Black Camp 21 Page 2

  ‘We should eat,’ he said, when his companion loomed over the ragged edge of the cliff. ‘You look like you’ve been in a war.’

  Hartmann sagged back against the tree. ‘We’re not really friends, you and me. We’re like those breakwaters. We just hold tight and cling on to each other and hope there’s still something standing when the shit swirls away.’

  ‘You always were a miserable bastard, Max.’

  Neither man laughed, but the warmth was building again and each of them wanted to talk. It had been a long time and there were more secrets even than before.

  ‘I thought you were going to die.’ Koenig had broken the silence first. ‘The last time I saw you there was a hole in your guts.’

  Wearily, Hartmann’s fingers circled the scar through his damp tunic.

  He’d been lucky. He knew that. For years they’d fired guns at bull’s-eyes. Then, in 1941, they’d started killing men. That spring, he and Koenig had been rushed into the 2nd SS Panzer Division – the so-called elite ‘Das Reich’ – and by midsummer they were poised in their armoured vehicles somewhere along Russia’s immense western border. Just them and three million others, each one certain of victory over Bolshevism.

  Through clouds of flying insects, they’d swept east, across vast plains, silencing every bleat of resistance. By mid-October, the first snows were falling, and as troop-carriers floundered in brown slurry, slaughtered Russians had been thrown on to the mud like planks. Too clearly, Hartmann remembered the ruined faces, but it was the sound – of the tanks crushing each corpse – which kept him from sleep.

  ‘Did it hurt? Did you know what happened?’

  ‘I knew it was a sniper.’ He could still feel the flesh knotted thick around the old wound. ‘I wasn’t sorry to be going home.’

  It was relief, not pain or guilt, which he’d felt the most. After botched front-line first aid, infection had torn through his body. For six days, he’d clung to life on a freezing, filthy train shipping the wounded back to the west.

  In letters from Munich, his father had assured him that Communism was on its knees, but in his dreams Hartmann saw frozen tracks and frostbitten fingers and an endless quagmire highway paved with mutilated boys in uniforms.

  ‘I was lucky, Erich. I’d seen enough.’

  Boiling sap was dripping from the charred stump of a branch.

  ‘You saw nothing,’ said Koenig.

  ‘I killed people. That was plenty for me.’

  Koenig swallowed and spat into the flames. ‘You killed soldiers, Max. Russian soldiers. You fought to the rules. After you’d gone there were no rules.’

  Hartmann stared into the flames.

  ‘They were animals out there. The partisans were nailing German soldiers to barn walls through their tongues. They were slinging them up with meat hooks through their cocks.’

  ‘You saw these things?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we just heard. Rumours.’

  ‘We were in their fucking country. What did you expect?’

  ‘In the early days we shipped the prisoners back behind our lines.

  Then, after a while, we just started killing them.’

  ‘You started killing them? You?’

  Koenig had stood up, and was furiously stoking life back into the fire.

  ‘Fuck, Koenig. Fuck.’

  ‘No one seemed to care what we did. Or how we did it. Petrol, bullets, bayonets, fists. You were all right, Max. You were down the fucking Brienner Strasse drinking beer. Me, I was loving every second of it.’

  ‘And the medal?’ asked Hartmann quietly.

  ‘They were Bolsheviks. Scum.’ Koenig had slowed down. ‘People did what they had to.’

  Hartmann reached inside his tunic. They were damp, and a little crooked, but his Gauloises were still intact. From the edge of the fire pit he picked up a glowing twig, lit two cigarettes, and handed one across.

  ‘French smokes.’ Koenig smiled. ‘One of the sweetest perks of our victory over the barbarians.’

  In the thickening gloom, the wet paper sizzled and the blazing tips hovered like fireflies against the dark. From old habit, the two young men drew together, held the rich smoke deep, and released it in one long synchronised sigh. As their lungs emptied, Hartmann leaned across.

  ‘Don’t worry, Erich. I’m going to burn too, believe me.’

  ‘I’m not worried. I never worry. We’re all going to burn if we don’t win. Let’s go.’

