by Sven Hassel
She suddenly looked across at us and smiled. Tiny smiled back, in a rather sickly fashion, I thought.
‘But anyway, you see, as I walked down the road I realized that the car was parked outside my door, not Frau Becker’s, and I thought for a moment it was Paul come back from the grave . . . Paul was my youngest son, of course. The one I was telling you about . . . Well, the young man that got out of the car, he looked just like him, I’m sure. Six feet tall, wide shoulders, narrow hips, blond hair, blue eyes . . . he was always the most handsome of the four . . . And this young man was so like him it gave me quite a turn. And when he spoke, he was so gentle, so polite, so obviously well brought up. He must have come from a good family, you know . . . The only thing I didn’t take to was the black leather he was wearing. He seemed to be all black leather from head to foot . . . so cold, I always feel. So very impersonal . . . But then, perhaps it’s a uniform?’
Smiling now at Tiny, now at the photograph of Himmler, she took us through the entire scene. I was able to picture it so well: the blond young god from the SS, with his arrogant blue eyes and his black leather boots, and the silly old lady, faded and trusting and too busy comparing him with dead baby Paul to notice the menace lurking behind his façade of polished charm.
Frau Dreyer?’ he had politely inquired, as he stepped out of the car.
And the old woman, all of a flutter, had presented herself to him and held out her hand and had it crushed in a big black gauntlet, and the young man had gone on to verify the fact that she was indeed the Emilie Dreyer who lived at Hind-enburgstrasse No. 9. And all the time standing there with a suave smile on his face and a Walter 7.65 in his pocket, and old Frau Dreyer never suspecting a thing. He turned and opened the car door, to usher her into the back seat. They wanted her at headquarters, there were matters that had to be talked about.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, but I can’t possibly manage today! I have an appointment with Dr Jöhr, to have my feet seen to, you know. I suffer very badly with my feet.’
And the SS man had laughed aloud at that. A visit to the chiropodist! That was the poorest excuse he had ever heard.
Frau Dreyer never knew why he found her innocent statement of fact so amusing. She went on to explain, in case he might not have appreciated the seriousness of the problem, that Dr. Jöhr was a busy man with a large practice, and if you didn’t cancel an appointment at least twenty-four hours in advance you still had to pay for it.
The SS man laughed even louder. He at least had a good sense of humour.
Don’t you worry about your feet, old lady. We’ll get in touch with Dr Jöhr and see that he doesn’t charge you.’
‘But you see,’ she said, ‘it might be weeks before I can make another appointment. He’s such a very busy man . . .’
Losing patience with the daft old bag, the SS man had taken her by the shoulder and pushed her towards the car. As he did so, she had suddenly realized that his left arm was missing, and this had completely sidetracked her from the problem of her feet. Such a dreadful thing to have happened! Such a tragedy, such a disaster, such a—
‘Do you mind if we don’t discuss it?’ he said, curtly.
She showed him the SS ring that had belonged to Paul. She told him about Paul, about his Iron Cross and how he had died for his country, but the young man seemed curiously uninterested. He had bundled her into the back seat of the car and slammed the door on her, and they had driven off at full speed to the Gestapo. They went everywhere at full speed, those people.
The driver was a very different type from the other young man. A rough, tough, crude type of person. No manners, no breeding. He had a glass eye, which had been ill made and looked more like a blood alley than a glass eye. And his face was thick and coarse, and Frau Dreyer felt from the beginning that he was out of sympathy with her.
‘Watch it, grandma!’ were the first words he had addressed to her, as she was hustled into the car; and then, turning to his companion: ‘I hope the old bag behaves herself in the back.’
‘You get on with the driving and leave everything else to me,’ was the young man’s retort.
Frau Dreyer felt that the implied rebuke had been justified.
‘It was not up to a man of that class to address me as grandmother,’ she told us. ‘And as for calling me a bag, I find that to be totally lacking in respect towards one’s elders and betters.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ said Tiny. ‘But if I was you I wouldn’t get too hot under the collar about it. I mean, it’s not like calling someone a—’
Just in time, Porta clapped a hand over his mouth.
‘In future,’ he begged him, ‘just confine your remarks to a simple yes or no and then we’ll all rest a lot easier.’
‘Get out of it!’ shouted Tiny, indignantly breaking free. ‘I’ll say what I flaming like and it’s no concern of yours . . . And I’m certainly not saying yes any more, I can tell you that for nothing. First time I ever said yes it got me two months in the nick. I swore blind after that I’d stick to no.’
‘So long as you do,’ said Porta. ‘That’s all we ask.’
And he turned back to the bench on which he was stacking up one of his marked packs of cards. He always put them away very carefully in their original wrapping paper, sticking it down with an application and regard for detail that was totally missing from the more official tasks that were given him.
Barcelona and Heide were idly playing dice again. Frau Dreyer went on with her tale as if there had never been any interruption.
‘I couldn’t help feeling he was rather an unpleasant man altogether. He drove so fast, you know, really quite dangerous, and on several occasions I swear it was a miracle that people escaped. But he just laughed, as if it were a great joke . . . Then at Harversterhude they stopped to pick up a young girl. I don’t know why they wanted her, but I must say that even the young man who was so charming to me behaved in a VERY ungallant way towards her. Perhaps she may have done wrong, I wouldn’t know, but I really cannot see that there was any need for them to hit her as they did. A gentleman should never hit a woman, never! And if he does, he only shows himself to be no gentleman, and so I said to the young man. Don’t you agree with me. Herr Feldwebel?’
‘I do indeed,’ said the Old Man, gravely.
‘I wouldn’t have hit her,’ said Tiny. ‘What’d be the point of it? I can think of something I’d far rather do. What’s the point of clobbering ’em if you can—’
This time, it was the Legionnaire who shut him up. Frau Dreyer blandly continued.
‘When we arrived here,’ she explained to us, ‘they showed me in to a sort of waiting room up on the third floor. There seemed to be a great many other people there who had come from interviews, and they left me in with them for some time. Not very polite, I thought. After all, I hadn’t ASKED to see Herr Bielert, you know. It was he who had sent for me. So I do think they might have made a little more effort . . . However, I suppose they are busy men and there is a war on. I think an apology is all I would have asked . . . Well, even when they took me out of the waiting room I still didn’t get to see Herr Bielert. Instead, they insisted on going through all my pockets and my handbag and taking away a great many letters of a personal nature. I know they were only doing their job, I know there is a war on and we all have to beware of foreign agents, but I still can’t help feeling that they were overreaching themselves just a little . . . and I am still at a loss to know what right they have to read my letters . . . Anyway, when they had searched me they took me off to a second waiting room. I didn’t like it in there at all. An old man with a gun sat on a chair and wouldn’t let any of us speak. It was most boring, and not only that, I was hungry.’
They had left her there for several hours, and then the blond one-armed Oberscharführer had collected her and taken her to a small room elsewhere in the building, where two men in civilian clothes had asked her if she had ever said the Führer was a fool.
‘Well, of course,’ she t
old us, ‘I denied it at once. I said to them, someone has been spreading horrid lies about me. And then they asked me if I wouldn’t please try to help them, because you see it was their job to look into all this sort of thing and make sure no one had ever said anything bad about the Führer, and really in the end they were quite nice about it all and told me I should take my time and try to remember exactly what it was I’d said . . .’
‘Didn’t you ever tell your neighbour, Frau Becker, that you thought the Führer had been foolish ever to start the war?’ Bielert had asked her.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said to him. ‘I did say that and I’d say it again. I think this war is a piece of sheer folly.’
And then, to her bewilderment they had all laughed heartily and the one man had written down her words on a sheet of paper.
‘You see, Frau Dreyer, it’s just as we said . . . you called the Führer a fool.’
She had been taken aback, then. Assured them that by saying the war was a foolish action, she had not intended to imply that the Führer was a fool. She wouldn’t – hadn’t – couldn’t—’
‘But surely,’ Bielert had insisted, ‘anyone who commits a foolish action is a foolish person, and hence a fool?’
She had to admit the logic of it.
‘But, as I told him, I wasn’t the only person who said such things. Everyone was saying them. I was only repeating what I’d heard . . .’
Of course, Bielert had at once jumped in to ask who, and where, and when.
‘Well, there’s Herr Gelbenschneid, the station master, for a start. I have frequently heard him say that this war is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Germany . . . And then there’s Frau Dietrich, the nurse at the chiropodist’s. She told me only the other day she wished the war had never been started and the sooner we were defeated the better as far as she was concerned. And then—’
In her ignorance, she had dictated a whole list of names to Bielert’s avid note-taking companion, who had promptly passed them on to the Oberscharführer – presumably for immediate action.
‘And then,’ said Frau Dreyer, wonderingly, ‘they wanted to know if I’d ever been in a mental home . . .’
‘As a matter of interest,’ said Porta turning round, ‘have you?’
‘Well, no, I haven’t, and it seemed such an odd question that I quite took fright and began to cry . . . To tell you the truth,’ confessed Frau Dreyer, confidentially, ‘I was scared they were going to fine me. For saying things I shouldn’t have, you know. Even though I didn’t realize they were wrong . . . I asked them if I mightn’t apologize rather than pay a fine, because all I have is my widow’s pension, you see, and I simply couldn’t afford it . . . Well, they were really very nice about it all. They said I shouldn’t have to pay a fine, so not to worry about it, and they would accept my apologies on behalf of the Führer . . . And then, I remember, they grew very friendly and began asking me questions about my boys. They were so interested in them, it quite took my mind off everything else! And we talked of this and that, and it turned out that Herr Bielert was a good friend of Bent, who used to be my Kurt’s closest companion in the old days. He became an SS Obersturmführer, and quite often he used to come round and visit when Kurt was on leave. Now, he was a brave boy, such a row of medals on his chest, and yet, you know, he didn’t believe in the war, either. I remember once, it was just before Kurt’s birthday, just before the battalion was sent to the front, I remember Bent telling me that the Führer was only a man, not a god, and that like all men he sometimes made mistakes . . . And as for Himmler! I can’t tell you how angry he and Kurt became whenever one mentioned Himmler! You would have thought the poor man had done them some personal injury! Why, I remember—’
‘Hang on, a second,’ said the Old Man, frowning. you didn’t tell him all this, did you? You didn’t tell Bielert?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, blithely. ‘They were so interested, you see, and Herr Bielert told me that Bent had always been an intelligent boy and that he was wasted at the front, so they were going to call him back to Hamburg and promote him. I wanted to write and let him know straight away, but they said not to, because they wanted it to be a surprise for him.’
‘Of course,’ agreed the Old Man, solemnly. ‘And what else did you talk about while you were there?’
Well, now—’ She gathered up the wrinkles in her forehead, trying to remember. ‘We spoke of my nephew, Dietrich. He’s a student of theology, you know. For some reason Herr Bielert seemed to think that he might have said bad things about the Führer. He asked me to tell them what Dietrich had said, and I told them, I can’t recall that he ever said anything . . . And then Herr Bielert grew quite angry and shouted at me, couldn’t understand what it was that I’d done to displease him, and the other man kept shaking his head at me and I grew so confused I really don’t know what I should have done if Herr Bielerfs telephone had started to ring. And they all ran out with their revolvers and I was left alone for some while until another man came and took me away.’
‘Brought you down here?’ asked the Legionnaire.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘They shut me up in a little room, and then they came for me again and took me back to see Herr Bielert. And that was when they wrote down everything I’d told them and I had to sign it for them.’ She smiled. ‘When I’d done that they were pleased with me again. They gave me coffee and cakes and told me I should be taken care of.’
We looked at her, silently. It was incredible that anyone could be so naïve.
‘I wonder if my car will be here soon?’
She addressed her appeal to the Old Man, who made vague noises of encouragement and looked across at the rest of us. We shuffled our feet and stared at the floor.
‘One day when you can spare the time,’ said Frau Dreyer, graciously, ‘you must drop round to visit me. Let me know beforehand and I’ll see if I can’t make one of my fruit cakes for you. All the boys like my fruit cake . . .’
We mumbled our thanks and she smiled upon us and nodded her head up and down on its frail neck, and then, to our unspeakable relief, her eyelids drooped and she drifted off into an exhausted sleep, snoring gently and rhythmically.
Porta had finished stacking his marked cards. He suggested a game and we agreed, provided we play with Barcelona’s pack.
Two hours later we were still playing, so engrossed in the game that we could hardly bear to leave the table for long enough even to stagger across to the handbasin for a piss. Frau Dreyer slept on.
We were disturbed by an impatient rapping at the door. Barcelona went across to answer it and found himself confronted by two SD men earring sub MGs.
‘Heil Hitler!’ they greeted him, severely. ‘You got an Emilie Dreyer down here?’
At the sound of her name, the old lady woke up. She stumbled across the room, heavy with sleep.
‘Is that my car?’
‘That’s it, lady. Your car . . . Get your things together and come with us. We’re taking you to Fuhlsbüttel.’
‘Fublsbüttel?’ She hesitated. ‘But I don’t want to go to Fuhlsbüttel, I want to go home.’
The SD man laughed.
‘Don’t we all?’
‘But Herr Bielert said—’
‘Herr Bielert said he’d lay on a car for you, and he has. And we’re all going off in it together for a nice little ride to Fuhlsbüttel. So be a good lady and hurry along, I don’t want to have to get rough with someone old enough to be my grandmother.’
For the first time, Frau Dreyer began dimly to perceive something of the truth. She turned, trembling, to the Old Man and held out her hands.
‘Herr Feldwebel—’
‘God will protect you,’ said the Old Man, very low and almost as if he were ashamed of himself. ‘Go with them, Frau Dreyer. It’s all you can do. All any of us can do . . .’
‘Yes, of course,’she said, doubtfully.
She stood a moment, helpless, her old lined face quivering. We handed her her bag and her coat and s
ilently she pattered after the SD men. One of her shoe laces was undone and both her thick wool stockings were crumpling round her ankles. The heavy door slammed behind her. We heard the other doors slamming, as well, as the prisoners were taken from their cells. They were led into the courtyard, packed into the big green vans that would transport them to Fuhlsbüttel.
In one of them sat a little old lady who even now could not understand the crime she had committed.
