Fifteen Words Read online

  ‘But what was he wearing when he left?’ Max would often ask.

  Jenny would never give him a straight answer, just smother a smile and dance her slender eyebrows about. Sometimes she would linger at the door after this, toying with him a little more, knowing he wouldn’t dare begin to undress before she had left the room. She wallowed in the awkwardness of the moment. But not out of malice towards him. She just wanted to be around him and his gentleness for as long as possible. She wasn’t used to it. Oh, she was used to hearing the soldiers tell her that they loved her and call her by their wives’ names in the heat of the moment, she even put up with the rough angry ones working out their frustrations on her, but they were paying. They were customers. Regardless of getting a free examination, she found herself happily donating her time and effort to Max. Breakfast, washing, concern.

  ‘We heard about the plane crash the other night,’ she said when his clothes were drying and he was appropriately dressed in the spare uniform, drinking coffee – no doubt left behind by another grateful customer.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Thomas. When he was here with Trudi.’

  I suppose the letter from his wife wasn’t enough to comfort him then, Max thought with a bitterness that surprised even himself.

  ‘Oh,’ he said filling his mouth with hot coffee to avoid voicing his thoughts.

  ‘He said you took over.’

  ‘Well, someone had to and it certainly wasn’t going to be him.’

  The little cockroach, Max thought swallowing more coffee and bile. Bad-mouthing me to a load of prostitutes because he was too spineless to do his job. And too spineless to be faithful in marriage come to think of it, if his little visit to Trudi is anything to go by. And I helped him sort through the letters as well! Granted we only found half a note, but at least he got something.

  ‘It sounded like you were very brave,’ Jenny said without a hint of playfulness this time.

  ‘I was just doing my job,’ Max said with a modesty that sounded ridiculous even to his unassuming soul.

  Jenny gestured for him to stay where he was as she clip-clopped down the hall to her cell, returning moments later clutching a small picture, which she pressed into his palm.

  The picture was by no means new. It was curling at the edges, the back was stained with something brown and the image itself was faded. It was an image of the baby Jesus held by a Black Madonna. At first he thought she had “borrowed” it from the nuns, as she had his breakfast marmalade, but from the way she said:

  ‘I want you to have this. If you keep this with you all the time it will keep you safe and protected. Will you do that?’

  He knew it was hers and that it had kept her safe and protected for many years already. And that’s why he replied:

  ‘I can’t take this. What about you?’

  He wondered if the nuns knew that their antitheses, their nemeses, or one of them at least, was a Madonna-toting Catholic too.

  ‘I’m all right. No need to worry about me. I live a charmed life, I do,’ she laughed.

  She laughed so hard it echoed down the hall, but he caught the look in her eyes at the same time which didn’t hold the same conviction about her invincibility as her voice. Nevertheless he knew it would be futile to try and refuse the gift. And he was deeply moved by it. So he held it reverently admiring it for a while before slipping it into his pocket.

  Yet the moment he pocketed it he felt as though he’d been unfaithful to Erika. Not only had he accepted a gift from another woman, he’d accepted a gift from a prostitute. How would he ever explain that to her when she asked where he’d got it? He’d probably lie in order not to hurt her feelings. Say some dying soldier had given it to him or something like that. Not that there was anything to be hurt about. It’s not like he was sleeping with Jenny. She was just a patient. A friend even, but nothing more. A very pretty friend with incredibly slender eyebrows and a petite hourglass figure, sure… He poured the still very hot coffee down his throat to punish himself for noticing. Now he was angry at Erika for being suspicious when she wasn’t; she couldn’t be yet, and she had no knowledge of the picture. Now he was angry at himself for being angry with her.

  Now his commanding officer was marching down the hallway followed by Beatrix, sweeping the marble floor with the hem of the feather-trimmed dressing gown she wore so flamboyantly in the hope he might notice.

