The Wolf Children

by Cay Rademacher

  It took them an hour to get to Öjendorf Cemetery. At times they walked down clear streets, at others they had to take paths through heaped rubble so narrow that they had to walk in single file. Stave didn’t mind; it made the silence between them less oppressive. He watched Karl, walking ahead of him, and noticed that the boy unconsciously rubbed at the stump of his right index finger, as if he could somehow encourage it to grow again.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew all these short cuts through the ruins,’ Stave said, for the sake of saying something.

  ‘I used to go to the cemetery sometimes,’ Karl replied without looking round.

  Stave was so surprised that he nearly tripped over a sharp-edged broken piece of concrete. After the funeral he and his son had never gone out to Öjendorf together. He had assumed Karl had never visited his mother's grave.

  ‘How often were you there?’ he asked, cautiously.

  ‘I didn’t count. The dead don’t keep a visitors’ book.’

  Some of the ruins resembled ancient garden walls, waist-high stone walls as if they’d been deliberately erected on either side of the path. Behind them lay heaps of rubble, often as high as the houses they had once been. The bricks radiated heat, and a column of dust lingered in the air in the canyons between them, making Stave's eyes go red. All I need now is to burst into tears, he thought to himself, using his handkerchief to mop the sweat from his brow. Whatever might have happened to Karl in Vorkuta, he hadn’t lost any of his strength. Quite the opposite in fact. Stave would have slowed down a long while back if he hadn’t feared being left behind.

  Suddenly Karl turned off the path and climbed up a pile of rubble twice his height. ‘Have you lost your orientation?’ Stave asked. ‘We’re almost there.’

  ‘That's the point.’

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  ‘Something for mother, a little gift.’ He stood up. In his right hand were three blue and three silver thistles that had been growing in the cracks between lumps of rubble. ‘Tough things,’ he said. ‘No wonder Mother always liked thistles so much, despite the prickles. Not exactly a mourning wreath though.’

  ‘She’ll like them,’ Stave managed to get out. He was deeply moved by his son's gesture. At least he hasn’t lost his soul altogether, he reflected hopefully.

  Öjendorf Cemetery is Hamburg's City of the Dead, out to the east, criss-crossed by road. Before the war even buses had gone through it, dropping off thousands of mourners at stops on the way through.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Stave said again.

  ‘Sooner or later we’re all there,’ Karl replied, ‘but hopefully not right now. When the time comes, do you want to be buried next to Mother?’

  The chief inspector stopped in his tracks. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because of the other woman.’

  ‘The “other woman” is called Anna von Veckinhausen, and I have no idea whether or not I’ll ever even live with her, let alone die and be buried near her. I’ll let you do what you like with my ashes.’

  ‘I’ll deal with them,’ Karl replied, leaving Stave uncertain as to whether he was being sarcastic or deadly earnest.

  They entered the grove set aside for burial urns, a few hundred metres beyond the main entrance. A rose bush, a lavender bush, the flower heads still green and unopened, giving off only a little scent, evergreen bushes, a ring of cypress trees and willows spared the woodcutters’ axes in the last winter. In the middle an empty plinth, where a half life-size statue of a weeping woman had stood until somebody stole it. In a semi-circle around it dozens of urns were buried in the summer of ‘43, when nobody had the time or energy to lay out row after row after row of individual graves.

  Stave didn’t look at the spot where Margarethe's ashes were buried. Instead he fixed his gaze on the empty plinth, unable to get any words out. Don’t hold it against yourself, this is something different: shame. You’re ashamed because now you love another woman. Ashamed that you didn’t manage to get Karl, the visible legacy of the deceased, on to the straight and narrow. At least not in the Nazi years, and maybe not now either, if you don’t know what to do or say.

  His son laid the thistles on the ground where the urns were buried. Then he made an awkward gesture; for a moment Stave thought he was going to put his hands together as if to pray but in the end he put them behind his back.

