‘Surely you realize that!’
So she moved the coach again, and the Party steward went ahead and directed her to a place in the lee of the wind, at the side of the gymnasium of the sports complex. He probably felt sorry for the coach — such an old-fashioned vehicle. But it had a coat of arms on the door, and that meant something, after all.
Auntie thanked him for showing her where to go, and she said ‘Heil Hitler!’ She added, ‘There’s a farm cart in the third street on the right with a Pole and a Ukrainian woman in it. They’re with us, if anything happens.’ She said ‘Heil Hitler’ again, and the Party man put his hand to the peak of his cap; he knew what was what now. The only question was whether, at five in the morning, Vladimir would realize that they were not in the same place. Peter stationed himself in front of the goal, with the binoculars dangling from his neck and the air pistol in his belt, but he couldn’t stand there for ever.
‘Why are you hanging around here, boy?’ he was asked.
‘We’ll tell your friend Vladimir where to look when he turns up in the morning,’ someone told him. ‘Trust us for that!’
As chance would have it, a young war widow from Mitkau was fetching soup at the same time as Auntie. They didn’t know each other, they’d never met before, but both were from Mitkau. That kind of thing creates a bond.
The young woman had made a spontaneous decision to get on her horse and ride away, leaving everything behind just as it was. She had nothing with her but a small bundle. She had the Iron Cross awarded to her husband who had fallen at Demyansk in a bag round her neck. She showed the Iron Cross to everyone, and said that she had ridden away because there was a whiff of Russians in the air.
Then she mounted her horse again and rode off. She couldn’t stand it here any more. ‘Perhaps I’ll get through yet,’ she said.
Meanwhile Peter went into the town: it had a long high street, a marketplace and a church. Sure enough, their big farm cart was standing in the third street on the right, and the two bay horses swished their tails when they saw him. Peter told Vladimir that they weren’t in front of the goalposts any more, but outside the gymnasium. Then he went in search of a pharmacy, because he had left his toothbrush behind. There must surely be a pharmacy somewhere here.
He asked local people where he could find a pharmacy. The local people looked different from those on the trek, who were now described as refugees. The local people went to their offices carrying briefcases, and there were ladies wearing hats sitting in a café. They were friendly and gave Peter information. One lady took a fancy to him, and accompanied him to the pharmacy. Did he think, she asked, that the Russians would get as far as this? She was so worried, she didn’t know what to do.
‘Are you all on your own?’
Peter would have liked to tell her about his mother, who had been taken away, but she might yet come back …
People were queuing outside the pharmacy — Heil Hitler — and it was some time before he could buy his toothbrush. He also bought some toothpowder and a cake of soap. You were really supposed to be on a list of regular customers to do that, but the pharmacist made an exception for him because he was a refugee. He also bought a bag of Italian liquorice, which cost five pfennigs and tasted nice.
He was sure to be all right now.
‘Close the door!’ called the pharmacist.
He’d have to hide the liquorice from Auntie. He was squandering money when he bought it.
Old-fashioned gravestones in the shape of crosses stood crooked in the churchyard beside the little whitewashed church, and there were new wooden crosses there too. A man came along with a bundle; it was a dead child. The pastor arrived and said, ‘Leave the body there, and I’ll see to it later.’ Then he turned back and asked for the child’s name, wrote it on a piece of paper and put his note with the bundle.
The bundle lay there in the draughty church porch, and the note blew away.
In the church, someone was trying to play the organ, which was out of tune.
Eternity, O mighty word,
Running my heart through like a sword,
Beginning without end …
Peter looked at the crooked crosses. Did the dead lying under them have crooked legs, like Christ in the Mitkau church, whose feet crossed at the ankles? Were Elfie’s feet crossed like that in her grave, or were they lying side by side, straight?
Dead bodies sweat. Had someone washed her feet with warm water? Had her whole body been washed with a warm sponge? Had her hair been brushed for the last time and plaited into braids?
Eternity, great is my grief,
I know not where, with my belief
In God, my thoughts to send.
He couldn’t remember now what his little sister had looked like. No stone had been placed on her grave. Plenty of time for that, they had said. But no stone on her grave? No name, nothing?
They had buried her with a bunch of lilies of the valley in her hands.
Who would ever come looking for her?
There was a bar outside the church, the stumps of two linden trees in front of it. They sold weak beer in the bar. Two men staggered across the street with a drunk between them. They were refugees too, speaking so broad a dialect that Peter couldn’t understand it.
The woman who had taken him to the pharmacy met him again, and this time she couldn’t restrain herself. ‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘Going around here all by yourself? Don’t you have anyone left in the world?’ And she invited him to go home with her, saying she had some cake that she thought he would like.
She lived up two flights of stairs, in an apartment looking down into a back yard. The clock on her wall chimed, ding-dong ding-dong, with the hands pointing to four. Then Peter was sitting on an old green sofa trimmed with tassels, eating cake and telling long stories of all that had happened to him. His village — ‘you wouldn’t know it,’ he said — had been captured overnight by the Russians, and he had taken refuge in the woodshed with the Russians outside, sort of hunched figures brown as earth. They were scurrying past, and he huddled into a corner and didn’t move. His heart was in his mouth!
The woman listened, fascinated. So he went on and on about the hunched, brown figures of the Russians scurrying past, and the screaming of the women. And in the night, he said, he had crawled through the snow at a temperature of minus twenty-five degrees until he finally reached the German lines, where an officer congratulated him in person.
Here the old grandpa from next door joined them, and made doubtful noises over Peter’s stories as he listened. So then it was time — ‘Oh, my word! I must be going!’ — for Peter to make himself scarce. ‘His unit’, he said, was waiting for him, and he showed his air pistol. The woman gave him a book about the World War, saying she was sure it would interest him. It contained old-fashioned pictures of old-fashioned soldiers. The book, she said, had belonged to her son, who was now a prisoner in Karelia. ‘Hmm,’ said the old man. ‘Hmm. Figures as brown as earth?’
Perhaps the boy’s stories were true.
At the same time, the telephone was ringing at the Georgenhof. The Hesses had lit a fire in the hall and were sitting comfortably beside it. It was the teacher who finally picked up the receiver and shouted, ‘What?’down it. ‘What did you say?General Com mand?’ There was a rushing sound far away, a distant voice; he couldn’t make anything out. FrauHesse took the receiver from her husband, but she couldn’t understand what the voice was saying either, except that it was Eberhard vonGlobig beside Lake Garda, trying to get in touch with his wife. ‘Er — Herr von Globig …’ said Frau Hesse — for a brief moment the curtain of interference was lifted — ‘your wife isn’t here any more … we don’t know …’ But that was as far as she could get. And what should she have told him? There was one more croaked phrase … ‘In the cellar …’ and that was the end of the call.