The End of It, page 17
But Ilse saw Heinecke in Vienna! Saw him in a shop window standing behind her! Or perhaps she was mistaken. Overwrought. He’ll never know. Perhaps Heinecke went to Vienna, perhaps he was following Ilse, but the other guy got to her first.
He prepares for a trip to the Baltic coast. He’s keen to go. He hopes to slip in a quick visit to Sassnitz to see Uwe, give him some money to send on to Gerda.
In the afternoon he goes for a walk while it’s still light. He passes the zoo, stares at the huge flak towers there, the guns on top pointing up at the grey sky like gigantic fingers, sees the flak girls in their uniforms arriving for their night-time duties, neat and efficient-looking, long hair braided and coiled tidily as if about to set out for a hike in the country.
They’ll probably have a quiet night now the RAF seems occupied with supporting the Allied armies; the raids tailed off some time ago. The people in the street seem exhausted, heads down in the main, old men and women clutching bags in case there’s something to buy, now and again, an amputee on crutches. There’s the clop-clop of a skinny horse and rumbling cart wheels, the sound of a train, bicycle bells, a Wehrmacht truck, a car with a boiler on the back and in between, feet on pavements, steel-tipped heels clicking on the stones. And then, in front of him, a woman. They stop.
‘Jochen.’
‘Frau Hofmann.’
Embarrassment. Is she going to speak, start a conversation? Or an argument? He sees his cap fly through the front door again. It could only have been her who threw it out.
‘Are you well, Jochen?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘You were limping.’
‘I landed badly.’
‘With a parachute?’
‘Yes. And are you well, and everyone?’
‘Anna is working hard. Everyone is.’
He has to ask. ‘How is Lotte?’
‘She’s very quiet. She’s very hurt, you know.’
‘We would have been miserable. Her as much as me.’
‘I know. I told her that. A lifetime would feel even longer with the wrong person. She told me everything you said. I was shocked.’ She takes his hands, gazes into his eyes. ‘My husband’s… work, if that’s the word for it, what he’s told me before has always made me squirm, but what you said I’d truly never heard. It’s unspeakable. I asked him what he’d told you. I made him answer. Your report was accurate. I had no idea. You must believe me. I’m deeply ashamed. I can hardly believe it all. It’s buried in my head now. I’m complicit, of course, I’m his wife. I come from the time before the Nazis, but when I and those like me are gone… what hope will there be for us all? For Germans? If everyone is like Josef?’
‘I don’t know, Frau Hofmann.’
‘You’re a good boy, Jochen. May God go with you.’ She puts her hand on his cheek.
He’s suddenly anxious for her, for Lotte and Anna, too. He has a clear picture of what’s to come.
‘You must leave Berlin, you know. Very soon. Have you got friends in the west? Someone you could stay with? All of you?’
‘My husband will never leave.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of him. Look, when the Reds arrive…’
‘Will they?’
‘They’re bound to beat the Americans to Berlin. Don’t be here. Any of you. When my father was killed, they rounded up fifty Russian villagers and shot them. From what I’ve heard, that was one of our more civilised acts out there. They’ll be keen to even things up. I don’t mean to frighten you but it won’t be pleasant if you’re here. There’ll be no protection for women.’
Galland won’t send him back to Jonny, tells him he’s not fully recovered yet. One of these days he’ll just get in his Gustav and fly back, orders or no orders. He goes to Otto’s pigsty and drags him out for a drink. Otto knows a place with a piano that can’t afford a pianist, so Otto plays for free when he goes there, when he isn’t on duty with his Volkssturm kids. They have beer; there’s still some left. Otto wonders if it’s safe for Jochen to go to Sassnitz and see Uwe. There might be questions about why a Luftwaffe Hauptmann is visiting a fisherman.
‘Passing on family greetings from his brother? News of Berlin?’
‘Then I’m in the mix, too.’
‘I could just wander along the quay, breathing in the sea air, meet Uwe by chance, have a chat. I’ll make sure I’m that way, anyway, visiting a unit. They can’t still be checking up on everyone with the whole country falling to pieces.’
