Klaus stretches, he digs the toe of his boot under Rainer’s right buttock and kicks it about.
‘I’m fucking freezing. Let’s get something to warm us up …’
‘What about him?’
‘I’ve cuffed him to the stove.’
Rainer gets to his feet and comes over to me, gets down on his haunches and lifts up my head.
‘We worked him over, didn’t we?’
‘We did.’
‘Five minutes,’ says Rainer.
_ _ _
I count the minutes, I count the dead in the darkness, try to recall their names, their faces. Etke. Greta Weissbecker, who died for being nice. Steiner, Breker, Goga, Wäspli, the Czapski family, Zaludok’s entire ghetto, the Schwabenland brothers, Kindler, Grünfeldt, Haber, Frezl. The deaf boy. The ones who got blown to bits. The nameless. The mad Russian with his tin of peaches. The Jewish girl who spat semen in her hand.
Masja. Already, her heart stopped, her body barely cold, the blood sinks inside her organism, dark pools settle at the bottom of her organs and muscles, livid islands rising up to the surface of her skin, livor mortis, and soon, in the morning, now, come the first of the blowflies to deposit their eggs, the fat flesh flies, the beetles, a scabby fox, a dog, and in a few days she will be unrecognisable, an emaciated object, a bundle of bones, a memory only, in my searing brain.
I hear footsteps in the gravel outside the wagon. They come to a halt.
‘Right,’ says Klaus, and clambers inside. He tosses me Rainer’s wallet. He lights a cigarette, his face blank. ‘You keep your mouth shut!’
_ _ _
The train starts moving.
In a moment it will halt at the station itself and the wagon will fill with troops, men heading home on leave, wounded, an unfamiliar multitude.
I have a couple of minutes, at most, but the darkness is on my side.
‘Get these off me.’
‘As if …’
‘Come on. A police officer cuffed to a stove. How are you going to explain that?’
He ponders for a second, then steps up and uncuffs me.
‘One wrong move …’
I get to my feet and try to shake some life into my hand.
‘Aren’t I supposed to have a pistol?’
‘You show me where the gold is, then maybe …’
I sit down with a sigh.
‘I’m starving. Haven’t you got anything?’
He rummages in his rucksack, produces a tin and rolls it towards me.
‘Tin opener? Have you got one? Or would that be too risky?’
It lands in my lap. The tin sighs as I press the blade into the lid. I scoop up the congealed goulash and press handfuls into my mouth.
‘Thanks,’ I mutter.
He is over by the door, looking out.
I come up behind him with the tin, the sharp, jagged lid.
‘Want some?’
‘What?’
He half turns, a sudden warmth in his voice.
I grip his chin, wrench back his head and cut into him below the jugular. The artery is impossible to pin down. He flails his arms, and strikes my ear, launching my spectacles into the darkness. He twists to face me, a hand already clutching at my neck, and then I slice open his larynx. He stiffens for a second as air squeals from his lungs, as I chop at the artery.
Then comes the blood.
I hold him upright, as it pumps out.
He collapses at the knees, and I allow him to fall to the floor.
His pupils are already fixed.
The moist film of his eyes glistens a moment in the night, then it too is extinguished.
I retrieve my PPK, pat him down and find his papers, his and Rainer’s Soldbücher, the three wallets, and dump his body onto the shunting ground.
I rinse my hands in the piss bucket, then throw that out too.
I am shaking uncontrollably, and I have to use both hands to put my spectacles back on.
_ _ _
‘Ah, company at last! I’ve been sat here freezing on my own since Minsk,’ I exclaim as the first hands grip the wagon door and men begin to clamber inside.
‘Dieter Horn,’ one of them says by way of introduction, hand raised in salute. ‘Panzergrenadier. Where are you heading?’
‘Hamburg.’
‘Hamburg? Me too. Whereabouts?’
‘Hamm.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No, no joke.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘Rumpffweg …’
‘Small world!’
‘All he can talk about is bloody Hamm,’ someone says. ‘You’d think everyone who was anyone had to come from Hamm.’
‘It’s true!’ I say, and laugh.
I still can’t stop my hands from shaking.
Home
We come to a standstill somewhere in Vorpommern, in a haze of pollen and summer heat, on a siding, half hidden by a flourish of birch trees. Above us a rumbling swarm of American bombers, USAAF, are out daylight bombing, their white bellies flying fortresses of aluminium, shining serpents in the sky.
Are they heading for Rostock? Berlin?
I move my bowels, crouched on the edge of a gravel pit.
I have emptied the wallets and dispersed the documents, the two Soldbücher, identification papers, photographs. Coins too, and a safety pin. I stare blankly at a small knotted keyring from Rainer’s wallet, embellished with ceramic beads.
Klaus Maier, Rainer Fuchs, short and tall respectively. Missing in action, as the letter will say, the notification that will be sent in a week’s time to a village in Westfalen, to Rainer’s wife, a pudgy woman with a low hairline and a surly mouth, when Rainer fails to return from Navahrudak. And the daughter who knotted his keyring will forever inhabit the wilderness of missing and will place flowers and small ceramic items on an empty grave without ever learning that her father was a bastard.
Perhaps it is for the best.
Requiescat in pace.
I light up an Efka for the child I do not know, and spit tobacco shreds.
Klaus has a pocket album with small photographs of animals and massacres, a long-eared owl on
