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The men at the barber’s shop in Laun were waiting for the right moment to assemble and form a National Committee of independent Czechoslovakia. All they needed was a leader. They sat watching the boy with Down’s Syndrome playing with the cords of the blinds by the window. The boy groaned in a world of his own. Occasionally, he turned around and addressed one of the men without the slightest hint of shyness, his upper lip drawn up toward his nose, genetically disfigured into a permanent smile.
‘Who’s next?’ the barber asked, knowing that a son follows after a father.
The boy sat down on his father’s knee and allowed the barber to hang a sheet around him and tuck it under the collar. It was all new to him. He was silent, reassured by his father’s words, until the barber began to clip rhythmically with the scissors. ‘There’s a good boy,’ the barber kept saying. But even before the scissors had touched the boy’s hair, he began to struggle and make life difficult. The white sheet had already come undone. There was no point in putting it back. Instead, the barber manoeuvred himself around the chair as best he could to try and get at the boy’s hair.
Both the father and the barber tried to distract the boy. ‘Look, look in the mirror. Look, there’s a good boy.’ The barber tapped the mirror with his scissors. ‘There’s a good boy. Nearly finished,’ he kept saying.
But the boy soon began to wail. Not so much like crying, but a solid howl; half fear and half mistrust. He kept looking around to see what was going on but he couldn’t understand the purpose of the scissors. He tried to free his arms from his father’s grip. Wisps of cut hair fell into his eyes, tickled his nose and his neck behind his collar. Nobody could explain it to him. The barber got a scented towel and wiped it over the boy’s face, taking away a mixture of saliva, cut hair and tears.
Another armoured car went by outside. The barber managed to deflect the boy’s attention for long enough to clip a semi-circle over the ears. The fingers of his left hand pinned the boy’s head down vigorously. But the sound of the scissors magnified in the boy’s ears to the size of shears and he resumed his howls, louder than ever.
The whole barber’s shop had become occupied with the boy’s haircut. Once again the barber made an attempt to distract the boy. He took out two ivory brushes, clacked them together and gave them to the boy. The barber rushed around, exploiting the moment. It was a race against time, before the boy dropped the brushes again and put his hands up. That was enough. His father released him and the boy jumped down, running into the centre of the room.
‘Vla, vla,’ he said, holding his ears, showing off his haircut to the men waiting on the bench.
That was the morning the Czechs finally decided to liberate themselves from the fascists and hand themselves over to the communists. The grand uprising in Prague had begun. The whole country was rising up in support. In Laun, a man named Jaroslav Süssmerlich walked into the pub U Somolu at 81 Prag Strasse and convened the first meeting of the National Committee. The men at the barber’s shop abandoned their places in the queue and joined him.
They demanded the immediate surrender. They wanted nothing but outright capitulation. By phone, Jaroslav Süssmerlich translated the anger of the town and told the Germans they were ready to attack the garrison. The men from Kladno had already taken the arms dump at Hriskov. But the German commander in Laun made it clear that he had no authority to capitulate until orders came from Prague; from the German High Command. Besides, they held a number of key prisoners; Czech resistance fighters. It became a hostage drama. Negotiations became a race against time. Nobody realized that the Russians were approaching from the north instead of the south.
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Bertha Sommer emerged from the church of St Nicholas, pushing the heavy oak door like a child. The idea of heavy oak doors in churches is to make people feel small and innocent; children of God. She adjusted her hat, blessed herself from the font and looked down the steep concrete steps, where she saw an armoured car parked along the kerb. It was the only vehicle in the street. The engine was running. Officer Kern stood beside the driver and both of them looked up at her. There was something wrong. She knew it.
Around her, everything else in the street bore the inertia of centuries. The houses, the dusty windows, the grey roofs, all looked as though they would never change.
Bertha Sommer had a good nose. It was the way Officer Kern looked at her as she descended the church steps that told her something had changed. For a moment, she thought she was being arrested for betrayal of the Reich. Either that, or she was fleeing straight away, back to the German border. She told herself she didn’t care. After the initial fright, there is always a moment of indifference.
