To Die in Spring

by Ralf Rothmann

  The guard wore a dirty neckerchief and his mouth was just a slash in all his stubble. There was no collar on his uniform jacket, but it must have once have belonged to a senior rank; the fabric was officer quality. Where the stripes on the sleeve and the name of his division had been, a spiky wreath gleamed in the sunlight, made up of the ends of faded gold threads. Walter said hoarsely, ‘I’m a German. Give me water, comrade.’

  With both fists on the handle of the hydrant key, the man studied Walter’s mustard-coloured trousers, his short zip-up bomber jacket. ‘How am I supposed to do that if you haven’t got a cup?’ he asked. ‘And why are you wearing that Yank gear? Do you work for them?’

  ‘No,’ said Walter, ‘I was in the camp, the prisoner-of-war camp, and they gave us their clothes. The German uniforms were rotting right off our bones. Now give me water, please. I’ve been walking for hours.’

  The other man gave a start. He had styes in his eyes. ‘You’ve come from the camp? From Dachau? Isn’t that where the bigwigs go? What did they give you to eat?’

  Walter licked his raw lips. ‘To eat? My God, pineapple. Tinned pineapple, every day. Sometimes biscuits. I can’t remember what potatoes taste like, let alone meat.’ Again, he bent down to the standpipe and held his hands under the opening. ‘Come on, I’ve got to get to the station!’

  But the man didn’t move. ‘Tinned pineapple?’ he asked. ‘Every day? What luxury. And we have to go into the fields and chew daisies. Look, I’m not giving you any water, not without a cup.’

  Walter raised his eyebrows. ‘Enough! Where am I supposed to get one of those? Let it run, for heaven’s sake! Can’t you see that everyone’s waiting?’

  ‘Not my problem. Drinking water is precious, you must know that if you’ve come from the camp. Drinking water can only be dispensed into containers, so that nothing is lost. I have my instructions.’

  Walter shook his head in disbelief. He clenched his fists, stepped over the patch of mud in front of the hydrant and asked through his teeth, ‘And, excuse me, who gives you those? Your Führer? He’s dead, in case you haven’t heard!’

  He stood with one foot on the tip of the man’s shoe; the man lowered his chin and narrowed his eyes. His breath was bad. ‘Hello, what’s this? Are you threatening me, you filthy Yank? And getting violent while you’re about it? You can kiss my arse!’

  There was grumbling and cursing when he pulled his rectangular spanner from the hydrant and pushed it behind his belt. With his pelvis jutting and his arms folded, he raised his chin and shouted, ‘Listen to this – official announcement: the supply of drinking water is being interrupted until further notice because of infringement of public order. As water guard, I have the right to do this. Objections should be delivered in writing to the city administration. The nearest alternative supply station is at the Stachus.’ He gave a nod. ‘You can thank this fellow . . .’

  Then he climbed over a pile of bricks and disappeared into the basement of a house, of which nothing remained but its firewalls. Crows flew through the nave of the church on the other side of the square, and Walter, whose shirt was sticking to his back, looked around. A few ragged men stepped from the queue and came towards him in silence, including an old man in knee-length lederhosen who set his bucket down in the dust. The expression under his white eyebrows was one of sheer fury.

  ‘What a fool, what an idiot!’ he said. ‘What a wretch! These are the imbeciles . . .’ He pushed Walter gently aside and turned round. ‘What have we got, Huberle? An English one or a French one?’

  The man he had addressed, he too in short trousers, with gouty fingers, reached into his rucksack. ‘How should I know? Just a spanner.’ He took out a brand-new adjustable wrench and tapped it against the hydrant. ‘Look, this is aluminium. Like iron, you can whack someone over the head with it, but it’s aluminium, you understand? As modern as it gets. So, which way does it go, left or right?’

  He licked the tips of his moustache and applied the tool, pressing a foot against the hydrant, and after a quiet gurgling in the pipe, giving off a smell of warm rubber, the water shot across the cobbles in a high arc. The people groaned with relief and clapped, and one of the young women, with her blonde hair in a bun at the back of her neck, handed Walter her jug.

