The Last Shot (8 page)

I forget why Anke is beautiful. When you see her after a long time, you say to yourself, with a familiar shock: she is extremely beautiful. As much so in a pair of jeans and T-shirt as she would be dressed up to go out for an evening. Maybe it’s a universal charm, crossing all boundaries of personal preference. Everybody likes her. She can get away with anything. She can do no wrong.

Is it some kind of perfect symmetry in her features? Is she like a model? No. In the mirror, she is a little off-centre. Her smile is left-seeking. That’s the real test of symmetry, the one that artists use when painting portraits. Anke has idiosyncratic beauty. You would never guess her background. Or her age. She is one of those women who are beautiful as children and go on being so until they’re eighty. She will be a lovely old woman. Her mother is the same.

Anke jumped out of the Mercedes and walked over to embrace me. She had that slanted smile on her face. Life is for a laugh was her leitmotif; always was. I threw my bag into the back beside the child seat. On the far side, there was a large box of disposable nappies. It made me calculate. Alexander was four. Still a baby.

It was like a homecoming. Anke drove slowly through the town, talking and asking questions. The old buildings of Münster were all lit up, light spilling over on to nearby trees. The streets were empty. Sunday evening. We stopped at traffic lights, where the red light bled on to a tree beside it. Anke kept talking and looking at me.

Jürgen had the door open when we arrived. He embraced me too and stepped back to take a good look at me, to see if I had changed.

‘I got your card,’ he said, punching me and then leading me away into the living-room with his arm around my shoulder.

Alexander was shy at first. Jürgen showed him how to shake hands. Then Alex wanted to shake hands again and again. He ran away and came back to say hello again. His eyes shone.

‘I hope you’ve got some time,’ Jürgen said. ‘I hope you can stay for a while. We’ve got a lot to talk about. And I’m going to take you hang-gliding if you stay till next weekend.’

I told him I could stay only a few days. He said he was going to change my mind. Then he sat back and listened. Jürgen wanted to know everything.

Alex ran into the kitchen, where Anke was preparing something to eat. He came back moments later with an onion for me. After a while he came back again with an apple. His mouth dribbled.

Jürgen talked about his new practice. He had taken over his father’s practice and moved into new premises. Then he began to talk about changes happening in Germany, about the freedom trains. Münster was full of East Germans and displaced Germans from Poland. What did freedom of choice mean in Germany? What did they want?

‘It’s the choice between thirty-five bars of soap,’ Jürgen said. ‘The choice between mauve and sludge-green blouses. The choice to boot down the
Autobahn
at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. Everybody wants that choice.’

Alexander had dragged a chair into the middle of the room and sat underneath it, pretending to go to sleep. He began to sing. It was more like groaning.

‘Real freedom is a completely different matter,’ Jürgen said. ‘Something we can talk about later: the difference between state freedom and domestic freedom. Personal freedom.’

Over dinner, it was Anke’s turn to talk about the events in Germany. People wanted the freedom to go anywhere in the world, even if they chose to stay at home.

On the wall of the kitchen hung a wooden plate with an egg-cup, spoon and a child’s cup glued to it. Jürgen usually fed
Alex when he was home. He showed extreme patience. Alex was limited in what he could chew. He got distracted and he wanted to eat from Jürgen’s plate or from my plate instead. Jürgen and Anke never talked about him in the third person when he was present. Jürgen held out the cup and Alex sang or sighed noisily as he drank. When he finished, there was a milk moustache on his upper lip.

After dinner I gave Alex the spinning top. It drove him mad. At first he got very excited about it when Jürgen spun it for him. But then he tried it himself and the handle broke off. He began to wail. Jürgen took him on his knee while I fixed the spinning top. But Alex was tired. He kept crying. I could see the full extent of his deformities; the pronounced cast in his eyes, the ill-fitting teeth and his inability to understand.

Bertha Sommer never saw the hostages being released. She never caught sight of their faces or of anyone getting off the trucks in Postelberg. All she saw were the onlookers in the streets and the occasional glimpse of purple lilac in full bloom as the trucks moved on again. The summer had come. It was hot on the trucks, under the green tarpaulins, as they drove out of Czechoslovakia. At times the trucks were hit by a shower of rain, but the sun quickly came out again. There was a smell in the trucks, like the inside of a marquee tent. There was also a constant smell of diesel.

After Postelberg, things moved slower than ever. Sometimes the pace was reduced to no more than five or ten kilometres an hour. Every conceivable form of transport was out on the roads, every available set of wheels; carts, barrows, prams, on the move. Outside Postelberg, they were held up for almost an hour.

The German units from Laun were determined to stay together as one convoy. Everywhere, Sudetenland civilians attached themselves to the retreat, getting in between the trucks, sometimes separating part of the convoy. Whole families were fleeing to Germany. Families pleading to be taken on the trucks. They knew what was going to happen. Bertha Sommer saw crowds of women and children, some of them leading farm animals. Some of the women carried enamel buckets for suitcases. The roads were stuffed with people fleeing, carrying as many of their belongings as they could, afraid to look back, afraid to think of what they were leaving behind. Bertha was the same, she had also left things behind, things she couldn’t carry.

