Berlin: A Novel (18 page)

Are there many like him around, then?'

'Othmar the postman is a rabid Nazi. And Kaunitz the local Party leader. He sent old Wicaz to the guillotine for listening to enemy radio stations.'

Papa Zastrow came in the afternoon. He had two days off. 'They're looking for you and the boy,' he told Helga. 'The medical director has told the Gestapo. Just as a precaution to shield his own back, if you ask me. They think your trail leads to Berlin.'

'Good,' said his son, pleased. 'No one will look for you in the Spreewald.' He took her hand and patted it clumsily. 'You mustn't be frightened.'

'So Urban is back: said Helga. She tried to remain calm, but the fear in her voice gave her away. 'What about the children?'

Zastrow lowered his voice. 'They're being transferred on the fifteenth of January at three in the afternoon.'

'I must go to Klein Moorbach,' Helga decided. 'Who'll take me?'

'Not me,' said Mato firmly. 'One suicide mission is enough.'

'You'll never find the way alone. What do you want to do there anyway?' asked Hejdus, sounding troubled.

'See what happens. Be a witness for when the day of reckoning comes.'

'If they catch you they'll take you to the Gestapo head office in Cottbus. They'll get you to talk there sooner or later, and we'll all be done for. They're just waiting for an excuse to put all us Sorbs in a camp, like they did with the gypsies.'

Wanda Hejdus spoke up, smoothing things over. 'Please stay here, Helga. Your Karl needs you. All these horrors will soon be over, and then you can go wherever you like.'

Zastrow tried to be optimistic too. 'Now that the Americans are joining in, I'm glad to say it's purely a question of time.'

'You're right. How stupid of me. I'm grateful to you all for letting Karl and me stay here,' said Helga, mollifying her hosts. But secretly she hadn't changed her mind.

The girls were playing on the landing stage with Karl. Hejdus was mending fish-traps in the winter sunlight. Wanda was in the kitchen. Helga strolled over to the Zastrows' cottage.

Mato was sitting by the window, practising his accordion. His father had gone back to the porter's lodge the day before. Helga came up behind the young man and stroked his head.

'Don't give yourself the trouble, I'm not taking you.' She began massaging his neck gently. Anyway. what do you want to go back to that nuthouse for?' She slipped the strap of the accordion off his shoulders, and the palms of her hands circled on his chest through his shirt. She felt his nipples hardening. He put the accordion down on the table. 'Hejdus will murder me if I take you.'

'Hejdus doesn't need to know.' She pulled him to his feet and turned him round to face her. Her lips tenderly touched his mouth as she spoke. 'You will take me, won't you?' She pressed close to him. Seducing this goodlooking boy was rather intriguing, she thought, surprised at her own frivolity.

She kissed him. Her tongue flickered, like a little snake on the attack. Her sex rubbed against his, and she could feel his erection growing. Gently, she drew him down on the bed, and they fell back on the check pillows.

Once he had overcome his initial shyness they made passionate love. She reached orgasm three times before he climaxed with a loud cry. Then they lay peacefully side by side. All that for a boating trip?' He laughed. happy.

'How far is it from Klein Moorbach to the nearest town of any size?'

'Lubnjow, that's Liibbenau to you, is ten kilometres from the hospital. If you want to know exactly. I'll show you on the map - later.' He tried to draw her towards him again, but she pushed him away. He got the map out of the table drawer and unfolded it on the bed. 'Right, so you want to pay a quick visit to the loony bin, heaven knows why. But why LUbbenau afterwards?'

'Those who ask no questions and do as I want will get their reward,' she whispered in his ear. Then her warm lips encircled his prick.

Hejdus was fiddling with the People's Radio. He switched it on only for the midday news, in order to save the bulky battery. Mains electricity ended in Liibbenau. No fanfares announcing special victory bulletins had been broadcast for some time now. Instead, the newsreader reported on the heroic battle for Stalingrad and Rommel's correction of the Front in North Africa, which the informed listener could decipher as the beginning of the end. Karl was sitting at the table with the girls, looking at a picture book. Wanda Hejdus was standing at the stove. Helga did not want to tear herself away from this peaceful scene. She went out, telling them she'd see whether the washing on the line was dry. Mato was waiting in the rowing boat.

