Then, from one day to the next, instead of being sent to some front with this company, he got orders to go to Wörgl for noncom training, equipped for an infantry march: 3 sets underwear; 2 pairs socks; 1 tent pole; 2 tent pegs; 1 complete uniform, twill; 1 complete rifleman’s dress uniform; 2 blankets, wool; 1 tent fly; 1 cooking pot; 1 gas mask; 1 steel helmet; 1 bread bag with canteen; 6 cartridge pouches plus rifle and sidearm.
During the ride into the Inn valley, the first sounds of war. Then every day the twin-fuselage strafers roared down the valley, bombing and shooting up everything in sight. The major who directed the training in Wörgl was obviously tortured by the fact that he had to put up with those twin-fuselage Lightnings thundering by, and there was nothing he could do about it but take cover and stay put until they thundered off again. The major, who was plastered with medals—what most caught your eye was the Iron Cross in gold on the right half of his chest—ordered the troops under his command to fire their rifles at the low-flying planes. Especially the men with scopes on their rifles should shoot at the Lightnings. Somebody said that the planes were so well armored that rifle bullets would bounce right off them, but no one dared tell that to the major. He arrived at every muster on horseback. He sat on his white steed and announced that the final victory was at hand. The advanced V1s and V2s were almost ready to be deployed, and the U-boat war was entering a new . . . Johann stared at the spring sky and thought: Blue casque above the valley of the Inn. When the major mentioned the Führer, Johann paid attention. With the Führer a month ago: what calm, what strength, and how intently he listened, and suddenly quite impulsive, worked all night long into the wee hours, then had the answer, so brilliant in its simplicity that none of his associates had come up with it.
When they went out into the field for training, the white horse would have been too tempting a target for the Lightning gunners. They deployed without the major and scratched their heads about the fact that such an experienced major could have said he expected to get a positive report soon from the riflemen with scopes. Aim three to five plane lengths ahead of them, he’d told them. But that meant there would be nothing but thin air in the crosshairs of the scope or in your notch and bead sights. Someone had heard tell that the major had been a Nazi propaganda officer on the Russian front. Johann did not fire a single shot when they took cover from a Lightning attack at the edge of a forest. It was March and then April; he lay on the edge of the woods looking down at the foaming Inn. The French were advancing from Innsbruck, the Americans from Rosenheim. If the French were already in Innsbruck, that meant they were in Wasserburg, too. So the war was over. Four other guys whose home towns were also occupied were of the same opinion. Since the major rode a hobbyhorse through the barracks when he got drunk every evening, claiming that the Inn valley was the lifeline of the Alpine fortress and the Alpine fortress was the guarantor of final victory, Johann and the other four decided to put some distance between themselves and the speaker. Their rucksacks were filled with canned hunter’s sausage. They had been permitted to empty out a storehouse that would soon be captured by the Americans. As soon as darkness fell, they set off uphill, northward. And were amazed when they came to the path leading that way: hundreds or thousands were following it, sleeping in haystacks and going on at dawn. And at a fast clip. Simply following the guys ahead of them. Now always under cover of woods. At some point, the ground stopped rising and began to fall. At some point they ran out of woods. Farther down there would be more tree cover. Suddenly, around a bend, watchdogs and motorcycles blocked their path. Military police, their chests covered with tin, at once started bellowing at them, “Get a move on, march!” Three hundred yards down the hill was a collection point where you were supposed to check in. A fighting unit was being put together to defend the Alpine fortress. When the watchdogs could no longer see them and the collection point was not yet in sight, the five of them walked, as if unintentionally, a bit to the side of the path, and as soon as there were some bushes and trees, they faded into the forest. Everyone else kept going toward the collection point. Wurmser, from Mittenwald, had engineered this maneuver. As soon as the forest absorbed them, they turned back uphill. But when they reached the top, they didn’t continue down into Austrian territory but kept to the ridgeline, heading west. They kept sinking up to their bellies in rotting spring snowdrifts. Unexpectedly, a hut in a clearing. They were greeted by a stout little man with a pistol trained on them. Staff commissariat officer. Once assured of their peaceful intentions, he invited them in. The entire hut was full of supplies. They could help themselves. He was living there with two female assistants whose combined ages were less than his.
