Heinz Rein - Berlin Finale

Klose had been listening carefully. ‘All very lovely, son,’ he says, ‘but what happens now?’

Lassehn shrugs his narrow shoulders. ‘I don’t have any particular plan,’ he replies. ‘The war can’t go on for much longer, our men are completely finished. Once the Russkis get going at the Oder…’

‘That’s exactly what I think,’ Klose agrees, ‘but let’s leave high strategy aside for a moment and address the burning question of the day. Where are you going to stay? Where do your parents live?’

Lassehn lowers his head. ‘My parents died in the big raid on Lankwitz in forty-three,’ he says quietly.

There is a short pause. Klose shrugs slowly as if to express regret, then he gets up and turns on the radio. ‘Let’s see how things are in the air,’ he says.

‘…at the gong it will be two minutes past two. Here is the air report. Over Reich territory there are no hostile fighting units. I repeat. Over Reich territory…’

‘The impudence of it,’ Klose says, ‘over Reich territory. That should be over what’s still left of Reich territory.’

‘…no hostile fighting units. The army report follows. Führer’s headquarters, fourteenth of April. Wehrmacht Supreme Command…’

‘Let’s see what they’re going to serve us up with today,’ Klose says.

‘The most important bit is the front line at the Oder,’ Lassehn says, ‘the calm – there…’

‘Shut up!’ says Klose. ‘Just listen!’

‘At the front leading to the Stettin Lagoon, in the Bay of Danzig and in Kurland no particular combat operations have been under way.

On the Elbe the enemy managed to gain a foothold after violent battles with weakened forces south-east of Magdeburg on the eastern shore of the river. In central Germany the Americans have advanced further with attacks to the north and the south-east. Reconnaissance units have explored the zone around the Saale near Halle and the zone around Zeitz.’

Klose contemptuously switches off the radio. ‘We know the rest,’ he says furiously, ‘we know it all too well. “The attack was victoriously repelled, but sadly the town was lost.”’ He turns again to Lassehn, who is propped up on arms spread wide on the table and looking stiffly down in front of him, and taps him on the shoulder a few times with an outstretched index finger. ‘Don’t let yourself go, son,’ he says, ‘don’t go soft on me.’

Lassehn looks at him through glistening eyes. ‘It’s over, Mr Klose.’ Klose sits down again.

‘Have you absolutely no relatives in Berlin?’ he asks.

A small, hesitant smile plays on Lassehn’s face.

‘Relatives? No, or rather I do, in fact…’ He pauses noticeably. ‘A woman, in fact.’

‘Please don’t beat around the bush, Joachim,’ says Klose, smiling sympathetically. ‘You mean a fiancée or a girlfriend, a little sex kitten for cuddles. Am I right?’

‘Not this time, Mr Klose,’ Lassehn says seriously. ‘As I said: a woman. I’m actually married.’

‘Lad, lad,’ says Klose, and shakes his head. ‘Whatever for?’

‘A strange question, Mr Klose, and a difficult one to answer.’

‘Great love and all that, I get it.’

Lassehn shakes his head very slightly. ‘Great love?’, he says thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know if it was great love. A few months before I was injured I went on leave, I was very alone. I have no friends and have always been a bit of a loner, my friends were Bach and Beethoven and Chopin. Until then women played no part in my life at all, then I met her, and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by loneliness and the hateful duty of having to go back to the front… You know, Mr Klose, when you’re that far up the creek in the end you don’t care about anything, but when you’ve wiped it off and reacquainted yourself with cleanliness, the idea of having to go back into it… So I just needed someone for me who could be something like a target for my thoughts, desires and longings, within me there awoke a burning desire for female tenderness, the desire to disappear entirely into another human being, it was…’

Lassehn breaks off and looks quizzically at Klose. ‘I hope I’m not boring you, Mr Klose, I’m sure you’re not used to…’

‘I’m used to all kinds of things! Just go on talking, my boy,’ Klose says encouragingly. ‘You speak almost like a poet, it’s different and I’m enjoying it, so keep going.’

Lassehn nods gratefully. ‘It’s good to be able to express myself for once. Yes, so it wasn’t just that, it was also to some extent a desire to have somewhere for one’s thoughts to go, when you were lying out in snow and dirt and ice again, when life seemed more worthless than everything else in the world, when the only words you ever got to hear were rough yokel conversations, about scoffing and boozing, about women and about… Come on, you know yourself, Mr Klose, you were a soldier. Yes, then I met Irmgard and fell in love with her, as I would probably have fallen in love with any other girl, simply because I was ready. I should imagine she felt something similar, and the same evening we had agreed that we would marry while I was still on leave. Things like that go through quite quickly when they’ve got the papers to hand, and they didn’t look too closely at leave marriages. Well, we got married, and it didn’t change much in either of our lives, I went back to the front, my wife stayed living with her aunt and went on doing her job… Yes, that’s it in fact.’

Klose rocks his head back and forth. ‘Lad, lad,’ he says at last and exhales noisily. ‘Just for a bit of… you do know you don’t actually have to get married?’

‘But Mr Klose,’ Lassehn protests, ‘I’ve already told you it wasn’t that.’

‘You aren’t about to change my mind, son,’ Klose says energetically. ‘Wasn’t there another way of winning her over?’

‘That did have something to do with it,’ Lassehn admits, ‘but it wasn’t the crucial thing.’

‘So how old is this little wife of yours?’

‘Twenty-three.’

Klose nods a few times. ‘She’ll have enjoyed being the young bride. And besides’ – Klose looks Lassehn closely in the eye – ‘I can imagine that you’re quite a handsome fellow when you’re clean-shaven and nicely turned out, there’s something of the artist about you, and girls like that. Well, she married you. And what is marriage nowadays? These days people get married the way they used to strike up friendships, it doesn’t even matter. Marriage today is worth just as much as the whole Nazi state. But there’s one thing I’m completely clear about: you barely know your wife, it couldn’t be otherwise.’

‘You’re right, Mr Klose,’ says Lassehn, ‘the few days we still have left…’

‘Yes, I get it,’ Klose laughs, ‘out of bed, into bed and in between honeymoon sweet nothings. You know your wife’s legs, her bosom, her cute little nose and other lovely things, but you haven’t the faintest notion what’s going on in her mind. Is that true or am I right?’

Lassehn looks at Klose in surprise and nods. ‘It’s amazing, Mr Klose, how you can…’

Klose chuckles. ‘Nothing is amazing, but old Klose doesn’t come from Dummsdorf, he comes from Rixdorf, and only clever little boys are born there. I understand you, music student Joachim Lassehn, you wanted to do some proper living before you went back to Vorenezh, before you allowed yourself to be thrown back into the lottery drum of death. I felt exactly the same when I came home on leave from France, I cooked up a storm and threw all my money around till there wasn’t a cent. When life and death are as closely bound together as they are in wartime, you draw on life as if it were a spring, you don’t want to waste a single drop. You’ve probably been a bit more civilized about it than I was, but if you look closely it was the same thing.’