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One morning in January of 1945, Professor Emil Kohl received two letters. Both were postmarked Ahlborn, dated two weeks apart and written by different people.

The first was from his father, saying that he had been taken ill and once more pleading for a visit from his older son.

The second letter, this one written by Stefan, was an announcement of the death of Viktor Kohl and the date set for his burial. There was no request for Emil to attend, Stefan having assumed that it was hopeless even to ask.

So it caught the younger brother by surprise when, on the day of the funeral, Emil showed up at his door.

‘I am not here for you,’ were the first words out of Emil’s mouth.

Even though the brothers had grown apart with the passage of time, they had also grown more similar in appearance. Their thinning hair had been cropped short and both men looked rounder in the chest. Once-prominent cheekbones were now hidden by the fullness of their age. In addition, each brother had independently adopted the curious habit of not looking directly at a person when speaking to them.

But if it caught either one by surprise to come face to face with this blurred reflection of himself, he made no mention of it.

Although Emil and Stefan stood side by side at the service, neither one talked to the other. They sang, they knelt, they prayed and they shook hands with a long line of parishioners, but it was as if each man stood alone. It had become a test of wills, to see who could cling longest to the silence that enveloped them. Only after they had accompanied their father’s coffin down into the crypt did they finally begin to talk.

It was Stefan who spoke first. ‘I can’t undo what’s done,’ he said.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Emil rounded on his brother. ‘No you can’t!’ he shouted, ‘and even if you spent the rest of your life begging for forgiveness, the pain you’ve caused could never be undone.’

‘I will not apologise,’ said Stefan. ‘I have nothing to apologise for, least of all to you.’

‘Nothing?’ Emil demanded angrily, his voice echoing about the crypt, where the new pine of their father’s coffin seemed to glow in the light of the paraffin lanterns used to light the space. ‘You left me to clean up the mess you made of this family when you wandered off to join that monstrous cult. Even back at school in Krasnoyar, the pressure was on me to live up to our parents’ expectations. You had it easy. They expected nothing from you.’

Stefan tried to reason with his brother. ‘There’s no point in blaming each other for the different ways in which our parents treated us. They are gone now. All we have left is each other, and if we could just sit down and talk . . .’

‘You would not want to hear the things I have to say,’ Emil interrupted.

‘Maybe not,’ replied Stefan, ‘but I would rather hear them now than get to the end of my life knowing we might have come to terms and chose instead to wallow in our pride.’

‘It’s too late,’ said Emil.

‘No!’ Stefan told him. ‘As long as we draw breath, it will never be too late, and I will always be here to help you if I can.’

That evening, the brothers walked the two kilometres to the railway station in the nearby town of Kottonforst. In the cool evening air, they stood on the platform and shared a cigarette. The burning tip glowed poppy red as each man inhaled the smoke, before passing it back to the other.

Before long, the train arrived, belching steam and clanking to a stop.

Two soldiers, home on leave, disembarked. One had made his way from Italy, still wearing the faded sandy-olive cuff title of his service in the Afrika Korps. Another man, bundled in the grey leather coat of a U-boat commander, wandered back and forth along the platform, softly calling the name of his wife.

‘Remember what I said,’ said Stefan, as his brother climbed aboard the train.

That night, fearing an imminent Soviet assault upon the town, German troops arrived in Ahlborn and ordered the villagers to evacuate. Those who could not walk were piled on to trucks. The rest escaped on foot. Before he joined the stream of refugees, Stefan Kohl returned to the crypt, prised open his father’s coffin and placed the icon, still wrapped in its protective cloth, between the dead man’s hands. It was the only place where he felt sure that the
The Shepherd
would be safe. ‘You owe me that much,’ Stefan whispered to his father’s corpse, before he nailed the coffin shut again.

Only a few days after returning to the laboratory in his house at Leverkeusen, Emil completed his work on stabilising the soman compound.

