To Die in Spring Page 9

  But Walter said no. ‘I wouldn’t get away, at least not here. The roads are muddy, it’s all flat as far as the border, there’s nowhere to hide. The military police see everyone from a thousand metres away and they’ll hang you straight away, no trial. They’re real bastards. It’s probably less risky if you just stay put and try to keep your head down till the end.’ He pointed at Fiete’s arm. ‘Rub dirt in your wound – you might get fever and chills and then you’d be unfit for service. What some people do.’

  Fiete plucked something from the carpet on the altar steps. ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes our segment on “How to Have a Happy War”.’ His sombre voice made him sound like a cinema advertisement: ‘Rope too tight for you? Bullets too fast? Then why not try lovely sepsis! Three weeks of convulsions in a sickbed, nice and warm in your own shit, and at last you’ll hear the angels singing. Free to party members, and for regular people it’s available for the low, low price of one human life.’

  Walter grinned, waved the smoke away from his face. They both looked up as they heard the pews move beneath the rood loft, heard hoofs scrape across the floor and saw the half-naked figure of a saint, pierced by arrows, wobbling on its plinth. Again and again the animals shoved their muzzles into the empty buckets and Fiete, with a sigh, got up, struck a match and opened the door beside the confessional. The matchlight flame glided along a shelf full of chalices, cruets and other Mass paraphernalia, and suddenly there was the sound of something falling over, and he called out, ‘There’s a toilet in here, but no water. Not even the holy stuff.’

  Walter got to his feet and buttoned up his coat; the steppe cattle turned their heads when he reached for the handles of the wheelbarrow and tipped their long horns on the floor. Slightly curved, they rolled with a bright tinkling sound and came to rest beneath the pulpit; the noise hurt Walter’s teeth. He collected a few of the dirty buckets and hauled them in the barrow across the meadow outside, to the shore. The wide beams of the searchlights crossed the sky, and little individual flakes floated down from above; Walter took them at first for snow, but it was ash. After he had tried the water and cleaned the buckets, he scooped them full, put them in the wheelbarrow and wheeled them carefully back into the church. He had also hung two on the handles, though it wasn’t until he got to the polished door-sill, more a dip than a bulge, that some of the water slopped over and spilled.

  Fiete, wrapped in an embroidered cope, raised a wine glass to him. ‘The blood of our Lord,’ he said. ‘To the Eternal Father, the Prince of Peace and the calf’s liver sausage! Not a drop for the dolts!’ He had found and lit several thick altar candles; the gold leaf of the icons shone as Walter gave water to the animals, whose eyes were already sunken with thirst. The long shadows of their eyelids lay like tear-trails on their pale grey cheeks; again Walter pushed the wheelbarrow to the lake.

  After all the cows were watered, he joined his friend sitting on the altar steps. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Fiete held a bottle out to Walter, ‘Early Mass Riesling’, and they looked out mutely into the night. Sparks burst from collapsing roofs and windows; the air smelled of charred Bakelite. Fire engines and ambulances drove along the opposite shore. Burn victims were wrapped in blankets. Distant cries echoed in the body of the painted organ. ‘Elisabeth hasn’t written for weeks,’ Walter said and sipped at the wine. ‘Since we left. I hope nothing’s happened.’

  *

  In the room that he shared with four other drivers, the storehouse of a former bakery, it was still dark when someone called his name. The light from a lamp grazed the white tiles and Walter sat up. Dawn was already breaking behind the silhouette in the open door – a hint of red – and the Junker in the coat said in a low voice, ‘Come on, get dressed! We’re going to see the boss.’

  The cigarette butts on the cobbles were the only sign of where the machine-gun post had stood. The sandbags were in the moat now. Walter buttoned up his shirt and jacket as he followed the man across the bridge. Lorries, some camouflaged with nets and branches, came towards them, and in the courtyard half-tracks were being loaded. Both SS and Wehrmacht soldiers carried boxes, furniture and rolls of carpet out of the fortress, and when someone bumped a big map of the front stretched over a panel against a pillar, little red and green flags trickled to the ground.

