The Last Shot

by Hugo Hamilton

  She crouched down on the outside of the platform, getting soaked. She felt the rain getting in at the back of her neck. She saw the rain light up orange as it travelled past the light. She then heard Hauptmann Selders’s voice. He was standing on the porch, condemning the weather. She couldn’t move. She had no idea what to do. She knew her coat and her hat and her hair were getting soaked and realized how irrelevant it was. If she was caught there with her bag, she was finished.

  Hauptmann Selders stayed on the porch gazing out at the rain. If he had looked down, he would have seen her. Every time she looked up, the strong rain blinded her.

  Bertha crept slowly back towards the arch, holding her bag against her chest. She was ready to drop the bag. Ready to say she had come out because she felt ill. She made it back to the arch.

  It was more than she could endure. With her back against the wall, she clutched the handles of her bag in her fist. Now, even the thought of Russian captivity seemed better than being caught there in the arch, with her bag, attempting to flee; a common deserter.

  She had changed her mind. She was no good at breaking the law. You needed a devious mind. You needed to have done it before. She was weak. Certain that she had already been seen.

  She heard the heavy sound of boots hurrying along the platform. A group of soldiers passed her by with their heads down against the rain. Just as they passed her hiding in the arch, they took a sharp turn and ran across the square away from her.

  All Bertha Sommer wanted to do now was to get back to the safety of her room. The escape was far too risky, she decided. As soon as she heard the door to the administration block close, she checked the square and ran back to her own accommodation building.

  Back in her room, she felt relieved. She took off her coat and her hat. Everything was soaked. She dried her hair. And slowly she began to regret that she hadn’t gone the whole distance. She had gone so far. She was let down by her own fear and there was no way she would try it again. Her courage began to come back. But it was too late. She felt despair and anger at the fact that she had not made the escape with Kern. She felt she would never see home again.

  Just before 11.45 she went out into the corridor to see if the Red Cross vehicle was still there. It was. She could see no movement around the vehicle. Once again she thought of making a run for it, abandoning all caution. But then she saw the vehicle lights come on. It began to move towards the gates. Then it was gone. Her chance had disappeared.

  Bertha went back into her room and settled down for the night. She couldn’t sleep. She could only think of Officer Kern waiting for her. She had let him down. He would surely think she had decided to remain loyal to the army. And he was the only man she could trust around here. Now she was on her own.

  Finally, she fell asleep, only because she was exhausted and because the constant rain beating on the window mesmerized her.

  In the morning, she got up and thought of the Red Cross car making its way towards the German border. She tried to visualize how far they would have got by now. She had a quick breakfast and reported for work early, at 5.45. The rain had eased off. It felt ridiculous to walk so confidently past the arch where she had been hiding only hours before.

  Hauptmann Selders was already in his office surrounded by some of the officers. They were talking about Hriskov. The arms dump had fallen into Czech hands. During the night, soldiers had returned to the garrison on foot with the news. There was fighting to the north as well. She heard one officer come in with a report that one of the Red Cross vehicles had disappeared. Nothing more was said. She asked if there was anything she could do. She took the phone and tried to get a line to the capital.

  An hour later, she got a real fright. Bertha couldn’t tell whether she reacted with shock or sheer joy when she saw Officer Kern walk into the office with a report. German reinforcements had entered Prague and were set to regain control of the city. She ignored the information. She couldn’t believe it was Officer Kern speaking. He had stayed behind. Why? She wanted to explain everything to him. But he went out again, avoiding her gaze.

  It became clear that Kern had waited for her. Had he passed up a golden chance for her? To stay behind with her? The implication of such loyalty weighed on her thoughts.

  9

  The first time I went to Laun – now Louny – was late in 1985. First impressions are those of a sleepy town with a massive bus station which is completely out of proportion to the size of the town. The bleak tar-macadamed bus station offers little shelter except for a row of covered passenger islands. The bus routes which pass through the station give you some idea of the industry and crop farming in that part of Bohemia. It’s like being dropped off at the edge of an industrial estate. I arrived there in the afternoon, in October, the best time to travel anywhere.

  Around the bus station there was nothing but derelict land, overgrown with weeds. In the distance, I could see some isolated high-rise apartment blocks. The town itself had no colour. It’s got an old square and a remarkable church. But it’s not a place you would see on a tourist brochure. The people at the tourist office in Prague looked surprised that I wanted to go to Louny. What would a foreigner want in Louny? There were many places of interest, with ancient castles, like Kutná Hóra, or Karlovy Vary. And then there was Theresienstadt, not far from Louny, Czechoslovakia’s Nazi transit camp where the ashes of 20,000 Jews were said to have been thrown in the river.

  All I really wanted was to see Louny. There are places like that where you just want to be able to say: I’ve been there, I’ve seen the place.

  There was little to see in Louny. Coming from West Germany, as I did, the place looked uninteresting, like a faded water-colour. The place that history left behind.

  The shops were sparsely stocked with tins of beans and tins of stew. Everywhere in Czechoslovakia, I saw these neat pyramids of cans in the shop windows. There was a queue outside one of the shops in Louny. From Prague, I had learned that the sight of a queue was the sign of something worth buying. It seemed to be a bookshop.

