by Sam Eastland
Per and Ole Ottesen were twins who lived together in a low-roofed house, not far from the village of Saksebro. They had spent all their lives on Bornholm, running a small dairy farm which they had inherited from their parents. Neither man had married and now they were both very old.
Due to poor management, the Ottesen farm had shrunk until it was only a shadow of its former self. Their father, Karl Ottesen, had once owned a hundred and fifty head of cattle, exporting not only milk but butter and cheese as well to the nearby Swedish mainland. He had been one of the first people on Bornholm to own a motor car – a 1902 wood-panelled Arrol-Johnston – and even though it could not travel far or well upon the roads of that largely unpaved island, the fact of ownership had been enough to ensure his elevated standing in the community. Lacking such ambition, the Ottesen brothers were content to let the business dwindle until only a few cows remained, whose milk produced barely enough to cover the cost of their feed.
Now they were down to one cow, an irritable Friesian named Lotti. She was blind in one eye and gave no milk and, two days before, as Ole was leading her out of the barn so that Per could clean her stall, she fastened on to the seat of Ole’s trousers and tore off a large piece of cloth, exposing the old man’s buttocks to the winter cold.
So they decided to shoot her.
Having settled upon this course, it soon became apparent to the twins that neither was prepared to carry out the deed. Lotti had been with them a long time. She was, to all intents and purposes, a member of their family.
The two men sat in spindle-backed chairs beside the fireplace, while they tried to come up with a plan.
‘Father would have done it,’ said Per.
‘He would,’ agreed Ole, ‘and there would have been no discussion, before or afterwards.’
‘You should be the one,’ said Per.
‘And why is that?’ protested his brother.
‘I have always been a gentler soul.’
‘Gentler!’ laughed Ole. ‘You son of a bitch.’
‘And what does that make you?’ replied Per.
They lapsed into silence for a while.
‘It’s got to be done,’ muttered Ole.
This time, there was no disagreement from his twin.
Ole leaned back in his chair and rummaged in his waistcoat pocket, emerging seconds later with a two-krone coin between his fingers. ‘I’ll flip you for it,’ he said.
Per squinted at him. ‘This is some kind of trick.’
‘You can flip the coin,’ Ole tossed it into his lap.
‘I get to call it as well!’
Ole shrugged. ‘You really are a son of a bitch.’
Per settled the coin on his thumbnail, then launched it into the air.
Both men watched it tumbling up and then down.
Per caught the coin, slapped it on to the top of his other hand and then fixed his brother with a stare that could have passed for madness.
‘Crown or cross?’ demanded Ole. The cross referred to a Roman numeral, fixed inside the monogram of the Danish king, Christian X. On the other side of the coin was the king’s crown.
Per’s hand had begun to tremble.
‘Go on!’ shouted Ole. ‘Choose, damn you!’
‘Cross!’ he blurted. ‘No! Crown! Cross!’
Ole lunged forward. ‘You can’t have both, you simpleton!’
‘Crown,’ Per said softly. Then slowly, he lifted his hand.
It was the cross.
‘Ha!’ crowed Ole.
‘I meant to say crown,’ muttered Per.
‘Too late now,’ answered his brother as he got up from his chair, reached above the fireplace and took down the only gun they owned, a model 1896 Krag rifle which had belonged to their father, who had served in the Bornholm Militia. ‘Make it quick,’ commanded Ole, as he handed the rifle to Per.
Per lit a kerosene lantern. Then he put on a thick wool coat with wooden toggle buttons and stepped through the anteroom, where they put their muddy boots in summer time. He closed the door behind him and then opened the second door out into the farmyard.
Sheet ice lay like mirrors in the barnyard and the old man shuffled along carefully, still wearing his slippers.
Arriving at the barn, he opened the heavy door and made his way inside. He was going to close the door again, to keep in what little heat there was, but there seemed to be no point to that and he left it open instead.
Lotti was in a stall among several others, all of them empty except hers. She watched the old man approach, turning her head so she could see with her good eye.
She had won prizes in her day. A medal from the 1935 Agricultural Fair in Sandvig still hung from an old nail above her stall. ‘Lotti – Beste Kuh,’ it said.
Per stopped in front of the cow. ‘Lotti,’ he said solemnly, ‘I have to kill you now.’
The cow just looked at him and chewed.
After setting down the lantern, Per leaned upon the gun as if it were a cane. Why is this so hard for me, he wondered, but even as the thought passed through his mind, he knew the answer. The death of this animal would mark the end of his life as a farmer. And if he was no longer a farmer, then what was he? What purpose was there left for him in life? And if he served no purpose, then what point was there in going on at all?
At that moment, it would almost have been easier for Per to shoot himself than it would have been to put a bullet through the forehead of that temperamental cow.
Exhausted by such unforgiving thoughts, the old man sat down on a bale of hay. ‘To hell with everything,’ he sighed.
