Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  Tick tick tick tick.

  ‘Are you all right up there, buddy?’ Edgar’s voice sounded concerned, but slightly irritated too by his friend’s unconscious fidgeting.

  ‘Yes. Fine. Sorry. Edgar?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ he sung with barely concealed impatience.

  ‘Did you bring any paperwork back from the hospital?’

  ‘Can’t say I did, no. I know reading material is severely limited round here but I haven’t sunk so low as to use our medication stats for bedtime reading. Yet.’

  So Max rooted deeper into his mattress and found a stub of a pencil and the letter from Tim’s erstwhile lover. There wasn’t much of it that wasn’t charred or covered in words, except for the top of the yellow page where the beastly woman had decided it would improve the presentation of her adulterous words if she left a nice header space. Good girl! Good girl, Max chewed the appellation with his tongue as he concentrated on folding the blank area, scoring it well with a black-rimmed fingernail, then, with all the care and precision of a bomb disposal expert, tearing it off.

  He found Paul awake on his bunk, but not awake in the way everyone else was – exhausted but prevented from sleep by the malicious squall – no, Paul was awake like a child is awake on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Dr Portner.’

  ‘I have a favour to ask.’

  ‘Like I said, Doctor, I owe you one.’

  The war was over. Germany had surrendered yesterday. Erika was a married woman with a baby on the way. A Catholic convert who had relished her wedding at Freiburg cathedral and since seen the devastation her erstwhile party had brought to her country. Things could only get better now, surely, even under the occupation of the Allies. Perhaps they would help rebuild the country they had bombed to smithereens. Perhaps food would not be so hard to come by. The daily ration of fifty grams of bread, one potato, fifty grams of fat and one hundred grams of meat or sausage was getting rather tiresome, not to mention damned unhealthy she thought, as she watched her own skinny hand pull back the lace curtain at the sound of footsteps marching towards the apartment – Karl and Martha’s apartment where she had lived for the past couple of months, where, despite the nurturing muliebrity of Martha, Karl still fluttered about her, as he had done on that indelible train journey from Neurode, convinced that she would give birth unsupported on the living room rug any second.

  He had a point. The midwife from the neighbouring village, whom she had engaged for her birth, had fled when prisoners released from Dachau had pillaged the area. But Erika had a plan. She had heard that since the bombings in Munich, the University Orthopaedic Clinic had been relocated to Bernried Castle and she was going there today to talk to the doctors about letting her give birth there.

  The frilly edge of the curtain between her fingers was a kind of braille relating stories of that wedding day: the long bridal gown her friend had smuggled out of her parents’ shoe shop where a sign over the front declared EXCHANGE A BRIDAL GOWN FOR SHOES! Erika had nothing to exchange for the shoes, but her friend had pilfered a pair of white ones for her too and the outfit was complete. She was almost saddle sore after riding about the fields on her bicycle all afternoon the day before the ceremony, picking flowers to decorate the altar. But not as sore as she was after the wedding night, Erika snickered to herself, as she recalled the uncorked passion of that night with Max, the percussion of the headboard against the wall of their hotel room and the sphincter-mouthed indignation of the middle aged woman at breakfast the next morning which was a sure sign to the young lovers that she had had the pleasure of reserving the room next to theirs. The hotel room was paid for by Erika’s parents.

  ‘No daughter of mine is going to spend her wedding night in student digs,’ her father had announced deliberately in front of Max’s parents, flexing his factory owner’s financial muscles as they met for the first time at the Polterabend, the wedding-eve party. ‘I’ll arrange a room for you at the Zähringer Hof,’ he said vaingloriously, his eyes fixed as he did on Erika so that she wasn’t sure for a moment whether the room in question was meant for her new husband too.

  ‘Well, it’s good to see at least someone is prospering when the rest of the country is going to pot,’ Karl said with no intention of malice and just in case it could possibly be received that way he punctuated the statement with a little laugh.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose the country would be going to pot if all of its men did their duty and fought in this war,’ Erika’s father said with every intention of malice and just in case it could possibly be received any other way he punctuated the statement with a little laugh. ‘I’ll be going back to front as soon as we’re done here.’

  Done here! Erika despised the way he made her wedding, the most special day of her life, sound like an irritating bit of business that had to be endured before he went back to the really important business of killing in the name of the Führer. But then business, any business had always come before her, she thought shifting her foot with the scar on the sole from the time she ran barefoot from her deadening solitude in the villa.

  ‘Captain of the Border Guard,’ he said puffing up his chest as if on parade. ‘I assume we’re all in favour of defending our country against invasion by the Russians?’

  ‘Invasion? Or retaliation?’ Karl mumbled rubbing his wrist.

  His counterpart might have chosen to ignore that or perhaps he didn’t even hear it under the noise of his own convictions. ‘I fought at the Battle of the Somme, you know,’ he forged on. ‘Wounded terribly.’ He hitched up a trouser leg revealing an impressive scar.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Erika’s mother groaned and took Martha by the arm. ‘If you boys are going to start comparing the size of your… scars, then us girls will leave you to it.’ And she grabbed her daughter too and went off to graze at the buffet they had miraculously conjured from their rations.

