Entombed, page 21
Marlowe shook his head angrily. ‘Why do you bloody German women think that all we want to do is to have sex with you?’
Erika could feel blood rushing to her face. ‘Because that’s the truth of it!’
He held her hostile eyes for seconds then turned, suppressing anger. ‘I have to go.’
Erika watched him for a few moments. She didn’t know what she felt any more. She didn’t even care what she felt.
She turned, walking bitterly into darkness.
Jochim Faber sank deeper into the shadows of the archway as he watched two British soldiers checking the identity papers of a pedestrian on the opposite side of the street. It was night. A dangerous time in post-war Berlin where three or four murders were being committed every day, especially during the hours of darkness. People killed for money, revenge, betrayal, hatred, fear, but mostly they killed for food or to escape the military net that was scooping up war criminals like ocean krill.
The soldiers handed the pass back to the man and walked on, steel-studded boots on concrete. From somewhere close by came the sound of a radio, sad, lonely, full of regret. A baby was crying.
Erika stepped from the Red Cross canteen, closed and locked the door and walked along the street, away from the shadowed archway. Her brother went after her, running silently. She turned, sensing him, but it was too late. He swung her around, pushing her violently against the brick wall. She tried to cry out but couldn’t breathe, his arm around her neck.
‘I missed your friend, Monique, the other night. It was just going to be a friendly warning but that bloody British officer showed up and she got away.’
Erika was struggling desperately. ‘Jochim,’ she managed to shout, but he tightened the stranglehold on her throat. Her words died away, choked off.
‘This is your last warning, Erika. Then, one dark night, I’ll be meeting your friend, Monique Moller, like this, and she won’t be so lucky. I need those D.P. papers. If I don’t get them I’m dead.’ He pushed her away, violently. ‘Get me my bloody papers!’
He turned, walking into darkness, leaving her gasping for breath.
She struggled to her feet, holding a hand to her bruised neck. By the time she looked for him he had disappeared into the night.
Gdynia, Poland
10 May, 1946, 10.30 a.m.
After the rock-fall that had so badly injured Voss, Klein began drinking even more heavily. Hans tried to prevent him from taking bottles from their store of schnapps but Klein snapped at him: ‘It’s all kaput anyway! Finished!’ His voice rose suddenly so that he was shouting, flecks of saliva jetting from his lips. ‘We’re all going to die. Look at us, we’re corpses, walking corpses, just like one of those bloody horror films. We’ve already been buried but we just haven’t had the sense to die yet like good little German soldiers.’
‘Klein, listen to me... .’
‘No!’ he screamed excitedly, head shaking wildly. ‘It’s over. I’m no longer a soldier, I no longer take orders from you or anyone else.’
A sinister light came into his eyes. ‘Only the Führer can give me orders now.’
He raised the bottle to his lips, drinking deeply, coughing as the fiery liquid caught at the back of his throat. ‘We might as well get pissed, pissed as fairies at a fornication festival. Sod-all use it will do to stay sober! It’s over, can’t you see? The tunnel is stuffed and so are we! We should shoot ourselves, save the bother of trying to live for a few more miserable weeks or months or even bloody years! I don’t want to spend another year down here. Do you hear me?’ he was screaming now. ‘Are you bloody listening?’
He fell into an angry silence, giving Hans a baleful look, eyes red, malignant, before shuffling away into darkness.
Hans let him go. In reality he no longer had any control over them. Any semblance of military discipline had long disappeared. It was no longer a case of an officer and his men. They were subhuman, all of them, just animals buried alive.
Now it was simply a fight for survival. Nothing mattered any more.
Just survival.
After that, Klein kept to himself. He lived in the same area but prepared his own meals. He propped a faded photograph of Hitler against a meat-can. The photograph showed Hitler as a younger man, dressed in his uniform with the Nazi armband. He was standing on a rostrum surveying an enormous crowd. There was a haughty, almost terrifying look of complete control on his face — eyes hooded, lips compressed, jaw thrust aggressively forward. Klein had torn that photograph from a magazine and placed it into his wallet years before.
