The New Confessions (62 page)

It took twenty minutes to reach the Le Muy-Fréjus road, much longer than Cavanaugh-Crabbe had estimated. I stopped the car thirty
yards short of the junction. I was worried that we had got lost somehow. I got out and looked round. It was still very hot. The dust that had risen behind us hung in the air. I looked at my watch: four-fifteen—it had been a long day.

There was a scuffle in the backseat. Two Dogs shoved the Azerbaijani out of the car.

“Look at this guy’s pockets, Mr. Todd. Something’s bothering me.”

The soldier stood there, his hands half-raised. The two hip pockets of his tunic were dark with old blood. They were buttoned down and bulging.

“Is he wounded?”

“No. Look at his wrists.”

The man wore two wristwatches on each wrist. I told him in German to empty his pockets. He didn’t seem to understand. I reached to undo the flap on one and to my astonishment he slapped my hands away.

“
Nein
,” he said, taking a pace backwards. He looked nervous, worried. Then, suddenly, he turned and ran into the vineyard.

With a shout Two Dogs was after him. I followed. Two Dogs ran down the aisle of vines, gaining on the soldier easily. He caught up with him on the edge of a small copse of cork oaks and, holding the barrel, he swung his carbine like a club in a wide arc. The butt glanced heavily off the soldier’s head. When I arrived Two Dogs stood over him, gun leveled. The soldier was trying to get up on his knees but kept falling over like a concussed boxer. Two Dogs pushed him flat with a boot. This time the soldier gave up and lay there, flat.

“Check his pockets, Mr. Todd.”

I was out of breath. Dusty sunbeams slanted through the leaves of the cork oaks. The Azerbaijani had a bad gash above his right ear. His eyes were shut, his face was covered in dust and he was moaning slightly. Carefully, with bilious foreboding, I unbuttoned his pocket and reached in. My fingers felt something.

I thought: saveloys, thin German sausages, Azerbaijani biltong.

I pulled out five severed fingers, women’s fingers, old and young fingers, all with rings on them.

I did not scream. I gave a kind of audible shudder, as one does when shocked by sudden cold.

“Jesus Christ,” Two Dogs said.

The man had fourteen ring fingers in his hip pockets. His breast pockets were full of jewelry and more watches. By now I was feeling sick. He was still lying down, moaning slightly.

“What’ll we do?” I asked.

“Maybe we should—”

Two Dogs put the muzzle of his carbine in the man’s left ear and pulled the trigger. The man’s head gave a little jump and then seemed to half-deflate. Then Two Dogs stepped back and fired three shots into his body. Puffs of dust rose from his tunic.

“We’ll say he tried to escape, OK, Mr. Todd?”

“What? Yes, fine. Absolutely.”

We didn’t touch anything. We left the fingers—a small pile of human kindling—beside the body. We walked silently back through the vineyard towards the car. Two of its doors stood wide open. All around us were woods, hills, small fields, vineyards. Some birds soared above in the pale blue sky. Cicadas screeched in the grass at our feet.

Two Dogs patted me on the shoulder.

“Best thing to do. I think we had to do that.”

“What a day,” I said.

“Shall I drive?”

“No, no. Let me. It’ll take my mind off things.”

We got into the car and I started the engine. We bumped down onto what we hoped was the Le Muy-Fréjus road and turned left as instructed. We had gone, I suppose, about four hundred yards when the first bullet shattered the windscreen and there was a metallic punching sound down the side of the car. I felt as though I had been kicked in the thigh and my right foot instinctively drove the accelerator down to the floor. We swerved, plunged off the road into an irrigation ditch. I banged my head and lost focus. My brain was a mist. I felt Two Dogs helping me out.

I stood on the road somehow. Two Dogs kept asking, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I was aware of a damp heat about my torso. Before I fell over I saw the paratroopers advancing on us and I heard the clear accents of my native country.

“Sorry, Yank. We thought youse was Jerries inna fuckin’ Mercedes. Onyboady hurt?”

I set off for the beach today longing for a swim. But I turned back after five minutes. My leg was aching slightly.

If we hadn’t shot the Azerbaijani … if I hadn’t volunteered to drive …

Two Dogs had bruised his elbow. I had taken a bullet through my chest, high up on the right side. It smashed a rib, passed through my right lung and ricocheted off my shoulderblade. The big rectus femoris muscle on my left thigh was almost severed, as if by a butcher’s knife. The two lasting consequences of this accident were a limp, when I was tired, and the ruination of my fine first serve at tennis.

Anyway, that sort of “if only” digression is futile. To indulge in it is to place a blind obeisance in the laws of cause and effect. The cause of my bullet wounds was a trigger-happy Scottish para. Any attempt to trace the line further back is doomed. Could we say that my being shot was the result of Leo Druce’s smear campaign in the English press? In one sense that would be entirely accurate. In another it’s perfectly absurd. It was bad luck. Happenstance. The quantum state breaking into one human life. I bear that soldier no grudge.

I convalesced in a large naval hospital near Washington, D.C. I was well looked after—Eddie saw to that. Fresh flowers every day, the best food.
The Equalizer
, as Two Dogs had told me, had been a considerable success. I had made some money. Lone Star was buoyant, as was its owner. Eddie had great plans, he told me: next we would make
Jesse James
, then
Kit Carson
. We could run the gamut of Western folk heroes. When I left the hospital he invited me to come and stay with him in Los Angeles, but I saw out the rest of the war in Ramón Dusenberry’s San Diego home, slowly and steadily regaining my health. I seemed to function surprisingly well on one lung. I wondered why nature had bothered to double up that organ—perhaps in case you got a bullet through the first.

