A Man Without Breath

Pauline laughed. ‘Why don’t you let me help you to forget about all that?’

‘No, listen to me, it’s true. You know it’s true, too. You’ve seen the bodies hanged on street corners as an example to the rest of the local population.’

I drank some more and tried to lasso a stray thought that was running around my head like a loose horse. That image, and the picture of six Russians hanged by the Gestapo rope, was very much in my mind. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the length of rope in my tunic pocket that I’d untied from the shooter’s tree at Krasny Bor. And the certainty that I’d seen something since then that seemed relevant to all that.

I drank some more and we just lay there on the bed and someone played the only German record again and I dreamed a terrible waking allegory of poetry and music and forensic pathology and dead Poles. It was always dead Poles and I was one of them, lying stiffly in the ground with two bodies pressed close beside me and one on top of me, so that I could not move my arms or my legs; and then the earth-mover started up its engine and started to fill in the grave with tonnes of soil and sand, and the trees and the sky gradually disappeared, and all was suffocating darkness, without end, amen.

CHAPTER 11

Friday, April 30th 1943

When eventually I awoke with a start my eyes and my skin were leaking with fear at the idea of being buried alive. Or dead. Either one seemed an intolerable idea. My dreams always seemed designed to warn me about death, and they swiftly turned into nightmares when it appeared that the warning had come too late. Fuelled by alcohol and depression, this one had been no different to the worst of them.

The three girls were gone and everything was bathed in a urine-coloured moonlight that seemed to add an extra loathsomeness to the already sordid room. Outside the window a dog was barking and a locomotive was moving in the distant railway yards like a large wheezing animal that couldn’t make up its mind which way to go. Through the floor I could hear the sound of music and men’s voices and women’s laughter. I felt as if one of the uneven bed springs was twisting its way through my stomach.

An armoured car on Schlachthofstrasse came past the window, shaking the dirty glass in the damp casement. I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that it was well after midnight, which meant that it was time to leave and straighten myself. A delegation of French, including Fernand de Brinon, the Vichy secretary of state, had flown in the previous afternoon, and later this morning several German officers including me were supposed to escort them to the graves of those bodies already exhumed from Katyn Wood – among them two Polish generals, Mieczyslaw Smorawiski and Bronislaw Bohatyrewicz.

When I got up from the bed an empty bottle of vodka and an ashtray that had been balanced on my chest fell onto the floor. Ignoring an overwhelming feeling of nausea, I found my boots and my tunic, and when I put my hands in my pockets and found the length of rope I’d untied from the tree at Krasny Bor I remembered what it was that I’d been trying to recall before the drink had claimed me.

Peshkov’s coat. When I’d driven past him on the road from Krasny Bor to the castle, his coat – normally tied around the waist with a length of rope – had been loose. Had he lost the rope? Was that rope now in my pocket? And if it was, had Peshkov been the gunman who’d murdered Berruguete and taken a shot at me?

I went downstairs and then – following a sincere and lengthy thank you to the madame for letting me sleep – I stepped out into the night air of Smolensk, retched into the gutter and walked back to the car congratulating myself that the other thing – the thing I had tried to forget – was now forgotten. Now if I could only remember my name.

By the time I was on the road to Vitebsk I had started to feel well enough to think of my duties again, and I stopped at the castle and sent the message to Goebbels as I had originally intended doing. Lieutenant Hodt, the duty signals officer, was manning the radio himself because several of his men – including Lutz – were sick with fever.

‘It’s this damned place,’ he said. ‘The men keep getting bitten by insects.’

I nodded at the livid red lump on the side of his neck.

‘Looks like you’ve been bitten yourself.’

He shook his head. ‘No, that was one of the colonel’s bees. Hurts like bloody blazes.’

I offered him a cigarette.

‘Given up,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘You should start again,’ I told him. ‘Insects don’t like the smoke. I haven’t been bitten since I got here.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’ Hodt grinned. ‘The word is Von Kluge bit you pretty hard, Gunther. They say your head is still lying on the floor of the officers’ mess.’

I tried a grin – my first for a while; it almost worked, I think. ‘He’ll get over it,’ I said. ‘Now that his Putzer is out of the hospital.’

‘In my opinion you didn’t hit him hard enough.’