Homecoming
‘Will you play for us?’ Max’s father, his eyes glistening with anticipation, was lighting the first of the final batch of his precious pre-war stock of Havana cigars. His neighbour and only other houseguest, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, had tactfully refused the offer of a cigar (magnanimously insisting that he preferred his pipe) and Max was rolling one of his disreputable newspaper concoctions. ‘Or you could accompany Bettina?’
‘Tell me about von Wammensee first.’
Bertram von Aschau blew out a rich ring of smoke, then poked at it with the tip of his cigar as if he were puncturing a balloon. ‘An excellent match. The boy works alongside Hans-Albin at the Army Ordnance Department. Good family. Most definitely not Briefadel upstarts. I looked them up in the Almanac de Gotha. Bettina’s children will retain her Uradel status, I’m relieved to say.’
Hildegarde von Aschau let her embroidery fall onto her lap. ‘Bertram! How could you? How could you stoop to looking up Fritz’s family in that beastly, ill-bred book?’
‘Well, my father looked your family up in it before he would allow us to marry. And very satisfactory the experience proved too.’
Max smiled. It was years since he had heard his father flirting with his mother, no matter how esoterically. It made her instantly more human, and he felt his affection for her rekindling in the warmth of his father’s obvious esteem. The frontline seemed indescribably far away in this civilized, book-lined room, with its prominent collection of Jean Paul novels, its roaring fire, its wooden panelling, and the near-ubiquitous antlers scattered around the walls and light brackets – even doubling as clothes hooks and as gun cradles for his father’s precious collection of antique firearms.
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen chose that moment to break into the conversation, his sensuous, almost oriental-looking eyes panning across Max’s face. ‘I am sorry to change the subject.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘But I so rarely get the chance to speak to someone fresh from the front. May I assume, Max, that you have not been so far indoctrinated by Herr Himmler’s SS,’ – he waved his pipe placatingly – ‘that you are still capable of rational, independent thought?’
Max, jerked from his ruminations, managed a nervous laugh. ‘There is very little rational, independent thought on the front line. We have neither the time nor the energy for it. We are too busy trying to survive.’
‘Nevertheless.’
Max stubbed out his half-smoked papirosu. ‘Nevertheless.’
‘Good. Then perhaps this paper may serve as your bedtime reading.’ Reck-Malleczewen rummaged in the pockets of his woollen jacket and withdrew a folded sheet of foolscap. ‘I must ask you first to swear to me that you will not reveal its contents to anyone outside this room.’ He held the paper up.
Max hesitated. Then he nodded. ‘I swear.’ With a quizzical glance at his father, he strode across the room and retrieved the paper from Reck-Malleczewen’s hand. He glanced at the title, then read it out aloud, shaking his head in disbelief as he began to fathom its import. ‘“Basic Principles For The New Order”? You are joking, surely?’
Reck-Malleczewen raised one hand emphatically. ‘Hardly. Both your father and I have already added our names to it. We feel that, in the present circumstances, it is time to stand up and be counted.’
Max turned pale. ‘Then you will stand up and be counted against the corner of a concrete wall. You and your families.’ He waved the paper in the air, as if he wished to demonstrate to the others just how flimsy it was. ‘Have you any idea at all what you are setting yourself up against?’
Bertram von Aschau let the ash of his cigar fall into the fireplace. ‘Reck is right, Max. This has all gone on too long. If we aristocrats had moved earlier – organized ourselves more effectively when we still had a chance of stopping this barbarism – then Germany would not find itself in the position it is in today.’
Max swivelled to face him. ‘Half the Wehrmacht officer class is made up of aristocrats, if you hadn’t noticed. And just how do you propose to convince them that now, after all these years, is the ideal time for the grand gesture? Are you going to call on your beloved Crown Prince Rupprecht to step in and take over the government of Bavaria, perhaps? Muster your own personal Freikorps from what remains of the local peasantry? Is that your plan? Or do you mean to send a delegation to ask the Führer to abdicate? I’m sorry, Father, but this is madness, what you are suggesting. Tell me that it’s a joke. A bad joke.’
