Then they took off.
But nor before the Lieutenant-Colonel had received Tiny’s papers. He slapped the police sergeant on the shoulder with them and assured him: ‘You’ll never forget this, Sergeant!’ Tiny blinked his bruised eyes. Growling sounds emerged from his swollen mouth. The Lieutenant-Colonel eyed him critically, smacked him in the side with the documents and said, ‘I won’t forget you, soldier. I’ll keep an eye on you. Do your duty and you’ll fall happily for the Fatherland!’
Tiny had sort of come to attention and was staring stupidly at the Lieutenant-Colonel, who skipped after the others in peculiar waltz time.
Tiny spat on the floor and said, ‘Come, Emma, we’re clearing out!’
She took his hand and pulled him along like a little boy who has had a fall in the street and now is going home to be soothed by mother.
Tiny was put to bed on milk and rusks. Later he had homemade cookies with cocoa.
The Battleship and sister Annelise tucked him up in bed with blankets to keep him from being cold. Late in the night, after things were quiet, he and the Legionnaire got drunk. They whispered together for hours. Now and then we caught words like ‘head-hunters’ and ‘monkey face.’
It was quite late on Saturday when they decided to look up ‘Monkey-Face’ to discuss his conduct with him in private. They were in a very exalted mood when they set out, and thanks to a bottle of vodka which the Legionnaire had brought with him, the mood improved as they approached their goal.
They found Braun in his underpants. He appeared extremely bewildered, possibly because of the late, unannounced visit. Naturally it took some time for him to recognize Tiny, and when he did, the joy of reunion was decidedly on Tiny’s side. Tiny was fabulously sociable. He tickled unarmed Braun under the chin with his battle knife, pinched his cheek coquettishly and promised to slash his throat.
Sergeant Major Braun managed only to utter a half-smothered scream before the steel fingers of the Legionnaire closed about his throat and squeezed the air out of him.
‘I want to send him off myself,’ Tiny protested as Braun started turning lilac.
Mrs Braun was a zealous member of the Nazi Women’s Organization and looked it. She appeared in the door to the conjugal bedroom, and before she realized what actually was happening she commanded in a shrill voice: ‘I demand quiet immediately!’
Despite the subdued blackout illumination, there was light enough to show that her wispy hair was studded with paper curlers. To ward off a beginning cold, she had twined a pair of blue woollen ladies’ panties about her neck. Her flannel nightgown was almost new and faintly pink. On her feet she had Wehrmacht socks. Like everything else, the nightgown had belonged to the former owner of the apartment, a Jewish widow who had died in Neuengamme.
Mrs Braun’s taking possession of that apartment was the fulfillment of a wish she had entertained for a long time. Three years had passed since the widow and her three children were picked up by the SS. The arrest went so rapidly that mother and children were unable to take anything with them except what they had on, and that wasn’t much, since they were picked up at 3 o’clock in the morning.
Mrs Braun took part in the action, dressed in high boots and a leather jacket. On the stairs, the youngest child, a boy of three, lost a shoe. When he got into the street, wet with rain, he cried and said he was cold. An SS Unterscharführer gave him a smack in the face and said:
‘Here’s heat for you, you miserable Jew brat!’
Mrs Braun spat in the mother’s face and kicked her in the shins. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll see to you and your kids when we get to the camp.’
Then she walked in and started moving around the furniture of the Jewish family. She wanted to have it arranged to her own taste before the Sergeant Major returned from the Precinct.
The Jewish mother and the two youngest children were sent to the gas chamber. The oldest child, a girl of 15, ended up in a camp brothel.
Tiny had discovered all of this through many strange channels, known only to those who are at odds with society.
Tiny squinted at Mrs Braun. His throat made some gurgling animal noises. He stretched out a hairy hand and grabbed the scrawny, vicious human snake by her hair.
She screamed, but only briefly. He slammed her head against the door panel. Then he dropped the lifeless body to the ground with a hollow thud.
‘She’s a devil,’ he said to the Legionnaire and stamped on the woman’s face with his heavy boots.
