The surgeon came in. The two doctors looked at the X-rays. No doubt they could see all the poisonous dissidence that had collected inside his rib-cage over the years.
The surgeon took Bach’s hand and began to turn it, moving it towards and away from the screen. His concern was the splinter-wound; it was quite incidental that a young and highly educated man was attached to it.
The doctors talked to each other in a mixture of Latin and jocular curses. Bach realized he was going to be all right – he wasn’t going to lose his arm after all.
‘Get the lieutenant ready to be operated on,’ said the surgeon. ‘I’m going to take a look at this skull-wound. It’s a difficult case.’
The orderly removed Bach’s gown, and the surgeon’s assistant, a young woman, told him to sit down on the stool.
‘Heavens!’ said Bach, smiling pitifully and feeling embarrassed at his nakedness. ‘You should warm these stools up, Fräulein, before asking a combatant from the battle of Stalingrad to sit down on them with a bare behind.’
‘That’s not part of our routine,’ she answered in absolute seriousness. Then she began taking out a terrifying-looking array of instruments from a glass-fronted cupboard.
The extraction of the splinter, however, proved quick and simple. Bach even felt a little resentful: the surgeon’s contempt for this ridiculously simple operation seemed to extend to the patient.
The assistant asked Bach if he needed to be accompanied back to his ward.
‘I’ll be all right by myself.’
‘Anyway, you won’t need to stay here long,’ she said reassuringly.
‘Fine,’ he answered. ‘I was already beginning to feel bored.’
She smiled.
Her picture of wounded soldiers was obviously derived from newspaper articles. These were full of stories about soldiers who had quietly slipped out of hospital in order to return to their beloved companies and battalions. They apparently felt an overpowering need to be fighting – otherwise life simply wasn’t worth living.
Maybe journalists really had found people like that in hospital. Bach, on the other hand, felt shamefully happy to lie on a bed with clean sheets, eat his plate of rice, take a puff at his – strictly forbidden – cigarette, and strike up a conversation with his neighbours.
There were four men in the ward – three officers serving at the Front and a civil servant with a pot belly and a hollow chest. He had been sent from the rear on a mission and had a car accident near Gumrak. When he lay on his back, his hands folded across his stomach, it looked as though someone had jokingly stuffed a football under the blanket. No doubt this was why he had been nicknamed ‘the goalkeeper’.
The goalkeeper was the only one to complain about being temporarily disabled. He spoke in an exalted tone about duty, the army, the Fatherland and his pride at being wounded in Stalingrad.
The three officers were amused at his brand of patriotism. One of them, Krap, who was lying on his stomach because of a wound in the buttocks, had been in command of a detachment of scouts. He had a pale face, thick lips and staring brown eyes.
‘I guess you’re the kind of goalkeeper who’s not content just to defend his own goal,’ he said, ‘but likes to send the ball into his opponent’s net as well.’
Wanting to say something stinging in reply, the goalkeeper asked:
‘Why are you so pale? I suppose you have to work in an office.’
‘No,’ said Krap. ‘I’m a night bird. That’s when I go hunting. Unlike you, I do my screwing during the day.’
Krap was obsessed with sex. It was his chief topic of conversation.
After this, everyone began cursing the bureaucrats who cleared out of Berlin every evening and drove back to their country homes, and those fine warriors, the quartermasters, who were awarded more medals than men serving in the front line. They talked about the sufferings undergone by soldiers’ families when their houses were destroyed by bombs. They cursed the Casanovas in the rear who tried to make off with soldiers’ wives. They cursed the military stores where you couldn’t buy anything except eau-de-Cologne and razor-blades.
In the bed next to Bach was a Lieutenant Gerne. At first Bach had thought he was an aristocrat, but he turned out to be a peasant – one of the men brought to the fore by the National Socialists. He had been the deputy to a regimental chief of staff and had been wounded by a bomb-splinter during a night air-raid.
