And with that, Max sped off almost driving over the policeman’s toes.
It was Erika’s turn to scowl at the officer now. After all, if he had not been irritating her husband, Max would have said a proper goodbye to her. Surely.
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ Hummel called out to Erika as he strolled off down the street, ‘if we do find out anything, doctor.’
The journey lasted for ever. It could have been days for all Netta knew: each time she woke from a nap she had no idea how long she’d been asleep. All she saw was mile upon mile of never-ending road; hours and hours of boring countryside. Where was the seaside? The sand and the waves? Her blissful bounce was now a frustrated fidget. Every glimpse of water got her hopes up only to be dashed when she realised they were just crossing over a smelly old river.
‘Not much longer now,’ her papa smiled, ‘and then we get to go on a boat.’
At least she was with her papa. She had him all to herself now. No way could anyone steal him this time. There was nobody else around, just him and her, alone in the red car. And he was happy. He was smiling at her. He wasn’t grumpy, he wasn’t shouting at her, they were going to build sandcastles together on the beach. It was going to be amazing.
The port was teeming with people. It was frightening to the little girl, especially the soldiers who spoke in a funny language she didn’t understand. As her papa bought the tickets to get them on the ferry she saw a sign on the dock telling anyone arriving by boat that they were entering the Britischer Sektor, whatever that was.
The sign was in German, English and Russian.
Max saw Netta craning her neck up to look at it and the Cyrillic he recognised there made his skin crawl. They were only going an hour across the water to the holiday island of Sylt, but suddenly Max was filled with a sense of dread, as if he was standing on the rimy edge of the Barents Sea again, looking out at the single storey wooden structure standing on stilts out in the grey water. His hospital for the four years he was a prisoner. Where he had to tend to the sick and injured with nothing but aspirin for pain and coal for diarrhoea, vascular clamps made from bits of wire fence and a piece of leather to bite on for anaesthetic.
‘Come on, Papa, let’s go!’ Netta said, yanking him back towards the car.
He instinctively resisted. If he didn’t, he felt he would never be able to return from that island. That place of isolation.
‘Papa!’
His daughter’s voice penetrated his misted mind and told him he was not in Gegesha anymore. There were never any little girls in Gegesha, so he couldn’t possibly be there.
He blinked, looked down and saw her; smiled to smooth away the anxiety clouding her face and hurried to the car.
Once on the water he breathed in the warm salty air and toasted his face against the sun. He caught his daughter copying his movements: a big breath in, eyes scrunched up against the light. He chuckled quietly to himself. She copied this too.
The home was in a small town on the northernmost tip of the island. When they drove up to the imposing slab of a mansion, a group of gaunt children were on their way out, led by their antithesis, a gargantuan matron who seemed to be made up of a collection of spheres: a globe of a head, a very planet of a body, and two massive orbs for breasts. Even her ankles had been replaced with rondures connecting her considerable calves to her feet, which seemed to be the only slender thing about her, flattened no doubt under the weight of the solar system piled upon them.
‘Ah, you must be Herr Portner?’ she wheezed and, far from worrying about enlightening her with his proper title, Max was more concerned with the implications if this woman was meant to be an ambassador for the healing powers of the sea air in Sylt. ‘And you must be Netta?’ she said to the little girl, who had already ejected herself from the car, and was pulling on every reserve of will power she had lest she dart off towards the vast expanse of sand beckoning to her on the other side of the promenade and risk the return of the wrath of her father.
‘How does she know my name?’ she whispered to her papa.
‘The tide is out so we were all just going out for a walk along the beach. Perhaps Netta would like to join us?’
Despite her awesome size, the lady seemed nice enough to Netta. And a whole bunch of kids to play with on the beach too! This was a pleasant surprise, but she didn’t know any of them yet, so she turned to her papa to make sure he was coming too.
‘Go ahead, darling,’ Max said, ‘I’ll just get some of our things out of the car, then I’ll catch you up.’
‘No, I can wait for you.’
‘No, go! Go on, have some fun. You’ve been waiting for this for ages, haven’t you?’ He took off his glasses and winked at the woman. ‘Go with Frau…?’
