Reaching the village hall the foursome discovered that their tickets, far from being free, simply entitled them to come up with a four Reichsmark entrance fee. After some grumbling – Hannes was all for telling the doorman to stuff his wretched movie – they came up with the cash and filtered inside. The hall lacked sufficient chairs for the likely audience, and those available, arranged in rows at the back, were already occupied. But the large area of floor space at the front was still only sparsely populated, and they managed to secure a stretch of wall on the far side to sit against. Looking round, Paul could see that most of the men were from artillery units like their own. The few tank men present had managed, with characteristic arrogance, to seize the front row of chairs.
The hall gradually filled, the babble of conversation growing steadily louder, until the ceiling lights abruptly went out, and the film began flickering on the large white sheet which covered half of the end wall. The first scenes drew deep sighs of appreciation, less for their content than for the fact that the film was in colour.
Paul, like almost everyone else in the hall, already knew the story – the Pomeranian town’s defiance of the French in 1807 had been a staple of school history lessons and Hitlerjugend meetings for as long as he could remember. It had, however, ended in failure when the overall war was lost, and Paul was intrigued to discover how Goebbels and his film producers – Effi’s ‘nightmare machine’ – had finessed this unfortunate fact. He soon found out. Kolberg opened in 1913, after the eventual defeat of the French, with one of the characters reflecting on the importance of civilian militia, and the crucial role the men of the town had played in pointing the way towards victory.
Most of the rest was flashback. The indomitable mayor first overcame the doubters in his own camp – some seduced by foreign liberalism, others weakened by cowardice or too much self-importance – and then held the French at bay with the usual heady mixture of ingenuity, courage and extraordinary will-power.
It was impressively done, and almost insultingly lavish. He remembered Effi explaining how salt was always used for snow, and that hundreds of railway wagons would be used to transport it to a set. And then there were the soldiers – thousands of them. Where had they come from? They looked too much like Germans to be prisoners. They could only be real soldiers, taken out of the front line at some point in the last eighteen months. It beggared belief. Paul felt anger rising inside him. How many men had died for lack of support while Goebbels was making epics?
Let it go, he told himself. This might well be the last movie he would ever see. He should enjoy the spectacle, enjoy imagining a night in Kristina Söderbaum’s arms. Forget everything else.
And, for most of the film, he did. It had to end though, and when the lights came on it felt like a slap in the face from reality. Most of the faces around him reflected similar feelings – the sense of angry hopelessness as the hall emptied out was impossible to ignore. Haaf had enjoyed it of course, but even he seemed aware that overt enthusiasm was inappropriate, and the four of them walked back to their woods in almost complete silence. If the film-makers’ intention had been to stiffen resolve, and to foster the belief that eventual victory was still possible, they had made it several years too late, and shown it to the wrong audience.
Of course, Paul thought later, as he clambered up into his bunk, it didn’t help that the real Kolberg had surrendered to the Soviets more than a month ago.
The level of noise suggested to Russell that the transport plane was slowly shaking itself to pieces, but Varennikov was all smiles, as if he had trouble believing how much fun it was. The dispatcher nonchalantly propped beside the open doorway was taking periodic drags on his hand-cupped cigarette, apparently oblivious to the strong smell of aviation fuel suffusing the cabin. If the inevitable explosion didn’t kill him, Russell thought, then the fall was bound to. He checked his harness for the umpteenth time and reminded himself why he had agreed to this madness. ‘The things we do for love,’ he muttered under his breath.
He and the young physicist had spent the previous twenty-four hours rushing through lessons that usually lasted a fortnight. They had mastered exit technique, flight technique, landing technique. They had jumped off steps, off the end of a ramp, from the dry equivalent of a high-diving platform, and, finally, off a hundred foot tower. And now, against every inclination his mind and body could muster, they were about to leap from a thoroughly airborne plane.
The dispatcher was beckoning. Russell fought his way forward against the wind and looked down. The patchwork of forests and fields seemed both alarmingly close and alarmingly distant. He turned to the dispatcher expecting some final message of comfort, just as a hand in the back pushed him firmly into space.
The shock took his breath away. The transport plane, so solid and loud and all-encompassing, had vanished in an instant, leaving him plummeting through an eerie silence. He frantically tugged at the ripcord, thinking as he did so that he was pulling too hard, and that he’d be left with only a piece of broken rope and a perplexed Buster Keaton expression on his face as he dropped like a stone. But the chute snapped open, the heavens tugged him back, and he was floating down exactly the way he was supposed to. He dropped his head on his chest, held his elbows in, tried to keep his lower limbs behind the line of his trunk – all the things their instructors had been pummelling into them for the last twenty-four hours.
It was extraordinarily peaceful. He could hear the plane again now, a low drone in the distance. He could see the aerodrome below, the huts and training tower on the eastern rim, the wide expanse of grass at which he’d been aimed. Away in the distance sunlight was glinting on a clutch of golden domes.
Looking up, he could see Varennikov dangling beneath his red chute. The Russian’s smile would be broader than ever.
After seeming no nearer for most of his fall, the ground rose to meet him at breakneck speed. He told himself to concentrate, not to let his legs out in front of his body. This was the moment his rational self feared most, when his forty-five-year-old bones were put to the ultimate test. A broken ankle now, and that would probably be that, though he wouldn’t put it past the Soviets to drop him in a cast.
At least he was falling onto flat grass – the dispatcher’s shove had been well-timed. He took a deep breath, mentally rehearsed his technique, and rolled away as he hit the ground, ending up in a relieved heap. He looked up to see Varennikov hit the grass running some twenty metres away. He hardly needed to roll, but did so with all the graceful agility of youth. ‘Show-off,’ Russell murmured to himself. He lay on his back, staring up at the blue sky and wondering whether kissing the ground was in order, only clambering to his feet when he heard Varennikov anxiously ask if he was all right.
A jeep was on its way to collect them, their plane coming in to land.
‘Again,’ their chief instructor barked from the front seat of the jeep.
‘Why?’ Russell wanted to know. ‘We know how to do it now. Why risk an injury?’
‘Five by day, two by night,’ the instructor told him. ‘The minimum,’ he added for emphasis. A bomb fell through the roof of the Pathology block extension on the Sunday morning, burying one male prisoner alive in the cells which lay below. It took them most of the morning to dig him out, but the young man managed a smile as they carried him through the basement rooms en route to the hospital. Rosa had been crying on and off since the news of his entombment, and Effi guessed that the incident had triggered some family memory.