She smelled a wisp of woodsmoke drifting down the street. Nothing visible, beyond the faint blue tint in the distance above the houses. It was a reassurance. Bertha knew every kind of smoke. She had smelled all the different smokes of the war: gunsmoke, fires, scorched landscape, phosphor smoke; even the smell of burning hair. She feared and respected every smell. She then got the smell of Officer Kern’s cigarette. Kern looked serious. When he spoke to her, it was back to his official voice. The former intimacy was ignored. She expected the worst.
‘Fräulein Sommer, we have instructions to return to the garrison immediately. By right, I should have conveyed this to you without delay. We must go straight away.’
He held the door of the vehicle for her and whispered, as she held her hat to get in, ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
Afterwards, she felt foolish to have mistrusted him so much. She felt naïve, and envied the way men always seemed to know everything first. Inside the church, she had been under the brief illusion that it was raining outside, only to come out and find the street dry and the sun trying to break through the clouds at last.
The driver turned the vehicle and headed back through the town, past the square, along the main street towards the hill leading up to the garrison.
‘Apparently there is something going on here in the town,’ Kern said to her in the back of the car. ‘Hauptmann Selders has ordered all personnel off the streets.’
Kern didn’t discuss it any more. She asked him what it meant but he put a finger over his lips and pointed at the silent driver. They all went mute and looked out of the windows. Bertha saw nothing. No sign of anything going on. At the end of the town, she spotted two women hanging out washing. On a wall, she saw a ginger-coloured cat preparing to jump down. Smoke rose from the last three chimneys in the town. Nothing would ever change the speed of smoke rising from a chimney on a calm day in May.
Her own life would soon accelerate beyond recognition. After months and months of waiting, since Christmas, she would finally move into a new, though perhaps uncertain future. Anything was better than waiting. She thought of Caen in Normandy where she had spent most of the war. And the trips to Paris which had been so exciting. Czechoslovakia had provided none of that excitement. It became the place to wait for the war to end. She could only think of home. She could only think of the frustrating irony that the car in which she sat was actually travelling in the wrong direction. East. Into the arms of the Russians.
She turned around to look through the back window at the town. It may be the last look, she thought. Everywhere Bertha Sommer went, she called things by a private, arcane name in her own mind. As the armoured car climbed the hill back towards the garrison, she looked back and called it: the hill of the last time looking back. The morning of the end of the Reich, she said to herself as they drove through the gates.
‘Tonight,’ Officer Kern whispered discreetly to her as she got out of the car. She didn’t respond. She watched him click his heels and bow slightly, before he marched away towards the command centre.
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I always thought it was strange that things between Anke and myself ended with a crash. Or was that actually the beginning? It was in Jügen’s car. Just coming off the Autobahn, heading back into the centre of Düsseldorf, we were hit by another car. Don’t ask me how. All I know is that I’m certain it wasn’t my fault. The other car came out of a slip road and hit us on Anke’s side, the passenger side. It was in the evening. Dark. Wet. Autumn. I only remember the bang and the sudden immobility afterwards. It was like being attacked for no reason. Neither Anke nor I suffered any real injuries. It all must have looked much worse than it was because the other car had been overturned by the impact. I thought the occupants must be dead, because nobody moved. But it turned out that the driver, a middle-aged woman, escaped gracefully with nothing more than concussion.
The big problem was that I was driving. I was sitting in the driving seat of Jürgen’s car. A car I wasn’t insured to drive and a car I shouldn’t have been sitting in at all in the first place. Anke was hurt. The other car had crashed into us from the right and Anke had got a terrible thump all the way down from her shoulder to her knee. Even though nothing was broken, she was badly bruised.
‘I’m all right, I’m all right,’ she kept saying, hysterically reassuring herself, or both of us. ‘It’s nothing. Honestly.’
All we thought of at that moment was the fact that I was in the driving seat. Uninsured. Without a licence to drive in Germany. The complications would have been enormous. Like all survivors, glad to be alive and uninjured, we reassured ourselves that nothing else mattered. But then, when we saw that the street was empty and that nobody had emerged from the overturned car, we thought again. We could get away with it.
