Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

Lotti was in a stall among several others, all of them empty except hers. She watched the old man approach, turning her head so she could see with her good eye.

She had won prizes in her day. A medal from the 1935 Agricultural Fair in Sandvig still hung from an old nail above her stall. ‘Lotti – Beste Kuh,’ it said.

Per stopped in front of the cow. ‘Lotti,’ he said solemnly, ‘I have to kill you now.’

The cow just looked at him and chewed.

After setting down the lantern, Per leaned upon the gun as if it were a cane. Why is this so hard for me, he wondered, but even as the thought passed through his mind, he knew the answer. The death of this animal would mark the end of his life as a farmer. And if he was no longer a farmer, then what was he? What purpose was there left for him in life? And if he served no purpose, then what point was there in going on at all?

At that moment, it would almost have been easier for Per to shoot himself than it would have been to put a bullet through the forehead of that temperamental cow.

Exhausted by such unforgiving thoughts, the old man sat down on a bale of hay. ‘To hell with everything,’ he sighed.

‘I knew you couldn’t do it,’ said a voice. It was Ole. Hearing no shots fired, he had come to check on his brother and now stood in the doorway, arms folded, with a disapproving frown upon his face.

‘I was just . . . collecting myself,’ Per replied defensively.

‘No, you weren’t.’

Per stared at the ground. ‘I’m damned if I will shoot this cow.’ He held out the gun to his brother. ‘You can do it.’

But Ole made no move to take the rifle. The truth was he couldn’t do it either. ‘God will take her when he’s ready,’ he announced.

Per rose to his feet, shouldered the gun on its tired leather sling, picked up the lantern and followed his brother out into the barnyard.

At that moment, both men saw what they simultaneously perceived to be a shooting star, so perfectly reflected in the ice which covered the barnyard that there appeared to be not one but two meteors, each one racing towards the other on a collision course.

This was followed by a roar of wind, like one of the katabatic gusts which sometimes blew in off the Baltic, wrenching trees out of the ground and knocking over chimney pots.

The ground shook.

Both men stumbled and fell.

The lantern slipped from Per’s grasp and broke upon the ground, sending a splash of blazing kerosene across the ground, which flickered yellow to orange to blue and finally sizzled away into the melting ice.

Then out of the darkness came a thumping, clattering shower of roof tiles, old nails, pitchforks and smouldering bales of hay.

The brothers cowered, speechless, as the trappings of their life crashed down around them.

When this barrage had finally ceased, Per and Ole climbed shakily to their feet and stared at a wall of dust, even blacker than the night, rising from where the barn had been only a moment before.

As the dust began to clear, and stars winked out of the gloom, they realised that their barn had been completely destroyed. Somewhere in that tangle of charred beams and splintered planks was Lotti. Or what was left of her. There was nothing to be done about it now.

‘God did not waste any time,’ remarked Ole.

‘He might have been a little less heavy-handed,’ said Per, as the two men returned to their house.

A few hours later, just as the first rays of dawn began to glimmer off the rooftops of Berlin, a man named Rochus Misch was woken by the telephone.

Misch opened his eyes. By the pale light which filtered in through his curtains, he noticed that the crack in his ceiling had spread. When it first appeared, back in January, after a British 10-ton bomb known as a Grand Slam had obliterated an apartment block three streets away, Misch had simply painted over the crack. One week later, the crack reappeared after another bomb, this time from an American B-17 flying daylight raids over the city, knocked out power to the entire suburb of Karlshorst. This time, Misch just left the crack alone. It was a rented flat, after all. In the weeks that followed, the crack meandered in a crooked path across the chiffon-yellow paint, travelling like a slow-moving lightning bolt from one end of the ceiling to the other. For Misch, its relentless progress seemed to take on hidden meaning. The closer it came to the opposite end of the ceiling from which it had begun, the more Misch became convinced that when it finally arrived, something momentous would take place.

It was almost there. Holding out his arm and clenching his hand into a fist, Misch measured that the crack had only three knuckle-lengths to go before it reached its destination. What happened then had become the stuff of Misch’s nightmares which, like the crack itself across the once-clear field of yellow paint, had worked their way into his waking thoughts until it seemed as if they must consume his mind entirely.

The phone rang again.

Still half asleep, he tossed aside the crumpled sheets and made his way down the hall to where the phone stood on a wooden table, its battered finish partially hidden by a place mat crocheted with the red, white and black design of the National Socialist flag. The phone rested on the white circle in the middle of the flag, concealing all but the outer edges of the swastika, which jutted like the legs of a huge, squashed spider from beneath the heavy casing of the phone.

Misch picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello? Who is there?’

There was no answer. In fact, the line was dead.

Mystified, he put the phone down again and glanced at his watch. It was 6 a.m., a full two hours before he had to report for work. That gave him another half-hour of lying in bed. Maybe he could fall asleep. Or maybe he’d just stare at the crack in the ceiling.

Misch had almost reached the bed when the phone jangled yet again.

Muttering a curse, he spun around and stared at it, as if daring it to make another sound.

As the last shadows of sleep drifted from his mind, Misch realised that something was wrong. The phone wasn’t actually ringing, at least not in the way it normally did. Instead, after the initial high-pitched rattle of bells, its tone faded out almost apologetically, as if something other than an incoming call was causing the disturbance.

At that moment, Misch felt a faint vibration through the worn-out socks he always wore to bed. It was only because he was standing still that he felt it at all. But the bells inside the telephone responded faintly and at last Misch understood that this vibration was the cause.

But what, in turn, was causing the vibration?

Misch walked over to the window, drew the heavy velvet blackout curtains and rested his hand against the window pane. He felt it, like a weak electric charge, trembling through his skin. It was too early in the morning for an air raid. The RAF night bombers were usually gone by about 2 or 3 a.m. and the Americans rarely arrived before noon. Besides, he had heard no sirens to indicate that he should head down to the shelter in the basement.

And suddenly he remembered a day, back in the autumn of 1939 when, as part of an armoured column making its way across Poland, his column had passed by a huge snub-barrelled cannon being transported on its own railway tracks to the outskirts of Warsaw. In white Sutterlin-script letters as tall as a man he read the cannon’s name – Thor. That night, as Misch sat beside a fire made of willow branches, poking the embers with the remains of a Polish cavalry lance from the obliterated Pomorske Cavalry Brigade, he had felt the same trembling of the earth beneath his feet. It was the sound of Thor, launching its 4,700-pound shells at the Polish capital. He had been told that a single shell from that gun could destroy an entire city block.