‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘You’ve heard the stories,’ she hissed. ‘Priests sexually abusing children in their congregations. Is that the alternative to National Socialism? Please!’
‘Resistance movements. Ha!’ the Gauleiter shrieked. ‘Medical students in universities around the country…’ Max, Babyface, Edgar and Horst suddenly stiffened as if the Gauleiter was talking directly at them. ‘Spoiled brats who foul their own nest while others are dying for them on the front. Their kind shamelessly abuse their privileges. They can study in wartime thanks to our money. The Treaty of Versailles gave us nothing but poverty, inflation and unemployment. Our Führer eliminated all that.’
Erika luxuriated in the boys’ silence and nodded along with the cap perched on the bald head in front of her. However, her stomach growled as if to contest the Gauleiter’s statement. She thought of her sparse, damp room, her box for a table, her meals of bread and jam. Then she thought of the money her parents sent each month, which allowed her to eat better, splash out a bit, for a week or two at least, yet she saw that allowance as she saw the fence around the villa when she was small.
‘Our daily worship is going to our workplaces to build the German nation. And our daily prayer is work for that nation.’
After rapturous applause for this final statement, the crowd dispersed. Max, Babyface, Edgar and Horst made for the café, hands shoved deep in their pockets, huddled together so tightly as they chattered away that to Erika they looked like a four-headed beast. She followed them nonetheless, until, that was, the bald man in the cap held her by the arm.
‘Can I help you?’ she said offended.
‘I think we can help each other. You’re from the university I suspect?’
‘I am,’ she said shoving her hands deep into her own pockets now.
‘A student of medicine?’
‘Yes,’ she said fingering a large hole in one pocket she hadn’t noticed before.
‘I completely agree with your thoughts on the church. I completely agree that the National Socialists are the solution for our nation. But even in your university the threat to all that is good is festering as we speak. However, I can eliminate it for you. As easy as wiping out an infestation of rodents. If you just supply me with the chemicals to do so, doctor!’
‘What chemicals do you mean exactly?’
‘A small amount of cyanide, the kind you students use every day for one experiment or another. That’s all.’
‘Oh… I don’t really use…’
‘A hundred Marks,’ he said shoving the cash into one purple pocket.
She didn’t dare look. She just rubbed the notes between her fingers as if she could count them that way. They felt warm after being in the bald man’s pocket.
‘You don’t have to worry about what I do with the stuff. Just see it as a simple purchase, which doesn’t only help you out financially, but helps the nation we both so love.’
As she hurried to the café she caressed the notes in her pocket and it was all she could do not to insist on buying everyone a round of schnapps to celebrate.
It was two o’clock in the morning when Max was dragged from his bed for interrogation. The first he knew of it was the collar of his shirt cutting into his neck as he was yanked onto the floor. In the struggle the entire bunk nearly toppled, waking Edgar below who shouted after them:
‘Where are you taking him? What are you doing, you bastards!’
Max had barely had chance to focus his bleary eyes on who was doing this to him, but his ears picked out Edgar’s words clearly enough. Not just because they were shrieked down the barracks after him, but because the fear in them was so new it penetrated even Max’s molested being. Long gone was the caustic wit and the sarcasm that had always been his armour; now his words were raw and naked, the words of someone that has lost so many friends. And when your family is your friends there is nothing left when the last one is taken too.
The two mute guards, whose orders it seemed were to drag Max so fast that he couldn’t find his footing, bore him like he and Edgar had done so many wounded soldiers from the churned up waters of the Rhine or the battered streets of Breslau, but when it finally came to set him down it was not gently onto a hospital cot – he was dumped with unnecessary force into a chair before a desk in an office which he had barely had occasion to set foot in since the day he arrived at Gegesha all those years ago.
