Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  ‘He’s buried now,’ she said. ‘Poor little arsehole, with his jokes, why did it have to be him? Is his cart still alive?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hanno. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘And we’ve got to take the dog. It’s a sacred trust. Though I don’t know why we’ve been burdened with an extra mouth in these times.’ She said this in an old woman’s voice, disapproving, sad. ‘Come on, mutt.’

  Hanno stood by Sperling. He didn’t want to leave him. He’d already left Wolfgang.

  ‘Hanno,’ said Effi, ‘can’t you help me catch this dog?’

  Hanno looked up to see Cornelius duck away from Effi with all the hair on his spine standing up.

  ‘He doesn’t want to go with us,’ said Hanno.

  ‘OK,’ said Effi, ‘if you’re so ungrateful, mutt. We’ll just take the cart.’

  But when she got near the cart Cornelius sprang forward, jumped on top of it, and growled at her.

  ‘We’ll have to bribe him,’ said Effi, and fetched the sardine tin out of her bag. ‘Let’s hope there are some goodies in the cart to make up.’

  ‘You’re giving the sardines to the dog?’

  ‘Not all of them.’ Effi put the key into the tab of the tin and turned it back, singing, ‘Dinner time, Swing Boy, dinner time, dog.’

  As soon as the dog caught the sardine smell he was there.

  ‘We’ll have some first,’ said Effi, ‘show him who’s boss. Two each for us, the mutt can have the last one and lick the tin out.’

  Hanno saw the sardines under the curling lid, saw dark rich flesh looking out from under the fragile silver skins. Somewhere there were heavy engines in the further sky. He saw big planes, bombers, saw smoke go up where they were dropping explosives – maybe on civilians, maybe on the army. There he was standing on the open road, in danger. But he had sardines to eat. They tasted good. And Sperling had said: ‘Like a brother.’ And his own brother was dead. These were all things that he couldn’t fit together in his mind.

  He watched Effi put the tin down in front of the waiting, panting dog. Cornelius slobbered his tongue into the opening, getting the single sardine she’d left him and every last drop of oil: he didn’t notice when she got hold of his string lead.

  She tugged at him as soon as he’d finished. He put his hind legs forward and skidded along the road. You could hear his nails on the rough surface. Effi swore, using words Hanno had never heard, some of them sounded French, some English, only one was German. It made no difference to the dog. She slapped him. Suddenly he jerked forward and jumped onto the cart again. He sat there. He wasn’t growling now.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Effi. ‘Some dogs pull carts, we’ve got to push a dog. Little Sperling was a joker all right.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Effi said: ‘I feel as if he was still there.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Hanno.

  ‘Sperling. How can he have left so quickly? We’d only just met him. Hey, maybe his ghost is sitting on the cart, cracking jokes we can’t hear. I’d better not die, Hanno, it must be awful, out on the street, playing to people who don’t even know you’re there.’ He didn’t answer. ‘Do you know I’m here, kid?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, forget it.’ She thought, It’s not just Sperling that’s bugging him.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this dog weighs a ton, do we really have to drag him? Is the cart worth it?’

  ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘I haven’t had the chance to look inside.’

  At the next turn of the road, they found the family from the night before, only now the Czekallas were dead and the old woman was standing in the lopsided wagon with little Barbara, unloading it. The man Hungerland was cutting meat out of one of the horses, only every now and again he’d whip round and stare at whatever ghost was stalking him. Ma Headscarf was crying as she packed meat away in sacking. And now the dog was off the cart, he snatched a big piece of meat out of Ma Headscarf’s hand and ran to the other side of the ditch to gobble it up. Ma Headscarf, holding the rest of the meat high up in the air, screamed at Effi: ‘Where did you get that cur?’

  Effi asked Hanno, ‘Is this another of Sperling’s jokes? Not in good taste, is it?’

  ‘You’re shameless, both of you,’ said Ma Headscarf. ‘People are dead here – you don’t care about that, do you?’ She bent down to pick another piece of meat off the ground.

  Effi got her knife out. Poor Ma Headscarf, she thought. It’s tough losing your friends, and the Czekalla woman didn’t seem to have been such a stinker as her husband. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘why grudge the poor dog a treat? There’s plenty for all of us.’

