There's a Man With a Gun Over There (29 page)

“We left in the summer. I drove. We had the top down. Glorious. The general was in the backseat. The troops were behind us in trucks. Bands along the way. We sang ‘Lili Marlene,' and the general saluted those who'd come out to see us off. The onlookers waved flags and shouted ‘
Heil Hitler
!' We commandeered rooms in the finest hotels along the highway. It was a good life, driving to Russia in our open Mercedes.”

Herr Engeler smiled at us and, with his hand over his heart, began to sing in a baritone voice.

Vor der Kaserne

Vor dem großen Tor

Steht eine Laterne

Steht sie noch davor.

As he finished the opening of the song, his hand went out, and a trembling finger pointed out Lili Marlene, somewhere beyond where we sat in Room 250.

“Not a gun was fired until we got to some town in Russia. I've forgotten its name. That's where we dug in. We somehow got cut off from the rest of the brigade. Cut off for evermore. It was the fall then.
Kennen Sie diese Geschichte
? Do you know this history?”

Goldberg, our history student, raised his hand to answer “Yes,” but Herr Engeler didn't see him. He was talking to some ghostly reality at the back of Room 250 on that sunny afternoon in the spring of 1970, in Monterey, California. The six of us in our brown shirts stared at him, at the colored arrows on the
Kriegskarte
, drawn so boldly across Russia—stared at the smiling young man in his graduation gown—stared at the frowning young man beside the Mercedes-Benz.

“
Ach, ja. Schrecklich
. It got worse and worse. We were so isolated. Our little group—we had our own little war. The big war was on the radio until our batteries went dead. All day long, on the radio, the generals pleaded for artillery. The trucks with the guns were lost somewhere.
So kalt
. Cold, cold.
Ach, die Toten
. So many dead.
Alles verloren
. It's all lost. Winter. So cold, cold. The dead stacked all around us. It was too cold to bury them. The ground broke the tips of the axes. We stacked our
Kameraden
. Made bunkers of them to protect our riflemen. Even in death they could not escape the war.”

Underneath the lantern

by the barrack gate,

Darling I remember

the way you used to wait;

His voice trembled this time. His finger shook as he pointed.

“You're not going to believe this,” Quarles told someone at the break.

“Shhh,” Renner said, as Frau Schneider went by, bowing her head, trying to hear our gossip, nodding, not missing a beat.

43.

H
err Engeler was pacing back and forth when we came back from the break.

“
Ach, ja
,” he said and sat back on the table. “
Wo sind wir gewesen
?” Where were we?

“
Im Russland
,” Goldberg said.

“Yes, in Russia,” Herr Engeler said, starting up again.

In terrible Mother Russia. It was so cold, but then in spring comes the warm weather and all the artillery shells a general could want. Unfortunately they are coming to us from the other side.

My general was quite depressed. He had this headquarters tent and sat at a little table bundled up with four or five coats on, staring at photographs of his wife and children. With each month of the spring, he removed a coat.

For a while, he drank brandy as he sat there. He had one of those windup Victrolas and would play these thick, shellac records. Of course his favorite song was “Lili Marlene.” He played it over and over. The record became scratchier and scratchier, and the sound of the woman's voice got farther and farther away from us, as if even she knew that we were losing the war and wanted to get away from our lost little brigade.

In May, he was down to two coats, and he reached into his pants pocket and handed me the keys to the Mercedes and gave me one of these maps you see here.

“
Du musst zurück nach Deutchland fahren, Leutnant Engeler
,” he told me. Drive back to Germany. He used the familiar form with me, as if he were my father. “
Wir sind alle tot hier, versteht's du,
” he said. We're all dead here. He wanted to save one of us.

So early the next morning, I took one baked potato. It was my allotment. It was the only kind of food we had.

Oh, that car. We'd arrived at the battle in the bright promise of summer with the top down and the wind in our faces. When they started shooting at us, we forgot about the car. When it started snowing, I covered it with a tarp, and there it sat for the winter. Incredibly, the car started on the first try, though I couldn't get the top up. I didn't care. I put it in gear and headed on down the road.

The guard looked me over as I left the camp. I told him I was reporting back to headquarters. The general had given me a note, like a permission slip to stay home from school, and I showed the guard that.

