The parks started to green and the air smelt of spring. On Sundays, they filled with Fremdarbeiter,100 the shouted greetings of Poles and Frenchmen, of Balkan and Mediterranean types flirting, their women dressed up in very short skirts. Everybody looked askance at such unnatural good spirits. People whispered about the reprisals this “enemy within” would wreak on them, just as soon as they could. Foreign workers set up their own black markets in goods train depots; it was said to be the French who broke into food shops and stole the suitcases poor folk shoved outside burning houses. It was the Poles robbing the old and unwary at train stations; it was foreign women spreading the venereal diseases that put “our men” into military hospitals, the harshest penalties notwithstanding. Nicolai noticed how many German women went with these conscripted foreigners, even in public, in the absence of their husbands. He too admired their joie de vivre. These cheerful people were resistant to the German disease of literal-mindedness, so dangerous that it might kill them all. It spread its tentacles everywhere. Since Rudolf Heϐ had fled to England, apparently influenced by a clairvoyant, all clairvoyants were banned. Even the future was rationed, the wags said. Entertainments were dangerous: Goebbels banned all clowns, “because he had to be the best.” First, foreign singers were not permitted to perform, then the opera was closed. There were no legal entertainments left, apart from sex. People said that even Hitler could not succeed in banning that.
The spring brought good news. His father’s division was posted to Italy, to a place called Roccasecca. There, sorrel grew wild in the hills and the vines were bursting into leaf. On his days of leave he went north, searching for the lost villa of Pliny in the hills outside Città di Castello, where dark green lines of cypresses delineated the lie of ancient terrains. His father wrote that certain olive trees, so ancient and gnarled that the bark was much paler than the palest leaves, might indicate where, in Tifernum Tiberinum, the writer had walked on the slopes and fertile hills. He described the craters the Allied bombs made, uprooting the tallest poplars so that they lay neatly on the path, as though a giant hand had lifted them very delicately and then laid them down to rest. Reading and rereading them, Nicolai learnt these letters by heart.
Spring shone even on lawns that were unwatered and unkempt, the grass growing long among weeds and drooping shrubbery, and between the rows where they had planted carrots and beans. Nicolai noticed in the new light that the house had grown scales, where large patches of paint were flaking from walls. He watched the honeycomb pattern the sun made on the ground as he walked in the shade of long, stretched-out camouflage nets, gashed here and there, thus demonstrating both their fragility and the absurdity of relying on this, or anything, for protection. On a brilliant May morning, off duty and playing hopscotch with his sister in the garden, he heard a sound like a huge swarming cloud of bees, saw a dark cloud to the west that shimmered and made a noise that went on increasing, a deep, penetrating humming that made all the windows not already broken vibrate. Over two hundred bombers in one formation, the sun reflecting off fuselages and whirling propellers, were all glitter and shimmer as they passed over the house. Sabine waved gaily at them.
“You sweet idiot. They’re the enemy. Americans.”
These enormous four-engined bombers were called Flying Fortresses, a magnificent and terrifying sight. To see so many aircraft in broad daylight confirmed what they all already knew, that the war was lost.
Transferred to work on a flak battery of four 88mm anti-aircraft guns, Nicolai was given the job of staring at the sky to spot the earliest sign of a vapour trail, to hear the first drone of a distant engine. He could have volunteered to train as a gunner, if he wanted to, but he did not. He took care to keep his head down, to say little, to use his energy in avoiding killing anyone. He continued to do menial jobs. By day, the Americans flew overhead, usually B-17s and B-24s in tight formation despite the hellish artillery they were throwing up against them, never wavering, never taking evasive action, wave after wave in a relentless advance. At night, when it was the RAF’s shift, his job was to pick up the hot shells the guns spat out every few seconds and carry them to a pile out of the way, to be reused later. He dragged over sledges of ammunition when the off-duty factory workers who were supposed to help did not turn up. An 88 battery needed ten men to operate it, the shells weighed seven or eight kilos each and they were permanently short of staff.
