The Other Side of Silence (11 page)

I lit a cigarette and helped myself to some of her father's brandy.

“Please,” she said. “I need to know. Every woman in Königsberg wants to know what to expect. Particularly the women in the auxiliary services. You see, none of us in the auxiliary is particularly sure of our status as noncombatants. We're in uniform and are obliged to obey military orders but forbidden to use weapons and we're subject to civilian law. So where does that leave us? Will we be treated like civilians or prisoners of war? And will it matter a damn which is which when the Russians turn up? I don't mind dying. But I'd rather not be gang-raped before I die.”

I didn't speak. How could I tell her what I knew? The things I'd heard from the few survivors of Nemmersdorf beggared description.

“Please, Bernie. Look, the word is that there were seventy-two women and girls in Nemmersdorf aged between eight and eighty-four. And that all of them were raped.”

I nodded. “As a matter of fact, it's worse. Much worse than anything you've heard.”

“How is that possible?”

“Raped, mutilated, and murdered.” I paused. “All of them. Women crucified. Breasts cut off. Violated with vodka bottles. Your worst nightmare. What happened at Schulzenwalde was worse. There were ninety-five at Schulzenwalde. Dr. Goebbels is already organizing a team of Swiss and Swedish reporters and observers to go and see the place for themselves so he can tell
the world's press that this is what Germany has been fighting against all along. Frankly, I think you can expect the newsreels to start getting worse from now on. They'll be telling the truth, in other words. As you say, their intention is now to deter us from surrendering. As if fighting on to the last is really going to make any damn difference.”

“Why are the Russians doing this? I thought there were supposed to be rules on how you treat people in war.”

“There are. It's just that we've treated Soviet POWs and Jews so very badly that we can expect no better treatment ourselves. There's a concentration camp to the west of here called Stutthof where more than a hundred thousand people—mostly Poles—are currently imprisoned. But we've been starving and murdering Jews there for a year.”

Irmela nodded. “Which would fit with what we've heard in the signals. Naval captains have been complaining to their superiors here and in Danzig. Ships from the German navy have been used by the SS to take Jews to Stutthof from a camp called Klooga in Estonia. Apparently those prisoners were in a pretty bad way.”

“Look,” I said, “I think there's every chance we'll get all of the women and children out of Königsberg before the Red Army finally gets here. But before that happens, things in this city are going to get an awful lot worse.”

One night, we were going to the Spätenbrau Restaurant on Kneiphöfsche Langgasse, near Cathedral Island. But en route we went to see the ruins of the cathedral and Immanuel Kant's
grave, which was largely undamaged, mostly to give ourselves an appetite for life. Irmela knew a lot about Kant but was always kind enough not to tell me too much at once since I was an intelligence officer more by default than by aptitude. What I knew about Kant you could write on a spinning gas nebula. The cathedral itself was like a huge, empty skull found in the embers of a fire after some medieval execution. It was hard to know exactly what the RAF had been aiming their bombs at, since the nearest military target was more than a kilometer away. Or was it that they figured the only way to beat Germany was to be as bad as Germany? If so, then it certainly looked as if they had a good chance of winning.

“I always thought I'd get married in here,” said Irmela as we wandered hand in hand around the ruins.

“Anyone in particular?”

“There was someone, but he was killed at Stalingrad.”

“One of the lucky ones, probably.”

“You think so?”

“We won't see most of those boys again. From what we know in the FHO, they're most of them working in Soviet slave-labor camps. If you ask me, your boyfriend was spared.” I nodded. “So, let's you and I get married instead. In here. Right now. Come on. Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, you're already married,” she said, “in case you'd forgotten.”

“What's that got to do with anything? Besides, my wife is back in Berlin and I'll probably never see her again. Oh, and
there's this for good measure: You say you love me and I certainly love you and I just happen to have a ring on my finger that will do for a ceremony until I can buy another. Besides, you'll probably be a widow before very long. And the blasphemy and bigamy certainly doesn't matter either since I'm going to hell already. If it makes you feel any better I'll take full responsibility for this when I get down there. I'll say, ‘Look, it wasn't Irmela's fault, I persuaded her.'”