  While Koenig packed the car, Hartmann hoofed sand over the hot ash. It was a clear night, and the grey light of a full moon was flickering on the tide. To hide their dishevelled uniforms, both men had slung on their long army coats. With their caps on, they would pass muster. Recriminations were unlikely in any case. Since the war in the west had gone quiet, everyone had let themselves go a little. No one would look too closely, and people had lost the habit of asking questions.

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ barked Koenig with a questioning grin.

  ‘Heil Hitler indeed,’ retorted Hartmann. ‘Your new best friend.’

  Driving north to the coast, the roads had been forlorn. After nightfall, it was as if the entire country had been abandoned.

  Above the hungry churn of the engine, they could hear nothing. Every farm building stood black in its field, and the trees seemed to draw back from the accusing sweep of their headlights. At the centre of a crossroads outside Creully, an immense boar stood and watched as they swerved by.

  ‘He’s directing the traffic,’ mouthed Koenig.

  But Hartmann couldn’t hear and wasn’t looking. In the dark, everything seemed so miraculously undamaged. In the dark, no one could see what they had done.

  Shortly before midnight, they were back. Outside Koenig’s billet, on the woody fringes of Villers-Bocage, Hartmann stopped the car and silenced its engine. Without speaking, Koenig opened his door, walked to the back and began clearing the boot.

  Through the twin columns of the headlights, mayflies swirled like angry dust. At the end of a long gravel drive, they could just make out a gloomy farmhouse and beyond that the murky shapes of weaponry beneath grim drapes of mottled camouflage.

  ‘This is me, then. I’m staying here.’

  ‘I’m another hour away,’ said Hartmann. ‘No one will notice I took the car.’ Somewhere behind them, a tawny owl was cooing; in rhythm, it seemed, with the cooling ping of the exhaust.

  It would be good to be alone again. Koenig’s fireside confessional had troubled him.

  Everyone half knew things or half heard things, but back home his father’s generation had their hands over their ears. What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. There were people in Germany, Hartmann had long ago concluded, who would prefer none of them to get back alive with their stories.

  ‘Take care,’ said Koenig, offering his hand. ‘It could be a long time.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Let’s be optimistic. They might never come. In three months, we might be home cracking a bottle together for my birthday.’ Hartmann eased out the clutch as Koenig stepped back.

  ‘I’ve just realised, Max. You’ve never really told me what you’ve been doing these past few years.’

  ‘You never asked.’ The car was inching slowly into the darkness.

  ‘Well? You’ve got two seconds.’ In a moment, Hartmann would be gone.

  ‘I got married, Erich. I think I have a child.’

  2

  6 August 1944

  05:24 hours

  With a nervous shiver, Hartmann stirred. Sleep had taken him by surprise, but not for long. Never for long. Since that night, he’d seen, and heard, nothing of Koenig. Since early June, the shit-storm had broken their army into pieces, and now, in the hollow beneath his tank, he recoiled from the person he’d become. Grease-knotted hair lay in clumps across his scalp. Around his neck, where the lice had taken residence, a minefield of red scabs seeped into a sweat-black collar. At the end of each filthy finger, he could feel the sticky scum of battle; blood, and engin
e oil, and the dark brown dust he’d been tearing through for weeks.

  Wriggling from the shelter of the tank, he could see colour and shape forming inside the black silhouettes of the night. Daylight was advancing fast. Figures were moving everywhere in a half-crouch, and the hiss of boiling tea had joined the chorus of morning sound. Soon there would be an order of some sort. Shortly afterwards – if the previous days were anything to go by – it would be countermanded. Somewhere close by a radio operator was swearing furiously at his broken equipment. The Waffen SS, Hartmann thought. We’re not so impressive now.

  With his back against steel, he searched his ragged pockets for a smoke. That, at least, would be in good shape.

  His father had carried the silver cigarette case in the trenches, carving his name and a date – 11 November 1918 – deep into the inside lid. Now it had gone to war again, providing an elegant sanctuary for the last few things in Hartmann’s ownership that mattered. Dry matches, four Gauloises and a photograph.

