‘Then I’ll take up the chase alone and hunt him until he drops. As long as we both live, there will be no let-up and no mercy, even if I have to drag him from his orderly room or his bed or some latrine he’s crawled into. A man who kills one Kroysing has to face the other’s pistol or pitchfork, and that’s the end of him. And now go and see your comrade. What’s he called?’
‘Pahl,’ Bertin replied. ‘Wilhelm Pahl. It would be nice if you could look out for him. Goodnight.’
When Bertin had left the room, Lieutenant Mettner turned on to his back. ‘You’ll destroy that young man, my dear Kroysing, if he acts as a witness against a captain.’
‘May I turn out the light?’ asked Kroysing politely in reply.
Mettner smiled, not at all offended. ‘Please do, my dear Kroysing. That lucky fellow Flachsbauer has been asleep for a while.’
CHAPTER TWO
Suffering flesh
‘HOW NICE THAT he’s got a visitor,’ said Sister Mariechen, who was on duty in ward 3 – minor cases. And her small blue eyes twinkled amiably as she greeted Bertin. ‘He simply doesn’t want to get better. He seems preoccupied. Tell him it was really nothing. Now hold the fort for me a moment,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get you some nibbles.’ And with a maternal shake of the head, she bustled out of the dismal ward to have a chat with Sister Annchen and Sister Louise in the kitchen.
Fourteen of the 18 beds were occupied, and Pahl’s bed was next to the window. Three electric light bulbs hung over the central passageway. The one furthest away was turned on and shaded by a blue bag. ‘Come and sit next me, my friend,’ said Pahl weakly. ‘They’re all asleep and the old bird’s gone out. We might not get another chance to speak privately.’
Bertin felt moved as he looked at Pahl the typesetter’s strangely alien face as though he’d never seen it before. He looked like one of the executed men in those big depictions of the Deposition from the Cross from the Middle Ages – pallid and extinct. There was a frizz of grey-brown stubble on his cheeks that emphasised his stubborn brow, squashed nose and remarkably bright eyes. The thin moustache above his lips repeated his eyebrows and underlined the set of his mouth. He’d pulled his blanket up round his chin, such that his short neck was hidden from view and all that remained of his familiar form was a face etched with pain.
‘Everything’s fine here,’ said Pahl. ‘The people have been quite decent so far, and the food is edible. But I absolutely cannot get over what they did to me, nor will I until the day I die.’
Bertin shook his head sympathetically. Wilhelm Pahl really wasn’t the man he’d been. What had happened? Exactly what had happened to nearly all the ‘minor cases’ over the past year: slish-slash, the doctor had chopped off his big toe – it was high time, he’d said. The blood poisoning had already spread to the middle of his foot. They’d laid Pahl on a scrubbed table, tied him and held him down, and then operated. ‘I was fully awake, my friend, completely conscious. They showed no mercy or compassion.’ To the contrary. The medical officer had yelled at Pahl the typesetter for kicking up a fuss over such a trifle and had told him he’d be lucky to get off that lightly, since his leg was swollen and discoloured below the knee and if they had to take more off there wouldn’t be any chloroform for that either. Happily, the first intervention was enough. But – and the medical officer could not get over this – Pahl was not getting better. He took an iron hold of himself when the bandages were being changed, ground his teeth and didn’t say a word, but his whole body trembled and he nearly passed out. Some kind of inner turmoil was how Dr Münnich, the medical captain, explained his unusual condition to his assistants and the more intelligent orderlies and nurses when the word ‘malingering’ was mentioned. A psychic trauma, he called it, for which the ground had obviously been laid by childhood experiences connected with his deformity. But for his recovery to make better progress he would have to regain his lust for life and direct his will, which clearly had not dissociated itself from the experience of pain, forwards.
‘Boy,’ said Pahl, ‘it’s unbelievable that there are such things in the world, that people can inflict so much pain on you, that the pain can go right through you to your heart and brain and back again… It doesn’t really fit with the world of blue skies and bogus sunshine and birds singing to order that we’ve all been sold. But it fits with a society that’s harder than hard. It fits with the situation of the oppressed classes. With how a man can be condemned from birth to toil and go without, even if he has great gifts that could benefit humanity…’ He stopped talking and closed his eyes. ‘The slaughterhouse,’ he said shaking his head, ‘is always there, it’s just that now in war time we see it everywhere. We’re conceived for the slaughterhouse, brought up to it and trained for it, and we work for it, and then eventually we die in it. And that’s what’s called life.’ His breathing grew heavy, and he put his waxen hands on the bed cover. Bertin instinctively looked for the red lacerations from the nails. A couple of tears seeped out from under Pahl’s right eyelid. My God, thought Bertin, and I had tears in my eyes earlier over a bowl of soup. ‘We must stop supplying the slaughterhouse,’ Pahl continued in a low voice, while around him the others snored, ‘starting with the one we can see all around us.’
‘So far as that’s in our power,’ agreed Bertin cautiously.
‘It’s in our power alone. Only the victims of injustice can stop injustice. Only the oppressed can put an end to oppression. Only men who’ve been shelled can bring the shell factories to a standstill. Why would those who profit from the torment want to abolish it? No reason.’
Bertin was glad to be able to distract Pahl from his sorrows by contradicting him. A sensible man would willingly give up one-third of his power in order to be able to enjoy the remaining two-thirds in peace, he said. But Pahl said no. That had never happened. Everyone preferred to grasp hold of three thirds and be killed for it. And so the proletariat would be forced into a reckoning with the capitalist class.
Pain hardens you, Bertin thought. Aloud, he said there were some very decent capitalists.
And in a whisper Pahl rejected this objection. First the world had to be rid of collective injustice. ‘If you had a finger hacked off, you’d spend your whole life wanting to abolish finger hacking. It’s good to get this all off my chest. This place is full of butchers and pious old women, and the patients only think about next lunchtime’s soup and whether the nurses are sleeping with the doctors or officers. Sometimes it drives me nuts. The ruling class certainly has finished us off.’
Bertin stole a glance at his watch. Pahl noticed and said he should go: duty required sleep. ‘That game old bird will be back in a minute, so we’d better decide quickly what we’re going to do.’ Would Bertin allow himself to be requested if Pahl could get him a job somewhere when he’d recovered and was back at work? He’d be able to work his way up from typesetter to copy editor, and it was a secure job as no administration could afford to ignore newspapers, whose job it was to titivate the national mood morning, noon and night.
Bertin looked away. This tormented man was so sure of his cause and so convinced he’d be able to spirit Bertin away. Bertin asked if he hadn’t perhaps underestimated the difficulties.
‘No,’ said Pahl impatiently. ‘And once you’re in Berlin, perhaps you’ll come and talk to a works gathering or a members’ meeting. And then maybe you’ll write me up a few leaflets that’ll get the ammunitions factory workers thinking. Agreed?’