To Die in Spring Read online

  The curtain, a threadbare sheet of jute, was not fully drawn. Moonlight shone into the room, and the first thing Walter saw was the dress hanging neatly over the back of the chair, a paper flower in its button hole. Rubber boots stood at the end of the narrow bed, and when he slowly lifted the lamp – its light was faint, its flame flickering – Elisabeth put her hand over her eyes. She had put on fresh lipstick, and the visible pulse in the vein in her throat and the deep black of her armpit hair took Walter’s breath away for a moment. With a hand pressed against the slope of the roof, the dry thatch, he trod on his heels to get his boots off. The iron bed creaked. ‘I hope you’re going to turn that light out soon!’ Elisabeth whispered and edged sideways. ‘Otherwise I’m off.’

  *

  Only the gate of the actual barracks was still undamaged, a massive brick arch. The roof of the commander’s office had been blown away, rain rattled on the tables, drenched carpets sagged under the plaster. But in the hut on the edge of the clay pit it was warm. That afternoon the Stabsscharführer had ordered them to stay indoors, and almost all the recruits – twenty-four of them shared the room – lay on their beds writing letters, playing chess or just dozing. Damp socks and forage caps steamed on the flue, and the wood in the stove gave off a resinous smell.

  Their quarters were covered with tarpaulins which in turn were covered with brushwood, camouflage which had also been employed on the transporters and anti-aircraft guns hidden among the trees, and although the British had stopped bombing army barracks some time ago – because, it was secretly suspected, they soon planned to move in themselves – a few heads always rose whenever the wind made the tarpaulins clatter. The noise was very much like that of the fighter-bombers that flew over the area more and more frequently, sometimes even during the day, and shot at everything, even cattle. Visible a long way off in the flat landscape, stable roofs could be seen smoking: the smouldering thatch.

  Walter went to the window and opened the package that his mother had sent him. Raindrops and the occasional hailstone tapped against the pane. The seven women from the nearby camp, who worked in the unit, stood huddled under the rusty sheet of corrugated iron that served as the porch of their weather-beaten shed. Needle-thin trickles ran through the holes in their makeshift shelter onto their shorn heads and into the necks of their overalls and jackets. They were all looking down. Their guard, in his long cape, pulled his dog off the platform when a wagon trundled down the slope. Its brakes squealed.

  The parcel contained cigarettes, a tin of cola chocolate, some fruit loaf with candied lemon peel and a photograph of the ruins of their house. Walter threw Fiete, who was sitting on a stool dabbing at the blisters on his feet, a pack of Overstolz cigarettes. Little Sven Jacobsen from Elmshorn, who had been in the bunk above Walter’s for two days, whistled through his teeth. ‘You seem to be doing all right!’ he whispered. ‘I’d like a mother like that.’

  The house in Essen was only a pile of bricks now; a piece of chimney and the stairs protruded from it and Leni’s harmonium lay in the garden, or rather the charred remains of it did. ‘My mother’s doing all right, anyhow,’ Walter said, and shoved the tin of chocolate under his pillow. ‘She has a new crush, an undertaker, and I keep getting cigarettes.’ He handed Sven a pack as well, and sat down at the table with his letter. ‘The only problem is that I don’t smoke.’

  His mother had used a blue pen. She must have licked the tip from time to time; the first letters of certain words were a slightly deeper colour:

  I’m glad you’re still in the barracks. Maybe the final victory will come soon and you won’t ever have to leave! Everything’s in a state of chaos here. Thank heavens we were in the bunker when the bomb fell. Herbert is good to us, we help him in the shop. He always has a lot of coffin makers around, because people are always dying, as they put it so nicely, but at the moment, sadly, he’s got even more than usual. His house, the gatehouse at the old cemetery, you know it, hasn’t been touched so far. There’s a door in the basement leading even further down, into the catacombs. It used to be cisterns – the water store for the brewery! – and now they have bones stacked in it, gruesome. But there’s no better place in an air raid, you hardly feel a quiver.

