The Last Shot

by Hugo Hamilton

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about luck,’ he said, as soon as Maria was gone.

  ‘I think we gave too much credit to luck, after the war. It really was made out to be something. We tried to make certain that we could make it a permanent thing; everyone worked hard to ensure that luck was stacked up for themselves. I mean, why should anyone have to be lucky to be alive?

  ‘Then they try to pass the luck on to their next of kin.’

  He nodded at the door where Maria had gone out. He included himself in all his observations. He spoke freely, as though he had often spoken to me before, or as though he had been waiting for years to say this to me.

  ‘Idiots. Today we take luck for granted, here in Germany, and we don’t know what to do with it. I have never seen Germans so unhappy. This business with the Wall and German unity is not going to make them happier either. I see my own daughter, Maria, strangled by luck.’

  Kern stopped talking and looked at me again for a long time, as though he hadn’t seen me for years.

  I had come to ask him questions. I wanted to know about Bertha Sommer. What happened? He was going to tell me everything, honestly. Otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me to come. I knew he would unfold everything in his own way; he had nothing to hide. And there was no need to force anything.

  I told him how the diaries of Bertha Sommer had come into my hands and how they ended abruptly after the war, in May 1945. She had taken them up again, years later, but they had become domestic, they talked about happy moments in her life, the linguistic charms of her children when they were small, locks of hair etc. But there were five attempts to write down what she called ‘something very painful’. Some agonizing memory which she could never get rid of or share with anyone. She had written it to her own children, a letter which was not to be opened until after her death, in which she wanted to unfold a ‘heavy secret’. But she never finished it. After a while she must have learned to suppress it.

  ‘When did she die?’ he asked, sitting up suddenly.

  ‘August the sixth, five years ago,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He stared at the floor for a while. ‘I never found out where she went. Where did she go?’

  ‘Vermont,’ I said. ‘She spent all of her life in America, living in Vermont. As far as I know, she came back to Germany once in the sixties, that was all.’

  Franz Kern became even more silent and pensive.

  ‘So she got to America after all…’

  I realized that Kern needed long pauses of silence to assimilate the information and the entirely new perspective it foisted on his life. I had given him an image of Bertha Sommer’s life which he had never imagined. He had thought of every other permutation of her life. He had wished her well as she drifted out of his memory.

  ‘Did she ever talk about the shooting?’ he asked.

  ‘She mentioned something.’

  ‘She wasn’t able to forget it,’ he said. Dreaming again. It was as though he was suddenly back in the past. ‘That’s what the heavy secret was. She couldn’t forget. Maybe if we were still together, she might have got over it. I couldn’t get it out of my head, either. I suppose we were afraid there would be a trial, an investigation. There was no need for any of that. It was a big mistake. All of it.’

  He talked for a long time. Explained everything. The light faded outside. Another feeble wintry evening. Kitchen windows began to steam up everywhere in Nuremberg. TVs came on. Cartoons. News. Football results. People all over Germany sealed into their own luck.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘They were different times. Everybody had to get away with their own lives. Everybody had a duty to themselves. Every woman has a duty to be a woman. People like Bertha had a duty to survive. There was nothing for her to regret. She had nothing to hide. She was nothing but honesty.’

  The phone rang. It looked as though Kern was going to ignore it. I asked if I should answer it for him. It was Maria. I called her Frau Jazinski, giving her the proper respect. She said she was coming over again to make an evening meal. I was welcome to stay and have something to eat.

  There was a slight panic. There was a lot that Franz Kern and I had not yet discussed. He was still determined to keep his daughter out of all this.

  ‘There is no point in her asking me endless questions at this stage. It would turn the place into a war tribunal.’

  ‘How much does she know?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I looked at him with some obvious surprise.

  ‘She knows about Laun. She knows that I fled from the Russians. That I saved a girl’s life. That I was involved in a skirmish with partisans and rescued a girl from certain death. My daughter is proud of me. As proud as you can be in this country…

  ‘But she knows nothing about Bertha. She doesn’t know that I loved Bertha. That I would have gone anywhere with her…That I was mad about her…

  ‘And I never told anyone that I killed two men long after the war was over. Well, maybe it was the twilight of the war. Maybe the war wasn’t over. Maybe it’s still not over.’

  Kern stood up. He grimaced and said he had some pain in his leg that was tormenting him. He made a remark about being told by people that pain and pleasure were the same thing. He wasn’t convinced. He smiled and walked over to an antique bureau, unlocked a small, carved door and searched around for something. He held his stick pinned against the bureau with his knee.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten your mother,’ he said.

  He came over and handed me a locket.

  ‘This used to belong to her. I think you should have it now. She gave it to me before she disappeared. I never saw her again. I had no idea where she went.’

  I looked at the locket for a while. Kern switched on a low table lamp so that I could see better.

  ‘She got it in France, I think.’ Then he stood looking out through the window into the dark, beyond the reflection of the interior, the table lamp, the furniture of his own living-room, as though he could actually see something out there, as though he could see right back to the Fichtel mountains, to the lake, and the woods.