The streets were full of mud too. And full of rumour. The whole of Europe was full of rumour. On the trucks, it became
clear that the Russians were trying to close off the escape from the north. The retreating army was trying to make it to Eger on the German border as quickly as possible, but the pace of the streets made it difficult.

On 9 May the Soviet Army had all but caught up with them. The soldiers at the back of the truck spotted them behind. At the edge of a valley, they could see the densely packed road curling through the trees and emerging on the opposite side of the valley behind them. Officer Kern handed Bertha the binoculars and she could see, with great shock, the first Russian tanks and armoured cars in pursuit. Binoculars show exactly how close you can be.

Everybody on the truck began to talk at the same time. Officer Kern silenced them and said the Russians would never catch up. The roads were too clogged. As long as the Germans were not held up somewhere along the road ahead, there was no danger. Besides, there was too much mud everywhere. The tanks could never cross through the fields.

By the time they reached Eger, the following day, they were safe. They abandoned the trucks. It was part of the terms of surrender that all military equipment was to be left behind at the border. The Americans at Eger would not have let them through on trucks either.

The Wehrmacht began to disintegrate. Bertha and Officer Kern got down from the truck and set off on their bikes. The soldiers all laid their weapons down by the side of the road. There were piles of helmets like mounds of skulls. Most of the personnel, like Officer Kern, changed out of their uniforms into civilian clothes. They rolled up their uniforms and placed them under bushes, behind walls, anywhere along the route. A few of them, like Kern, held on to their hand weapons, concealing them among their belongings, just to be safe. Many of them kept their boots. Where would you get boots as good as German army boots?

Officer Kern asked Bertha to drop the title of Officer. From time to time she still involuntarily gave him that prefix as they
cycled through Eger. They passed a large refugee camp outside the town on the German side. They saw the American troops who were stationed in Eger and who let the retreating Germans pass freely. There were too many of them to stop.

By the time they reached the foot of the Fichtel mountains, Bertha Sommer knew everything there was to know about mud. It clung to her shoes and to the tyres of her bike. She knew mud in every stage of its composition, how it dried and fell off in lumps from the wheels of prams and carts. She had seen thousands of footprints and wheeltracks.

The sun in May 1945 quickly dried the tracks.

Franz Kern and Bertha Sommer headed for the hills. They were trying to get off the main roads as soon as possible. From now on there were new dangers. Angry Czechs and Poles returning home in the opposite direction. The main roads would be treacherous. There would be thieves. There was nobody you could trust. A bicycle was like gold. In May 1945 it was like owning a ranch. Defending it was like a war in itself, a cold war at least.

They went as far into the Fichtel hills as they could. ‘The first German afternoon,’ Bertha wrote in her diary when they stopped to rest. It was written in bold handwriting in the evening when they had put sufficient distance between themselves and the main German retreat. They had reached a height from which they could see the traffic crawling along the road. It never stopped; even after 10 in the evening, when darkness fell, the horns and the lights passing along below them went on.

They had stopped because Bertha was exhausted. She had no energy left. She needed to sleep. Here in the first elevation of the Fichtel mountains, they could take a rest knowing that there was less danger of being attacked or getting their bikes stolen. They ate some black bread, sitting with their backs to tree trunks. They also had some chocolate, the remains of their rations, which was meant to last until they got home.

Bertha’s arms were burning from the sun and began to feel cool after dark. She shivered and put on her coat. She was glad
she had insisted on bringing it, even though it made cycling harder in the heat of the day. She thanked Franz for getting her this far. They sat talking for a while; exchanging biographies.

‘Bertha Sommer, born Kempen, four sisters, mother still alive, brought up in a strict Catholic background…’

Most of it was already known. They expanded and told stories about themselves.

‘Franz Kern, married, no children, born Nuremberg, two brothers killed in action, one a pilot…’

Kern hid the bikes under foliage and branches. It took a while. She heard the cracking of twigs and branches. He came back and they talked for a while longer until Bertha began to laugh.

‘Nerves,’ she explained. But she couldn’t stop laughing. She became embarrassed about it. She hadn’t laughed like this since she was a child. Since the Third Reich began. She sat by the tree, chuckling behind the palm of her hand like an elated child.

‘What’s the matter with you, Fräulein Sommer?’ he asked.

‘It’s nothing, I’m just happy,’ she said. She went on laughing uncontrollably to herself, excluding him. Maybe it was the cold night air. It could have been fear. People laugh out of fear.

‘Halt,’ Kern said. ‘I hear something.’

She stopped abruptly and fell silent. There was nothing to laugh about. Neither of them said a word. They listened.

After a while, when they were sure it was nothing, she settled down and fell asleep. With Franz Kern, she felt safe enough to sleep. Nothing mattered any more.

Kern stayed awake. An ingrained war mentality. He heard every crack, every microscopic night-time noise on the hillside juxtaposed on to the distant sound of endless traffic along the road below. He had spent the war years listening to radio signals. He only fell asleep just before dawn when the birds set up such a shrill contest of noise that it drowned out every other sound, and every danger.

