The Last Shot (9 page)

The following morning, Alexander was collected by bus to go to his special school. Everybody’s life was worked out with sheer precision. Jürgen spent the day at the practice and later in the afternoon went on to the local hospital. Anke normally went to the university, where she had gone back to take up social sciences. That Monday morning she was having a long drawn-out breakfast. She was going to show me around Münster.

She suggested the bikes.

I took Jürgen’s bike. I love these German bikes where you can back-pedal to brake. We spent all morning cycling through the cobbled streets.

‘What’s Münster got?’ I shouted after her.

‘It’s got everything the heart could desire.’ She knows how to answer with extreme irony. To say something without irony is leaving yourself open, unprotected.

‘Let’s see. Munster: it’s got a market place. It’s got jewellers, cafés, canals, cathedrals…and bells, endless bells on a Sunday. It’s the rainiest city in Germany. It’s flat, it’s green, it’s got no industry and never had. It’s a sanctuary for kite flyers, wanderers, cyclists, and, and, and…’

Anke often broke off with the words and, and, and…It reminded me of the time we first met in Düsseldorf.

‘Is that all?’

‘Well…’ She thought, puffing. ‘Münster now has a large concentration of Tommies – British soldiers.’

After another pause she added: ‘Münster also has the distinction of being the first civilian target to have been bombed from the air during the war.’

We went for coffee. Anke had strawberry cake. While we were sitting down, she told me how she felt about Alex and his
illness. She could not bring herself to say the word leukaemia. Otherwise, she claimed to have come to terms with the inevitable. A few minutes later, quite unprovoked it seemed to me, she started crying. Tears streamed down her face quite openly while she spoke about her life in general. What I found strange was that she didn’t seem unhappy. If anything, she wanted to cry.

‘I can’t let myself cry in the house,’ she said.

She talked about Alexander with a false optimism, as though optimism would preserve him from fate. She refused to believe in fate.

‘What kills me is all these people who tell me it’s God’s plan,’ she said angrily. ‘I get the nuns here telling me I am blessed with the presence of a son like that. All that sanctimonious shit makes me angry…All this equality, some day, in heaven.’

Then Anke changed the subject. She was possessed of great diversity, and began to plan out a route for us to cycle. Before we left the café, Anke stole the silver jug from the table, placed it in her pocket and went up to pay the bill.

‘Jürgen never lets me steal things like that. He says we can buy all the jugs we want. It’s not the same.’

Minutes ago, she was crying. Now she laughed as we cycled away through the medieval streets and out of the town along the red paths; tyres grinding on the sand underneath. We came to a stable in the country, far away from any houses. When Anke saw the owner of the stable, a large woman with a red face, dressed in jodhpurs and riding hat, they greeted each other and Anke stopped. I was introduced to Frau Bohle. We were taken on a tour of the stables. Anke explained that people owned the horses individually and rented the space at the stables.

The woman showed us her favourite horse. Winnitou. I picked an apple from a wheelbarrow full of apples and gave it to a horse called Navajo. The horse gripped the apple with his lips. I watched him catch the fruit with his brown teeth and juggle it around in his mouth as he chewed. To a horse, an apple must be
like a piece of chocolate is to us. He crunched for ages. Other horses looked out over the gates. There is something intimate in the way a horse looks at you.

We cycled on. Anke went ahead and I kept looking at the way her feet turned in the pedals. Sometimes she slowed down to remark on something; a feature in the landscape. Then she would race ahead again.

Once a squadron of RAF jets flew overhead reducing the land to white silence. When the soft, grinding sound of the bicycle tyres returned, Anke looked around and said, ‘So peaceful out here…’

Anke stopped. We left the bikes at the edge of the forest and walked for a while up-hill through the trees. When we seemed close to the top, Anke took my hand and led me out into a clearing where we could suddenly see right across the landscape. The town of Munster was like a toy town on the horizon, covered in a blue-grey cloud, under the streaming rain. We stood together for a while saying nothing.

These were the limits of freedom.

We cycled right into those blue clouds on the way back. It was as though we were travelling to meet them, cycling right into the rain. We got soaked. Anke’s hair was plastered down on her skull. Whenever she blinked, dozens of tiny drops jumped from her eyelashes.

The change came at last in the Eastern Bloc. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse. The excitement in Germany about the freedom trains and the influx of East Germans had reached fever-pitch. It was on everybody’s mind. On everybody’s lips. Quite suddenly, before anyone had time to start fighting for it, the Berlin Wall came down and nobody could believe it. The day of 9 November 1989 was as strange as the day the Wall was built.

This time people around the world were able to see history on television. Crowds flocked to Berlin to chisel away a piece of the Wall for themselves. I watched it on TV myself. I saw the ecstatic faces of women, and men, jumping, embracing each other in the streets, in tears. The ecstasy of history.

