“Where the fuck have you been, Sergeant?”
“This is Captain Gunther,” said Oehl. “He’s going to drive us to Banja Luka.”
“Is he now? That’s very decent of him.”
“I told you last night. That lieutenant at the Esplanade fixed it for us to travel south with him. He’s from Berlin.”
“We were in Berlin, last week,” said the captain. “Or was it the week before? We only went because we thought there’d be women. Well, everyone knows about Berlin women. We thought there’d be nightclubs. But it wasn’t like that at all. Anyway, we stayed at some boring SS villa at a place called Wannsee. Do you know it?”
“The Villa Minoux? Yes, I know it.”
“It was very boring. There’s more nightlife in Zagreb than there is in Berlin.”
“On the evidence of this place, that’s probably true.”
Geiger smiled affably and proffered the bottle, and hardly wishing to start what I hoped would be our short association on the wrong foot, I took it and swigged at the contents: it was raki, or the milk of the brave, and believe me, you had to be brave to drink that stuff.
“I can tell that this is your first time in Croatia,” he said. “The way you drank the raki.”
“First time.” Thinking I’d better let them know I wasn’t a complete green beak, I added something about having just come from Smolensk.
“Smolensk, eh? This is better than Smolensk. Not as many Wehrmacht around to get in the way, with their sense of honor and fair play and all that shit.”
“I love it already.”
“You grab his kit,” Oehl told me, “and I’ll get him onto his feet.”
I returned Geiger’s bottle, hoisted his pack onto my back, and then picked up the daddy.
“Watch that,” said Geiger. “Trigger’s a bit light. You wouldn’t want to shoot anyone, would you? At least not until we’re across the border into Bosnia. Then it really doesn’t matter who you fucking shoot.” He laughed as if he were joking, and it was later on that day before I discovered that this was not a joke.
Oehl maneuvred Captain Geiger down the stairs behind me, with the captain still giving advice on how things were in Yugoslavia.
“The important thing to remember is that you shoot them before they shoot you. Or worse. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be captured by these First Proletarian bastards. Not unless you want to find out what your own dick tastes like. They like to cut it off, you see, and make you eat it before you bleed out. Balls, too, if they’re in a mood to be generous with your provisions.”
“Good meat’s in short supply everywhere,” I said.
Geiger laughed loudly as we emerged onto the street. “I like him, Sergeant. Gunther, did you say? Well, Captain Gunther, you’re not as much of a cunt as you look. What do you think, Sergeant?”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“Does this fellow Tito have a Second Proletarian Brigade?” I asked.
“Good point,” said Geiger. “I don’t know. But it makes you think, eh? Even when you’re a fucking Prole there’s some sort of class division. Marx would be disappointed.”
It wasn’t yet nine o’clock but already it was so hot my tunic was sticking to my back, and when we reached the Mercedes I dumped Geiger’s kit on the backseat and took off my tunic. Geiger removed his, too, and I caught sight of an enormous thick scar on his chest, as if someone had drawn a knife across it. His hooded, hollow eyes caught mine looking at it and he smiled a thin smile without feeling the need to offer any explanation as to how he had come by it. But I knew he hadn’t got it from helping old ladies across busy roads. Tall, thin, blond, distinguished even — in another life he might have been a student prince, or an actor; but now he had such a disappointed, corrupted look that he reminded me most of a fallen angel. He brushed off Oehl’s hands, swayed a little, vomited copiously into the gutter, and then climbed into the back of the car, where he uttered a loud groan and then closed his eyes.
“That way,” said Oehl, pointing around the windscreen. “Drive past the fucking mosque and then down past Gestapo HQ.”
We quickly left the city behind. The sun was strong, the land seemed to cower underneath its fierce effect. With the hood of the car folded down behind us like the bellows of an accordion we drove southeast from Zagreb, into Slavonia. The land was very flat and very fertile as a result of the Pannonian Sea, which had existed here about half a million years ago. Apparently, the sea lasted for nine million years, which was probably going to put what happened over the course of the next couple of days into some sort of perspective; but I knew that the sooner I was away from this place and safely back in Berlin, the better. And all I could think about was sleeping with Dalia Dresner again. Especially now that I’d met my two traveling companions. Every time I looked at them I had a bad feeling about this particular road trip. Geiger’s sergeant kept the machine gun over the edge of the door like a rear gunner in a Dornier and looked like he was keen to use it. After half an hour, Geiger opened his eyes and lit one cigarette after another as though the clean country air was an affront to his lungs. The machine gun on his lap might have been a briefcase, he looked so relaxed with it. The smile on his face was not a happy smile. It was more like Bolle’s smile, just like in the Berlin song, because, for all the terrible things that he does and that happen to him, Bolle still has a bloody marvelous time.
Twenty
Factories, garages, scrap-metal yards, and lumberyards gave way to houses that were half finished or half destroyed, it was hard to tell which. Villages, centuries old, that were all but deserted. The car jolted along the empty road. I did my best to steer around the potholes and sometimes what were obviously shell holes. After a while the road narrowed and deteriorated in quality so that we were soon making no more than thirty kilometers an hour. We drove on, past small holdings, goats tethered to fences, and men plowing fields or digging ditches. Here and there we saw road signs, all of them punctured with bullet holes, but mostly there was just the dusty road through this godforsaken country. The few people we saw paid us little or no attention. My mission was a universe away from the lives of those who eked out an existence here. Now and then a cart, impossibly laden with grass, or watermelons, or corn, provided a fleeting contact with reality. It was drawn by a knackered horse and steered by men who seemed only vaguely human, their faces covered with ant colonies of stubble and almost expressionless, as if they had been carved from the very oak trees that lined the road. These people wanted no justification for being there, no creed or warped ideology to excuse their unfenced existence in this place. This was their home; it had always been their home and it always would be. Men like me and Geiger and Oehl were just passing through on our way to a private hell that we had created for ourselves. I enjoyed seeing these lean, stoic men; they made me think I belonged in a world where something as straightforward and honest as growing tobacco and sugar beet, and animal husbandry, still existed; but this feeling never lasted long. From time to time Geiger would discharge his daddy at a cow in a field and frighten it off like a rabbit, and once a Focke-Wulf 190 flew low over our heads, ripping open the sky in a great salvo of oil and metal.
Nobody said much until we came across the carcass of a horse lying next to a burned-out Italian tankette. From the look and smell of the dead animal it was days old; but my two companions insisted on taking a closer look, with guns at the ready, of course. While Oehl walked off to scout the road up ahead, Geiger looked at the saddle on the horse and declared it had belonged to a Serb.