The end of it, p.7
The End of It, page 7
They laugh. Jochen pours the cognac. ‘You’re the mad one.’
‘It runs in the families of princes. It’s the inbreeding.’
The Junkers needs a new engine, so Jochen finds a driver and sends Heinrich home in a kübelwagen. Heinrich allows his radar operator into the back seat but forbids him to speak. He and Jochen shake hands.
‘Don’t forget, we’re both expendable,’ Heinrich says.
Jochen sends his guys to Achmer in trucks. He doesn’t want all his 109s parked in a mass with every other fighter from the area. A strafing run from a Mustang could cause havoc. He flies over to Achmer himself, though. By ten to eleven they’re all lined up in ranks on the hardstanding with their feet in the snow. He’s wearing his leather greatcoat. His Ami jacket would be inappropriate here. Goering’s Oak Leaves with Swords and Diamonds is at his throat. He’s scratched a mark on the reverse of the metal with a nail so he can tell his twins apart.
Ten minutes late, Fatty zooms up in a Mercedes limousine at the head of a column of twenty or so cars and half-tracks. Beck calls them to attention. Goering wears a comic opera uniform of a shamefully fancy design in grey, with gold all over his epaulettes and the peak of his cap, and scarlet boots of what looks like doeskin below tight breeches. He sweeps down the lines, looks into eyes, has a word here and there. A photographer follows him, taking pictures now and again. The light is poor and guys recoil a little, clearly surprised by the flash in their faces. When he gets to Jochen he reaches out to lift the Diamonds a little.
His nails are shiny. His usual varnish. There’s a flash from the camera.
‘You got it then.’
‘Yes. Thank you, sir.’
‘How are the legs?’
‘Fine, sir.’
Jochen stares back at the face. Goering is flushed. No, it’s rouge and surely that’s lipstick, too. He catches a whiff of scent as the wind swirls around them.
‘How many heavies have you got?’
‘Eleven, sir.’ Another flash.
Goering nods and goes on. Jochen follows Beck as they inspect the pilots in Jochen’s gruppe.
When he’s finished, Goering walks to the front to face them. His aides have set up a low podium and there’s a microphone there, too. Is he going to sing? Jochen has to bite his cheek to prevent a smile at the thought. But it’s not a song.
‘That was fucking awful,’ Goering begins. ‘You can’t even do a parade properly. In fact, I don’t know what it is you can do properly because you certainly can’t fight Americans, can you? You just let them fly all over Germany and kill nuns and children. Nuns! And kids! Have you got no pride?’
More than you, you perfumed slob!
‘You’re just a scared bunch of namby-pambies, keeping out of the big boys’ way. Four B17s you got yesterday between you. Four! What’s the fucking use of that? I should ground the lot of you and save the fuel. Don’t you remember the RAF boys over London? Every day we thought we’d got the lot of them but the next day there they were again, snapping around, making life difficult for us.’
Oh, were you up there, too, Fatso?
‘They were defending their country! Their motherland! Never frightened! Brave lads who flung themselves at us and died to save their homes! I’m ashamed to lead you.’
Lead?
‘How can I explain your failure to the Führer?’
You’ll think of something.
‘If this happens again, heads will roll. Examples will be made of some.’
They should all volunteer. He will. He’ll volunteer to be made an example of. Fatty won’t have anyone left who can get a bomber.
‘I’m going. Don’t make me come back again.’
Goering steps off the podium and makes straight for his car without even the courtesy of a salute. His aides rush around dismantling podium and equipment.
Without really thinking and although it’s not his position to do it, not being in command of the parade, and though he always tries to avoid it, but just to shame that mountain of lard a little, Jochen calls out, ‘Heil Hitler!’ and slings his arm up. Everyone follows suit. Goering is caught just about to climb into his car. He stops, glares at them all and raises his arm.
