Comrades of War (7 page)

Where the gray curtain parted, Tiny appeared, dragging a lifeless figure behind him. He threw it down before us in the middle of the bridge, like an angler who’s caught an unusually big pike he’d like to show off a bit. He grinned:

‘Seen the like of this before, eh?’

The throat of the dead Siberian soldier gaped red and made sucking motions like the gills of a big fish. The blood muddied up the iron of the bridge.

Using his sleeve, Tiny wiped some black blood off his face. It was from the foreign soldier, whose blood had spattered Tiny as he slit the soldier’s throat from ear to ear.

Tiny grinned apologetically. ‘Look how this pig messed me up when I knocked him off.’

The Old Man drew a deep breath. ‘How did you find him?’

‘He came up from the river, was going to play a trick on you, fellows. Haw-haw, I was too bright for him and made a slight gash in the Stalin beggar.’

‘You’ve saved us,’ the Old Man said, holding up a couple of high-explosive charges he’d found under the oilskin uniform of the enemy soldier.

‘A suicide rifleman,’ Stege shuddered and stroked his sub-machine gun.

Porta whistled long and pointedly.

‘Tiny,’ the Old Man said. ‘You saved our lives. If that fellow had caught us by surprise, we’d have been blown sky-high like a well-oiled rocket.’

Tiny was in contortions from embarrassment. He wasn’t used to praise.

‘I lunged my knife straight at his face and just gave a pull. It sank in so easily and gently, then he was dead. He yelled only once. And, d’you know, half his yell came out through the hole I’d cut in his throat.’

‘You’re good with the knife,’ the Legionnaire nodded proudly. He was Tiny’s teacher in using the knife properly.

Tiny swelled with pride and joy. He looked at the Old Man, narrowed his eyes a little and bent his head to a pleading angle.

‘After this, may I rape the rifle girl with the fat ass?’

The old man shook his head, slung his sub-machine gun across his shoulder and continued across the bridge. The rest of us followed in silence. Tiny shouted more loudly than necessary. His voice penetrated deep into the fog and must’ve been heard both by the Russians and by our own troops far on the opposite shore.

‘Christ, I’ll do it anyway. I saved you, and she isn’t so very tender, you know.’

The Old Man stopped, swung his sub-machine gun under Tiny’s nose and said quite low, but with so much weight that no one could mistake him, ‘You stay away from the flintlock girls, including the one you’re so sweet on. Otherwise you’ll go straight to hell and I’d be sorry to have that happen. I mean it, Tiny.’

‘Turds,’ Tiny growled. He sulked again like an offended child. He didn’t get his hands on those flintlock girls. But he became even more proficient with the knife. The Legionnaire was proud.

Neither Tiny nor the Legionnaire used the steel sling. They used only the knife. The rest of us preferred the sling; it was noiseless. But Tiny didn’t at all mind their screaming. He said that they seemed more dead when they’d screamed first.

Ewald well knew Tiny’s skill with the long battle knife. But Ewald, too, was handy with a knife. His own weapon, however, was a switchblade knife, of the kind fancied by the Portuguese and by pimps in Marseille. Sailors coming to Marseille from Oporto and Lisbon made good business with these switchblade knives. Ewald had received his from a sailor who’d gotten very drunk. It was on account of this sailor that Ewald, the pimp, served his twenty-first prison term. Something or other – it could never be established with certainty precisely what – had saved Ewald from the liquidation camps for habitual criminals. When questioned about this, Ewald sensibly kept quiet and casually shrugged his shoulders.

Criminal Secretary Nauer at Police Headquarters, Stadthausbrücke 8, had torn off one of Ewald’s ears and broken his toes. Not because of the murder of that sailor. That was of minor importance. He wasn’t the only sailor who was killed during that time. The mortuary chapel for unidentified persons had space for a great many cadavers, and as long as they didn’t have to be piled on top of each other there was no reason to make a fuss. But Herr Nauer at Police Headquarters believed that Ewald had some dope on
Rote Kapelle
, the large underground Communist organization. The dream of Herr Nauer was to be transferred to the Communist Section of the Secret State Police. This section was headed by
Kriminalrat
Kraus, the greatest criminal who ever held public office. But Kraus was a fine police officer, at least by the standards of the Third Reich, or even by police standards anywhere.

