A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  He thought he might celebrate with a piece of the eel tied curing in the belt loops of his trousers. But then he thought that if he moved his hands from his sides, the sharpshooter with the long rifle would probably err on the side of caution and put a round in him that would take out most of his chest. The man with the rifle did move then, climbing out of his seat and manning the machine gun, spinning the weapon on its swivel base so that it covered Landau. Landau raised his hands above his head and tried to smile through the cracks and scabs of his frozen lips. He estimated he was somewhere east of Lubeck and Hamburg and must have escaped the Russian zone as he swung south, inland, at Wismar. Unless the Americans were lost. He didn’t know how bad a complication that would be for them. On paper the Americans and Russians were allies. But wars were not fought on paper. Wars were fought in the snow with rifles that possessed a lethal range of a kilometre or more. They were fought with machine guns like the .50 calibre Browning mounted and manned on the back of the American Jeep.

  He had not been this close to Americans before and he was impressed. They possessed a fantastic quantity of equipment. There was a field radio in the Jeep. A pick and a shovel and a water canister with something like a sixty-litre capacity were neatly mounted on its side. Both of the Americans in the Jeep had side arms and he could see that the pistols were large-calibre automatics. Their personal kit included grenades, knives and abundant ammunition pouches. The men themselves looked clean and fit and well fed. They were very alert. There was something else about them, though, that puzzled him. Given the lack of threat or provocation he represented, they looked inexplicably furious. Landau was not concerned about the corporal squatting behind the machine gun. He was worried about the man behind the wheel. The corporal wouldn’t kill him unless the sergeant gave the order to fire. The sergeant, though, looked like a man comfortable with issuing commands. Now, he looked appraisingly at Landau. He was blond and freckled and heavily built. He spat a green stain into the snow near Landau’s ragged feet and the air was assaulted by the stench of chewing tobacco.

  ‘Easy, pilgrim,’ the American said. ‘Any sudden moves will severely diminish your chances of surviving the next few minutes. Keep your hands where they are. Get over here.’

  The words were spoken in fluent German. Landau thought the accent from Hanover. He did as he was told. When he got there he saw something the bulk of the Jeep had hidden during his approach. The torso of a third soldier rested upright in the snow about thirty feet away. He was holding a rifle equipped with a bayonet in his right hand. The stock was resting on the snow. His blood was fresh but already congealed in a thick puddle on the snow around him. There was nothing of him at all below the waist. About sixty feet further on from the corpse, a metal hatch stood open on the ground. It looked like a tank hatch, had the same sort of mechanism that would securely lock it from the underside. But it was bigger than a tank hatch and there was nothing underneath it but flat terrain.

  ‘Sir, how far does the minefield extend?’

  ‘Speak when I fucking tell you to,’ the sergeant said. Snow was falling carelessly out of the sky in odd flakes and drifts. But the tracks of the Jeep were still clear. They could reverse the Jeep out of there to safety. The dead comrade they were so upset about had not opened the hatch. He had not even reached it. It struck Landau as odd that it was open. But then war was a very odd state of affairs altogether. Still, he thought he knew what was going to happen next.

  ‘Here’s how it’s going to play, pilgrim,’ the sergeant said. ‘You’re going to walk from here to that hatch over there and back. You’re going to plant your feet very firmly in the snow along the way. Imagine your footfalls are stepping-stones across a stream. That’s how you are going to do it. If you don’t start now, the corporal will send you to Valhalla, or wherever the fuck it is you people think you go when you die. He’ll also kill you if you stop walking. Or if you try to run away.’

  Landau licked his lips. ‘You’d kill an unarmed civilian?’

  ‘Oh, pilgrim, I’d kill any fucker,’ the sergeant said. He spat again. ‘You people didn’t worry overmuch about who was armed and who wasn’t, did you? When you were killing half the world?’

  Landau, no philosopher, nevertheless thought this a point well made. He knew he’d made a mistake, though, in his claim to be a civilian.

