Men of Snow (37 page)

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That night his bedroom was full of trees. He was not asleep. He was listening to the rain that had started again and the distant sounds of traffic and trees moving their branches around him as he stared up at the ceiling filled with the motion of the high firs balanced against a distant sky. There was the scent of the pine, the soft sound of the rain. He could see intertwining roots that formed part of the roof of an earth shelter. Kas was there for a moment being encircled by the roots that were like white veins squeezing him. His mouth was open but no sound came.

As Leon turned and lay on his side Brucker’s face was only inches away. The German was looking straight at him with a resigned expression as though nothing mattered any more. The war was over. Everything was finished. Nothing could be reclaimed. The dead were dead. Everything else was pointless. Brucker was telling him to leave it all in the dark past, to leave his mother and father and sister and uncle David and Polyna there, to leave Kas and Radek and big Paul and the rest of the Poles, to leave Adam on the train to Siberia, to let them all be left back in the silence because that was where they were. Nothing could change that.

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Three days later David went down to the bar of their Hamburg hotel leaving Leon by himself in an overheated room that looked out onto one of the city’s main streets.

Sonya had been pleased when he had told her about his trip with David.

‘You need a break Leon. It’ll do you good,’ she had said.

He thought of her back in the gallery. It was the only part of his world that he really understood. The rest was now a confusion of feelings that he often was too tired to explore.

They had taken the Dover – Calais ferry and driven through Belgium and Holland into Germany. The autobahns had been clogged with cars and lorries, everybody busy and on the move. Germany it seemed was thriving, even more than he had expected.

There was a tension in the realisation that Brucker might be only a few miles away. For the first time he was in the land of the enemy, of the perpetrators, and yet all he was worried about was the unbearable heat in the room. Now Leon was sitting in his shirt sleeves by the window watching the evening traffic below and listening to Rachel chastising him.

‘You’ve created him to be like this. He has listened to every single thing you’ve told him until it’s as if it’s all his now, his experience, his war, his suffering.’

He closed his eyes and bent forward slightly, his thick grey hair reflecting light from the too bright neon strip on the ceiling.

‘You trapped him,’ Rachel continued, ‘You could have released him a long time ago. But no, you think you’ve tried and yet now you’re scared that he’ll want to take things further than you ever had the courage to do. You’ve made him angry Leon, so angry.’

He could not control her. She was in his head and he was too tired.

‘I’m asking you. Try and stop him. He has no life, no friends, no interests besides this obsession. I don’t know whether you can save him, but promise you’ll at least try. You have to do that Leon.’

Rachel had been dying and had used some of her final moments to make another attempt.

‘Please Leon. You’ve shown him over and over again what you suffered when it should have been you helping him to forget.’

He could feel the perspiration down his back as he walked over to sit on the edge of the bed, for once unable to block out her words.

‘You can’t keep doing this to our son. You’re destroying who he could be.’

‘He asks and I’m not going to lie,’ he could hear himself saying.

‘And why does he want to know so badly?’

‘Because he feels for what happened. He’s a Jew for God’s sake. He understands what the past means. He has a right to know.’

‘He has a right to his own life,’ Rachel had said.

‘And what’s that life supposed to be based on? It has to come from somewhere. It shares a history. All that can’t be just ignored.’

‘He won’t listen to me. He thinks I’m naive, that I don’ understand or don’t really care, just because I spent the war in England’

‘And I tell David that’s not true.’

‘Well he’s not listening. He’s not listening.’

‘No,’ Leon muttered to himself, ‘No he’s not,’ looking up as David tapped on the door before coming into the sweltering room.

‘I’ve told them again, at reception,’ he said, ‘she says the heating switches down through the night.’

‘Well I hope she’s right.’

David went over to try and open the window. He was wearing tight jeans and a sweater that made him look even taller.

‘Hamburg,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Leon said back.

‘We’re here.’

‘Yes.’

And he’s here.’

‘We hope so.’

For the next hour they went through their plans. David spread out a map of the city working out a route from the hotel to where Brucker lived.

Instead of joining a law firm David had been employed for the last eight years in a firm of head hunters. One of the reasons had been the hope that his company’s resources would help him find Brucker. In the end it was a small business that checked any reference in the media to anything a customer might wish that had come across the photograph of Brucker in the Hamburg newspaper. It was then David’s contacts had helped him find the German’s address.

‘I still find this hard to believe,’ Leon said as David folded up the map.

‘That’s because you doubted this would ever happen.’

‘And it’s because of you David. You’ve made this happen.’

‘Well we haven’t done anything yet.’

‘We will. I believe now that we will. But we just talk to him, nothing else.’

David got up again.

‘You promised that,’ his father added.

‘But you agree we talk to him in a place of our choosing.’

‘Brucker will refuse. Of course he will.’

‘Well we’ll come to that.’

‘No violence David.’

‘For God’s sake. We don’t know yet if the bastard is where he’s supposed to be. Let’s just take it stage by stage and not get ahead of ourselves.’

Later as David was leaving to go to his own room Leon said to him, ‘You know that finding Brucker will never be enough, because whatever happens, David we’ll never understand him.’

His son’s face had stiffened as he replied, ‘I don’t want to understand him. I just want the bastard to know that things haven’t been forgotten. That’s all.’

In the bathroom as he was preparing to go to bed Leon opened his box of pills. They were an essential part of the daily routine to keep him alive. His body had a complicated pattern of different problems, especially trying to combat high blood pressure as well intestine complaints, constant headaches, a bad back, poor eyesight, high cholesterol, bouts of dizziness followed by days of flu like symptoms. All of it he knew was a consequence of the war. His array of medical problems was his legacy from those years, something that he had to combat every day of his life. Except for Sonya and David he saw more of his doctor than anybody else.

