The Last Shot (3 page)

Before Bertha Sommer reported for work that morning she went to her room to pack. She was taking Officer Kern’s advice and decided to have a light bag ready so she could leave at a moment’s notice. She had made no final decision about fleeing that evening; she was still tormenting herself with the choice. Desert, or stay and face the Russians. One way or the other, she wanted to be ready.

She made two selections of clothes; an A selection and a B selection. Clothes she wanted to take with her and those she would simply have to leave behind. Occasionally she would hold up a garment, like the pale blue blouse, remembering the shop in Paris where she had bought it, and then transfer it from the B selection back to the A selection.

She thought about Officer Kern. He had an honest face. A face she could trust. She knew he was married. He had told her that quite openly when they first met in the office in January. He told her then that there was a lady’s bicycle belonging to his wife Monica left behind in the garrison. He and his wife used to go cycling together in the summer. Fräaulein Sommer was welcome to make use of the bike any time she wanted. But the weather in January was too cold for cycling. And when the spring came, the environs of Laun became too dangerous. Besides, then came the directive from Hauptmann Selders, confining everyone to the garrison.

Officer Kern was a calm man. He seemed to know everything. He was a man of predictions. Even back in January he had told her the war wouldn’t last long. And when the war was over, the bicycle would become the fastest mode of transport in the whole of Europe. He would be sorry to leave it behind.

He had a married look about him, she thought, as she sorted
her clothes. She packed her bag with her sisters in mind. Then she took everything out again and packed it more sensibly, thinking of the worst. She laid out her russet coat and hat on the bed. It was time to go to the office.

She had gone through all this before, evacuating back from Caen in Normandy, running from the British. Now she was running from something worse. She kneeled down and prayed, silently. She was ready for God. Then she quickly wrote a note in her diary, which lay on the table. The morning of the end of the Reich. Packed my bags. Am I a civilian? How will they treat civilians?

Bertha Sommer spent the morning trying to get through to Berlin. She knew it was useless but she kept trying. Berlin was well lost by now. The Russian flag had flown from the roof of the
Reichstag
since 30 April. Another officer kept trying to get through to Prague, with no more success. The office had worked itself into a quiet panic. Cups of coffee were frequently started but seldom finished. Hauptmann Selders fought off the constant demands of the Czechs in Laun. He had already made the concession of withdrawing the army from the town. He fought off the almost hourly demands to surrender with the single remaining advantage left to him. In the end, he could bargain with hostages. But there was no question of capitulation or further withdrawal until he got word from the High Command.

Bertha didn’t see Officer Kern anywhere. She knew where he was, in the communications room next door, but she wondered why he hadn’t been seen in the office.

By mid-morning she had become so busy herself that she forgot everything. She had been asked to sort out the files on to a trolley. Ready for incineration. Lunchtime passed without anybody getting hungry. Hauptmann Selders ordered a Wurst sandwich but never touched it when it arrived. The other officers had no appetite either. And when Bertha went to the canteen, she had to force herself to have lunch, telling herself it might be the last. But the logic was no substitute for appetite.

She was thinking too much. She had been put in charge of erasing the records. How to end a war? We know how to start a war, she thought. We know nothing about finishing it.

Early afternoon, Officer Kern came rushing into the office for the first time. He had heard something. At 1.30, the radio signal from Prague was interrupted. A spokesman in Czech appealed to all factions throughout Czechoslovakia to rise up against the fascists. Minutes later the Germans had regained control of the station. But it had become obvious that there was a struggle on for the capital. It became clear why they had also lost contact with Prague on the phone.

Hauptmann Selders called his officers for an impromptu conference. Another phone-call came from the town demanding immediate capitulation.

Everyone looked at Hauptmann Selders, waiting for him to announce withdrawal. He made a brief speech. Bertha Sommer stopped sorting files to listen. But her heart sank. She had expected something else.

‘There remains only one option open to us at present,’ he said. ‘While the German Army is still at war, we must remain firm. We cannot act in our own self-interest and make an escape bid. To do so would be irresponsible and put at risk thousands of German civilians still on Czech soil. We would also put ourselves at risk. You know the terms under which General Schörner operates. We must wait for the command.’

Bertha thought for a moment that he was referring to her. To Officer Kern’s escape plan. She looked at him standing by the window, but he didn’t look back. She felt implicated, even though she had consented to nothing.

‘At the same time,’ Hauptmann Selders said, ‘we should be ready to move out immediately.’

The officers agreed with Hauptmann Selders’s decision. There was no dissent. Arrangements were being made for the inevitable evacuation. One officer put forward a plan to use the hostages. Everybody went back to work.

Bertha spent the afternoon burning. A large punctured fuel
bin had been placed in the centre of the square outside on her instructions. She had been told to oversee the burning personally.

The afternoon turned out bright and sunny. Looking south, she saw beams of sunlight lancing through the clouds on to the rounded hills. It looked as though the rain would hold off for a while. She didn’t need her coat.