‘Kid, when people have problems too big to solve, they settle on the unimportant things they can do. Following you around might be one of them.’
Galland promises he can go back for the big attack he’s planning: three thousand fighters, five hundred Ami heavies in flames. He goes home feeling more cheerful and practises the new Beethoven Sonata he’s come across. No 17. They call it The Tempest. He doesn’t know if Beethoven named it but parts of it feel like a tempest. He loves it.
Rolf comes in and sits listening until Jochen finishes.
‘I don’t know how you do that.’
‘I started when I was six. I ought to be competent.’
‘Was it your mother that got you started?’
‘I heard someone play, apparently, and said I wanted to do it.’
‘I had a letter from her. She’s quite happy there. Wonders if we have bachelor nights out together.’
Jochen bursts out laughing and Rolf smirks.
‘She doesn’t know what Berlin’s like now, does she?’ Jochen says.
‘She wants to come back though.’
‘No! She mustn’t!’ The thought alarms him.
‘I wrote back at once, from work, and said I forbade it.’
‘Will she listen to you?’
‘You know your mother.’
‘I’ll write too. I’ll do it this evening, get it off tomorrow.’
‘Good. I haven’t told her about the Austrian yet. I don’t quite know how to.’
‘You must, I suppose,’ Jochen says.
‘It will all come out. When he’s hanged.’
‘Should I tell her?’
‘No. Me.’
They’re silent.
‘Someone at work said his father-in-law had got his pills.’
‘What pills?’
‘For the whole family. Wife and two kids.’
‘To…?
‘Top themselves.’
‘Jesus!’
‘Haven’t you heard anyone talk like that? He’s not the first one I’ve heard say it,’ Rolf says. ‘People can’t imagine life with the Reich gone. The shame. Nothing to believe in anymore. The rug pulled from under their feet. The Reds bossing us about when they get here. Getting their own back.’
‘Doing to us what we did to them?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Can’t you join mother?’
‘I can’t just walk out on my job. There are responsibilities. I’ll stay and help run Berlin until they arrest me.’
‘What for?’
‘I’m a policeman under the Nazis, Jochen. I must be guilty of something.’
It’s impossible to go to Sassnitz to see Uwe. The nearest unit he could arrange to inspect is a hundred kilometres away. Too far just to go for a spin in a kübelwagen and turn up on the quayside. He could put some money in a letter but mightn’t it be stolen? And anyway, really, with the state of the war, the mark can’t be worth much now outside Germany. Who in Sweden would want to exchange marks for krona? And do they check on letters to Sweden? There can’t be many sent. Is there any point in running a risk by posting Gerda a pile of worthless paper? Probably he should forget the whole idea. Has she got enough money, though? The thought keeps running through his mind; he wakes up at night with it.
He’s waiting for Galland’s order to go back to his gruppe when he hears they’ve cancelled the big attack. Not Galland, those above him, probably Hitler. Galland lets off steam.
‘Does Churchill do this to his guys?’ he shouts. ‘Do you think Hitler’s actually an Allied agent?’
‘Dolfo,’ Winter says, ‘put a sock in it. Don’t say things like that, not in front of the kid.’
Galland sits there shaking his head. ‘We’re fucked,’ he says, ‘totally and absolutely. Fucked.’
He lights a cigar. Someone sends him them from Spain. Neither of them wants one. They stink and taste foul.
‘They’ve got something else secret up their sleeves for the units I’ve been saving up,’ Galland says. ‘I wonder what stroke of genius that will be? Something brilliant that will get the lot of them killed, I expect.’
There seems little point to their inspections. Everyone’s doing their best at every place they visit. It’s clear what’s needed: more experienced pilots, but where will they come from? And enough fuel to allow all the new guys to train, but they haven’t got it.
Jochen empties his bank account. Not so much really but handy for Gerda if he sends it and she can change it. He writes to her, too, but doesn’t post the letter. Rolf doesn’t know for sure if they check mail going abroad but he’d be surprised if there wasn’t a section for that purpose.
