Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  ‘The big First-Aid expert, is that you?’ She put her head on one side and made her eyes big and flirtatious.

  ‘I do know how to do First Aid. We learned, in the Hitler Youth.’

  ‘So I’m lucky, aren’t I?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, though it was hard to concentrate, the way she was looking at him, ‘you’ve got blood all the way down your arm, do you want me to help you?’

  ‘It hurts,’ she said. ‘It’s only a graze, though.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know everything, don’t you?’ Her eyes narrowed.

  A moment ago he’d thought he might kiss her, now he knew he wouldn’t. He said: ‘I know you’re winding me up.’

  ‘Do you? Look, here’s that handkerchief. It’s even quite clean – thank heavens, Otto never blew his nose on it.’

  He wiped the blood with it, wishing he had another to use as a bandage, but this one would have to do. Then he rolled the messy thing into something like a bandage and tied it carefully round her arm. She pulled her sleeve down and put her arm into her jacket with a little shudder. Then she leaned towards him again, took his face between her hands – he could hardly believe it was happening, she was going to kiss him on the mouth.

  Only she didn’t. At the last minute it was his cheek she kissed, but quite near his mouth. He felt his face go hot, he was blushing, and wished he could stay cool. Then he heard the fighting getting nearer, louder, and the air darkened again. He had the stupid idea that another Hanno was fighting and dying out there.

  He remembered the Jew again and started to talk to her about him: it came out in a rush, like a confession. ‘Effi – I was in town, once, with my mate Emil and – some other boys.’

  He still couldn’t talk about Wolfgang.

  ‘It was when the Jews were still around and an old Jew came along with an armful of books, he had a yellow star on, so we knew what he was. And we’d had a lesson in school about Jews, that day. So we started to yell at him. There were people standing there who could have told us to stop, but they didn’t and Emil slapped his behind. The Jew just stood still and shivered, he didn’t move. He dropped all his books and Emil kicked them into a puddle. The others laughed. But I walked out on them.’

  She drew away from him. The closeness that had started him talking was gone, but he carried on even though he thought he was making a fool of himself.

  He said: ‘The teacher had told us Jews were bad, he said they had to be chased out of Germany, but – that man didn’t look like the pictures in our schoolbooks, with those hook noses and blue chins; I’ve never seen any people like that. He was just an old man with white hair. And it felt wrong when Emil slapped his behind. Kids shouldn’t slap old men.’

  ‘Were you sorry for him?’

  ‘I felt ashamed. My mates were laughing at the Jew because he didn’t dare move or pick up his books. Then I went home all on my own. I thought they were cool, I thought I was just like a disapproving old woman. I couldn’t help it, though. Anyway, it didn’t make any difference when I went away. They didn’t stop.’

  Wolfgang had come home furious with him, he’d said Hanno had let them all down. They’d fought. He’d given Wolfgang a black eye. Then they’d more or less agreed to forget all about it.

  Effi pulled her knees up to her chest and didn’t say anything.

  He said: ‘Emil’s in the Black Forest now. His father got taken prisoner in Normandy and his mother took him and his little brother to stay with his uncle and aunt; they’ve got a farm there. I wonder if he went into the Home Guard.’

  It had always been the three of them, the Frisch twins and Emil Honecker. They’d done everything together. Then it had just been Hanno and Wolfgang. Now it was only Hanno.

  In a hard voice, Effi said: ‘What do you think happened to the Jew?’

  ‘They were all deported, weren’t they? To be resettled in the east.’

  ‘Your teacher didn’t like them, did he? Do you think they were sent to nice places? Wherever they went, it’d be filthy. Like the ones in the camps in Germany, being starved and worked to death.’

  ‘Weren’t they criminals? Communists and left-wingers?’

  ‘And Jews. Did nobody from your town ever talk when he came home from the Front in Russia? About masses of Jews having to dig their own graves and take all their clothes off and be shot? And they were so good, they did as they were told, maybe they thought they’d be let off then, maybe they believed in miracles like Hitler does.’

  He said: ‘I did hear that, but I thought they must have been conspiring against us with the Communists. Or why would they have killed them?’

