The Cross of Iron (49 page)

‘Who is she? Your girl? ’

A faint, mischievous grin passed over Faber’s face as he answered: ‘A birch, a sapling birch.’

It was hot and still now, as if there were no war at all, no Hill 121. 4. A narrow stream wound westward, through green bushes, and the landscape stretched on for mile upon mile. Steiner felt the sadness of parting as if it were a harmless but troublesome disease. You never get used to it, he thought. It’s always the same and always new. He stretched his good arm. ‘Maybe I’ll meet Schnurrbart somewhere. If he comes back before me, tell him to look after all you babies.’ He hesitated. Then, impatience and emotion in his voice, he began rapidly shaking hands all around. Hollerbach offered to accompany him to Kanskoye.

‘Drop us a line once in a while,’ Kern said. His watery eyes were sad. With surprise Steiner saw that the corners of his mouth were twitching. He turned rapidly away.

Krüger was waiting for him and Hollerbach a short distance away, glowering fiercely at Steiner.

‘You can bring something for me. When you come back, I mean. ’

‘A gravestone?’ Steiner asked.

Krüger curled his upper lip, exposing his fine set of teeth. ‘I’ll get one of those for you some day,’ he retorted. ‘No, I mean something else. You can bring me a bottle of Cologne water.’

‘What for?’ Steiner asked suspiciously.

‘Just in case we have to live in the same bunker again,’ Krüger replied, covering his mouth with the back of his hand.

Steiner nodded. ‘You mean because my nose is so sensitive?’ ‘Who’s talking about your nose?’ Krüger growled.

Steiner shrugged. ‘Well, you know,’ he said innocently, ‘they say people can’t smell themselves.’

There was no answer to that one. ‘You have no idea what a relief it’ll be not to have to see you for a while,’ Krüger said malevolently.

Hollerbach chuckled in advance and looked at Steiner, who delivered his calm reply: ‘No, you’re wrong, I do have an idea. I so often feel the same way myself.’

Before Krüger could speak again, Steiner started off. ‘Take it easy,’ he called loudly.

Krüger stood looking after them. They had gone quite a way before he funnelled his hands over his mouth and shouted: ‘Come back soon.’ Steiner raised his sound arm and waved.

For a long while Steiner and Hollerbach walked in silence side by side. Hollerbach glanced at him now and then. He’s tough, he was thinking, to be able to walk this distance with his wound. After a while he caught himself wishing that he himself would not have to go back.

‘I’d like to be going with you,’ he said.

‘Where to?’ Steiner asked.

‘Home, of course.’

They slowed their pace. Steiner looked off toward the hills. ‘Home?’ he repeated softly. ‘Where is that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you know where your home is?’ he asked.

‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘That’s a moot question.’ Steiner grinned. Then he became serious again. ‘You’re at home where you’re happy, isn’t that so?’ ‘Of course.’

‘And were you happy at home, really happy?’

Hollerbach hesitated. Steiner nodded. ‘So you weren’t. Being at home is nothing more than crude habit and the pitiable knowledge that we don’t have to worry where we’re going to spend the night. It’s being with a few people you like, and when you lose those few, you can’t stand the place any more because everything around you reminds you of them. And being at home means giving up voluntarily all the things you don’t have at home. It’s the damned commonplaceness of existence and an infernal mirror that shows you the wrinkles coming in your face. Believe me, of all the illusions in our lives the biggest is the idea that somewhere is home for us. There isn’t any place really where you can keep your balance without dancing like a tightrope walker. Do you see what I mean? ’

‘No,’ Hollerbach said.

Steiner frowned. ‘No wonder. There’s a lousy clever system in it. From childhood on they put blinkers on us so we won’t see to either side of us. Every time, just before you’re about to see, they toss you a bone like you were a dog. You can sink your teeth into that and forget about it all for a while. The older you get and the more demanding you become, the bigger the bone. But when the time comes that you’re sick of it all—school, job and so on— then they throw you the biggest bone of all. That’s the one that really does the trick; it’s guaranteed to wear your teeth down because it keeps you busy even in bed, so that you don’t have a minute to spare to think about other things. Ah...’ He waved his sound arm disgustedly.

