Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  It had been Magda who’d wanted to come. Ida had always wanted to stay put at home; it could hardly have been any worse if they’d done that.

  She set her teeth. There was no point in regretting what she’d done, she’d had enough of that in her life already. As for Barbara, it’d be up to Ida to stop Magda getting at her with some religious nonsense. Telling her that how she couldn’t get married in a white dress, or even worse, that no respectable man would ever marry her. Magda was quite capable of that, and why, Ida couldn’t understand, because surely she loved her daughter? People shouldn’t have strong beliefs, Ida thought, faith made you merciless.

  It was different with grandmothers, children told them things they wouldn’t tell their own parents. Only just now Barbara wasn’t telling anything to anyone. She hadn’t said a word since it happened.

  I want to be at home, Ida thought, with everything going right. She’d go home one day, though. She had the title deeds to her house in her pocket. Even if now she had to ride in a wagon with Lisbeth Czekalla and her vile husband and be grateful to them because if Lisbeth hadn’t been Magda’s best friend she’d never have taken them up in her wagon and they’d all have had to walk. The Czekallas’ horses didn’t look as if they’d last much longer anyway, that was why the Russians hadn’t taken them, and the cow was in the same state. She’d have felt sorry for Czekalla, coming back from Russia so badly injured, if he’d ever been a likeable man. She did feel sorry for Lisbeth, having all the work to do and Czekalla to live with on top of that. At least he didn’t hit Lisbeth any more, she was stronger than him since his wound, even with the baby coming.

  *

  Effi was struggling, and Hanno was worried about her. It was only a little wound, but pain dragged you down, he knew that. She was so pale her dark eyes and black hair looked like ink on white paper. And she was hungry. They were both hungry. They’d eaten Ginger’s bread, it hadn’t gone far, neither had the chocolate. There were still the sardines, but you had to keep something in reserve. It would soon be dark. The trek was thinning out, nobody wanted to stay on the road at night, even though they’d been safe on it so far. The fighting hadn’t come to this part of the forest, so they’d try to find shelter there.

  The wagon ahead of them had a couple of knobbly sacks at the rear. It was turning, following a small line of others into the forest.

  ‘Potatoes,’ he said, and Effi nodded. ‘Shall we go after it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was good to be walking on a forest track again. There were birches and pines growing on either side of it and the air was better.

  ‘Cigarettes for potatoes?’ he asked. She nodded again. He could see she was all in. He said: ‘I’ll do the trading.’

  There was a place where a lot of wagons had come to a halt, a clearing far enough away from the road to feel safe. People were unharnessing their horses and tying them to birch trees for the night. The horses were lucky, they could eat grass, and they got going at once. As they moved the halter-ropes slid up and down the white peeling bark, nudging it off the pink fleshy lower layers.

  There was a man leaning on a tree, drinking from a schnapps bottle and complaining to his flimsy pregnant wife while she milked their cow. ‘Why on earth did we have to take that Rupf woman up with us?’ he said. ‘Just because Magda Lehmann’s your friend. We should have left the old woman behind, you don’t like her either, but you had to start off, Oh, Fritz, she’s Magda’s mother. And those sacks of food that she won’t be sharing with us, oh no, not Ida Rupf.’

  The wife carried on milking as if she was too tired to do anything else. Hanno spoke to the husband, who gave him a long stare.

  ‘Why aren’t you in the Home Guard?’

  ‘Why aren’t you?’

  ‘I got half my lung shot away in Russia.’

  Effi was shaking her head slowly from side to side. I’ve got to leave it, Hanno told himself. Keep cool.

  ‘I’ve got cigarettes to sell,’ he said.

  An old woman turned round from beside the nearest wagon and came hurrying up to him. She had a pair of expensive-looking silver foxes’ heads round her neck and her grey hair was tied up in a silk headscarf. Her coat was dirty, but good.

  ‘You’ve got cigarettes?’

  She smiled at Hanno and a gold tooth winked as she bared it. ‘What will you take for them?’

  ‘I’ll buy a fag,’ said the man quickly, shoving his bottle in his pocket. ‘As long as they’re real tobacco.’

