by Heinz Rein
To confront the past and prove to himself that he still had some kind of relationship with her, he had gone to Prager Platz to visit Ursula, his mother’s youngest sister, whom he loved with the forlorn adoration of a nephew several years younger. It had been a gloomy day, evening had fallen early, and it was only upon leaving the underground at Nürnberger Platz that he had realized that Ursula was no longer living in Berlin. But out of defiance he had still climbed the steps to Nürnberger Strasse, had crossed Prager Platz, that round square that looked as if it was surrounded by giant gravestones, and turned into Aschaffenburger Strasse, that burnt-out stone canyon with heaps of rubble and backdrop walls in which empty windows stared like dead eye sockets. It was dark, and impossible to make anything out, but just as, sitting at the piano, he didn’t need to trouble his memory of the score to play, he found, even in the darkness and in the midst of the destruction, the house whose steps he had climbed so often, and never without a beating heart. He climbed through the cave that had once been a hallway and was now like a dried-up, stony river bed, and then stood in front of the garden house, as the rear of the tenement was known here in the west, and if a veiled, pale moon had not wandered ghostlike through the ruin and illuminated the charred beams with painful clarity, he might have thought the house was still standing. For minutes he had stared unwavering into the cold, bare house, in a corner where deep black shadows stretched. That was the corner where the baby grand had stood, he had sat there, and there had also been an armchair that she had sat in and listened motionlessly, and he had always had to play the same pieces for her, Beethoven’s Ecossaises and Weber’s Perpetuum mobile or, if they felt particularly solemn, the Appassionata, music from another world, from a distant star. When he had finished she had risen to her feet and run her hands gently over his hair. The bright light of a passing car had darted across his back for a matter of seconds and broken the enchantment, shedding too bright a light on the blank walls and the dead tree stump and abruptly turning the gentle face of the past into the grimace of the present.
So that was the grim background, labour service, Küstrin, Stavanger, Orel, Lankwitz, Baumschulenweg, Aschaffenburger Strasse. Not a patch of light in the darkness, not a friendly sound emerged from the backdrop, no memory of friendship or tenderness went with him, only the music was still there, but it sounded quieter and quieter within him. It was drowned by shouts, by roars, by thunder, it vibrated unattainably far and high among the spheres. The young soldier stood alone in the big city, loneliness had suddenly been dropped over him like an enormous bell jar. Life pulsed all around, only he was excluded, his brittle nature, his taciturnity would not let him participate, join in with unhesitating open-mindedness, plunge himself into the frenzy of a hysterical bustle of enjoyment, he couldn’t do it, it was not in him, it was against his nature. But the idea of having to return to the eastern front, subjected once again to the coarse conversations of his comrades, the bloody haze of battle and idiotic orders, the suffering faces of a tormented population, without having even the smallest point of reference at home, someone he could waste his thoughts on if they threatened to become crusted with blood and revulsion, made him more open and receptive than he had ever been before, but the engine of his receptivity needed feeding from within.
That time coincided precisely with Lassehn’s meeting with Irmgard Niedermeyer. He sat opposite her in the S-Bahn and hadn’t even noticed her at first; he had chosen a seat at random and sat down. His eye went to the rows of houses that stood endlessly along the tracks and whose windows sometimes allowed a brief glimpse into the flats, but then, as if drawn by some magical force, he turned his head from the window, and his eyes met those of the girl who was sitting diagonally opposite him and who hastily turned her head away when Lassehn’s eye came to rest on her. Something in Lassehn immediately opened up, grief dissolved into a painful longing for tenderness and care, for a still point and a target for his thoughts. He studied the girl’s face, it was narrow and slightly pale, her dark-brown hair fell over the round forehead with a soft wave, the mouth had a tender, passionate curve. The girl’s face was shadowed by sadness, but a hint of promising joy and lust were recognizable in her features. Every now and again a hesitant little smile played upon them, which slightly curled the corners of her mouth and sent bright little sparks flashing in her eyes. Lassehn absorbed every feature of that face, he inhaled it like a suffocating man breathing deeply to pump fresh air into his lungs. An enormous yearning to give and receive tenderness grew within him, he couldn’t take his eyes off the girl, and now the reverse was true as well, her face turned slowly towards him as if an invisible hand were turning her head in his direction. Lassehn did not turn away or cast his eyes down and their eyes came to rest firmly on one another.
Both faces were tense and serious, their gaze interrupted only by the occasional blink. Lassehn could not have said whether that look lasted a few seconds or many minutes, and when at last they looked away, a little smile appeared upon their faces. Lassehn closed his eyes with happiness, his heart thumped all the way to his temples, and when he opened his eyes again he was welcomed by the girl’s eyes, and now nothing stood in the way of that look, no embarrassment, no shame.