‘Auttenberg,’ Frau Auttenberg informed him.
‘Go with Frau Auttenberg…’
‘Before the tide comes in and the sand is all gone again.’ It was Auttenberg’s turn to wink at the rather well-groomed and somewhat handsome man before her.
The thought of all that beautiful sand being swallowed up again by the sea before she’d had a chance to play on it was too much for the little girl to bear. She scampered off and some of the other waifs, who had long since had their sense of free will beaten out of them by Frau Auttenberg, forgot for a moment that this was so, infected as they were by the new ball of energy rolling past them, and they began to run towards the sand as well.
‘Wait for me!’ Auttenberg foghorned.
The kids came to their senses, their dull senseless senses, again, reverting to a heavy plod, which Netta, much to her own bemusement, found herself trying to emulate.
Max watched the children filing down to the sand under the surveillance of Auttenberg and felt sick. He turned away, pulled the cases from the boot and, looking at the two storey brick block in front of him, he felt as if he was looking at the long wooden mildew hut which had housed him and ten thousand other Germans in bunks with barely enough room to squeeze between them, where gaping holes let in lacerating draughts and pelting rain for four years until it became the numb norm.
Four years. His freedom taken from him for four years.
Four weeks. ‘It’s only for four weeks,’ he’d said to Erika. But he wasn’t so old as to have forgotten himself how interminable four weeks could feel when you were a child. When you were somewhere you didn’t want to be.
He checked Netta in at the reception desk. Left her cases with the red-faced man there and went back out to the car.
He drove out onto the road, but had to stop. He couldn’t see for the tears in his eyes. He wiped at them furiously and looked out onto the beach again. He could make out Netta’s golden locks bobbing around as she ordered a boy to help her with a sand castle. In those two little humans Max saw himself and Horst as kids on the farm, playing Cowboys and Indians, and as altar boys in the cemetery using a crucifix as a ladder to get to the juiciest cherries on the branches which hung over the priest’s garden wall.
Suddenly he knew how it felt to be umbilically tied to someone. And something was yanking on that bond with all its might.
Down on the sand Netta saw the bright red car easily as it zoomed by the white stucco houses on the sea front.
‘Papa!’ she screamed and the car came to an abrupt halt.
‘Now, Netta…’ Frau Auttenberg warned, but Netta had far more important things on her mind than falling into line like all the other puny idiots.
‘Papa!’ again she screamed, running up the beach towards the road and the stationary car.
He must have heard me, she told herself. He must have realised he had forgotten me. Silly Papa! What on earth was on his mind to make him drive off like that without…
Then the car moved off again. Faster than before and the wind filled her head with the roar of the advancing sea.
Much of the original hospital had been destroyed in the air raids, so the building in which Max and Edgar worked was brand new. Edgar seemed to luxuriate in the
surroundings, which were indeed luxurious for both patients and staff compared to the execrable conditions they’d worked in in the labour camp. But Max found this clean floored, well-resourced, whitewashed place as alien as his home life. He found the doctors’ and nurses’ grumblings about their working conditions (standard conversation for front line workers about their managers from time in memoriam) offensive, especially when any well founded comments about under-staffing were made in ignorance of the fact that, had not all the Jewish doctors been expelled by the Nazis, the place would have a full complement of staff and some of the finest doctors in Europe. And it was all he could do sometimes to restrain himself from telling a whingeing patient to buck up and think themselves lucky they were going to have anaesthetic at all.
For a brief moment at dinner at the Portners’, Edgar had seen a glimmer of his old buddy. But the sight of his daughter’s untouched plate had sent Max’s shutters guillotining down again. Sometimes Edgar told himself it was just Max being his ultra-professional self whilst they were at work, but when Max politely refused every offer from Edgar of a drink after their shift, a poetry night in Bochum, or even the opera in the brand new Städtische Bühnen, he felt waves of grief wash over him, which were even more powerful than those he had felt when their friend Horst had been killed in Gegesha.