‘What is it you really want?’ Hollerbach asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Steiner answered tonelessly. ‘You always think you no longer have any illusions. But believe me, the biggest illusion of all is believing you’re without illusions. ’

They had covered somewhat more than a mile by now, and his shoulder was beginning to ache viciously again. They ought to be level with Kanskoye soon, and it was getting to be time to cross over the hill. He looked up along the road, marked by the tracks of innumerable vehicles. It ran almost due west and disappeared in the distance beyond a gentle undulation in the landscape. Probably it led to Kanskoye, swinging in a big arc around the hill. On their left, about twenty yards away, the brook turned sharply off toward the north and appeared to lose itself in an endless plain. This must be the spot the doctor had mentioned. Steiner came to a stop and looked up the hill.

‘What’s the matter?’ Hollerbach asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

‘We have to cross over here,’ Steiner said. ‘But let’s have a cigarette first.’

They dropped to the ground where they were, and Steiner swung off his tunic, which he had hanging loosely over his back. He was glad to see that the bandage was not yet soaked through with blood. As they lit their cigarettes, Hollerbach looked down at the ground with a troubled expression.

‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ he said. ‘You’re always talking about somebody tossing us bones. Who the devil is this “they” of yours? ’

‘If I knew that, I’d know everything,’ Steiner replied. ‘But it isn’t something you can prove; you just believe it or don’t. Maybe some day I’ll get to the bottom of it. ’

He looked at the other man. Hollerbach’s face was flushed and dirty. He had removed his steel helmet and his blond hair straggled over his forehead. How little I know about him, Steiner thought suddenly. We never have time for each other; we lie in the same mud for three years and hardly know more than each other’s names. It’s a shame.

‘It’s a shame,’ Hollerbach said.

Steiner grinned at the apparent harmony of their thoughts and asked: ‘What? ’

‘It’s all a shame,’ Hollerbach explained. ‘Everything. In the old days I always wanted to get away from Mudau, my home town, and now I’m away from it and I wish I were back. Then when I think of working my arse off for the lousy railway, I’m not so sure. Why the hell does it have to be like that? ’

‘It’s always a mistake to do more thinking than we’re supposed to,’ Steiner said thoughtfully. He felt his shoulder and went on: ‘They say man is the perfect creature when he’s nothing more than a pretty poor compromise between an animal and something better than himself. A contradiction, dreaming of nectar and ambrosia and eating pig’s flesh, talking about love—and whoring around every chance he gets, talking about goodness—and being beastly to the other fellow. Not much good. ’

He suddenly felt no inclination to go on with the discussion, and frowned into the distance. Hollerbach started to answer. But at that moment a succession of violent crashes sounded behind them. The rolling echo rumbled above their heads, weird and heart-stopping. ‘Tanks,’ Hollerbach exclaimed.

Steiner nodded. They sat motionless, listening. Those first explosions seemed only the beginning of a regular battle. The cannonade grew in intensity, and interspersed between the louder explosions came the crackle of rifle fire. ‘That must be the assault regiment,’ Steiner said. He recalled Stransky’s mentioning antitank guns.

They could hear motors now also. Hollerbach glanced over at the underbush that grew beside the brook. It would afford good cover. But they sat still, staring up the hill. From where they sat they could see only a little of it because the initially steep slope flattened out somewhat higher up.

By the time they saw the Russian tank tearing down the slope, it was less than two hundred feet away. Steiner uttered a warning cry, turned instantly and made for the underbrush as fast as his legs could carry him. Hollerbach followed at once. But he had taken only a few steps when he remembered Steiner’s pack still lying where they had been sitting. He turned, snatched it up and then ran with desperate leaps after Steiner. He saw that Steiner had come within a few yards of the brook and wanted to shout to him to stick to the left, where the brush was somewhat thicker. At that moment a shattering roar sounded behind him; the earth burst open and he plunged to the ground like a felled tree. He could feel nothing at all, but was still conscious. His eyes remained open and he saw Steiner stop abruptly, turn and stare toward him. And he shouted to him to go on running and throw himself into the brook. But although he shouted as loudly as he could, he was unable to hear his own voice, and astonishment at this fact occupied his mind so completely for the next few seconds that he forgot everything else. His attentiveness returned only when Steiner's figure disappeared behind a cloud of smoke that suddenly appeared between them as though fallen from the sky. Then he saw that Steiner was lying on the ground and behaving strangely. He seemed to be crawling like a crab, and it struck Hollerbach as astonishing that he was not moving forward so much as a yard. It looked so funny that he giggled. Then it occurred to him that there was a stillness all about. He turned his head, and his eyes froze.