  ‘Move,’ the sergeant said. ‘I suggest you take a route different to the one attempted by our late friend and colleague.’

  Landau went. He consoled himself with the thought that they were going to kill him anyway. He hoped they would spare a bullet for him if he tripped a mine and survived the detonation. Probably they would. They had such an extravagance of kit. They would not weigh the cost of a bullet against the opportunity to silence the noise of his screams. He progressed through the minefield on his numb and ragged feet. He was afraid, dry mouthed with dread. But he was not as frightened as he had been in his life. Buckner, the ether doctor, had made him follow Martin Hamer to a wood near the camp where Hamer sometimes went for the solitude. And Hamer had of course discovered his surveillance. There had only been the two of them that day in the Polish wood. And Hamer knew how to frighten a man. That had been fear. Christ, that had been fear.

  He had reached the hatch. He looked down into a circular cylinder of concrete with further hatched openings on its sides. It was guarded by a dead officer in an SS uniform who, judging by his green, glassy expression, had bitten down on his cyanide pill. It was the opening to somewhere that didn’t concern Landau and he had no curiosity at all about where or to what it would lead.

  ‘You can come back here now, pilgim.’

  Probably the dead officer stank. But he would be competing with the smell of the eels knotted to the belt loops of Landau’s trousers. They weren’t curing, the eels. They were rotting. There was no point in kidding himself, he thought, despondently. His field rations were a long way past their best.

  ‘I’m a soldier, just like you,’ he said to the sergeant, when he reached the Jeep.

  ‘He’s lying, Sarge,’ the corporal behind the machine gun said. His voice was filled with a bland menace Landau remembered having heard before on occasions involving death. He allowed nothing on his face to register the fact that he understood their language. His appeals were spoken in German and to the sergeant.

  ‘I have a mother. A wife and children waiting for me in Hamburg. Infants. The war is over. Please.’

  The sergeant seemed to consider him, drumming the fingers of his big hands in a heavy tattoo on the metal steering wheel of the Jeep. He reached over and took a rifle from its bracket on the side of the vehicle and took an eight-round clip from one of his pockets. He loaded a single bullet from the clip into the rifle. Then he threw the weapon to Landau.

  ‘Shoot something, soldier,’ he said.

  The rifle was a Garand, the M1 .30 carbine, the mass-produced weapon of the American infantry. It was a short, comparatively light rifle with a small, almost abbreviated stock. It seemed like a toy compared to the Springfield sniper rifle the corporal had covered him with on his approach to this strange encounter. That leant now on the Jeep’s passenger seat, a wonderful weapon of awesome range and calibre and killing accuracy.

  But the Garand would do. He was a man of no great stature and the Garand suited his dimensions better.

  Landau chambered his single round and held the unfamiliar gun between both hands across his chest with his finger testing the trigger tension. There was a joy thrilling through him at the having of a weapon in his hands again that came as a wonderful surprise. All capacity for emotion he had thought bled and wearied out of him. He looked up, at the low sky, raising the rifle as he did so to his shoulder.

  ‘He’s got to be fucking kidding,’ the corporal said.

  The distance was about four hundred metres. It was nowhere near the limit of Landau’s shooting skill or even the Garand’s effective range, but the bird was a finch, fast moving, erratic in the swoops and dips of its flig
ht. It was a challenging shot. There was no other target in that white wilderness. And he sensed the sergeant would not be patient long in waiting for one. So Landau aimed and squeezed the trigger and the report of the rifle was a compressed sound in the cold as the recoil thumped its stock into his shoulder and the bird tumbled in small pieces of flesh and feathers out of the air.

  ‘I’ll be blowed,’ the corporal said.

  Landau tried not to let his reluctance show on his face as he handed the weapon back.

  ‘Your lucky day, pilgrim,’ the sergeant said. ‘If you’d missed, I’d have killed you.’

  Landau nodded. He knew this was true.