Somewhere between the night of the 10th and the morning of the 11th of May, all formality was lost between them. They had begun to call each other by first names. Bertha and Franz.

Jürgen took me to see his new practice. He had claimed me to himself after dinner while Anke put Alex to bed. It was a duty she enjoyed. It took an hour, often longer, to put Alex to bed. They agreed quite amicably about it. ‘You have the whole day tomorrow,’ Jürgen said to her.

Jürgen’s practice looked more like a reception in an advertising agency than the rooms of a gynaecologist. The reception itself was a jungle with tropical plants and fish-tanks. The fish-tanks came from his father’s practice, and Jürgen told me how his father used to scrape the green crust off the glass with a blade every Saturday. He told me how he once saw the blade snap in his father’s fingers, and one of the larger fish swam up and swallowed a small shard of it.

Above the reception desk, there was a large, commanding poster of a stork in flight carrying a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. Elsewhere there were other maternity posters from the fifties and newer posters about AIDS.

Jürgen showed me how the practice was designed with three surgeries, each with well-planned interlinking doors so that he could pass from one to the other, minimizing the time delay between patients. The nurses ran the operation very smoothly, indicating which room was next.

Jürgen and I sat in one of the surgeries talking about his success. I sat in the doctor’s seat while Jürgen sat on an examining couch, swinging his legs. He spoke with an infallible doctor’s touch.

He told me that he had taken on two assistant gynaecologists. But he was still looking at new ways to make each examination more efficient. They had already ensured that women undergoing examination were in the chair, undressed and waiting
under a white towel when the doctor came in. There was a special examining chair in which the woman was hoisted up, legs splayed apart.

Had he become dispassionate about women, I asked. Was it difficult to take his mind off women?

‘I don’t see women in this surgery – I only see patients.’

He was taken aback by my question, as though I had undermined his professional integrity. But then he understood, everything belonged to the realm of serious inquiry. I began to play with an instrument lying on his desk.

‘I talk to them in the third person. I make no connection between their vaginas and their faces. The only comparisons I make are for health reasons. The only thing that arouses my attention or my interest is disease and problems. Actually, the only time I am ever reminded that they are women is with some of my Turkish patients. They will take off all their clothes except the head-dress.’

I was playing with some kind of torch in my hands. I looked at the red light that shone through the gaps in my fingers every time I lit it.

‘I examine the prostitutes of Münster as well. It’s part of the work I do for the city. My father used to do it too. Every week I examine them and give them disease-free certificates. Without it they can’t work.’

It was a while before I realized that the torch in my hand was specifically designed for gynaecological examinations. I put it back and went over to the window. I stood looking down over the square where work on new paving had been abandoned for the weekend. Shallow sandpits into which the paving stones would be placed were cordoned off by red and white tape. A tool shed stood in the middle. A woman waited while her dog on a leash crouched in a sand dune.

‘You came at the right time,’ Jürgen said.

It became clear that he had brought me here to talk about something else. Perhaps Anke? For a moment, I thought he was going to drag up the past. The crash.

‘Anke can get very unhappy sometimes,’ he said. ‘She will do everything for Alex. But things are difficult for her. It’s hard for me too, but I understand, because I’m a doctor. I can detach myself from the world, from the emotion. I am used to suppressing emotions.’

‘She has gone back to college again?’ I asked.

‘Yes. She decided that she needed to think about something else. She has to progress. With Alex, she can be so depressed. She has to feel she is going somewhere.’

He came over and stood by the window. There was some premonition in his words. We were both looking out through parallel blinds at the Sunday evening square. There was nobody out there now. I was leaning with my elbow on the window frame. Jürgen’s eyes were looking at me.

‘Alex is very ill. You know that. He’s got leukaemia. He won’t live long.’

I expressed shock. Jürgen quickly ran through a medical explanation, giving me the causes, treatment and long-term outlook on leukaemia. There was little hope in Alex’s case. I wondered if this was Jürgen’s way of protecting himself from his own emotions. When things went wrong, he turned into a doctor.

‘It’s good to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Anke and I still find it impossible to discuss it. Together, we still hope it’s not true.’

Jürgen pulled me away from the window. He suggested going for a drink. There was nothing more anyone could say about Alex. Nothing I could say to help.

‘You know,’ Jürgen said. ‘If Alex had been born in the Third Reich, he would have been eliminated – life unworthy of life. In ten years’ time, his condition will be quite routinely picked up at the embryo stage. I feel lucky for him. Alex is like a refugee. We feel as though we’ve saved his life. Part of his life, anyway.’

In the lift going back down, I offered more encouragement. Jürgen said they were happier with Alexander than they might ever have been without him.

We walked across the square, finding our way along between
the sandpits and the mounds of new paving stones. We went for a quiet drink on the way home. Anke was already asleep when we arrived back. Jürgen showed me my room, and when I got into bed I found a piece of chocolate cake, half-eaten, under the sheet. At first I thought it was Anke’s idea of a little joke. Then I realized it must have been Alexander. It was a gift.