‘How will you get to America?’
‘Not telling. When I make my first film, you’ll come to watch me in the cinema, then you’ll know.’ She started to play the harmonica, ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’. She said: ‘I want to smoke again, kid. Thanks.’
He passed the fag over, sat on the ground with his arms wrapped round his knees. She watched him through the smoke.
He said, ‘Who is that Pierre? That’s a French name.’ She reminded herself that his father had been a policeman. Fraternizing with the foreign slave labourers had been a crime in the glorious German pirate Reich. And she was a criminal, she’d broken the Nazi law over and over again. The Nazis were so loud about their ideas, it got to you sometimes. Once she’d been smuggling food to a Jew in hiding, suddenly she’d felt almost wicked. She’d got herself through by saying, I’m Red Riding Hood, taking food to my Granny, the Nazis are the wolves, and I’ve got to make sure the story goes right, no wolves eating Granny this time. It was stupid and childish, but it worked.
She couldn’t tell him the truth, but suddenly she felt a whole malicious story make itself up inside her head. How would he take it?
‘Pierre was what you’d call a volunteer – a slave labourer, I call it - but he got away from the factory and stayed in Berlin pretending to be German,’ she told him. ‘He’d used to be a jazz musician. My aunt Annelie took him in. She bought stolen goods and sold them on.’
‘I thought she had a bar.’
‘Use your imagination. She did both. Pierre didn’t have a ration card so we used to burgle houses during the air-raids, when everyone was in the shelters. We pretended to be wardens.’ That was good, she’d make it better. ‘We got jewellery as well as food, I used to sell it to a Nazi high-up who was saving up to run away. Schulz, his name was.’ That was good. ‘And Aunt Annelie taught me how to pick pockets.’
He stared at her. What would he say? Suddenly she realized she was really angry. Was it with him, or with herself for stealing Ginger’s pack? She didn’t know.
She said, ‘Look, kid, I told you, Germans are all thieves now. Our men took all the food out of Russia, didn’t they? Didn’t matter because the Ivans were supposed to be sub-humans. Only now it turns out they can thrash the master race.’
His jaw clenched. He reached out and yanked at a young oak-branch, wanting to break it off, but it only bent over, then hung there crippled, refusing to come away. He stopped trying and looked at his hands.
‘We’d better move,’ he said. ‘The soldiers might come after us.’
*
At noon they came out of the forest onto a side road. Down it tramped a line of refugees – children, women, old people; riding wagons, pushing handcarts, bicycles, wheelbarrows even, carrying rucksacks; thin tired cows with their udders swinging, goats in the same state, dogs with their mouths open.
A lone soldier came past without his gun. He was trying to get civilian clothing from a woman who had three small boys behind her on the wagon.
‘I haven’t got any,’ she kept saying. ‘You’ll have to ask someone else.’
‘You must have something laid by for your husband,’ said the soldier, whining and pawing the wagon. ‘Think how useful an army greatcoat would be to him.’
‘He’s got one,’ said the woman. ‘He probably wants rid of it as much as you do.’
Hanno looked at her face. It was savage with fear.
‘Push off,’ she said. ‘Take your filthy hands off my wagon.’
I was lucky, Hanno thought. I found a dead man to strip.
‘Which way is west?’ Effi asked.
Again, he looked for that slight brightness in the grubby sky. Then he pointed to the right. The way everyone else was going.
‘Do you want to go west?’
She hesitated. ‘I want to go where the Amis are. What about you?’
He knew he wouldn’t do any werewolf action. It was over. The soldier had said it. The Russians had answered the phone at army headquarters. He said, ‘I’ll go to Frankfurt, to my mother and sister.’
He thought of all the times he used to come to Mother with his hurts, when he was a little kid. Being without Wolfgang was the worst hurt he’d ever felt, and it’d break her heart when he brought it to her.
They went down to the road and joined the refugee trek, just behind a wagon that had a skinny cow attached behind it.
‘Mother and Heide might have been walking like this. If they hadn’t got train tickets,’ Hanno said.
‘Train tickets? They were lucky.’
