Comrades of War (9 page)

‘Maybe we’ve landed in a partisan nest,’ the Old Man mumbled. ‘Then good night, girls!’

Tiny pulled out one of those sticky-bombs he always stuffed his pockets with and threw in the most unlikely places.

‘Shouldn’t we send the whole rotten pigsty to hell?’ he asked, about to ready the charge.

‘Just restrain yourself,’ the Old Man said. ‘Let’s get this stable searched so we can play undisturbed. If not, we’ll go completely nuts.’

Huddled together we crowded up the stairs. We had all our weapons cocked and were ready to mow down everything that got in our way.

Porta kicked the door open with a crash, then rapidly ran for cover while the little Legionnaire sprayed a full magazine of bullets into the pitch-dark room. Heide hurled a hand grenade into the room beside it.

‘At the devils,’ Porta roared as he sprinted along the balcony that ran around the entire house.

Storm carbines and sub-machine guns flashed vicious blue flames into the darkness. It was like fighting windmills.

‘
Vive la légion!
’ the little Legionnaire yelled, swinging his sub-machine gun over his head. With the leap of a tiger he rushed into a room he had already razed with a hand grenade.

A stupendous riot broke loose in there, as if he were engaged with several partisans; but it took only a couple of minutes till we realized what the battle was all about. He had jumped straight into a clothes cabinet and it had fallen on top of him, catching him as in a trap. He bawled and thundered to get out.

After a quarter of an hour the second floor was wrecked so thoroughly that a typhoon would have appeared like a puff of air by comparison. Down and feathers from heavy peasant quilts that we’d torn apart in our fright and fury sifted down like a fine snow everywhere.

Quiet as mice we stood listening by the landing. Darkness everywhere. A soft rustle reached us from the lower floor.

‘
Mon Dieu
,’ came softly from the Legionnaire.

Fear tingled along our spines. Heide was the first to lose his head.

‘Who’s there? We have a bead on you, you devils!’ he roared, making the quiet house tremble.

His roar was followed by a profound silence. Again we stood quietly listening for a few moments, convinced we were not the only living beings there.

‘Shouldn’t we get out?’ Tiny whispered, moving over to one of the windows.

Again a rustle downstairs.

‘
Stoy!
’ Porta called and sent a shower from his sub-machine gun into the darkness of the ground floor. ‘Halt!’

Tiny let out a howl and jumped out through the window, bits of broken glass flying about his ears.

There was a general panic. We couldn’t stand the uncertainty any longer. Everybody tried to get out. It was as if Tiny had taken our courage along with him.

There was a hitch in the loading mechanism of Heide’s sub-machine gun. He shied the gun after the unknown thing in the dark.

Somehow all of us except Stege managed to get out of the house. He had remained inside.

‘We must go and get Stege,’ the Old Man said. Once more we pushed our way into the damned house.

‘Hugo, where are you?’ the Old Man called in a low voice.

A match was struck and the kerosene lamp on the table was lit.

In the smoky glare we made out a tall thin figure in the striped costume of a concentration camp. The Old Man was the first to recover from his surprise.

The horribly emaciated figure drew himself up in a military manner and reeled off a report, his glance rigidly fixed on the Old Man.

‘Herr Sergeant! Security Prisoner 36789508A reports being separated from his unit, Kz-Railroad Construction Detail 4356 East!’

‘Holy Ludmilla!’ Porta exclaimed. ‘What a mouthful. You didn’t learn that one in Sunday school.’

‘Anyone beside you here, zebra?’ Tiny asked.

‘No, Herr Corporal,’ the zebra man answered.

‘Cut that out,’ exclaimed the Old Man, annoyed.

‘Oh, well?’ said Tiny, who felt flattered being addressed with service rank and ‘Herr.’ It had never happened to him before.

‘Shut up,’ the Old Man ordered. ‘Find Stege so we can go on with our game.’ Turning to the
Konzentration
prisoner, he continued: ‘You’d better find something to chew on. You look as if you need it.’

The old zebra man looked about him nervously. He kept standing rigidly at attention in the middle of the floor, his fingers glued to the seam of his trousers. ‘Sit down, old geezer,’ Porta grinned, pointing invitingly at the table. ‘Get yourself a bit of bread and a piece of meat. There’s plenty of it. You’ll also find a spot of bug-juice to rinse your gullet with.’

The old prisoner moved his jaws in convulsive spasms.

