by Pierre Frei
A passenger train was waiting at a distance, beside the unroofed part of the platform. It was terribly overcrowded. People crammed into the toilets. She found a place to stand in the corridor. The journey lasted for ever, because the train was diverted into sidings several times to allow troop transports past. Jurek was waiting at Wrietzow with the horse and cart. 'Wilcome, Freilein.' The Polish groom helped her up with pleasure and admiration in his eyes.
Her mother was preparing rutabagas in the kitchen with Lina. 'Oh, you should have stayed in Spain,' she said, sounding concerned.
'You know I had to come.' Detta hugged her. 'How are you, Mama?'
'With potatoes, marjoram and bacon this will make a perfectly acceptable one-pot meal for all of us,' said the Baroness, evading the question. 'Your father's in the library.'
The Baron was sitting by the fire. He had grown old. 'I'm finished, they've retired me because of my heart. Detta, child, how good to see you. It will cheer your mother up. She takes refuge in her duties, or what she considers her duties. She doesn't show it, but she misses our two little ones a great deal.' Fritz and Viktoria, now thirteen and fifteen, were studying in Munich.
Detta was hardly listening. 'Where is he?' she asked impatiently.
The door flew open and her brother strode in. He whirled her around, beside himself with delight. 'Sister dear, at last.' He was pale and had lost weight, his breeches and thick pullover were too large for him, but he was as lively and enthusiastic as ever.
This is the time to bring out the last of my Armagnac.' As if by magic, their father produced a bottle from behind the works of Detlev von Liliencron and poured them glasses.
'Cheers, Father, Detta - here's to our future!' cried Hans-Georg confidently.
'To your future,' the master of Aichborn corrected him. 'My time is over. There's nothing left for me now. The old values are all gone.'
'There'll be new values and a new, free Reich, peaceful and respected by the whole world.' Hans-Georg sounded as though he were trying to persuade himself.
'But first we must get you out of the old Reich,' Detta soberly interrupted. She rang the bell by the fireplace. Bensing appeared. In honour of the day he had put on his shiny black jacket, which didn't really go with his gumboots. 'The Maybach, Bensing?'
'With your BMW in the old barn, hidden under straw and old junk. Both cars have full tanks. I check on them regularly.'
'Take the D plate off my roadster and paint a C beside it. Then screw it on the Maybach. CD stands for Corps Diplomatique. And take that little throw over the back of the sofa, the one I embroidered with Mother's family coat of arms in the Spanish colours, and fasten it on the radiator as a pennant. Polish up the car and iron your chauffeur's uniform. We're off on Wednesday morning. My brother's a Spanish diplomat, and our flight to Barcelona leaves from Tempelhof at two in the afternoon.'
'I'll get to work immediately, Fraulein Detta.' Bensing went away with measured tread.
'Barcelona?' asked her brother incredulously.
'Tom Glaser will fly us out.' She explained her plan.
'I hope to God it works,' murmured the Baron, shaking his head.
A hunting horn sounded from somewhere above. 'We have a lookout posted on the tower.' Hans-Georg was suddenly in a hurry. She watched from the tall window as he sprinted across the yard and disappeared down the hatch into the potato cellar. Bensing chugged up with the tractor and dumped a load of muck over the entrance.
Fanselow climbed out of his car in his brown Party uniform and stalked up to the entrance of the schloss. The Baron wrinkled his nose. He often comes to pay what he calls a friendly visit, to see how I am. I think he's trying to hedge his bets.'
'I'll go and see the horses.' Detta had no desire to meet the man.
Tom Glaser's call reached her at lunchtime. The night before, an incendiary bomb had destroyed his JU 290, which had been tanked up for the return flight. 'There isn't a spare plane. The whole of Lufthansa is grounded.'
And that, in an instant, was the end of Detta's bold plan. But she did not let her disappointment show. 'Oh well,' she told her brother. A few more days among the potatoes won't kill you. The BBC is saying the Russians have crossed the Oder at Frankfurt. And that's at most eighty kilometres from here.'