  As the match fizzed in his fingers, he drew the picture close to the flame. ‘Alize. Alize Hartmann. Talk to me,’ he whispered, before tucking the image carefully back inside the case.

  As it always did now, the nicotine made him feel faint, and he closed his eyes to steady himself. There’d been too many days recently without food or sleep, and the scar of his old wound was stretched painfully tight across his shrunken belly.

  Alize. How strange that it was his father who had reunited them.

  Back in Vienna, they’d been accidental friends, no more. Once a month, Alize’s father had visited the Hartmann home in Leopoldstadt to cut the professor’s hair. And while the two men traded city gossip, Max would steer the barber’s daughter towards a sunlit warren of attic rooms, where they contentedly read stories to each other, or quietly ransacked chests stuffed with his mother’s old clothes.

  They were a similar age, and she was blonde and pretty, but there’d been no letters – nothing had ever been said – and when the professor relocated in Germany the connection had been severed. Just occasionally, when Max saw a barber’s pole, he’d unexpectedly found himself remembering her. Other than that, the girl had vanished entirely from his life.

  ‘They’ve moved up to the north coast. Not sure where,’ his father told him, after receiving a brief postcard from his old friend.

  ‘What does he say?’ Max had asked.

  ‘He says to keep on top of the hairs in my ears.’

  And then, just as suddenly, she was back.

  She was now nineteen years old, ambitious, and had never left home alone before, nor expected to. But in the summer of 1942, as the bombing of Hamburg intensified, the city’s brightest students were being ordered south from the Baltic shores to the few places in Germany the RAF hadn’t yet blitzed. Improbably, Munich was still one of them, and to Alize Netzel, Professor Emil Hartmann represented two lifelines, being both a familiar name from her past and a chance to somehow complete her studies.

  On a stifling July afternoon she’d boarded a train and inched fearfully towards the Bavarian mountains. That same evening, as the last snows glowed on the distant Alps, around four hundred bombers crossed the English Channel bound for the city where her parents lived. By the time Alize tumbled into Munich’s crowded Central Station, she was an orphan.

  Hartmann’s father had known what to do. Since his wife’s departure, and with Max away at the eastern front, he’d felt lost inside an enormous house on the northern edge of the city.

  He already knew too much about loneliness. Vienna was his true home, not Munich. For years, most of his furniture had been abandoned beneath sheets in darkened rooms. Outside his work – and the party – he had nothing. Alize Netzel’s tragedy would be his salvation; a small debt he could repay to the man who had once shaved his neck.

  At the station, they’d embraced awkwardly. He’d carried her small bag back to his house, and when the news trickled south from Hamburg he made a promise to keep her safe. It was an arrangement that would suit them both. She was a diligent student with nowhere else to go. She could take the attic space, the house would rise from its slumber, and hopefully soon Max would be well enough to return home.

  In fact, the professor’s son had been well enough for months.

  Throughout the previous winter, he’d hovered on the brink of death, weakened by the sniper’s bullet which had blown a hole through his gut, and by the subsequent operation which removed an infected length of his intestine.

  As the periods of delirium began to shorten, Hartmann had enjoyed thoughts of mutinous lucidity. To the fury of the nursing staff, he had taken to wearing his newly minted Iron Cross – a reward for he knew not what – pinned to his pyjama top. He was also overheard praising the valour and patriotism of the Russian army; remarks for which he was informally admonished by the surgeon who’d stitched him back together.

  By the time he was strong enough to move, he had been back in Germany for almost six months. In all that time, there’d been no word from Koenig, and precious little reliable information on the fate of his fellow soldiers out in the cold. In all probability, Koenig was frozen dead in a ditch along with the rest of them. No one said it too loud, but the winter had won and the 2nd Panzer Division had been wiped from the face of the earth. Or so the half-rumours claimed.

  No bad thing perhaps, thought Hartmann, whose convalescence now proceeded in a military hostel hidden within an anonymous leafy suburb of Berlin.

