This transcended stony fields and tedium. For me, exiled, brimming with desire for nakedness, a blank page, however discoloured, was restoration of the fitting and needful, all else gaunt as a scarecrow.
Local girls had long been conscripted for military brothels and, I was to learn, SS stud farms. Those I had once avoided revenged themselves in dreams, taunting, undressing, but beyond reach, so that I awoke wet and frustrated.
Spade in hand, I would stare up at the sky. Clouds were now lean and dark, now white, billowing sails, bergs, continents or fleeting red sores. More remembered words descended:
Meaningless? Certainly not. Essence of privacy, exclamation of soul, resounding like a rattle, making life limitless, creating alternative language for eye and ear, like Forest stored with apparitions, real or shadowy, or ships, faint question-marks, far out on unknown missions.
Greg’s rough features had inescapably worsened, grimly perplexed. America, he grumbled, was a bastard nation dunged by a bullock. He cursed the Bear People, adding that it did his heart good to think of Churchill crucified on a tree. Bulletins were less exultant as the Wehrmacht, with Moscow within range, now made strategic retreat.
Though immobile, I was simultaneously being driven towards a fate likely to be ugly. Death in Africa, Russia, Italy. Many contemporaries must have perished or run off the edge of the world. I was nothing in nowhere. The SS, under their prim, bespectacled Grand Master, must soon round me up: Berlin had crowed that many Baltic volunteers were gloriously fighting in Russia. Estonia was hailed as the Ostland Protectorate.
I understood, from neighbours’ cautious exchanges, that the Baltic peoples had initially welcomed the Germans. I would have been with them, recovering my rights. But forebodings increased. From strangers on roads, from awesome speeches and music on Berlin radio, we heard of disaster at Stalingrad, which could not be shrugged off as a strategic feint to straighten the line or as Jewish conspiracy. Nor could we be comforted by the promise of Final Victory. The Führer’s personal word.
Folk-tales and Chaplin deceived. No giant was felled by the dwarf, the princess was diseased, happy endings mocked. Fate commanded. With hands chapped and swollen, my mind feeble, I saw a faint glow in the east, behind skeleton trees; then thoughts of Stalin-grad, and, back with my notebook, I attempted the rich and strange.
But the pencil stammered, imagination fluttered, folded wings, subsided into mud and ditch. Nevertheless, I must strain towards something else, runic with undiscovered messages, strong as basalt.
More often, sleepless from cold, I recognized more painfully the gap between impulse and words. At seventeen, I had changed to stone, failing the riddle at crossroads. In Soviet slavery, my tools would be not words but hoe and shovel.
By Easter 1944, with Mussolini punctured, Americans and British bloodily converging on Rome, we could hear guns, still distant but with the horizon closer, green and yellow flashes splitting the night. Greg discovered, nailed to a barn, a proclamation, badly printed but legible, signed Die Weisser Rose, the White Rose, thanking Herr Adolf Hitler for the sacrifice of 330,000 at Stalingrad. ‘They are hunting us.’
Greg’s mouth was tight as a hyphen. ‘Burn it.’
The SS had withdrawn and would never come back.Whatever the straightness of fronts, Ragnarok was near, giants blazing and roaring vengeance, savage women castrating the fallen.
The Allies landed in France. No, Dr Goebbels insisted, they had not landed, they were quarrelling, they no longer existed. Roosevelt had killed himself. Perhaps, but German eagles drooped, we were allowed to hear of massed bombing in Saxony, Westphalia, even Berlin. Of Mother, I could think no more, deadened by an uncensored account of the destruction of Münster Zoo. The fanged and tusked adrift. A sentence heard long ago, lurched back, The asp and the dromedary shall be about the streets. I heard Pastor Ulrich tolling:
In prophetic trance, Stefan George had wondered if he heard the last uprising of gods above a silent town.
Trudi’s boar-like uncle uttered some antique refrain, ‘May earth cover you lightly, so that dogs can tear you more easily.’ The imprecation discharged at an undisclosed target.
Distant rumbles could no longer be dismissed as thunder. Night skies reddened.Where knights ride, famine grows.
Illegal radio stations were fearless, perhaps manned by the White Rose. Valga, Estonian border town, had surrendered to inflamed, uncontrolled Russians. Reval partisans had captured Parliament Hill and hoisted red flags above government offices, the Germans in desperate flight. Meanwhile, hoping to escape notice in my isolated farm, I watched new leaf, occasionally prayed.
Prayers can be answered, and old stories were not always wrong. On a warm spring day, very early, a dark-green car without insignia drove up, a German civilian, nondescript but armed, presented Greg with a package, then myself with an order, the signature illegible on paper stamped with the swastika, that I should accompany him.
It could only be a call-up for the last army of the Reich, Goebbels having announced Hitler’s fury against army commanders incompetent, cowardly, disloyal. My captor’s silence was that of manacles, while he drove through packs of refugees, carts laden with chairs, bedding, lambs; small groups begging help; broken-down lorries; tanks, probably abandoned from lack of fuel. Periodic explosions sounded behind us, horribly close. Herdish, muddied troops sullenly parted for us, many maimed, bandaged in grotesque camouflage. Corpses lay under hedge and tree and those too fatigued to move. No officers were discernible: some might have torn off badges, others had been shot from behind. Roads were holed or blocked by fallen trees, charred lorries, empty staff cars. We passed wrecked inns and garages, smouldering villages swarming with military stragglers. The plains would bear no harvest.
Well provisioned, we stopped nowhere. Once the driver had to pistol off angry, dishevelled troopers. What sort of army could I expect? The night was lit with fires. We drove on, and by dawn I found myself at Meinnenberg.
TWO:
MEINNENBERG
Twelve million displaced persons were on the move, south and west, as the Red Armies lunged through Prussian Junkerdom, massed tanks and planes racing the Western Allies to Berlin. But the Führer still resisted, and the Wehrmacht had counter-attacked in the west. Throughout eastern Germany the Russians were said to be shooting all captives, with more women and children fearing rape than since the Thirty Years War. Ragnarok had demolished Ergriffenheit, enchantment with god-leaders.