The silence gained in depth. Mobius sucked his tongue and said,
‘All you can do is die like warriors. So let’s keep it orderly. You show us some Polish pride and courage. And we’ll show you some German respect. Oh, and you’ll get your last supper. You’ll get your double ration of warm bilge. Now raus! Hauptscharfuhrer? If you please.’
At 22.07 that night I was obliged to get out of bed and receive Prufer’s oral report. From Bunker 3 I’d gone straight to the Krankenbau, where Professor Zulz gave me a vitamin shot and 2 cc’s of chloropromazine, which is supposedly an anti-emetic as well as a sedative. It didn’t stop me practically sicking my ring out in the recovery bay, and I was sure I’d collapse in the slush as I stumbled home (no question of meeting the midday transport).
Now I said to Wolfram Prufer, ‘Excuse the dressing gown. Come on through.’ All right, I’d sworn off alcohol for the nonce, but I reckoned Prufer was due a gulp, after that kind of day, and it would’ve seemed unmanly not to join him. ‘Ihre Gesundheit. How’d it go?’
‘Pretty smooth, sir.’
In the yard of Bunker 3 a small fraction of the Polish contingent chose to die fighting (a barricade, quickly overrun), but the rest of them, 291 men, were uneventfully shot between 17.10 and 17.45.
‘Quite exemplary,’ said Prufer, with no expression on his unreadable face. ‘In its way.’
I refilled our glasses, and we talked on, dispensing, late as it was, with the usual formalities. I said,
‘Weren’t you surprised Mobius was so… unsubtle about it? I was expecting a stratagem of some kind. You know, some form of deceit.’
‘The deceit came yesterday. He told them they’d have to be taught a lesson, and he threatened to round up their families if they tried anything.’
‘What’s deceitful about that? That’s what we do, isn’t it?’
‘No, not any more. Apparently it isn’t worth the bother, so we stopped. Costs too much tracking them down. See, they’ve all been evicted and shuffled about. And besides…’
He proceeded to say that in any case these families, in large part, had already been bombed or strafed or hanged or starved or frozen — or, for that matter, shot in the course of earlier mass reprisals. Prufer drawled on,
‘And those children he mentioned, ½ of them, all the 1s that’re any good, have been packed off to the Reich and Germanised. So it’s just not worth the sweat.’
‘And those men,’ I said. ‘They simply…?’
‘No trouble at all. They had their soup and spent an hour or 2 writing postcards. When the time came a lot of them were singing. Patriotic stuff. And nearly all of them yelled out something like Long live Poland last thing. But that was all.’
‘Long live Poland. That’s a funny 1.’
Prufer stretched his neck and said, ‘There was almost another cock-up — ferrying the bodies away before their mates got back from work. We covered the carts but we couldn’t do anything about the blood of course. Wasn’t time. The men saw. It was tense. It was tense, mein Kommandant. Mobius thinks we may have to do another batch. Repeat the whole palaver.’
‘… Na. How’s your brother, Prufer?’
‘Which 1?’
‘The 1 in Stalingrad. Freiherr? No. Irmfried.’
Left to myself, I engaged in an hour of soul-searching, sprawled on the easy chair by the fire with the bottle on my lap. There was I (I mused), offing old ladies and little boys, whilst other men gave a luminescent display of valour. I was of course thinking with envious admiration of the Untersturmfuhrer. Facing down those massive Polacks like that, saying, with ice in his heart, ‘Ihr weisst wie wir sind.’
You know what we’re like.
That’s National Socialism!
And mind you, disposing of the young and the elderly requires other strengths and virtues — fanaticism, radicalism, severity, implacability, hardness, iciness, mercilessness, und so weiter. After all (as I often say to myself), somebody’s got to do it — the Jews’d give us the same treatment if they had ½ a chance, as everybody knows. They had a pretty fair crack at it in November 1918, when the war profiteers, buying cheap and selling…
… I levered myself upright and wandered out into the kitchen. Hannah was standing at the table, eating a green salad from the bowl with the wooden fork and the wooden spoon.
‘Na ja,’ I said, with a huge intake of breath. ‘Front-line service. That’s the thing. I’ve ½ a mind to request a transfer. To the east. Where, even as we speak, Hannah, world history is being forged. And I want to be in the thick of it, nicht? We’re about to give Judaeo-Bolshevism the biggest—’
‘Give who?’
‘Judaeo-Bolshevism. On the Volga. We’re going to give Judaeo-Bolshevism the biggest bloody nose of all time. You heard the speech? The city’s virtually ours. Stalingrad. On the Volga, woman. On the Volga.’
‘So soon,’ she said. ‘Once again you’re drunk.’
‘Na, perhaps I am. So might…’ I reached into the jar for a pickled onion. Chewing vigorously, I said, ‘You know, my dear, I was thinking. I was thinking we ought to do what little we can for poor Alisz Seisser. She’s back. As an inmate.’
‘Alisz Seisser? What for?’
‘Bit of an, bit of an, an enigma. Pardon. They’ve got her down as an Asozial.’
‘Which means?’
‘Could mean anything. Vagrancy. Begging. Prostitution, heaven forbid. Or a uh, relatively minor offence. Grumbling. Painting her toenails.’
‘Painting her toenails? Mm, I suppose that makes perfect sense. In wartime. A savage blow to morale.’ She wiped her Mund with a napkin, and her Gesicht readjusted. ‘Which is already in retreat, I hear.’
‘Quatsch! Who says?’
‘Norberte Uhl. Who got it from Drogo. And from Suzi Erkel. Who got it from Olbricht… Well then. What’s the little we can do for Alisz Seisser?’
To begin with there was a series of intensely lyrical, almost Edenic dalliances, in the sylvan surrounds of our Bavarian farmstead (leased from my in-laws), with various young shepherdesses, milkmaids, and stable girls (this all started during Hannah’s 2nd trimester). How often would I, in my leather shorts and embroidered tunic, vault the sheep dip and scamper through the barn doors in hot pursuit of my vernal lovely who, with an amorous yelp and a playful shimmy of her flaxen rump, would disappear on all 4s into our secret nest beneath the haystack! And how many hours would we beguile, in the idyllic paddock behind the shearing shed, Hansel with a blade of grass between his laughing lips, and his head buried in the dirndled lap of his buxom and rubicund Gretel!
Then, in ’32, Hannah and myself were inexorably drawn to Munich — city of my dreams and my yearning.
Gone were the flocks, the rills, the milking stools, the cowslips, the wild thyme, and the piping maids. Whilst commuting each day to the suburb of Dachau (where I would begin quite a career), and whilst heading a family of 4, I still found time for a committed but eminently sensible relationship with a lady of great sophistication called Xondra, who maintained a service apartment on Schillerstrasse near the Hauptbahnhof. Quite suddenly she married a prosperous pawnbroker from Ingolstadt, but I went on to make other friends in the same flatblock — notably Pucci, Booboo, and the golden-haired Marguerite. But all that was a very long time ago.