‘This is no joke, Max. And neither is it madness.’ Reck-Malleczewen held up his pipe stem. ‘While you have been away fighting, things have changed here. Did they tell you what happened in Hamburg? During the bombing? In one night, 200,000 dead. The asphalt became so hot that people fleeing from the horror of the phosphorous bombs sank into the pavements as if into a swamp. Mothers threw their own children into the river to drown rather than see them swallowed up in such an inferno.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘And now your very own SS Schwarze Korps journal blithely proclaims that there is no such thing as “tragedy”. I quote: “It is a condition first discovered by the Pope for the subjection of mankind.”’
‘Please don’t use the Holy Father’s name in such a context.’ Max’s mother had let her embroidery fall to the floor and was staring, white-faced, at Reck-Malleczewen.
‘What other context is there to use it in, Hildegarde? What other context exists anymore?’
Max could feel his throat constricting with the absurdity of the situation. ‘And do you really expect me to sign this paper when I have read it? Is that what this is all about?’
Reck waved an appeasing hand. ‘No. You are a front-line serving officer. They would simply withdraw you and feed you to the wolves. Of course we don’t expect you to sign. We are expendable, you are not.’
Max threw his head back. ‘Why are you expendable and I am not? What do you think I have been doing at the front? Conserving myself for posterity? For the New Order?’
‘Max.’ Reck-Malleczewen’s voice was soothing. Reasonable. As if he were explaining the forces of nature to a child. ‘What we want of you is understanding. We want to tap into your capacity to change things when the time comes. And the time will come, I am certain of it. The worm will turn. It is then that enlightened military commanders like yourself must guide their soldiers in the right direction.’
Max thrust his hands angrily into his trouser pockets. He began to pace up and down in front of the fire. ‘Turn ourselves over to the enemy? Is that what you are asking? Have you any idea what the enemy would do to us?’ He stopped pacing and turned to face Reck. ‘And how many men do you think I have left over from the slaughter? At the last count, twelve. Enough to turn the tide, do you think?’
Reck-Malleczewen flapped his hand placatingly. ‘Of course we don’t expect you to give yourselves up. But when you return to the front, you can at least explain to your superior officers what is happening back in Germany. Prepare them for the inevitable moment when Hitler is overthrown. Then, and only then, can we sue for an honourable peace.’
Max crumpled up the paper and threw it angrily into the fire. ‘It’s too late for that, I’m afraid. Far too much has happened. The Russians will never allow us an honourable surrender after what we’ve done to them. Our only possible choice is to fight to the death. I refuse to risk the lives of my men for yet another lost cause, when we already have a terminal one to contend with as it is.’
‘Max!’ It was his mother. ‘Your father asked you to play for us. And you are frightening Bettina with your talk. Please go to the piano immediately.’
Max dropped his head. It was all so utterly pointless. Decent men like Reck, and his father, and Hans-Albin, and Fritz, would never understand that Hitler was not the enemy anymore. That he was merely a sideshow – a man who had succeeded in outlasting even the results of his own blunders. He had unleashed a virus on them all, and eventually it would sweep them away, whether they willed it or not.
He looked around the room with w
ild eyes. At the cracked and peeling portraits of his ancestors. At the faded Millefeuille tapestries. At his father’s beloved Memling. At his mother’s prized collection of blue glaze Dresden porcelain. At the painted furniture, so comforting, so gemütlich, so ordered. At the Venetian lacquer harpsichord, with its rustic panels. At the Biedermeier piano, ready and waiting for him to play the war away. He sighed dutifully. ‘It’s been so long, Mother. I’m not sure my fingers will obey me anymore.’
‘Bettina will turn the pages for you. Come. We would like to listen.’
Max hesitated, then walked slowly towards the piano. He felt as if he were inside one of his own recurring dreams – the dream of a dying man confronted by the gates of Hell and afforded one final, short-lived attempt at oblivion. He sat down. He was tempted, for one absurd moment, to burst out laughing.
‘What will you play for us?’
Max shook his head in despair. ‘I can’t remember anything. It’s just gone. I can’t think anymore.’
