To Die in Spring Read online

  Then he fell asleep and Walter turned the light out. Wrapped in his blanket, he sat awake for a few more minutes, listening to the rain. The effect of the vodka was already fading, and the cold was creeping up into his legs. In the dark, the wounded groaned or coughed up phlegm, and once a young, almost childlike voice said, as if asleep, ‘Mama, help me.’ The soldier who had said it must have been lying directly behind Walter, and seemed to be scratching at the wooden side of the truck, now quietly repeating, ‘Why won’t you help me?’ Walter wrapped himself tighter in the rough material.

  It was the sudden silence that woke him. Rain was no longer rattling against the truck, the foaming torrent beside the road had become a smoothly flowing stream. Mist crept up the slope and the countless rectangular fishponds in the valley already had a silver-grey shimmer. Shivering, Walter stretched his limbs and rubbed his face. Jochen was wheezing quietly, his knapsack bunched up under his neck and his blanket drawn up over his chin. He looked peaceful and relaxed; his beautiful mouth – feminine in spite of the stubble – seemed to be smiling, but the pupils beneath his closed lids moved tirelessly. A few soldiers on the flatbed were snoring.

  Slowly the horizon took shape. Individual poplar trees and the top of a church tower loomed into the strip of dawn which moved so evenly across the black plain that it had a curved appearance. A thrush perched on the highest branch of a birch tree by the edge of the field and replied to the birdsong coming from the forest. From time to time it flapped its wings or hopped on the spot, which made it look rough or angry, cresting furiously as if it didn’t like the echo one bit.

  In the distance a lone fighter-bomber was heading north. Its engine couldn’t be heard from the slope; the only way of telling that its guns were firing was the smoke that rose up here and there. The plane grew smaller and Walter unbuttoned the breast pocket of his jacket, in which there was a tin still containing some cola chocolates, and put one of the triangles in his mouth. The blue-jay feather was in the tin as well; he ran his thumb along the edge, and just as it occurred to him that the bonnet of the Henschel was pointing east, and the windscreen must have been reflecting the morning light – a spark against the damp black forest – the plane turned towards him.

  He nudged his sleeping companion, shouted his name, but Jochen didn’t react, and Walter jumped out and ran around the front of the cab. Wrenching open the door, he reached under Jochen’s armpits and pulled him a little way out. The boy groaned indignantly and lashed out. The reflection of the Ilyushin darted towards them across the ponds in the valley, the engine could be heard now, and Walter gripped Jochen more tightly, wrapped his arms around the woozy soldier and fell back against the slope. The truck’s windows burst, and shots riddled its chassis. The perforating rattle was followed by the cold ping of ricochets, and the wounded men screamed when two tyres burst and the truck, with a hissing jolt, tilted to one side.

  The tarpaulins too had been shredded, and now the red stars on the plane’s wings were right overhead. The bomb bay seemed to be empty and Walter and Jochen could see the tail-gunner’s boots, the pale fur around the legs: his gunfire ripped bark from the oaks and hacked holes in the gravel of the road, before he too passed out of range, over the Henschel. Jochen tried to get up. Walter, however, refused to let go, twigs and roots hanging from his face, ditch water flowing into his boots, listening after the single-engine plane – which didn’t turn. Once it had left the mountain ridge behind, it was quiet again in the forest. The morning mist was gradually departing. Light shone through the pale leaves.

  The truck-bed too was quiet. Walter pushed Jochen away and leaped to his feet, tearing aside what was left of the tarpaulins. The ridge pole was bent and the metal-covered planks between the beds of straw had thumb-thick holes in them through which blood was dripping onto the road and mixing there with spilled petrol. None of the men reacted to his shouts; he climbed up and stepped over the contorted bodies. Their eyes were filled with such sudden horror or incredulous amazement that it made them look still awake and alive, but a gravity was already settling over their grey faces, which no longer seemed of this world and so left no doubt. An officer with the new Iron Cross pinned on the bandage tied across his chest was clutching a photograph of a smiling girl in his fist, and after Walter had checked his and every other soldier’s necks for a pulse, he broke off the perforated dog tags on their chains and put the loose halves in his pocket.

