But how in God’s name did she get Cordula to take her capsule with the bombers thundering overhead and the building shaking on its foundations? Would she have held Cordula’s hand? Of course, she would; one weak hand holding another’s. She would have secretly broken the capsule beforehand and mixed the cyanide with the child’s hot chocolate in a fine china cup. She would have told Cordula it was a special treat.
Frick needs to weep alone in the lime woods. He is weary, not through the shock of their deaths – that has still to penetrate – nor the looming defeat of Germany. His ennui rises from a source that refuses to be defined. He staggers to his feet to salute and depart, but Krüger waves him down again.
“There is more, Ernst.”
Frick perches back onto the edge of the chair and Krüger offers him a cigarette. Frick takes it with a vacant nod and Krüger lights it for him with his solid gold lighter embossed with the Totemkopf.
“Are you aware that you are on Truman’s List?”
“No, Obergruppenführer.”
“Well, I am afraid you are; I believe you are number one hundred and thirty-seven. I am also on that list. There are nearly three thousand of us marked down to be arrested and tried as war criminals.”
Frick stares at him and then he asks, “What number have the Americans bestowed upon you, Obergruppenführer?” The deadness of his tone implies his lack of empathy.
“Nineteen, but that is beside the point. In just days this war will be over, and our brave soldiers will surrender and hopefully return to their homes. You and I, on the other hand, will face the victors’ justice; they will put on a show trial and we’ll be sentenced to death.”
After the news he’s just heard about Brigitte and Cordula, Frick is not sure that he cares, but he feels a flicker of injustice. “How can that be, Obergruppenführer, surely we would be prisoners of war.”
“We’re hated, Ernst, you cannot believe how much we are hated, and, make no mistake, we will not be honourably shot. If we are lucky we’ll fall into the hands of the English hangman and die in seconds, otherwise we’ll dangle on American cowboy nooses, or, worse, be pole-lynched by the Slavs.”
“So, it has all come to this.”
“Of course, we have the option of suicide.”
“Like my wife,” says Frick blinking fiercely and shaking his head.
“Ernst, she had no alternative. The Russians were already in Berlin.” Krüger pauses to light another cigarette, this one is small and black. “On the other hand, you do have another choice; that is, if you follow my last order.”
Frick will agree to anything if he can leave now and weep alone.
Five minutes later, he is escorted out by a stiffly uniformed SS Gruppenführer carrying a swagger stick. “They are calling us war criminals,” he says.
“So I believe,” says Frick.
“But how can we be criminals, Herr Brigadeführer? We performed our lawful duties; we defended the German people from the humanoid vermin. We rid Europe of most of its Jewish pestilence and we fought bravely for the Great Victory of Truth.”
“Yes,” says Frick, but he has heard all this before, word for word. Was it Goebbels who had said it? No, it must have been Himmler or Frank; perhaps it was Göring.
It doesn’t matter, Brigitte and Cordula are dead.
*
In just three days, he possesses a new passport. It’s in the name of Otto Brandt.
Krüger explains, “Our victors prefer certain German names over others. ‘Otto’ is one of their favourites. It has an amiable connotation, almost lovable: they give it to circus bears and Labrador dogs. And Brandt? Fresh and uncomplicated, like new bread. From now on, you are Otto Brandt, a civilian – with a new life for the post-war era.”
On his way out, the crusty Gruppenführer confides to him that the Gestapo had selected a Soviet prisoner of war (POW) roughly Frick’s age and physique, forced him to put on an SS uniform, tied him to a tree, strapped a live grenade under his jaw and blew his head into oblivion. Later, the Corp was duly informed that SS Brigadeführer Ernst Frick, unable to endure the loss of his wife and daughter, had committed suicide.
His parents will be told the same story. It is as well; how could they cope with their only child on trial for mass murder? Far better they think he is dead. He wonders if they will gather some of the congregation from their church together and hold a service for him – probably not.
