Comrades of War (10 page)

Heide gave a prolonged hoarse squeak like a rat that’s been squeezed into a corner and sees the bared fangs of a terrier flashing over it. He wanted to scurry off, but the Legionnaire tripped him up. He fell and slid along the floor.

Tiny grabbed him by his feet and swung him gaily around. His head, hit the wall with a smack. Tiny, who by now had worked himself to fever pitch, let out a roar, raised his knife and was going to stab Heide in the back. But he was stopped by the old Jew, who caught his arm: ‘No, no, comrade, don’t kill him!’

We were astonished to hear Heide’s victim appear as his defender, but even more astonished to hear the word ‘comrade’ spoken by someone who up to now had addressed us as if we were gods.

Tiny flung away the unconscious Heide and gaped at the old Jew who was clinging to his arm, deathly pale and trembling all over.

‘What the hell?’ he said, perplexed. ‘Why shouldn’t I knock that skunk cold? He stepped on your toes, you know.’

The old prisoner shook his head.

‘No, comrade, he didn’t insult me. After all, I’m a Jew. Those other things he didn’t mean at all. He’s sick. It will pass when the world gets well.’

‘Sick?’ Porta sneered. ‘That damn well beats everything. Heide is the healthiest rotten bastard in the world. He deserves being butchered.’

Tiny nodded rapturously and shook off the Jew.

‘You’re right, Joseph Porta. Maybe Tiny should see how deep he can sink this knife into his throat?’

The prisoner caught Tiny’s hand, kissed it and begged: ‘No, no, leave him alone! After all, I’m the principal party!’

The Old Man waved his hand in protest.

‘Don’t be so bloodthirsty. Let that swine lie where he is, and sit down so we can get the game going.’

We sat down, though a bit reluctantly. The Old Man dealt.

‘Would you take a hand in a game of blackjack?’ he asked the old prisoner.

‘No, thank you, Herr Sergeant’

The Old Man shook his head despairingly and flung up his hands. ‘God almighty! Can’t you even say “comrade” to me? You do to Tiny, that big bull-necked fool!’

The old prisoner nodded and opened his mouth. A moment passed before the words came: ‘I’ll try to say “comrade,” but it is somewhat difficult.’

We played a little in silence. Then Brandt threw down his cards.

‘I’ve no patience any more. Doesn’t someone have a story?’

‘You’re a stupid swine,’ Porta said, throwing down his cards.

‘Anything else?’ Brandt asked, cocking his head like a bull ready to toss someone.

‘I’ll smash your ugly face,’ Porta flared up. He hurled a bottle after Brandt, who lightning-quick ducked his head as the bottle crashed against the wall in a shower of fragments.

‘It’s a pity you are messing up the house this way,’ the old Jew whispered.

‘What’s that to you?’ Brandt shouted angrily. ‘It isn’t your house.’

‘Precisely because of that,’ the old one said. ‘If it were mine, it wouldn’t matter. But I’m sorry on behalf of the people who own it. They have two children to hand it on to.’

‘How do you know?’ Brandt asked.

‘There are children’s clothes in the closet,’ the Jew answered.

‘Did you have a house yourself?’ Brandt asked.

‘Did have, yes. Now I have nothing. The house was taken away a long time ago.’

‘By whom? The bailiff?’ came naively from Krause, the SS man.

We laughed till we coughed.

The old Jew nodded. ‘The bailiff? You might call them that.’

‘I suppose you snatched your house from someone in the Weimar period?’ Krause said.

‘Not that I know of,’ came rather pointedly from the old prisoner.

‘How did you get into the cage, zebra?’ Porta asked, sucking at his only tooth with a smacking, sputtering sound, while he wiped his top hat with a fragment of old newspaper. The headlines still spoke of victorious advances for the German army. When he had finished with the hat, he blew his nose on the victorious army and tossed the thousands of heroes into a dark corner by the old stove.

The old Jew took one more piece of meat and stuffed it into his mouth. He still looked hungry.

‘Don’t eat too quickly,’ the Old Man warned. ‘It takes less time to overeat than to die from hunger. Rich food is not for you.’ Kindly, the Old Man thrust a piece of lean meat across to the prisoner.

‘How did Krause’s friends get their hands on you?’ Porta asked, scratching the red jungle of his thick mop of hair with the point of his knife.

‘They’re not my friends,’ Krause flared up.