  Throughout it all, his father had stayed in touch. Every few days, a letter came from Munich, and in each one the professor seemed a little more desperate for Max to return. And then suddenly – during a glorious run of August sunshine – Emil’s tone changed. Do you remember Alize? I’m sure that you must, wrote the professor. The war has caused her a terrible loss, and she’s staying in Munich now; here, with me in our house. You’d still like her, I think. She’s a bright young thing and we’re good for each other. I suppose neither of us really has anyone else! Come and see for yourself as soon as you’re strong enough. You’ll be amazed. I’ve even opened the curtains in the drawing room again . . . and I promise not to talk about politics.

  A few days later, wearing his SS uniform, Hartmann arrived back in Munich. Inside the railway station, huge swastika flags hung scarlet from every upper floor window. Around him exuberant crowds of passengers flowed out on to the sunlit concourse where a brass band played patriotic tunes watched by grinning, cross-legged schoolgirls.

  It felt incongruous to him that the British had spared the city for so long. Berlin might be the brains, but Munich had always been the bloody heart of this blighted enterprise. As he strode homewards, every building seemed to be a Nazi shrine.

  Hitler had ranted here, Hitler had raved there; in the Braunes Haus, the Sterneckerbräu, and the Hofbräuhaus. Pictures of the Führer glowered from walls and windows and yet the city itself seemed curiously oblivious of the filthy war Max had been fighting. True, the streets had been cleared of Jews, but – as yet – only a handful of bombs had fallen to break the spell, and the dogs still ate biscuits here, not corpses.

  ‘You look magnificent,’ his father had said, after a tense doorstep embrace. ‘The war is going well then.’ It hadn’t really been a question.

  ‘Depends whose side you’re on, Father,’ Hartmann had muttered, as the professor carefully decanted champagne into a slender flute.

  ‘And whose side are you on, son?’

  For a moment, over a toast, the two locked eyes. All around them, in the rambling rear garden, a warm breeze was lifting the scent off the lavender beds.

  ‘To survival,’ proclaimed Emil as the glasses chinked.

  ‘Of the fittest,’ replied Hartmann.

  ‘And to the Führer,’ said the professor, rising stiffly to his feet.

  ‘And to the Führer,’ whispered his son.

  Later, when Emil’s lodger returned – standing quietly at the back door – she was struck by how alike the two had become: the s
ame thick crush of dark hair; the same shadowed intensity around their eyes. When they turned and stood, she saw it again in their lean, strong bodies, and when Max spoke she discerned the same kindness that had rescued her from despair.

  ‘Come and join us, Alize,’ he said, reaching out for her hand. ‘Come and save us from an argument.’

  ‘You remember me then?’

  ‘Of course. They were happy days. And you haven’t changed a bit.’

  Later on, she could remember little of their first moments together. One glass of champagne had made her drowsy, the airless weather was draining, and the professor’s son had seemed uncomfortable with small talk.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she had said eventually. ‘I have an essay to write.’

  Lying on her attic bed, Alize felt the day’s heat building in her room. Through an open skylight she could still hear the men’s muffled voices, rising up on the warm air; father and son. At times it sounded like shouting, but she wasn’t sure, and in between there were long silences broken only by the sound of popping corks.

  Working on her studies was out of the question. The professor’s son had unsettled her. It wasn’t just the whole Schutzstaffel thing. Men in the SS were supposed to have an aura, and like all her old school friends, Alize regarded the dark uniform as a potent lure. No, it was something else; something more intriguing. As a boy, he’d been brittle and awkward. Down there in the garden, he’d sounded wiser and more careworn than his own illustrious father. However perfectly his uniform had been tailored, he clearly wore it with unease. He had also become extraordinarily handsome.

  All in all, Alize concluded, she would not be unhappy to see more of Unterscharführer Max Hartmann.

  It was her good fortune that Hartmann felt exactly the same. Since his mother walked out, women had played so little part in his life he’d forgotten how to talk to them, and yet he couldn’t shake the image of her lustrous brown hair, her sorrowful expression and the polka-dot dress that clung to her with such distinction. Nor did he particularly want to.