  I handed the locket back towards him but he refused to take it back.

  ‘No. I want you to have it. I am glad you came. I wouldn’t like to have given it to anyone else.’

  He stood looking out of the window or at the reflection of the room. I stood beside him. It was as though the two of us were looking at each other in a mirror.

  ‘Am I German or American? Or Polish?’ I asked, suddenly.

  I regretted asking this almost as soon as I had said it.

  ‘You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I understand.’

  ‘I couldn’t answer that,’ he said, turning around. ‘I wouldn’t know. But it feels like talking to a son.’

  I could see that it was all beginning to upset him. His eyes had become watery. I could see how old he was now. He reached out his arm to place it around my shoulder and I helped him back to his chair.

  ‘Now tell me about Vermont,’ he said.

  He wanted to know everything. Every small detail. He asked me to tell him about myself, what I was doing. Where I was living. He saw that I was still holding the locket in my hand and told me to put it away before his daughter came back.

  There were further pauses as he took the whole picture of Bertha Sommer’s life into his memory. It was as though her life had been lived out in an hour, while we were talking. He had spent his whole life searching for her in his imagination. He had settled for vague explanations, imaginary versions of her life which he could live with. It was as though she had suddenly come back to him. He would have to change his whole life again. He had to adjust his past; everything.

  ‘You look like her,’ he said again, staring at me.

  42

  Germany was spectacular. The fields shone with new crops. The sun had become hotter and lifted the smells of the farms along the way. New-born calves leaped around their mothers on the green pastures.<
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  After Bayreuth, Bertha and Franz cycled into a flatter landscape, where the avenues and roads were alive with flies and bees and midges. Whenever they stopped, which was quite frequently, they often had to keep beating them off with their hands. Once again, they had slowed down the pace of their journey.

  In the villages, they were given small portions of food to help them on. Mostly bread. They bartered some of their jam. There was never enough because of the shortages everywhere. They were always hungry. Bertha had lost weight. But she was brown and glowing from the sun.

  They cycled for days. The more they cycled, the more the war and what happened to them in the Fichtel mountains receded into the past. They could even talk about it, occasionally, because talking helps you to forget, they thought. Occasionally, there was regret. Bertha thought it was wrong to have left the bodies uncovered in the woods. Maybe they should have been buried. Maybe somebody should have said a prayer over them. But she agreed that it was impossible, that they had had to leave quickly. And Franz kept reminding her that it was no crime, that it was an accident. They would be counted among the millions who died needlessly in the war.

  It couldn’t be helped. They agreed on that. And every time they agreed not to speak about it ever again. Let’s not talk about that any more. It’s over.

  The weather grew warmer all the time, and balmy. Sometimes it was oppressive. Sometimes Bertha’s navy dress clung to her after the cycling. She wished she could wash or bathe somewhere. Her soap had almost run out. Only a thin wafer of it was left, the size of a host. There wasn’t a bar of soap to be found in the whole of Germany, she thought. They stayed out most nights. Once or twice, they were put up and allowed to sleep on the floor in the villages or the farm-houses along the way.

  They were coming closer to Nuremberg all the time. There was no hurry now. Some of the days were so hot and clammy that it made travelling impossible. Without much food, proper sleep or any opportunity to wash, it was difficult to move much. And everywhere the air was still and thick. The country smells of cattle and grass and pigs and woodsmoke slowed things down even further. One morning a wind came up, a wonderful breeze swept across the fields, down from the Fichtel mountains which they had left far behind them.

  They should have known. It was followed by a very sudden thunderstorm which caught them both out in the open, in the middle of Germany, without a house in sight, or even a tree to shelter under. They got soaked. They stopped along the road and Bertha made some attempts to cover them both with her russet coat. But they were already soaked. And the rain was ruthless.

  It was a cool rain. They gave in to it and enjoyed the soaking. Bertha laughed. She hadn’t felt rain like this since she was a child. What they wanted to avoid became a luxury. Within twenty minutes, the sun was out again, raising the steam from the roads, drying everything almost as quickly as it had got wet.

  They walked down a lane and stopped at a field, high with corn. Bertha had to change, or dry her clothes. She was left with no choice but to take her dress off to dry it. All her other dresses were too tight for cycling. She berated the fashion that made clothes impossible for walking and moving about in. But then, she was determined to keep her good dresses intact.

  Franz found a secluded spot and flattened a square of young corn where Bertha could sit for a while under the sun and get dry. She sat in her underwear, in a white slip, her only good one left. The sun was so strong that her hair was dry within minutes; so dry that she had to loosen strands that had gone rigid.

  She felt the luxury of taking off her shoes, feeling the ribbed stems of corn under the soles of her feet. It was great to sit on anything other than a saddle. By now she hated cycling. She sat with her knees up, her hands holding her slip up over her knees. From where Franz stood, the sun illuminated her thighs through the slip; he tried not to look, keeping his eyes towards the road, to make sure nobody came. But the land was empty.

  ‘Franz,’ she called.

  He turned, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. She was holding something towards him.