  Erika looked back sympathetically as Max wobbled, poised to join her as soon as courtesy dictated he could.

  ‘I fought in the Great War,’ she heard her father bark and saw Karl’s eye twitch in response to that horror’s dubious epithet, ‘and my greatest wish, when this present war came upon us was that we older generations would fight, and not our sons,’ he said putting a hand on Max’s shoulder, which stunned Erika not simply because it was so warmly done, but because it was almost the first time he had acknowledged his son-in-law all evening, ‘so that they could have a better future’.

  Karl glared at the hand on his son’s shoulder as if it was riddled with leprosy.

  Given the state of the transport system and the constant threat of air raids they couldn’t have expected many more family members to make it to Freiburg, but Erika was more than happy just to have Edgar, Babyface, Horst and other college friends present to celebrate with and dilute the tensions her parents inevitably brought with them.

  And I want to create a family of my own? She wondered, I’ve spent all my childhood trying to run away from family and here I am about to make another one. I’ve spent all my childhood watching my parents live out the kind of resignation they call marriage and here I am about to get married too. Am I mentally handicapped? She laughed as she gulped on the champagne, provided by her father, of course.

  As tradition had it at the Polterabend everyone had brought some pieces of old crockery to smash at the end of the evening.

  ‘I love this part,’ Edgar’s eyes had sparkled as he raised a plate and hurled it to the ground with all the force his maverick being could muster.

  Erika could have sworn she saw Max flinch as the sound of the first item smashing resounded around the room. She went over to him and held his hand as the crashing and cracking crescendoed. It was true. With every item exploding on the floor a little pulse of terror was transmitted from his hand to hers. She squeezed his hand to smother the implication and looked into his face. He smiled broadly, raised a cup above his head and threw it at the floor with the kind of abandon he wanted her to see.
/>   Babyface and Horst seemed to enjoy the licensed anarchy just as much as Edgar, whilst Martha and Helene threw their pieces with rather less vigour, almost reluctantly in fact and looked mournfully out over the floor of broken ceramics – such a waste of perfectly good crockery! Erika could see them itching to get the brooms and tidy up the porcelain snowdrift they had created by their destruction. But it was not their job. The entire point of all that mess was that the bride and groom were left to clear it all up as a symbol of their commitment to working together through the trials of life and Erika and Max grabbed the brooms with gusto.

  ‘Look at him go,’ Edgar heckled. ‘He’s going to be a very good boy around the house, isn’t he?’

  Max and Erika chuckled at Edgar’s performance as required, but shared a clandestine grin knowing there was more to this ritual than housekeeping as far they were concerned and the jingle the shards made as they swept them across the floor was music to their ears.

  ‘In my day,’ Erika’s father proclaimed, ‘the groom had to clear this lot up all by himself, you know, to show his commitment to take on domestic duties in the marital home.’

  ‘No, dear,’ Helene said at a volume fuelled by plenty of champagne and Nussaschnapps, ‘that was just what we all told you at our wedding. Shame it didn’t have any effect in the long term, eh?’

  Erika watched with a mixture of dread and delight as her father’s florid face somehow became even redder and Karl guffawed.

  ‘Max!’ Martha’s admonishing tone had both Max and his papa turning to her obediently, but Max junior quickly realised it was his father who was in trouble for laughing as Martha only ever used Karl’s actual first name when she was reprimanding him. And if he was particularly for the high jump she would use his full title: Max Karl Portner!

  Erika twisted the lace curtain around her finger. There were two army officers heading towards the door. She panicked briefly. Before she realised they were American officers. Before she realised they weren’t German ones coming to inform her of her brave husband’s death perhaps, as he served his country on the Eastern Front. Nevertheless she twisted the curtain tighter, just as she had twisted the train of her wedding dress around her finger fearfully as Karl had staggered towards them outside the cathedral, his suit smeared with blood, his grazed hands clutching a dead goose.

  ‘Papa, what on earth has happened?’ Max ran to meet him, checking him over as Karl used to do to Max when he was a little boy returned home crying after some misadventure playing on the farm.

  ‘I called up a friend who lives nearby. Franz, remember?’ he appealed to his wife who had already deduced quicker than her doctor son, merely by his demeanour, that it was not Karl’s blood on his suit, or even the goose’s for that matter. ‘He took me out on his motorcycle. We scoured the countryside for a farmer that would give us a good price on a goose. I bought it for your wedding breakfast. No son of mine is going to have a wedding breakfast without some quality meat on the table,’ his voice quivered as he tried in vain to echo the braggadocio in Gunther’s declaration last night concerning the hotel room.

  ‘So what about this blood?’ Max asked having now come more scientifically to the same conclusion as his mother.

  ‘I’m not sure where we had driven to. Closer to enemy lines than I could have imagined I suppose. Or perhaps it was one of our own soldiers thinking we were the enemy.’