Unlike Max, Edgar had no intention of becoming a GP, so had established himself in the orthopaedics department. Max, who had to complete his civilian experience in the Klinik before moving onto the surgery with Erika, was moved around from department to department. And when his orthopaedic rotation came around, Edgar was convinced that working closely with Max again would reignite old memories and reinvigorate their friendship.
‘Six of them there were. Six of our boys nailed to the table by their tongues.’
‘How are we doing today…?’ Edgar interrupted the grotesque tale a patient was regaling another in the ward with and checked his notes, ‘…Herr Leichtfuss?’
‘It’s Lieutenant Leichtfuss. And I’m still bloody sore. Can you give me something more for the pain?’
Edgar examined what was left of the soldier’s arm, inviting Max to do the same. Leichtfuss had been in a Soviet labour camp too. His fingers had become frostbitten but he had refused to let any of the quacks, as he called the doctors among his fellow inmates, to treat him. When he was finally released a few weeks ago, the entire arm was gangrenous and had to be removed near the shoulder.
Max and Edgar exchanged the kind of telepathic looks they had done in Gegesha and it sent a thrill through the entire length of the tall doctor.
‘Don’t worry, Herr Leichtfuss,’ Edgar said deliberately, ‘We will order an increase in your morphine dose for now, but the site is healing well. The pain should subside soon enough.’
He scribbled on the man’s chart and moved on to the next bed, leaving Leichtfuss to resume his loud reminiscences with the man opposite.
‘Six of our soldiers nailed to the table by their tongues, ten hung up from meat hooks in the slaughterhouse and another fifteen thrown down the well and stoned to death. Can you believe it? Bloody barbarians those Bolshevists.’
‘Dr Portner.’ Edgar grabbed Max’s attention back from the diabolical picture being painted behind him. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me your assessment of Herr Neuffer’s arthritis?’
‘I was guarding a train going to Korosten,’ Leichtfusss’s interlocutor chimed in, ‘a cattle train packed with Ivans. Sixty or seventy men in each truck. We were transporting them to Lwow. Each time we reached a station they were herded with truncheons to the drinking troughs and back. They drank there like beasts, they were so thirsty. At every station ten of them were taken out dead: suffocated through lack of oxygen. And sometimes when the train came in, they peered out from between the slats and shouted to the civilians there, “Bread! Bread please, and God will bless you.” Then they threw out their shirts and their last pairs of socks and shoes to the kids, who brought them pumpkins in return. They threw these pumpkins in through the gaps and then all you heard was a terrific din like the rearing of wild animals. They must have been killing each other in there just to get a bite of raw pumpkin.’
‘You see what I mean? Bloody animals, the lot of them.’ Leichtfuss whipped his remaining arm at his new friend. ‘You see we’re not supposed to admit it openly, but we were far too soft on our POWs. If we’d have carried it through to the hilt, made them disappear completely, our country wouldn’t be in such trouble now. These half measures are always wrong.’
And then Max was no longer manipulating Herr Neuffer’s wrists, but, much to Edgar’s disappointment, was standing over Leichtfuss saying, ‘I think you missed your friend’s point there.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ The patient looked disgruntled at yet another interruption.
‘I think what he might have been saying is: is it any wonder the Russians nailed German soldiers’ tongues to the table if that’s how we treated them when they were our prisoners?’
‘Dr Portner…’ Edgar put his hand on his colleague’s shoulder.
‘No, Ed! Did you ever stop to think,’ Max said through gritted teeth to the soldier, ‘why they treated us like they did in the labour camps?’
Leichtfuss was fuming now. ‘Oh, you were in a camp too, were you? Then you should know better than anyone how brutal those bastards are.’
‘Germany invaded their home. They were fighting for their lives!’ His mild-mannered buddy was as close to bellowing as he ever got, his eyes moist with frustration, so Edgar used his superior height to bulldoze Max out of the ward, which now resonated with the indignant ramblings of Leichtfuss.
‘Such things don’t go unavenged,’ Max was sobbing now in the arms of his friend, who was trying to shield him from gossiping eyes blinking up and down the corridor. ‘God is punishing us for what we did to the rest of the world, Ed.’