‘Quick,’ Anke said, hauling herself up out of the seat. ‘Quick, before the police arrive.’
She manoeuvred herself across me as best she could. A swift seat-change inside the car. Once she was in the driving seat and I was in the passenger seat, everything seemed all right. At least we could explain that much. It was only when she sat back with the steering wheel in her hands that she said she began to feel any pain at all on her right side.
I can never be sure if Jürgen ever discovered that I was driving. Or if he ever found out where Anke and I could have been to in his car. Or what we were up to. Anke was already married to Jürgen. Just married, in fact. I had been at the wedding not long before that.
The idea of Anke and I driving off together like this was her strange notion of a final farewell; Anke’s idea of saying goodbye to me, taking me back to the Eifel mountains, to the exact spot where we went the first time. She was basically meeting me for the last time as a lover, a formal rite whereby she was now ceremoniously entering into a new life with Jürgen. From now on she would be married. Why she left this intimate farewell until a month after the wedding was beyond me. I have never fully understood Anke.
The crash must have changed her plans. It placed us together in a further conspiracy. Because we had switched places inside the car, we were bound together for ever in a fraud. We were going to have to tell lies. And then backup lies with more lies. We were going to have to discuss and plan out a communal approach.
We didn’t know what to tell Jürgen. How was I going to explain being in the car in the first place? Even as we sat in the car, shocked, waiting for the police or an ambulance or something, Anke suggested that I should just walk away, pretend that she was the only occupant in the car. There was nobody around. It might have worked. But I was against it, instinctively. I stayed.
Walking away never works. I began to think about the driver of the other car, overturned, right behind us. I had difficulty opening the door on my side, but I got out and went over to see. I told Anke to stay in the driver’s seat. Eventually, people came out from houses near by and called an ambulance. The woman in the other car was unconscious, though when she was taken away one of the ambulance men said she would be fine. Anke was taken to hospital too, for observation, overnight.
It was up to me to phone and tell Jürgen. And somehow, maybe because Jürgen and I have known each other for so long, there was no immediate pressure for an explanation. All Jürgen wanted to know was that she was all right. What hospital? What ward? He didn’t ask me how I knew or how it happened or anything. I volunteered nothing.
In the end, I left it to Anke to do all the talking, since the whole thing was her idea in the first place. When Jürgen arrived at the hospital that night he still wasn’t asking for an explanation, and Anke said little else other than that she had been giving me a lift home. We had met for a drink. The fact that the location of the crash didn’t correspond with my route home from anywhere never came up. Nor did the fact that her injuries were on the wrong side of her body.
I went to visit her at the hospital early the next day, before she was discharged, to see what she had said to Jürgen. She showed me her bruises. She didn’t remember being hit at all. But the proof was there. A massive blue, black, purple cloud under her swollen skin, all along her arm, and down the side of her right thigh. There was a small bandage on her thigh where the skin had burst.
‘Looks lovely, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’ve got myself a fine-looking mark there.’
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘I’m quite proud of it. The only thing that bothers me are these endless X-rays.’
She pulled back the sheet and showed me the full extent of the bruising. Everybody has a natural fascination for injuries. You want to see more.
‘Do you want to kiss my bruise?’ she asked.
I ignored her because it made me uneasy. I knew that Jürgen was coming to collect her any minute. She stuck her tongue out at me and covered herself up again. That was Anke all right. She was always sticking her tongue out like that.
‘What are you going to say to Jürgen?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. I’ll tell him everything. The whole thing, if he asks.’
‘Everything?’
‘Well, the only thing he doesn’t need to know is that you were driving his car. I think we should keep that a secret for the moment.’
Jürgen never asked. There was never anything said about the crash. I think Jürgen was glad that nothing worse had happened to Anke. No broken bones. He was concerned for her. He also asked how I was. Maybe it was his medical background, his doctor’s instinct for discretion.
The fact that Jürgen never pursued any questions made me think even more. I slowly began to believe that it was Jürgen who had sent Anke on this farewell trip with me. Maybe they did have a pact. Maybe he had some notion that one final trip up to the Eifel would end it for Anke and me. One last goodbye to a past lover. And the fact that Jürgen, a doctor, a highly intelligent man with an inquiring mind, never noticed that the bruises were on the wrong side worried me. But then, nobody else asked either.
