Evony
Frau Fischer wants to put me to bed but I shake my head and point towards the sofas and she nods understandingly. “Of course. You’ll want to see Herr Oberstleutnant as soon as he comes in. A car accident and being attacked on top of that, you poor girl.”
It’s not seeing Volker that I want, but asking him what he’s done, what he’s doing at this very moment. He wouldn’t torture Ulrich, would he? I hear rumors about what goes on in the Stasi prison. Sleep deprivation, water torture, beatings. I imagine him looking on, smoking impassively while a guard breaks Ulrich’s fingers.
Once I’m tucked onto the sofa under a blanket, Frau Fischer gives me ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel to put over my swollen lip and examines my neck. “I was a nurse in the war,” she explains, putting a first-aid kit on the side table. “Though I don’t remember treating anyone for strangulation. Can you swallow?”
I can, though it’s painful. Remembering what Volker said, I croak, “Could I please have some sweet tea?”
The housekeeper tilts my chin up. “In a minute. You’re going to have some nasty bruises.” She rubs arnica cream on my neck, looks at my lip and informs me I’m going to need stitches. The needle is threaded before she tells me she doesn’t have any anesthetic. With the same persuasive tone she uses to get me to eat more breakfast in the mornings she coaxes me into allowing her to put two stitches in my lip as she did this “all the time during the war”. I want to tell her that there isn’t a war on and there are things such as doctors with anesthetic readily available, but she’s strangely overbearing in nursing mode and I find myself submitting without protest.
I realize after she’s put a mug of weak, sugary black tea in my hands and gone to prepare beef broth that I probably should have insisted she call a doctor because my mouth hurts even more now. These people who lived through the war. Do they all go about shooting people and sticking needles in them as if it’s nothing?
A wretched mood settles over me as I watch the fire crackle. For weeks I’ve imagined crossing paths with someone from my old life and fantasizing that they would help me. The moment I do find someone he jumps to the wrong conclusion and tries to kill me.
I drain my mug of tea, turning over the other unhappy thought in my mind. Neither Ulrich nor Volker knows where my father is. I don’t understand how this can be. Volker not tell me where my father is, because he likes to control and manipulate? Yes. Not know? Impossible. Or at least it should be. I think back to that first night when I asked him what became of Dad. His sly smile, and then, You mean you don’t know? So, he was bluffing. Pretending to be all-knowing to make me feel powerless. Or is he lying now?
I must doze off because I wake some time later to Volker taking the empty mug out of my hands. He’s crouching down next to me, his face close to mine, and his eyes are soft as he looks at the stitches in my lip.
“How are you feeling mein armes Mädchen?” My poor girl. I notice he’s taken off his uniform jacket. Did it get bloodied or is it because he knows I don’t like it?
“Where’s Ulrich?” I croak. I clear my throat and it hurts like tonsillitis.
He tucks the blankets around me. “Not now, Liebling. You’ve had a shock and—”
“No, now. Tell me.” But from the way his mouth compresses into a thin line and his eyes drop away I know that Ulrich’s dead. My face creases and I start to sob, my stitches pulling painfully. “How could you? I asked you not to hurt him.”
“Evony, he nearly killed you. Was I supposed to just—”
But I put my hands on his chest and try to push him away. “It wasn’t about me. He was a good person. Now you know how much we hate you, that he saw me with you and thought the worst. He thought I betrayed everyone to you.”
Volker lets me cry for several minutes, not moving from where he is. My hands are still pressed against his chest and his thumbs rub over my knuckles. I pull away, hating that he’s the one comforting me. “You’re not even sorry, are you?”
“Nein,” he mutters. The weary look on his face is back. I suppose it takes a lot out of you, murdering.
“And Ana? Why did you have to kill her?”
A puzzled line appears between his brows. Of course. He doesn’t even know who she is. “Ana Friedman. She was there the night we tried to escape. She pointed a gun at you and you shot her. You didn’t even give her a chance to surrender.” My voice is rasping but I don’t care. I need to know how he can be so ruthless.
