For two days of his journey he feasted on black bread and rabbit stew when he fell in with a giant madman who had lived rough, so he claimed, for ten years. The man reminisced fondly about the happy times when all the other vagrants, the ones they caught, were rounded up by the Gestapo and shot in the forest.
Too much competition again, the tramp grumbled. The good days are gone forever, he said, sucking meat from soft little bones, chewing his food between hard, toothless gums.
And Landau nodded his head. It was a philosophy he had his own good reasons for agreeing with.
He was grateful, relieved, when the morphine he had laced the vagrant’s meal with finally took effect and the man dropped into a heavy stupor. Landau wasn’t at all sure of the provenance of the rabbit in his bowl. Rabbits did not have fingernails. He sifted through the various horrors in his new friend’s pockets and found only a clasp knife worth taking. So he took it. And he progressed on his way.
The land was black with corpses, black with the cinders of fires, scowling with defeat, sown everywhere with fear, sullen with accusation. The very air was heavy and impending with the hatred of the world. Landau saw the lights from Russian camps and heard their singing. He saw the dust churn and rise over fallow fields as the grind of their mechanized columns squared and quartered their prize portion of his fatherland. He hid from their aeroplanes and watched as the hammer and sickle insignia cavorted on painted wingtips through German skies.
He made his way to Danzig and when he got there, he sneaked and stole close enough to see the port. He saw the sandbag-and-gun, bristle-and-wire cumulus and watchtowers of its new fortifications. Searchlights carved through the ash in the air in vigilant sweeps. And Landau almost wept with laughter. It was the familiarity. And the irony of it, too. They were constructing an empire here, the Russians. They needed a workforce for their empire and had taken, already, determined steps to prevent that workforce from leaving. Danzig under the Russians had taken on the characteristics familiar to him from the industry-rich parts of Poland he had seen under his own army’s occupation.
Beyond this dock perimeter, he could just make out the harbour. He studied it through the telescopic sight that was all that remained of his precious, lamented rifle. And what he saw did not give him hope. The superstructures of several scuttled warships he supposed were from the North Sea Fleet, blockaded the port. Through his sight they looked crenellated, in their grey massiveness like so many castles rising, listing, from the sea. Some of them were smoking and wore the tattered damage of attempts, presumably, to blow them out of the water from above. But they had been skilfully sunk. They were too low in the water for a bomb or an air-launched torpedo to strike their flooded ammunition magazines. Divers would have to do that with explosives and timers. And the task would be painstaking and fraught with danger. The naval wrecks were sure to have been booby trapped by their bereft captains and banished crews. There were other sunk craft. The assorted hulls of tankers and freight vessels canted at mad angles out of lapping, oily water. One object he couldn’t make sense of at all, thinking at first it might be the corpse of a whale. Then he saw the pattern of rivets on the hull and realized it was in fact a capsized U-boat. It wobbled in the water, full of ballast and poisoned air, bobbed with the grotesque motion of a child’s toy in a giant bathtub.
Landau knew that even given the fearful efficiency of the Russians, it would be months before this carnage was properly cleared. To escape undetected, he needed a working port with a volume of traffic busy enough to divert its custodians, overwork them, make them tired or nonchalant. That wasn’t Danzig. With no food in his belly and no money in his pockets, he would need to formulate another strategy entirely. He didn’t have much hope. He had never set great store by hope; he had never been a sentimental man. But he set considerable store by cunning. And he was more desperate than he had ever been in his thin, inconsequential life.
Landau had married, as everyone had who practically could, because there was no way to prosper in Germany under Hitler unless you conformed to the imperatives of the state and its breeding programme. He had wed a fat girl from a village a few miles from his Dresden barracks. In her League of German Maidens uniform, she had looked fecund, if not comely. She was undemanding of him. And she had produced two fat, apple-cheeked children in three years of fertile industry. Though there was no doubt he was their biological father, he had never really taken to either child. Nevertheless, the family was photogenic enough and as a family man, he swiftly won the kind of military preferment that had been his motive for spawning in the first place.
