It was the one thing that I was certain of with Jürgen. Nothing would incite him to impatience. Violence would have been inconceivable. Maybe he was capable of killing for revenge. I wasn’t sure. This fine Greek restaurant seemed a good place to take out a gun and shoot your wife’s lover.
We spent most of the time talking about Eastern Europe. Jürgen said it was the most important revolution in history. More important than the French Revolution. Perestroika would put us all to shame, he thought. Then he told us about his difficulties in finding another gynaecologist.
‘Not a decent gynaecologist to spare between here and Dresden,’ Jürgen said, laughing openly. We had drunk quite a bit of wine.
After dinner, Jürgen ordered coffee and brandy. The association with the scent of coffee from earlier in the day was renewed. Guilt by scent.
Jürgen spoke up. Quite abruptly, over the brandy, he brought up the subject of Anke and myself as though he had completely forgotten it in the meantime. He hadn’t. He was saving it up. First he toasted, then he stared at both me and Anke alternately. Seriously. A little drunk.
‘I wanted to talk to you both together about this,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to make it a long drawn-out thing. I know how these things happen. I know the strength of love…’
Anke and I looked at each other. We were both completely surprised when it came. It was like an official announcement. I was sure people at the next table were able to hear him. His solemn mood was obvious.
‘I will say to you both very honestly what I think,’ Jürgen went on. ‘I have to say it. I know you are having this affair. I cannot stop it.’
We listened. We had no right to speak.
‘I thought, four years ago, when we came to live here in Münster, that it was all over. When you came to visit, I knew you were coming as a friend. This has hurt me very much. I know there is nothing I can do. You will still remain my best friend, no matter what happens. And I will still love Anke, no matter what happens…’
Jürgen took my hand. Then he took Anke’s hand. It must have looked like a seance. The three of us silent; tears in Jürgen’s eyes. Tears in Anke’s eyes.
‘I love you both so much,’ he said, looking from one to the other. ‘I have thought about this every minute of the day. It has cost me so much pain, but I would hate to lose you…either of you.’
He was drunk. Things got worse. We discussed the whole thing very rationally for a while. Anke made excuses. Something had just snapped inside her, she explained. She put her arms around Jürgen. Her tears mingled with his. I could see that the waiter was making anxious glances. But the Greeks understand this kind of thing. They didn’t interfere. They brought more brandy. I’ve never seen Anke that drunk before.
I told Jürgen ten times over that I was leaving the next day. It was all a big mistake. I vowed to him that I wouldn’t do this to him again. Anke looked distressed. She hung with her arms around Jürgen’s neck.
And Jürgen put his hand on my throat, with my shirt in his fist.
‘I love you…you bastard.’
We walked home together, the three of us arm in arm, Jürgen in the middle, stumbling through the Altstadt of Münster. Sometimes we stopped and put our heads together in the middle of the street. We passed through an archway where the spotlights shine upwards at the old buildings and past the buildings into the reddish-black sky.
35
I went to Nuremberg.
I began to search for Franz Kern, again, in late November that year. It seemed even more ironic that I should be digging up the end of the war when everybody else was moving so feverishly towards German unity. A new era for Germany. Now it was time at last to drop the Second World War.
I found the old list of Kerns. I had only contacted and ticked off ten Kerns before I gave up. I was surprised at my lack of determination. This time, I would put all discretion aside; I had no intention of being brutal or making old people suffer any more guilt or trauma over the war, but I wanted to know. It was down to sheer curiosity by now.
I booked into a guest-house close to the centre of town this time. Pension Sonne, on the fourth floor, no lift; clean, quiet, run by an old woman, Frau Schellinger, and her daughter. It had a phone in the breakfast-room. Frau Schellinger promised to take messages for me if I was out. She told me later that most of the people she catered for were travelling salesmen and American tourists, like myself. I felt I belonged more to the salesman category.
I told Frau Schellinger that I worked in market research. She seemed pleased. Eager to help. She was officially retired now. Her daughter ran the guest-house and she was only really helping out. I rarely saw the daughter.
By day, I made phone-calls and went up the hill to the library. In the evening I made more calls to those who were not replying during the day. There seemed less of a rush. I was going about this in a more strategic way, like a market survey. I enjoyed the task more, crossing off the Kerns, talking to people about the war. I found another Fritz Kern who had been in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. But the wrong end. He was captured by the Russians near Jihlava. He spent months in Russia before he was released.
I found a Franz Kern who said he had lost both legs in the Crimea during the war. He said he had been loaded on a truck with other dead soldiers, unconscious, taken for dead. He found himself on top of a stinking communal grave when he managed to shout out and was saved.
I went to meet him in a suburb of Nuremberg one afternoon. It took me ages to find his small, one-room apartment. He had a shiny red face and oiled grey hair. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, he was brought down to the noisy pub on the ground floor of the same building by his son. They would drink beer and schnapps together and play Skat. He had obviously told his story a hundred times over. He was a happy man, with no deep attitude to the war, just glad to be alive.
