Goebbels always had his propaganda aims, and now so had I. History was not going to be prevented from knowing what had really happened at Gleiwitz – not if I had anything to do with this.
Speaking to any of the correspondents assembled in Smolensk wasn’t going to be easy. They were all accompanied by Secretary Lassler from the Foreign Office, Schippert from the Reich Chancellery press department, and Captain Freudeman, a local army officer who, according to Von Gersdorff, was very possibly Gestapo too. I thought my best chance was to speak to one of the reporters the next day, when they visited the temporary laboratory where all the Katyn documents recovered from grave number one were now exhibited; this was the specially glassed-in veranda of the wooden house where the field police was billeted just outside Smolensk, in Grushtshenki – the temporary lab in Katyn Wood having proved unsuitable because of the overpowering smell of the corpses and the swarm of flies that had descended upon the open grave.
I must have lain under that stump like one of those dead Polish officers for ten or fifteen minutes, and perhaps it was this image that changed my mind about what I was proposing to do. I won’t say that I started to see things through the eyes of the dead men in Katyn Wood. Let’s just say that lying there, in what was not much less than an open grave, after someone had tried to put a bullet in my head, I began to see things from a different perspective. I started to feel uneasy about what I was planning to do with Captain Schottlander’s intelligence report. And I remembered something my father had told me once during the course of a very German argument about Marx and history and ‘the world’s spirit on horseback’ – I think that was his phrase. He’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade me not to volunteer for the army in August 1914. ‘History’, he said – with a dismissive inconsequence that stopped me from paying more attention to his words at the time – ‘is all very well, and perhaps it does progress by learning from its mistakes, but it’s people that really matter; nothing ever matters quite as much as them.’ And as I stared up at the treetops, it began to dawn on me that while it was one thing owing a responsibility to history, it was surely something greater when you owed a responsibility to more than four thousand men. Especially when they had been ignominiously murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. Their story deserved to be told, and in a way that could not be denied – as it surely would be if another egregious Nazi lie was now exposed to the world’s press. A genuine effort by the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda to expose the truth of what had really happened at Katyn Wood would certainly be compromised if I revealed the truth of what had really happened at Gleiwitz.
It was dark when I dared to move from the cover of my open grave. By now it was clear that whoever had been shooting at me was long gone, and also that no one else had heard the shots – but for an owl hooting its derision at my own lack of courage, the wood at Krasny Bor was quiet. I might have reported the matter to the field police but I had no wish to waste any more time. So I brushed the earth off my army uniform and went and knocked on her door.
Ines greeted my appearance at her door with a mixture of shock and amusement. There was an unlit cigarette in her hand and her boots and medical whites lay on the floor where she had dropped them earlier. She seemed a little less pleased to see me than the previous evening, but that might just have been because she was tired.
‘You look like you need a drink,’ she said, ushering me inside. ‘Correction: you look like you’ve already had two. What did you do? Exhume a dead body with your bare hands?’
‘I was almost a dead body myself. Someone took a shot at me just now.’
‘Anyone you know?’ She closed the door and then looked out of the window.
‘You don’t sound very surprised about it.’
‘What’s another corpse around here, Gunther? I’ve spent my whole day with them. I never saw so many dead people. You were in the war – the Great War. Was it anything like this?’
‘Yes, now you come to mention it.’
‘Think he’s still out there?’ She drew the curtain and turned to face me.
‘Who? The gunman? No. All the same I think I’d better stay here tonight. Just in case.’
Ines shook her head. ‘Not tonight, lover. I’m exhausted.’
‘Have you got a drink?’
‘I think so. If you don’t mind Spanish brandy.’ She pointed at the bed. ‘Sit down.’
‘I don’t mind it at all,’ I said.
Ines opened one of her cases, took out a silver hip flask that was as big as a hot water bottle and poured me one into a teacup. I sat down on the edge of her bed, tipped it into my mouth and let the stuff chase down my nerves and put them safely under anaesthetic for another time.
‘Thanks.’ I nodded at the flask in her hand. ‘Is there a dog that comes with that thing? To rescue travellers?’
‘There should be, shouldn’t there? This was a present to my uncle, from the nursing staff at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, when he retired.’
‘I can see why he had to go. That’s quite a drinking habit he must have had.’
She was wearing black baggy trousers and a thick tweed jacket over a plaid shirt; her red hair was gathered at the back of her head in a bun and there were black loafers on her feet; she smelt lightly of sweat and her usually pale flesh was looking just a little flushed – the way all natural redheads do when they’ve been doing something strenuous like running or making love.
‘You’re hurt, do you know that?’
‘It’s just a scratch. I threw myself on the ground when the shooting started and landed on a tree root.’
‘Take off your shirt and let me put some iodine on it.’
‘Yes, doctor. But I’d rather you saved the shirt, if you could. I didn’t bring that many with me, and the laundry here is a little slow.’
I took off my tie and then my shirt and let her clean the scratch with some lint.
‘I think this shirt has had it,’ she said.
‘Which makes it fortunate I own a needle and thread.’
‘I’m considering asking you to fetch it. Your wound is actually quite deep. But for now we’ll see how you manage with a field dressing.’
‘Yes, doctor.’
Ines tore open a bandage parcel and began to wind a roll around my chest. She worked quickly and expertly, like someone who’d done it many times before, but gently, too, like she wanted to spare me from pain.
‘You know, I really don’t think there’s much wrong with your bedside manner.’
‘Maybe that’s because you’re used to sitting on my bed.’
‘True.’
‘Help yourself to more brandy.’
I poured another cupful, but before I could drink it she took it out of my hands and drank it herself.
‘Why didn’t you come to dinner tonight?’
‘I told you, Gunther, I’m exhausted. After we picked up the commission from the airport, Professor Buhtz and I went back to grave number one and did another sixteen autopsies. The last thing I feel like doing is putting on a nice dress and having my hand kissed by so many gallant army officers. It still stinks of the rubber glove it’s been wearing.’