The Aftermath Page 17

  The snow in the meadow was virgin, and Edmund took delight in making the first prints in it, relishing the sound of his sinking boots and the fact that his wellingtons were just tall enough to keep the snow out. Ahead, he could see a bonfire burning, its black smoke marking the point where the sky touched the earth, the grey cloud so low it bled into the ground and killed the horizon. A black remnant of river broke the ubiquity of white, but the all-consuming force of the cold had decimated its width by freezing it from the banks inwards by hundreds of feet, leaving brook-sized rivulets here and there in the ice archipelagos. In an ox-bowed section, now completely iced over, a sailboat had been caught in the freeze, its prow thrust up, its stern held back, caught in a dead, cold ripple. The force of the still-flowing river had pushed up chunks of ice that jagged this way and that: they reminded Edmund of the photos of the alien ice-fields that Scott had crossed on his fatal trek. In the middle of the river, where the water was still moving, barges of ice floated hearse-like downstream. On one of these sat a murder of crows. Nature didn’t intend one to feel sorry for a crow, but the sight of these birds moved Edmund. Too cold to fly, and fat from puffing out their feathers, they looked as though they had surrendered their carrion calling and resigned themselves to riding their iceboat to the sea.

  Edmund approached the camp, the brown NAAFI paper bag tucked under his arm, sure that his largesse would bring him respect and promotion in the hearts of the ferals. Ozi and company were gathered around a bonfire, closer to the flames than looked humanly possible. One of the boys was fuelling the roar with bits of broken-up chicken coop. There were fewer outhouses than before: the wood shed was gone, as was the stable; it looked as if the ferals had burnt half their accommodation. Ozi was sitting on his suitcase like an old man waiting for a long-delayed train; he was so still he looked as though he had frozen on his perch. One of the boys nudged him to life.

  ‘Good Tommy.’

  Ozi jumped up, saluted someone in the fire then turned towards the approaching Edmund, walking around the bonfire but remaining within the circumference of its heat, his face cracking into a wild, half-demented, half-ecstatic smile. ‘Ed-mund,’ he said, delighting in the way he said it. ‘Vot you got?’

  Edmund reached the edge of the bonfire’s muddy hearth. The heat had driven back the snow and made a circle of brown mulch in a three-foot radius around the fire, in which the ferals stood unflinching, as if adapted to withstand the intense heat.

  ‘Vot you got?’ Ozi asked again. ‘Vot you got? Vot you got?’ he repeated, his teeth chattering after every ‘got’.

  ‘Ciggies.’

  Edmund handed Ozi the bag, having to turn away and shield one side of his face from the heat. The sight of the contraband turned Ozi from expectant child to forensic professional. He dipped into the bag and produced a packet of Player’s, sniffed it then checked to see if the seal was broken. Good. They were as fresh as morning eggs. An unbroken seal would give him more bartering power. Ozi held the packet up and announced: ‘Player’s. Fa-mous cigarettes.’ The cellophane started to brown and blister from the heat.

  ‘Gut ciggies,’ Edmund said. ‘Player’s.’

  ‘Good fucking Tommy ciggies,’ Ozi said.

  A round of appreciative expletives seconded this as he passed the pack around. The boy whom Edmund had so easily wrestled to the ground was standing a little further back, looking on indifferently. Edmund used this moment of maximum favour to show that he had no hard feelings. He took a packet from the bag in Ozi’s arms and held one out for his former adversary to take. The boy resisted for a second before stepping over and taking it from Edmund, his need trumping his pride.

  There was the smell of something other than burning wood coming from the fire. Something was cooking. An animal was being roasted on a spit. It was hard to see exactly what it was: its head and feet had been removed; it looked bigger than a pig but smaller and skinnier than a cow. Whatever it was, it smelt good. Ozi took Edmund by the arm and led him round to the sizzling thing. He cut a strip from the lean haunch of the roasting beast and handed it to him. The meat was blackened and crisp.

  ‘Was ist los?’

  There were titters, which Edmund interpreted as a reaction to his poor German.