A Russian HiWi101 was assigned to them, a big burly fellow, a hard worker who did most of the lifting and helped Nicolai, as he did everyone. Nicolai had the impression that, like him, the man was hiding his intelligence for a reason. On beautiful dawns, as the sun hazed through the smoke, he would straighten up to see the man smiling, revealing slablike yellow teeth. As soon as they had the all clear, the men lit up. The sergeant who never stopped talking always threw a packet of cigarettes over to Iwan, who bowed and clapped his hands together. Then the two of them would have their smoke together and chat away, each telling the other the names of things. Though they had barely a word in common, they both understood work. His name wasn’t really Iwan; that was what they called all Russians. He was pathetically grateful for anything; usually the Russians rolled up the fag ends the others threw down.
Iwan took a fancy to Nicolai’s watch and endlessly tried it on, right then left wrist, daintily turning his brawny arms this way and that to admire it. If it had not been his father’s, Nicolai would have given him the pretty toy.
“Keep away from him,” said one of the gunner crew to Nicolai with a nudge. “It’s foreigners that sabotage the shells.”
“How could he? They’re all crated up.”
“Not here, idiot. In the munitions factories they do it. They’ve got thousands of foreign workers. They drill into a shell so the propellant and explosive ignite when it’s fired. Blows the barrel up when we load it. Then we all go sky high. If we’re lucky, they just rupture it. In which case you get a nice new face and both eardrums blown. Or if you’re unlucky . . .” He drew a finger across his throat and grinned broadly, happy to have frightened somebody lowlier than himself.
A week later, when the all clear went and Nicolai looked for his HiWi, he found Iwan lying on his back, staring sightlessly at the dawn. The long anticipated dud shell had gone off in the barrel of the 88 just as the Russian was waiting to feed the next shell into the loading mechanism. He had taken the full blow directly in his chest. The barrel of the gun had stripped open like a banana. His face was untouched. When he heard the news, the garrulous sergeant came over and closed the man’s eyes tenderly, then squatted beside the big body, waiting for the stretcher-bearers to come, unable to find a single word to say.
All the time the raids intensified. Though orders were issued forbidding workers to leave the city, thousands fled. In the oppressive heat of July, the smoke and dust were unbearable. His mother decided to take Sabine to the seaside, for health reasons. He hoped that it would cheer her up. His grandmother, growing according to his mother “more wilful by the day,” refused to leave Hamburg. He and Lore remained. He was not free to leave his post and she was needed to guard their house against marauding “bomb women”—women bombed out of their own houses who seized and occupied any dwelling they found temporarily empty, stripping it bare. But within a week the families already quartered with them were evacuated to the countryside and the house grew very quiet.
Early on a Sunday morning over seven hundred bombers attacked the city, setting fire to a vast area to the northwest and confusing the radar with a new technique so effective that it negated the anti-aircraft fire. On the way home, jumping over potholes, he saw new, smoking scenes of devastation, the grey cloud clearing like morning mist over the river to reveal the jagged shapes of buildings that, overnight, had turned into fantastical torn-paper versions of themselves. Glittering aluminium foil strips lay everywhere; this was the stuff the bombers had dropped. It looked exactly like the tinsel people hung on Christmas trees. He picked up handfuls and tossed it into the air.
Nicolai and Lore sat on the back steps. It was far too hot to stay inside. The garden was cracking in the unremitting heat, the few remaining lettuces wilting. It had been Sabine’s job to water them; she often forgot or, when she remembered, the water had been turned off. Lore, who for months had worked ceaselessly, now had little to do. She sat motionless beside him, the dry skin of her face looking used and thin in the brightness. He slithered down and lay flat on the path, letting the sun pound and dazzle him. He was, as usual, desperately tired.
“What will you do when the war ends, Nicolai?”
“Nothing. Eat. Sleep.”
“Study, that’s the important thing. Go to university. The only thing you can keep safe is what’s in your head.”
There was nothing in his head. He hadn’t even finished school. Anyway, his school was closed now, they all were. He rolled lazily onto his side, stared at the tiny creatures scurrying along the soil.
