Hugo Hamilton - The Last Shot

Bertha Sommer realized what it felt like to have luck on her side. She still had her three cases. And her life. All she had collected that night was a large pain in her right leg. Back in her seat she noticed the pain for the first time. Perhaps the sheer worry about survival was enough to anaesthetize it before that. When the train began to roll through the French night once more, Bertha finally got a chance to look at her leg. She rolled up her red dress and found a large blue bruise along the outside of her thigh. It was the size of a dinner plate, from the hip down, and around to her bottom. How it happened, she had no idea. She had no recollection of falling or banging into anything.

The girls in her compartment began to inspect her thigh. They had never seen such a big bruise before. How did it happen? It became a talking point. It was such a remarkable injury that the news travelled up along the carriages and Bertha repeatedly had to raise her dress to show other girls, bereaved girls whom she could not refuse. ‘Mein Gott, Bertha!’ they all exclaimed, staring at her rich, dark bruise, the size of an oval-shaped platter under the yellowish light of the carriage.

More girls came to look. What beautiful underwear, too, one of them remarked. Bertha got fed up putting her leg on display. It was nothing, she said. A war souvenir. She only agreed to show it for the last time as a concession to the Frühling sisters, who had lost everything somewhere on the edge of the forest near Liège. And while Bertha raised her dress once more, an officer passed by and put his head into the compartment.

‘Looks very nasty,’ he said, smiling.

Bertha was startled to hear his voice. She pulled her dress down and sat in her seat, refusing to look at the officer. He moved on after one of the girls said it was all right. Bertha was shocked to think that she had shown her bruise to a man. An officer. On a train.

Anke’s baby boy arrived in October, just after I had left on that trip to Czechoslovakia. I was away for a month in all, because I stopped in Nuremberg as well on the way back. As soon as I got back to Düsseldorf I found the card from Anke and Jürgen Lamprecht in the post. It was a printed card with a drawing of a stork carrying a baby bearing the announcement of their son Alexander.

I rang Anke at home to congratulate her. Anke rang me back later that same morning and arranged to meet me at a café in the centre of town.

She embraced me as usual, officially. She smiled that half-smile, but I could see she had something serious on her mind. Maybe I thought she looked a bit pale. We sat down for coffee outside a restaurant on the main shopping street. The weather was still quite warm. Why hadn’t she brought the baby for me to see? She said I would have to drop around myself, some evening. She would arrange it. After that, Anke was unusually quiet.

I began to talk about my trip to Prague. I told her how I had found a restaurant there with a bar of soap chained to the sink in the wash-room. And how the restaurant served a variety of dishes, including liver soup and a dish called ‘Ovary’. I took out a present of a Czech tube of toothpaste which I said I had bought especially for her. It was as hard as a metal bar. Normally Anke would have laughed at that. She said nothing. She looked at the toothpaste and then placed it on the table beside her coffee.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

Anke started crying. She cried to herself almost. As though she was alone.

What struck me as remarkable was that Anke never moved. She didn’t move her hands to stop the tears. She stayed sitting back, legs crossed, arms languishing over the armrests, allowing the tears to run down her face as though it was perfectly normal. It was as though there was nobody around. Then she began to explain quite rationally that there was something wrong with the baby.

‘Alexander has Down’s Syndrome,’ she said, making the first effort to remove the tears with a finger. Finally, she took a Kleenex from her bag.

I said I was sorry. I took her hand and said it again. I could think of nothing else to say. At the table next to us, there were two old women who kept looking at Anke. One of them had one of those little Spitz dogs tied on a lead to the leg of the table. He too was looking up at us, and when I looked back at him, he barked. I felt like kicking him.

I asked questions. Said some more ineffectual things and told Anke not to blame herself. She seemed not to hear me. She asked if these things usually skip a generation or what? I had no answer. I eventually took her back to her car and watched her drive away, crying.

Jürgen rang me a day later with a complete medical analysis. He could cope with it better. He was used to it as a doctor, as a gynaecologist. He told me straight out, there was no logic to it. But they would care for Alexander like any other child. No question. They would love him all the more.

Then he announced that Anke and himself had decided to move to Münster, where he was going to take over his father’s practice. It seemed like the right decision.

A month later, they were gone.

The trains still ran in the Reich. Through the latter part of the war, Bertha Sommer got to see every part of Germany from the windows of a train, travelling from one post to the next, hoping, like most other German girls, to avoid being sent to the Eastern Front. At one point, Bertha managed to feign an illness which kept her at home for some months. Late in 1944, when she could no longer get away with it, she was sent to a large camp outside Hamburg where thousands of young German women waited to be posted, mostly to Poland and Russia. Rumours went around that women had to dig the trenches. In Russia, the German girls were already knee-deep in mud.

Bertha was lucky, so far. It was God on her side. She delayed wherever she could. In December 1944 she stretched her Christmas leave and arrived two days late in Salzburg to find that her group had already departed for the East. Her name was on the missing list. She met with the anger of officers who didn’t know what to do with her and was eventually sent to Prague on New Year’s Eve.

There was frost everywhere. The journey continued in the afternoon, when Bertha was put on a train and placed in a compartment with a young soldier. The compartment was locked. There was no heating on. She had disobeyed the orders of the Reich and could only expect the worst.

It was only when the train had been rolling for a while through the white land that she looked around her and discovered that the soldier with her in the compartment was no more than fifteen or sixteen. He was chained to the seat. A deserter. It made her feel like a deserter too. During the entire journey, neither of them spoke a word, each fearing that the other was an informer, or that a normal conversation would combine them in some conspiracy. Bertha was afraid.

‘What did we imagine?’ she later wrote in her diary. ‘Our fears were simple and absolute…

‘Every time I wanted to go to the bathroom I had to call the guard to unlock the door. It made me feel like a criminal. Every time the boy had to go, they unlocked his chains and went with him. Were they afraid he would throw himself off the train? He was so young. He had just begun to grow a moustache. The whole idea was so idiotic. The effort to get this boy back to the Front took up the full attention of three grown-up soldiers.’

Somewhere along the way, at a small station in the mountains, the train stopped for a long time, at least an hour. There were trees all round, heavy bags of snow weighing on the branches. When the train moved on slowly, they moved past a timber-yard at the back of the station where Bertha saw something she never forgot.