  ‘Esel,’ Ozi said.

  Edmund knew the German for pig, dog, cow and lion, but he didn’t recognize this word. Maybe it was another word for beef. Not wanting to offend his host, he put the piece in his mouth and chewed.

  ‘Tommy like?’ Ozi asked.

  Edmund chewed on, with all eyes on his response. The meat was tough, with a flavour of something he couldn’t place. It was like beef, only sweeter. But it had been so overdone it could have been anything.

  ‘Ich liebe,’ he said, finally, unsure if this is what he meant, but it seemed to be the right answer.

  ‘Tommy liebt Esel!’ Ozi said, and everyone laughed and cheered and made gestures of approval and, for some reason, donkey brays. Edmund felt he had passed an initiation of some kind. Then he remembered that he had more to share. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a handkerchief tied into a pouch. Edmund looked for somewhere to set it down. Ozi directed him to his suitcase, turning it flat to make a table.

  ‘Muttis Haus,’ he said.

  Edmund lay the kerchief on the suitcase as the boys jostled themselves into a ring around him. He untied the knot and opened it out to reveal a sparkling mountain of sugar cubes. The sight drew an immediate and collective intake of breath, as though a magic trick had been performed. Unsure that they even knew what sugar was, Edmund took a cube from the summit and held it up to the light. Its granules sparkled.

  ‘Sugar,’ he said. He handed the cube to Ozi, who put it straight into his mouth.

  Ozi held it there, without moving his mouth, before crunching into it with his back teeth. Then he winced. A red mulch of spittle dribbled out of one side of his mouth. He reached inside to his lower jaw, felt for something and pulled out the bloody triangle of a rotten yellow tooth. He grimaced for everyone to see then looked back down at the tooth drizzled in blood sitting in his pink-black paw. His hand closed on it and he pocketed it. Edmund wondered what he could possibly do with it. It was beyond repair, and no tooth fairy would visit Ozi’s stinking manger. If indeed she visited any German kid any more: they had surely fallen a long way down her list of deserving recipients – below the Italians and the Japanese, at the very back of the queue.

  Ozi bent down, scooped up some snow and pressed it against his still-bleeding gum. Someone shouted: ‘Mann auf dem Fluss!’

  Everyone turned to look, and there, approaching them across the oxbow, was a man, ageless at this distance but springy and lithe and definitely coming towards them, walking on the frozen water of the Elbe with intent, an intent which seemed to telegraph itself to them and change the gathering into a twitchy herd. If they weren’t sure who it was, they all seemed to know who they didn’t want it to be.

  ‘Tsss. Ist er es?’

  ‘Nein.’

  ‘Ich kann ihn nicht erkennen.’

  The ice walker continued on and, for a moment, the air-bending heat of the fire made it appear that he walked on water.

  Only Ozi remained unimpressed. ‘It’s Berti, you chumps.’

  Siegfried said, ‘He won’t be happy. We hardly snitched anything.’

  The figure reached the bank and stepped up, his gait more upright and his stride lengthening as he stepped from ice to snow; and as he came across the meadow, all black and grey, a single orange glow of a dragged cigarette flared in the colourless wash of the winter air.

  ‘It’s only Berti,’ Ozi repeated. ‘I have what he wants.’ But it was c
lear that, beneath his bravado, he was steeling himself for something.

  Edmund felt nauseous with apprehension. He wanted to fly back across the meadow to the safety of home, but it was too late.

  ‘Ed-mund!’

  Ozi had his head in his suitcase. He barely lifted the lid, shielding its contents. He produced a Russian Cossack hat and tossed it to Edmund, pointing at his head.

  ‘No speak.’

  Edmund pulled the hat on and took up a position at the back of the pack; his feet felt thick and numb in his wellington boots; the Cossack hat smelt of diesel and was frozen hard as a helmet.

