To Die in Spring Read online

  The doves had fallen silent. Light grey and white feathers floated down from the loft and whirled up again in the breeze, and the two Sturmmänner looked to Walter. ‘That’s all there is to it,’ the bald one said with his hands on his hips. ‘No big deal, is it? Kind of thing you should do at least once in your life. Come on, the woman’s yours.’

  Fredo now hung motionless, with a trickle of dark blood at the corner of his mouth, and even though the Sturmmänner were senior in rank, Walter tapped his forehead – a quick and instinctive movement. His hand shook as he did so, and he turned round and walked to the car. ‘Oho!’ called the man with the silk scarf. ‘So we’ve got a choirboy here. Won’t sully his spotless soul. I don’t suppose you do confession? Fine, as you wish, the old woman can stay where she is. Leave her for the rats.’

  Shots could be heard in the mountains, the echo of fighting in the valley. After all the parachutes, bottles and ammunition bags had finally been stowed in the boot, and the men had sat down on the back seat beside their superior officer, Walter turned the key in the ignition and looked in the rear-view. Smoke was rising from the house, and the Rottenführer was polishing the stock of his sub-machine gun with his sleeve and blowing the dust out of the holes in its barrel jacket, making a fluting sound. They had left the blind woman as she was, suspended between the two hanged men, with blood running from their eyes and shit and urine dripping from her feet. Shadows on her sunken lids, her grey face wrinkled, the woman tilted her head and moved her lipless mouth – or was she only trembling? The legs of her stool wobbled, and Walter could hear her calling quietly, again and again, not at all urgent or frantic, but as she had probably done all her life – as if her husband were just in the next room: ‘Kristóf?’

  Her voice was surprisingly bright, almost girlish, and Walter shifted into gear and drove into the road. The suspension of the heavy car groaned. ‘Women have all the luck,’ the officer said. ‘Her partisan pals are probably waiting somewhere in the bushes, and they’ll fetch her down in a minute, so that she can make goulash for them . . .’ He leaned forward and tapped the triangle on Walter’s sleeve, which identified his corps. ‘Listen, noble Samaritan, there’s something I’ve always wanted to know: why do bright, strong lads like you go running around with the light-blue guys? Why are you bringing bread rolls to the front rather than fighting with the troops?’

  Walter shrugged and said nothing. He drove through a puddle, the axle banged, water splashed up before the wayside cross. ‘Well, because we’ve got our driving licences,’ August answered for him and scoured the sky with the field glasses. ‘Even in wartime, traffic from the right has right of way, Rottenführer.’

  The officer laughed, a barking laugh, and smacked August’s helmet with the flat of his hand. ‘Not bad, son . . . You’re pretty smart, aren’t you? A student or something, I saw that straight away. But they’ll rip you a new arsehole along with everyone else. How are you fixed up at the farm?’

  August glanced quickly over at Walter, and he shifted into the next gear and said, ‘Supply position A, military hospital operation. There are beds for the senior ranks. It used to be one of General Balck’s command posts. In the former library at the manor house there’s an officers’ mess, complete with samovar and easy chairs. And you can play billiards too.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ cried the other man, removing his prosthetic nose and shaking it out in the breeze. Silver clips protruded from the hole in the bone. ‘Did you hear that? That’s how the supply troops live! We’re knee-deep in the guts of our enemies and they’ve got beds! And books! Ah, wouldn’t it be nice to lose ourselves in a good book? I’ve always been a big fan of Karl May. Winnetou’s pupils are keener than a hawk’s.’ He fixed his prosthesis back on, put a cigarette in his mouth and asked casually, ‘But listen, boys, if you’re so well equipped, enjoying all that luxury, why do you need that old stool so badly? Why are we dragging it along behind us?’

  Walter, frowning, braked abruptly and turned his head to look. August pushed his helmet back. The bald Sturmmann scratched the fuller of his bayonet clean with his thumbnail. The one with the handkerchief gazed wearily into the landscape. Their superior officer sparked his lighter.

  The old woman’s stool, only three-legged now, lay a few metres behind the car in a puddle, and Walter tried to take deep breaths as he got out of the car and walked to the tow hitch. His knife was blunt; he bared his teeth as he cut the rope, and blinked into the sky, where a thin stream of smoke was drifting westwards, but from down here there was no longer any sign of the barn, just part of the mill tower; its shattered roof, in which the wind was ruffling the breast-feathers of the pigeons.

