Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“Including yours.”

“Naturally including mine. In a few months’ time, when the war is over, and you’re dead or in a Soviet labor camp, and Irmela and I are safely in Germany, you’ll wonder why you didn’t cooperate sooner. The fact is, we could have arranged for your passage home, too. I could have used a good man to help me guard all that priceless amber. So, do I have your cooperation, or not?”

Through all that he said, even through his white smiles and his smooth laughter and total confidence that I would meekly do exactly what he said, I knew that one day, in an unimaginable tomorrow’s world to which I knew I might never belong, I would see him again and pay him back in kind for everything he had done. For a moment the threat of some nebulous future revenge tried to form itself in my mouth and I even took a breath to give these futile words air. Instead, recognizing my impotence, I said nothing and I even think I must have nodded my quiet and spineless assent. The things you do for a woman.

Hennig buttoned up his tunic and then fetched his greatcoat and his cap.

“Shall we go?”

FRENCH RIVIERA

1956

The red beam from the lighthouse tracked across the Villa Mauresque as if searching the blue night sky for an enemy bomber to target but finding only me and Somerset Maugham seated side by side, next to the almost motionless swimming pool, and alerting each of us to the possibility that one of us might bring some as yet unknown harm to the other. He remained very still, and whenever the red light crossed his creased features, turning them the color of blood, he reminded me of a sort of vampire. I had been silent for a long moment and the old Englishman was sensitive enough to see that I had been much affected by the telling of this painful story-more affected than I could have imagined. It had been more than ten years, after all, and I hadn’t even got to the good bit.

“It’s been a while since I talked about it,” I told him. “If it comes to that, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it. Frankly, it’s not the sort of thing you bring up over a beer and a sausage.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I tapped a fingernail against the cocktail gong. It sounded just like my heart. Or so I wanted to believe. How else was I going to finish my story? I swallowed hard and kept on going.

“Konigsberg was surrendered to the Russians on April ninth, nineteen forty-five, after which I and ninety thousand other German soldiers were marched off into captivity. Me, I was one of the lucky ones. Someone helped me to escape, in nineteen forty-seven. Most of us died, however. I believe General Lasch was only repatriated about nine months ago. Meanwhile, the city was renamed Kaliningrad in July nineteen forty-six, in honor of some murderous Bolshevik, and cleansed of its entire German population. Many of those people unfortunate enough not to have fled the city were just forced into the countryside, where they starved or died of the cold. Today the only Germans left there are probably the statues of Immanuel Kant and Schiller.”

“But what happened to Irmela? What happened when she reached Germany? You can’t end the story there. Surely you haven’t finished.”

“I have if you want a happy ending.”

“I don’t like happy endings. I like an ending to be ambiguous because that’s the way life is. But wait a moment. Where’s the happy ending in you being sent off to a Soviet labor camp? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I? That’s about as happy as this story gets, I’m afraid.”

Maugham nodded. “Beginnings are much more enjoyable, it’s true. I sometimes think that novelists should never be allowed to write their own endings. Because this is where fiction p-parts company with reality. In real life we never actually recognize when something has truly ended. Which makes wrapping up a book in just one or two chapters almost impossible.”

I nodded and lit a cigarette. I’d smoked too much and my throat felt dry-too dry to continue speaking, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me stop there. I poured another gimlet from the pitcher and swallowed it-for medicinal purposes, of course.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “we both know there’s another ending to your story that you haven’t yet shared with me. After all these years there has to be.”

I nodded again. “Yes, there is.”

“I think you’d better tell me, don’t you?”

I took a breath and dived in.

“All right, sir. After Hennig and I met with Irmela and persuaded her to send the unencrypted signal-which was more difficult than might have been thought-he lent me a car and I drove her from Konigsberg to Gotenhafen, a distance of about two hundred kilometers, along a road that was sometimes jammed with civilians trying to escape from the Red Army. Some even chose to take a shortcut across the frozen sea, often with disastrous results. Meanwhile, the weather grew steadily worse with strong winds, snow, and below-freezing temperatures. Conditions on the road were so bad we almost didn’t reach the ship before it set sail, so there was little time for a proper good-bye. I wish I’d said more to her. You always do. I suppose given the speed with which we coupled, it makes just as much sense that we should have uncoupled so quickly. Everything we did back then was done in a hurry. A last-minute thing. She kissed me quickly and then bounded up the gangway of the Wilhelm Gustloff while I stood there like a useless capstan feeling a horrible mixture of relief that she was on board and real fear that I might never see her again.

“Not that the ship looked to me to be anything but seaworthy, although I’m no sailor. Much later on I learned that for the best part of five years the Gustloff had been docked at the pier in Gotenhafen, where it had been used first as a hospital ship for German soldiers wounded in Norway, and then as a floating barracks for trainees in the submarine division of the German navy. Consequently, the ship’s engines hadn’t been in operation for all that time and most of the skeleton crew wasn’t even German, but it was only supposed to be a three-day voyage, so this didn’t seem like a problem for a ship launched in nineteen thirty-seven. And certainly not as much of a problem as the sheer number of people who had boarded her. It was hard to say how many had crowded onto the ship to escape the Russians, but some estimates put it as high as twelve thousand, including a crew of one hundred and seventy-three. Back in the day it had been designed to accommodate fourteen hundred passengers and four hundred crew. So you can imagine what the scene at Gotenhafen was like. A vision of hell, perhaps. A Dore wood engraving of the Inferno . It goes almost without saying that there were not enough lifeboats, nor were there enough life vests, and in all respects, the ship was woefully ill-prepared for any kind of emergency. With so many people on board, nearly all of the exits and gangways were blocked and there was no time to practice any emergency drills. Also there were only two escort vessels to provide some sort of protection against Russian submarines. Because of the extreme cold, one of the two escort vessels-a torpedo boat-developed a crack in its hull and was forced to return to Gotenhafen. Which left just one escort vessel. The Lowe . Not only that, but a group of German minesweepers operating in the area of the Bay of Danzig was deemed to be in danger of colliding with the Gustloff , and so a decision was taken to turn on the ship’s navigation lights. Which went against all naval practice in wartime.

“Of course, all that would have been bad enough, but after the unencrypted message that Hennig forced Irmela to send on an open radio channel, there were already three Russian submarines heading for the area when the Gustloff set sail. At the submarine base in the Finnish port of Turku, they’d heard the same open-microphone message regarding the Gustloff and the Amber Room as the Russian Baltic naval headquarters in Kronstadt, and confusion now reigned about exactly what to do next. Eventually, the captain of one Russian submarine, the S-13, sighted the Gustloff lit up like a Christmas tree, radioed HQ for further instructions, and was ordered to shadow the ship but hold fire. Because it was night, the S-13 felt safe enough to surface, and then awaited clarification regarding the Gustloff and its priceless cargo from Kronstadt HQ, which had itself been desperately seeking a final decision from the Kremlin. Finally, the Kremlin responded: At all costs the Gustloff was not to be sunk.