‘Something by Hummel, perhaps? Or von Weber?’ Bertram von Aschau’s voice was tentative, wistful, conciliatory, the voice of a man who acknowledged his own shortcomings but surreptitiously cherished them.
His wife cut in on him. ‘No. He will play the Scarlatti piece. The D Minor sonata.’ Hers, as always, was the voice of reason rather than of sentimentality. She, Hildegarde von Aschau, her rigid tone implied, would never be the one to place her family in danger from some half-cocked masculine notion of ‘doing the right thing’.
‘Which one, Mama? There are two, as I remember.’
‘The K32. You must remember that one. It’s very short. I taught it to you on the morning of your fourteenth birthday. Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes. Of course I remember.’
Max held up a hand to stop Bettina rising from her seat. He took a deep breath, and as he took it, something automatic seemed to cut in, just as it had that morning, outside the church, on hearing the Bach cantata, clearing his mind and bringing him a delirious sense of peace. As he glided into the first tentative trill, his fingers took over from his mind, inhabiting the keys as if they had endured no absence – as if they had known no other path.
He half-closed his eyes. Despite his agitation, he could feel his breathing flutter and then steady, as the familiar music cradled him once again inside its analgesic arms.
Father Bauer
Now, many fruitless discussions later, and with the imminent ending of his leave in sight, Max’s mother had pointedly withdrawn to her room and was taking her meals alone; Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen had retired, beaten, to his converted monastery at Poing – bought following the forcible expropriation of his family home in favour of a hydroelectric plant in 1938, courtesy of Siemens – and Max’s father had retreated to his library and to his books and to his dreams of a revivified monarchist Bavaria. Bettina, in loco parentis, was making her rounds of the neediest local families with food parcels from the home farm, and Max was left, for the first time in nearly a week, to his own devices.
On a whim, and entirely contrary to military regulations, he decided to change out of his uniform into whatever civilian clothes he could rustle up from his own and his brother’s scant wardrobe, and go wandering. He ended by dressing himself in a blue and white Bavarian check shirt, charcoal grey woollen trousers, and a salt and pepper cardigan with silver buttons that he had managed to unearth from some forgotten drawer and which now only barely fitted him. As a result of this transformation he felt almost naked, as if, with the temporary sloughing of the protective carapace of his uniform, he was now vulnerable to the influences of an alien, and more threatening, world.
He had, until now, resolved to ignore his mother’s often repeated wish that he go to see Father Bauer to confess himself before attending Mass, but this unexpected morning, with its unseasonably strong sunlight and its crisp reminder of the happy days of his youth in the run-up to Christmas, had left him nostalgic for the old man’s company. Without really meaning to, therefore, he found that his feet were guiding him along the familiar road to Reckingen and to the house that his grandfather had made available to Father Bauer upon his arrival in the valley, many decades before, as a callow young priest.
Once he had made his decision, a brisk twenty minutes’ walk took him as far as the front gate. He had known the house, and Father Bauer, all his life. He had stood outside its portals in heatwave, rain, and blizzard, on mornings when the wheat crackled and grumbled in the warmth, and on early summer evenings after languid days of sunshine, when the freshly cut grass smelled as sweet as young girls’ hair and the sibilation of Father Bauer’s beloved trout stream seemed to him like the music of the spheres, the sound of an Aeolian harp and the echo of the Golden Mean, all strung together into one preternatural harmony.
He peered across the picket fence at the pine tree Father Bauer and the altar boys had planted to honour his elder brother’s matriculation; it stood more than twenty feet tall now, a stark reminder of the laches of the past, it skirts dusted with snow. Turning, he gazed back across the fields towards his father’s house, dimly visible through the distant evergreens. He found it impossible to conceive of enemy soldiers ever despoiling this treasured landscape of his youth – and yet, he told himself, this was exactly what his own people had done, during the past five years of total war, to the Russians, the French, the Poles, the Belgians, the Czechs, the Norwegians, the Greeks, the Hungarians, the Dutch, the Albanians. The list was endless. And for what? More Lebensraum? One man’s Napoleon complex? Max shook his head in bemusement at his own stupidity. He and his like had stepped enthusiastically on board the merry-go-round without ever bothering to consider that, at the end of the ride, there might conceivably be a price to pay.
