His muteness proved useful in the end. At the beginning of the year they combed through the camp in search of reinforcements because the final offensive was approaching. In the Russian books the Icelander had been registered as ‘Hans Bios,’ and someone was now convinced that this forty-year-old Old Norse specialist wasn’t German at all but Estonian. An inner voice encouraged Dad to accept that honour. Three days later he was a free man and sat fully clothed with a Russian rifle over his shoulder in a vehicle of the Red Army along with a bunch of weary recruits. It was not far from the course that he had lumbered on at the German steering wheel three winters earlier, half a war younger, and about twice as optimistic. Yet the fact that he was now wearing another jacket, the enemy’s, was not quite as humiliating as he had imagined. Anything was better than felling forests for Stalin, and when it came to the crunch, the uniform in itself was of no importance, we’re all brothers in war, we’re all enemies in war: surviving it was the only thing that mattered. Dad was now fighting solely for himself. He had to reclaim the small territory he had sacrificed to conquer a world that was now lost.
‘And when you go from Russia to Poland, at least you’re heading for Iceland.’
111
Daughter-of-Pearl
1945
Meanwhile I myself was sitting on the banks of the Oder. Children cried in the darkness and mothers were banging pots. The horses were on the ground, and ahead of us the river flowed from the south to the north, left to right. Slightly further down, a bridge was snorkelling in the water. A torch swayed in the air, reflected in the calm waters of the river, between two half-broken pillars and a semi-submerged bulk of steel. Gunfire resounded in the distance. No one seemed bothered by it. Fatigue had brought us tons of tranquillity. Only those who were hit by the bullets briefly paused in their walks to ponder their fortune or misfortune and then died. The others walked on, unperturbed.
A fortnight must have passed since I’d joined up with these people, German landowners and leaseholders who had ploughed Prussian soil over the centuries and were now trying to save themselves before it became Russian. This had prompted a great parade across the bomb-cratered landscape in the beautiful brown mud and occasional snowfall. The worst part was not knowing where my skin ended and the shoe began. But now our destination was finally within reach. If we could get across the Oder we’d be safe. Hitler would never allow Ivan to cross the river.
It was a beautiful and peaceful war night. We had left a lot of misery behind us, but here hope shimmered in the light of torches. Someone said that February was ending and that March awaited us on the other side of the river. The ground was free of snow and reasonably dry. People settled under the carriages and against the trees and scratched their gun bites. A boy had fallen asleep against the groin of a horse, and bone-weary mothers curled up around their newborn sorrows, the children they had lost yesterday or the day before. Our greybeard had fallen asleep under a horse carriage that had then started to roll; the wheel had stopped against the neck of the old man, who carried on sleeping in his beard. I contemplated his head, recalling all the stories it contained, which he had told us in a corner of smouldering ruins or a warm ditch. A female ancestor of his had been given a pearl necklace by her duke on a trip to Venice before the turn of 1800. This was no ordinary necklace, these were no ordinary pearls, but pearls made of mother-of-pearl that had been kissed by Casanova himself, thus increasing their value. Since then the necklace had been passed down in the family, from throat to throat, land to land, one war to the next, although the pearls had, bit by bit, slipped off the necklace.
‘My great-grandmother and -grandfather lost their land in the first Prussian war and bought it back with eighteen of the Italian pearls. Grandma used four of them to survive the Franco-Prussian War. In the First World War my father saved the family by buying a carriage and two horses for twenty pearls from the necklace. In this war we’ve survived with the remaining few. I paid thirteen for the car journey from Lodz to Warsaw, even though those daughters of Casanova were worth considerably more than that. I paid two to have sixteen people sheltered in the basement of an embassy, four to buy a whole pig, one for a warmer coat for my Anna… and so on, see…’
He pulled a frayed necklace out of his pockets, which now held only two weary pearls.
‘I have two left. Two pearls from the Casanova necklace.’
He looked us firmly in the eye, me and a thirteen-year-old freckled girl, and then slipped the pearls off the necklace, rolled them into his palm. Tiny rainbows appeared on the surface of the grey-white spheres that looked like small hard candies, and those rainbows seemed to have been woven into them like magical patterns made by elves. In the distance, bombs fell from the sky.
‘Now I’m giving them to you, one pearl each.’
We protested vigorously, but he was unyielding. Said he’d lost half his family in Russian air raids and didn’t give a damn about the other half, felt the historical jewels were better off placed ‘in the hands of the future.’
And now I sat here on the banks of the Oder River, gazing out at the water with my hands in my pockets. One held a grenade, the other a pearl.
112
Break from Life
1945
Dad had never seen the war advance at such a speed. The offensive into Poland moved so swiftly that they seemed to be running for days. They were often pushing the front back by as much as sixty miles a day. Battles were almost welcomed for the break they provided from the running. Privates lay in makeshift snowy trenches while the artillery launched its attacks. Dad had a close call in the village of Bialystok when he got a piece of a tank’s caterpillar track in his helmet. Black smoke puffed across the white field.
The race was on again, in full uniform, with a rifle and bag on his back – but eventually the forty-year-old started to lag behind. He separated from his platoon and for two weeks moved through a wintry green forest along with four limping, wounded colleagues, shooting nothing but fallow deer and hares.
Finally they stepped out of the thick of the pines into a clearing where squadrons had set up camp. Moustachioed officers stood outside greyish-brown tents smoking pipes – the men seemed strangely calm. The carcass of a horse lay on a heap of wet snow. Some men stood shivering around it, chewing on slices of flesh they had cut out of it. Moving in closer, they noticed an increasingly odd odour wafting through the air, the type of odour no human nose had ever smelled before, some kind of burning scent that hovered over the encampment like an invisible fog. Slightly north of them, white smoke smouldered from a pit that was encircled by a group of soldiers, most of whom had their backs turned to the camp: something big was burning there.
Hans Bios and his comrades approached, casting greetings at their brothers in arms, and then let their silence and gazes direct them towards the smouldering ruins. The smell and heat intensified as they drew closer. Through the thick smoke they caught a glimpse of human legs, arms and heads, naked trunks.
A mass grave appeared before them, crammed with bodies, five layers of corpses and crackling flames that gave off an unbearable heat. They couldn’t come closer to the grave without covering their faces. The bodies were little more than skin and bone, and pops were heard occasionally in the bonfire, like the bursting of twigs in a fireplace. Bladders or boils, someone explained, with the voice of an experienced traveller through hell. What was going on? Were these German prisoners of war?