The Man from Berlin

by Luke McCallin

  Reinhardt could not help but smile at this little man with an apparently big heart. Small, bespectacled, he seemed so strong, so sure of himself. Was there ever a time when he had been like that? ‘Yes, I will take it.’ He paused. ‘Doctor, there is perhaps one more thing you might consider doing for me.’ Begović raised his eyebrows but said nothing. ‘There was a second man with Hendel. A man called Krause. I know this because he was Hendel’s partner in…’ He hesitated, not wanting to reveal Hendel as having been GFP, but then wondered what the point of hiding it was anymore. ‘Hendel was secret field police. Krause was his partner. He was the one Tomić said ran past him and into the fields. I need to find him.’

  ‘Why do you think we might be able to help?’

  ‘Because the soldier – Lieutenant Krause – is half Slovenian. He speaks the language. He’s been missing now since Saturday night. Deserters usually turn up fast, or they turn up dead. I’m willing to bet he’s gone to ground somewhere in the city. If you should hear of something, or if you could put the word out…’

  Begović tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. ‘You do know most people around here, finding a German soldier on the run, will either bar their door to him or do their best to do away with him.’

  ‘I know. But now you know he is GFP, and I’m pretty sure you would love to put your hands on him. I’ve just given you a reason to look for him, and one for keeping him alive.’

  Begović shrugged with his mouth – his lips pursed, his chin bunching up as his eyebrows lifted. ‘It’s possible.’ He looked at Simo, but if he was looking for help, or inspiration, he found none. The big man just stared back at him. Begović sighed, pushed his glasses up on his forehead, and pinched his nose. ‘Very well,’ he said, letting them drop back down, and there was the faintest of smiles on his mouth as he looked at Reinhardt. ‘If we find him we will find some way of letting you know.’

  ‘The coffee shop on Baščaršija. You can leave a message for me there.’

  ‘The old man who runs that shop has been there since my father’s day, and his father served coffee to my grandfather. Most of the city has drunk his coffee at one time or another, I would imagine. I would not lightly put that man at any risk and we would be doing that, you and I, if we tried to pass messages through there.’ He paused. ‘I will think of something and let you know.’

  There was a silence. ‘What now?’ asked Reinhardt.

  ‘Now, Simo will show you out. You may return to Baščaršija. Do what you like with the film.’

  ‘I meant you, Doctor,’ said Reinhardt. ‘What becomes of you? They are looking for you.’

  ‘Me? I can take care of myself. Didn’t I tell you this is my city? It does not belong to you. Or the Ustaše. It never will.’ Begović smiled. ‘I may have to move quietly for a bit, but I won’t need to stay in the shadows much longer, I think.’

  ‘You’re that confident, are you? Of defeating us.’ Begović only nodded. ‘And then what? How will you resolve all the differences between all of you? Between Serb and Croat and Muslim?’ He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them, felt them ring flat like argument for argument’s sake. He remembered his conversation with Lehmann, when he had taken the opposite tack, tried to convince him of the natural complexity that existed here, the history of coexistence that the wars seemed always to overshadow.

  ‘Ah, Captain. Almost, you disappoint me.’ Reinhardt flushed, embarrassed. ‘The differences? Yes, they exist. Show me a people without differences, and I will show you a land that existed before time. Before man, even. But did we ask for this war? Was it inevitable? Or were there those among us who took advantage of turmoil elsewhere to enact their vision of what this Yugoslavia should, or should not, be? War was brought to us. As it has been so often throughout our so-called bloody history.’

  ‘Even without war, isn’t there more that divides you as a people than unites you?’ Again, as he spoke them, Reinhardt felt the hollowness of the words. Argument for argument’s sake, just like with his son. As he said them, he wished them back.

