‘You can’t. I mean, you don’t have to. I’ve been trying so hard to see things your way. I’ve been attending the groups with the Reverend Schäufele, you know that. I like his style I really do. His take on theology and philosophy is getting through. It really is.’
‘Woh, woh, woh!’ Max held up his hands in surrender. ‘It’s OK, I’m not going away because of you,’ he smiled and took both her wringing hands in his.
‘Well, where are you going then?’
‘To the front. I’ve been ordered to join the campaign against France.’
‘The what?’
‘The front…’
‘I heard what you said,’ she snapped, ‘and exactly how is that OK?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said throwing himself in the armchair, ‘Me going off to defend the nation against the Bolshevist sympathisers.’
‘That’s not funny, Max,’ she said feeling the need to pull the bread back out of the cupboard and chew on it furiously.
‘I’m sorry,’ he patted the arm of the chair. She didn’t go to him. ‘It’s not like I have a choice anyway. And I’m not really fighting. I’m going to take care of the wounded. Whatever we believe, you can’t deny that there will be hundreds of injured soldiers needing our help.’
The war had been raging around the borders of their country for nearly a year, but, apart from forcing them to choose another university to carry on their studies, it hadn’t really touched them. Erika could think of it as an old Nordic battle – like the ones she used to tell her girls in the Youth camps – where other types of Germans, mythical ones, fought and worked on behalf of the ordinary German, like her, like Max, who were busy building the future of their new nation through the sharpening of their intellects, through the acquiring of knowledge. They would be doctors who could heal the sick, the TB and cholera sufferers, deliver babies, set broken bones even. But to patch up soldiers pierced with bullets, shattered by landmines, broken wilfully by other human beings – that wasn’t part of her plan. She was writing a dissertation on the biochemical valency of amino acids in loaves of wholemeal bread for God’s sake! Every day she had to weigh the six rats in the lab in a shoebox, feed them wholemeal bread treated with amino acids, and then analyse their faeces and urine. Every now and then, a rat would escape and Erika would have to go hunting around the lab for it, but that was about as dramatic as life got for her these days and that was the way she liked it, thank you very much!
‘Will it be dangerous?’ she asked with all the naivety she could muster.
‘Well, I’m sure it will be more dangerous for the poor bastards with guns being shot at by the French. Besides, I’ll have big bad Edgar to look after me.’
‘He’s going to?’
‘Yes.’
It was April. She always hated April from then on.
When she saw them in their uniforms she felt a rush of blood through her body which she’d always expected was reserved for her wedding day. The wedding somewhere in the future where the groom was Max and the best man was Edgar. They looked so handsome in their thigh-length boots, their brass buttoned tunics, majestically detailed on the shoulders and collar in gold, and their dramatically lofty peaked caps. But there was something about them that had her stomach churning. And though she knew the mechanics of that was just the production of adrenalin causing a reduction in blood flow to the stomach in order to send more blood to the muscles, she could not immediately identify what it was about them that made her endocrine system produce this flight or fight chemical in the first place.
‘Take care,’ she ordered Edgar, ‘of him and you. And if you come back dead, I’ll kill you’.
Fifteen words. Most of which made no sense. And yet they said it all.
None for Max. But she hoped her embrace would be more eloquent. With her face buried in his neck she drew long and hard on his scent and was angered by the smell of the new uniform adulterating her drug.
She pulled away and realised how her eyes were constantly drawn to the Wehrmachtsadler on their chests and on their caps, the emblem of the National Socialists – her party – the swastika in the claws of the eagle, boastfully showing off its great wingspan. She should have been proud to see them sporting this symbol. But all she could see was the bird of prey circling in the skies before her and Hans, as they sat on Walmendinger Horn, moments before she… he fell to his death.
‘Come on, Erika, we have to go,’ Max said.
‘Come on, Erika, we have to go,’ Karl said, ‘We’re here. We’re at Bernried. We made it.’