She accompanied two recruits to the store-room on the far side of the square where a consignment of fuel was kept for the sole purpose of destroying documents. She had stacked most of the files on to two trolleys. Two more recruits came out pushing the trolleys into the square. There was nothing of great importance in the files, nothing but reports on resistance operations, command structures and details of the garrison’s personnel, names, ranks etc. She was told to burn everything. All over Germany, she thought, people are burning the past.

She placed some of the documents into the bin and stood back. One of the recruits stepped forward and poured some fuel over the documents. It was all done systematically, without any sense of urgency, or regret.

Bertha looked in the direction of the garrison’s main gates. Her mind was on escape.

Taking account of the wind direction, one of the soldiers politely advised her to stand back where the smoke would not contaminate her clothes. She saw him strike the match, an act that was no different to clicking his fingers. It was the first time she fully understood the qualities of petrol, a silent blast of flames sucking air violently from the surrounding space, from around her ears and her face.

One by one, she handed the documents over to the soldiers, who added them to the pyre. This was the way to end a war. Without a word. Bertha did ask one of them what area of Germany he came from: Dortmund. But it led to nothing. They went silently about the task, preparing for withdrawal. Later on, Hauptmann Selders came out carrying a number of files which he added to the fire himself. He stood with her for a moment
until he saw his own documents disappear. Throughout the afternoon, the flames were reflected in their eyes, in the windows of surrounding buildings and across the windscreens of trucks on the far side of the square.

By late afternoon, the clouds had taken over the sky once more. When the flames receded the charred remnants of paper began to curl and crinkle as they shrank. It doesn’t take long to burn a garrison with three companies of Ersatz Grenadiers of the 213th Battalion out of existence.

That was typical Anke, sticking out her tongue. For her it was really an expression of affection. Maybe with a bit of daring and natural contempt thrown in. She was into expressions. It was one of the things that struck me most about Anke when I met her first, at the university.

I told her she had jumped the queue in the
Mensa.
She stuck her tongue out at me.

I had been living in Düsseldorf for a number of years at that stage. Why Düsseldorf, I don’t really know. I could have stayed in Vermont, where I come from, or chosen any other city in America for a good clean American education. There is something about Germany that I want. Something that everybody secretly wants and openly denies. I opted for a European education at the university in Düsseldorf, where I studied German classics.

Jürgen was studying medicine there at the time. Later, he went on to do gynaecology. But while he was a student, we became good friends. In those five or six years, long before Anke came on the scene, Jürgen and I went everywhere together: Morocco, Greece, Peru, Ireland. He was a perfect travelling partner and a perfect friend. We always knew when to leave each other alone and when to be there to pick each other up. Some of those mornings after the Irish bars I was glad to have a doctor friend. With time, though, Jürgen’s job became more demanding. He grew a moustache and we travelled less together. He once took a two-week job in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war, and I wasn’t able to go. I think that was the first time he went anywhere without me.

We stayed the best of friends. Maybe the only real friends either of us ever had. Mutually exclusive. I think Jürgen would
agree with that in theory. We never stopped being friends.

But then came Anke. Anke Seidel.

Everything changed after she arrived. She was wilder than Jürgen and myself put together. There was no time for moderation or discretion. She kept saying there was no such thing as an afterlife. The day after she stuck her tongue out at me, she invited me for a drive to the Eifel mountain range. With her mother’s car, a case of her father’s champagne and a small Bavarian snuffbox full of cocaine, she drove the Audi into the Eifel in the middle of March. She showed me some of the landmarks, like Camp Vogelsang where Hitler trained his elite young successors. As promised, she also showed me where Heinrich Böll used to live. He was a hero. He had taught her how to cry.

That was the other thing about Anke. She was able to cry. She had a spiritual side to her. She could cry at will. In the car, she told me straight off that she had practised it when she was a child. She and her sister used to look in the mirror and summon up the emotion until the tears ran down. They once sat in the back of the car crying while their parents went shopping, and passers-by began to look into the car and worry about them until they burst out laughing. Her mother berated her for playing with her emotions. Never play with your sacred, involuntary faculties.

I didn’t believe that Anke could cry on the spot. Like a movie star. We had a long conversation about it as she drove the car. Then she stopped the car and started crying. Okay, it was outside Heinrich Böll’s house, but still and all, she did it. I was moved. So much so that I told her to stop crying.

It’s what she said afterwards that worried me. It sounded as though she was clocking up all her crying in advance. Advent-tears.

‘Maybe some day, I’ll have something to cry about,’ she said, laughing, as she drove on.

‘I’ll give you something to cry about,’ I said, as a joke.

I was never any good at jokes. I always listen too much to the
prediction of words. We dropped the subject and drove on into the mountains.

Eventually she stopped the car at a remote forest for a picnic. She got me to open the champagne and then dealt out a line of coke on the dashboard of her mother’s car, which we snorted with a 100 DM note. Ten minutes later, she handed me her glass to hold for a minute before she opened the door of the car and stepped outside. She leaned back in and said: ‘If you can catch me, you can have me.’ Then she slapped her bottom and ran off into the trees.