  ‘Take Simo. He is a Serb. Or take Karlo, there,’ he gestured at the other man. ‘He’s a Croat. You might say there is much that would divide us all from each other. The religions of our parents. The cities of our birth. Our education. Our class. Perhaps, once, we would have faced each other across a field of battle. Them under their crosses, me under the crescent. Now, we are united in the search for something greater than all of us. That something is a new Yugoslavia. This time, Communism will unite it, sure as a return to our prewar parochialisms will destroy us again.’

  ‘That kind of idealism… it rarely survives the crucible of war.’

  ‘Or the realities of peace, you might add. You think I don’t know that?’

  ‘I don’t know what you know, Doctor.’

  ‘Then I will tell you something of what I know. I was born in Sarajevo into an old family of landowners. I was educated here, and in Zagreb, and in Berlin. I am a doctor. I am a Muslim. I am descended from men who converted to Islam following the Ottoman conquest for reasons we can guess at, but never truly know. The Ustaše call us Muslims the flower of their nation, and claim us for themselves so they may argue that Croats outnumber all other peoples. The Četniks call us interlopers, Turks, and would extinguish us from this land, and forget their forefathers settled here from Serbia to escape the Ottomans or to fight for the Austrians. I am a Partisan. What, if any, of those things defines me more than another? I say none of them, and all of them, and if anyone has to choose, it is me. I am what I chose to be, not what others want me to be. I am a Yugoslav. This is my land. I have nowhere else to go. That is a little of what I know.’

  ‘You talk to me of choices?’ said Reinhardt. ‘I only know that the choices life makes you take strip away the person we wanted to be. Builds us up into something we never wanted. Until you look back on life, and you see that the track of your life is a scar that hides what might have been.’

  Begović looked at him, his eyes focused, intent. ‘If we had more time we could talk, you and I. Of what happened to you, to make you this way…’

  ‘What made me this way? Life, I suppose. Choices.’ Reinhardt paused, looked down. ‘Maybe I would say everything good in my life happened to me despite me. And nothing bad happened that I should not have been strong enough to prevent.’

  ‘You are an interesting man, if I may say that.’ Begović gave the smallest shake of his head. ‘I don’t say what we hope for will be easy. We can but try.’

  ‘Well, good luck to you, even so.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain. And good luck to you as well. I think you will need it more than me. But I think,’ Begović said, smiling, ‘that the tree still shows life.’

  They rose to their feet. There was a sudden moment of awkwardness, and then Reinhardt extended his hand. ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor,’ he said, as they shook.

  ‘Captain Reinhardt will be leaving now, Simo. Please see him on his way.’ Begović stepped back and looked at Reinhardt again. ‘Until we meet again,’ he said as Reinhardt walked past Karlo’s flat gaze.

  At the door onto the street, Simo handed Reinhardt back his pistol, then the magazine. He shut the door behind them, then pointed down the street, the way Reinhardt had come. ‘Here,’ he said, handing Reinhardt a small brass shell casing, carved into the shape of a minaret. ‘You came to buy something. You bought that at the shop opposite the entrance to this alley. You understand?’

  Reinhardt nodded. ‘I understand. For if anyone asks.’

  ‘And if they ask, the man in the shop will tell anyone he sold it to you for three kuna.’

  Reinhardt nodded again. ‘Three? Cheap at the price,’ he said as he put it in his pocket.

  The ghost of a smile flickered across Simo’s face, and then he turned away and was gone. Reinhardt put the film case under his arm as he walked slowly back down the alley, pu
tting the magazine back in his pistol before he holstered it. As he came up to the exit to the little street, he saw across the road the man who had been the waiter at the coffee shop. The man was looking at him and made the smallest of motions to Reinhardt to stop. He looked left and right, then back at him and nodded, and then he was gone too, and Reinhardt stepped out of the alley into the sunshine.

  He walked quickly back to the coffee shop, feeling a lift in his step. Thallberg was not there. He glanced at his watch. He had been gone about forty-five minutes. He should be here. He put his head into the shop and asked the old man as best he could if he had seen him. The old man came squinting out from behind his row of blackened kettles, wiping his hands on a rag. The pair of them talked past each other for a moment, and then Reinhardt gave up. He smiled, patted the man on the arm, and went back outside. He looked around the square, looked at the film case, and then knew where he needed to go.

