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 Kerns 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 wasnt 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 doesnt take long from Münster to Düsseldorf. She was back home again by 5 oclock. 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 wasnt 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 couldnt 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 didnt say much, just gave the address and a short, hasty note.
I know the Franz Kern you are looking for.
36
Franz Kern stood in the middle of the farmyard beside the dead dog. The dogs leg was still twitching, so it seemed. Foam clung to his purple lips and to his teeth. The sun shone directly into the farmyard. A shallow rusted basin full of water reflected the sheen of the sun. Midges or flies hovered over it. This had probably been the dogs drinking bowl, where he lapped the water with his long tongue. The rake with which the dog had been struck lay right beside him. Otherwise the farmyard was empty.
Kern felt helpless. He almost wished he was back in Laun. Again, the unforgiveable idea had entered his mind. What if he just got on his bike and left on his own? It was every man for himself. He could have left all this trouble behind. But the thought was too horrific to imagine. He had to force it out of his mind. There was no question of betraying her. Leaving her to the same fate as this dog. Bertha. He loved her.
He removed the small haversack from his back, took out the hand-gun and discarded the haversack beside one of the wooden farm buildings. He had never used the gun. Only three or four times at target practice. Never in combat. It felt strange in his hand. So easy to carry.
He had no idea where to run. He listened for a moment. He heard water. A stream somewhere. He thought once more of calling Bertha, even just to let her know he was with her. But he decided against it. He made a choice and ran around to the back of the outhouses where the forest began again; two chestnut trees, already in bloom, standing like a gateway into a deeper forest. Surely this is where Bertha ran to. He knew by intuition. There were banks of nettles everywhere else. It was the only way she could run, with bare legs.
He removed the small haversack from his back, took out the hand-gun and discarded the haversack beside one of the wooden farm buildings. He had never used the gun. Only three or four times at target practice. Never in combat. It felt strange in his hand. So easy to carry.
He had no idea where to run. He listened for a moment. He heard water. A stream somewhere. He thought once more of calling Bertha, even just to let her know he was with her. But he decided against it. He made a choice and ran around to the back of the outhouses where the forest began again; two chestnut trees, already in bloom, standing like a gateway into a deeper forest. Surely this is where Bertha ran to. He knew by intuition. There were banks of nettles everywhere else. It was the only way she could run, with bare legs.
In all the years of the war Franz Kern had seen no action. Not that he was looking for it. But he always had an irrational feeling that he was missing something; a phobia maybe that he would always arrive too late. It was a fear he had always had in school, during his tests, when he was asked to read out loud, when he was asked to write on the blackboard. He was afraid of being slow. It only began to disappear after he became a technician, or soon after he was conscripted into the army and discovered that others were slower, less enthusiastic than he was. He had always told himself to do his best. More talented people often did less well, and had less stamina.
Running through the chestnut trees into the cool shade of the forest, he told himself once more to do his best. He was a soldier. He was clever. He would find her.
Up to then, Franz Kerns attitude towards the war had been predominantly escapist. He did at the beginning feel as though something good was happening in Germany, but that quickly faded when he became a radio technician and heard the reaction from outside Germany. All he wanted to do in life was to open a shop and fix radios. At the age of eight, he had put together his first radio, a crystal receiver. With a small earphone, he received his first signal like a message, like a vocation from above. He excelled at his trade, working in a radio repair shop in Nuremberg before he was drafted into the army.
His skills were too essential to place him in combat. He became an officer with responsibility for listening to enemy signals. By then he had become familiar with international attitudes on the war. He could understand English, a little Russian and French. His aptitude as a technician saved him from the worst of the war. It did nothing for him now. He felt useless. He felt he wasnt made for action. This wasnt his type of thing. He was doing it only for Bertha.
As he ran through the trees he realized how lucky he was to have held on to his gun. At Eger, when he had taken off his uniform, he had rolled up the gun inside it, but had second thoughts and went back to get it. You never know, he thought to himself at the time.
He was less happy about the boots, which were next to useless now. His feet were baking and the boots made far too much noise on the gravel. Even running along the soft, spongy forest floor, they made a thump which vibrated through the limbs of the trees. They would give him away.
For the first time in his life, Franz Kern turned himself into a soldier. All his faculties were alert. He stopped behind a tree. He closed his mouth to listen.
37
Bertha Sommer remembered something as she ran through the trees. Not something she had time to think about in detail, but a penetrating flash of terror from her childhood. A childhood fear which had never gone away.
When Bertha was seven years old, she had fled from the town warden in Kempen, a man who had repeatedly warned her and her sisters not to play in the fountain on the square in front of their house. The Sommer girls had so much waste paper from their fathers stationery shop that they continued to sail paper boats on the water, clogging up the tiers of the fountain and spilling the water over the cobbled square. The furious town warden, who had to roll up his sleeves to unblock the fountain, regularly complained to the Sommer family, often chasing the girls away with his stick, until one day their grandmother let him into the house to teach them a lesson, personally.
The Sommer girls were terrified of him and hid under the stairs, still holding their shoes, which they had hastily picked up, still trying to stop the youngest girl, Gabi, from giving them away with her sobbing. But they were caught. All of them, except for Bertha, who had hidden behind the coat rack instead. They were marched into the front room under the eyes of the warden while Bertha slipped away, out of the house.
It was the most terrifying memory of her childhood. She spent the whole day running through the town, hiding in the park, until evening, when she returned to the house, exhausted and hungry, ready to give herself up.
It was all happening again.
Except that this time she was not running from nothing. This time, she knew what she was running from, even though she had the feeling she would prefer to give herself up. Her legs were stinging her. She must have run through a bank of nettles. There was also that stone in her shoe which she wanted to get rid of. She was close to a stream by the sound of it. Her sense of direction sent her in a wide sweep back in the direction of the farm. Where was Franz, she kept thinking. She wanted to call him. Realized that he was probably looking for her but that neither of them could afford to call each other.
She hid. She moved on. She stopped again and tried to remove the stone from her shoe. When she heard the men approaching, she turned and ran again. They were much closer than she thought; she had actually caught sight of them running, not their faces, but their legs and shoes underneath at ground level. The forest had a visibility of ten metres. Perhaps twenty metres if you looked out at floor level.