  *

  Dear Liesel, I hope you got my last letter. I’ve been waiting for your mail for a while, and if you wrote to me in Hamburg-Langenhorn I’ll probably have to wait a bit longer. We’re in the field now, in Hungary, I’m not allowed to tell you the name of the town. But I don’t have to go to the front line. I’m currently driving a Henschel and bringing supplies to the soldiers. The wine here is good and cheap, forty pfennigs a litre, and everyone drinks all day, even the drivers. In the Puszta it looks like back home, mostly flat, but there are mountains too, and things happen there that I’d rather not talk about. That’s what war is like. The locals are on our side, many speak German. They even have a Hitler Youth and a BDM, and if you ask the girls what that means they say ‘Boy, Do Me’. But don’t worry, I’ll be true to you. You be true to me too. You can get the piece of lavender soap out of my room before it dries out, Thamling won’t mind. They have lovely blouses here, with brightly coloured embroidery, write and tell me your size. My field post number is now 47704.

  Don’t smoke too much, it makes your teeth grey. And again: One, two, three. You know what that means.

  *

  They ran and hid wherever they could as soon as they heard the sound. When the low-flying planes with the red stars on their wings fired their guns, it sounded like someone quilting cardboard: as if strips of pasteboard were being drawn through a Singer sewing machine. They were single-engine Ilyushins, painted a dull, dark green, and only the experienced onlooker could tell that they were now flying with an extra gunner who could also lay down fire to the rear. Until this lesson was learned, many of the relieved survivors who emerged from cover as soon as the shadowy crosses had passed them by were seen to sink abruptly to the ground – often a heartbeat before the machine-gun noise even reached them.

  By now reinforcements were stationed in Tata – Totis in German – in the basements of the massive fortress, and every night the supply group drove over the mountains bringing food, fuel and ammunition to the Schambeck Plain. Despite the fact that ground ambushes in this area were nearly non-existent, there were still enormous losses on those terrible roads, which were bombed by the Russians every day and then repaired every night by army engineers again and again. The mountain passes, barely wide enough for a single vehicle, would crumble away, tipping over the trucks carrying wounded, or simply plunging them into a gorge. Traffic jams often formed, sometimes lasting all night, till the morning, when the oak woods – ordinarily dense but in March still relatively bare – offered little cover from the planes.

  Walter drove his truck slowly past the remains of a devastated supply column. Tyres smoked, dead soldiers hung from the cabs, mountains of bread were disintegrating in the rain. He had to brake and reverse repeatedly to manoeuvre the three-tonner around tight bends, sometimes skidding and crashing into trees or cliff walls, which would set off the groaning of the wounded lying on the flatbed behind him. Even though it was cool in the late evening, Walter started to sweat.

  The infantryman sitting next to him in the cab – a fair-haired lad with a high forehead and thin lips – held out an open tube. The kid’s head and right eye were bandaged, but he could still walk and move both arms. Any other soldier in his situation would have been given a tetanus injection and sent back into battle, but his father, Hauptsturmführer Greiff, comma
nder of the supply unit, had probably pulled some strings. ‘No thanks,’ Walter said, glancing at the infantryman’s yellow pills. ‘Doesn’t do my nerves much good. I’ve tried, believe me. After one Pervitin I was awake for three days. My heart was hammering away somewhere up in the clouds.’

  Jochen was the boy’s name. He grinned: ‘That’s the point of the things. They’re probably why I’m still alive. If you want to sleep you’ve got to take Veronal. Want some?’

  He took out another battered aluminium tube and again Walter shook his head. Jochen shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, the stuff makes you randy,’ he confided. ‘You take a few Pervitin and you can only think about fucking, even stuck in all this shit. Your comrade’s blood spurts in your face, you ram your bayonet into Ivan’s belly, and as soon as you can breathe again you’re dreaming of bubble-baths and plump arses. Even though it makes you completely numb down there, like an old man. You’re in your early twenties and you can’t get it up.’

