I telephone Manfred again.
The adjutant says something has happened.
He won’t say what.
When I look out of the window again, people are running.
_ _ _
Lida, 4 July 1943
Letter 7
Honey, dearest!
Thank you for the par
Manfred flings open the door.
He is pure energy, crackling electricity in his black uniform. He gives me a handshake, a slap on the back, a forceful embrace. When eventually he steps back I see he is fuming.
My eyes focus on his small head, his puckered mouth.
‘My car’s outside,’ he says.
‘What’s happened?’ I ask.
He is already at the desk, telephone receiver in hand. He pauses, stares at the letter to Eline. He sees the jar. He opens it, dabs a finger in the honey and puts it in his mouth.
‘Tell me what’s happened, for Christ’s sake!’ I snap at him.
‘What?’
‘Manfred!’
‘Steiner,’ he says quietly. ‘A reconnaissance plane spotted something north-east of Stützpunkt 43 … on his route … Gisela is with him …’
North-east of Stützpunkt 43
Manfred’s command vehicle bumps along the dirt road. I have asked him about Breker and Kindler, but have received only monosyllables in reply. Manfred picks at his teeth with a small ivory toothpick. It is stiflingly hot. A machine gunner is positioned at the front of the vehicle, his hand on the MG’s grip. There are four trucks behind us. Abruptly, the heavens open, a downpour, lightning leaping over the landscape. Manfred has Weber with him, a former forensics officer from Cologne, now regimental clerk. He keeps a small travelling case tucked under his right arm. His instruments? Manfred must fear the worst.
Weber’s slight frame trembles. He drops his cigarette.
I grind it underfoot and offer him my Efkas. He says something, without taking one. It’s cold now, visibility close to zero.
We pass Stützpunkt 43, heavily guarded by what appears to be Waffen-SS in camouflage and waterproof capes, the Leibstandarte. I thought they were further east, at the main front, Kursk. Are things moving that fast? Are the Russians already here in Belorussia, emerging from the forests in their heavy boots, with their Asiatic brains, their primitive battle cries? Our soldiers jump down from the trucks, man the flak, draw out the net. Men mill in the trenches and on the ridge, controlling the road. Hedgehogs are positioned further out, towards the swamps, the puszcza, the void.
Rain lashes at the tarp.
Manfred has left us. Weber shivers with cold.
We bide our time, waiting for it to end.
‘Partisans,’ Manfred says when eventually he returns and climbs back into the vehicle. ‘Several attacks today.’
He raps his knuckles against the driver’s helmet and we set off.
We are silent as we leave the last of the positions behind us and draw away into the terrain along an elevated gravel track. Nothing but green, broken only by white trunks as the fog rises after the rain.
_ _ _
Manfred jumps out.
Squeezing through the tarp, I see the burning vehicles, the dead strewn about, stripped naked, hanging from the vehicles, sprawled on the roadsides, heads submerged in ditchwater. It must have looked like a massacre from the air; black plumes rising up from the explosions, and flesh-coloured lumps.
Dogs sweep across a nearby field, jowls red with blood. They must come from the woods or the little village of broken-down farms a few hundred metres away. Our own dogs are in a frenzy, but will not be released. Not yet.
I bend down. There’s an ID tag in the mud.
3rd SS-Panzer Division. Totenkopf. Steiner’s division.
Everything else is gone: weapons, uniforms.
Manfred releases the safety catch of his PPK and fires into the air. He shouts out an order, points towards the running dogs with his gun. The machine gunner removes his leather helmet and waves it back at him. He looks dim-witted: big ears, small face, blinking eyes. He unleashes a round in the direction of the hurtling animals: jets of blood burst from their flesh, bullets ricochet off the vehicles, water leaping from the puddles. One of the dead is hit and the volley wrenches the corpse upwards, tearing it asunder.
I run up to him.
He hears nothing. I climb onto the footplate and slap him hard in the face.
‘For God’s sake, man! Stop!’
He turns his head towards me, shoulder wrenching from the recoil as he carries on firing, oblivious.
Then abruptly he stops and laughs.
His gums are receded, teeth brown with rot.
He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen years old.
Manfred is standing on a small mound.
He is waving at me frantically.
_ _ _
The open staff car smoulders, a shining black Mercedes in a ditch, behind it a trail of erratic skid marks in the wet clay. Manfred stands at the edge, looking down into the vehicle. There is a man in the passenger seat.
Something has hit him in the head, just above his shirt collar.
A large piece of shrapnel.
Leaning forward, I recognise the front teeth of Hauptsturmführer Heinz Breker. His distinctive gap.
I look up at Manfred. His eyes are fixed on something behind my back.
_ _ _
She is lying face-up in white fur, a feather boa slung around her neck. A white hat with a long red plume lies a metre away. Her white stockings are torn at the calves, her legs are alabaster, knickers at her ankles.
Her throat is taut, head turned to the side.
But I know who she is.
Frau Steiner, the actress. Gisela, née Lestrange. I saw her once at the Staatstheater in Hamburg, in ’41. Steiner, the SS general, smoking, in the front row. Braying and bragging. The society couple from the pages of Illustrierte. Beauty and the Beast of Minsk. She was Gretchen in Faust. Who could forget her doll’s face, her porcelain legs?
Bin ich doch so jung, so jung!
Und soll schon sterben!
Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.
Nah war der Freund, nun ist er fern
I’m still so young,
So very young, and must so early die!
Fair was I once, hence hath my ruin sprung,
My love is now distant, he then was nigh …
Fern? Or