Now more alert, but still spluttering from the way his shirt had been used as a leash, he tugged at his collar and found his watering eyes settling on the unlikely vision of a window box bursting with radishes, their ripe red heads just poking through the soil beneath a healthy little jungle of leaves above, making the most of the all night sunlight in this Arctic summer. Which of the officers that inhabited this building was nurturing little root vegetables and yet had no idea how to treat a human being? Max found the sight of the neat, well-tended window box hilarious in his tousled state and, as he watched the leaves leaning towards the sun, he knew that there couldn’t be a more perfect environment on the entire planet to break a human spirit: months and months of soul destroying darkness only to be followed by a short enticing spell of so much sun that you couldn’t sleep, before it ducked below the horizon again for another eight months. Then on the rimy edge of the world, the colourless sea stretching off into infinity, it was easy to feel abandoned by God and, when you had given up on God, feel abandoned by humanity. It was just surprising that the Russians deemed it appropriate to subject their own men to the same conditions and not expect them to break too, or go about breaking each other in response to such confounding circumstances.
Max shoved his eyes along from the radishes to find Sergeant Volkov standing to attention by the wall. Guarding the radishes, Max giggled inwardly, drunk on the pain inflicted on him so far and on the anticipation of more. No seriously, he told himself, if he’s standing like that, there must be a superior in the room. So he turned to look at the desk where Lieutenant Lagunov sat.
The lieutenant looked almost as dishevelled as Max felt, ragged as he was from still sharing that stinking flat and the one foul bed with three other families and their ever increasing broods. He had actually stopped taking his turn in the bed at night. It wasn’t worth the disruption to his hip-bruising sleep on the floor. Besides, just an hour in the sagging but soft bed was as tormenting to him as the brief Arctic summer was to Max.
Max thought about asking after Mrs Lagunov and little Oleg, to remind the soldier, if necessary, of the service he had been to his family in case it would help mitigate his plight – whatever his plight was – but since the lieutenant looked as unprepared to be here at this hour as Max, he thought better of it. Still slumped in his chair, hardly moving his lips, the interrogator began:
‘Gunther Jordan.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ Max’s question was a genuine one. He could have sworn Lagunov had just uttered the name of Erika’s father, but he must have been mistaken. This is what such sehnsucht did to a man’s brain, Max reasoned. He was hearing things now. His mind was making any little connection to Erika it could from the most tenuous of links.
‘Gunther Jordan. I know you know the man. So how about you tell me all of his movements since the war began.’
‘It is true I know the man,’ Max chose his words carefully, just in case they didn’t know the man was his father-in-law. He was suddenly terrified that something bad was going to happen to Erika because of this. ‘But how could I know much about his movements since I’ve been stuck here for the past four years?’
‘But before that you were in Germany. We picked you up in Breslau, I believe.’
‘You did but my… everyone I knew…’ He had a feeling they knew all about his family already but nevertheless he refused to acknowledge his relationship to Gunther yet and tempered his description of their location. ‘… everyone I knew was over the other side of the country. I rarely heard from them thanks to your guns blowing o
ur planes out of the sky’. Max knew he had snapped a little too soon, but the image of those remnants of letters snowing down on him from clouds of smoke and flame, of all that affection, that effort to connect ripped up and scattered to the wind by a few dumb artillery shells, pushed a button in him.
Lagunov barely had the energy to be riled by this, but he did sit up a little before saying, ‘So tell me what you do know from those rare occasions you heard from or about him.’
Max saw a great threat in the soldier’s little movement. Lagunov wasn’t at home now among the kids and the women, the pregnancy and the illness, where he was constantly out of his depth; he was here in his office where the rules and the pecking order were as clear as the Arctic air.
‘I know that he spent time in Greece in the early part of the war, then some time in ’44 he went to serve as an officer in Caucasus,’ he said recalling Gunther’s boasts directed at his own papa the last time he saw them both at his wedding. ‘Apart from that I know nothing about him or his movements.’
Lagunov shifted again, always in short, slight moves – a pawn on a chessboard. Now he was leaning forward slightly. ‘I think you saw our radishes over there. I am more than happy to give you some if you just tell me what I need to know.’