‘Did you go away on foot with your aunts? How did you come to lose them?’
‘That was just a story for Braun, or Otto, or whatever he’s called.’ She hesitated. ‘I might as well tell you. The aunt in Grunau’s a fairy tale but don’t contradict me if I talk about her to any more bullies. Or tell anyone else about the stolen goods. Aunt Annelie was killed in an air-raid in Berlin. Pierre died, too. I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘How did you get out of Berlin? They said nobody was allowed to leave any more.’
‘That Nazi bigwig I told you about, Schulz, he took me in his car.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘He used to take a fatherly interest in me. He’s dead too. A Russian plane machine-gunned his car. It turned over and threw me clear. He burned up in it.’
‘Did you care?’
‘Of course I did. I meant to travel to the Amis in comfort. No, I did care about him – a bit. I don’t know why. He wanted to adopt me once, only I didn’t want to be his kid, I wanted to stay with my aunt. I liked the life of crime.’ She grinned.
He said, ‘You know, my father – I could never believe what Otto said. My father was the law in our family. “Eat your dinner up and don’t complain. You’ve got to go to the Hitler Youth, you have to do your duty. What sort of mark is this? You know you’ve got to pay more attention at school.” He was always going on at us like that. Were you really a burglar and a pickpocket?’
‘Does it make you hate me?’
‘I hated that soldier. I’d have taken his pack if you hadn’t.’
She said: ‘The army got better food than the civvies anyway. We were just evening up the score.’
They fell silent and kept on walking. The road was old and broken up by frost, slippery with horse and cow droppings. It was far harder going than the sandy tracks they’d been following through the forest. After an hour or so it felt as if they’d been walking the road for always. It was as if the trek had its own life that had swallowed him and Effi and everyone else, taken their thoughts and even their fears, so that they had to plod wearily onwards towards a safety they wanted and yet couldn’t imagine with the noise of fighting all round them and planes in the further sky. It was there, that was all, and they had to reach it. His legs ached and soon his shoulders started to ache too. He was so tired, sometimes one foot would slither or he’d find his ankle going over in a pothole, but his army boots saved him from more than a wrench. In front of him the cow’s bandy legs moved resignedly onwards and her udder swung, but it didn’t look as if she had much milk to give. Maybe he was wrong. He didn’t know anything about cows.
The girl started to sing something he’d heard her singing before. Some popular song. Only the words sounded different.
‘What’s that?’
She pulled the harmonica out and played the melody.
He said, ‘Oh, I know that. It’s “Keep My Picture By You”.’
‘No, it isn’t. You’ll hear when we get to the Amis what it really is.’
‘What were the words you were singing before?’
‘English. I suppose you learned Latin and Greek at school.’
‘My sister learned English and I got her to teach me some. I didn’t like Latin and Greek.’
‘OK.’ She put the harmonica away. She sang:
I’m lost and broken-hearted
lonesome, weary and blue
and I’m writing these words, dear, to tell y
ou
you’re the Queen of my heart
and I’ll always be true.
I said words that should never be spoken
I behaved as if I didn’t care
and then you looked at me
and all I could see
were the raindrops shining in your hair.
He asked her: ‘Where did you learn those English words?’
‘I got the sheet music from Herr Schulz; the fat cats could get anything they wanted, even if it was forbidden. I got a couple of Louis Armstrong records from him, too.’
Could, she’d said. Yes, it was over. There was a new world coming, a world without the Party, a world where he wasn’t a twin any longer. It felt as if he’d have to learn a new language before he could live in it. ‘Did you learn English at school?’ he asked her.
‘Yeah. I learned it at school.’