He’s first back in his Gustav. Since there’s no one there to disturb, he plays scales in the mess. It’s a calming and nostalgic experience. He imagines himself long ago doing the same at the piano in their sitting room, his sister Ilse out at a friend’s house after school to escape the noise, his stepfather still at work, his mother working on dinner in the kitchen, pleased with herself for having a son who can play so well, always urging him on, lapping up Herr Walter’s praise of his playing, dreaming of a career for him on a concert stage.
He stops after half an hour. He should do scales every day and play two or three pieces as well. Use it or lose it. Playing songs for the guys to sing is no substitute for solid practice. He goes to the window. It’s grey and bleak out. The weather guys say snow is on its way, a blizzard. Perhaps they’ll get a day or two off. The others will be back soon.
There’ll just be time for lunch and, then, ready for the first alert. He goes to the gramophone and looks through the record pile for the Caruso he bought at the roadside in Berlin. He keeps the Beethoven he got at the same time in his room. An argument about Schnabel would be disagreeable in the mess. He doesn’t want guys to have to take sides. He wants friends and comrades here not ideological opponents.
He winds the gramophone, puts the record on, starts it turning and then lowers the needle; instant crackle and hiss, not unlike the sound through the headphones in the cockpit of his Gustav but, oh, the message that comes through this interference is much more welcome, infinitely more sublime than ‘Big build up in Dora-Dora’. There’s that golden, pure voice. Just imagine it in a concert hall, minus the background noise! Una Furtiva Lagrima. Old Enrico! What a voice! Has anyone ever been better? He must be the Schnabel of tenors.
Jochen stares out at the airfield landscape under the grey sky: the distant parked Gustavs, the scurrying figures hunched against the cold. It’s the right aria he’s listening to. A furtive tear! Steeped in melancholy. The lightness yet the strength of the voice! And that wonderful melody! It would be right for a funeral. But not a service funeral, the guys need a lift after a death in the unit. At Ilse’s funeral. It would have been appropriate. But could his mother have listened to it? Could he have? He’s close to tears, listening to this and remembering his murdered twin; two years in the earth now.
4
Pathetique
Low clouds, snow showers, freezing winds, lousy weather. He wears his snug Yank jacket almost constantly, only takes it off to sleep and then lays it on top of his blanket.
Jonny Beck, the Nazi, their commander, exhorts them all to make Fatty’s wish come true and knock down large numbers of bombers.
‘How?’ Jochen almost screams at him.
It’s like their old days in the desert.
‘We could bomb them again,’ Jonny says.
A few months ago, someone tried it. A two hundred kilo bomb with a fifteen second fuse a thousand metres above a box of Fortresses. Too complicated, too chancy.
Frontal attacks. Frontal attacks. But they don’t often get there to fire at the bombers, too busy avoiding Ami fighters. They chip away at the bombers but not enough go down to stop them coming; the same numbers are there the next day. There must be a conveyor belt from America to England. Sauer goes down, Schulze, Jansen, Riedel, Albrecht, Weiss, a couple of other guys too, not in the gruppe long enough for him to learn their names until someone writes them on the wall with all the others. Bubi has a leather glove thing someone has made him that fits over the control column to help him fly with a missing thumb. They lose two more one day, three the next. The day after, they don’t come. It’s the 23rd of December.
‘Day off. Christmas shopping,’ Schaefer says. He’s been to New York and he’s their authority on things American.
He’s up early alone on an engine test. No sun yet. His altitude makes it visible when he’s at six thousand. He keeps climbing, feeling colder and colder. At eight thousand he spots a glint above him. He carries on climbing. Nine thousand. Ten thousand. He’s level now. The glint has a shape. Two engines. Mosquito. It must be their daily meteorological flight. It would be nice to spoil their weather map but he’s too far for a shot. Not even worth bothering. He climbs a little further and then the Gustav refuses. Is he gaining on the Mosquito? It looks a little bigger but then it puts its nose down and begins to get smaller. He chases in a dive but it pulls away. Just too damned fast. He goes home for breakfast. The engine’s fine.