  He climbed down from the bed and took a shovel and a pickaxe from the cab. ‘Right, then,’ he said, half whispering, as if the dead men might hear him, ‘help me dig.’ But Jochen didn’t reply, didn’t even turn round. He stood in the road in his stocking feet, took the tube of pills out of his coat and shook it close to his ear, staring all the while down into the plain where smoke was rising from the chimneys of the peasants’ cottages and fish were leaping from the ponds into the red dawn.

  *

  A week later the first basements and storerooms in Totis were cleared as well. The men from the driving unit were lodged in the houses beyond the moat, but none of the guards on the bridge challenged Walter when he set off in the opposite direction, towards the English Garden. Curfew had begun, and where possible he avoided the road and walked close by fences, bushes or piles of rubble. Silence behind the closed shutters, not a person to be seen.

  It had turned cold again; ice rimmed the puddles. Walter could see very well in the dark, he could even see the garden paths between the roads, but he only noticed the motorcycle and sidecar at the last moment, and stepped behind a tree. Quieter than the rain, the soldiers were rolling the bike down the Schlossberg; it was only at the bottom of the road that the driver started the engine, skidding on the glistening cobblestones.

  The big iron gate was open; Walter stuck close to the pines, only looking up when there was a sudden noise overhead, a loud twittering and rustling in the sleeping trees of the park. The requisitioned cattle in the pavilions and chapels began lowing, dogs barked, and only then did the air-raid siren sound – the old siren on the tower, operated by a crank. Its sound was amplified by the Burgsee as the big spotlights on Calvary Hill, steaming in the rain, swept the clouds.

  Most of the windows of the palm house had been covered with boards. Mossy amphorae that had formerly decorated the roof of the baroque building lay shattered in the gravel. The field hospital was a transit station; anyone who didn’t have to go back to the front was sent on after swift emergency treatment, towards Graz or Vienna. Hungarian-German nuns sat in the pillared hall to the front of the building, washing bandages in tubs and smoking; a doctor, his stained white coat open over his uniform, shaving at a mirror, studied Walter mutely. Walter answered his imagined question with a nod.

  All the beds and straw mattresses that Walter walked past were occupied. Only a few lamps hung in the big room, which was divided by curtains, and aside from the usual field-hospital smell of gangrene and carbolic soap there was a faint scent of lemons or oranges. White blossoming trees stood in wooden tubs in the corners, there were bright pink and red camellias, and young bananas hung from a palm; the marble floor was heated by the warm springs of the town. Here and there men sat on the floor beside their beds, and when Walter pulled one curtain aside Fiete raised his head and grinned.

  There was a new seriousness in his grey-ringed eyes, and his teeth were strangely chalky and seemed to be wider apart than before. His scalp stubbly, his left arm in a sling, he was sitting under a narrow window packed shut with sandbags. Walter reached carefully for his good hand, but Fiete gripped him more firmly and drew him down to his mattress; straw spilled from the stitches of the striped fabric. ‘Don’t look so disheartened,’ he said and snapped a book shut. ‘I’m not about to kick the bucket. Didn’t you bring flowers?’

  He wore uniform trousers and a sports shirt with SS runes, and his scalp was red with raw louse bites, some of them already pustular; his eyebrows had been shaved off, too. Walter pointed to his shoulder, to the clean white bandage: ‘Will that g
et you home?’

  Fiete clicked his tongue. ‘Come off it! It was just a piece of shrapnel below my shoulder blade. If the wound doesn’t get inflamed, I’ll soon be usable again. About a year ago that would have been enough to send you home, having treated you and everything. But now . . . I’ve seen machine-gunners on crutches and one-armed tank drivers!’ He opened his canteen and poured something into his beaker. ‘And by now everyone knows that this war is completely pointless. Our officers are throwing hand grenades after their own men to get them to attack.’ Fiete took a swig and asked, ‘So, what brings you here, milk soldier? Aren’t you with the transport department?’

