Ostland, p.10
Ostland, page 10
There was only one possible answer. So I gave it, and I meant it, too: ‘Yes, Commissar, absolutely.’
Lüdtke nodded. He looked satisfied, as though I had now become, for the first time, one of his men. ‘Then I’ll add one further piece of advice. It’s about this ambition that you so clearly possess.’
I was about to defend myself, but he put up a hand to silence me. ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get ahead. If you work hard and contribute to the team then you will succeed, and deservedly so. But you have to do it the right way. If all you think about is personal advancement; if the only reason you do anything is to make yourself look good, then, yes, maybe you’ll climb, and plot, and stab your way to the top. But you won’t have my respect, nor that of anyone you work with, or who works for you. So by all means, think about what’s good for Georg Heuser. But think about what’s good for the job and the team first.’
‘I understand, Commissar.’
‘Good man. So, drink up your coffee and let’s get back to work.’
13
Ludwigsburg: April – October 1961
On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned orbit of the Earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft, thereby demonstrating that the Soviet Union was a political, military and scientific superpower that could match or even surpass the United States. On 4 June, at a summit meeting in Vienna with President Kennedy, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev told the American, British and French occupying powers in Berlin that they had until the end of the year to leave the city. As both sides ramped up their military preparations the threat of nuclear Armageddon hung over the world like a cloud of psychological fallout.
Life still had to carry on, however, even in the face of imminent oblivion, and for Paula Siebert that meant more preparations for a trial that was still over a year away. The ZSL investigators were now being assisted by special police task forces, staffed by officers known to have no links whatever with Nazism. They were conducting interviews across the country, sending a stream of information back to her office, all of which had to be analysed, assessed and set against the testimony of other witnesses. She was totally immersed in her work, barely even thinking of a personal life. It was true that she and Kraus went out to dinner once or twice a week after yet another late night at the office, but she told herself that that was just two colleagues sharing a working meal. There was nothing more to it than that.
One evening they found an Italian restaurant still open when everywhere else had closed. The proprietor gave them the same food that he and his staff were about to eat: spaghetti carbonara and a carafe of rough red wine, served in a raffia basket. They talked shop for a while and then, out of nowhere Paula said: ‘Do I remind you of Georg Heuser?’
Kraus burst out laughing. ‘You’ve got to be joking!’
To his surprise there was not a trace of a smile on her face. ‘No, I’m absolutely not,’ Paula said. ‘Last year when I interviewed him he said that I reminded him of himself. It’s been eating at me ever since.’
‘But you’ve got nothing in common with him at all.’
‘That’s not true. I’m the same age he was during the war. I’m a lawyer, like him …’
‘A qualified lawyer.’
Paula smiled. ‘Yes, I made that point to him, too. But even so, I’m ambitious; so was Heuser. I want to do my best, a little bit of a perfectionist, even.’
‘So are countless young lawyers. Listen, you’re the exact opposite of Georg Heuser in every way that matters, and the only reason he could have said such a thing, apart from wanting to hurt you, is because you remind him of what he might have been: a decent, honourable, caring human being.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Kraus said. He drank some wine and looked at Paula in a way she’d never seen him do before, as a man appraising a woman. Almost to her surprise she was flattered by his attention.
‘Also,’ Kraus went on, ‘whereas Georg Heuser is a repulsive middle-aged man with whom I would not share a meal even if I was starving and he was holding the world’s largest sausage …’
Paula giggled, Kraus grinned back at her and he was laughing too as he said: ‘You, on the other hand … you are a very beautiful young woman and dining with you is one of the very few pleasures of my increasingly miserable life.’
‘Miserable? What’s the matter?’
‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to wreck the mood. Forget it.’
‘No. There’s something bothering you. You can tell me what it is. I don’t mind.’
Whatever Paula might have expected, Kraus’s reply was far more blunt and more shocking: ‘Barbara kicked me out.’