  ‘Right this way, officer,’ Beatrix croaked pointlessly as he clearly knew where he was going.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ the officer barked

  ‘’Tler!’ Max mumbled as he stood and saluted.

  ‘I wanted to come and tell you personally, Dr Portner, that having been informed by Private Thomas Huber…’

  Oh, not content with bad-mouthing me to the girls, he’s been crying to the CO now too! Max paled at the injustice of it all. Just because he had more balls than that silly little private.

  ‘… of your immense bravery and initiative on the night of Thursday last at the landing strip, you and Dr Edgar Klein will be awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class.’

  Jenny squealed with delight and clapped a clap which brought Max back from his trance where thoughts of injustice entangled themselves with words of commendation.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘I told you!’ cried Jenny. ‘We all said how brave you were.’

  Even Thomas, it seemed.

  The CO rather impatiently repeated himself and Max thanked him before he turned on his heels and hurried out of the convent, pursued by Beatrix again. Jenny could not stand on ceremony a moment longer and threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Well done!’ she beamed at him as she pulled away again.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, fishing in his pocket to make sure the picture was still there.

  It was. And he caressed it gratefully and secretly with his thumb.

  They had to change trains at Halbstadt, but this time there was no room for them in the passenger carriages. They had to ride with their luggage in the goods wagon to Trautenau, but Karl produced some chocolate this time for the female guards who worked on the wagon and in return they made sure he and Erika had as comfortable a ride as possible among the mountains of things people were travelling with. Not just suitcases, but enormous framed pictures, grandfather clocks, furniture, boxes of possessions, the entire life of the non-Germans (and those who thought they were German until the government said otherwise) who were now refugees fleeing from the country they had called home all their lives.

  On the train from Trautenau to Alt-Backa, they found space in the passenger carriages again. Some girls from the Hitler Youth employment programme fell over themselves to help Karl and Erika into their carriage. Karl’s masculinity and his repulsion at their swastika armbands tempted him to refuse their offers, but the aching in his wrist overruled him and he found their fussing almost amusing in his relief.

  As the train pulled out of the station Erika answered the girls’ clucky questions about her bump, when it was due, what she wanted to call it if it was a boy, if it was a girl.

  ‘If it’s a girl I thought about Netta,’ she said. ‘If it’s a boy, Max. Definitely Max.’

  She found their enthusiasm something of a tonic and remembered the way she used to hold court like this with her own Hitler Youth group when she was a teenager.

  She felt her heart swell in her chest as she recalled singing through the streets of her village, leading the other young girls in her group, swastika banners held high. They would play sports in the fields, then make campfires, discuss the traditions and costumes of Germany and tell stories from the myths of the Norse people. The Youth Movement for Young Women gave Erika a way out of the gilded cage her parents had painstakingly forged for her. You’re the daughter of a textile factory owner, but you mustn’t venture out of the garden and across to the factory to mix with the labourers! We are such successful parents and that is why we do not have any time to spend with you
, but you must not go looking for adventure outside the grounds of the villa.

  The factory chimney dominated the entire village. To the adults there it was dominating enough – threatening their rest day with shadows of the working week ahead; or swelling their pride as a breadwinner for the family; or undermining their confidence in the future of farming; or corroborating their conviction in the rise of the cities, the urbanisation of the people. As the posters on her classroom wall said:

  In 1870, Germany had two farmers for every city-dweller. In 1930, there were four city dwellers for every two farmers. In 1870, two-thirds of the population lived in the countryside. By 1930, the proportion was reversed.

  Apartment buildings are the breeding ground of misery. They are fertile soil for Bolshevism. No soil, bad air, little sun, disease, unemployment and hunger, misery, moral decline, high death rate.

