It was, asserted Lanz, the final assault; but his tone questioned his words.
Meister picked up a toy rifle with a sparkling red star on its butt. He aimed it at a doll with eggshell-blue eyes and fuzzy blonde hair sitting on a shelf; but he didn’t pull the trigger because the doll suddenly became his sister. He lowered the rifle; his head was full of noise.
Lanz drew a diagram in the dust on the floor – the main factories, Red October, Barricade and Tractor Plant, lying between railroad and river. ‘They say that if we capture these we’ve won. And do you know what they are?’
Meister shrugged.
‘Heaps of bricks. That’s what we’re fighting for, bricks.’
Another wave of aircraft flew overhead to add their bombs to the shells and mortars falling on the Russians. Occasionally Yaks and Migs got among the bombers.
The tormented ground continued to tremble. The doll fell from the shelf and lay on its side in the dust.
***
To an extent Meister attributed his presence in Stalingrad to his sister, Magdalena, who was two years older than him. When, reluctantly, she had taken him as an adolescent to a café in Hamburg protruding over the water of the Binnenalster he had observed that she paid most attention, albeit not transparently, to the young men who had the most to offer – a future, perhaps, in the SS or Luftwaffe combined with athletic prowess, looks and wealth and some indefinable attraction that he merely sensed.
Knowing that he possessed none of the obvious assets – an aptitude for languages was hardly an entrée – suspecting that he lacked the more subtle accomplishments, Meister had set about rectifying this state of affairs. Thus he had become not only a sharp-shooter on the rifle range but a very smart young man indeed with occasional access to his father’s Mercedes-Benz and a reputation as a wit that, when the natural flow ran dry, had to be augmented by memorised aphorisms from a book of quotations.
The reputation and, in fact, the whole charade was soon demolished by Elzbeth. ‘That sounds suspiciously like Samuel Johnson,’ she said one day as, with elaborate nonchalance, he entertained her in one of the lounges of the Vier Jahreszeiten. ‘So he thought of it as well,’ Meister blustered; but his cheeks felt as though they were steaming.
‘Why do you bother, Karl? Be yourself.’
What confused him was that as Elzbeth was one of Magdalena’s acquaintances, one of the set, she should accept his epigrams, borrowed or otherwise, without question. Her blonde hair made small and deceptively innocent wings in front of her ears.
‘How do we know our true selves? We’re all guided, influenced.’
‘Then we should resist,’ she said, ‘before it’s too late.’
And so, abandoning affectation, he took her boating on the Aussenalster and walking in the countryside, and one Sunday morning he escorted her to the fish market at St. Pauli where at a stall thronged with young people who didn’t belong to the set they breakfasted on würst thickly daubed with mustard. And later that day he kissed her in the back of the Mercedes-Benz on a wharf overlooking the Elbe.
He joined the army two days after he was pictured with Elzbeth in the German newspapers receiving the cup for marksmanship in Berlin. He was trained as a sniper and two months later he was in Stalingrad.
***
‘I presume,’ Lanz said, raising his voice to compete with the bombardment, ‘you were one of the Young Folk.’
‘Of course. And Hitler Youth.’
He had been given a dagger engraved with the words BLOOD AND HONOUR and told that he could now defend his brown-shirt and uniform with it. At college grace had always been recited before meals; it had asserted that God had sent Hitler to save Germany.
‘Did you belong to any organisation?’ Meister asked.
‘The Young Offenders’ Association.’ Lanz was drinking vodka from an Army-issue flask and he was a little drunk; a lot of the troops were. ‘Did you believe all that Nazi shit they taught you?’ Lanz asked.
‘I believed what I saw. A new deal for Germany. A sense of purpose. Equality.’
‘Unless you happened to be a Jew.’
Meister didn’t reply. He had been uneasy about the Jewish problem since the night in November, 1938, when he had seen a mob pillage a synagogue in Hamburg. His father, holding his hand on the sidewalk, had laughed as uproariously at the distraught rabbi as he had at the clowns at the circus a few days earlier.
A Katyusha exploded nearby, its bellow distinct from the other explosions.
Lanz said: ‘And do you believe in all this?’ gesturing towards the gunfire.
‘I believe the Bolsheviks have got to be defeated.’
‘Bolsheviks! Don’t you realise that the end product of National Socialism and Communism is the same?’
It had never occurred to Meister. He searched his aching mind for a devastating retort. Finally he said: ‘National Socialism is the equal distribution of benefits: Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.’
He thought that was neat; he doubted whether Elzbeth would have agreed.
Lanz rubbed at his bald patch as though he were trying to remove it. It looked like a Jewish skull-cap, Meister thought.
Lanz swigged vodka. ‘And I suppose you think we’re going to beat the Bolsheviks?’
‘We’ve captured great tracts of Russia.’
‘Ah, but Russia goes on forever. Want a drink?’ offering the flask to Meister.
‘You know I don’t drink.’
‘Christ! What do you do except spout propaganda? What did I do to deserve this, nursemaid to a college kid? Have you ever had a woman?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Of course,’ Meister lied.
‘One like this?’ Lanz took a creased photograph of a naked woman wearing stiletto-heeled shoes from his wallet and showed it to Meister. She was smoking a cigarette in a holder and smiling coyly at the camera.
‘Prettier than that,’ Meister told Lanz
‘So who’s looking at her face?’
Remembering the quivering embraces with Elzbeth in the back of the Mercedes-Benz, the tentative, exploratory caresses, Meister was ashamed of the flicker of arousal he had experienced when he had looked at the photograph.
Lanz said: ‘Have you got a photograph of your girl?’
‘No,’ Meister said, but his hand strayed to the pocket of his tunic where, beneath studio lights, Elzbeth lay close to his heart.
Lanz shrugged. ‘Did you expect it to be like this?’ he asked, waving the flask towards the battle in the north of the city.
‘I don’t think
