Most of what Dr. da Silva said passed me by, so I asked: ‘But I feel fine right now, won’t it heal by itself?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. And the only reason you feel fine now is because of the morphine, trust me. I’d like to have a look at your medical records and then book you in for the day after tomorrow. I’m afraid that’s the earliest we can do. Of course you will be on a drip until then so the pain will be manageable. Be careful with the morphine, though – it’s a very effective painkiller but psychologically it can stir things up a bit.’
Dr. da Silva tucked the clipboard under his arm, then he continued: ‘It is an honour for me to operate on you. I watched you on the news today. You are a man of extraordinary bravery, extraordinary.’ As he said this he extended his left hand, expecting me to shake it with my left since my right was connected to the drip. In reply I raised my own right hand; the transparent plastic tube bounced up and down as I shook Dr. da Silva’s hand. He smiled at me. ‘Senhor Eisinger, I remove my hat to you,’ he said.
After Dr. da Silva had left, a large nurse with honey coloured skin and an abundance of dark frizzy hair appeared and introduced herself as Fernanda. She had bright eyes and spoke Portuguese with a musical carioca accent.
‘So, may I reveal o famoso Seu Otto to the world?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The curtain?’ she said, taking hold of the white plastic curtain which separated us from the rest of the ward and giving it a little tug.
‘Are you sure that’s necessary?’
In reply, Fernanda theatrically pulled the curtain aside. I could tell from Anna-Maria’s expression that she resented this display. Then I saw that there were three other beds in the ward, one to my right and two on the other side of the room, separated by a window. Through the window I could see a square of blue sky. All three beds were occupied by men of about my own age. They all appeared to be engrossed in some form of reading material, although I noticed furtive glances in my direction. At that moment another nurse rolled a food trolley into the ward. A table was placed over my legs and a plastic tray with a small pasta dish was put on top. I was not at all hungry.
‘Would you like help?’ asked Fernanda.
‘Yes please,’ I replied. ‘I would be grateful if you would eat as much of this as you can.’
Fernanda smiled. ‘A hero and a joker too,’ she said. ‘Then I shall have to force feed you.’
‘That’s quite alright,’ said Anna-Maria tersely. ‘I’ll feed him myself.’
Fernanda raised her eyebrows at me before moving on to the other patients. Anna-Maria lifted a forkful of pasta to my lips but the pain in my jaw was torturous when I tried to chew. I contented myself with a glass of orange juice and another press on the morphine button.
‘I spoke to Pietro this afternoon,’ said Anna-Maria tentatively. ‘He wishes you a speedy recovery.’
‘Ah yes, Pietro, a most amusing boy. What is he doing now?’ I asked.
‘He is studying for his exams, studying very hard.’
‘Yes of course, he is a student. Students must study.’
Anna-Maria coughed dryly into her fist, then she said, ‘He wanted me to ask you whether he could come to visit you. I think he would like to interview you about the attack.’
‘Really? If he wants to visit he is very welcome, though if it was shown on the news, as you said, then I suppose he already knows all about it.’
‘I think he’d like to talk to you in person, so long as you don’t mind.’
‘I would like to see him,’ I said, and I wasn’t just being polite. I always enjoyed it when Pietro came to visit Anna-Maria in São Paulo when he was a boy, and I had again formed a very favourable impression of him a year ago when he had picked us up from the airport, despite the unfortunate combi.
Again I felt the warm drowsiness of morphine enveloping me.
‘Siggi reminds me of an old friend,’ I said sleepily.
‘Perdão? Seu Otto?’
‘A most amusing boy… as fast as a greyhound. As fast as Quex. Poor Hitlerjunge Quex. Poor Siggi. So tragic.
*
When I awoke later that day the electric lights were on in the ward, although I could still see some colour in the square of sky through the window. Anna-Maria was no longer there. The grey plastic chair had been moved a little further away from the bed and was now occupied by the bronzed figure of Pietro. I closed my good eye almost all the way so I could observe him while still appearing to be asleep.
It was astonishing how closely Pietro resembled Siegfried, the dear friend of my youth. Pietro was now of course a few years older than Siggi had been when he died, but nevertheless they had the same regular features, the same intelligent, questioning eyes. Pietro’s hair was longer and more disorderly than Siggi’s could ever have been, but it reminded me that Siggi himself often used to be reprimanded for not having his cut short enough. Pietro was wearing a white t-shirt with the words Central Idiocy Agency across the front, and the same marooned-sailor trousers I had seen when he had picked us up at the airport. On his crossed legs he was balancing a book whose title I could just make out from the spine – Investigative Journalism, Context and Practice.
‘So, Anna-Maria says you would like to interview me,’ I said.
Pietro jumped. ‘Seu Otto,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were awake.’
‘Evidently.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘I feel well. Morphine is wonderful. The gentle arms of Morpheus.’
‘I can come back another time, if you prefer,’ said Pietro.
‘No, no. I may be a little drowsy today, that’s all,’ I said. Pietro remained silent so I continued: ‘Your grandmother says you want to ask me a few questions?’
