‘Do you think you love me?’ he asked quietly.
‘What?’
‘You said you fell in love. Have you really?’
She was thrown for a moment. That wasn’t the question he was supposed to ask. That wasn’t the retaliation she expected. So she retraced her steps through the melee of the last few seconds but found it to be true. She had said she loved him. On top of that, increased production of neurotransmitters, of the kind Von Euler was proposing, had clearly caused her hands to sweat, her cheeks to flush, and her heart to race, as if she had smoked a whole cigarette by herself. And the production of the chemical enteramine, which some radical researchers had proposed was responsible for mood, was high in Erika; in very similar levels, in fact, to that found in some mentally ill patients. So she had to conclude that indeed she did love him.
‘Yes,’ she said sulkily, sensing a warm unexpected resolution to this battle.
But his answer came like an instant snow drift, deadening all sound and sensation: ‘And I love you too. Which means you’re going to have to convince me of your faith. Or I have to convince you of mine. Otherwise we’ll have to separate.’
‘You OK, guys?’ Horst, skipping over the Bächle, was crossing the street towards them. ‘Has anyone seen Edgar?’
Erika wagged her thumb loosely in the direction of the alley, but kept her eyes on Max as he hid his behind the refracting and reflecting lenses of his specs.
‘What’s he doing down there?’ Horst didn’t wait for an answer, but strode into the darkness calling out his friend’s name.
‘Jesus!’ Edgar’s voice came howling from the gloom.
‘Jesus yourself!’ Horst appeared again looking appalled.
As if he was a plunger, Horst appeared to have unblocked the alley and out poured Edgar buttoning his trousers and a very embarrassed looking first year psychology student wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Edgar roared, his voice ricocheting off the shop fronts and cobbles.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Horst matched him, as if his ambition was to be the incarnation of his friend’s echo.
‘Is a man not entitled to any privacy these days?’ Edgar almost grinned.
‘In his own home, certainly, but you’re in the middle of the bloody street, man.’
‘Well, I am now, thanks to you.’
The psychology student hurried back to the basement and dived into the more liberal waters below.
‘And let’s face it, Horst, your problem is not where I do it, is it? It’s who I do it with. Isn’t it?’
‘No, it is not, it’s just that I wish you’d use a little more discretion. For your sake. I’m worried about you.’
‘How touching.’
‘Mate, did you miss the Night of the Long Knives? The execution of Röhm because he was a homosexual? The bonfires of books from the Institute of Sex Research in the Opernplatz?’
‘That was nearly ten years ago. I was a kid. So were you. Times have changed.’
‘Yes, they have. They’ve got worse. Now it’s not just the homosexuals that are disappearing to God knows where, it’s the spastics, the Jews and the blacks, in fact it’s anyone who the Gestapo doesn’t like the look of. I don’t care who you do it with, just be careful who sees you, Edgar.’
A light went on in the flat above the cigar shop.
‘Down there,’ Edgar jabbed a finger at the alley, ‘no one could see us, but now you’ve opened your mouth it seems the whole city knows my business. Thanks a lot!’ He marched across the road and sank into the basement too.
‘Damn him!’ Horst followed him inside.
Erika and Max stood unable to look each other in the face now. After the bellowing of the boys the street seemed eerily quiet with just the muffled chatter from the inn and the water running through the Bächle sounding to Erika like something melting.
A mere four weeks they had spent at Hunsfeld. Much less time than it had taken to get there from Breslau. And now they were off again, all that bouncing about in the back of a truck had Max feeling nauseous and praying:
‘Please, God, can we just stay in one place for a change?!’
‘Be careful what you pray for,’ Edgar muttered. ‘I’m starting to believe our God might have a bit of a sick sense of humour.’
‘Perhaps they’re taking us home,’ Horst said, not believing it for a second, but hoping for some entertaining reactions from Edgar at least.
Nothing came.
