Potsdam Station (16 page)

And not all the bribes were monetary. Dobberke loved the ladies, and was more than ready to stretch the rules in a woman prisoner’s favour if he received a favourable response to his overtures. Effi forced herself to consider the possibility – would she let the bastard fuck her if it improved her and Rosa’s chances of survival? She probably would, but doubted she’d be given the chance. Dobberke was said to like his flesh tender, and though she had become many things over the last four years, young wasn’t one of them.

The church bells were ringing as Paul, Neumaier, Hannes and Haaf walked into Diedersdorf that evening. A gesture of defiance, Paul guessed, in that no one was left to attend any services. The only show in town was at the village hall – a screening of the movie
Kolberg
, which rumour claimed had cost as much as a thousand new tanks. According to battalion some idiot from Personnel had delivered the tickets in his staff car, engine still running, eyes nervously scanning the eastern horizon and sky.

Reaching the village hall the foursome discovered that their tickets, far from being free, simply entitled them to come up with a four Reichsmark entrance fee. After some grumbling – Hannes was all for telling the doorman to stuff his wretched movie – they came up with the cash and filtered inside. The hall lacked sufficient chairs for the likely audience, and those available, arranged in rows at the back, were already occupied. But the large area of floor space at the front was still only sparsely populated, and they managed to secure a stretch of wall on the far side to sit against. Looking round, Paul could see that most of the men were from artillery units like their own. The few tank men present had managed, with characteristic arrogance, to seize the front row of chairs.

The hall gradually filled, the babble of conversation growing steadily louder, until the ceiling lights abruptly went out, and the film began flickering on the large white sheet which covered half of the end wall. The first scenes drew deep sighs of appreciation, less for their content than for the fact that the film was in colour.

Paul, like almost everyone else in the hall, already knew the story – the Pomeranian town’s defiance of the French in 1807 had been a staple of school history lessons and
Hitlerjugend
meetings for as long as he could remember. It had, however, ended in failure when the overall war was lost, and Paul was intrigued to discover how Goebbels and his film producers – Effi’s ‘nightmare machine’ – had finessed this unfortunate fact. He soon found out.
Kolberg
opened in 1913, after the eventual defeat of the French, with one of the characters reflecting on the importance of civilian militia, and the crucial role the men of the town had played in pointing the way towards victory.

Most of the rest was flashback. The indomitable mayor first overcame the doubters in his own camp – some seduced by foreign liberalism, others weakened by cowardice or too much self-importance – and then held the French at bay with the usual heady mixture of ingenuity, courage and extraordinary will-power.

It was impressively done, and almost insultingly lavish. He remembered Effi explaining how salt was always used for snow, and that hundreds of railway wagons would be used to transport it to a set. And then there were the soldiers – thousands of them. Where had they come from? They looked too much like Germans to be prisoners. They could only be real soldiers, taken out of the front line at some point in the last eighteen months. It beggared belief. Paul felt anger rising inside him. How many men had died for lack of support while Goebbels was making epics?

Let it go, he told himself. This might well be the last movie he would ever see. He should enjoy the spectacle, enjoy imagining a night in Kristina Söderbaum’s arms. Forget everything else.

And, for most of the film, he did. It had to end though, and when the lights came on it felt like a slap in the face from reality. Most of the faces around him reflected similar feelings – the sense of angry hopelessness as the hall emptied out was impossible to ignore. Haaf had enjoyed it of course, but even he seemed aware that overt enthusiasm was inappropriate, and the four of them walked back to their woods in almost complete silence. If the film-makers’ intention had been to stiffen resolve, and to foster the belief that eventual victory was still possible, they had made it several years too late, and shown it to the wrong audience.

Of course, Paul thought later, as he clambered up into his bunk, it didn’t help that the real Kolberg had surrendered to the Soviets more than a month ago.

The level of noise suggested to Russell that the transport plane was slowly shaking itself to pieces, but Varennikov was all smiles, as if he had trouble believing how much fun it was. The dispatcher nonchalantly propped beside the open doorway was taking periodic drags on his hand-cupped cigarette, apparently oblivious to the strong smell of aviation fuel suffusing the cabin. If the inevitable explosion didn’t kill him, Russell thought, then the fall was bound to. He checked his harness for the umpteenth time and reminded himself why he had agreed to this madness. ‘The things we do for love,’ he muttered under his breath.

He and the young physicist had spent the previous twenty-four hours rushing through lessons that usually lasted a fortnight. They had mastered exit technique, flight technique, landing technique. They had jumped off steps, off the end of a ramp, from the dry equivalent of a high-diving platform, and, finally, off a hundred foot tower. And now, against every inclination his mind and body could muster, they were about to leap from a thoroughly airborne plane.

The dispatcher was beckoning. Russell fought his way forward against the wind and looked down. The patchwork of forests and fields seemed both alarmingly close and alarmingly distant. He turned to the dispatcher expecting some final message of comfort, just as a hand in the back pushed him firmly into space.

The shock took his breath away. The transport plane, so solid and loud and all-encompassing, had vanished in an instant, leaving him plummeting through an eerie silence. He frantically tugged at the ripcord, thinking as he did so that he was pulling too hard, and that he’d be left with only a piece of broken rope and a perplexed Buster Keaton expression on his face as he dropped like a stone. But the chute snapped open, the heavens tugged him back, and he was floating down exactly the way he was supposed to. He dropped his head on his chest, held his elbows in, tried to keep his lower limbs behind the line of his trunk – all the things their instructors had been pummelling into them for the last twenty-four hours.

It was extraordinarily peaceful. He could hear the plane again now, a low drone in the distance. He could see the aerodrome below, the huts and training tower on the eastern rim, the wide expanse of grass at which he’d been aimed. Away in the distance sunlight was glinting on a clutch of golden domes.

