‘I forgot to ask,’ Király snorted sarcastically. ‘They didn’t stop me, so they must have been dead . . . or nearly dead.’
There was no point talking to Király, he was beyond contempt. Jerzy’s face was as cold as stone; I shook him to see if I could wake him up, but he didn’t stir, so I rubbed him vigorously first across his chest and then down his arms and legs. Király, who had slumped back on to his bed, looked on impassively. After a couple of minutes he said, ‘I think you’ve killed him.’
‘What do you mean?’ I hissed.
‘Never rub a man with hypothermia – you’ll give him a heart attack. When the blood from the extremities flows back into the heart it’s so cold that it causes a shock to the system,’ he said glibly.
I felt for Jerzy’s pulse again. This time there was nothing. Király was right, I had killed him.
‘You bastard, why didn’t you tell me that earlier?’
‘Because now we’ve both killed someone and we’re even. I couldn’t bear the thought of you getting on your high horse. If I hadn’t taken those blankets we would all have died except you with your bloody waistcoat. What a terrible waste of life that would have been, when one of us could have lived to keep you company. The question was, who was that one going to be? Well, I stayed awake the longest, and as I waited for the others to sleep I realized that although I hate this miserable life with all my heart I hate the thought of dying even more. You need that hatred to stay alive. So there it is, Daniecki. Long live Frantz Király. And don’t blame yourself for Ingwer, perhaps he wouldn’t have made it anyway. We’ll never know.’ Király casually reached over for Ingwer’s haversack and rooted around for the cigarettes that he knew were kept there. When he found them he put one in his mouth and fumbled with the matches in his gloved hand. Once lit he offered it to me. ‘Cigarette?’ he grinned provocatively.
That was when I punched him. He just laughed, picked up the cigarette that had fallen from his lips, took a deep drag and said, ‘Thought as much.’
When I emerged into the pale dawn light I was greeted by a scene of utter desolation. The dead were being dragged from every tent and lined up in neat rows while Lieutenant Neidlein checked them off a register. We dug temporary graves in the snow and piled up the frozen blue corpses of our friends. This was a ritual we were to repeat time and time again.
That night I wrote to Jerzy’s parents, who were now in Cracow. I told them that their boy was the bravest and most popular man in the company and would be sorely missed, I related how he had saved Lieutenant Neidlein’s life when I had given him up for dead, and that he was about to be made an NCO, but I couldn’t face explaining the circumstances of his death. Instead I wrote that he had died a hero in action. He was my dearest friend.
I have always thought that if I’d not been so stupid I could have saved Jerzy Ingwer. I should at least have called the divisional doctor. I felt so guilty that until today I have never told anyone what really happened. We make many mistakes in life, Fischel, and most of them we can put right. But some mistakes can never be righted and the guilt eats away at the soul. Of all the emotions we have, I have learnt that guilt is the most corrosive. Anger passes quickly, and hatred mellows with age and learning, but guilt endures.
You know what was crazy about the Carpathian campaign? Our biggest enemy was the cold; it was more ruthless than the Russians. Replacements arrived from every corner of the empire. Many of them didn’t speak German and had hardly had enough time to learn the eighty words of command that we were all supposed to know. There were many misunderstandings, morale was non-existent and men surrendered under the slightest threat. The fabric of the army began to unravel. The Czechs, who were never particularly loyal to the Habsburgs, openly discussed how they might achieve independence, some even proposed switching sides. The Romanians of Transylvania wanted to be part of a greater Romania. The Ruthenians sympathized with Russia, and an ever-increasing number of Poles also wanted an independent state. So who could you trust in the heat of battle?
