The Cross of Iron (40 page)

‘That one came like a flash of lightning,’ Kern said.

‘It always comes like lightning,’ Schnurrbart said tonelessly.

They looked down at Dorn. His lifeless eyes seemed to be staring through the twigs up at the fragile ribbons of cloud. ‘He was a fine chap, the Professor,’ Kern said tightly. ‘This stinking, this miserable war—just to kill like that—a man of his learning.’ He wiped his eyes and swallowed. Pasternack, standing beside Krüger, suddenly turned away and walked over to a tree. He pressed his forehead against the tree trunk and stood motionless.

‘What are you turning weepy for?’ Krüger growled hoarsely. ‘You think any of you are going to make out better? You make me laugh.’ He turned sharply, went back to the pit, picked up his spade and began digging furiously. Hollerbach followed him in silence.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Schnurrbart said to the others.

‘Are you going to let them lie like this?’ Maag asked.

‘I’ll cover them up. Let’s get through here.’

Hesitantly, they moved off. Schnurrbart stood beside the bodies for a while. Then he went to the Professor’s pack, extracted groundsheet and blanket, and spread them over the two dead men so that only their heavy nailed boots could be seen. As he started to put Dorn’s right arm under the blanket, he noticed the piece of paper in the clenched fist. With some effort he pulled it away and discovered that is was a letter. Slowly he straightened up. His eyes rested fascinated on the boots. German army boots, size forty-two. He suddenly recalled that these were the boots of a man who had joined the company shortly after Dorn, and had died under a hail of machine-gun bullets. At that time the boots were relatively new, and Dorn, who had been equipped with uncomfortable clodhoppers, had asked Fetscher for the boots. The nails had since become worn down and the soles were full of holes. What a long way those boots had come since their nails first rang challengingly upon the cobblestoned street of a small Czech town and the March sun was reflected in the high polish of the uppers. They had trodden the clean highways of Slovakia, the sandy paths in Poland, the corduroy roads of the Ukraine, the crushed flowers of the steppes, the lonely forest paths of the Caucasus, and more. In light and dark, on hills and valleys, over land and water. And the road had always been there. Dust and searing heat had dried the leather and cracked it. The boots had slogged through rain and bottomless swamps, through cold and deep snow. With a kind of insane clarity Schnurrbart calculated: perhaps 6, 000, 000 footsteps lay behind them. Now they had reached their final destination and were resting: unsightly, used up, worthless, lying with the warm sun upon the cracked leather. They lay waiting patiently, patient as the hide of which they were made. Schnurrbart suddenly became aware of the tears streaming down his face. Now Private First Class Dorn had left his boots and his body behind; for the road he was marching on now, he would need boots no longer.

In the evening the men of the supply column would load the flesh and the boots upon a horse. Somewhere among the hills was an army burial ground. There the earthly remains would be put under, and a simple wooden cross would be all that was left—that, and the grief of a wife and a Betty and a Jürgen.

Schnurrbart looked at the letter, and then back at the boots. It occurred to him that he had forgotten something: the philosophy and its unrest. But then he told himself that Doctor of Philosophy Dorn must at last be recognizing the ultimate meaning of his existence and the relationships among all things, for death solves many questions. Perhaps he was now in possession of an understanding that had no need of knowledge because it was terrifyingly simple, like all great matters. Slowly he thrust the letter into his pocket. He noticed Pasternack still leaning motionless against the tree. Going over to him, he placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come,’ he said softly. They joined the other men.

It was the last evening in Gursuf. They sat on a bench by the beach looking over the water. Steiner, his elbows propped on his knees, his chin in his hands, tried in vain to fight against his melancholy. The fourteen-day dream had come to an end. He would have to answer the call of the front as the others had, as had Towhead, who more than ten days ago had been absorbed by the boiling cauldron of the central sector. The front forgot no one. Well, he had known that from the start, and the knowledge had scarcely troubled him. It would have mattered to him as little as everything else. The prospect of seeing the men of his platoon again would certainly have overlaid the trivial regret at leaving this island of rest and peace—the present was always overshadowed by the demands of the next day. But something had happened since that extended from the present into the future. Ten days ago such a possibility would have seemed preposterous to him. But now.... He looked at the sea and the choking sensation in his throat grew stronger. When he was gone from here, the melody of the sea would still sound; the waves would pound on the beach, the pines rustle in the sea breeze, and the sun sink into the sea as it did every day at this time. All would remain, remain behind. He felt a hand touching his arm and turned his head. ‘You must not think about it, Rolf.’ 

