by Heinz Rein
Lucie Wiegand doesn’t answer the question. He’s not going to get me, she thinks, the whole thing is a trap, it’s far from inept, but I can see the snare.
Siering quickly finishes smoking his cigarette and throws the stub in the ashtray. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere like this,’ he says, his voice now a note harsher, and the friendly little wrinkles around his eyes have disappeared.
Aha, Kiepert thinks, off we go.
Lucie Wiegand looks through the window at the green lawn over the Untersturmführer’s shoulder. ‘You must try to get hold of the information you are after in some other way,’ she says.
‘When did you last see your husband?’ Siering asks.
‘My husband hasn’t lived here since June 1941,’ Lucie Wiegand says, avoiding the question.
‘That’s not what I want to know,’ Siering says sharply. ‘I asked you when you last saw your husband.’
‘That was when,’ Lucie Wiegand says.
‘Nonsense, Mrs Wiegand,’ says Siering, still calm, but raising his voice now, ‘utter nonsense. Your husband has been living in Berlin for the past four years, and you haven’t seen him? Who’s going to believe that?’
Lucie Wiegand remains stubbornly silent, her hands locked firmly together. Stay strong, she thinks, don’t give in, whatever happens next.
‘I simply don’t believe you,’ Siering goes on, he uncrosses his legs and brings his foot down hard on the carpet and sits there with his legs spread, hands on his knees, head thrust forward, cap at the back of his neck.
Lucie Wiegand shrugs her narrow shoulders and glances briefly at Kiepert.
Embarrassed, the police lieutenant looks away. I can’t help you, little woman, he thinks, he’s stronger than me, much stronger, he has the support of evil made flesh.
Siering leaps to his feet and walks right up to the small woman. ‘Are you going to talk now or not?’ he asks threateningly.
‘No,’ Lucie Wiegand says just as loudly and clearly.
‘You damned communist whore!’ Siering roars at her. ‘I’ll loosen your tongue for you! This is the first instalment!’ He raises his hand and strikes her in the middle of the face with the back of his hand.
Lucie Wiegand totters a few steps back and leans against the door frame, her small breasts heaving violently beneath her light-blue pullover.
Kiepert gives a start, as if he himself had been struck by the blow. He stares spellbound at Lucie Wiegand’s face, where a dark patch is appearing on her forehead, and then at Siering’s hand, which is imperturbably pinching a cigarette from the blue pack.
‘So, my darling,’ Siering says sarcastically, ‘now you’ve seen that I’m not to be messed with. Sit down.’
He pushes a chair at her with his foot.
Lucie Wiegand doesn’t move from the spot, her hands are clinging to the door frame and she looks steadily at the Untersturmführer. Her face is aflame and has become stiff as a mask.
‘I said sit down!’ Siering shouts, and lights his cigarette. ‘Would you like one too, darling?’
Not a muscle moves in Lucie Wiegand’s face.
I can’t watch this, Kiepert thinks, and looks out of the window.
‘So open up that sweet little gob of yours,’ Siering says, walking up and down in front of her. ‘You have visited him often in those four years, I’m sure you have, you’re a young woman and you don’t look frigid to me, you can’t live without it, you still need it, I’m sure it’s still fun, that old slap and tickle. Aren’t I right?’
You really are a swine, Kiepert thinks with revulsion.
Lucie Wiegand is breathing heavily, she feels the tears rising up, but forces them violently back. No, she doesn’t want to cry, she doesn’t want to show weakness to this man.
‘So, tell me, where have you been together?’ Siering goes on, not taking his eyes off her face for a moment. ‘On Friedenstrasse, on Gollnowstrasse, on the Landsberger Allee on Elbinger Strasse, on Löwestrasse, on Lebuser Strasse? You see, I’m well informed, my child. So tell me, where?’
Lucie Wiegand remains mute, she bites her lips and looks past the SS man.
‘Or perhaps at Dr Böttcher’s?’ Siering fires the question like an arrow.
Lucie Wiegand can’t quite avoid flinching, but she pulls herself together again straight away.
