In the evening, always at the same hour, a column of German prisoners of war returned. It turned off into our street through a dark archway, separating it from another street that led down to the market square.
All day the soldiers were taken off somewhere to work, and in the evening, at the exact same hour, they returned. You could hear them coming even before their first rank appeared under the archway. Tired, sweaty, hungry, they sang as they marched, and their singing reached our street before they marched down it. They sang in tune, like a good male voice choir, something of their own, something German, and they passed us in an orderly column.
The housewives peered out of open windows. Lying on embroidered cushions placed on the sills for that purpose, they were resting at the end of their day’s housework. Downstairs, by their front doors, the old men sat in chairs they had brought out, casting long, faint shadows on the pavement. Listening to the men marching, they rocked slowly in time to the song, and their shadows, etiolated by the late hour, also rocked a little.
But overall everything was so calm, not agitated. It was as if those presently marching into the street had no connection with those who lived on it. The appearance of the prisoners took me aback every time. Even later, when there was no singing because they had been forbidden to sing, they marched in line, silently, down our street, their steel-shod boots clacking rhythmically, to where they would be under guard by sentries. I stared at them transfixed. They were a living part of a war that was taking revenge on them for their defeat.
The town was intact, but there were ruins on the outskirts. By the time we got to Stendal, however, the ruins were no longer redolent with drama. The war in Germany had been over for two months, and the ruins already looked dilapidated. The inferno of war, it transpired, becomes extinct immediately the all-clear is sounded. You, a tiny ember, are still hissing and smouldering and flaring up, but it has gone out, and the flames of war no longer tint the now cold ruins. By now they only merit a paragraph as the property in the town is inventorized, an essential part of its variety.
These ruins are the town’s contribution to the past and its new starting point.
At the front, I did find myself talking to captured German soldiers whose psychology was wholly permeated by Nazism, but they were the exception. Much more commonly, the soldiers were just ordinary human beings bizarrely at odds with the monstrous monolith of which they had been a part until half an hour ago. That was distressing. In Stendal, up close, I found many of the town’s residents likeable, and the creature known as ‘a Nazi’ was nowhere to be found.
This was a strange period, without war, in a foreign, largely incomprehensible world that did not need you to come and organize it, because it was not you who were going to be living there. Shortly before I left Stendal, wandering through the streets one evening, I found myself in the town’s park. On the overgrown paths, a courting couple might be glimpsed in the distance, before disappearing and again leaving the park deserted. There was a brook with a little bridge over it. In the stagnant water matted with algae, the elongated leaves of a willow had clumped together. They were glued also to a moss-covered stone.
Along the bank the grass was swaying on long stems. A handful of sparrows flew up out of it. On the other side of the bridge I could see, where the pond weed had not taken over, the water moving on its way to somewhere. I gazed at it helplessly, surprised by a kind of awakening, having up till that moment been separated off by the war from that water, that grass, from everything that was not war.
Now it was August and the fourth month without war. In Stendal the headquarters of my army was accommodated in houses whose windows looked out to a highway. A barrier placed across the street was supposed to keep out the civilian population.
A retired railway official scuttled resolutely across the highway and burst through the screen of bushes that separated it from our street. He had come from wherever he had been temporarily resettled with his family. In a worn suit and wearing a bowler hat, wiry and tense, he came on some pretext into his house, which we had occupied, hoping by turning up to avert destruction and chaos. His carpets, rolled up and sewn into covers, stood in the corners of the rooms, but in the humid twilight, moths were in the air. The glass cabinet with his delicate porcelain coffee cups, which we used when cleaning our teeth, now had empty spaces on its shelves, and the cups were to be found in the bathroom perched precariously on the edge of the wash-hand basin, from where it was only too easy inadvertently to send them crashing to the tile floor. The house’s small garden was sadly and plaintively offering up its fruits.
Not far away, on the bridge or by the market square late at night, it did happen that a soldier would stop a lone passer-by and say, ‘Yer watch! Gerrit off,’ but by now marauding was being punished.
An ex-typist for the Gestapo, as dark-skinned as an Indian, her back as slender as a boy’s, with a black fringe of straight hair, in a short, fluttering skirt, climbed lightly and impudently over the fence, ready to make herself useful or make herself scarce, and walked along ‘our’ street with an arch spring in her step, showing off gleaming legs and dangling a broadbrimmed raspberry red hat by its elastic. (Hats were still fashionable.) She walked bouncily along, audaciously intending to treat someone with apples from her bag, evidently wanting to dispose them favourably towards her. This seemed not to be an insurmountable challenge, if the tall, handsome soldier sent here to headquarters from a Lithuanian division, in view of the acute need for translators, was anything to go by. This risk-taking young fellow was, in defiance of all regulations, smitten by the diabolical Gestapo girl. On the other side of the wooden fence, the typist’s fit, handsome young husband was waiting for her. Climbing back over the fence in the same manner as before, she quickly rejoined him and they went off back to their uneasy, and to us incomprehensible, life.
Hungry refugees sat all day on the ground in the square by the town hall. Victorious soldiers, growing languid in the hot sun, hung round the necks of stray dogs long ropes of precious pearls recovered from a bombed jewellery shop during the advance, and were drowsily amused, watching as these strange, weightless collars dangling on the dogs’ chests and, when they ran, flapping up in front of their muzzles, goaded them. The dogs rushed around crazily until the thread broke and the pearls scattered over the roadway. Then the dogs went back to the soldiers and waited patiently to be thrown something to eat, and wandered around with strands of thread, strung with pearls, caught in their fur.
A truck driver I barely knew, having only ever been driven once or twice in his truck, hailed me in the street: ‘Comrade Lieutenant, wait!’ He handed me a letter and asked me to read it when I had a moment. It was a written proposal of marriage. He promised me a good life, on the basis of a house in Sochi which he co-owned with his sister. The letter brimmed with confidence that I would respond positively, but he was not in the least downhearted or offended when I did not. From then on, though, when we met we would stop and chat like friends, not mentioning the letter but with a sense of having a connection, because we knew about something that had happened, and also knew something about each other that nobody else knew.
He was still wearing the tunic of the rank-and-file front-line driver, but these days of peace had given him new confidence: very soon he would again be behind the wheel in a holiday area and, moreover, in the midst of all the devastation, owning half a house on the fashionable Black Sea coast. He was probably mentally asking me, ‘How many of us men have survived, and how many of you women are going to be looking for a man back there in Russia?’ – and aware of his immeasurably stronger negotiating position. ‘Not every woman is going to get one. The wretched war has done you quite some disservice.’ Or perhaps he was genuinely taking pity on me in what he took to be my unenviable circumstances by offering his candidacy.