We let the lies stand.
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Before Bertha Sommer reported for work that morning she went to her room to pack. She was taking Officer Kern’s advice and decided to have a light bag ready so she could leave at a moment’s notice. She had made no final decision about fleeing that evening; she was still tormenting herself with the choice. Desert, or stay and face the Russians. One way or the other, she wanted to be ready.
She made two selections of clothes; an A selection and a B selection. Clothes she wanted to take with her and those she would simply have to leave behind. Occasionally she would hold up a garment, like the pale blue blouse, remembering the shop in Paris where she had bought it, and then transfer it from the B selection back to the A selection.
She thought about Officer Kern. He had an honest face. A face she could trust. She knew he was married. He had told her that quite openly when they first met in the office in January. He told her then that there was a lady’s bicycle belonging to his wife Monica left behind in the garrison. He and his wife used to go cycling together in the summer. Fräaulein Sommer was welcome to make use of the bike any time she wanted. But the weather in January was too cold for cycling. And when the spring came, the environs of Laun became too dangerous. Besides, then came the directive from Hauptmann Selders, confining everyone to the garrison.
Officer Kern was a calm man. He seemed to know everything. He was a man of predictions. Even back in January he had told her the war wouldn’t last long. And when the war was over, the bicycle would become the fastest mode of transport in the whole of Europe. He would be sorry to leave it behind.
He had a married look about him, she thought, as she sorted her clothes. She packed her bag with her sisters in mind. Then she took everything out again and packed it more sensibly, thinking of the worst. She laid out her russet coat and hat on the bed. It was time to go to the office.
She had gone through all this before, evacuating back from Caen in Normandy, running from the British. Now she was running from something worse. She kneeled down and prayed, silently. She was ready for God. Then she quickly wrote a note in her diary, which lay on the table. The morning of the end of the Reich. Packed my bags. Am I a civilian? How will they treat civilians?
Bertha Sommer spent the morning trying to get through to Berlin. She knew it was useless but she kept trying. Berlin was well lost by now. The Russian flag had flown from the roof of the Reichstag since 30 April. Another officer kept trying to get through to Prague, with no more success. The office had worked itself into a quiet panic. Cups of coffee were frequently started but seldom finished. Hauptmann Selders fought off the constant demands of the Czechs in Laun. He had already made the concession of withdrawing the army from the town. He fought off the almost hourly demands to surrender with the single remaining advantage left to him. In the end, he could bargain with hostages. But there was no question of capitulation or further withdrawal until he got word from the High Command.
Bertha didn’t see Officer Kern anywhere. She knew where he was, in the communications room next door, but she wondered why he hadn’t been seen in the office.
By mid-morning she had become so busy herself that she forgot everything. She had been asked to sort out the files on to a trolley. Ready for incineration. Lunchtime passed without anybody getting hungry. Hauptmann Selders ordered a Wurst sandwich but never touched it when it arrived. The other officers had no appetite either. And when Bertha went to the canteen, she had to force herself to have lunch, telling herself it might be the last. But the logic was no substitute for appetite.
She was thinking too much. She had been put in charge of erasing the records. How to end a war? We know how to start a war, she thought. We know nothing about finishing it.
Early afternoon, Officer Kern came rushing into the office for the first time. He had heard something. At 1.30, the radio signal from Prague was interrupted. A spokesman in Czech appealed to all factions throughout Czechoslovakia to rise up against the fascists. Minutes later the Germans had regained control of the station. But it had become obvious that there was a struggle on for the capital. It became clear why they had also lost contact with Prague on the phone.
Hauptmann Selders called his officers for an impromptu conference. Another phone-call came from the town demanding immediate capitulation.
Everyone looked at Hauptmann Selders, waiting for him to announce withdrawal. He made a brief speech. Bertha Sommer stopped sorting files to listen. But her heart sank. She had expected something else.
