Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"A nice village, " Maxim commented. "How many farms is it?"

"It used to be three, now it's two. The Leistritz family packed up and sold out, just after the war. Two of the boys were killed in Russia, then their father was killed by The Bomber. The last boy couldn't keep it going."

"You lost more in the war than we did," Maxim said, and instantly felt he'd pitched it too strong.

But the old man nodded emphatically. "Yes, we did that. You're right. War is a terrible thing."

"What happened about the Leistritz farm?"

"That's it." The stick waggled at a great building nesting among its outhouses at the bottom of the village. "Karl Scholz bought most of the land and my father bought the house and the rest and gave it to me to run. It was a terrible business. "

Maxim said nothing more until they were back at the inn.

The old man's name was Brenner and he chosea Dunkeland a Korn – a very dark beer plus a chaser of the local heart-stopper that tasted somewhere between very young whisky and vodka. Purely out of tact, Maxim braced his brain cells for a kamikaze mission and opted to drink in parallel.

For a quarter of an hour, Brenner talked about the weather, the Common Market and taxes. When he had finished the first beer, Maxim asked: "Did you know the Schickerts well?"

"Not well, no. They only came in the last winter of the war, just a few months. Old Leistritz took them in – he got paid, naturally. Everybody was taking in women and children from the cities, away from the bombing, or storing their furniture for them. My father said he'd never known a season before when chairs and commodes were the best crops." He chuckled, and finished his Korn as well. "After 1941 the village was full of strangers. They even sent us some French and Belgians, people like that, to work the land. Our own lads were getting killed in Russia, so they sent us Belgians to play with their widows. War isn't just terrible, it's ridiculous."

"But you did know them?" Maxim persisted.

Brenner looked at him. "Him, yes, a bit. He had a glass eye. Something of a scholar, and Leistritzsaid he'd done farm work before. He liked him."

"And her?"

"Ach."Brenner banged his right hand on the head of his stick as if to knock some feeling back into it. "I hardly saw her. It was winter, she stayed indoors with the baby. "

"Of course. Would you like another drink?"

While the woman was bringing more beer and the bottle of Korn, three other men came in. One wore a city suit but was carrying the jacket; the other two were in farm clothes. Brenner called the one in the suit over and introduced him as Rolf Scholz.

"This young Englishman wants to know something about Frau Schicken- do you remember her? What was her first name?"

"Brigitte,"Scholz said.

"That's right."

Maxim asked what Scholz would drink. He wa^ a hulk of a man in his middle fifties, inches taller than Maxim and instinctively stooping under the low beams of the tap-room. He moved with a delicacy that emphasised his power, and he had a slow smile and a gentle handshake.

They drank and Scholz asked bluntly: "What did you want to know about her?"

"Nothing much… just that she was killed by the bomb."

"The Bomber." It was said just the way the woman and Brenner had said it,Das Kampßugzeug,like The Event, and Scholz saw Maxim's puzzlement. "It wasn'tjust a bomb, but a whole bomber. An American, a B-26. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it still had all its bombs on board when it came down there, behind the church."

Maxim had wondered about that: the blast effect had seemed pretty widespread for just a bomb. Now they were talking about perhaps four tons of bombs toppling out of the sky one morning when Dornhausen thought the war had passed it by. And not even an air raid warning to send them into the cellars.

Maxim thought of asking if the bomber's crew had bailed out, but decided it might be tactless.

"She didn't actually get killed by The Bomber," Scholz went on. "She died later. Oh, there would be seven or eight who died later, in hospital."

Maxim sat for a while, absorbing that thought. "She didn't die here then?"

"That's what he said." Brenner sounded testy.

"You didn't help take her to hospital, or anything?"

Scholz took out a meerschaum pipe that was burned to a dark orange and blew through it. "The Americans did that. They were quick with it, too. Their medical service was probably the best thing about their Army."

Maxim glanced at him sharply and Scholz smiled a slow smile back. "I was in the Army then. Field engineers. But I picked up glandular fever and liver trouble in Italy that winter and I was still at home on sick leave when the whole thing finished. So… I just privately discharged myself and let the Americans think I'd been here all along. " Maxim instinctively smiled at him, then despised himself for the silly band-of-brother-soldiers stuff. Anyway, they didn't know he was a soldier.

"Do you know how badly she was hurt?", Brenner burst out: "No, we don't! D'you think when The Bomber came down it just killed twenty people and left the rest of us drinking Korn and singing fal-lal-lal? It blew the whole village upside down. They took another twenty people to hospital and I had the dairy roof down on my back and it took them two hours to dig me out. I was in bed for a week with concussion and the doctor said at first he thought I'd got a broken pelvis. And my leg's never been properly better since. No, I don't know how badly she was hurt. Just badly enough to die, I imagine."

Scholz listened gravely, taking pinches of tobacco and pressing each gently into the pipe with his thumb, then sucking noisily to make sure it wasn't too tight. "I think I remember seeing her. She got it in the back of the neck. With neck wounds you can't tell, it could be nothing or everything. Her husband, Rainer, he wasn't hit but he went in with them. He spoke the best English. Then he came back the next day – I think it was the next day – and told us who'd died. Then hecame again a couple of days after and took the baby. "

"He just took it away?" Maxim was surprised. "It was only five months, wasn't it?"

Scholz lit his pipe and puffed quickly. "What else should he do? We couldn't look after it forever. He said he was going off to find his sister. It wasn't easy, travelling, in those days, but it wasn't as if he belonged here anyway."

"Who arranged things like the death certificates?"

Brenner said: "How should we remember who arranged them? I was in bed the whole week. You may say the Americans were wonderful with their ambulances but they didn't pay for the dairy and half the animals were dead already or had to be slaughtered. It was an American bomber. But the English would have been worse."

"It was Rainerwho did that," Scholz said unperturbed, as if Brenner had never spoken. "I remember him going about the village, collecting the details, the birth certificates and things. He was good with forms, dealing with the bureaucrats. "

"He was a scholar," Brenner said, banging his hand on the stick again.

"And you never saw him after that?"

"Why should we?" Brenner wanted to know. "He wasn't one of the village."

Scholz was wearing that wise, reflective look that pipe-smokers get or act on the few occasions their pipes are working well. "There was somebody else asking about him, or her. A few weeks ago. "

"I didn't meet them. " Brenner sounded offended.

"Neither did 1.1 forget who told me; probably somebody in town. Would you know who it was?"

Maxim tried for an expression of indifference – tried desperately. Of course Mrs Howard must have been asking around. You know, the one whose driving-licence picture was in the paper, she'd been shot, wasn't she asking about the Schickerts? And now there's this Englishman asking about them: will you ring the police or shall I?