Audrey Magee - The Undertaking

But would she want him like that? A man who had surrendered. Would she forgive him and explain it fairly to their son? Tell him that his father had been starving to death in the Russian snow, abandoned. That nobody was coming. No Führer. No general. His chest tightened and he dug his hand under his tunic to massage the skin over his heart, in light circles, his fingers dipping between each rib, tears running from his eyes. After all he had done. His shoulders heaved in the flickering darkness.

He slept for a while, woke, and went outside. He took off his hats again, his scarves. Freezing his head. Freezing his thoughts. Everything white. No blame. No guilt. A bright white nothingness. No past. No future. He pulled on his hats, went back inside and sat beside Faustmann.

‘I’m going to get some soup.’

‘I see.’

‘Are you coming?’

‘No.’

‘We’re dying here.’

‘I know that.’

‘And you hate this war. This regime.’

‘I hate that one too.’

‘But you’re a communist.’

‘Wrong again, Faber.’

‘So what are you?’

‘Like you said. Dying.’

‘But politically?’

‘What’s the point, Faber? There is no point.’

Faber started to cry.

‘I have to. For my wife and son.’

‘You fought for them, and now you’ll surrender for them. They’re lucky to have you.’

‘I want to be a father.’

‘Good luck, then. Just don’t expect soup.’

‘They said they’ve got soup for us.’

‘That’s what Hitler said, and you believed him too.’

‘You’re a very cynical man.’

‘I’m a dying man, Faber.’

‘You can save yourself.’

‘Run along, Faber. I’m better off here.’

‘Why?’

‘They’ll shoot me.’

‘They won’t.’

‘To them, I’m Russian in a German uniform.’

‘They’ll find a use for you.’

‘A traitor’s bullet, Faber.’

‘Maybe not. Come with me, Faustmann.’

‘I’ll wait here. It seems appropriate.’

‘How can any of this be appropriate?’

‘I can’t be a Russian in Germany any more, or a German in Russia. Here is as good a place as any other. A bit of Russia owned by Germany.’

‘But what are you waiting for? You’ll die, Faustmann.’

‘And you won’t, Faber?’

‘I might not.’

‘You’ll wish you had.’

Faber wiped his eyes and pulled his knees to his chest.

‘Do you feel guilt, Faustmann?’

‘For what?’

‘For turning on your own people.’

‘Which are my own people, Faber?’

‘I feel guilt.’

‘The self-indulgence of the loser. You never felt guilt when you were winning.’

‘I didn’t have time.’

‘But you start to lose and you feel sentimental.’

‘Is that all guilt is, Faustmann? Sentimentality?’

‘No, not for you, Faber. It’s worse for you. You want the guilt to absolve you. Just like you want your wife and child to absolve you. Once absolved, you can kill or take soup.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Then what is?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’d better go. Get that soup.’

Faber reached his hand out to Faustmann. They shook.

‘Goodbye, Faustmann. Good luck.’

‘Good luck, Faber. I hope they give you soup.’

‘You do?’

‘Just find a way to survive without it.’

Faber wore all the blankets and coats he could find, even those covered in shit, and left, his back close to straight as he moved through the rubble to the river, to a walkway of branches frozen into the ice. His feet slipped, threatening to tumble him, but he remained upright, the air crisp and clean, purged of death and decay.

He realized that there were men on either side of him, shuffling, heads down, staring at the ice, refusing to look at each other, to observe each other’s surrender. A shot cut through the air. The man on Faber’s right fell forward, blood gushing from the back of his head. Faber stopped, registered the direction of the bullet, and ran, forcing the stiffness from his limbs as he fled east, tears streaming down his face. He wanted soup. That was all. And to see his son. To hold his wife. He ran faster, away from them, towards the laughing Russians banging spoons against metal bowls, cheering him on. He laughed too and reached his arms higher into the air, smiling in response to their smiles as he approached a large, black cooking pot. They beckoned him forward. He looked in. Chunks of meat and vegetables were simmering at the surface. He dropped his arms and cupped his hands, begging for their food. They laughed even harder, gold teeth flashing in the afternoon sun, and took his belts and wristwatch. He let them, and begged again. They put a gun to his back and steered him away from the pot, away from the smell of simmering beef. Away from the soup.

They pushed him to a post and barbed-wire pen erected on an open plain of snow. The guards rolled back a section of the fence. He hesitated. They pressed guns against his back, and he moved forward, staring at the snow covering his boots, declining to look at the other Germans, the huddle of frosted eyelashes, stooped shoulders and sunken faces encased in fraying army blankets, each appearing more like a woman at the end of her life than a man at the beginning of his.

He stood apart, detached, certain that his reason for surrender, his wife and child, was more valid than theirs, almost heroic rather than cowardly, maintaining a distance from them until the snow and wind arrived, until he needed their warmth.

He wormed his way into the huddle and remained there for several hours, motionless, almost indifferent to death or salvation but wishing for one or the other to silence the noise in his head, the terrible realization that Faustmann had been right.

He wanted to cry, but decided that required too much energy and fell asleep instead, on his feet, until the prisoners shuffled, slowly at first, then frantically, rushing at the fence, at the guard who banged his gun against a metal bucket, shouting ‘bread, bread’. It was dark, but the camp light illuminated the arc of his arm as he catapulted the bread over the fence, a pig farmer doling out the scraps from his table. Faber surged forward and threw himself on top of the other men, punched and kicked as hard as they did, bit too, and secured four pieces, one of them quite large, all of them hard. He stuffed them into his pockets and scurried, rat-like, to a quiet part of the pen to spit saliva on the crust, to suck and soften, ignoring the pain in his teeth, his cramping stomach, the sobbing of men left without any, relishing instead the surge of heat through his blood that made him sleepy and giddy until his temperature plummeted and he shivered, suddenly furiously hungry, desperate for something hot, the promised soup, anything to push away the cold and hunger, to push away the moans of the dying, the bodies of the already dead, to push away the realization that he was next, that he was standing in that grey space between death and life.

When morning came, he was surprised that he was still alive. Frozen and stiff, too numb even to shiver, but alive. The guards opened the pen and he joined a line that led to bread and sausage, silent and orderly. He ate and slipped again into the queue, pleased when they gave him more. And grateful.

They herded the men together, shot some of them and marched the rest further east, away from Stalingrad, their ignominy captured by a newspaper man with a camera perched in the snow, its bulb flashing.

She didn’t need food, but she went anyway, joining the early morning queue, dressed, like the other women, in black, her eyes, like theirs, red and swollen, her hair, unlike theirs, fashionably styled and her face freshly made-up.