The Constant Soldier

by William Ryan

  Brandt’s first thought was for Agneta. She was cleaning the washroom in the sleeping quarters, where the shot had come from. A cold chill ran down his neck. He had seen Peichl going down to the village so it couldn’t have been him. Brandt checked the officers – there were eight of them. One was missing. Schmidt.

  ‘Brandt?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Obersturmführer?’

  ‘Would you go and see what that noise was?’ Neumann said, his lips lifting in a tight, mirthless smile. ‘Find out what has happened.’

  Brandt walked across the dining room and opened the door that led to the bedrooms, closing it behind him. He stood for a moment. It was quiet. Nothing was out of place. Behind him, in the dining room, there was quiet laughter. Someone must have made one of the dark witticisms people came up with when they waited for bad news.

  Brandt made his way to the washroom first. He found Agneta, to his great relief, standing outside it. She must have been cleaning when the shot came and now stood there, waiting for whatever might happen next. She glanced up at him before looking back down to her feet. He wanted to reach out, to hold her. To tell her he would make sure she got out of this place safe and well.

  ‘There was a shot?’ he asked – and it sounded callous to him. But he couldn’t say anything more.

  ‘In there.’

  She pointed at a bedroom door – Schmidt’s. Brandt knocked, not expecting a response, before turning the handle. The hinges squealed as the door opened and his sense of anticipation was such that he stopped, his heartbeat thudding in his ears, then gave the door a firm push. Even before he saw the SS man he smelled the heavy, sweet scent of blood.

  Schmidt lay on his bed, his feet pointing at the ceiling – pale and veined, surprisingly delicate. There was a pillow over his face.

  He remembered Agneta was standing behind him.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Brandt said, as much to himself as to her.

  The dead man was wearing a silk dressing gown, the upper part of which he had protected from the blood with towels. He’d fixed a small label to one of its pockets with a pin. Brandt leant down to read it:

  Please send this dressing gown to my mother.

  Generous of him – to bequeath a memento of his suicide to the woman who’d given birth to him. There was a burned circle in the centre of the pillow that covered the young man’s head and his arm hung down from the bed, a finger caught in the trigger guard of a small automatic pistol. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see the gun. Perhaps that was why he’d fired through the pillow.

  Just to be certain, Brandt removed it – the cotton peeling away from Schmidt’s bloody face as he did so. The dead man’s eyes were closed. If it weren’t for the hole in his forehead – and the blood – he might have been asleep.

  Agneta had followed him in. He turned towards her, glimpsing something in her gaze before she lowered her eyes.

  ‘You knew him?’

  She looked up, surprised.

  ‘You looked as if you knew him, that’s all. Maybe from the camp?’

  She lowered her gaze.

  ‘I didn’t know him, Herr Brandt,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It’s always tragic when a life ends.’

  Perhaps the irony was unintentional. Brandt doubted it. He looked at her bowed head for a moment, thinking of what she must have seen and experienced in the last few years. Of course she would have changed. So had he. It didn’t alter anything.

  ‘Go down the back stairs to the kitchen. It’s best if you and the others stay away from here until I call for you.’

  ‘Of course, Herr Brandt.’

  She left. Relieved, he suspected, that he hadn’t questioned her further about her fleeting look of exultation.

  Brandt glanced around the SS man’s bedroom. The room was small and spartan, as all the rooms were – the luxury was all at the other end of the hut. There were few personal possessions on display – no photographs, no books. A portable gramophone and a box of records. Brandt leafed through them, out of curiosity. Some classical music, some popular tunes.

  Brandt opened the wardrobe – the few items of clothing had been labelled in the same way as the dressing gown. There were three parcels, small, with labels marked for his brothers: Franz, Kurt and Dietrich. He picked one up and whatever was inside it rattled. There was no one nearby and he was curious. He untied the string and unwrapped it. Inside was a small box and inside that hundreds of small, misshapen pieces of yellow metal.

