XPD (16 page)

‘My grandson,’ explained Wever. ‘He spends the day with us sometimes.’ In another voice, ‘You delivered the eggs to the Rendezvous des Gourmets, did you?’

‘They want to pay by the month. I said they would have to talk to you about it.’ She smiled. ‘They’ll never make a go of that place. They’ll be the third owners it’s had in three years. Trying to make it fancy,’ she said spitefully. ‘Trying to call it French names and serve wine. They’ll run up a bill with us and leave us without a penny if we’re not careful, Franz.’

‘They paid you?’ Wever leaned forward, loosened the laces in his heavy boots and then twisted each foot to make more space for his toes.

‘I said I’d take the eggs back if they didn’t.’ She smiled. ‘They knew I meant it. And the chickens too.’ She opened the purse which was on the table in front of her and selected some pound notes. She folded them into a tight packet and put them on the dresser. ‘That will be for the last payment on the rotovator,’ she said.

The kettle began to sing. She put water into the brown teapot, cradled it to feel its warmth and then tossed the water into the sink. The tea was measured into the pot: three people, three level spoons of tea. The boiling water sizzled as it passed over the hot metal of the kettle spout. She put a knitted cover on the teapot and reached for a jug of milk from the pantry. ‘Would you like a piece of toast, Mr Stuart?’ she said. The anticipation of the tea seemed to put her in a better mood. ‘We don’t have biscuits or any fancy cake in this house.’

‘Just tea,’ said Stuart.

The woman tipped some water into the bowl of flour and fat, and pummelled it fiercely. Then she sprinkled flour over the clean newspaper and tipped the soft pastry on to it with a loud plop. She reached for a rolling pin and began rolling the pastry. Her movements were energetic and determined, like someone completing physical exercises that she didn’t enjoy. She pursed her lips and stared down at the ever expanding sheet of cream-coloured pastry.

‘I never heard a shot fired in anger,’ said Franz Wever suddenly. ‘I wore a uniform and saluted my superiors and drew my rations, but most of the work I did in the army could have been done by a civilian.’

‘And what was that?’

‘I am a Berliner,’ said Wever. ‘I left school when I was fifteen. I learned shorthand and typing and worked in the Berlin office of the Hamburg–Amerika shipping line until I was drafted into the army. After basic training I went to the army signals school in Halle and became a teleprinter operator with Army Group 6 HQ in Hanover. I worked in that communications room for about a year. I was the only professional operator in the place – most of those kids had never even seen a teleprinter until they went to the signals school; they had to use me for anything important. Naturally I wanted to be near my parents and eventually I got a posting to the signals company of Wehrkreis III (Berlin-Brandenburg). Then I went to Zossen …’ He raised his eyes quizzically, to see if Stuart had heard of Zossen.

‘The general staff headquarters. Its communications room handled every order the German army ever got.’

Wever nodded. ‘It was a boring job. Everything was in code … meaningless jumbles of letters and numbers. Even working for the Hamburg-Amerika line was more interesting than that.’ Wever spooned three large spoons of sugar into his empty cup. ‘Pour out the tea, Lucy. It’s brewed.’

The woman finished rolling out the pastry. Briskly she rubbed the flour from her red-knuckled hands. Then she slapped the pastry on to a dish of cooked rhubarb, cutting the overhanging edges away with deft movements of the knife. ‘Why can’t you men pour out your own tea?’ she muttered, but she did it for them. Stuart realized that what he had at first thought was hostility to him was really her response to their talk of war. It was a part of her husband she could never share – like the happy moments of some previous marriage.

‘I’ll do the milking,’ said the woman accusingly. She put the teapot back on to the warm stove. ‘Someone will have to do it before it gets dark, and you’ll be talking about the war.’ Wever did not reply. The woman climbed into a battered sheepskin coat, her movements jerky and violent as if to demonstrate her anger. She turned up her collar before facing the bad weather, and banged the door after her.

‘Sugar?’ said Wever.

‘I’m trying to lose weight,’ said Stuart.

The bag was almost empty. Wever tore it open in order to release the final grains of sugar from its folds. He tipped them into his cup with care. ‘My wife loves that clock,’ he said.

