Comrades of War
Page 23
He nodded and forced a faint smile. ‘I’ll come, Dora. By Allah, I’ll come back! The lousy Ivans won’t be able to bring down a French corporal from La Légion Etrangère. Kabyles are wanted for that.’
‘Alfred, you must write to me! Every free minute you must write! I’ll go nuts if I don’t hear from you!’ She flung her arms about his neck and kissed him so savagely that she even got frightened herself. She felt as if an era was about to be annihilated.
She cried. Tears flowed down her cheeks and made deep furrows in the heavy layer of powder.
‘All aboard!’ the MPs roared. ‘The train is leaving. The doors will be locked. Marching orders and leave papers are to be held in readiness on boarding the train! On the double! On the double!’
The Legionnaire slowly stepped on the train. In the door he stopped.
Aunt Dora passed her hand over his scarred, haggard face. ‘Good-bye, girl,’ he said hoarsely.
She curled up her lips to a forced smile. ‘No, my Moroccan, not good-bye. Au revoir!’
He laughed. ‘True, au revoir. I’ll see you soon!’
Tiny hurled his pack through an open window. Then followed his cardboard box with three black puddings, one loaf of rye bread and a couple of bottles of schnapps.
‘Watch out, you soft macaroni sticks,’ he called. ‘Here comes strong ammunition for the crapper.’
Then he rushed again into the arms of the Battleship, who lifted him off the ground and kissed him.
‘Take care of yourself, you big bear, so I can get back the stumps of you,’ she growled in a deep basso. ‘Then we can get married and have twenty-three kids just as ugly as you.’
‘Hell,’ Tiny laughed, ‘that’s going to be the best job of my life! Christ, how I look forward to losing the war! Twenty-three snot-nosed kids, holy Jesus! We’ll make the first one in a haystack,’ he shouted cheerfully. ‘I always wanted to sprawl in a haystack. Do you like the smell of hay?’
‘Pig,’ she said in her mannish voice. ‘Can you imagine begetting our children in cow-feed? A thing like that is done in a bed with clean white sheets and not in a cow barn or out in the field.’ She gave him a ringing smack on the cheek. ‘Believe me, I’ll grind off your rough edges for you, you gutterpup!’
‘I think I’ll be getting the blind staggers pretty soon. I’m steaming hot,’ Tiny grinned happily. ‘I’m hot as hell for you. You’re just as good as the best one of those sex machines you can take a crack at in Wienert Neustadt. And that, you know, is quite an efficient machine, with her whole chassis running on self-lubricating ball bearings!’ He brightened up as if a great idea had occurred to him. ‘Emma, when the war’s over we’ll go to a whorehouse together – then you can see for yourself you’re just as good as the pigs there.’
‘You swine,’ the Battleship snarled, hitting him in the stomach to make him gasp for breath. ‘You shouldn’t even think of comparing me, your fiancée, with whores and such trash. I’m a decent woman and no whorehouse bitch, remember that! Or I’ll settle your hash for you!’
Tiny put his head to one side. He looked like a little boy. ‘You’ll have to forgive me for that one. I’m no fine gentleman, you know.’
‘All right, all right, you bear. Now, please, don’t make me blubber!’
An MP sergeant major came rushing toward them. He yelled at Tiny: ‘Get into the train, you lazy ox-gut!’
Tiny didn’t bother looking at him but kissed the Battleship with a loud smack.
The sergeant rushed on. Tiny took no notice of him and remained standing by the Battleship.
‘Listen, keep a sharp lookout when Tommy unloads his dung-cart,’ Tiny admonished. ‘Don’t get curious now and stick out your big mug!’
She smiled. Her eyes vanished completely in folds of fat.
‘The same goes for you!’ She stroked him fondly on the cheek, which was blackened with soot. ‘My lovely bear,’ she whispered, ‘you’re stupid as an ox, God knows, but how wonderful! Don’t you get any misplaced ideas of comradeship out there. I want you back. A leg blown off wouldn’t matter so much as long as you’re alive.’ She thought for a moment and went on: ‘In fact, it might not be a bad idea at all if you lost a leg. I could manage you better.’