  Hungerland said to Ma Headscarf: ‘There’s another piece of meat here, if you’re ready for it.’ He stared at Effi for a moment. I don’t like you, she thought. I don’t like the way you look at me.

  ‘If anyone has a right to those horses it’s our family,’ said Ma Headscarf, wrapping the next piece of meat up in the sacking and keeping an eye out for the dog. ‘Poor Lisbeth and I were at school together, she’d have wanted me to have them.’

  ‘Auntie,’ said Hanno, cheeking her, ‘are you going to carry two whole horses all the way to the Mulde?’ So he’d snapped out of his brooding. ‘I’ll get the meat,’ he said to Effi.

  Only Ma Headscarf wasn’t charmed with him the way her mother was. ‘Oh, go ahead!’ she shouted, in tears again. ‘Help yourself to all our food while you’re about it, why don’t you?’

  Effi gave him the knife. We’ve got to eat, she thought.

  ‘It’s an outrage,’ said Ma Headscarf, but she went back to packing the meat away. The old woman called to Effi. ‘Come here,’ she said, ‘Berlin baggage.’ She pointed. There were potatoes on the road that she’d shaken out of the sacks to make them light enough to carry. ‘You can have those,’ she said. ‘Share them with the boy, though.’

  Effi said: ‘We share everything.’

  ‘Do you now?’

  Effi grinned at the Rupf. ‘Not that, no.’

  The old dame grinned back. She said: ‘If you find anything else lying about, you can have it. There’s more than we can carry on this cart. Only do it quietly, so that my daughter doesn’t see you.’

  Effi picked up potatoes. She found half a sausage that had rolled away from the cart. She stuffed it inside the waistband of her skirt. Then she saw a heel of black bread and a linen bag of dried apple. With the potatoes, that was enough to be going on with.

  ‘What have you got there?’ bellowed Ma Headscarf.

  The old woman said: ‘Magda. It’s only some potatoes that we can’t carry.’

  ‘They’re thieves,’ said Ma Headscarf. ‘They must have stolen that cart.’

  ‘The cart was willed to us,’ said Effi. ‘By a dying man. So was the dog.’

  Hanno started to laugh. Effi saw that the dog was beside him, sitting up to beg. Of course, Sperling had taught him tricks. Hanno gave him a scrap of meat and he gulped it down, then got up on his haunches again. He was a sight, with his front paws dangling in the air.

  Ma Headscarf stared at them, poison in her eyes. The old dame grinned again, she was cool, and little Barbara didn’t react at all. Hungerland jumped and then shot one of those furtive looks over his shoulder. As if his ghosts might be laughing at him. Then he looked relieved, as if he’d seen them and discovered that they weren’t after all.

  ‘I’ve got as big a piece as we can carry,’ said Hanno when he’d stopped laughing. ‘I need something to wrap this in.’

  ‘You’ll get no sacking from us,’ said Ma Headscarf quickly.

  ‘Here you are,’ called the old woman. She threw a thin bundle of folded paper at Effi, who caught it. It was Czekalla’s family tree. He’d traced his ancestors back two centuries, all Aryan of course. Pure German. The name sounded Polish, but that didn’t matter in the crazy Nazi world. After all, there was even a story that Hitler was half-Jewish. None of it made sense when you really got down to it, except that National Soci
alism had all been about killing people. They’d done a good job there. Anyway, the Czekalla pedigree was nice stout paper; it’d wrap the meat up nicely.

  They put the meat in Effi’s bag because Cornelius could have got at it if it had been in the handcart. As for him, now that he had a full belly, he let Effi take his string and lead him away from the dead horses.

  As they went off, Ma Headscarf and her mother started arguing and shouting at each other. Ma Headscarf was angry with the old dame for giving food away. You could hear her shouting about ‘thieving vagabonds’. Then Effi and Hanno turned off the road and into the forest and the voices died away.

  *

  The track went uphill and down again. After something like half an hour’s walking there was an explosion ahead of them. The shock of the blast made them stagger. Then the trees came to an end in a swampy field full of bulrushes, and on the other side of it the battle was going on in another wood. When the next blast came it spat leaves, dirt and a few splinters in their faces, grazing Effi’s forehead. They threw themselves down, even the dog knew what to do.