‘It’s a fine piece,’ said Stuart. It was probably the only valuable item in the entire kitchen; virtually everything else seemed improvised, plastic or broken.

‘Obsessed with it,’ explained Wever. ‘Wouldn’t hear of selling it, not even when we needed money to buy seed a couple of years ago. It belonged to her father. She nursed him through those last few months.’ There was a silence in which the tick of the clock seemed to be louder than ever. ‘Nothing is too good for that clock,’ said Wever with a brief and bitter laugh. ‘No tractor oil for that mechanism; special oil from a shop in Norwich. Only yesterday she had someone come and replace one of the chimes. It had been on order for over two months.’ He drank some of his tea but could not take his eyes off the clock. ‘I can’t stand the sound of that ticking,’ he confided. ‘And the damned thing is always slow.’

He brought out a large linen handkerchief and blew his nose with studied care. Then he drank some tea and resumed his story. ‘From Zossen I was selected for duty with the signals detachment at the Wolfsschanze. Only the very best operators were sent there,’ said Wever. Even over such a long passage of time his pride was still evident. ‘That was the Führer’s headquarters in the Görlitz forest. It was a great honour …’ Wever wiped his nose again. ‘But I wasn’t too pleased at the time – no more weekly visits to my parents, no more cinemas, dances and all the pleasures of Berlin. The Wolfsschanze was in the middle of nowhere. The Görlitz forest is in a swampy area, sweltering hot in summer and plagued with mosquitoes; in winter it’s buried in deep snow, and in between times you get the rain and fog. My parents were pleased about it; I was made an officer soon after that, in charge of the Fernschreiberkompanien. And they were pleased because all of us permanent personnel knew we would never be sent to the Russian front.’

‘Why?’

‘It was a special order of the Führer. He was frightened that the Russians might capture one of us and obtain information about him and the day-to-day life at the headquarters.’

‘You were close to Hitler?’

‘Sometimes I would see him every day. It was in February that the signals officer of Hitler’s private train – the Führersonderzug – went into hospital and I was assigned to it. Of course, there were drawbacks to the job. Every uniform had to be well pressed and spotless. No swearing, no smoking, and my communications staff were overworked.’

‘And whose job was it to look after the records?’

‘One man could not have handled the paperwork,’ said Wever wearily. ‘It’s difficult to explain it to you.’ He folded his handkerchief and pushed it back into his pocket. ‘The Führersonderzug was like a travelling circus. The train always carried a dozen aides and adjutants, two or three secretaries and two physicians, as well as a surgeon. Then there would be the press men, Hoffmann, Hitler’s photographer, two or three people from the Foreign Office, and Hitler’s personal staff – three valets and two drivers – a dozen or more railway employees, and just as many catering staff, five railway policemen and three officials of the post office. There were two girls who did nothing other than keep the silver clean and polished and counted! And all that is without his military bodyguard or his SS bodyguard, or the aeroplanes and dozens of motor cars that followed the train to be ready in case Der Chef wanted them en route. Then there was the day-to-day paperwork of the army personnel, flak-gun crews, field kitchen, military police … Can you imagine how much paper was being filed away?’

‘I want to know about Hitler’s personal documents,’ said Stuart. ‘I’m trying to discover where they went in the last days of the war. My people say you know about this.’

Wever gave no sign of having heard him. Dabs of rain hit the window. It was growing darker in the kitchen, but electric light – like remnants of pastry and the last traces of sugar – was carefully husbanded in this household. Franz Wever’s head settled deeper into his hunched shoulders and he almost disappeared into the gloom.

‘I was with Hitler almost until the end.’ Wever drank some tea. ‘On 10 December 1944, at 1700 hours we took the Führer’s special train out of Berlin to a place near Giessen where a convoy of cars took him to Adlerhorst, his headquarters. I was asked to take the place of the signals officer of the FBB – the army escort battalion. He’d been on leave in Berlin on the night of 9 December and was killed in an air raid.’