‘Emma, are you crazy? Then I couldn’t run when Ivan gets up steam. Porta himself says that he who can run the fastest has the best chance of getting through this war alive.’
The MP came back. He stood splay-legged before Tiny, both fists on his hips.
‘Just tell me this, you Corporal Nil. Do we have to give you a written invitation before you board that train?’
Tiny didn’t turn around but answered coolly: ‘Please, do that, brother, but write slowly and slip the letter into one of those mailboxes that get emptied only once a week!’
‘Shut up, you . . . you . . .’ the sergeant screamed, ‘or I’ll take care of you! Into the train, you filthy bastard, and right this minute!’ He seized Tiny and pushed him into the train.
‘In two weeks I’ll be back with you,’ Tiny yelled out of the window to the Battleship. ‘Engagement leave, wedding leave – I’ll apply for all the leaves there are!’
When the train took off, he was on the point of falling out of the window. At the last moment his buddies in the compartment managed to pull him in.
‘Make way,’ he bellowed, rushed to the window and leaned far out. His head hit against an iron pillar as the train passed. Blood poured down his face from the big gash. ‘Hurrah! I have a skull fracture! Behave yourself now, Emma, till I’ll be home with you again! I’ll be coming soon,’ he added, pointing at his head.
‘Naturally!’ She was running alongside the train on her heavy legs, which were moving like drumsticks. With one hand she held her skirts above her massive knees. With the other she waved her red nurse’s cape. Her bosom sloshed over. Her face glowed. ‘Come back, Teddy Bear, do you hear? Come back to me!’
Aunt Dora stood by the kiosk some distance back on the platform. She was waving to the little Legionnaire who hung out through an open door.
A woman of about fifty had a three-year-old child on her arm. She fell and the tiny tot rolled screaming along the asphalt.
A soldier in the light gray uniform of the Marines let out a terrified scream.
The long train rolled faster and faster between the many ruins of Hamburg, carrying three thousand eight hundred pieces of uniformed beef cattle in the direction of Berlin.
An MP making his way through the corridors roared: ‘Shut the windows! Fire will open up on anyone who stays by an open window!’
‘Dungbeetle,’ snorted an artillery NCO lying on a luggage rack drinking.
In another compartment they started singing:
Come back, I am waiting for you.
I am waiting for you.
For you are to me
All my comfort.
Behind on the platform stood hundreds of sweethearts, parents, wives, and children. They were looking at the spot where the train had vanished from sight and where the clouds of smoke from the locomotive merged with the rain clouds.
Most of them were never to see each other again.
Aunt Dora stood alone by the kiosk, face chalk-white, eyes staring. Her lips moved.
‘Come back, Alfred. For God’s sake come back to me! It doesn’t matter in what shape, even on crutches, but do come!’
The Battleship stood all the way at the end of the platform. She was still waving mechanically with her large red shawl. Her lungs worked like a pair of bellows. She wheezily gasped for breath after the violent and unaccustomed exertion.
‘Big stupid Teddy Bear,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you get stuck out there!’
Then the hardened woman did something you’d never have believed her capable of. She prayed. Folded her hands and prayed. Right in the middle of a dusty railroad platform, under the broken glass roofs.
‘Dear God. You don’t often hear anything from Emma Kloters, but now I’m here, you see. Let my big, stupid cub come
back home to me. I don’t mind if you make a hamburger out of him as long as he is alive! I pray you, God, with all my heart, let my big, stupid, ugly cub come home alive!’
It had started raining. A dense drizzle. The platform slowly emptied. Sirens began wailing. People started running. Far away the first bombs were falling.
At the entrance to the platform a young girl was standing, as if petrified. She was biting her handkerchief, tearing the material to pieces with her teeth.
‘Otto,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘Oh, no, Otto!’ Suddenly she set up a piercing scream: ‘Otto, don’t let them murder you!’ She pulled her hair frantically. ‘Hitler, you murderer,’ she shrieked, loud enough to echo along the platform. ‘You’re a murderer, Hitler!’
