Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

His coffee came in a little silver pitcher on a round tray, with a small glass of water. He dropped a piece of sugar into the foam at the top of the pitcher, letting it settle in as he had seen others do. The sugar turned brown and slid into the coffee with a ripple. Quicker than it used to. The coffee seemed weaker every time he came, but it was still better than the swill they poured out in the mess. He stared slowly around himself and thought again about how, despite the fear and loathing generated by the war, and which the city’s narrow confines seemed to sometimes stir to crazed heights, despite the veiled glances that always came his way, the place sometimes still made him think of a costume party that never stopped.

The costumes he had once thought of as Eastern, as Oriental, were worn here by as wide a variety of men and women as he could never have imagined, many of them far less Oriental than the popular imagination he once was a part of would have had it. A man as blond as a Saxon went past dressed in the loose trousers and shirt that marked him as a Bosnian Muslim. There went a man in a suit and hat with the look of a lawyer who would have fit anyone’s image of a Turk back home. A dark young woman in a headscarf sitting on a step averted bright green eyes as he looked at her. The crowd was dotted with men in black suits and red fez, or white turbans, or wide-brimmed hats of Western fashion. Peasant women in veils and baggy pantaloons and slippers that curved up at the toe and stooped under heavy loads walked by, talking and laughing quietly among themselves, followed by a pair of ladies in long dresses and jackets.

From Vratnik, he heard the call to prayer begin, and he glanced up at the mosque on the corner of the square to see the muezzin climb out of the top of the minaret and cup his hands to his mouth. Behind Reinhardt, around the corner at the big Husref Bey mosque, he heard the call taken up, then heard it to the left and right on the slopes of the city. He stirred his coffee, waiting a moment for it to settle, then poured it, and worked his mind around how the murderer, or murderers, was moving around. Ilidza was a long way out, and the murders had taken place late on Saturday night. It was not that there was no traffic along that road at that time, but not much that was not military, and just about every civilian car would have been checked either by the police or by the Feldgendarmerie checkpoints at Marijin Dvor and out at Ilidza itself.

He sipped from the little white cup. The coffee was thin, slippery in his mouth, but it still felt right to be drinking it, out here on the square. The murderer drove out to Ilidza, he thought, testing the way the idea sat in his mind. Hendel drove out there. The murderer had to have left. As he saw it, that was a lot of driving, and a multiplication of risk. Kessler had told him the Feldgendarmerie had nothing in their records, but he had to see for himself. And get Padelin to do the same for the traffic police. Someone who had done what the murderer had done, it would be sure to affect you. He might have been pulled over for speeding, or driving erratically. If he had been, the Feldgendarmerie ought to have noted his plate number. The Sarajevo traffic police might have stopped him, although they would not have been able to do anything with a German and were unlikely to have made a record of any such incidents.

He sat staring at nothing for a moment, then took Brauer’s letter from his pocket. He held it by the bottom corners, then opened it slowly, pulling out two sheets of paper with Brauer’s crabbed handwriting across it. He sipped from his coffee and began reading.

Brauer was Reinhardt’s oldest and closest friend. It was not a friendship either of them had ever thought possible. Brauer was Reinhardt’s company sergeant when the young Gregor arrived on the Eastern Front in 1916. Brauer was twenty-two and already a hard-bitten veteran soldier in Meissner’s regiment. The two of them had lived and fought together for nearly four years. The Eastern Front, then the transfer into the stormtroops and assignment to the Western Front at the end of 1917 through to the end. Defeat. Retreat. Wounds. The turmoil of 1919, the drift into dissolution in 1920, then the offer of hope in the police.

If there was one bone of contention between them, unspoken for nearly all their friendship, it was the gulf in education. In the Wehr shy;macht, particularly in the army, education was key to an officer’s promotion. Reinhardt had his military college training, and his higher degrees in criminology. Brauer had a secondary school education. When Reinhardt had got over the injury he sustained in September 1918, he had been accepted into the Weimar police as an inspector, but Brauer had walked a beat for several years until at last Meissner managed to use his influence to get Brauer accepted for the test for inspector, and Reinhardt had sat and coached him for the exams.

When the time came to go back into the army, Reinhardt’s education and background had got him a captaincy. Brauer’s had secured him an NCO’s billet. In many ways, Hitler’s army had not changed from the Kaiser’s. It was still riven by divisions along class lines. Brauer had been mobilised into the infantry as an instructor. He lived in Berlin with his wife, but, he now wrote, they had moved out to the country to stay with his in-laws. The implication – unwritten, to get past the censors – was because of the bombing. Details followed, this and that, small things. Then the news that made Reinhardt go cold.

They have released more names of those fallen at Stalingrad , Brauer wrote. I am afraid Friedrich’s name is not among them.

Reinhardt slumped in his chair. His son had been with the Sixth Army. A young lieutenant in a panzergrenadier regiment. Reinhardt had not wanted his son to have a military career. But in an echo of what Marija’s mother had said that afternoon, what Reinhardt wanted had stopped being important to his son a long time ago. Much as it pained him to admit it, Reinhardt had lost his son to the Nazis. Not, he would sometimes comfort himself, that there was very much he could have done about it. Friedrich had been thirteen when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The Hitler Youth, the warping of history lessons in school, the endless parades, the oaths, the songs, the summer camps, the after-school activities, the discipline and uniforms and militarisation of school life, all produced a child increasingly alien to his parents.

It was a strange thing, Reinhardt remembered, to look at your child and look at a stranger. It was a stranger thing to feel scared of your child, to the point sometimes of not wanting to go home. There were stories in those days of children reporting on their parents. As a policeman then, he knew it sometimes happened. Father and son diverged on nearly everything, and only Carolin seemed able to maintain any sort of space where they could still, from time to time, be a family. Friedrich had watched Reinhardt’s struggle with his conscience over the politicisation of the police with contempt, and had joined up himself on his eighteenth birthday. Reinhardt had not seen or spoken to him until last year, but only followed the news from Russia with increasing worry and trepidation.

Reinhardt was pulled out of North Africa in early September, wounded when a British aircraft strafed his convoy. Recuperating in Italy, with time on his hands and his mind skirting the implications of the censored news from the east, he finally wrote to his son. The first letter in years, written with a hand that trembled. When a reply finally came several weeks later, delivered by an officer on leave and thus free of the censor’s black, Reinhardt could hardly bear to open it for fear the son still rejected the father.

Friedrich had been wounded and was recuperating at an army sanatorium on the coast of the Sea of Azov, not far from Mariupol. The letter was long, written over the space of several days, and not all of it made sense. Friedrich talked of many things. Of his war, his comrades. There were hints of things seen, and done, but not mentioned. Things perhaps too awful to contemplate. And nothing about the past. Nothing of them as a family. Reading the letter, Reinhardt could see, though, the spite and the spleen of his teenage years had been burned out of him. The Friedrich that came through the long, scrawled lines was purer, somehow. It was something Reinhardt recalled happening to him, in the first war. Everything not necessary for survival got burned away.