The equilibrium of Brezel’s sunny disposition was never disturbed. Only one thing bothered him: the state of mind of the padre, who couldn’t even summon up the energy to be grumpy any more. That was a bad sign for sure! In addition, he’d got such strange bees in his bonnet of late, one might well have imagined he’d gone insane… For instance, one time Peters returned clutching beneath his arm a pair of shapeless straw overshoes that he’d found tucked away under the seat of an abandoned vehicle from the baggage train. No one thought anything of it. But Peters spent the whole of that evening sitting muttering to himself. And in the middle of the night – as usual, bombs were raining down – he got up abruptly and took the shoes back. Brezel shook his head. ‘He’s losing his mind,’ he thought to himself, with touching concern. The next morning, he went to see what Peters had been up to. The lorry was still standing there, in the middle of nowhere. A soldier had just discovered the shoes and was feeding them to his horse.
On another occasion the padre came back from one of his perambulations laden with ammunition belts and a machine gun, which he had salvaged from a wrecked aircraft. The corporal shook with laughter at the sight.
‘What on earth do you want with that, Padre? Honestly – dragging a thing like that round with you!’
Peters shot him a dirty look.
‘Don’t stay here on my account! Go on, clear off, go and hole up in Stalingrad for all I care! I at least mean to stay and fight here, yes sir… to the last bullet… to the last man standing!’
The machine gun had to be stowed under the camp bed. Once it was out of sight, the padre promptly forgot all about it.
Also, in the middle of reading something, Peters would suddenly give a violent start. ‘Listen, can’t you hear those monsters grinding their teeth? All their screaming and groaning?’
Brezel could hear nothing but the regular heavy breathing of someone sleeping in the corner.
‘That’s my domain,’ the padre whispered. ‘I’m the King of the Dead of Gumrak!’
As Peters was returning one day from the nearby airfield, where he’d gone to deliver the post, he passed two soldiers dragging behind them a tarpaulin full of loaves of bread. Peters hadn’t seen any bread for days. He swooped down on the men like a hawk.
‘Hey, where do you think you’re going with that?’
The two men, a sergeant and a corporal, stopped in their tracks, uncertain what to do. They clearly had a guilty conscience.
‘Planning to eat the lot yourselves, were you, eh? Unbelievable! That’s just not on—’
Peters was shaking with hunger and greed. He dug his hands into the pile of frozen loaves and rummaged around.
‘How old are you?’ he suddenly asked the nonplussed sergeant. ‘Thirty-six, eh? Right, give me three of those loaves! And you too. Three loaves apiece, that’s not asking too much! That’s just behaving like decent human beings.’
And before they could stop him, he’d stuck six loaves under his arms and made off with them. He did some sums in his head as he walked: six loaves between two men at the rate of half a loaf per man per day – that meant they’d last six days all told! For six whole days he and Brezel could stuff themselves, really eat till their bellies were bursting. He was whistling to himself as he walked down the bunker steps. Brezel’s eyes almost popped out of his head when he caught sight of the loaves. His respect for the padre suddenly shot up, though he also felt a twinge of something like envy that he hadn’t managed to pull off such a coup himself. Peters was more cheerful than he’d ever seen him.
‘How about that, then?’ he crowed. ‘Daddy’s brought home the bacon! Pass me a knife!’
As they were tucking in, with bulging cheeks, one of the medical NCOs came in, a small, inoffensive man with an ascetic face that looked like it had been transplanted to this war zone from a monastery. Normally he was welcome in Peters’s bunker, but today that was clearly far from the case. He immediately twigged to the hostile atmosphere. He went and sat down quietly in a corner and tactfully refrained from noticing the loaf on the table. All at once, Peters lost his appetite. He pulled out a loaf from under the camp bed and pushed it over to the corporal.
‘There, that’s for you!’
The corporal thanked him sheepishly; he stroked the loaf lovingly and sniffed it but then left it be. With studied insouciance, Brezel explained how they’d come by this unexpected cornucopia. The Franciscan monk was incurious to a degree and so the conversation dried up. After a while he stood up to go.
‘So… can I take this loaf with me?’
‘No, you’ve got to eat it here!’ said Peters gruffly. ‘If you take it away with you, you’ll be left with…’ He broke off, transfixed by the long, serious and not remotely reproachful stare the corporal was directing at him.
‘You’ve no idea how much I’ll enjoy that, Padre,’ he said quietly. Peters’s pale face became so drained of blood that it took on a sickly greenish hue. He began shaking uncontrollably. He reached under the bed again and pulled out another loaf – and a second, and a third, and eventually a fourth, all the remaining loaves.
‘There… there! Take the lot… just take them!’
It was like a sudden attack of self-destructiveness. He even threw in the rest of his own half-loaf.
‘Go on, take it! And clear off!’
Without a word, the medical NCO gathered up the dark loaves and disappeared. His eyes were shining. Five loaves! With a bit of adroit cutting, they could get twenty slices out of each loaf. That meant two hundred men, two hundred hungry, wounded men would get an extra half slice of bread today!
The poet Brezel slunk around Peters’s bunker like a whipped dog. He didn’t dare speak to the padre. But Peters had retreated far back into the shadow of his corner. He was weeping.
A heavy grey pall hangs above the ground. The harsh frost has disappeared. The dry snow still makes a noise when you tread on it, but it no longer emits a sharp, tormented squeak; now it sounds more like the lazy croaking of disgruntled frogs. First Lieutenant Breuer is making his way through the scattered foothills of the gorge to the airfield at Gumrak. He is trudging along the winding footpath, often sinking up to his knees in the deep snow and stumbling over abandoned foxholes. Behind him, the voices of his comrades and the sound of sporadic gunfire grow ever fainter. He steps out on to the open plain. A light wind playfully whips up little eddies of snow. In the distance, the blurred outlines of stationary vehicles begin to emerge from the surrounding gloom. He heads towards them. Under his frozen, brown-stained head dressing, a blinding headache is raging in his skull, pulsating right through to the roots of his hair and rendering his thoughts dull and confused. Thousands of men are being torn to pieces by shells, he thinks, thousands bleed to death or die of their festering wounds, or of the cold… And one man who’s remained hale and hearty and unscathed then goes and falls over and pokes his eye out. Like he wasn’t in Stalingrad at all, but somewhere in Berlin, or Königsberg! For that, he won’t even get a badge identifying him as one of the war wounded. How stupid it would be, he thinks, how ignominious if he were now to die from this injury!
Abruptly, he finds himself in an abandoned town, walking past ransacked, wrecked vehicles, past burned-out aircraft fuselages, bent radio antennae, and blasted concrete bunker roofs. No people, no smoke, no signs of life at all. Everything lies extinct in an abyss of solitude. Now and then a shell fired from somewhere or other and heading for who knows where whines over his head with an evil zisssch sound. An overpowering urge takes hold of him simply to crawl into a hole in this forsaken place, to avoid seeing or hearing anything more and slowly drift into sleep. Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth of the month. Tomorrow it will all be over and done with…