The Last Shot (13 page)

Jürgen was bound to have his suspicions. After all, Anke and I had a past together. He had good reason to kill me. I thought of that over the next three days. I had every intention of leaving. Sooner or later, I was sure Jürgen would come back and find us in the apartment, if not actually in bed then both having a shower at a most peculiar time of day: 2 in the afternoon.

It didn’t stop.

Anke and I got on so well. We could talk about things. Maybe if we knew that we would spend the rest of our lives together, who knows, we might have run from each other. If I had asked her to divorce Jürgen, she would have said no. But I never asked. If we could have predicted the future, perhaps we would not have have been so desperate.

One morning, after Jürgen had gone to work and Alex had been collected by the special bus, Anke came in with coffee. She got into my bed and we talked for a long time. There seemed no end to the things we had to say to each other. My fear of running out of things to say to people disappeared with Anke.

She sat up in the bed, resting on her elbow, holding her saucer in one hand, the cup in the other, sipping occasionally and letting her head lean over so that her brown, or is it russet, hair hung. I told her that I had been in Nuremberg looking for Franz Kern. I told her what I knew. I explained how I had given up the search back in 1985 and was half-thinking of taking it up again. She encouraged me. Kept saying I should go back to Nuremberg to establish what happened.

It was good to talk to her about it. I told her that it seemed unfair to harass old people who wanted to forget what happened. Nonsense, she said. She would do it herself. But then, Anke never had any second thoughts about anything; she
always went ahead applying her first and as usual most accurate instinct. I said it made me feel a bit like a Nazi-hunter. I felt I had no stomach for it, dragging the past out of people wasn’t my idea of pleasure.

I changed the subject. I asked her if she and Jürgen would come and see me in Düsseldorf some time.

‘Difficult,’ she said.

It was stupid to ask. I didn’t pursue it. She placed her cup and saucer on my forehead. The coffee was no longer hot, but I could feel warmth conducted through the saucer into my forehead. I could also see that there was still come coffee left. It was glass crockery, the kind that doesn’t break when it falls on the floor. She allowed the cup and saucer to balance there on my forehead while I began to laugh, a sort of helpless laugh, knowing that using my hands to remove it or steady it myself was cheating.

‘Leave it,’ she said, restraining my hands.

The cup rocked with my laughing.

‘Handy having you here,’ she said. ‘Somewhere to put my cup while I’m in bed.’

I struggled to free my hands. I could have remained still and prevented the cup from falling that way. In that case, she said, and began to tickle me. I laughed and struggled with her until the cup tipped over and the luke-warm coffee soaked my chest. She fell backwards laughing while I put away the cup.

Jürgen did find out, as it happens. He rang during the day and said we would all go out to dinner that evening; the last evening. Frau Moltke, an occasional babysitter, came to look after Alex.

At the restaurant, Jürgen pretended he knew nothing. He talked about Germany. And football. He talked about his practice. He was now certain that he would have to employ another gynaecologist, his third. The reputation set up by his father’s practice was doubling by the month.

Anke was dressed up. She wore long silver earrings. They looked like lizards. Her hair was tied up at the back. I could see
the flame of the candle reflected in her eyes. She wore a turquoise off-the-shoulder dress and I could see a sort of matt refulgence on her bare shoulders. Jürgen wore a loose beige jacket with pronounced shoulders. He looked strong.

It was the one thing that I was certain of with Jürgen. Nothing would incite him to impatience. Violence would have been inconceivable. Maybe he was capable of killing for revenge. I wasn’t sure. This fine Greek restaurant seemed a good place to take out a gun and shoot your wife’s lover.

We spent most of the time talking about Eastern Europe. Jürgen said it was the most important revolution in history. More important than the French Revolution. Perestroika would put us all to shame, he thought. Then he told us about his difficulties in finding another gynaecologist.

‘Not a decent gynaecologist to spare between here and Dresden,’ Jürgen said, laughing openly. We had drunk quite a bit of wine.

After dinner, Jürgen ordered coffee and brandy. The association with the scent of coffee from earlier in the day was renewed. Guilt by scent.

Jürgen spoke up. Quite abruptly, over the brandy, he brought up the subject of Anke and myself as though he had completely forgotten it in the meantime. He hadn’t. He was saving it up. First he toasted, then he stared at both me and Anke alternately. Seriously. A little drunk.

‘I wanted to talk to you both together about this,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to make it a long drawn-out thing. I know how these things happen. I know the strength of love…’

Anke and I looked at each other. We were both completely surprised when it came. It was like an official announcement. I was sure people at the next table were able to hear him. His solemn mood was obvious.

‘I will say to you both very honestly what I think,’ Jürgen went on. ‘I have to say it. I know you are having this affair. I cannot stop it.’