  Gold fillings and gold teeth.

  §

  ‘Well?’ Neumann asked, when he returned to the dining room.

  ‘I’m afraid Untersturmführer Schmidt had an accident.’

  ‘Fatal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Neumann looked around at the other officers, shrugging – as if to say ‘these things happen’.

  ‘A shame,’ Neumann said.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Should we . . .’ began a doctor with a razor thin moustache.

  Neumann shook his head.

  ‘We have a procedure.’

  Neumann picked up a knife from the table and began to tap it gently on the rim of his coffee cup. At first Brandt thought he was making some kind of point, but it seemed Neumann was unaware of the noise the knife made.

  ‘Thank you, Brandt. Inform Scharführer Peichl. He’ll tell you what to do. Please bring any papers you find in Schmidt’s room to my office – without exception. Now, gentlemen, let’s resume our breakfast.’

  The conversation started up before Brandt had left the room. He had been working in the hut for less than a week and there had been two deaths – but no one, except for him, appeared to think this unusual.

  15

  NEUMANN SAT at his desk, concentrating on breathing slowly and deeply. He needed to be still, to calm down. Despite himself, he stood up, moving to the window – looking out – seeing nothing unusual. He sat back down. He sat for long enough to breathe three times and then stood up again, pushing his chair back. He found he was rubbing the side of his head. For some reason he couldn’t stop doing it. He put his hands in his pockets, bunching them into fists. They were safer there. Out of the way.

  It was all that boy Schmidt’s fault. Maybe Schmidt had the right idea. Perhaps it was, after all, better to shoot yourself. To get it over with. He took one of the fists out of his pocket and pushed it, knuckle first against the wall – as hard as he could. It hurt. It helped. He began to walk again. He found his hands were covering his face.

  Neumann caught his reflection in the small mirror on top of one of the filing cabinets. His nose was between his fingers, which pointed upwards. He looked as though he was praying. Which in a way he was. His best chance for a solution was the Commandant. The Commandant always talked sense – he could be trusted. Their friendship was built on solid ground – it stretched back over thirty years. The Commandant would look after him. He’d tell him what to do. How to forget.

  ‘Herr Obersturmführer.’

  He turned to find Brandt standing in the doorway. He hadn’t heard him come in. He was conscious that his hands were still pressed together. He dropped them to his sides. Then clasped them behind his back.

  ‘What is it, Brandt?’ he said, trying to keep his voice level. ‘Why didn’t you knock?’

  Brandt appeared confused by the question.

  ‘But I did, Herr Obersturmführer. There was no response. I was going to leave these on your desk. Schmidt’s papers, as requested.’

  Brandt held out a black leather notebook towards him. Neumann made the effort to smile and saw the man relax a little. Neumann knew he needed to control his inner anxiety. He must behave absolutely normally.

  ‘Herr Obersturmführer?’

  Neumann had almost forgotten Brandt was there.

  ‘I’m sorry, I was distracted. What is it you have for me?’

  ‘The young officer’s papers. They include a diary – and some photographs.’

  ‘He kept a diary?’

 
Neumann took it from Brandt and then glanced up to see if any information about the diary’s contents could be gleaned from his expression. A fruitless exercise, given his injuries.

  ‘Yes, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  Neumann found that he had opened the notebook, without thinking. He looked down, and his eyes were drawn to a photograph. A bearded man, his blurred face almost as blank as Brandt’s – his black eyes asking no questions and offering no explanation as to why Schmidt, whose image was crisp in contrast to his victim’s, was pressing a gun into the side of his head.

  ‘My God.’

  The diary tumbled to the floor and four photographs fell out, sliding across the floor as if they were alive. He stepped back from them, finding the desk behind him, and was grateful for its support. The photographs made a series. The man was dead at the end of it, with Schmidt’s boot pressing onto his corpse. The hunter and his quarry. Neumann looked up to see Brandt examining him.