‘There remains only one option open to us at present,’ he said. ‘While the German Army is still at war, we must remain firm. We cannot act in our own self-interest and make an escape bid. To do so would be irresponsible and put at risk thousands of German civilians still on Czech soil. We would also put ourselves at risk. You know the terms under which General Schörner operates. We must wait for the command.’
Bertha thought for a moment that he was referring to her. To Officer Kern’s escape plan. She looked at him standing by the window, but he didn’t look back. She felt implicated, even though she had consented to nothing.
‘At the same time,’ Hauptmann Selders said, ‘we should be ready to move out immediately.’
The officers agreed with Hauptmann Selders’s decision. There was no dissent. Arrangements were being made for the inevitable evacuation. One officer put forward a plan to use the hostages. Everybody went back to work.
Bertha spent the afternoon burning. A large punctured fuel bin had been placed in the centre of the square outside on her instructions. She had been told to oversee the burning personally.
The afternoon turned out bright and sunny. Looking south, she saw beams of sunlight lancing through the clouds on to the rounded hills. It looked as though the rain would hold off for a while. She didn’t need her coat.
She accompanied two recruits to the store-room on the far side of the square where a consignment of fuel was kept for the sole purpose of destroying documents. She had stacked most of the files on to two trolleys. Two more recruits came out pushing the trolleys into the square. There was nothing of great importance in the files, nothing but reports on resistance operations, command structures and details of the garrison’s personnel, names, ranks etc. She was told to burn everything. All over Germany, she thought, people are burning the past.
She placed some of the documents into the bin and stood back. One of the recruits stepped forward and poured some fuel over the documents. It was all done systematically, without any sense of urgency, or regret.
Bertha looked in the direction of the garrison’s main gates. Her mind was on escape.
Taking account of the wind direction, one of the soldiers politely advised her to stand back where the smoke would not contaminate her clothes. She saw him strike the match, an act that was no different to clicking his fingers. It was the first time she fully understood the qualities of petrol, a silent blast of flames sucking air violently from the surrounding space, from around her ears and her face.
One by one, she handed the documents over to the soldiers, who added them to the pyre. This was the way to end a war. Without a word. Bertha did ask one of them what area of Germany he came from: Dortmund. But it led to nothing. They went silently about the task, preparing for withdrawal. Later on, Hauptmann Selders came out carrying a number of files which he added to the fire himself. He stood with her for a moment until he saw his own documents disappear. Throughout the afternoon, the flames were reflected in their eyes, in the windows of surrounding buildings and across the windscreens of trucks on the far side of the square.
By late afternoon, the clouds had taken over the sky once more. When the flames receded the charred remnants of paper began to curl and crinkle as they shrank. It doesn’t take long to burn a garrison with three companies of Ersatz Grenadiers of the 213th Battalion out of existence.
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That was typical Anke, sticking out her tongue. For her it was really an expression of affection. Maybe with a bit of daring and natural contempt thrown in. She was into expressions. It was one of the things that struck me most about Anke when I met her first, at the university.
I told her she had jumped the queue in the Mensa. She stuck her tongue out at me.
I had been living in Düsseldorf for a number of years at that stage. Why Düsseldorf, I don’t really know. I could have stayed in Vermont, where I come from, or chosen any other city in America for a good clean American education. There is something about Germany that I want. Something that everybody secretly wants and openly denies. I opted for a European education at the university in Düsseldorf, where I studied German classics.
Jürgen was studying medicine there at the time. Later, he went on to do gynaecology. But while he was a student, we became good friends. In those five or six years, long before Anke came on the scene, Jürgen and I went everywhere together: Morocco, Greece, Peru, Ireland. He was a perfect travelling partner and a perfect friend. We always knew when to leave each other alone and when to be there to pick each other up. Some of those mornings after the Irish bars I was glad to have a doctor friend. With time, though, Jürgen’s job became more demanding. He grew a moustache and we travelled less together. He once took a two-week job in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war, and I wasn’t able to go. I think that was the first time he went anywhere without me.
We stayed the best of friends. Maybe the only real friends either of us ever had. Mutually exclusive. I think Jürgen would agree with that in theory. We never stopped being friends.