The hunting horn on the tower sounded early in the morning. Hans-Georg disappeared into his hiding place. Bensing pushed the muck over the hatch. Two jeeps drew up outside the schloss and eight Red Army soldiers jumped out, pointing their Kalashnikovs menacingly. A limousine stopped in the entrance. An officer stepped out, followed by Fanselow. The district farmers' leader was wearing a cloth cap and a red band round the arm of his jacket.
The master of Aichborn, standing very straight, appeared in the entrance. 'There's the Fascist general!' cried Fanselow.
'General yes. Fascist no; snapped the Baron. Detta went to his side.
And that's the daughter! A Fascist cow.' Fanselow's voice rose and broke.
Detta calmly approached him. 'No crayfish today, Fanselow, just potato soup. You can slurp it up from the tip of the spoon, I expect that's more your style.' Fanselow went red in the face. Detta turned to the Russian and spoke French to him. 'Je suis Henriette von Aichborn. What will happen to my father? He's old and sick.'
'Major Rubakhov, NKVD, the officer introduced himself in perfect German. 'My orders are to arrest Lieutenant-General Heinrich von Aichborn as a war criminal.'
Aichborn indicated his cardigan. I suppose I can change first.' He did not wait for the answer.
'Make a break for it, would you?' Fanselow grabbed the Baron's sleeve.
'Don't do that,' the Russian officer told him, and turned to look at the family pictures in the hall.
'I am a war criminal too.' The Baroness appeared at the top of the staircase in her hat and coat.
The major shrugged. As you like.' The Baron came and stood beside her. The general's stripes on his breeches shone red, and the blue enamel of the Prussian order Pour le Merite gleamed on his collar. He kissed his wife's hand with old-fashioned courtesy and gave her his arm. With inimitable dignity the two of them walked downstairs. Bensing helped his master into his coat. The major held the door of the car open, Heinrich and Maria von Aichborn got in, and the limousine started.
'We'll be back,' Fanselow spat, jumping into the jeep. Bensing shook his fist at him, tears of rage in his eyes.
'I'm sure they'll be back soon.' Detta put a comforting arm round his shoulders. Suddenly it dawned on her. 'The war's over, Bensing. We're free,' she said in amazement.
'Yes, Fraulein Detta.' Bensing walked away, his steps weary.
'Hans-Georg, we're free!' She ran across the yard and picked up the pitchfork. 'Free! Free! Free!' she shouted, exultant. The muck flew in all directions, and the hatch swung open. Like a phoenix. her brother came up into the light. The morning sunlight coloured his thin face gold. Detta fell on his neck, and danced exuberantly across the yard with him. 'No more Gestapo, no more fear.' She kissed him lovingly. Then her euphoria evaporated. 'The Russians have taken Father away.' she said. 'Fanselow must have denounced him. Mother went with him.'
'Father's done nothing wrong. They'll soon set him free,' Hans-Georg soothed her.
A military vehicle roared into the yard, followed by two motorbikes with sidecars. Six SS men in long rubber coats pointed their sub-machine guns at everyone present.
An SS lieutenant got out of the vehicle. 'Sturmfiihrer Keil, Special Commando Unit. 'He gave Hans-Georg a cold look. 'Who are you? Your papers!' he barked.
'Five minutes ago I was Cavalry Captain Baron von Aichborn. Now I'm just a farmer. The Russians have been here. The war's over -- for you too. Herr Keil.'
We decide when the war is over. Hang the traitor,' ordered the Sturmfuhrer.
Two men seized Hans-Georg. A third took a piece of cord out of his coat pocket and tied his hands behind his back. The driver brought a milking stool and calf's halter out of the cowshed. They dragged Hans-Georg, who was resi
sting in vain, under the light fitting outside the coach house. It all seemed horribly routine.
'Please wait,' Detta heard her voice as if from very far away. 'I'II get his papers.'
'I'll give you one minute,' the SS executioner called after her. She crossed the yard like a sleepwalker.
At the gun-room window she came to herself again. She saw them lift Hans-Georg on the stool and put the noose around his neck. One of the SS men was raising his leg to kick the stool away. She felt the smooth shaft of the rifle against her cheek, she had her brother's forehead in the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight. 'Breathe out, pull the trigger slowly, rather as if you were squeezing a sponge, or you'll swerve to one side,' she heard him say.
