A touching story: around noon we have a visit from Fräulein Behn, our fearless lead mare from the basement. She’s now lodging with young Frau Lehmann, whose husband is missing in the east, and helping out with her two children. To date, neither the young mother nor Fräulein Behn has been raped… although both are quite nice-looking. It turns out the small children are their great protection. They understood this from the first night of Russians, when two rough men showed up, shouting and pounding their rifle butts and demanded to be let in. When Fräulein Behn started to open the door they just pushed her into the room… then stopped in front of the crib where the baby and four-year-old Lutz were sleeping together. One of them said in flabbergasted German, ‘Small child?’ They both stared at the crib a while – and then stole away on tiptoe.
Fräulein Behn asks me to come up for a couple of minutes; they have two Russian visitors, one older, one young. They’ve been there once before and today they’ve brought some chocolate for the children. The women would like to speak with them, so they’ve asked me to play interpreter.
Soon we’re all sitting across from one another: the two soldiers, Fräulein Behn, Frau Lehmann with Lutz clinging to her knee, and me. The baby is right there in her stroller. The older Russian asks me to translate: ‘What a beautiful little girl! A real beauty!’ And he winds his index finger into one of the baby’s copper curls. Then he asks me to tell the two women that he also has two children, two boys, who are living with their grandmother in the country. He fishes a photo out of his battered cardboard wallet: two crew-cut heads on paper that’s turned a darkish brown. He hasn’t seen them since 1941. I’ve figured out that concept of home leave is foreign to nearly all the Russians. Most of them have been separated from their families since the beginning of the war; that’s nearly four years. I assume that this is because most of the war has been fought in their country, and with the civilian population being transferred back and forth, no one knows for sure where his family is at any given moment. On top of that there’s the enormous distances and the pitiful condition of the roads. It’s also possible that, at least in the first years of the German advance, the authorities were afraid their people might desert or go over to the other side. Whatever the case, these men were never entitled to home leave like ours were. I explain this to the two women, and Frau Lehmann says, full of understanding, ‘Well, that excuses some things.’
The second Russian guest is a young boy of seventeen, a former partisan who joined up with the westward-advancing troops. He looks at me, brow deeply furrowed, and asks me to translate that in his village German soldiers stabbed some children to death and took others by the feet and bashed their heads against a wall. Before I translate I ask, ‘Did you hear that? Or see it yourself?’ He gazes off and says in a stern voice, ‘I saw it twice myself.’ I translate.
‘I don’t believe it,’ answers Frau Lehmann. ‘Our soldiers? My husband? Never!’ Fräulein Behn tells me to ask the Russian whether the soldiers in question had ‘a bird here’ (on their caps) or ‘a bird there’ (on their arms) – in other words, whether they were Wehrmacht or SS. The Russian understands the question right away – the villagers probably learned to make that distinction. But even if it was SS men in this case, our conquerors will consider them part of the ‘nation’ and charge us all accordingly. Talk like this is already making the rounds; today at the pump I heard several people say, ‘Our boys probably weren’t much different over there.’
Silence. We all stare into space. A shadow has fallen in the room. The baby pays no attention – she bites the foreign finger, cooing and squealing. I feel a lump rising in my throat. She seems like a miracle to me, pink and white with copper curls, flowering here in this desolate, half-looted room, among us adult human beings so mired in filth. And suddenly I realize why the warriors are drawn to the little baby.
First for the rest of Saturday. Once again the major showed up around 8 p.m. with his Asian orderly, who reached into his bottomless pockets and this time pulled out two turbots – by no means large, but fresh. The widow breaded and baked the delicious fish, which we then all shared. Even the Uzbek was given a piece in his corner window, which he always makes a beeline for, just like a loyal dog. A very tasty meal indeed.