But then came Anke. Anke Seidel.
Everything changed after she arrived. She was wilder than Jürgen and myself put together. There was no time for moderation or discretion. She kept saying there was no such thing as an afterlife. The day after she stuck her tongue out at me, she invited me for a drive to the Eifel mountain range. With her mother’s car, a case of her father’s champagne and a small Bavarian snuffbox full of cocaine, she drove the Audi into the Eifel in the middle of March. She showed me some of the landmarks, like Camp Vogelsang where Hitler trained his elite young successors. As promised, she also showed me where Heinrich Böll used to live. He was a hero. He had taught her how to cry.
That was the other thing about Anke. She was able to cry. She had a spiritual side to her. She could cry at will. In the car, she told me straight off that she had practised it when she was a child. She and her sister used to look in the mirror and summon up the emotion until the tears ran down. They once sat in the back of the car crying while their parents went shopping, and passers-by began to look into the car and worry about them until they burst out laughing. Her mother berated her for playing with her emotions. Never play with your sacred, involuntary faculties.
I didn’t believe that Anke could cry on the spot. Like a movie star. We had a long conversation about it as she drove the car. Then she stopped the car and started crying. Okay, it was outside Heinrich Böll’s house, but still and all, she did it. I was moved. So much so that I told her to stop crying.
It’s what she said afterwards that worried me. It sounded as though she was clocking up all her crying in advance. Advent-tears.
‘Maybe some day, I’ll have something to cry about,’ she said, laughing, as she drove on.
‘I’ll give you something to cry about,’ I said, as a joke.
I was never any good at jokes. I always listen too much to the prediction of words. We dropped the subject and drove on into the mountains.
Eventually she stopped the car at a remote forest for a picnic. She got me to open the champagne and then dealt out a line of coke on the dashboard of her mother’s car, which we snorted with a 100 DM note. Ten minutes later, she handed me her glass to hold for a minute before she opened the door of the car and stepped outside. She leaned back in and said: ‘If you can catch me, you can have me.’ Then she slapped her bottom and ran off into the trees.
I believe she let me catch her.
It burned intensely for a short while between Anke and myself. We were seen everywhere together. But then, after about two months, she took an equally sudden, but even stronger liking to Jürgen. It seemed far more durable between them right from the beginning. In fact, he seemed to settle her down quite a bit. From time to time, she did revert to me, briefly, for an afternoon, a night, a weekend at most. But she was already leaning more and more towards Jürgen. Then she moved in with him altogether. In less than a year, they decided to get married, which they did with a great carnival in August of 1984. I was left trying to work out what it was that Jürgen had and I didn’t. It was more than the moustache.
Then came the crash. Anke and I drove up to the Eifel for the last time. To what she called the consecrated forest. You can see why I was beginning to think that Jürgen was in on it as well; as though he had made a deal with her. But then I realized it was much more like one of her own plans. Anke’s farewell.
Since the crash I have been back home to Vermont, wondering if I should leave Germany to Jürgen and Anke. I really thought that in order to forget Anke, I would literally have to leave the country. We were still the best of friends, all of us, and we kept on meeting. They went on inviting me to dinner parties along with other friends. Occasionally I met them for drinks at the White Bear or the Irish Pub where Jürgen burst out one night with the news that Anke was expecting a baby. I congratulated them both and made a toast. Jürgen was already drunk. Anke was moved to tears.
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During the afternoon, the people of Laun began to reclaim their town. As soon as the last of the German patrols had withdrawn back to the garrison, they gathered in the streets quietly, in small groups. Children came out to play on the square beneath the statue of the Czech martyr Johann Huss, which had ironically been allowed to stay untouched during the war.
Rumours went around about the uprising in Prague. About the imminent German capitulation. Men went up to the post office and began to throw stamps and registration forms into the street with a mixture of anger and joy. They had been given instructions by the National Committee at the U Somolu pub to repossess the institutions of the state. The officials who had been working at the post office up to then joined in, throwing documents out through the windows where they fluttered and chased each other in the street. Then the post office was closed for business.