His son talked about the German football team. His son was very broad, about five times the size of his father. He was able to lift his father and carry him around. The mother had died some years ago. I asked the son his age. He looked at me in a strange way, silent, as though he knew what I was really asking. If he was born since the war, since the legs were blown away. The father answered, slapping his son on the back, saying, ‘His mother was a beautiful woman.’
They were the only Kerns I could find who would meet me. Most of the Kerns I phoned grunted suspiciously and said they had nothing to do with the war. There was a particular Frau Kern who didn’t know where her husband had been. She dropped the phone and went to ask him. I had this picture of a very old couple, senile, losing all memory, puzzling over the question. It seemed to me that they had lost the memory of the phone ringing, but after a while she did come back and said: Jugoslawien.
I wasn’t having much success but I was being very patient. In the meantime, I had placed a discreet ad in two German newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Nürnberger Nachrichten, leaving a box number. The lady at the reception in the Nuremberg office said that kind of ad was not unusual after the war. She helped me with the wording.
After the phone-calls in the evening, I ticked off the list of Kerns in the breakfast-room, counted the digits I had spent on the phone and went in to pay Frau Schellinger. Occasionally I would see a salesman through the frosted orange glass door, pacing up and down, waiting to use the phone. To phone his wife, I suppose.
I paid Frau Schellinger each evening for the phone-calls. And each evening I would find her sitting in her living-room, or in reception, behind the glass partition. She began to invite me in. I sat down sometimes to talk to her. There was a massive TV in the corner, always on. She talked about reunification.
‘The people over there in the East should know that we didn’t have it easy either,’ she said. She had obviously been thinking about all this, waiting for somebody who would listen.
‘You get nothing for nothing,’ she went on. ‘We all had to work hard for what we have. Every Pfennig, we saved.’
Within minutes
she had taken out a coffee-table book showing photographs of the old and the completely restored Nuremberg.
‘Here, you can see for yourself. Nuremberg had eighty-five per cent bomb damage after the war. Here, there was nothing left standing. Not one house was left with its roof on.’
I glanced dutifully through the post-war black and white photographs of the city. It looked like a village, low walls with rubble. The spires of churches, the buildings I had already become familiar with from walking around the town, were ruins. It was remarkable. The opposite page showed the same buildings completely restored. I knew all this from other German cities, Frankfurt, Berlin, Cologne. But she wanted to tell her story.
‘This house had no roof and no floors. Only the stairs were left. We lived here under a canopy for three years. Everywhere, I had buckets collecting the rain. I restored this house with my own two hands.’
I looked around to admire her achievement. It was a fine house in the centre of the city. She owned the third and fourth floors, now worth at least 2 million DM, she estimated.
The TV in the corner was showing particularly explicit love scenes, which she ignored completely. She went on talking about the war. She must have thought it was odd to find somebody who was interested in listening to her.
‘If they want some of this economic miracle,’ she said, referring once more to the East Germans, ‘they’ll have to work for it like anyone else. You don’t get this Wohlstand for nothing.’
The TV was now showing the silhouette of a naked woman standing against a window. I have always wondered how older German people can be so impervious to nudity on the screen and nudity on the front of magazines at the newspaper kiosks. I decided to ask her about her husband.
‘He’s long dead,’ she replied. It looked as though she wanted to leave it at that.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said. ‘Where did that happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He didn’t come back. He left this house to go to the Front in nineteen forty-four. I went to the country, to my aunts. I never heard from him. I came back here after the war but I knew he had fallen somewhere. I never heard anything, God bless him.’
She paused and thought back.
‘Sometimes people came to me saying they had seen him. I would invite them in and ask them where, when. I would give them food. Sometimes I gave them money. Or gifts. I was so overjoyed to hear that he was alive, maybe in some POW camp. Other men came and said the same thing. I believed them. My hopes were so high I gave them gifts of silver, anything I had. But then, when the months and the years went by, I realized they had conned me. They had all come just to get their food and gifts. He never came back.’
I began to think of Franz Kern’s wife. Perhaps she was left waiting for him after the war, waiting for days and weeks, slowly beginning to believe the agonizing truth that he wasn’t coming back. What if Franz Kern never returned to Nuremberg? I would have been searching aimlessly for him. Maybe I should be looking for him in America.
I returned to Düsseldorf.
I had failed to find Franz Kern. For weeks I was hoping to get some response from the adverts I had placed in the papers. Nothing.
Anke phoned me. She wanted to meet me. She had to meet me. In those weeks, she began to come down Düsseldorf on the train once a week, then twice a week. It doesn’t take long from Münster to Düsseldorf. She was back home again by 5 o’clock. We met at the station, we went for lunch. Sometimes we went back to my apartment.
After Christmas, she came down to Düsseldorf regularly, at least once a week. It wasn’t just love. She needed to talk to me. Sometimes we did nothing but talk together for hours. Occasionally, we decided to meet on neutral ground, in some other smaller town. Throughout January and February we met in towns like Geldern, Kevelaer and Xanten, where we visited the cathedral. We once went to Kempen, to satisfy my curiosity, and walked around the market square and around the old fountain.
