The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  It was close to dark when we got home. I managed not to cry until I was alone in my bedroom, and then Thomas came looking for me and said I didn’t deserve what had happened to me, none of us did. I went downstairs again when everyone was asleep and looked for a bottle of bee pollen in the kitchen cupboards. I didn’t know what such a bottle would look like, but knew its contents had protected my mother against the radiation at Mercy House. She’d talked about putting charcoal powder in her tea, too. I didn’t know where else to look for either of these things, or if I’d even know them to see them. Taking care to favour my gauzed hands, I climbed on the kitchen counter and searched our cupboards. I found nothing of interest but for a loaded mousetrap, which made me jump with fright when it snapped back there in the dark.

  1944

  The Eendracht sat at anchor for three days in a windless calm. On the fourth morning the northerlies brought the first smells of rot and decay. He smelled it on deck as he watched the flattened city. He smelled it in his cabin and on his clothes and in the food he ate in the stunned silence of the cafeteria. Soon it was everywhere, a taste he could not spit out. The landscape smouldered on after the fires were down, the cloud hanging over it like the very Hand of God. Slowly it began to break apart, drifting eastward to Southend-on-Sea and finally out over the Channel.

  At night the city was black as coal, vanished from the face of the earth, yet along the length of the river the constellations of campfires grew.

  On the fifth morning he watched a young man heave himself over the ship’s railing—an attempt to swim to shore, or to die, he could not know which. At length the figure disappeared from view, arms pinwheeling against the current. The whales did not appear again but the gulls arrived now, fattened on the dead, and took their rest on the ledges of the upper decks where they preened their dirty feathers.

  The smouldering was gone now but the smoke and charred smell presided over the estuary. On board, the breakdown was already well underway. Elser noticed it midway through the fourth afternoon. Groups of men collected. In the cafeterias and common rooms, impromptu assemblies gathered, alliances forming to plot a course of action. The captain attempted to maintain order, but chaos spread through the ship. Some wanted to steam for South America, others to return to Rotterdam to take their chances there. The sergeant-at-arms made three arrests that day. On the fifth day he himself was placed in the brig after six members of the crew took control of the ship. The engines were turned over for the first time in days and the Eendracht began to move.

  Elser felt the vibrations of the steel plates underfoot and saw the shoreline slowly slip away. He wondered if the men who’d taken control had opted for a return to Holland. In the evening, the fires that dotted the estuary shoreline grew distant and pale, but it was impossible to gather from this position what direction the ship was headed.

  Around midnight he heard shots fired somewhere below the wheelhouse. The engines fell silent again and remained so for the rest of the night.

  He broke apart items of furniture in his cabin and selected a pointed fragment of chair-leg and held it in his hand as he lay listening for footsteps in the passageway on the other side of his door. In the morning he came up on deck and saw a German frigate a thousand yards off their portside.

  THE UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER WAS announced that afternoon over the wireless. Even without any knowledge of English, Elser heard defeat in the prime minister’s voice. The war was lost, and all British forces would begin demobilization at once.

  “The history of mankind has never seen a weapon of such destructive power as the one used against us,” Churchill said, “and no race so determined to rain down fury upon the heads of its enemy. Let there be no shame, only great sorrow. Defeat is one miserable truth. Disgrace is another. These times have laid us low. But they have not robbed us of the moral courage that binds us. Great Britain is evermore the land of honour and freedom, and one day we shall see new light. Now we will remember our greatest triumphs in our nation’s gravest hour. Never will history record that in these days a people so noble deserted her principles. And that is our victory. Today, in the midst of suffering and danger, our resolve is steadfast, our sorrows great.”

  A boarding party arrived from the frigate and took command of the Eendracht the following morning. It was an orderly process. Elser waited on the aft deck among the passengers and crew while the German officer who led the party carried out his inspections, nodding with the look on his face of a hunter taking in the full appreciation of his day’s work.

  WITHIN HOURS THE SHIP put in at the eastern basin of St. Katharine Docks alongside a wrecked paddle steamer turned on its side, the rusted hull blown open like tissue paper. Elser was with the first of the work gangs that were taken ashore and marched a hundred yards into the burned city, where they were put to work clearing a roadway of bodies and burned-out car wrecks and heaps of brick and stone and twisted metal. They worked until full dark, and that night Elser sheltered with twenty other men on the second floor of a building whose east wall lay in a heaping pile in the street. He sat in a room that looked out over the emptiness, speechless and exhausted, and wept at the devastation brought down on this city.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, A blizzard of leaflets fell from the sky and settled like snow all around him:

  THE WAR IS OVER

  CHURCHILL IS IN CUSTODY

  THE ENGLISH ARE DEFEATED

  They worked on through that day, the wind scuttling the leaflets along the street, and at twilight their guards marched them underground to a tube station already crowded with survivors of the bomb. The long, narrow space was grey-lit with torches that illuminated the ghost-like figures spread out before him. He found a narrow path and sat and watched as a lone man appeared from the darkness at one end of the tunnel pulling a two-wheeled shopping cart in which sat, as if in a cage, a child of perhaps four or five. The man wore Wellingtons and a black tuxedo suit jacket and what looked to be pyjama bottoms, torn and smeared with soot. The child in the cart stared at the people on the platform as the man wheeled her past along the rutted track. Seated on the platform, Elser watched him walk the rails over the length of the station, the cart lurching against each tie, from one end to the other, until the man and his burden faded again into darkness.