  ‘We’ll have to go back,’ said Hanno into her ear because of the noise. ‘Sooner or later they’ll stop fighting there and we can cross.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s find a nice thicket and look through this cart. I want to see what Sperling left us. Hey, we could even light a fire and cook meat and potatoes. If an Ivan flyer sees smoke he’ll only think one of his mates has dropped a bomb in the woods. I’m so hungry, my God, I’m surprised I didn’t grab a chunk of meat back there, the way the dog did.’

  He said: ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a tree if it was stewed long enough.’

  ‘I’m so hungry I can feel my stomach sticking to my spine.’

  ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. And I’m going to eat a horse.’ He grinned, but not quite as if he was happy.

  ‘Ma Headscarf wanted a whole horse. Poor woman.’

  ‘How come you’re sorry for her? She doesn’t like you.’

  ‘She’s in a nasty situation, and maybe her husband’s dead. How’s she going to hear about it, if he is? Nobody will know her address. Do you think the Allies will set up an information centre for Germans when the war’s over?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel bad about eating the horses. They just had to do what they were told till the Ivans killed them.’

  ‘That’s what it’s like to be a domestic animal, kid. Oh, I feel sorry for the horses, too. But they’re in horse heaven, they don’t need their bodies any more, and we’re hungry.’

  They left the track. It was hard to push the cart, though the undercarriage had been part of one smart perambulator once upon a time and it was well sprung. But sprawls of bramble lassoed its wheels and every now and again it’d drop through a drift of dead leaves into a sudden dip in the ground and stick there. The trees were young pines growing close together, and they didn’t always want to let the cart pass between them. In the end they found a small clearing surrounded by horse-chestnut saplings and scrub. The spot felt as safe as you could ever feel these days.

  ‘I’ll get some wood,’ said Hanno. He still had to talk loudly to be heard, even back here.

  Effi tied the dog to a tree trunk. Then she started to clear the sandy soil, brushing leaves and sticks into a heap for kindling, making a circular wall of earth for a fire-place, with gaps every now and again to let the air through. Hanno had gone out of sight and she listened out for his foot crunching on sticks. She couldn’t hear him though, just the fighting. She thought, supposing something bad happens to him?

  And she was remembering all the bad stuff, Sperling dying, Pierre dying, Aunt Annelie’s body, Mama, even old Schulz inside the flames of his posh Merc. That was the second Merc he’d lost when he’d been travelling with Effi.

  She shouldn’t have thought that, now her mind was running unstoppably to the worst memories, she was right back there in Mama’s bedroom in Wannsee, Mama was coughing and making Effi learn Aunt Annelie’s address off by heart because she was going to die. She said: ‘Tell Schulz you want to go to Annelie. No one else. Schulz will take you there.’ It was the last thing she said before she stopped breathing. Effi knew Aunt Annelie, they’d met up with her a few times, always in cafés in the middle of Berlin, because Aunt Annelie didn’t trust Anna the maid. It was always a bit stiff because Mama was a Wannsee lady and Aunt Annelie was working-class to the bone. They respected each other, though, and Mama trusted Aunt Annelie.

  Schulz was away when Mama fell so very ill; he was in Vienna, he didn’t even know what was happening. Effi had asked Anna to telegraph to him after Mama died, and Anna just said: ‘That’s not for you to decide.’ She must have sent the telegram, though, because after Effi had been three days in that foul hospital one of the nurses came in and told her she was leaving. ‘A gentleman called Herr Schulz has come for you,’ she said, putting Effi’s clothes down on the bed. Gooing, the way Anna used to. Schulz was waiting outside the ward. He’d been crying. He told Effi her lungs were OK. Then they got into his Merc and the driver took them to his plushy house and Schulz sat her down in the salon and said he was going to adopt her.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to go to my aunt.’

  ‘Your aunt,’ said Schulz. ‘You’re too young to understand why that’s a bad idea.’

  ‘Mama said I had to go to her.’

  ‘You’re a well-off child,’ said Schulz – as if that would make her want to stay with him. He explained to her that now she owned the villa and had a lot of investments, he was her trustee, he said, he’d make sure she was comfortable.

