Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  ‘Ask the dog,’ said Effi, ‘maybe Sperling told him. I wish I could make tickets that’d get me on a train. All the way to the west. Here, let’s share one of those fags.’

  He pulled one out and lit it at the fire, then passed it to her. She held it out between her two fingers, imagining it was at the end of a long holder. Then she took a breath of smoke and felt good. When she’d had enough, she passed it back to him.

  ‘We’d have done OK,’ she said, ‘even if we hadn’t got the horseflesh and the potatoes and sausage. Now – well, we won’t eat it all at once. It’s a shame that Ma Headscarf got so angry with us – what was the point? You know what’s wrong with me? In spite of everything I know, I still really want to believe the world’s good.’

  The wood burned apart on the fire and the pot started to slip sideways. Hanno rescued it with a piece of wood he’d set aside to use as a poker and got it sitting nice and steady again.

  ‘Can I have the knife?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve got it, kid. You were getting the meat with it.’

  ‘So I have. I wanted to try something with this.’ He pulled a piece of wood from his pocket.

  ‘It’s half rotten.’

  ‘That’s why.’ It was a big knot of wood with a little bit of splintered straight stuff at either side of it. He got the knife and started to cut the soft brown rotten wood away from the sound white stuff, holding the round edge of the knot against his palm.

  ‘What kind of wood is it?’

  ‘Pine, I think. I just – I like the shape of this.’ His head was bent and intent, and his hands were different, suddenly, very careful and clever. He’d made a good job of bandaging her arm, too. Suddenly she wanted to kiss him again.

  And then it hit her, a real slap in the face. Here she was letting herself get sweet on him, but he didn’t know who she really was, and she’d no idea what he’d say if she told him.

  ‘What are you making?’ she asked. Though that wasn’t what she really wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just a shape, not a thing. I just want to see what’s left in the wood when all this rotten stuff comes out.’

  ‘It’s a nice curve. Like a wave in a picture.’

  ‘Yes, or – I don’t know.’

  ‘Like music. You just hear a line in your head, then you want some more to go with it. That’s what my father used to say.’

  ‘Your father, did he used to be a musician?’

  Oh, God, what could she say now? And what was wrong with her, that she kept giving things away?

  ‘Yeah, he was in a military band. The trumpet. He used to write some of the music himself.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘D’you like brass bands?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re good with your hands.’

  ‘At school they got angry with me because I used to doodle on my exercise books. I got beaten a few times. Wasting paper, didn’t I know there was a war on?’ He frowned. Staring at the wood, pushing the rotten stuff out with his knife, he said: ‘I used to like going scouting at weekends. And the solstice bonfires, and the torchlight processions we used to have, with all the singing and the banners. It made you believe in it all.’

  She was glad she hadn’t kissed him now. She didn’t say anything.

  He said: ‘I didn’t like my sports teacher. He taught us to box. He’d be standing there, shouting. “Come on, come on, I want to see blood.” There used to be this really weedy boy at school. Jürgen Markus, the English teacher’s son. And the sports teacher, Keller, last year he put me opposite Markus and told me to hit him. “Go on,” he said, “he’s easy to knock down.” I looked at Markus, and I couldn’t.’

  ‘Because he was so weedy?’ She didn’t want to hear this stuff, it was like the story about the Jew – was he blaming himself for sometimes feeling sorry for someone?

  ‘It’s not as easy as that. Old Markus was quite big in the Nazi Party, locally, and Jürgen used to hang around in the playground and listen to what the kids were saying about their parents, then he’d tell his father. A lot of people hated them both. He got Hans Nagel’s mother three years in jail for listening to the BBC. That’s one of the things I didn’t like. All the sneaking. You always had to be so careful what you said. Then all of a sudden, just after Easter, Markus wasn’t there, some enemy he’d made in the Party had denounced him and now he was in a concentration camp. So Jürgen was on his own, and that was when Keller gave him to me to hit. Look, he was a filthy little rat. I ought to have been able to hit him. Then suddenly Keller hit me, and he shouted: “Do you want to hit someone now?” I was really angry then, I hit Jürgen and made his nose bleed. Keller asked me what was wrong with me. I didn’t know. Look, I don’t want to talk about this kind of thing.’

