'At our HQ we call them "orderly sergeants",' said Gerne.
'Quiet!' said Krap, raising one finger. 'Listen! There go the heavy guns.'
'While we have a little drink in the ward for the lightly wounded,' said Fresser.
Their carefree mood returned. They began to talk about Russian women. Everyone had some experience to recount. Bach usually disliked such conversations, but suddenly he found himself telling them about the girl who lived in the cellar of a ruined house. He made a real story out of it and they all had a good laugh.
Then the orderly came in. He glanced at their bright faces and then started to take the sheets off the goalkeeper's bed.
'So has our brave defender of the Fatherland been unmasked as a malingerer?' asked Fresser.
'Say something,' said Gerne. 'We're men here. You can tell us if something's happened.'
'He's dead. Cardiac arrest.'
'That's what comes of too many patriotic speeches,' said Gerne.
'You shouldn't speak like that about a dead man,' said Bach. 'He wasn't just putting on an act. He was being sincere. No, comrades, it's not right.'
'Ah!' said Gerne. 'I wasn't so wrong after all. I thought the lieutenant would give us the Party line. I knew at once he was a true ideologue.'
11
That night Bach felt too comfortable to go to sleep. It was strange to think of his comrades and their bunker, to remember how he and Lenard had drunk coffee and smoked as they watched the sunset through the open door.
Yesterday, as he got into the field-ambulance, he had put his good arm round Lenard's shoulder; they had looked each other in the eye and burst out laughing. No, he'd certainly never have guessed he'd end up drinking with an SS officer in a Stalingrad bunker – or walking through ruins lit up by fires to visit a Russian woman.
What had happened to him was extraordinary. He had hated Hitler for many years. When he had heard grey-haired professors shamelessly claiming that Faraday, Darwin and Edison were nothing but crooks who'd plagiarized the ideas of German scientists, when he had heard them declare Hitler to be the greatest scientist of all times and all nations, he had thought savagely: 'What nonsense! But they'll be unmasked soon enough!' And he had felt the same about those improbable novels about the happiness of ideologically spotless workers and peasants, about the great educational work carried out by the all-wise Party. And as for the miserable poems printed in magazines! These had upset him most of all – as a schoolboy he had written poetry himself.
And now here he was – in Stalingrad – wanting to join the Party! As a child, when he had been afraid his father would get the better of him in an argument, he had put his hands over his ears and shouted: 'No, no, I'm not going to listen!' Well, now he had listened. And his world had been turned upside down.
He still felt as disgusted as ever by the plays and films he saw. Perhaps the people would have to go without poetry for a few years or even a decade? But it was quite possible to write the truth even now! What greater truth could there be today than the truth of the German soul? And the masters of the Renaissance had been able to express the very loftiest of spiritual values in works commissioned by bishops and princes…
Although Krap was still asleep, he was evidently still fighting some old battle; in a voice that could probably be heard on the street he screamed: 'Quick! A hand-grenade!' Obviously wanting to crawl forward, he turned over awkwardly, yelled with pain and then began to snore again.
Bach felt differently even about the extermination of the Jews. Previously it had sent shivers down his spine. Even now, if he were in power himself, he would immediately put a stop to this genocide. Nevertheless, though he had several Jewish friends himself, he had to admit that there was such a thing as a German soul and a German character – which meant that there must also be a Jewish soul and a Jewish character.
Marxism had failed! His mother and father had both been Social Democrats and this failure had been hard for him to admit. It was as though Marx were a physicist who had based a theory of the structure of matter on centrifugal forces and had felt only contempt for the universal forces of gravitational attraction. He had defined the centrifugal forces between the different classes and had succeeded more clearly than anyone in showing how they had operated throughout human history. But, like many great theoreticians, he had overestimated the importance of the forces he had discovered; he had believed that these forces alone determined the development of a society and the course of history. He had not so much as glimpsed the powerful forces that hold a nation together in spite of class differences; his social physics, based on a contempt for the universal law of national attraction, was simply absurd.
The State is not an effect; it is a cause!
The law that determines the birth of a nation-state is something miraculous and wonderful. A state is a living unity; it alone has the power to express what is most precious, what is truly immortal in millions of people – a German character, a German hearth, a German will, a German spirit of sacrifice.
Bach lay there for a while with his eyes closed. He began counting sheep – one white, one black, one white, one black, one white, one black…
The next morning, after breakfast, he wrote a letter to his mother. Knowing she wouldn't like what he was writing, he frowned and sighed. But it was important to tell her what he had now come to feel. He hadn't said anything during his last spell of leave. But she had noticed his irritability, his unwillingness to go on listening to the same old reminiscences about his father.
She would consider him an apostate from the faith of his father. But that wasn't true. Apostasy was the very thing he was renouncing.
Tired out by the morning routine, the patients were very quiet. During the night a man with serious wounds had been installed in the goalkeeper's bed. He was still unconscious and they didn't yet know what unit he was from.
How could he tell his mother that the people of this new Germany were now closer to him than friends he had known since childhood?
An orderly came in.
'Lieutenant Bach?'
'Yes?' said Bach, covering the letter with the palm of his hand.
'There's a Russian woman asking after you, Lieutenant.'
'Me?' said Bach in surprise. He realized it must be Zina. But how could she have found out where he was? She must have asked the driver of the field-ambulance. He felt touched and delighted. She must have hitched a lift during the night and then walked seven or eight kilometres. He imagined her pale face, her large eyes, her thin neck, the grey shawl she wore round her head.
Meanwhile the ward was in uproar.
'Lieutenant Bach!' said Gerne. 'I take my hat off to you. That's what I call successful work on the native population!'
Fresser waved his hands in the air, as though shaking off drops of water. 'Call her in! The lieutenant's got a good wide bed. We can marry them right now.'
'Women are like dogs,' said Krap. 'They always follow their men.'
All of a sudden Bach felt indignant. What did she think she was doing? How could she come and visit him in hospital? German officers were forbidden to have relationships with Russian women. And what if there'd been relatives of his working in the hospital, or friends of the Forsters? Even a German woman would hardly have come to visit him after such a trivial affair…
The man who'd been seriously wounded seemed to be laughing contemptuously in his sleep.
'Tell the woman I'm unable to come out to see her,' he said grimly. Not wanting to take part in the general hilarity, he picked up his pencil and read over what he'd written so far.