Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  It was a good thing they’d milked the goat, because that was the day the cow’s milk dried up. There’d been less and less of it, now there was nothing left in her udder. They left her on the farm. There was plenty of grass and she could recover from the journey. Effi was glad for her.

  *

  As they walked onwards, the skies cleared and the weather grew sunny and warm, it was the kind of weather you wanted for your holidays. There’d be the odd rainstorm, but then the sun came out again at once. The larches were breaking out in feathery new needles. The oak leaves turned green instead of red and grew larger, and the birch-tassels dangled longer and looser, powdering the air with their pollen. The birds sang. But always, in the middle of all this loveliness, there’d be an explosion somewhere and you’d see earth and debris flying up into the sky, or a squadron of bombers would fly overhead.

  Once they met a group of British Tommies who the Russians had let out of their prisoner-of-war camp. They had news, the Amis were at the Elbe, they’d met up with the Russians in Torgau and they weren’t coming any further. There was still fighting in Berlin, and Hitler was probably still alive. The British were heading for Torgau, too, but they were able to use the roads. One of them had a camera and some film that the Ivans had given him – looted of course – and he took a photograph of them all. That was crazy, tourist snaps in the woods when they were still supposed to be at war with the Tommies. But cool, too, in a way.

  You got used to the weight of your bags on your shoulders, and the particular aches they gave you, the hurt in your arms and shoulders became part of you, the bags were like an outgrowth of you. The bags got lighter of course. So did the handcart, that Hanno insisted on pushing all the time, he wouldn’t let Effi take a turn. They ate Ida Rupf’s potatoes raw. They ate the good sausage from Silesia and Sperling’s blue-stripe sausages too, small slice by small slice. The chocolate went quickly, because it’d have melted if they hadn’t eaten it. They opened the tins of salmon and ate them, also the caviar. There were no more treats for Cornelius – he got the odd slice of raw potato but otherwise he had to fend for himself. As soon as they stopped every evening he’d disappear into the forest and come back licking his lips. He came back to Effi. He’d chosen her for his special person; he liked Hanno next best, then old Ida, then Barbara. He put up with Ma Headscarf; he knew she belonged to their party. He got upset if they spread out too far. He’d run round them then, trying to herd them together.

  The odd thing was that he’d stopped barking. He didn’t bark at the other refugees, he didn’t bark at the Tommies. He seemed to know, all of a sudden, how much danger they were in. At night he’d sleep curled up against Effi’s stomach, while she slept back to back with Hanno. Every night Hanno and Effi would kiss each other before they sank into dark, exhausted sleep, every morning they’d have a kiss because each of them was so pleased to see the other one was still there. Cornelius tried to get involved in the kisses, so half the time Effi would end up with Hanno kissing her lips and Cornelius kissing her ear, then he’d switch to Hanno. He made them laugh. That was good. Laughter kept you alive.

  Then one day they came across an old woman gathering wood. She wasn’t a refugee. She said she lived in a village nearby. Yes, the Russians had been there. She shook her head. She said she had a bakery, she was selling bread to the Russians now, and she’d supplied British and French prisoners-of-war on their way to the Elbe – they wanted to cross the river but the Russians weren’t letting anyone across, not even the Franzis and the Tommies. The Germans had destroyed the Elbe bridge at Torgau, but the Russians had put a pontoon bridge across. American high-ups were allowed over it, she said. She said it was a good thing to have the bakery, word had got around and the Russians were leaving her in peace, because they wanted her good bread.

  ‘How far does the forest go?’ asked Hanno.

  The old woman didn’t ask why they wanted to stay in the forest. She said: ‘You need to go a bit south-east from here. Towards Arzberg.’ She put her bundle of wood down and pointed. ‘You don’t want to go to Torgau, it’s full of Ivans. The Tommies and the Franzis go there, the Russians let them sleep in the old army lockup. The Ivans don’t trouble them.’ She gave a shrill, nasty laugh. ‘If you want to cross the Elbe, you need to go away from the Ivans’ headquarters. It’s about a kilometre from the edge of the woods to the river. Mind you, the Ivans patrol the bank. They won’t let you across. They’ll kill you first. I don’t know what the world has come to, that we can’t move freely in our own country and the barbarians come here to kill and torment us. I don’t care. I just bake my bread.’ She laughed again, just as nastily. Her eyes looked like mildewed blackcurrants and her lashes were clogged with flour. There was flour in her hair too, and Cornelius went and sniffed at the bits of dough that were clinging to her arms and the sleeves that were rolled halfway up her arms.

