Bertha Sommer realized what it felt like to have luck on her side. She still had her three cases. And her life. All she had collected that night was a large pain in her right leg. Back in her seat she noticed the pain for the first time. Perhaps the sheer worry about survival was enough to anaesthetize it before that. When the train began to roll through the French night once more, Bertha finally got a chance to look at her leg. She rolled up her red dress and found a large blue bruise along the outside of her thigh. It was the size of a dinner plate, from the hip down, and around to her bottom. How it happened, she had no idea. She had no recollection of falling or banging into anything.
The girls in her compartment began to inspect her thigh. They had never seen such a big bruise before. How did it happen? It became a talking point. It was such a remarkable injury that the news travelled up along the carriages and Bertha repeatedly had to raise her dress to show other girls, bereaved girls whom she could not refuse. Mein Gott, Bertha! they all exclaimed, staring at her rich, dark bruise, the size of an oval-shaped platter under the yellowish light of the carriage.
More girls came to look. What beautiful underwear, too, one of them remarked. Bertha got fed up putting her leg on display. It was nothing, she said. A war souvenir. She only agreed to show it for the last time as a concession to the Frühling sisters, who had lost everything somewhere on the edge of the forest near Liège. And while Bertha raised her dress once more, an officer passed by and put his head into the compartment.
Looks very nasty, he said, smiling.
Bertha was startled to hear his voice. She pulled her dress down and sat in her seat, refusing to look at the officer. He moved on after one of the girls said it was all right. Bertha was shocked to think that she had shown her bruise to a man. An officer. On a train.
11
Ankes baby boy arrived in October, just after I had left on that trip to Czechoslovakia. I was away for a month in all, because I stopped in Nuremberg as well on the way back. As soon as I got back to Düsseldorf I found the card from Anke and Jürgen Lamprecht in the post. It was a printed card with a drawing of a stork carrying a baby bearing the announcement of their son Alexander.
I rang Anke at home to congratulate her. Anke rang me back later that same morning and arranged to meet me at a café in the centre of town.
She embraced me as usual, officially. She smiled that half-smile, but I could see she had something serious on her mind. Maybe I thought she looked a bit pale. We sat down for coffee outside a restaurant on the main shopping street. The weather was still quite warm. Why hadnt she brought the baby for me to see? She said I would have to drop around myself, some evening. She would arrange it. After that, Anke was unusually quiet.
I began to talk about my trip to Prague. I told her how I had found a restaurant there with a bar of soap chained to the sink in the wash-room. And how the restaurant served a variety of dishes, including liver soup and a dish called Ovary. I took out a present of a Czech tube of toothpaste which I said I had bought especially for her. It was as hard as a metal bar. Normally Anke would have laughed at that. She said nothing. She looked at the toothpaste and then placed it on the table beside her coffee.
Whats wrong? I asked.
Anke started crying. She cried to herself almost. As though she was alone.
What struck me as remarkable was that Anke never moved. She didnt move her hands to stop the tears. She stayed sitting back, legs crossed, arms languishing over the armrests, allowing the tears to run down her face as though it was perfectly normal. It was as though there was nobody around. Then she began to explain quite rationally that there was something wrong with the baby.
Alexander has Downs Syndrome, she said, making the first effort to remove the tears with a finger. Finally, she took a Kleenex from her bag.
I said I was sorry. I took her hand and said it again. I could think of nothing else to say. At the table next to us, there were two old women who kept looking at Anke. One of them had one of those little Spitz dogs tied on a lead to the leg of the table. He too was looking up at us, and when I looked back at him, he barked. I felt like kicking him.
I asked questions. Said some more ineffectual things and told Anke not to blame herself. She seemed not to hear me. She asked if these things usually skip a generation or what? I had no answer. I eventually took her back to her car and watched her drive away, crying.
Jürgen rang me a day later with a complete medical analysis. He could cope with it better. He was used to it as a doctor, as a gynaecologist. He told me straight out, there was no logic to it. But they would care for Alexander like any other child. No question. They would love him all the more.
Jürgen rang me a day later with a complete medical analysis. He could cope with it better. He was used to it as a doctor, as a gynaecologist. He told me straight out, there was no logic to it. But they would care for Alexander like any other child. No question. They would love him all the more.
