Breuer stops dead. He is breathing heavily. His gaze fixes on a figure he suddenly sees standing there, grey and sunken-eyed, by the entrance to a bunker.
‘Hey! Hey, you there!’
He is shocked at the sound of his own voice. The man doesn’t move. He looks across at Breuer like a timid deer. Then, all of a sudden, he gives a start and disappears in a single bound into the bowels of the earth.
This place gives Breuer the creeps. He moves on, quickening his pace. Eventually he comes upon a road that bends off to the left, which he takes without thinking. Signs of a village appear somewhere off in the distance. Whooo-sh-sh comes a tearing sound high above his head. Up ahead, three large sulphurous mushroom clouds billow into the sky. The ground quakes slightly, followed by the dull rumble of the heavy explosions. They must have hit Gumrak… Breuer breaks his stride for a moment. He wonders whether he ought in fact to avoid the place. But he baulks at the thought of wading through deep snow. It’s all of no account anyway. Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth.
Gradually, the village takes shape against the snowy backdrop. White-roofed sheds, a stone building with several floors, a sturdy, round tower with a swollen head, and then some railway carriages and stationary locomotives. The scene changes radically on both sides of the road. The snow looks scorched here, and all kinds of debris are lying scattered around – splintered pieces of wood from barns, fences and farm carts, along with rocks and steel rails. In between, circular bomb craters yawn, and the black holes of exposed cellars and bunkers with their roofs blown apart. From the innards of this devastated landscape, thin blackish wafts of smoke rise and drift along the ground. Mingled with this haze, which has an acrid smell of burning, is a hint of that sickly sweet stench that had lain like a nightmarish miasma over the sites of the battles fought during the hot summer of ’42. A smell of cadavers. Off to one side, more shells fizz by. Violent impacts shake the ground. The fire is concentrated on the southern exit of the village. A figure is poking around in the debris to one side of the road. It looks like a very old woman, but is actually a soldier. Once again, Breuer is hit by a paralysing feeling of exhaustion. Where should he head for now? The Staff HQ in Stalingradski will have long gone. They’ll have taken cover somewhere, waiting for the end to come!
The figure has vanished underground. At the point where he disappeared, a light plume of smoke is twisting up, suggesting human life. Breuer totters over piles of rubble and makes for the spot. He slips down into a hole in the ground. It is a small, dark opening, covered in makeshift fashion with a piece of concealed corrugated iron. Chinks of daylight coming through the gaps at the edges of this ramshackle cover illuminate dirty puddles on the floor. Breuer ducks down. He presses his back against the wall, his hands groping along the damp clay. His good eye struggles to make out any details in the semi-darkness. Are those figures cowering silently against the walls or lying prone on the floor dead bodies? They’re certainly not moving or speaking… No, they’re not dead – there’s the man he’d spotted outside squatting in front of the small doorless stove! He’s feeding damp pieces of wood into the fire. Stolidly, and oblivious to any interruption, he stares with dead eyes into the blaze; his mouth hangs open and his lower jaw trembles like a dotard’s. But there really are some corpses here too! The terrible smell that he smelled outside gives the game away, this disgusting stench of sweat, pus, human excrement and… decaying flesh! Breuer can feel his whole body beginning to shake. He’s seized by an urge to get away from this place – anywhere but here! Frost, snow and loneliness suddenly seem inviting compared to this ghastly mixture of the decomposing dead and the decaying living. But he still hesitates to leave. He’s just heard someone call his name, surely! Is he feverish, hallucinating? Is his pain-wracked head mocking him? There it is again, more clearly now, but still sounding like it’s coming through a walclass="underline"
‘Breuer!’
Breuer winces in fear. He holds his breath and listens… Yes, there it is again.
‘Breuer… I’m here!’
The first lieutenant stumbles over a tangle of limbs to a bundle of rags in the far corner. The grey light filtering through the bunker cover falls on a yellowed face, with what looks like parchment stretched over it; the contours of the man’s skull shimmer through his taut skin. A downy beard covers a pointed chin. Two unnaturally large eyes sunk in deeply shadowed sockets are trained squarely on him. Breuer feels his knees buckle.
‘Wiese – is that you?’
The man’s mouth, no more than a thin line, opens in a feeble smile, revealing the exposed roots of his top teeth.
‘Yes, Breuer, I… to think it’s come to this!’
There’s another thump of falling shells, very near this time. The corrugated iron rattles loudly, and snow and earth crumble down into the bunker. The tangled heap of bodies shifts and groans. Someone mutters prayers, hurried and fearful. Breuer has stooped over the sick man, as if to shield him. ‘My God, Wiese,’ he stammers, ‘how did you end up here – in this awful dump?’
Wiese had closed his eyes momentarily. Now they open, large and clear, once more. It is as though his failing body has redirected its last vestiges of energy into these eyes.
‘You can’t mock God’s justice!’[3] he proclaims earnestly, showing wisdom beyond his years. Breuer still can’t understand what’s going on. He presses his comrade for answers. Wiese doesn’t appear to hear him. He keeps talking all the while, quietly and calmly.
‘It’s so hard to die… like this.’
And he tells Breuer, haltingly and incoherently, about his feelings of guilt.
‘I saw it all coming and didn’t do anything to stop it. I thought I could choose my own path, just for myself, aside from the mainstream… And I’ve been punished for that.’ Sometimes, his train of thought gets muddled and his eyes glaze over; but he always rallies and becomes lucid again. He talks about his life, his parents’ house in a small town in the Rhineland, and his schooldays. His father had wanted him to go to university and become a teacher. But he didn’t want that and had joined the German railways instead, so he’d have the freedom and leisure to devote himself entirely to music and his beloved books when the working day was over. And fate was kind to him, even in this conflict. He’d come through the war unscathed, untainted. And then came the incident with the burning plane…
Breuer has heard all of that before. But today it is bathed in a new light, under the merciless glare of a clear-sighted self-awareness. It makes Breuer forget all his pain and his own hopeless position.
‘I’ll stick by you, Wiese! I’ll get a doctor and find us something to eat… you just wait, you’ll make it through all right!’
Wiese dismisses Breuer’s words with a wave of his hand.
‘At night the faces of all the dead crowd round me, looking at me… You didn’t know anything… But I did, I knew everything, Breuer. And I said and did nothing! I wanted to be the only righteous person among all the lost souls. And I’ve paid the price for it. God cannot be mocked!’
Tiredness forces Lieutenant Wiese to pause. Breuer is shaking, all too painfully aware of his own impotence. What’s going on here cannot be happening; it’s blasphemous folly! He wants to help but has no idea what he should do. In the gloom, he tries to make out if Wiese has a dressing, or any signs of a wound. But all he can see is a ragged, sticky, brown-stained greatcoat. A hand is pushed towards him.
3
‘You can’t mock God’s justice’ – quotation from St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 6 verse 7.