He smiled bitterly. ‘It is so close now,’ he said softly. ‘I can’t help thinking about it, whether I want to or not.’

She sighed and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘Yesterday it was still so far off,’ she whispered. ‘As far away as the stars.’

He drew her close. ‘The stars are often closer to us than human beings; tomorrow you’ll be thousands of light years away from me.’ ‘How far is that?’ she asked seriously.

‘How far?’ He wrinkled his brow. Then he nodded his head in the direction of the water. ‘If you walk across the sea until you are so tired that your feet can no longer carry you, you’ve taken the first step.’

And how many steps are there?’

He raised his face toward the sky. ‘As many as there are stars.’ 

‘Then it is far,’ she breathed.

He nodded. After a while he placed his arm around her waist and studied her face. ‘You shouldn’t have come into the canteen that evening,’ he murmured.

‘Would you have liked that better?’

‘If you had asked me that yesterday I would have said no.’ 

‘And today?’

He smiled tormentedly. ‘Today I no longer know what to say.’ 

‘I didn’t want to come.’

‘But you came anyway.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t know how I waited for you, and I really did drink only one bottle.’

She kissed him quickly and ran her hand over his hair. ‘You kept your word,’ she said solemnly.

They fell silent. Steiner thought about that meeting. Even now he still felt a certain surprise at how quickly she had agreed, that evening, to go walking with him on the beach, although her experiences should not have encouraged her to take such risks. They had spoken little, but next night they had met again, and each time there had been more between them. Each through the other discovered new things in their surroundings, things they had not noticed before, and as they drew closer to one another his own front of cynicism dropped away without his even noticing the change. Whenever, alone in his room, he thought over their last meeting and the things she had said, he felt a quiet joy that quelled the bitterness within him and uncovered long buried, deeply overlaid feelings.

And yet, he suddenly realized all this had taken place and yet when he came right down to it, he knew very little more about her than her name. The thought bothered him, and he said: ‘I know so little about you.’

She smiled at him. ‘It isn’t good for a man to know too much about a woman.’

‘I don’t see that.’

Her voice dropped lower. ‘Knowledge is often quickly forgotten.’ 

He still did not understand. ‘I think you and I are talking about two different things,’ he said cautiously.

She shook her head firmly. ‘No. Why do you want to know more about me?’

‘That’s simple. Because I want to see you again some day.’ 

‘And why do you want to see me again?’

His face hardened. Seeing this, she quickly took his hand. ‘We are both sensible enough and old enough,’ she said, ‘to know that there has to be more between a man and woman than walks by moonlight and an occasional kiss.’

‘Why do you talk like that?’ he asked quietly.

She hesitated, avoiding his eyes. Then she lifted her head. ‘Because,’ she explained firmly, ‘I don’t want you to go on feeling until the last hour that you have something to make up to me.’ 

Breathlessly, he stared at her. ‘Is that feeling unjustified?’ he asked at last.

‘Yes.’ When he looked down at the ground, she added: ‘If it were justified, we would not have met again.’ Her voice became stronger. ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I know less about you than you do about me. But what I know is basis enough for what I said.’

He thought he understood her now. He nodded and drew her head tenderly against his chest. ‘It’s all right, I know what you mean. Perhaps it was because things need time to develop and time was just what we haven’t had.’

‘Perhaps we have not used it properly,’ she replied pensively, ‘or perhaps this is the way it had to be.’

‘You sound like the Professor and Schnurrbart,’ he said.

‘Who are they? You’ve never told me about them.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You’d have to actually know them; it wouldn’t be any good describing them. Perhaps I would never have come to know you if it had not been for them.’

‘You’re talking in riddles.’

‘There are no such things. What we call riddles are only the inadequacies of our minds.’

‘That is philosophy,’ she said gravely.

He began to laugh, stood up quickly and drew her to her feet. ‘Come,’ he said softly.