Soundlessly, they slipped along the waterway in the midday sun. It was warm for this time of year. The muted boom of an early bittern could be heard across the water. Out in the channel, they met a couple of other boats. Only a brief nod of the head was exchanged. Better to keep to yourself in these uncertain times. Just before three in the afternoon they pulled into the reeds by the park wall. Zastrow's spare key let her through the little gate. She reached the hospital unseen.

The green Opel Blitz was waiting at the tradesmen's entrance. Gotze was leaning on the bonnet, looking bored, smoking a cigarette. Three orderlies were lounging around nearby. Children's voices were raised in song: 'Little Hans, on his own, went out in the world alone. . .'Nurse Evi appeared, with the children in a crocodile behind her. They were holding hands and singing: ong ...' The orderlies lifted them into the '... With hat and stick, he sang a song. . .' truck one by one. '... As merrily he walked along.'

Helga thought of the hours she had spent teaching them that rhyme. Her heart constricted. She forced herself to watch and do nothing. If she intervened she would be arrested, and they would get everything out of her. Then Karl would die, and Mato, and many more, and the Sorbs would be put in a concentration camp.

ay ...' Nurse Evi was singing along with them. 'But his mother wept all day. . .' She was about to get into the truck with her charges, but Grabbe stopped her. Gotze trod out his cigarette and slammed the two halves of the door shut. '... When little Hans had gone away.' Their childish voices were muted inside the closed truck. Gotze bolted the doors, climbed into the driver's cab and started the engine. The truck began to move. Helga saw Dr Urban's face at a first-floor window. He showed no emotion. You brute! cried a voice inside her. Child-murderer! The tears were flowing down her face.

She went back to the boat. Mato was surprised. 'That was quick. Let's get going.'

'We must wait until dark. I still have something to do.' She crept under the tarpaulin and fell into sleep as if in a deep faint. In her dreams she heard children's voices singing. 'Little Hans, on his own.. .'. When she woke, night had fallen.

She pushed back the tarpaulin. 'Wait till I'm back.'

'This is crazy,' Mato protested. 'If they catch you it's the end for all of us. Come on, see sense and let's be off.'

She had no intention of doing such a thing, but she put her arm around him. 'Be a dear boy,' she breathed in his ear. 'It will be lovely again once we're home.'

Sleet drove into her face as she struggled through the undergrowth to the coach-house. She put on the light. You couldn't see the coach house from the hospital. The green Opel Blitz was standing in its place, with her bicycle propped nearby. She picked up the telephone and dialled Urban's extension. He answered in forbidding tones. 'Yes, what is it?'

She slipped into the role she hated. 'You know who this is.'

He was surprised. 'Nurse Helga?'

'I want to see you. In the coach house.'

'The coach house?'

'Do you have to repeat everything I say? Come at once. And bring the whip with you.'

'The whip. Oh yes.' His voice sounded both submissive and eager.

She unbuttoned her loden coat until her skirt and boots were in view. When he arrived she was standing at the back of the coach house, beside the truck. 'The whip,' she demanded coldly. He gave it to her with a look of doglike devotion. She pointed to the bicycle with the whip handle. 'Get that on board and then get in yourself.' He obeyed. 'Now, take your clothes off.' Visibly excited, he did so. 'Down on all fours, facing forward,' she ordered. His buttocks were large and flat, and his penis, red and ugly, dangled between his thighs. She slapped her boot with the whip, making him jump. Then she closed the doors and shot the bolts. The ignition key was hanging from its nail by the telephone as usual.

The gears were similar to those in her Brennabor. She pulled the starter button. After turning over and failing a few times, the engine caught. She put the truck into first gear. stepped on the gas slightly, and engaged the clutch. The truck jerked forward. There was a grinding sound as she changed up into second gear. It was a long time since she had last driven. Just enough light came through the narrow slit left in the headlights, partly obscured to comply with blackout regulations, for her to find the way to the gate. She stopped and hooted impatiently.