  ‘Army issue,’ said Hanno, and the man laughed sharply.

  ‘You can have a potato for a cigarette,’ said the old woman, ‘and an apple. Will it do?’

  Hanno shook his head. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’

  ‘All he’ll give you is a drink of milk,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Milk’s fresh,’ said Hanno. ‘Warm.’

  The old woman said, ‘Their cow’s diseased. And he won’t save the cigarette, I know you, Czekalla, for all you’ve only one lung to smoke it with.’

  ‘I take you with me out of the kindness of my heart,’ said the man. ‘Now all you do is hurl abuse at me.’

  The old woman laughed rudely at him. ‘You took me because your wife told you to. You have to do as you’re told now, Czekalla, and serve you right.’

  Hanno said: ‘Why should I care what you do with the cigarettes? We want two potatoes and an apple.’

  ‘Four potatoes, two apples,’ she said quickly, ‘for two cigarettes.’

  Hanno looked at Effi. They knew it was a good bargain, and they’d get the milk as well.

  ‘Magda!’ shouted the old woman. ‘I’ve bought some cigarettes.’

  The woman who came was the woman who’d scrapped with Effi at the drainage ditch. She came slowly, pulling her feet as if they didn’t want to obey her mother. She had the child with the bloody stockings with her. Hanno tried not to look at the child, maybe nobody looked at her any more, she’d be invisible till she changed her stockings, but probably she didn’t have any more stockings with her.

  The old woman went back to the wagon, came back with four potatoes and two apples and handed them over to Hanno. There was something about her – the jaunty tilt of her head when the deal was done – that Hanno couldn’t help liking. She stuffed the cigarettes away in her own pocket and he wondered how many times they’d change hands before anybody smoked them. The man Czekalla didn’t smoke his cigarette either, maybe only because of what the old woman had said.

  The daughter, Frau Magda, darted a poisoned look at Effi.

  The milk was thin, but comforting. They drank it at once. There’d be fruit and raw potato afterwards.

  ‘Ida Rupf,’ said the old woman to Hanno. ‘From the Giants’ Mountains in Silesia.’

  Hanno said: ‘I went there on holiday once.’

  ‘Really? Where did you go?’

  ‘A place near the Snowcap.’

  ‘I live near there,’ she said proudly. ‘I own a hotel.’

  ‘You owned it,’ said Czekalla. ‘The Ivans have it now.’

  ‘I have the title deeds. I’ll go back. I’ve got a chestful of silver buried in the garden. I’d be there still if you and the other men had fought the Ivans properly. How is it, just tell me, that our men could go to Paris in a week, but they never took Moscow?’

  The headscarfed Magda was running a rosary through her fingers, but now she stopped. ‘Just remember,’ she said, ‘before you say any more, Mother, that my husband’s out there and he’s doing everything he can to stop them.’ There was an angry sob in her voice

  Her mother opened her mouth to say something, but Czekalla interrupted her.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s another world out there; the Ivan’s not made like us, he’s a monster, he can stand anything.’ He got his schnapps bottle out again. ‘Why didn’t you send us better clothes for the winter, tell me that? If you’d collected more wool, maybe less good men would have frozen to death. They’d have bee
n here to keep the Bolsheviks off you.’

  But we did collect, thought Hanno. Wolfgang and Emil and I used to go out day after day, doing the clothes collections for the troops. Much good it did. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the raped girl had sat down on the ground and was pulling the petals off a dandelion, he loves me, he loves me not.

  Czekalla’s wife grabbed his arm and jerked her head towards the child, who took no notice. Too loudly, she said, ‘You brought me chocolates from Paris, and the silk stockings, it was good when you came back from France.’ She put her hand on her stomach, as if the baby was crying inside there and she wanted to soothe it.

  Frau Rupf wanted to laugh the whole thing off, but she wasn’t a tactful woman. ‘You pleased your wife once, then, Czekalla.’