‘Why? What have you done?’
‘What haven’t I done, more like. I’ve not been at home with my family. I’ve not paid attention to her or the kids. I’ve spent all my time on this damn case.’
‘Doesn’t she understand how important this is?’
‘Just the opposite, she thinks it’s a total waste of time. All her friends are convinced I’m going after decent German men, destroying their reputations and throwing them in jail over issues that should have been forgotten long ago. Frankly, Barbara agrees with them. And I don’t even get paid any more money for working all these evenings and weekends.’
‘But it’s not fair to make you choose between your family and your job.’
‘Barbara would say I’ve already made that choice myself. If I work when I could be at home. And maybe she’s right. I love little Hansi and Gitta with all my heart … but I spend my time with men I despise. And I’m not even making a decent case against them. Of course they’re guilty, but the bastards know we can’t prove it. The witnesses are either all dead, or they’re too scared to talk. We need a smoking gun, but God knows where we’ll find it.’
Paula toyed with her spaghetti. ‘Maybe Becker and Wessel had the right idea. One of them managed to get another job. The other simply retired.’
‘So why do we hang on, eh?’
Paula just about managed a little laugh as she said: ‘What else can I do?’
‘I know what your mother would say. Think how happy she’d be if you got down to the job of marrying and making babies.’
‘How dare you!’ Paula cried in mock outrage, laughing genuinely this time.
‘But it’s the same choice, isn’t it?’ Kraus said, with a quiet seriousness. ‘We’ve both put our work before our personal lives. Why do we do that?’
‘Because we can’t let them get away with it.’
‘Why not? After all, Barbara’s right, they’re all leading decent, respectable lives.’
‘Because of what they represent.’
‘Which is?’
Kraus was expecting an argument founded on political morality. And he got the feeling that what she said surprised her as much as it did him.
‘They killed my daddy,’ she said, like the girl she must have been when she’d heard the news. ‘He died outside Moscow, at a place called Khimki. It was the absolute farthest the army got into Russia. They told us he’d died at our greatest moment of glory, as if that was supposed to make it better … I think of him lying there in the snow – his poor, frozen body – when he should have been safe and warm at home with his family, a proper father, kissing his wife and playing games with me. And I don’t blame the Russians. I blame the Nazis who started the war and sent him to fight in it … So that’s why I can’t let the things they did be forgotten, whatever my mother says. It would be like forgetting my own father. Like betraying him.’
He reached across the table and rested his hand on hers. She didn’t move it away, enjoying the feeling of her fingers being swallowed up in his great paw, relishing the tenderness of his touch. She found herself entwining her fingers with his, still with her head down, gazing at the hands on the white tablecloth, not yet ready to look him in the eye again.
Finally she said: ‘How about you? Why do you do it?’
‘Ah, now that’s a long story …’ Kraus leaned back in his chair, his head back, his shirt straining against his shoulders and chest. He thought for a moment and then leaned forward again, putting his elbows on the table.
‘I was taken prisoner by the Americans. It was 13th May, 1943, the day the Afrika Korps surrendered. We’d been going back and forth across that damn desert for two years, but we couldn’t go on any longer, not once the Yanks had come into the fight. They took us across the Atlantic in the same ships they’d used to send their boys to North Africa …’ Kraus grinned. ‘Shitting ourselves all the way, terrified we’d be sunk by one of our own U-boats. When we got to America we were sent to Camp Hearne, Texas, way down near the Mexican border. We couldn’t believe it. We’d been in the Sahara desert, but this damn place was even hotter!’
‘My God, how terrible.’
‘No, it wasn’t too bad at all. The rations were set at two thousand calories a day – I ate better there than at any other time in the whole war. The enlisted men had to work in the fields outside the camp, but it wasn’t forced labour. They got paid the same as the local farmhands. I was a non-commissioned officer so I was allowed to study instead. I learned English and began my first law degree. We had a theatre, an orchestra, we were even given a daily bottle of beer.’