  I haven’t heard a thing from your father – luckily, I almost said. That thing about demotion is probably true. Old Krüger, who also works in Dachau and is on holiday here because of the direct hit, confirmed the story for me. Apparently, your father gave some cigarettes to those criminals or whoever is locked up in there, half a pack of Ecksteins. One of the other guards spilled some beer during a card game, and the butts were put on the stove to dry. They almost fried to a crisp and so no one wanted to smoke them. Your father gave them to the inmates, and for that they shipped him who knows where.

  The light changed, and Walter looked up; a truck with a wood carburettor was pulling up outside the hut.

  And many Happy Returns! If you need anything let me know. We are doing reasonably well, Herbert sets his own prices. No one can tell me how many marks I need to handle a corpse, he always says, and it’s true! Sometimes I smell something on his hands, but maybe it’s my imagination, because he’s very clean. And now I will stop. (Good heavens, eighteen . . . Do you have a photograph of yourself, in uniform?) Warmest greetings from your M.

  Walter turned the damp socks and caps over on the flue and pushed the letter into the embers. A draught whistled through the cracks in the window and, even though it was still pouring rain, the women came out from under the porch and began unloading sacks from the truck. Where the sacks were open, papers, rusty tins and ragged prison uniforms spilled out, which they gathered up before dragging everything to the water-filled clay pit, which didn’t seem to be very deep. The contents sank just below the muddy surface, and for a moment it looked as if the guard’s dog, a Rottweiler, was running over the top of the water.

  The door was pushed open, a stool fell over. The recruits, almost all in black training uniforms with runes on their chests, jumped from their beds and stood at attention. Some groaned, and Untersturmführer Dr Rapp, ‘the snapper’, as they called him, briefly raised his arm in salute before examining the feet of his men, sore from the forced march. Grinning, he turned on the ceiling light.

  He had a medical bag with him, and put a razor, a packet of cotton wool and a handful of small metal ink-stamps peppered with needles on the table. Then he uncorked a chemist’s bottle, poured a clear liquid into two kidney-shaped bowls and unscrewed a bottle of ink. ‘So, listen here,’ he said, lowering himself onto the chair. ‘You’re going to get a tattoo of your blood group. A soldier should always have it in his head, but who knows where your heads are right now . . . A little joke. Show me the inside of your left upper arm and get ready for a tiny little prick.’

  He took off his cap, looked at a piece of paper and nodded to the pockmarked Jörn Asmussen, the senior soldier in the quarters. After disinfecting the spot with cotton wool, the doctor dipped the appropriate stamp in some ink, pulled the skin taut with thumb and forefinger and stuck in the needles to the hilt. Then he handed the man a plaster and crossed his name off a list. ‘Incidentally, you may have to get rid of that mark, some day,’ he said. ‘History is capricious. In that case I advise you to stub out a cigarette on it. Sturmanwärter Caroli, A-positive, step forward!’

  Fiete rolled up his sleeve and hobbled to the table; the officer looked up at him, shaking his head. ‘Well look at this, if it isn’t our aesthete. Dance shoes too tight again last night? Iodine may help, son, but it’ll heal faster if you piss on your feet.’ A few recruits sniggered as the doctor took some cotton wool from the packet and used it to wipe the face of his watch: ‘I’m not joking, men, it’s true. Urine is sterile if you’re healthy. Pee on your wounds, even in the field, and everything will heal three times as fast.’

  He pressed the stamp into Fiete’s skin, and the boy closed his eyes tight and groaned through gritted teeth, ‘I wish to report, Untersturmführer, that I’ve also got
blisters on my heels.’

  The officer, lips pursed, studied the bloody tips of his needles and nodded. ‘Yes, that’s tough, I quite understand . . . And of course it takes a manhood of remarkable dimensions and a bit of flexibility not to spill it all over yourself.’ He winked at the assembled company. ‘You’ll just have to get someone else to piss on your feet, won’t you?’

  Some pulled faces, others laughed, and even Fiete grinned. He rested his hands on the table, almost touching the officer’s cap, accepted the plaster and asked amid the general hilarity, ‘Are we actually still going to be deployed, Dr Rapp?’

  Immediately they all fell silent, and their superior threw the stamp into one of the bowls. Then he leaned back in his chair, clasped his fingers over his belt buckle and looked at Fiete’s hands until he drew them back. ‘Still?’ the doctor asked, frowning. ‘What do you mean still, Candidate Caroli? How am I supposed to understand that word?’ He smiled vaguely, almost wistfully; spruce logs crackled in the stove. ‘Should I understand it at all?’