To compound this the Russians launched a ferocious attack on the Dukla and Lupków Passes, and again we were butchered. And then towards the end of March disaster struck: the garrison at Przemyśl surrendered and every last desperate starving man passed into Russian hands. What stupidity! Those poor men should never have been left there in the first place. But what really makes me angry is that in a vain attempt to save them, we had lost the service of another eight hundred thousand men. Not all killed by the Russians, Fischel. No, most of them were actually incapacitated by cold weather; frostbite, pneumonia, that kind of thing. But despite these losses Conrad von Hötzendorf did not order a retreat, he didn’t even change tactics. For us on the front line it was clear that this cretin would fight to the last man. He would first empty the empire of its youth, then turn to their fathers. When finally the war was lost the royal families of Europe, the tsars, the kaisers, the emperors and the kings – who were all related anyway – would sit down over lunch, congratulate the winner and give him a bit of land.
The day after the fall of Przemyśl the clouds dropped down over the mountains and we were enveloped in a thick fog. I was in a small work party returning from trench-digging duty along the new line, which now crossed the southern approach road to the Lupków Pass. The atmosphere in the group was sombre; we were dispirited and exhausted. Király was simmering with fury like a volcano before eruption. The new boys had quickly lost their hunger for war; they felt duped by the propaganda machine which had sucked them into this icy hell promising them honour and glory on the battlefield. They had come to save Przemyśl but they had never got close, all they did was freeze in their tents and dig holes in the snow. When they did fight, their shells bounced off the ice and failed to explode, and their rifles jammed. We were humiliated and impotent. The Russians were formidable, unbeatable, their progress relentless. We didn’t know that they were running out of weapons, or that revolutionaries were infiltrating the army and undermining its morale. We didn’t know that their men were treated worse than ours and that their officers operated the brutal Prussian rule, a military orthodoxy left over from the Napoleonic War which posited that the most effective soldier was one who feared his own officers more than the enemy. We didn’t know that within four months the Russians would have withdrawn from Galicia. It was inconceivable. If you had asked any Austro-Hungarian where we would be in July 1915 he would have said ‘defending Budapest’. So it was with utter dejection that we traipsed back in a long line through the snow and mist towards our encampment. The going was slow, the visibility poor. I kept my eye on the footholes of the man in front and followed in his steps. After a while Király, who was two ahead of me, came to a halt.
‘I’ve lost them,’ he said.
There were six of us lost in a disorientating whiteness which stretched out in all directions. A debate ensued as to which way we should go. I and three others instinctively felt that we should head one way but Király insisted that the last man he saw had been walking another way. So we followed Király. After half an hour of walking we saw shadows looming in the snow. As we got closer I could make out the distinctive brown greatcoats of the Russians. But before we could turn and flee Király had surrendered on our behalf; he held his white handkerchief aloft and threw his rifle and spade into the snow. The Russian guns were pointing at us. We followed Király’s lead, and I would be lying if I didn’t say that it was a relief to see our rifles hit the ground. Our war was over. Two days later the Lupków Pass was in enemy hands. The Russians were staring down on Hungary from the Carpathian heights with spring ahead of them. They had us by the throat.
12
FOR THREE WEEKS LEO STAYED IN HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE IN Leeds and waited for time to heal him. Each day he asked himself why he felt worse. His memories replayed obsessively and his mind was in paralysis. At least in that first week after Eleni’s death there had been things to organize, there had been a purpose to each day, but now she was buried there was nothing to
do other than sit by the garden window and dwell on his misfortune. He was in a cryogenic state, frozen on 2 April 1992. If they had thawed him out and brought him back to life they would have found him babbling about that day. He could not look forward to the future, he could not even exist in the present. The only thing that distinguished one day from the next was the slow dwindling of the light in his eyes. At night he battled against sleep but when he inevitably lost he was haunted by nightmares so painful that his parents were often woken by his cries.
First it was the fox. Late one night in the back garden, caught in the burglar light, the fox stopped in its tracks, turned slowly towards the window and stared at him. Leo shuddered. The following morning came the squirrel. It scampered down a tree and ran into the garden in search of food. After a moment’s foraging it ran straight towards the big patio door, checked left, checked right, then stood up on its hind legs and stared at Leo just as the fox had done. Finally it was the pigeon that landed on the windowsill in front of Leo. She jerked back her neck in surprise and gazed at him intently.