Then came Czechoslovakia. I had been there only a month before, and nobody believed it would ever happen. Suddenly the silent power of the majority took over. The small crowds I had seen standing around with candles along the Karls Bridge swelled into thousands on Wenceslas Square. I imagined the deafening sound of all those footsteps in the streets. I heard the sound of keys ringing, the symbol of freedom. Days later, the velvet revolution had liberated Czechoslovakia from communist tyranny. They had discovered the power of harmless masses; and the power of silent feet, and candles.

This time, everybody in Prague was expecting the tanks again. The whole world was waiting for the shooting to start. But weapons had become less than useless against candles. You can’t argue with candles.

The streets of Prague were celebrating. People leaping on the bonnets and roofs of cars. Students drinking in the streets. The pubs and cafés were crammed with talkers. Everywhere people
were ready to explain, as though they had never done so before, among themselves and to the press reporters around the world. The miracle had to be re-enacted and repeated again and again in words and in smiles to camera. I thought of going back to Prague. Trust me to have visited Prague a month before the greatest revolution in history.

I watched it all on the TV. I saw that the temperature had dropped to freezing point in Prague. You could see people’s breath as they talked.

I sent a note to Dr Milan Houdek to congratulate him and his country on their liberation.

Two weeks later, I received a letter from him thanking me. He had checked some of the facts about Louny at the end of the war in 1945. He confirmed them against other sources. He went on to describe the celebrations and the euphoria of the town when the communist government fell. He said he saw people go into the pub U Somolu who had never been inside a bar before. He saw people talking who had never opened their mouths in their lives before. He saw people who wouldn’t greet each other in the street dancing together on the square in sub-zero temperatures. At the end of the letter, he wrote this:

You remember I told you in the church that I don’t like communists. I could not imagine such great and splendid changes would happen so early. But it could not have been possible without changes in the USSR. Now the communists do not want to leave their castle at Louny, saying it was built for their members. You know the tall red building at the end of the town where I came to meet you? They are holding on to it. We plan to make a people chain around the building. We hope the TV stations will come…

I sent a note thanking him for his research. I enclosed some cuttings from British newspapers so that he could compare the reportage. I wanted him to see how interested the outside world was.

Some weeks later, I received another short letter back:

Thank you for your letter. I will write to you what happened after you were here in Louny. The day after you left, two secret policemen came to me. I was asked who you were, where I had met you, what we had been speaking about. They wanted to know if you had a suitcase. They even asked me if I had not made a photograph of you! I had to lend them the books from which you got the information about the year 1945. They were distracted by two things: that you had been inside the communist headquarters and had seen its interior, and also why you had been so interested in the garrison in Louny. Perhaps they thought you was a terrorist or spy. Perhaps they wanted to get me. They had been waiting for the chance to take my job in the archives. So it was with us in Czechoslovakia till 17 November. Now it seems to be a joke, but it was not…

…Some words about Mrs Sekalova: she visited me. She was too sad and told me her life for communism had no sense. I remembered John Lennon and ‘whispered words of wisdom, let it be’.

I sent a further note asking him to let me know what happened to the communist headquarters. Some weeks later I got a note back saying the communists could not be dislodged despite two attempts at a people’s chain. I checked his address against an earlier letter and noticed that he had changed his address. He has moved, I thought. Instead of Lenivova 95, he was now at Praska 95. I wrote back and asked him if it was a new address. Maybe he just got rid of Lenin. I then began to realize that they had changed the names of the streets in Louny, just as they did when the Germans moved out in May 1945.

It was all behind them now.

Some days later, when Bertha and Franz had put sufficient distance behind them, they felt they could relax the pace a little. They had cycled mostly up-hill. In fact they had spent most of the time on foot, pushing the bikes along. The summer had come into its own. Sometimes they passed a field of rye or a bank of grass exploding with red poppies. And as they climbed higher into the Fichtel hills, they met more and more trees instead of fields. Walking with the bikes was sheer work in the heat. Sweat rolled into Bertha’s eyes.

At one point, around noon on another hot day, she was blinded by sweat and banged her foot against the pedal of her bike while walking beside it. She gashed an agonizing cut on her ankle. Bertha dropped her bike, sat down on the grass verge for a moment to hold her leg until the pain slowly receded.

Franz was a patient man. He came back and asked if she was all right. She got up again.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘When I think of what other people must have gone through.’

He held the bike for her. They moved on. She began to forget about her ankle. A thin trickle of blood had rolled down into her shoe and stopped. It became a thin, almost black, line as it dried in the sun.

Sometimes there was a short, swift down-hill ride through a cool forest. A quick spin which made her lightheaded, thinking she could cycle anywhere. By the end of the down-hill run, by the time the road climbed upwards again, she would be almost frozen, with goose pimples bursting through the sunburn on her arms. When she got off the bike, the heat attacked her again.

Once, going down-hill, she swallowed something. An insect.
She tried to spit it out again, veered towards the bank of the road and almost crashed into the ditch.