As if conjured up, a couple of young civilians in black leather coats stood beside her. A silver badge glittered in the hand of one of them. Those who were closest heard him hiss:
‘Stapo!’
She resisted frantically and continued screaming as she was hauled away. She vanished into the mysterious darkness of the Police Station.
Otto, an infantry Pfc, sat in the departed leave train, whispering: ‘My own Lotte, we’ll soon see each other again!’ To a buddy he said: ‘My wife’s going to have a child.’
But his Lotte was never to give birth. She had spoken the truth in a country where truth was dead.
The train rumbled through Germany. It halted shortly at an overcrowded depot. New droves of tired soldiers boarded the train. They clambered over suitcases, rucksacks, haversacks, knapsacks, gas masks, rifles, tommy guns, steel helmets, rolled-up coats, and cursing soldiers in gray, green, blue, black and brown. All services. Sixteen- to twenty-year-old seamen in dark blue with U-boat badges on their sleeves. Fanatic SS men in field gray with vacant, glassy-eyed Teutonic expressions – they were educated in the so-called Order Castles, to the abysmal intellectual impoverishment of the dictatorship. Oldish policemen in uniforms of poisonous green on their way to an MP division. They were to be slaughtered by the enemy’s savage partisan units lying in wait for them like hungry beasts of prey.
There were black tank gunners, their filthy uniforms giving off a stench of gasoline and diesel oil. Broad peasant-like cavalrymen with loud yellow shoulder straps. Sedate mountain chasseurs with a tin edelweiss on their sleeves. Artillerymen with sparse decorations on the grayish-green breasts of their uniforms. Engineers with faces as sad as their black shoulder straps, dead tired from endless toil. Stout and contented naval gunners happy to belong to the guard units on a stretch of coast far behind the front. Intelligence soldiers with bright faces who generously sprinkled their speech with foreign words to show they were proficient in languages. But the majority were infantrymen in tattered uniforms, a living loud protest against the designation ‘the queen of all the services.’
In every nook there was card-playing or drinking. One group of men was having a whispered confab as they huddled around an MC noncom.
‘Jaundice is crap,’ he told the listening soldiers, ‘with that, it won’t last long till you’re out of the rest-home again. Syph or the clap isn’t any good, either. Holy Mother, they practically cut off your tail if you turn up with something like that.’ He cautiously looked about him, but seeing no dangerous-looking persons nosing around he ducked into the group again. The conversation became a muttered whisper.
‘No, fellows, typhoid, real first-class typhoid, that’s the stuff. A temperature that almost splits your asshole. When you’re about half dead, they just can’t resist any more. They stroke your hair and pat you like a little boy. They’re so kind to you you think it’s all a dream, because they’re certain you’re going to pop off. And it’s a long sickness.’
‘How do you get typhoid?’ a short thin infantryman wanted to know.
‘In the dairy, you baby ass,’ an engineer Pfc grinned.
The little infantryman looked offended.
A number of small packages changed owners. The MC noncom put away big bundles of bills in his pockets. He smiled mysteriously and again looked around.
‘You just take the stuff in those packages and dissolve it in coffee, and on top of it you take a nice swig of vodka. After two weeks the latest you’ll be farting in a lovely bed, and the war will be over for half a year at least.’
‘Can you die from it?’ a cavalryman asked suspiciously.
‘Have you ever gotten something without taking a risk, you horse’s ass?’ asked an airman in an elegant gray-blue uniform with his breast studded with decorations. He was at most twenty years old, but the war in the clouds had aged him ten years. It looked as if Herman Göring’s aerial Teutons had had enough of heroic battle.
We passed through Berlin in the dark of night. An air-raid alarm was on.
On the overcrowded train there was a fight to get to the toilets. Cursing remarks flew back and forth in the heavy fetid air.
In a compartment in the middle of the car the little Legionnaire sat squeezed between Tiny and me. On the opposite seat Ewald, pale as a sheet, was reduced to invisibility between Bauer and Stein.
The East Prussian hung on a rack telling jokes.
‘What’s the news from the Führer?’ Bauer called to the little East Prussian, who was an expert at imitating voices.
‘Yes, let’s hear what the Führer has to say about the momentary situation,’ Stein expectantly grinned.