Goering seems to have given up. He’s not around for Galland to argue with. A guy called Gollob, a laughable name, is very critical of Galland. Gollob’s a strict Nazi – Jonny would love him – and he’s a pal of Himmler’s. Then Jonny’s shot down, a bullet through the thigh, bashed about the head, injured right forearm. He’s a bit of a mess, out for months.
‘Go and take over there,’ Galland says.
‘The Geschwader? I never thought I’d command a Geschwader.’
‘Neither did I,’ Galland says. ‘It shows what a state we’re in.’
The Geschwader’s back at Marx. The Ami’s again. He takes his turn at alarm start, strapped in, oxygen mask hanging loose ready to clip up, hood down and secured, crackle and interference in his ears as he waits for the command to start up and go. His Gustav is in among the trees, a few metres from the edge of the wooded area, all set to taxi out and take off straight from where it now stands with rain dripping from the branches above onto the canopy and wings.
Why are they doing this still? Out of the twelve he’ll lead up against the Amis, five can barely fly. They’ll be fortunate to get back down again. Only Jochen and a couple of others have a realistic chance of getting a Fortress. And they’ll be chased all around the sky by Mustangs. Since his return he’s been up five times and got a Mustang and a Fortress.
They’ve lost two or three on each flight and had only one body to put in the earth, the rest are buried metres deep where they went in.
Everything feels different since his return. He’s anxious. He’s never had that feeling before. He’s never doubted his ability before. Perhaps it’s his eye. He passed all the tests, read the chart with ease, sang out the bottom line in triumph, but in the air? Others seem to spot the tiny approaching dots before he does. And where he’d always have a clear idea of what was all around him in the sky, he isn’t sure that he does now. It isn’t quite that he’s afraid, more that he’s keyed up, feels he has to concentrate where before he went with the moment, let his instinct lead him. Now? Where has his instinct gone? He’s had the glory, the awards, mixed with all the clowns, as his father called their leaders, but he’s still in the Big Top waiting for it to burn down. He wants it over. He wants a surrender. They’ll be vanquished, captured, all their vanities exploded, but they’ll be alive and kicking still and Germany can wait for what comes next, when they’ve all lived through the shame of what’s gone on. Difficult to imagine now, but in twenty years or thirty? He’ll only be in his mid-fifties. Kids like Ilse will have their own kids and none of them will know anything about the crowd of gangsters he serves now. All he’s got to do is live and he’ll be around to see what happens.
The radio crackles on in his ears.
He calls in. ‘Red leader here. Any news?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
Who’s that on the radio? Some unteroffizier he can’t put a name to yet. Perhaps they won’t come today. The weather’s pretty foul. Stand down, climb out, walk back joking with the guys, coffee, some kind of cake someone will have managed to make. How lovely would that be?
‘Build up in Dora-Dora. Alarm start!’
He looks to the right and circles his hand to the guy looking up at him, presses the button and smoke belches out of the engine. He looks along the line of Gustavs under the trees, amongst the undergrowth; clouds of smoke swept back by the propellers. The chocks are dragged away and through the vibration he feels the Gustav swaying as it bounces out from its lair in the wood and onto the open grass that stretches away before him.
He only looks in a mirror to shave. He doesn’t like the pale drawn face he sees. Or the way his cheek twitches. He pops in on the doc.
‘My eye stings. Could it be the wound?’
‘Could be. Bathe it in hot water. I’ll find some ointment. How long have you had the twitch?’
‘A while.’
‘You need a sea cruise.’
Jochen laughs.
‘Sleeping all right?’
‘Not really.’
‘I can give you something for that.’
‘I have to be alert the moment I wake up.’
‘I’ve got something for that, too.’
‘Pervitin?’
‘Lots of guys take it.’
‘What is it actually?’
‘Methamphetamine. It’ll keep you buzzing.’
He’s been resisting Pervitin since 1940. ‘What happens when you stop taking it?’