  They stood there, silently, stiffly, as if they didn’t know why they were there. Stave tried to address Margarethe's ghost, to tell her about his new life. But he felt foolish. A prayer? The last prayer he had uttered was at his confirmation and that had been a cascade of words he’d learnt by heart with no meaning to him. Should he put his hand on his son's shoulder? It seemed a phoney gesture. And so he just stood there, three paces from the empty plinth, three paces from his silent son.

  At least Mother's at home,’ Karl said, out of nowhere. The he turned and began heading back towards the main gate with that same, long, powerful stride he had used to navigate his way through the maze of ruins. He didn’t look back.

  Stave could feel the sweat running down from his crown over his neck into the collar of his shirt. Only when Karl had reached the main gate did he start out after him.

  Somewhere amid the ruins he caught up with his son. Karl had waited for him. ‘I’m going to move out,’ Karl announced casually, staring over the top of an indoor heating stove that had remained standing like some pillar from antiquity while the house around it had burned to the ground.

  ‘Where to? Accommodation is hard to find.’ Stave tried to sound relaxed, even though his heart was breaking.

  ‘Into an allotment colony towards Berne. Little shed with water on tap, a camping toilet and a heating stove. Not as if I’m going to need that over the next few months.’

  ‘An allotment garden?’ Stave choked out. Previously he had ignored the existence of such things, considered the world of allotment gardeners who lived there at the weekends boring. Since 1945 those with allotments and sheds had become little kings and queens, growing potatoes, lettuce and even tobacco on their jealously defended little patches. Anyone who had one could make a fortune on the black market in a good year. ‘Who's going to let you move into his allotment shed?’

  ‘A war comrade. He was in Vorkuta too and came back a few weeks ahead of me. His parents had an allotment and shed. They died in 1943. Some other people had taken over their patch.’

  ‘Some other people?’

  Karl shrugged his shoulders. ‘Somebody had just moved in and was squatting there. My friend threw them out.’

  ‘They left voluntarily?’

  ‘My friend had better arguments, ones he’d learnt in the Wehrmacht.’

  This isn’t good, Stave thought to himself. Karl hadn’t mentioned his friend's name, and he didn’t ask. But he feared that the boy was getting in with the wrong sort of people. ‘When do you plan to move out?’

  ‘Straight away. I’ve already packed. Wasn’t as if there was very much.’

  Stave pretended to stumble, to conceal the effect on him. He reached out a hand to support himself against a brick wall. ‘So soon?’

  ‘I’m not leaving Hamburg.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘At first I’ll cut tobacco leaves and dry them.’

  ‘They’re looking for people to do repair work: builders, plumbers, installation people.’

  Karl looked at the ruins around him and gave a bitter laugh. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘The British are looking for car mechanics, even shipbuilders.’

  His son gave him a sympathetic look. ‘I asked around yesterday how things were. One of my comrades is the doorman at a hotel for the British. He used to be an officer on board a steam ship. Another looks after the tracks on a stretch of railway line. A third makes ships in a bottle and sells them on the black market. I’m going to grow tobacco. You do whatever you can find.’

  You stayed at school to take the final leaving certificate just to go and grow tobacco,
Stave wanted to yell at him. But he checked himself. Maybe the younger ones would come to terms with the new times better than we oldies who made such a hash of everything. They walked the rest of the way home in silence, Stave walking more slowly, not just because he was already exhausted but in order to spend more time with Karl. He wracked his brain in vain searching for something he could talk to him about, without causing any difficulties. This can’t be happening, he said to himself, that he should turn up as if from the dead outside my door just a couple of days ago, and already we have nothing more to say to one another.

  Back at the apartment, he watched as Karl gathered together his few items of clothing and packed them into an old leather school satchel he must have got hold of somewhere or other. He had to fiddle about quite a long time with his crippled hand at the ties that held the flap down. Stave had to fight the impulse to rush over and help him.

  ‘Will you stay for supper?’

  Karl shook his head. ‘Down by the allotments they’ve got potato soup and then a special garden pipe to smoke. I won’t be a burden on you any more.’