The East Prussian put his gas mask up to his mouth for a microphone, pulled the hair down over his forehead, and thrust out his lower lip. He looked like a horrible caricature of Hitler, but his voice was an amazingly skillful imitation.
‘German women, German men, German children, my dear racial brothers! We have never been closer to final victory than we are right now. I have given my Army commanders orders to straighten out our strongly winding front lines, which made our operations difficult and demanded too great sacrifices, so that now our operations can proceed everywhere as planned! Many enemies of the people and pernicious elements have claimed that these adjustments of the front are a kind of retreat. But I tell you, my dear racial brothers, that my heroic soldiers will remain where they have taken their stand. The Soviet masses are bleeding to death, Stalin, that arch-criminal’ – here the voice of the East Prussian rose to a roar of rage that would have made Hitler turn-pale with envy – ‘has lost all chances for winning this war which he forced upon us. My German engineers are working at high pressure to design new weapons, miraculous and epoch-making, for crushing our barbarous enemies. German men, German women, my brave Army, my heroic Air Force, my proficient Navy – one more tiny exertion and final victory will be ours! Rest assured that a hero’s death will be yours!’
As he wanted to raise his arm for ‘Heil,’ he rolled out of the rack and landed on top of those who were sitting underneath. Then he rolled onto the floor.
‘The Führer has fallen!’ Bauer called.
Tiny rolled a cigarette for himself. He did it very painstakingly, taking extreme care not to lose the minutest speck of tobacco. He wetted it, closed it and handed it to the Legionnaire. He rolled another which he handed to me. Only then did he start rolling one for himself. Before he’d finished he discovered that mine didn’t quite stick together in the gluing. He cautiously put away his own half-finished cigarette, picked up mine, licked it and pinched it firmly together.
‘Now it’s better,’ he said, handing it to me again.
During the four months’ stay in the army hospital Tiny had collected every single butt, not only his own but also others’. He had cleaned the tobacco conscientiously and was now the owner of a large bag of it. He would go on preserving the butts from the cigarettes he was now smoking and so on, forever, so that every grain of tobacco would be utilized. His poverty in the past had taught him never to waste anything. Everything can be used. Everything can become new.
‘Do you think they’ll give me leave if I get spliced with Emma?’ he asked, passing his tongue along the adhesive edge of the cigarette paper.
‘Oh, shut up,’ Tiny said. ‘Emma isn’t a sweet girl. She’s an armored car in the shape of a woman and could give Edel such a slap on his snout that he wouldn’t wake up.’
The Legionnaire went on: ‘And Edel will tell you this besides when you apply for leave: “Tiny, hurry up and get yourself shot. A hero’s death is your only hope. Because, after the war you’re going to be sent to a liquidation camp anyway, as a danger to the national health.”’
We grimaced at the thought of the familiar tone we would have to put up with soon again.
‘First Sergeant Edel can kiss my ass,’ Tiny muttered peevishly.
‘He definitely won’t do that,’ the Legionnaire laughed.
Soon after, in the middle of a conversation about politics, Tiny said: ‘Actually, I don’t understand very much about it.’
‘We can believe that quite easily,’ Bauer laughed.
With a meditative expression in his face Tiny went on. ‘After all I’m only a swine from a reform school. My mother didn’t care a damn about us nine children. And I only remember my old man when he was drunk. I never saw him sober. In reform school they thrashed us, and if they didn’t, we thrashed each other. Does anyone of you know what a holy reform school is like?’
When no one answered, he went on, all the while sketching imaginary patterns with his rifle butt.
‘Nah, that’s just what I thought. Look, these mission people are real devils when they get power. We really had no school. You won’t have any use for that anyway, the principal said. Many years ago he’d been a pastor in Thüringen. He was said to have run around with the organ-pounder’s wife. Because of that he was thrown out of his Thüringen church. And it’s true, we didn’t really need to know how to read and write to haul iron girders or dig ditches. So that when I became a member of our club, I said to myself’ – he looked about him – ‘Don’t forget you’re in active service, you’re not a reservist. Those who hold the stick must be right.