Nightmare in Berlin (6 page)

But Alma had ploughed on regardless, exclaiming angrily: ‘Well, I'm glad the old boy's dead! If ever I hated anyone, it was him — in fact I hate him still …'

‘Fine, fine', Doll had interrupted. ‘He's dead, let's forget him. Don't let's talk about him again.'

And they didn't talk about him again. Whenever Dr. Doll approached the house, he fixed his gaze studiously on the other side of the street, while his wife kept on eyeing the house with a resentful or scornful look. Neither reaction suggested they had succeeded in forgetting, as Doll had wished, and they both knew — although they said nothing — that they neither could forget nor wanted to forget. The dead veterinarian Wilhelm had caused them too much heartache for that.

He called himself a veterinarian on his brass plate, but in truth he was such a coward that he had hardly ever dared to go near a sick horse or cow. The local farmers knew this so well that they only ever called him out to give injections to pigs with erysipelas, which is why he was known far and wide as ‘Piglet Willem'. He was a big, heavily built man in his sixties, with a grey, sallow face that was twisted into a permanent grimace, as if he had the taste of bile in his mouth.

There was absolutely nothing about this vet to set him apart from the common run of men, except for one thing: he was a connoisseur of fine wine. He drank schnaps and beer as well, but only for its alcohol content, because he had been for a long time what one might term a ‘moderate drinker'; he needed a certain amount of alcohol every day, but his intake could not be called excessive. Wine was his real passion, though, and the better the wine, the happier he was. At such times, the bilious wrinkles in his face would soften, and he was seen to smile. For a man of his means, it was a somewhat expensive passion, but he usually found a way to indulge it.

Shortly before five in the afternoon, nothing would keep him at home a moment longer, and not even the most urgent phone call could get him to attend a sick animal. He picked up his stick, put on his little Tyrolean hat with its badger-hair plume, and strolled sedately along the street, dressed invariably in knee breeches, and walking with his feet splayed out to the sides.

Dr. Wilhelm — Piglet Willem — was just a short walk away from his destination, a small hotel where at one time he had effectively had his own private supply of wine on tap. That was when the landlord was still alive, a man who dearly liked a drink himself. After his death, the establishment was run by his widow and then increasingly by their youngest daughter, a girl of mercurial temperament and fierce dislikes, one of which — and not the least of them — was the vet, Dr. Wilhelm.

To his profound dismay, the vet found that the daughter of the house now frequently refused to bring him the bottle of wine he had ordered, only bringing him a glass instead, though other tables were still getting their bottles often enough. If he then complained, speaking with his characteristic slow and measured delivery through that caustic, nutcracker mouth of his, she would cut him off as soon as he started with her quick, sharp tongue: ‘You expect your wine every day. The others just come in occasionally — that's the difference! You'd drink us dry if I let you!'

Other times, she would not even deign to reply. Or else she would reach quickly for his glass and say: ‘If you don't want the glass, I'll be happy to take it back again. You don't
have
to drink it!' In short, she took care to remind him every day that he was entirely dependent on her whims for the satisfaction of his drinking desires. He had to put up with her insults and her diminishing servings of wine with a grumpy sigh, but still he came back every day for more, without dignity or shame.

From the little hotel, the vet would then process sedately, with his curiously splay-footed gait, halfway across the town to the little railway station, where he generally entered the second-class waiting room shortly before six o'clock. Here he often had the good fortune to find the town's wealthy corn merchant sitting at the table reserved for regulars, where he himself had a seat, and this gentleman was always happy to share his wine with him. Sometimes the corn merchant would be sitting at a separate table with one or more of his customers, in which case the vet would go up to them, inquire gravely ‘May I?', and was generally invited to join them. For here Dr. Wilhelm was able to trade on another side of his character: he had quite a repertoire of bawdy country jokes and stories, which he could recite in the authentic local dialect. His stories were frequently met with gales of laughter, their effect heightened by the fact that his sour expression didn't change at all — which put the corn merchant's customers in a sweeter mood.