“We ought to take them for ourselves,” said Wurmser.
Richard, who planned to be a priest, said, “Shh.”
Ferdl from a family of hoteliers in Garmisch said he wouldn’t touch them with a manure fork.
Since their rucksacks were still practically full, they just stuffed packs of cigarettes in wherever they could. So long then, Herr Commissariat Officer.
Toward evening, they descended until they came to a farm. They slept in the hay, exchanged their uniform coats for old farmers’ jackets, ate bread dunked in milk out of double-handled bowls, learned that the Reich had surrendered and all soldiers were to report immediately to POW collection points. Anyone caught in possession of a weapon would be regarded as a Werwolf, i.e., get shot. They still had their pistols, but they were relieved of them before they had even reached Garmisch. Wurmser had already left them because he lived on a farm near Mittenwald. When he was a hundred yards down the hill, he’d treated them to a farewell yodel. Johann didn’t yodel back. He would have given anything to be able to yodel like Wurmser. That last yodel hung in the air like a gleaming, hundred-yard-long whipcord. And not even half an hour later, they were confronted by two men in striped prison garb who relieved them of their watches, pistols, and cigarettes. Johann was glad that Wurmser had already taken his leave, because he was jumpy and obstinate and proud—unpredictable in general. He might have put up resistance. And these two were already armed with pistols. Apparently, they couldn’t get enough of them. Johann thought of his father’s lovely 8 mm. He was going to return from his war without a pistol. No problem.
Herbert, the apprentice saddler from Mindelheim, said, “They were from Dachau.”
“They were queers,” said the hotelier’s son from Garmisch. Besides hotelier, he planned to be a violinist. The three others—Herbert, Richard, and Johann—lay at the edge of the woods and watched him go. From terraces and open windows they heard gramophone music, jazz. American soldiers were lying and sitting around with their legs propped on the tables. Herbert the apprentice saddler, Richard from Radolfzell, and Johann lay in the bushes, looking and listening. They had never seen soldiers like these. They weren’t soldiers, they were movie stars.
For a while, they were on familiar ground. They had done their training between Kreuzeck and Garmisch. When they had gotten past Garmisch, the Mindelheim boy left them.
“Take it easy, Herbert.”
“You fellows take it easy, too.”
Richard and Johann didn’t know how long it would take them to get to Füssen. “After Füssen I know the way,” said Johann. He didn’t, but he hoped that if he stuck to the ridgeline from Füssen on, he could find his way to Immenstadt and, staying on the ridge, to Oberstaufen and from there, with the lake in sight, down into the foothills but keeping to the woods, to Lindenberg, Heimenkirch, and Wangen. He might even make it to Geiselharz and down through thirty-nine sweet little hamlets into the riot of cherry, pear, and apple blossoms surrounding and embracing Wasserburg.
“Stick with me, Richard, until we see how things go.” But already on the third day of their trek à deux, a greenish, open vehicle occupied by four soldiers appeared in front of them on one of the forest trails; a few days later they learned that these sturdy machines built to travel cross country were called jeeps. Now they had been taken prisoner, were t
old to sit on the hood, and they took off down the curving trail. Johann and Richard clung to the windshield so they wouldn’t be thrown off. On the paved road in the valley, they were transferred to an armored car, where they crouched—or lay more than crouched—between whipping antennas. They went roaring away and pulled up in front of a wide-open gateway where soldiers, both blacks and whites, were sitting around. It was the Garmisch hockey rink. On all the bleachers and the playing surface, prisoners sat or lay. Richard and Johann found a spot on a bench that was at least roofed over. Johann felt like crying. But then there were books. The library of Radio Munich had been evacuated here for safekeeping. Instead of lining up for work outside the camp where you could earn better rations by washing tanks, Johann became the camp librarian. And six weeks later, when a lieutenant drove him home in a jeep, his rucksack was fuller than ever. Full of books, that is, especially Stifter. He’d started right in on him. Johann came home with a library on his back.