He learned to socialize. He learned to do this with his wife’s parents, with the local pastor and, as they grew up, with his little angels too. He found it easy enough. He watched other people doing it and if they were generally adjudged to do it well, he copied them. His children loved him. He was a considerate and patient father. He never smacked them. It became an indulgence remarked upon.
He imagined that his wife and children were dead now. Certainly he would never see them again. But they had served a purpose, provided him with a skill the absence of which might have proved a fatal handicap in his efforts to escape and assimilate himself into the new world order. The experience of his family had given him the ability to communicate with other people. He would never be a garrulous, life and soul sort. But he had mastered the basics. He could get by.
Some were alert, of course, to his true nature. Some men possessed the preternatural instincts of the hunter and were aware, he supposed, of the danger he might represent. One such man had been Martin Hamer. He had met many impressive men during the course of the war. Hamer had been the only one he had truly feared. But he was dead, wasn’t he? Landau was almost certain that Hamer was dead. He had seen the bullet strike home in the traitor’s one faltering step in the snow as he carried his whore in his arms to Switzerland over the pass.
Landau liked to think it was destiny that had put him in the position to take that fateful shot. But it had been luck, really, hadn’t it? Nevertheless, the skill to execute it had been his, seated in the lower branches of the pine tree he had climbed to achieve the angle, the soap from an incomplete shave drying as grey scum on his cheeks and his throat, even as he had taken aim. It had not been an easy shot, either. Hamer was a formidable adversary. He had butchered the man who had led their mission to bring him back with no weapon other than his hands. You felt a sense of foreboding when you saw him. You felt fear even looking at his broad back through a telescopic gun sight.
Landau put that gun sight into the breast pocket of his civilian suit. The rifle it had served, its lethal barrel and action and lovingly polished walnut stock, were decaying now, weighted by a net bag of road spoil at the bottom of a canal. In some ways, that rifle had defined him. But he was forced now to be someone else. And he was forced to find that person somewhere other than Danzig.
The city had been German through six years of Nazi rule. Now it was in Soviet hands. But the talk was of it being handed over to the Poles, renamed, and the very speaking of the German language outlawed here. It was a ruin anyway, a place of waste and rubble, not much more than a vindictive memory.
He needed to get to the American zone, he knew. The Americans were building an empire in Germany, too. But theirs was a metaphysical empire constructed from hearts and minds. He had heard the refugees, in their sad processions, whisper as much as they had passed his various hides on the journey to the port. He did not want to be broken on the wheel of Soviet industry. Who did? He would get to the American zone, where those social skills he had so studiously acquired would surely serve him in much better stead.
But then the winter came to Germany and, with its bleak arrival, there was no comfort. Landau’s new plan had been to stick to the limit of the land, to skirt the edge of the Baltic Sea. Hamburg was a port in American hands. He could work his way to Hamburg without having to endure a march across his country’s scorched hinterland. Most of those fleeing the East were
stampeding through Russian-held Germany to Berlin. It was flight rather than strategy and made no sense to Landau. They would scour the land in their hundreds of thousands and starve. There was no provision for them. The Red Army had many qualities but compassion and pity for defeated invaders were not among them. Emotion drove the German exodus to Berlin. Berlin was the heart of Mother Germany. But those that got there would find neither comfort nor even recognition. The heart of the country was riven and burnt.
His own survival logic lay in fish. The Russians could not burn or deplete the sea. One day their trawlers would empty the Baltic of fish stocks in pursuance of one of their mad, five-year plans, he was sure. But he was equally sure that the war had left the fishing grounds to grow rich and heavy in neglect. The proof of this was evident in the spoil left by those who did possess the expertise and the presence of mind to harvest the sea in the chaos. Landau came eventually on his escape west from Danzig to a small natural inlet with a wooden dock a little past Kolberg. And he saw the gulls in a mad clutter above a pile of some stinking matter a few feet proud of the tide line. Sensing something edible, he took a driftwood spar from the debris washed up there and scattered the scavenging birds. They left a mound of fish guts and heads and eels still writhing; as birds pecked, they struggled to eat the entrails of herring and flounder and cod.