When they finally stopped it wasn’t home. Not in the way Horst had meant anyway. It was a camp called Gegesha on the border between Russia and Eastern Finland. The centre piece of which was a long hut, a hundred metres long and thirty metres wide, Max guessed, made of wooden logs, of which two-thirds were below ground level. As they were herded towards this massive toadstool poking through the earth Max checked his five deutschmark watch.
Tick tick tick tick.
Perhaps the cheap piece of rubbish had finally given up the ghost. After all, it said midday and it was dark. He checked his quality pocket watch.
Midday too.
‘It seems we’re in the Arctic Circle, boys,’ he mumbled to his colleagues.
No special arrangements for the doctors and their little Polish protégé here. They were ordered to find a place with the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety six prisoners in the subterranean log hut on bunks with barely enough room to squeeze between them which meant you got to know the nocturnal habits of your neighbours all too well.
Max was cursed with a top bunk, which meant you were closer to the part of the hut that was above ground. On his first night he was pelted with razor-edged raindrops blown in by the raving winds through the gaps in the logs as he lay on his bunk trying in vain to get some sleep.
They were woken… No, not woken since most had not got to sleep yet. They were ordered out of their beds as usual before dawn… No, not dawn since they would not see the sun again for nearly five months. They were ordered out of their beds as usual at five o’clock in the morning and the medical team were instructed to follow a guard who spoke incredibly good German and was, Max, had to admit, strikingly good looking. Perhaps it was not just his chiselled faced, piercing blue eyes and blonde hair – an Aryan look which would have Hitler himself scratching at his black hair with confusion – but the sheer confidence that speaking the language of his captives so well gave him. There was not much it seemed that they could say when he was in earshot which he didn’t catch, which had rarely been the case so far with other guards.
As this guard led them through a gate in the perimeter fence, through which they would always be counted in and out by the sentries there, one of them hovering above in a lookout post, Tokarev trained on them, Max became aware of a sound he had not heard for many years. The sleeping dragon sound of the sea. Until that point he had no idea that Gegesha Camp was situated on the coast. But it was hardly the seaside of his summer holidays with Erika on Rügen Island; squinting in the primary coloured dazzle, the back of your throat warmed by the sun beaming in through your mouth agape with laughter and love. This new picture was scratched out in charcoals, backwashed in diesel coloured waves.
‘Welcome to your new camp hospital, gentlemen,’ the guard grinned.
A wooden walkway stretched from where they stood on the edge of the gravel shore fifteen metres to a single storey wooden structure standing on stilts out in the grey water.
‘This is their idea of quarantine, I suppose,’ Edgar sneered, not yet familiar with the need to curb his tongue around this linguistically gifted guard.
‘Yes it is,’ said the guard ushering them onto the bridge. He, however, stayed on shore as a vampire would stay out of the sun and Max realised it was the Russians’ fear of being contaminated with their captives’ diseases that had led them to build this ivory tower, the one place in the entire camp the prisoners could be free of Ivan.
Oh my, thought
Max, this place is going to be awfully popular when they find out.
The guard went on, ‘And you are expected to maintain the highest standards of clinical cleanliness here at all times.’
‘Well, I am sure we will be given the highest level of clinical resources to achieve that aim,’ Edgar said, this time fully intending the guard to hear and understand.
Max stepped onto the walkway feeling a little like he was walking the plank. The building ahead of him was about a tenth of the size of their barracks, so it was no surprise to hear that the Soviets thought it could house about a tenth of the number of men that the barracks could.
‘A maximum – and I stress this is a maximum not the norm – a maximum of nine percent of the camp’s population is permitted to be ill at any one time. The rest must be fit to work. Any more than nine percent and the doctor will be held responsible and he will be put in solitary confinement or sentenced to hard labour.’
Max assumed that meant him, the chief doctor. Horst wondered if it meant the doctor who admitted the patient who tipped the sickness figures into the red. They all decided right then to keep as close an eye on their admission figures as Ivan would be.
