‘What, me?’ exclaimed Lakosch, outraged. ‘Lissnup must be off his rocker! I’ve been driving round the whole day, and then I’m expected to keep watch half the night as well? Not a bloody chance!’
‘Maybe it’s in lieu of those “three days’ work details” he threatened you with that time,’ said Geibel. He held up a photograph in the glow cast by the oven. ‘Get a load of this, though,’ he announced proudly. ‘It’s my wife!’
But Lakosch wasn’t in the mood any more. He cast a desultory glance at the picture. It showed a buxom young woman who was passably pretty.
‘Shame she’s shacked up with such a halfwit,’ he muttered.
Geibel took that as a mark of respect from Lakosch, and as a mark of his gratitude, he asked, ‘No photos of your own to show us, then?’
‘What am I, some kind of photo album?’ grumbled Lakosch, but he still pulled a dog-eared passport photograph from his pay-book and passed it over to Geibel.
‘But this is a picture of you!’
‘Well spotted!’
‘So, you were a storm trooper, eh?’ said Herbert in astonishment, looking over Geibel’s shoulder. ‘No, wait a minute – the National Socialist Motor Corps,’ Herbert corrected himself, ‘and a squad leader, what’s more!’
‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’ remarked Lakosch drily.
‘I’m a Party member, too, you know,’ said Geibel, somewhat peevishly, as he handed the photo back to Lakosch. ‘I really didn’t want to join at first, but my wife kept on at me. And it’s actually better now that I am, given that all my customers…’
‘Well, I don’t have to worry about all that crap, thank God!’ Herbert interrupted. In the interim, he’d cut up the sausage from the tin into small pieces and was stewing it in a mess tin on the top of the oven. ‘No one bothers asking a dentist whether he’s a Party member or not.’
‘I can see you have a pretty low opinion of me!’ snapped Lakosch, leafing through his pay-book. Herbert took exception to this.
‘Are you trying to tell us that you cheerfully go and ruin your Sundays by playing those war games out of sheer conviction?’
Lakosch put his papers away and looked up, incensed.
‘Yes, I am, as a matter of fact! You obviously can’t imagine how anyone might possibly be interested in improving the lot of the ordinary working man, can you?’
‘You’ve got nothing to complain about! You earned plenty as a long-distance lorry driver!’
‘I’m not talking about me. Take the miners in Upper Silesia, for example! My dad was a coal miner, you—Hey, it’s no laughing matter!’
‘Oh right! So everything’s got better and better for him since 1933, has it?’
‘No, not for him. He’s dead,’ conceded Lakosch, momentarily put off his stride. ‘But it has for other people, no question!’ he continued, growing more animated again. ‘Loads of things have changed, I can tell you! And if they hadn’t foisted this war on us, we’d already have socialism in Germany!’
‘If, if…,’ Herbert said mockingly. ‘And if you hadn’t brought the tin of sausage with you, we wouldn’t have anything to eat now! So, why don’t you get stuck in and pipe down, you old socialist?’
Saying this, he pushed the mess tin over to Lakosch; a smell of burned fat wafted up from it. Lakosch took an aluminium spoon and a piece of crispbread from his pocket and began eating.
‘That’s the thing about this war,’ he resumed, busily chewing. ‘Why did they go and start it? I’ll tell you – it’s because they envied us our socialism! That was all it was about! But just you wait: when we’ve won the war, then you’ll see some changes all right! Adolf will abolish the banks and the trust funds, and do away with big business altogether. Everything’ll be nationalized.’
‘Nationalized?’ asked Geibel in alarm. ‘What, the little shops and all?’
‘No, of course not all small businesses, you clod!’ Lakosch replied dismissively. ‘We’re not communists!’
‘And he won’t nationalize the big concerns either,’ Herbert chipped in. ‘Do you imagine Hitler’ll allow them to profiteer from this war just in order to snatch it all back from them once it’s over?’
‘You know nothing!’ spluttered Lakosch. ‘Do you think the words “National Socialist” and “Workers’ Party” are there just for show? Adolf was a working man himself. I’m telling you, he won’t do the dirty on ordinary people!’
At that moment, the sentry stuck his head through the flap of the tent.
‘How about relieving me, then? It’s ten past twelve already!’
Lakosch got to his feet, cursing, jammed on his steel helmet, picked up his rifle and went out into the cold. He’d been fired up by the discussion and was irritated at being interrupted. He paced slowly up and down between the tents, from which came the faint sounds of the sleeping men. Memories of the distant past, suppressed in the frenzy of war, had been stirred up in him once more. He thought of his father, who’d been dead six years now. His memory of him was quite hazy, as he hadn’t seen him that often. Either he was on the day shift at the colliery, or when he was on night shift he spent the day asleep. But on Sundays, he’d sometimes take little Karl by the hand and walk past the pithead with him. He’d show him the dark sheds where they washed the coal, the tall winding tower with its wheels and cables, the huge spoil tips, the confusion of railway lines, with coal slack piled up between them, and he’d tell Karl about the back-breaking work down at the coalface. But he also spoke about the future, about a time when the pit would belong to the miners and they’d work freely in humane conditions. And he’d talk about Lenin, whose ambition was to liberate working men around the world. And so the young boy, who grew up in a sooty tenement block, had an ideal image of the future implanted deep within him at that time, an image that for him was associated with the open air and sunlight and bright colours and a loaf of white bread on the table every day. Together with the other lads from the neighbourhood back then, he’d go around the streets chanting ‘Long live Moscow!’, chuck stones at policemen from a safe distance and draw Soviet stars on the walls of houses in chalk. And he’d always be at the forefront of the procession, shouting and singing and clapping his hands to the beat of the music, when the ‘Red Front’ marched through their part of town in their green shirts, with the shawm pipe band at their head…
Then came 1933 – he was fourteen at that time, but still looked like a ten-year-old – and the ‘National Revolution’, and he’d found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. Both there and at school, he was taught that the Führer was going to create a ‘community of the German people’, and that once the ‘bonds of interest slavery’ had been broken, workers would be freed and they would see the dawning of a great, powerful empire of social justice. Full of enthusiasm, he’d gone home and told his parents about this. And his father, who’d been aged prematurely by his job, and who could only summon up a contemptuous laugh for such stuff, or smack him roughly round the chops, struck him for ever after as a misfit, a strange relic of a bygone era. He couldn’t understand how people could get worked up over such abstract things as that Lenin, who’d been dead for ages after all, while at the same time being unable or unwilling to see the great miracle that was occurring before their very eyes in Germany. Well, the old man could think what he liked as far as he was concerned. If only he hadn’t gone around shooting his mouth off! But he would keep saying things in public like ‘Hitler – that means war, you mark my words!’ and other such nonsense. So one day they picked him up and stuck him in a concentration camp. And after a few weeks the family received the briefest of messages: ‘Shot while attempting to escape.’ That dreadful day came back to him like it was only yesterday. While his mother, pale and silent but not crying, held the card in her hands and stared at it, he bawled his eyes out in grief and fury. How could the old man have been so stupid as to try and do a runner! What would have happened if he’d just sat tight? A couple of months’ hard labour in the camp and a bit of political re-education, which would have done him no harm. And for that he tries to escape? Well, it had happened now, and his dad would never get to see the new social order that he would surely, in time, have come round to.