Kraus was hanged in 1946 in a cell in Fuhlsbüttel. It was raining. The weather was really dismal that day. He squeaked like a drowning mouse and looked like one, too. He had to be carried to the hemp rope, which smelled pleasantly new – that is, if you can stand the smell of a rope.

He was supported by two young men as he stood on the stool under the steel pipe in the ceiling to which the rope had been fastened. He jumped up and down on the stool like a rubber ball, sobbing: ‘No, no!’ But Fate said, ‘Yes, oh yes!’ The stool was kicked out from under his thick feet.

He gurgled a little. Sort of long and deep, like sour milk that can’t quite make it out of the neck of a bottle. His neck stretched and his eyes popped out of their sockets.

One of the young men let out a mere ‘Damn it!’ in his native English and went on his way. The other stayed behind to take a snapshot. Since this was prohibited by law, he had to make haste, but it was ‘a damned good souvenir,’ he later told his girl friend in Harburg. She was a nice girl who happened to love that sort of photograph. Her father was shot in the back of his head with a Nagan pistol somewhere in the East. Not because he had done anything, but because somebody had to be shot in the back of the head with Nagans now that the war was over. But at that time the girl didn’t know this.

The picture showed clearly
Kriminalrat
Kraus’ tongue hanging out of his mouth. Large, strangely swollen.

Laughing, the young man said to the girl from Harburg: ‘He doesn’t want to have anything to do with us. He sticks out his tongue at us.’

The young man didn’t know that
Kriminalrat
Kraus, from Gestapo’s department 6C, the so-called Communist department, would’ve sold his own mother, wife, and children to get into the secret service of his own country. Kraus had volunteered his services. He had talked and smirked every day for an entire year, and now he stuck out his tongue, like all snakes.

Ewald, pimp, murderer, sadist, and lady-killer, managed to get out of Police Headquarters without becoming acquainted with
Kriminalrat
Kraus. Dumpy Kraus. How? He was said to have talked both plenty and long, lies as well as truth.

Aunt Dora had taken some unusually powerful puffs at her cheroot and said: ‘None of my business. But if that swine starts speaking to “Lange Nauer” about anything that concerns me, then . . .’ She smiled and winked. Whether the wink was caused by the smoke from her perpetual cheroot, or by the necessity of signaling to someone in the soft darkness around the little tables – that couldn’t quite be determined.

Now, Ewald stood squeezed between two bar stools, afraid of what might come.

Everything about Ewald recalled a jackal. For one, he had all of the jackal’s cowardliness.

Tiny grinned as he played with his knife. He tossed it in the air and caught it again. He did it again and again. Ewald’s face bobbed up and down as he followed the knife with his eyes.

Tiny looked at him. ‘Would you care to fight Tiny, my lamb?’

Ewald shook his head.

Tiny leaned back and chuckled. ‘You’re a turd, Ewald. And no one fights a turd. It’s only good for spitting at.’

Tiny spat at Ewald. Ewald wiped the gob off his face with the back of his hand, then rubbed his hand clean on his trousers.

Aunt Dora was picking her teeth with a fork and looking from one to another. ‘No rumpus, boys. If you want to kill that swine, do it outside. But don’t play any pranks here.’

Ewald again made an attempt to get away, but Tiny tripped him up. He toppled over and slid some distance along the floor. When he got up and was about to run, a knife whizzed right past his head. It embedded itself in the door of the room where he used to flog the girls.

He pulled up with fright and whispered hoarsely, ‘I haven’t done any harm to you.’

‘We damn well hope you haven’t – for your own sake,’ Stein grinned.

Tiny motioned Stein to lay off and called quite loudly: ‘Come over here, you louse, we would just love to have a little talk with you. Come!’

Ewald walked slowly up to the bar, followed by all eyes. The girls nodded with expectant pleasure, gloating over Ewald’s unhappy predicament.

Tiny patted him lightly on the cheek, but finished it off with a terrific slap in the face which made Ewald topple over.

‘But good Heavens, what are you doing to baby-boy?’ Stein said, pretending to be shocked. He made as if to help Ewald get up from the floor, but suddenly the terrified Ewald was sent flying through the air by a judo grip. He crashed to the floor and lay there unconscious.

Tiny thought he owed him a last greeting. Big and heavy, he got up and bent over the curled-up figure on the floor. He squinted at the Legionnaire, who gave him a secret nod as he was taking a sip from his glass. Tiny winked and gave Ewald a kick in the groin. He doubled up like a sandwich that’s been lying around for too long.

