Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  ‘Lie on your back,’ he shouted in her ear. She did as she was told, coughing with the water she’d swallowed. He got behind her, managed to hook under her arms with his hands and started to kick out with his legs, hard. He’d used to play drowning and lifesaving with Wolfgang, now it was for real and it didn’t matter about splashing any longer. They had to stay afloat or die. Effi, he thought. What’s happening to Effi?

  *

  Effi saw the current tear Ma Headscarf and Barbara away a moment before it reached her. Cornelius was swimming beside her, but he whirled away faster than she did. Oh, God, she thought, and the water was throwing her about, shoving her along; it didn’t care if it drowned her. And then suddenly it was as if there were huge springs inside her arms and legs, as if someone else was using them to swim, someone hugely strong and powerful.

  When at last the river stopped giving her a hard time and let her float easily, she’d forgotten which bank she was heading for, for all she knew she was on her way back to the Russians. Please God, no. And she thought about the others, what had happened to them? It was no good wondering, though, all she could do was get herself onto dry land.

  She made herself think: the river was flowing north and she wanted the west bank. So she’d have to try and swim to the left. She kicked out, but the enormous battle with the river had taken all her strength, for all it had felt as if someone else was helping her. She couldn’t fight any longer, the best she could do was to float for a while. She hung in the river and trod water, and then the faint moonlight showed her the left bank coming closer, there were willows hanging over the edge of the water, please, river, she thought, take me to the willows.

  The river wasn’t taking her to the willows, it was bearing her past them, just out of reach. She wanted to cry, but that’d be a stupid waste of energy. How far was she going to go, and how far would it be before she lost all her strength and just drowned? And then she felt something under her feet: the river had brought her to the shallows. She stood up in water that reached to her waist and waded towards the bank. About a metre from the nearest willow tree there was a deep pool, but the water was hardly moving there, so she splashed in and swam across. Then she scrambled to the shore under the splaying willow branches.

  She tried to shake some of the water off her and ended up falling down in the grass. She sat there, dripping and shivering. In a moment she’d need to go looking for the others. But how could she ever find them? She might be walking one way along the river bank, and they might be walking the other. They might keep missing each other – and then the really bad thoughts came and this time she couldn’t brush them away. It was so cold and quiet here on the other side of the river, it made her believe they were all dead. Hanno might be dead. Maybe even Papa had been killed on his way through Germany – he was in the army, after all. To make herself better she got her harmonica out of the bag, the poor thing was wet through, so she shook it before she tried to blow through it. At first it didn’t make any sound, then it made a lost little note, and then another. It sounded so sad she put it away again. The wind blew.

  And then someone was there. It was Cornelius.

  He was wagging his whole self, not just his tail, he was licking her face all over and making little crying, barking noises. It was OK for him to make noises now, the Russians were on the opposite bank. She put her arms round him and felt his wriggling warmth, but he wouldn’t be held still for very long. He got up and nudged her. He wanted her to come with him. So she stood up – that wasn’t easy, she felt like an old woman – and he put his nose in the air and ran, looping back to make sure she was still following him, nudging her to get her to keep up. He brought her to Frau Magda and Barbara, who were standing staring out at the river. Effi shouted and they turned round. She’d never have thought she’d be so pleased to see Ma Headscarf. They kissed each other and hugged, and then Barbara spoke – she thought it was OK to talk on this side of the river, then. She said: ‘My grandmother.’

  Hanno, thought Effi. I want Hanno. And she was scared for him, so scared that the insect was crawling round and round her stomach the way it had done when they took her off to hospital after Mama died.

  She wanted to shout his name out, but when she opened her mouth she couldn’t; it was as if she’d got used to hiding and keeping quiet, it was hard to make a noise. She got the harmonica out again and tried to play it. It was a bit better than last time, but not much.

  Then Cornelius started to bark. That was some solo, fit to wake the dead. No, she shouldn’t have thought that. It was live people he was trying to reach.

