsterdam.’

  He’d shake his head and say: ‘One day, kid, you’ll really experience Paris.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ she’d say.

  ‘So Amsterdam – can you remember Amsterdam?’

  ‘Only some tall brick buildings and canals. But I can remember London.’

  ‘OK, kid, tell me about London.’

  ‘We had a flat in Chelsea; it was really small but it was cool because I could get out of bed in the morning and look at the river. I can remember my school, too. It was called an ‘advanced school’.

  ‘What’s this – “advanced school”?’

  ‘Nobody was ever hit and you could choose what you studied.’

  ‘So what did you study? And were the other children nice, or were they horrible because no one ever disciplined them?’

  ‘I studied music, of course. The teachers were really good at music. And art. That’s why my parents sent me there. But I did the other things, too: arithmetic and reading and writing. The kids were nice. There was another kid from Germany, she was called Nini Engelmann. Her family were Jewish – that was why they’d come away – and her father was an architect, but he couldn’t get enough work in England and they went on to America. The other kids thought I must be Jewish too, quite a few of them were. I had to explain to them how Papa was a Communist and Hitler wanted to kill him, and some of them didn’t know who Hitler was, and I told them he was the Government in Germany and he was a bad man. They used to giggle if Nini and I talked German together. Not nastily. They really were nice kids, and a lot of their parents were artists too, like mine.’

  ‘And your father was a composer even though his father kept a bar. He rose from the working class. And your mother?’

  ‘You know she was a film star and a singer.’

  ‘I’m making you practise your English.’

  ‘You should have been a schoolteacher. Anyway, my accent’s better than yours.’

  ‘And can you speak French as well as I speak English, kid?’

  ‘No. OK.’

  ‘Your mother came from a rich family, didn’t she? Did she work when you were in England?’

  ‘Not very much, she had to look after me. She gave singing lessons, and sometimes she sang at concerts.’

  ‘And your father was a composer but he ended up writing popular songs? Not that I have anything against popular songs, kid, I’d rather listen to them than to symphonies myself, though good music is good music.’

  ‘It was hard for him to get work, there were so many artists who’d had to leave Germany. I can remember him always writing letters to people in concert halls and opera houses and then getting angry and saying he’d been ruined when he left Germany, he’d had a reputation for classical music once and now he could only write schlock for Tin Pan Alley. But he was good at popular music. Everybody liked it.’

  ‘So did he never get his classical work performed?’

  ‘Sometimes. Not enough to make money. The popular music kept us fed.’

  ‘So you can remember your father?’

  ‘He had fair hair and blue eyes, and he was quite tall.’

  ‘You got that from that photograph your aunt has – you look at it all the time.’

  ‘I do remember him.’ And now she started to talk in German after all. English was too slow. ‘He used to take me to the piano and put me on his lap, and he’d make me play music, well, really it was my fingers on top of his, but there I was suddenly playing something really good and difficult. He was a wonderful pianist, my papa. And when I was playing my little-kid pieces he used to come and listen and then he’d tell me things, the way you do, and I always played better after that. And he’d play the piano and we’d all sing. And I can remember one Sunday afternoon we were out for a walk on the riverbank. Mama was wearing red sandals and she had a red hat and a white dress with short sleeves and a big skirt, and I had a white dress and black patent leather shoes with ankle-straps and I had a red hat too, I always wanted to dress like Mama, she was the elegantest lady in the world. And Papa was wearing a summer jacket; it was a lovely day, the river was dancing and all shiny, there was an old dirty dredger tied up at the bank and even that looked like an oil painting and then Mama and I started skipping along the pavement, singing: “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.” There were
people staring at us – English people don’t sing in the street, you know, and usually we were careful to try and behave properly, because of fitting in, but that day we just didn’t care and Papa stood there and clapped and there was an old man walking up the street and he stopped, and said: “Lovely! Lovely!”’

  Pierre said: ‘You’ve never told me that before.’

  ‘I never will again. It’s a special memory, I don’t even remember it a lot to myself, I’m scared it might get spoilt if I bring it out too often.’

  *

  There were other things she remembered that she didn’t want to talk to Pierre about. Like when letters used to come from Germany, letters with thin skins, she used to call them in her little-kid way, they didn’t weigh much but what was inside them was pretty heavy. There was Grandmama in Germany, she had tuberculosis, and she was getting worse. And there were whisperings; Effi hadn’t understood them at the time.

  Papa whispering to Mama, ‘Hansen has got rid of his wife.’

  Mama saying: ‘Hitler is the devil. Destroying people’s lives. Oh my God, the Sachers are dead.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  Mama, pushing the letter over to Papa. ‘Read.’ And then, not waiting for Papa to read, whispering: ‘They gassed themselves, and the child, too.’

  She knew what it was about now. The Nazis had told actors and artists who had Jewish husbands or wives that there’d be no more work for them unless they divorced. The Sachers had killed themselves so that they wouldn’t have to part. But she’d felt safe at the time with Mama and Papa, she’d never have imagined Hitler could drive them apart.

  A letter came from Grandmama. Mama said, ‘She’s not got long to live. Six months maybe, the doctors say.’

  There were arguments. Mama was desperate to go, Papa didn’t want her to. Mama was miserable. Effi remembered her crying beside the monkey cage at the zoo, the two of them had gone there to be cheered up. A little monkey with a wrinkled face came and made faces at Mama but he couldn’t make her laugh. Effi kissed her and she wiped her eyes, gave a kind of smile. She sent Effi off on an elephant ride. ‘Have a nice time,’ she said. Effi came back and waved to Mama and shouted to show her what a good time she was having on the elephant. Mama looked up at her as if it hurt to see Effi smiling, and her face was all wet again.