Steiner, too, was quite conscious. Although he felt as though every inch of his body had been pierced by splinters, and although he was quite faint with pain, he tried to crawl over the ground toward the motionless Hollerbach. He was completely unaware of the senselessness of his efforts. From the moment he had seen the advancing tank heading straight toward the helpless Hollerbach, he had lost all sense of what he was doing; he writhed like a madman, eyes popping, foam dribbling from his mouth. His arms and legs flailed wildly around his body like ripples around a point where a stone has been thrown into water, self-consuming and ineffectual. At last he lay still like a body already dead, only his eyes burning in a white face. The tank had approached within ten yards of the motionless body, and Steiner saw Hollerbach turn his head. Then Steiner opened his mouth and screamed. He screamed so that the land heaved and a storm rose that carried the hills before it as though they were skyscraper-high waves of water stretching from horizon to horizon. When he looked up he saw the space between sky and earth beginning to fill, darkening with a horde of withered leaves that whirled closer and closer and showered down upon him like snow. He saw without seeing the tank pass over Hollerbach’s twitching body, mashing it into the ground and leaving a bloody track upon the hard soil as it moved off toward the east. The landscape lay unchanged under the hot noonday sun. Only where the bushes crowded up against the narrow stream a few paces beyond Steiner’s still body a few dry leaves were strewn, and beyond the underbrush there yawned between sky and earth a fearful void.

Somewhere in the East.

Dear Rolf,

I am sitting on an old sandbar, tanned like a South Sea islander, dangling my feet in the water. And those feet need it, by God. Last night a Russian gunboat tried to make a landing. Krüger happened to be on guard and drove it off with his carbine. So he says. He spent two hours diving today and found two old leather boots, both of them for the left foot. Krüger insists they belonged to the captain and first mate of the boat. We chucked them back into the water. (The boots, of course. ) It’s about time you were coming back. For the past three weeks we’ve been stationed here on the Black Sea, heroically battling against boredom. We snooze all day long, and sleep all night. What a life, I tell you. It’s a pity you’re not with us. None of these birds can play chess, just when we’d have plenty of time for it. Have I written you that Maag is back again? He really stuffed his belly while he was back home; he’s put on lots of weight. Faber looked at his calendar yesterday and discovered that it’s exactly three months since you were wounded. Time flies. This is all for now. Writing a letter in this heat is tough work. Krüger and Kern are looking over my shoulder and both of them say I have a handwriting like an old goat. But my beautiful style makes up for it, don’t you think? Keep well and watch out that they don’t pick you up and stick you in some other unit when you start back for here. Things are supposed to be pretty hot back on the main front. All the best.

Your old friend

SCHNURRBART

Steiner’s hands holding the letter sank to his lap. He looked out of the train window. Three months, he thought. It seemed to him that ten times three months had passed. Thrusting the letter back into his breast pocket, he closed his eyes. He had been wounded at the beginning of May, and now the hot August sun was searing down upon the parched earth of the bridgehead. He had hoped the division would be in the Crimea by the time he returned to it. But although the front in the north was daily shifting further to the west, although the situation was growing more precarious with every passing moment, no move had been made to abandon the Kuban bridgehead. More and more people were predicting another Stalingrad. He looked out of the window again, abstractedly watching the telegraph poles sweep by. The monotonous song of the wheels on the rails was lulling. Most of the other men in the compartment were sitting with heads drooping, eyes closed, slumped into queer positions on the uncomfortable seats. In a state half-way between sleeping and waking and dreaming of the end of this interminable trip—he had been travelling for almost ten days now—he went over the events of the past three months.

He recalled the moment when he had come to again in one of the dirty cots at the clearing station—the first stage of his journey back home to Germany. He had never learned how he had got there. Perhaps some men of the 3rd Battalion had picked him up that evening. During the night he was operated on, and when he awoke again from deep anaesthesia he was already on the way to a field hospital. Two days later he was sent in a hospital train nonstop as far as Przemysl and ended his journey in a hospital back home in Passau.