Actually, they were afraid of this lieutenant because he always carried a whip with him. One time he had stopped beside Johann just as he was writing down a poem in his latest notebook. In the snow on the Kreuzeck, he had clearly felt that he would never write another poem. Whether he was thinking of Magda or of Lena, he would express himself in some other way. Perhaps in Zarathustra’s tone. But when he discovered what being a prisoner was like, his resolution dissolved. He just had to follow his hand, which followed a mood against which he was defenseless. He felt free of second thoughts and just wrote down what came to him. And he realized that the American lieutenant everyone was afraid of because he carried a whip was standing barely a yard away from him. And he kept writing.
Though the jumbled peaks are calling,
Once goals of my keenest attempts,
The valley still tugs at my heartstrings.
“Poems,” said the lieutenant. Johann turned red. The lieutenant patted his shoulder approvingly with the handle of his whip. He only used it when he happened upon an SS man. These SS men, barely older than Johann, had been captured near Crailsheim. The lieutenant asked where Johann lived.
“Lake of Constance,” said Johann. Suddenly the lieutenant was much more interested in Johann. His mother’s people had immigrated to America from a town on Lake Constance, a place called Graubunden. Johann neglected to tell the lieutenant that Graubunden wasn’t a town on Lake Constance but a Swiss canton. He pretended that Lake Constance was so big he didn’t know all the towns on it.
Leave-taking from Richard. Every day Richard had volunteered for work outside the camp and had become acquainted with an American chaplain. Now he was serving at the altar on Sundays.
“So, take it easy, Richard.”
“Take it easier, Johann.”
And now out and over and down into the land of June.
The French wanted the lieutenant to drop off his charge at Singers’ Hall in Lindau, where they housed their prisoners. But the lieutenant drove with Johann from one lakeside villa to the next until he found a Capitaine Montigny and interrupted his Sunday conversation. He was quickly persuaded to make out a laissez-passer for Johann that would supposedly protect him from further attempts to seize him. The lieutenant, who wore wire-rim glasses, dropped Johann off at the grade crossing by gatekeeper Stoiber’s house. Johann thanked him in English. Although he’d had six and a half years of English in school and always gotten an A or A minus, he’d only heard real English once a year, namely, in the last period before Christmas vacation from a record on which George Bernard Shaw said that his name was George Bernard Shaw, so he understood almost nothing the lieutenant said to him.
As Johann walked along the tracks toward the setting sun, he was dissatisfied with himself for not thanking the lieutenant more profusely.
That was always the way with him. When something happened for which he should be thankful, he was so filled with what someone had done for him that he only realized much later how inadequate his thanks were compared to the favor he had received: that he was able to come home on a June Sunday evening of pure gold, his rucksack full of books—he had simply packed it with his favorites and not a soul had raised any objections—along the tracks past the fruit growers’ auction hall, past the warehouse where Mother had handed Herr Witzigmann the loan guarantee, past the spot by the tracks where the blackened ground showed that for years Johann had unloaded boxcars full of coke, coal, and briquettes at that spot, past the freight depot—but by then he could already see the house, the terrace full of soldiers, a thicket of bicycles leaning against the side of the house and under the blooming chestnut trees, and in the street between the restaurant and the station and on the square where clubs and organizations had always assembled before a parade there were now soldiers riding bicycles in circles. Johann came to a stop. He was not going to get past them. He certainly couldn’t interrupt what they were doing. They kept grabbing fresh bicycles from against the house wall, riding them in wild circles, and then discarding them and getting new ones. They were obviously having great fun riding around, snaking past each other, and then throwing the bikes away. In color they ranged from brown to black. Africans, probably. And Niklaus was going over to each discarded bicycle, picking it up, and adding it to the thicket of bikes that had accumulated between the wall of the house and the chestnut trees. With studied casualness, Johann turned off toward shoemaker Gierer’s little house farther down the hill, walked behind it and then onto the path that led up between blooming espaliered pears to an arch of roses and onto Dorfstrasse. He crossed it and mounted the five steps to the terrace. To his left and right were tables full of