We listened. We had no right to speak.

‘I thought, four years ago, when we came to live here in Münster, that it was all over. When you came to visit, I knew you were coming as a friend. This has hurt me very much. I know there is nothing I can do. You will still remain my best friend, no matter what happens. And I will still love Anke, no matter what happens…’

Jürgen took my hand. Then he took Anke’s hand. It must have looked like a seance. The three of us silent; tears in Jürgen’s eyes. Tears in Anke’s eyes.

‘I love you both so much,’ he said, looking from one to the other. ‘I have thought about this every minute of the day. It has cost me so much pain, but I would hate to lose you…either of you.’

He was drunk. Things got worse. We discussed the whole thing very rationally for a while. Anke made excuses. Something had just snapped inside her, she explained. She put her arms around Jürgen. Her tears mingled with his. I could see that the waiter was making anxious glances. But the Greeks understand this kind of thing. They didn’t interfere. They brought more brandy. I’ve never seen Anke that drunk before.

I told Jürgen ten times over that I was leaving the next day. It was all a big mistake. I vowed to him that I wouldn’t do this to him again. Anke looked distressed. She hung with her arms around Jürgen’s neck.

And Jürgen put his hand on my throat, with my shirt in his fist.

‘I love you…you bastard.’

We walked home together, the three of us arm in arm, Jürgen in the middle, stumbling through the
Altstadt
of Münster. Sometimes we stopped and put our heads together in the middle of the street. We passed through an archway where the spotlights shine upwards at the old buildings and past the buildings into the reddish-black sky.

I went to Nuremberg.

I began to search for Franz Kern, again, in late November that year. It seemed even more ironic that I should be digging up the end of the war when everybody else was moving so feverishly towards German unity. A new era for Germany. Now it was time at last to drop the Second World War.

I found the old list of Kerns. I had only contacted and ticked off ten Kerns before I gave up. I was surprised at my lack of determination. This time, I would put all discretion aside; I had no intention of being brutal or making old people suffer any more guilt or trauma over the war, but I wanted to know. It was down to sheer curiosity by now.

I booked into a guest-house close to the centre of town this time.
Pension
Sonne, on the fourth floor, no lift; clean, quiet, run by an old woman, Frau Schellinger, and her daughter. It had a phone in the breakfast-room. Frau Schellinger promised to take messages for me if I was out. She told me later that most of the people she catered for were travelling salesmen and American tourists, like myself. I felt I belonged more to the salesman category.

I told Frau Schellinger that I worked in market research. She seemed pleased. Eager to help. She was officially retired now. Her daughter ran the guest-house and she was only really helping out. I rarely saw the daughter.

By day, I made phone-calls and went up the hill to the library. In the evening I made more calls to those who were not replying during the day. There seemed less of a rush. I was going about this in a more strategic way, like a market survey. I enjoyed the task more, crossing off the Kerns, talking to people about the war. I found another Fritz Kern who had
been in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. But the wrong end. He was captured by the Russians near Jihlava. He spent months in Russia before he was released.

I found a Franz Kern who said he had lost both legs in the Crimea during the war. He said he had been loaded on a truck with other dead soldiers, unconscious, taken for dead. He found himself on top of a stinking communal grave when he managed to shout out and was saved.

I went to meet him in a suburb of Nuremberg one afternoon. It took me ages to find his small, one-room apartment. He had a shiny red face and oiled grey hair. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, he was brought down to the noisy pub on the ground floor of the same building by his son. They would drink beer and schnapps together and play Skat. He had obviously told his story a hundred times over. He was a happy man, with no deep attitude to the war, just glad to be alive.

His son talked about the German football team. His son was very broad, about five times the size of his father. He was able to lift his father and carry him around. The mother had died some years ago. I asked the son his age. He looked at me in a strange way, silent, as though he knew what I was really asking. If he was born since the war, since the legs were blown away. The father answered, slapping his son on the back, saying, ‘His mother was a beautiful woman.’

They were the only Kerns I could find who would meet me. Most of the Kerns I phoned grunted suspiciously and said they had nothing to do with the war. There was a particular Frau Kern who didn’t know where her husband had been. She dropped the phone and went to ask him. I had this picture of a very old couple, senile, losing all memory, puzzling over the question. It seemed to me that they had lost the memory of the phone ringing, but after a while she did come back and said:
Jugoslawien.

I wasn’t having much success but I was being very patient. In the meantime, I had placed a discreet ad in two German newspapers, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
and the
Nürnberger
Nachrichten,
leaving a box number. The lady at the reception in the Nuremberg office said that kind of ad was not unusual after the war. She helped me with the wording.