The last embers of the day sank in the west. A dark shadow trailed across the sky and only on the margin where the sea plunged into the blackness a strip of bright light clung, trembled for a time, and then shrank up like a dead man’s face, scattering as it was extinguished a rain of blinking lights upon the water, until the shadow fell over the horizon like a black curtain, hiding everything beneath it. Arm in arm, they walked along the beach. Steiner regarded her face from the side. Later they went out to the tip of a narrow sandbar that extended far out into the water, and sat down. He felt her body close beside his, and when he put his arm around her she let herself fall back against it. ‘Why must that be?’ she whispered.

‘What?’

‘The war and all these terrible things.’

‘Perhaps so that we could meet one another.’ He sat up a little.

‘Do you believe in fated meetings?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered thoughtfully, her finger following the lines of his mouth. ‘I don’t know what I believe and I don’t know what you want me to say. But it’s obvious that many things had to come together so that we two could meet.’

He nodded. Her words sounded echoes in him. He leaned over her so that he could feel her breath upon his face. ‘And where will we meet again?’

She closed her eyes and whispered: ‘Somewhere above or below the stars. Perhaps-’

He closed her mouth with a long kiss. When his hand felt for her knees, she started and opened her eyes. Then she threw her arms around his neck and sighed. Her skin was smooth and firm; he began to undress her slowly, with great care and tenderness. She did not resist, and he felt her trembling under his hands in the cool night air.

A long while later they walked back the way they had come. When they reached the wide grounds around the building where they had first met, Steiner stopped and drew her close. ‘I still don’t know all about you,’ he said softly.

‘I’ll write to you.’

He nodded. ‘As you like. Don’t forget the address.’

He looked across the low wall at the building. ‘I’ll be leaving very early and won’t see you again. Perhaps we’ll not meet until the war is over. Why won’t you tell me where you live?’

‘I’ll write you all about it,’ she murmured, leaning her head against his chest. He could not understand her strange conduct and looked down upon her, frowning. When he took hold of her chin to see her face, she turned her head aside quickly, whispering: ‘No, please don’t.’ Suddenly she wound her arms around him and kissed him wildly. Then she broke loose and ran off.

He watched her until she disappeared in the darkness of the lawns. He wanted to call out to her, but his voice would not obey him. Unsteadily he staggered forward a few steps, then stood still. At his back the surf roared, monotonous, heavy and mournful. For a while he stood peering among the trees. Then he turned away. Slowly he returned to the beach and walked with bowed head toward his quarters. At the gate he stopped for a moment and looked up at the mountains. They crouched blackly under the weight of the sky. Over their bent backs hung the moon, its face cold and expressionless. Steiner hunched his shoulders and moved his lips. His voice sounded strange to himself as he said, like a prayer: ‘As you like.’ Then he went in and up to his room.

EASTER PASSED ALMOST
unnoticed in the monotony of their existence. Spring they were scarcely aware of. Only now and then, when they went out of the dugouts and bunkers and stood in the deep trenches, lifting their weary faces to the warm sunlight and closing their eyes, did they forget their surroundings for a few minutes. Until somewhere in the vicinity a shell exploded and the dark cloud of smoke and dust rolled over their heads. Then they crouched like beasts and their faces turned hard and angry. They cursed and went back into the bunkers where they sat longingly looking up at the narrow strip of blue sky that showed above the edge of the trench.

The expected Russian grand offensive had not yet begun. But more and more big guns were raining shells down on their position s. The hill was veiled in the dust of detonations all day long, and at night heavy bombers flew so close over the positions that the men in their bunkers hunched their heads between their shoulders. Uncertainty as to when the enemy offensive would come hardly bothered them. For months and years they had been learning the art of waiting. They moved about their trenches and weapon pits like acrobats, for any false step, any awkward movement, could swiftly put an end to all movement. But they did so with the s
kill
and indifference of long practice. The daily artillery fire upon the positions, the reconnaissance attacks of strong Russian patrols almost every night, and the heavy bombardment of the rear positions, cost the battalion more and more casualties. Scarcely a day passed without some dramatic incidents. While the soldiers, thousands of miles from home, under a cloudless sky in that decisive spring of 1943 waited for the Russian general offensive, they learned in helpless despair that the war, in a new and terrible form, was being carried over the front lines into their homeland. The familiar faces around them grew rarer; more and more they felt that their struggle was meaningless, and they grew steadily quieter and more hopeless.