*
Four years later, Brandt is absorbed in a week-old London newspaper left behind in the chalet where he works and he learns, with a shock, that there is still no letting-up in the pursuit of the remaining Nazis on Truman’s List. According to the News Chronicle there have been recent sightings of Adolf Eichmann and Martin Bormann. Ominously, the report goes on to say that the Americans are beginning to doubt the earlier accounts of the deaths of leading SS officers, and Brandt feels the blood drain from his cheeks as he faces the possibility that the ‘suicide’ of Ernst Frick might be reinvestigated.
Originally, it had been a wise move fleeing to the Tyrol. He had secured permanent employment as a driver and handyman at a retreat centre for British academics, which was an isolated chalet where, up till now, his memories of the Aktion have been interned – frozen in the past. The one exception is the harrowing experience of the fox woman he killed in the saw pit.
Brandt’s duties are varied yet undemanding, with every predictable week followed by another as the years passed. His speedily acquired knowledge of the local countryside, his affable assistance to the guests, and his willingness to coach them tennis, golf and skiing in his spare time have earned him the respect and even some affection from his former enemies.
His earlier engineering training has made him indispensable to his employers, and there is not a single mechanical device – be it a vehicle, boiler, engine or stove – that he hasn’t repaired and maintained. It is because of his talent for engineering that he has just completed a correspondence course run by St Gallen – an international institute in Switzerland dedicated to alleviating the worldwide shortage of civil engineers. Brandt has passed with distinction. Although the part-time study was rigorous, thanks to his interaction with the chalet’s British visitors, he also seized the opportunity to learn English and he is now fluent.
Of course it may all come to naught. Today’s report in the News Chronicle has so alarmed him that when he wakes up the next morning he is amazed that he is still a free man, and that there had been no crashing of fists on his bedroom door and no soldiers in olive-drab uniforms waiting in the yard to beat him senseless and drag him back to Germany for victors’ justice; that same ‘justice’ that had seen his former comrades condemned for loyally obeying their Führer and hanged like felons in Landsberg prison.
The ignominy of the gallows is not for him, and Brandt is determined never to be taken prisoner. At the bottom of his trunk is an oilskin bag containing his service Lüger, which he keeps fully loaded. From now on this will be at hand every night on his bedside table. During the daytime he will stow it in his pack and if the victors come for him, he will be sure to keep the last bullet for himself.
He is so obsessed by the thought of being captured that, today, he almost forgot to collect the new chef from the railway station. Clearly, he must pull himself together; the last thing he needs is to lose his employment.
Today, he is driving the chalet’s little bus back along the scenic route after fetching groceries from the town. Had the past been different, this is where he would have chosen to bring Brigitte and Cordula for their holidays. Little golden Cordula, she would now be nearly thirteen. He blinks his eyes furiously and drives on.
The road passes through a grove of high larches, then climbs to a paradise of flower meadows with tall buttercups and silver-white butterflies, sparkling brooks, and mountain lakes.
Yesterday, he brought three of the English lecturers h
ere for their picnic. They had lain back in the clover and watched golden eagles circling in the milky blue sky. When he brought out some field glasses from the bus, they all sat up and took turns to watch ibexes scrambling over the higher rocks. One of the lecturers spotted a marmot nibbling moss only metres from them.
“How sweet,” she had said, pointing. She was the only one wearing spectacles and these had small, perfectly round lenses like Himmler’s.
“Oh, well spotted, Beverley,” said one of the other women, “and, look, there’s another one too, and another; such gorgeous, docile creatures.”
Brandt had been bemused by these women. “But, madam,” he had said, “you say they are gorgeous, but don’t you remember that on Monday you and this other lady got up at dawn and set out with me to hunt them?”
He reminded them how they had both hidden behind a rock and fired at two remarkably fat marmots grazing among the wild poppies. The women had wounded the animals; one had crawled off dragging its shattered leg, and the other was only able to twist its head from side to side being unable to move its paralysed body. Brandt reminded them that he had to take one of the rifles to finish both animals off with clean shots to their heads. “But the pelts are ruined,” one of the women had whined when he’d retrieved the carcases.
