Fifteen Words
Page 24
Voices downstairs disturbed her tussled thoughts. Karl’s voice. Martha’s voice. And a man’s voice. The voices were raised to a degree of animation, excitement, commotion even. Despite the fear that told her to hide away up here in the attic, she found herself checking her appearance briefly in the mirror before hurrying downstairs. She had to hurry, as there might still be time, she realised, to stop him saying anything stupid to her in-laws.
In the ever-fluctuating intensity of light emitted from the bulbs which dangled from the beams of the hospital, Max, having completed his rounds, pored over the papers on his desk with such absorption one might have assumed he was auditing the sickness figures or checking the stock levels. But in fact he was still trying to concentrate everything his heart and mind had to communicate to Erika into fifteen words – and with more urgency now than ever since Eva’s letter to Horst had Max itching with paranoia. After yet another growl of frustration and the furious scratching of his pencil over an unsatisfactory attempt, Edgar appeared at his shoulder.
‘Think of it like a song, buddy.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Despite the crossings-out, Max instinctively put his hand over the page self-consciously.
‘Think of it like swing,’ he said clicking his fingers to the tune in his head.
‘Swing.’
‘Yeah. And think of a full length letter like an opera.’
Max loved the opera. Well, Erika loved the opera and she had taken Max on a few occasions after which he was hooked himself. It was one of the things he missed most about being in prison here. He had not yet become as enamoured with swing music as his best friend.
‘You see, that’s one reason – I think – why the Nazis had such a problem with swing. It is a threat to classical music because, in just a three minute song, it can take the spirit to heights an opera takes three hours to reach.’
Max looked at his bohemian friend suspiciously and said, ‘But don’t tell me you don’t appreciate classical music now. You played organ in the church for God’s sake. You were the first one to buy a ticket for Madame Butterfly or Carmen when they came to town.’
‘Uh!’ Edgar slapped a hand over his heart, ‘Carmen – such a triumph of melody and orchestration. And as for that fiery gypsy. Enough to turn a homo hetero.’
Max had to smile.
‘No, I love classical music, but the Nazis were probably worried if everyone fell in love with the music of the nigger,’ he mouthed the word with pantomime disgust, ‘and fell out of love with the interminable racist rants of Wagner and the likes, then the country would go to pot. And we know better than most where that policy got us, don’t we.’
Max removed his hand from the page and examined the clouds of graphite he had scratched there.
‘A song, you say?’
‘Exactly. Right now you need to think like a swing musician.’
‘But I don’t exactly have the music of Vince Lopez and his Smooth Swing Orchestra behind me to elevate the words, do I?’
‘Suave Swing Orchestra.’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s Vince Lopez and his Suave Swing Orchestra. Not Smooth Swing Orchestra,’ Edgar said with listless disapproval, before snapping back into his effervescent role as Max’s lyrical guru.
‘Well, think of yourself as a poet then.’
‘A poet.’
‘Yes, a poet,’ he cried. ‘Trim off all that unnecessary fat from the sentences chattering away in your little head and charge the remaining words with meaning to the utmost degree.’
‘But how?’ Max recalled watching with gaping awe as Reinhold Schneider took to the stage in the basement of The Golden Bear and recited his beautifully encrypted antiestablishment pieces.
‘Only those who pray may still be able
To stop the sword over our heads…’
Max felt the confluence of emotions again when these glorious opening lines accompanied Erika’s unreasonable stomp from the bar. He knew he had to follow her. He wanted to. He wanted her to be happy. He wasn’t happy if she wasn’t. But just a few more lines first. He had to hear a few more life affirming lines from the mouth of the poet himself before he went back to real – as yet uncertain – life outside The Golden Bear, in the streets where the Bächle trickled like tears on the face of the city.
‘Only those who pray may still be able
To stop the sword over our heads…’
There’s fifteen words there, Max counted, but I’m no Schneider, he told himself.