I love you, she thought. The sound of the shot drowned out her stifled cry.
A Russian airman, flying low, had put the SS unit to flight. Silence lay over Aichborn. The spring sun warmed the silent people. The Polish workers took off their caps and crossed themselves. Women wept as they looked at the body.
They carried him into the house and laid him on the big ash table where game was skinned and cut up in the hunting season. Detta washed his naked body with slow, caressing movements. Lina helped her to dress the dead man in his uniform. They had to cut his riding boots open at the back to get them on. Then they laid him on a bed of ivy in the Aichborn chapel. Bensing would have made the coffin by evening.
Torchlight illuminated the graves behind the chapel where the Aichborns had been laid to rest for the last four hundred years, except for those who had fallen in battle far away. The night was cold and starlit. Pastor Wunsig spoke of the peace in the land that Detta's brother would not see now, and the eternal peace that he had found. Detta stood heavily veiled by the graveside, as tradition demanded. In the kitchen she took her veil off. She offered the pastor grog to warm him up, and told an amusing story about herself and Hans-Georg as children. Aichborn women never showed their feelings, and Detta had no feelings any more. Everything inside her was empty.
She registered what went on around her in the next few hours: the arrival of the red hordes under a fat little captain who watched what his soldiers were doing with approval and had the youngest girls brought to him: the screams of the raped women and beaten men: the senseless slaughter of horses and cattle. She registered it but did not really take it in. She and Lina made huge pans of soup in the kitchen for the victors, and that preserved her from the worst for the moment, but she cherished no illusions about the future.
As she was carrying a soup pan out to the men round their fire, Jurek grabbed her. He had been drinking with the soldiers. 'Come here, German whore!' he bellowed, dragging Detta away from the fire into the dark. His breath smelled of vodka. He let go of her behind the stables. 'You scream so they think I kill you,' he whispered.
Detta screamed until her throat hurt.
'I saddled Loschek. Get away quick, right?'
He had tied a blanket on the old horse's back with a girth. He helped her up. The night was cold and starry once again. She orientated herself by the Great Bear. Berlin, here I come, she thought. I'm repeating myself, she realized bitterly.
The Berlin city commandant looked up from his desk. 'Good morning, Curt.'
'Good morning, sir.' Curtis S. Chalford indicated his companion. 'Sir, this is Henriette von Aichborn.'
The general shook hands with Detta. 'Glad to meet you, Miss von Aichborn. I am Henry Abbot. We're all here to find out whether you'd like to become my German liaison.' Abbot was a lean, grey-haired man with a weathered face. He had the clipped, dry accent typical of New England aristocracy. Detta liked him at once, and the feeling seemed to be reciprocated.
'That's entirely up to you, General Abbot. But why don't we give it a try?' she said.
A trial period, excellent,' Chalford agreed. Detta had gone to see him at the German-American Employment office, and he had suggested her for the post - the applicant spoke fluent English, was a real lady, and had that certain something that you couldn't learn but were born with.
Detta would have taken almost any job. She wanted just one thing - to immerse herself in work and to forget it all; her wild flight from Aichborn, first on horseback and then on foot, after hungry, homeless people had killed the old nag. She had hidden from the marauding liberators in the undergrowth or in barns by day, taking remote paths through the woods and fields by night, then spent the following weeks with the Glasers in Mahlow on the outskirts of Berlin - the fact that a woman Red Army major was billeted on them meant that they escaped the worst. News came from the faithful Bensing, by roundabout ways, that her mother had been released, but her father was in the NKVD camp at Buchenwald.
After the Western Allies had entered the capital, Detta ventured to the Steubenplatz, which was in the British sector. Her apartment was occupied. A family who had survived the trek from East Prussia had been quartered there. She was able to retrieve a few things from her wardrobe, though where she would take them she didn't know.
At the Housing Department, where she stood in line for hours on end, someone spoke to her. 'It's Fraulein von Aichborn, isn't it?' The woman wore a once elegant, foal-skin coat and a headscarf. 'Elisabeth Mohr. You visited us once at Horn's fashion house on the Kurfdrstendamm, with Fraulein Goldberg. It must have been in about 1935.'
'Frau Mohr, yes, I remember.'
