When an orderly came for Effi early that afternoon, she was glad that Johanna was on hand to look after the girl. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she shouted over her shoulder, hoping it was true.
Dobberke’s office was at the end of a book-lined corridor on the top floor. He gestured Effi into a chair and stared at her for several seconds before picking up what looked like her papers. The famous whip was in view, hanging from a nail in the wall. The black German shepherd was asleep in a corner.
‘You are from Fürstenwalde?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I know it well,’ he said with a smile. ‘What was your address?’
The smile told her he was bluffing. ‘Nordstrasse 53,’ she said. ‘It’s a few streets north of the town centre.’
He grunted. ‘How long have you lived there?’
‘Eight years,’ Effi said, picking a figure out of the air.
Dobberke laughed. ‘You expect me to believe that a Jew could survive detection in a small town like Fürstenwalde for eight years?’
‘I am not a Jew.’
‘You look like one.’
‘I can’t help that.’
‘And the girl you have in tow – is she not a Jew?’
This was a question that Effi had expected, and she had considered saying no. But the only explanation of the faded star that she could think of – that Rosa had somehow ended up with the blouse of a young Jewish girl of similar size – sounded almost ludicrously unconvincing. ‘She is a half-Jew, a mischling,’ she told Dobberke. She explained about her sister’s marriage to a Jew, and how she herself had come to be Rosa’s guardian. ‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ Effi concluded. ‘We should be in the hospital, not the collection centre.’
Dobberke stared at her for a few more seconds, almost admiringly, she thought. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ he said at last. ‘You arrive here with papers that are less than a day old, a girl with a star on her dress, and a very practised story. I think there’s more to you than meets the eye…’ He cocked his head, and she heard the rising whine of the siren. ‘If you had arrived a week ago,’ he continued, rising to his feet, ‘you would be on your way to Französische Strasse for a real interrogation. That may no longer be possible, but the war isn’t over yet. In the meantime, you will stay exactly where you are.’
They were ripped from sleep by unearthly thunder – even deep inside the dugout the onset of the Soviet bombardment seemed loud enough to awaken comrades long since dead. This is it, Paul thought, leaping down from his bunk. The beginning of the end.
Haaf stared at him wide-eyed, apparently paralysed. ‘Move,’ Paul told him. ‘We have guns to man.’
Outside it was light enough to check his watch by, and dawn was still three hours away. Vehicles were hurrying west on the road – supply trucks probably, caught too close to the front. They had to be German at any rate – the Soviets would not be moving until the bombardment ended. Paul watched as stretches of earth heaved up around them, wondering which would be hit.
Exploding shells flashed a few hundred metres away to the south, the noise of their detonations engulfed in the wider cacophony. Shaken out of his trance, Paul raced across to the deep trenches that connected their gun emplacements and leapt in, almost landing on Hannes. Haaf was right behind him, barefoot and clutching a boot in either hand.
The shells were drawing closer, ripping a corridor of destruction through the wood with mathematical precision. They waited, grim faces lit by the flaring sky above the trees, for death to descend, but this time the maths were on their side, and the line of fire passed harmlessly in front of their position.
‘I can’t stand this,’ Paul thought. But he could. He had in the past.
The level of noise grew no easier to endure – as he knew from experience it rose until increasing deafness provided its own defence. He looked at his watch. It was three-twenty, which probably meant another ten minutes. He stared up at the long rectangle of sky, trying to lose himself in the swirling patterns of light and smoke.
At exactly three-thirty the sound quality shifted, and the decibel level dropped a merciful fraction. The full-on bombardment of the front areas had shifted to a rolling barrage, as the Soviet artillery concentrated on clearing a route across the Oderbruch for their tanks and infantry, and on obliterating the first line of defence on the lip of the escarpment. The latter, Paul knew, would be more or less devoid of troops, the German commanders having finally learned that it paid to pull them out before the bombardment started, and quickly return them once it was over.
Soon they could hear the Soviet tank guns, and the answering 88s. machine-gun fire began filling the spaces in between. Like a fucking orchestra, Paul thought.
No shells were falling around them now, but all knew the reprieve was temporary. They ate their breakfasts mostly in silence, thinking ahead to the moment when the tanks would appear in their sights. Not for the first time, Paul felt an intense need to be moving. He could understand why people in the rear lines sometimes ran screaming towards the front, eager to settle things once and for all.
Soon after five-thirty, nature’s light began seeping into the sky, and by six the sun was rising above the eastern horizon, illuminating a world of drifting black smoke. Low-flying Soviet fighters were soon whizzing in and out of the man-made clouds, but clearly found it hard to pick out targets on the ground. A horse-drawn ambulance cart hurried by on the Seelow-Diedersdorf road, headed for the aid stations farther back. The first of many, Paul thought.
There were too many ways to be killed, and too many hours in the day. Soon after two o’clock a shell suddenly struck the upper trunk of a tree nearby, setting it ablaze. As they all scrambled for the shelter of the front walls, other shells followed, straddling and surrounding their emplacements without ever hitting them, like some malign god intent on scaring them half to death before finishing them off. The noise and heat were so intense that Neumaier started screaming abuse at the Soviet gunners. Haaf, he noticed, had tears streaming down his adolescent face.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shelling stopped, and the war was once again several kilometres distant.
‘Why don’t you send Haaf back to the command post for our welfare stores?’ Paul suggested to Sergeant Utermann.
‘Does he know the way?’
‘I’ll go with him,’ Hannes volunteered.
Darkness had almost fallen when the pair finally returned, loaded up with cigarettes and other necessities.
‘They’re still handing out razors?’ Neumaier expostulated. ‘Who are we supposed to be impressing – fucking Ivan?’ He seemed much better pleased with the chocolate and biscuits in the front line packets.
‘Don’t forget your buttons’ Hannes told him. ‘You wouldn’t want your dick to fall out in Red Square.’
Paul smiled, and stared at his allotment of writing paper. There was no post anymore. Maybe he should start writing war poetry. The other day someone had shown him a poem by Bertolt Brecht, one of his father’s old favourites, a communist writer who’d left Germany when the Nazis came to power. He’d been living in America ever since, but he hadn’t forgotten Hitler or the Wehrmacht. ‘To the German Soldiers in the East’ was the name of the poem Paul had read, and one line had stayed with him: ‘there is no longer a road leading home.’ Perhaps Brecht had meant that they would never see Germany again, in which case he’d been wrong – here they were, defending German soil. But that didn’t matter – there was a bigger truth there, for Paul himself and so many others. They might die in front of Berlin, but even if they survived, the home they had known was gone.