  But to little Erika, what she saw when she looked at that chimney through the bars of the villa gate was a veritable enchanted castle, the scaly neck of a rearing dragon, or Rapunzel’s doorless home. The gates of the factory opened into a world where Schneewittchen’s dwarves and the pointed-eared, winged Wichtelmänner toiled, creating all the wonderful fabrics her father boasted of. On one side of the factory gates was the porter’s lodge manned by the one-armed Herr Weiser, or rather, the lair where the deformed troll dwelt, she told herself on that impulsive day when she found her bare feet darting from the villa gate, hopping across the dirt track and tip-toeing under his window. But concentrating more on not being spotted than where she was putting her feet, she stepped on a shard of broken glass. Being barefoot, the shard sunk deep into her skin and, had she not slapped a hand across her mouth, her yelp of pain would have surely alerted the porter to her presence. But there was no way she would be able to hide her bleeding foot from her mother as she scampered back to the villa. Blood red footprints led her mother straight to Erika, who was punished for disobeying her parents.

  ‘If only I was a doctor,’ she had thought as she sat locked in her bedroom, ‘I could have fixed my own foot before they ever found out.’

  When she was thirteen the Youth Movement handed her the key to escape her eternal house arrest. It was every boy and girl’s duty to join the Hitler Youth. And there was even an opportunity for Erika to organise and lead a group of girls of her own, enhancing her education and promoting national pride. Her parents would never argue with that. And she got to escape the villa for training camps in Hassitz. She found herself loved and valued by the other rural girls. She adored looking after them, feasted on the feedback, a novelty to her. Starved of cinema or theatre or anything remotely fun, she brought the girls sports and stories of life way beyond the villages. Stories of a proud people with strong traditions, of a people without space. She read all these things in the book which was delivered to her every month from the leader of the Movement, Baldur von Schirach himself. A book of songs, lectures, and stories which she would absorb lying on her front, feet in the air, legs twisting around each other in the zoetrope light of a log fire.

  On a Youth Movement hiking trip to the Allgäu Alps, it wasn’t the thinning air at such altitudes which left her breathless, but the majestic landscapes they traversed like something from the Nordic sagas with which she entertained the other girls by campfire light in the evenings. If these mythical landscapes really could exist, she thought, then so could the powerful Aryan race that originated in such places.

  There she met Hans, a boy in a hiking group from a nearby Swiss boarding school. He was tall, quiet and gentle. He looked every bit the handsome Aryan ideal. All the way to the summit of Walmendinger Horn, they talked – when their lungs allowed them – of the beauty around them, the millions of years of history it had presided over and what might be in store for it in the future. When they got to the summit, two thousand feet above sea level, she pulled a booklet she had been given by the Hitler Youth from her backpack and enthusiastically pointed him to the parts which appealed to her scientific sensibilities:

  From the study of genetics, we have learned that the individual human being is inextricably bound to his ancestors through his birth and inheritance. The great genetic river of a people can suffer many impurities and injuries along the way. These can occur in two ways. First, diseased genes can develop within the bloodstream of a people. If a people is to remain strong and healthy, these cannot be allowed to be passed on. The purpose of our current genetic policy is to prevent the passing on of such diseased genes and to promote healthy blood. A people’s bloodstream, however, can also be injured by mixing it with alien blood from foreign races. Our racial policy is designed to prevent this from happening.

  The past era either entirely ignored human inequality, or else acted contrary to its better knowledge. During the colonisation of Paraguay in the nineteenth century, for example, the Jesuits permitted white settlers to marry native Indian women. Perhaps they thought that the native population would thus be raised to the level of the whites. But these mixed marriages produced unhappy bastards who were neither white nor native. In most cases, they inherited the bad characteristics of both groups, lacking spiritual stability. In our time, too, certain people occasionally lacked a feeling for racial honour. The numerous bastards resulting from relations with the black occupation forces in the Rhine region, or those that came from relations between Jews and Germans, are tragic examples.

  Hans closed the book and turned the red cover over in his reddening hands, stroking the canvas binding and caressing the embossed letters as if they might serve better than his mittens up here in the dipping temperatures.