As she hurried her half-sleeping self off the train Erika clutched the scrap of paper in her hand the way a baby does an adult finger and it was only as she stood outside the station waiting for Karl to find something on which to drag her luggage all the way home, that she unfurled her hand and the paper within which read:
Changed at Böhmisch-Leina, didn’t want to wake you. Such a pleasure. Another time I hope.
She cherished the words from Benjamin as she would have done a note from Max, because here she was six months without a word. Was he alive or dead? Was he suffering? Had he been bowled over by someone new, one of those nurses or prostitutes even? She felt an instant connection to Benjamin. They had passed some delightful hours in conversation considering the circumstances. Had she missed out on the chance of knowing him further, if her husband turned cad? Another time, he hoped. How would they ever find each other again to have another time in this vast disintegrating country? Max a cad? How ridiculous a thought was that? Of all the men least likely to misbehave, Max was top of the list. Then where the hell was he?
Karl appeared slipping about in the grey slush of old snow pulling a small handcart.
‘Quick,’ he panted, ‘Let’s get all your luggage onto here. That way I can pull it home.’
‘Where did you get this?’ Erika asked as they filled it with her luggage.
‘Oh, I, er, found it,’ he mumbled before almost shouting out, ‘We made it! We made it, Erika! For a moment there I thought we never would. Thank God, eh? Thank God.’
Through her aching muscles and cramping womb she managed to appreciate the wonder that was her father-in-law, who, having spent days travelling to meet her then hauled Erika and her cursed luggage all the way back across the country with his crippled hand purely to keep her and her child safe, give them both the best chance of life in this dying nation. Edgar had once said rather mischievously that if you wanted to see what your spouse would be like in the future you only had to look to their parents. She was doing just that right now and feeling more convinced than ever that she had married the right man.
‘Yes, thank God,’ she said screwing up the scrap of paper and letting it fall into the sleet which within seconds had blotted the words into an unintelligible smudge the shape of a distant memory.
When word spread that no Ivan would ever set foot in the hospital for fear of catching something, sick prisoners began arriving not just with their ailments but usually with an electronic component or a tool stolen from the cement factory, or spent rifle cartridges stuffed with oats from the stables which were meant to feed the horses. The space beneath the beds in the hospital became storage for all manner of booty and Max had no fear that it would ever be discovered. Here, fifteen feet out in the Barents Sea, a prisoner was king of his own little plot of freedom, albeit a dark, freezing, infected, isolated plot of freedom.
Edgar watched as two of his young patients sat by the fireplace. One, who had sawn through his thigh instead of the tree he was supposed to be cutting down, was bashing some of those cartridges of oats until he’d made a powder from which the chaff could easily be blown away. Left with the grey flowers, he cooked them over the fire in a tin can with some water and salt.
‘I’m glad we’re not vets,’ Edgar said, his stomach growling.
‘What makes you say that?’ Max was distracted by the Wanzen infesting every bit of degraded skin on the dying captain he leant over, no matter how
often he tried to clean the bugs away.
‘Well those horses will be in a terrible way before long since the men are stealing all their oats.’
‘Ivan doesn’t mind,’ the private in the bed next to the infested captain piped up. ‘When the horses collapse they slaughter them and share the meat around.’
Even the thought of such a precious delicacy as horsemeat could not get Max salivating given his current view of maggot-ridden human flesh. Edgar on the other hand had his eye on some of that gruel being prepared on the fire.
‘Hey, Peter, what are you doing?’ he said to the patient who was merely observing the cooking.
‘Nothing,’ Peter said quite accurately.
‘What have we told you about warming your feet on the fireplace?’
‘Ah, come on, doctor, my toes are like ice,’ Peter groaned his eyes fixed on the soon to be ready porridge.
‘Actually your toes are on fire,’ Edgar sighed rather annoyed that he would now have to wait for a taste of that porridge since for the next few minutes he would be dealing with Peter’s toes again, so necrotic from the frostbite that he could not even feel the flames take hold.
‘Shit!’ Peter seemed to forget about porridge for a moment. ‘Do something!’