“Nicolai, promise me that you will get a good degree and use your brain. You could be a lawyer, if there is any law, if there is any justice in Germany, after the war.”
“I’ll find Ilse. After the war, that’s the first thing I’ll do and you’ll come with me, to France. You can show me things. I promise I’ll learn from you.”
“No. Learn from decent people.” Her teeth were bared in a horrible grimace of self-disgust. “I’ll never see France. I don’t know why my useless life has been prolonged.”
“Don’t say that, Lore, please.”
Then she said nothing at all. She always talked like that: in intense bursts, relapsing into long periods of silence. Everybody else was trapped in the detail or told lies. Lies made the world feel safe, otherwise they would all fall down the deep cracks between the words and their meanings. But Lore told the truth. The relentless light revealed the pain that lay, always, just under the surface of her face. Long starved of vitamins, his teeth had started to hurt in just that way, as though they had been bathed in some invisible sugary solution for months that had all at once penetrated the enamel to hit the raw agony of pulp. Her malnutrition was of the soul. She was drifting away from him, or perhaps he was just too tired to tether her, too tired to do anything for anyone.
On his grandmother’s seventieth birthday they took the trolley bus into town. It was a while since he had been in the centre. The city wore a depressed aspect, dusty and shabby, with shops, restaurants and department stores all boarded up. Long queues stood in front of every food shop; elsewhere streets seemed empty. Flags and posters hung over many bombed-out sites with the legend: FÜHRER, WIR MARSCHIEREN MIT DIR BIS ZUM ENDSIEG.102 Along the Rothenbaumchaussee, piles of rubble smouldered and smoked, for the weather continued abnormally hot, over thirty-two degrees Centigrade by day and not much cooler at night. His grandmother, delighted that he had broadened out and grown so tall, seemed shocked by Lore’s appearance.
“All bones and eyes. My dear, you’re ill. I shall make you an appointment with my good doctor here,” said his grandmother solicitously, but Lore did not reply. It suddenly was obvious to Nicolai, but she would not even consider it. She had a way of shutting her mouth and then smiling that he knew well, which meant that the issue was closed.
“At least a cup of tea.”
While she bustled around with the samovar, she told them how she had spoken in her “good London English” to Canadian prisoners of war working on a bomb site to see if they were well treated. They had presented her with a packet of strong tea.
“I was delighted. Imagine, every month, a Red Cross package from America with chocolate, tins of cheese and margarine and tea and Nescafé. They can give to us, not the other way round. Not, of course, that we have anything to complain of, nothing,” and she patted Lore’s hand, lowering her voice, “not like some people. We’re going out; I’ve saved my coupons and it’s decided. There’s nothing good to eat, not even ‘under the table.’ Still, it may be our last night together for a long time. We’ll make the most of it.”
Walking back towards the Alster with the heat striking up from the pavement, he noticed here and there strange paintings resembling alpine landscapes on partly wrecked buildings. People boarded over the apertures or broken windows, brightened them with crudely painted flowers or animals. Outside the town hall, untouched by the latest attack, the Winter Relief “sacrificial column” still stood four storeys high, a plywood monument in the shape of a Greek temple testifying to a million privations. His grandmother nudged him as they passed it. “You’d think a bomb would manage to hit that ugly thing. To think of what we’ve given to ‘those people.’ And today I stood in a queue for four hours to exchange a burnt-out hundred-watt bulb for a sixty-watt one. And there are no shoes anywhere. And in my queue it was a real slanging match, between those who had been bombed out three times or four. How do people manage?” She lowered her voice, with a glance at Lore. “Of course, we are being punished for what we did to the Jews.” Again, Lore said nothing.
They arrived at a crowded restaurant on the Alster, where the head waiter greeted his grandmother with elaborate compliments and led them to the remaining free table on the terrace. Two old men were singing and playing accordions on a little boat moored at the low stone jetty. His grandmother tapped her fingers to the music. They ordered a roast bird, which someone said was pigeon; at any rate, it was not on the ration cards.