  It was getting dark, and when they reached the mountain top Walter turned the headlights on. The strips of light that passed through the truck’s headlight covers were just enough to let Walter see the bare minimum in the rain: wreckage, rubble, the edge of an abyss. The rubber on the windscreen wipers had worn away, their bare metal arms scratching the misted glass, so Walter and Jochen were both busy trying to rub the condensation away with their sleeves when the brakes jammed. The heavy Henschel 33 skidded some way across the gravel, ending up at an angle, and Walter shifted into reverse to take the pressure off the eroded brake pads. Even so, the brake pedal wouldn’t budge; cursing, Walter turned off the engine.

  He shifted into gear and got some tools out of the box. There was a sound of rushing and gurgling in the darkness, water poured across the road in narrow streams. Carrying a carbide lamp, Walter crept under the truck and hammered off the rusty nuts, unscrewing the pipes from the encrusted drums. After he had drained the fluid he started the engine again, and the pedal flapped against the floor of the cab. He drove slowly onwards into the valley, almost without putting his foot on the accelerator, and only in second gear, because he could only stop the truck with the handbrake and the gears now. The engine wailed and a jolt ran through the passengers’ limbs.

  Jochen pressed his feet against the metal of the dashboard and lit a papirosa. His cigarette holder was twice as long as the cigarette itself and, coughing, he held his head. ‘Bloody steppe weeds,’ he said. ‘Stinks like burning mattresses, doesn’t it? We’ll soon be smoking these in the camps, if we’re smoking anything at all. Have you got any real cigarettes left? Secret supplies?’

  Walter knew all about the hidden stores, but only said, ‘How should I know? You’d need to ask your dad.’

  The boy took another drag, and in the glow of the Machorka tobacco his uninjured eye looked feverish. ‘My dad . . . of all people. I wouldn’t ask him for a glass of water, the bastard. It’s his fault that I’ve got to walk around with a black eye patch for the rest of my life. I could have spent the whole war on easy street! Army research institute in Kummersdorf, not far from home. My mother wangled that one, she liked me more than him, and that pissed the old fellow off. He was worried I’d go soft, that I’d turn into one of them. Always nice cold showers, raw meat on bread and let me at the enemy, you know the drill. Old school.’

  Bending forward, he spat on the floor between his feet. ‘He knows Sepp Dietrich and had me transferred. Kampfgruppe Ney – all fat bastards and sadists. That toughened me up, of course. But I turned back into a fairy, even at the front. When you’re in fear for your life you see it all rushing past before your eyes, and I wrote to tell him that, too. But now that my mother’s dead and our house in Jena is a pile of ashes, he’s getting sentimental and clinging to family. I couldn’t give a damn, believe me.’

  The bend in the road ahead of them had been unevenly repaired, and to bring their speed down Walter shifted into first gear. He struck the stick with the ball of his hand, and the moaning in its ancient mechanism, as well as the sound of tearing metal, made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. ‘Where were you fighting?’ he asked. ‘In Stuhlweissenburg as well?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jochen. ‘Mid-February. A hellhole, more than a quarter of the regiment snuffed it. Ivan with absolute air supremacy, and not so much as a fart from our planes. And no supplies either, we ate bloody bread from the breadbags of the dead. And once we’d lost the dump we were told we were unworthy to bear the name of the division. Führer decree: cuff bands removed!’ He grunted mockingly. ‘He’d probably forgotten that they’d been taken off a long time ago; exactly who was to be sent to the front was going to be kept secret until the actual attack – another order from above. But our Adolf doesn’t do things by halves: every enemy must be beheaded twice. Why do you ask about Stuhlweissenburg?’

  Walter said nothing. They passed the bend, and when he was about to shift up again the stick wouldn’t move, not even with Jochen’s help. They both tugged on it, the stem vibrated, kicked away, the gear wheels crunched, suddenly the axis was spinning at idle and they heard the click of broken iron teeth in the gear box. ‘Great, that’s that,’ Walter said, turning the truck off. The strips of light across the bushes ahead of them went out. ‘It’s going to be a cold night out here.’

  He pulled the handbrake. As far as he could see, they had reached the edge of the forest. Jochen wound the side window down. The sound of rain, amplified by the tarpaulin over the flatbed, was deafening. Jochen flipped his cigarette out the window and exclaimed, ‘You mean we’ve got to stay here? In the middle of nowhere?’