‘My God, that sounds like paradise compared with life at home back then! Why did they treat you so well?’
‘They were Americans. They had food and drink to spare. And they thought the Afrika Korps were Good Germans. We’d fought an honourable war. General Rommel himself had ordered us not to mistreat any Jews we came across. So the Americans had some respect for us as worthy enemies … and then one day in early May ’45, just as the war in Europe was ending, everything changed. We went into breakfast and there was half as much food as before. The guards – men we’d got to know, that we joked with and shared cigarettes with – were looking at us with hatred and contempt in their eyes. We couldn’t understand it. We knew the war was ending. Shouldn’t they be more friendly now, not less? Then we were led into the theatre. It had a projector for showing movies. The lights went down, the projector came on and it was a newsreel. American jeeps, driven by GIs just like the ones guarding us, came up to the gates of a camp and in the middle of the gates were metal letters that said “Arbeit macht frei”. Then the gates opened and the jeeps went through and immediately they were surrounded by a host of men and women, some in ordinary clothes, others in striped uniforms, but all of them thin … so thin, my God, we couldn’t believe it – they were like skeletons …’
Kraus pushed away the remains of his spaghetti as if the very sight of it was offensive and went on: ‘It was Dachau. The Americans had got there at the end of April and they wanted us to know what they’d found. The camera showed piles of hundreds, even thousands of dead bodies, all naked and, again, just skin and bone. And there were Germans, in SS uniforms, having to carry these bodies into huge open graves … There was a train, too, the death-train from Buchenwald: cattle-trucks filled with more and more dead bodies … The horror of it was … indescribable …’
His voice tailed away for a moment and then Kraus continued. ‘We’d heard stories, of course, rumours really, about the killing of the Jews, but how could any sane man even imagine that anything like this could possibly exist? Anyway, from that day on, the Americans hated us … So if you want to know why I put my work before my family it’s because I love my children and I don’t want them to grow up having to bear the burden of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ shame. I want us to be redeemed in the eyes of the world. I’ve already fought for my country once, and now I’m fighting for it again in a different, better way. And nothing that anyone, including my wife, can say will ever convince me otherwise.’
After they left the restaurant Paula stopped on the pavement, took Kraus’s hands in hers and looked up at his big, broad face with its silver-streaked beard, its weather-beaten skin and those deep brown eyes that could be full of gentleness one moment and as black and hard as coal the next.
‘We can’t breathe a word of this to anyone,’ she said, knowing there was no need to explain herself.
‘For both our sakes,’ Kraus replied. And so it began.
*
It was a Sunday morning in August and the air was already warm, the sun slicing through the gaps in the curtains, lighting up the dust-motes floating in the air, as Paula lay in bed, watching Kraus sleep. She reached out and traced a finger down his back and smiled as she thought of how he’d taken her to bed. She’d cooked his favourite dish, roast pork, braised cabbage and dumplings, and had just carried the dirty dishes into her tiny kitchen. She put them in the sink, turned around and there he was, looking at her with a wicked smile on his face, and before she could say a word he’d put his mouth over hers and kissed her with an intensity that had taken her breath away. While her head was still spinning and at the exact moment when she was beginning to wonder if her legs were still capable of supporting her he had reached down, lifted her off her feet and held her in his arms, still kissing her. She felt weightless, helpless and vulnerable to him and yet absolutely safe. Above all, she felt consumed with sheer physical desire, a passionate hunger that no other man had ever induced in her.
Just thinking about it now made her tingle, and she curled up behind him and draped an arm across him, pressing herself against his body to feel his warmth and breathe in his smell. Kraus grunted, rolled on to his back and she wrapped her leg around his thigh and nestled her head against his chest. Paula loved the sheer mass of him. He was like a mighty granite cliff and she was the sea, hurling herself against him, knowing that he could withstand anything.