‘Eleni,’ he heard himself say.
‘Hello,’ the pigeon said, with a jerk of the neck. She threw a glance back towards the garden. ‘I always loved your parents’ garden,’ she said. The pigeon turned back and eyed him quizzically, ‘Look at you, Leo, you’re so lifeless a fly could lay eggs on you. Don’t be alone.’
‘But I am alone, Eleni.’
The pigeon ruffled up her feathers and walked along the window ledge nodding to herself in contemplation. She stopped, looked into the distance and shook her head. She fluttered her wings as if to leave, then seemed to change her mind. She looked him in the eye one more time, ‘I’m lonely too, Leo, but I feel worse when I see you like this.’ She buried her head in her wing momentarily, then abruptly took to the sky and disappeared over the fence.
Eleni was everywhere. She had transformed into beetles, cats, hedgehogs and sparrows. When a solitary sunbeam pierced through the cloud cover and alighted on the old beech tree he saw her brilliance. She was running in the random gusts of wind that picked up rubbish and sent it swirling down the street. She danced in the little pools of rainwater that gathered where the flagstones dipped. At dusk she withered with the petals of the morning glory. She invaded every thought and coloured every vision. He would not shake her off. She would not let go. They clung on to each other across the frontier of death, magically transcending all that is intangible, invisible, unknown.
Grief drifted like a pollutant through the house, sucking the spontaneity out of his parents, making their stomachs curdle after meals, and straining their conversations. Eve hovered over Leo but couldn’t get through to him. As her frustration grew she turned increasingly against Frank, who shuffled around like a worn-out slipper pretending everything was normal. ‘There are no shortcuts for grief,’ he would say ineffectually.
One night Eve snapped. ‘Why don’t you ever try and talk to him? He’s your son too, for God’s sake. Stop avoiding him. You can be so selfish. You of all people, Frank, should know what he’s feeling. Tell him the truth. Can’t you see he needs you?’
‘What happened to me was different. I was much younger,’ he said stonily.
‘What exactly are you frightened of?’
Frank threw his arms up in anger, ‘What do you want me to do, Eve, tell him I spent every day of my childhood weeping for my parents? Tell him about that wretched letter from the Red Cross? And how is that going to help him? How is it going to help him to know that his dad was also a miserable sod? I loved Eleni and it breaks my heart to see Leo lose her. But nothing is going to make him feel better right now.’
Eve had scraped a raw nerve, he rarely raised his voice and she knew that he did not want the conversation to go further. There was a whole lot more to Frank’s past than he was prepared to discuss. It had taken her several years after they first met to get the truth out of him, but he still hadn’t told Leo anything. Leo had always been told that his paternal grandparents had died when his father was a baby. He knew too that his father had been adopted, although he never met the family who had adopted him. It wasn’t until he was ten that he had asked how and when his grandparents had died. Frank had opened his mouth and the first words that fell out were ‘in the war’ which was half true, followed by ‘in the Blitz’ which wasn’t. And the lie was completed with ‘a wall collapsed on top of them’.
Frank persuaded himself that Leo was too young to know the truth. Eve strongly disagreed and had made him swear that he would come clean when Leo was older. But with time the lie put down roots and Frank found himself repeating it. Soon it had assumed the mantle of truth and Frank was afraid to unpick it, and, for all her irritation, Eve had never dared to push him. His peace of mind seemed to rest on his choice not to discuss his past.
‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she said, changing tack. ‘I didn’t mean to stir things up. You may well have been miserable once but you’ve come through. Perhaps there’s something in that for him. Surely he’s old enough now.’
Frank sighed; he couldn’t escape this any longer. He’d been meaning to tell Leo for some time but the opportunity had never arisen, and besides the thought of it made him feel sick.
‘All right, I’ll have a chat with him.’