  IN THE MORNING THE German soldiers marched them back up into the grey light of day, where they were fed watery soup and skillet bread at a two-wheeled field kitchen pulled by a half-starved quarter horse. Elser ate quickly and watched the thin stems of smoke rising all around them and believed hell would look no different. He stored in his pocket the crusts that remained when the order was given to fall in. They were marched through the ruins and put to work clearing the stretch of road that reached north from London Bridge to Monument Square and the great Doric column that still stood there, everything else between the river and the column razed to the ground. Their guards stood upwind from where they worked collecting bodies while they cleared the roadway of wrecked cars and rubble. Nearing midday Elser saw a woman and man cradling a child, huddled together at the base of the column, their faces blank with terror. The child was sleeping or dead, he could not tell, but after these eight days the burns on its body seemed to continually boil, as if the bomb’s fire was still alight in its victim’s flesh.

  He removed the crusts of bread from his pocket and placed them on the ground for the man and woman and backed away.

  It was from that point on that he began to wonder if there was some connection between this strange new fire and the frequent rotation he’d begun to notice in the soldiers who drove them on through these ruins. Their guards served only half a day before they were replaced by a new squad of soldiers. He’d not spoken a word for fear he’d be discovered, but he listened for anything that might help him understand what was happening in the world beyond these smoking heaps of rubble, and if this bomb he’d watched fall from the sky had been loaded with some new incendiary that lingered on past its first impact. He heard the soldiers
talk of their relief that the war was over, and that they were eager to get home now as much as anyone, but he did not hear them speak about the bomb or the survivors, whose wounds were like nothing he’d seen before.

  IN THE DAYS THAT followed he saw the shadows burned into the pavements, and later he learned that these had once been people, and that the odd geometry burned into the skin of some of the survivors reflected the patterns of the clothing they’d been wearing on that morning the bomb fell from the sky. He learned to quickly rifle through the pockets of the dead when the guards weren’t watching, though he knew three men in his work gang had already been shot for looting, the world now operating at these strange extremes where the chance of pulling a biscuit or a penknife from a dead man’s pocket was worth the risk. Usually he ate any food he found right away, but the roll of Parma Violets he discovered in a young woman’s handbag kept him going for days. At night, among the weeping on the platform of the tube station, and later when they migrated north, deeper into the city, he’d sneak one from the cellophane wrap he’d secreted in his waistband and hold it under his tongue for as long as it lasted. He’d imagine another place in another time, eyes closed and far away, and he’d keep them closed for as long as he could before the taste of ash crept back over his tongue.

  One night as he held the candy under his tongue he heard his guards speaking of the penal colony called Madagascar that would begin receiving Jews from across Europe before the new year. In an instant the illusion he’d harboured slipped away and he imagined the horrors that might be unleashed back home, now that this madness could find its final expression.

  SOMETIMES THE THINGS HE took away with him weren’t edible or practical at all but simply offered some temporary distraction from the world around him. With the pocket watch he found under a collapsed wall north of the Doric column he imagined the Illinois Watch Company as it might have been back at the turn of the century, the early 1890s if he read its markings right, and the places it had travelled to until it finally arrived and died here in this city, its two intact hands stopped forever at eight-fifteen.

  The living were worse off than the dead by now, weeks after the bomb. He still found them sometimes, up there in those piles of brick, and carried them down to the street and laid them out for help to come. But the doctors arriving from all over England worked day and night in the aid stations that began to appear throughout the city, and so those people he tried to help received no help at all until the wagons came to collect the dead.

  WHEN HE OVERHEARD A young soldier, speaking in Low Saxon, refer to something called “radiation” twenty days into his recruitment, he wondered if this was the thing that fuelled the fires that seemed to boil on under the skin or erupt into scabs and scarring of frightening proportions. The two men listening to the soldier warmed their coffee over a cook-fire as he spoke. It was neither a pestilence nor a poison gas but an after-effect of the weapon they were celebrating back home, he said, a danger so persistent that each German squad could serve only six hours at a time.

  AT FIRST ELSER DIDN’T notice the slow creep of blindness that began to consume him a month or so into his ordeal, and when he did he was able to convince himself that the blurring in his left eye was a result of his starvation diet and the deep exhaustion that consumed him. He’d seen the opaqueness gathering over the eyes of some of the men he worked alongside and told himself this would not be his fate. He would not end up as one of those poor devils sitting helplessly in a ditch, the pearl-like blankness drawn over their eyes like curtains, but in the days leading into November the vision in his right eye began to dim too, and from that time on the world around him began to fall into darkness.