  ‘You’re not a burden to me.’

  For the first time Karl looked at him considerately. ‘I’m grown up,’ he said slowly, almost tenderly. ‘A lot more grown up than you can imagine. I’ve been a soldier on the front line, and a prisoner in a gulag. I go crazy if somebody else is in the same room with me for any length of time. I’m going to look after the allotment for my friend. He isn’t there most of the time. He's already done a good bit of business and got himself an apartment. I’ll be able to relax. And so will you, if you want to get together with that woman again.’

  Stave closed his eyes. ‘Anna isn’t throwing you out. She doesn’t want to do that. Nor do I.’ And she may in any case never set foot in here again, he added to himself.

  ‘Even so, it's better if I go.’

  ‘Will you at least look in from time to time?’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  Karl nodded, an awkward gesture from a teenage boy become a man far too early. Stave listened at the door to his footsteps descending the stairwell. Then suddenly the apartment was uncannily still.

  For a long time Stave sat and stared at the closed door. Grief and a feeling of failure weighed on him like a ton of bricks. Then he got up and ripped open the windows and the door to the balcony, feeling as if he was going to suffocate — not that it helped, the air was like liquid lead. He grabbed all the bottles, pots and non-recyclable glassware he could find in the kitchen cupboards and filled them all with the rust-tinged water from the taps. Better to fill as much as he could now while the water was still running. He filled the bath too even though he knew that if it sat there a long time it would leave horrible rings on the enamel that would take hours to scrub clean. Eventually he went out on to the balcony and sat down, chewed on the dry bread and washed it down with water tasting of iron. He watched a truck rumbling down Ahrensburger Strasse. Maybe one of Greta Boesel's deliveries, he thought briefly, hoping that the case might distract him. A haze fell over the street, and in the distance he could hear children playing and laughing.

  That's all I need, he told himself, to sit here like some old-age pensioner listening to the noises of the street. One of his younger colleagues had a few days ago lent him one of the new American novels that had been banned in the brown years but was now available in a German translation. It was a thin volume more like a compact magazine, printed on cheap paper, a picture scrawled on the cover of human figures on a coast somewhere, and beneath that the price – fifty pfennigs – and the title In Another Country. I can understand that, Stave thought to himself — I feel as if Hamburg is another country.

  He began reading but within half an hour he realised that he couldn’t remember a single sentence of what he’d read. Angrily he closed the book. Outside the setting sun had turned the ruins a fiery red. He wondered if Karl was still roaming the streets or if he had already arrived at the allotment. He tortured himself with the thought that he might have wasted the one chance to put things to rights between himself and his son.

  He was almost relieved when there was a cautious knock on the door.

  Constable Ruge was standing in the stairwell, his young face tanned from the sun. He was about to speak when the chief inspector interrupted him. ‘You are the Angel of Death,’ he growled at him. ‘Come in and tell me what's happened.’

  ‘We’ve had another murder.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to take it on, on top of the Winkelmann case?’

  Ruge's already red face took on an even deeper shade. ‘On the contrary. Cuddel Breuer has put Chief Inspector Dönnecke on this case.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘Because I think there's something you need to know. The body was found near the railway tracks down at Dammtor. It's one of the coal thieves.’

  ‘Wilhelm Meinke!’ Stave announced, grabbing his hat and shoulder holster.

  ‘I knew you would be interested,’ Ruge said proudly, trotting down the staircase after the chief inspector.

  ‘Did Dönnecke send you to me?’ he asked in amazement as he clambered into the Mercedes, trying to roll down the stuck passenger window to let in a bit of air.

  The young officer stared straight ahead, screwing up his eyes against the low evening sunshine. ‘No’ was his short reply.

  ‘You came off your own bat?’

  ‘Nobody thought there was any need to tell you. So I decided I would.’

  I’m amazed, Stave realised, both delighted and almost embarrassingly touched at the same time. This boy has been following my case and as soon as he thinks that there's something I’m missing out on, he comes to tell me. Not exactly the done thing; he could cause trouble for himself if somebody found out. I will make sure that doesn’t happen.

