Another Kind of Country (18 page)

Miller said, ‘Do I need to look at the rest of the contracts?’

Frau Tischler shook her head.

Fine, but there was ambiguity in that shake of the head; perhaps it meant that only these contracts had been changed.

Miller said, ‘All changed?’

Frau Tischler nodded. Without a word she gathered up the manila folders in her meaty arms and Miller watched as she began to replace the files in the grey cabinets.
So now you know more than Whitacre, what can you do about it?

Frau Tischler didn’t reply when Miller said thank you but she gave him the briefest of nods to acknowledge his presence and his going.

It’s her country and yet all she can do is surreptitiously point out to a foreigner the possibility of a set-up and a sell-off.

Except that Patrick Miller didn’t feel like a foreigner; he just didn’t know what, if anything, he should do
with this dangerous knowledge.

Almost 12.30. He signed out under the smile-free attention of the duty porters and stepped out into the day. October, but with the heat of an Indian summer day. He set off at a brisk walk through the noontime streets.

In the lobby of the university he checked with yet another unsmiling porter. Yes, Frau Rossman was teaching, her class would end in a few minutes.

They smiled when they saw each other. He longed to embrace her but he didn’t know how she’d react. Or how the uniformed porter would record such a display. They shook hands and Miller kissed Rosa Rossman chastely on the cheek.

Yes, she was free for lunch but the day was too fine to sit indoors, shouldn’t they make the most of what might be the last of summer? They could share her sandwiches, she always made too much, she’d have to get a smaller lunch box. She smiled at him, dimples blinking in the creamy skin under the black eyes.

He took her rucksack and they walked towards the river. A kind of tension hung over the streets, as though the late blast of summer might darken into a roll of thunder. Armed Vopos stood on corners, patrolled in pairs. On the previous Monday night hundreds of demonstrators had spilled out of St Nicholas’s Church on to the streets of Leipzig in silent, candle-carrying protest; no shots had been fired but Honecker and the Politburo had made it clear that no demonstration would be allowed to jeopardize the jubilee celebrations.

Others had had the same idea about making the most of the weather but Miller found an empty patch of grass on the crowded bank. He spread his jacket on the grass, Rosa took the packet of sandwiches from her rucksack.

It seems almost normal, Miller
thought, as they chewed in a companionable silence. There is no Wall, no armed policemen on the streets. No doctored contracts in Frau Tischler’s registry, no preparations in hand to sell off a country’s assets.

He leaned close to Rosa’s ear to tell her.

‘So it’s happening,’ she whispered.

‘About a year, the general said.’

The river streamed below them, oblivious. The Vopos patrolled the streets, the border guards manned the crossing points of the Wall.
Like the river, they know nothing
.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Miller said. ‘But I feel I must do
something
.’

‘I’ll speak to my father.’

Miller looked at the river, at other couples on the grass.

‘And I’d like to see you, Rosa. I mean soon.’

‘After the jubilee parade,’ Rosa said. ‘My father will be on the reviewing stand but somebody will drive him home after – we could meet then.’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to think about contracts now. ‘Yes,’ he said again.

The nearness of her was almost overwhelming. He felt her eyes on him, he knew he could happily drown in those huge black eyes; he thought, we could go somewhere else, maybe London, forget all this shit, just be together. Then again, Miller thought, maybe I don’t want to be elsewhere.

Rosa Rossman, it seemed, could read his mind.

‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘I have no wish to live anywhere else.’

Miller laughed. ‘How did you know I was thinking about that?’

‘Maybe it’s because I’m beginning to feel close to you.’ She poured tea from her flask for both of them. ‘Sometimes I can tell what my father is going
to say before he says it.’ The eyes twinkling like dark diamonds. ‘You’d better think only nice things about me, Herr Patrick Miller.’

She drank some tea, smiled.

‘You’re blushing, Herr Miller!’

‘But only because you make me feel good.’ Miller looked at the sky, at the still river. ‘I’ve always liked this city but now,’ he glanced at her, wished he wasn’t blushing, ‘well, it’s different now.’

‘Different
good
or different
bad
?’

‘Rosa . . .’ He felt her nearness on the grass, wanted to touch her, could find no words.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘You do?’

‘Yes, Patrick, I know.’