There she was walking beside him with her black curls and her eyes and her smile going up at the corners of her mouth. Her lips had been soft when they’d touched his cheek. He remembered the feel of her back against his, the bone of her spine, the tiny movements of her body even while she lay still. She was supposed to be a bad girl, a delinquent – he didn’t care. Maybe he even liked the idea? She talked as if she knew all about the world that was coming. The peacetime world. Was it really going to be the way she said? He imagined himself with long hair flopping into his face and a loud, checked English jacket, the kind of boy Emil’s father went on about when he took the Louis Armstrong record away. There were kids like that in Hamburg, Emil’s father said, they were a disgrace to the Reich. So what? Wolfgang had been a credit to the Reich, he’d had to die a hero’s death – but he’d really wanted to have fun and be alive. Hanno was fed up with destiny and duty and loyalty, all they seemed to mean was killing and dying. Now he wanted to dance with a girl in a satin dress. With Effi in a satin dress. Effi, he said under his breath, liking the feel of her name on his tongue.
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing.’
A shell exploded, perhaps a kilometre away, and another, and another. You could see trees exploding. The refugee column started to hurry. Effi tripped in a crack. Hanno put his hand out and saved her from falling.
‘Thanks,’ she said. He hadn’t noticed how pale she was.
‘How’s your arm?’ he asked her.
‘Sore,’ she said. ‘It makes you tired.’
She started to sing, she had a rough, strong singing voice, she could make it miaow like a cat’s.
I’m tired of thieving
tired of lying.
Take me to the Promised Land.
It was evening, the fighting had got worse and worse around them but it hadn’t come to the road they were on. Lucky so far, thought Effi; how long will it last? There was a nasty taste in the air, the wind was blowing it through a clump of last year’s dead bulrushes, and straight into her mouth.
‘I need another drink,’ she said. ‘Pass me the water, Hitler Youth.’
He rounded on her, furious. ‘Don’t call me Hitler Youth!’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Swing Boy, I want the water.’
‘There’s not much left.’
‘We’ll have to get some more. This countryside’s full of drainage ditches.’
‘Dirty water,’ he said, worried, ‘and no chance of boiling it.’
She said, ‘If you drink, you might get dysentery. If you don’t drink, you’re bound to die of thirst.’
‘OK.’
They both drank a mouthful out of the milk can.
Half an hour later the column slowed down, wagons and walkers had to wait, go forward a few paces, wait again. The woman with a bicycle who was walking just behind them called out to the man who was driving the cart ahead.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ he shouted back.
It came to Effi that it might be the Ivans up ahead, taking things off people and dragging the women away. But there’d be screams then, surely? The stopping and the starting set her nerves whining; it was much worse than the plodding trek.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Hanno.
‘Just tired.’
Her arm was burning, and she wanted a proper drink of water. She wanted Pierre. She wanted him to come and pick her up and carry her to bed where Aunt Annelie would tuck her in. She shivered.
The column moved again and they saw what had slowed it down. There was a drainage ditch running under the road and people were getting water from it, hustling each other with their bottles and cups. Their wagons and carts were blocking the road.
‘I’ll get the water,’ said Hanno.
She said, ‘We’ll both go.’ But she flinched from the thought of those elbows and shoulders hitting her bad arm.
‘Don’t be a fool.’
‘Swing Boy,’ she said, ‘if you want to run errands for me, I’ll be kind and let you.’
He shoved his way in and came back with the milk can full.
The water was full of silt. Effi tried to gather it under her tongue and spit it out afterwards, but she ended up swallowing most of it. Anyway, it was good to drink. Hanno went back and filled the milk can again. The women were good at pushing and shoving but he was better, he seemed to be enjoying himself. Well, the old women were always complaining about the Hitler Youth, saying they were taught not to stand back for their elders.
A tall woman with a blue and white checked scarf tied round her head gave Effi a push from behind. ‘Hey, Fräulein,’ she said, ‘standing about in everybody’s way.’
She’d hurt Effi’s arm after all. Effi realized she needed to bad-mouth somebody, and God, who was meant to provide, had provided this sour-faced cow. It’d be blasphemy to throw God’s gift back at him.
‘Too stupid to find your way round me, then?’ she answered.
‘I never heard such cheek. Berlin brat. If you’re too lazy to fetch water, you shouldn’t block other people.’
Ma Headscarf had a milk pail in her hand too, a bigger one than Effi and Hanno’s. There was a kid behind her, putting her thin face out to watch her mother arguing, and Effi caught sight of her stockings, blood all over them. Oh God, she thought, she’s been raped.
