Grandfather’s shipyard had been destroyed three months earlier in a night attack. How heavily his grandmother had leant on her stick as she walked up the Elbchaussee, picking her path through heaps of dirty snow, skidding a little in her rubber overshoes with their slippery soles. Spotting her from his window, he and Sabine had run to meet her at the gate. Wordlessly, she had thrust out a piece of paper. It was very neatly typed. He did not take in what it was at first. There, listed alphabetically, were the names of all the men who had died. Unable to part with it, she carried the paper with her, unfolding and showing it to everyone she met, taking continual stock of the magnitude of the human disaster by the chance reactions of strangers. His mother rose from a sea of daily nuisances and complaints (for Colonel Oster had been seconded to Berlin, where life was still decent) to be dashed on a frightening peak of desolation. Her future security was gone. The war had taken away her men, then the business that had been their whole support. Finally she understood that the life that she knew was over. She feared everything. She cried at any trifle. He had half wished unhappiness upon her; now that it had come, he saw how little it suited her.
Sabine trotted to school beside him, frowning at the world, wondering things out loud. School was a waste of time; they learnt nothing and often his year was despatched to carry out some menial task, winding hose reels or shovelling coal.
“What are you thinking, Nico?”
“Nothing much.” He mostly thought about his feet, so cold that he couldn’t feel them. They bore sizeable calluses where his father’s shoes, two sizes smaller, pinched. Some of the calluses were whitish-yellow, the colour of dead flesh; others, blood-filled, were a sinister purply black. With every step they hurt.
“Nico, why was Mutti crying?”
“Relief, I expect. The war’s nearly over,” he said, and Sabine clapped her hands for pleasure and, smiling, revealed red-raw dots, raspberry pips trapped between her teeth.
After Stalingrad, air raids increased in frequency. Their house was a paper one, made of parchment and twigs that could flare up in a moment, and Nicolai appointed himself fire watchman for the Elbchaussee. Despite bitter complaints from the women quartered with them, he moved all the furniture from the top storeys, insisting that they all live on the ground floor. He overruled his mother, who wept because now even her sitting room was spoilt. He packed everything she said was valuable into boxes, stacked them high in the cellar. He shovelled their remaining coal as far down into the deeper cellars as it would go. He placed buckets of water ready in the cellar, with lids to keep the water fresh, and took towels from his mother’s sparse stock, so they could breathe through them if necessary. It was then a matter of waiting for the inevitable.
They sat side by side on hard chairs in the deep coal cellar listening to the steady drone of planes overhead. At first they came only on clear days; then grey skies and rain proved no protection. If they were not there by seven-thirty, they wouldn’t come. Then the RAF extended its working hours. Nicolai listened: the short, sharp sound was a firebomb, which could spray fire as far as eighty metres all around. The crack of an explosive bomb was much greater, a 106-kilo bomb that threw out oil or rags soaked in petrol, or a firebomb which covered houses with petrol and rubber “cow-pats.” These were the worst, combining with explosions that tore out doors and windows, letting air in to feed the flames. Fire scared him. In the streets, people battled impossible flames with tiny amounts of water, passing chains of buckets from hand to hand. A neighbour, bombed out, howled inconsolably that she had lost the only photographs she had of her son, killed in action. That was why some carried suitcases everywhere containing their most treasured possessions. For the same reason he had dismantled his darkroom, storing the equipment and chemicals in the deepest corner, sorrowing for the loss of the only place where he was truly himself.
When it quietened down, people dozed. War was perpetual tiredness, the ability to sleep standing up. Nicolai looked at the book he had grabbed from his father’s shelves in a rush as the siren sounded, delving for the forbidden second layer. It was a thin volume of poetry by Heinrich Heine. “The whole world will become German,” it said. The strong, crisp words sang in his head. He read to Lore in a whisper,
“Es brannte an allen Ecken zugleich
Man sah nur Rauch und Flammen!