  As if there were another, undamaged earth beneath all the rubble and dust, the wide stream revealed a mosaic star on the ground – a compass rose – and after Walter had both taken a drink and doused his face, the young woman asked quietly, ‘What does tinned pineapple taste like?’ She scratched the side of her nose with her little finger. ‘Sweet?’

  An ivory edelweiss hung from the breast of her dirndl and as he gave her back the vessel their hands touched fleetingly. ‘Yes,’ he said, aware that he was turning red. ‘A little sweeter every day. We ate grass as well or it would have been unbearable.’

  She laughed because she thought this was a joke, and he nodded to her and set off for the station. On either side of the street were ruins several storeys high, and on some of the inside walls paintings or clocks still hung, a towel beside a shard of mirror. In front of a pile of stones, tracks had been laid for the trucks that were carrying the rubble away, which narrowed the street. If an army truck honked its horn, people had to step right into the rubble to get out of the way, holding on to twisted gas or water pipes and craning their necks to see what was on the flatbeds passing by. Many waved or tapped their lips with two fingers – a mute request for cigarettes – but the GIs seldom returned the greeting, and then only to children. To some they threw gumdrops or oranges.

  The station was closed to civilians. In the shimmering air over the tracks the pylons and radio masts seemed to be moving or dissolving from one moment to the next. There was no glass in the curved arches of the crowded hall, the roof held up here and there by the trunks of spruce trees; hardly a wall wasn’t cracked. The bars of the windows, melted into strange shapes in the intense heat of the nighttime raids, hung like steel foliage from the parapets, but in spite of the countless shell holes, the letters above the ticket counters could still be deciphered: ‘Munich, Capital of the Movement!’

  Nuns handed out tea and dried apple rings to the discharged soldiers, hundreds of them, from different services. They squatted or lay among rubble and broken glass on the platforms and looked mutely in the direction from which their train was supposed to come. Twisted tracks loomed into the sky, sleepers dangled from them. The walls of burned-out wagons that had tipped from the tracks were inscribed with chalk; addresses, missing person announcements, messages for those who had not yet been found. Beneath the crossed-out words ‘Home to the Reich’, someone had written ‘Home to Mummy!’

  *

  Endless fields of rubble in Essen, too; the city centre looked as if it had been bombed even after not a stone was left standing. Alone and apparently undamaged, the huge synagogue on Steeler Strasse loomed into the summer sky, and had it not been for the traces of soot and smoke above its windows, older than the war, one might have been tempted to think of something like mercy, a protecting power.

  The tram to Borbeck was full to bursting. People stood crammed together in dented cars with no windows, and Walter’s journey took nearly two hours: time and again they had to get out and struggle on foot through craters full of twisted metal, broken pipes and sewage, to board another tram on the other side. The Persil advertisements on the green carriages were scratched, or had been blistered by the firestorms, and their wooden seats had been pulled out. The silent passengers were plainly starving, and even the gaunt faces of the conductors were darkened by grief. But the sound of the bell, the long shrill ringing when they pulled the cord on the ceiling, was just as silvery and bright as before.

  Outside the Lito in Frohnhausen, which only showed English-language films, children were trying to free chewing gum from the cobbles. Walter travelled as far as the monastery and then towards Klopstockstrasse. Sheds cobbled together from corrugated iron and floorboards stood behind the piles of rubble,
and the smoke of wood fires filled the air. Some ruins had chicken wire stretched across them and were being used as stables; rabbits and chickens sat on cupboards, chests of drawers and white-spattered chairs, and in one bathroom a thin cow stood, eating hay from the tub.

  In the rubble of the house where Walter had spent his childhood, the occasional blue tile gleamed in the exposed corridor. He climbed onto the mountain of bricks and looked round. All three aisles of St Dionysius – apart from a few pointed arches – had been destroyed, but the tower was still standing. The high chimney of the Linde bakery was only just held in shape by its steel rings. A crowd waited outside its newly barred door, which bore the inscription ‘Essenausgabe/Food Distribution’; pots and milk churns clanged when bored children knocked them together. Then sparrows flew up from the bushes.