  ‘He left a note – asking that his parents be sent the diary. All his clothes have labels attached to them, marking them for members of his family.’

  ‘My God,’ Neumann repeated. He didn’t believe in a supreme being but there was something reassuring about saying the words aloud.

  ‘His parents can’t see these photographs,’ he said, hearing the constriction in his throat. ‘Burn them. Have you read the diary?’

  ‘No.’

  Neumann stooped down and opened the small black notebook at random. Four lines were enough to tell him it must also be destroyed. He looked at the note Schmidt had left for his mother. It wouldn’t do either.

  ‘Burn everything, Brandt. His clothes, his papers – the lot.’

  ‘As you wish, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  Neumann handed the book to Brandt but he left the photographs where they lay. He wanted nothing to do with them. He walked towards the window and watched Brandt’s reflection as he gathered up the pictures of the dead man. Neumann heard a low grunt as he leant forward. Of pain? Of shock? He knew he should destroy the photographs himself but already thoughts of the train were filling his head, threatening to overwhelm him. Brandt stood awkwardly to his feet.

  ‘Thank you, Brandt.’

  After he left, Neumann allowed his forehead to rest against the window. He had been conscious, for some time, that the real world was no longer quite solid and in its place something frightening made up of memories and sensation was emerging. His past was beginning to overlay his present. It was worst at night but even now, on a summer’s morning, he had the strongest feeling of the presence of others in the room. He closed his eyes and listened. He could hear breathing. He wasn’t certain it was his.

  He knew that there was no one there, but what if one day he forgot that?

  He sat down, once again, at his desk. He breathed deeply and placed his hands flat on its surface, spreading his fingers wide. He felt a tear roll down his cheek. He watched it drop onto the desk at a point almost exactly equidistant between his thumbs. He took a deep breath. Tried to stop the people he’d killed on the train forcing themselves into his consciousness.

  A nose pushed against his hip – Wolf – the dog’s soft eyes looking up at him. Neumann smiled down at him.

  Neumann was saved, for the moment at least. He picked up the telephone.

  He would have to tell the Commandant about Schmidt. He would have to ask him what should be done.

  16

  BRANDT TOOK the diary to the scullery at the back of the kitchen area. He wouldn’t be disturbed here – at least not immediately anyway. Joanna and Agneta were upstairs, dealing with Schmidt’s body. He placed the notebook on the porcelain-tiled counter and opened it.

  There was no obvious claim of ownership on the exterior. Someone – Schmidt, he suspected – had cut a patch from the board on its inside cover. The hole was big enough to have contained a man’s name and address.

  At first the diary was an ordinary enough description of military life – nothing too remarkable. Schmidt had been stationed in Bavaria and the events he recounted were normal enough – a dance here, a commendation there. It was when his battalion formed part of the invasion of the Ukraine in 1941 that the story changed abruptly. In the beginning there had been anger and confusion. He’d feared what he was being asked to do was wrong. But soon the doubts faded. After that, pages were filled with names of villages and towns and the tallies of the dead. Twenty dead Jews here. Forty there. Sometimes only a handful – a slow day. And beside the numbers of Jews killed by his platoon, there was another tally – the ones he’d killed personally. Hundreds of them, when you added the numbers up. He had kept count.

  The photographs brought the diary into focus. Brandt examined the images in the single electric bulb’s weak glow. In this light, the greys and blacks were less harsh than in Neumann’s office, almost as though a warm yellow wash had been applied.

  They were from the summer of 1941, if he wasn’t mistaken – you could tell from the happiness of the soldiers and the way their summer uniforms had been crusted with dust from the speed of their advance. Schmidt had been a Scharführer then – the SS equivalent of a sergeant – his chevrons black and silver against his grey uniform. He looked young to have commanded other men.

  Brandt had his own memories of that summer. He remembered the heat and the grime as they’d rolled across the empty steppe, pursuing an enemy that was learning how to fight back by losing battle after battle. It had been some kind of collective madness. They were to be the masters of a new empire and even the humblest of them held the power of death over anyone they came across. Even more so when it came to the Jews.