  Erika’s father sniffed loudly at the absurd notion of one of his comrades making such a mistake.

  ‘What? What happened?’

  ‘There was gunfire. I was riding pillion holding on to the goose and Franz was driving. He got hit. Lost control of the bike. We both came off. But he died from the gunshot wounds.’

  ‘Where’s Franz now? Are you sure he’s dead?’ Max demanded and Erika could see him instinctively gearing up to go and try to save Franz’s life wherever he was. She felt the same medic’s urge tightening the muscles in her white shoed feet, but the urge to have nothing spoil her wedding day was even greater and her eyes bore into the back of Max’s head willing him to turn around and see her on the steps of the cathedral; the cathedral that she could barely stomach sitting in not so many months ago; the house of the faith she had sedulously studied and, with archaeological dedication, unearthed the relevance of to her own life, in order that she could share that life completely with him. And cathedral or no cathedral, Catholic wedding or not, she couldn’t help but be relieved, as ashamed as she was to be, when Karl answered:

  ‘He’s dead all right. Some people rushed over from the nearby farm. They knew him. Better than I did. They brought me back to town and took the body on to his wife. Oh, Martha what a terrible thing for her to endure. We must go and pay our respects.’

  ‘We all will. Later.’ Martha rubbed pointlessly at the stains on his suit, smoothed his lapels and straightened his tie. In those few adoring, protective gestures and the unspoken end to her sentence but right now we have your son’s wedding to attend, Erika knew she would be more than happy if she and Max ended up like Karl and Martha.

  She opened the door to the American officers, both with riding crops in their hands. One yapped in rubbish German:

  ‘Go from this apartment immediately. If you do not have all things out in the few hours next, you will not be able to come for them and they will be confiscated.’

  That’s all he said, gripping the riding crop as if he would not hesitate to use it on her should she be an uncooperative little filly. She was speechless, but she opened the door fully now to let them see her belly in the hope that the sight of her predicament may soften them, change their minds even.

  They turned and left abruptly and a few hours later she sat on the doorstep with her shell-shocked in-laws and boxes full of their possessions, Karl’s wrist almost visibly throbbing at the thought of more odysseys playing the porter.

  ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ Max barely had a chance to put down his bag when he arrived at the hospital before the private called him over with such urgency Max assumed the pain in his kidneys had returned.

  ‘Are you OK, Manfred?’

  ‘No, the captain just died. Look!’

  The soldier was right. It was easy to tell when someone even as comatose as the captain had finally given up the ghost because all the bugs were finally abandoning his body. But now, on the hunt for fresh, living meat to feed on they were pullulating across the floor towards Manfred’s bed.

  ‘Do something!’

  Just when the putrid caravan of Wanzen were halfway on their exodus across the gulf of rimy floor between their old home and their next terrified intended conquest, fire rained down from the heavens and incinerated every last one of them.

  ‘Thanks, Doctor,’ Manfred exhaled examining the carnage on the floor for any signs of survivors. But the trowel full of white hot embers Max had scooped from the fireplace had been effective. He only wished he could have been as effective when the captain was alive.

  The captain was their first fatality so Max went back out to the gate where he had been counted through only minutes before that morning by Sergeant Volkov, the handsome guard who was, to ask where they were to bury the dead.

  ‘Wherever you like,’ he smiled with a laissez faire that Max was supposed to see straight through and did.

  With more faux confederacy Volkov ducked into the small hut by the gate and brought out a shovel. ‘Just make sure it’s nowhere near the camp.’ He held out the shovel to Max who felt like he was stepping into a snare by taking it, but took it nonetheless, reasoning that Volkov’s amusement may simply lay in the fact that he was requiring Max to dig the graves himself.

  Max enlisted Bubi’s help and the two of them went up on the hill between the shore and the forest and began digging. Or rather they began jarring their own skeletons by ramming the shovel into the solid earth for a few futile moments before trying another piece of unyielding ground, and another, and another. Volkov loitered at a distance behind them, ostensibly to make sure the prisoners didn’t
escape, but they all knew it was for no such reason but for his own entertainment. Max looked over his aching shoulder to see Volkov’s smooth face lacerated by a grin.

  ‘Anywhere you like, Doctor.’

  ‘The ground’s too frozen,’ Bubi called out, as exasperated as his boss, but a little less comprehending of the dynamics at work.

  ‘OK,’ Max put a tranquilising hand on Bubi’s sinewy arm. ‘OK,’ he called out to Volkov, ‘we can’t bury the dead in the earth. I hope you enjoyed that little…’

  ‘No, you cannot bury the dead in the earth, Doctor. Not we. Do not tar me with the same brush. You cannot bury the dead. It seems God is denying your kind a sanctified burial. But then what would Nazis want with such a ritual anyway? You lot eschew religion, isn’t that right? Hitler is your God, no? No? Only, the last I heard Hitler was being blown to pieces as he cowered in a bunker somewhere like a rat underground. So how does that work? Your God is not very omnipotent, not very omniscient. He’s not even immortal.’