Die Kirchentürme loderten auf
Und stürzten krachend zusammen.96
“Why is Heine banned?” he asked.
“He was baptised, but his parents were Jewish. He wrote the Lorelei.”
“That’s in my songbook,” said Sabine. They had not realised that the child was listening to them.
“Ssh, go back to sleep.”
“Come here, darling,” said Lore; she took Sabine’s head on her lap and stroked her. He worried that the sorrows and fears Sabine felt were actually Lore’s, that in touching the little girl, she was unknowingly infecting her.
“Will we all burn up?”
“No, Sabine,” he said. “He was writing a hundred years ago, in bad times when he had to leave Germany. The big fire burnt half the city but it was long ago.”
Sabine murmured. Soon she too slept. Her imagination, daily stretching each puddle into a lake and making of every pebble a mountain, could not encompass anything so big.
February 28th was his seventeenth birthday. His mother gave him a watch of his father’s, which he put on with pride. Lore gave him a pair of shoes, real prewar men’s hiking boots in brown leather, exactly his size. He was staggered by the generosity of the gift. A complex barter of onions and a sack of potatoes for half a dozen sheets—sheets and linen of any kind being particularly valuable to the bombed-out women—had brought her to the friend of one of them, the young widow of a pilot, a man with the right-sized feet. She shrugged away the difficulties, the trouble she had gone to, what it had cost. Yet, for the moment before he felt the wonderful ease of them (they were worn in but still newish and with a perfect pair of laces) he wished away the dead man’s shoes. Sabine had made him a card. He admired her handwriting—excellent for a child of six who was only just at school. Looking closer, he realised that she had carefully traced over words which Lore had written.
At school that day, he was presented with an official document telling him to report for military training to the Reichsarbeitsdienst.97 Fear shuddered through his guts. Manpower was short and for some time boys turning eighteen had been issued with a Notabitur98 because the fatherland needed them. It was the turn of the seventeen-year-olds. For years there had been talk of victory; now they were spurred on by threats. Bad as things were, they were told that they would be far worse off if Germany lost. The war would eat them all. Yet he could not regret leaving an institution where there were no books, where old dodderers brought in from retirement could not keep order and did not try to teach. His mission was to assist in the manning of local flak stations, thereby releasing trained men for the front. He was to start by learning to operate a searchlight. Nicolai woke daily with the same sense of disbelief. He had not exactly imagined himself running the shipyard, destined as Wolfgang’s inheritance rather than his, but it had always been a source of security. That security was gone. Now his half-brother, who wanted things so badly that he generally got them, was a fully fledged SS officer somewhere in Poland. And he, the recalcitrant schoolboy and reluctant warrior, was to spend his nights picking bombers from the sky. Had his father not told him to keep his eyes fixed on a point far away? Perhaps the gods were mocking them both. He wanted to live. It was the only thought in his head.
Riding into town, the S-Bahn crossed areas of Hamburg that had been destroyed, the tracks so bizarrely untouched that the credulous claimed the Allies did it deliberately. (They intend German citizens to travel, went the grim analysis, so they can see the worst and spread the word.) Everyone in the packed carriage pressed to the windows and stared out, saying nothing. Their silence had a muffled quality, as though they were collectively holding their breath. Perha
ps, in these superstitious times, they were. Nothing moved in these places; no living soul could be seen. They saw the wallpapers change on bedroom walls; a black open shaft plunged down a six-storey house to the cellar. Skeletons of houses held one another up. Only the wind inhabited the desolation, creating restless seizures of dust and dirt. Grains of mortar and rubble dust flew up, eddies and clouds of it powdering over black burnt brick.
He found Klaus waiting at the end of the Feldstraϐe, close to the Reeperbahn. His uniform made him look older, though the helmet sat crookedly, being too large for his small head. His friend, who loved welding and was good at it, had given up his apprenticeship in the boiler factory to enlist in the Luftwaffe. Now he was a gunner in a flak battalion. He had not been able to stand the prospect of two more years of grinding hard work in a factory with a hard boss and no earnings. He insisted that they visit “his” tower first, the brutal concrete mass of the double flak tower dominating the red-light district. Entering, Nicolai saw that the cavernous spaces in the lower storeys of the flak tower were empty.