When the goalkeeper was taken away to be operated on, Lieutenant Fresser, a rather simple man who had the bed in the corner, said: ‘People have been shooting at me since 1939, but I’ve never made a song and dance about my patriotism. I get my food and drink, I get clothed – and I fight. Without philosophising about it.’
‘Not entirely,’ said Bach. ‘When front-line soldiers make fun of a man like the goalkeeper, that’s already a kind of philosophy.’
‘Really?’ said Gerne. ‘How very interesting! May I ask just what kind of philosophy?’
Bach could tell from the hostile expression in Gerne’s eyes that he was one of those people with a deep hatred of the old German intelligentsia. Bach had had his fill of speeches and articles attacking the intelligentsia for their admiration of American plutocracy, their hidden sympathies for Talmudism and Hebraic abstraction, and for the Jewish styles in literature and painting. Now he felt furious. If he was prepared to bow down before the rude strength of these new men, why then should they look at him with that wolf-like suspicion? Hadn’t he been bitten by as many lice as they had? Hadn’t he had frost bite? Here he was, a front-line officer – and they still didn’t consider him a true German! Bach closed his eyes and turned to the wall.
‘Why do you ask with such venom?’ he wanted to mutter angrily.
‘Do you really not understand?’ Gerne would reply with a smile of contemptuous superiority.
‘No, I don’t understand,’ he would say irritably. ‘I told you. But perhaps I can guess.’
Gerne, of course, would burst out laughing.
‘You suspect me of duplicity,’ he would shout.
‘That’s right! Duplicity!’ Gerne would repeat brightly.
‘Impotence of the will?’
At this point Fresser would begin to laugh. Krap, supporting himself on his elbows, would stare insolently at Bach.
‘You’re a band of degenerates!’ Bach would thunder. ‘And you, Gerne, are half-way between a man and a monkey!’
Numb with hatred, Bach screwed up his eyes still tighter.
‘You only have to write some little pamphlet on the most trivial of questions, and you think that gives you the right to despise the men who laid the foundations of German science. You only have to publish some miserable novella, and you think you can spit on the glory of German literature. You seem to imagine the arts and sciences as a kind of Ministry where there’s no room for you because the older generation won’t make way. Where you and your little book are denied admittance by Koch, Nernst, Planck and Kellerman . . . No, the arts and sciences are a Mount Parnassus beneath an infinite sky! There’s room there for every genuine talent that has appeared throughout human history . . . Yes, if there’s no place for you and your sterile fruits, it’s certainly not for lack of room! You can throw out Einstein, but you’ll never take his place yourselves. Yes, Einstein may be a Jew, but – forgive me for saying this – he’s a genius. There’s no power in the world that could enable you to step into his shoes. Is it really worth expending so much energy destroying people whose places must remain forever unoccupied? If your impotence has made it impossible for you to follow the paths opened up by Hitler, then the fault lies with you and you alone. Police methods and hatred can never achieve anything in the realm of culture. Can’t you see how profoundly Hitler and Goebbels understand this? You should learn from them. See with what love, patience and tact, they themselves cherish German science, art and literature! Follow their example! Follow the path of consolidation instead of sowing discord in the midst of our common cause!’
After deliveri
ng this imaginary speech, Bach opened his eyes again. His neighbours were all lying quietly under their blankets.
‘Watch this, comrades!’ said Fresser. With the sweeping gesture of a conjuror, he took out from under his pillow a litre bottle of ‘Three Knaves’ Italian cognac.
Gerne made a strange sound in his throat. Only a true drunkard – and a peasant drunkard at that – could gaze at a bottle with quite such rapture.
‘He’s not so bad after all,’ thought Bach, feeling ashamed of his hysterical speech.
Fresser, hopping about on one leg, filled the glasses on their bedside tables.
‘You’re a lion!’ said Krap with a smile.
‘A true soldier!’ said Gerne.
‘One of the quacks spotted my bottle,’ said Fresser. ‘“What’s that you’ve got wrapped up in a newspaper?” he asked. “Letters from my mother,” I answered. “I carry them with me wherever I go.”’
He raised his glass.