Sometimes he would sit alone, talking to himself, just looking at that photograph, muttering of the goodness of evil and the evil of good; of the madness he had seen long ago in Hitler’s eyes but also the dark genius, the gentleness of insanity that could caress a child’s ear one moment and order genocide the next.
Almost incoherently, Klein would mumble his old army allegiance to Hitler, stumbling over the words and wavering off into half-remembered rhymes from his boyhood. Long straggling hair hanging down over his shoulders, his beard on his chest, eyes red, either from alcohol or weariness or both, his uniform no longer recognisable as such, the once field-grey jacket and trousers stained to the colour of mud, ragged and torn.
But they all looked much the same now, Hans reflected. Hollow eyes, hollow cheeks, long matted beards. Their skin, without any sunlight, had become almost translucently white, like the earth grubs he had dug up in the garden as a child.
Their bodies had lost weight, the constant work and poor nutrition had seen to that, and the uniforms seemed to hang even more limply on their sparse, angular frames.
The water was once again almost finished; it had not rained for weeks and Hans was forced to reduce the ration. They were no longer working on the tunnel so required less fluid intake. He mixed one bottle of wine with one mug of water as a daily ration, and while Klein reluctantly accepted this restriction he also kept drinking schnapps steadily and heavily. Sometimes the others would find him collapsed on the floor — drunk into unconsciousness.
One evening, after they had finished their meal, Wolff and Hans sat quietly together in the light of a candle. Voss’s health was deteriorating, Hans was sure that he would be dead within a week or two but there was nothing more he could do for the injured man. Klein was half drunk, seated on a wooden box, muttering to himself.
‘What about the tunnel, Herr Hauptmann? Can we repair it?’ Wolff asked.
Hans poured his ration of water and wine into a mug, reflecting for a few moments. ‘I’m not sure. It would be difficult and also dangerous.’
Wolff looked at him carefully. ‘We have to get out of here somehow. It’s no good just sitting here waiting to die. Klein might be a rabid Nazi, and bovine-stupid, but he’s right — if we don’t do something we’re just walking corpses. We can’t survive down here forever. One day the wine will run out and there’ll be no more rainwater and we’ll just die, or perhaps the roof will collapse and crush us, so we really have nothing to lose by trying again. If that tunnel’s no good then we can start another, and another after that. Anything’s better than just sitting here.’
Hans glanced up from his mug. Wolff looked as pale as a ghost with dirty blond hair falling down on either side of his face. Like a Viking, Hans thought, one of those hardy warriors of old. Only the militaryissue steel spectacles perched almost academically on the end of his nose didn’t fit the picture.
‘I don’t know if we have the heart to dig another tunnel,’ he admitted finally.
‘We have the heart, captain. I know it.’
‘But look at Klein. He just wants to die. He’s trying to drink himself to death, you can see that. And Voss, well, even if he lives, which is doubtful, he’ll never work again.’
Wolff leaned forward, eyes bright. ‘Even if it’s just the two of us, we can do it. We can work in shifts. We can find a way out of here.’
‘You think I haven’t spent my every waking minute trying to figure out how to do that?’ Hans asked bitterly.
‘We all have. Every one of us has been trying to find a way out. But when it comes down to it there’s only one way and that’s by digging. Somehow we have to find a way of constructing a tunnel that works, that’s not going to lead us into another rubble zone.’
Hans drank the last of his ration, setting the mug carefully onto a wooden box. He used both hands to brush bedraggled hair from his face.
‘It’s all rubble, Wolff. The lot of it. The street above, the port. The whole port was so badly hit by enemy bombing that there’s not too much left standing. Rubble everywhere and we can’t know if it’s safe or unstable. Just like the old warehouse above us. It needs only a bit of added pressure from above, or a bit of undermining from below and the whole thing is going to come down on us.’
