Pale Horse Riding

by Chris Petit

Schlegel looked at his unfinished plate. It had gone cold. He chewed disconsolately, struggling to get the now-slimy mixture down his throat.

  Morgen had them on slivovitz after dinner. They learned a little more about their companion. Where she was now stationed had been in quarantine for almost a year and it had only just been lifted. She coloured attractively and said she probably shouldn’t be telling.

  Morgen waved the matter aside and asked about her recent course in Berlin. It was out in Steglitz, she said, where she had done her stenographer’s training.

  ‘The first time was great fun. Everything is more serious now.’

  Schlegel could not get over her knowing Krick. Lovers, by the sound of it; he was sure despite her saying she was over him. Krick had the air of a ladies’ man, who seemed to take for granted he could go to bed with any woman he wanted. Even in the field, with none available, there had been his seductive cologne and charm.

  ‘Have you been where you are long?’ Morgen asked.

  Since the beginning of 1941, she said.

  So over two years. Schlegel noted that wistful expression again. Morgen continued to probe, but she would only say hers was a garrison posting and she worked in a construction office.

  ‘As in building things?’ asked Morgen.

  She laughed at his obviousness. ‘As in building things.’

  ‘Construction?’ repeated Morgen. ‘Are you by any chance familiar with Kammler?’

  She produced a sound that Schlegel could interpret only as a suppressed squeal of surprise.

  She whispered, ‘The man is a god.’ She stared and asked if they knew him.

  ‘Not as such,’ said Morgen. ‘It was when you mentioned construction. Do you?’

  He leaned forward, interested.

  She had met him, she said, some months after her arrival. There had been a major reshuffle over that summer. The old local construction office was disbanded and Dr Kammler came from Berlin for several inspections. It had fallen to her to show him where everything was.

  ‘Why you?’ asked Morgen. ‘Wouldn’t he have been assigned an adjutant?’

  Schlegel could see it was difficult for her to say more. He supposed assigning someone so lowly had been intended as a garrison snub to Dr Kammler.

  Schlegel thought, first Krick now Kammler. Perhaps she was much more interesting than she let on.

  He wondered that again when he woke, or dreamed he woke, in the night to discover her at the end of his bed. His first thought was she must be sleepwalking, then saw she was still dressed.

  Blue moonlight shone through the thin curtain. He asked what she wanted. She asked the reason for his hair being white. He didn’t know why he didn’t resort to his usual excuses and admitted he had once shot a lot of people in a ditch. He couldn’t prove it but he thought one was a result of the other. He asked if there was anything she wanted. She shook her head and he saw her face was bathed in tears. Outside rain started to fall, driven by the wind against the window.

  Schlegel thought he hadn’t slept, yet he must have because when he woke she was gone.

  He could make no sense of why she had come to him. He supposed her neurotic or lonely.

  Perhaps she hadn’t been there at all and it was a dreamlike projection of an obscure desire. He was not one that others sought out, yet from the start he had been aware of her looking at him.

  She was not in the dining room for breakfast. Morgen was already down. There was bread and jam and a watery concoction pretending to be coffee. Was she avoiding him? Schlegel wondered. Maybe she was annoyed he hadn’t made a move; a woman turning up in a man’s room at night . . .

  Should he have told her about knowing Krick? No one had mentioned Auschwitz, but it was obvious that was where she worked.

  Now Krick was with her; and soon they would be there too.

  III

  Darkness was falling as they reached their destination. They arrived parched and foul-tempered after another day wasted in sidings, making way for troop and munitions convoys, then crawling forward into an unseasonably stifling heatwave.

  The night train had come through after only an hour’s delay. On the platform the widow and the kid were the only faces Schlegel recognised. No sign of Schulze. A big crowd gathered, locals going to market, including cattle. Schlegel thought he glimpsed Schulze up ahead as they embarked. The train was even more crammed than before. Morgen bribed the guard with cigarettes to let them travel in the goods’ van where they at least could spread out but had to share with the cows and their copious ordure.