“You promise?”

“I can include that in the vows we make, if you like.”

“We don't even have a priest.”

“Who needs a priest in a Lutheran cathedral? I thought that was the whole idea of the German Reformation. To abolish priestly intercession. Besides, I can remember all the damn words. I've been married enough times already to know them by heart.”

“You're serious, aren't you?”

“Under the circumstances I can't honestly see that God will mind very much. Frankly, I think he'll be glad that anyone can be in a ruin like this and still believe that the idea of God is even possible.”

“I think he's possible, just not very likely,” she said. “There were a hundred children killed in this cathedral when they took shelter from those RAF bombs. As a way of confirming that God doesn't exist it probably beats Nietzsche, don't you think?”

“In which case this will be like a second chance for him. For God, yes. A good way for him to get started in this city again. A chance to make it up to us. To show us that he really means
something. You know, I'll bet we'll be the first people to get married in this church since that happened.”

“You're mad, do you know that?” But she was smiling. “Why do you want to do this?”

“Because words matter, don't they? Most of the time I don't say what I mean just to keep from being arrested by the Gestapo. For once I'd like to say something that's actually important and mean it.”

She nodded.

“I'll take that as a yes.”

We were still celebrating our mock marriage—to be honest, it had seemed a lot more than a mock marriage at the time—with a horsemeat dinner in the Spätenbrau Restaurant when the devil put in an early appearance, as might have been expected after our lighthearted blasphemy. An unexpected bottle of extremely good Riesling arrived at our table, followed closely by its handsome donor, an SD captain whom, for a moment—it had been six years—I only half-remembered. But he remembered me, all right. Blackmailers need to have good memories. It was Harold Hennig, and to my irritation, he greeted me as if we'd been old friends.

“Berlin, wasn't it?” he said. “January, thirty-eight.”

I stood up; he was a captain, after all, and I a mere lieutenant and it was a few moments before I connected him with the von Frisch case.

“Yes. It was. Gunther. FHO.”

“Harold Hennig,” he said, and clicked his heels as he bowed
politely at Irmela. “Well, Gunther, aren't you going to introduce me to this charming young lady?”

“This is Over Auxiliary—?” I was never quite sure of her non-military rank in the women's auxiliary and glanced at Irmela, who nodded back that I'd got this right. “Miss Irmela Schaper.”

“May I join you both?”

“Yes.”

“You look as if you're celebrating something,” he observed.

“We're alive,” I said. “That's always a cause for celebration these days.”

“True.” Captain Hennig sat down and took out an elegant, amber cigarette case, which he opened in front of us to reveal a perfectly paraded battalion of good cigarettes and then offered them around the table. “True. Where there's life, there's hope, eh?”

Irmela took one of his cigarettes and studied it like an interesting curio, and then sniffed the tobacco appreciatively. “I don't know if I should smoke this or keep it as a souvenir.”

“Smoke it,” he said, “and take another one for later.”

So she did.

“Is this what the Gestapo is smoking these days?” I said, savoring the taste of a real nail. “Things must be better than I thought.”

“Oh, I'm not with the Gestapo anymore,” he said. “Not since the beginning of the war. I work for the Erich Koch Institute now.”

“On the corner of Tragheimer and Gartenstrasse,” said Irmela. “I know that building.”

“Since the bombing we're rather more often found in Friedrichsberg.”

“That must be nice,” I said. “And a lot safer, too, I'd have thought.”