All this time, Emil had been waiting for a call, perhaps from Hitler himself, informing him that he was needed. Now he began to realise that the call was never going to come, that he had been the victim of a hoax, and that this hoax had been his own invention. The dismantling of the IG Farben lab had not been a ruse after all. Hitler had never intended for him to keep the Sartaman Project alive, and the fact that he had done so, in spite of a direct order from the highest authority in the Reich, would virtually guarantee him a death sentence, if ever his work was discovered.

Emil’s mind see-sawed between the fear that he might, at any time, find himself under arrest, and the dismay that the true potential of his discoveries had not been appreciated, after all.

This left him with very few options. He could go to Meinhardt, explain his mistake and hope that they showed him some mercy. Or he could destroy all the work he had done on his own and hope no one ever found out.

Neither one of these seemed very promising.

It wasn’t long
before a third option took shape, one that would allow him not only to save his own life but the Sartaman Project as well.

His own country had turned its back on him. That much seemed perfectly clear. And their ignorance would cost them dearly.

The only course of action now, Emil decided, was to turn himself over to the Allies. There, he had no doubt, his achievements would be properly recognised.

The only question was how.

Before the war, Emil had kept in touch with numerous chemists in the Soviet Union. He had been a part of several international organisations and had served on committees with men and women whom, thanks to the bungling of politicians, he was now forced to consider enemies. But he had never thought of them that way. Theirs was a community of science, not of political ideals and national boundaries. In spite of this, the war had severed their lines of communication and Emil had no way of getting in touch with them.

What he needed was someone familiar with Russian culture, who spoke the language and had travelled widely there. Such a person could re-establish contact with his former colleagues. Once they learned what he had to offer, they would surely waste no time bringing him across the lines.

Where could he locate such a person? He did not even know where to begin. But the more Emil thought about it, the more he came to realise that the answer to this dilemma was his own brother.

Stefan had said he would always be there to help. This would be his chance to prove it.

He immediately applied for two weeks’ leave from IG Farben, where his continued employment was little more than a charade, and set out for Ahlborn, carrying a rucksack filled with clothes and a briefcase containing three vials of soman, each one contained within a silver-lined glass tube and sealed with a spring-loaded cap.

His leave had been readily granted by Meinhardt, who seemed quite happy to know that Kohl would not be glooming around the laboratory and performing tasks which, both men knew, were next to useless in light of Germany’s current situation.

Knowing that Meinhardt would be in no hurry to have him return, Kohl reckoned that it would be at least a week after his leave ended before Meinhardt sent someone to find him. It would then take the authorities a further couple of weeks to track him to his brother’s house in Ahlborn, by which time, with luck, he would already be gone.

On the morning of 4 February 1945, having reached the nearby town of Kottonforst by train, Emil managed to find a place on a cart belonging to a farmer heading in the direction of Ahlborn.

The farmer regarded Emil suspiciously, and seemed to take particular offence at the neatness and good repair of the professor’s clothes. The man’s own wardrobe included wooden clogs and a loosely woven sack coat with two large patch pockets on the front, each one of which was crammed with objects useful to the man, such as a pipe with a well-chewed stem and a pack of Skat cards. There was also a piece of paper with some phrases written down for him in Russian by a Soviet prisoner he had employed on his farm until, finally acknowledging that the war was lost for Germany, and anticipating the imminent arrival of the Red Army, had allowed the man to escape, but not before instructing the prisoner to write down the words for ‘I am a friend’, ‘Long live Comrade Stalin’ and ‘Don’t shoot. I surrender.’ The prisoner, who had been half-starved by the farmer and made to live in a chicken coop, dutifully wrote down ‘I hate all Russians’, ‘Death to Comrade Stalin’ and ‘Go ahead and shoot me you bastard’ before slipping away from captivity.

‘You can ride in the back,’ the man said to Professor Kohl, and then to emphasise his lack of want for company, he spat on the plank next to him, where Emil might otherwise have sat.

With his suitcase on his lap, Kohl jostled on a pile of mouldy-smelling hay until they reached a crossroads in the woods. A signpost which had once pointed the way to Ahlborn had been snapped in half by retreating German soldiers, in a desperate attempt to lead the Red Army astray in any way they could.