‘And so, from Lieutenant Fresser, with greetings from the Front!’
They all drank.
Gerne, who immediately wanted more, said: ‘Damn it! I suppose we’ll have to leave some for the goalkeeper.’
‘To hell with the goalkeeper!’ said Krap. ‘Don’t you agree, Lieutenant?’
‘We can have a drink – and he can carry out his duty to the Fatherland,’ said Fresser. ‘After all, we deserve a little fun.’
‘My backside’s really beginning to come to life,’ said Krap. ‘All I need now is a nice plump woman.’
They all felt a sense of ease and happiness.
‘Well,’ said Gerne, raising his glass. ‘Let’s have another!’
‘It’s a good thing we landed up in the same ward, isn’t it?’
‘I thought that straight away. I came in and I thought: “Yes, these are real men. They’re hardened soldiers.”’
‘I must admit that I did have some doubts about Bach,’ said Gerne. ‘I thought he must be a Party member.’
‘No, I’ve never been a member.’
They began to feel hot and removed their blankets. Their talk turned to the war.
Fresser had been on the left flank, near Okatovka. ‘God knows,’ he said, ‘these Russians just don’t know how to advance. But it’s already November and we haven’t moved forward either. Remember all the vodka we drank in August? All those toasts? “Here’s to our continued friendship after the war! We must found an association for veterans of Stalingrad!”’
‘They know how to launch an attack all right,’ said Krap. He himself had been in the area of the factories. ‘What they can’t do is hold on. They drive us out of a building and then they just lie down and go to sleep. Or else they stuff themselves while their officers get pissed.’
‘They’re savages,’ said Fresser with a wink. ‘And we’ve wasted more iron on these savages from Stalingrad than on the whole of Europe.’
‘And not just iron,’ said Bach.
‘If nothing’s decided by winter,’ said Gerne, ‘then it will be a real stalemate. It’s crazy.’
‘We’re preparing an offensive in the area of the factories,’ said Krap very quietly. ‘There’s never been such a concentration of forces. Any day now they’ll be unleashed. By November 20th we’ll be sleeping with girls from Saratov.’
Through the curtained windows came the hum of Russian bombers and the majestic, unhurried thunder of artillery.
‘There go the Russian cuckoos,’ said Bach. ‘They always carry out their raids around this time. Some people call them “nerve-saws”.’
‘At our HQ we call them “orderly sergeants”,’ said Gerne.
‘Quiet!’ said Krap, raising one finger. ‘Listen! There go the heavy guns.’
‘While we have a little drink in the ward for the lightly wounded,’ said Fresser.
Their carefree mood returned. They began to talk about Russian women. Everyone had some experience to recount. Bach usually disliked such conversations, but suddenly he found himself telling them about the girl who lived in the cellar of a ruined house. He made a real story out of it and they all had a good laugh.
Then the orderly came in. He glanced at their bright faces and then started to take the sheets off the goalkeeper’s bed.
‘So has our brave defender of the Fatherland been unmasked as a malingerer?’ asked Fresser.
‘Say something,’ said Gerne. ‘We’re men here. You can tell us if something’s happened.’
‘He’s dead. Cardiac arrest.’
‘That’s what comes of too many patriotic speeches,’ said Gerne.
‘You shouldn’t speak like that about a dead man,’ said Bach. ‘He wasn’t just putting on an act. He was being sincere. No, comrades, it’s not right.’
‘Ah!’ said Gerne. ‘I wasn’t so wrong after all. I thought the lieutenant would give us the Party line. I knew at once he was a true ideologue.’
11
That night Bach felt too comfortable to go to sleep. It was strange to think of his comrades and their bunker, to remember how he and Lenard had drunk coffee and smoked as they watched the sunset through the open door.
Yesterday, as he got into the field-ambulance, he had put his good arm round Lenard’s shoulder; they had looked each other in the eye and burst out laughing. No, he’d certainly never have guessed he’d end up drinking with an SS officer in a Stalingrad bunker – or walking through ruins lit up by fires to visit a Russian woman.