He strangled Braun with a piece of steel wire. When he was sure he was dead, he mumbled piously: ‘Et cum spiritu tuo,’ the only thing he remembered from his childhood Catholic reform school in Minden.
When they left they checked scrupulously if the door was properly latched.
‘Thieves might come,’ Tiny said. ‘All kinds of trash are hanging around, you know.’ Then he hitched up his trousers and followed the Legionnaire.
When they returned to Aunt Dora she put up two glasses for them and said: ‘How about another glass, fellows?’ She said it as if they had just taken off for a dance a moment ago.
‘Well, here’s to the big rat,’ the Legionnaire said as they lifted their glasses.
Aunt Dora took an akvavit with bitters for herself and gave out a long and heart-felt sigh.
‘Did you get them?’ she asked, puffing away at her white cheroot.
The Legionnaire looked at her and winked, clicked his tongue and raised the refilled glass: ‘Here’s to you, Aunt Dora!’
She grinned: ‘And to the death of all those you’re going to settle with!’
They tossed off their glasses.
‘I’ll be damned,’ the Legionnaire burped, ‘but there’s nothing as good as this. For all the things that trouble you.’
Should anyone be naive enough to ask Aunt Dora if they had been with her all night, she would swear on her soul’s salvation that they had never left the room.
But no one asked. The darkness of oblivion had fallen on Monkey-Face.
Next morning the Canadians attacked Hamburg and the part of town where he had lived was a sea of flames.
Tiny looked at the Legionnaire and said, ‘Thank Heavens we decided to go over there yesterday! Or we’d have come too late. And then we’d never get to Allah’s garden where the eternal flowers grow, Desert Rambler!’
‘You shouldn’t scoff at serious things,’ the Legionnaire gently reproved him.
‘You have to make contacts,’ said Aunt Dora. ‘It’s essential, like vitamins.’
‘Pretty Paul’ was a good contact. He sent people to the gallows or exempted them from compulsory conscription just as it suited his book. Unless it paid, he did nothing for anybody. It wouldn’t pay to neglect doing something for Aunt Dora. When she called, he came.
‘Pretty Paul’ was one of the most pernicious vipers in the Third Reich, but Aunt Dora possessed serum against his bite.
She laughed and scratched her fat thighs with a corkscrew as she followed the retreat of the Security men with her eyes.
She poured the gin that ‘Pretty Paul’ had sniffed at into the sink as if it were a corrosive acid.
Tiny was sorry for the gin. Stein and the infantry sergeant felt the same way.
VIII
Wind Force 11
We were discharged from the army hospital on a Wednesday. The boss, Oberstabsarzt Dr Mahler, kept muttering as he moved about flapping his arms. While shaking hands, he looked us straight in the eye and said something nice to each of us.
It took us three days to say good-bye. Tiny surpassed himself in piggish excesses at the whorehouse. The girls would never forget him as long as they lived.
The Legionnaire and I got stone blind at Aunt Dora’s in Wind Force 11. Aunt Dora drank with us. Once in a while she would mumble something under her breath and look at the Legionnaire. She was chain-smoking cheroots. The ashtray was filled to the brim.
We sat in a narrow niche protected by a subdued red light.
‘Your absinthe t
astes like putrid licorice,’ the Legionnaire said.
‘And you’re a Moroccan pimp,’ Aunt Dora answered caustically.
‘What are you going to do when the war’s over?’ I asked, just for the sake of saying something. I couldn’t think of anything else just at that moment.
The little Legionnaire finished off his glass and snapped his fingers at Trude, the girl from Berlin, who brought him a refill. She was about to take the bottle away, but Aunt Dora caught her wrist and snarled: ‘Leave the pot!’
Trude winced at the rough grip and almost said something, but a sharp ‘Scram, you cow!’ caused her to vanish behind the bar counter as quickly as she could.
‘What am I going to do when the war’s over?’ muttered the little Legionnaire, as if addressing himself.
You could see he was thinking intensely. He drank a little and rolled the liquid on his tongue.
