Fifteen Words Read online

  FIFTEEN

  WORDS

  Monika Jephcott Thomas

  To my parents who encouraged me to be myself

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Fifteen words

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Preface

  He was poisoned. Someone had poisoned him.

  ‘It might have been an accident,’ Erika offered rather lamely.

  ‘An accident?’ Edgar snapped. ‘How does a man accidentally ingest enough cyanide to do that?’ He gestured to the puddle of wine on the floor as if the professor was still there re-enacting his convulsions for the benefit of their education.

  ‘The Gestapo warned him not to speak out against their euthanasia program,’ Horst stated quietly from behind his hand.

  ‘Warned! They threatened him. And he wasn’t intimidated. So they’ve tried to bump him off. These are the kind of people that are running our country.’ Edgar looked from Horst to Erika.

  Erika dropped her eyes to the floor and watched as one of the café staff mopped the red wine from it.

  Max looked at the revolver in his hand. It was the first time he had taken it from its holster since that terrifying train journey through Romania close to the Southern Front. Yet this time he felt he was actually going to have to pull the trigger. The question was, would he be aiming at the Russians surrounding the city or at himself?

  The gun was a Walther P38, not dissimilar to his father’s Luger P08, but a cheaper version massed produced for the German army now that the financial cost of war was spiralling out of control. Max turned the gun over in his hands, juggling it with thoughts of his father putting that Luger to his own forearm when Max was just a boy and pulling the trigger. Papa had shattered just about every bone in his wrist, but it was the only way he could make sure he did not have to serve in the German army in the Great War.

  ‘There was nothing great about it,’ Papa had grumbled the day Max had announced his intention to join up. But his father had reluctantly chewed up his bitterness for the Nazis and his fears for his son and swallowed them with a mouthful of recently rationed hard bread and tinned pork. He had to admire his son for forging a career for himself as a doctor. ‘What would this country do without people like him?’ he whispered to his wife as they both stared at the ceiling that night in bed, wide-eyed in the gloom with parental concern. ‘Our people will be broken soon, just like they were before, and it will be his job to try and put them back together again, God help him!’

  Max had wanted to be a doctor since he was sixteen. He had known he had to be a doctor since he was sixteen. Since the time Tante Bertel had taken him to the theatre. Then, he was so engrossed in the play before him (on the edge of his seat as Polly Peachum cried for her lover and Macheath was about to be hung on the gallows; the ominous music from the orchestra seemingly emanating from his own swelling chest) that Max thought the mighty crash which rocked the floor beneath him, was the result of a wonderful choreography between pyrotechnical effects, timpani and cymbals. But as the screams from the street dominoed through the audience and even reached the actors, Max realised this was not part of the show. Some of the audience were frozen to their seats, fearful of what the screams outside portended. Others, who Max could only assume were not as enamoured with The Threepenny Opera as he was, hurried their friends and partners into the street with a strange excitement on their faces for the greater spectacle which awaited them outside the theatre.

  ‘There’s been an accident. A terrible accident. A tram. A lorry…’ one disembodied screech reached Max and his aunt from over the heads of the stampeding theatregoers.

  ‘Tante,’ Max could not control the quivering in his voice. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Let’s go!’ Bertel declared in a tone of such confidence she might well have been trying to compensate for her nephew’s obvious lack of it. ‘We need to help!’

  Max followed Bertel into a street strewn with beer and bodies. For a second, he told himself that there had been a riotous party and everyone had collapsed on the ground from too much drinking. But the blood and dismemberment told another story; one which he could not deny when he saw the double-decker tram torn apart as if it was made of paper and the lorry from the Kronen brewery on its side, its contents soaking the road with a boozy stench.

  Bertel grabbed Max by the sleeve and, with an intrepidity which he could only marvel at, she marched through the chaos towards the cigar shop opposite the theatre, where a ladder leant against the awning.

  ‘Help me carry this!’ she ordered Max. ‘We are going to use it as a stretcher. We’re going to lay each casualty on it in turn and carry them to the hospital, understand?’

  Max nodded his head furiously. From the moment Bertel had opened her mouth he was hanging on her every word, determined not to let her down, determined to infect himself with her courage.

  The hospital was only two hundred metres away. Yet after hauling four casualties there and watching Bertel’s stern but comforting way of telling each that they would be OK, despite their screams and horrific injuries, Max felt weaker and more useless than ever.

  ‘I should have been able to do more,’ he told himself when he finally got home and hid in the lavatory, trying to get the sound of that screaming to quieten down; desperate for a sense of solitude after all the crowds, the bumping of elbows, the tripping over bodies. ‘I will never be so useless again.’

  So Dr Max Portner weighed the pistol in his palms, red and cracked from the late winter frosts. He noted the secret code 480 on the slide, which had replaced the old Walther Arms banner decorating previous models for fear the Allies could identify weapon production sites from such markings and bomb them. But that was the least of his fears and those of his fellow Germans right now in Breslau, the city surrounded as it was by the Sixth Army of the First Ukrainian Front. The city had been under siege now for over seventy days. Max had tended to so many wounded and dying soldiers in that time he knew there couldn’t be many left to protect the great military fortress Hitler had decreed the city to become against the advancing Russians.