Then he announced that Anke and himself had decided to move to Münster, where he was going to take over his fathers practice. It seemed like the right decision.
A month later, they were gone.
12
The trains still ran in the Reich. Through the latter part of the war, Bertha Sommer got to see every part of Germany from the windows of a train, travelling from one post to the next, hoping, like most other German girls, to avoid being sent to the Eastern Front. At one point, Bertha managed to feign an illness which kept her at home for some months. Late in 1944, when she could no longer get away with it, she was sent to a large camp outside Hamburg where thousands of young German women waited to be posted, mostly to Poland and Russia. Rumours went around that women had to dig the trenches. In Russia, the German girls were already knee-deep in mud.
Bertha was lucky, so far. It was God on her side. She delayed wherever she could. In December 1944 she stretched her Christmas leave and arrived two days late in Salzburg to find that her group had already departed for the East. Her name was on the missing list. She met with the anger of officers who didnt know what to do with her and was eventually sent to Prague on New Years Eve.
There was frost everywhere. The journey continued in the afternoon, when Bertha was put on a train and placed in a compartment with a young soldier. The compartment was locked. There was no heating on. She had disobeyed the orders of the Reich and could only expect the worst.
It was only when the train had been rolling for a while through the white land that she looked around her and discovered that the soldier with her in the compartment was no more than fifteen or sixteen. He was chained to the seat. A deserter. It made her feel like a deserter too. During the entire journey, neither of them spoke a word, each fearing that the other was an informer, or that a normal conversation would combine them in some conspiracy. Bertha was afraid.
What did we imagine? she later wrote in her diary. Our fears were simple and absolute
Every time I wanted to go to the bathroom I had to call the guard to unlock the door. It made me feel like a criminal. Every time the boy had to go, they unlocked his chains and went with him. Were they afraid he would throw himself off the train? He was so young. He had just begun to grow a moustache. The whole idea was so idiotic. The effort to get this boy back to the Front took up the full attention of three grown-up soldiers.
Somewhere along the way, at a small station in the mountains, the train stopped for a long time, at least an hour. There were trees all round, heavy bags of snow weighing on the branches. When the train moved on slowly, they moved past a timber-yard at the back of the station where Bertha saw something she never forgot.
She looked away at first and couldnt believe it. Then she looked again before the train moved along behind a large timber-shed and straight into the woods again. There in the yard she had seen three men hanging from an improvised scaffold. She saw them long enough to believe it. Their bodies were limp. Their heads hung down as though they were asleep or something. They wore civilian clothes and had cardboard signs around their necks. Some soldiers stood around the yard, looking on. Smoking. Or maybe it was their breath. There was no breath from the men hanging.
It was the only time that Berthas eyes fully met those of the recruit in the carriage with her. He had obviously seen it too, and a stark acknowledgement flashed between them until they remembered their own situation and ignored the brief contact again.
Bertha could not help thinking about it as the train rocked along through the white landscape, through a German fairytale. Had they done that for Germany? For her? All the time, as the train sped on towards Prague, she kept repeating her own secret name for that day in her mind. The Timber-yard of silent breath. With a combination of fury and fear, she repeated the title in her head like a lullaby, trying to keep a nightmare away. Later, she changed it again. It became: the Timber-yard of breath.
The journey took sixteen hours. For a long time, she was unable to eat the sandwiches she had brought with her. She felt sick. She was also afraid to share her food with the nameless soldier in her compartment. Only when it was dark did she decide to eat furtively, avoiding any eye contact. She ate alone, chewing quietly. The food soon gave her a warm feeling. But it felt all wrong. In the dark, she leaned over and placed a sandwich made of black bread and cheese on the seat beside the soldier. The boy took the sandwich without a word. Their silent chewing was like a coded conversation.
The train arrived in Prague early in the morning on New Years Day. The boy was led away, handcuffed to another soldier.
At the time, Berthas own luck seemed more important to her. But in the subsequent months while she was stationed in Laun, it played on her mind. The men hanging. And the young soldier chained to the seat. She should have spoken to him. Asked his name. Encouraged him. Memorized his address so that she could send word to his mother for him. But there were always other things which took over. Other personal fears.