  Through the ventilation slit Schlegel stood watching an endless eastward procession of young men in uniform and contemplated the bonds of indissoluble comradeship, forged in a storm of steel. That was the theory; not for him, all that laying down one’s life for country and blood and earth.

  Until the war he had always supposed his life would be spent slacking around, chasing women (a mystery), sitting in night clubs listening to risqué music, as much as that was possible, and drinking in bars. He had no plan, to the exasperation of his mother, for whom position mattered. His stepfather was easier-going and suggested the racing world, which would have been perfect, being louche, except he disliked horses. Did he have principles? Coveting other men’s wives was inevitable, he supposed. Thou shalt not kill; he was in agreement with that, a rather unfashionable stance. Any thoughts of equality were laughed at by his mother. ‘Come on, darling. There’s always a pecking order, even among equals.’ Thou shalt not steal; yes, except he had in his youth, shoplifting, more for dare and amusement than gain, and got caught. He suspected his mother had been secretly proud, being impatient of sticklers. Most of the time he was aware of his own insignificance in the greater scheme. He was one of the meek and, regardless of the Sermon on the Mount, he would not inherit the earth, or even get close. At least he didn’t subscribe to what Morgen called the raving nihilism going on all around them. It wasn’t that people didn’t believe in anything, Morgen said, in an unguarded moment, they believed too much, in all the wrong things, as though history could be stage-managed in a phantasmagoria of wishful thinking and willed destiny, fuelled by too many dangerous dreams.

  ‘For the Yanks it was a land grab, none of this dressing up in historical fulfilment.’

  Schlegel suspected Morgen knew too much and wasn’t telling.

  They stood in the booking hall, stunned by the anticlimax of arrival. Considering the lateness of the hour, the station remained crowded, its smells like anywhere, except worse – coal, tobacco, sweat and dirty toilets.

  Men hung around hoping to pick up nonexistent girls, standing at a refreshments stand and beer stall, sucking on bottles and noisily talking a strange language.

  A tinny loudspeaker announced a delay of the night train to Vienna.

  Morgen put his bag down and lit a cigarette. His tiny holdall suggested he had no plans to stay long. Schlegel had overpacked.

  The stickiness brought on by the crushing heat left everyone’s shirt and jacket stained with sweat.

  Morgen suggested a beer. One of the drinkers, nondescript and sallow, sidled over and in fractured German attempted to scrounge a cigarette. Morgen said, ‘Fuck off, son.’

  The man continued to stand smiling and uncomprehending, his hand stuck out.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Morgen, flipping him one. ‘Now fuck off.’

  The man backed away, bowing.

  ‘Hungarian, at a guess,’ said Morgen. ‘Christ, it’s hot.’

  Outside the full heat of the night hit them and Schlegel thought he saw Schulze walk away in the velvet dusk. Two cabs in a taxi rank waited in white-painted boxes, under a sign. A huge flag hung off a large formal building on the far side of an empty square.

  Morgen had a row with his taxi driver, who said he was close enough to walk. Typical of Morgen to pick a fight, Schlegel thought.

  His impression was of a dirty old town, smoke and factories. The square in front of the station with its dusty horse c
hestnuts was an open expanse no one had got around to paving. The grand building opposite, draped with its flag, looked like the architect had only half-remembered how to copy the French style.

  The taxi driver told Morgen it was his hotel, all of two minutes’ walk and not worth the meter. Schlegel thought the episode ridiculous until deftly solved by Morgen offering a fare upfront and ordering the man to drive around the square until the money was used up.

  Morgen invited Schlegel to join him. Schlegel preferred to walk and drink the rest of his beer. Benches stood in the middle of the square. On one sat a kissing couple, the lad with his hand up the back of the girl’s blouse. She caught Schlegel’s eye and gave him a brassy stare. Schlegel sat down away from them and watched the absurd round of Morgen’s taxi. He stared at the baked ground and thought of summer downpours that started with a few heavy splashes of rain. The girl had smelled of sweat and something more pungent.

  He thought about Sybil and about Schulze.