‘First, I’ll give you a few smacks for asking such a stupid question.’ He drank a bit more, turned his glass in his hand and intently scrutinized the colored reflections. ‘The first two weeks I’m going to be dead drunk from morning till night. Then I’ll have to cut the throats of a couple of acquaintances of mine. If I can bring myself to do it,’ he added in a moment. ‘Maybe I’ll do some fast business.’
‘In women, I suppose?’ Aunt Dora cut in.
‘Well, why not?’ the Legionnaire asked and raised his eyebrows. ‘One thing’s like another. In certain places there’s a shortage of women, and scarce goods bring high prices. If we’d met twenty years ago, you’d have fetched a handsome sum, you fat-assed bitch. I’d have gotten stinking drunk on the money I made on you, and you’d have had fun with a whole battalion in an Algiers whorehouse.’
‘Swine,’ came Aunt Dora’s only comment.
‘Let’s have another beer,’ I proposed.
We had another beer and mixed a double absinthe in each glass.
‘It cleanses the kidneys,’ Aunt Dora said.
‘After boozing and selling sluts,’ the Legionnaire went on, ‘and after cutting the throats of a couple of guys whose ties I don’t like, I’ll retire just as quietly and live like a rich man on the other side of the ocean. In some place where there are no stinking police.’
He laughed at the thought.
‘You won’t even get yourself to believe that,’ Aunt Dora said. She lit a fresh cheroot with the one just finished.
‘Merde, what do you know about that? Why shouldn’t I believe it?’ The Legionnaire was working himself up. ‘Sacre nom de Dieu, why shouldn’t I be able to sell the bitches? I could even sell you, though you’d fetch only a sou.’
‘You’re nuts,’ Aunt Dora said. But she didn’t take offense. ‘Do you want me to tell you what you’ll do when you’re through with Hitler’s war? You’ll dive into the first French recruiting office you come to and put your scrawl to a twenty-four year contract!’
The Legionnaire looked at her. He looked at her a good while. The long knife scar running from his forehead straight across his nose flamed red – it seemed as if the blood would burst through the thin skin. He ground out his half-smoked cigarette in a saucer filled with salt sticks.
There was a rustle at the revolving door. It came from the curtain in front of the cloakroom, a beaded curtain with threaded shells like those seen in southern Spain and in the Philippines. A boatswain had given it as a present to Aunt Dora a very long time ago. He later went down with the battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic.
One night, that boatswain had bellowed into a Gestapo’s face:
‘I don’t give a damn about you or Adolf either!’
With that he had flung a glass into the face of the head-hunter, who drew his pistol. Aunt Dora, who’d been standing somewhat in the background, swung a stocking filled with rocks. A hollow thud. Two days later the Gestapo was found in a ditch at the far end of Harburg.
Next day the boatswain sailed off on his tramp. When he returned home again, he brought Aunt Dora the string of pearls with the shells. It was hung like a curtain before the cloakroom door. While the two of them were putting it up Aunt Dora stepped through a cane-bottomed chair. They had quite a laugh over it. Then each of them put away a quart.
The boatswain went to Kiel. He’d just been drafted. This was in 1939. Aunt Dora saw him once more before he set out to sea in the battleship named for the statesman.
The boatswain died cursing and screaming in the ice-cold water. A seagull ate his eyes, some mackerel a bit of his burnt leg.
‘Damned crowd!’ were the last words he yelled (in English) before he died.
The Legionnaire took another small draft of beer.
‘So that’s what you think?’ He said this in a strangely low voice.
‘Alfred,’ Aunt Dora said in a remarkably gentle voice hard to associate with her. ‘Stay with me. You may snooze in bed all day and get drunk as often as you like. In fact, once you’ve chucked your uniform, you won’t have to be sober for a moment more in all the rest of your life.’
Did tears glitter in the eyes of that brutal woman – or was it merely an optical illusion? Those eyes, clear as water and hard as a cobra’s just before it sinks its teeth into a rabbit. Yes, Aunt Dora wept. She grasped Alfred Kalb’s hand. He returned her grasp.
The two resembled each other. The saloon-keeper and the veteran who could boast of fifteen years in the African desert.
A petty officer came over to the table. ‘How mysterious you are,’ he grinned drunkenly and nudged Aunt Dora.
