Then We Take Berlin (18 page)

As the tailgate swung up another truck drew up next to them. While the drivers talked, across the gap, Nell saw the burgomeister, wedged in between the grocer and the man who ran the pharmacy. He turned away from her gaze. She looked around. The two trucks held perhaps forty or fifty locals—sullen, resentful, or merely perplexed—and the skeletal man, who was none of these. She could see him clearly for the first time now, skin the colour of parchment, stretched across the cheekbones as tight as timpani, and as the truck jerked into life she fell down next to him and found herself looking into eyes that did not look back.

§46

The small convoy of two trucks and a jeep arrived at the gates of Bergen-Belsen in a matter of minutes. The jeep led, and the truck carrying the burgomeister, the pharmacist, the grocer and, it seemed, every other district notable, overtook them as the first truck stopped to unload the prisoner. Two Tommies lifted him down, his teeth still clenched around the pipe, his limbs still tucked into his chest and sides as though minimising his place in the world.

When they set him down Nell thought he might unwind like a watch spring, but he stayed hunched, sucking on the last of Great-Uncle Klaus’s tobacco.

She jumped down, the Tommies seemed not to notice her as they banged the tailgate shut and drove on another hundred metres.

Nell looked around her, lifted her eyes from this lone, troubling individual to the scene in which she had landed. She was washed ashore, driftwood bobbing at the edge of an unknown world, flotsam in a lagoon of barbed wire, marooned upon the dark side of the moon. He was not a lone individual, he was one of thousands.

Everywhere she looked living skeletons squatted, naked and half naked, everywhere she looked vacant eyes looked at nothing, everywhere she looked men, women, and children lay prone as sleeping dogs or hunkered down to shit where they were. And beyond them the dead, body piled upon body as they had been tossed out and tossed aside—rat-gnawed limbs, bird-pecked eyes and the concave stomachs of the starved.

She followed the trail in the dust left by the trucks, past wooden huts onto a flat parade ground. It resembled a grotesque jamboree. The British had provided tents, and the prisoners had lit campfires—fires by the dozen, fires by the hundred. A thousand billycans of boiling water. She picked her way across in a haze of smoke and steam.

She peered into one of the huts. The smell hit her like a blow to the gut—death and shit and decay. The full blast of the corruption that wafted and faded all the way to Celle when the wind was southerly. An abattoir could not smell as bad as this. It was as though she had plucked the lid off the dustbin and come across a nest of maggots in stinking meat—but the meat was human flesh and the living and the dead lay side by side.

The old men were just in front of her, poked and prodded forward by the British. A shuffling line of the stout and the respectable, all dressed for the occasion. Old men in winter woollen overcoats, clutching their felt hats to their chests as though they might be entering a church, old men herded along like sheep. But sheep were never so silent.

She picked her way between them until she found Klaus. As she touched him on the arm to let him know she was there, a diesel engine started up with a roar and Klaus turned and pressed her head to his chest blocking her view.

“Don’t,” he said.

But she squirmed free. Ducked underneath his restraining arm. Found herself on the edge of a pit some two metres deep and twenty long, in which the dead were strewn in their hundreds. And on the far side a British sergeant, a scarf across his nose and mouth, drove a bulldozer forward to topple more bodies in, a Gordian knot of arms and legs cascading down to add another layer. Humanity shovelled up and tipped like garbage. Dogs did not die this way.

Behind her the pharmacist was crying, the grocer was throwing up, and Klaus’s hand rested upon her shoulders, his fingers digging hard into her collarbone, less restraining her than himself.

The Tommies made them watch as the bulldozer did its work, the pit was filled with corpses and the first scoop of soil tipped back on top of them. A grave for the great unknown.

Then a whistle blew and the engine stopped. A rumble that dwindled to nothing and left a piercing silence. A bucket of earth poised in mid-air ready to fall. The British major stood on the far side, across a gulf as wide as evolution itself, and began yelling something at them all in mechanical German, reading it off a sheet of paper, something formal, a headmaster’s reprimand, almost a lecture—but she neither saw nor heard.

Suddenly it was over. Whatever purpose had brought them there was fulfilled and half a dozen Tommies came along, badgering them in English and reinforcing their words with nudges from rifle butts and the one German phrase they all appeared to know.

“
Schnell. Schnell. Macht schnell.
”

Again they missed her. Either they hadn’t seen her or they didn’t associate her with the old men, or any child was taken to be an inmate. It seemed to her that she must wear some cloak of invisibility like a creature in a Brothers Grimm tale.

She stared into the pit. As though she might will the dead to move and show they were not dead. As though a hand might yet rise up for rescue. Some instinct made her want to count them, but it was absurd—a tangled skein of limbs, slack, nacreous skin and featureless faces, a merging of individual bodies into a composite dead flesh. Extreme emaciation produced effects she had never had cause to imagine. Human beings reduced to sticks—the difference between thighs and calves eliminated as legs, and arms, shrank to the straight lines of geometry, the human curve disappearing, punctuated only by the bulbous knots of knees and elbows, and the gaping anus—the fixed shutter, the dark lens, as though it had opened only to expel life and admit death.

An April breeze had caught the ubiquitous dust, whipping it up into eddies, settling it on the dead like frosting.

A line from school English lessons—all those weeks spent translating the metaphysical poets—rolled around in her mind: “The grave’s a fine and private place . . .”

This wasn’t.

A hand on her arm. Slowly she turned.

It was the English captain who had first approached her an hour, a year, a lifetime ago.