Siering has noticed her movement, and laughs triumphantly with his mouth wide open. ‘Time to spill the beans, sweetheart,’ he says, and waves his burning cigarette around in front of her face. ‘Or else I’ll resort to other methods, I’ve dealt with very different people, you little louse. I have highly efficient ways of opening that sweet little mouth of yours. Have you ever heard of the third degree?’
Lucie Wiegand presses her lips tightly together and closes her eyes until they are tiny slits.
‘Well, what’s it to be? Are we going to reach an agreement?’ Siering presses.
Lucie slowly opens her mouth, moistening her dry lips with a quick movement of her tongue. ‘No,’ she says resolutely.
‘I would feel sorry for you, my darling,’ Siering says with a grin that spreads across the whole of his face. ‘I’m sure you’d make a lovely little bed-partner if you weren’t a communist whore. You’re quite tasty, as a matter of fact.’
Kiepert turns back into the room, he can no longer hold himself back. ‘Comrade,’ he says, ‘this isn’t the way …’
Siering spins on his heel in an instant. ‘What are you talking about?’ he roars. ‘Have you gone mad? There are more things at stake here than some little slut. Do you hear me?’
Kiepert bites his lips and doesn’t say a word.
‘Did you hear me, I’m asking you?’ Siering yells.
‘Yes,’ Kiepert mutters between clenched teeth.
‘That’s what I’d advise,’ Siering says, still in a menacing voice, and takes a few quick drags. ‘So, now back to you, little one. So far you’ve only had to deal with wet dishrags like this one here,’ – he nods to Kiepert – ‘but I’m cut from different cloth, my darling. Don’t imagine I’m going to be careful with you just because you’re a woman.’
Lucie Wiegand opens her half-closed eyes and looks steady at the SS man.
‘I want to know where your husband is, and you’d better believe me, I’ll get it out of you, even if it means turning you inside out.’
He wants to know where Fritz is? The thought flashes through Lucie Wiegand’s mind. That means they haven’t got him. Her chest fills with a deep sigh of relief. They’ve been on his trail, they’ve lost the trail again and I’m to put them right, which is why this monster has come to Eichwalde.
Siering steps right up to Lucie Wiegand and points his cigarette at her as if it were a gun. ‘So, where’s your old man?’ he asks, his face the image of fearful threat. ‘Will you open your mouth, you filthy whore?’
Lucie Wiegand stares at him fearlessly. ‘No,’ she says in a firm voice.
‘So you won’t,’ Siering says, drawling the three words without any particular emphasis, but with a terrible note of menace.
Kiepert bends far forward, he feels as if someone is pressing down on the back of his neck.
Siering, who is a good head taller than the small, delicate woman, bends down to her. ‘What are you wearing under your jumper, sweetie?’ he asks. His voice has shed its hardness, but there is a different tone in it, a repellent friendliness.
What’s that question supposed to mean? Kiepert thinks. Is he going to … No, that’s impossible.
Lucie Wiegand ignores the question; the words still echo inside her, they haven’t got Fritz, they haven’t got him, they’re still looking for him.
‘So you’re not going to tell me, little one?’ Siering says. ‘Well pay attention, we’ll get it out of you.’ With a secure, hard grip he grabs Lucie Wiegand’s hands, which she has wedged against the door frame, and pulls them powerfully backwards, then with his other hand he presses the cigarette against her arm, in an instant the ember burns through the wool t
o the skin, immediately there is a smell of burnt wool and singed flesh. Lucie Wiegand struggles in the SS man’s tight grip, but she is unable to resist his superior strength. He holds her like a vice and presses the cigarette harder against her arm. Kiepert is paralysed, he was prepared for further blows, but he hadn’t expected this. ‘Comrade,’ he says hoarsely and takes a few steps into the room, ‘this is really unacceptable.’
‘Shut your mouth!’ roars Siering, but he lets go of Lucie Wiegand and throws his cigarette butt heedlessly on the carpet.
Lucie Wiegand sinks exhaustedly against the door frame, she shuts her eyes, her face is contorted with pain, but not a sound issues from her lips.