  The baronial hall was well heated. Hauptsturmführer Greiff, as always in riding breeches and polished boots, was standing under the high bay window, signing a list held out to him by a nurse. He was gaunt, with a sharp profile; the folds and wrinkles in his face had grown deeper over the past few weeks. In spite of the blade-shaped shadow that the peak of his cap cast over Greiff’s eyes, Walter thought he recognized a hint of amusement in them when he put his fingertips to the seams of his trousers and clicked his heels together.

  The nurse left, and the officer stepped to the big table on which his files were stacked in big folders. ‘Urban, correct? Walter Urban, transport department. Where were you last night?’ he asked, and studied Walter’s dirty uniform. ‘As I hear it, you left your quarters without permission. And presumably you know what that means? Three hours of punishment exercises for the whole barracks. At least three – the SS-Stabsscharführer will decide. Under all that nice barbed wire . . . Your comrades are going to love you for that.’

  He grinned thinly, and when Walter took a breath to explain his absence, the Hauptsturmführer swept his hand through the air. ‘Fine, let’s forget that one – you’re here now. At ease.’

  A loud crackling came from the stove beside the Hauptsturmführer’s desk, green and decorated with gold crenellations, and he opened a folder. ‘My son told me what you did for him recently, and what he owes you. Or what I owe you, one might say. In fact, your behaviour was simply in line with your duties, only what was to be expected, but in the present situation, when everyone just wants to save his own arse . . . Well . . . At any rate, I’m proud and glad to have men like you in the unit, spirited men, and will recommend you for a decoration.’ He tore up a few pages from the file. ‘Any objections?’

  Commands issued from the corridor, curses and foot-steps hurrying down stairs, and at first Walter shook his head, unable to find any words. Then he pressed his thumbnails firmly into the tips of his little fingers, returned to attention and said hoarsely, ‘Well, if you’ll permit me . . . I don’t want to seem ungrateful, Hauptsturmführer, I really don’t. It’s a great honour. But perhaps . . . I mean . . .’ He swallowed. ‘Couldn’t I have a few days’ leave instead?’

  With vertical wrinkles between his eyebrows the officer raised his chin. ‘You want what?’ He laughed drily, as if after some biting witticism, and opened the next folder. ‘Secret Command Document’, read its cover. ‘I’m sorry, son, that’s really not an option. You can see what’s going on here. You’re more likely to get the Knight’s Cross. No one is allowed to go home, not even me.’

  ‘No, no!’ Walter said quickly. ‘I wasn’t thinking about home leave, Hauptsturmführer. Everything’s destroyed back home, and there are hardly any trains running.’ He cleared his throat. ‘My father fell recently, near Stuhlweissenburg, and I’d like to visit his grave. I mean, I mightn’t even find it. But I would like to have looked for it.’

  Engines were starting in the courtyard; the window panes vibrated. The officer studied Walter once more, now with a mild, almost civil expression on his face, and pulled his gloves on. The thin leather was so tight that you could see every knuckle and even his double wedding ring. With a shake of his head he opened the stove door and pushed some papers inside. A whistle rose up the chimney, flames darted from the door, the yellow pages turned black and the big SS runes white in the fire before everything turned to ash.

  Then Grieff sighed audibly, reached into his desk drawer and uncapped his pen. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just this once. This is a marching order, Stuhlweissenburg and district. Don’t say a word to anyone. Go to the motor sergeant and tell him to issue you with a vehicle and fuel for three days. No det
ours, no contact with the population. After that I want to see you again in Abda, where we’ll be moving temporarily. It’s southwest of Győr on the Raab, ask around.’ He handed Walter a document with a wink. ‘And don’t forget your carbine. As far as the Russians are concerned we’re criminals even when we’re on leave.’

  Walter saluted. The cushioned door fell shut. There was no one on the stairs now or in the offices, the open cupboards were empty; he ran across the courtyard, where only a limousine with blue flags, an Opel Blitz truck full of fuel canisters and two motorbikes were parked. The Schirrmeister, a fat reservist whose office was in the cellar of the keep, was putting his helmet on as Walter came in, and said, ‘You should have come earlier, lad. Where am I supposed to conjure a car from? Two Stoewers and a Kübel of mine were shot up last night, nearly brand new.’ He spat. ‘I could offer you a little donkey or a requisitioned lady’s bicycle. Or you could take one of the messengers’ boneshakers out there. They’ve got full tanks at least.’