“In air raids, we fit thousands in here. Up to twenty thousand, but more always try to get in,” and, arms outstretched, Klaus swivelled right, then left, to demonstrate the delights of his kingdom. “When it’s jumping, we get as many as thirty or forty thousand, packed in like sardines.”
They trudged up the broad flights of concrete stairs heading for the eighth floor, where Klaus and his comrades slept. He banged on the walls as they went.
“Look at that. Isn’t that lovely? Three metres of concrete, safe as houses and girls all around. We sneak out and visit them. I’m going to survive this war here. Much safer than sitting in a fleapit factory waiting for a bomb to drop on you. I’ve got the bloody gun platform right over my head. I’m safer than Hitler.”
He kept a bottle of schnapps under his army cot. They drank appreciatively.
“Klaus—what would you think, if I could have done better by you? I mean, got you a decent apprenticeship,” ventured Nicolai.
“What, if pigs could fly?”
“My mother’s family owns a shipyard. Owned it, that is. It got bombed to hell before Christmas, killed nearly everybody in it. Only the night watchman survived. An old man of seventy-three.”
“Is that a joke?”
He shrugged.
Klaus let out a long, low whistle. “You big shit. You really could have got me in. A real apprenticeship.”
“Yes, and you could have gone up with the works.”
“Poor fellows, I feel for them. To the fallen.”
“The fallen.”
They had another drink, saluting them. Klaus gave him sidelong glances and he felt ashamed of himself for not telling him earlier. What had silenced him was the same cast of mind that told Nicolai to keep stumm about his own fighting ambitions (nil). He thought of the things his father had said. How much energy and intelligence did it take to avoid killing anyone? Would he have enough?
But Klaus was already draining the little glass and now jumped up laughing, bouncing springily on the soles of his feet, mock-punching at Nicolai. “You saved me. Good for you. We’re alive, aren’t we?”
Somehow they were both energised by the news. What was death for, if not to make life sweeter?
It was a short walk to the Talstraϐe, the centre of St. Pauli’s black market, where they fortified themselves: the bar, hidden behind layers of blackout curtains, belched smoke and heat towards them. The lighting was harsh on the flushed and hectic faces of drinkers who laughed and talked too loud and did not care what they consumed, as long as it kept coming. They left after one schnapps, heading for the main brothel street, the Herbertstraϐe. A sign said that entry was forbidden for young people under the age of eighteen, a rule nobody enforced. Numerous young people wandered around in the blackout getting up to mischief. Steel gates with obliquely slanted bars screened the alleyway from casual eyes. Nicolai sauntered through behind Klaus.
The narrow street was so full of sailors, airmen and soldiers in uniform that they obscured the girls. They sat on stools in windows or stood, gazing boldly at the men who ogled them: a redhead in a swim-suit, a Spanish-looking woman in a tight black evening dress fluttering a fan; a girl-next-door type in skirt and blouse and sandals, the skirt pulled up, the girl beckoning. He wondered what they did about maintaining the blackout. Perhaps they pulled the curtains to when the air-raid siren sounded. Ahead of him in a business suit an ordinary-looking man, who could have been anyone’s father, walked slowly, goggling at the merchandise.
“You and your camera. You could make some money here, photographing the girls. You’ve got a proper setup, haven’t you?”
“Sort of.”
“I could sell plenty, the lads think of nothing else. Look. What about her?”
An older woman, tapping on the window, blew Nicolai a kiss.
“To photograph?”
“For a quickie, idiot. She’s not pretty enough to photograph.”
When he smiled back, rather uncertainly, she held out both hands with spread fingers.