When the girl got out, Lassehn also left the carriage as if anything else were impossible, he was jostled as he got out and lost sight of the girl for a few seconds. He was immediately filled with a burrowing excitement, he ploughed his way through the crowd with long and thoughtless strides – then saw her by the steps leading to the exit, she stood there and looked at him calmly – she was waiting for him. Lassehn held out his hand, at the same moment it struck him as ridiculous and simple-minded and gauche, but he didn’t know how to behave, how to speak, he had never addressed a girl in the street before, he had had absolutely nothing to do with girls apart from some insignificant little flirtations. In labour service and during his time in the army he had always refused to join in with the vulgar pursuits of his comrades, and had had to endure a degree of mockery and a certain suspicion of strangeness. Some acquaintances had remained superficial because he did not have the gift of small talk, serious notes always quickly crept into his conversations, and if they were not echoed they were very soon followed by silence. So he was not unacquainted with girls, but they had always seemed puzzling and hard to understand, he had not sought out their company and in the end had had no opportunity to seek it, particularly since he was not the type for fleeting friendships and non-committal erotic connections.
And now he had been struck by a look that did not lure him towards a superficial flirtation, but in whose depths something fated seemed to gleam, a smile had been directed at him that seemed to spring not from coquettishness but from seriousness and melancholy. A girl had simply got to her feet and waited for him as if it was the most natural thing in the world, she had taken his hand, they had passed through the station barrier together and walked across a few streets. At first there were no words between them, only that look and the feeling of their joined hands. He had felt the girl’s pulse beating in his hand and a great feeling of happiness had swept over him as if he were being freed from the cold loneliness of his life. He began to talk, slowly at first, with careful, considered words, his speech was like a stone that won’t move initially but starts rolling once it has been set in motion down a slope.
Lassehn gave everything of himself that afternoon. After a brief separation he met the girl the same evening, it was like a miracle that he could not grasp. The next day they appeared at the register office in Charlottenburg, eight days later they married, and another eight days later Lassehn had to go back to the front. Those two weeks were intoxicating, but joy was mixed with pain, beauty contorted with horror, separation loomed over their union, but perhaps it was that dualism that created their curious inebriation. For the first time Lassehn was entirely absorbed in another person. He immersed himself entirely in her, he felt the heartbeat of a girl, a woman, his wife, against his chest, her hot, quick breat
h on his mouth, her warmth in all the pores of his body, it was a drunken pleasure, insatiable in its bid to give oneself entirely to the other person and at the same time possess them entirely, which extinguished all other thoughts, concentrating the will completely upon itself. The mystery of the opposite sex had revealed itself to him for the first time. The days were now a quivering wait for night, and night a wait for morning which would reveal a head of tousled dark hair on his shoulder. Lassehn was often ashamed of his happiness, which allowed him to lie in a white bed beside a soft, warm body when his parents had just died a terrible death, but he always managed to justify himself in the end. Did he not have to go back to the front, did he not have the right to live his life to the full before he did so?
The memory rises hotly in Lassehn, hot and painful, but the pain that seizes him now is different from the one that was once the musical accompaniment to his happiness. It is the pain of recognition that even that happiness was not real. Now that he has acquired fresh knowledge, much that seemed mysterious, which he attributed to his inexperience of the unpredictable nature of women, now appears in quite a different light.
In the past he had always ignored the memories that are now assailing him, but those memories are too concrete for him to avoid, they force him remorselessly to analyse, to draw up checks and balances, they imperiously call for understanding and conclusions. Lassehn did not feel that his wife understood him, he had an unconquerable need for tenderness, for a soft hand to stroke his hair gently, for blissful peace on a beloved shoulder, for the beating of her heart and the rushing of her blood, but she didn’t understand that, when he was blissfully happy and only wanted her near him to find confirmation for himself she pulled him to her with brutal tenderness, suffocated him with caresses and did not yield until everything ended in a wild embrace. But Lassehn’s need for unerotic tenderness did not always end like that, sometimes his wife withdrew from him for no reason, shook off his presence like an unnecessary item of clothing and gave him a look that was empty and inessential and fell upon him as if he were an unimportant stranger.
Lassehn had probably felt at the time that the sexual connection alone could not establish complete contact between them. Increasingly he had a sense that his wife had not laid the book of her life so open before him, but all of those hints and suggestions had remained so small and trivial in comparison with the great passion that time and again overwhelmed them. But now it was becoming apparent that those hints and suggestions had taken root and now, in the light of an entirely new consideration, are proliferating in confusion. Much that had remained unnoticed then, or dismissed with a shrug, is now gaining in significance. Why had Irmgard insisted on marrying straight away? At the time Lassehn had seen it as an entirely natural demand, it had even, in fact, corresponded with his own desires, though the suddenness of it surprised him. But today he is becoming aware of the discrepancy between that demand and Irmgard’s normal attitude to such matters. That attitude was free, and unburdened by traditional ideas, she was also, as she sometimes hinted in passing, by no means unexperienced in erotic matters, and had had other relationships before marrying him. So why had she only granted him an embrace once they were legally united, while with other men she had not insisted on that requirement? At the time Lassehn had sought an explanation for her favours, and found it in the idea that she was unwilling to be exploited, not being aware at the time of how platitudinous that point of view really was. Now he knows – and the recognition is a deeply painful one – that it was not the right to material support that was due to her as a soldier’s wife, that it was not even that she was wearied of erotic vagabondage, but merely an attempt to legitimize her unborn child by another man by marrying him.