  She hadn’t been listening properly anyway. Why should she care about him? He was just some boy she’d run into on the road. It was Papa she cared about, and cared about reaching. She thought she’d tell a story to let him know she was tough. ‘Do you remember when they bombed the zoo in Berlin?’

  ‘I heard about it.’

  ‘Well, next morning I was pretending to queue for cakes in one of those smart cafés on Kurfürstendamm – I was getting ready to take a purse out of a smart dame’s handbag – and one of the tigers pushed his way inside.’ It was a story everyone had been telling in Berlin, she hadn’t actually been in the café but that didn’t matter. ‘Everyone raced for the door into the kitchen, but the tiger just started to eat a cake off the table and then it dropped dead. One of the lady customers said that showed what sort of a cake they served in the joint. Then all hell broke loose, the café owner was screaming that he’d sue her, and she was refusing to give her name and address. It made it easy for me to get the dame’s purse. There were crocodiles and snakes swimming in the canal outside.’

  Hanno said: ‘You know, my brother –’

  ‘Didn’t know you had a brother.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘You started.’

  She ought to want rid of him. To be right away from him, away from Germany too, in America with Papa. Yes, if wishes were horses, beggars would be parading into Moscow.

  She said: ‘Look, I know what. Let’s make ourselves some tickets.’ She fetched the stamps and ticket blanks out of the cashbox. ‘One for me, one for you, one for Cornelius. Where can we go?’

  The stamps had a wheel at the side: when you moved it, you got different stations. ‘Cologne,’ she said, ‘Düsseldorf, Essen. All those places are bombed to bits. How about Göttingen? There’s a famous university there, isn’t there? We could study, you and me.’

  She’d learned to hide what she was feeling, it was good to see she hadn’t lost the knack. She wasn’t going back to liking him, hadn’t he said he believed in the Nazi stuff? Neither was she going to listen to the little voice that said she wasn’t being fair to him. It was all too much, too difficult, and now she noticed how sore her bad arm was again.

  She moved the wheel back. ‘I know, Frankfurt am Main. Where your mother is. And the Amis.’ She stamped three ticket blanks. ‘And it has to leave from somewhere. A place round here. Where are we, anyway? Here’s a stamp for a place called Kummersdorf, how about that? I’m sure we’re near Kummersdorf. Village of sorrows, Kummersdorf’s everywhere nowadays. Now the date. The train goes tomorrow. At twelve. The blanks all say “Valid one month from” – I don’t know what date it is.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ he said. ‘Maybe the twenty-fourth?’

  There was an enormous explosion: the whole wood shook and the dog started howling. God, it was dark!

  ‘Shut up,’ she said to the dog. ‘You must have been in air-raids before now.’

  ‘Ammunition going up,’ said Hanno. ‘Your turn for the fag.’

  She sucked smoke in. ‘Thanks, sweetie. Listen, what date should I put on these tickets?’

  ‘April the fifteenth,’ he said. ‘Leaves us plenty of time. There’s another stamp, l
ook. It says “Express” – that’s what we want.’

  ‘An express train to get us out of this mess, that’d be something.’ She passed a ticket to him. ‘Last express train out of Kummersdorf. Don’t lose your ticket, or what will you show at the barrier? Look, I’m going to make a ticket for the kid, Barbara. I promised her she’d be all right. I won’t give tickets to Ma Headscarf, though. I don’t want her on my train. Oh, why not? The kid’s probably fond of her mum. And the granny’s sweet on you. We don’t have to share a compartment with them. Maybe I’ll let them all ride the train. Louis Armstrong did a song like that. Pierre taught it me. But I won’t have that Hungerland on board. He’s creepy. He can walk. I ain’t joking, I’m a tough guy.’