“I don't care what this note says. You are a traitor to leave us here like this. You should die with your regiment,” he said, but he nonetheless waved me on, and I left our doomed camp, the rising sun at my back, driving on this road back to Germany. Even with the sun, I was freezing cold because the top was down. Aside from the chill, the big challenge was avoiding all the holes in the road from artillery shells.

I passed soldiers once in a while.

“Hey, da,”
they yelled.

“Hey, da,”
I yelled back. Sometimes I gave them rides; sometimes they just looked at me with these gray, starved faces. They were all eyes, shuffling along.

I had extra gas in tanks strapped to the running boards, but I ran out of gasoline somewhere in Poland. I started walking. At first, most of the others on the road were soldiers like me fleeing back to Germany, but then people started walking toward us, Poles fleeing the armies coming east from Germany. I knew some Polish and asked a man what the territory was like ahead, in the west toward Germany. It's all crazy they told me—soldiers everywhere—Americans, Russians, everyone shooting at everyone else.

I had some money, German marks—probably worthless by then—but I gave all of it to the man for his clothes, and he took mine. So now he was a German soldier headed back to the front, and I was a Polish peasant headed to Germany. It all made perfect sense then. Funny, those clothes of his smelled like rotten strawberries. I've never forgotten the scent.

I walked and walked. I slept in ditches and drank water from feeding troughs in farm fields. It was still cold there in the east. I have arthritis in my elbow now for all the times I broke the ice on top to get to the water below. When I talk about it, the pain shoots through here.

I was lucky. I could speak some English, some Russian, and some Polish. I'd been an actor at the university. I didn't know it then, but I was about to have my moment. Funny, isn't it, how your moment just slips up on you.

I walked and walked. I'd lost my map, so I never knew exactly where I was. Some nights I could hear the Russians singing around their campfires. Some nights it was the Poles. Less and less often it was the Germans.

After days and days of walking, I was stopped by American soldiers in a Jeep. They had that same haunted look that our soldiers had. All eyes. I spoke to them in Russian. I made quite a show, and they drove me to this German village they'd captured and made the
Bürgermeister
feed me.

I spoke Polish to him. That
Bürgermeister
just fell all over himself bowing and bringing me dishes himself—you know, taking them from the waiters and giving them to me and muttering “
Bitte schön, der Herr
.” Thank you sir.
Lebersuppe, sauerbraten, kohl
—liver soup, marinated roast beef, cabbage—a real German meal. I hadn't eaten food like that in months, but I made the mistake of using the German word
Salz
—salt—and the
Bürgermeister
heard my accent from just that one word and knew I was German.

Before I knew it, he threw my coat at me.

“
Verräter
!” he screamed. Traitor.

I was back on the road. Weeks went by. They seemed like hours. An American truck stopped. A soldier with a gun sat at the back and lifted up a tarp and motioned me up there. All Polish civilians looking at the floor. I thought the game was up, but I didn't say a word. After an hour of driving, the truck stopped.

“Here you are,” the soldier at the back says and points to the ground with his gun. When I just sit there, afraid to get out, he says, “Stoppen you-a here-a.” I always loved the way the Americans made up words, as if they thought their inventions were a foreign language.

I got down from the back of the truck and walked with the Poles into the American compound. I worked there for several days, digging a trench around the perimeter, cleaning the latrines—peasant work. They fed us hamburgers. Every night hamburgers and ice cream for dessert. Never in my life before had I eaten butter pecan ice cream.

I was homesick for Berlin, so one night I just left. I'd picked up a compass somewhere and started walking through the woods. I had to backtrack. I had come too far west. I had a little knapsack with food and a jar of water in it. I got to this river that was a border somewhere. There was a bridge, but the Russians guarding it wouldn't let me cross, so I went a mile downstream, took off my clothes, and, holding them over-head, swam across. It was so cold my teeth began to chatter halfway across. Then I was shaking all over, and my legs were knocking, one against the other, and all my swimming did was spin me around, naked, in the middle of the river, but the gods were kind, the current, oh sweet God the current lifted me right up to the shore like a sinner God wanted to save. Before I knew it, I was sitting on rocks at the far side of the river, and the morning sun came over the pine trees and warmed me. It took an hour or two, but finally the shivers went out of me.

I lost my compass, and then I lost myself. It was getting more and more dangerous as I walked along, but listen to me, my friends, customs and languages will get you anywhere. You must pay attention.
Immer aufpaßen
.