But why me, of all people? Lassehn wonders desperately. Why from the great mass of men was I the one she chose? Have I only been a means to an end? Had she only given herself to him so uninhibitedly, and suffocated his hesitant references to responsibility with outbursts of passion so that she could dispel any doubts that might later arise? Had it all been a calculation? Hadn’t there been a bit of love involved as well, given that the other reasons, perhaps the true cause, could never have produced such an effect? Every question immediately yields another, the chain of ideas never breaks.
But if it was love, couldn’t she have said so openly? Would she not have felt the obligation first of all to come clean about the past, by being open and unsparing about herself and about him, rather than entering into a new relationship with a lie, or at least with a guilty silence? But that had probably been cowardice, stronger than honesty, and perhaps also fear that everything – having only begun – might already be over. At any rate, and Lassehn came at last to this conclusion, things are by no means as unambiguous and clear as Mrs Buschkamp likes to see them, her interpretation is also a little too simplistic. Lassehn is one of those people who do not believe in essential wickedness, he sees weakness, carelessness, fear, cowardice and incapacity as supposedly smaller sins, and does not know that it is the sweetness of that first embrace that still quivers within him. Lassehn feels his way tentatively through his emotions as if through a jungle, in which every step must be conquered and every path freshly hewn, but this is the path he must walk, because at the end of it stand truth and clarity. Whatever happens he must speak to his wife, the sooner the better. He must know whether the journey on which he embarked with her on 21 September 1943 leads to a common future, or whether it had already come to an end when he went off to the eastern front two weeks later.
Then a question hits him like a stone. Where is the child that Irmgard was carrying?
VII
15 April, 12.00 noon
Lassehn gives a start when a hand grips him hard by the shoulder.
‘Who are you?,’ asks a hoarse, raw voice.
Lassehn hears the words as if from a great distance. He was so immersed in the past that it takes him a moment to re-emerge into the present. Now the coarse words bring him and his thoughts back into the present.
‘I’m sorry?,’ he asks mechanically.
‘I want to know who you are,’ the challenging voice repeats impatiently.
At last the veil that the past had wrapped around him is torn, and Lassehn becomes aware of where he is: in the air-raid shelter of 26 Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse in Charlottenburg. And in a flash he is also aware of his situation: a deserter with inadequate papers in a city that is keenly searching for soldiers who have fled the battlefield, a deserter, surrounded by strangers, any of whom could give him away, any of whom could be a spy, only out of fear of being accused of helping a deserter, not handing him over. Even though the whole edifice of the state is shaking and tottering and Party, Gestapo and Wehrmacht are all writhing in agony under the annihilating blows of a superior adversary, their power is still stretched around everyone like a ring of steel. The fear of terror is still great enough to give every threat the desired intensity, every order unconditional obedience. Behind everyone there still stretches the black shadow of the SS, the horror of the concentration camps and the death sentences of the People’s Courts. The man standing in front of Lassehn is dressed in civilian clothes that are also military, steel helmet, windcheater with belt and gas mask, knee-length boots and breeches, blue armband and Party insignia.
Lassehn reaches for the revolver in his trouser pocket, he wants to have the gun ready to fire in any eventuality. As he stays in his half-reclining position, every muscle in him tenses as he contemplates the possibility of flight.
‘What right do you have to ask me that?’ he asks.
‘I’m the air-raid warden for this building,’ the man replies.
‘Very interesting,’ Lassehn says casually. ‘I don’t care, as far as I’m concerned you can stay that way.’
A vein stands out thick and red on the man’s forehead, but he manages to contain himself. ‘I am responsible for the safety of the shelter,’ he says, ‘and I am also the Party Block Warden. So, who are you?’
‘
My name is Kempner,’ Lassehn says now. ‘Is that enough for you?’
The man ignores the question. ‘I want to see your papers,’ he demands.
‘I haven’t got any,’ Lassehn says, ‘I lost all my papers when I was escaping.’
‘When you fled?’ the air-raid warden asks in surprise. ‘Who were you fleeing?’
‘The Russians, of course,’ Lassehn says, and tries to look nonchalant. ‘Had to leave everything at home, the whole place was topsy-turvy.’
The man gives him a penetrating look. ‘Where from?’ he asks curtly.
‘From Neumark,’ Lassehn says, ‘between Soldin and Lippehne.’
‘And no papers?’ the man persists. ‘People always have papers.’
‘Not always,’ Lassehn disagrees, ‘if you’re working in the fields …’
The man shuts his eyes tight, you can tell that behind his forehead the thoughts are chasing after one another. ‘Since when have you been travelling?’
Lassehn rocks his head back and forth. ‘Well, for fourteen days, perhaps three weeks,’ he replies. Why is he asking all these questions?, he thinks.
‘Listen, there’s something wrong here,’ the warden says after a short pause.