Erich Koch was the Nazi Party gauleiter of East Prussia, and his huge country estate at Friedrichsberg, just outside the city, was the center of his commercial exploitation of the province, which, by all accounts, was completely unscrupulous. But his authority was absolute and General Lasch was obliged to give way to Koch's imperious demands. Even now the Erich Koch Institute in the city's Tragheim district was being remodeled—to a princely standard, it was bruited; while, at Koch's orders, a large number of civilian workers was soon to be put to work building an airplane runway on Paradeplatz, presumably so Koch could make a quick getaway in his personal Focke-Wulf Condor—and this at a time when there was a more pressing need to build the city's defenses for the Battle of Königsberg that was coming as soon as winter was over. Everyone assumed it would be the spring thaw of 1945 when the Red Army made its big push against the city. Right now, everything was frozen solid. Even the Russians. It was Erich Koch who had refused to consider the comprehensive and systematic plan proposed by General Lasch for the immediate evacuation of all civilians from East Prussia and who had placed his faith in building a wall—the Erich Koch Wall—in
a place and to a construction standard that was of questionable value.

“The governor isn't in Friedrichsberg for reasons of his own personal safety,” explained Hennig, “but because that's simply the best place to coordinate the defense of the city. It's not just Königsberg that's under threat but Danzig, too. Rest assured, the governor is looking after all our interests.”

“I was sure he would be,” I said, but everyone knew that Koch was looking out for his own interests most of all. I had a good idea that the Park Hotel where I was living was actually owned by the Erich Koch Institute and that the army was obliged to pay Koch four marks a night for every officer staying there, but I thought it best to confine my comments to general approval of the gauleiter. Koch was notoriously touchy and inclined to order the arrest and execution of anyone critical of his absolute rule. Public executions were common in Königsberg, with bodies left hanging from lampposts near the refugee camps on the southern side of the city where, it was believed, there was a much greater need for discipline.

“And what service do you perform for Governor Koch?” I asked Hennig, being careful not to mention blackmail and extortion.

He shook his head and poured some wine into a glass. “You might say that I'm his aide-de-camp. A military liaison officer. Just a glorified messenger, really. The governor issues an order and I have the job of conveying it to the military commander. Or anyone else who matters.” He smiled at Irmela. “And what
about you, my dear? I can see that you're in the naval auxiliary but doing what, may I ask.”

“I'm in signals.”

“Ah. You're a Valkyrie. A lightning maiden. No wonder this fellow Gunther is spending time with you, my dear. He always did like to stand a little too close to high voltages. In nineteen thirty-eight, he almost got his fingers burned. Didn't you, Gunther?”

“It's a wonder I have any fingerprints left,” I said.

At this Irmela picked up my right hand and kissed my fingertips, one by one, and while I appreciated the tenderness of her gesture, I could have wished that she'd not done this in front of Harold Hennig, for whom all knowledge was power, probably. It wasn't that I thought he might tell my wife, but there was just something about him knowing about us I didn't like.

He grinned. “Well, we're all survivors, eh?”

“For how much longer, though,” I said. “That's the question.”

“A word of advice, old fellow,” said Hennig. “There are only two people in East Prussia who still believe in the final victory. One of them is Adolf Hitler. The other is Erich Koch. So, if I were you, I'd avoid defeatist talk like that. I'd hate to see you end up decorating a lamppost for the edification of some foreign workers and refugees.”

“It's horrible the way they do that,” said Irmela.

“And yet it is hard to see how else good order is to be maintained in this city,” said Hennig. “Iron discipline is the only way we are going to hold out for any longer.” He shook his head.
“Anyway, I'm very glad to have left behind the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse way of doing things. The Gestapo, I mean, with their torture chambers and knuckle-dusters. To be quite frank, I was never cut out for all that heavy stuff. Even with the law behind you, it's not for me.”

His eyes glanced momentarily at me and I wondered if he'd forgotten how my partner, Bruno Stahlecker, and I had been obliged by him to fetch Captain von Frisch from Gestapo HQ after Hennig and his thugs had finished beating the old man half to death. But even if he hadn't forgotten about this and knew that I hadn't either, it was probably best I didn't mention it now. No one likes to be told that he's a loathsome piece of shit in front of a beautiful woman.

Hennig looked perfectly at ease, however, as if he'd been recalling his days with a student society given to displays of unruly behavior. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his riding breeches and pushed his chair back so that it stood on only two legs, rocking to and fro, and continued in this somewhat expansive mode, as if he was someone used to being listened to.