  Morgen’s taxi had the square to itself. A few couples strolled arm in arm, looking like melting ice creams. Mosquitos were starting to come out. Schlegel slapped his neck and saw the kissing couple were gone. He picked up his case and walked over to the hotel as the gathering darkness sucked the colour out of the day.

  Schlegel’s tiny room in the eaves reminded him of his little rooftop box in Auguststrasse. The view was of the square and the station, and in the last of the light he made out a goods yard and factory buildings. A big moon hung in the sky. In contrast to Berlin, lights were on. No blackout. He found it hard to convey to himself the utter strangeness and remote beauty of it, even in that shitty town.

  A fly spray came with the room. He gave a couple of desultory squirts and watched them dissolve. The smell was toxic.

  The thought of being able to stroll through lit streets led Schlegel back outside. Left took him to a checkpoint and a squat sentry box bathed in sticky yellow light. The station stood revealed as a long, low affair, impressive in scale and sardonic in tone, as though the town’s sole point of attraction was departure.

  He walked the other way towards the town, passing nondescript buildings in search of an identity, the more superior a job-lot in the neo-classical style, the less-favoured little more than huts. No one was around. An empty bus rattled past, lit up, and again he stared. Shops looked shut for good, streets were in poor repair, with horse droppings and rotten drains. Schlegel supposed all the action was at the hotel. A town with lights on and nowhere to go!

  The hotel toilets were scrawled with graffiti. Schlegel sat in his stall listening to the drunken traffic using the urinals, accompanied by copious splashing. Someone vomited and said: ‘That’s better.’ Graffiti danced in front of his eyes. A vagina dentens, labelled Jew cunt. Scribbled exhortations to fuck my cock bitch. Recommendations for the best givers of fellatio. Bragging and aggression of the dreariest kind, apart from one fanatically neat inscription, chilling by comparison, which rocked Schlegel.

  Make friends with the beast.

  Morgen was waiting in the dining room, at a table in the corner. He waved a mimeographed sheet. ‘Look, a choice of dishes and nothing crossed out.’

  Apart from the serving orderly, no one paid them any attention but Schlegel was aware of surreptitious inspection.

  The place seemed principally for the use of officers, uniformed bucks, who noisily fancied themselves, sitting and standing drinking, not eating. Women were in too. Schlegel guessed most were garrison staff, though they were surprisingly dolled up. The tone was superior, even if most were in the process of getting roaring drunk.

  Morgen said, ‘Cushy billet.’

  Schlegel wondered if Schulze drank there, and dressed up. He looked around to see if Krick was in. Morgen said nothing. The room grew raucous, with women staggering and whooping, steadied by equally drunk men sweating booze who felt them up. Morgen struck Schlegel as not at all himself, as if the journey had robbed him. He complained that even his cigarettes tasted foul.

  Eventually he said, ‘Remember in those American westerns, how before the ambush someone always said it was too quiet.’

  ‘You can’t say that of here.’

  ‘Too noisy but I suspect the same. Tomorrow we find out if we are being set up.’

  Schlegel slept badly. During the night he was woken by a fistfight outside, a woman’s shrieked climax and mosquito attacks.

  He lay feeling like a stranger in his own life.

  The next morning’s sullen progression of checkpoints was in no hurry to process them. It was going to be another unseasonably, stinking-hot day. The guards scraped their heels as they slouched. There wasn’t much soldierly about the place. ‘Is this the cream?’ wondered Morgen.

  Inside the garrison, it was hard to see what all the palaver of getting in was about. It all looked desperately ordinary, not a fortress or a citadel or anything resembling a prison particularly. They emerged into a commercial sector, with industrial sheds, some brick, and temporary wooden huts crammed wherever. They passed a row of working stables. Morgen asked one of the grooms where the post office was. Nobody seemed to know. A horse kicked a stable door, making Schlegel jump. They walked on. More sheds. A water tower. A tall chimney. Schlegel had already sweated through his jacket.

  He blinked at the dome of pitiless sky; on the horizon a billowing stain of smoke.

  They wordlessly removed their jackets. Everything aspired to dull military regulation, kerbs marked by stones painted white, with link chains. Even the scrapyard next to the motor pool appeared pointlessly tidy.