  Effi asked: ‘Aren’t you hungry? Did they teach you how to do without food in the Hitler Youth? That would have been useful training.’

  They ate a wing of duck each.

  Effi said: ‘There’s not much food left. We’ll have to find some other Germans.’

  ‘We already met one. He wanted to shoot us.’

  ‘I hope we never meet him again. Real civilians, that’s what we want. We could barter.’

  ‘What have you got to barter with?’

  ‘Good fags. I was holding on to them till the war ended, but it’s no good if we croak from hunger here.’

  There was a noise of small hooves. Another herd of deer running away from the fighting.

  He said: ‘We’re not out of food yet.’

  ‘If we wait till we’ve nothing,’ said Effi, ‘we’ll starve.’

  *

  In the end the other Germans came to them and they weren’t much nicer than Otto. They were two soldiers, ordinary ones, ragged and bloody, but not badly hurt. She could hear their breath heaving as they came through the trees. They headed straight for the refuge.

  ‘You should have kept your gun,’ said the little weaselly one to the big ginger-haired one.

  ‘Morning,’ said Effi. ‘Dangerous out there, is it?’

  Swine, she thought, don’t answer me, will you? Just come in, flop down, keep talking to each other as if we weren’t here. But she made room for them. So did Hanno, because the gun was law, it had been Russian law half an hour ago, now it was German law because Weasel still had his. He lay on his side and clutched it to his belly.

  ‘No, I shouldn’t have kept my gun,’ said Ginger to Weasel. He had a rash of freckles over his face and blood smeared on his cheek. He put his head down and panted. ‘My war’s over, mate.’

  Effi hated the smell of him, pig-meat, she thought, that’s what he is, a great big heavy carcass, and then: some people are really hard to like.

  ‘Ordinary folk like us,’ said Ginger as if he’d heard her thought. He rolled over onto his back. ‘It’s always us who get it in the neck. Little people. And their wives.’

  ‘You be glad you’ve still got a wife,’ said Weasel. ‘My Trudchen ran off to live with a butcher in Hamburg, roast meat every Sunday, then she got roasted in the big fire-bomb raid. No Sunday lunches for her any more.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘No kids.’

  ‘I’ve got kids,’ said Ginger. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got a wife. The Ivans have probably had her by now.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ Weasel asked Ginger.

  They weren’t buddies then, they must have just met up.

  ‘Halle.’

  ‘No, that’s all right, the Amis are there. They reached the Mulde three days ago.’

  ‘That’s what the army bulletins say –’ Ginger groaned and shifted himself. ‘Bullet in my shoulder at Bialystok,’ he said, ‘never been right since. Can you believe anything they tell you?’

  Effi asked: ‘How far is it to the Mulde?’

  ‘You’ll never get there, girlie, don’t bother,’ said Ginger. ‘The Ivans’ll get you first. We had our fun in Russia, now they’re bringing the party back to our house.’ To Weasel, he said: ‘Our Colonel rang Headquarters at Zossen, someone picks up the phone, the Colonel starts off, saying, We’ve lost the rest of our unit, what are
we meant to do now? Ivan’s here, says the voice on the other end. You know what you can do with yourself. It was a Russian. They’re in Army Headquarters. It’s over, brother. Do you know you can get drunk on fuel oil?’

  Weasel said: ‘Where d’you think you’ll get fuel oil from?’

  They’d have to get away from this pair. They’d attract the Ivans.

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ she asked, because she really wanted to know.

  ‘Well, kids,’ said Weasel, ‘the heroic army of General Busse – heard of it? We were coming to save Berlin – is lying around the autobahn, smashed into pieces by the Reds. The Reds like the autobahns, they’re very grateful to us for building them a nice four-lane ride all the way to the capital.’

  ‘Have you got any food?’ asked Hanno. ‘We’ve run out.’

  Weasel laughed. ‘We’ve been fighting for you all the way from Russia, now you want food as well? Forget it, kid.’

  Effi didn’t want to offer him fags for food: if he knew she had fags he’d just take them, she’d swear. Ginger yawned, groaned, and closed his eyes.