  ‘I want you to have this, Franz. For saving my life.’

  ‘Oh no. I couldn’t take that from you.’

  ‘No, you must. I insist. I want you to have it. I want you to carry it with you. I want you to know how grateful I am to you, no matter what happens to us now.’

  ‘But nothing will happen to us now.’

  ‘I insist. I want you to keep this.’

  He took it. It would have offended her if he hadn’t. He sat beside her, thanked her, said there was nothing to thank him for because he would have done anything for her. She told him to put it away safely into his pocket and never to lose it. It was valuable. How much was impossible to say. The Reichmark was worth nothing. She said it was probably worth thousands of dollars. She was joking. They began to think in dollars as they kissed.

  They kissed and laughed. After a while, Bertha sat up for a moment to tell Franz something serious.

  ‘I want you to know, Franz, that you were the only man with me, ever.’

  She hesitated. She looked at the ground, at her feet on the straw stems of the corn.

  ‘I mean. There was nobody else…’

  She had difficulty saying what she meant to say.

  ‘Franz,’ she said, gathering courage, ‘what I meant to say was that you are the only man who has been inside me. Those men in the forest, they didn’t succeed. You rescued me in time.’

  Bertha blushed and looked away. Franz drew her towards him.

  ‘Bertha, don’t think about it. Bertha, mein Schatz. Let’s not say any more about it.’

  Bertha pushed him over. He lay on his back and pulled her down on top of him. It was easy to forget with Franz. He dissolved memories, evaporated them like the rain-water on the roads.

  ‘I’m not cycling another metre today,’ she said. ‘I refuse. I’m on strike.’

  Bertha giggled. She felt it was time to laugh again, and began to tickle him. She kept thinking what all this must look like from above. She had an aerial view of herself in the corner of a rectangular field, her blue pleated dress thrown over a hedge with arms stretched out like a sunbather. Her own bottom in the air, covered only by Franz’s strong, bronzed hands on her white skin.

  She was afraid of nothing.

  43

  It was Jürgen who called me for the funeral. He spoke very evenly as usual; his doctor’s voice.

  ‘I thought you would like to know,’ he said. ‘Alexander died yesterday evening. Anke and I would like it very much if you could come to the funeral.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it.’

  I didn’t ask him any questions. I felt it wasn’t appropriate over the phone or at that time, unless Jürgen volunteered. He didn’t. I assumed he had gone through with his plan and was protecting me from any involvement.

  ‘He died peacefully?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Jürgen answered briefly. It came like a full admission. He would say no more. He gave me the time of the funeral and said he looked forward to seeing me.

  I was on the Intercity once more, early in the morning, looking like a businessman. I don’t know what it is about funerals that is like a business. What I felt about Alexander was not the tragedy of his death, but his release from his pain. Maybe I thought of death as something like a trophy. I was sad for Anke, and sad for Jürgen. They were left with nothing.

  I don’t know why I attract so many businessmen on these train journeys. On my way to Münster for the funeral, I got talking to another man in a suit, who might equally have been going to a funeral had he not told me he was going to a meeting in Osnabrück. He was in cosmetics. They were branching into the East in a big way. That was what his meeting was going to be about. He had been chosen to take on the East.

  ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it. The Berlin Wall down. German unity. All this freedom. Europe is a new world.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I could hardly say otherw
ise, on the Intercity.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ he kept saying. Telling me where his company was planning its strategy. He was open about his joy. He went further, perhaps, than he should have gone, telling me trade secrets, things you would say only to a friend or a complete stranger. I could have been a commercial spy. The great new spy stories are all going to shift from political espionage into commercial espionage. New le Carrés. Maybe the famous Glienecke Bridge in Berlin will now be used to swap managers, planners or chemical engineers under cover of darkness.

  This businessman was so enthusiastic, he was almost drunk on progress. He talked about Berlin with great excitement.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said. ‘All the people who own property beside the Wall. Some of the worst districts up to now. And overnight…they became millionaires. And those people in the East, living in wooden houses along the outer border of West Berlin, their wooden shacks become priceless overnight, holiday homes. God knows what.’

  He invited me for coffee in the Speisewagen, where we sat at the table opposite each other. The white tablecloth bore the Intercity mark. Then he let me in on a personal secret. He wasn’t going to stay with his firm. He was going to make it on his own. It was the big chance.

  ‘Oh no. I’m not going to let it go by,’ he said. ‘My place is going to be Prague. Prague is the big one. Wait till you see.’

  He drew back. He wasn’t going to tell me what his scheme was. What exact business he had. in mind. But he said he had already been there five times since the Velvet Revolution. He was learning Czech like a maniac. He was waiting for the right moment.

  Münster was pouring rain. I got a taxi and remembered how Anke said it was one of the rainiest towns in Germany. I went straight to the church. I was there to see Anke arriving with Jürgen, surrounded by relatives. I had met Anke’s mother before and I also recognized Jürgen’s parents. Anke seemed calm, less solemn than I had imagined, though she wore a black dress. Must have bought it for the day. I’d never seen it before.