  ‘Are some of our colleagues still at the spot where the body was found?’ he asked cautiously.

  Ruge shook his head. ‘Dr Czrisini maybe. Kienle had already packed his stuff away when I left them half an hour ago. There's a couple of uniforms to secure the area.’

  ‘What about Dönnecke?’

  ‘He's already gone. He thinks he already knows who did it.’

  ‘Who?’

  Ruge shrugged. ‘He told a few of his colleagues, but not me. I was too far away. And ...’ he hesitated, ‘... I didn’t dare ask.’

  ‘I understand,’ Stave muttered. Chief Inspector Dönnecke had been in the CID since the Kaiser had been on the throne. He could be less than polite. ‘Has he arrested the killer?’

  ‘As far as I know, they’re still looking for him.’

  They passed by a wide expanse of ruins on the right-hand side. Stave glanced briefly at an old one-legged man who was piling up bricks in the shadow of a three-metre high wall. He's trying to build himself a shelter, he thought to himself. A novice. A police patrol will find him soon enough here on Ahrensburger Strasse. Or somebody will come along and steal all the building material he's collected. Probably just got back to Hamburg.

  Then his thoughts turned to Wilhelm Meinke. Would the boy still be alive if he had arrested him that afternoon? Best not to think too long and hard about that one. Maybe the boy's body was already lying in some bush while he was spying on Ehrlich and Anna in the rose garden not far away. He felt uncomfortable, nagged by the idea that he was somehow responsible.

  ‘Is the body still there?’

  ‘Yes, unless Dr Czrisini has done his work faster than normal.’

  Five minutes later they were there. ‘Stave,’ the pathologist said, though he didn’t seem particularly surprised to see him. Ruge had parked the Mercedes on Tiergarten Strasse, between the train tracks and the wild shrubbery that grew at the edges of Planten un Blomen. The doctor and a few uniformed policemen were standing half-hidden behind some bushes.

  The chief inspector glanced at the boy's undernourished body Meinke had wanted to emigrate to America, he suddenly remembered. When he had first interviewed him back in the winter
, the boy had mentioned that he had a relative in New York. He wondered if anybody would be bothered to try to inform him.

  The hair on the back of the boy's head was smeared with blood, the dry earth around the spot where his head lay had turned dark.

  ‘Trauma to the skull and brain,’ Czrisini said. He had come up to where the chief inspector stood. ‘From just looking at him, I would say two fractures of the skull, to the rear.’

  ‘Two blows to the head?’

  The pathologist nodded. ‘Probably. The old rim of the hat rule: wounds caused by a fall are usually located where you would see them if the victim had been wearing a hat. Most caused by blows are located higher up on the skull.’

  ‘Below the level of the brim of a hat, the victim would be more likely to see them coming.’

  ‘Exactly, as is the case here. Did you know the boy?’

  ‘Only slightly. I interviewed him twice. What's your opinion? Was he attacked here?’

  ‘The patch of blood on the ground suggests so. Kienle didn’t find blood anywhere else in the vicinity.’

  ‘Meinke was standing among the bushes. Probably waiting for the next coal train to come along. His murderer creeps up behind him and delivers two blows to the skull.’

  ‘With either a stick or a rock, I suspect. I may know more after the autopsy. I doubt that the boy would have seen his killer. But standing in the bushes he might well have heard him coming — rustling branches. With all those thorns not many people could get through without making a noise of some sort.’

  ‘Or Meinke knew there was somebody standing behind him, just had no idea they were going to attack him. How long has he been dead?’

  ‘From the temperature of the body, I would say since late afternoon. The murder was reported by a young couple around six o’clock. They had been intending to have a little fun together here in the bushes. The discovery took away their appetite.’

  ‘Were there none of the other coal thieves around when the police showed up?’

  ‘Vanished as fast as fans of the Führer did in 1945. They’ll be looking for another spot to work from.’