Frau Mohr had to give up a room in her apartment. 'I'd rather find a tenant for myself than have someone billeted on me.' So Detta and her few things found a place to live in Waltraudstrasse on the Fischtal park, and had the benefit of Frau Mohr's good advice, too. 'If you speak any English, you could try getting work with the Yanks. They pay in Allimarks, but most important of all, they give you something to eat.'
And now she was in the process of taking up one of the most important posts open to a German at this time: advising the US city commandant and liaising between him and the people of Berlin. But she felt no pleasure or satisfaction. She felt empty and alone.
The arrival of her mother was an unexpected gleam of light. The Baroness had made her way to Berlin on foot and on the roofs of overcrowded freight trains. Fanselow and his Red friends were ravaging Aichborn. They had looted the schloss and expropriated the land.
The Baroness smiled painfully. 'Bensing had to go through a session of self-criticism as a "minion of the Junkers". He insisted on staying. Someone must be at Aichborn when Father comes home, he says. Oh, Detta, I have so little hope. I hear that conditions in the camp at Buchenwald are even worse under our new masters than before.'
From then on mother and daughter shared the same bed. Frau von Aichborn was not a refugee and had no right to accommodation in Berlin. She lived like a shadow, spending her days reading or going for long walks in the Fischtal. A pretty park,' she said. 'Did you know that the name Fischtal has nothing to do with fish? The farmers of Zehlendorf used to call the pastures there the "Viehstall", the "cowshed". A man out walking told me that.'
She revived when she was allowed to start teaching a Spanish course at a new adult education centre. And she was finally allotted a room too, in the basement of a villa in Katharinenstrasse, quite close to Detta. A photograph on the chest of drawers showed the Baron in gumboots inspecting a breeding bull. Both the Baron and the bull looked happy.
The way to work wasn't far: over the Waltraudbriicke to Argentinische Allee and then to Oskar-Helene-Heim U-Bahn station. Opposite stood the buildings of what had been the Luftgaukommando, which the Americans had made their Berlin headquarters, and by virtue of their liking for absurd acronyms called oMGUS, 'Office of the Military Government of the United States'. The sandstone facades of the Third Reich were intact and the same as ever. The smell of Nescafe and Virginia cigarettes in the polished corridors was new.
Detta went that way every day, and every day the blind man met her. He was a youngish man, small, with dark glasses and a white stick, wearing a uniform mended in several places and bearing the outline of a Luftwaffe eagle that had been remove
d from its breast. She supposed he lived somewhere nearby.
She felt sorry for him. But it would have gone no further - she was in no mood to make new acquaintances - if he hadn't almost walked into the path of a car one morning. She grabbed his sleeve and held him back. He was alarmed, then understood and thanked her. 'I know you. I know your footsteps. We meet here every morning, don't we? I'm taking my daily constitutional, so as not to get old before my time.'
'Come on.' Detta took his arm and led him across the street. 'Have a good morning,' she wished him on the other side. He walked away, his footsteps sure. He obviously knew every paving stone.
Her new daily routine began as she showed her pass to the guard at the entrance. Lieutenant Anny Randolph, personal assistant to the city commandant, was waiting for her in the outer office with a black coffee. It had taken a little while for Detta to get used to it: the Americans boiled their coffee instead of brewing it. 'Hi, Detta, how are you this morning?'
'Thanks, Anny, swell,' said Detta, imitating the lively New Yorker's speech. 'What's on?'
'The boss wants to see you. The people wanting a newspaper licence have an appointment at eleven.'
A normal working day began. Colonel Tucker, adjutant to the city commandant, looked in briefly, but there was nothing for him. Mr Gold, the inscrutable representative of the State Department, who apparently didn't speak a word of German although he came from Frankfurt am Main, brought the city commandant an envelope with 'Confidential' stamped on it, and Anny Randolph gave him a receipt. Herr Bongarts did his weekly round with his little bottle and brush, disinfecting the four hundred phones in OMGUS. The Americans feared germs even more than Communism.
Henry Abbot rose courteously when Detta entered his office, and pointed to one of the armchairs. 'Do sit down, Henriette.'
'Thank you, sir. It's about the licence to publish a new Berlin newspaper, isn't it?'