  I went into the pub U Somolu on the main street and had a drink, knowing that all Czech pubs have a habit of closing early. I would have spoken to some of the men in the pub, but they spoke neither English nor German and I didn’t have a word of Czech. They looked at me. They must have wondered too what brought a German to Louny. I would like to have told them where I was really from. But it was too complicated.

  I walked around the streets for a while. In the square, I sat down beside the statue of Johann Huss. The warm October sun hit the square at an angle. After a while the shadow of the buildings edged up across my face and reached the base of the façades on the other side. The loudspeakers which hung around the square suddenly came alive. First with a crackle and a lot of background noise, perhaps that of someone fumbling with the microphone, the voice eventually boomed out over the square. I had no idea what it was saying.

  I tried some more people with English and received a bewildered stare each time. Then I wondered if this town, on the edge of the Sudetenland according to pre-war maps, might still have some old people who spoke German.

  People shrugged a lot. I could see that they were dying to help me but were unable to. One man kept asking me questions enthusiastically in Czech. At the post office, somebody eventually pointed to an old woman who spoke a little German. I asked her about the garrison outside the town, at the top of the hill. She shook her head.

  ‘You cannot go there,’ she said. ‘Nothing for tourists.’ She waved her index finger.

  I asked her what it was being used for. Who occupied it now?

  ‘Russen,’ she said.

  It was not something she wanted to elaborate on. I had already asked too much. She walked away.

  Since there was nothing else to do in Louny, I decided to walk back beyond the bus station up the hill to take a look at the garrison. It seemed like an impossible place to defend, surrounded only by a low wall and some rusted barbed wire. Around to the front of
the garrison, along the wall, there was a large red star. That was as far as I went.

  The journey back to Prague takes around an hour. The bus was full of workers commuting back to the towns along the way. A girl beside me kept falling asleep with her head repeatedly sinking on to my shoulder. Perhaps she was a factory, girl. She wore overalls underneath her coat. Every now and again she woke up and realized that she had begun to lean against me. But she soon fell asleep again. Whenever the bus stopped, she sat up, startled, looking out through the windows as though she had gone too far.

  10

  According to the diaries of Bertha Sommer, an impeccably written account of the life of a young woman who reached the age of twenty when the Second World War started, she was born with a trinity of strong values: faith, honesty and cleanliness. There was nothing Bertha liked more than to wash her feet in the evening. She liked clean feet. Her faith and honesty helped her through what she called ‘the turbulent times’ in which she lived.

  Born in the small Rhineland town of Kempen, she was brought up in a family devoted to the Catholic faith, except perhaps for her father, Erich, who was more devoted to cynicism and a good joke. In any case, both cynicism and Catholicism combined to place the family at odds with the new ideology of Nazism, and with the people in their town who had risen to prominence out of nowhere.

  Up to then, Bertha’s father had been a prominent businessman with a fine toy and stationery shop on the market square. He had a prodigious disregard for the most elementary notion of profit and loss. He refused to join what he called the ‘Brown Wave’. His standing with the people of the town was based on the old values of gentlemanly wit. ‘God save us from sudden wealth,’ he would say, to the amusement of his followers, who shared his taste for wine, song and humour, along with his compulsion for practical jokes. One Sunday morning he borrowed a brown Nazi cap and climbed up to place it on top of the St George monument at the centre of the market square. Then he went and apologized for offending St George.

  But Germany had lost its sense of humour. Nothing could save Erich Sommer from the plummeting Weimar economy, the accelerating age of fascism and his own progressive ill-health. The pulmonary illness which he had brought back from the First World War got the better of him. He bowed out just before the Second World War, leaving behind his wife and five daughters, a trove of unsaleable toys, a hoard of initialled silver cutlery which was eventually sold off for nothing, and his inimitable sense of humour. Bertha writes how he asked her to bring him a mirror on his death-bed, where he looked at himself in silence for a long time before he said: ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Erich.’

  With little else to share among them, the five sisters held on to some of their father’s humour. They had a propensity to break down laughing, often until the tears rolled down their faces. His remarks were repeated as a comfort to their mother.

  Bertha’s mother, Maria, a professional opera singer who had given up her art for marriage, tried in vain to salvage the business. She resorted to giving singing and piano classes instead. If nothing else, the house was filled with laughter and music. Five girls and a mother who had once sung in the opera. They all sang arias, Schumann, hymns, love songs, pop songs like ‘Lili Marlene’, nursery rhymes – everything. In winter they placed a lighted candle into the grate to give students the illusion of warmth. But the demand for piano lessons had begun to diminish in a country preparing for war. The family eventually came to depend on social security under the new National Socialist state.

  Life in Kempen became harder to explain. The Jews in the town disappeared. Families to whom Bertha had often been sent to buy gherkins had gone overnight. Once, on a trip to an aunt in Düsseldorf, Bertha records in her diary how she and her mother saw brand new shoes and leatherwear flung into the streets and how her mother said, ‘What idiots. They’ll regret this some day.’ Shortly after that, the social security payments were mysteriously withdrawn from the Sommer family and life became impossible.