  Hanno was there. He was coming through the trees, he had his arm round old Ida, you could see she couldn’t move without his help. But Effi ran towards him and put her arm round old Ida on the other side and then Frau Magda came up and put her arms round her mother, and they were all embracing and kissing, but the best thing was when she and Hanno were in each other’s arms, that was heaven on earth, his wet front against hers, the warmth of his hard chest, the feel of his hands in her wet hair, the feel of his lips on hers.

  ‘I love you,’ she said to him.

  ‘Remember you’re not alone,’ croaked old Ida, grinning.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ma Headscarf; she didn’t like the great love scene – well, that was her problem. Effi didn’t care. She pulled away from Hanno but they kept on holding hands.

  ‘So now we go on to Frankfurt,’ said Frau Magda. ‘Only what are we going to eat?’

  Effi said, ‘My father will help.’

  ‘Your father?’ asked Ma Headscarf. ‘Where’s he meant to be?’

  ‘He’s in the American army.’

  ‘Not more lies,’ said Ma Headscarf. ‘You’ll go to hell, my girl, if you don’t mend your ways very soon.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bruno Mann, of the US Psychological Warfare Branch, stood in his office in Leipzig. He was about to start another day interviewing prisoners of war for information about the German army’s plans. He’d liked it better when he’d been writing pamphlets urging the soldiers to stop fighting and recording announcements to be broadcast over to German troop placements: ‘The war’s as good as over! Why die now?’

  Now they were here, coming into his office. They never seemed to expect a German in US uniform. They’d give him the information but resent him for being an émigré. Sometimes they’d get self-righteous with him: ‘I never liked Hitler but I’d never have joined the enemy. I stayed and fought for my country.’ Even when in the end the only thing they’d been fighting for was a place in the queue to surrender to the US Army.

  It was pointless to interview them anyway, all he got was rumours and the business about never having liked Hitler. No German soldier had ever liked Hitler, it seemed, and yet they’d done plenty of mischief at his command. And now the Russians were in Berlin. Bruno had been hoping to go to Berlin – it was the real reason he’d joined the US Army – till the bad news came that they were stopping at the Elbe.

  He’d been over to the other side. He’d gone with a group of war correspondents – he was supposed to interpret so that they could interview the civilian population, but the journalists had been more interested in getting together with the Russians to drink vodka and confiscated German booze. He’d taken the jeep and driven out into the countryside alone. He’d found Germans then. Women mostly, women with hollow eyes, one with half her hair torn out. When they’d seen the US Army jeep they’d thrown themselves at it, they’d hardly bothered to wonder that it was a German inside the foreign uniform. They’d all talked at once.

  ‘The Russians caught us up on the road. They took us away and – please tell the other Amis, they ought to know what’s happening.’ Or: ‘We took shelter in a farmhouse, in the middle of the night the Russians were suddenly there. My daughter, yes, four of them. Please help us to get to the Amis.’

  All he could do was to urge them to find a doctor. He turned the jeep round and drove as fast as he could, back to the war corr
espondents’ party. He drove them back over the bridge and went back to his lodgings where he drank half a bottle of American whiskey all alone. It didn’t drown his fear. The war correspondents were all writing that the Russians were being decent to the German population – that was what the folks at home wanted to hear. Bruno imagined the Russians in Berlin, going into the bar where Effi and Annelie cowered, grabbing them – he threw the rest of the bottle of whiskey onto the floor. The smash of the glass was no consolation. It only made him think of the Russians wrecking the bar. And worse thoughts came. Effi and Annelie might be dead. A bomb or a shell might have got them.

  If only Annelie and her lover had been able to send Effi out! They knew how to do it. They’d been part of the network that had smuggled Jews out of Germany. They’d had their routes and their couriers. Schulz had stopped them. Bruno had gathered that from the carefully coded messages in Annelie’s letters.