  27

  Padelin hammered on the door, short staccato bursts of three, until it finally opened. ‘Can you play this?’ Padelin said, showing the case of film to Jelić. He took the case, turned it over in his hands, and nodded. ‘Do it now,’ said Padelin, pushing past him into the studio.

  ‘Come in, make yourself at home,’ Jelić muttered under his breath. From the look on his face, it was clear Jelić had not expected them back. He pointed to the big table they had sat at earlier while he inserted the film in a projector and began making adjustments. Padelin sat at the table with his big hands folded one within the other, the knuckles stark and pale. Reinhardt shook a cigarette loose and stared at him. What was he thinking, he wondered. Was he frightened of what he would see, of seeing Marija Vukić in a way that he might have imagined but would never have thought possible?

  He felt Reinhardt looking at him and turned those flat, catlike eyes on him. ‘This had better be worth it,’ he said, again.

  ‘I think it will be,’ said Reinhardt, around a mouthful of smoke.

  ‘And you cannot tell me where you got it from?’

  ‘Not yet, no. I’m sorry.’ Padelin worked his mouth as if around something noxious.

  ‘Over there, on that screen,’ Jelić finally said as he switched off the lights and drew the curtains. A white light shone on the screen, then flickered grey and black, and an image juddered into life. It steadied into black and white and showed the bedroom in Vukić’s house, with the bed made up. There was no sound. In the mirror on the wall over the bed, they could see movement, reflected movement. Someone, two people, moving around in the living room.

  They came closer, into view, and it was Vukić and someone else. They stumbled from side to side, clutched in each other’s embrace. Vukić, and a man. Taller than her, a head of grey hair, almost white, close-cut. Big shoulders, big arms came into view as she pulled a white shirt from his back. He had a belly on him, this man, but it seemed he was made more of muscle and bone than fat. They came closer into view, turning and stumbling, and Reinhardt leaned towards the screen, trying to see. Trousers. If he was a general, he would have a stripe down his trousers. But nothing. He had taken them off elsewhere and stood with his backside bare towards the camera. Vukić turned him and pushed him down onto the bed. He bounced on it, shuffling himself excitedly up onto the pillows with his arms outstretched to her. With a thick mat of fur on his chest, with his thick arms and legs, he looked like a bear. He looked like the man in the photo from Hendel’s file.

  Vukić sauntered towards the end of the bed, with the faintest flicker of her eyes towards the hidden camera. She undid the back of her dress and let it slide to the floor. She stood clad only in her garters and belt, stood in such a way that they could see her in the other mirror, at the head of the bed. Reinhardt felt his breath go thick in his throat at the sight of her, and he could feel as much as see the man on the bed go still with desire. She lifted one knee onto the bed, then the other, sliding up and over and then astride him as if he were a horse, and she its rider.

  There followed then what seemed to Reinhardt to be an interminable blur of limbs and quivering flesh, and a shifting kaleidoscope of positions. They were not two people making love. Not even two humans having sex. They were two animals rutting. When it was finally over, the man was kneeling behind her, the line of his thighs and back taut with his pleasure, and his hands clamped around the flesh of her buttocks. He collapsed onto the bed next to her, his chest rising and falling, and she lowered herself to her stomach. After a while, he got up, passing in a blur of white in front of the camera, and returned with two glasses and a bottle of champagne. He poured, and they lay in bed, talking and drinking and smoking. Another period of time passed, and he rose from the bed again. Vukić lay there a moment, then stretched like a cat. She looked right at the camera, smiled, and rose from the bed. In the mirror on the other wall they saw her walk into the living room and out of the camera’s view.

  Reinhardt swallowed and let out a breath slowly. Padelin had sat still throughout the film, unbending, every line of his body screaming a kind of outraged severity. Now, it seemed as though there were a tremor deep inside him, a quiver that seemed to move from within to without.