‘Who knows? No one ever has.’
‘Thanks. Just give me the ointment.’
He gets his adjutant, Jonny’s adjutant, promoted. He’s too rigid for Jochen. He moves Scholz with his eye patch in to assist him. He likes Scholz. Scholz longs to go home and become a civilian.
‘I’ll get some kind of job,’ Scholz says when asked about after the war. ‘Anything will do as long as there’s enough to live on. And I’ll go home every evening after work and read the paper and eat cabbage soup, or whatever it is we can afford, and go to sleep in my own bed next to my wife.’ He and Jochen get on.
He talks to Schaefer over lunch when Schaefer lands at Geschwader HQ out of fuel. He’s done well with Jochen’s old gruppe. Schaefer was in Russia in the successful days. When Jochen tells him about what he saw at Buchenwald, Schaefer drags his own memories out: what he saw in Russia, what was left after einsatzgruppe commandos had moved on – the burnt villages, the piles of bodies. Sub-human or not, the Russian peasants breathed and lived, and who would treat dogs like that? Schaefer is glad he can fight more cleanly in the air, terrible though the fighting they have to do is. He can see no way out, either, and doesn’t want to be taken by the Reds. His family live outside Cologne, so he supposes the Amis or the British will get there, and things should go humanely, with laws applied. If only they could reach an agreement with the Allies and unite with them to fight the Communists! But Jochen doesn’t agree. He doesn’t want to fight anyone anymore.
France has pretty well gone. Belgium and Holland too. But now there’s a big scheme afoot for mid-December. An offensive through the Ardennes! The brass are hoping for bad weather to keep the enemy on the ground, but anyway the fighter Geschwadern are to support the attack in all out fashion, bombing and strafing allied airfields, destroying on the ground the planes they can’t shoot down in the air. Jochen can’t pass on information to his guys; it’s top secret. When he asks about special training for the operation – for new guys, in particular, who’ve only flown interception at altitude against heavy bombers and have no experience in low-flying and shooting at ground targets – he’s told there won’t be any. And no more fuel for extra hours in the air. He protests. He’s told to shut up. He rings Galland, who says he’s already protested about it till he was blue in the face. The plan comes from the highest level. Galland thinks the next step will be his dismissal. Gollob is pushing for it.
The Ardennes attack begins but fog keeps them on the ground. And then low cloud and snow. They can’t help the panzers. But the Allies can’t fly either. It’s freezing. God help the infantry guys trying to sleep in shallow holes in the ground! He’s tucked up snugly at night with his Ami jacket spread out on top of his blankets. They mooch around the field, sit around fires. Jochen talks to everyone: pilots; admin staff; drivers; flak guys; cooks; the men in black, their mechanics. Are they building up fuel reserves through not flying? No. There are no deliveries arriving. He transfers Jurg to look after his Gustav and all the HQ flight’s machines.
He writes a Christmas letter to his mother. He imagines their women’s household there, singing in the kitchen, baking, passing Andreas around amongst them. He writes a note to Hertha and Lilo, his pals since kindergarten; he can’t write just to Hertha. In fact, he wonders if Hertha is still his pal since he turned her down that evening. He adds a Christmas page to his letter to Gerda but he still doesn’t post it.
Promotion comes in. Scholz brings the message through; Major, to go with command of the Geschwader. He’s now Geschwader Kommodore, Major Murville. More money but nothing to spend it on. The next day they are able to take off. No airfield attacks, though, the signal isn’t given. They dart about at low level below the clouds looking for targets of opportunity: parked tanks, artillery batteries; trucks; assembled troops. There’s constant flak and small arms fire at them. He expects to be hit every moment. He drops his bomb on a pair of tanks, has no idea if he gets them. He shoots up a line of trucks. He darts into cloud to avoid Spitfires when his ammunition’s gone but pops out quickly because he doesn’t want to fly into a hill. He lands back on the snowy field and taxis into the trees. There are many wheel tracks leading straight into the woods. So much for hiding their presence.
