The Commissar (32 page)

‘“And
you
have been a volunteer?” roared the general, purple in the face and sending the Rottweiler on the
lionskin a severe military look. “We have had one or two small setbacks recently in unimportant sectors of the front. But what you call retreat, my good man, is no more than regrouping and straightening of the front. A necessary tactical operation which demonstrates the cool-headedness of our Supreme Commander. At this very moment our tanks are crashing along the Russian roads. Machine-guns rattle and German artillery pieces roar. Our shells rain down on the heads of the
untermensch
, who are now beginning to realize who makes the decisions. A good army leader can do great things with the German soldier!” He crashes his pointer down on the map. “In these forests we have amassed an army with a striking power of which neither God nor the Devil has ever seen the like. Once it begins to roll nothing will stop it until it is east of Moscow. Look, man! We have stormed from victory to victory. We have rolled up Jugoslavia and Greece, and thrown them into the ashcan. The crowing Gallic cock has lost his feathers, and been sent head over heels to defeat in just 40 days! Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway smashed and thrown on the scrap-heap. They can only do what we order them to do. And here are Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria and invincible Hungary, our brave European allies. We could, if we wished, hand over the whole conduct of the war in the east to them.”

‘“The general forgot Italy,” the potato-dealer put in.

‘“Yes! We must also take Italy into account,” admitted the general, letting the pointer wave a few times up and down the Italian boot. In reality he couldn’t stand the Italians, or their spaghetti.

‘“Can we
really
trust these Bulgarians and Rumanians?” asked Strange, thinking of all the money owing to him in those two countries. “I’ve heard they desert to the enemy by the battalion and they won’t speak German any more?”

‘“That’s
enough
,” roared the general. “I won’t have high treason talked in my house! Understand
that
, you – you
rolunleer
!”

‘Now things began to develop at a pace nobody could have foreseen,’ smiles Porta, happily. ‘All the accusations they could think of, from cycle-stealing to high treason, flew to and fro in the room, accompanied by barked comments from the Rottweiler.

‘“They can stuff this world war for all I care,” roared “Spuds”, scarlet in the face. “I don’t give a damn who wins. All I want is for a few distilleries to be left standing by the artillery shits and the mad bombers, so that I can get my potato and barley sales back up again when it’s over!”

‘“I’ve seen through
you
,” screamed the general, planting his fists on his hips. ‘Do you understand me? You – you bottle-lover!’’ He grabbed the potato-dealer by the shoulders and shook him like a rat.

‘Unfortunately he carried out this unbridled attack on a party member right in front of the Führer’s melancholy likeness.

‘The potato-feller tore himself out of the general’s grip, and took the opportunity of giving the Führer’s picture a stretched-arm salute.

‘“I warn you, general,” he howled, insultedly. “I am not just a uniformed booby dancing round with a tin sword at his side! I am a holder of the Blood Order! I am a party member, I have a permit to carry a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it!”

‘“What do I care about that,” shouted the general, who had by now forgotten all he had learnt at Potsdam Officers’ School, and was back on the parade-ground again. “I shit on your Blood Order, believe me, you schnapps burner, you! And where your party’s concerned there won’t be much of that left when the war’s over! Ha!” he barked, whiffling his pointer through the air. “Do you and your Führer think that
we
,” pointing a finger at his own chest,”the Prussian Army, which sprang from the earth at the command of Frederick the Great, will give your seventh-rank party the time of day? A party that’s only able to think in terms of swivelling swastikas! D’you
think we Germans can be led astray by foreign idealogies?”

‘The potato-dealer couldn’t believe his ears. He was close to going over to the wall and knocking his head against it to clear his thoughts. A
foreign
idea! Shit on the party! This uniformed fop must have had his brains boiled from too much sun on his
pickelhaube
! Swivelling swastikas? What interesting thoughts those generals had! But the red-tabbed dope had it all wrong. They weren’t curtseying round a semi-crippled Kaiser any more. A Kaiser whose only positive result in life was to lose a world war. They’d got to learn what the new era was all about! He opened his mouth several times to say something. His brain was overflowing with ready answers. But the general didn’t give him time to speak.

