The Other Side of Silence

“So. You’re invited for dinner. It’s canned stuff, mostly. But my father did have quite a decent selection of Mosels.”

“Suddenly I seem to have quite an appetite.”

“Shall we say eight o’clock?”

I glanced at my watch. “That’s going to be the longest five hours of my life. What am I going to do with myself until then?”

“So go row a boat.”

And that was it. I went to her parents’ apartment in Hammerweg Strasse for dinner. She cooked me a meal, I drank a couple of bottles of nice cold Mosel, and within a couple hours of me arriving there, we were lovers. That’s how things were in those days. Implausibly fast. Uncomplicated. Nobody mentioned love or marriage or consequences. Nobody thought about the future because nobody thought they had a future. Really, you can’t beat how easy life can be when you think there isn’t going to be a tomorrow. Weeks passed like this and together, as winter arrived, we celebrated what we assumed might be our last few months on earth.

Irmela was tall and athletic. She was also highly intelligent, which was why she was working as a lightning maid in the naval signals section. She had to be intelligent to encrypt all communications using a special four-rotor code machine called the Scherbius Enigma before sending them. Before the war, she’d studied mathematics at Albertina University on Paradeplatz. The university was destroyed, like almost everything else in Konigsberg, and while many people, including me, still took the risk of going into the remains of the university library in search of books-Grafe und Unzer, the largest bookstore in Europe and opposite the university, had been completely consumed by flames after a napalm bomb fell through the glass roof-General Lasch, the military commander of Hitler’s northern army, had his army headquarters in a bunker deep under the ruins. For several weeks I was just happy to see a lot of Irmela, who was an enthusiastic and noisy on-the-top kind of lover with considerable experience of men, which I came to appreciate. She knew I was married and didn’t want anything from me except my company and my jokes, which in those days were a lot better than they are now. Experience has taught me that it’s better to be serious, and I should know; I’ve tried and failed to be serious on thousands of occasions.

After the British bombing, the Russians halted their attack on the city for the winter and regrouped. Somehow the Alhambra movie theater on Hufenallee managed to keep going despite having been hit by a bomb, and while plays were no longer performed we often went there to see a movie, even though that always meant having to sit through newsreels telling us how well the war was going for Germany, and how victory would be ours in the end. Sometimes, after the film, Irmela would ask me if things were really as good as the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda described, which was a safe and secure way of asking if they were as bad as everyone said they were. Mostly I said that reports of mass rape and atrocities that stemmed from East Prussian towns nearer the Russian front were always exaggerated. But she knew I was lying and not because she thought that I believed in the final victory; she knew I was trying not to scare her, that’s all. And one day toward the end of October 1944, she confronted my lies and evasions head on. Of course, she’d read some of the signals traffic about a place called Nemmersdorf, which was about a hundred kilometers east of Konigsberg; she also knew that I’d been there to report on the situation for the FHO. We were in bed at her parents’ place in Hammerweg Strasse at the time, and had just finished a particularly noisy bout of lovemaking.

“Christ,” I said, “I hope the neighbors don’t complain. Anyone would think I was raping you, or something.”

That was the only time she hit me.

“Don’t make jokes about that kind of thing,” she said gravely. “I don’t know a single girl in the auxiliary service who isn’t petrified about what’s going to happen when the Ivans turn up. You hear things. Bad things. Terrible things. We’re all terrified.”

“It’s not as bad as people say.”

“Liar,” she said. “Liar. Look, Bernie, neither of us is a Nazi. The Gestapo aren’t listening. Just for once don’t spare my feelings. I know you’re trying to stop me from worrying, but I also know you were somewhere near Nemmersdorf. Your name is on the report. You don’t have to give me the details, only please tell me if anything of what I’ve heard about that place is true or not. If the Ivans really are as monstrous as people say they are. Or if the whole thing really is meant to deter us from surrendering. Which is the other rumor, of course. That the Ministry of Truth is trying to scare us out of surrender.”

I lit a cigarette and helped myself to some of her father’s brandy.