Anke kept telling me how ill Alexander was. He still went to the special school every day. But sometimes she had to take him to hospital for tests. Endless tests. Jürgen was saying there was little hope. Leukaemia was not something they had found a successful treatment for. Sometimes Anke had to postpone our meeting. So we talked on the phone instead. Anke cried a lot. Every time we met she cried for Alexander.
I had already given up any hope of a response from my ads in the newspaper when I got a letter through the box number from the Frankfurter Allgemeine. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to ring Anke and tell her. It was a letter on blue paper from a woman named Frau Marianne Jazinski. It didn’t say much, just gave the address and a short, hasty note.
‘I know the Franz Kern you are looking for.’
36
Franz Kern stood in the middle of the farmyard beside the dead dog. The dog’s leg was still twitching, so it seemed. Foam clung to his purple lips and to his teeth. The sun shone directly into the farmyard. A shallow rusted basin full of water reflected the sheen of the sun. Midges or flies hovered over it. This had probably been the dog’s drinking bowl, where he lapped the water with his long tongue. The rake with which the dog had been struck lay right beside him. Otherwise the farmyard was empty.
Kern felt helpless. He almost wished he was back in Laun. Again, the unforgiveable idea had entered his mind. What if he just got on his bike and left on his own? It was every man for himself. He could have left all this trouble behind. But the thought was too horrific to imagine. He had to force it out of his mind. There was no question of betraying her. Leaving her to the same fate as this dog. Bertha. He loved her.
He removed the small haversack from his back, took out the hand-gun and discarded the haversack beside one of the wooden farm buildings. He had never used the gun. Only three or four times at target practice. Never in combat. It felt strange in his hand. So easy to carry.
He had no idea where to run. He listened for a moment. He heard water. A stream somewhere. He thought once more of calling Bertha, even just to let her know he was with her. But he decided against it. He made a choice and ran around to the back of the outhouses where the forest began again; two chestnut trees, already in bloom, standing like a gateway into a deeper forest. Surely this is where Bertha ran to. He knew by intuition. There were banks of nettles everywhere else. It was the only way she could run, with bare legs.
In all the years of the war Franz Kern had seen no action. Not that he was looking for it. But he always had an irrational feeling that he was missing something; a phobia maybe that he would always arrive too late. It was a fear he had always had in school, during his tests, when he was asked to read out loud, when he was asked to write on the blackboard. He was afraid of being slow. It only began to disappear after he became a technician, or soon after he was conscripted into the army and discovered that others were slower, less enthusiastic than he was. He had always told himself to do his best. More talented people often did less well, and had less stamina.
Running through the chestnut trees into the cool shade of the forest, he told himself once more to do his best. He was a soldier. He was clever. He would find her.
Up to then, Franz Kern’s attitude towards the war had been predominantly escapist. He did at the beginning feel as though something good was happening in Germany, but that quickly faded when he became a radio technician and heard the reaction from outside Germany. All he wanted to do in life was to open a shop and fix radios. At the age of eight, he had put together his first radio, a crystal receiver. With a small earphone, he received his first signal like a message, like a vocation from above. He excelled at his trade, working in a radio repair shop in Nuremberg before he was drafted into the army.
His skills were too essential to place him in combat. He became an officer with responsibility for listening to enemy signals. By then he had become familiar with international attitudes on the war. He could understand English, a little Russian and French. His aptitude as a technician saved him from the worst of the war. It did
nothing for him now. He felt useless. He felt he wasn’t made for action. This wasn’t his type of thing. He was doing it only for Bertha.
As he ran through the trees he realized how lucky he was to have held on to his gun. At Eger, when he had taken off his uniform, he had rolled up the gun inside it, but had second thoughts and went back to get it. You never know, he thought to himself at the time.
He was less happy about the boots, which were next to useless now. His feet were baking and the boots made far too much noise on the gravel. Even running along the soft, spongy forest floor, they made a thump which vibrated through the limbs of the trees. They would give him away.
For the first time in his life, Franz Kern turned himself into a soldier. All his faculties were alert. He stopped behind a tree. He closed his mouth to listen.
37
Bertha Sommer remembered something as she ran through the trees. Not something she had time to think about in detail, but a penetrating flash of terror from her childhood. A childhood fear which had never gone away.
When Bertha was seven years old, she had fled from the town warden in Kempen, a man who had repeatedly warned her and her sisters not to play in the fountain on the square in front of their house. The Sommer girls had so much waste paper from their father’s stationery shop that they continued to sail paper boats on the water, clogging up the tiers of the fountain and spilling the water over the cobbled square. The furious town warden, who had to roll up his sleeves to unblock the fountain, regularly complained to the Sommer family, often chasing the girls away with his stick, until one day their grandmother let him into the house to teach them a lesson, personally.
The Last Shot Page 12