  ‘Keep that dog away from my bakery,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll get the Ivans to shoot it for stealing the bread.’

  She’s almost mad, thought Effi, only she’s got her bakery – that keeps her sane. That’s the way it goes, everyone needs something to hold onto.

  She glanced at Hanno and saw the sun shining on his fair head. She wanted to put her hand there, his hair would be warm with the sun. She didn’t like to, though, not with the old woman’s bleary eyes on her.

  They thanked the old woman and left. On through the woods and the good smells of spring. Almost there, thought Effi. It’s going to be OK. It’s got to be OK. But she didn’t dare say it aloud.

  The forest gave out in the end. They saw a meadow full of dog-daisies and a cobbled road bordered with trees. There was a wrecked Wehrmacht tank on the road, the cobbles must have been well laid because the fighting hadn’t broken them up.

  ‘We can’t go out there,’ said Hanno. ‘It’s far too open and the Ivans could come any time. Not now, anyway.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ida. ‘We’ve got to wait till dusk.’

  So they went back a little way into the woods and sat eating cold potato. The sky darkened and it started to rain. It was a warm rain; Effi put her face into it and washed it clean, rubbing it with her hands.

  ‘You’re better off dirty,’ said Ma Headscarf in her crossest voice.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Effi. ‘But I’ll get myself clean first. It feels so good.’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference to the Ivans,’ said Ida.

  She was brown now, they all were, and the brown was kind to the wrinkles on her face. You could see how pretty she’d been when her Felix had gone walking with her up in the Giants’ Mountains. But her eyes were sunken deep into her face, which was too thin. She was forcing herself on even though she was almost deadbeat. Effi remembered what Otto had said about her dying on the road.

  She thought: I don’t want old Ida to die. She’s cool. I want her to make it.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Granny, get some sleep.’ The old woman liked it when you called her Granny. She grinned, sighed, and did as Effi told her, lay down on the grass and let her eyes fall shut. She snored a bit, but not too loudly, not enough for the Ivans to hear. The rest of them sat and dozed too. The day wore on, sunshine and then another rainshower, and at last it started to grow dark.

  ‘It’s got to be dark enough for us not to be visible, but not too dark for us to see,’ said Hanno in his ‘I’m a boy, so I know’ voice. But he did know, really, so she’d let him off.

  ‘Isn’t it dark enough yet?’ asked Frau Magda after a while. ‘We don’t know how far it is to the Elbe.’

  ‘The baker woman said a kilometre.’

  ‘If we’ve got to the place she was talking about.’

  Hanno said, ‘If we go out too soon we might never find out how far it is. Anyway, the moon’s still quite full. If we get to the river it’ll give a bit of light. Too much, maybe.’

  ‘How long before we start?’ said old Ida.

  ‘Not long,’ said Hanno. ‘Ten minutes maybe?’ So they sat still till he no
dded to himself, and said, ‘Yes.’

  Up they got, and went out through the meadow of sleeping dog-daisies. The trees were dark and straight against the deep-blue sky: it’s a lovely colour, thought Effi, I wouldn’t mind a dress that colour. When I’m in America, I’ll have one. They walked alongside the road, on the other side of the ditch. Listening all the time. For an engine, or booted footsteps, or the quiet sound of bicycle wheels turning. She thought: How are we meant to get across the Elbe anyway? It’s not just the old woman who’s crazy.