‘I know that,’ Wolff said, taking the glasses from his nose and wiping them on his tunic. ‘But we must try.’
Hans was silent for a few moments. ‘All right,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘We’ll try again. But first we have to rest. We’ll dig after it rains; we can’t do any more digging without water.’
Wolff nodded. Without glasses he looked strangely myopic. He nodded towards Klein, seated alone, muttering darkly to himself.
‘Then I hope that bastard is praying to Adolf for some rain.’
Berlin
20 May, 1946, 9.20 p.m.
The bar was crowded with American and British soldiers. It was popular with the military because German prostitutes often worked there and whisky was cheap.
Erika sat alone at a table, drinking heavily. She felt her temples throbbing both to the pulse of the music and the heavy flow of Johnny Walker.
‘Want to dance?’
She noticed that the British soldier was young and sober.
Her look was malevolent.
The soldier shrugged, turning away.
Erika ordered another drink. She looked around the bar, saw the British soldier again. He was talking to a group of Americans. She made a sudden decision, drank more whisky and walked over. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
The soldier smiled. She led him to the dance-floor. He took her in his arms. They swayed together.
‘What’s your name?’
She shook her head. ‘Does it matter?’
‘I guess not. I’m Jack Hickok.’
She looked at him, eyes red. ‘Hickok. Like the Yankee cowboy.’
He grinned. ‘Except I’m from Croydon. Do you know where that is?’
Erika wasn’t really listening. They danced a few more steps; she was feeling the strength of the whisky — swaying slightly.
He tightened his grip. ‘I haven’t seen you here before.’
She deliberately looked bored. ‘I just want to dance, not talk.’
‘Okay, just dance.’
The song changed. Suddenly she felt tired, deflated. Her steps faltered. The soldier steadied her. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m okay. Too much whisky.’
‘Would you like to sit down?’
She nodded. They walked to her table. She drank more whisky as the soldier sat beside her. ‘Maybe you’ve had enough.’
Erika looked at him a little drunkenly. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Jack. Jack Hickok.’
‘Oh yea. I remember.’ She blew imaginary six-shooter smoke from the tips of her fingers. ‘Like the cowboy.’
‘Look, maybe I should leave.’
She seemed to sober a little, looking at him with hard eyes.
He wondered if she was really as drunk as she seemed.
She leaned closer. ‘You have a room, soldier?’
He nodded. ‘I’m on leave for a week. I have a room in the hotel just across the street.’
She gulped whisky, emptying the glass. ‘Let’s go then.’
Even with all the whisky, Erika realised that she was not making love.
She was having sex just for the pure futility of it.
It was, she decided, an end of dreams, something you did just to flush out the system, to forget, to get back to normal, whatever ‘normal’ was. It was a simple statement of how her life had changed so much that she could no longer recognise herself — didn’t even want to recognise herself.
She felt the soldier inside her but there was nothing. No emotion. There wasn’t even any pleasure. He could have been another of the Russians. She lay on the mattress with his heavy weight pressing down and in, thrusting, and when he had finished she turned away.
He couldn’t see the tears.
The self-anger. The bitterness. The self-loathing.
The sheer futility of life.
Monique was making coffee at the gas-ring when the front door began reverberating with a loud knocking. From beyond the door she could hear the landlord calling urgently.
‘Frau von Roth ... Frau von Roth. I know you’re in there. I can hear you... .’
Monique turned off the gas-ring, moving to the door, opening it a few centimetres.
The landlord stood with legs apart, hand pushing on the door. ‘Ah it’s you.’
‘Erika’s not here today Herr Dorfmann. She’s out.’
Dorfmann pushed harder, the door swung open. ‘I don’t give a damn. I just want the rent you owe.’
Monique attempted to push the door closed. ‘Now’s not a good time.’
Dorfmann stuck a foot in the door. ‘You women are three weeks behind.’