Kiepert has retreated to his place by the window again. I’m powerless, he thinks, of course I could … A thought rises hotly up in him, but he immediately rejects it again. For a few fleeting seconds he considered simply shooting the SS man. Mrs Wiegand certainly wouldn’t give him away, but it’s only a passing impulse, it would have called for courage and initiative and he doesn’t have those.
‘My dear chap,’ Siering says, turning to face Kiepert. ‘Let’s talk later.’ He sits down and crosses his legs. ‘Well, now, my beauty,’ he says in a voice filled with scorn and derision, ‘are you going to talk to me?’
Lucie Wiegand opens her eyes and her face twitches. ‘Yes,’ she says firmly.
‘Well, then, I knew it,’ Siering says jovially, and lights another cigarette. ‘Why didn’t you do that before? You could have spared yourself the hole in your jumper and that tattoo on your arm.’
Kiepert listens. Is she going to tell him everything, he thinks? Poor little woman, it didn’t take long to break you down. But her voice sounded so curiously firm, not like that of a person who is finally, after being tortured, ready to make their confession.
‘So, what do you have to tell me now, my golden little darling? Open that sugar-sweet little mouth of yours.’
Lucie Wiegand straightens and presses her back firmly against the door frame, as if finding a support for what she is about to say. ‘Even if you tear me to pieces, you won’t get a word out of me, you bloody fascist scoundrel!’
Kiepert holds his breath, something terrible is about to happen.
Siering is startled for a second, but then he slowly gets up from his chair and is with Lucie Wiegand in an instant. ‘You cheeky little bitch, you damned whore,’ he roars, and slaps her face to the right and the left, grips her by the shoulders and drags her into the middle of the room, stands next to her breathing heavily and raises a foot to give her a kick.
Then the doorbell rings.
‘Who is it?’ Siering shouts.
Kiepert peers out of the window. By now dusk has fallen. ‘There’s a young man at the gate, as far as I can tell,’ he says.
‘Is he one of yours, Kiepert?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ Kiepert replies.
‘Believing is for priests,’ Siering spits.
The bell rings for a second and then for a third time. ‘Let’s take a look at this little bird of ours, who wants to stroll into the red nest,’ Siering says cynically. ‘But how are we going to lure him in here, without arousing his suspicions?’
‘He’s on his way, you don’t need to do a thing,’ Kiepert says, sighing with relief at the temporary conclusion of the terrible scene that was playing out a moment before. ‘In the meantime he’s discovered that the garden gate isn’t locked. I can see the young man quite clearly, I don’t know him, he’s not from Eichwalde as far as I can tell.’
Siering opens the door to the hallway and glances at Lucie Wiegand. She is lying motionless on the carpet with her head on her bent arms and her feet drawn up tight against her body, and two big tears run down her cheeks.
XX
16 April, 7.00 p.m.
At Eichwalde Station Lassehn is checked once again, this time by two armed men in plain clothes, who each wear a white armband with the inscription ‘town guard’; they are patrolling the platform with a bored air and dutifully pounce on anyone who isn’t local.
Lassehn shows his papers and is immediately allowed to pass, they’ve only glanced at them and then given them back.
Now Lassehn walks along Bahnhofstrasse. After a few days of the uninterrupted spectacle of devastation, the view of an undamaged city is as inconceivable as that of a well-fed person to a starving one. Everything here is peaceful, everything goes its own way, and perhaps the people are in slightly more of a hurry than they might have been in normal times. The shops aren’t boarded-up caves, they still have display windows, the houses still have glass windows and red-tiled roofs, the streets are swept, you don’t walk on broken glass or stumble over piles of rubble, the trees are sprouting their first leaves, in people’s front gardens the buds of the shrubs are already far advanced, in the gardens to the rear the soil is being turned as if in certain anticipation of a good harvest.
War seems to have ignored the idyll of this small town just beyond the gates of Berlin.
The further Lassehn gets from the station, the quieter and more peaceful it becomes. If houses dominated near the station and the gardens were merely adjuncts, here the gardens assume greater importance, with the houses merely placed in the middle of them. Lassehn walks as if in a daze, he is almost numbed by the silence, he hears his own footsteps on the cobblestones, birdsong reaches his ear. The wind here stirs like a veil; it doesn’t swirl up chalk dust and ashes, or carry the smell of burning into every corner.