  Close up, this Berti didn’t look much to be afraid of – he was not much older than the rest of the boys; not much taller, his stature belittled by his outsized coat – but by the time he was within the orbit of the fire the boys had clustered into a trembling, mute huddle. Edmund felt himself being pushed back into the fire as the pack unwittingly backed away. Only Ozi, keeping up his faux indifference, remained apart. And it was to Ozi that Berti went, barely noticing the presence of anyone else. He asked Ozi something quietly, not wanting anyone else to hear. Ozi handed him a piece of paper and chuntered and chirped as it was inspected. The young man looked neither pleased nor displeased. He folded the paper carefully and put it inside his coat.

  ‘Was hast du für mich?’

  This question sent Ozi into a full repertoire of shrugs, beseeching hands and head-shaking, then he pointed his thumb over his shoulder to some imaginary accomplice who’d let him down. Halfway through his unconvincing riff – even Edmund thought Ozi resembled a squirming, shifty little worm – Berti silenced him by grabbing his face in the pincer of one hand. The movement, its violence and proximity, pumped adrenalin and dread into Edmund’s system. He felt he was going to vomit.

  Released from his grip and seeming immediately to forget the abuse, Ozi became a maître d’, pointing Berti towards the spit as though to a table in the best spot in a restaurant. Berti approached the animal. He studied it for a moment then turned to Ozi and the rest of them. He looked even angrier.

  ‘Wir essen Esel, während die Engländer Kuchen essen!’

  There was that word again. Esel. And something about the British eating cake.

  Ozi tried to distract Berti with his next trick, waving what looked like a tube of medicine. He was like a lion tamer whip-cracking his beast from chair to flaming hoop to stair, permitting the lion no time to remember its essential ‘lionness’.

  ‘Berti, schau mal, was wir für dich haben! Pervitin!’

  Berti snatched the tube and took two tablets straight away. Ozi then clapped at the others to give up what was in their pockets. Otto produced a church collection tray and laid it on the ground. The ferals tossed whatever they had into it, a measly but eclectic offering: some medicine for venereal disease, prophylactics, sugar cubes. Reluctantly, Ozi added most of Edmund’s contribution.

  This last caught Berti’s eye.

  ‘Wo hast du den Zucker gefunden?’

  No one answered.

  Ozi said something about hotels, but Berti didn’t like it. He grabbed Dietmar and held him in a headlock and drew the orange tip of his cigarette to within an inch of his eyelid. Dietmar moaned as the cigarette singed his lashes.

  Edmund swallowed the acid rising in his gullet. Hot urine burnt into his thigh. He wanted to tell Berti to stop, but he was too afraid to speak, even though he knew that in some way he was responsible for the torture being dispensed. What would his father do?

  ‘Stop! Please … Stop it.’

  The English words disarmed the assault immediately. Berti released Dietmar, and the huddle cleaved to leave a channel from Berti to Edmund.

  ‘He’s all right, Berti,’ Ozi said. ‘He brings us ciggies … and he brought the sugar. He is a good Tommy.’

  A full flow of hot piss flooded Edmund’s pants and trickled down inside his trousers, all the way to his wellingtons. The heat was momentarily comforting, but his legs felt rubbery and weak: he couldn’t have run even if he’d wanted to. He thought of his father again. This was not the heroic death he’d envisaged. If they found him, they’d see the yellow stain in the snow. Medal winners didn’t piss their pants. Edmund Morgan: Rest In Piss.

  But, for some reason, Berti didn’t move. He remained where he was, calculating something. He conferred quietly with Ozi, glancing occasionally at Edmund. Eventually, he turned to him, wary. He looked down at the tray and gathered up a packet of Player’s.

  ‘Bring ciggies,’ he said in English. ‘Here. Every week.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Or I will do this.’ He held up the cigarette to his eye. ‘To you.’

  Ozi turned to Edmund. ‘Good Tommy. You bring ciggies … here … tomorrow und’ – he made a forward arch with his hand to indicate the leap of a week – ‘und next.’

  Edmund nodded furiously.

  Berti then threw his sugar cubes into the fire. They landed on the wire mesh of the chicken coop that was burning and Ozi made a squawking noise and leapt right on to it to get them; but the heat was too fierce and, almost in the same motion, he sprang back and out like a frog, landing on the ground, his coat-tails alight. The others laughed at him as he rolled in the snow to dampen the flames.