He felt her hand on his, resting on his jacket. She leaned closer and kissed him on the mouth. When they drew apart, Miller knew that Berlin – his life – was changed forever. He looked at Rosa in wonder. ‘Coming here,’ he said, ‘was worthwhile just to meet you.’ She touched his face with her hand. Her voice was no more than a whisper.

‘I could say that too, Patrick.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘it’s because we’re outsiders thrown together in a great city.’ He knew he was leaving much unsaid but knew too that everything didn’t have to be spelled out, that she could hear his song in the spaces between his words. ‘You and me, even you and General Reder.’

‘You’re curious about my father, aren’t you?’

‘Forgive me,’ Miller said. ‘Maybe it’s because he’s your father and he obviously loves you. My own father . . .’ Miller shrugged. ‘I’ve read General Reder’s “official” autobiography, the stuff you brought to the office. I have a feeling there’s a great story there somewhere, a life lived close to
the edge, but General Reder has done a great job of concealing it.’

‘You have to be careful, Patrick, when you’re a general,’ Rosa said. ‘
Especially
when you’re a general. And you’re right, I helped my father to make it as bland as possible.’

‘I understand,’ Miller said, ‘and anyway it’s not my business.’

She looked around, her eyes measuring the nearness of the others on the river bank. Miller had to lean closer to hear her.

‘My father fought in the war on the eastern front, Patrick. I’m certain that he fought honourably and bravely. He saw terrible things done but I can be sure that he took no part in such – such
things
. He was a tank commander in the Ukraine and you know what was done there.’ Rosa paused, leaned even closer. ‘You know the stories – the
truth
. My father saw the Einsatzgruppen in action.’ Her face paled as if the horror of the SS special action groups were unloosed again on their Jew-hunts across eastern Europe. Miller saw her shiver, took her hand in his. ‘My father knew what they were doing but there was nothing he could do about it. As a tank commander his duty was to keep himself and his men alive.’

She saw the question in Miller’s eyes, met his gaze.

‘General Reder,’ she said, ‘was a German soldier but he was never a Nazi.’

Now it was Miller’s turn to shiver, as if the mere words, Nazi, Einsatzgruppen, could chill the midday sun.

‘And now . . .’ Miller hesitated. He needed to know but he didn’t know how to ask without offence; he feared losing her in the very moment of finding her.

‘You’re wondering,’ Rosa said, ‘if you can trust a man who fought against the Red Army and then took their side. You’re wondering if he’s just a turncoat who only ever wants to save his own skin.’

Miller was silent.
She’s doing it again, reading my mind
.

‘My father saw what was right
and what was wrong,’ Rosa said. ‘He chose the
right
, that’s all.’

Something like a song swelled in Miller.
This woman, these people, this divided city, this tortured country riven by doubt and protest
: it’s my truth, my here-and-now, my tomorrow.

‘Say something, Patrick.’

Miller was smiling, ‘Your father chose the right.’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said, ‘he did.’ She pressed his hand on the jacket. ‘I don’t want to have secrets from you.’

She drew closer to Miller
and started to tell him.

January 1944

Kirovograd

Ukraine

‘We move at 0600 hours.’ General Bayerlein looked at the tired faces gathered in front of him. ‘From that moment all radio contact with HQ will cease. It is,’ the faintest of smiles on the general’s weathered features, ‘for our own safety.’

At the back of the crowded cellar
someone laughed nervously. General
Bayerlein didn’t laugh. Watching his men burn to death in their own tanks wasn’t much of a laughing matter. He’d seen enough charred corpses in North Africa and here on the snows of the Ukraine. So for their own safety, no radio communication after the 3rd Panzer Division begins its attempt at escape from encirclement in Kirovograd.

Like the other group commanders in the packed room, Major Hans Reder understood the real reason for the radio blackout. In Berlin the Führer had, as usual, vetoed any attempt at break-out and escape; like the soldiers at Stalingrad, the men in Kirovograd should fight to their last bullet and the last drop of their rich, unyielding German blood. German honour – and the Führer – demanded and deserved nothing less.

At nineteen, Reder was the youngest man in the gathering. Hans Reder didn’t feel
nineteen. Mostly he just felt exhausted.

‘Major Reder?’ It took him a few seconds to realize that
Major
Reder was
Hans
Reder.
Him
: the boy from West Prussia.

