‘They say it’s going to snow tonight.’
‘It’s still lovely.’
‘Whenever I was sad and thinking of you I would come walking here. And I would jump over the cemetery fence.’
‘You can do that?’
‘See? I just did.’
She didn’t think twice and leapt over the fence as well. After walking some thirty metres they found the entrance gate, which was open, and Sara struggled to hold back a nervous laugh, as if she didn’t want to laugh in the house of the dead. They reached the grave at the back and Sara read the name on it, curious.
‘Who are they?’ asked the commander with no stars.
‘Germans from the resistance.’
The commander went over to get a better look at them. The man was middle-aged, and looked more like an office worker than a guerrilla fighter; and she looked like a peaceful housewife.
‘How did you get here?’
‘It’s a long story. We want explosives.’
‘Where the hell did you come from and who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Himmler has to visit Ferlach.’
‘Where is that?’
‘In Klagenfurt. Here, on the other side of the border. We know the territory.’
‘And?’
‘We want to offer him a warm reception.’
‘How?’
‘By blowing him up.’
‘You won’t be able to get close enough.’
‘We know how to do it.’
‘You don’t know how to do it.’
‘Yes. Because we are willing to die to kill him.’
‘Who did you say you were?’
‘We didn’t say. The Nazis dismantled our resistance group. They executed thirty of our comrades. And our leader committed suicide in prison. Those of us who are left want to give meaning to the death of so many heroes.’
‘Who was your leader?’
‘Herbert Baum.’
‘You are the group that …’
‘Yes.’
Nervous glances from the commander with no stars at his assistant with the blond moustache.
‘When did you say Himmler was visiting?’
They studied the suicide plan in depth; yes, it was possible, quite possible. Therefore, they assigned them a generous ration of dynamite and the supervision of Danilo Janicek. Since they were very short of resources, they decided that after five days Janicek would rejoin the partisan group, whether or not the operation had been carried out. And Janicek was not to commit suicide along with them, under any circumstances.
‘It’s dangerous,’ protested Danilo Janicek, who wasn’t the least bit thrilled with the idea when they explained it to him.
‘Yes. But if it comes off …’
‘I’m not sure about this.’
‘It’s an order, Janicek. Take someone with you to cover your back.’
‘The priest. I need strong shoulders and good marksmanship.’
And that was how Drago Gradnik ended up on the paths of Jelendol, emulating a krošnjar, loaded down with explosives and just as happy as if he were transporting spoons and wooden plates. The explosives reached their destination safely. A rail-thin man received them in a dark garage on Waidischerstrasse and assured them that Himmler’s visit to Ferlach was confirmed for two days later.
No one was able to explain how the tragedy happened. Not even the activists in Herbert Baum’s group can understand it still. But the day before their planned assassination, Danilo and the priest were preparing the explosives.
‘It must have been unstable material.’
‘No. It was used for military operations: it wasn’t unstable.’
‘I’m sure it must have been sweating. I don’t know if you know but when dynamite sweats …’
‘I know: but the material was fine.’
‘Well, then they bungled it.’
‘It’s hard to believe. But there’s no other explanation.’
The fact is that at three in the morning, when they had already packed the charges into the rucksacks that the two members of the suicide commando planned to use to blow themselves up, with Himmler as their dance partner, Danilo, tired, anxious, said don’t touch that, damn it, and the priest, weary and annoyed by the other man’s tone, put down the rucksack they’d just loaded up, too hard. There was light and noise and the dark garage lit up for a fraction of a second before blowing up with the glass, bricks from the partition wall and bits of Danilo and Father Gradnik mixed into the rubble.
When the occupying military authorities tried to reconstruct the events, all they found were the remains of at least two people. And one of those people had honking big feet. And amid the scrap iron, intestines and blood splatters they found, around a wide neck, the ID tag of missing SS-Obersturmführer Franz Grübbe, who according to the only approved version, the version of SS-Hauptsturmführer Timotheus Schaaf, was the abject cause of that humiliating defeat of a Waffen-SS division that had heroically succumbed at the entrance to Kranjska Gora, since as soon as he heard the first shots, he ran towards the enemies with his hands in the air begging for mercy. An SS officer begging for mercy from a communist guerrilla commando! Now we understand it: the abject traitor reappeared, mixed up in the preparation of an abject attempt on the Reichsführer himself, because that was nothing less than a plan to kill Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
‘And who is this Grübbe?’
‘A traitor to the fatherland, to the Führer and the sacred vow he solemnly swore when he joined the Schutzstaffel. SS-Haupsturmführer Schaaf can give you more details.’
‘May he be shamefully reviled.’
The telegram that Lothar Grübbe received was curt and to the point, informing him of the infamy committed by his abject son, who wanted to make an attempt on the life of his highest direct superior, the Reichsführer, but had been blown up into a thousand abject bits when handling the explosive. And it added that they had made twelve arrests of German traitors belonging to an already crushed group like that of the abject Jew Herbert Baum. The shame of the empire will fall on your abject son for a thousand years.
And Lothar Grübbe cried with a smile and that night he told Anna, you see, my love, our son had a change of mind. I wanted to spare you this, but it turns out that our Franz had got his head filled with all of Hitler’s crap; and something made him realise that he was wrong. The infamy of the regime has befallen us, which is the greatest joy they can give a Grübbe.