Beverley, who had not been part of the hunt, was looking more and more horrified. She turned to Brandt. “Is all this true, Otto?” she asked, and when he nodded she rounded on her companions. “Hilary, Janet, how could you shoot such gentle animals – and in such a picturesque setting like this?” She opened her arms dramatically to embrace the whole vista of woods, lakes and quilted fields.
“But, Beverly, I did see you tucking into the marmot stew that night,” said Janet.
Beverley had straightened her spectacles, and Brandt noticed that they had tortoiseshell rims and the little piggy lenses were smudged with fingerprints. “Never,” she said. “I didn’t really enjoy the stew at all.”
“But, Beverley, you raved about it. You said how well it went with our polenta, bacon and all those fresh garden beans.”
Beverley sniffed, mumbled something about only eating it to please them, for, after all, they had taken the trouble to hunt the marmots and, of course, it was wrong to waste food when everyone in England was still on rations.
“But you even had a second helping,” said the jubilant Hilary, joining in with the taunting of Beverley, but then her mood changed and she scowled at Brandt. “I think it’s so cruel, really. I wish I hadn’t come hunting with you after all, Otto, but when you were showing us how to shoot… it seemed just so easy, too easy to want to kill them.” She raised a straight left arm like a rifle barrel. “Bang bang,” she said, “all dead.”
To satisfy himself that their concern for marmots was a sham, Brandt had begun to play it up. “Marmot meat is also delicious in sausages,” he’d said, “even better than the stew, and all that fat makes a beautiful skin cream, you should take some back to Cambridge with you… and have you seen the marmot furs in our visitors’ shop?”
“They might be worth a look,” muttered Beverly still fiddling with her tortoiseshell spectacles.
Brandt retains mixed feelings about hunting. However, one of his regular tasks is to shoot game for the pot: hares, ducks, pigeons, deer, quail and, the easiest targets of all, marmots. Nonetheless, the Führer was known to be an avowed defender of animals and would not have been at all pleased with him for this. Brandt remembers how, in 1935, a farmer near Weimar was jailed for two years for neglecting his horse. The man never finished his sentence; he died from a beating he received in Dachau at the hands of a guard who, like the Führer, also loved animals.
*
Driving back with the groceries, Brandt spots a group of women, all with colourful gathered skirts, crossing a field. He gives them a wave and they wave back, all except a tall woman, who is the only one not wearing a head scarf. She has turbulent red hair, and a face as pale and taut as a skull. The woman glances in his direction, frowns, then stalks on ahead of the others.
Brandt’s stomach tenses and his chest feels ice cold, but, although he focuses on the road ahead, the unhallowed memory of the woman in the saw pit makes its alarming return. When he arrives back at the chalet, he hopes that some hard, physical work will clear his mind.
After humping the nine heavy crates of groceries to the chalet and garaging the bus, he slouches off to chop more yule logs. There really is no need for this extra wood, as there’s enough to last another year, yet he axes, hauls and splits timber, and this is wholly because he once held the rank of a Brigadeführer of the Reich SS and he will never permit himself to grow soft, even when he is ninety years old.
Maintaining a fit and muscular body is what the Führer would expect of him; it is not to impress women. From as long ago as 1940, Brant has steadily been losing his libido. There might have been a time when that would have alarmed him, but not now. That bloodied corpse in the saw pit has supplanted all other women in his thoughts. He pictures her lingering behind the trembling curtains in his room at night, lurking in every dark wood, standing on the shore of a mountain lake and waiting for him on a rail platform. She will not let him be.
Next day, while Brandt is mending a trellis in the garden, a couple from Edinburgh University try to get him to pose with them for a photograph, but he is convinced that his square clipped beard and darkened hair will not fool a trained investigator poring over a holiday snap in Austria. Brandt smiles at the couple, glances at his watch and shakes his head. “I am so sorry, sir, madam. I need to assist our chef, or you will not be dining tonight.”