  ‘Uschi, come and sit with Grandma!’ called an elderly woman, and the girl who had been staring at Walter turned round. The cemetery wall had been hit as well, but the gatehouse where the undertakers worked on the ground floor looked unchanged. Not a single crack in the plaster or the black glass nameplate, not a slab of slate missing from the roof with the dormer window, Walter saw, as he turned the rusty handle, knocked the dust from his jacket and immediately stepped back in alarm.

  As if she had been standing behind it, waiting, his sister opened the door without warning and said quietly, almost whispering into the vacuum, the sudden suspension of time: ‘I knew, I dreamed it!’ She smiled radiantly. ‘My feather protected you!’

  For a ghostly moment he saw their father’s face, and she jumped from the step into his arms. The shadows in the corners of her eyes seemed darker, her shoulders bonier, and he spun her so violently through the air that her plaits flew and her velvet slippers fell on the stone floor. As soon as they had got their breath back he wrinkled his nose and asked, ‘What’s that smell? Have you taken up smoking or something?’

  She wore a floral smock dress over tracksuit bottoms, and she pointed to the windows above the company sign, HESS UNDERTAKERS. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘It’s Mum’s boyfriend’s birthday, he’s turning a hundred and eighty or something. But he’s plastered already, so you don’t need to wish him many happy returns. He’s snoring in his armchair and the others are drinking his Bols and smoking all his fags.’ She reached between her lips and pulled out a long strand of gum. ‘Do you want to try this? It’s only a week old and still quite soft. At night I put it in an egg cup full of sugar, it sucks it all in and tastes sweet again.’

  He pulled a face and they sat down on the front stairs. ‘School’s still shut, though we may be able to go back in August,’ she chattered on. ‘The whole roof is wrecked, can you imagine? In the meantime I’m teaching myself some things, particularly English. First of all we had the Yanks, with their brilliant swing music, and now we’ve got the Tommies. They’re not so great because they’re a bit boring, they hardly listen to any music and talk through their noses like teapots. But of course their chocolate tastes spectacular!’

  A little boy riding a rusty bike along the pavement braked abruptly and swerved around her embroidered slippers. ‘Good idea!’ she called after him and winked at her brother. ‘And soon I’m going to the north. There’s a sanatorium in Glücksburg. The cough has got better, but Dr Böhmer says they’re soon going to be opening even more mines than they had before the war. We’re the engine of the economy, in fact, so the air’s going to be so bad that you won’t be able to hang your washing out ever again.’ She stretched her big toes through the holes in her socks, then pulled them back in again. ‘During the war, though, you have to admit, we had excellent air! I mean, when things weren’t on fire. I could always breathe properly, even at night, and I stopped sweating all the time. I felt really healthy.’ She pulled out some of the grass beside the stoop and let it trickle over Walter’s fingers. ‘And what about you? Have you got a girlfriend up there? I bet you have! Is she nice?’

  He grinned, nodded, and without going any deeper into the issue she lowered her head and tried to blow a bubble with her gum, but it was too tough and all she managed was a hard pop. She was holding her plaits together under her chin, and suddenly her eyes became moist and her lips went tight. ‘What happened to Dad is terrible, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought I could miss him. Did Mum actually send you the telegram? I can’t remember, I was in such a state. The same day my friend was dug out of the basement, Micky Berg, remember? The one you gave your Trix building set to? He was great, I went to school with him every morning. I always had to hold his glasses when he fought for me. And then they shovelled him out, and he sat there on a bench, covered in chalk and without his glasses. He looked like an old man.’

  She sniffed, swallowed, spat her gum into the grass, and he put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. Tears dripped onto his jacket and rolled over the waterproof fabric, and for a while neither of them said anything, just looked across the pile of bricks at the hospital. Fine hairs stood out on Leni’s head and on her plaits, tickling Walter’s neck, and it was so quiet in the street that he could hear her breath, the quiet whistling under her collarbone.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said at last and sniffed hard. ‘They’re looking for workers all over the place. You make good money as a miner and you get extra food, even butter and fresh milk – not that powdered muck. The miners’ association gives you a flat, and we can move in together. I’ll clean, wash the clothes and make your sandwiches. I’m strong, believe me, and it would get me away from that fat bastard at last. I mean, Dad was bad enough, but this guy . . .’