While he walks along the streets in a slight stupor, he can’t help thinking of Wiegand, for whom he is making this journey, and who has had to avoid these streets for years. Being excluded from one’s actual sphere of life over a period of years, the constant temptation to reach into that sphere from one’s shadowy existence strikes Lassehn as even harder, even more unbearable than the lurking peril forever pointed at his heart like the tip of a lance. Lassehn cannot feel the silence that seems to float among the gardens here as something pure. It is a silence that awakens in him something like a painfully consuming yearning because it is a silence in the middle of a hurricane of many deaths and mutilations, of hatred and wickedness. The silence is not a silence, but the taking of a breath before new hatred and new wickedness. That silence has often overwhelmed him when he stood at night on sentry duty and looked into the sky, where star flickered next to star and the moon poured its cold, blue light over the landscape.
That sky arches over all human beings, he thought then, over all human beings now lying in beds and sleeping bags, on bales of straw and on the ground, and who are immersed in sleep, who have interrupted their work to continue with their lives, whether damned or blissful, wretched or replete. Why can the peace of night not extend into day? Why is nature only an accumulator that enriches new energies which can then be transformed again into death and destruction?
Then Lassehn is standing at the garden gate that bears the aluminium sign ‘Wiegand’, and he rings, he hears the bell sound and waits. No one comes to open the door. He rings again and moves the latch more playfully than purposefully and the unlocked gate opens.
So she’s at home, Lassehn thinks, heading towards the house along the gravel path. He knocks at the door, steps into a little hallway and audibly clears his throat, but the house remains completely silent, oppressively silent …
Curious, Lassehn thinks, and shakes his head slightly, all the doors are open, I rang the bell twice, but no one answered.
He takes a few steps further into the hallway and looks at a painting showing some wild ducks above a monotonous landscape of dunes with tufts of marram grass, then he clears his throat again.
‘Come in, young man,’ a man’s voice says suddenly from a slightly open door.
She must have visitors, Lassehn thinks. He knocks twice on the door and opens it. ‘Hello …’ He is unable to finish his sentence, his heart seems suddenly to have leaped into his throat with terrible force. He finds himself facing an SS officer and a policeman. Damn it all,
he’s fallen into a trap.
The SS officer has exploited Lassehn’s second of alarm to push the door out of his hand and shut it behind him, while the police officer in the green uniform leans with his arms folded against the windowsill. Lassehn can now tell that he is a lieutenant.
‘Sit down at the desk,’ Siering says imperiously. ‘Take care you don’t trip.’
Lassehn stands there hesitantly for a moment, he shivers slightly, his thoughts become confused, and he suddenly feels terribly weary.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ the SS man yells at him.
Lassehn takes a step in the direction he has been ordered and then stops again and tries to put his thoughts in order. Don’t immediately give yourself up for lost if you encounter an obstacle, Klose told him, not everything is as desperate as it might seem at first sight, often it only appears that way because you give up, there’s plenty of time left to die. Only now does he see what was previously hidden from him in the vague light of the room: a woman is lying on the floor, her hands laid protectively over her head and her legs pulled up tightly to her body. At that moment everything becomes clear to him, the woman can be no one but Mrs Wiegand, and the way she is lying there clearly indicates that …
‘If you do not immediately accept my unmistakeable invitation,’ the Untersturmführer says cynically, ‘you’ll be joining her down there.’
Stay calm, Lassehn thinks and walks the few steps to the desk, stay calm, don’t be hasty, you’ve missed the opportunity to act at lightning speed in any case, it’s not only about me, it’s also about the woman. My God, what has this bastard done to her?
‘So, at last,’ the SS man says. ‘Are you always so slow?’
Lassehn doesn’t reply, he forces back the agitation that is rising up in him like effervescent water, he clenches his teeth firmly to take control of it. There is no point pretending, the situation is not propitious, the SS officer has occupied the door and the police lieutenant the window, and the second window is about six metres away. To get there he would have to cross the whole length of the room, but even if it were possible to reach the window, there would be no question of leaving the woman behind on her own.