In the Shadow of the Storm

by Ella Zeiss

  They all felt the consequences of the mobilisation. The conscripted men were missing from the workforce and had to be replaced by those left behind – mainly women. Working hours were therefore extended and everyone worked from dawn until dusk all week long with no days off. Some evenings Anna could barely straighten her back when she got home. She saw her husband and son only briefly before going to bed when they finally came in tired, hungry and dirty. At least Yvo was spared this ordeal. There was enough responsibility resting on her young shoulders as it was. She was the one who organised their family life: she washed the clothes, looked after the cow and the garden, bought food and cooked the meals. Anna couldn’t imagine how they would cope once school began again. She didn’t want her daughter to neglect her studies to do the housework, but they had little choice.

  In the next room she could hear Erich coughing. She didn’t like the way his cough kept returning, even in the middle of summer. He seemed to be well enough otherwise but she didn’t want his condition to get any worse and at the same time she didn’t want to worry him about it. God only knew, things were hard enough for him as it was.

  September 1941, Baku, Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan

  I really need your help with my algebra in a minute – I just don’t understand a thing,’ Emma sighed with an imploring look at her brother.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Harri said unwillingly. ‘Just let me finish my own work.’ School had started a week ago and after the long summer break, he too was finding the step up a challenge. Having spent the last couple of months outside all the time, he wasn’t much enjoying sitting in a heated classroom all day long.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Emma said jealously, ‘you’ll be finished in a year’s time.’

  Harri snorted. ‘You surely don’t think it’s going to be any easier at university than it is at school, do you?’

  All of a sudden he stopped in his tracks. They had just come out of the shadow of the tall vines and could see their little house up ahead. A man was sitting outside, his eyes closed and his face turned to the sun. Harri’s heart leapt.

  ‘Vater!’ they shouted at the same moment, and began to run. ‘Vater!’

  Their father jumped to his feet and hugged them both as they leapt into his arms.

  ‘You’re home again!’ Emma stammered happily.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Harri asked. He was worried – normally you were only sent home from the Front if you weren’t fit to fight.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ Vater said to reassure him, but Harri could hear a note in his voice that made him wonder. ‘Let’s go in.’ Vater opened the door. ‘I was just enjoying the sun while I waited for you. I’d almost forgotten how beautiful and peaceful it is here.’

  ‘Did you see any fighting?’ Harri asked curiously.

  ‘Yes, I did. More than I would have liked.’ Vater fell silent and Harri said not another word. ‘When does Mutter get home?’

  ‘Not usually until it’s getting dark. Working hours have been extended because so many men are gone.’ Harri hated to see his mother looking so tired and worn. He didn’t know how she coped. She appeared to be so small and delicate but was in fact incredibly strong. He tried to ease her workload where he could and had even offered to leave school, albeit with a heavy heart, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Good qualifications are the most important thing to give you a start in life,’ was all she said. ‘It’s the only way to open doors and stand out in a crowd.’ Seeing her work so hard in the vineyard day after day, Harri wasn’t sure if he believed her. What use were all her years of experience as a teacher? She had been allowed to work in quality control at first, but the beginning of the war had changed priorities. Everyone was equal these days. It made no difference what qualifications you had or how good you were at something. All that counted were two strong arms and the will to work hard.

  ‘Are you hungry, Papa?’ Emma started rummaging in the kitchen cupboard.

  ‘Yes, something to eat would be nice.’

  ‘Why don’t I fry up some eggs or potatoes?’

  Vater smiled. ‘Can I have both?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she beamed.

  Harri hid his smile and took out his schoolbooks. Emma was obviously willing to do anything to get out of her algebra homework.

  ‘How long can you stay?’ she asked happily, starting to peel the potatoes.

  Vater shrugged. ‘Forever, I hope.’

  Harri laid down his pencil. ‘What happened?’ he asked quietly.

  His father stared at his clasped fingers. ‘I was discharged,’ he said at last.

  ‘Discharged?’ Harri exclaimed in surprise. He didn’t know that was even possible. ‘Did you do something wrong?’

  ‘No. All the Germans who were called up have been sent back home.’

  ‘And what does that mean for us?’

  ‘It means I can be with you again,’ Vater said with a small smile. ‘I can’t say that I’m especially sorry but as far as everything else is concerned, we’ll just have to wait and see. Tomorrow, the first thing I’m going to do is go and see Director Klydeshev and try and get my old job back. We always worked well together until now.’

  Loud banging on the door tore Harri from his sleep. He rubbed his eyes sleepily and tried to think straight.

  ‘What is it?’ his sister asked, shocked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He got out of bed and felt his way to the door in the dark. In the next room he could hear his father’s voice. He had been home for two weeks now – two lovely quiet weeks. He had been given his old job back at once and everything had been fine until now.

  A pale shimmer of light shone through the crack beneath the door. His parents had obviously turned on the lamp. Harri spied cautiously into the living room and saw his father open the front door.

  ‘Samuel Pfeiffer?’ someone asked arrogantly.