They lose two more. Jochen now has five more bombers and three Mustangs and a Lightning, but three times has landed with bullets in wings and fuselage. How long will he last? He’s the best one there and he finds it hard. What can they expect the kids who turn up barely able to fly to achieve?
In the mirror while shaving he discovers grey hairs at each temple. He falls asleep on occasion at his desk as he looks through paperwork then lies awake most of the night, imagining warm Swedish sunshine and Gerda next to him on a bench, laughing.
Everyone’s exhausted. He sends them off one by one for a few days rest at home or days and nights of debauchery as their fancies take them. Then Beck sends him off, too, for five days. Bubi will have the gruppe. It’s mid-January. The train is slow and freezing cold. He longs for his Ami flying jacket, but he might get lynched in that.
There’s more rubble in Berlin than when he was last here. People look dishevelled, dirty, downtrodden. Apart, that is, from the shiny staff officers who demand salutes and, with their women, seem to flit about above the new grim reality of wartime Berlin. He feels more and more melancholic as he trudges towards home. Where are all the girls from a year or two back that he’d exchange smiles with as they passed? How will his mother be managing?
There’s been no time to write. His arrival will be a surprise.
Near home, he spots Frau Schreiber in a queue. He doesn’t want to see her. Her son, his friend Bert, is assumed dead in a sunken U-boat and here Jochen is, alive and loaded with medals. But she turns and sees him. He starts a tentative smile, but she positively beams at him.
‘Jochen!’ she almost shouts. ‘I’ve had a card from Bert. They picked him up. He’s safe in England!’ She laughs. ‘He’s working on a farm!’
It’s a miracle. How many guys ever get out of a sinking U-boat? He runs up the stairs of their building and rings the bell but the footsteps he hears coming aren’t his mother’s.
The door swings wide and Lotte’s astonished face stares at him for an instant before she throws herself at him, flings her arms around his neck and nearly knocks him over.
Later, Jochen walks Lotte home. They can’t see each other’s faces in the blackout.
‘We go to the cellar,’ she says, when Jochen asks where they shelter during a raid, and then, ‘Are you going to come in?’
He can’t bear the thought of kissing her mother, of having her sister call him brother, of shaking hands with her father, of losing to him at chess again, all in the glare of the lamplight in that once Jewish house. He says he must go back to see his mother. Lotte is immediately understanding. She’s splendid, really. If only.
‘Have you given Lotte a date?’ his mother says as he throws his cap and greatcoat on the sofa and flops down next to them. He shakes his head.
‘You’re not the only fish in the sea. You’ll lose her!’
He looks back at her. Silent. If only.
‘You’re waiting on that Jewish woman, aren’t you?’
‘Her name’s Gerda.’
‘I know that, but it doesn’t matter what her name is, does it?’
He looks at her, still silent.
‘I liked her,’ she goes on, ‘she seemed nice. But she’s Jewish.’
‘Mother!’
‘Wait! That would always be a problem. That would be a problem anywhere in the world, let alone here, now. It would have been a problem when I was your age. Jews and Christians. We have our own beliefs. We don’t marry each other. Just think what her family would say.’
‘I think the Reich has solved that problem for her.’
His mother sighs. ‘And she isn’t here, is she?’
‘No, thank God.’
‘You can’t have her, Jochen. She isn’t here and never likely to be. But Lotte is. She’s a lovely young woman. You make a beautiful couple.’
‘So Goebbels told me.’
‘Have you slept with her?’
‘Mother!’
‘If you have, it’s your duty to marry her.’
He stares at the lamp in the corner.
‘You’re an officer and supposed to be a gentleman,’ she says. ‘You should follow your duty. It’s what your father would have expected.’
The laugh has escaped before he can stop it. ‘The man who left you?’
It’s her turn to stare now. ‘Never mind that.’
He picks up his cap and great coat. ‘I’m going out.’
‘You haven’t eaten.’