‘Close up your bellows,’ Tiny snarled, cracking a louse. ‘When Porta says they are your friends, then they
are
your friends!’ He didn’t forget to score the table for the dead louse. He had a bet with Porta who had the most.

Heide groaned and got up from the floor. His face was caked with clotted blood. One eyelid was closed and terribly swollen. He spat out a tooth and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; a thin streak of blood still trickled out.

Porta looked at him out of the corner of his eye, put the cracked monocle in his eye and clicked his tongue.

‘Bumped your noodle a bit, Julius Jew-eater, eh? Baby-boy seems to take after his great namesake, Streicher, eh, you slum lout?’

Heide didn’t answer.

Resting his chin on his hand, the old Jew began talking. It sounded like he was talking to himself. Talking as only those can talk who’ve been locked up in an inferno of silence for a very long time. They don’t really talk. They cough and hawk the words out. They dream aloud that they have a cold.

‘It was in ’38 they caught us. I got away because I had connections.’

‘You desert camels from the “Holy Land” always have connections,’ Julius scoffed from the floor. He spat out the name ‘Holy Land’ with contempt. His hate was so big he wouldn’t even stop at risking his life to get it off his chest. He snarled like a vicious dog, lips curled up and teeth bared.

‘You should be up there swinging, sheeny!’

The old Jew went on unwincingly. The hellhound who sat barking noisily at his feet didn’t exist for him.

‘I was living in Hamburg, in Hoch Allee by Rothenbaum, a lovely place,’ he dreamed, and sighed with longing for Hamburg in sunlight, when it smells of salt, sea, and smoke from the ships, and when laughter floats from the small boats on the Alster. ‘I was a dental surgeon. Had many friends and nice patients.’

‘I bet they were hook-noses like yourself,’ Heide cried.

Tiny threw a big hunk of pork at his head. He toppled over, but got on his feet again, though with some difficulty. He growled spitefully. ‘To be at table with a Jew dog,’ he lisped and squirted a jet of blood and spit at the prisoner.

‘I was lucky enough to get my passport stamped by the Party and left Hamburg by steamship. I planned to go to China by way of the Soviet Union.’ He rocked his head. ‘By way of the Soviet Union – what a cursed idea!’

‘But they’re your friends,’ Heide sneered. ‘Jew friends in Moscow. The devil only knows why you didn’t become a commissar, with a Nagan for neckshot liquidations.’

The Jew looked up.

‘There is a lot that you and the devil don’t understand.’ He looked at Heide with an inscrutable expression in his eyes. ‘Over there, too, we Jews are hunted.’

The Old Man gave a tired laugh. ‘Yes, you’re also hunted in the Soviet Union. You were hunted in Poland. You’re hunted almost all over the world. The devil knows why.’

Turning to Heide, he continued: ‘Heide, you ought to know why, you so faithfully follow your namesake!’

‘Jews are swine and crooks,’ Heide barked. ‘The Talmud is the proof.’

Julius Heide hated Jews because the most gifted boy in his class at school was a Jewish boy called Mouritz. Little Mouritz helped big Julius. He whispered to him and wrote small slips of paper for him. As the years passed, Julius felt each whispered word and each slip of paper like a stinging defeat. His hate swelled, grew inward. On Crystal Night, he participated with enthusiasm in the window-breaking. Together with other young Nazi hopefuls and the rest of the riffraff, he tore hooting and howling through the Jewish quarter of Berlin. The whole thing was so deliciously safe for this gang, which was under the direct protection of the authorities. For the rest, Julius Heide didn’t understand race hatred any better than the other twelve of us. He had learned by heart long periods from Julius Streicher’s inflammatory paper.

We played for a while in silence, but the game bored us. Porta pulled out his recorder, cleaned his nose on his fingers, spat over Tiny’s head and began playing. He started several times as if searching for a piece that was acceptable to him and finally switched over to ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik.’ He improved as he went on, and soon he cast a spell over us with his playing. Into the dark mountain cabin he lured the beauty of spring in the warbling of thousands of birds, a faraway, carefree world. He transformed the cabin into a crystal hall where ladies and gentlemen in silk costumes danced a minuet. He leaned back his head and pointed the flute skyward. It sounded like a full orchestra of two-hundred-year-old instruments, directed by a court musician.