  ‘Follow our tyre tracks. That’ll put you on the road to Hamburg about seven miles back. I’d offer you a ride, but we’re going to be a little tied up here for a while.’ He looked back at the trail of footprints Landau had left as their safe path to whatever secret it was the mines and SS corpse were guarding.

  ‘Besides,’ the corporal said, ‘you fucking stink.’ He laughed. ‘Who’d you serve with? The fish unit?’

  The sergeant smiled briefly at that and jerked his head in the direction Landau now knew was where Hamburg lay. ‘Beat it, pilgrim,’ he said.

  With German such as he spoke it, his father or his mother must have come from Altmark or Gifhorn or Wolfsburg. Somewhere in that region. It was remarkable. He had almost been curious enough to ask about it, but that would have been dangerous. The sergeant seemed a very angry man. Angry about his comrade’s death, about matters generally.

  Landau had never met Americans before. On the whole, he had enjoyed the experience. Walking away from them in the rags on his ruined feet, he began to think America a place where he might thrive.

  He had expected plaudits, a citation, perhaps a medal and a promotion too, after killing Martin Hamer. But the pursuit had been a grim and bloody catastrophe, all told. And they had wanted proof of the traitor’s death.

  They sent a squadron of mountain troops with an SS man and a guide and found a blood trail leading over the pass. There was much blood in the snow and they looked for his body optimistic that he might have bled to death soon after being shot. But he was strong. He was quite unbelievably strong. They were still following in the steady footfalls of the tracks he made as he carried his whore in his arms over the mountains when the weather closed in. The guide was forced to bring them down. The white-out lasted three days and brought a metre of snow and obliterated all trace of Hamer’s wound and the escape. Worse, they wanted to know why Landau had taken only a single shot.

  The answer was a mixture of fastidiousness and foolish pride. He had been bested, twice, by Hamer at the camp. The single shot was his vindication. It was the proof to himself of his confidence in his defining skill. Of course, he could not tell his interrogators that. And he had plenty of time to regret his hubris in the years after, consigned to a shit hole training camp in Vilnius to teach loyal Lithuanians how to shoot Soviet infantry with a bullet ration that seemed to grow scarcer by the week. In Vilnius, under seeping Lithuanian skies, he could feel the breath of the Russians on his neck. And he wished bitterly that he had riddled them both with bullets; killed the whore, left her and Hamer bundled and cold on the high pass clutching one another in death.

  He was thinking this as he stumbled into the charred ruin of Hamburg. It was something he had thought about a lot. It was a therapeutic thought, one that took his mind off the cold and the hunger in his belly and the grotesque stink of the decomposing eels flapping around his midriff. It was a thought that cheered him. He would speculate on what he should have done and picturing it would excite him in a way and renew his energy. Was hatred fuelling him? He didn’t care. Certainly he hated the Polish woman. Sparing her, with his fastidious marksmanship, had been a terrible mistake. Its nagging consequence was that he could not take the pride in having killed Hamer he knew he was entitled to.

  He walked into Hamburg. And he felt a sudden, overwhelming shame about his smell and his appearance. He shuffled towards the rousing aroma of an American soup kitchen. And he realized that everyone in the queue for soup and bread looked just as he did. Steam rose from tureens of nourishing soup and great pots of simmering coffee and Landau heard the juices in his empty stomach boil in expectation. What did they call it? The land of the brave? The home of the free? A cheerful American volunteer put a tin cup in his hand and gave him an enamel dish. He would go to America, Landau decided. Germany was spent. They had spent Germany. He would go to America. He would give himself a fresh start in life. He had earned it.

  It was six years before Landau gathered the means to emigrate to America. He took with him three hundred dollars, laboured English, his skill with a rifle and a violent antipathy to fish of any sort. He worked as a pump jockey at a gas station and lived in a sort of village comprising old Airstream trailers mounted on concrete blocks. That was in Connecticut. When he tired of the work, he moved west and juggled shifts as a short-order cook in a roadside diner with bartending in a tavern half a mile along the turnpike. But the Americans were willing slaves to soap, he discovered. And what was seen as his indifferent attitude to hygiene got him fired from the diner. He was not a natural at the bar work, either, lacking the smalltalk to cheer the huddle of thirsty losers who gathered each night to drink.