‘Think of the Japanese masters of haiku,’ Edgar was pontificating now. ‘In a mere seventeen syllables, or should I say on,’ he bowed, ‘they managed to capture the physical and spiritual world in a highly refined and conscious manner.’
‘Edgar,’ Max said from beneath unamused eyebrows.
‘No, you have to try. Come on.’ He nudged Max from the chair and took his place. Pencil poised, he thought for a moment then began to write:
Ice and unceasing snow
‘No that’s six syllables. It has to have three lines of five, seven, then five syllables.’
Ice and drift s of snow
‘There we go!’
Freeze my dreaming but every day
‘Well that’s eight syllables,’ Max pointed out, getting dragged into the game.
‘I know, I know.’
Freeze my dreams, but each day
‘Better,’ Edgar told himself sucking on the end of the pencil, ‘but too much cold, ice snow and freezing’.
‘And what’s this got to do with Erika anyway?’ Max grumbled.
‘You’ll see, you’ll see, give me a chance, old boy.’
A few more rejected words, much rapid counting of syllables and then finally Edgar recited his masterpiece:
Ice and drifts of snow
Blight my dreams yet Erika
Still I rise for you.
‘Uh!’ That hand was clamped to his breast again. ‘How’s that? And, one two three four five six… fifteen! It has fifteen words exactly. I’m a genius! Send that to her and melt her heart, mister. I’ve clearly missed my calling. I should have been a poet not a bloody doctor.’
‘I’ll attest to that,’ groaned the prisoner in the nearest bed who’d had to endure irrigation of the gaping ulcers on his leg by Edgar that afternoon.
Unlike his patient, Edgar was back on his feet, admiring the words on the desk as if it were a painting in the Louvre.
‘It’s… lovely, er, I think,’ Max sighed, ‘but it’s not me, is it? I mean, she’ll wonder who the hell wrote this. Think it’s a prank or something.’
‘A prank? A prank?’ Edgar squeaked. ‘Erika appreciates literature. She would see the craftsmanship in this even if you can’t.’ And he stomped off to pointlessly poke the fire.
Max sat staring at the flamboyance Edgar had left on the page until his eyes saw nothing, but his ears tuned into the ebb and flow of the waves on the shore outside; to all the memories they brought like bottles breaking on the stones and unfurling their messages to float on the surface of Max’s trance.
‘Take care,’ Erika had ordered Edgar before they left for the Rhine, ‘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.
I know it is not the same, but would you be my adopted brother, brother?
Fifteen words from his dear friend Horst sewed up a wound in his soul he thought could never be repaired when Sepp was killed.
My dear brave Max. May you never lose me again! With admiration always from Jenny.
Those fifteen words from Jenny were like a Christmas gift to a child when he discovered them many days after she’d written them, and he felt they gave the talismanic picture even more power to protect him from the rigours of life in Gegesha.
All prosaic indeed compared to Edgar’s outpouring, but Max knew exactly what he wanted to write to Erika now as he blinked himself back to the present and pressed his pen
cil into the page with a secret smile.
‘Max, Edgar!’ Bubi’s voice was so cracked with grief as he entered the room that Edgar dropped the poker and rushed over to the boy.
Max kept his eyes on the page, but the pencil had stopped after only one letter, a long confident L.
‘What is it, Bubi? What is it?’ Edgar hissed.
Max waited for the word that he both knew would come and prayed would never do so. In the ever fluctuating intensity of light emitted from the bulbs which dangled now from the beams of the hospital like little luminous nooses, Bubi said:
‘Horst.’
Transcription of covert recording made at Gegesha labour camp 16 June 1948.
Meeting commenced 0830hrs
Utkin (Colonel): Explain to me what happened.
Volkov (Sergeant): Yesterday afternoon, the afternoon of June 15th, I was alerted that a prisoner had escaped.
Utkin: How had he escaped?
Volkov: He was counted out of the gate in the morning but failed to return after his shift at the hospital.