soldiers. The air was thick with the sounds of French. Only about five more strides would bring him to the two steps that led from the terrace to the open front door. Those were the five most difficult steps he had ever taken in his entire life. Luckily, the terrace was divided by planters of ivy. But he wouldn’t be invisible. He was prepared to be taken into custody. Although the laissez-passer of Commander Montigny was in his pocket, if one of them was to tear it up before his eyes, they could do whatever they wanted with him. Transport him to France. To a mine. Even in Garmisch, entire truckloads of prisoners from the hockey rink were being driven off to France to work in the mines. He hadn’t shaved during the whole time he was forced to sit and lie around at the skating rink. They did have faucets. You could stand in line, get some water, and shave. Johann felt that as long as he was a prisoner, he couldn’t shave. So he had grown a kind of beard, and it was pleasant to rub his hand against its wiry curls. Now, in the midst of excitedly chattering French soldiers, he feared they would be more likely to let a clean-shaven man get past than one with a beard. He was glad he was wearing the farmer’s jacket that was more yellow than green and had staghorn buttons. It was surely less provocative than a uniform jacket. He had tried to give the lieutenant his military service book to show to the French capitaine, but the American had handed it back to him with a smile, pointing to the forged birth date. In one of the lonely farms where they slept, they had heard that only soldiers born in 1927 and earlier would be taken prisoner and had used their thumbs to smudge out the sevens and then made them into eights. But of course it was obvious what they had tried to do. He did have his laissez-passer, however, with the correct information. He just had to keep that in mind and then take five firm steps, walking so confidently he would exude a sort of unapproachability. At least, that was the idea. Five steps between the ivy planters. Johann wondered who had gotten the ivy planters out of winter storage. The bright chatter of French sounds filled the universe. At any moment one of them could jump up and . . . Daniel in the lions’ den, he thought. But Daniel had his God, a God who, if you believed in him, would close their jaws. All Johann had was his fear. The front door was open. The two wings of the swinging doors were also open. Then he was in the passageway. Already could see to the right of the kitchen door the framed, color print of fashionable ladies and gentlemen playing tennis on the deck of an ocean liner. Now he hoped that some other
things would also be as they always had been. Just short of the kitchen door, he would turn left and then before he reached the window, turn right, up the stairs, and across the creaking floor to the door of Room 8 . . . But before he could turn left, there was Lena in the kitchen door. Dark and light purple stripes in slanting lines competed on a dress that was close-fitting and had a neckline that was a bit too deep. Johann thought of the soldiers who occupied the house.
“Your mother’s in church,” said the mouth beneath the eyes and the hair.
Johann said, “Thank you,” ran up the stairs, threw off his rucksack, blew out the candle burning under the picture of the guardian angel, even crossed himself, but had to smile at that, ran back down, out the back door, and down into the village. He passed the Linden Tree, obviously not commandeered, but no sign of being in business, either. No need now for him to count the guests in the Linden Tree or Café Schnitzler. Even before he had reached Schnitzlers’ garden, he saw a man sitting in the café window. Head Teacher Heller. He was sitting so that you saw him directly from the front. His back was straight but his head was bowed. He sat without moving. Johann was unable to look for very long. As soon as he read the sign that had been hung around the teacher’s neck, he ran off. The sign said: I WAS A NAZI, and it was signed by Head Teacher Heller. Then Johann slowed down again. He didn’t want to attract attention. He passed a few local people and said hello. They didn’t recognize him until he spoke, and they told him so. It made him happy that they recognized his voice despite the farmer’s jacket and the beard. When he reached the churchyard, he considered: should he now enter the church from the back like a grown-up, or should he enter at the side as he always had? In any case, first of all he had to gaze down at the lake through the crenellations of the churchyard wall. As in the falling snow on the Kreuzeck, he had the urge to respond to what he saw and he answered: Among your beauties, the water level in June. If it sinks half an inch, he thought, it loses one hundred sixty million cubic feet. He hoped nothing had happened to Adolf.
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