  They each had a rolled-up blanket on top of their packs, they probably had chocolate and porridge in there, more bread, sausage maybe.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ said Weasel to Ginger. ‘If the Ivans come to get you, at least you’ll have slept first. But keep hold of your pack, you don’t want the kids to nick it.’

  ‘If they nick my pack I’ll crack their heads together and watch their brains spill out.’ He meant it, too. Just like that swine Otto.

  ‘Nah,’ said Weasel. ‘I’ll stay awake. They won’t try anything.’

  In her head Effi heard Pierre saying, ‘Sometimes, kid, you have to steal from the undeserving.’ In her head she could see him standing in the ruins of a Party fat cat’s house, holding a jar of caviar and grinning because a Jew was going to eat it.

  Ginger was snoring already. Weasel put his head on his own pack and wrenched his eyelids open, but he dropped into sleep almost as quickly as Ginger. If I give them a while to get properly away – thought Effi. It wasn’t her fault, after all. Weasel had put the idea into her head.

  Hanno was sitting there with his eyes wide open, he’d had the same thought. She shook her head at him, keep still, boy. She’d do it better, she was lighter and had deft girl’s fingers. She crept carefully round Ginger, ducking her head away from the curving pine branches.

  It was a good thing she was thin, there was such a narrow space between the two men, but she went up like a worm, inch by inch: elbows – her arm was hurting, though – hips, knees, feet. At last she was face to face with the pack. She pushed herself up on her knees, put her hands out, picked it up and slung it round her shoulders so that it was hanging on her front. Then she backed away. This time it had to be on her knees with her head right down, dreadfully, scarily slowly, so as not to make a sound. The length of a tall fat man. It felt like a day’s walking.

  She was halfway back when Ginger opened his eyes and made grunty stirring noises. Hanno sucked in his breath. She went cold, time slowed down and then she knew what to do.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, ‘go back to sleep.’

  Ginger turned on his side and went on snoring. Now his fat arse was poking out and she had to wriggle past it; it’d have been funny if he wasn’t so dangerous.

  She looked at Hanno again. He gathered up his milk pail – the water swished around inside and dribbled over the lip – crawled with her to the edge of the shelter, stood up next to her. They walked away, away from Weasel and Ginger, away from where you could hear the fighting. Effi kept the pack on her front, she wouldn’t slow down for anything.

  Chapter Eight

  They’d walked for half an hour. Effi felt bad. OK, Ginger was a swine, but she’d taken everything he had left. And for herself. She and Pierre had always done like Robin Hood in England, taken from the rich to give to the poor. They came to a thicket of young oaks and there she stopped. She sat down.

  ‘Can we empty his pack out and get rid of it?’ said Hanno, sitting beside her. There was an edgy note in his voice. ‘I don’t want to carry army stuff.’

  ‘Wouldn’t help your undercover action?’ He didn’t respond. She told herself she’d taken the pack now, it’d be suicide to take it back to Ginger and crazy to waste it. She pulled the blanket loose from its straps. ‘That blanket’s good, we’ve got to keep that. OK. What’s inside? Oh, God, cigarettes. Gold. One for us now, Hanno boy, what d’you say? And more matches, I was getting short of matches. Oh, lordy, chocolate. And a tin of sardines. I wonder where he rustled those up. And his bread.’

  ‘We’re thieves,’ said the boy.

  Sharply, she said, ‘He’s a German soldier. He was a thief. They went out to steal things from foreign countries; look, Hanno, everyone in Germany’s been eating stolen goods since the war began.’

  He didn’t answer but she could see she’d shocked him. She’d insulted his father’s memory, she shouldn’t have said that. Or maybe she was glad she had. She didn’t know.

  She went on emptying Ginger’s pack. There was his stinking underwear, she threw that on the ground. And then she felt the harmonica at the bottom of the pack. Oh, sweetheart, she thought, I lost you when the house was bombed, now you’ve risen from the grave.

  ‘A mouth organ,’ said Hanno, brightening up.

  ‘Hands off,’ she said. ‘It’s mine.’

  It was even a chromatic harmonica, it’d play any key she wanted. For a moment she felt bad again for taking it, but Ginger couldn’t have been a jazzman. Probably he’d murdered a Jewish jazzman in Russia and stolen the harmonica from him. It made her feel better to think that.