‘I’ll get something somewhere.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
Going down the stairs, he’s immediately remorseful. How could he have said that to her, ‘The man who left you’. And she’s only thinking of him, of course. What mother would want her son hanging about waiting for a Jewish woman who’s hiding in another country and that he would have had great difficulty in marrying even at the best of times? He should go back. Apologise. But he doesn’t want to start the conversation up again. He can apologise in the morning. Right now, he wants a drink. And he’s hungry.
He finds a cab and asks for the Adlon Hotel, the only place he’s certain will be able to feed him. The cab is a wood-burner; there’s petrol for very few now. Up ahead, when he gets out, stands the Brandenburg Gate. The Kaiser used to pop down through it, he’s heard, and take advantage of the Adlon’s splendid heating to hold meetings with foreign dignitaries.
Up the marble steps and he’s bowed in amongst the marble columns. He heads for the dining room. All the shiny staff officers in Berlin appear to have congregated here with their women, whose bare shoulders gleam in the lamplight, whose silk dresses shimmer and whose necklaces and earrings twinkle under the chandeliers. What are the chances of a table for one?
‘But you must have a space somewhere,’ he shouts to the Maître d’ over the enormous hubbub in the room.
‘If the Hauptmann perhaps knows someone in the room whose party he could join?’
Jochen glances around and is quite pleased to realise he knows none of these shiny-faced parasites.
‘I’m afraid not.’ He can always go to the club and see Otto. Perhaps Willi will be there and will cook him an omelette. He turns to go and almost walks into a Luftwaffe general with a moustache and a large cigar in his mouth, clearly just returning from the facilities. It’s Galland.
‘Murville! Trying to get dinner?’
Jochen nods.
Galland turns to the Maître d’. ‘Bring another chair to my table.’ Galland puts his arm round Jochen’s shoulder and guides him across the room. ‘Nice bauble there. Not as nice as mine, though, I expect.’ Galland also wears the Diamonds at his throat. ‘Fatty didn’t like the diamonds Hitler got so he got me some better ones.’
Jochen laughs. ‘Snap.’
Galland won’t hear of an omelette, insists he has the venison. ‘If any of your guys were here, they’d have it,’ he says, when Jochen pleads guilt over the squalid rations his men are eating back at Marx. They talk about the failings of their Gustavs and the splendours of the Amis’ Mustangs.
‘Light me, will you?’ Galland’s companion asks him. He pulls out his zippo. She holds his hand to raise the flame to her cigarette.
‘Forgive me, Baroness,’ he says, ‘talking shop like this.’
‘Don’t worry about it, darling, and call me Gisela. It’s always the same when we meet any of his boys. Horsepower, rounds per minute, turning circles! Jabber, jabber, jabber. I’m used to staring into space. What he doesn’t know is I’m composing my memoirs in my head. I’m going to dish the dirt on him. There, Dolfo! And I’ll call you Adolf in them because you hate it.’ She flicks back her blonde hair and smiles at Galland. She has green eyes and Jochen’s immediately jealous that Galland has someone who’ll make fun of him. Lotte would never do that now. Gerda would always be ready to.
He tells Galland about Goering’s rant at them.
‘He did the same in Sicily,’ Galland says.
‘He’s not leading us, is he?’
‘Where would he take us if he was?’
He starts off on Mustangs again. ‘We’ll all be dead before we know it.’
‘Listen,’ Galland says, and beckons him closer.
‘Secrets time!’ the Baroness says.
‘Gisela! Keep it under your hat, Murville, but you just have to stick it out a bit longer and you’ll have a jet.’
‘Is it ready? The 262? How fast?’
‘Nine hundred.’
‘Nine hundred!’
‘Shhh! Four thirty-millimetre cannon. And twenty-four rockets.’
‘Rockets!’
‘Don’t forget to ask about the turning circle, darling.’
Jochen grins. ‘Gisela! No turning in a baby like that, eh, General?’
‘Never.’
‘It’s good then?’
‘Wonderful. Like being pushed in the back by an angel.’
‘How long before we get them? Weeks?’
‘Months.’
Months!
‘I’ll be mincemeat by then.’