Utkin: He’s a doctor then?
Volkov: Yes, one of them.
Utkin: How did you know he wasn’t tending to a patient somewhere; to one of our officers in town for example?
Volkov: This particular doctor never does go into town. I have personally seen to it that only the chief doctor is sent to treat our officers, sir. The medic in question is just his subordinate.
Utkin: That may be so, but where did you eventually find the doctor?
Volkov: The prisoner was caught up with on the road west of Pechenga heading for the border. He was spotted by our men at the checkpoint ducking off the road. I was already in pursuit at this time anticipating the prisoner’s move.
Utkin: How very insightful of you, sergeant. How did you know he was going to make a run for it?
Volkov: Well, he had just received some, er, devastating news from Germany. Sad really. His wife was marrying some other man apparently. I expected he might do something rash.
Utkin: So you were there when he was apprehended?
Volkov: Yes. I was radioed from the checkpoint. The prisoner was attempting to go cross country to avoid our vehicles, but our armoured car had no problem with the terrain and he was apprehended without further incident.
Utkin: Without further incident, you say? You are joking surely, sergeant?
Volkov: Well, without further incident until he attempted to grab at my pistol, sir, but luckily I got there first. That’s when there was a bit of a scuffle for it resulting in the gun going off.
Utkin: Going off?
Volkov: Yes, sir. The prisoner was shot.
Utkin: Did you attempt to treat his wounds?
Volkov: Of course, sir, but without a medic present there was only so much we could do.
Utkin: But there was a medic present wasn’t there, Sergeant?
Volkov: I beg your pardon sir, but there wasn’t.
Utkin: There was. And he was writhing about on the ground no doubt due to the bullet wound in his..?
Volkov: Oh, I see, in his stomach sir. It appeared to be in his stomach. Of course it was likely to be, what with the scuffle and everything. But it was difficult to tell, the light being what it was.
Utkin: It’s the middle of bloody June, Volkov, you can’t blame it on the dark this time.
Volkov: It was, erm, raining sir.
Utkin: [unintelligible] So now we’re one medic short in a camp already overrun with death and disease, where even our own men are dropping like flies.
Volkov: But he was trying to escape, trying to attack us, sir and so I simply—
Utkin: You simply went by the book as you always do, sergeant, right? Well, very well done. Very well done.
Volkov: Thank you, sir.
Utkin: Oh, get out!
Meeting adjourned 0840hrs.
Max saw his feet first. Two odd boots. One pretty worn, the other in great condition, the one he had given to Horst not that long ago. That was when he knew it was true. The unbelievable truth that his brother was dead. The body dumped at the bottom of the hill with all the others from the hospital. Except Horst hadn’t ever been treated in the hospital. He never stood a chance at surviving the bullet wound. And Max never stood a chance of trying to help him.
‘You stupid bloody idiot, Horst. Running away on your own like that. Without even telling me. Not that I would have let you go, of course, but at least if you had insisted I could have made sure you took… I don’t know… some things in case of emergenc—’ Max’s body was seized by spasms of grief.
He felt Edgar’s hand on his shoulder. Heard Bubi’s shivering lips utter, ‘Oh God,’ and tried to get a grip on himself as he always did when the boy was present. Not that Bubi was a sixteen-year-old boy anymore. Bubi was a twenty-year-old man, but Max still felt an overwhelming desire to protect him from grief and horror, and be a bastion of confidence and strength for him, which no boy should ever have to provide for himself. From Mrs Lagunov’s little Oleg to Bubi to his own daughter Netta, none of them had asked to be born and certainly not into a world as desecrated as this one. They owe us nothing, Max cried out inwardly. Not even after a lifetime of rearing them, when we are old and infirm can we demand they look after us in return. No compensation is great enough for what we did by bringing them here in the first place. The very least we selfish adults can do, Max riled at himself, is soften the blow of existence as much as possible.