Recollection clears his brow. “A young woman about your age, ja? Blonde? She pointed a gun at me so I fired first.”
“But she wouldn’t have shot you! She was terrified of you. If you’d just told her to put the gun down you know she would have—”
He cuts across me with a shake of his head. “No, I do not know that. You may know because you were her friend, but I could not see inside her mind.”
“She was my friend,” I echo bleakly. Ana and Ulrich and my father, all gone. Dead, or just lost.
Volker regards me for several long moments, frustration and pity warring on his face. Then, briskly, as if he wants to put all this behind him, he says, “I have been a soldier for a long time. If my enemy points a gun at me then I shoot first. Your friend knew the risks when she tried to escape. She could have surrendered as the guards told her to do but she chose to attack.”
I shake my head over and over, too upset to speak. I can’t get the memory out of my head of him raising his gun to kill Ana. “East Berlin isn’t a battleground and we’re citizens, not your enemy.”
Volker’s eyes grow flinty, the firelight flashing in their depths. “It is a battleground. You have no idea what is at stake and how quickly things can change. Regimes rise and fall, fascists take hold. Invasions, genocide.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. The war was twenty years ago.”
He nods slowly. “Ja, Liebling, it was. You don’t remember it at all. You’ve seen pictures and heard stories but that can’t compare to seeing things for yourself.” Volker gets to his feet and goes to the whisky decanter, pouring a measure of amber fluid into a glass. “I went to Auschwitz after the surrender and I saw what they had done, and it haunts me. That is something to flee from. The Wall, what I do? It doesn’t compare.”
I don’t like him talking about the death camps and the war. I don’t see what they have to do with Ulrich and Ana.
He sits on the opposite sofa, resting his elbows on his knees and looking down into his glass. “You have seen only this Germany, this divided but stable Germany, and though I know it’s not perfect you think it is worthless. I do what I have to do to protect it and I sleep easily afterwards.”
But he doesn’t always sleep easily, does he? I can see the smudges beneath his eyes, the lines of fatigue on his face. I turn over what he’s just told me and something seems odd. “Why did you go to Auschwitz?”
He takes a mouthful of whiskey. “I just did.”
It sounds like him, this need to see things for himself. To discover what his beloved Germany had done while he’d been fighting. But there’s a strange look on his face and I feel like he must have gone there for a reason. And suddenly I realize what that reason might be.
“You were looking for someone.”
He turns the glass in his fingers. He doesn’t reply but he doesn’t say no either.
We learned about Auschwitz in school. It was one of the extermination camps, a place of highly efficient slaughter. The descriptions of the camp gave me nightmares and I suspect the awful answer before I ask the question. “Did you find them?”
Volker stares into his whisky for several long minutes. “You know, I suppose, how the camps worked?”
I give a non-committal nod. I read about it, so I know as much as I can from books.
“The prisoners arrived by train. When they alighted, an SS officer assessed each one, and either pointed recht—” he points to the right “—and they were put to work, or links, and they were gassed immediately. She was sent to the left.”
Just like that, as if sorting marbles or players for a game of football. Who was she? His mother, his sister? But from the bitter look on his face I think it must have been someone even more dear. Someone who must have been Jewish. If they were lovers or married she was probably the age I am now, or thereabouts. Is that why he took me, because he never got over what happened to her? This captivity, this manipulative facsimile of love, is this all he’s capable of now?
“She was my…”
But he doesn’t need to say it. I can see from his face that he was in love with her.
“She suffered and died while I was a prisoner of war, and I was powerless to stop it.” He puts his empty glass aside and gets to his feet. I see how tired he is, but also how conviction burns brightly in his eyes as he looks at me.
“But I’m not powerless now. So you see, Liebling, if anyone hurts you, and I’m able to, I will kill them.”