  Walter, who was starting to feel uncomfortably warm, reached into his inside pocket. ‘I should be, yes. But we probably don’t have to go out tonight, at least not with ammunition. Our section is redrawing the main battle line, pulling it back.’ He looked around. ‘Of course we can’t call it “retreating”. They’re preparing a big push, that’s all, and to do that you have to have room to take a run-up, right?’ Winking, he handed Fiete a package. ‘Here, instead of flowers . . . I’m afraid I forgot the mustard.’

  Fiete opened his mouth, his cracked lips, rubbed his chin. Almost all his nails were gnawed down to the skin, and his fingers shook as he unwrapped the greaseproof paper around the smoked pork chop: a big end piece with herb stalks and juniper berries still clinging to it.

  ‘Dear God!’ He tilted his head, inhaled the fragrance of marjoram and bay, and his eyes glistened. ‘I always thought that dying was the worst thing at the front,’ Fiete said, and looked at his friend. ‘But it’s not true, Ata, it’s absolutely not true. If you’re lucky, dying is a snap of the fingers. Barely sleeping and never knowing if supplies are going to get through is much worse. The thought of being slaughtered when you’re hungry is almost unbearable. You want to eat your fill before you give up the ghost for nothing at all.’ Groaning quietly, he bit into the tender meat. ‘That is, I mean, for the Greater Germany, of course . . . Thanks, I owe you one.’

  Walter waved his hand dismissively. They could already hear the roar of the Russian Tupolev planes and the hissing quad-cannon that the anti-aircraft unit always fired in heavy clouds; they turned quickly on their own axes. Normally the bombers concentrated on the underground bunkers and munitions factories on the edge of town, but tonight there were direct hits nearby. Each blast made the boards over the windows rattle, made dust trickle from the cracks in the high vaulting painted with clouds and birds.

  The nuns ran over and switched off the carbide lamps. Their burners continued to glow for a moment longer, and even though it was impossible in all the noise – the guns firing, the wail of engines, the cries of animals – for a moment Walter thought he could hear the spring under the marble, its quiet gurgle. He took off his wristwatch. ‘My father fell,’ he said and stared into the darkness. ‘In a punishment battalion, not far from here. The telegram arrived the day before yesterday. Maybe he was more of a decent guy than I gave him credit for. But now I’ll never be able to tell him so.’

  Fiete raised his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Not something you’d wish on anyone . . . I’ve seen a few of those suicide battalions. The poor bastards get sent into the most god-awful messes – all just to distract an enemy machine gun . . . Did you get on with your father? Did you like him?’

  Walter puffed out his cheeks. ‘Well, he wasn’t exactly a role model. He drank and hit me and felt up my sister. But sometimes we went fishing together, in the Ruhr – he had a smoking stove in the basement. And his kites made of lantern paper always flew higher than anyone else’s. Once I was able to defend myself we barely spoke. But it’s funny – since I heard he was dead, my beard started growing a lot faster. No idea why. Have to shave every day, now. And there’s something wrong with me, I’m always scared, really terrified, before we go out.’

  Fiete drank some water. His parents had died in the air raids on Hamburg, and he leaned his head against the wall, where his jacket hung on a nail, and said, ‘I think that’s normal, Ata. And he must have loved you, fathers can’t help it. Just like you can’t help missing something once they’re gone. You’re really terrified for the first time, and you cry . . . But eventually it makes you stronger, too.’

  The glow of flames fell through the chinks in the boards, and Walter scratched the back of his hand and nodded. ‘I wouldn’t mind that . . .’ He pointed at the hardback book. ‘What’s that you’re reading? The Secret City? Is that allowed?’

  Fiete grinned. He swallowed the rest of the pork chop, licked the greaseproof paper and then his fingers. ‘Don’t worry, chief, they’re just poems, they won’t overthrow the state. I don’t suppose you’ve got a smoke?’

  Shaking his head, Walter flicked through the volume, which had occasional notes in its margin. Then he reached into his pocket and handed Fiete a flat box of Overstolz. ‘With best wishes from old Jörn. He might drop by tomorrow.’