  Another big explosion, but it felt better when you had something to do. She made three more tickets and handed them to Hanno. He put them into the cart. She fetched out her harmonica and played a high, sharp note like a train’s whistle, then set the harmonica to repeat a set of metallic short phrases. The air was full of engine noise, Effi sent the locomotive hustling along the track, making it whistle again. She stopped, looked at him, raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Brilliant,’ he said. But he was still a scumbag Nazi kid. He said: ‘That’s a man’s jacket, isn’t it?’

  She snatched the fag from his mouth. There wasn’t much of it left now. ‘Smart boy. It used to belong to my Uncle Max. Aunt Annelie cut it down for me.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was a con man. He used to sell audiences with Hitler to people up from the country. He even made special badges for them to wear – eagle, swastika, the lot. At first he just gave his suckers directions and then vanished, then he started getting too interested in the whole thing, telling them fairy tales he’d invented about what’d happen when they got inside. He spent too much time with them, they got to remember his face, so the police caught him. He died in the camp. Poor Uncle Max.’

  It wasn’t a bad story considering she’d just made it up.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘All right,’ said Hanno suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you about my brother. He was my twin, he was half an hour younger than me. We were both supposed to be cheeky, but he was cheekier. My mother used to say I was the quieter one. He liked the Louis Armstrong music too; I can remember how he danced to it. When I was being caned for cheeking the teacher about working down at the wireworks he said in a really loud voice, “We thank Hanno Frisch for giving our teacher this much-needed exercise.” He got the cane too.’

  She said: ‘And he’s in Frankfurt. With your mother and your sister.’

  ‘You know he’s not.’ He sat quite still, staring at the ground. ‘They got him in the chest; at least he died straightaway. I put him down behind a wall, but I didn’t bury him. I stayed with him a bit, then I ran away. I don’t even know where it was that he died. I wish I’d buried him.’

  ‘You’ve confessed,’ said Effi quickly. It was no use asking him what he’d have buried the kid with, he’d never listen. ‘Just say six Aves and four Glorias.’

  He put his hand on his own chest. You could see he was afraid of crying. ‘We weren’t religious, my father left the church. Are you a Catholic?’

  ‘My father wasn’t, but my mother was, so I had to be. Aunt Annelie wasn’t. I went back to confession a year ago, just for fun.’ That was all true, at least.

  ‘What did you confess?’

  ‘Oh, the usual rubbish, but the priest wanted to know if I’d had any thoughts. I said I was always thinking. No, he said, not ordinary thoughts. Sinful thoughts about boys. Dirty old man. I said I wanted to be a nun and I never went back. This fag’s finished. We ought to save our fag-ends, we can make roll-ups with the tobacco if we can find some paper.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him about the stealing?’

  ‘That wasn’t a sin, it was my job.’

  ‘What happened to the Frenchman? Pierre?’ Hanno asked.

  ‘The police hanged him.’

  A muscle tightened in his cheek and he turned his face away. ‘Do you think the food’s ready?’

  The meat was tough, but that was good because they mustn’t eat too much of it. It took longer to eat when it was tough. They drank all the gravy. The potatoes were white and soft inside their charred jackets.

  Cornelius laid his head on Effi’s foot now, eyes rolling up like a saint gazing at God.

  ‘You’ve had,’ Effi told him, putting the pot with the rest of the meat back in her bag. ‘I’m a tough guy, it’s no use coming begging to me.’

  Hanno threw dirt on the dying fire. Then suddenly there were tears running down his face, he was sobbing and shaking all over as if it was really hard for him to cry. The dog went to him and nudged him with his wet nose. There was no need for her to try and comfort him, then. He had Cornelius. But he didn’t take any notice of the dog. She couldn’t let him just sit there on the ground and cry like that, it was awful. She went over to him and put her arm on his shoulder. He clutched her and cried. That was bad, she wanted to cry too – but no, she thought. I won’t cry till I find Papa. Then the boy had his arms round her, they were close together and he wasn’t crying so hard. Her bag was getting wedged between them and hurting, but she pushed it to one side. They were holding each other tight, they were kissing each other, mouth to mouth. His body was close to hers, his hand was against her back, this is so nice, she thought, you could forget about everything else.