‘You’ll have to see Erika.’
Dorfmann pushed a finger into her chest. ‘Tell her she has three days. If I haven’t seen my money by then you’ll both be out on the street.’ He looked at her balefully, removing his foot from the door. ‘Understand?’
Monique nodded bitterly. ‘I’ll tell her.’
She closed the door, going back to the stove to pour coffee. For several minutes she stood at the window, looking reflectively down at the street. She heard Erika’s key in the lock.
Erika came into the apartment looking as if she’d been beaten. Hair bedraggled. Clothes stained. There were dark bruises of exhaustion and alcohol beneath her eyes.
‘Jesus Erika, where have you been all night? I’ve been frantic with worry.’
Erika dropped keys on the table. ‘I have to shower.’
‘But what happened? You look like shit.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me! I thought you’d been attacked or something.’
Erika walked into the bathroom, dropping clothes behind her. ‘It was nothing like that.’
‘What then? Have you been with that officer? Captain Marlowe?’
She shook her head tiredly. ‘No, not Marlowe.’
‘Who then?’
Erika turned on the taps, stepping under the shower. ‘I told you. It doesn’t matter.’
They sat together at the cracked window. Erika looked half dead from exhaustion as she dried her hair on a towel.
Monique was worried. ‘You need something to eat.’
Erika found difficulty answering. She remained silent, eyes glazed.
Monique offered her a cigarette. ‘Where were you last night?’
She shrugged. ‘I was with somebody.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Some bloody soldier at a military bar.’
Monique looked at her friend sadly. ‘This is no way to get over him, you know, to get over losing Hans.’
Erika lit her cigarette. ‘Maybe not.’ She looked bitterly at Monique. ‘The soldier thought I was a prostitute. Afterwards he tried to pay me — ten dollars and bar of American chocolate.’
‘What did you do?’
Erika rummaged in her bag. The chocolate dropped onto the table. Her words were bitter. ‘I guess that makes me about the cheapest whore in Berlin.’
‘Erika ... please! You can’t do this any more, it’s killing you.’
She looked bleak. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Monique took her friend’s hand. ‘Erika, he’s dead. Hans is gone. We all understand that. It’s terrible. I know, but drinking yourself to death isn’t going to solve anything. You have to start looking after yourself. You need to eat something.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
Monique paused before giving her an anxious look. ‘Dorfmann was chasing us for rent again.’
Erika shrugged. ‘The money’s all gone. My savings. There’s nothing left.’
She turned to look out of the window. A young boy was rummaging for food in a rubbish bin. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing any more.’ Her voice seemed lost. ‘Don’t know where I am half the time, or what I want.’
She looked at Monique, half confused, tired. ‘Sometimes I don’t know if I loved Hans at all. It seems like a dream, a fairy-tale I’ve invented to keep me sane — or to send me insane, who the hell knows?’
Monique reached over, touching Erika’s arm. ‘You need to stop drinking.’
Erika looked at her, balefully. ‘I can’t even do that because it’s all I have now’
Gdynia, Poland
22 May, 1946, 9.50 a.m.
Voss died, almost unnoticed, passing quietly in the night. He had been alive when they had gone to bed the previous night and in the morning he was just a corpse.
It was as simple as that.
They encased the body in flour. Hans said a few words. No one was really listening. Then they drank steadily for twenty-four hours and finally found their own oblivion.
But they had other, more urgent problems. The water had run out. Hans had been steadily decreasing their ration until it had been reduced to hardly a spoonful each morning and evening.
Now, however, the barrel had run dry.
It was becoming hotter and the cellar was stifling. It had still not rained and they were constantly parched; the only relief from their torment came with the issue of a bottle of wine at morning and another at night. As a result they were also often feeling drunk and sleepy. This, in itself, was not a bad thing, Hans thought hazily. They had nothing to do but to try to keep the rat population down as much as possible and by restricting their movements their bodies required less fluids and oxygen.