As his weeping eyes took in the rest of his friend’s body and blinked at his face, Max realised what he was looking at was Horst, but not Horst. That was Horst’s face – despite the blue skin and frost on his eyebrows, which made him look aged, it was clearly his face. But it wasn’t him. Because his spirit had gone, hurrying back to wherever it had first been dragged from when he was conceived, and left the body unrecognisable.
To cocoon himself in the arms of his wife was the only thing that could even begin to ease the sting of his loss, yet he didn’t even have Erika’s body with him here, spirit or no spirit within it. How was he supposed to recognise her anymore, keep her in his mind? Every time he thought of her it was a struggle to see anything now. And he wondered if it was the same for her. She’s receding from view, he sobbed to himself, like the unscathed Germany did at the end of a tunnel as he watched from the back of a train passing into Romania. She was a voice on a radio, a radio that couldn’t be tuned. A ghost among the static. A face in a movie, a movie reel burnt in the bombing of the cinema where the audience slept in their seats with cherry red faces from carbon monoxide poisoning. Put the reel through the projector once more and some frames would have survived, but the images would flash across the screen too quickly to be identified, especially by an audience of suffocated corpses. The letters she wrote no longer got through. She waited invisibly for word from her vanishing husband.
He sat up on his bunk, clawed his stub of a pencil from the mattress and his as yet unwritten postcard from his bag and wrote his fifteen words to Erika at last:
I am in hell. There is no God. Live for the moment and forget me.
Edgar looked for hours at the empty bunk next to him and heard the scratching of the pencil above him. When Max finally stopped thrashing about and slept, Edgar got up and read the words on the postcard Max held to his chest in the light of the Midnight Sun burning through the rotting roof.
Erika burst into the living room to find him standing there facing Karl and Martha. She still knew so little about Rodrick. She didn’t even register as she almost slid down the stairs, that the third voice in the living room was far too trebly to be his. It was a man’s all right, but not the heavy lowing of her lover. Rather the gentle yapping of an old friend.
‘Babyface!’
Most of the apprehensions he’d had at seeing Erika again after all this time were blown away by the huff of relief that shot from her gaping mouth. And if any remained thereafter they were squeezed out of him by the arms she clamped so firmly around him.
‘What are you doing here?’ she squealed, releasing him for a moment so she could examine him. It was no surprise to Erika, or anyone else that knew his nickname, that the years had been kind to Kurt Bayer. He didn’t look any different from the last time she saw him in Freiburg and she couldn’t help a snort of envy, especially given the tut she’d just aimed at her own drawn reflection upstairs moments ago.
‘Kurt is staying just the other side of Dortmund,’ Karl beamed, delighted to have a male acquaintance of Erika’s in the house whom he didn’t consider a threat to the stability of his household or his absent son. ‘I was just saying the last time we saw him was probably on your wedding day.’
‘I think that’s probably true,’ Babyface said, just as he’d responded the first time Karl had said this minutes ago.
‘What an eventful day that was!’ Karl chuckled. ‘What with the goose and…’ He flushed and looked suddenly sad, ‘… and poor Franz.’
Martha put a hand on his arm to let him know she could take it from here and she did: ‘We had to beg, borrow and steal to make that wedding day a success, rationing being what it was at the time. It was quite some challenge, wasn’t it! But all worth it in the end, eh?’ She looked straight at Erika, as if daring her to disagree.
‘Oh, I remember it well. Great party. Great day. Good times,’ Babyface sighed.
Each of his short sentences seemed to bring the sun a degree lower behind the rooftops. The four of them stood trying to fill the growing silence with little coughs or chuckles until Martha said:
‘Well, I will make you two a nice cup of coffee as I’m sure you have so much to catch up on.’
‘Oh thank you, Mrs Portner, that’s very kind.’
‘No trouble,’ Karl said following his wife into the kitchen. ‘Make yourself at home. Any friend of Max and Erika’s is a friend of ours.’