in her hands that she said she began to feel any pain at all on her right side.
I can never be sure if Jürgen ever discovered that I was driving. Or if he ever found out where Anke and I could have been to in his car. Or what we were up to. Anke was already married to Jürgen. Just married, in fact. I had been at the wedding not long before that.
The idea of Anke and I driving off together like this was her strange notion of a final farewell; Anke’s idea of saying goodbye to me, taking me back to the Eifel mountains, to the exact spot where we went the first time. She was basically meeting me for the last time as a lover, a formal rite whereby she was now ceremoniously entering into a new life with Jürgen. From now on she would be married. Why she left this intimate farewell until a month after the wedding was beyond me. I have never fully understood Anke.
The crash must have changed her plans. It placed us together in a further conspiracy. Because we had switched places inside the car, we were bound together for ever in a fraud. We were going to have to tell lies. And then backup lies with more lies. We were going to have to discuss and plan out a communal approach.
We didn’t know what to tell Jürgen. How was I going to explain being in the car in the first place? Even as we sat in the car, shocked, waiting for the police or an ambulance or something, Anke suggested that I should just walk away, pretend that she was the only occupant in the car. There was nobody around. It might have worked. But I was against it, instinctively. I stayed.
Walking away never works. I began to think about the driver of the other car, overturned, right behind us. I had difficulty opening the door on my side, but I got out and went over to see. I told Anke to stay in the driver’s seat. Eventually, people came out from houses near by and called an ambulance. The woman in the other car was unconscious, though when she was taken away one of the ambulance men said she would be fine. Anke was taken to hospital too, for observation, overnight.
It was up to me to phone and tell Jürgen. And somehow, maybe because Jürgen and I have known each other for so long, there was no immediate pressure for an explanation. All Jürgen wanted to know was that she was all right. What hospital? What ward? He didn’t ask me how I knew or how it happened or anything. I volunteered nothing.
In the end, I left it to Anke to do all the talking, since the whole thing was her idea in the first place. When Jürgen arrived at the hospital that night he still wasn’t asking for an explanation, and Anke said little else other than that she had been giving me a lift home. We had met for a drink. The fact that the location of the crash didn’t correspond with my route home from anywhere never came up. Nor did the fact that her injuries were on the wrong side of her body.
I went to visit her at the hospital early the next day, before she was discharged, to see what she had said to Jürgen. She showed me her bruises. She didn’t remember being hit at all. But the proof was there. A massive blue, black, purple cloud under her swollen skin, all along her arm, and down the side of her right thigh. There was a small bandage on her thigh where the skin had burst.
‘Looks lovely, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’ve got myself a fine-looking mark there.’
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘I’m quite proud of it. The only thing that bothers me are these endless X-rays.’
She pulled back the sheet and showed me the full extent of the bruising. Everybody has a natural fascination for injuries. You want to see more.
‘Do you want to kiss my bruise?’ she asked.
I ignored her because it made me uneasy. I knew that Jürgen was coming to collect her any minute. She stuck her tongue out at me and covered herself up again. That was Anke all right. She was always sticking her tongue out like that.
‘What are you going to say to Jürgen?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. I’ll tell him everything. The whole thing, if he asks.’
‘Everything?’
‘Well, the only thing he doesn’t need to know is that you were driving his car. I think we should keep that a secret for the moment.’
Jürgen never asked. There was never anything said about the crash. I think Jürgen was glad that nothing worse had happened to Anke. No broken bones. He was concerned for her. He also asked how I was. Maybe it was his medical background, his doctor’s instinct for discretion.
The fact that Jürgen never pursued any questions made me think even more. I slowly began to believe that it was Jürgen who had sent Anke on this farewell trip with me. Maybe they did have a pact. Maybe he had some notion that one final trip up to the Eifel would end it for Anke and me. One last goodbye to a past lover. And the fact that Jürgen, a doctor, a highly intelligent man with an inquiring mind, never noticed that the bruises were on the wrong side worried me. But then, nobody else asked either.
We let the lies stand.
Before Bertha Sommer reported for work that morning she went to her room to pack. She was taking Officer Kern’s advice and decided to have a light bag ready so she could leave at a moment’s notice. She had made no final decision about fleeing that evening; she was still tormenting herself with the choice. Desert, or stay and face the Russians. One way or the other, she wanted to be ready.
She made two selections of clothes; an A selection and a B selection. Clothes she wanted to take with her and those she would simply have to leave behind. Occasionally she would hold up a garment, like the pale blue blouse, remembering the shop in Paris where she had bought it, and then transfer it from the B selection back to the A selection.
She thought about Officer Kern. He had an honest face. A face she could trust. She knew he was married. He had told her that quite openly when they first met in the office in January. He told her then that there was a lady’s bicycle belonging to his wife Monica left behind in the garrison. He and his wife used to go cycling together in the summer. Fräaulein Sommer was welcome to make use of the bike any time she wanted. But the weather in January was too cold for cycling. And when the spring came, the environs of Laun became too dangerous. Besides, then came the directive from Hauptmann Selders, confining everyone to the garrison.
Officer Kern was a calm man. He seemed to know everything. He was a man of predictions. Even back in January he had told her the war wouldn’t last long. And when the war was over, the bicycle would become the fastest mode of transport in the whole of Europe. He would be sorry to leave it behind.
He had a married look about him, she thought, as she sorted her clothes. She packed her bag with her sisters in mind. Then she took everything out again and packed it more sensibly, thinking of the worst. She laid out her russet coat and hat on the bed. It was time to go to the office.
She had gone through all this before, evacuating back from Caen in Normandy, running from the British. Now she was running from something worse. She kneeled down and prayed, silently. She was ready for God. Then she quickly wrote a note in her diary, which lay on the table. The morning of the end of the Reich. Packed my bags. Am I a civilian? How will they treat civilians?
Bertha Sommer spent the morning trying to get through to Berlin. She knew it was useless but she kept trying. Berlin was well lost by now. The Russian flag had flown from the roof of the Reichstag since 30 April. Another officer kept trying to get through