  The four-stroke bikes – a BMW R75 and a Zündapp, both with sidecars – were encrusted with mud, but their engines sounded impeccable, and after Walter had checked the oil and the tyre pressure, he opted for the BMW. He took a fuel canister from the flatbed of the Blitz, tied it on behind the spare wheel and drove slowly over the bridge to his quarters to fetch a coat, his field kit and some supplies. The March sun shone brightly over the town. Charred corpses lay amid the few remaining houses but the fires had gone out and the lakes of phosphorus in the market square were now scattered with sand. Spit-cakes and fresh sesame rings were already on sale again. Most of the Reich flags above the doors of the houses hung in tatters from their poles.

  *

  By the entrance to the English Garden, with its yellow forsythias, two military policemen stood smoking in open capes. On the polished granite cobblestones the braking distance was longer than usual, and Walter hadn’t skidded a bike’s length past the man with the red signalling disc before the other one had released the safety catch on his sub-machine gun. Walter raised one pacifying hand, reached the other into his coat and held out his pay book and marching orders to the policemen. The tips of its pages trembled, and the officer with the gun studied Walter with narrowed eyes before he looked over the documents.

  ‘Oho!’ he said. ‘Someone’s in good with the boss. From the man himself . . . But here it says Stuhlweissenburg, soldier – that’s towards the gunfire, not away from it. Or are we actually looking to desert, when all’s said and done?’

  Walter’s jawbone twitched. ‘No, no, why would I do that?’ he answered and pointed to the park. ‘I’d just like to say a quick goodbye to my friend. He’s in the hospital.’

  The officer looked past him at the main road, where a troop of prisoners was marching; bearded Russians in the rags of their uniforms. Some were barefoot, and the Hungarian-German militiamen who were guarding them seemed to enjoy cracking their whips. ‘In the palm house? Nothing in there but corpses now. All wounded men still capable of travelling were taken to Győr early this morning. And by the way, soldiers don’t have friends, they have comrades.’ He threw the papers onto his tank. ‘Now wipe that sweat off the back of your neck and clear off!’

  Walter saluted and left the town heading south. The land was flat all the way to the horizon, the previous year’s grass crushed by the rain. Here and there a wellhead which cast blue reflections in puddles and hoof-prints. No people anywhere, no cattle, but between the burned or derelict cottages along the road there were tilled fields. Young maize shimmered over crumbly soil; even tank tracks had been used as furrows; turnip leaves on red stems emerged from mulched straw.

  A buzzard sailed high above the bike, the feathers at its wing-tips spread. Walter stopped under a tree and unscrewed the lid of his canteen. In the bird’s repeated calls he thought he heard shrill outrage at his presence; only as he drank did he notice the rabbits, a dozen or more. They lay motionless, far apart in the brown grass; anyone would probably have looked right through them had it not been for the quiet wind that ran through their fur from time to time, showing the white skin beneath.

  Their ears flat against their backs, their back legs outstretched, they quivered at the cry of the buzzard whose shadow began to move faster over the grass, flying in circles, but the rabbits gave no sign of fleeing or seeking cover. They were all so thin that their ribs showed, and their eyelids were swollen nearly shut – what little eye could be seen in those slits looked bloody. Walter scoured the plain with his field glasses. Then he hung his gas mask on the handlebars and rode slowly on.

  It came from the east, the wind, you could imagine you smelled mountain herbs on it, and the sun was already high in the sky when he reached a hamlet in the Puszta – four or five houses with roofs of rusting metal, a single great chimney looming over them all. The chimney belonged to a tile factory, now abandoned; the kiln was cold, the wooden moulds empty, and tender green stems grew from the mud and clay mixture in the middle. The cottages seemed just as abandoned, their shutters closed, and when Walter tried the bell pull by a door only the hinge squeaked. The bell had no clapper.

  From an oak by the crossing, where a whitewashed bakehouse stood, a hanged man dangled – a soldier of the Waffen-SS. His hand was thickly bandaged and his face – eyes narrowed and mouth open – was covered with dust from the road. He might have been Walter’s age. On his cheek, which almost touched his shoulder, Walter could make out beak marks, and on the man’s chest there hung a white wooden sign with the inscription ‘I am a COWARD. The same will happen to all traitors to the Fatherland who abandon their comrades. VICTORY OR SIBERIA!’ The neat, level letters, which looked as though they had been professionally printed in black gothic script, were painted on the sign along pencil lines.