With other lovers she’d always been less than her true self, forever restraining her intelligence and her opinions for fear of undermining their fragile sense of masculine superiority. At work, invariably the lone woman surrounded by men, she had to struggle to find the confidence to make herself heard. If she did speak up, half her concentration was spent pitching her voice at the precise point where she would seem neither meek and feeble, nor shrill and aggressive. Even when she succeeded and got her point across, she had to wait for one of the men to repeat it before anyone would take it seriously.
But Kraus was different. He wanted to know what she thought about things and took her views seriously enough to argue with her when he disagreed. The first few times he’d done it, Paula had been upset, not wanting to displease him and fearing that a dispute might hurt their relationship. It took time for her to understand that Kraus was actually paying her the compliment of treating her as an equal. He was happy for her to test him. He wanted everything she had to offer. The moment she truly accepted that Kraus could handle her – all of her – it seemed to liberate her physically as well, allowing her to seek pleasure without shame or restraint.
No one on earth could arouse her as he did. And now he was waking up, his arm was snaking down her back, cupping her bottom in his hand and pulling her closer to him, and she was lifting her head to meet him as he brought his lips to hers and the bliss was spreading through her all over again.
Afterwards, as they were lying together, basking in the afterglow, Paula said: ‘Tell me why you love me.’
Kraus laughed. ‘What … again? You’re like a kid who wants to hear the same bedtime story every night!’
‘But it’s such a good story. And we are in bed …’
‘Oh all right then …’
Paula snuggled up to him and put her head on his chest, wanting to feel the soft, rumbling resonance of his voice as Kraus spoke.
‘I love you for your mind,’ he said, ‘which is so fine, so clever and original, but well disciplined when it needs to be. I love you for your heart, which is brave and filled with love and passion and commitment to all the things you believe in – all the people, too.’
‘Like you,’ she murmured.
‘Mmm …’
‘What else do you love me for?’
‘For your pretty face, even when it’s grumpy and frustrated because the world isn’t treating you right, and especially when you smile and your eyes light up and suddenly you’re like the sun coming out on a cloudy day, making everything seem better. I love all the funny little expressions you have when you think I’m not watching you. I love you because you snore …’
‘I don’t!’
‘… very, very softly and then insist that you don’t. I love you when you’re getting dressed and even more when you’re getting undressed. I love the scent of your hair. And I really love your body. I love feeling your tits in my hands, and the curve of your back, and the line of your legs. I love what’s between your legs. And finally, I love … your … ass!’
As he said the last word he spanked her, once, just hard enough to sting a little, and she squealed in surprise as the momentary pain seemed to heighten all the other, softer sensations she was experiencing, like a dash of chilli in a rich, warm stew.
‘You beast!’ she cried, doing her best to sound outraged. She sat up and straddled him. When she looked down at Kraus’s face it was wreathed in a smile of pure contentment. His eyes were fixed on her breasts. ‘You look fucking great,’ he said, and then, a moment later, ‘I could really use a cup of coffee.’
‘Then get it yourself!’
‘How can I? You’re on top of me.’
Paula rolled off. ‘Now I’m not.’
‘Oh, go on … I said how much I love you. Don’t I deserve some coffee in return?’
Paula sighed. ‘All right … just this once. Because you did say it very nicely …’
She got out of bed and walked, still naked into the kitchen. She sorted out the percolator, lit the gas hob and waited for the coffee to brew. She thought of going back to bed but knew that if she did, she wouldn’t get out again, so decided to stay where she was. There was a transistor radio sitting on the windowsill and Paula switched it on, expecting to hear the usual blend of light classical music and popular songs from her favourite station. Instead there was some kind of news report, a live broadcast, by the sound of it. She caught something about soldiers and crowds of onlookers, then the reporter’s voice rising in volume and pitch as he described a young East German soldier dashing away from the rest of his unit, towards the crowds that had gathered on the western side.