  Berti picked up the rest of the ferals’ offering and pointed at Edmund then back towards the Villa Lubert. Edmund didn’t need to understand exactly, he could feel the intention and he started to obey, backing away from the ferocious weight of the man’s stare, his scared legs buckling and stumbling as he broke into a run.

  The Nissen huts of Hammerbrook were banked up to the eaves with snow and the golden glow of kerosene lights at their windows gave the impression of a cosy, contented village hunkering down.

  ‘Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel,’ Minister Shaw said, recognizing the tune, as Lewis led him up the snow-swept path between the huts towards the people at the hand-out point.

  As Lewis had predicted, the steady snowfall of the last two days had cleaned up any signs of discord, driving people indoors and protesters off the streets. So far, everything the minister had seen on his tour had given the impression of a difficult situation being brilliantly managed: even the factory protesters had put down their placards, while, here at the camp, where Lewis had hoped to present Shaw (and the accompanying photographer from Die Welt newspaper) with some irrefutable images of hardship, charity was out in force. The Red Cross, the Quaker Society and the Salvation Army were present, its brass band playing carols while their colleagues dispensed soup and food parcels to queues of DPs.

  ‘It’s good to see that you’re getting them fed, Colonel.’

  ‘Twenty people have died of starvation this month, Minister. It’s only going to get worse. Without the food parcels, these people would starve. Germany can’t feed itself.’

  ‘But there is rich farmland all around.’

  The photographer was trying to manoeuvre Shaw into position for the next shot.

  ‘The Russians have the breadbasket, but they’re not sharing,’ Lewis replied, knowing Shaw was only half listening. ‘The city’s supplies usually come from farmland that’s now in the Russian zone, but the Russians won’t give us grain until we dismantle more factories. As a result, 90 per cent of the food in the British zone is imported. That’s 2 million tons of food a day, Minister. And already the ships can’t get through the ice. If we dismantle the factories, the Germans won’t have work. Meanwhile, many of them can’t work anyway, until they’ve been cleared through the de-Nazification process. It’s a vicious cycle.’

  Shaw nodded thoughtfully, but Lewis felt he’d given him too much: a scattershot rather than a
bullseye. And now the photographer was moving in.

  ‘Minister. If I could get you to take a position behind the trestle. I would like to get a shot of you handing over a parcel.’

  For Leyland, the overseeing officer from Die Welt, the brief was simple: show the British in a good light to the German public, standing side by side with Germans in their hardship. He already had a few reputation-saving pictures in the can: Shaw perched on a child’s school chair, next to three smiling German girls as they studiously examined a history book depicting the Houses of Parliament (‘German children learn rudiments of democracy’); Shaw standing over a printer’s block at Die Welt (‘Germans enjoy the benefits of a free press once more’). But ‘Minister hands out food parcels to grateful Germans’ was surely going to be the shot of the day, providing the syncretism everyone needed: it would show Germans that the British were compassionate and competent; it would allay the criticisms being levied at the Control Commission; and leave Shaw looking like a man of action. Shaw knew the drill: ask a question, shake a hand, look concerned.

  Shaw said hello in German to an elderly woman and stooped magnanimously to present the gift. The woman took it with a grimace and left without saying a word, unmoved by the minister’s studied compassion. The photographer snapped, but where was the gratitude? He needed to capture the gratitude. A mother with a toddler riding her hip came to the table next. The photographer closed in. Shaw instinctively blessed the little girl with his gloved hand and handed the food parcel to her like some plain-clothes St Nicholas. The photographer crouched, aimed and got the shot.

  A scruffy young man, who had been following them ever since they’d arrived, called out to Shaw:

  ‘Tommy, gibt uns mehr zu essen, sonst werden wir Hitler nicht vergessen!’

  These words had been shouted at Lewis before: once by a woman stealing coal at Dammtor station and once by a young boy at the Goosemarket.