“Ten Reichsmarks,” said Klaus. “Go on, haggle a bit. You’ll get her for five.”
He examined the lipstick creases around her mouth, the bosom pulled high, one leg with a slightly swollen knee pushed out provocatively. Her hands, with their brown liver spots, were very ugly. Nobody could want her. He shook his head.
“This is my one.”
Klaus’s voice held a certain pride. “His” girl had fair hair in plaits, wound round her ears, was dressed in a similarly foolish short dirndl and low-cut blouse with full, puffed sleeves. She had a silly face, was a rag doll with rouged cheeks. He felt no desire for her at all. He hovered around while Klaus went in. His friend was back in ten or fifteen minutes, grinning. She had washed him, before and after. They all did. Though he did not want to die without having had a woman, Nicolai had no appetite for a “quickie” with any of them. Abruptly, with a sudden shaft of surprise, almost of dismay, he understood why. It was Clara this girl brought to mind; Clara, that pink-and-white porcelain rosebud whom he sharply, urgently desired.
Head jerking (he must have fallen asleep on a sandbag), he leapt to his feet as sirens wailed and the searchlights sprang up, the blue-white glare of the master light a kilometre away joined by its near satellite, his own 150 cm light, sweeping left to right. Running down the slight slope, Nicolai jumped over the electricity cable winding its snaking path from generator to light, hurrying to take up position with the two other lads. Leaning in to the warm metal, his frozen face connected with the heat of 990-million candlepower. The aim was for the two lights between them to cone the lead RAF plane coming in, the “master of ceremonies,” blinding the pilot leading the convoy of bombers to their target. Then the gunners would blast him out of the sky. Their job was to turn the searchlight as fast as possible (some were motorised; not theirs) and catch that first plane in the light. The sergeant shouted instructions; Nicolai and the other human mules heaved and shifted the great drum into its new trajectory.
Seated beside the enormous bowl of the sound locator, fat bum spilling over the tractor seat, the sergeant adjusted the wheels of the trumpet to “hear” the course of the oncoming convoy. He cursed continuously. He was an irritable gnome guiding a milky white beam so solid you could have drunk it. Suddenly they had their moth. The beams, intersecting through fuzzy night air, froze the lead plane; there were only sixty seconds before the target passed into the next zone. All along the Elbe, the sky was split by lights. The guns behind them kept up a continual staccato ack-ack; then the MC was gone. Already, the searchlights one sector on were picking up the lead plane, still intact, holding the tiny black smear in the next piece of sky. Following him came the drone of the bombers. Even over the ceaseless stutter of flak he could hear the distant thump of heavy explosions starting up somewhere near the port. He couldn’t stop staring up against the constant flashes of exploding shells, the sky a soup of flying objects, black spots, then t
heir precise white negatives burning on his eyelids.
The all clear sounded around five in the morning. Nicolai liked this dark, this quiet, making his way back through air that stank of cordite, feeling for the potholes and new craters. For twenty pfennigs he had magnesium rubbed on the soles on his boots. The sparks meant that others would see him and avoid tripping over him. Not for him the indignity of collisions, the crude insolence of boys groping any woman in the blackout. Time spent in the darkroom had given him a sixth sense. Sometimes he even walked with his eyes shut, feeling his way and using that sense (a boy on a bicycle about to hit the kerb) to divine where he was. His marker on the way home was the dairy. He could just make out the big bottles glimmering through cracks in the boarded-up window, having long ago been filled with salt, not cream. When he got home he heated himself up a plate of soup, the whitish glue known as blauer Heinrich,99 more potato starch than anything else. It was the exact colour of watered-down milk. The spoon slopping the liquid on its way to his mouth told him that his hands were shaking. Events came upon him like this, in after-reaction. It seemed to him that he shook as much from disbelief as from fear, though there was fear and plenty of it. He rubbed his hands together until he had them under control and finished the soup. If, one day, they did not still, how could he ever become a photographer?
The Children's War Page 35