  Walter looked at his watch, its phosphorus numbers. ‘Where else? They’ll send someone if we don’t come back, but it could be a while. I once had to spend two nights in the steppes, without any kind of cover. I dug myself a hole. But in case you were thinking of running, it’s twenty kilometres to Totis, a good day’s march. There probably aren’t many partisans but the area’s swarming with military police, the kind who like to pick up stragglers.’ He put a finger to his temple. ‘They’ll show you the way.’

  Water poured, foaming, down the slope. Walter got out, walked around the truck carrying a carbide lamp and untied one corner of the tarpaulin. Six men lay on the straw that the orderlies had scattered over the metal truck-bed; one had a splinted leg, another a splinted arm tied to a bar on the back of the truck. Almost all of them turned – heads close-cropped because of lice – when the beam from the lamp fell on them: big eyes in dirty faces, terrified expressions. Walter said, ‘We’ve got engine damage, sorry. Somebody will probably pick us up soon. Chuck us your canteens, there’s gallons of fresh water here.’

  After he had seen to the men – a bandage had to be retied and shitty straw scraped from the truck-bed – he washed his hands and climbed back into the cab. He adjusted the ventilation, put his lamp under the dashboard. Jochen took a small but ornate glass bottle from his knapsack. ‘Russian vodka,’ he said, cutting the wax off the cork. ‘My last prisoner was an officer. He showed me a picture of his children and gave me this hooch . . . I’d have let him go, all things being equal. He spoke a bit of German. But our dear comrades . . . Forget it.’ He handed Walter the flat bottle with its grand decorations. ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

  He was sliding up close to him, too close, and Walter lifted his elbow, a mute threat. He sniffed the neck of the bottle and sipped the vodka, but couldn’t taste anything. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said, running his fingers along the Cyrillic letters. ‘Her name’s Elisabeth, Liesel.’ After the next swig, a bigger one, he coughed, and felt a faint burning, a warming stream deep in his chest. ‘She lives on the farm where I worked. She fled with her mother from the area around Danzig, and she’s cheeky, she is, like a gypsy girl. But she did go to middle school.’

  Jochen laughed and dug out a new Papirossa. ‘Well, then . . .’ Removing the filter he sank back against his fur-covered knapsack. ‘My father was always trying to set me up with one of his colleagues’ daughters.
He’s an architect in civilian life, and probably thought I could take over his company some day. But I hate all that right-angled crap. I tend to live in a muddle at home. I wanted to be a painter, to roam around the world wherever I liked and magic up pictures of whatever pleased me . . . But now I can bury that aspiration along with the rest. Or have you ever seen a one-eyed painter?’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘So how’s your old man? Is he in the forces too?’

  Walter nodded. ‘He’s in the Waffen-SS as well, a camp guard. Last I heard, though, he was in a punishment battalion just outside Stuhlweissenburg. No idea if he’s still alive. Haven’t heard anything for ages.’

  Jochen drank the vodka as if it was water. His Adam’s apple jerked up and down. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much about that one. The whole area is one big military cemetery. When the tank tracks turn and burrow in the dirt, Russian and German bones fly in the air. But perhaps he’ll be lucky, we’ve just retaken the town. It’s actually quite pretty there, old buildings covered with stucco and gold. Except that these Hungarian Germans have a screw loose, at least the men do. They all have little square moustaches and side partings. There’s a Hitler in every post office.’

  He took a few more quick and greedy drags on his cigarette, crunched on two Veronals and washed them down with the rest of the vodka. The bottle smashed in the darkness, and Walter took a matted blanket down from the luggage net and said, ‘My father has a snot mop like that too. But he’s never been political, he was just looking for work. And with that moustache he got taken on straight away . . .’

  Jochen smiled wearily, pulled off his jackboots and curled up in his coat on the seat of the truck, farting brazenly. He wrapped his arms firmly in front of his chest, and after a few minutes he was breathing so regularly that Walter was surprised when he raised his head once more: ‘I liked it best at Balaton,’ he said thickly. ‘That light over the lake and between the trees . . . There was some peace there, believe me! More powerful than any number of shells!’