  He dismissed Fiete with a nod, and after all the men had been tattooed he walked to the sink in the corner, washed out the stamps and bowls and put them back in his bag. Finally, he snapped his fingers: ‘So, candidates, listen up!’ He waited until everyone was at attention, and looked past the recruits to the pit outside. His lids hung wearily over his pupils. ‘Of course you will not be deployed,’ he said in an almost paternal tone, and there were sighs of relief from the men. Fiete winked at Walter.

  ‘That’s about the stupidest question you could’ve asked! You already are being deployed,’ he went on. ‘This is the end of basic training, even though you’ve spent only three weeks in barracks instead of the usual three months – you can now call yourselves members of the Waffen-SS. Your company, with all of its Scharführers, will join the troops outside Budapest; at nine p.m. the transporters will be in the yard. Beds are to be stripped, cupboards cleared. I don’t want to see a toothpick left here! Sieg Heil!’

  He reached for his bag and turned to leave. When the door had closed behind him, many of the young men dropped onto their beds and cursed quietly. Fiete swept a few chess pieces from the board with the back of his hand, then lit a cigarette and joined Walter at the window. Walter was eating a piece of the fruit loaf, letting it slowly dissolve on his tongue.

  The rain rattled against the glass, which was cracked – a silver line. All the sacks were now in the pit. In the huts over by the pit – you could only see the rooftops, a few chimneys, no smoke – a bugle sounded for evening roll call, and the women, whose clothes stuck to their backs, slowly pushed the wagon back up the steep slope. The dog snuffled at their legs.

  The puddles outside quivered in a breeze, the long roots of bushes and trees dangling from the various exposed layers of earth swayed, and Walter wiped condensation from the pane of glass, closing his eyes tightly. For a heartbeat he could still believe that he hadn’t seen what he thought he’d seen through the mottled glass, and he nudged Fiete in disbelief. But something was definitely moving in the pond, there was twitching under the mud-coloured jute; a knee could be discerned, perhaps an elbow, the suggestion of a thin face. And a moment later it was under the water.

  *

  Dear Elisabeth, we have to leave here after all, so I’m writing to you quickly, because this is my last chance. My time here has been torture, but at least I’ve got my driving licence, for all classes of vehicle, which is also valid in civilian life. So you can start choosing what I will soon be driving you about in. Maybe an armoured car? I received your card, you’re very lazy. Even my sister sends me more mail and she has tuberculosis. What do you mean by ‘One, two, three’? I can just about imagine, but it would be nicer if you could write it out in a letter. I hear from old Thamling that you have to do the cows now, and that serves you right. You’ll be able to see how hard we work. Fiete sends his best, of course he had a dirty joke at the ready, something about milking stools and so on. Now we’re packing our stuff, we’re off to Hungary, and once we have a field post number I’ll send it to you so that you can write to me. Or you can go to the central issuing agency in Erfurt and write ‘at the front’ underneath my name, and that will get there too. Unless I’m ‘under the ground’ by then. But I don’t believe I will be, because I have this one clear memory that protects me. One, two, three.

  *

  During the night they had reached the outskirts of Ingolstadt, where the forty men in the platoon were to be quartered in a workshop warehouse; a barn on the edge of a forest. It had been freezing on the back of the transporter, so everyone was crowding round the stove and getting snapped at because they were in the way. The previous evening a medical unit had set off too early and found themselves in the sights of American fighter-bombers: the survivors, some of them in bandages, were working with the men from the maintenance troop to repair their van – a badly riddled Opel Blitz with a box body – so sleep was out of the question amid all the sawing, hammering and soldering.

  The troops sat around on bales of straw and smoked, and when volunteers were needed to fetch food from the village, almost all of them put their hands up. The two lidded enamel buckets needed two soldiers each to carry them, on shoulder poles, and Egon Vatteroth, their Scharführer, pushed his cap off his forehead and scoured the thinly clouded sky before waving them through the gate towards the country road. ‘Keep your eyes open!’ he called after them. ‘I don’t want to be left with a hotpot of human flesh. The Yanks have impeccable targeting devices – they’ll shoot the cigs out of your mouths.’