  THE GERMAN TRANSPORTS ANCHORED off Sunset Park and West New Brighton continued to disgorge their divisions and equipment as the Channel fell to its autumn storms. The advance commando units that spread through the city in the early days after the signing of the unconditional surrender on board the Scharnhorst worked in short, brutal rotations cleaning up the last of the resistance that remained before shipping off again to one of the troop carriers at anchor in the Thames estuary, where they scrubbed down and swallowed the iodine pills they were told were another variation on the Pervitin they’d been taking since their push through Europe began. They worked in conjunction with the British Union of Fascists and the English Bund Society, who in the early years of the war had met in basements and alleyways but would now ascend to the very heights of political power in this new England.

  On the steps of Parliament House in Edinburgh, William Gilmour of the Scottish Democratic Fascist Party declared the triumph of Scottish independence and the death of the English liberal class. There was talk now of the end of the Bolshevik menace, and finally the Jewish problem could be seen to with a firm hand. Those who’d lain in wait seized their opportunity. Sir Oswald Mosley, disgraced Member of Parliament for Smethwick and leader of the British Union of Fascists, was released from house arrest and summoned to Berlin. He was received by Chancellor Göring, who later that day spoke on the wireless to the people of Great Britain of the wave of National Socialism that was now crashing over the British Isles and of the heroic new generation of leaders that would carry their proud nation into the future.

  ELSER ROSE TO HIS feet when the kapos came along the platform kicking and swinging their truncheons. He blinked and shook his head, not sure he was in his own body, or that it wasn’t still the middle of the night and this some drill meant to torment them further, rousing them in the pitch-darkness, so absorbing that it was absolute. Not even the miners’ lights the kapos wore or the torches they carried pierced it. He hit the side of his head with his open palm, as if to activate some stalled mechanism buried there, and then, waving his hand over his eyes, he knew he was blind.

  The kapos swung their truncheons and shouted their orders again and the crowd started to move along the platform. Elser raised his hands and felt along the wall and made it up the stairs into the cold morning before he fell hard against a low pile of brick and sat waiting for the guards to notice. He knew what was coming. He’d seen dozens of men like he was now—those who’d stared into the centre of the fire that day in August—shot and left for the wagons to come and collect them.

  He heard the guard approach and stand over him a moment, the leather of his boots and the strap being drawn through the holster’s buckle, and then he felt the Luger’s muzzle against his temple.

  It was God’s mercy and quickly now, please. He was ready, here in this place he’d created with the killing of one monster that gave rise to another. He was responsible for all of this, his plan turned so viciously upside down, and he felt the hands of death begin to close upon him.

  He sat there at the centre of his life, waiting.

  The man who should have shot him holstered his sidearm and called out that there was another one here, useless and blind as a stone.

  Elser heard his footsteps moving off, and in a moment other men came and he was dragged over the broken cobble and hefted into the back of a truck.

  IT WAS HOURS LATER and raining when the vehicle stopped and the German soldiers began unloading the blind. Leading them one by one to a rope tied to a post, they took each prisoner’s right hand and placed it on the rope, and the left hand on the shoulder of the prisoner in front of them. The rain when Elser was brought down from the truck-bed tasted of ash and smoke and froze him to the bone, and he was added to the procession of the blind. And so the line grew until the command was given, and as one they began to move.

  After seventy-eight counted steps he stumbled on stairs that led up and out of the rain into a structure that echoed with their shuffling misery. He dropped his hand from the shoulder in front of him, the chain broken, and reached into the emptiness beside him, and there on his left he felt something smooth and hard and textured with age. His fingers travelled over it and fell away to nothing as he stepped forward. He felt the same shape replicated again and then again, and he knew that he was in a chur
ch and these were the seatbacks of pews.

  In his mind’s eye he saw the space they moved through—the aisle, the chancel ahead, and the figure of a tortured Christ hovering somewhere above—until an English voice called out and the procession stopped and slid away by ones and twos onto the cold of the waiting benches.

  The saints had been taken down from their pedestals now and the first ten rows of pews unbolted from the stone floor to make room for what became the casualty clearing station at the St. John-at-Hampstead Parish Church of the Blind. He learned its name later, and that those who tended to them in this place were a Red Cross team from Cardiff, but on the day of his arrival he knew only what he touched and smelled. There were no German voices here, once they were unloaded from the truck, that might help him understand how long he would be kept. In the early hours of his arrival and in the days that followed he tapped his throat when a voice spoke to him, as if to indicate he was mute, and out of pity or haste a hand took his and led him forward to where he was supposed to stand or sit, for how long he never knew.

  AFTER THE RAINSTORM ENDED that first night, the wide, echoing space was silent but for the muted coughing of those around him and the metallic sound of a water dripping from overhead into a tin cup or plate and the stubborn wind whistling through an opening in a blown-out chancel window. Gone was the smell of charred and rotting bodies, and now the cold air smelled of earth and rain and woodsmoke. He wrapped himself in the blanket he’d been provided and set to praying. The cold ate into his bones. He prayed that he might find the world returned to itself whole and intact when morning came, that none of this was more than a haunting dream. He prayed that sight would be restored to him and to those sprawled out around him, and that he might be forgiven for what he’d done to set this miserable history in motion. He prayed for those he loved and that their memory would never be lost and prayed for the city he’d been delivered from, and when the violent shivering seized his whole body he prayed for a dry pair of boots and the simple warmth of a fire.