We left Wind Force 11 proud of our work.

‘You are a business commodity,’ said Brandt, the cross-country truck driver. ‘Every Jew in Himmler’s camps becomes a first-class object of trade.’

‘That isn’t true,’ cried the old Jew in the striped prisoner’s uniform.

Brandt laughed. Heide laughed, All of us laughed, but joylessly.

‘You and all of you Jews will never be anything else than what you are right now – and have been for thousands of years – a plain commodity, a trump held by the rulers which they play or don’t play, depending on the needs of their tawdry market,’ Brandt continued.

Stege nodded. ‘There’s something to what you’re saying. At the moment we are the big joes. Later, when the war’s over, you will be. The whole thing works like a dial, with “sun” and “rain” as on the old barometers. Today, we’re in the sun and you in the shade. But soon the situation may be reversed. At the moment, in any case, the Jews are one of the best items on the political market.’

The old Jew sat listening with open mouth. Despair shone in his hollow eyes.

‘It isn’t true,’ he whispered. ‘The chains will soon be broken, as when Moses brought us out of slavery in Egypt.’

The old prisoner let out a tired laugh.

‘That was possible a couple of thousand years ago; it isn’t today. Some of you’ll escape the gangs of Himmler, but on the other side there will also be Himmlers, and they’ll know how to use you to their own advantage. You are and will continue to be a mere object.’

‘No,’ said the old Jew. ‘A new age will come.’

Bending toward him, Porta gave him two hundred marks.

‘This will give you a start in the new age you’re talking of. When you’ve found it, be sure to send us a postcard.’

Loud laughter.

The Jew gently passed his hand over the bills. He looked at Porta with a feeble smile. ‘What address should I send it to?’

Porta shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows?’ His voice softened to a confidential whisper: ‘If you notice a rusty steel helmet on the ground, knock at it and ask: “Who is rotting here?” When you come to mine, I’ll answer: “One of the stupidest swine in the whole German army.” Then you just place your postcard under the helmet and I’ll pick it up at full moon.’

V

The Jew

‘I love you,’ I told her, and at the same time I thought: I have said that so many times. I wonder if I mean it this time.

She laughed softly. The crow’s-feet around her eyes displayed their finest texture.

‘We aren’t likely to have much luck at it,’ she said, putting her arms around my neck and kissing me.

We sat down on the sofa and looked through the window out upon the Alster. A boat was sailing out there, an old boat loaded with people. She passed a finger along my broken nose.

‘Did it hurt very much when your nose was broken in Torgau?’

‘Nah, but it bled like a fountain.’

‘Didn’t it hurt at all?’

‘A little, maybe – well, yes, afterwards it hurt quite a bit.’

‘Your eyes are cold, Sven, even when you laugh. They are hard. Try to make them kind!’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘That’s my eyes. Can one’s eyes be changed? Yours are brown and gentle. Mine are gray and evil. I’m evil because my work demands it.’

‘No, not evil. You’re not evil.’

‘Oh, yes, I am. I am one of Hitler’s soldiers and must be evil.’

‘Nonsense. You’re not a soldier and certainly not Hitler’s. You’re a boy who has been slipped into an ugly uniform with tin on the breast. The war is evil. Not people. Kiss me once more! Hold me close. Tighter. Tighter! Ah, now. Now I’m comfortable. It’s so lovely to feel safe. If one only could be safe always.’

Instead of answering I kissed her. We lay down on the sofa and fixed our eyes on the rosette on the ceiling. In the street some people were quarreling. A trolley braked with a grating noise.

‘How do you look in civilian clothes?’

‘Oh, go to hell. Worse than a fool,’ I assured her.

‘You use ugly language.’

‘I know, but it belongs to my trade.’

She raised herself on her elbow and looked into my eyes, as if trying to see to the bottom of a well. She looked at me for a long while.

‘You’re afraid of yourself,’ she said and pressed her lips to mine. Hot lips, a taut body – for a moment they kindled something in me which resembled tenderness. A soldier at war is not accustomed to being loved for his own sake, only for his body and his uniform – and because there is no one else.

Rot, I thought and again looked indifferently at the ceiling. We were both lying on our backs again, resting our eyes on the rosette in the ceiling and letting our minds wander.