‘Herr Staff Corporal! Security Prisoner No. 36789508A requests permission to make a statement.’

‘Spit it out, brother,’ Tiny growled, pushing his light-gray bowler over his forehead.

The old Jew didn’t say anything. He seemed to be searching for the right words. He knew the deadly danger in saying something displeasing. A misplaced word could mean death. Despite our armbonds with the skulls and bones and the expressive
Strafabteilung
, he saw in us his enemies.

‘Hey, you zebra! What did you wish to whisper to us?’ Porta barked. With a dirty finger he poked the tall skinny figure with the yellow-gray face, caked with month-old grime.

Wearily the man moved his bloodshot eyes from one to another of the government-sponsored killers.

‘Well, what did you wish to say?’ grinned Brandt, the former cross-country truck driver. He sucked vehemently at a hollow tooth that was always giving off a frightful odor. He didn’t dare go to the dentist; he preferred to suffer the ache. Eventually we had put everything into that tooth, from gunpowder to hydrochloric acid. Even dried bird shit had gotten into it. That was Porta’s idea.

‘Say something,’ I said, smiling to the man in the striped rags.

‘Can’t you shut up for once, you fools!’ the Old Man snapped. ‘Don’t you see you’re driving the man nuts with your stupid questions? Can’t you tell by just looking at him that he’s half dead from fright? If you looked at yourselves in the mirror, you’d get a shock, too. The devil is a beauty compared to you.’

He walked over to the old Jew and placed his arm around his shoulder. Scratching an eyebrow with the tip of his pipe, he said in his own peculiar manner: ‘You shouldn’t be frightened of us, my friend. We aren’t as bad as we look. What was it you wished to say? Just spit it out! If you think we’re a pack of stupid swine, say so. Because that’s what we are.’

The prisoner took a deep breath and looked at the Old Man’s small, compact worker’s figure with its bearded, good-humored face underneath the black panzer field cap. Their eyes met. The almost black eyes of the prisoner and the Old Man’s clear blue ones. We could feel these two men finding each other.

‘Herr Sergeant! Taking something here is looting. I’ve been in hiding in this house for three days, but I haven’t touched a thing.’

The Old Man shook his head, laughing.

‘Forget that rubbish. Sit down at the table and rake it in. What’s looting today? What’s rape today? A joke, just a joke, that’s all.’ He turned to Heide. ‘Get some more food and booze!’

Heide stood gaping at the prisoner as if he had caught a glimpse of something unnatural, something far beyond the scope of his understanding.

Tiny bent over him and let out a shout that could be heard for miles: ‘Go and get some grub, you dung beetle, or you’ll get a fist through your teeth!’

Heide startled. He walked reluctantly to the kitchen to carry out the Old Man’s order.

Porta and the Legionnaire had gone upstairs to look for Stege. They found him lying unconscious in the corridor. When we revived him we discovered that in the mad rush of getting out of the cabin he’d bashed his head into an open door.

‘Where have you slept the three days you’ve been here?’ the Old Man asked the concentration camp prisoner.

‘On the floor in the kitchen, Herr Sergeant.’

‘Cut out that rank crap! I can’t see why you didn’t lie down in one of the many beds standing around.’

‘That’s because I have vermin, and besides I didn’t want to mess up those nice beds.’

‘Holy Mary!’ Porta cried, bursting into a roar of laughter. ‘Everybody should be that considerate. Then the war would be a ball.’

The Old Man shook his head and laughed. ‘Some angel you are, brother. The couple of bugs you’ve got won’t make much difference once we have had a snooze here, not to mention what our brothers on the other side will do when they come. They and we are hardly as considerate as you, whom they call the scum of the earth.’

Heide entered with his arms full of schnapps and smoked fat, which he tossed on the table with a clatter.

Stege pulled a book from the shelves and held it out to the Old Man. ‘Our hosts are people with foresight,’ he laughed. ‘They’ll obviously take care to jump off the bandwagon at the right moment.’

We glanced at the book: Karl Marx.

‘That would be just the thing for the Gestapo,’ Heide grumbled.

‘Dry up, you ass-kisser!’ Porta snarled. ‘If not, we’ll carve the phonograph out of your throat so you’ll blare into space for the last time. We haven’t forgotten you squealed.’

Heide scowled angrily at the gangling Porta and his top hat, but the sub-machine gun, tilting seemingly by accident in the red-haired soldier’s hand, made him keep shut. He still remembered the trip through the forest.

