Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

All of a sudden, he realised he was shaking, and a spasm ran through his stomach. He glanced quickly around the bar, but no one was paying him any attention, and he folded his arms tightly, pressing his hands to his sides. He hunched around the blaze of stress and confusion and frustration that burned in the pit of his belly and drew a long, ragged breath through his clenched teeth. It was coming up to midnight, and he realised how tired he was and how much he had absorbed that day.

‘Enough,’ he said to himself. ‘Enough.’ When he felt steady, he left and crossed the courtyard over to his wing and took the stairs up to his second-floor room. With a trembling hand he pushed the door open to the bathroom and pulled on the light. The bulb flickered on, steadying slowly. Showers to the left, behind a wall of cracked white tiles. Toilet stalls to the right, the toilets mere squats, holes with footrests to either side. A line of sinks down the middle of the room with mirrors in front of them.

His stomach cramped, and he winced. He hunched over a sink, but nothing came up. He ran water and splashed his face, wetting the back of his neck, and drank his fill. Settling his fists, he stared at himself in the dull mirror. He looked dreadful. His face was drawn and lined, a drab fuzz of stubble furring his cheeks, his eyes sunk far back and the whites yellow in the vapid glow of the bulb.

He felt the bile rising again and hung his head over the sink, breathing hoarsely through his nose, waiting. Nothing came up, but he felt something. His skin began to crawl. He lifted his head, sniffing the air like an animal, and found it. That acrid tang. The same one he had smelled outside Vukic’s house. He drew his pistol as he lurched around, his eyes stabbing along the line of stalls. One by one, he pushed the doors open onto nothing, only the stained round hole in the floor, until he came to the end, to the one he often used. There was a window there, there was light during the day, and the smell of men’s waste and the carbolic slop the cleaners used was not quite so strong. He pushed the door open. The smell was there. There was a sprinkling of ash down the angle of floor and wall, and there, floating in the water at the bottom of the hole, a finger’s length of what looked like cardboard. He fished it out with two fingers. A cardboard filter. A Belomorkanal papirosa.

He backed hurriedly out, hastening back to his room. Feeling in his pocket for his key he saw something. Felt it, more than saw it, he realised, as he leaned over to look at his door. There was just light enough to show him the several small, bright strikes of metal to either side of the keyhole. Glints, where something had been put into the keyhole, and moved around. Someone had tried to force his door. Perhaps had succeeded.

He told himself whoever it was, they were gone now. He unlocked the door and pushed it open with his foot, sweeping the room with his pistol. The room was empty and, as far as he could see in the light coming in the window, had not been disturbed. Taking a quick glance up and down the corridor again, he went inside and locked the door, shoving his ladderback chair up under the door handle.

Whatever strength had held him together until then, it began to slough away like sand in the tide. He lurched across the room and fumbled open the drawer on the little table by his bed, lifting out Carolin’s picture in its silver frame. He clutched it to his chest and slid down into the corner opposite the door, drawing his knees up, and, dragging the air into his lungs, he willed the panic, and the stress, and all the pent-up emotions of the day to pass. But as much as he wished for it, he dreaded the sleep that would follow, and the dream that now haunted him, nearly every night.

It is a cool day for October, but his head feels cooked inside his helmet, and his shirt inside the battledress tunic is stuck to his back with sweat. He stands by the side of the road where the Feldgendarmerie have ordered them to stop. Smoke broods over the town; there is the rattle and clatter of gunfire. Here, there, women huddle in desperate groups bounded by the anguished lines of their backs and shoulders, fists clenched at their mouths.

He walks away from where Freilinger argues with the Feld shy;gendarmerie. He turns a corner, another. Doors stand open. A length of fabric hangs torn out of a smashed shutter. The smell of burning is strong. Faces twitch at him from the darkness within houses, from behind the sheen of a window, from behind the folds of a curtain. Another corner, then another, and there is a field, the hassocks stiff with frost, the ground hard and tufted. There are soldiers, and lines of men and boys, just schoolboys with, here and there, the taller figures of their teachers. They are ordered into the field, class by class, the younger ones hand in hand, some crying, some walking bravely. Most just stare at the back of the person in front of them with the fixed resignation of those already dead.

And there, a moment that comes perhaps once in a lifetime. A pivot, around which a life can turn. A line of children, a row of soldiers, people moving, a swirl in the crowd, and two boys at the end of the line are left alone. Brothers, twins perhaps, they stand small and lost and wide-eyed in each other’s arms as the crowd eddies around them. He sees them, and they him, and he has but to reach out to them and he can take them away from here. He knows it, they know it, he sees himself doing it – he feels himself doing it – but the boys are gone, taken away. The moment is past, a fading outline of possibilities.

They are all gone, pressed and herded into the field, lined up in front of the ditches with the earth turned fresh and black behind them, and Reinhardt is moving forward, pushing men from his way, but they are heavy, immobile. He comes up behind the rank of soldiers as they raise their rifles, their shoulders swivelling. The crash of gunfire, the screams. Officers step down into the ditch. There is the crack-crack of their pistols. Somewhere nearby, the field is burning; smoke eddies slow and heavy, lying indolently atop the stench of blood and bowel.

A moment of stillness, and calm. It was a pivot, that moment, around which a life can turn. Or a nail, from which it could hang itself.

18

WEDNESDAY

He woke with a ragged, tearing intake of breath. The smell of the smoke faded away, but he knew that as long as he lived he would never forget that day in October, in Kragujevac, behind the barracks at Stanovija Polje, when more than two thousand men and boys were executed in reprisal for a Partisan ambush that had killed and wounded some thirty Germans.

It was early morning, and he already felt drained, empty. He winced from the pain of his bladder as he straightened his legs, uncurling himself from the corner. His left knee was stiff and painful, his eyes full of sand from lack of sleep. He cleaned himself up as well as he could, avoiding his eyes in the mirror as he shaved as well as his shaking hand would allow. Downstairs, his breakfast tasted like ashes. More and more, what was within him seemed to leach out into the waking world. That, or the madness the world seemed to have sunk into was leaking in. He did not know anymore, but it was the dream that seemed to symbolise, for him, the predicament he found himself in. A man who loved his country, but who hated what it had become. A man who had found friendships stronger than anything he could have imagined in the army, but who could no longer stand the sight of the uniform he wore. Not for the first time, he longed for someone to confide in, but of the three people with whom he might have done so – Carolin, Meissner, and Brauer – one was dead and the other two far away.