“Look . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know Major Thomas was going to do that. The old men, well . . . perhaps they had to see this, but I would not have exposed you to this for the world.”

“I’m not a child.”

“I think perhaps you are. What are you? Fifteen?”

“Eighteen,” she lied. “And I could be of use to you.”

“How so? Do you have medical training? I have fifty thousand patients. I could use all the nurses I can get.”

“No. I have no training of any kind.”

“Then I don’t see what use you’d be—”

“Please!”

She didn’t stamp her foot. She waited until she saw compliance in his eyes.

“You’re English… and you speak German? Perhaps some French?”

“No . . . I speak next to no French.”

“These people . . . these people that the Ger…. that
we
have put here . . . they are French, Poles, Russians, Jugoslavians . . . I speak more of their languages than you do.”

“Russian? You speak Russian?”

“Better than my Polish. And my French and English are fluent. I can help you do what you are going to do.”

“And what is it you think we are going to do?”

“Put them back together again.”

Whatever it was he was going to say she had stopped him in his tracks, the words half formed on his lips froze into silence. He turned away from the pit, took a couple of steps, turned back with the bodies beyond his line of sight.

“Put them back together again? Jesus Christ.”

“Believe me. I can help.”

“I’m sure you can. Russian? Polish? No one on my staff speaks either.”

“It’s what I am. A child of language . . . a word child.”

He looked off into the middle distance, to a group of the motionless living, squatting on the ground as her skeletal man had squatted in the dog kennel. Then he looked back at her. She could almost hear the sigh he would not let out.

“Alright, word child. Report to the main gate. Eight o’clock tomorrow. Ask for me. Nicolas Dekker of the Royal Army Medical Corps—and I’m not English, I’m Dutch.”

On her way back to the main gate she came across her skeletal man, squatting exactly where the Tommies had set him down when they lifted him from the truck, dust settling upon him, on the living as on the dead. She doubted he had moved a millimetre. His pipe had gone out. Without the pipe would she have known him? He was all but indistinguishable from every other skeletal man. The identities of the living had blurred, the flesh of the dead had merged. He heard her approach, but did not look up. The hand simply extended in her direction, his gaze elsewhere, infinity, oblivion, locked on to some inner vision, and all he said was, “
Gib mir Tabak
.”

§47

When she got home the front door was wide open and the house silent. The British had taken every mattress in the house and most of the bedding.

Klaus was in the garden, digging. It was almost time to plant potatoes. He was out there most of the day and returned only an hour before dusk. He prepared a meal of mashed turnips and bacon, said nothing at all in the cooking of it and next to nothing in the eating.

Afterwards, there was no music, no BBC.

She had a thousand questions that came down to one question, and she did not ask it because she knew he would not answer.

“
Wer sind wir, was sind wir?
”

Who are we? What are we?

§48

Dekker asked her to roll up her sleeve.

“We’re losing hundreds to malnutrition every day. They can’t keep down what we give them. If we don’t get it right, thousands will die. After that the biggest threat is typhus. You won’t starve to death. You’re skinny but you’re healthy. But typhus will take the strong as well as the weak. And we have typhus rampant—you’ve surely smelt it, that stench of boiling peas. Like winter in an Amsterdam café.
Erwtensoep
and pumpernickel.”

She watched the needle sink into her upper arm.

To speak might stop her crying.

“We were rationed too.”

“We?”

“My family. Mother, Father, me. Berlin was rationed.”

“Don’t talk to me about rationing. Rationing isn’t hunger. And whilst you may not have known it the Wehrmacht stripped Poland and the Ukraine to feed Berlin.”

He dropped the needle into a steel kidney dish and stuck Elastoplast on her arm.

“I’m putting you in with the German nurses. They’re awkward buggers, but they’re fitter and, dammit, they’re saner than the inmate nurses we’ve found. But they speak nothing but German and their attitude has got to change. Interpret for them. Get between their denial and the patient’s fear.”

“Denial?”

“They don’t believe their own eyes. They don’t believe what Germany has done. Any more than those old men yesterday. They probably thought rationing was starvation too. And the patients trust no one speaking German. Why would they?”

§49

The German nurses were crisp, confident, and contemptuous. They had arrived from another world, one that was clean and starched. They could not have scared Nell more if they had carried guns. Clearly, they felt she was superfluous. They’d get through to the inmates without her help. Dekker told them they wouldn’t, shouted down the protests of “she’s just a child” and “it’s unprofessional.”

“You know what unprofessional means? It means you don’t like what I’m asking you to do. You know what this uniform and these three pips mean? It means you bloody well do it anyway!”

One of the first tasks was to try to inject a ward of Polish women against typhus.

Most of them were just a day away from the filth of the huts they had been found in—hours before they had been hosed down and scrubbed in the makeshift showers, those with lice had been shaved, and, as far as was possible, they had been clothed, although in most cases this amounted to no more than a clean blanket to drape around their shoulders.

The sight of German nurses in Wehrmacht uniforms widened Polish eyes. The women seemed to flatten themselves against the wall, as though they would pass through it like wraiths.

Nell explained what was happening to the first woman they approached, but at the sight of a hypodermic needle her reaction was to scuttle into a corner, to make herself as small as possible and to pull her blanket over her head.

Nell caught a muttered
Strauß
(ostrich) from one of the nurses. And the nurse, flourishing the hypodermic like Lady Macbeth’s dagger, moved on to the next bed and told the next patient, in uncompromising German, that she hoped she would be
vernünftig
.

Sensible. Not a word Nell had found much use for since the day she found her
Tabak
man in the dog kennel. She translated all the same.