“Base here, over to you.” The commander scrambled towards the R/T.
“My compass is playing up! I can’t seem to find the right way… I think I’m flying sideways.”
“Straighten the aircraft then!”
“Herr Leutnant, allow me to land, please. I can’t see anything here.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know…”
“Look at your coordinates and the map!”
“Somewhere over some field… I think… The compass doesn’t seem to work properly.”
“Land then. But carefully.”
“Jawohl. I’ll try to lower it slowly. I think I still have some two hundred yards left to the…”
A short gasp and the radio suddenly died, despite all of the base commander’s desperate cries and attempts to smack it back into working.
“It’s not on your side; it’s on his,” Johann commented with a cold accusation in his voice. “That’s your first one for today. You have seven more to lead to their deaths. Excuse me for not keeping you company. It’s entirely your cross to bear from now on. I hope it was worth it, your skin, that is.”
Through the misty sea, he trudged back to the controller’s hut and found his way back to his old chair, where the cold coffee was waiting for him on the windowsill. The controller offered him to warm it up but receded and hid behind his log books at the mere sight of Johann’s face.
“Would you kill eight men to save your life?” He asked the boy suddenly, taking a long bitter sip of the murky black liquid.
The youth started, pulled the log books even closer to himself like an infantryman fortifying his foxhole against the enemy. “I’m just a controller, Herr Hauptmann…”
“It’s a theoretical question.”
“Well… It depends, I suppose. Are we talking about eight enemy soldiers?”
“No. Your own people.”
“Then no. Of course not.”
“Are you married?”
The controller lowered his eyes, blushing. “No.”
“Do you have a girl you love waiting for you at home?”
The young man shook his head negatively again.
Johann rubbed his forehead, irritated for some reason. Why do they have to be so young? Why did they have to learn to hold a gun before the body of a beloved in their hands? Why did they have to marry the war just because there was nothing else around?
“But, let’s imagine that you are married and your wife is waiting for you at home. Would you do it then?” he pressed, with some malicious coldness in his voice. He wanted to pry a positive answer out of him just to persuade himself once and for all that everything that was still good in this world was now good and lost and there was no hope for any of them anymore. They should all perish, the damned generation, so that the new one would grow not knowing its warrior fathers, so that it would learn to love instead of hate, for hate was all they knew and could offer them.
“No.” For the first time, the young man shook his head with stubborn resolution and didn’t seem so frightened and unsure anymore.
“Why not?”
“Because some things are more important than one’s own desire to survive.”
“But your wife? You’d leave her alone.”
“She’d mourn me like the good man that I was and would go on with her life. I wouldn’t be able to return to her and look her in the eyes anyway, had I committed such a crime. Even one man’s life in exchange for yours is too much…”
Johann nodded; smiled for the first time, a strange and uncertain smile of a man who forgot how to do it properly. “Can I sleep in here tonight?”
“I only have one cot… but you can have it,” the controller quickly offered, the bright disposition back on his face.
“I’ll be fine on the floor. Can I borrow your typewriter for a few minutes, too? I want to write a letter to someone.”
It started raining◦– or snowing◦– the dirty mass turning into sleet outside while Johann was typing, deep in concentration, the controller breathing in excitement behind his shoulder. I witnessed an unprecedented atrocity today…
“You can’t write something of this sort to the Reichsmarschall himself, Herr Hauptmann!” he whispered at last. “They’ll court-martial you for treason…”
“Let them.” Johann shrugged indifferently, slashing his signature under the text. “You said it yourself, some things are more important than one’s own desire to survive.”
“But you’re not killing anyone!”
“Other people are killing other people. Standing aside and pretending that I’m not seeing it doesn’t sit well with me, just like actual murder wouldn’t sit with you. And I do have a wife at home and I want to return a good man to her, just like you said. And I want to be able to look her in the eyes and know that my conscience is clean.”
They shook hands the following morning, bright blue and cold.
“I joined the Luftwaffe because of you,” the controller suddenly said. “You, and Hauptmann von Sielaff. You spoke together at my school in Berlin. I instantly knew that I wanted to be just like you.”
With a sudden surge of emotion, Johann pulled him into an embrace, clapping his back while he choked back tears. “You are just like us, my good fellow. You are just like us.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ukraine, Winter 1944
“Replacement pilots are here, Herr Hauptmann!”
The Staffeladjutant’s voice pulled Johann out of his slumber. He slept fully-clothed, with his legs, in pilot’s fur boots, drawn close to his chest to keep warm. The small stove didn’t do much for the warmth and he had already sent two people home with frostbite to their toes and fingers, not two weeks ago. They returned a day ago, with a stamp on their papers, “fit for active duty” and only shrugged at Johann’s rhetorical question, if all those numbskulls in Germany had lost their reason.
“We didn’t even reach Germany, Herr Hauptmann. The doctor at the transit station operated on us and told us to go back. He said Sajer can walk just fine without toes. And I,” the man presented his bandaged hands, with stumps instead of several fingers, “can still hold things. He said, as long as I have hands, I don’t get to go home.”
Johann didn’t even find himself surprised anymore. It appeared, his homeland had gone mad while he was away but he still fought for it because he didn’t know anything else in his life besides fighting.
He stepped outside, turned from side to side to awaken his body from its half-frozen state, hearing his bones crack as he did so.
“How many?” He asked his Staffeladjutant.
“Only two, Herr Hauptmann.”
Instead of the four that he had lost. That wasn’t surprising either; a standard ratio by now.
He watched the two figures approach, navigating their way in between the snowdrifts that had already accumulated in a three-hour period. Their faces were wrapped in scarves up to their eyes, but as soon as the first figure pulled the cloth down and saluted him half-heartedly, Johann only sighed. Another “vintage Hitlerjugend.”
“Leutnant Hertel,” the man introduced himself with a certain air of authority about him. “I’m here to report to your base commander.”
“I am the base commander. Hauptmann Brandt,” Johann replied with a morose grin.
The man, who was of his father’s age, pulled back it seemed, taking in the small frame drowning in the jacket that looked as if it had come off someone else’s shoulder; a mop of blond hair that was long overdue for a date with a barber’s scissors; pale, boyish face. But it was the eyes, the eyes that were so infinitely hollow and forlorn, like those of an old man, tired of life and expecting death with calm abandon; the eyes made Hertel nod slowly, with a measure of respect◦– so, you are; I see it now◦– and straightened, to salute him properly.