Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘I’m going to have to sort through the rest of those letters first,’ he exhaled the words to himself as he hustled, ‘just in case there’s actually something from her’.

  He had only got part of the way through half of them the other night when Thomas had called out ‘Got it!’ and held Maria’s letter up from his pile, so Max had stopped. He had told other soldiers in the unit, his patients and his medical colleagues to go through them when they could, but he had not found the time himself yet. Perhaps because he knew how deflated he’d be if he didn’t find anything from Erika. But that might not be because she hadn’t written, he told himself, her letter may have not survived the explosion. Many didn’t and of the many others, only a few shreds remained. Without the address at the top or the signature at the end for many soldiers it was a guessing game to recognise the handwriting or identify their loved ones from the turns of phrase they favoured. And so he would enjoy the game tonight, he promised himself. He would know it was her the moment he saw it because her handwriting was identical to his. This had been a great advantage when she had been struggling with Physics so badly in the second year of medical school. He had taken the exam for her and they both passed with flying colours. Max hadn’t felt great about deceiving the faculty but knew he’d have felt a whole lot worse if she had failed the course and had to move away.

  These thoughts kept him distracted as he entered the monastery shell through the archway and one of its bricks shattered and flung itself at Max’s face. A bullet had hit it inches from his head. He threw himself to the floor, blinking brick dust from his eyes and scrambled across the floor in his clean uniform heading to the basement. Now the air was being sliced with bullet after bullet and the remains of the monastery rained down in little pieces over him.

  He was shocked. Bombing had become part and parcel of this war. The constant bumblebee buzz of bomber planes in the distance were a feature of the night you got used to eventually. But being shot at was still a relative novelty for the doctor. Especially here in his hospital where he’d hoped the huge red cross on the roof acted as a kind of talisman warding off advancing Russians.

  The bullets were coming from all angles now which meant, Max hoped, some of them were from his own unit firing back. He heard his own involuntary grunts of fear every time the air was whipped near him, every time he thought he’d been hit for sure this time. He finally reached the basement door and found it to be locked. Of course. They had heard the gunfire below and had begun barricading themselves in.

  ‘Edgar! Lutz! It’s Max. Let me in!’ he hammered on the door with a force he didn’t know he possessed and one that would leave his hand feeling bruised for days afterwards – although that would be the least of his troubles.

  It seemed as if a rifle had been fired close by his head, but it was just the sound of the bolts on the other side of the door being undone quickly. The door opened and Max almost fell in on whoever it was standing there, but not before he had caught a glimpse of the garden and the field behind it, covered with snow still, transforming itself from a flat white expanse to the ghostly shapes of soldiers in white snow vests and hoods. The place was crawling with them. Russian soldiers, well prepared for a winter war. This is it, he thought to himself, they’re upon us, God help us.

  He fell into the basement only to be faced with more white coats. His heart almost stopped right then. They had already been here. Laid a trap for him.

  ‘Good God, buddy, we thought you were…’ It was Edgar who was clad in white. Of course, medical garb. And Lutz in his white coat too, bolting the door behind him. Horst and Dolf were not in white yet, as they had been rudely awakened by the attack and were still stumbling around trying to work out if they were in the grip of a nightmare or not. The nuns and monks fussed around the maze of beds audibly praying for themselves and their charges. Sister Agnes was among them this morning. She glanced across at Max as he entered. Her face was thunder. This is the final indignation, it seemed to roar. You bring your whores and your war upon us. And now we are to be captured by the Russians too.

  The fact that in Max’s mind she was the stiff and puritanical yin to Jenny’s yang only made him suddenly fear for the convent and all its inhabitants, stiff or not, yin or yang.

  The Walther P38 was back in Max’s hand. His colleagues held their revolvers too. They all looked absurd holding guns. They should have retractors or swabs or scalpels. They weren’t soldiers. All of the soldiers were lying in beds around them incapacitated, useless. The few that remained active of their unit could now be heard shouting above their heads ‘Retreat! Retreat!’

  ‘If they fall back,’ Horst said, ‘perhaps the Russians will follow and pass over us.’

  Horst, usually the joker in their pack, was trying to convince himself more than anyone else in the room, so that was when Max knew it was over for them.

  ‘And then what?’ Edgar grumbled. ‘We jump in the truck with no petrol and escape?’ Where to?’

  It was painful to hear, but Edgar had a point. The city had been surrounded for nearly three months now. They had no resources left. Really the only option now was surrender or be killed. And none of them were sure whether they even had a say in that any more.

  The familiar crescendo of a plane had Max grabbing the backpack of letters along with his medical bag which he still had with him from this morning. The ground started shaking as bombs fell in the street. The basement door turned into spears hurtling across the room. The blast wave sent the nuns’ headgear and the men’s hats whizzing off their heads. It would have been comical to witness if some of the nuns were not now impaled on shards of the door. The ceiling was ripped from the basement, allowing the sunlight to flood in but the eyes of everyone inside were filled with a darkening dust.

  ‘Max! Max!’ he heard Edgar calling his name and was instantly galvanised by the knowledge that his friend was alive.