  No insignia now, no identifying marks; Walter took the camera out of the sidecar, a little Voigtlander in a leather case that he had borrowed from Jörn; but then he couldn’t bring himself to click the shutter. He went into the bakehouse and sat down on a bench under its little window. Pillars of smoke, far apart, rose into the sky on the horizon and combined to form an extended black cloud that was drifting towards Lake Balaton. Walter could feel the impact of shells as vibrations under his feet; the knot on the tree branch creaked whenever a gust of wind stirred the hanged man. Even the corpse’s teeth were grey with dust.

  An old beech branch with almost transparent leaves trembled by the crossing; Walter huddled up on the bench. Using his felt-covered flask as a pillow, his hands folded between his knees, he slept for over an hour under his coat. In the afternoon he ate some bread with cheese from a tube, filled his bike’s tank and set off again along the path, a crooked trail between thorny bushes, grey with tufts of wool at waist height. Young soldiers hung from other trees or posts on the plain, all with large-lettered signs hanging over their chests. Many had had their pockets turned out, hardly any wore boots, and their feet, if they were close to the ground, had been gnawed to the bone.

  The shadows grew longer, and after Walter crossed the grassland to a small mound – his trail of dust still darkened the air far behind him – he turned onto a cobbled road. Lined with ash trees, it led into a village with a railway station and a pub of sorts that bore the word ‘Wolfen’. He asked the two soldiers by the anti-aircraft gun the way to the cemetery. The 3.7 cm gun was screwed onto a trolley and the men, who sat smoking on the ammunition box, eyed Walter wearily. ‘There are more graves here than living people,’ the taller of the two replied, a Gefreiter with a bandaged head. ‘Who are you looking for?’

  The narrow field of honour for the fallen members of the Waffen-SS, surrounded by a fence, lay on the way out of the village, and was distinguished from the graveyard for Wehrmacht soldiers on the other side of the road by the fact that the crossbars of the birch-tree crosses were both set at a downward-facing angle, forming the arrow-shaped death rune. On the crosses’ upper tips were the helmets of the dead; Walter turned off his engine, opened the leather-hinged gate and
walked along the graves, his heart thumping in his throat. There were small wooden signs with burned inscriptions and here and there flowers lay on the plinths: star hyacinths, yellow cinquefoil. But he couldn’t find his father’s name.

  At the far end of the cemetery stood a particularly large cross – it too was made of birch wood, and the soldier who knelt before it, raking the earth, was looking back at Walter. He was an elderly man, already bald, with glasses and aluminium braiding on both sleeves of his uniform, and he picked up his crutches from the grass and got to his feet. As he did so, he gritted his teeth, but shook his head vigorously when Walter came over to help him. ‘What is it?’ he wheezed and put the claw-like rake in his bag. ‘Can I help you?’

  Walter saluted, told him who he was looking for, and the officer read the telegram that had brought news of the death, bearing the battalion stamp. ‘No Alfred Urban here,’ he said. ‘These were all my men. Last week they were singing merrily . . .’ He took a silver case from his pocket and snapped it open. There were slender cigarettes in it and a photo stuck to the inside of the lid. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but members of punishment squads seldom get a memorial, son. People aren’t going to saw a tree down for that. They’re buried where they fall – if at all. And Stuhlweissenburg is a hotly contested area . . . the enemy isn’t exactly known for looking after cemeteries, is he?’

  The old man offered Walter a cigar, and Walter looked again at the photograph in the case – a family in a garden having tea – then he said thank you, pushed the gate shut and rode on. The land was hilly and the road wasn’t bad, it was even paved over long stretches. But farmers warned him of Russian planes, and where possible he sought the cover of the forests or crossed the fields along log roads. Every hundred metres, camouflaged armed reconnaissance vehicles stood between the trees, and the men from the measurement and meteorological branches studied him through their field glasses. With pine sprigs on his helmet and a telephone receiver to his ear, one of them pointed at where he was headed and dragged a warning thumb along his throat. Walter grinned and waved to him.