  Of course they were all crazy with hope. So was Hanno; maybe he was telling himself there’d be a boat with oars waiting for him when they got to the river bank. There wasn’t, of course. There was a group of Russians, sitting by the river with a blazing fire. Two of them had guitars and they were singing. Effi wanted to stand still and listen all night, it was dreadful that she had to back off from music like that and creep past it. The music made her think of huge open spaces where the wind blew through long snowy winters, of enormous forests of birch, lovely white stem after white stem, birds flying between the branches, of huge rivers that froze up in winter and broke up, crashing and racing in the spring.

  She puzzled for a moment over the Ivans. They were really good musicians, they’d come here to finish Hitler, she was grateful to them, really she was. But they were like some huge piece of machinery that produced what you wanted but kept catching people up in the cogs and mashing them to pieces.

  They got about half a kilometre away from the Russians; if you listened carefully you could just still hear the singing, or maybe that was only because the music had got stuck in Effi’s mind. They came past a bomb-crater and stopped by a big tree that must have been knocked sideways by the blast. It hung at a crazy angle over the river. Even without the half-moon the water gleamed pale grey as if it had collected all the light that was left in the sky. It was smooth water, and not flowing too fast.

  ‘How are we going to get across?’ Ida Rupf asked.

  ‘I could swim,’ said Hanno. ‘I used to swim in the river.’ With Wolfgang.

  ‘But –’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ said old Ida. ‘You’re quite right. And I’m not sure about Barbara. Magda can swim, she’s a good strong swimmer. We had her taught when we used to go to the North Sea.’

  ‘I’m a strong swimmer too,’ said Effi. ‘I used to swim a lot in the Wannsee.’

  ‘It’s too far,’ said old Ida. ‘And there must be currents and weeds. And the Ivans might hear the splashing.’

  Suddenly Effi thought there must be a Russian in the bushes behind them, listening, waiting to jump out at them. She felt goose pimples start up all over her skin. And then it grew much darker. The clouds came over and the heavens opened. They all ran under the shelter of the leaning tree. It was a bit drier there, though the rain still dripped through the branches. Outside you could hear it hissing down onto the ground. Effi thought, The river’s really going to be cold now.

  The cloudburst eased off after about ten minutes. Now the rain was coming down only thinly, but they stayed under the tree, till there was a creaking sound, and the earth heaved underneath them.

  ‘Get out!’ shouted Hanno. He had hold of Effi’s arm and dragged her away from the tree. The other three ran out after them. Cornelius was already clear. But they’d have had time to stroll out because the tree went over really slowly, groaning and creaking all the time, till it came to rest on the surface of the water. The river started to gurgle against it on the side where the current was. They could just see the fringe of roots that kept it moored to the edge of the bank.

  ‘The rain must have done it,’ said Hanno. ‘The earth got soaked, and then it gave way.’

  ‘We didn’t bring the cart,’ said Effi.

  They went round searching for it, but it had vanished.

  ‘It must be in the water,’ said Hanno in the end.

  ‘On its way to Hamburg by now,’ said Effi. ‘That’s bad; we promised Sperling to look after it. At least we’ve still got Cornelius.’

  Hanno said, ‘Look at the tree. It’s half of a bridge.’

  ‘Not quite half,’ said old Ida. ‘It’s further than it looks. And are we proposing to dance along the trunk like tightrope walkers?’

  ‘We could hold onto it and float,’ said Hanno. ‘On the side the current washes against so that if we lost our grip we’d get washed against the tree.’

  ‘I can help you,’ said Frau Magda to her mother.

  ‘You couldn’t,’ said Ida. ‘You’d have to look after Barbara.’

  There was a silence. Old Ida was the most likely person to drown, there was no getting round that. The tree shifted a little in the water, like a moored boat.

  ‘It’s a present from God,’ said Ida suddenly. ‘If we don’t accept it, who knows what other chance there’ll be? And I’ve had my life, and there are these young girls to think about. We’ll go. No, don’t waste time thanking me. We’ll have to leave what we can behind. At least we’ve eaten most of the food.’

  ‘We mustn’t have too many clothes on either,’ said Hanno. ‘They’ll weigh us down.’