Looking up, he could see Varennikov dangling beneath his red chute. The Russian’s smile would be broader than ever.

After seeming no nearer for most of his fall, the ground rose to meet him at breakneck speed. He told himself to concentrate, not to let his legs out in front of his body. This was the moment his rational self feared most, when his forty-five-year-old bones were put to the ultimate test. A broken ankle now, and that would probably be that, though he wouldn’t put it past the Soviets to drop him in a cast.

At least he was falling onto flat grass – the dispatcher’s shove had been well-timed. He took a deep breath, mentally rehearsed his technique, and rolled away as he hit the ground, ending up in a relieved heap. He looked up to see Varennikov hit the grass running some twenty metres away. He hardly needed to roll, but did so with all the graceful agility of youth. ‘Show-off,’ Russell murmured to himself. He lay on his back, staring up at the blue sky and wondering whether kissing the ground was in order, only clambering to his feet when he heard Varennikov anxiously ask if he was all right.

A jeep was on its way to collect them, their plane coming in to land.

‘Again,’ their chief instructor barked from the front seat of the jeep.

‘Why?’ Russell wanted to know. ‘We know how to do it now. Why risk an injury?’

‘Five by day, two by night,’ the instructor told him. ‘The minimum,’ he added for emphasis. A bomb fell through the roof of the Pathology block extension on the Sunday morning, burying one male prisoner alive in the cells which lay below. It took them most of the morning to dig him out, but the young man managed a smile as they carried him through the basement rooms en route to the hospital. Rosa had been crying on and off since the news of his entombment, and Effi guessed that the incident had triggered some family memory.

When an orderly came for Effi early that afternoon, she was glad that Johanna was on hand to look after the girl. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she shouted over her shoulder, hoping it was true.

Dobberke’s office was at the end of a book-lined corridor on the top floor. He gestured Effi into a chair and stared at her for several seconds before picking up what looked like her papers. The famous whip was in view, hanging from a nail in the wall. The black German shepherd was asleep in a corner.

‘You are from Fürstenwalde?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I know it well,’ he said with a smile. ‘What was your address?’

The smile told her he was bluffing. ‘Nordstrasse 53,’ she said. ‘It’s a few streets north of the town centre.’

He grunted. ‘How long have you lived there?’

‘Eight years,’ Effi said, picking a figure out of the air.

Dobberke laughed. ‘You expect me to believe that a Jew could survive detection in a small town like Fürstenwalde for eight years?’

‘I am not a Jew.’

‘You look like one.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘And the girl you have in tow – is she not a Jew?’

This was a question that Effi had expected, and she had considered saying no. But the only explanation of the faded star that she could think of – that Rosa had somehow ended up with the blouse of a young Jewish girl of similar size – sounded almost ludicrously unconvincing. ‘She is a half-Jew, a
mischling
,’ she told Dobberke. She explained about her sister’s marriage to a Jew, and how she herself had come to be Rosa’s guardian. ‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ Effi concluded. ‘We should be in the hospital, not the collection centre.’

Dobberke stared at her for a few more seconds, almost admiringly, she thought. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ he said at last. ‘You arrive here with papers that are less than a day old, a girl with a star on her dress, and a very practised story. I think there’s more to you than meets the eye…’ He cocked his head, and she heard the rising whine of the siren. ‘If you had arrived a week ago,’ he continued, rising to his feet, ‘you would be on your way to Französische Strasse for a real interrogation. That may no longer be possible, but the war isn’t over yet. In the meantime, you will stay exactly where you are.’

They were ripped from sleep by unearthly thunder – even deep inside the dugout the onset of the Soviet bombardment seemed loud enough to awaken comrades long since dead. This is it, Paul thought, leaping down from his bunk. The beginning of the end.

Haaf stared at him wide-eyed, apparently paralysed. ‘Move,’ Paul told him. ‘We have guns to man.’

Outside it was light enough to check his watch by, and dawn was still three hours away. Vehicles were hurrying west on the road – supply trucks probably, caught too close to the front. They had to be German at any rate – the Soviets would not be moving until the bombardment ended. Paul watched as stretches of earth heaved up around them, wondering which would be hit.

Exploding shells flashed a few hundred metres away to the south, the noise of their detonations engulfed in the wider cacophony. Shaken out of his trance, Paul raced across to the deep trenches that connected their gun emplacements and leapt in, almost landing on Hannes. Haaf was right behind him, barefoot and clutching a boot in either hand.

The shells were drawing closer, ripping a corridor of destruction through the wood with mathematical precision. They waited, grim faces lit by the flaring sky above the trees, for death to descend, but this time the maths were on their side, and the line of fire passed harmlessly in front of their position.

‘I can’t stand this,’ Paul thought. But he could. He had in the past.

The level of noise grew no easier to endure – as he knew from experience it rose until increasing deafness provided its own defence. He looked at his watch. It was three-twenty, which probably meant another ten minutes. He stared up at the long rectangle of sky, trying to lose himself in the swirling patterns of light and smoke.

At exactly three-thirty the sound quality shifted, and the decibel level dropped a merciful fraction. The full-on bombardment of the front areas had shifted to a rolling barrage, as the Soviet artillery concentrated on clearing a route across the Oderbruch for their tanks and infantry, and on obliterating the first line of defence on the lip of the escarpment. The latter, Paul knew, would be more or less devoid of troops, the German commanders having finally learned that it paid to pull them out before the bombardment started, and quickly return them once it was over.

Soon they could hear the Soviet tank guns, and the answering 88s. machine-gun fire began filling the spaces in between. Like a fucking orchestra, Paul thought.