As he finally got into bed the worry was about his son’s reaction to Brucker if they managed to meet him. Leon accepted what Rachel had said so often, that their son was ravaged with an anger that he could not control. They had seen it on the rugby field. At university David had regularly got into fights. His game was always likely to explode into violence. That was why they only went to watch him on rare occasions. Both he and Rachel had dreaded seeing another of his outbursts when it would take several of his own team to pull him away from fighting.

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As planned the next morning David went to hire a car leaving their Rover with its English number plate in the hotel car park. Both were in winter overcoats as they set off across the city. More snow had been forecast on the local TV station. Both of them had spent a night in overheated rooms that still had not been fixed.

‘Whatever happened to so called German efficiency?’ was David’s sarcastic comment that he finally made to one of the receptionists who was now beginning to think he was just out to make trouble.

In less than half an hour they were parked up in the tree lined avenue with its expensive houses walled or fenced off from the road. There were a few other cars parked in the street. Mothers were taking their children to school as the sky darkened. Old leaves were frozen onto the pavements. Here the sounds of the rest of the city seemed at such a distance that they were just a fain drone in the background.

Leon watched as David walked off down the street towards the smart apartment block to check on Brucker’s flat number.

‘We don’t want to be too obvious,’ he had said to him before he got out of the car, ‘The quicker we do this part the better.’

‘Won’t be a minute and that’s all we’ll do this morning. We can come back later. We have to find out first if he’s here and then what his routine is if he has one.’

‘Don’t worry about that. Brucker will have one,’ Leon said with confidence, ‘I’ve been thinking about him long enough to know that much.’

‘But you can’t be sure,’ David had argued.

‘Of course not, it’s a guess, an estimation.’

‘Well we don’t want too many of them father. We need to be sure.’

Now he looked through the windscreen at the snow beginning to fall feeling the tension increasing until he felt almost sick with it. Momentarily he lost the reasons for them being there. He was scared of his son’s reaction, worried that he might not be able to control him. In the end he did not trust David being able to restrain himself. His son had spent years preparing for this moment and now it had come he was straining to get on with it. Leon could tell how much he wanted this, to finally confront the one man who represented all the horror, to let Brucker know he had not got away with the killing. And yet for Leon it was not so simple. So much time had passed and with it the full force of what he had experienced. He did not want any more violence, any more death, but knew that given the chance that’s just what his son was seeking. He was lost between his own confusion and trying to limit David’s actions.

‘He’s there, fourth floor, flat two,’ was David’s information when he came back, ‘He’s there father. Let’s just hope he’s not taken some long retirement holiday.’

Back at the hotel Leon had a sleep in the afternoon. He knew he had to go with David back to Brucker’s street that evening. He had promised him he would follow what they had agreed, but Leon still did not trust him sufficiently to let him go off by himself. David was too worked up. He told his father he would be using the hotel gym that afternoon while he took his nap, but even then Leon was not sure that was what his son would really do. David was only twenty nine. He had all the energy needed, that and an obvious physical strength. There was an eagerness now that Leon found exhausting. Part of him even regretted coming at all. He was not ready, not driven like David. The past had seen too much death for him to ever want more, death following death. He could not imagine causing pain even to Brucker, to the one he detested more than anyone. Revenge had been mellowed to something verbal. Yes he wanted to confront Brucker, but did not believe that it would have that much effect on the German. He would be too clever, too confident. Yes the attempt was necessary. That would have to be enough. What he was not sure of was whether it would be for his son.

The snow continued throughout the day giving a thin covering over the road in Brucker’s street. There were few vehicles which had left tyre tracks, only a delivery van while Leon and David had been waiting, and two limousines that disappeared up the drive of one of the houses. They had parked further down the street from the apartment block, but there was enough street lighting to be able to see its entrance. They decided to wait no more than an hour. The quietness of the street was an unforeseen problem. The two of them sitting there was obvious but unavoidable. They had to find out what Brucker did through the day if their plan was to work.

A taxi came along the street and stopped at the entrance to the apartment block. Leon and David were suddenly paying more attention until they watched an elderly lady with too many shopping bags struggle out of the taxi and into the entranceway. After that there was little activity. The street seemed to merge into a quiet winter’s evening, the snow falling through the beams of the street lights that accentuated the twisted bare branches of the line of trees on either side.

Leon thought how Brucker had found himself a smart, expensive, almost exclusive place to live. He had been successful. Whatever had happened in the war had obviously had no effect on the rest of his life, from officer to company director, looking still sharp and purposeful in the newspaper photograph, Franz Brucker after over thirty years in a thriving sports business had at last retired, the occasion celebrated by a function at one of the top hotels in Hamburg. Like David he had spent years studying the nature of the Wehrmacht officers who were directly involved in extermination. There had been so many of them. On two brief glimpses Leon knew it was impossible to fully understand who that person was, the character of Brucker, and yet he still believed he had explored enough material to give him some sense of this man. He looked fit for his age and he would have worked on that. There would be an inner confidence, an assurance about him. Leon doubted that he would have got married. Brucker would not be the type to share his life with anybody. He would be totally focused, willing himself to complete whatever task he had set himself. The article in the newspaper had said he enjoyed walking in the Alps which again Leon could imagine, again the emphasis on health and fitness, a man of nearly seventy still going up mountains. For so long he had tried to get close to who Brucker was, to understand the possible contradictions there might be in a man with his personality, somebody who could watch the worst kind of butchery he had ordered and finish up as a successful businessman, somebody who must be able to get on with other people, to be admired, to be able to stimulate. Was this the man they were dealing with? He would be clever, secretive, always one step ahead. David had discussed what would happen when Brucker refused to get into the car.