  He worked next as a garage mechanic, but found the American automobile too irksomely reliable to earn him anything like a decent income. He squandered most of his savings on a hot-dog and soda concession that failed to provide any but a meagre return. And so he was forced into a shiftless life of petty theft, living out of a suitcase in a succession of featureless motels, increasingly aware that the forces of law and order in his new country were shrewd and energetic opponents with far greater resources than he would ever have at his disposal. There were no friends during this period. And there were no women. He was relieved, to be honest, that he was no longer obliged to be involved with a woman. In the old Germany, a family had been a necessary accoutrement. Here, nobody cared. And nobody could have cared less than Landau did.

  He got a job eventually, servicing and selling guns at a Colorado hunting resort. He saw the advertisement for the job among the classifieds in a newspaper left on the seat of an Oldsmobile he stole from outside a Denver barbershop. He was obliged to try to sell the Remington brand. But he considered Remington a fine manufacturer of mass-produced rifles. He was of the view that underestimating American factory output had probably cost Germany the war. The Americans made good hunting rifles. They made good radios and refrigerators, too. His own, hand-tooled rifle, he fashioned himself. He made it to the exact specifications of the weapon that had killed Hamer, even to the burr on the walnut stock. And, of course, he made his own bullets. The evening in his workshop was very satisfying when he attached to his new rifle the old sight through which he had taken aim at the traitor in the mountains above Landeck.

  He thrived in Colorado, at the lodge, where they took his rudeness and taciturnity to be aspects of what they called character.

  ‘What sort of ammo should I be buying, Pete?’ he would be asked by an executive from General Motors in a ridiculous plaid jacket.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll be too drunk to shoot straight,’ he would say. ‘Too drunk or too hungover.’

  And the executive and his friends would roar with the good-natured laughter of men enjoying themselves at play and he’d be thumped on the back or subjected to a friendly headlock by someone dressed like the hunter in the Bugs Bunny cartoons he watched sometimes on the television.

  The ruder he was, the more they apparently liked it. Old Pete, they called him. And he knew that his status at the lodge in Colorado, despite his acknowledged expertise, was that of a grumpy and reluctant clown. And so he thrived, despising the misapprehension and ignorance that bolstered his growing popularity.

  He would watch glorious sunsets over the mountains and as the day disappeared in a purple flush, creeping across the rocks above the tree line, a
part of him would ache with nostalgia for the great days outside Poznan in the camp. The days of Rolfe’s munificent reign, when the very uniform ruled a ripe and fearful world. It was the woman, he came to realize, pondering those sunsets, thinking of those times. Hamer would have come and then gone again back to his murderous war in the east, had it not been for the intervention of the Polish whore.

  And then one day, he saw her. She was in a photograph on the front of a newspaper discarded by one of the lodge guests on a counter in the gun shop. A smear of gun oil had been absorbed by the newsprint, staining it. But the picture was clear enough. She was svelte and handsome in a tailored suit and her hair was long and she had gained weight and hardly aged at all. She was pictured with the young senator from Massachusetts, the one tipped to get the Democratic nomination for the presidency. The caption explained that Mr Kennedy had been present with his aides at a picnic fundraiser in Hollywood. But it was someone else in the picture that most shocked and fascinated Landau. It was a girl, blonde, at the edge of the frame, too young to be employed as an aide to anyone.

  ‘You have your father’s eyes,’ Landau whispered to the picture.

  He wondered did the girl know who her father was. He wondered did the girl have any notion of the cause her late father had served and the things, in that service, that her late father had done. Then his eye was dragged back to Kennedy, the figure at the centre of the picture, his charismatic smile wrinkling the skin around his eyes in the California sun. And he wondered what the young senator knew about the past of the handsome woman described in the caption as his aide.