Radishes! Were times so hard, Max thought, that he would sell his own father-in-law down the river for a handful of root vegetables?
But nevertheless Max’s mouth went about trying to imagine the peppery burst those little red bulbs would make in his mouth when bitten, but it was so long since it had consumed something of such flavour it was struggling to recreate the effect. Meanwhile Max’s eyes were mesmerised by the warming steam rising from the cup on the desk, which was devoid of anything else except Lagunov’s peaked cap and an enormous bunch of keys so big it must have opened every single lock in the entire camp and beyond.
‘I would love some radishes, sir,’ Max eventually said in utter earnestness, ‘but I honestly do not know more than I’ve told you already’.
He heard the scuff of Volkov’s boots on the wooden floor behind him, saw Lagunov’s eyes dart up over his head, then nothing. Nothing happened for a while, except Max became aware of how hot it was in this office. So much hotter than any room he had ever been in during the last four years.
‘Gunther Jordan is being detained in one of our other labour camps, you know.’
Max didn’t know and Lagunov could see this from the way his prisoner’s face twitched at the news. ‘He’s been sentenced to twenty-five years hard labour.’
Twenty-five years! Max reeled, not just at the possibility of staying here in Gegesha for another twenty-one years, but at the fact that poor Erika must now be dealing with losing her father as well as her husband to the war.
Lagunov continued, ‘I know Gunther Jordan is a relation of yours—’
‘You’re right,’ Max cut in reasoning that he should quickly offer up more information on his relationship to Gunther, even though it was clear now they already knew about it, but at least it would look like he was being cooperative if he told them before they told him. ‘He is a relation of mine, in fact he’s my wife’s father, but we have never been particularly close and I don’t know much about what he gets up to. However,’ he added with a bitter sarcasm he seemed to have inherited from Edgar, ‘if perhaps you’d allow me to write to my wife using more than fifteen bloody words, I could ask her to enlighten you’.
The boots behind him were on the move again, but this time Lagunov chose not to impede their progress across the room with his tired eyes and a second later Volkov’s hands were clamped around Max’s neck forcing his head down to his knees.
‘You know more, Portner. You know where he was during the war and you’re going to tell us.’
Volkov had come to be synonymous among the men with brutality but his filthy murderous hands on Max’s skin now, after what he’d heard about Horst’s demise, was too much for him to bear. He twisted himself out of Volkov’s grip and stood up facing the sergeant spitting the words, ‘But then, Lieutenant, you’d have to make sure your sergeant let my wife’s reply through otherwise you’ll never get the information you want. You see, he has a tendency to confiscate letters and murder prisoners too, did you kn—?’
Volkov grabbed Max with both hands at the back of his neck and yanked him down towards the ground bringing his knee up to Max’s face as he fell.
Max heard himself squeal with pain and Volkov hiss. ‘Don’t forget your place, you Nazi cockroach. You’re in my Empire now and you will tell us what we want to know.’
There was a jangling and scraping above as that huge bunch of keys on the desk was grabbed and brought down on Max’s head.
‘Tell us the truth!’
Ch-mp.
‘Tell us the truth!’
Ch-mp.
‘Tell us!’
Ch-mp, ‘Tell us!’ Ch-mp, ch-mp. The keys bit into the ball of human on the ground.
Max had put his hands over his head until they curled up, bruised and bleeding. Then only his skull was left to protect him from death as the keys thumped into him again and again. The barracks key, the office key, the solitary key, the kitchen key, the key to the storerooms, the key to the locksmith’s workshop, the key to the armoured car, the key to the main gate, the keys to freedom – that’s what each and every one of them were. Where once he thought the guards brandished them to keep him captive, now he realised that all together and wielded like a multi-headed mace, rapped over his head until his skull caved in, they were in fact the keys to freedom, because death was the only road to freedom now.