  Harri’s blood froze in his veins. This could not be happening. Not again.

  ‘Yes,’ his father said clearly.

  ‘You’re under arrest.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough. You can get dressed if you wish.’ The man speaking signalled to one of the other men, who followed Vater into the bedroom.

  ‘Who else is here?’ the speaker asked, turning to Mutter.

  ‘Only me and our two children.’

  ‘Ask them to come here so we can search the house.’

  ‘Come on!’ Harri grabbed his sister’s hand and walked into the living room. He kept his eyes firmly on the ground so the men wouldn’t notice the anger and hatred that was burning inside him. Why did the authorities always have to come and destroy everything as soon as things seemed to turn all right at last?

  He could feel the man’s piercing gaze now resting on him.

  ‘How old are you?’

  Slowly Harri raised his head. ‘Sixteen.’

  The man sneered at him. ‘Too young to arrest then, but only just. We’ll be watching you.’

  Harri did his best to hide his feelings. When his sister quietly disengaged her hand from his, he realised that his clenched fist had been hurting her and told himself to relax.

  Vater came out of the room fully dressed. ‘It’s all some misunderstanding,’ he said, wanting to reassure them, but it was no use.

  Harri almost snorted out loud. This was no misunderstanding, it was a deliberate act, but he knew anything he said would only make matters worse for his father and for himself. If the men decided to arrest him too, then Mutter and Emma would be on their own without any male support.

  Unable to do anything, they watched helplessly as the men searched their home. Ransacked would have been a better word, Harri thought. All the pictures were thrown off the walls, the furniture was shifted. They even knocked down the partition wall between the two rooms. The few words Harri overheard suggested they were on the lookout for a radio or transmitter used to pass on information to the enemy. When the secret police had finished their work, not a si
ngle thing was left standing in its rightful place. Even their framed family photo was smashed to pieces.

  ‘We’ll see each other soon,’ Vater promised resolutely as the men led him away. The door slammed shut behind them.

  Harri tried not to think about the incident four years ago when his uncle had been taken from his family in similar circumstances and had never returned.

  In a daze, he bent down to lift the photo away from the broken shards of glass, noticing that although the glass was shattered the frame was still in one piece.

  His actions seemed to free his mother and sister from their torpor as slowly and stiffly they both started to help tidy up. No one said a word. It wasn’t necessary. They all understood what had just happened and what might come next. Nobody cried, not this time.

  To give him something else to think about, Harri wondered why exactly that might be. Were they all hoping that things would sort themselves out again, that everything would work out in the end because they had been lucky in the past? Or were they just getting used to it by now? Was it getting to be a routine, saying goodbye to Vater in the middle of the night, not knowing how he nor they were going to fare? Life carried on regardless, it always did, somehow or other – was that what they were all thinking?

  The following morning Mutter left the house at dawn, hoping to speak to the director of the sovkhoz before work started. Even if false accusations against her husband were nothing new, she would do everything in her power to disprove them.

  Harri hated the fact that he couldn’t go with her. He even played with the idea of skipping school, but Mutter wouldn’t hear of it. She said it would put them all in a bad light if he suddenly started doing that kind of thing.

  To be honest Harri might as well have stayed at home after all. His mind kept wandering, his thoughts constantly returning to his father or whether or not his mother would be able to do anything to help. He wasn’t able to concentrate on what his teachers were saying at all. For the most part they just left him alone and he wasn’t sorry. He didn’t know if they knew that his father had been arrested or, which was probably more likely, had simply decided that a normally excellent student was having a bad day, and he didn’t really care.

  Only Sergey Alexandrovich, his teacher for literature, took the opportunity to embarrass him in public. He called Harri to the blackboard and grilled him with questions about Tolstoy’s masterwork War and Peace, correctly assuming that Harri hadn’t paid attention to a single thing he had just been telling them about it.

  Luckily Harri had read the book the previous year and after a few minor difficulties with the first two questions, soon began to remember more and more detail.

  Eventually his teacher sent him back to his seat with a sour look, awarding him a C grade for his efforts.

  Harri was sure his answers hadn’t been that bad, but knew from experience that there was no point in trying to argue with Sergey Alexandrovich. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. His father had been taken away and he couldn’t have cared less what grades he got.

  He just about managed to sit through the day’s lessons until it was time to go home, then charged out of the classroom.

  His sister was already waiting for him impatiently outside. ‘Should we take a little detour and go and see Mutter?’ she asked.

  He nodded. Emma was every bit as nervous and agitated as he was. There was no way they could stand waiting until this evening for more news. Anything would be better than the suspense of not knowing what was happening.

  It wasn’t difficult to find Mutter. They could hear the women who were out in the fields harvesting the grapes singing from a long way off. Harri and his sister followed the sound of the music until they saw their mother.

  She was just straightening up and stretching her back, wiping the sweat from her brow. Wearily she circled her aching shoulders and looked around, then jumped when she saw the children and ran over to them with a look of alarm on her face. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘No,’ Emma said quickly, and lowered her voice. ‘We wanted to hear if there’s any news.’