What had happened to him was extraordinary. He had hated Hitler for many years. When he had heard grey-haired professors shamelessly claiming that Faraday, Darwin and Edison were nothing but crooks who’d plagiarized the ideas of German scientists, when he had heard them declare Hitler to be the greatest scientist of all times and all nations, he had thought savagely: ‘What nonsense! But they’ll be unmasked soon enough!’ And he had felt the same about those improbable novels about the happiness of ideologically spotless workers and peasants, about the great educational work carried out by the all-wise Party. And as for the miserable poems printed in magazines! These had upset him most of all – as a schoolboy he had written poetry himself.
And now here he was – in Stalingrad – wanting to join the Party! As a child, when he had been afraid his father would get the better of him in an argument, he had put his hands over his ears and shouted: ‘No, no, I’m not going to listen!’ Well, now he had listened. And his world had been turned upside down.
He still felt as disgusted as ever by the plays and films he saw. Perhaps the people would have to go without poetry for a few years or even a decade? But it was quite possible to write the truth even now! What greater truth could there be today than the truth of the German soul? And the masters of the Renaissance had been able to express the very loftiest of spiritual values in works commissioned by bishops and princes . . .
Although Krap was still asleep, he was evidently still fighting some old battle; in a voice that could probably be heard on the street he screamed: ‘Quick! A hand-grenade!’ Obviously wanting to crawl forward, he turned over awkwardly, yelled with pain and then began to snore again.
Bach felt differently even about the extermination of the Jews. Previously it had sent shivers down his spine. Even now, if he were in power himself, he would immediately put a stop to this genocide. Nevertheless, though he had several Jewish friends himself, he had to admit that there was such a thing as a German soul and a German character – which meant that there must also be a Jewish soul and a Jewish character.
Marxism had failed! His mother and father had both been Social Democrats and this failure had been hard for him to admit. It was as though Marx were a physicist who had based a theory of the structure of matter on centrifugal forces and had felt only contempt for the universal forces of gravitational attraction. He had defined the centrifugal forces between the different classes and had succeeded more clearly than anyone in showing how they had operated throughout human history. But, like many great theoreticians, he had overestimated the import
ance of the forces he had discovered; he had believed that these forces alone determined the development of a society and the course of history. He had not so much as glimpsed the powerful forces that hold a nation together in spite of class differences; his social physics, based on a contempt for the universal law of national attraction, was simply absurd.
The State is not an effect; it is a cause!
The law that determines the birth of a nation-state is something miraculous and wonderful. A state is a living unity; it alone has the power to express what is most precious, what is truly immortal in millions of people – a German character, a German heart, a German will, a German spirit of sacrifice.
Bach lay there for a while with his eyes closed. He began counting sheep – one white, one black, one white, one black, one white, one black . . .
The next morning, after breakfast, he wrote a letter to his mother. Knowing she wouldn’t like what he was writing, he frowned and sighed. But it was important to tell her what he had now come to feel. He hadn’t said anything during his last spell of leave. But she had noticed his irritability, his unwillingness to go on listening to the same old reminiscences about his father.
She would consider him an apostate from the faith of his father. But that wasn’t true. Apostasy was the very thing he was renouncing.
Tired out by the morning routine, the patients were very quiet. During the night a man with serious wounds had been installed in the goalkeeper’s bed. He was still unconscious and they didn’t yet know what unit he was from.
How could he tell his mother that the people of this new Germany were now closer to him than friends he had known since childhood?
An orderly came in.
‘Lieutenant Bach?’
‘Yes?’ said Bach, covering the letter with the palm of his hand.
‘There’s a Russian woman asking after you, Lieutenant.’
‘Me?’ said Bach in surprise. He realized it must be Zina. But how could she have found out where he was? She must have asked the driver of the field-ambulance. He felt touched and delighted. She must have hitched a lift during the night and then walked seven or eight kilometres. He imagined her pale face, her large eyes, her thin neck, the grey shawl she wore round her head.