  A plane roared overhead. Max shoved his pistol back into its holster and threw himself instinctively into one of the bomb craters in the garden which they had begun using as latrines. The last thing on his mind was the gallons of other people’s shit he was now crouched trembling in. When the bombs didn’t come he dared to look up and, since the plane was so low, he managed to identify one of his own, a Luftwaffe aircraft dropping another load of supplies. These air drops used to bring him a sense of hope, but the city was on its knees now and he doubted they would survive until tomorrow. Doubted they should survive if all he’d heard about the POW camps was true.

  ‘Erika,’ he whispered to himself, craning his neck up to track the plane, ‘If only…’

  His unarticulated wish stuck in his extended throat as his eyes took in the sight of the plane exploding – a direct hit from one of the Russian anti-aircraft guns positioned around the city. His heart sank to its lowest point yet, but his eyes found strange solace in the bizarre beauty of the billowing clouds of smoke and flame, sending now useless pieces of medical equipment and food hurtling to the earth. Some of it even reached the garden where he was rooted in the ground agog.

  And then it began to snow.

  As if nature was attempting to cool down the infernal destruction and pacify the angry explosion marring its skies. The flakes were big, some too big to be snow Max gradually realised as he blinked at the smaller ones adorning his lashes. He held out his hand to catch one of the false flakes. It was part of a letter. Pages and pages, some quite intact began to flutter down into the garden. He clamb
ered out of the cesspit and began, as instinctively as he had protected himself from the bombs by diving into a stinking toilet, to gather up the mail which the plane had also been trying to deliver along with supplies. Letters from loved ones to their men on the front. His fists were soon full of the treasure, the only thing salvageable from this final nail in the coffin of Breslau. Somewhere in the frosted corners of his mind he wished there was a letter from Erika among them and yet, like a player in one of Hitler’s fundraising lotteries, he never believed for a minute that he held the winning ticket.

  The burning plane was gone now. The white winter sky was victorious again. Max expected a phalanx of white-coated Russians to emerge from it any second, swarming over his hospital. He waited. But as it didn’t come – yet – he wedged his bounty of letters under part of a broken bedframe to stop the wind stealing them and washed as much shit from his skin as he could with the burning cold water from the barrel which had been set up to catch the rain. He was careful to use the cracked bowl to decant the water. Careful not to let the dirty liquid cascading off of him fall back into the barrel. This was, after all, all the water they had; water for sterilising surgical instruments and for cleaning the gaping wounds of soldiers.

  The cold water on his cracked skin felt like a punishment rather than a remedy. The shit didn’t seem that bad by comparison. He hurried inside – as far as the carcass of the monastery could be called inside – to dry off and see if there was any likelihood of them bringing any survivors from the exploded plane.

  No one came.

  He stood looking out of one of the grand arches that used to be a window at the front of this monastery they had commandeered as a field hospital. He stood there rather recklessly since most of the staff and patients in this hospital now spent their time below ground in the cellars, one of the few features of the building left intact, and a far safer place to be if the next plane that cast a shadow on this place was a Russian one.

  He had felt awkward when they had first arrived. Felt he was bringing death and havoc to a place of peace and meditation, but, as their trucks wheezed and heaved into the driveway a year earlier in March of ’44, he saw from the rubble, which used to be the church, that death and havoc had already beaten them to it.

  The monks had been welcoming enough and had donned the Red Cross arm bands to denote their role as nursing assistants enthusiastically, but the nuns, who also cared for the sick, did so with much more disdain behind their eyes, Max thought. And he didn’t blame them. The Nazis had ordered the convent to house thirty prostitutes alongside the Sisters. These girls could serve the men in ways the nuns could only wonder at. And the Nazis could have housed them anywhere in the city. But they chose the convent just to offend the nuns. To underline their contempt for all things religious. After all, how could you be devoted to the Führer if you were wasting your time devoting yourself to some insubstantial God?

  Max was here as a doctor, not a Nazi. He had never supported the party and he couldn’t help but wish Erika could see what he saw now. Then perhaps the vestiges of faith she had in the government would explode with the same strange beauty and completeness as the plane had over the monastery garden.

  The plane. The letters! He’d forgotten in his haste to get dry (though he still felt damp) and in his concern for the survivors, who did not survive.

  He hurried back through the shell of the monastery out to the garden. If he didn’t know it was medically impossible, he would have believed he could feel his heart melting into his stomach. He prayed the letters had not been ripped out from under their unsightly paperweight by the insidious winds. He had no idea why but he felt terribly attached to these shreds of communication. He needed them to still be there. He would hate himself if he had been so stupid as to let them blow away.

  Shielded by the garden wall, the papers were where he’d left them under the slats of the broken bed. The massage of relief his entire being felt then told him he did know why he felt so attached to these bits of paper after all. Because he knew how he would feel if Erika’s words were among them. How warmed, how hugged, how caressed he would be. How connected. As connected as his fingers interlaced with hers moments before their first kiss, or just like they used to be beneath the blanket he brought down from his room to keep them warm as they read together wedged into the old armchair she had in her room in their student digs in Freiburg.