  Hanno said: ‘But girls don’t play the mouth organ.’

  ‘Maybe your sister doesn’t play it, so what? And it’s not a mouth organ, it’s a harmonica. Mississippi saxophone, even.’ She blew through the harmonica and wiped it to get Ginger’s spit out. It moaned with relief. She tried it out, very quietly, just a few notes here and there, and then there was a piece wanting to come, ‘Body and Soul’.

  ‘What are you playing?’ he asked. Then: ‘It’s good. I can’t play anything like as well as that.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He was nice, policeman’s kid or not.

  She played with the theme, improvising, the way she used to play with Pierre. Him on the piano, they’d accompany each other’s solos, listening hard for the way the music had to go, and Aunt Annelie would come down into the cellar and say: ‘Hot Club of France, is it? Pierre, the way you’ve got that child talking, I don’t know what her father will say.’ Then she’d laugh, because she didn’t think it mattered how you talked and anyway Effi had picked up a nice Berlin worker’s accent to go with Pierre’s jazzman slang. And Pierre would tell them for the hundredth time how he’d heard Larry Adler play the harmonica in Paris with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. He’d heard the best musicians, Pierre had. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong. He was good. She’d thought they’d perform together and Papa would be in the audience.

  She stopped in mid-note.

  ‘Let’s have that fag,’ she said, and lit up. It was bad tobacco, but it’d make her feel better. Papa, she thought, Papa.

  She asked Hanno, ‘Which way is the Mulde? Where the Amis are?’

  He stared at the dirty sky, then pointed at a brighter part where the sun must be. He said: ‘The same way as Leipzig and Frankfurt.’ Suddenly his face hardened, his cheekbones stood out. He said: ‘I feel like a coward. I ought to go back and fight.’

  That made her angry. It wasn’t just that she’d be on her own. She didn’t want him dead. After all, she’d kissed him back there. Though she’d half-wished she hadn’t when he started saying the Jews and the comrades in the camps were all criminals.

  ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Go and get killed with the rest of them. How many boys have already died for nothing?’

  A huge shudder went through him. For a moment, he looked half-crazed, the way h
e did when he first came to the farm. Then he grabbed Ginger’s empty pack, threw it down on the ground again, and kicked it away.

  ‘Give me the fag,’ he said.

  She passed it over. ‘The fighting was bad,’ she said, ‘was it?’

  He smoked. He didn’t answer. Then he gave a quick, miserable shrug of his shoulders. ‘I liked you playing the harmonica. It was jazz, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Jazz isn’t for nice Hitler youths; where did you hear it?’

  ‘Emil had a record,’ said Hanno. But he was thinking about the bad stuff, she could tell. Wasn’t Emil the one who’d hit the old Jew? Hanno’s friend who went to the Black Forest. Oh, it was too complicated. She wanted to cheer him up, anyway.

  ‘Who was the artist?’

  ‘Louis Armstrong. I don’t know how Emil got hold of it, but we listened to it once, then his father – he was home on leave – found out and broke the record to pieces. He said didn’t Emil know the Negro music was forbidden? He said if anyone heard we’d all go to youth concentration camp.’

  ‘Smashed one of Louis’s records? Idiot. But that’s the crazy world we’ve been living in. The thing about jazz,’ she said, ‘when you do a solo, that’s something special, you don’t follow the music line, you dance around it. If you like jazz, you like to have fun. That’s why our leaders don’t like it. But you’ll be able to listen when the war’s over, you’ll be in some peacetime club with traffic outside and lights in the streets, there’ll be no more Hitler Youth and no more Gestapo, and Louis will tour Europe again. Pierre said he would.’

  ‘Who’s Pierre?’

  How could she have let his name out? Quickly, she said: ‘You’ll be sitting there with a nice beer, smoking and talking about anything you like. Listening to a band. Dating a nice girl.’

  ‘I might be drinking with you – are you a nice girl?’ That was better.

  She said: ‘I’ll be in America. I’m going to be a star, I’ll have a lion with a diamond collar, and drive a pink limousine and sunbathe on the beach and have a long gold cigarette-holder.’