  He had selected Ole and Harry Laatz, twins from near Plön, as well as Walter and skinny Paul Jeppsen, and the men walked quickly down the path; a lane through yellow grass that wetted their coats. They stuck closely to the pollarded willows by the ditch, their broom-like buds already blossoming here and there, and Paul, a farmer’s son from somewhere near Husum, pulled off a twig and said, ‘Someone should cut off these witches’ brooms, or they’ll turn into weeping willows.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Ole, who shared a shoulder pole with Walter. ‘Leave something for the bees. No need to do anything before the catkins are out.’ The twins, who barely resembled one another, came from the country; freckled Ole had been doing an engineering apprenticeship in Flensburg when he’d been collected from the courtyard of the technical college three weeks earlier and brought straight to the barracks. ‘Our father often trimmed them in the winter, because there was nothing else to do. And then we had to weave them into those bloody fences, like women. Wasn’t that a pain, Harry?’

  ‘Nah, not really,’ said his brother. ‘I liked doing it. ’Specially if Hilde was there.’ He looked at Walter. A bit plumper than his brother, he had been attending the agricultural college in Kiel; soldiers from the Frundsberg Division had surrounded the Gloria Cinema and declared all the men who came out to be volunteers. ‘Our cousin, Hildchen, remember? You’ve never seen anything so filthy. She pulled the bark from the slippery willow branches like it was a condom and . . .’ He groaned. ‘I can’t put it into words. I went to see that film with her, Romance in a Major Key or whatever it was called, back row. And guess where my hands were?’

  ‘Shut up!’ hissed Paul, and they all stopped and stared into the clouds, which were scattered against the pale blue March sky – but he just squeezed out a fart, a high note like the sound of a toy trumpet, and they walked on laughing. The path turned into a paved road leading downhill between hop fields, and the sound of their heels grew louder as they passed through a railway embankment. In the dip behind the tunnel was the village, four or five farmhouses, a pub and a brightly painted church. The wall below the onion-shaped dome was supported by struts, and you could see into the belfry to the empty headstock. A hawk crouched between the rafters.

  Two Wehrmacht motorbikes stood outside the pub, uncamouflaged. The heavy door creaked on its hinges and as the boys stepped into a corridor full of cupboards and dressers they were surrounded by a cool silence, filled
with the smell of yeast and cooking fruit. The black stone slabs on the floor shimmered in the candlelight that flickered in front of a crucifix, a poster on the wall showed the crooked shadow of a man with a hat and a turned-up collar. Ole called out, ‘Heil Hitler, my friends! Is anyone there? We’re the soup troop.’

  Pigs squealed somewhere. At the end of the passageway a door was pushed open and a young woman in a sleeveless apron came out of the stable. ‘Damn. You lot here already?’ Her hair was tied up at the back of her neck and for a moment it looked as if she was wearing red gloves. There was fresh blood on her rubber boots as well, and when she noticed the boys staring at her bare knees she couldn’t help chuckling. ‘We’re slaughtering,’ she said, and pointed with her knife to the kitchen, where a stone pot sat on the fire. ‘Help yourselves. There are bags of bread in the bedroom.’

  The stable door closed. Splashes of grease on the kitchen wall ran in the patch of sunlight that fell through a barred window and trickled away into the shade. ‘Well, heavens above,’ said Ole, bending over the pot. ‘What sort of soup is this supposed to be? Looks like tomorrow’s shit, doesn’t it?’

  The over-boiled lentil stew, with black onions floating on the surface, smelled like vinegar, and while occasional slices of potato were apparent, not a single piece of meat could be found. ‘No,’ his brother replied and licked his finger. ‘Yesterday’s.’

  Paul took a few ladles from the pile of cutlery in the sink, and while his comrades scooped the tepid brew into their buckets, Walter opened the hatch and peered into the pub. It was gloomy in there too, in spite of the bright noon hour; in the thick walls the windows looked like arrow slits. A fair-haired boy in knee breeches, sitting on a stool and reading, replied to Paul’s ‘Heil!’ with a timid ‘Grüss Gott!’ He let his feet dangle in his alpine shoes and glanced once towards the stove in the corner, a warning nod.