‘I will do something, I’ll chuck you out of this hospital if you keep refusing to listen to medical advice.’ Edgar hurried as fast as he could on that rink of a floor, and brought a bowl of fresh snow for Peter to dunk his smouldering purple toes into, his cement bag socks having fallen away in cinders already. ‘Good job there’s no shortage of this stuff round here,’ Edgar pouted. ‘Frostbite or burns the prescription is the same anyway: snow.’
A howl outside on the shore had everyone in the hospital thinking there were wolves attacking until Max, having peered out into the perennial gloom, called over to his colleague, ‘Ed, it seems we have a new arrival.’
The two doctors ran out across the bridge to where the Russian guards had dumped the prisoner who was writhing in the gravel, his trousers around his ankles and his legs and shirt bathed in blood so bright red it seemed to be the only colour in this otherwise monochrome world.
‘Can you tell us your name?’
‘Dieter,’ the man cried, ‘my name is Dieter and you have to help me, please’.
‘What happened, Dieter? Where is all this blood from?’
‘OW, it hurts so mu-OW, you have to help m-OW. You have to save it.’
As Bubi sprinted out of the hospital with a stretcher the medics examined the exposed legs and eventually, despite the lack of lighting, focused on the source of Dieter’s haemorrhaging.
With a mixture of horror, wonder and a deeply suppressed urge to laugh Edgar declared, ‘His penis has exploded.’
After a roof-raising amount of howling, a huge amount of wound packing and the application of a few vascular clamps made from parts of a wire fence by an ex-engineer from Heidelberg, who slept in the bunk next to Max, Dieter was a lot calmer.
‘So how did this happen?’ Max asked, trying hard not to be entertained by the sheer novelty of the situation. After all, this was something he had never encountered before and made a stark contrast to the endless stream of typhoid, yellow fever, frostbite and lacerations.
‘I work at the factory that makes cement bags.’
Max made a grateful sound – after all, most men nowadays had an extra layer of clothing made from some of those stolen cement bags.
‘And we discovered recently that the Russian electricians that fix the machines when they break down get paid a good overtime rate. The more the machines break down, the more overtime they have to do, the happier they are. So we struck a deal with them. We would make the machines fail and they would give us some bread in return for all that overtime.’
‘Some bread,’ Max mused looking at Dieter’s lips cracked and swollen with scurvy. You need more than bread. We all do, he thought. ‘And how do you make the machines fail, short of ripping out wires which I guess the guards would soon get wise to?’
‘Exactly. That was too obvious. So that’s where my secret weapon came in. See, I have this weird ability to piss quite a distance, so I could stand out of sight and piss into the machine causing it to short circuit.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. It was all going so well for weeks. And then this afternoon – boom – it kind of backfired.’
‘So I see,’ Max chewed at his own vitamin deficient lips for a moment then called out, ‘Peter, when you were working in the woods…’
‘Before he mistook his thigh for a tree trunk, you mean,’ Edgar couldn’t resist.
‘Thank you!’ Peter, toes no longer aflame, stuck out his tongue at Edgar and then gave Max his full attention, ‘Yes, Dr Portner?’
Dr Portner continued, ‘You must be surrounded by conifers, are you not?’
‘Of course.’
‘Pine needles everywhere then?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And do you see any berries growing?’
‘Those little red ones.’
‘Cranberries?’
‘I think so.’
On his way back to the barracks that night Max stopped at the kitchens to sweet talk the cooks into letting him have a couple of the empty barrels that had contained salted fish. Like the kitchen staff in Hunsfeld, they were more than happy to have the doctors keeping a special eye on their health, so Max arrived back at the barracks with two barrels which he set up by the door, announcing to all the men that whenever they worked in the forest they were now obliged to bring back a pocket full of pine needles, dumping them in one barrel where they would infuse with water, and a pocket full of cranberries, dumping them in the other. Then before leaving the barracks every morning each man was to take a drink of the pine needle water and munch on a handful of berries thereby preventing them all from getting sick with scurvy.
‘And keeping our sickness figures down, you genius.’ Edgar playfully prodded Max from his bunk below. ‘How did you even know pine needles were a good source of vitamin C?’