‘“Look at that,” roared the general in a well-trained voice of command. He pointed to a large, dark painting which represented German justice. A giant oak, decorated like a rich family’s Christmas tree. From every branch dangled a malefactor with a good German rope round his neck. It was a well-balanced composition. Women, children, young and old, even a skinny dog, were hanging there. “Look you potato-dealer,
look
!” he roared. “Here ends every German scoundrel, mongrel,
schweinhund
and plague-rat, who dares to besmirch the Fatherland with word or deed. Take note of it, schnapps-burner! We Prussians deal harshly with villains who think they can go their own way. A rope round their necks, and up with them. The thought, my man, is father to the deed! Consider that!” He emphasized his harsh words and dark warnings by pointing to a number of beautifully framed pencil drawings, showing smiling SS-men carrying out executions after the Army’s victorious march through Poland and Russia. Carrying them out completely in accordance with Army Regulations. “I had begun to regard you as being a good person, but now I have seen through you. You are a beast of the field, an
untermensch
swine! Get out of my house! You wicked scoundrel!
March
! And take your mongrel with
you! It too will get to know what facing a German court-martial means!”

‘The potato-dealer almost fell out of the door, followed by his dog. The dog turned its head and stared, with grinning jaws, at the raging general. “You can just wait,” it thought, “till we two party members’ve been down to have a word with our Gauleiter!”

‘Herr Strange jumped on his bicycle and pedalled off. He almost fell off again, when he turned in his saddle to spit a few farewell curses and threats at the general.
He
was still standing in the doorway, slashing holes in the air with his riding-whip.

‘“That uniformed queer’s going to learn what it’s all about,” the potato-dealer confided to his dog as they spurted down
Soest Weg
.

‘“Bow-wow!” barked the dog, in agreement.

‘They didn’t stop till they arrived at the Gauleiter’s pompous residence. Outside it the blood-red swastika flag waved lazily in the summer breeze.

‘“The flag,” said the potato-dealer, raising his right arm; “Heil! Sieg!”

‘The Gauleiter came all the way out on to the steps to greet him. They had been friends ever since they worked together as farmhands on the estate of a baron who had since been executed.

‘“Asphalt disease, Leonhard?” asked the Gauleiter in his thick, beery voice. “You look as if you’d been eating tar!”

‘“A general,” panted Strange, “an Imperial Prussian sod!”

‘“Hope you didn’t bite him?” laughed the Gauleiter noisily. “That could give us problems, you know!”

‘“I didn’t, but Wotan did! He ate off half his arse when he said he’d shit on the Führer, and the party was only a foreign idea!”

‘“The devil! I didn’t know your dog could talk,” cried the Gauleiter in surprise. He straddled his legs and stared
threateningly at the dog. “Be careful what you say, you black villain!”

‘“No! Hell, Bruno, it wasn’t Wotan who said it, it was that fop of a general!”

‘“Shit on the Führer, would he?” asked the Gauleiter, a threatening tone coming into his beery voice. “We’ll
flatten
him! No trouble! By the way, you owe me 500 marks from last Thursday. Not forgotten it, I hope?”

‘“You’ll get ’em tomorrow. Word of honour! I’ll get ’em from the woman who hasn’t got her divorce yet from the Yid we sent to the concentration camp!”

‘“Mind you don’t get yourself mixed up in anything smelly,” the Gauleiter warned him darkly, scratching the dog behind the ears. “The good times, when us party comrades could do what the hell we liked, are passing away! The bloody Army’s got too much say in things, these days. All the police shits are scared of ’em. Watch out for the front line, Leonhard. As you know there’s a need for gun-fodder, and, unfortunately, the Army decides who’s to be the targets! Once get posted there and even the party couldn’t get you back home again!”

‘“Don’t say things like that, Bruno.
You
can get
me
out of it if they suddenly drop on me? I’ve been in one war for Germany. That’s enough for me.”

‘“Let ’em reach out after you first,” the Gauleiter comforted him, opening his arms wide.’ “Your job’s still deferred. The country can’t do without schnapps. We need it to keep our spirits up under all these hard and testing experiences we’re going through.”