  At night the landing strip looked as beautiful to Max as Freiburg Cathedral used to during mass. But here on the airfield – which Hitler had destroyed a large swathe of the city centre to create – there was no great gothic architecture arching above him like the ribcage of a prehistoric whale; no stained glass windows afire with colours which glowed from a mysterious fuel; no spine-stroking, soul-squeezing music pumping from the feet and fingers of his great friend Edgar on the organ. No, all this bald patch of ground in the middle of Breslau had in common with his beloved cathedral were the candles.

  A hundred candles in tin can lanterns, fifty on each side of the otherwise dark landing-strip to guide the plywood gliders bringing food, ammunition and medical supplies under cover of the night. It almost managed to take his breath away now as much as it did on that first night he worked this shift so many months ago. Their own little vigil, one which he hoped was being matched somewhere by his wife staring into the heart of a candle as if it was a portal to the ones that twinkled before him. This was his church now. His pew a cot inside the bunker which peeped out just above the ground near the airfield.

  Edgar, his best friend, fellow medical graduate and favourite musician from Freiburg had folded his long body onto the cot next to Max. A soldier and two monks were also in the bunker waiting to get the supplies off the expected plane and then to extinguish the hundred candles, like some greedy centenarians eager to eat their birthday cake, before the Russians spotted their landing strip and turned it into unusable craters.

  ‘What’s in the bag, buddy?’ Edgar nodded at the extra backpack Max had brought tonight, using the English (or rather the US) word to address his friend as he always did, to demonstrate his love of all things American as much as his contempt of the government’s efforts to suppress them. He could see paper sprouting from the side with the broken clasp and was suddenly filled with the crazy idea it might be sheet music. Forbidden swing music from the USA, which Max had acquired for him as a wonderful present. But where the hell would Max get swing music these days? Edgar couldn’t remember the last time he had heard any, let alone played some.

  ‘Take a look,’ Max smiled. ‘And you,’ he said to the soldier. ‘They’re letters I rescued from the plane that came down yesterday. There might be something for you in there.’

  Max watched as the soldier tore into the bag and rifled through the pages as he would devour some Silesian Streuselkuchen should he ever get to taste some again. God’s best invention on earth that plum crumble cake! Max told his nose that that’s what he smelt now instead of the mildew fermenting on the bunker walls.

  Edgar waited patiently for his turn with the letters. He wasn’t in as much of a rush as the soldier because he could almost guarantee there would be nothing for him in there. He didn’t have a wife like Max did, not even a girlfriend. He preferred to keep his options open. He was still in his mid-twenties after all. As was Max. He loved both Max and Erika dearly, but their desire to bind themselves together so soon in life, in a life that was doing everything it could possibly do to keep them apart, to destroy one of them and leave the other in wretched grief for the rest of their days, was simply beyond Edgar.

  ‘Was there anything from In…?’

  Was that a crack of thunder? Or a Russian anti-aircraft gun?

  The first they knew of the glider landing was the sound, like a tree being felled. It had been hit by the Russians and smashed on the landing strip, sending its crew sprawling over the field and swiping many of those celestial candles from their places, extinguishing some whilst the others turned into devilish little firelighter
s, setting aflame parts of the plane that weren’t already in splinters.

  A switch flicked in Max. As it did in Edgar. Max was no longer an extra pair of hands to get supplies off the plane, he was the doctor in charge of saving the five airmen strewn about out there beyond the bunker. The concrete bunker that could keep them safe from further gunfire. What was the point in leaving it then? The airmen must be in as many pieces as their plane. Surely they were beyond saving, weren’t they? These thoughts of a sixteen-year-old Max inevitably raced through his head at a time like this. Thoughts chased and kicked out by images of his aunt Bertel crackling with initiative and puffed with resourcefulness. And that was why Max found himself outside the bunker seconds after the candle flames had begun to taste the plane.

  ‘Bring the cots!’ he bellowed. Bellowing was never his strong point, but he would not be heard over the continuing gunfire otherwise.

  Edgar, who had his arms outstretched as he ran behind Max, as if to grab him and drag him back into the sensible safety of the bunker, quickly followed his friend’s order and directed the monks to carry one cot between them whilst he grabbed the other with the soldier whose name he thought was Thomas. It was difficult to remember all the soldiers’ names that came through here. And it didn’t pay to get too friendly with any of them. They might not be around for long or they might be delivered back to you in a terrible state of dismemberment. Edgar felt it was much better to just stay tight with his little medical team: Max, Horst, Dolf and Lutz. Just the five of them. They were there to help the wounded and the sick and they’d all be home again by Christmas. At least that’s what they kept telling themselves. Just like they had the year before when they’d been posted here, and the year before that on the Western Front.

  Edgar and Thomas scampered towards the silhouette of Max, all of them stooped like old men as bullets whipped the air above them. The silhouette waved one arm at Edgar emphatically in the negative. It seems there were only four airmen to save now. The silhouette fled to the left and Edgar followed. With no signal from Max over the second airman, save the flashing of the firelight in his round glasses, Edgar knew this one was alive and he directed Thomas to haul him onto the cot.