The following day father and son sat side by side staring into the garden, both silent. Frank couldn’t think of anything to say. Or rather he did not know how to start saying what he ought to say. Like a teenager on a first date he played out a series of opening lines in his mind and rejected them all for some reason or other. It was better not to speak than say the wrong thing. After a while Frank wanted to get up and leave, but by then he felt the silence was demanding to be broken. It would be worse to leave without saying anything at all. Eventually he put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and squeezed hard. Leo turned and looked at his father mournfully and Frank remembered his golden-haired son of four running naked on the sands of Rhossilli Bay, screaming when the icy sea caught his toes. How could that carefree boy have become this weary young man? Speak, Frank, speak, he said to himself. Say something, something fatherly, something wise and soothing. Tell him the truth, just open your mouth and let the words drop out. Tell him how much you love him, tell him you will pick him up and carry him on your shoulder just as you did when he was little, tell him you will hug him until the hurt has gone and he can walk for himself again. No words came to his lips.
Leo stared at his father expectantly, ‘Is everything all right, Dad?’
There was another long silence. Then at last, ‘Listen, Leo, I want to talk to you about something very important. It might make you feel better.’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘Well . . . how can I put this . . . you see, it’s about your inheritance.’
‘My inheritance?’
‘Yes . . . well that’s the word your grandfather used before he died,’ Frank said.
‘Dad, I don’t care about my inheritance right now. Why are you even talking about it? It’s not important to me.’
‘No, of course not, Leo. I’m sorry, we’ll talk about it another time. I’m sorry . . .’
Frank picked up his chair, placed it back in the kitchen, and disappeared upstairs in a cloud of regret.
13
‘I’M GOING OUT,’ SAID LEO ONE AFTERNOON. A SOUND FROM nowhere. His mother looked up from the newspaper she wasn’t reading. She had taken to sitting near him and pretending to read. She did not want him to feel alone, nor did she want him to feel watched. So she would sit quietly, hoping that soon he would need to talk and she would be there to help him.
‘Do you want some company?’ Eve asked.
‘No.’
‘We could go for a nice walk,’ she offered.
‘No.’
‘No, well that’s fine, have a good time . . . Where are you thinking of going? Would you like to borrow the car?’
‘No thanks, I’ve just got to get out of here for a while.’ He stood up, yawned, went
to the cupboard under the stairs, found his trainers, forced his feet into them without undoing the already tied laces and walked out of the front door.
He walked without aim past the suburban houses of his parents’ neighbours, past shops and parks, to a part of town he hardly knew. He paid little attention to the derelict houses and run-down warehouses that now surrounded him, but instead tried to use each step to suppress the rising sense of panic that had gripped him since the morning. He had awoken with the aching fear that the numbness that was slowly eating his soul would never leave him, and that time would heal nothing. The longer he waited for time the more he festered. He was rotting, as all living matter does, any semblance of order was crumbling into chaos. Time, the heralded healer, had become his enemy.
It was dark. He had been mugged by dusk without noticing. And now he was lost. He felt a pang in his knee, the swelling had gone, only a scar remained. He was glad of it, it was the last physical reminder of his travels with Eleni and he wore it like a badge of honour. He walked on looking for a familiar landmark. At the end of the street he happened across a dingy looking pub and realized how thirsty he was. He expected it to be one of those quiet little pubs with a couple of drunk warehousemen tottering at the bar. The sort of place that never earns the publican a penny, the sort of place he would normally avoid but now suited his mood. He could not see inside for the thick purple curtains that covered the windows. He pushed open the door and was hit by a wall of cigarette smoke and the roaring vulgar sound of men who have left their women at home. The place was so full he could hardly get beyond the door. The men stood with their backs to him, drinks in hand, pushing up their ruddy necks, straining to get a view of something.
‘You’re just in time, mate, show’s about to start,’ a man by the door shouted in his ear. ‘If you make it to the bar mine’s a Guinness.’ Leo pushed his way through the bodies. The men started stomping and cheering. Leo followed their focus and saw a young woman wearing a fake fur coat walk on to a small stage. So this is life, Leo thought.
Random Acts of Heroic Love Page 11