  ‘There’s more,’ whispered Reinhardt. ‘There must be more.’

  More time went by. Reinhardt concentrated on the mirror, where it showed something of what was happening in the living room. Something lurched into view, a blurred scramble of grey and black and white in the doorway as reflected in the mirror. Movement suddenly erupted onto the screen, two people struggling arm in arm. Vukić and the man, half dressed. He ducked his head beneath the swing and clutch of her fingers, gripped her head in one hand, punched her with the other. He hammered at her with his fists, and she fell to the floor. He kicked her in the side, slammed his foot down on her back. He took her by the hair and dragged her up, twisted her around, and punched her once, twice, a third time. She went limp. He hit her again, and again, and then his fist paused, stayed raised. He let her go, and she collapsed backwards and rolled onto her back. The man struggled to his feet, one hand on his knee, the other raised to his face. His chest heaved, and then he stepped back and was gone.

  More time passed. Eventually, she stirred, hauled herself onto the bed, where she lay. Rolling onto one elbow, she pushed herself up and stumbled into the bathroom. She came out, holding a towel wadded to her mouth and leaning against the wall. She stumbled past the camera, into the living room, and was gone. The film ran on. In the mirror, Reinhardt could see movement from time to time. Probably her. Then it was over. The film juddered to a halt, and there was the clatter of the end of the reel going around and around on the projector.

  Reinhardt drew in a long, slow breath around the weight he found in his chest.

  ‘Picku materinu!’ grated Padelin.

  There was the strike of a match behind them. Jelić cleared his throat. Reinhardt had forgotten he was even there. ‘Now that,’ Jelić said, around a cigarette, a tremor in his voice, ‘is the Marija I remember.’

  Padelin rose from his seat in a calm eruption of energy. Reinhardt stayed staring at the screen as he heard Jelić’s yelp of protest, and the sound of Padelin’s hand, the open palm, and then the meatier thud of his fist. Blow after blow, Jelić’s cries fading into grunts, and then the ragged whimper of something broken, and then nothing. Through it all, Padelin made not a sound, and Reinhardt had eyes only for the screen, blank now. If the film could have run a little more he might have seen the end, her death, seen the man who wielded the knife. There was a part of him that felt this was all a show. A stage, and her the player, and as in a film she would rise from her bed when it was all over, show that it was all just theatre, fake, managed and directed by her.

  Eventually, he stood and turned. Jelić cowered in a corner, weeping quietly, his face a mask of blood. Reinhardt ran his eyes over the room, spotting a sink in a corner with a cupboard over the top. Opening it, he found a bottle of slivovitz. He poured a measur
e into a glass he found standing in the sink, knocking it back and wincing as it burned its way down. He poured another and took it over to Jelić. The man watched him coming like a dog that expects only its master’s boot, and only stared at the proffered glass through eyes that were already swelling shut. He finally took it with a quivering hand and turned into the corner with it.

  Padelin was nowhere to be seen, but Reinhardt spotted that the door was ajar, not shut. He looked at the projector, not knowing what to do with it. ‘Jelić,’ he called. The man ignored him, twisted inward with the glass resting on his broken lips. ‘Jelić,’ he said, sharper. The man looked up, screwing his head up and around to see through his swollen eyes. ‘The man on the film. Was that the one from Russia?’ He nodded, eventually. ‘Jelić. Can you take the film off, please?’ The man stared up at him with his head canted sideways. ‘The film. Please take it off.’

  Jelić swallowed slowly, then rose to his feet. He flinched, a hand going to his chest as if to keep something in, and shuffled over to the projector. He flipped switches and clips and detached the case of film. He handed it to Reinhardt without a word and went back to his corner, folding himself into it and around the glass. Reinhardt watched him for a moment, then turned and left, knowing words were unnecessary, and wholly inadequate to whatever pain Jelić felt.