The Legionnaire jumped up and hit him to the floor with one stroke. He kicked him in the face and sat down again.
‘Dora, old girl,’ he whispered intimately. ‘Let’s be grown up and not start anything silly. You and I, we know. No rose-colored nonsense for us. You belong here among sluts, tramps and booze and I in the desert with a tommy gun across my shoulder. But once we’ve grown real old and tired, we’ll send each other a postcard and meet. Then we’ll find a little place where we can buy a bar with only seven stools.’
Aunt Dora took a deep breath and looked loving at him.
‘Alfred, the two of us are never going to get a bar with seven stools. One day you’ll suffocate in red sand while all of your filthy blood is being drained off, and I’ll die from the DTs.’
Trude, the Berlin girl, came up to them and whispered something to Aunt Dora.
‘Go to hell,’ she snarled. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy!’
‘Yes, but it’s red Bernard,’ Trude justified herself.
‘I don’t care a damn,’ Aunt Dora cried and hurled her glass after Trude, who hurriedly withdrew.
The Legionnaire got up, brought over a couple of bottles and mixed something. He poured out a beer glass of it for Aunt Dora.
‘Drink, girl. All of us have the war tantrums. Why should you go scot-free?’
An air-raid siren started hooting. Others tuned into chorus.
‘Alert,’ some guest said. As if we didn’t know.
Several left Wind Force 11. An office clerk looking like a petty embezzler said he wanted to get home before they came. Most of us didn’t make a move and went on drinking. Soldiers as well as civilians. Girls and ladies.
A dark-blonde lady inquired about shelters. She looked good, wore high-heeled shoes and a close-fitting knee-length skirt. Her stockings were slightly grayish. Very sheer. She wasn’t a common barfly.
The first bombs hit. A whole series of explosions shook the house. Flak began booming away. We could easily make out the sound of the high-altitude shells exploding.
‘Can you hear the Tommies?’ someone asked.
We listened. Yes, we could hear them. Singing treble, the heavy bombers were circling over Hamburg.
‘Oh, shove the Tommies up your ass!’ bawled a corporal with the Order of the Frozen Flesh on his breast. ‘You should have a look at Ivan’s combat pilots. Then you might learn something, you hick-town heroes!’
‘Who’re you calling a hick-town hero?’ an NCO shouted and got
up menacingly. His entire breast was plastered with jingling combat medals. His nose was missing. The hole was covered up with a black flap.
‘Where can we take shelter?’ the dark-blonde lady called.
‘Here,’ someone laughed, knocking an empty bar stool.
A new series of bombs hit the houses and streets. A sailor with a U-boat campaign ribbon set up a grin.
‘I bet they’re shitting in their pants now!’ He stuck his hand under a girl’s dress.
The girl put her arm around his neck and whispered: ‘Sailor, you mustn’t!’ But she let him do it anyway.
The lady who wished to take shelter walked out, followed by a nervous, somewhat corpulent gentleman.
A thundering crash rocked the house, which groaned like a wounded animal. The electric light blinked ominously.
‘That was quite a raindrop,’ the U-boat sailor laughed. He bent the girl back over the counter. She squealed loudly.
The lady and the corpulent gentleman came back out of breath. They seemed to apologize as they wiped their feet on the mat.
‘It’s terrible. They’re dropping bombs,’ she panted excitedly.
She looked sweet. Her hair was disheveled and red spots of fear were on her cheeks. She obviously wasn’t on familiar terms with death yet.
‘Oh, bombs, really?’ Aunt Dora jeered. ‘Damned if I didn’t think they were dropping flowers on us.’
The lady sat down on an empty bar stool. A strip of naked flesh was exposed above her gray stocking. She glanced around bewildered. The corpulent man sat on a chair in the middle of the room, puffing anxiously.
The sailor pushed his girl aside and swaggered up to the lady. The long band around his cap had disappeared. The girl had probably torn it off.
Without saying a word he slipped a big hand up her legs. Offended, she cried out and pulled her skirt over her knees. But it immediately slipped back again because of the tall bar stool. The sailor swayed. His brown eyes smiled.