Franz laughed when she told him. He said she was lucky, he hadn’t eaten yet.

They had little food left. Some bread, that’s all. They stopped at a farm where a large woman came out and gave them some fresh bread and lard. She explained that she had nothing else left; her store, or what was left of it, had already been emptied by passing refugees heading east. The woman warned about thieves and looters. She made some weak tea with sugar which Bertha and Franz drank by the gate while they ate the thick slices of bread. The woman was leaning out of the window asking them questions when she saw a band of strangers coming down the hill.

‘Polen,’
she whispered, urgently, and disappeared, shutting the window.

The group of men coming towards them along the road were no more than 200 metres away. Bertha and Franz were left with nothing to do but stand and see what would happen. Franz decided to act fast.

‘Bring the bikes around to the back of the house,’ he ordered.

‘But they can see us,’ Bertha said. ‘It’s no use, they’ll know.’

‘Take the bikes around to the back,’ he repeated through his teeth.

She brought the bikes around one by one while Franz stood at the gate, looking at the Polish exiles approaching. Bertha stayed at the back of the house. The tactic worked. Perhaps the passing Poles believed that they belonged to the house. Perhaps they were uninterested. Perhaps they knew they were close to the Czech border and could only hold their home country in mind. Perhaps it was sheer luck.

They passed by without a word.

Afterwards, the woman in the house came out and said she couldn’t believe it. She had been raided several times. There was nothing left in the house to take. She had also hidden some valuables. There was no law to protect her now, she said. She
was not blaming the returning exiles. It was reparation, she said.

The woman told Bertha and Franz about other people in the area who were less fortunate. Another family not far from there had been terrorized by them and had everything taken. All of their family heirlooms were gone. A woman back in the direction of Eger had been beaten up in her home. Another old man who resisted the plunder had his arms broken.

Bertha felt safe with Franz. She was sure that he was clever and that his presence would eventually get her home. Later on, they met a soldier, a deserter who had spent three weeks in the woods. They gave him directions to get back to Bremen. Franz told him to go over Hof.

From time to time Bertha’s mind leaped forward to that moment when she herself would arrive home. She would have to send a message in advance to give them time to prepare for her arrival. Time to welcome her back to life. She had a recurring image of herself on the doorstep with her mother, her aunt, her sisters and the neighbours. Every minute of the journey was bringing her closer.

By evening, they reached a lake, a small lake in the hills. It was a remote place in the Fichtel hills where the population had thinned out to a few scattered houses. When they saw the lake surrounded by trees, they decided to stop. The sheer beauty of the place made Bertha plead with Franz to stay there for the night. Somehow, the urgency had receded. The race to get home could be postponed. The lake was set in the middle of a forest, far away from habitation. In the middle of nowhere. The middle of Germany.

They felt the peace of the surroundings. They heard those strange lulls in the forest where every bird decides to stop whistling at the same time and then start up again without notice. The sun, still warm, was beginning to sink over the tops of the trees beyond the lake. The insects took over the air.

Bertha wanted to swim. She looked forward to bathing properly for the first time in days and even had a small piece of
soap left. It felt like the last piece of soap in Europe. By the time the sun and sky began to tint red, she had found an enclave where she could swim in complete privacy. She had the whole lake to herself.

Franz Kern was a decent man, she could assure herself. She could trust him not to spy on her. He was married. She felt she knew him well enough to trust him.

She removed all her clothes and placed them by a tree. She took only the soap with her. She had felt nothing so free and soothing as lake-water in years. It was so cool at first, it shocked her. Small clouds of soapy water drifted around her as she washed. She ducked her head down and washed her hair. She heard the silence of the lake underneath each time. A silence full of trout.

When she had finished washing, she threw the soap up on to the bank, where she hoped it wouldn’t collect grit.

She swam out a little, into the lake. She felt she was swimming with the trout. Her body looked like gold through the brown mountainy water. She had escaped the worst of this war. Even as she was swimming she remembered to thank God; a mental thanks as she turned on her back and kicked her legs. The sound of the splashing echoed across the lake. It was peacetime in Germany. Then at times she had an idle suspicion that Franz might be sneaking a look at her. She dismissed it and thought it was only her imagination. She saw nothing but the interior of the woods, which had now turned dark with the absence of light.

The lake itself was still quite bright. The reddish sunlight had turned the trunks of the trees at the edge to bronze. Bertha swam to the bank and stepped out of the lake, water dripping on to the stones. She left footprints on the hard earth. She began to dry herself, feeling the last of the day’s heat. She got dressed and picked up the small bar of soap. With her fingernail she prized off three brown pine needles and wondered if she would offer the soap to Franz. Of course she would.

She threw the towel over her arm and stared out at the lake.
The midges still hovered over the water. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was like a painting.

On the far side of the lake, two men in the darkness of the trees had been watching her. Two Polish exiles. They had been in these woods for weeks. They had not seen soap for months. They had not seen the sight of a naked woman for years.