‘Yes, for my degree. If it’s ok with you, that is. I have to write a piece based on an investigative interview. I saw you on the news yesterday – they showed you hitting an armed robber with your stick. I was watching with my girlfriend – she didn’t know that Vovó works for you – and she said, ‘What an amazing man, I wonder what made him do that?’ and so I thought maybe that’s something I could investigate.’
‘I see.’
‘But Vovó told me you were concussed and so you might not remember what happened.’
‘I remember it all quite well.’
‘Really?’ Are you willing to talk about it?’ Pietro looked at me so brightly, it would have been hard to refuse him even if I had wanted to.
‘Yes,’ I said.
A smile flashed across Pietro’s face. ‘So what made you decide to hit the gunman?’ he asked. ‘You must have known what could happen.’
‘I was angry,’ I said.
Pietro leant forward and took a notepad out of the satchel by his feet.
‘You were angry because the gunmen were holding up the store?’ asked Pietro.
‘No, it wasn’t so much that.’ I paused for a moment and wondered whether I ought to tell Pietro what I had really felt. After all, my actual motive was less noble than the one he was imputing to me. There have been times in the past when I have been presented with a choice between a convenient half-truth or a less comfortable truth. It is probably fair to say that I have more often opted for the former. I do not know why I didn’t do so this time. Perhaps it was the morphine, or perhaps the bright earnest curiosity in Pietro’s eyes. I see the turmoil of these recent weeks as originating with that moment, in that decision to tell the truth.
‘I was angry because, well, because those gunmen thought I was totally insignificant,’ I said. ‘They didn’t even bother watching me. When you are old people often don’t see you, or they appear to look through you. You get used to it; after all, growing old is a slow process. But while I was in that shop I’d been thinking back to when I was young, at the end of the war.’
I paused for a moment. Since first arriving in Brazil in 1947, I had never mentioned my commendation for the Iron Cross Second Class. Even in my first interview with Feldmann Breweries
, when asked about my experiences during the war, I had merely stated that I had defended my country. That was a standard response back then, and I had not been asked any more questions. However, on this occasion I felt impelled to tell the truth.
‘I was commended for the Iron Cross Second Class. Hauptmann Brandhoff told me I was the youngest hero he had ever met. I hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Then those men broke in and looked through me as if I were a ghost. That’s what made me angry.’
‘Nossa. I didn’t know that. How old were you when you were decorated?’
‘I was never actually decorated. I was commended for a decoration in February 1945 but our position was overrun by the Allies shortly afterwards and I never heard any more about it. I was 15 years old.’
Pietro was scribbling in his notebook.
‘So young? What did you do to be commended?’
‘I defended my country,’ I said.
‘How?’ asked Pietro.
These are, of course, different times. It did not surprise me that Pietro wanted to know more. Nevertheless, I had to gather my thoughts to formulate a reply. When you have not spoken about something for over half a century, the words do not come easily.
‘By eliminating the lead tank of the Allied 7th Armoured Division,’ I said.
Pietro’s eyes widened. ‘Really? How did you do that?’
‘I dug a foxhole in the road and hid in it overnight,’ I said. ‘Then I fired a Panzerfaust at the tank once it had passed overhead.’
‘Panzerfaust?’ queried Pietro.
‘A Panzerfaust is a grenade launcher, specially developed for use against tanks. It looks like a stick with a bulbous head, about half a metre long.’ I thought back to those strange, unwieldy weapons, halfway between a lollipop and a phallus. I had been small for my age; carrying a Panzerfaust over a long distance was torturous for me.
Pietro was looking expectantly at me, so I continued: ‘Panzerfausts were simple to use. They had sights attached to them and you just lined up the target and pulled the trigger. You had to be careful there was no one behind you – the flames would shoot out the back.’
‘And you were only 15 when you destroyed the tank with a Panzerfaust?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how did you know what to do?’
I took a deep breath. It felt strange to be talking about these things, using these words which now sounded so unfamiliar but which once represented almost the entirety of my existence. ‘Well, I’d been doing military training since I entered the Jungvolk, just after my eighth birthday. I didn’t learn how to use a Panzerfaust until I was in the Hitler Jugend – that was a bit later, when I was twelve. Before the war you used to have to be fourteen, but things were speeded up for us because of the need for manpower.’
‘So you were in the Hitler Jugend when you blew up the tank?’ asked Pietro, still taking notes.
‘Technically yes, although by then I had volunteered for the Volkssturm.’
Pietro looked confused. He repeated, ‘Volkssturm?’
I could see this was going to get complicated. I said, ‘The Volkssturm was the People’s Army, volunteers who were too young or too old for the Wehrmacht. As a member of the Volkssturm you were officially a soldier and therefore protected by the Hague War Convention. You were formally protected whereas other combatants, if taken prisoner, could be shot as partisans. That was one reason for volunteering. Also, we were told that we would be given a gun and allowed to use it.’
‘Did all Hitler Youths volunteer for the Volkssturm?’
‘No. As a Hitler Youth, you could volunteer either for the Volkssturm or to be one of the Flakhelfer who manned the anti-aircraft batteries. However, in both cases you were still officially a member of the Hitler Youth. But once you turned 16, you left the Hitler Youth and were recruited straight into the Wehrmacht. At least, that’s what is was like for my generation, but we were one of the last intakes.’