No, Brandt cannot remain any longer in Europe. Folded in the drawer by his bed is an article he cut out from a recent copy of the Manchester Guardian he found in the guest lounge. He reads it for the third time.
‘The Great Australian Crisis: Populate or Perish.’
In order to increase its white population, the Commonwealth of Australia has abandoned its policy of not admitting former enemy aliens as immigrants. Providing they have not borne arms against Australian troops, they have never been members of designated criminal organisations such as the SS and Gestapo, they possess technical or scientific training, and that they can prove they are of pure European descent, their applications are now welcome.
Tonight, he writes a letter of application to emigrate as a civil engineer. He furnishes the Australians with his papers, including his engineering degree, and a faked discharge from the Wehrmacht that specifies his modest but versatile service as an Unterfeldwebel in one of Rommel’s sapper units and afterwards his posting as a bomb disposal expert in Hamburg.
The following month, a local doctor contracted by the Australian Consulate gives him a first-class medical report and the chalet’s manager writes him a testimonial that is so glowing it reads like a eulogy.
His interview in Vienna is as amiable as it is successful. Brandt is listed as a demolition and explosives engineer under the Employment of Scientific Aliens Scheme, and is immediately recruited to work on the new Snowy River Project in New South Wales. He is given The Blue Guide for New Settlers, a book full of photographs and articles about Australia being ‘the lucky country.’
Three weeks’ later, Otto Brandt embarks from Bremerhaven on the British steamship Syrenia bound for Sydney. After he steps on board, he looks back to shore and watches a father and a ragged boy kicking a ball about in the muddy clay of a bomb crater. In a momentary flash of yearning, he despairs that somewhere else in German soil lie the bodies of his wife and child, and then he turns away from the railing and goes below deck, as if the immediate business of finding his cabin, securing his berth and unpacking his case will help him forget, at least for a while, how Brigitte had hated him so much.
4
Brandt’s nostrils are already accustomed to the all-pervading fumes of marine diesel and new paint on deck, but not the sickly air below
. Only two hundred emigrants have embarked at Bremerhaven, so, until the ship reaches Southampton, Brandt has a whole cabin to himself. His first action is to hoist his case onto a top bunk at the very end of the cabin where his pillow will be level with the sole porthole. As he looks out, the sea looks very grey and unnervingly close.
On the first days of the voyage the ship is three-quarters empty. Because of the temporary high ratio of ship’s crew to passengers, Brandt finds himself running into members of the British crew every time he goes on deck, but he is wary since he’s heard that most of them had been recruited straight off the war convoys.
“The convoy men are deep,” his steward tells him. “You don’t know what they’re on about half the time. You never get to know ’em, properly know ’em, I mean. They’re men apart, just like those old prophets in the Bible, such as Moses and Abraham.”
But Brandt thinks that to compare them with characters from the Old Testament would be anathema for mariners exposed to years of surprise attacks by the Luftwaffe or the U-boats, where at any time they could meet their God beneath the dark swells and growling pack ice of the Arctic Sea. Because he is a German, and a fugitive at that, Brandt finds these British seamen alarming, but it is even worse when some of them seem to know more about the state of his soul than they should. Tregowan, the grizzled first mate is a case in point; his gruff voice snaps Brandt to alertness.
“A long voyage like this one stirs up the demons in a man; it’s six and a half weeks – and longer still if we run into heavy seas. It will change your outlook on life; it’s not a little ferry trip like crossing the Atlantic, you’re steaming to the other side of the globe, brother, and it hasn’t hit you yet. Tomorrow, in Southampton, we’ll be taking on more than a thousand more emigrants, most of them will never see Blighty again, some won’t be able to afford to anyway, but, whatever happens, they’ll be changed human beings by the time they disembark in Sydney.”
Orphaned Leaves Page 3
