The Redbreast (15 page)

After he had read so much about the Märklin rifle on the Internet at the University Library, the weapon itself had been something of an anticlimax. It looked like a standard hunting rifle, only a little bigger. The courier had shown him how to assemble it and strip it; he called him ‘Herr Uriah’. Then the old man put the dismantled rifle into a large shoulder-bag and took the lift down to reception. For a brief moment he had considered going over to Betty Andresen and asking her to order a taxi for him. Another impulse.

‘Hello!’

The old man looked up. ‘I think we’ll have to give you a hearing test as well.’

Dr Buer stood in the doorway and made an attempt at a jovial smile. He led him into the surgery. The bags under the doctor’s eyes had become even bigger.

‘I called your name three times.’

I forget my name
, the old man reflected.
I forget all my names
.

The old man deduced from the doctor’s helping hand that he had bad news.

‘Well, I’ve got the results of the samples we took,’ he said, quickly, before he had settled into his chair. To get the bad news over and done with as fast as possible. ‘And I’m afraid it has spread.’

‘Of course it’s spread,’ the old man said. ‘Isn’t that what cancer cells do? Spread?’

‘Ha, ha. Yes, it is.’ Dr Buer brushed an invisible speck of dust off the desk.

‘Cancer is like us,’ the old man said. ‘It just does what it has to do.’

‘Yes,’ Dr Buer said. He looked relaxed in a forced way, in his slumped sitting position.

‘Like you, doctor. You just do what you have to do.’

‘You’re so right, so right.’ Dr Buer smiled and put on his glasses. ‘We’re still considering chemotherapy. It would weaken you, but it could prolong . . . um . . .’

‘My life?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have I got left without chemo?’

Buer’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘A little less than we had first assumed.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that the cancer has spread from the liver via the blood stream to —’

‘For Christ’s sake, will you just tell me how long.’

Dr Buer gaped blankly.

‘You hate this job, don’t you?’ the old man said. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing. A date, please.’

‘It’s impossible to —’

Dr Buer jumped in his chair as the old man’s fist hit the desktop so hard that the telephone receiver leapt off the cradle. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped when he saw the old man’s quivering forefinger. Then he sighed, took off his glasses and ran a tired hand over his face.

‘This summer. June, perhaps earlier. August at the latest.’

‘Great,’ the old man said. ‘That’ll do fine. Pain?’

‘Can come at any time. You’ll be given medicine.’

‘Will I be able to function?’

‘Hard to say. Depends on the pain.’

‘I must have medicine that enables me to function. It’s important. Do you understand?’

‘All painkillers —’

‘I can take a lot of pain. I simply need something to keep me conscious so that I can think and act rationally.’

Happy Christmas. That was the last thing Dr Buer had said. The old man stood on the steps. At first he hadn’t understood why the city was so full of people, but once he had been reminded of the imminent religious festival he saw the panic in the eyes of people dashing along the pavements in search of last-minute Christmas presents. Some shoppers had gathered round a pop group playing in Egerstorget. A man wearing a Salvation Army uniform was going round with a collection box. A junkie stamped his feet in the snow, his eyes flickering like stearin candles about to go out. Two teenage girls, arm in arm, passed him, rosy-cheeked and bursting with stories to tell about boys and expectations of their lives to come. And the candles. There were candles in every damned window. He raised his face to the Oslo sky; a warm, golden dome of reflected light from the city. My God, how he longed for her. Next Christmas, he thought. Next Christmas we will celebrate together, my darling.

Part Three
URIAH

23
Rudolf II Hospital, Vienna. 7 June 1944.

H
ELENA
L
ANG WALKED WITH QUICK STEPS AS SHE PUSHED
a trolley towards Ward 4. The windows were open and she breathed in, filling her lungs and head with the fresh smell of newly mown grass. No smell of death and destruction today. It was a year since Vienna had been bombed for the first time. In recent weeks, when the weather had been clear, they had been bombed every single night. Even though the Rudolf II Hospital was several kilometres away from the centre, raised aloft from the war in the green Viennese woods, the stench of smoke from the fires in the city had smothered the scents of summer.