  What did Effi care about a lot of investments? And she didn’t want the villa, she felt as if it had killed Mama and Grandmama. She wanted to go to Aunt Annelie and she kept telling Schulz so, till he gave in. He took her back to Wannsee and Anna had to pack up the things she wanted to take with her. Only she looked under the mattress for Papa’s photograph and it had gone. She turned round and saw Anna in the doorway. Watching her. She knew Anna had got rid of the photograph. Luckily Aunt Annelie had one, too, or Effi might have forgotten what Papa looked like.

  The car was driving up Schönhauser Allee when the air-raid siren started. Effi, Schulz and the chauffeur had to get out of the car and hide in the public shelter. It was the first big raid on Berlin, but they didn’t know how bad it was going to be.

  The roof kept shaking with the blast and the light bulbs went dancing around all over the place. Everyone was so scared; later on they were still scared but they found ways of coping with it, they’d breathe in special ways, they’d knit. This time was the worst. Schulz sat there in his sharp suit, drumming with his thumbs on his sleek trouser legs, you could see how uncomfortable he felt with all the workers around him in their shabby clothes. When the all-clear sounded and they came up into the open, half the street had been wrecked. There was smoke billowing everywhere and the sky was red with fire.

  ‘It’s not safe to go on,’ said Schulz.

  Effi said: ‘It’s further to go back.’

  The chauffeur said: ‘Didn’t there used to be a Jewish cemetery up here?’

  Schulz looked at him as if he was mad. ‘Where’s the car?’ he said.

  A block of masonry had fallen on the bonnet, at least that time Schulz was still alive to create about it. ‘My God, child, have you any idea how much that model costs? I knew we shouldn’t have come.’

  Effi only said: ‘We’ll have to walk.’

  She did mind that Schulz was dead. OK, he’d wanted to get Mama away from Papa. He’d probably written dozens of letters to artists telling them they’d have to ditch their Jewish wives or husbands if they wanted to keep working. But he’d never been a complete swine like Otto – please God she’d never meet Otto again. Schulz had got her to Aunt Annelie even though he didn’t want to. He used to come to see her in Prenzlauer Berg now and again and she wasn’t sorry to see him. He’d got her out of Berlin in the end.

  ‘It’s all crazy,’ she
said to the dog. ‘None of it makes sense.’ He whined, sniffing after the meat in her bag. ‘Sit down,’ she said to him. She was glad he was there, though, and now he did as he was told. She hadn’t expected that. His eyes, with their pale lashes, were watering with his desire for meat. ‘You’ve eaten,’ she said to him. ‘We haven’t.’ He looked ashamed of himself, lay down and poked his nose towards his big hairy paws. It was all done for effect, of course. All she had to do was to speak kindly to him and he’d be up and capering again. One of his feet was twitching, and his wet spongy brown nose was moving. If he could talk he’d have been asking her if she’d heard this one? Just like poor little Sperling.

  Hanno was back, and he had a good armful of wood. They built the fire together. The kindling burned pale and fast, then, as they loaded it down with thicker sticks and chunks of wormy tree-branch, it settled down to a darker, fiercer heat. They got two potatoes out and set them in the embers. They’d be black and sooty by the time they were ready. They put all the horse-flesh in the pot to roast because they both knew it’d keep better once it had been cooked. The brown smell of meat crept out between the pot and the lid.

  ‘Someone could smell that,’ said Hanno.

  She said: ‘You’ve got to take a risk sometimes.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What’s in the cart?’

  She showed him the dried apple and the sausage, then set it aside where the dog couldn’t get it. He reached into the cart and fetched out a bundle of clean underpants, a shirt and a pair of trousers, all rolled up tight. There was a rolled blanket and a small cushion decorated with a cross-stitch heart and the words ‘From Liesl’. There was a half-loaf of bread, one of the blue-stripe sausages that was so full of cereal it was really bread, a pot of rhubarb jam and a bottle of white beer.

  ‘More fags,’ said Hanno. ‘Two packets. And matches again. What’s this?’ It was a cash box. He opened it up. ‘No money in here. Ticket blanks. For the railway, of course, that’s where he worked, isn’t it? And a lot of big rubber stamps with dates and places. I wonder why he brought those with him.’