Zastrow came out of the porter's lodge looking sleepy, Jule on her leash with him. He opened the gate without looking into the truck. 'Pack of criminals,' he muttered.

She had memorized the map. A driveway led from the gate to the road. You turned right for Liibbenau. The sleet had stopped, but she still drove slowly. Her face was set like stone. She knew that with every revolution of the engine it was pumping deadly gas into the load area. Urban would be coughing, retching, finally breathing stertorously. Convulsions would shake him until he perished miserably, racked by convulsive twitching. The thought filled her with satisfaction.

It took her over half an hour to go the ten kilometres. She wanted to make quite sure. She stopped in the square outside the town hall, empty at this time of night, turned off the engine and jumped out of the driver's cab. She pushed back the bolts. Urban's naked body fell towards her. In his death agony he had been clawing at the doors. His torso hung out of the truck. She took her bicycle out and placed the message she had prepared in advance beside the body:

THIS IS HOW THEY DEAL WITH 'WORTHLESS LIVES' IN KLEIN MOORBACH. SO FAR 18 CHILDREN AND 34 ADULTS HAVE PERISHED.

It took her fifteen minutes to cycle back. When she reached the park wall she put the bicycle over her shoulders and made her way to the small gate by the light of her torch. She opened the gate and pushed the bicycle through it. In the coach house she propped it against the wall.

All finished?' asked Mato when she joined him in the boat.

All finished.' Exhausted, she crawled underneath the tarpaulin.

A Gestapo special unit came from Berlin. Their investigations led nowhere. Helga had cut the letters for her message out of the Spreewaldboten newspaper and stuck them together. She had taken the sheet of paper from a new school exercise book belonging to the Hejdus girls, the sort you could buy anywhere, and she burned the rest of the exercise book. She had been wearing gloves throughout her nocturnal operations. Moreover, she had been officially missing for weeks, so no one connected her with Urban's death.

'People are furious,' reported Hejdus. He had been in the town. 'They smashed up the gas truck. No one knows who was driving it.' He looked hard at Helga. 'Well, we don't know anything either.'

Special units of the police and the SS combed the entire forest area on foot and in motorboats over the next few days, but the water prevented their dogs from picking up a trail. Helga, Karl, Mato and two other men who had not joined up spent many hours in the hiding place under the house. Finally the search troops were withdrawn. The Spreewald had given away none of those it protected.

Nor did it give them away in the months to come. While squadrons of Allied bombers flew over them in the direction of Berlin, the people on the Kaupe continued their simple way of life. A beautiful spring made up for the last winter of the war. March was warm and sunny, and April as hot as summer. Helga, Mato and Karl had to go down under the house less and less often. The rulers of the Greater German Reich, not so great now, had worse problems than the Sorbs.

Helga and Mato had climbed up to the raised hide at the mouth of the channel, not to keep watch but for one of their secret meetings. Mato was sitting on the narrow bench, leaning back. Helga was astride him, riding them both to a satisfying climax. They made love when the opportunity offered, Mato with a young man's amazed ardour, Helga enjoying herself very much. She was thirty-five, and these physical encounters did her good. The inhabitants of the Kaupe knew about the relationship and tacitly approved.

The others were all sitting in the sun when the two of them came back. A biplane with the red star on its wings flew overhead, purring like a sewing machine. The girls waved up at it. The pilot waved back. 'Well, it'll soon be over now,' said Zastrow. He had given up his porter's job. 'Remains to be seen if the new masters are any better than the old,' he added sceptically.

The new masters arrived on a Sunday. Helga was swimming. She loved those moments in the cool water when she felt weightless and free. In spite of the thunder of the guns, which was getting closer and closer, the war had remained improbable, something which didn't seem to affect her. Now, all at once, it became reality. A shallow, motorized pontoon glided along the waterway and made fast. Six young Red Army soldiers jumped on land, sub-machine guns drawn and ready. One of them had a pockmarked, Mongol face. With a couple of strokes, Helga reached the bank. The soldiers stared at her. They had never seen a woman in a bathing suit before.