Otherwise the vet generally did all right for himself in the station bar. He'd been a regular there for decades. For decades past, he had sat at the regulars' reserved table from around six to eight in the evening, accompanied by his wife in earlier years, but on his own since her death. The landlord, Kurz, kept him on a tight rein, but generally made sure that his old customer didn't go without.

Around suppertime, the waiting room emptied quickly, and Dr. Wilhelm also went on his way. What awaited him now in the little town's premier hotel was always an open question: it might be a lot, or it might be virtually nothing. The wine still flowed freely in this establishment, but the landlord was a man who liked to take his customers' money — and the more the better. Even when it made very little sense to take money off his customers, since there was hardly anything left to buy with money, the landlord kept on increasing the price of his wines sold by the bottle, so that the cost of even a single bottle was way beyond the means of a poor pig innoculator like him, whose daily earnings frequently amounted to less than five marks.

So here Dr. Wilhelm had to take potluck, and there were many times when he had to sit for hours over a glass of watered-down, wartime beer, while he morosely watched SS officers drinking one bottle after another. They never invited him over to their table: the SS always kept its distance from the ordinary German people. Or else there would be some Hitler Youth leader, not even twenty years old, knocking back dessert wines with his girlfriend — and no more interested than the others in the storytelling talents of the ageing vet.

So these were difficult times for an old alcoholic, for whom drinking was a necessity of life. As the hours went by and the night wore on, and the patrons became increasingly drunk and boisterous, and the white-haired landlord, ever smiling and full of bonhomie, called time on them … as it became quite clear that there was nothing for him this evening, even though so many others were thoroughly well-oiled … as he then, having paid for his beer, totted up the few miserable coins and notes in his pocket to see if he might have enough for a small schnaps at least, knowing full well that he didn't … as he finally picked up his stick and his hat with a heavy, bitter sigh and stepped out into the night to walk back to his house … and as he thought about the night ahead, in which he would have to summon up sleep with boring tablets instead of alcohol, which so divinely filled his sleep with sweet dreams … then his leathery face became, if possible, even more jaundiced than before, he was racked with envy for everyone and everything, and he would have gladly let the whole world go to hell without a thought, in return for a single bottle of wine!

But the old vet had better days, too. All of a sudden, this premier hotel on the town square would be frequented by summer visitors or anglers on a fishing trip, who always loved to hear stories about this remote area that had scarcely been touched by the war. Or else a farmer would see the old man sitting there, which made him think how long it was since he had called him out to his farm, and his bad conscience would prompt him to invite Piglet Willem to join him at his table, chat to him, and give him a drink — for everybody knew about his weakness.

The best times, though, were when all the regulars came together around their table in this hotel. Unfortunately this only happened once or twice a month at most, whenever the circuit judge came over from the district town to hold the appointed court session in the little town. Then the hotelier would get straight on the telephone and notify a local landowner, the dentist, an agricultural-products wholesaler, and also Dr. Doll — but not the old vet, who turned up anyway.

How Doll had become a part of this motley company he was hardly able to say himself in later years. To begin with — and this was years earlier, at the time of his first marriage, when he was working a smallholding near the little town — he had probably been intrigued by such a mixed bag of drinking companions, and more especially by the stories they had to tell. The old judge in particular excelled in this regard, and told a far better story than the vet, whose jokes were often rather too broad, not to say downright vulgar. But Doll had quickly realised that even these people were utterly mediocre. By the second evening, the old circuit judge had to repeat the same stories; he only knew ten or a dozen, but he was more than happy to tell them a hundred times. It also became increasingly obvious that he liked to be given food for free, and to short-change the staff when it came to handing over his ration coupons. The dentist's head was filled with stories about women; his day job was just a pretext for him to grope his female patients while they were lying back in the dentist's chair. And as for the old vet, he was just an old soak who became more greedy and tiresome with every passing day.