  Effi thought about the stuff she had in her bag. She’d take the fags, they’d get soaked, of course, and the paper would be ruined, but you could dry the tobacco out and use it for roll-ups. And she’d take the cotton reels: they’d dry. But she’d brought the silk pyjamas with her when she’d changed back into her ordinary clothes. She might as well leave those behind.

  ‘I’ll leave my fox-fur,’ said old Ida. Effi could just see, in the dark, how she stroked the heads one last time and then dropped the fur in the grass.

  ‘And we’ll have to take our shoes off,’ said Hanno. ‘We can hang them round our necks, though – we’ll need them on the other side.’

  Effi took off her jacket and strung the boots round her neck. Here goes, she thought. There were lots of spirituals about crossing the river – only that was the river of Jordan. You died and the other side was heaven. Well, she didn’t need to die; it would be heaven to be with Papa.

  *

  Hanno went first, then old Ida with a bit more of a splash than he liked, then Frau Magda with Barbara, and Effi. Hanno thought it was better if the weaker swimmers had a strong swimmer either side of them. He didn’t like to be so far away from Effi, but he reminded himself that Effi was tough and a good swimmer. Cornelius stayed on the bank for a moment, then jumped in after Effi and paddled – he made a splash, and they all held still, listening in case the Russians were coming with their guns. But there was no sound apart from the night-time quacking of ducks and the odd shrill noise from a coot.

  The rain had left a layer of cold water at the surface, but there was warmer water down below that had held onto the warmth from the day’s sunlight. The current tugged where it ran away under the tree-trunk. People had probably been taking branches off the tree for firewood lower down, because at first they had a nice smooth trunk to hold onto and everything went easily. They were quite a way out into the river when they came to the first branches. They came splaying out into the water, you couldn’t climb over them because you’d splash into the water on the other side. They’d have to float out to the end of them.

  I didn’t think about this, thought Hanno. I should have done, though. And supposing the tree came away from the bank and started to float away? It might roll and push us underwater. Maybe this was a bad idea.

  Then he thought about Mother. He had to reach the other bank of the river before he could get to her and to Heide: for a moment he had a vision of her lying in bed in Aunt Lisi’s house, trying to imagine where he was, trying to protect him with her thoughts. They had to go on. Old Ida had said it, what other chance would they get?

  So he stopped thinking. It was a nightmare getting round the branches. The twigs and leaves came in his face and scratched him: the tree didn’t want him – or the others – there now, it wanted to be left alone in the water, maybe. The river ran faster out here, too, and eddied
as it ran into the tree. He had to fight the current. The smaller branches bent and whipped around. Sometimes he took hold of dead wood and it snapped. And always he was listening out for old Ida behind him, calling as quietly as he could to her, encouraging her.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she called back. ‘Save your breath.’

  He thought her voice was wavering.

  ‘Come closer to me. Keep a hold of my shirt, I’ll hang on to the tree for both of us.’

  She came, probably she’d have argued but she didn’t want to waste time. Even a heavy person – which she wasn’t – wouldn’t be much weight to pull in the water. Sometimes the ends of the branches were close to one another, so he only had to let go of one and grasp another to pull them both forward, sometimes the current washed them back into the trunk and then he had to work his way right out to the end of the next branch. It was completely dark now, there were only a few stars in the sky, and he had to do everything by feel. Once he was suddenly terrified that Effi had been drowned, so he called back to Frau Magda, who called behind her to Effi, and then told him Effi was still there ‘and the dog,’ she said.

  A jeep came along the road and the headlamps lit the water just ahead of them. They tried to be still, though the water moved them around in among the branches; there was no helping that. Hanno’s heart bumped fast – but the beams swept away before they reached the floating tree. Then the moon rose and gave them a little more light, but that was a worry, because he saw that they were less than ten metres from the bank, and if a Russian foot patrol came, they might see them. A few minutes later they came to a place where there weren’t any more branches ahead, and now the current was flowing really fast. Suddenly, Hanno couldn’t hold on any longer. Ida’s grip tightened on his shirt, and it tore. He reached out and managed to grab her before she was pulled away from him. She’d never survive on her own in this water.