Helena swung round a corner and smiled at Dr Brockhard, who appeared to want to stop and talk, then hurried on. Brockhard, with those rigid staring eyes of his behind glasses, always made her nervous and uncomfortable when they came face to face. Now and then she had the impression that these meetings in the corridor were not accidental. Her mother would probably have had respiratory problems if she had seen the way in which Helena avoided the promising young doctor, especially as Brockhard came from a particularly distinguished Viennese family. However, Helena liked neither Brockhard nor his family, nor her mother’s attempts to use her as a ticket back into the upper echelons of society. Her mother blamed the war for what had happened. It was to blame for Helena’s father, Henrik Lang, losing his Jewish lenders so abruptly and thus not being able to pay his creditors as arranged. The financial crisis had resulted in him having to improvise and he had made his Jewish bankers transfer their bond holdings, which the Austrian state had confiscated, to Lang. And now Henrik Lang was in prison for having conspired with Jewish enemies of the state.

Unlike her mother, Helena missed her father more than she missed the social status her family had enjoyed. She did not miss, for example, the banquets, the adolescent, superficial conversations and the continual attempts to marry her off to one of the spoiled rich boys.

She looked at her wristwatch and scurried along. A small bird had obviously flown in through one of the open windows and now it was calmly sitting on one of the globe lamps hanging from the high ceiling and singing. Some days Helena found it incomprehensible that a war was raging outside. Perhaps it was because the forest, the tight rows of spruce trees, closed out all the things they didn’t want to see. If you went into the wards, however, you soon knew that the peace was illusory. The wounded soldiers with their mutilated bodies and their battered psyches brought the war home to them. To begin with, she had listened to their stories, practically convinced that with her strength of mind and her faith she could help to lead them out of their misery. Yet they all seemed to tell more of the same nightmare story about how much man can and has to endure on earth, and about the degradation involved in simply wanting to live. Only the dead escape unscathed. So Helena stopped listening. She pretended she was listening as she changed bandages, checked temperatures and gave them medicine or food. And when they were asleep she tried not to look at them, as even then their faces continued to tell their stories. She could read suffering in the pale, boyish faces, brutality in the hardened, closed faces and a longing for death in the pain-contorted features of one man who had just found out that his foot would have to be amputated.

Nevertheless, she walked in today with quick, light steps. Perhaps it was because it was summer, perhaps it was because a doctor had told her how beautiful she was this morning, or perhaps it was because of the Norwegian patient in Ward 4 who would soon say ‘
Guten Morgen
’ in his funny German. Then he would eat breakfast while giving her lingering looks as she went from bed to bed, serving the other patients, saying a few encouraging words to each one. For every fifth or sixth bed she attended to she cast a glance back at him and, if he smiled at her, she would quickly return the smile and continue as if nothing had happened. Nothing. And yet it was everything. It was the thought of these small moments that got her through the days now; that allowed her to laugh when the badly burned Kapitän Hadler in the bed by the door jokingly asked if they would soon send him his genitals back from the Eastern Front.

She pushed open the door to Ward 4. The sunlight flooding into the room made everything white – the walls, the ceiling, the sheets – shine.
That’s what it must be like when you enter paradise
, she thought.

‘
Guten Morgen, Helena.
’

She smiled at him. He was sitting in a chair beside the bed and reading a book.

‘Did you sleep well, Uriah?’ she asked him cheerfully.

‘Like a bear,’ he said.

‘Bear?’

‘Yes.In ...what do you call it in German when they sleep all winter?’

‘Ah, hibernation.’

‘Yes, hibernation.’

They both laughed. Helena knew that the other patients were watching them. She mustn’t spend more time with him than the others.

‘And your head? It’s getting a little better every day now, isn’t it?’

‘Yes indeed, it’s getting better and better. One day I’ll be just as good-looking as I used to be, you’ll see.’

She remembered when they brought him in. It seemed to contravene the laws of nature that anyone could survive the hole he had in his forehead. She caught his teacup with the pot and it almost toppled over.

‘Whoa!’ he laughed. ‘Were you out dancing until the wee small hours last night?’