  Our friend has made up a list of guests for his party in Prince’s Street. He hasn’t yet told his wife about the party. That meant Prince Albrecht Street, the Gestapo’s headquarters. The list of friends meant a list of Annelie’s contacts that Schulz had got together – but he hadn’t shared them with the Gestapo. The date is not fixed yet, but he has assured us that when our little Effi goes on her holidays he’ll send out the invitations.

  Annelie had told him how Schulz had wanted to adopt Effi. She was the image of Leni, and Schulz had wanted to marry Leni. Effi wouldn’t let herself be adopted, and Schulz didn’t want to force her, because then she’d hate him. So he’d let her go to Annelie, but because he’d wanted to keep her near him, he’d blackmailed Annelie. If Effi left Germany, he’d tell the Gestapo what he knew and more people than she would have lost their lives.

  Annelie had never told Effi about Schulz’s game. She was an intelligent little thing, but she had to be innocent with Schulz when he came visiting. She had to be friendly. That was their only guarantee of safety. If she’d refused to see Schulz he might have lost patience and shopped them after all.

  ‘I should have gone myself,’ said Bruno aloud. But he knew he couldn’t have done. Even if he hadn’t been arrested himself, once he took Effi away Schulz would have taken his revenge.

  Now – as he did almost every day – he was remembering the horrible arguments with Leni, when she’d said she wanted to go back to her mother in Germany. How she’d shouted at him that she’d given up everything just to come with him and stay in this miserable flat in this horrible country, and she’d spent years being lonely and bored all the time the child was at school. And he’d asked her if she’d rather have stayed in Germany and made films for Hitler.

  She’d turned away from him and said, ‘I’m my mother’s only child and she’s dying.’

  I should have been kinder to her, he thought. I was a brute.

  Then one day she’d told him she was going. That she’d bought the tickets. And he’d said, ‘You’re not taking the child into that hellhole?’

  He thought he remembered every word of that shouting match, he could play it in his head like a film.

  ‘You’re so busy,’ said Leni. Angrily. ‘You hardly have time for us now, how could you look after her on your own?’

  He hadn’t considered her loneliness in England – he’d had plenty of time to do that since.

  ‘I’m working myself stupid,’ he’d said, ‘just to keep you and the child.’ He’d said it self-righteously, he’d remembered the schlocky popular songs he had to write, he’d felt sorry for himself because the world wanted those instead of his symphonies; he’d even, God help him, been afraid that now his working-class origins were catching up with him, clawing him back. Fine Communist he’d been.

  ‘We could have stayed,’ Leni had said. ‘Other people got by, they adjusted.’

  ‘Turned into Nazis, you mean? Do you remember the Brownshirts were coming for me? Do you remember what they did to Max? The trouble with you is you grew up with too much money, you never had to face reality.’

  Leni shut her mouth tight for a moment. Then she said, ‘Schulz will look after me. He’d have made it all right for you, too.’

  He was furious. ‘So you’ve been writing to Schulz? As well as sneaking off and getting the tickets behind my back?’

  ‘Schulz will make sure I get in and out all right.’

  He screamed: ‘Go on, then! Go to Schulz! Marry him if you like! Just leave me the child!’

  ‘No,’ said Leni.

  They caught the evening boat train. He refused to go to Victoria Station to see them off. It was raining and they stood outside the house getting wet and not saying anything while the taxicab waited for them.

  Leni said, ‘Are you hoping we’ll miss the train?’

  ‘No,’ he said angrily. ‘You’ve given yourself plenty of time.’

  ‘Bruno,’ she said, ‘we’ll be back soon.’

  She’d wanted to kiss and be friends. But he wouldn’t. He’d kissed Effi. He’d said to her, ‘Remember I love you.’ He’d given Leni a quick unfriendly kiss on the cheek and gone back into the house. He’d slammed the door. And she’d gone to Germany and that was the last time he ever saw her. Oh, they’d made it up in letters. But he’d never held her in his arms again.