  ‘Sneering at me,’ said Czekalla angrily, ‘you filthy old hag. We burned their villages down and drove them into the minefields, thousands of them we shot and strung up – you’ve no idea how many there were – he’s treacherous, the Russian, drinks it in with his mother’s milk, the women and kids are worst of all. I’ve had to execute girls and boys no older than this pair here.’

  Hanno remembered Otto, and he shivered.

  ‘Who told you to behave like that?’ said Frau Rupf. ‘You might have guessed they’d come here and take their revenge.’

  ‘You always know better than anyone else, don’t you? Who d’you think told me what to do? The officers, and who gave them their orders? Our great military leader Hitler, who turned out not to know his arse from his elbow, led us into a war we couldn’t win – now he’ll put a bullet in his head, it’s all the same to him what happens to the ordinary folk.’

  Frau Rupf said: ‘And he had a bee in his bonnet about the Jews.’ Then she looked as if she wished she hadn’t said it.

  Frau Magda clutched her rosary. ‘The Jews killed Jesus.’

  ‘That’s why you didn’t care about the Steinbergs at your church,’ said Frau Rupf – and still she looked as if she wished she could keep quiet, but she kept on, ‘they’d been converted, they loved Jesus, but that didn’t stop the police rounding them up.’

  ‘Why bother about the Jews?’ said Czekalla. ‘We’ve got enough on our plates.’

  ‘You said they lived like pigs out there in Russia,’ said Frau Rupf. ‘You came home and told everyone what a good idea it was to kill them. But the Steinbergs used to have a nice clean house and Herr Steinberg was the best doctor, he was so kind to everyone, especially to – to the children.’

  The horses’ big teeth tore at their evening meal of grass. You could see flashes in the sky and hear explosions, but in between the explosions you could hear the birds singing here. Hanno wanted them to shut up and stop arguing.

  Effi sat down by the little girl. ‘Poor kid,’ she said. ‘I bet you’re tired, aren’t you? Fed up with them shouting at each other?’

  The girl was at her second dandelion, tearing the petals out and throwing them away. When Effi spoke to her she looked up at her for a moment. Her eyes were blank and dazed.

  ‘Come on,’ said Effi, ‘let’s make a chain.’ She picked a yellow flower and split its stem with her fingernail, then threaded another through the green stem.

  Frau Magda burst out crying, putting her hands over her face so that the tears dripped through her fingers. She pulled her headscarf off her dirty head and wiped her face with it. ‘Can’t you let anyone have a moment’s peace?’ she asked her mother.

  Frau Czekalla put her hand to her face and said: ‘You hear terrible rumours about the concentration camps in Poland. They say they were gassing millions of Jews –’

  Everyone fell completely silent. It was a bad silence, it felt as if it’d go on for ever, then Frau Rupf said loudly: ‘There’s no point in thinking about rumours, we hear too many rumours, we need to keep our spirits up, after all. I wish I could listen to the BBC, then we might find out what’s really going on.’

  Hanno noticed that another man had come up to join their group. He was standing quite still, listening. He had silvery-white hair and was wearing a smart suit underneath an open overcoat with a fur collar, a Homburg hat and walking boots that looked odd underneath his grey trousers. He’d put a small suitcase down on the ground beside him. He had wolf eyes, triangular, savage, somehow. And he was quivering slightly. He was a frightened wolf in smart civilized clothing. But not a fighting man, like Otto. He was a professional man, maybe, something like a doctor or a lawyer. He was watching Effi as she made the dandelion chain for the little girl.

  ‘I have coffee,’ he said. His voice trembled ever so slightly and then he started. He leapt round to his left. Hanno’s heart bumped and he looked to see what had scared the man so much, but there wasn’t anything. The man turned back, took a deep breath and pulled the edges of his coat round him. ‘My name is Hungerland,’ he said. ‘I would exchange coffee beans for food if you were prepared to accommodate me.’

  Effi had finished the dandelion chain, and she put it on Barbara’s head. Effi and the child looked at each other for a few moments, then Effi laughed and the girl gave her a shaky smile. Effi took the harmonica out and played it quietly, something quick and cheeky. ‘It’s OK,’ she said to the girl, ‘just forget the bad stuff and think about the future. The kids didn’t start it, nothing we could have done, nobody ever asked us. But one day you’re going to get on a train to Paris. There’ll be peace then. You’ll stay in a smart hotel and wear nice clothes and drink coffee on the Champs-Elysées.’