Somewhere in his fading consciousness Max felt a cooling rush of air on his raging scalp, heard another set of boots scuff the floor and felt a pause of such welcome length between beatings he thought that he had finally died. But the pain was not gone. And in the afterlife there was no pain, isn’t that so? But that was the afterlife he used to believe in, not the afterlife he’d come to accept now, the one that bore a diabolical resemblance to the present. Yet despite this acceptance, the notion that the pain you die in is eternal too sent a contraction of panic through him that made him long perversely for the sensation of metal pounding on his skull again. There was the sound of the chair toppling and of someone bawling, ‘Get off of him, get off, you idiot!’ Then the smell of bad breath and vodka as two big arms sat him up. But having sat him up the arms did something extraordinary – they embraced him, cradled him and a voice apologised to Max for the behaviour of his subordinates.
‘This man helped my wife,’ Colonel Utkin roared. ‘And yours, you bloody fool. What do you think you’re doing letting this animal loose on him?’
‘I-I-I didn’t—’ Lagunov began wearily.
‘Go and get the other medic from the barracks! Quickly! This man needs attention.’
Utkin had spoken with his eyes fixed on Max’s bleeding head, dabbing at it with a handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket and leaning the doctor against his broad chest as they sat on the floor. Lagunov looked at Volkov. Volkov looked at Lagunov. Both unsure who was just ordered to get help, so neither budged. Until Utkin looked up appalled and howled, ‘You!’ to Volkov who scampered from the office and across the parade ground to the sound of foxes crying up on the hill.
Max’s wounds were not as bad as Edgar first feared. There was no evidence of serious concussion, but a few days in a bed at the hospital to be sure was in order with round the clock observation by the only functioning doctor left until he was too tired to observe anything, then Bubi took over under strict instructions to wake Edgar should he notice any vomiting, convulsions, sensitivity to light or sound, slurred speech or confusion in the patient.
Bubi, wide-eyed, had parroted Edgar as he listed the symptoms to look out for and the young man recited them constantly under his breath in between prayers for his mentor’s quick recovery as he sat by Max’s bed rocking ever so slightly on his chair.
The patient woke at intervals relieved to see empty beds
in the room. The sickness figures were reasonably low, he tried to reassure himself, although since the population of the camp had dwindled so much due to death and the occasional release, it took a much smaller number of patients to reach the nine per cent quota allowed. Those who were on the mend toiled away using the bounty stored under the beds, making heaters, fashioning tools better than the ones they were given to work with in the factories or the forests, making extra clothes from cement bags or cooking porridge on the stove.
Max slept and when he woke again Bubi had turned into Edgar. He slept some more and when he woke again Edgar had turned into Jenny. But that could have been a dream. He was still a little disorientated from all that beating around his brain. He slept again and when he woke he saw Edgar out on the bridge buying cigarettes from a prisoner who worked in the cement factory. The factory worker handed over the cigarettes and Edgar handed over something in return which winked in the sunlight before disappearing into his pocket.
‘What did you trade for those?’ Max said through sticky lips nodding at Edgar’s handful of smokes as he sat down again.
Edgar looked at his purchase in silence for a moment as if weighing up whether he had got a good deal or not. Then, deciding he had, he looked at Max, tossing his eyebrows as casually as he could and said, ‘My Iron Cross.’
They hadn’t had a chance to send them home after receiving them from the CO back in Breslau what with the attack on the monastery and their subsequent capture, so the medals had sunk to the depths of their bags, not the most practical of possessions, and remained there ever since. Yet no matter how hard Max tried, and despite the fact it was an accolade bestowed on them by a regime they didn’t support, he couldn’t help but be proud of his Iron Cross and he couldn’t wait to show Erika and Netta.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Max!’ Edgar whined, putting one of the cigarettes up to his mouth with a trembling hand. ‘I don’t need a bloody medal right now, but I really, really need a fag.’
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