It was the same story with the others: a dull, commonplace bunch, along with their sly landlord, who was only interested in making money. So Doll didn't always take up the invitation when he was summoned by telephone to join the other regulars. But he came often enough, maybe just because he fancied a few drinks or because he was fond of good wine himself, and because village life at home was even more dull than this crowd. He came and drank and played the generous host, being still fairly well fixed for money at that time, and any freeloaders, from the greedy vet to the cautious circuit judge, did well by him. On particularly good nights, the fat, white-haired hotelier would crawl into the furthest recesses of his cellar and emerge with bottles of Burgundy lagged with dust, or bottles of ‘Mumm extra dry'. To go with the red wine he would serve fine cheeses — no mention of ration coupons! — which they ate in little wedges straight out of their hands. These were blissful times for the old vet, and his friendship with Doll seemed firmly established.

But that changed, and as is usually the case when male friends have a falling-out, it was all because of a woman. Quite how the old circuit judge came to meet this radiant young woman was a mystery; at all events, when Dr. Doll arrived a little late one evening to join the assembled company, he met there the wife of a Berlin factory-owner who had built himself a cabin on the shore of one of the many lakes in the area, so that he could come and enjoy some weekend fishing.

But on this particular evening the husband had stayed behind in Berlin, and his young wife was sitting alone among the all-male regulars gathered around the table. She tossed her strawberry-blonde locks, and gazed attentively at whoever was speaking, with her long, slender face and her lovely blood-red mouth — it was just as if this mouth was actually looking at you. Then she would throw her head back, her little white throat seeming to dance with laughter — heavens above, how she could laugh, my God, how young she was! Doll shoved the old vet aside and sat down next to this amazing youthful apparition, who was now sitting on the long corner sofa in between Doll and the old circuit judge.

How young she was, how full of life, and how alluringly she laughed at the judge's stories, however witless and inane! Doll began to tell stories himself, and if anyone could tell a good story, it was him. Unlike the circuit judge and the vet, he didn't just repeat the same old anecdotes he'd wheeled out a hundred times before; Doll's stories just popped into his head, from different times in his life, as if he had never thought of them before. He spoke more quickly — it all came tumbling out, his tales trumping everybody else's — and in between times he ordered wine, and more wine, and kept it flowing freely.

It turned into a great evening. It makes quite an impression on a man in his late forties when a beautiful young woman in her twenties lets him know that she finds him interesting. But the youthful interest being shown in him did not rob Doll of his powers of critical observation, and they alerted him to the fact that while he was talking intently with his neighbour on his left, the old vet on his right was looking after his own needs. The vet had long since lost any interest in stories or women; all he cared about was alcohol. There was plenty of alcohol around the table, but to Piglet Willem's way of thinking it was being drunk too slowly. When he saw that all eyes were fixed on the young woman, the vet reached out and felt for the bottle. He quickly filled his glass, drained it, and promptly filled it again …

‘Whoa there!' cried Doll, who appeared to have his back to him, but had seen everything. ‘That's not on! As long as I'm buying, I'll be the one to say when!' And with that, he took the bottle from Wilhelm's hand, though not ungently.

Needless to say, everyone promptly rounded on the old freeloader and soak, teasing him unmercifully. They made fun of him, dredged up the most embarrassing stories about him, and accused him to his face in the meanest fashion. But it didn't bother him very much; he felt no shame. He was long accustomed to having his human dignity insulted as the price for every cadged drink. This had been happening for so long, and so often, that by now all his human dignity was long gone. He despised them all, of course, and they could all have dropped down dead before his eyes — he wouldn't have cared, because alcohol was all he cared about now. So he let them mock and bait him, it all fell on deaf ears, and as his podgy, age-spotted hand gripped the stem of the wine glass, he thought to himself:
I've had two more glasses of wine than you have!
And:
If I get the chance, I'll try it again!