  ‘I was meant to be a big landlord out in Russia,’ muttered Czekalla. ‘That was what they promised me, but things never go the way they should.’

  *

  ‘That Czekalla,’ said Hanno to Effi. They’d found a sheltered spot among a stand of pine trees and were sitting down eating slices of raw potato, after that they’d share an apple.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He reminded me – when he was talking about what he’d done in Russia –’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to sleep well tonight, and I won’t if I have to think about Otto.’

  ‘OK.’ But he still wanted to bad-mouth Czekalla. ‘When he asked me: why aren’t you in the Home Guard? I’ve had a skinful of people like that going on at me. You know, one day I’d been fire-watching on the roof all night and as soon as we got to school they marched us down to the railway station to move these huge spools of wire from the works in our town, a bomb had wrecked the freight tracks at the factory and we had to roll them half a kilometre and then get them up a ramp to the trucks. It was three hours of punishing work, and then we had to go back to school. The teacher started on at us, why hadn’t we learned our Latin verbs? Emil stood up and he said: “Excuse me, sir, we’ve been too busy labouring and fire-watching.” So he says: “Listen, Honecker, just because you’ve been trying out a man’s job doesn’t mean you can fool a real man.” So I stood up and I said, if he was a real man, why hadn’t he been down at the wireworks with us? I got the cane.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s what you get for being a good boy. You should have said you wouldn’t go to the wireworks.’

  He grinned. ‘It was better than Latin verbs.’

  She was looking better now she’d had something to eat, and could rest.

  ‘Czekalla’s a little swine,’ she said, ‘but it’s the man with the coffee I really don’t like. Hungerland – what sort of name is that?’

  ‘He’s mad. He was looking at things that weren’t there.’

  ‘Yes, but what sent him mad?’

  ‘Maybe he’s had a bad experience.’

  ‘Or given someone else a bad experience. Killed someone who didn’t deserve to be killed, a lot of people maybe.’

  Hanno remembered the story she’d told about hospital.

  ‘That girl was killed just because she was part Jewish?’

  ‘She had one leg shorter than the other, too. But being part Jewish must have made it worse.’

  ‘There was a big row about the killings i
n the hospitals, wasn’t there? Some priest preached against it from the pulpit. I remember thinking how glad I was there was nothing wrong with any of us. At least they stopped it.’

  ‘They said they did.’

  He said, ‘It shook me up to think about it too. But in the end, you just got on with your life. Only – Effi, my father came home for the last time at Christmas, he was really tired all the time and he kept shouting at us, but we went for a walk, once. It’d been snowing, it was really beautiful.’

  It had been the three of them. Father and his two boys, one either side of him. He remembered the pines clumped with snow and the birch-stems looking yellow against the cold whiteness. They’d walked along a forest path. It was very quiet and the sky was grey with more snow to come.

  ‘We hardly talked. We were just together. But he said: “When this war is over, all I want to do is to forget.”’

  ‘Yeah. There’ll be plenty who want that.’

  Hanno pulled his mind away from the memory of Wolfgang on Father’s other side.

  ‘But I want to understand. What do you think he was talking about? Did he do the kind of thing Czekalla did? Killing kids in Russia?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to ask, Swing Boy?’

  ‘I can’t ask, can I? He’s dead. Anyway, he fought in Russia, in the winter. In temperatures of forty below zero. They didn’t have warm clothes and the fuel froze in the tanks’ engines. Men were falling apart from frostbite. That must have been what he meant.’

  But he was shivering, as if the Russian cold was blowing round him.

  She wiped her hands on her skirt. ‘It’s what happened to that poor little Barbara that’s bugging me. The Russians didn’t do anything to Czekalla, did they? They took it out on her, what did she ever do to them? Look, I told you, I want to sleep well tonight. What do you like doing as well as listening to Louis Armstrong?’