*
The hospital started filling up fast. With the usual diseases, cold-and labour-related injuries as well as a fair share of fakers who were expelled as quickly as possible as the sickness figures rose dangerously near the nine per cent mark. As Edgar’s sarcasm had foretold, the resources with which to achieve low sickness figures were very limited and any attempt at prevention as opposed to simply curing was seen by the Soviets as some kind of dissension among the doctors. But prevention was a must, not just to keep the figures below the magic number but to keep men from dying unnecessary and painful deaths.
‘How are those fingers today, Paul?’ Max’s question was almost rhetorical.
Paul’s index and middle finger on his left hand which had done him proud for all of his forty-six years so far were now, to Max, the colour of pain. His training, his exposure to the pulsing red soup inside us, meant to Max all the shades of red the body could produce were indications of life and the possibility of repair, but there was something about the majestically rich purple and green Paul’s frostbitten fingers were inflated with and the layers of skin like choux pastry which fringed them that was so far from the norm that Max could barely conceal his distaste. And it wasn’t an injury caused by another human being, caused by a man-made weapon tearing into flesh and bone, or even a piece of poorly maintained machinery cutting short a labourer’s career. It was simply nature telling him in big purple and green neon signs that this part of the world was no place for humans, no place for humans without the appropriate equipment anyway.
‘They don’t feel too bad today, doctor,’ Paul smiled prodding at the puffed up purple digits in a way which made Max wince. ‘In fact I just can’t feel them at all.’
‘Well, we’ve given it plenty of time to see if we can recover them.’
‘I’m not sure massaging them in snow and dunking them in cold water was ever going to help.’
‘I know it seems crazy when all you want to do is warm them up, but if you heat severe frostbite up too fast the damage will be even greater and the tissue will never be recoverable. But, having said that, it’s been weeks now, hasn’t it. I think it’s safe to say we’ve done all we can.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Well, now the non-viable tissue is clearly demarcated I think it’s time we removed the fingers before they become gangrenous and it spreads into the hand and the rest of your body.’
‘Oh, really?’
Paul was one of Max’s favourite patients. Even when you tell him you’re about to amputate his fingers he says oh really in the way a child does when he’s told he can’t go to see his favourite cousin due to the weather.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘When?’
‘Now. I mean, as soon as we’ve, er, prepared the instruments.’ Max glanced out towards the shore then shared an embarrassed look with Horst who was carefully weighing up half gram portions of aspirin from the half pound ration they had been given by the Russians. Aspirin for pain and coal for diarrhoea – that was the level of resources they were working with. They had nothing to use as anaesthetic and certainly no proper instruments for amputating fingers. Hence Max’s stalling.
‘Where’s Bubi?’ he hissed over Horst’s shoulder.
‘Perhaps he got caught.’
‘Oh no, surely not,’ Max bit at his cuticles imagining the worst for his new little friend and for all his frostbitten patients too.
‘The locksmith’s isn’t that far. It’s only on the other side of the…’
‘Dr Portner, sir!’ A breathless Bubi burst into the building.
‘Are you all right? Did you get it?’ Max led Bubi to a quiet corner by the fireplace.
‘Yes, yes,’ the lad said ferreting about in the lining at the back of his jacket where he had concealed the locksmith’s kind but contraband donation: a pair of well used pliers.
‘Excellent, well done, son. No one questioned you?’
‘No, I just told the guards I was running late this morning because I had the shits, and they said, well, you’re going to the right place then, aren’t you.’
Bubi laughed. Max almost did too, but his mind was already racing ahead in preparation for the surgery he was about to perform. He threw the metal pliers in the fire. That was as much sterilisation as they were going to get here. The highest standards of clinical cleanliness the dashing guard had insisted. Don’t make me laugh, Max thought. When he had asked for something to clean the hospital floor with he was told to chuck a bucket of water over it, which after a few minutes froze, producing a new clean surface, sure, but it had them all tottering about the place like novice ice skaters.
