— Exactly. That’s how it started.
— Yes. No one but the adjutant.
— Not a word… just that movement of his hand. The next day, after Heraklion had been taken, I was marched, dazed and humiliated, without a chance to say a word in my defense, with the English and Greek POWs to the municipal museum, which the barbarians of the staff company had turned into a prison. You can see it right down there, Grandmother, that building with the columns that’s covered with green tiles. I’ve set the chair up at just the right angle for you to sit here and look at it…
— No, Grandmother. Try to make out the third window from the right on the second floor. That’s what I looked out on the world from while stewing in my thoughts during the long summer and short autumn of 1941.
— So I guessed right…
— But when did you find out?
— I knew it! I knew it!
— I knew you’d find some way of finding out I was in jail.
— Because I was sure that as soon as you discovered that I wasn’t in the East, you’d wonder why.
— No, I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I just didn’t want to write you about it, because I knew my letters would be read, and I didn’t want to stain the family honor you held sacred. And yet why pretend, Grandmother… I was longing all along for a word of comfort from you…
— I said comfort, not agreement…
— Because no one wanted to get involved… they all washed their hands of it… if the great commander had passed sentence on his death stretcher, there was no possible court of appeal. And that beastly adjutant, who had made it all up in his sick imagination, flew off to Berlin with a planeload of coffins a few days later to represent our brigade at all the funerals, after which he disappeared in the Adjutant General’s office there, leaving me with a sentence that was not only irrevocable and unappealable, but unspecifiable as well. Every week I petitioned the commander of the prison to be told how much time I had to serve, but no one wanted to take responsibility even for that…
— As a matter of fact, I was quite simply forgotten about, Grandmother.
— Precisely. But…
— That’s so, that’s so. You couldn’t have put it any better. You know the mentality of staff officers. But before we go on, here’s the English tea that I promised you, still piping hot and with milk in it, made to perfection by a Scottish prisoner.
— As sweet as could be… and with just the cake to go with it…
— Lately we’ve been training on bland English food to prepare for our rematch with them…
— Who knows, Grandmother, where we’ll meet up with their food again… perhaps in one of their prisoner-of-war camps…
— It’s not a matter of fear. It’s just facing facts.
— Absolutely not, Grandmother. No one intends to shed any blood for this island a second time. Enough of it already flowed like water once. Don’t you want your cake?
— But it’s really a very light and soothing sort of cake…
— Never mind… here, give it back to me, maybe you’ll change your mind later. But do please look carefully at that window, and try picturing me, Grandmother, standing there for hours on end, looking out at the hillside that we’re on now…
— That very room and window. From the twenty-third of May to the ninth of December. Twenty-eight weeks. Look at it. I paced back and forth in front of it for whole nights at a time, totally devastated in the beginning. That’s the very window I sometimes wanted to throw myself out of, especially — when he wasn’t busy saluting and pinning medals on my brigade — each, time I saw General Student appear with his staff to raise and lower the flag… the window from which I saw all the adjutants swimming and frolicking in the sea, the same sea I hadn’t even put my foot in yet, though I would have given anything to do it. One day I heard some English prisoners singing before being shipped off to a POW camp in Germany, and I was green with envy and longing… And there was a night in June when, after the 7th Paratrooper Division had received its orders to fly out of the island and I saw that everyone was determined to forget me, I lost control and began screaming into the darkness at a group of soldiers standing below me in battle gear…
— Yes. I really screamed.
— Because I kept telling myself, it simply can’t be that I don’t mean anything to anyone. No one paid me the slightest attention, because no one knew who I was anymore. My fellow wolf-packers were long dead, the adjutants were all off attending funerals, and the command of the island kept changing too. German units pulled out and Italians began to arrive. The prison guards called me “the paradeserter,” and it all became too much for me. I was even thinking, Grandmother, of telling them who I was…
— I mean, who you are… I thought that maybe the name of Admiral Sauchon would at least get me a hearing. But then, on June 22nd, the stunning news arrived of Operation Barbarossa, and all at once, most ardent Grandmother, I had a change of heart and quieted down completely…
— Not at all. On the contrary, I understood at once, Grandmother, what a dreadful mistake had been made.
— No, Grandmother, no…
— No, Grandmother, no. Old Redbeard doomed the Reich that Saturday once and for all. Because instead of pushing on southward to bathe and cleanse our age-old barbarism in a civilization more ancient than our own, folding ourselves back into the blue womb of the Mediterranean and slowly letting our history slough away from us, we were stupid enough to turn east. What for? What for, Grandmother? Supposedly, to look for living space. In point of fact, however, the only purpose of it all was to encounter other barbarians like ourselves. What were we trying to prove? How superior we were? As if we didn’t know that already… That’s when I realized that Student and his fellow generals had succeeded in bamboozling our Führer, our poor Hitler, who had taken leave of his senses and quite forgotten what that thoroughest of teachers Gustav Koch had taught us all. And that, Grandmother, was when I understood my mission: to point out to the fast-approaching Judgment Day the existence of an escape clause. And all at once I felt at peace, because I knew that something bigger and more important than that beastly adjutant, bigger and more important than Thomas Stanzler’s dying hand, had landed me in jail…