  They passed out of the working area into the garrison proper. A wide, long avenue ran down to the main gate, with red-bricked barracks, grass verges and flowerbeds. Two women in uniform walked out of a building, laughing and carrying files. One wore becoming dark glasses.

  They ignored them and carried on laughing.

  The post office was in the block next to the big staff hospital, opposite the tall chimney, which stood behind a high grassy bank, planted with wilting silver birch. The entrance to the block was in the middle, up a short path and a couple of steps. Scorched grass watered by feeble sprinklers made tiny rainbows and sprayed their feet. Schlegel wanted only to lie down and get soaked.

  Inside, everything was arrowed. Construction department, first floor to the right. Post office, ground floor left. Laundry and dry cleaning, left. The wide central corridor had fire extinguishers and its waxed floors gleamed in the muted light.

  The post office was a large room with a counter and a wired-off section, with boxed shelving full of parcels and letters, presided over by a tiny man no taller than a child.

  Morgen said they were there to see Horn. The tiny man looked surprised, as though no one had asked before. When he was gone Morgen said there used to be a minimum height requirement.

  The man returned, lifted the counter and told them to follow, complaining that someone had stolen his electric fan.

  An airless corridor of shelves smelling of hot dust led into a back room where a corpulent man with an enormous waist sat in shirt and braces behind a makeshift plywood desk. He was surrounded by a mess whose lack of organisation said nothing for the efficiency of the postal service.

  The tiny man departed, still grumbling about his fan. The fat man offered a wet handshake.

  ‘It’s like a fucking sauna in here. My fan has been stolen too.’

  Horn looked exhausted, with huge bags under his eyes, one of which had a weeping stye. His hair lay plastered like dried seaweed over a pink scalp.

  Morgen produced his pass.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Horn, inspecting it. ‘Herr Richter.’

  He didn’t sound particularly convinced but turned out to be more efficient than he looked. He reached down and picked a parcelled box out of the mess. Though still wrapped and loosely held by string, it had been opened. Horn rummaged inside and produced two large gold nuggets. They gleamed less than Schlegel was expecting, and were much bigger, the size of a child�
�s fist.

  ‘His name is Bock. We call him Dr Gold, ha-ha. A dentist working here. As regular as clockwork with his postings, Wednesdays and Fridays, sent to a sister in Freiburg, labelled food parcel.’ He peered at the label. ‘Dry goods, it says, in brackets.’

  He produced a large hardback register, with ruled vertical columns, listing all packages and parcels posted, with stated contents.

  ‘For insurance purposes. In case they get lost.’

  The record confirmed previous transactions to the same address.

  Morgen picked up one of the nuggets and asked if the dentist was stealing gold from his own clinic.

  Horn said undoubtedly.

  ‘Nevertheless, a lot of gold.’

  ‘There is something of a surplus.’

  Morgen looked at him sharply. ‘On whose authority did you open the parcel?’

  ‘My own.’

  ‘Reason?’

  ‘Tip-off.’

  ‘Anonymous?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why of course?’

  ‘How things work here.’

  ‘No idea where this anonymous tip-off came from?’

  Horn sighed mightily. ‘Prisoners. Jealous colleague. A rival in another department.’ He added with a mirthless laugh, ‘Everyone hates everybody here.’

  ‘And who did you inform?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Aren’t you why we’re here?’

  ‘I see what you mean. I informed my superior in Berlin. He said someone would come and here you are!’

  Morgen asked why he was laughing and Horn said he never expected anyone to turn up.

  ‘Tell us about Bock.’

  ‘Average. Nondescript. He’ll be in again two-thirty tomorrow, if the register is right; catch him red-handed.’

  Schlegel thought Bock must be brazen or stupid to use the army post office. Maybe nobody cared.

  ‘This amount of gold in a dental practice?’ Morgen asked.

  ‘Quite so. I am looking forward to seeing his face.’ Horn paused, thoughtful, pointed at the gold. ‘Why don’t you help yourself? Everyone else does.’