‘I knew you couldn’t do it,’ said a voice. It was Ole. Hearing no shots fired, he had come to check on his brother and now stood in the doorway, arms folded, with a disapproving frown upon his face.
‘I was just . . . collecting myself,’ Per replied defensively.
‘No, you weren’t.’
Per stared at the ground. ‘I’m damned if I will shoot this cow.’ He held out the gun to his brother. ‘You can do it.’
But Ole made no move to take the rifle. The truth was he couldn’t do it either. ‘God will take her when he’s ready,’ he announced.
Per rose to his feet, shouldered the gun on its tired leather sling, picked up the lantern and followed his brother out into the barnyard.
At that moment, both men saw what they simultaneously perceived to be a shooting star, so perfectly reflected in the ice which covered the barnyard that there appeared to be not one but two meteors, each one racing towards the other on a collision course.
This was followed by a roar of wind, like one of the katabatic gusts which sometimes blew in off the Baltic, wrenching trees out of the ground and knocking over chimney pots.
The ground shook.
Both men stumbled and fell.
The lantern slipped from Per’s grasp and broke upon the ground, sending a splash of blazing kerosene across the ground, which flickered yellow to orange to blue and finally sizzled away into the melting ice.
Then out of the darkness came a thumping, clattering shower of roof tiles, old nails, pitchforks and smouldering bales of hay.
The brothers cowered, speechless, as the trappings of their life crashed down around them.
When this barrage had finally ceased, Per and Ole climbed shakily to their feet and stared at a wall of dust, even blacker than the night, rising from where the barn had been only a moment before.
As the dust began to clear, and stars winked out of the gloom, they realised that their barn had been completely destroyed. Somewhere in that tangle of charred beams and splintered planks was Lotti. Or what was left of her. There was nothing to be done about it now.
‘God did not waste any time,’ remarked Ole.
‘He might have been a little less heavy-handed,’ said Per, as the two men returned to their house.
A few hours later, just as the first rays of dawn began to glimmer off the rooftops of Berlin, a man named Rochus Misch was woken by the telephone.
It was almost there. Holding out his arm and clenching his hand into a fist, Misch measured that the crack had only three knuckle-lengths to go before it reached its destination. What happened then had become the stuff of Misch’s nightmares which, like the crack itself across the once-clear field of yellow paint, had worked their way into his waking thoughts until it seemed as if they must consume his mind entirely.
The phone rang again.
Still half asleep, he tossed aside the crumpled sheets and made his way down the hall to where the phone stood on a wooden table, its battered finish partially hidden by a place mat crocheted with the red, white and black design of the National Socialist flag. The phone rested on the white circle in the middle of the flag, concealing all but the outer edges of the swastika, which jutted like the legs of a huge, squashed spider from beneath the heavy casing of the phone.
Misch picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello? Who is there?’
There was no answer. In fact, the line was dead.
Mystified, he put the phone down again and glanced at his watch. It was 6 a.m., a full two hours before he had to report for work. That gave him another half-hour of lying in bed. Maybe he could fall asleep. Or maybe he’d just stare at the crack in the ceiling.
Misch had almost reached the bed when the phone jangled yet again.
Muttering a curse, he spun around and stared at it, as if daring it to make another sound.
As the last shadows of sleep drifted from his mind, Misch realised that something was wrong. The phone wasn’t actually ringing, at least not in the way it normally did. Instead, after the initial high-pitched rattle of bells, its tone faded out almost apologetically, as if something other than an incoming call was causing the disturbance.
At that moment, Misch felt a faint vibration through the worn-out socks he always wore to bed. It was only because he was standing still that he felt it at all. But the bells inside the telephone responded faintly and at last Misch understood that this vibration was the cause.
But what, in turn, was causing the vibration?
Misch walked over to the window, drew the heavy velvet blackout curtains and rested his hand against the window pane. He felt it, like a weak electric charge, trembling through his skin. It was too early in the morning for an air raid. The RAF night bombers were usually gone by about 2 or 3 a.m. and the Americans rarely arrived before noon. Besides, he had heard no sirens to indicate that he should head down to the shelter in the basement.
And suddenly he remembered a day, back in the autumn of 1939 when, as part of an armoured column making its way across Poland, his column had passed by a huge snub-barrelled cannon being transported on its own railway tracks to the outskirts of Warsaw. In white Sutterlin-script letters as tall as a man he read the cannon’s name – Thor. That night, as Misch sat beside a fire made of willow branches, poking the embers with the remains of a Polish cavalry lance from the obliterated Pomorske Cavalry Brigade, he had felt the same trembling of the earth beneath his feet. It was the sound of Thor, launching its 4,700-pound shells at the Polish capital. He had been told that a single shell from that gun could destroy an entire city block.
At last Misch understood what had hounded him from his sleep. Russian long-range artillery had come within range of Berlin. In the days and weeks ahead, what little had remained undamaged by the Anglo-American bombers would be pounded into dust by Stalin’s guns.