Landau, sat on the scree of pebbles and amid the slime of scales and stink of fish blood, feasted on the discard, raw. He retched with the age and unaccustomed richness of the feast at first, throwing up. His body had become a stranger to such nourishment. But after the one bout of stomach cramps and vomit, he was able to discipline himself to keep the matter down. When he could eat no more, he crawled off to a building higher on the beach. When he got there he saw that it was a smokehouse, abandoned by war. He inhaled the salt aroma of the smokehouse, present even under the threat of snow on a chill wind.
Someone had netted the stuff he had found. But whatever industry had trawled the sea here once was a ghost of itself. Subsistence, Landau thought. The old tidal rituals abandoned to women and girls. Thus the waste. He was glad then, as nourishment leaked into his deprived body, of the Führer’s blind faith in the earth as the larder of the fatherland. The Führer’s breadbasket philosophy had made an almost mystical faith of barley and corn; of the scythe and the harvest, the ancient pattern of fields sown and crops nurtured and reaped. His hunger for fertile land had been principal among their reasons for conquest. The fishermen, by contrast, had been conscripted for war. They stoked the boilers on battleships and perished in submarines. And the sea had grown rich and fertile in their absence.
There was a heavy padlock on the smokehouse door. It was still strong, but had long rusted and seized. His instinct was right, he felt. There were no men here. There was no industry. Women had taken out the boat that had netted his meal. There was no danger here from people. There was only the biting hazard of the cold. It had got colder in the last few minutes, he felt. The food should have warmed him, but the cold wind pulled and teased at his layers of stinking rags, and his toes were growing numb in the leather boots he had peeled off the feet of his tramp. He looked out towards the water. The Baltic Sea was the same metallic blue-grey as the sky. White fronds of icy water capped sluggish waves. There was a still, bitter emptiness to the sky that he knew was the prelude to a storm. In this temperature, in this exposure, that storm would be a blizzard. With desperate hands, he prised a loose plank from the smokehouse wall and slithered inside through the gap. He replaced the plank as best he could and looked around inside.
There were charred racks on the walls where once the people from here had flavoured the fish. There was a storm lantern suspended from a beam and when he shook it, a sump of paraffin and rust gurgled in its base. But he had not the means to light the lamp and did not anyway dare draw attention to himself by risking either light or the heat of a fire. He saw a wooden wheelbarrow heaped high with beech shavings. The shavings were dry, dessicated; had been there probably since before the war. He tipped the barrow’s contents into a pile on the wooden floor and lay in them. He gathered the shavings around him, making a burrow. The walls of the smokehouse were shuddering now with the force of the wind and, through a narrow window, he could see the light had turned sullen under a lead-coloured sky. He shivered. He knew that it was a weakness to hanker after the past, but sometimes he was honestly nostalgic for the camp. For the good days at the camp. For the time before Hamer came and everything turned bad and was destroyed.
Ariel Buckner, a doctor and a geneticist with a fondness for the ether bottle had official charge of the camp. He’d administered it carelessly, under the benign authority of his cousin Wilhelm Buckner, an important figure in Poznan in the organization of the General Government. But Hans Rolfe had to all intents and purposes run the place. Rolfe was a veteran of the Bier Keller Putsch, a proud bearer through the street-fighting years of the blood banners. He sang the table-thumping songs with party pride threatening to burst the blood vessels in his thick neck most nights; claimed to have known Horst Wessell, to have been there when Wessell’s anthem aired for the first time, earning a beery accolade in some cobbled cavern with straw on the floor under the Munich streets. He had been a bully, had Rolfe. He had been as mighty a pain in the arse as any man who ever strutted under party colours. But he had made the camp a profitable enterprise. The Poles inside it laboured and Rolfe sold off the bulk of what they produced. He hired inmates out as labour to the pioneer farmers paid generous Berlin subsidies to try to grow crops on Polish soil. Everyone in the camp benefited. And then Hamer arrived.
He had come, it was said, to recover from a war wound. His duties were light, nominal. Lousy timing had to take some of the blame. But he was one of those officers, like Rommel, later like Von Stauffenberg, Landau believed, one of those aristocratic types who thought themselves above the squalor and self-interest indivisible from war. And he had happened to be there when Rolfe set one of Buckner’s dogs on the woman for goading him about the size of his dick.
