‘They paid you?’ Wever leaned forward, loosened the laces in his heavy boots and then twisted each foot to make more space for his toes.
‘I said I’d take the eggs back if they didn’t.’ She smiled. ‘They knew I meant it. And the chickens too.’ She opened the purse which was on the table in front of her and selected some pound notes. She folded them into a tight packet and put them on the dresser, ‘That will be for the last payment on the rotovator,’ she said.
The kettle began to sing. She put water into the brown teapot, cradled it to feel its warmth and then tossed the water into the sink. The tea was measured into the pot: three people, three level spoons of tea. The boiling water sizzled as it passed over the hot metal of the kettle spout. She put a knitted cover on the teapot and reached for a jug of milk from the pantry. ‘Would you like a piece of toast, Mr Stuart?’ she said. The anticipation of the tea seemed to put her in a better mood. ‘We don’t have biscuits or any fancy cake in this house.’
‘Just tea,’ said Stuart.
The woman tipped some water into the bowl of flour and fat, and pummelled it fiercely. Then she sprinkled flour over the clean newspaper and tipped the soft pastry on to it with a loud plop. She reached for a rolling pin and began rolling the pastry. Her movements were energetic and determined, like someone completing physical exercises that she didn’t enjoy. She pursed her lips and stared down at the ever expanding sheet of cream-coloured pastry.
‘I never heard a shot fired in anger,’ said Franz Wever suddenly. ‘I wore a uniform and saluted my superiors and drew my rations, but most of the work I did in the army could have been done by a civilian.’
‘And what was that?’
‘I am a Berliner,’ said Wever. ‘I left school when I was fifteen. I learned shorthand and typing and worked in the Berlin office of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line until I was drafted into the army. After basic training I went to the army signals school in Halle and became a teleprinter operator with Army Group 6 HQ in Hanover. I worked in that communications room for about a year. I was the only professional operator in the place-most of those kids had never even seen a teleprinter until they went to the signals school; they had to use me for anything important. Naturally I wanted to be near my parents and eventually I got a posting to the signals company of Wehrkreis III (Berlin-Brandenburg). Then I went to Zossen… ’ He raised his eyes quizzically, to see if Stuart had heard of Zossen.
‘The general staff headquarters. Its communications room handled every order the German army ever got.’
Wever nodded. ‘It was a boring job. Everything was in code… meaningless jumbles of letters and numbers. Even working for the Hamburg-Amerika line was more interesting than that.’ Wever spooned three large spoons of sugar into his empty cup. ‘Pour out the tea, Lucy. It’s brewed.’
The woman finished rolling out the pastry. Briskly she rubbed the flour from her red-knuckled hands. Then she slapped the pastry onto a dish of cooked rhubarb, cutting the overhanging edges away with deft movements of the knife. ‘Why can’t you men pour out your own tea?’ she muttered, but she did it for them. Stuart realized that what he had at first thought was hostility to him was really her response to their talk of war. It was a part of her husband she could never share-like the happy moments of some previous marriage.
‘I’ll do the milking,’ said the woman accusingly. She put the teapot back onto the warm stove. ‘Someone will have to do it before it gets dark, and you’ll be talking about the war.’ Wever did not reply. The woman climbed into a battered sheepskin coat, her movements jerky and violent as if to demonstrate her anger. She turned up her collar before facing the bad weather, and banged the door after her.
‘Sugar?’ said Wever.
‘I’m trying to lose weight,’ said Stuart.
The bag was almost empty. Wever tore it open in order to release the final grains of sugar from its folds. He tipped them into his cup with care. ‘My wife loves that clock,’ he said.
‘It’s a fine piece,’ said Stuart. It was probably the only valuable item in the entire kitchen; virtually everything else seemed improvised, plastic or broken.
‘Obsessed with it,’ explained Wever. ‘Wouldn’t hear of selling it, not even when we needed money to buy seed a couple of years ago. It belonged to her father. She nursed him through those last few months.’ There was a silence in which the tick of the clock seemed to be louder than ever. ‘Nothing is too good for that clock,’ said Wever with a brief and bitter laugh. ‘No tractor oil for that mechanism; special oil from a shop in Norwich. Only yesterday she had someone come and replace one of the chimes. It had been on order for over two months.’ He drank some of his tea but could not take his eyes off the clock. ‘I can’t stand the sound of that ticking,’ he confided. ‘And the damned thing is always slow.’
He brought out a large linen handkerchief and blew his nose with studied care. Then he drank some tea and resumed his story. ‘From Zossen I was selected for duty with the signals detachment at the Wolfsschanze. Only the very best operators were sent there,’ said Wever. Even over such a long passage of time his pride was still evident. ‘That was the Führer’s headquarters in the Görlitz forest. It was a great honour… ’ Wever wiped his nose again. ‘But I wasn’t too pleased at the time-no more weekly visits to my parents, no more cinemas, dances and all the pleasures of Berlin. The Wolfsschanze was in the middle of nowhere. The Görlitz forest is in a swampy area, sweltering hot in summer and plagued with mosquitoes; in winter it’s buried in deep snow, and in between times you get the rain and fog. My parents were pleased about it; I was made an officer soon after that, in charge of the Fernschreiberkompanien. And they were pleased because all of us permanent personnel knew we would never be sent to the Russian front.’
‘Why?’
‘It was a special order of the Führer. He was frightened that the Russians might capture one of us and obtain information about him and the day-to-day life at the headquarters.’
‘You were close to Hitler?’
‘Sometimes I would see him every day. It was in February that the signals officer of Hitler’s private train-the Führersonderzug-went into hospital and I was assigned to it. Of course, there were drawbacks to the job. Every uniform had to be well pressed and spotless. No swearing, no smoking, and my communications staff were overworked.’
‘And whose job was it to look after the records?’
‘One man could not have handled the paperwork,’ said Wever wearily. ‘It’s difficult to explain it to you.’ He folded his handkerchief and pushed it back into his pocket ‘The Führersonderzug was like a travelling circus. The train always carried a dozen aides and adjutants, two or three secretaries and two physicians, as well as a surgeon. Then there would be the press men, Hoffmann, Hitler’s photographer, two or three people from the Foreign Office, and Hitler’s personal staff-three valets and two drivers-a dozen or more railway employees, and just as many catering staff, five railway policemen and three officials of the post office. There were two girls who did nothing other than keep the silver clean and polished and counted! And all that is without his military bodyguard or his SS bodyguard, or the aeroplanes and dozens of motor cars that followed the train to be ready in case Der Chef wanted them en route. Then there was the day-to-day paperwork of the army personnel, flak-gun crews, field kitchen, military police… Can you imagine how much paper was being filed away?’
‘I want to know about Hitler’s personal documents,’ said Stuart. ‘I’m trying to discover where they went in the last days of the war. My people say you know about this.’
Wever gave no sign of having heard him. Dabs of rain hit the window. It was growing darker in the kitchen, but electric light-like remnants of pastry and the last traces of sugar-was carefully husbanded in this household. Franz Wever’s head settled deeper into his hunched shoulders and he almost disappeared into the gloom.