She looked up. He winked at her. ‘Mmm,’ she said, and became flustered because she was lying about such a silly thing.

‘What do you dance here in Vienna?’

‘I mean, no, I wasn’t dancing. I just went to bed late.’

‘You probably dance waltzes, don’t you? Viennese waltzes and so on.’

‘Yes, I suppose we do,’ she said, concentrating on the thermometer.

‘Like this,’ he said and stood up. Then he began to sing. The others looked up from their beds. The song was in an unfamiliar language, but he had such a warm, beautiful voice. The healthiest patients cheered and laughed as he pivoted round with small, careful waltz steps and the loose dressing gown cords swung with him.

‘Come back here, Uriah, or I’ll send you right back to the Eastern Front,’ she shouted sternly.

He went back obediently and sat down. His name was not Uriah, but it was the name he had insisted they use.

‘Do you know the Rhineland Polka?’ he asked. ‘Rhineland Polka?’

‘It’s a dance we’ve borrowed from the Rhineland. Shall I show you?’

‘You sit there nice and still until you’re well again.’

‘And then I’ll take you out in Vienna and teach you the Rhineland Polka.’

The hours he had spent in the summer sun on the veranda over the past days had given him a healthy complexion, and now his white teeth sparkled against his happy face.

‘I think you sound well enough to be sent back already,’ she countered, but was unable to stop the blush which had shot into her cheeks. She was standing ready to continue her round when she felt his hand against hers.

‘Say yes,’ he whispered.

She waved him away with a bright laugh and went on to the next bed with her heart singing like a little bird in her bosom.

‘Well?’ Dr Brockhard said, peering up from his papers when she came into his office, and as usual she didn’t know if this ‘well?’ was a question, an introduction to a longer question or simply his way of speaking. So she just stood by the door.

‘You asked to see me, Doctor?’

‘Why do you insist on being so formal with me, Helena?’ Brockhard sighed with a smile. ‘My goodness, we’ve known each other since we were children, haven’t we?’

‘What was it you wanted from me?’

‘I’ve decided to report the Norwegian in Ward 4 fit for duty.’

‘I see.’

She didn’t turn a hair. Why should she? Patients came here to become well again, then they left. The alternative was dying. That was life in a hospital.

‘I passed on the report to the Wehrmacht five days ago. We have already received his new posting.’

‘That was quick.’ Her voice was firm and calm. ‘Yes, they desperately need more men. We’re fighting a war, as you know.’

‘Yes,’ she said. But didn’t say what she was thinking:
We’re fighting a war and you’re sitting here hundreds of kilometres from the front, twenty-two years old, doing the job a seventy-year-old could have done. Thanks to Herr Brockhard Senior
.

‘I thought I would ask you to give him his orders since the two of you seem to get on so well.’

She could feel him scrutinising her reaction.

‘By the way, what is it that you like so much about him particularly, Helena? What distinguishes him from the four hundred other soldiers we have here at the hospital?’

She was about to protest, but he pre-empted her.

‘Sorry, Helena, this is none of my business of course. It’s just my curious nature. I . . .’ He picked up a pen in front of him between the tips of his two index fingers, turned and looked out of the window. ‘. . . simply wonder what you can see in a foreign fortune-hunter who betrays his own country in order to curry favour with the conquering army. If you understand what I mean. How’s your mother by the way?’

Helena swallowed before answering.

‘You don’t need to worry about my mother, Doctor. If you give me the orders, I’ll pass them on.’

Brockhard turned to face her. He picked up a letter from the desk. ‘He’s being sent to the 3rd Panzer Division in Hungary. You know what that means, I take it?’

She frowned. ‘The 3rd Panzer Division? He volunteered for the Waffen SS. Why should he be enlisted in the regular Wehrmacht?’

Brockhard shrugged his shoulders. ‘In these times we have to accomplish what we can and perform the tasks we are set to do. Or don’t you agree, Helena?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s in the infantry, isn’t he? In other words, he has to run behind combat vehicles, not sit in them. A friend of mine who was in the Ukraine tells me that every single day they shoot Russians until their machine guns run hot and the bodies are piled high, but they keep pouring in as if there were no end to them.’