‘I’m sorry for the nice table,’ the old prisoner remarked as the Legionnaire began chopping up fat on the table top.

‘The table isn’t yours,’ Brandt brushed him off. He set about slicing bread with his battle knife in the same manner.

‘Things should be protected,’ the prisoner said doggedly.

‘Dry up, sheeny!’ Heide roared, foaming at the mouth.

We waited in suspense for what was coming. Knowing Heide we sniffed trouble.

Porta was brushing his topper with his sleeve. He grinned fiendishly. Stege was playing with a hand grenade. The Old Man eyed the ceiling and shuffled the cards in silence. Tiny was noisily sucking a goose leg. Brandt was scraping out a jar of jam with a slice of bread. Krause, a former SS man who’d come to us on account of cowardice and political unreliability, was picking his teeth with a bayonet. His small green, vicious dog’s eyes were bent on Heide, who had dared to enter one of the most hazardous areas in the laws of a penal regiment; attacking a prisoner.

Heide took a swig from a bottle of schnapps. He held it slightly away from his mouth and shoved his head all the way back, making the colorless liquid stream down his throat in a long jet. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down with the gulps. Part of the schnapps overflowed the corners of his mouth and ran down his neck.

He dropped the bottle on the table with a heavy thump. The schnapps spilled out. Bending forward, he brought his face close to the old prisoner’s. His eyes, bloodshot from drink, were set in a malevolent stare. He belched convulsively.

‘Huh, zebra! I, Julius Heide, noncommissioned officer in the 27th Panzer Penal Regiment, tell you that you are a stinking, lice-infested Jew swine!’

Heide looked around triumphantly. ‘What do you say to that, sheeny?’

The old Jew sat on a stool at the table. He looked listlessly at the drunken Heide. He didn’t seem to understand it was he who was being treated like dirt in this way. All the filthy taunts were lost on him. He had heard them too often. They didn’t get through to his brain any longer. He had become immune to obscene words.

Heide shook his head like a bull just before it gores the bullfighter.

‘I mean you, you rotten corpse!’ He hissed it out through the corner of his mouth. ‘You are a Jew louse! A piece of stinking Jewish shit!’ He leaned back his head and roared with laughter at his own wit. Cackling, he repeated: ‘Jewish shit!’

He kept on repeating it, alternating it with ‘shit-house,’ ‘dunghill,’ and many more vocables of the latrine which he didn’t forget, even for a moment, to combine with ‘Jew.’ He warmed to his subject. He stepped on the gas. His tongue ran away with him. He howled and screamed.

The rest of us sat silent. The old prisoner was eating and didn’t pay the slightest attention to him. He seemed to be sitting in a room completely by himself, not hearing the stream of dirty words.

Porta grinned expectantly. Tiny picked his nose. The Legionnaire whistled: ‘Come now, come now, death.’

The Old Man dealt the cards, slowly and deliberately. Stege was chewing on a stick. Krause was catching lice.

All at once a 7.65 pistol was in Heide’s hand. He released the safety-catch with a click, which to us sounded like a crash.

‘Now, Jew, I am going to blow out your shit-brain!’

He grinned fiendishly, slowly raised his pistol and took precise aim at the old man’s head.

For a moment there was an ominous silence. Then the old Jew lifted his head and looked at Heide with a pair of strange dead eyes.

‘You want to shoot me,
Herr Unteroffizier
? There is nothing to be done about that. Whether you shoot me or a dog matters nothing. The only difference is that the dog is afraid of death, if it knows what’s coming. I’m not. I have expected it every day for years. Go ahead and shoot me if you like, but let’s go outside. Otherwise we’d make a mess on the floor in here.’

‘Cut out that crap,’ Heide hissed. We saw him bend his finger and pull the trigger tight.

The Old Man alone didn’t look up. He turned up a card in his solitaire, ‘Black Sarah.’

‘Put away that pistol!’ he hissed like the crack of a whip.

Heide sat there as if stupefied.

‘I hate these damn Jews, and I’ve always wanted to plug one.’

‘Put away that rod, and right now!’

Tiny got up and flipped open his battle knife.

The Old Man looked up. ‘Julius Heide, put down that gun!’

The Legionnaire hummed: ‘Come now, death.’

Slowly, imperceptibly, Heide lowered his hand. The pistol clattered on the floor. Terror glittered in his eyes. The superman who had just shown his big snout had been transformed into a cringing cur, crestfallen with fear.