  ‘Get the patients above ground,’ he called back. Although the distinction between above and below was fast becoming blurred.

  The floor was crunchy with the shattered glass from the patients’ drips. Those that could walk were already being helped by Horst and Lutz to clamber out of the basement, barefoot and in their pyjamas. They limped, slipped and slid across the icy grounds, falling on top of one another absurdly, heading who knows where.

  Max and Edgar fumbled around the remains of the basement, assessing those still in their beds, trying to reassure the monk sitting on a bench with a thick piece of the ceiling crushing his lap like a diabolical desk.

  ‘Doctor, help me!’ he cried out.

  ‘Edgar?’ Max asked hopelessly.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Edgar remained for a while knowing the masonry was too heavy to move and even if they ever did move it the resulting reperfusion in the legs would send potassium, phosphate and urate leaking into the circulation killing the monk before they could amputate. How ironic, scoffed Edgar to himself, I know about crush syndrome because of Bywater’s findings published in the British Medical Journal; findings he’d made during our blitz on London a few years back.

  Max began clearing rubble from a pile, out of which stuck a nun’s legs. He soon stopped. Her head was pressed flat like a flower in a book. He helped another nun up to the street and saw how the blast had slung around the sandstone monuments and headstones in the church yard. How it had denuded the resting bones beneath, exposing them to the harsh existence of their descendants. He saw the intact wall of the house opposite where the Nazis had painted:

  And then his heart leapt as he saw soldiers, German soldiers from his unit, familiar faces, emerging from the clouds of dust. Only to find their arms raised, their weapons gone, and the white cloaked Russians prodding them from behind with the barrels of their Tokarevs.

  The Russians were shouting commands. One of the German soldiers translated, though there wasn’t much need. If any one of them put a foot in the wrong direction they would be bashed with the barrel of a gun, shepherded into the co
rrect formation.

  ‘Can you see Dolf?’ Max whispered to Edgar, ‘Did he make it out?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Edgar said before getting a whack with the butt of a gun in his back.

  The loss of Dolf shook Max harder than anything else had up to that point. Here they were defeated by the Russians, but at least his team of five were still together. After everything they were still there to support each other, help others, work through this, survive. But no, one of them hadn’t survived. The team was crumbling at last and he felt like one of his patients who had lost a limb now trying to stand where their captors told them to without stumbling.

  ‘Get up!’ a Soviet soldier bawled at the one-legged patient on the ground, whose remaining foot was bleeding from the glass and blue from the cold.

  Edgar dared to move to help his patient up and got another whack for his troubles.

  ‘Get up! Get up! Get up!’ the Russian screamed.

  The soldier in pyjamas looked up at his adversary with a knitted brow that said, ‘Can’t you see? That is the one thing on earth right now I cannot do for you.’

  And the Russian knew it was the one thing on earth the patient couldn’t do. It was the perfect opportunity to show the rest of these fascists what would happen to them if they disobeyed orders.

  The Russian shot the man in the face.

  Max’s medical muscles twitched needing to spring into action to fix the man, but he was beyond fixing, and had Max been so bold as to move he would have been shot in the face too. And then what good would he be to the rest of the unit? He told himself over and over again. It was not cowardice, now they were prisoners of war, to stay alive. It was the best thing he could do for his fellow Germans. It was the only thing he could do for Erika.

  Another Soviet, not the trigger-happy one thankfully, approached Edgar.

  Edgar, not wanting another smack, kept his eyes front. The Soviet circled him, like a Siberian tiger picking up a scent, the scent of one who would dare to help the man in pyjamas, the scent of a doctor. He yanked the backpack from Edgar. It had medical equipment in it. Bingo! He confiscated that and turned to Max. Max felt the muscles in his lumbar strain as the soldier ripped his bags from his back too. One contained the letters. It might as well have been used toilet paper for all the Russian cared. The other contained his medical equipment and some food he’d been hoarding too. The soldier took this one and left the bag of letters in the mud at Max’s feet.

  Max pushed his hand into his pocket. It was the bruised one and as the bruise was pinched by the lining of his trousers it made him feel sick, but he ploughed on, delving in to find the picture of the Black Madonna and Jesus, the one Jenny had given him for protection.

  But it wasn’t there.

  His hand was throbbing with pain as it fished frantically around for the picture. He tried his other pocket. And then he realised. He was wearing the spare uniform when she had given it to him. He had put it in the pocket of the spare uniform whilst his own was drying and no doubt it was still in there.

  ‘If you keep this with you all the time it will keep you safe and protected. Will you do that?’ she’d said.

  And he’d already failed to do so. And now look what had happened!

  But then, at least, he told himself, she might have found it again. And so she still has it to keep herself safe.

  He looked down the street in which they were all held now at gunpoint. Blinking through the dust which was beginning to settle, allowing the bright cold sun to illuminate everything again.

  The convent was gone. Blown to bits finally like everything else in the street.

  So much for religion, Max sneered inwardly.