Landau had seen the whole thing from the vantage point of his watchtower. Hamer had strutted by. The woman was pegging out washing. Rolfe had looked the worse for wear from drink, truthfully, struggling on his boot heels for traction behind the ether doctor’s Dobermanns, exercising them. The woman had held out a peg in her fist and pushed it down till only an inch of it showed. And Rolfe had blushed and glowered and set one of the dogs on her.
Hamer hadn’t been content merely with killing the doctor’s dog. He insisted on putting Rolfe on a charge. Landau hadn’t seen the subsequent fight between the two men. It took place in the stables, late. And Rolfe was beaten and humbled. Landau and others tried to tell him there was no disgrace in that. Hamer had fought hand to hand in the cellars under Stalingrad. It was rumoured he had bitten out a Cossack’s throat in the pitch blackness of night fighting where you identified friend and foe by the smell of the rations on their breath and in their sweat. There was no dishonour, surely, in losing a fight to such a man. Better to take pride in having survived it. So Landau and others argued with Rolfe. But there was no reasoning with him. He wanted revenge on the girl and saw Hamer as her protector. He had to discourage Hamer so that he could have a free hand in dealing with the taunting Polish whore. So he ambushed Hamer with a pick handle at night in the rain. And Landau did see this fight, on the porch of Hamer’s camp quarters. Indeed, he gave the waiting Rolfe the nod when Hamer approached after one of his evenings over Buckner’s chess table. And Hamer disarmed and held Hans Rolfe and spoke to him. And Landau, who had a sniper’s eyes, saw the stain spread across the sergeant’s groin in the sweep of a searchlight as he struggled to get free and pissed himself, knowing that he never would. And then Landau heard the neck of Hans Rolfe snap as Hamer twisted the sergeant’s head in his hands. It was a small, sudden sound of shocking finality.
Hamer left the corpse in the rain on his porch as a warning, or a reproach. Or maybe he left it there just as a trophy.
In six years of war, Landau had never seen a man with anything close to the facility for killing other men that Martin Hamer possessed.
He survived the ice storm. After two days of shelter in the smokehouse, the wind cursing the land from the Baltic Sea lifted and vanished. The sun emerged from a streak of red, petrified cloud with the dawn and ascended into a cold blue sky. When the air grew warm enough, swaddled in his rags, Landau left his sanctuary of wood shavings and fish odour for the white enormity of the world. Even the sea held snow, he saw to his astonishment. It heaved in a briny crust at the edge of the land with the lap and stir of the water underneath.
And he found more fish. The cold made them torpid in the slushy water. Sometimes he would trawl from a jetty with a tatter of discarded net. Sometimes he would bait a hook and fish with a line. Once he stole a boat and snatched a dozing cod from the sea with his hands alone. But then he saw Russians around an oil drum brazier guarding a solitary building on a promontory and he knew that he would need to be more careful and less greedy if he were to survive his solitary march. West, he trudged, to Swinemunde. He passed through Wolgast and Greifswald, where he sat and rested and sucked the brains from the eels that were the last of his precious rations as his route took him inland and away from the sea.
Because he was careless and tired, because his eyes were red-rimmed and raw with snow-blindness, the Americans saw him before he saw them. They were in a Jeep and the vehicle had a heavy machine gun mounted on its rear. They were half a mile away when they consolidated into something more significant than a black smudge on the undulating whiteness of the snow. He knew they had seen him. The machine gun appeared unmanned and motionless. But the long barrel of a sharpshooter’s rifle moved as he did, covering him, between the hands of the soldier in the passenger seat. It took him an age to reach them. Once he stumbled and, recovering himself, lost them completely against the blank vastness of the plain. Then they were there again. With the extravagance of Americans, they were going nowhere with the engine running. He thought the warm idling of their engine a wonderful sound after all the wind screech and silence he had been forced to listen to. It sounded civilized. It was, somehow, a hospitable sound.
A Shadow on the Sun Page 6