I believe she let me catch her.

It burned intensely for a short while between Anke and myself. We were seen everywhere together. But then, after about two months, she took an equally sudden, but even stronger liking to Jürgen. It seemed far more durable between them right from the beginning. In fact, he seemed to settle her down quite a bit. From time to time, she did revert to me, briefly, for an afternoon, a night, a weekend at most. But she was already leaning more and more towards Jürgen. Then she moved in with him altogether. In less than a year, they decided to get married, which they did with a great carnival in August of 1984. I was left trying to work out what it was that Jürgen had and I didn’t. It was more than the moustache.

Then came the crash. Anke and I drove up to the Eifel for the last time. To what she called the consecrated forest. You can see why I was beginning to think that Jürgen was in on it as well; as though he had made a deal with her. But then I realized it was much more like one of her own plans. Anke’s farewell.

Since the crash I have been back home to Vermont, wondering if I should leave Germany to Jürgen and Anke. I really thought that in order to forget Anke, I would literally have to leave the country. We were still the best of friends, all of us, and we kept on meeting. They went on inviting me to dinner parties along with other friends. Occasionally I met them for drinks at the White Bear or the Irish Pub where
Jürgen burst out one night with the news that Anke was expecting a baby. I congratulated them both and made a toast. Jürgen was already drunk. Anke was moved to tears.

During the afternoon, the people of Laun began to reclaim their town. As soon as the last of the German patrols had withdrawn back to the garrison, they gathered in the streets quietly, in small groups. Children came out to play on the square beneath the statue of the Czech martyr Johann Huss, which had ironically been allowed to stay untouched during the war.

Rumours went around about the uprising in Prague. About the imminent German capitulation. Men went up to the post office and began to throw stamps and registration forms into the street with a mixture of anger and joy. They had been given instructions by the National Committee at the U Somolu pub to repossess the institutions of the state. The officials who had been working at the post office up to then joined in, throwing documents out through the windows where they fluttered and chased each other in the street. Then the post office was closed for business.

The children who had come to watch this spectacle went back to the square to play, chasing, trying to take a scarf off each other. There were three girls and a boy; along with a dog who was trying to join in with their game. An over-friendly town dog who had always tilted his head and followed every inhabitant through the streets with equal curiosity, occasionally receiving a pat on the head from a German soldier, or the German woman in the red coat, coming from Mass. He was everybody’s friend.

The idiocy of impartiality.

The dog chased the children around the square, keeping his eyes on the scarf, inevitably tearing at one of the girls’ clothes instead of the scarf. The game was stopped and one of the older girls got cross, clouting him over the head. The girl whose dress was caught in the dog’s mouth went on giggling as though she
had been caught out as part of the game. When the dog eventually let go, the children tried to chase him away, but he stayed with them, at a distance, until they began to chase each other again and forgot that he was a dog. He was one of them.

Outside the pub U Somolu, where the National Committee was still in session, still negotiating with the Germans, a crowd, mainly men, had gathered to celebrate. They wanted to add voice to victory. They were told the pub was closed. It was too early to celebrate. Jaroslav Süssmerlich came out in person to explain that, if anything, things were going badly. The latest news from Prague was that German reinforcements were regaining control of the capital. The men outside announced their readiness to join the uprising by attacking the garrison. But the garrison held Czech hostages. An attack was impossible. Süssmerlich gave his men something else to do.

The people of the town went away and began to remove the German street signs, replacing them with rough, hastily painted Czech names on wood. They had reclaimed their town. Above the town, the sky was a celebration. From time to time, sunlight broke out over the hills, over the roof-tops of Laun, lighting up the calm columns of smoke like blue angels. There were no cars in Laun. Nobody owned very much. All they owned was their place in the world.

Some of the people went into the church to give thanks to God. Others went home to listen to the radio in groups, waiting for the Russian liberation. Others cooked food, fecklessly using up ingredients they might have rationed carefully for months up to then.

Before nightfall, a young couple arrived at the door of the pub asking to speak to the leader of the National Committee. They were told to go away. But they insisted.

‘Just for one minute,’ the girl said hopefully.

When they wouldn’t go away, Süssmerlich finally agreed to speak to them. They had already received permission from their parents to marry. They had postponed the wedding for weeks, knowing it was wiser to wait for the end of the war. They had
obtained permission from the priest in the town. All they needed now was permission from the National Committee. They wanted to marry the following morning.

Süssmerlich became angry.

‘Can’t you control your passions? The war is not over yet.’

But the intending couple returned some time later accompanied by the priest. The bride appealed with her eyes. The priest spoke on their behalf and explained that the couple wanted to get married on the day Czechoslovakia was liberated. On VE day.

Süssmerlich softened. Who could fail to understand such a request? He gave his permission and wished them luck in their lives. The couple thanked him. The priest blessed the revolution.