After the phone-calls in the evening, I ticked off the list of Kerns in the breakfast-room, counted the digits I had spent on the phone and went in to pay Frau Schellinger. Occasionally I would see a salesman through the frosted orange glass door, pacing up and down, waiting to use the phone. To phone his wife, I suppose.

I paid Frau Schellinger each evening for the phone-calls. And each evening I would find her sitting in her living-room, or in reception, behind the glass partition. She began to invite me in. I sat down sometimes to talk to her. There was a massive TV in the corner, always on. She talked about reunification.

‘The people over there in the East should know that we didn’t have it easy either,’ she said. She had obviously been thinking about all this, waiting for somebody who would listen.

‘You get nothing for nothing,’ she went on. ‘We all had to work hard for what we have. Every
Pfennig,
we saved.’

Within minutes she had taken out a coffee-table book showing photographs of the old and the completely restored Nuremberg.

‘Here, you can see for yourself. Nuremberg had eighty-five per cent bomb damage after the war. Here, there was nothing left standing. Not one house was left with its roof on.’

I glanced dutifully through the post-war black and white photographs of the city. It looked like a village, low walls with rubble. The spires of churches, the buildings I had already become familiar with from walking around the town, were ruins. It was remarkable. The opposite page showed the same buildings completely restored. I knew all this from other German cities, Frankfurt, Berlin, Cologne. But she wanted to tell her story.

‘This house had no roof and no floors. Only the stairs were left. We lived here under a canopy for three years. Everywhere, I had buckets collecting the rain. I restored this house with my own two hands.’

I looked around to admire her achievement. It was a fine house
in the centre of the city. She owned the third and fourth floors, now worth at least 2 million DM, she estimated.

The TV in the corner was showing particularly explicit love scenes, which she ignored completely. She went on talking about the war. She must have thought it was odd to find somebody who was interested in listening to her.

‘If they want some of this economic miracle,’ she said, referring once more to the East Germans, ‘they’ll have to work for it like anyone else. You don’t get this
Wohlstand
for nothing.’

The TV was now showing the silhouette of a naked woman standing against a window. I have always wondered how older German people can be so impervious to nudity on the screen and nudity on the front of magazines at the newspaper kiosks. I decided to ask her about her husband.

‘He’s long dead,’ she replied. It looked as though she wanted to leave it at that.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said. ‘Where did that happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He didn’t come back. He left this house to go to the Front in nineteen forty-four. I went to the country, to my aunts. I never heard from him. I came back here after the war but I knew he had fallen somewhere. I never heard anything, God bless him.’

She paused and thought back.

‘Sometimes people came to me saying they had seen him. I would invite them in and ask them where, when. I would give them food. Sometimes I gave them money. Or gifts. I was so overjoyed to hear that he was alive, maybe in some POW camp. Other men came and said the same thing. I believed them. My hopes were so high I gave them gifts of silver, anything I had. But then, when the months and the years went by, I realized they had conned me. They had all come just to get their food and gifts. He never came back.’

I began to think of Franz Kern’s wife. Perhaps she was left waiting for him after the war, waiting for days and weeks, slowly beginning to believe the agonizing truth that he wasn’t coming back. What if Franz Kern never returned to Nuremberg?
I would have been searching aimlessly for him. Maybe I should be looking for him in America.

I returned to Düsseldorf.

I had failed to find Franz Kern. For weeks I was hoping to get some response from the adverts I had placed in the papers. Nothing.

Anke phoned me. She wanted to meet me. She had to meet me. In those weeks, she began to come down Düsseldorf on the train once a week, then twice a week. It doesn’t take long from Münster to Düsseldorf. She was back home again by 5 o’clock. We met at the station, we went for lunch. Sometimes we went back to my apartment.

After Christmas, she came down to Düsseldorf regularly, at least once a week. It wasn’t just love. She needed to talk to me. Sometimes we did nothing but talk together for hours. Occasionally, we decided to meet on neutral ground, in some other smaller town. Throughout January and February we met in towns like Geldern, Kevelaer and Xanten, where we visited the cathedral. We once went to Kempen, to satisfy my curiosity, and walked around the market square and around the old fountain.

Anke kept telling me how ill Alexander was. He still went to the special school every day. But sometimes she had to take him to hospital for tests. Endless tests. Jürgen was saying there was little hope. Leukaemia was not something they had found a successful treatment for. Sometimes Anke had to postpone our meeting. So we talked on the phone instead. Anke cried a lot. Every time we met she cried for Alexander.

I had already given up any hope of a response from my ads in the newspaper when I got a letter through the box number from the
Frankfurter Allgemeine.
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to ring Anke and tell her. It was a letter on blue paper from a woman named Frau Marianne Jazinski. It didn’t say much, just gave the address and a short, hasty note.

‘I know the Franz Kern you are looking for.’