  Mutter looked around and shooed them away from the other women working nearby.

  ‘I talked to Director Klydeshev,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t know that Vater was going to be arrested and was very surprised when I told him what had happened. He promised to plead in his favour. He thinks that if there’s no actual charge, he should be able to get him out.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness!’ Emma exclaimed quietly.

  Mutter smiled, but the expression of concern didn’t leave her face. ‘Now all we can do is hope and pray.’

  Chapter 22

  Harri had just finished his homework when Mutter came running into the house nearly out of breath. ‘We have to start packing at once,’ she said abruptly. ‘We’re being resettled the day after tomorrow!’

  ‘What!’ Harri stared at her, not understanding what she was saying, waiting for the meaning of her words to sink in. ‘Why?’

  She shrugged helplessly. ‘They didn’t say. Director Klydeshev called by today. I think we can be thankful that we’ve even been warned – this way we can at least pack up a few things and slaughter the pig.’ She looked around frantically. ‘Where is your sister?’

  ‘Outside in the garden.’ Harri stood up and went over to his mother, whose eyes were scanning the room. Presumably she was trying to work out what they should take with them. ‘Sit down and have a rest, Mutter,’ he said softly. ‘You probably ran all the way home, didn’t you?’

  She nodded and sat down unwillingly. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

  ‘Do you know where they’re going to send us?’

  ‘Farther east, to Kazakhstan, as far as I know.’ She gasped for air as if she had suddenly remembered something. ‘The winters there are far colder! I need to make warm linings for our coats. I hope we have enough wadding.’

  ‘I’ll tell Emma and she can run to the shop and buy some more. I’ll see to the pig.’

  ‘Thank you.’ His mother gave him a tender smile.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said gloomily.

  They had bought the pig a few weeks ago, looking forward to a special roast at Christmas and smoked ham all through the winter – that was not going to happen now. And neither were his dreams. Here at the edge of Baku, going to university had seemed a real possibility. Harri didn’t know where they were moving to, but he doubted very much that there were that many universities in the endless expanse of the Kazakh Steppe.

  He immediately reprimanded himself for being so selfish. How insignificant a career as an engineer seemed in comparison to the fact that they were going to have to leave everything behind again, everything they had built up with such effort. They were going to have to start from scratch all over again, and also they would be leaving without Vater. His arrest had been a week ago and still there was no news. All they knew was that he was in prison in Baku waiting for his case to be reviewed – at least, that was what they had been told. No one in authority cared that Vater was wasting away in prison even though he was innocent, nor that his family was being sent so far away.

  Emma was busy digging up potatoes behind the house when Harri appeared with the squealing piglet under his arm.

  ‘What are you doing with that poor animal?’

  ‘I’m going to kill it.’

  ‘What? No!’ she cried shocked. ‘It’s for Christmas! I was going to make some very special pâté out of that pig.’

  ‘Well, it’s not possible now, I’m afraid.’ Harri took a deep breath and told her the bitter truth. There was no point in hiding the news. ‘We’re going to be resettled in Kazakhstan, the day after tomorrow.’

  His sister stared at him, her eyes wide with fright. ‘But why?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I could make a guess,’ he said slowly. He had heard all sorts of things over the past few weeks – murmurings and rumours, news from people’s fathers still at the Front. ‘The Wehrmacht is pressing eve
r further forward. Maybe they’re worried we might change sides and help the enemy, or maybe because we have relatives abroad.’ One of Vater’s cousins had moved to Canada right after the October Revolution.

  ‘But we’re not even in contact with any of them!’

  ‘I know that and you know that, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean the authorities will believe us. I don’t know.’ He spread his hands helplessly. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. No one asked us and we have no say in this. We’ll just have to get ready as best we can. Mother wants you to run to the shop and buy as much wadding as possible so she can line our winter coats really well, then you can help me preserve the meat.’

  Emma hesitated. ‘And what about Papa?’ she asked. She was shaking.

  How Harri would have loved to be able to say something comforting to her, but the sad truth was that his father’s fate didn’t depend on his family being close by. They had no influence on the outcome. ‘If they let him out, he’ll be able to follow us, I’m sure,’ he said at last. That was all the hope he could give her.

  He had just finished cutting up the piglet, putting the meat into pots to be baked in the big brick oven next to the house, when his mother came out. Lost in thought, she stopped next to a tree and ran her fingers over the bark.

  ‘Your father planted this tree for me last autumn,’ she said softly, ‘because he knows how much I love peaches. It bore its first fruit this year. Remember how beautifully sweet and juicy those peaches were?’

  Harri nodded silently. He could remember exactly when he and his father had chosen the tree together at the market to please her.

  ‘Do you know what’s so strange?’ she continued quietly. ‘We’ve had a peach tree in every garden we’ve lived in so far, and each time it bloomed properly for the first time, we had to leave. It was like that in the Crimea, then in Armavir and now here. Isn’t that mad?’ Almost tenderly, her fingers ran over the bark of the tree while Harri searched for words.