‘Why didn’t you volunteer for the Flakhelfer?’
‘I certainly thought about it, and a couple of my friends volunteered. It was a good way of avoiding the boring HJ duties.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like marching and drill, things we had been doing for years. Also, we all craved action back then, and as a Flakhelfer there was a chance that you might see some.’
‘So why didn’t you volunteer?’
‘Well, I enjoyed the sports in the HJ, particularly the climbing. Flakhelfer were being recruited in the summer of ’44, but I knew I had a chance of being chosen to climb the Matterhorn with an elite team that same summer, so I didn’t want to volunteer before then. Then, after the summer, there was more pressure to volunteer for the Volkssturm, so that’s what I did.’
‘What was the Volkssturm like?’ asked Pietro.
‘I hated it,’ I said. ‘The Volkssturm was a ragtag army of elderly civilians who had never held a spade, let alone a gun. They were supposed to be enthusiastic volunteers, though in fact most of them had been conscripted. They were totally unfit to fight. The whole thing was shambolic. And then there were a few of us recruited straight out of the HJ. We’d been doing military training since we were eight years old. We could march better than we could walk.’
Pietro looked astonished. ‘You learned to march when you were eight years old?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘But you can’t have marched very far, at that age.’
‘On the contrary. That’s when I marched all the way to Nuremberg for the rally. 500 kilometers.’
Pietro’s eyes opened wide. Even to my own ears it sounded astonishing, but that’s the way it was.
‘Did you spend all your time in the Jungvolk marching?’ asked Pietro.
‘A lot of time, yes. But we also played wargames. And we learnt how to dig a foxhole and fire a panzerfaust. That’s why I later found the Volkssturm so ridiculous. The Volkssturm instructors were trying to teach us the same techniques, but they didn’t have a clue. We knew much more about foxholes and panzerfausts than they did – we’d been training all our lives. It would have been funny, if we hadn’t also known that the future of Germany lay in the hands of these incompetents.’
My jaw had started to hurt again so I pressed the morphine button once more. As I did so I reflected that I had not spoken about my life in Germany in this much detail since, well, since for ever really. But I did not find it unpleasant. Unfamiliar, yes, but not unpleasant.
Pietro had stopped writing. He asked, ‘Como vai o Seu Otto? Are you tired?’
‘I am a little tired, but stay until you have to leave,’ I said.
‘If you’re certain…’ Pietro looked at me for confirmation. I nodded very slightly with my head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I wanted to ask, how did you actually destroy the tank? What did you do? Who gave the orders?’
‘The tank, yes. In fact, there were no orders. It was my own idea – that is why it was later considered an act of exceptional bravery. Many of the Volkssturm would have tried to stop me had they known. They didn’t want to antagonise the invaders in any way. I can understand that now. After all, many of them had wives and children to think of. But it was different for us back then. We thought very little of our own lives. All that mattered was Germany. Germany had to be defended; we never questioned that. Already the enemy had crossed the Rhine – that was a heavy blow. The Russians were advancing in the east, raping girls as young as eight and women as old as eighty. The posters and the radio broadcasts left us in no doubt about that. For me, defending Germany was the same as protecting my mother from the barbarous Russians – that’s how I saw it.’
‘Did all Hitler Youths see it that way, do you think?’
‘I think so, yes. You have to understand that we had been brought up to believe that Germany was everything, we were nothing. We had grown up with those songs.’
‘Which songs?’
‘The Hitlerjugend songs.’
‘Like what? Can you remember one?’
‘Deutschland, du sollst leuchtend stehen, Mögen wir auch untergehen… “Germany, you must shine even if we must die.” That’s one I used to like. There were many. Before I even joined the Jungvolk I’d heard them sung by the columns of Hitler Youths marching in the streets. My God, those boys were impressive, marching in step, singing in unison. We ran alongside the columns trying to pick up the words but we didn’t learn them properly until we became Jungvolk ourselves. Then we sang them on marches and at the meetings. Later, when we went to the summer camp in the mountains, we sang them at night around the campfire.’
As I lay with my eyes closed in that hospital bed in Florianópolis, my jaw and hip fractured, my mind drifting on an opiate sea, I thought to myself how far away those campfires were. Another world, another life. And yet the memory was so vivid – my nostrils twitched in recollection of the scent of pine which used to be almost intoxicating, so clean and pure. Pine and the cool, cavernous smell of the Drachenwand, that mighty rockface above the campfire, where we climbed by day and above which a pale moon would nightly rise. Standing in front of the fire and facing us is Kurt Gruber, the 17-year-old leader of our Schar and a hero in our eyes. Theatrical as ever, he tells us once again the legend of the Nibelungen, this time the story of the slaughter of the faithful Burgundians in Etzel’s castle. Siggi is sitting beside me, enraptured. Strange that he is the best climber of us all – his movements so natural on the rock – and yet he has told me that he prefers listening to the Nibelungenlied to climbing. His face is beautiful in the firelight. If only I could always remember him that way.
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