  Plans had to be made to ease the burden. Grandmothers and aunts all conferred to make the best decisions for the five girls. Husbands were sought for the two eldest. The two youngest continued at school. Bertha, right in the middle, went to work as a secretarial assistant at the employment exchange, where she went on to obtain excellent references praising her enthusiasm and attractive manner. When the war came, her attributes were welcomed into the service of the army as part of the civilian personnel.

  Bertha spent most of the time on the French coast of Normandy until the British arrived. She used the years in France to help her family, regularly sending home money to her mother and regularly arriving home with suitcases full of French fashions – dresses, blouses, hats, lingerie – all of which were quickly claimed by her sisters.

  Shortly before D Day, she left France for the last time, with her cases stuffed to the gills. The trains were packed with girls coming home with their belongings, all evacuating back from the Normandy coast. The bombs were already raining on Germany. Bertha prayed hard. When they heard the planes overhead, she prayed for her life. And for her suitcases.

  The first sight of bombed-out buildings and torn railway tracks came as a shock. It made the satin dress she was wearing at the time feel so inappropriate. She prayed it would be her last train journey of this war.

  In the middle of the night, the train stopped very suddenly with a terrible jolt. Most of the girls were asleep, heads against shoulders, legs stretched out with travel-weary familiarity. Right in the middle of the country, the train stopped so suddenly that the girls were flung to the floor, into each other’s arms or across each other. The lights went out. They could hear the sound of planes. Explosions of noise. Gunfire. In the distance, they saw the trail of anti-aircraft guns illuminating the sky. Nobody dared look out. Bertha found herself on the floor, underneath two others.

  When the noise began to abate, an officer came through the carriage shouting at everyone to get out. The girls were all asking whether they should bring their cases. No luggage, the officer commanded.

  They stepped down from the train and were all rushed into the forest which ran along the tracks. They could smell the smoke. Further along the line, the sky was lit up by a burning train, a munitions train which had come under fire. The girls held to the edge of the forest for fear of partisans. The night was black. Three hundred women, two officers, a dozen recruits. The French train driver was bribed, or persuaded at gunpoint, to drive the empty train past the bombed-out munitions train. All the time, they heard the planes overhead. And they smelled smoke.

  When they rejoined the train further along the track it was missing half its carriages. Bertha was fortunate to be reunited with her luggage. Many of the other girls never saw their things again. One of the officers assured them that the luggage would be sent on after them, but nobody believed him. As soon as they were gone, the carriages left behind would be looted and burned out by the French resistance. When the shortened train resumed the journey in the direction of Germany, it carried dozens of sobbing girls.

  Bertha Sommer realized what it felt like to have luck on her side. She still had her three cases. And her life. All she had collected that night was a large pain in her right leg. Back in her seat she noticed the pain for the first time. Perhaps the sheer worry about survival was enough to anaesthetize it before that. When the train began to roll through the French night once more, Bertha finally got a chance to look at her leg. She rolled up her red dress and found a large blue bruise along the outside of her thigh. It was the size of a dinner plate, from the hip down, and around to her bottom. How it happened, she had no idea. She had no recollection of falling or banging into anything.

  The girls in her compartment began to inspect her thigh. They had never seen such a big bruise before. How did it happen? It became a talking point. It was such a remarkable injury that the news travelled up along the carriages and Bertha repeatedly had to raise her dress to show other girls, bereaved girls whom she could not refuse. ‘Mein Gott, B
ertha!’ they all exclaimed, staring at her rich, dark bruise, the size of an oval-shaped platter under the yellowish light of the carriage.

  More girls came to look. What beautiful underwear, too, one of them remarked. Bertha got fed up putting her leg on display. It was nothing, she said. A war souvenir. She only agreed to show it for the last time as a concession to the Frühling sisters, who had lost everything somewhere on the edge of the forest near Liège. And while Bertha raised her dress once more, an officer passed by and put his head into the compartment.

  ‘Looks very nasty,’ he said, smiling.

  Bertha was startled to hear his voice. She pulled her dress down and sat in her seat, refusing to look at the officer. He moved on after one of the girls said it was all right. Bertha was shocked to think that she had shown her bruise to a man. An officer. On a train.

  11

  Anke’s baby boy arrived in October, just after I had left on that trip to Czechoslovakia. I was away for a month in all, because I stopped in Nuremberg as well on the way back. As soon as I got back to Düsseldorf I found the card from Anke and Jürgen Lamprecht in the post. It was a printed card with a drawing of a stork carrying a baby bearing the announcement of their son Alexander.

  I rang Anke at home to congratulate her. Anke rang me back later that same morning and arranged to meet me at a café in the centre of town.

  She embraced me as usual, officially. She smiled that half-smile, but I could see she had something serious on her mind. Maybe I thought she looked a bit pale. We sat down for coffee outside a restaurant on the main shopping street. The weather was still quite warm. Why hadn’t she brought the baby for me to see? She said I would have to drop around myself, some evening. She would arrange it. After that, Anke was unusually quiet.