Chapter Seven #3
Victor could not help but smile at the sight. That was why the crutch was gone: Tobias was getting better; he was walking unaided.
An absurd idea crept into his mind then.
What if they packed what little they could find for supplies and left the city?
Pick a road and walk for as long as their legs could carry them—stop, rest, and move on again.
Their papers might see them through some of the checkpoints; maybe they could board a train or walk the remaining distance to the border, go to Frankfurt, then reach Rhine, cross it by some of its bridges and go on into France.
Throw away their papers and clothes, and become someone else. Someone without honour: braveless, fatherless brothers. The war had started without them—it could end without them.
What if…
“—I signed documents,” Tobias was saying. “I signed and dispatched orders. For years, I signed and dispatched orders. With my own hands I added to the poison, the rot, the death, to this sick vision of the Fatherland, of the Reich.”
He spat the word, lips curling up in bitter disgust and shame.
“We will rebuild after the war.” Victor extended his hand and looked at the smoke curling out of the tiny glowing tip of the cigarette.
He smiled, imagining a future where Germany rose from the ashes and embers of its own ambitions, finally, ultimately humbled by the Allies.
The whole world had seen it rise once as an empire: they would see it rise again.
“After!” His brother scowled, breath hissing.
“There will be no after for what we have done. For all the people we killed. Their deaths are on your hands and mine, Victor. I may not have shoved families onto the trains, or dragged fathers and brothers out of beds and into the cellars under Ka?stra?e. But I signed the documents. I dispatched the orders. It will only get worse—these killings are not enough. They will never be!”
“Tobias—”
“If this is how far we and our countrymen have gone, what will we do next? We kill and are rewarded for it—applauded for it! It does not matter if we win or lose the war, don’t you see? There is no going back from this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Jews. We are killing them in the concentration camps. In Dachau and Flossenbürg, in the steel factories. All those trains go out full and return empty.”
It was not the first time Victor had heard this nonsense.
For years the newspapers had talked of nothing else but the Jews.
Whole streets and cities were plastered with signs and posters barring Jews, threatening them.
Businesses had been run into the ground and entire families forced to leave their homes.
In school, a boy had stopped coming to class; later it was revealed that he was Jewish, and his whole family had abandoned their home, fleeing abroad.
The Reich claimed to be free of Jews—judenfrei; that they were no longer a problem.
How this had been accomplished, Victor did not know: it was impossible to take an entire people and dispose of them completely, but he did not entertain these conspiracies.
Hearing his brother repeat them now disappointed him.
“Tobby.” Victor flicked the cigarette butt to the ground and stomped on it. He willed his voice into an even, sympathetic tone. “There are children on those trains. We are not sending children to factories and death camps.”
His brother said nothing, staring at him.
When the silence became unnerving, Victor attempted to appeal to reason.
“These killings…do you have proof? That many people—and children—do not just disappear.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Tobias’ face tightened in a grimace; he looked him up and down, as if seeing Victor for the first time.
Whatever Tobias was seeing in his brother, it repulsed him.
Dietmar looks at Mother like that, Victor thought. He looks at her expecting to find something she can never be.
Whatever Tobias searched for in his brother, it was not there that night in the street.
Victor expected they would argue for a bit, Tobias giving voice to all the pressure and resentment that had built up inside him.
Everything he was holding in while sitting at the dinner table, or when he went to work.
If he wanted to shout and hit Victor, he would let him.
Whatever little solace he could offer, if it meant that, by the end of the night, they went home as brothers.
They would wait for the lottery drum of death together.
Tobias turned his head, having had enough of the sight of his little brother, and looked out ahead, down the empty street behind Victor.
The longer they stayed silent, the harder it became to speak again.
Victor did not want to talk about mad conspiracies and shadow governments.
He had seen enough in the papers his father and grandfather brought home; he had heard enough praise and curses for the Wehrmacht.
“Want one?” He put a fresh cigarette in his mouth and fumbled with the matchbox.
Tobias grunted something negative and began to move away from the streetlamp.
He put one leg in front of the other slowly.
Left, right, he moved without purpose, his body desperate to escape the thoughts that tormented his mind.
Left, right… the soles of his shoes dragged a little on the pavement.
Tobias put his hand in his coat pocket, searching.
Faintly something metal clicked in the night.
A light appeared in the building to their left, throwing a long shadow out on the street.
The little square of light fluttered when figures moved behind the curtains.
It disappeared just as abruptly as it had appeared, like the flick of a candle.
If people were moving about, it meant that the all-clear had sounded and the police would soon be back on patrol.
The last thing Victor wanted was to be stopped for inspection when his brother was like this.
Tobias had managed to put enough distance between them; he was partially obscured by the fog and darkness.
Victor had to squint to make out the outline of his brother, the hands no longer stuffed in the pockets but hanging limply at his sides, head bowed so his chin sank into the collar of his pullover and coat.
The clicking came again. Like a key turning inside a lock. And immediately after it, a voice was talking, muffled, distant.
“Tobby?”
“—dispatched me from the regiment.” The voice grew louder but still Victor made a step towards his brother, this spectre. “Do you remember why they sent me home?”
“You got injured. Your leg. Enemy fire,” Victor said, keeping his words deliberately short.
Click.
Like a coin pushed inside a slot machine.
“Shrapnel does not do that.” Tobias shook his head. He kept his back to Victor, talking as if to the night itself. “I have seen men have their limbs torn and blown apart by shrapnel. Stepping on grenades. It goes everywhere—the human body.”
Click.
“Me? We were short on bullets and I fired all of mine into my own hip. I emptied the whole cylinder. Kept pulling the trigger, and beating at my leg with my fists, with the empty revolver, hacking with the knife. Anything… anything that would get me out of there. By then I thought…”
Click.
“I thought I had seen the worst of it, what men do to other men.”
With his back turned, Tobias raised his hand and for one dreadful second Victor saw the outline of a revolver.
The same kind of revolver he carried on him now, always strapped to his holster.
The clicking came again from somewhere deep within the metal cylinder of the thing, the bolts and pins rattled.
The long barrel pressing against his brother’s temple.
There would be no letters glorifying the death of Tobias Schwarzschild.
There would be no heroic end in the name of the Führer, the German Nation, and the Fatherland.
Wolfgang Schwarzschild knew that the moment his eyes lifted from the cold, broken body of his child, and fell upon the bloodied hands and uniform of Victor—his now only living son and successor.
Victor’s dry eyes stared, unblinking, at the coffin as it was lowered into the ground.
The same unnameable darkness that had claimed his brother’s mind, now engulfed his body.
The undertakers had done the best they could to fit all the pieces together, binding the head and chin with cloth, sewing him up like a construct.
The body washed and dressed in the ceremonial garb of the SS.
A swastika carved into the lid of the coffin and another engraved upon the tombstone.
Tobias had died wearing civilian clothes, but they were burying him in uniform, leaving no room for doubt where his allegiances lay, or how well he had performed his duty.
Victor’s jaw hurt where his father had hit him, repeatedly ramming his fist into the cheekbone and the bridge of his nose. The blood mingled with the spittle as his father yelled and cursed. The echo of the memory made Victor’s temple throb.
That night, after the sirens stopped, Victor gathered his brother’s lifeless body and carried him home.
Placed him upon the dining table, the blood trailed behind them like a bride’s veil.
He did not know how much time had passed before his parents returned from the bunker.
He might have stood there for hours, staring at the body.
“Coward!” Wolfgang spat and shoved a chair aside before turning back to his son, hands raised. “Traitor! You have ruined us all!”