  And it was clear the man Schmidt was about to shoot in the first of the photographs was a Jew. A prayer shawl hung over his shoulders and stiff locks of hair hung down from his black skullcap. The man did not seem frightened – his eyes were calm. Perhaps he hadn’t understood what was about to happen. The soldiers who surrounded him were laughing and joking – perhaps he had hoped that they would let him go when they’d had their fun with him.

  Schmidt, in particular, appeared to fizz with the excitement of it all – his face was more distinct than the others, his eyes bright in the flat sunlight that cast long shadows along the dusty road behind them. Perhaps it was their youth that bothered Brandt most. He’d seen plenty of pointless horror during his time in Russia but these men looked like children playing a game. Schmidt seemed to be seeking approval from the camera in the way a young boy might from a parent. If there was guilt, it was a child’s guilt, one who knew his mischief was being tolerated just this once, even encouraged. Now that Brandt looked again, he wondered if the photographer had been the one in charge, rather than Schmidt or any of the others. Perhaps it was the officer commanding the platoon? Yes, that was it – the performance was for the camera’s benefit. The young SS men’s smiling faces filled the frame precisely and the image was crisp. The lighting, although natural, had been chosen carefully. The sun must have been low to the soldiers’ right to have cast such long shadows. The picture must been taken just before dusk – some of the men still had dust circles around their eyes from their driving goggles. They were waiting for the photographer’s decision as to what would happen next.

  At first he’d thought the dead man was out of focus, but this wasn’t the case. He’d turned, either voluntarily or on instruction, slightly away from the low sun so that much of his face was in shadow. He must have been very tall – even on his knees his head came up to Schmidt’s collar. Had that been what had drawn their attention to him – why they’d marked him out? His height? One side of the Jew’s face was swollen and there were dark splatters on his white shirt. Another detail struck Brandt now – Schmidt’s hand was raised to his ear. As though he were listening for an instruction. Perhaps that was why the soldiers appeared to show no awareness of the crime they were participating in – because, after all, they were only following the orders of the man with the camera. At the precise moment of the first photograph
, everything was still a joke. A man was being humiliated, yes, but this was as far as it would go. He wondered if the photograph encapsulated the moment before the photographer decided otherwise.

  Maybe, without the photographer’s instruction, nothing would have happened – the Jew would have lived a little longer. That didn’t mean the soldiers weren’t to blame. They could all have taken ten steps to the left or right and the photographer would have been left with only the Jew in front of him. But they hadn’t. The photographer had told Schmidt what to do but Schmidt had pulled the trigger. The second photograph was less posed. The dead man was toppling sideways, lifeless. Schmidt was no longer looking at the camera, but at the gun in his hand – as if it had suddenly become inexplicable. The young men standing behind him were no longer uniformly elated – one had turned away, his hand to his mouth. Another was looking at the camera, his anger clearly visible. Most looked confused, as if they hadn’t understood the joke’s punchline. Had they really thought it would end in a different way?

  In the third photograph, some of the soldiers had left. Schmidt, frowning now, had leant down – his hand touching the dead man’s neck. A taller comrade with blonde hair slicked across his skull had placed a hand on Schmidt’s shoulder. It wasn’t clear whether he was reassuring Schmidt or congratulating him – his expression was serious, but not disapproving. This was how it had been, often as not, when these things had happened – men had encouraged each other into something and then reassured each other afterwards. But, in their hearts, they’d known the truth of the matter. No one was the same after killing. He wondered if this had been Schmidt’s first murder.

  The fourth photograph – the last – was different again. Now Schmidt stood in mock triumph, one foot on the dead man’s chest. His smile was dazzling white. How long had passed, it was impossible to tell. A few minutes perhaps – long enough for the other soldiers to leave Schmidt on his own – with only the corpse and the photographer for company.