  Fiete, overjoyed, clapped him on the shoulder and put a cigarette in his mouth. Just as he struck a match – tiny sparks leaped from its sulphurous head – it went quiet all around: a roaring vacuum between two heartbeats in which their eardrums throbbed and their breathing paused. And then a bomb exploded beside the orangery.

  A jolt shook the vault, big lumps of plaster shattered on the floor, the nurses screamed. Sheets were pulled aside, iron beds shifted, and those wounded who could still walk dragged themselves through the clouds of dust to the door. Walter jumped up too and helped his friend into his boots. Then he wrapped Fiete’s jacket around him, picked up the knapsack beside the bed and looked around in vain for Fiete’s coat. ‘Stolen,’ Fiete mumbled, and went outside.

  The sky over the park was bright. The burning air made their lungs ache and their eyes stream. The Russians had bombed the part of the town on the other side of the lake with phosphorus. Stuck to the melting tarmac, soldiers burned up in black smoke. Swathed in flames as if in ragged veils, women ran along the promenade, threw their burning children from the wall and jumped blindly after them. Trees blazed, bells sounded, but the arcing fountains sprayed by the firefighters evaporated before they reached their goal.

  The AA cannons echoed over the lake and from somewhere beyond them the wailing descent of a bomber that had been hit. Countless people rolled in the water, which seethed and hissed and steamed, but no sooner had they emerged and tottered back to shore than the chemical reacted again. The rubbery film on their skin burst into flame on contact with oxygen, a bluish flicker, and whenever these desperate men and women, whose cries rang out more and more shrilly across the water, tried to slap out these flames, the fire only clung to their hands as well, leaving them with no option but to sink back silently into the icy water.

  *

  The road led below some pine trees towards a small white-washed church. The windows were shattered, one half of the double doors open. The glow of flames from the city flickered over the church’s statues and paintings, and the cattle inside, not even twenty Hungarian greys with dark patches around their eyes, turned their heads. A few pews had been hammered together in the middle of the nave in such a way that each pair formed a manger from which the animals ate brownish silage. There was no straw anywhere; cow piss spattered right onto the mosaic floor and Fiete grimaced. ‘Just look at that. Old Thamling would crucify us if he saw such scrawny arses. Have the beasts been milked dry?’

  Legs bound, tied each to each, they had only just been clipped; a wheelbarrow of ribbed horns, each a good arm long, stood beside the altar. ‘Looks that way,’ Walter said, touching an udder. The hair-circled teats of the breed were stumpy and short and had to be gripped with the fingertips rather than the fist. ‘Or wait, here’s a pregnant one, very pregnant. She’ll be calving soon.’

  The wooden pails in the improvised mangers between the piles of food were empty but too dirty for use, and in the tabernacle there was nothing but a box of matches. Still, the shell-shaped b
asin of the font was removable, and once he had checked the pregnant cow’s fetters, Walter pushed the artfully carved tin bowl under her udders.

  Unlike many cows in her condition, which buck and kick out when you take the first milk from them, the milk that is crucial for their calf’s survival, this one was behaving very calmly; it even licked Fiete’s hand. Walter milked off a good litre, and then the two soldiers sat down and drank from it in turn beneath the Eternal Light that hung from the ceiling. The colostrum was thick as custard and run through with fine threads of blood – there’s nothing more invigorating – and after they had emptied the bowl they contemplated the emblem on the floor: a gryphon with a sabre in one claw and three roses in the other. Fidelis ad mortem, it said underneath. ‘Faithful unto death,’ Fiete translated. ‘Sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?’

  The guns had fallen silent, the bombers could no longer be heard, but the all clear still hadn’t been sounded. ‘Ortrud wrote,’ Fiete said and looked, smoking a cigarette, through the open church door. Even the reeds were burning; corpses drifted in the water, turned slowly in the current of the feeder streams. ‘They’re all at their wits’ end, too. The pub took a direct hit, the boat is gone. But they’re all safe. And now my girl’s thinking of a long-distance wedding. Had no idea there was such a thing. At the register office they put a helmet on the table, and that’s you.’

  He edged closer, and even though there wasn’t another soul in the room he lowered his voice. ‘How would you get away? What do you think? On a motorbike or something? So you can go in any direction you like?’