One hour later, his chin dotted with scabs of bloody tissue paper from a hasty shaving job with a worn-out razor, Misch passed through the security checkpoint at the Old Reichschancellery. He side-stepped the boiler-suited workmen who were making their way across the marble floors, sweeping away fragments of glass from panes broken out of the tall Chancellery windows. The sound of it was almost musical, like that of a wind chime stirring in the breeze.
In January of that year, the German High Command had begun the process of relocating from the Chancellery buildings into the safer, bomb-proof complex below, which was known to all who worked there as the Führerbunker. Hitler himself had relinquished his lavish suite, with its views of the Chancellery Garden, for a cramped and stuffy quarters below ground. Since then, with the exception of short strolls amongst the rubble in the company of his German shepherd, Blondi, Hitler had seldom ventured out into the city. Now he could often be found, at any time of day or night, wandering its narrow corridors on errands known only to himself.
It used to be that Misch would hurry through the halls of this great building on his way to work, barely stopping to notice the beautiful furnishings or the lifesize portraits of statesmen like Bismarck and Friedrich the Great, glowering down from their frames.
But today he did not hurry.
Suddenly, there seemed to be no point.
All a person could do now was to wait for the end of what was to have been the Thousand-Year Reich, whose obliteration after less than a decade of existence would soon play out in the streets of this doomed city.
Misch did not expect to survive the coming battle. These days, in his plodding commute from the flat to his work and home again, the smallest things, even the sound of broken glass as it was swept across a floor, took on a kind of sacredness.
After the checkpoint, Misch descended a staircase broken up into four separate columns, each consisting of eleven steps. As he made his way underground, the air became thicker and more humid. To Misch, it smelled like a men’s locker room. In places, the cement ceiling was fuzzed with a curious white crystalline substance where water had leaked through.
Few people outside the Chancellery building even knew of the existence of this underground warren of rooms and narrow passageways, with its battleship-grey walls of re-barred concrete six feet thick and floors lined with burgundy-red carpeting.
In a little alcove 55 feet below ground level, Misch took his seat at a radio transmitter. For the next eight hours, with the exception of one forty-five-minute break, this would be Misch’s domain. All radio traffic in and out of this underground complex passed through this single transmitter and it was Misch’s task to transfer incoming and outgoing calls to their proper recipients. For the most part, it was mind-numbing work, with long stretches in which the radio fell silent. During these periods, he would sometimes put a call through to his wife, who had gone with their infant son to live with her parents south of the city, where they would be safer from the bombing raids. The strength of the radio antenna also allowed him to listen in to the various German Army broadcast stations, known as Senders, which had once been scattered over the vast areas of conquered territory, from Arctic Norway to the Libyan desert, but were now confined to the few corners of the Reich that the Allies had not yet wrestled from their grasp.
He shared this tedious duty with another radio operator, a squat and fleshy Austrian named Zeltner, whose toes had frozen off when he fell asleep in a bunker outside Borodino in the winter of 1941. The injury removed him from any possibility of service on the front line, and he had helped to run the switchboard at the Chancellery until, like Misch, he had been transferred down int
o the bunker. Zeltner moved about surprisingly well for a man with no toes and, when in uniform, showed almost no sign of his deformity. This was accomplished by stuffing the ends of his boot with crumpled sheets of newspaper.
Other than this, Misch knew very little about the man with whom he exchanged a few words twice a day, when he began and ended his shift, and whose body heat he each day felt in the padded chair they shared at the switchboard.
‘Anything come in?’ Misch asked.
‘Only this,’ replied Zeltner, handing over a message form, which had been filled with only two words. ‘It’s from a general named Hagemann, somewhere on the Baltic coast.’
Misch squinted at the message form. ‘“Diamond Stream observed”. What the hell is that?’
‘The man was probably drunk,’ laughed Zeltner. ‘I suppose you could do the general a favour and not hand it in.’
Misch tossed it back on to the desk.
Zeltner climbed out of his chair and slapped Misch on the back to say goodbye.
Misch had only been at his station for a few minutes before he heard a familiar shuffling sound coming up the corridor behind him.
He did not turn around. He didn’t need to.
Misch heard the sharply exhaled breaths and the switchblade noise of a man sucking at his teeth.
It had become almost a game for Misch, allowing himself to be sneaked up on in this way.
He felt a hand settle lightly on his shoulder, and then a voice softly calling his name. ‘Misch.’
Misch turned, rising from his chair. His heels crashed together as he came face to face with Adolf Hitler.
He wore a pearl-grey, double-breasted jacket, a green shirt and black trousers. Fastened to the jacket was an iron cross from the Great War and a gold-rimmed National Socialist Party member badge with a serial number of 001. In a few days, Hitler would turn fifty-six, but he looked at least a decade older than he was. His pale blue-grey eyes were watery and unfocused and he held his left hand against his side to stop the trembling which had taken over much of his body.
There was a rumour going around that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease.