Unhinge the Universe

by Aleksandr Voinov

  “He saved my life.” He bit off the “sir” before it could slip out.

  “And you his. That makes you even, doesn’t it?”

  Hagen shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it measure up that way?”

  But his carefully guarded response faltered when John’s bed came into view. He was the only patient in this part of the infirmary, but even so, the guards drew closer as if Hagen would attempt to murder somebody.

  “Captain Nicholls, your prisoner,” Morris said and stepped up to John’s bed.

  John’s leg was lifted and straightened out, bandaged thickly, as was his shoulder. Hagen winced at the extent of the injuries, but John looked up, and although his eyes had an odd sheen (morphine?), he was conscious. Just seeing him lifted a huge weight off his heart, and Hagen managed to stop himself before he betrayed it to Morris. Barely.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” John said, then turned his gaze on Hagen, clearly searching him for signs of injury.

  For several awkward moments, nobody spoke, and Hagen began to wonder if that was another test, or might turn into a cross-examination. He cleared his throat. “It’s good to see you alive, Captain.” Not allowing his voice to shake was the best he could do. He’d hoped John would be all right, but even broken bones could be bad. Sieg had died from internal bleeding, too, a knowledge that had driven Hagen all the way here like a demon from Hell.

  “Friedrich.” John put a hand on the mattress as if to sit up, but winced and gave up. “How are you?”

  “Good. I’m good.” Hagen looked down at his handcuffs and shrugged, giving a smile that felt a bit weird on his face. “Can’t seem to shed these.” Naked, clothed, he always ended up chained.

  John nodded, a smile forming on his lips, too. “Not that it kept you from fighting off armed soldiers.”

  Hagen noticed a sudden intake of breath in his guards and lifted his hands placidly. Don’t say that, or they’ll chain me to the wall by the neck. But that would be overly familiar. Banter had no place here, but it ached and gnawed at him that he couldn’t speak his mind.

  Be careful about this. All of this. Especially in the camp.

  “I didn’t think. I was just not going to . . .” Let them kill you. “Let them shoot me. Some habits are hard to break.” Yet I did when I brought you here. When I returned to you. When I allowed you to touch me.

  John nodded. “It’d have been unlawful in any case. You were taken under the rules of the Geneva Conventions.”

  Taken? Hagen pressed his lips together. Was John playing games with him? Why else use that word and not captured?

  “I’ll . . .” Hagen cleared his throat again, railing inside at being guarded, having to guard himself, but there was no privacy to be had or negotiated for. He’d promised to be careful, and it was already a miracle he’d gotten this far. John must have asked for him. Or Morris was playing games. “I’ll be sent to America. The war’s over for me.”

  “That’s good. Good. It’s . . .” John glanced down at his bandages. “It’s likely over for me as well.”

  Hagen found more relief in that than perhaps he should have. At least while he waited out the end of the war in a POW camp, he wouldn’t have to worry about John dying out here.

  When their eyes met again, the pain in John’s went far deeper than his bullet wound and broken bones, and when he spoke, his voice was just slightly unsteady. “Thank you. For saving my life.”

  “And mine,” Hagen managed to get out before his throat closed up. Last chance to see John, and no chance whatsoever to tell him anything—how worried he’d been, or that running away had never really been an option, not truly, but not because there was no place to run to.

  John looked at Morris. “Thank you, sir. I’m going to rest easier knowing he’s okay.”

  Morris nodded and was just reaching out for Hagen’s arm when a thought occurred to Hagen. “Sir. I—” He stumbled over his words, the “sir,” and the impulse that might be incriminating.

  “What is it?”

  Hagen shook his head, but Morris gave him that questioning stare, and suddenly not answering the question was just as incriminating as answering it. “My . . . the . . .” He gestured toward his chest, chains around his wrists rattling as he indicated his bare breast pocket.

  “The medal? What about it?”

  “Where . . .” Hagen swallowed, hesitated one last time. “What’s become of it?”

  Morris drew it out of his pocket and turned it over and over between his fingers. “It’s right here.” Maybe Hagen wasn’t completely well versed in the subtext of American speech, but something about those three words, though spoken plainly for the most part, said, “You don’t think you’re getting it back, do you, SS dog?”

  Hagen let his gaze rest on the Iron Cross for a moment. He tried not to notice the mangled pin on the back, but couldn’t really avoid it. From when I pulled it off, he told himself. Broke the pin to save the flesh. And maybe I’m no longer worthy of it.

  Then he shook himself back to life and nodded toward John. “It should be his.”

  The faintest creak suggested John had moved a little, maybe startled, but Hagen kept his eyes on the colonel.

  Morris opened his fingers, then closed them again, this time pulling the medal against his palm so that only the one edge remained visible. “And why is that, SS-Untersturmführer?” There was no subtext now. The disgust was clear.

  “He captured me.” Hagen replayed the words in his mind. They sounded so strange, he wondered if he’d gotten the English wrong, but, no, it was correct. Just strange. “I was—am his prisoner. It should be his.”

  “The US Army does not condone war trophies,” Morris said with a snarl. He lowered his hand, keeping the medal at his side.

  “So you’ll keep it.” Hagen arched an eyebrow, well aware he was wandering into a minefield. “But . . . not as a trophy, yes?”

  The colonel set his jaw. His fingers moved, like he was exploring the edge of the medal.

  Hagen noticed something from the corner of his eye—a Christmas card folded open on a table. A bit early, or was it? The last few days had a way of expanding into weeks when he thought about them. What day was this? Surely closer to New Year’s Eve than Christmas, but what the hell. “As a Christmas present. I want to make a gift, but that’s the only thing I—” have left. He choked off the rest of the sentence. It just sounded too pitiful.

  The medal could be replaced (or would it?)—it was entered into his papers. This particular one had been previously worn by his commander, and Hagen remembered the day when he’d received it, and how proud he’d been. Now it all seemed like some bizarre children’s game.

  Though he was still proud of how he’d earned it.

  “How many people did you murder for this?” Morris still didn’t relinquish the Cross.

  Hagen drew a deep breath. “I saved a wounded comrade under fire, sir. And that’s the honest truth.”

  Morris stiffened, surprise taking over where disgust had looked like a permanent stain. “Did you?”

  Hagen nodded. “I did.”

  Suspicion crept in. Gott, what did this asshole think? That German soldiers left their own to die in the mud?

  Morris looked down as he brought up the medal and opened his hand. He studied it like a treasure he’d stumbled across himself. Perhaps a medal he had earned. Or a trophy, the damned hypocrite. And what had become of Sieg’s medals? Trophies, too?

  “Sir.” Hagen waited until he had the colonel’s attention again. “I owe him my life. A gift seems only right before I go.”

  Someone inhaled sharply, and the quiet groan that followed told him it had been John. He glanced at John, and their eyes met for a fleeting, dangerous second.

  Before I go.

  Yes, I felt it too.

  He faced Morris again, pushing back his shoulders and almost snapping to attention. “Please, sir.”

  Morris extended his hand, palm down and Cross dangling from between his fingers. “All rig
ht.”

  Hagen held out his own hand, keeping the other close to it because of the chain between them. Morris released the medal, and it landed soundlessly in Hagen’s palm.

  He drew it back, chains jingling softly against his clothes. The Cross was warm from Morris’s hand, and still somehow cold. Twin memories flashed through his mind—the ceremony in which he’d received it, the hail of gunfire under which he’d earned it—and then he turned back to John.

  “This is yours now,” he said, and slowly extended his hand—his chained hands—toward John. “Frohe Weihnachten, mein Freund. Happy New Year.”

  John lifted his hand, but didn’t manage to bridge the gap, so Hagen took one exceedingly careful step toward him and placed the medal into his palm. The brush of skin on skin rattled him, and he masked it with a smile. “Get well.”

  He saw something large and wordless in John’s eyes but forced himself to turn away. He’d walk back into a hail of bullets before he’d risk John’s career and peace.

  John couldn’t decide which was harder to look at: the medal in his hand, or Hagen’s back.

  One of the guards reached for Hagen’s arm, and John’s heart jumped into his throat.

  “Wait.” The word burst out of him before he could think twice.

  The guard stopped, hand hovering just inches from Hagen’s arm. Hagen turned around, eyebrows up, a mix of confusion and fear in his eyes.

  John moistened his lips. He weakly held onto the medal, searching its surface with the tip of his thumb for every remaining hint of Hagen’s body heat. His nail caught on the little swastika in the center, and the 1939 at the bottom arm.

  “I . . . have nothing to give you in return.” He held Hagen’s gaze, wondering if there was some way to silently convey, Except the one thing I know they’ll never let you take into the POW camp.

  Hagen offered a thin smile. It may have been John’s imagination, but he thought there was a faint extra shine in the blue eyes he’d hated not long ago. “I don’t need anything in return.” He raised his hands a little, the motion slow like the chains were attached to ship anchors. “I have my life.” He nodded toward John’s hand and the medal between his fingers. “We’ll call it even.”

  He turned again, and this time, the guard took his arm. He didn’t resist as he was led away. John wanted to call out to him, if only to hear himself saying Hagen’s name in his presence just one last time, but that would have been dangerous. Too dangerous. And it required air he didn’t have.

  Boots scuffed on the floor. Morris’s, Hagen’s, the guards’; he couldn’t pick out the ones he wished would turn around and come back. Chains rattled and scraped. They’d shackled his ankles too, hadn’t they? So he wouldn’t run. Or maybe to break his spirit a little more.

  As the sounds faded, John thought that the chains had been effective at breaking a man’s spirit, but in this case, perhaps not the spirit of the one who wore them.

  A door closed.

  John held the medal tighter. The warmth on its surface was undoubtedly from his own hand now, but he told himself some of Hagen’s warmth—that gentle warmth he’d once felt against his flesh from his head to his toes—had been captured inside the thick Cross.

  He’d only known Hagen a few days, only spent a couple of nights with him on level ground, but watching him go had left John’s chest aching. It was insane, it didn’t make sense, but he wasn’t ready to let Hagen go.

  There was no one around, no one to see him or possibly overhear his thoughts, but he was beyond caring anyway. Hand unsteady, he brought the medal up closer to his face. He inspected the details, thumbed the edges, marveling that an insignia bearing a swastika, never mind the man who wore it, could ever have this effect on him.

  Then, blinking his eyes into focus—just watering from the Cross’s metallic smell, that was all—he drew the medal even closer.

  “Frohe Weihnachten, mein Freund,” he whispered, and pressed his lips to the warm surface.

  Merry Christmas, my friend.

  Happy New Year.

  March 1, 1945

  Dear Hagen,

  I hope this letter has found you, and I hope it has found you in good health and in good spirits. I had wanted to write sooner, but locating an address proved challenging.

  It should come as no surprise that I’ve been discharged as a result of my injuries. I’ve returned to my home in Indiana, where I’ve taken a job in an accounting firm. Perhaps not an exciting vocation, but I believe I’ve had my fill of excitement for a while.

  Are you well? What are you doing to pass the time?

  Do write back—I look forward to hearing from you and knowing you are well.

  Sincerely,

  John W. Nicholls

  11 March 1945

  Dear John,

  You cannot imagine my relief at receiving your letter, and hearing that you have recovered and returned home safely.

  I am indeed well and in good spirits. Much better spirits since the arrival of your letter.

  There isn’t much to tell of life here. We share the camp with veterans from several branches, and it can be a colourful mix at times! The food is plentiful and very good, much better than I’ve eaten in a while. Some of our men are so starved when they arrive, the plentiful food makes them sick. It seems hard to imagine at times that there is no rationing, though I believe it’s not the same for American civilians. The ordinary soldiers work on the farms, and we officers help organize the work details. I also translate—not many guards speak German, and it’s no better the other way round. When the authorities aren’t making us officers work, they keep us occupied with classes, movies, games, and the like.

  You would laugh if you saw how seriously some of the men take that game called Monopoly. Every time a new set arrives, the men are like children at Christmas. I don’t see what the excitement is all about.

  Please continue to write. Your letters give me something to look forward to in this place.

  With kind regards,

  Hagen Friedrich

  March 25, 1945

  Dear Hagen,

  It’s wonderful to hear from you, and to know you are doing well, if perhaps bored. Boredom is a welcome change, I think, from the front. Monopoly, though? I can hardly imagine how that’s any better than the monotony of doing nothing.

  It is odd, though, isn’t it, adapting to a life without bullets and bombs at every turn? Even my hometown seems unfamiliar without signs of recent combat. Sometimes I’ll pass a man on the street, and we’ll exchange a look, and I suspect he’s thinking the same, that life is so strange without all that danger and regimented chaos.

  Nevertheless, I’d prefer to be here and struggling to adapt than back there. The arrival of spring has helped, too. Without the bite of winter, it’s easier to believe that those terrible times are behind us.

  I do hope the warmth of spring and the absence of the noise of war is bringing you some peace, Hagen. I pray the worst is behind all of us.

  Sincerely,

  John

  20 April 1945

  Dear John,

  It is good to hear from you again. Little has changed since my last letter. Boredom and monotony are constant companions in this place. As you say, the absence of guns and bombs helps, and this warmth is surely a welcome change, though they say it will get very hot come summer.

  Today is Hitler’s birthday, and I’m staying away from the others. The mood is too fraught.

  The Red Cross has been given my family’s information, but I’ve not heard anything. If what little news we’ve been given is true, and Eastern Prussia has fallen entirely to the Russians, and the rest of Germany is in such ruins, then I fear I already know their fate.

  I worry about my own future. I do not wish to return to Germany with the others, who will be repatriated. Camp authorities have been helping me with procuring citizenship and perhaps a university education. The world will be different when I leave here, when the war is over. America is not Germany, and no
thing is what it was before the war began. Where my place is in all of that, I simply don’t know.

  Apologies for such a gloomy letter, especially after your letters do so much to raise my spirits. I hope the next one is a happier one.

  Cordially,

  Hagen

  April 30, 1945

  Dear Hagen,

  I am sorry to hear you’ve been unable to locate your family. If there is anything I can do to aid in your search or the Red Cross’s, please let me know.

  Gloomy letters are a reality of war, I’m afraid. It’s taken its toll on all of us after all this time, and there have been terrible losses on all sides. I pray that you are given good news soon.

  Know always, Hagen, that you have a friend in America. When the time comes and you are free, I will gladly help you adjust to your new life here. I have not forgotten and will not forget that without you, I would not have a life here myself, and that debt will not go unpaid.

  Your friend,

  John

  9 May 1945

  Dear John,

  Now that the Wehrmacht has capitulated unconditionally, the camp knows no other subject of conversation. The mood in the camp has surely changed. Bittersweet, indeed. Above all, we are all speculating about when exactly we will be released and sent back to Germany. And what state it will be in, and how our families will welcome us—as survivors, or . . . it doesn’t bear thinking about.

  We’re eager for freedom, but many of the men aren’t ecstatic over even that inevitable outcome, since we fought so hard and we lost so many friends and comrades. It makes you wonder. Myself, I never imagined I’d be relieved to see my fatherland fall, but I’m gladly embracing the end of the war.

  Still no word of my family. Perhaps that will change once things have settled down, though I assume it might take many months. Nothing from my aunt’s family here in America, either, so I can only assume they don’t wish to see me. It’s a strange feeling to be alone in the world. But what am I saying? I am not alone. I have you. I have your friendship. In these times, I cannot begin to express how much I treasure that.