The old Jew began humming the tune. He hummed in a deep hoarse voice. Then he fell into a reverie. Cheerful safe rooms from a time hundreds of years ago – before 1935, when the world all at once reversed and became evil and cruel. A woman in light blue, a fascinating woman, quiet and gentle. The woman he loved. His Anna. How she could laugh! With such real heartiness, her mouth open and her white teeth flashing like fresh-caught herring glinting in the August sunlight. She always had a kind answer. Anna, his beloved Anna, who was killed in a gateway because she had committed ‘racial outrage.’ The killers were laughing young men in brown uniforms. He remembered it as if it were yesterday. They’d been to the theater to see
William Tell
. It was only ten o’clock as they were walking home. He wanted to get a pack of cigarettes from a machine. She walked ahead a bit, slowly, on tapping high heels. Suddenly, the taps were drowned out by the trampling of iron-studded boots. She screamed twice. The first scream was long and tinged with horror. The second died away in a rattle. Paralyzed, he stood there watching them butcher her. Again and again fell their hard deadly blows. A shortish SA man, with ash-blond hair and the sort of open laughing face that no mother could help loving, split her head with a board. It happened on June 23, 1935, diagonally across from Dammtor.

Before that day they often had musical evenings. He played the bassoon or violin, and she the piano. It was almost always Mozart Anna played with the same deep insight as the filthy, red-haired corporal with the tall, bulging hat.

The little Legionnaire pulled out his harmonica and joined in playing a piece of music that was almost unknown to us. But it made us dream. Suddenly they switched over to a whirling Cossack dance. In the same instant all melancholy thoughts were swept away. We went wild, just like the Cossacks must have done in their villages when this dance was struck up.

Stege, beating time against the table, represented the drum row. Tiny and Brandt jumped to their feet and let out a long-drawn Tartar yell. They leaped high in the air and tapped their bootlegs with their hands. Their feet moved like a drum roll as they whirled along the floor. The rest of us got roused and followed them. The whole house rocked. During the intervals we drank as if possessed.

The old Jew laughed. He also was drunk. He had forgotten the wife they’d killed in a gateway. The strong vodka blotted out the house that had been confiscated. He had forgotten the thousands of blows received from young men in elegant, impeccable uniforms with the death’s heads on their caps. Forgotten also was the rope which had dangled hungrily from a rotten beam. He wanted to dance. He danced with Heide. They shouted. They drank. They sang:

Who will foot the bill?

They bellowed with all their strength:

Who can afford it?

Accompanied by Porta’s laughing flute, we caroled the old carnival song in rapturous chorus:

And who has a pile of money?

‘I don’t have a shilling,’ roared the old Jew, cutting the most ludicrous figures as he danced around with Heide, who had forgotten that he hated Jews. They pounced at each other and rocked their hips.

Heide wound a blanket about him, fitting it coquettishly like a dress.

Porta switched over to a Spanish peasant dance. For castanets Stege was hammering with a couple of plates. We danced something we imagined was a flamenco.

The Legionnaire roared ecstatically: ‘
Ca, c’est la légion!
’

Exhausted, we sank down on the chairs. We drank some more. We played. We drank once again. We blazed, red and hotly drunk. The maundering talk of drunken men flowed like a nondescript porridge whose ingredients no one could determine. But we didn’t care about that.

Tomorrow we shall die.

Oh, come now, death!

Heide wept on the Jew’s shoulder and received one long pardon after another. He swore by many strange saints that he would slash the throat of every SS man he ran across. In a whisper he confided to the old Jew that he, Julius Heide, was a slurping pig. He demanded he give him a box on the ear. It turned out a tiny one, a mere breath.

‘Harder,’ Julius hiccuped, offering his cheek.

Tiny had watched the numerous mild attempts of the old Jew in silence. Finally he lost patience, stood up, and hit Heide over the head with a wooden ladle.

With a gurgle he rolled over. The last thing he managed to say before he slipped into unconsciousness was: ‘Thanks, pal, it was lovely to get a regular thrashing.’

There was a lull. For a short while we sat drinking in silence. Then, quite of himself, the old prisoner returned to his story. He hiccuped a little.

‘It was in a dirty little village that my journey to China was interrupted.’ He raised his cup. ‘Your health!’ Half of what he drank splashed over at the corners of his mouth. ‘My name is Gerhard Stief – presently, since we are with the colors, ex-Lieutenant of the infantry, Gerhard Stief.’ He chuckled and screwed up one eye as if he’d told us an unbelievably funny joke.