‘Sir?’

‘Your group will lead off, along with Major Kolf’s group and,’ General Bayerlein nodded to the two men standing beside Hans, ‘Captain Schmidt.’

‘Sir!’ A chorused response, cigarettes cupped in hand, heels clicked. The Panzer Korps was less formal, less interested in spit’n’polish than much of the military but when General Bayerlein gave an order, even in his casual way, you remembered your place and clicked your military heels.

The general went on outlining his breakout formation. There were no questions. There was no need: General Bayerlein’s orders were clear, delivered as simply as Hans’s teacher’s half-time instructions to the village football team on a Sunday morning.
Another life, another world
.

A huge explosion shook the packed cellar. The lights went out on the low ceiling. Matches were struck, cigarette lighters flared, the waiting candles caught flame. In the candlelight the faces seemed even greyer, more weary. The general lit a cigarette. The assembled men spoke softly in pairs and groups.

They waited for the next explosion.

The barrage that followed seemed to be moving away, east, towards the city centre. But again the cellar shook as the blast waves ripped through the earth. The candles flickered.
Fucking Ivan. You never knew when he’d decide to send a few shells over. You just knew that he was out there, beyond the city, waiting for the chance to gut you. Slowly
.

The barrage ended as abruptly as it had begun. The lights came on in the cellar.

Hans Reder nodded to the men beside him, the men who would lead the groups on either
side of him, Major Kolf and Captain Schmidt. Like himself, short, jockeys for the metal monsters that could so easily – and so often – become flaming metal tombs. So better not to know them too well. You never knew which shell had anybody’s name on it.

The men waited.

‘Any second now.’ A stage whisper from the back of the group. The men laughed nervously. Ivan had, for the last few days, lobbed over a few extra shells just when you thought it was all over.

On cue, it came, a brief salvo that reverberated through the earth. The lights flickered but did not go out. The cellar seemed to settle back on its haunches. The tank commanders doused the candles. Outside, they knew, it was a starless night under the winter sky of the Ukraine. Outside, too, they’d be sorting the freshly dead from the freshly wounded: like every man in the cellar, Hans Reder had no wish ever to be numbered among the wounded, waiting your turn for the surgeon’s knife in the abattoir confines of the field hospital. The bleary-eyed doctors did their best to stem an impossible tide of guts and blood – and Ivan was no respecter of Red Cross ethics.

‘Any questions, gentlemen?’

Nobody had any questions for General Bayerlein. Least of all about the wounded and dying who would be left behind in the breakout attempt.

‘So, good luck, gentlemen.’ General Bayerlein’s words broke up the meeting. The men dispersed slowly. Why hurry towards the dark dawn over the filthy snows of the Ukraine? Soon enough their great beasts would growl into life and push on across the churned landscape towards the Russian guns. Soon enough, blood would be spilled.

Only the broken walls of Kirovograd Town Hall remained standing above the cellar. With the
others Reder picked his way among the rubble towards a gap in the walls. He skirted the tangled remains of a once-elegant staircase. Overhead the dark sky seemed to threaten snow. Falling snow would help to hide their advance; drifts would mire their caterpillar tracks. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Reder said goodnight to Kolf and Schmidt, the men with whom he would spearhead the dawn breakout. Both men seemed equally unwilling to linger amid the rubble. All of them had seen enough of battle – of death – to know the pointlessness of conjecture, the uselessness of trying to anticipate the nature of the battle to come. You couldn’t write the script for the battlefield. Death came where and when it wished.

Less than two years ago Hans Reder had begun learning his trade as a mechanic in a garage in Danzig that had once specialized in German and Czech motorbikes; by the time Hans arrived, in the summer of 1942, the entire workforce had been dragooned into military support. Lorries, cars, motorcycles, all in military grey or green, passed through the garage on the narrow street above Danzig harbour. The men who taught Hans Reder his trade were old or infirm or both. They wheezed over engine blocks, coughed into the entrails of trucks and cars. They taught Reder what they knew and looked at him with unenvying eyes. They were men who had been rousted from retirement; they were men who had survived the war of 1914–18. They had watched the younger workforce of the garage march off to restage the madness. They shook Hans Reder’s hand when he was called up in the summer of 1943 but they did not look him in the eye.