  Karl’s wrist was pinching and throbbing. Its disability was a memento he carried with him eternally. A memento of the strength of his convictions. A memento of his youthful recklessness. Would he have put a gun to his own arm now if called up to fight for the Nazis? Probably not. Age was a strict governess. But he would still had to have found a way – albeit a less permanent one – of avoiding conscription. Yet if the governess of age was so bloody sensible, why was he at four o’clock on a freezing January morning dragging himself from station to station all around the country with his pregnant daughter-in-law and her tonnes of luggage? Women, he thought, do they have a gene that makes them incapable of travelling light? Of course the reason why I am at four o’clock on a freezing January morning dragging myself at my age from station to station all around the country with my pregnant daughter-in-law and her tonnes of luggage, he said to himself as someone knocked Erika’s valise from his weakening grip, is that my young fit son is not available to do so because he wasn’t bold enough to shoot himself in the wrist. Another case dropped from his grasp and hit the platform with a resounding slap. He took it as a slap across his own face for that last remark about Max. In fact, he was proud of Max. He knew his son was simply following his vocation as a doctor and doing that at a time of war when you did not support the government took more conviction than perhaps even Karl had when he was his age.

  Erika was trying to crouch to pick up the cases that had fallen, but the strain on her back was severe now and you didn’t have to be a doctor to know she might not be able to get up again if she got herself too near the floor.

  ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it,’ Karl used his damaged hand to shoo Erika back upright whilst he put one last great effort in with his good hand and gathered up the valise and the suitcase somehow keeping the portmanteau and the satchel under his armpits.

  He waddled to the waiting room pregnant with luggage and found a corner in which to let it all fall again, this time intentionally. As he stacked the luggage neatly, he turned to look for Erika. She was waddling too and looking rather yellow, but that might have been just the glow from the lanterns in the crowded room.

  It wasn’t.

  The room was so warm, what with the lanterns and the number of bodies crammed into it, that it should have been a joy after the icy conditions outside, but the heat wrapped itself round Erika’s face like a horse blanket and she couldn’t breathe. She felt nauseous and looked desperately around for somewhere to sit. But, with no enthusiastic girls from the Hitler Youth on hand to demonstrate their community spirit, the seats remained full and the faces in them turned carefully away to look at the floor, their newspapers or their fingernails, if necessary. Anything to avoid catching the eye of the pregnant woman and her father, or whatever he was. Erika was furious, which didn’t help her light-headedness. If she vomited right there and then over these ignoramuses’ feet it would serve them right. No wonder the country was going to shit, she thought. This is not what they taught us in the Youth Movement.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Karl hurried back to her.

  ‘I can’t stay in here. I’m sorry, Karl. I’ve got to get out.’

  Karl ushered her out and looked back at the pyramid of luggage in the corner. His heart sank at the thought of hauling it back out again. For a moment he hesitated at the threshold like a man torn between two mistresses. Or rather, like Odysseus caught between Scylla and Charybdis, he thought, because of all the people that could be with her now, I have no idea how to deal with a pregnant woman. My wife would know what to do. Even Max would know, medically at least.

  Erika knew perfectly well what to do with a pregnant woman, but that didn’t stop her cursing her gender as Karl pushed through the crowds with his good arm, whilst she clutched at his damaged one.

  ‘We’ll see if we can find another NSV office. There must be one around here somewhere,’ he said.

  She resented being seen as the woman among her fellow graduates, rather than the doctor. She was as much as a doctor as the rest of them, but here she was stuck on the home front, lugging this fat lump of a body around a disintegrating rail network, all because of a small anatomical difference between them that made the men men and the women women. OK, not so small in Max’s case, she smiled naughtily to herself and felt especially wanton as Max’s father w
as right there next to her ranting at another NSV administrator. She was glad she had managed to joke herself out of this bad mood. The sofa she was sitting on, that she put her elephantine ankles up on, helped dissolve her resentment and her nausea too.

  ‘I’ll go back and look after the luggage,’ Karl was saying, ‘then I’ll come back and get you when the train is about to go’.

  She nodded and smiled gratefully at him, but she couldn’t help wishing she had a woman here with her. Sometimes, empathy was even more valuable than a determined man armed with cigarettes and chocolate. When the men were called up, she was left behind without even a fellow female doctor to bemoan the situation with. She sometimes thought she would have liked it if there was at least one other girl in their little gang at Freiburg, but females were very much in the minority at medical school and, besides, she rather enjoyed the status of being the only girl in the group, privy to all the lads’ laddishness when they forgot, as they so readily did, that there was a lady present, and yet equally she was revered by them as a precious island of femininity set in this testosterone sea. She didn’t even mind the attention it got her from the lecturers, even if it did blow her cover occasionally. Professor Lang had called out to her as she sat down to her final lecture at Innsbruck in the spring term:

  ‘Fräulein Kollegin, I have not seen you very often this term.’

  Erika had blushed a little, but it was well hidden beneath her unusually tanned skin. Because the professor was right. She had barely attended a lecture of his all term. As the German system allowed students to change universities on a term by term basis, she and Max had chosen Innsbruck just for the spring term not because of Lang’s expertise in physiological chemistry, as they told the faculty, but because of the university’s close proximity to some of the best ski slopes in the country.