‘I don’t know, I seem to remember reading something about it in a book I picked up in the monastery back in Breslau,’ Max said to the damp wooden roof above him where scenes of crashing planes, being bombed, treating sexually transmitted diseases to prostitutes in convents and retrieving dismembered bodies from candlelit airfields flickered among the shadows like a perverse kind of idyll compared to his current reality. He turned his head on the pillow to the left and then the right. Like being in the house of mirrors at Freiburg funfair, his own image repeated hundreds of times stretched off into the distance both ways, hundreds of “sleeping” men whose sleep could only ever be described in inverted commas up here in the draughty upper bunks. He took a handful of earth from his own little collection and stuffed it into some of the particularly offensive gaps between the logs in the wall. He knew the wind or the rain would have washed his makeshift mortar away by the morning, but that didn’t stop him reapplying it every night. For now at least.
‘Hey, Dr Portner.’ It was Paul, his head and shoulders just rising above the edge of the bunk. In the half-light from the two fireplaces at each end of the hut, Paul’s clavicles resembled wire coat hangers on which someone had hung an old skin suit.
‘Hello, Paul, how’s the hand doing?’
Paul held the nicely healing stumps on his left hand up for inspection. ‘I guess my chances of a glittering career as a concert pianist are somewhat reduced now, but otherwise everything’s fine,’ he grinned. ‘In fact,’ he brought his face close to Max and whispered, ‘everything’s more than fine. I was just coming to say thanks for saving my life and goodbye’.
‘Goodbye?’
‘Yes. I’m being released tomorrow.’
‘Released?’
‘Yes. Deggendorf here I come!’
‘But how?’ Max tried to sound happy for Paul and suffocate the rising envy by letting his face sink into his grimy emaciated pillow as they talked.
‘Well, I’ve been here a long time now. You know I was here way before you lot arrived. And in the end I realised if you start making all the right pro-communist sounds for long enough they start to believe you, think you’re converted. So I just wanted to say thanks for looking after me so well and if I can return the favour in any way, ever, you just let me know, OK?’
‘OK,’ Max whispered, sitting himself up at last so he could shake Paul’s hand, the intact one, vigorously to demonstrate the goodwill he couldn’t articulate in words right then.
Max watched Paul saunter back to his bunk – it was the relaxed walk of one who knows his awful circumstances are about to be reversed for ever, which makes the awful something almost to be savoured for once. Max grabbed a little more dirt from his stash and punched it into a taunting gap in the wall. Would he still have the energy to do this every night if he had been here as long as Paul, he wondered? Would he still have the resourcefulness and desire to help his patients after so long, after losing so many to such usually curable ailments? Paul was free to go. That should have given him hope, but it just made him conscious of how long he had been away from home.
Tick tick tick tick.
He searched among the shadows in the roof for images of Erika. He saw slender eyebrows and a petite hourglass figure and realised he was seeing parts of Jenny. The last female he had seen, the most recent in his memory. He had learnt so much about the body and the brain, its millions of neurological pathways and synaptic connections, but only now was he able to offer a hypothesis from his own experience that there may only be a limited space for memories, and that older memories were ousted by the newer ones, whether we wanted them to be or not. He was losing the feeling of her fingers woven with his beneath the blanket. He was losing the smell of her hair on the pillow. He was losing the shape of her neck which that sapphire blue dress had accentuated so well. He could blink images of her onto the backs of his eyelids like old photos, but he was losing the essence of her and he was furious. After everything they had gone through to cement their bond. After everything she had gone through to shift her faith. It had been more than a year since he had seen her. He clawed at the hole in his mattress and fished out the part of her letter he had kept from the Russians on the train the day Tim had been killed. He mouthed her phrases and diction; it helped him hear her voice again. Around the disembodied voice he tried to build her body, but instead he saw a black-skinned woman. A Madonna in fact. In a stained, warped picture. And found himself feeling under his blanket into his trouser pocket where there was nothing but that bloody cheap watch from Freiburg market.
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