“Do you have caviar? That’s not rationed. Like hats. You can have as many of those as you like,” she said. “Beluga, naturally, the best.”
Nicolai made an effort to smile. The bird, when it came, was very small and rather overcooked. He forced it down with a little of the dry bread. Lore would not eat and kept her coat on, even though it was so very warm. His grandmother talked and talked: she told them about the magical boat rides of her youth and the long summer days when Groϐpapa, an athletic young man, used to row her under the green canopies of weeping willows along the shore and try to kiss her under every tree. Her forced good cheer was beginning to depress him. He felt himself receding far into the distance. The old woman with her mouth opening and closing shrank to the size of a thumbnail.
“We will survive,” his grandmother said. “We survived the last war, we built up a fine business.” She had taken the list of victims out of her bag, was touching the worn paper and shuffling it round and round. “Our good German people are enormously resilient.”
She spoke far too loudly, perhaps because she was growing deaf, perhaps because other people might be listening. Then he realised that she was not saying these things for their benefit at all. It was her unease that was talking, the worries that ran round her head ceaselessly and the little clichés with which she consoled herself. At last, he felt sorry for her. Taking the piece of paper from her, he slipped it back in her bag.
“We must drink to your health,” he said, “to another seventy years, Groϐmama,” and they clinked their glasses together. When the sirens started their wail, there was a general groan and everybody stood to run to the shelters. The nearest one, under the Alsterhaus department store, though big, was already packed. They made their way down the broad stone steps just in time, for the wardens closed the doors and told those behind to go elsewhere.
These planes did not stop. He estimated many hundreds, at least as many as the great bombardment of the other night, wave after wave. The thundering of anti-aircraft artillery was continuous; the walls shook.
“Is that you or not?” said a girl’s plaintive voice.
“It’s me,” said three or four male voices at once. Then there was laughter.
The vaulted cellars smelt very bad. Somebody made the old joke about bran bread being responsible for the foul air, but then there was a general silence. Crushed with so many strangers, nobody spoke. Nicolai perched uncomfortably on one of the buckets of sand, his face running with sweat. His grandmother, who was sitting against the wall in quite a good spot, had her eyes closed. Perhaps she was praying. Then the lights went out, there was the rumble of t
hings falling, dust whirling, the feeling of choking on the hot gritty air. His head felt weird. Perhaps it was the beer they had drunk that made him feel so woozy, as though none of it was happening, yet the bombs were so near that the cellar floor shook all the time.
“We’ll be buried alive!” It was a woman’s voice, high with hysteria.
“Shh. Keep calm,” the warden kept saying. Nicolai’s head dropped; the lack of air was getting to him. He started breathing very slowly and regularly through his nose. Please, he said, don’t let me die from carbon monoxide poisoning. He could feel the sweat running straight down his face and the back of his neck. There was an enormous bang and the whole place jolted. The air filled with acrid fumes, which stung so much that his eyes squeezed shut. A series of explosions followed, sucking the air out.
A door opened in the blackness. He was scrambling up and out, pulling in deep breaths of air, into the brilliant yellow light. He reached down to help the person behind. He knew this woman; it came to him that her name was Lore. The sky was the colour of sulphur and much brighter than day. The houses across the street were on fire, gigantic flames licking at them. Dark outlines of people at the windows were throwing chairs and tables and mattresses out of windows. They fell, flashing light and then dark, in slow motion through the bright air. Brilliant red and white target bombs fell all around them. They were stained-glass windows, coloured panes giving onto a golden sky and everything was beautiful. He pointed up.
“They call them Christmas trees,” he said calmly. “You see, it’s because of the shape.” He strove to capture the sergeant’s precision. “A magnesium flare, on a parachute, falling at a given speed. They illuminate the target area beautifully.” He could not hear his voice. The woman Lore was saying something, but he did not know what. He indicated his ears. She pulled at his arm, pointing. People were digging at the stones and dirt with their hands. Then he remembered who he was and knew that his grandmother was under there; part of the cellar had collapsed.
The Children's War Page 36