I was as fully recovered as I would ever be by the end of 1945. Eddie was still urging me to have a look at his script on Jesse James. I pleaded ill health for as long as I could, but then a letter arrived that changed everything and set me on a different course of action.

The envelope that contained it was a curious-looking object, almost obliterate with official stamps and chinagraph markings. It had been sent first to my father’s house and had eventually found its way to me. It was from Karl-Heinz and was dated October 1945.

Karl-Heinz was alive. This was the best news. How? By what unlikely chance? Suddenly the lethargy of my convalescent’s life fell away. I knew what to do now. I was going back to work for the
Chula Vista Herald-Post
.

I was full of astonishing optimism during my journey to Berlin. I felt, hard though it may be to credit, that my life was beginning again. Karl-Heinz was alive. Somehow, I knew we would finish
The Confessions
now, and though I had no idea what form it would take, I was sure it would come about. Too much lying around in hospital beds. Too many hours staring at the Pacific Ocean with nothing to occupy my mind, I hear you say. I had sent Karl-Heinz the money he had asked for; now all I had to do was find him.

However, that elation—that old exhilarating sense of potential—began to seep away as we flew over the city on our approach to Templehof. I had been prepared for an image of destruction, but the vision that confronted me that afternoon in March 1946 was not so much shocking as unreal in a bizarre, sinister way. Berlin was gone, its skyline vanished. When you stand in a city and look casually about you, you see towers, roofs, steeples, gables, chimneys, treetops. Light comes at
you through angles and over inclines, sometimes squeezing in through alleyways, sometimes basting the general view in wide boulevards and parks. Berlin was not razed, the shells of buildings still stood, but it had lost all those idiosyncrasies that made it particular—that made it “Berlin.” Only the Funkturm stood tall and untouched above the devastated streets. Everything else was uniformly gray and everything had been battered.

How can I explain it? If you have ever seen a rugby team troop off the pitch at the end of a game played in exceptionally muddy conditions, you can bring to mind an analogue. The tired, tousled, dirty men seem suddenly the same size and thickness, all covered and clotted in mud. The slim, speedy winger is indistinguishable from the balding hooker with the beer belly. Their ordeal, their exhaustion and dishevelment, have homogenized them. And this is what had happened to Berlin. It was one large ruin. The city had fused.

I was billeted in a villa in Zehlendorf—west in the American sector. It was designated by the press bureau of the military government PSR-4, for some reason. There were half a dozen journalists staying there and it was run by a pale silent woman called Frau Hanf. She was tall and rather beautiful in an exhausted, strained sort of way, but she was the very paradigm of formality. I never dared ask her a personal question.

The next day we were taken on a tour of the city. My depression deepened. What overwhelmed me was the mess. It seemed impossible that it could ever be cleaned up. I could not imagine how a new city could ever emerge from this devastation. We drove up the Kurfürstendamm towards the Gedächtniskirche. The houses on either side were scorched shells, uneasy facades, set between vast rubble mounds. To my amazement, however, I saw bright signs and fresh paint, even neon. Shops, cafés,
Lokale
, were open and making a brave show of plying for trade. The streets were full of people, stooped and intent and walking uncharacteristically slowly for Berliners. Everywhere were gangs of grubby trousered women sorting through bricks. Opposite the church, the Gloria-Palast—where
The Confessions: Part I
had played for a week—was a tumbled crater of stone and concrete.

We drove on. Another tremendous shock. The Tiergarten had gone! gone completely, not a tree left. In its place were thousands of tatty garden plots. I was overwhelmed by this transformation. I tried to imagine Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne, Central Park, as vast vegetable gardens, all the trees cut down for fuel.…

On the Brandenburg Gate were red flags and pictures of Lenin. The
stark white of the memorial to the Unknown Russian Soldier seemed almost obscene set against the miserable incinerated black of the buildings all around. The Dome, the Schloss, the Chancellery … the Adlon Hotel, Wilhelmstrasse … everything shattered or demolished. I looked out of the windows at the drear view, the gangs of women and POWs sifting through the debris, my mind a confusing sequence of “before” and “after.” Where was the Bristol, the Eden, the Esplanade? Where were the embassies, the theaters, the department stores? That pile of bricks had been the bar where I would have a drink after my stint as doorman at the Windsor. This space used to be Duric Lodokian’s house. That rubble mountain had been the hotel where Leo Druce had his wedding reception. Monika Alt used to live behind this cauterized facade.… And so on. It’s pointless to rehearse the conflict of emotions, the sweet and sour memories that day provoked. They lessened subsequently and with some speed. You can get used to anything. Normality is like some tenacious waste-ground weed: it will establish itself in the most unlikely places. But I never got used to what had happened to the river Spree. Perhaps because that first day I had arrived in Berlin in ’24, in the early morning before the city was up and about, I had walked along its banks from the Lehrter Station through a cold misty dawn. Now it was the city’s sewer, clogged and polluted, rimmed with scum and thick with effluent and excreta. Its strong ornamented bridges had all been destroyed and makeshift wooden spans replaced the shattered arches. It seemed almost too solid to flow, but if you could bear to stand long enough (you could hang a hat on the smell off it, as the Berliners used to say) you could see its surface shift and eddy after a fashion, as if it were a prototype river not yet perfected, an early design model now superseded and antiquated.