‘Horst, can you assist on this amputation please?’
‘Of course. Bubi, do you want to take over here for a while? I’ve done the aspirin. All you have to do is break up that lump of coal and grind it down into a fine powder.’
‘No problem,’ Bubi said as eagerly as ever, sitting down in front of the little black meteor on the table and grabbing the small crowbar next to it.
Max retrieved the pliers from the fire. Horst swept up a generous helping of aspirin and they both approached the patient’s bed.
‘OK, Paul,’ Max said as gently and apologetically as possible without losing the necessary confidence you would need to hear in the voice of the person about to hack off two of your fingers with a pair of pliers, ‘let’s do this, eh?’
‘You’re the boss,’ Paul chuckled weakly offering up his colourful hand whilst his feet wiggled around under the blanket in anticipation of the pain to come.
Bubi put the crowbar to the lump of coke and pushed down. Nothing. It was clearly going to need a little more force than that to break off a piece.
‘You can bite down on this if you like,’ Horst offered Paul a strip of leather, once part of the left boot of a previous patient, who no longer needed it.
Bubi found a solid looking lump of wood, part of the leg of a broken chair. It would make the perfect hammer.
‘We’re going to need more light,’ Max said stepping carefully across to the fireplace and lighting a small bunch of tapers in it. When he propped them up in an old tin can by Paul’s bed things were a little clearer.
‘They look like state of the art surgical implements!’ Paul nodded nervously at the pliers.
‘Only the best for you, Paul,’ Max smiled.
Bubi stood up to get a better angle on the coal, nearly slipped on the icy floor and sat down again.
‘OK. It’ll be over before you can count to three,’ Max said.
‘Good, coz I’ll only be able to count that far – on this hand anyway,’ Paul chuckled nervously.
‘OK, here we go.’
Bubi brought his improvised wooden hammer down on the crowbar—
CRACK
—and
a piece sheared off—
CRACK
—and another.
That was the hard part done. Now he could enjoy grinding it up into dust in the pestle and mortar. There was something so satisfying to him about doing this. He saw himself as the coal doctor, transforming something so abrasive and harsh into something so pleasant to the touch, and something that could heal too. Bubi was also becoming expert at blocking out the sound of human suffering.
‘I have to go away,’ he said when she opened the door. At first she didn’t register, she was too embarrassed about the possibility of him divining that the morsel of dry bread and small jar of Rhenish apple chutney, which sat on the box that doubled as a table, was all she could afford to dine on that night. Embarrassed that she had spent all her ample monthly allowance from her parents on a new dress. But who needed food when you had love? And she had not just bought this dress because it was so very delicious to her eye. She had intended that it would be to Max’s too. It was silk rayon with a heart-shaped neckline and a bow on the waist. Short sleeves with a shirred bust and bodice. But the most important feature of all was the colour. It was sapphire blue. When she saw the dress it was the colour that convinced her she had to have it. And that he would love it. She wore it to Mass one day and stared at the blue rose window over the altar throughout, hoping that Max would make the connection too.
She put the lid on the jar and stashed it in the cupboard with the bread, wiping the crumbs from the top of the box saying, ‘Just a little snack before I go to feed the rats in the lab. I get hungry watching them eat otherwise.’ She let out a rather limp laugh as his words settled on her cerebral cortex like snow. ‘What did you say?’
‘I have to go away.’
That’s what she thought he said.
He had to go away.
It wasn’t the first time he had to go away. He had to go away to Innsbruck in the spring term last year. In fact it was her idea. He had to go to get the best teaching in the country for physiological chemistry. She followed him. For the skiing. He’d had to go away to Freiburg when the war began and the University of Bonn decided to close because of it. She decided to go to Freiburg too. Edgar and Horst also in fact. And that was where they met Babyface. But there was something about the way he said he had to go away now which told her that, this time, going with him was not an option. She felt herself shaking, heard herself saying things like:
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