‘They sat down happily at the Gauleiter’s large desk, which once belonged to a Social Democratic Minister for Justice. He’s been rehabilitated since and now works on the rock-pile at Buchenwalde.

‘Well, they sat there drinking cognac and putting a long report together. They were both holders of the Blood Order and the party emblem in gold, and they knew exactly which way to march to get somewhere. They’d
played cards together every Thursday for years. They even had the same mistress, the sausage and delicatessen shop-owner Kelp’s wife, Gertrude, a tall, black-haired, slightly plump lady whose ears stuck out. She wore size 8 in shoes, and could walk any infantryman tired on Winter Help Day, when they all marched to Pader Halle in a torchlight procession to drink beer, after rattling their collection-boxes all day. Gertrude was Herr Kelp’s third wife, by the way. The first one died a natural death by drowning. Jumped into the Pader River with a lump of iron tied round her neck. Her name was Ulrikka, a very Christian, believing lady. She jumped in the river from the bridge behind the cathedral. Probably thought the Lord’d forgive her if she gave up her life near a holy place.

‘If God did forgive her I’ve never heard about it,’ smiles Porta, waving his arm in the air. ‘Still there’s not much gets out about what happens up there! Or down in the other place, for that matter!

‘The sausage and delicatessen man’s second wife’s name was Wilhelmina. Feminine of the Kaiser’s name. Her father sold cheese off the barrow. Mrs Wilhelmina was Aryan all over. Flaxen hair pulled back tight over her skull and braided. Looked like a frayed rope that had been left out in the rain. Down deep in her horsy-lookin’ face a couple of wicked, German hen’s eyes glittered. She always wore flat-heeled soles, and white stockings with black and red bobbles, that went halfway up her leg. This Aryan lady was not a sexually exciting creature. Quite the opposite! A man who got inside her would have got his prick broken up and ground into sausage-meat! They used to say she had a couple of rotating swastikas mounted up in it goin’ both ways.’ Porta suggests the motion with both hands. ‘This Himmler-style woman took the mail train to Dortmund one day to buy curtain remnants at Liebstoss’s shop in
Hindenburg Strasse
. An ancient liver sausage had exploded in the hands of the Kelbs’ Polish servant girl, and has
spurted out all over the curtains. It cost the servant girl a spell in Ravensbrück, by the way. But Frau Wilhelmina had better have stayed home that day. She started her trip by visiting the baker. Otto, in
General Ludendorffstrasse
, who had a combined coffee-house and bakery. There she got four large cream cakes down her. She exchanged news with a couple of other party wives, who also had flaxen hair and buns at the back of their necks.

‘When she was crossin’
Adolf Hitler Platz
a couple of hours later they began to toot a red alert. Bombs started to fall immediately. It howled, whistled and crashed all round her German bat-ears, and dust and dirt came down on her flaxen hair. Her Aryan braids came loose. She looked like a witch that’d been through a thunderstorm, on her way down from Norway to have a look at what was happening in old Germany under the national awakening!

‘BANG! A bomb went off in front of her. It seemed as if the world had gone up in flames. BANG! Another went off behind her, and it seemed as if Satan was stoking up the fires of Hell! She became, of course, completely, Teutonically confused. First she ran one way, then she ran the other way.

‘“Get under cover, you soppy idiot,” screamed a bareheaded policeman. His helmet had been blown off his head.

“‘
Wachtmeister! Wachtmeister
!”she screamed. “Tell me where to go!” She just managed to get her flaxen poll out of the way when a number four tram came flying through the air. The helmetless policeman didn’t, though. The tram took him with it into Schultze’s furniture store. Luckily for Schultze he had closed down two days before to wait for better times. Now he got rid of his stock, anyway, and only had to clean up after the tram and the policeman.

‘Frau Wilhelmina ran round in circles, screaming. Then she saw a safe place: the National Socialist Constituency Office. But before she got there a 1,000 pounder bulls-eyed in on her. It tickled her all down her back and then went off. Frau Wilhelmina went with it!