‘Come on, Barbara,’ said Ma Headscarf. ‘We haven’t time to dawdle like this little trollop.’
Effi stared at the poor raped kid.
Hanno came back: ‘What do you want?’ he asked Ma Headscarf.
‘She doesn’t want anything,’ said Effi. ‘Except to mind her own business.’ She saw a tiny shiver go through Ma Headscarf – was she afraid of Hanno? Then the dame stuck her nose in the air as if Effi and Hanno smelt bad, but she was the smelly one, they’d washed yesterday – snorted and hunched down to dip her milk pail in the ditch.
‘Let’s go on,’ said Effi. ‘I don’t like her, she’s like the nurse who came in when my mother was really ill. She even looks like her.’
‘What did she do?’ Hanno asked.
She shouldn’t be talking when she was so tired, especially not about this, but she couldn’t stop, somehow.
‘She wanted to keep me apart from my mother – it sounded OK, because of the infection, but if I was going to get TB I’d already have got it. Schmidt, she was called. There are some names you never forget, aren’t there? Usually the kind you’d rather forget. She just hated to see me sitting beside my mother. Her face used to go sour enough to make a jazz band lose the tune. And then I got a cold and started to cough and Schmidt said I’d caught TB. She said it just to punish us. I had to keep telling my mother I really was OK. And then my mother died. She died really peacefully in my arms. At least the nurse was out of the room then. She came in and said: “That’s what happens when I turn my back just for one minute.” And I had to go to hospital and be X-rayed. I didn’t want to go. They dragged me off as if I was under arrest.’
‘What was it like in hospital?’
‘Vile.’ Now she ought to stop. But she went on. ‘The nurse sai
d my mother and I must be part Jewish because of our black hair and black eyes; she said Jews carried TB. And there’d been a kid at my school who really was part Jewish. Claudia. She went to hospital for an operation and they killed her there.’
Would he say it was just criminal kids who were killed? He didn’t say anything. He was frowning again, then he looked away from Effi.
She said, ‘I kept thinking about the hospital doctors giving Claudia something – like a drink – and then she was dead. I was so scared, Hanno, I thought they’d do that to me. I think it was the first time I really knew I could die myself – my mother had died, hadn’t she? It felt like a horrible insect crawling round in my stomach.’
He put his arm round her. He patted her shoulder, rather clumsily, but it helped. They were together, a double act. It was OK. She laughed.
‘I told you I’m going to have a pet lion. I’ll take it around with me like a dog and it’ll scare bad-tempered dames shitless. That’ll show them. Hanno, boy, one day they’ll all come to see me in the movies, maybe even that Nurse Schmidt, and that cow back there with the checked headscarf and her poor little kid, did you see her stockings? I’ll make them all smile, I’ll be the biggest star –’
Judy Garland. Marlene Dietrich. Effi Mann.
Chapter Nine
Ida Rupf noticed the two children cheeking Magda at the drainage ditch. Dear God, she thought, where were their mothers? Children shouldn’t run round like that with no one to keep an eye on them. The girl was a baggage, but the boy was nice-looking. If her little Hans had grown up he might have looked like that boy. Well, she had troubles enough of her own.
Was it only yesterday it had happened? The Russian soldiers, shouting in a German she could hardly understand, but it had been clear what they wanted. How any of them would get over it, God knew – and little Barbara was only twelve! And Lisbeth Czekalla, dear God, who was expecting a baby. The only saving grace was that the other Russian – an officer, she thought – had come and put a stop to it. But they’d helped themselves to half the food – perhaps they’d thought they were being kind when they left a few sacks for her and her family. And they’d taken her horses. She kept trying to see their backs and their two pairs of ears, instead of the Czekallas’ unsound beasts. But wishing wouldn’t bring them back, they were gone, poor Fred and Botho whom she’d reared from foals. Now the Russians would be taking them into battle, and they’d never done anything heavier than draw guests to and from the station in the fly till she’d had to harness them to a wagon to escape.
Last Train from Kummersdorf Page 8