Wever was still, his eyes closed. In the wretched little kitchen, the daylight fading, he seemed to be asleep. When he spoke again it was enough to make Stuart start in surprise. ‘The train returned to Berlin on 16 January 1945. The Führer was bent and seemed unwell. We arrived about ten o’clock in the morning. The fleet of black three-axle Mercedes cars was waiting in the forecourt of the railway station. A small crowd had gathered but the police were keeping them moving. There were growing fears about another attempt on his life. Now that the Third Reich was nearly finished, there was anti-Nazi talk in the bars and Berliners had invented some bitter jokes about the Nazi leaders taking gold to South America. There had always been anti-Nazi jokes in Berlin – it was renowned for them – but the jokes were different now …

‘Once we were back in Berlin Der Chef spent more and more time down in the underground bunker where he eventually died. The American bombers would arrive just before lunch and the RAF about midnight.

‘For a few days the Führer kept his apartment in the small Old Chancellery building and continued to hold his military conferences in the big new Chancellery which Speer had designed. It had suffered several direct hits but the Führer’s study and dining room were intact. On Wednesday, 21 March, when the news was coming in that Patton’s infantry were entering Ludwigshafen, Der Chef sent for me. By that time the tapestries and valuable paintings had been removed for safekeeping and we had to detour through side passages because of the damage. Many of the windows were broken and had been crudely closed off with heavy cardboard which rattled noisily with the wind from the garden. It was depressing for anyone who remembered it as it had once been.

‘I arrived at the entrance together with Colonel General Guderian and his adjutant. They had to go through exactly the same security checks that I was subjected to, and there were armed sentries every ten paces. The whole Zitadelle – the part of Berlin where all the government buildings were – was teeming with troops. A company of the Führer Begleit Battalion was moved out of the Lichterfelde barracks at short notice and put into the Chancellery with the SS Begleit Kommando. It was chaos because the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Wache Reichskanzlei was still there with no room to spare.

‘At the end of every corridor my papers were checked against a log-book entry. When we got to the ante-room I took my pistol from its holster and gave it to the Waffen SS guards. There was a table filled with them, each gun tagged with the name of the owner. Even Guderian and his adjutant had to hand over their briefcases for the guards to examine inside and out. There were no body checks but I don’t think anyone with a lumpy uniform would have got into the ante-room.’ Wever smiled.

‘Once inside the ante-room I saw all the big brass waiting for the daily conference. There was Keitel, Dönitz, Jodl, some of Himmler’s RSHA people and, sprawled in the armchair looking miserable, I saw Göring himself. I sat down on one of the embroidered gilt chairs feeling out of place, then the study doors opened and Günsche came into the ante-room.’

‘Günsche was Hitler’s adjutant,’ said Stuart to display his newly acquired knowledge. ‘His SS adjutant.’

‘Hitler had dozens of SS adjutants,’ said Wever, showing no admiration for this interjection. ‘Four SS persönliche Adjutanten – it was bureaucracy running wild …’ He brushed aside the interruption with a movement of the hand and sipped some more tea. ‘But SS Sturmbannführer Günsche was one of them and combat commandant too. At the end it was Günsche who soaked Hitler’s body in petrol and set it afire. He beckoned to me, and told the others – including Göring – that the Führer would receive them in five minutes. They looked at me as I was ushered into the study to see what it was that made me so important. I was trying to guess. As always in this sort of situation it is guilty fears that predominate. I wondered if I was going to be executed for telling some anti-Hitler joke or complaining about the dehydrated cabbage. Everyone had heard me complain about that cabbage.

‘Günsche took me through the enormous study, with the painting of Bismarck and Hitler’s gigantic desk, to a side room where they stored documents of the sort the Führer might require at short notice during his daily conferences. It was a small room and Hitler stood in the middle of it. As I came closer to him I could smell the medicated sweets he used whenever he had a sore throat. He had a pathological fear of contracting a disease of the throat.

‘He was a shocking sight. You must remember that I had seen him often. On the train I would sometimes be giving him teleprinter messages by the dozen. When things were going well, the Führer would exchange a few words. He remembered the names of my parents and my mother’s birthplace – Linz in Austria. Now I could hardly recognize him. His face seemed to have aged forty years, his eye sockets were deeply sunken and the skin of his cheeks dark, as if bruised. He was stooped and seemed to have lost the use of his left arm, which trembled constantly. His voice was very low and hoarse and almost unrecognizable to anyone who had heard his speeches of earlier years – and which of us had not! When he spoke he leaned forward and used his right hand to grasp his throat, as if to help his vocal cords.