‘That way,’ said the man, nodding down one of the roads.

Emil thanked him and climbed down off the cart.

‘You are not from Ahlborn,’ said the man.

‘No,’ admitted Kohl.

‘Then why go?’

‘I have family there.’

‘Not any more, you don’t,’ the man told him. ‘The Army took them all away. The Reds are coming, or haven’t you heard? The only people left in Ahlborn now are either dead or those who are insane enough to have returned to their homes.’

Kohl nodded. ‘That just about sums up my relatives,’ he said.

‘Suit yourself,’ grunted the farmer.

Soon afterwards, Emil arrived at the outskirts of the village. There was little damage to be seen and the solidly built houses and small shops which lined Ahlborn’s only street were all more or less intact. Some of the buildings had holes in their roofs. A few of the doors had been kicked in. As Emil made his way towards Stefan’s house on the other side of town, he held his breath while he stepped around the rotting remains of a dead cow, its bones showing through the tightly drawn black-and-white hide. He was startled to see the dark hulk of a Russian tank parked in a muddy lane, but a second glance at its peeled paint and bare metal, already beginning to rust into a pinkish fuzz, told him the tank had burned out and been abandoned.

He passed the church where the service for his father had been held. This building showed more damage than any of the others he had seen so far. Of the few artillery shells which had landed in Ahlborn, only this one had done any real harm. The roof tiles of the church hung crooked like a set of rotten teeth. All along the front of the church, the stained-glass windows were smashed in and the lead bands which had held each piece of glass in place sagged like the wet strands of a spiderweb. Through the open door, Emil could see titled pews and hymn books strewn about.

At that moment, Emil was startled to hear a voice coming from somewhere inside the church where his father was buried. Someone had cried out, not in fear, it seemed to Emil, but in sadness and exasperation. Curious, he walked to the entrance of the church. The smell of old sandalwood incense, sunk into the walls from centuries of use, mingled with the damp odour of the charred roof beams.

‘Hello?’ he called into the dark.

There was a rustling noise, and then the swishing sound of footfalls on stone steps. Someone appeared from a doorway beside the altar, which Emil knew led to the crypt. He remembered helping Stefan to carry his father’s coffin down the narrow staircase to the airless little chamber where the bones of other priests lay in their brittle wooden boxes. Even before Emil could discern the features of the man’s face, he recognised from the silhouette that it was his brother. ‘Stefan?’ he called.

Stefan stopped in his tracks.

He had arrived in town only an hour before. When he learned that the Soviet onslaught had failed to materialise and that fighting in the village had been limited to a few small skirmishes between reconnaissance groups on both sides, he had slipped away from the tide of refugees, stolen a rickety bicycle and ridden back to Ahlborn. The first thing he did was to go straight to the church. Ever since leaving the village, he had been tormented by the thought that the icon might have been destroyed in the skirmishes. His first glimpse of the church, with its windows stoved in and door smashed open, seemed to confirm his worst fears. He raced into the building and shoved aside the splintered furniture, until he reached the door which led down to the crypt. In spite of the damage to the interior, at least the building was intact, and he took this as a hopeful sign that the icon might be safe, after all. It never occurred to him that the icon might have been removed from its hiding place. His only fear was that the crypt might have been engulfed in flames, or that its ceiling had collapsed. It was not until he had lit the oil lamp hanging on the wall that the possibility of theft occurred to him. As he stood among the splintered fragments of his father’s coffin, staring down at the brittle, frost-gloved hands of Viktor Kohl, Stefan realised the icon had been stolen. He could not understand why this coffin was the only one that had been opened. It was as if the thieves had known exactly what they were looking for.

A part of him still refused to believe it. He began to prise the lids from the other coffins, in case, perhaps, he had placed the icon in the wrong one. One by one, he tipped out bodies and skeletons on to the floor, until he was wading through bones and the air was filled with a sweet and sickly-smelling dust which made the oil lamp sputter and clogged his lungs until he could barely breathe.