  ‘Be careful, Erika, please.’

  He spoke in such gentle tones that the frigid winds almost whisked the words away over the ridge before she had a chance to register them.

  She thought for a moment he was talking about the smooth outcrop of rock on which they sat, legs dangling into the heavens below. But she had no fear of heights and, as he continued, she realised he was not worried for her physical safety here.

  ‘Some diseases may well be genetic. But that’s why we have doctors to heal the sick and scientists who can help the doctors find better remedies. I’m not sure that anyone has proved that spiritual stability and honour can be passed down in the blood. Are these not things the people around us instil in us, our parents and leaders?’

  Erika looked out across the ridge and felt a little vertigo for the first time in her life.

  ‘Yet your leaders simply kill anyone with a different view to them. Does that sound honourable or stable?’

  ‘If you’re referring to the Röhm-Putsch…’

  ‘The Night of the Long Knives,’ Hans gave the alternative moniker.

  ‘That was a necessary response,’ Erika said to the eagle levitating below them scanning the pass for prey, ‘to a coup which would have seen our government unlawfully executed themselves’.

  ‘Who told you there was ever a coup planned? This book?’

  Hans was stroking it again and Erika registered that his hands did so unconsciously in an effort to find something pleasing about it at least on the outside, if there was nothing attractive to him within. She snatched back the book.

  They sat legs dangling into the abyss below.

  ‘I like you, Erika. I like you because you are clever and strong. Just take care of yourself and look around you at all the other sides of the story before you make up your mind.’

  Erika felt patronised. At least that’s what she told herself she felt. It was much easier to comprehend and describe than the swirling emotions this lad had stirred in her. So she hoisted herself up onto her feet and climbed back onto the plateau.

  ‘Erika!’ Hans’ voice was weak against the wind again as he called after her, but she ignored him. She didn’t look back down to the outcrop preferring now the company of her peers who were finishing their packed lunches and were ready to be led by her, happily, unquestioningly.

  Just a few minutes later, as Erika and the girls were ab
out to set off again, the Alps began to bellow, shriek and weep. Some of the girls rushed to the edge of the plateau to see what this eerie sound was, but Erika was rooted to the spot by it. It was the sound of adolescent boys crying for their classmate.

  ‘He’s down there! He’s fallen! He must have slipped! Hans! Hans! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!’

  Erika replayed the last few minutes in her mind and was wracked with the sound of Hans calling after her transmuting into the noise of him crying for help. When she eventually shuffled over to the young crowd, which wailed in a way beyond its years, she saw, as they did, that there was no trace left of Hans on the outcrop, except for one mitten they all recognised as his.

  The eagle rode the thermals, circling the ridge, waiting for confirmation that the large creature that had just landed there was dead and fair game for scavenging.

  In her tent that night, Erika cried as quietly as she could. She needed to be strong for the others. But something else kept putting an icy hand over her mouth to subdue her distress too. That something had a gusty voice which confirmed that things were in fact as simple as the posters on the classroom wall drew them, things were as elementary as her Hitler Youth literature laid out for her. And to prove it was so, to prove it was Nature’s way, things had been made very simple for her again, now the voice of dissension had been eliminated up here by Nature, where Nature reigned supreme.

  There was a screaming of metal on metal and her eyes snapped open. The girls were gone and Karl was gently shaking her telling her they had to get off the train.

  Max hurried back to the hospital. There were patients that needed his care. He needed to lend a hand. Couldn’t leave Edgar and Lutz on their own all morning. And of course he couldn’t wait to tell them about his Iron Cross. Oh, and also there was the small matter of possibly getting bombed on the way back to keep him moving quickly. He nearly twisted his ankle a couple of times clambering over the rubble without concentrating properly. He couldn’t wait to tell Erika too. He would write to her that night and hope the Red Cross could take his letter out of the city and back to Kunzendorf when they passed through.