  If Effi’s dead, he thought – and he’d thought that more often than once a day – my life won’t be worth living and I’ll throw my useless body in the Elbe.

  His phone rang.

  ‘Lieutenant Mann? My name’s Kline, Lieutenant Kline. I’m a medical officer in Torgau. I’ve got a German girl here, speaks English, claims to be your daughter. You don’t have a daughter in Germany, do you? I’d have gotten rid of her right away, but she won’t leave me alone. She’s with a little bunch of bedraggled refugees and a comic dog, they swam the Elbe last night, she says, flagged down my jeep on the road – pretty little thing, mind you –’

  Bruno said, ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Black curly hair, black eyes.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  He ran outside and got into his jeep. He didn’t care about the prisoners he had to interview. He drove to Torgau. He had to drive more slowly than he wanted to because suddenly his life was worth something after all. He kept having to stop for tanks or for queues of prisoners being marched off to camp, for civilians going God knew where. It took him two and a half hours. Towards the end of the journey he started to worry that the girl wasn’t Effi after all. That she was just some crazy girl who’d got hold of one of his records and liked the song, so had decided to be his daughter. Maybe he should have had Kline bring her to the phone and asked her a few questions to make sure the journey was worthwhile?

  He found Lieutenant Kline in a big old house that had been turned into a temporary hospital, and asked him if he could see the girl where she couldn’t see him.

  ‘Sure,’ said Kline. ‘I’ll get her in the yard here, you can look out through the window from my office.’ He put his head on one side. ‘So you do have a daughter in Germany? What’s the story? OK, OK, I won’t hang around.’

  He stood by the window, another US officer in uniform. He looked out into the yard. There was an arched gateway at the back of it. Kline came back with the dog he’d been talking about – and Effi. He knew her at once. She looked just like Leni when they’d first met. He ran into the yard, almost tripping over his own feet, clumsy with joy. Effi saw him. Her eyes opened wide. She recognized him. After all these years she recognized him. She was running towards him. A moment later she was in his arms.

  Chapter Twenty

  Even then, it wasn’t easy. The Americans weren’t supposed to be ‘fraternizing’ with the German population. This didn’t stop the GIs going to bed with German girls – nor did it stop Papa squeezing all five of them, and the dog, into the jeep and driving them back to Leipzig, but it did make it strictly illegal for him to keep Effi and Hanno in his apartment. The dog wasn’t a problem. Papa could keep as many dogs as he liked.

  What Papa did wa
s to have Effi tell her story to the Colonel. In English. By the time she’d finished the Colonel was in tears.

  ‘Just forget about the rules,’ he said. ‘After all, we’re making them now.’

  That was crazy because the Amis had made the non-fraternization rule, but it didn’t matter. You did what you could get away with, Effi had known that for years. It wasn’t going to be any different in peacetime. Now Papa was getting the Americans in Frankfurt to look for Hanno’s mother and his sister; when they’d done that, he said, he’d wangle a trip to Frankfurt, so that he could take Hanno in his jeep.

  Effi didn’t want Hanno’s mother and his big sister to be dead, but she wanted it to be a while before the Amis found them.

  Frau Rupf, Frau Magda and Barbara went on to Frankfurt anyway. They’d thought they might stay in Leipzig for a while, but Papa warned them that the Americans were likely to withdraw a long way behind their present lines. The Russians would almost certainly be coming to Leipzig.

  He gave them a good meal and a supply of tinned rations, and he got hold of a little cart and a pony for them – that cost a lot of American cigarettes – so that they could ride to Frankfurt in comfort. They left on the day that the news came about Hitler’s death. Effi was truly sorry to say goodbye to old Ida and little, damaged Barbara, who was talking again and had discovered chewing gum. She was almost sad to say goodbye to Ma Headscarf. She gave them all the dried-out tobacco, and the cotton reels. She didn’t need either now and they’d be able to sell them. She just kept one cotton reel for herself in memory of Aunt Annelie.