‘You did nothing, Max. We are not the same as that fool in there.’ Edgar ushered Max further from prying eyes and ears. ‘Look, remember that medical officer over at the demob centre? Let me make you an appointment to go and see him. There might be something he can do to help you?’
‘Help me?’
‘Yes, before all this gives you a nervous breakdown or something.’
‘But I’m the doctor, Ed. I’m supposed to help people.’ Visions of his sixteen-year-old self, standing petrified at the scene of the tram crash whilst Tante Bertel took control and ordered him to bring a ladder to use as a stretcher, throbbed through his brain. ‘I can’t be the one asking for help.’
‘I get it.’ Edgar had Max by the arms as if he might shake the sense of these words into him. ‘That’s the war talking. The army that teaches us we have to be big strong men. Brainwashes us into believing we always have to fight. But we’re not in the army anymore, buddy. We don’t have to pretend, OK?’
Max wanted to say it was the likes of Leichtfuss who should have their heads checked, not him, but he allowed himself to be persuaded by the large hands gripping his arms, the closest he was going to get to the warm embrace he really needed right then.
*
Dr. Siskin was a slight man, who wished he was stocky. A man of average height who would rather be tall. A naturally smooth faced officer who craved a handlebar moustache. But he had an enormous mahogany desk and an expensive leather chair behind which and in which he felt his shortcomings were well disguised, and as he sat listening to the doctor from Dortmund Klinik painfully pulling out his reason for being in Siskin’s office today, the demob officer felt taller, stockier and hairier than ever.
Granted, Siskin was more used to examining eyes, ears and looking down throats, but this wasn’t the first time in recent months an ex-POW had come to him in reasonable physical health claiming they were on the brink of a nervous breakdown. So he told Dr Max Portner the same thing he had told all the others. The same thing in fact that Siskin’s father had told his son when he had cried and cried over seeing his mother run over and killed
by a horse and cart outside their home:
‘What are you?’ As he spoke Siskin always rubbed beneath his nose with the length of his fountain pen, as if he had a little itch, to compensate for the lack of facial hair there. ‘Eh? What are you, Dr Portner? A man or a mouse?’
Max left the demob centre more deflated than when he went in. But with every mile of his journey home and with every memory of Dr Siskin which lashed at his skull, his sense of defeat was transmuted into anger. He drove his car faster than usual and even sped up when pedestrians were crossing the road, enjoying the power he possessed to make them run. Once at home he asked his father about the old motorbike languishing in the garden shed.
‘I think we should fix it up. It would be great for getting around from patient to patient when I take over the surgery soon.’
Karl was a little bit surprised at his son’s turn of phrase. Take over the surgery? As far as Karl knew, Erika had no intention of stopping work. He thought they would be working together in there. And then there was the fact that they hadn’t long ago splashed out on the DKW. Did they really need a second vehicle? Nevertheless he found himself saying:
‘Yes, why not? We could do it together. I need a new project.’ Karl beckoned his son out to the shed.
He was elated at the thought of something that would bring him closer to his son again. Since Max’s return, Karl felt feckless and weak. He had fired a gun at his own wrist to avoid conscription in the First World War and hence had none of the experiences his son had had in the army, or as a prisoner. He had no common ground, no way of saying with any authority or conviction: I understand what you’ve been through, son. You can talk to me because I know what you’ve been through. And what irked him more than anything else was that Erika’s father served in both wars and was at that moment still prisoner in a Siberian labour camp. When that vainglorious bastard was finally home, Karl had squirmed, he would no doubt be around swapping POW stories with Max and making snide comments, just like he did at Max and Erika’s wedding, about how the country wouldn’t have gone to pot if all of its men had done their duty and fought in the war. Karl’s biggest fear was losing his son to Gunther Jordan, Captain of the bloody Border Guard! So he rubbed his stiff wrist with renewed vigour as he opened the shed and stood in the doorway shoulder to shoulder with Max, both of them ready to transform the rusting heap in front of them, as only real men could.
The Watcher Page 5