  ‘How come?’ Walter asked, leaning back and looking at her. ‘What does he do? Does he hit you? Or does he get grabby?’

  Leni grunted. ‘I’d like to see him try! I’d stick the apple peeler in his ball sack. No, he’s just disgusting, you know? He eats like a pig, the grease drips from his chin, and when you go into the bathroom he’s standing there with his trousers at half-mast looking at his poo. And he has a box of watches and rings he collected from his dead people, can you believe it? Why should we bury those? he always says, the maggots don’t wear jewellery. Good God almighty . . .’ She looked up at Walter, interlinked her fingers with his and asked quietly, almost timidly, ‘How long are you staying?’

  Walter shrugged. ‘Depends on the trains. I’ve got my work up there, Leni, they won’t keep the job open for me for ever. But if you come on your spa cure, we can see each other for longer, I promise. Glücksburg isn’t at the end of the world. I’ll collect you on the tractor and show you the farm and the animals and everything. We might even get the confiscated horses back, too.’

  She grimaced as if the sun were shining in her eyes. ‘Christ, don’t talk to me like I’m a kid! I’m nearly thirteen! And I’ve been in love, I cried till my pillow was full. There was a captain here, David Reeve, a real film star. Young lady, he used to say, take care, young lady. He even had strawberry-flavoured chewing gum and his fingernails were always clean. But I’ve got over him now. The world doesn’t owe you anything, you know, certainly not romance. Maybe I’ll kiss a man once, just once, just to see what it’s like, and after school I’ll join the nuns over there.’ She nudged him with her elbow, slipped into her shoes and smiled broadly. ‘I don’t suppose you want to kiss me, do you? Come on, let’s go upstairs. It’ll soon be feeding time.’

  On the ground floor of the narrow house, coffin lids of various colours leaned against the walls with price tags hanging from their crosses. Behind the office with the Adler typewriter a flight of stairs behind a frosted glass door led to the first floor. The leaves of the rubber plant in the corridor gleamed, looking as polished as the linoleum, but the living room, where about twenty people were sitting and chatting in low voices, was grimy and full of smoke. The curtains were yellow, and Walter’s sister pointed to a bald man in the armchair beside the window. He seemed to be asleep – with his chin on his chest, below which swelled a high belly, and both hands in his lap. His breath stirred the tip of the handk
erchief in his jacket pocket, and one thumb twitched. ‘That’s him,’ Leni whispered, and a few guests turned round. ‘Mum’s cash cow.’

  The men were smoking cigars, as were some of the women, and they were all drinking wine with bits of fruit in it. Walter didn’t know anybody apart from Herr Moritz, the old tailor from Kraftstrasse; they shook hands with him and leaned forward to understand his cheerful greeting, which he whispered because he was suffering from a sore throat. A thin old man tested the fabric of Walter’s uniform jacket between his fingers; Walter was about to explain where it came from when his mother entered the room.

  Plumper than she had been before the war, she had put on lipstick and done her dark hair in waves, and at first she seemed not to see him. She blinked into the smoke. She wore a sleeveless red dress with a pearl brooch and a white apron. She said, ‘Clear the middle of the table for me!’ She was holding a big serving dish with crunchy bits of roast chicken and schnitzels in breadcrumbs on it, and while the guests moved their cups, glasses and ashtrays aside and unfolded their napkins, Leni linked arms with her homecoming brother and said, ‘Look, Frau Urban, look who I’ve brought!’

  But their mother set the dish down before she looked up, and Walter, who was having difficulty swallowing, knew that she had noticed him a long time before. Even though she was just forty-five, he noticed the skin on her neck hung wearily down; now she pretended to give a start and opened her mouth wide. Her eyebrows, raised high in surprise, made her forehead look even lower, and the theatrical clapping of her hands, with all their gold jewellery, embarrassed him, since he felt that it was all a performance for the benefit of her guests. Dark fluff grew around the corners of her lips, and her brown eyes were as cold as ever; Walter couldn’t see himself in them.