The hallways were deserted, as they should have been; their room, however, met them with anything but silence. Instead of finding their roommates peacefully slumbering as they had left them, Johann and Willi stopped in their tracks at the sight of horrible disarray; blankets and mattresses were thrown onto the floor, the contents of the closets scattered about in the most chaotic of manners, clothes half-hanging out of the opened window. Willi quickly flipped the light against all regulations and gasped at the sight of Walter’s face, smeared with blood and obviously badly battered, as Rudi tended to the biggest cut on his friend’s lip. Walter only sniffled quietly; not because he was crying but to stop his nose from bleeding.
“What the hell happened?” Willi immediately squatted in front of the disheveled couple.
“Is it because of us?” Johann demanded.
“Because of you? No.” Rudi shook his head. “Meinzer came in here with his cronies, dragged Walt off his bed and started beating him. I tried to stop them but they threw a blanket over my head and one of them held me the entire time they were beating Walt. Then they did this,” he vaguely gestured around himself, “and left. I was wondering where you two were.”
“Why did they beat him?” Johann blinked, his mind refusing to process the latest events. Walter was the best pilot in school; moreover, he was well-known all over Germany as a teenage prodigy aerobatics master. He was as nice as they came, never talked back to anyone, never made any enemies. Hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if Meinzer decided to call on him or Willi in the middle of the night and teach them a thing or two for sassing him, but Walt? It just didn’t make sense.
“They said, it was because he’s a Jew.” Rudi shrugged again.
Walter positively refused to meet Johann or Willi’s gaze as both turned to him.
“Meinzer said… Meinzer said the SS all over the Reich was teaching Jews a lesson—”
“Shut it, Rudi; will you?” Willi barked in sudden irritation and touched Walter’s hand. “But you’re not Jewish; I know your father◦– he’s not Jewish!”
“No, he’s not.” Walter finally looked at him with lackluster eyes, one of which had already started to turn black. “My mother is. I’m a first-degree mischling. I was only allowed here because Herr Reichsmarschall himself signed my entrance papers. He served together with my father and he was very nice to me the few times that I met him.”
“Don’t worry, Walt.” Willi patted his knee. “I’ll make Meinzer pay for it.”
By the time they had to go to the showers, the room was clean and ready for inspection. Willi stalled for some reason, waved them off, mumbled something about joining them later and only appeared in the showers ten minutes later. Johann paid no mind to it until he heard guffaws and whispers during the breakfast, soon engulfing the whole mess; Fahnenjunker Meinzer wetted his bed!
“It gets better!” One of the cadets, sitting on the opposite side of the table, leaned forward so everyone would hear him better. “He was screaming at the top of his lungs that someone did it to him! As though someone would purposely pee in his bed, ha-ha!”
Johann turned his head to Willi, who kept eating his eggs with the most unassuming of airs.
“Why would you do that?” Johann whispered into his ear.
“Look at Walt. He’s smiling,” Willi offered him as a simple explanation.
FIVE
December 1938
The announcement of Christmas leave was celebrated with cheers across the school. Cadets were provided with report cards to present to their parents and Johann studied his with a beaming smile; military discipline, close-order drill, the manual of arms activities, history of aviation, the theory of flight, aeronautic engineering, aerodynamics, and meteorology◦– almost all excellent entries. Willi burst into the room, waved his report card in front of Johann’s nose and stuck his tongue out before Johann could clip him behind the ear for his teasing. How that rascal, who usually used a textbook as a pillow during classes, managed to pass every single examination with flying colors, was beyond Johann’s understanding. It wasn’t due to any favoritism displayed by the instructors and teachers either; they were equally demanding to all cadets. It was solely due to Willi’s intellect, which managed to absorb everything like a sponge whereas it took Johann hours of poring over his textbooks.
“So, you live in Beeskow,” Willi began in his tone which Johann knew by now; he had something on his mind. “The train will take you through Berlin on the way there. Why don’t you spend a day with me? I’ll show you the city. You’ll meet my mother.”
Johann considered the proposition with a mixture of excitement and hesitation. He had already alerted his parents, in his letter, of the date of his arrival and they’d be waiting for him, undoubtedly, his Mutti holding Harald by the hand, which he’d try to yank away, comical and stern in his winter Jungvolk uniform, insisting that he was too old for all that hand-holding…
“I’ve hardly ever brought any friends home before,” Willi spoke in his nonchalant tone, which he had always used when he pretended not to be bothered by something that, in fact, bothered him immensely, “and my mother would be delighted to see you. I told her about you and your invitation. But if you want to go straight home, I’ll understand. Your family must be missing you terribly.”
Johann finished polishing his shoes and put away the brush in its case; glanced up at Willi, whose beseeching eyes stared with such silent intensity behind that impenetrable mask of his that Johann didn’t have the heart to refuse him. “All right. Let’s spend the day together. But the next morning, I’m leaving and that’s the end of it! And I’ll have to call my father to warn him about the change of plans.”
He laughed in embarrassment as Willi nearly crushed him in the tightest embrace.
On the train, their Luftwaffe cadets’ uniforms were met with much more enthusiasm than their former Hitlerjugend ones, which they had shed after the first day of orientation. Girls, who rode in the same car with their mothers, kept throwing inquisitive gazes in their direction, smiled shyly and this time even stern mothers didn’t seem to mind. The Luftwaffe propaganda leaflets flooded the newspaper kiosks lately and the future knights of the sky suddenly seemed like a mighty good marriage prospect rather than an ordinary ‘Hans’ from the street.
Willi didn’t seem to pay the faintest attention to them though. He babbled away in the most impassionate of manners, enumerating all of the things that they simply must see in Berlin and drew something on the frozen windows with his finger, a dreamy expression sitting on his handsome face.
“S-Bahn will take us to the Gleisdreieck Station, from which we’ll take a U-Bahn to my house.” Willi’s words barely registered in his brain as Johann, once again, got immersed in thoughts of his family. “And in the evening, my father will take us out for dinner and entertainment. I already asked him and he’s looking forward to meeting you. You don’t mind, do you?”
Johann only shook his head absent-mindedly.
Berlin’s U-Bahn was far louder and much more cramped than Johann could have possibly imagined. He kept mumbling excuses under his breath as he stumbled into people in the dark, whirling crowd, in his determination not to let Willi out of his sight. He only breathed out in relief when they escaped the suffocating tube of the U-Bahn at last.
Much to his astonishment, Willi hailed a taxi cab◦– the house is a bit in the outskirts; you wouldn’t want to get there by bus. The “outskirts” turned out to be an apparently affluent area, populated by villas of all shapes and sizes, each twice the size of the house belonging to Johann’s family, which wasn’t considered to be struggling by any means. The door was opened by a maid; a round woman well into her fifties, who rushed to enclose Willi in her embrace and kiss both of his cheeks while Johann shifted his weight, with uncertainty, from one foot to another. Willi’s mother soon appeared as well and Johann instantly guessed where Willi got his good looks from. She was still rather young, in her late thirties perhaps and wore her golden hair in an elegant crown around her head.