Father Bauer’s familiar voice distracted him from his thoughts. Max turned back towards the house feeling curiously unsettled, as if he were the nauseated victim of the aftershock of some far distant earthquake.
‘Frau Winkelmann told me you were here.’
Father Bauer rested for a moment on the doorframe, sucking the thin winter air into his lungs. He eased himself across the threshold of the house and sidestepped painstakingly down the staircase, one arm locked to the railing.
Max moved swiftly in to help him, but Father Bauer raised an admonitory hand.
‘No. Stay where you are. It is good for me to walk. Good to force movement into old joints.’
Max followed the elderly priest’s unsteady progress towards him down the snow-banked path, shocked afresh by the deterioration a few short years had contrived on the vital, sprightly old man he had left behind him when he set off to war.
‘Shouldn’t you be using a stick? Two, even?’
Father Bauer cocked his head to one side. ‘Why not three? Or a bath chair, perhaps? Frau Winkelmann could push me. Or we could attach a donkey, and I could drive myself to and from the Theresien-Kirche waving a carrot?’
Max laughed. ‘That would certainly amuse the altar boys.’
Father Bauer had reached the picket fence by now. He glanced up, breathing heavily, his head nodding, his right arm jerking spasmodically in non-sequential counterpoint. ‘There aren’t any altar boys any more. They are all at the front. Or in the Hitler Youth. Or dead.’
Max decided that Father Bauer’s dignity had been sufficiently attended to. He grasped him firmly by the elbow, pointedly ignoring his remarks. ‘Do you wish to go back inside?’
‘No. I need the air. And I should very much like you to tell me what you were seeing out there with your faraway eyes.’
Max stepped backwards. He let Father Bauer’s elbow fall. ‘Faraway eyes?’
Father Bauer nodded. ‘Yes. You look through things, Max, not at them anymore. I noticed it at the church, immediately after you arrived. You saw me, but you were looking at something beyond where I was standing. Were you looking at God, perhaps?’
‘I’m afraid not, Father.’
‘“Satan hath desired to have you, that he may s
ift you as wheat.” St Luke, of course. The wisest of the Apostles. Is it the devil, then, you see?’
Max shrugged fatalistically, as if the implications of Father Bauer’s words had passed him by – but he felt the frigid hand of truth clutch at his heart nevertheless. ‘Something like that. His works, perhaps. My reflection in his eyes.’
The old priest rested one fragile hand on Max’s arm. ‘But you have not done the devil’s work, Max.’
‘Haven’t I?’
Father Bauer shook his head. ‘I think not, Maxl. I think not. Do you still, at least, believe?’
‘Mother asked me the same question, the day I arrived.’
‘And what did you answer her?’
Max reached inside his shirt, revealing his crucifix. ‘I wear it all the time. It is the one thing that brings order into the chaos that surrounds me.’
Father Bauer made the sign of the cross, then chucked Max tenderly on his cheek with a cupped palm. ‘Order, alone, offers us no personal redemption, my son.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘I mean that we must act morally. Not merely cling to the memories of what we have learned.’
Max tucked the crucifix back inside his shirt. ‘How can anyone act morally in a war?’
‘With greater ease than in times of peace, my boy.’
Max shook his head. ‘But surely, Father, war changes the language of morality?’
Father Bauer waved one of his gnarled fingers, as if he were scrubbing out some symbol on an invisible blackboard. ‘No, Max. Not at all. It merely throws it into greater relief.’
Max found himself taken aback, as always, by the acuity of Father Bauer’s mind. The old man seemed to see what others only took for granted – understand, where others simply accepted. ‘Am I so obvious, then?’
‘You are wounded, child. These evil men have taken you and bent you to their will. They have played on your sense of duty, on the honour that you feel should be a soldier’s lot, and they have twisted that honour to their own ends. Have you come to make confession?’
The Occupation Secret Page 5