  And then suddenly she remembered everything. She felt sick and angry, ragingly angry with herself, with him. He was a policeman’s kid and the police had killed Pierre. And he was stuffed full of Nazi lies. The Nazis said the Jews wanted to destroy Germany. They said all the enemies were Jews, the Russians were Bolshevik Jews, the English and the Americans were Jewish fat-cat businessmen. Every bomb that fell out of the sky was supposed to be Jewish. What would he say if he knew she’d helped hide Jews from the police and get them out of Germany? He’d say she’d helped kill his twin brother. She shoved him off her, rolled away from him and stood up. He sat there with his mouth open. She hated his stupid face.

  She said: ‘Let me tell you, Hitler Youth. You’re nothing compared to Pierre. Listen, one night we did an apartment, it was the only thing standing in a whole block, and there were fires everywhere, it was as hot as hell. The people had a Steinway grand in their best room, all black and shiny, and there was a white vase on it with violets, but they’d wilted in the heat and they were plastered flat to the side. And Pierre said: “Look, forget about work for a moment. I’m going to play that piano.” So he played “When the Saints Go Marching In”. I sang, and he played, and all the time I could smell the violets, even though they were really dead, and I was sweating in torrents, but I could sing all right because they’d got their windows so well taped up they hadn’t broken and there wasn’t any smoke in the place. I’ll swear Pierre played better than he’d ever done in his life. And I knew I wanted to be a singer more than anything, more than I wanted to live, maybe, even though that doesn’t make sense. Then the piano started to go out of tune. It sounded all right at first, just as if he’d changed key, but it got worse and worse, and in the end he stood up. He said: “You’re a professional, kid, you’ve got what it takes. Now let’s get out, this is the hottest club either of us will ever play.” That was Pierre, he was really something.’

  She thought, I want to go back to Berlin, I have to go back and find him, it was all a mistake, they didn’t string him up after all and he’s waiting for me there, looking round, shouting, ‘Effi, how can I go back to Annelie without you?’

  The boy started to say something, but she didn’t want to hear it. She ran away, on and on into the woods, tripping over tree roots and brambles. Once she fell and grazed her hands. She got up and went on running, she didn’t know where she was running to, she didn’t care, the wildness was howling inside her and all the while she knew Pierre and Aunt Annelie were both really dead and she kept on running.

  *

 
Hanno stood up. Mechanically, he started to pack everything into the cart. He thought, what did I do wrong? The dog whined.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said. He stared at the ashes under their cover of sandy soil. He’d have to go to Frankfurt, wouldn’t he? Mother was waiting for him in Frankfurt. And Effi didn’t want him any longer. She’d said he was nothing.

  He sat down again and clutched his arms round him. Now he was crying again; it was horrible to cry, it felt as if the sobs were breaking him apart. There was a cold touch on his forehead. It was the dog again, nosing him. He stopped crying. Now the dog got up, tugging at the string. The dog knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to go after Effi. Maybe only because she had the meat. Hanno felt empty and hopeless. Then he felt it in his gut that he must go after Effi, it was like the shape that was left after he’d scooped the rotten stuff out of the pine-knot, the thing that had to be. He picked the pine-knot off the ground and shoved it in the cart, somehow he didn’t want to leave it behind. He stood up and wondered which way to go. The dog knew.

  He ran forwards with his nose on the ground.

  *

  Effi stopped still when she heard the voices ahead of her. The wildness all drained out of her and she listened. They were women’s voices, but that didn’t mean they weren’t Russians – there were supposed to be women with the Russian army, people said they were terrible, brutal women because they carried guns. No, these women were talking German. It was the old dame talking to Ma Headscarf. She mustn’t let them see her in a state. I’m all right, she told herself, I’m going to get out of here on a luxury train. And she wouldn’t let herself miss the boy. Good riddance.

  You’ll be OK, she told herself. Don’t think. Sing.

  I’ve nothing to eat

  not a crust, not a bone.