The Last Shot. Hugo Hamilton
spent the afternoon burning. A large punctured fuel bin had been placed in the centre of the square outside on her instructions. She had been told to oversee the burning personally.
The afternoon turned out bright and sunny. Looking south, she saw beams of sunlight lancing through the clouds on to the rounded hills. It looked as though the rain would hold off for a while. She didn’t need her coat.
She accompanied two recruits to the store-room on the far side of the square where a consignment of fuel was kept for the sole purpose of destroying documents. She had stacked most of the files on to two trolleys. Two more recruits came out pushing the trolleys into the square. There was nothing of great importance in the files, nothing but reports on resistance operations, command structures and details of the garrison’s personnel, names, ranks etc. She was told to burn everything. All over Germany, she thought, people are burning the past.
She placed some of the documents into the bin and stood back. One of the recruits stepped forward and poured some fuel over the documents. It was all done systematically, without any sense of urgency, or regret.
Bertha looked in the direction of the garrison’s main gates. Her mind was on escape.
Taking account of the wind direction, one of the soldiers politely advised her to stand back where the smoke would not contaminate her clothes. She saw him strike the match, an act that was no different to clicking his fingers. It was the first time she fully understood the qualities of petrol, a silent blast of flames sucking air violently from the surrounding space, from around her ears and her face.
One by one, she handed the documents over to the soldiers, who added them to the pyre. This was the way to end a war. Without a word. Bertha did ask one of them what area of Germany he came from: Dortmund. But it led to nothing. They went silently about the task, preparing for withdrawal. Later on, Hauptmann Selders came out carrying a number of files which he added to the fire himself. He stood with her for a moment until he saw his own documents disappear. Throughout the afternoon, the flames were reflected in their eyes, in the windows of surrounding buildings and across the windscreens of trucks on the far side of the square.
By late afternoon, the clouds had taken over the sky once more. When the flames receded the charred remnants of paper began to curl and crinkle as they shrank. It doesn’t take long to burn a garrison with three companies of Ersatz Grenadiers of the 213th Battalion out of existence.
That was typical Anke, sticking out her tongue. For her it was really an expression of affection. Maybe with a bit of daring and natural contempt thrown in. She was into expressions. It was one of the things that struck me most about Anke when I met her first, at the university.
I told her she had jumped the queue in the Mensa. She stuck her tongue out at me.
I had been living in Düsseldorf for a number of years at that stage. Why Düsseldorf, I don’t really know. I could have stayed in Vermont, where I come from, or chosen any other city in America for a good clean American education. There is something about Germany that I want. Something that everybody secretly wants and openly denies. I opted for a European education at the university in Düsseldorf, where I studied German classics.
Jürgen was studying medicine there at the time. Later, he went on to do gynaecology. But while he was a student, we became good friends. In those five or six years, long before Anke came on the scene, Jürgen and I went everywhere together: Morocco, Greece, Peru, Ireland. He was a perfect travelling partner and a perfect friend. We always knew when to leave each other alone and when to be there to pick each other up. Some of those mornings after the Irish bars I was glad to have a doctor friend. With time, though, Jürgen’s job became more demanding. He grew a moustache and we travelled less together. He once took a two-week job in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war, and I wasn’t able to go. I think that was the first time he went anywhere without me.
We stayed the best of friends. Maybe the only real friends either of us ever had. Mutually exclusive. I think Jürgen would agree with that in theory. We never stopped being friends.
But then came Anke. Anke Seidel.
Everything changed after she arrived. She was wilder than Jürgen and myself put together. There was no time for moderation or discretion. She kept saying there was no such thing as an afterlife. The day after she stuck her tongue out at me, she invited me for a drive to the Eifel mountain range. With her mother’s car, a case of her father’s champagne and a small Bavarian snuffbox full of cocaine, she drove the Audi into the Eifel in the middle of March. She showed me some of the landmarks, like Camp Vogelsang where Hitler trained his elite young successors. As promised, she also showed me where Heinrich Böll used to live. He was a hero. He had taught her how to cry.
That was the other thing about Anke. She was able to cry. She had a spiritual side to her. She could cry at will. In the car, she told me straight off that she had practised it when she was a child. She and her sister used to look in the mirror and summon up the emotion until the tears ran down. They once sat in the back of the car crying while their parents went shopping, and passers-by began to look into the car and worry about them until they burst out laughing. Her mother berated her for playing with her emotions. Never play with your sacred, involuntary faculties.
I didn’t believe that Anke could cry on the spot. Like a movie star. We had a long conversation about it as she drove the car. Then she stopped the car and started crying. Okay, it was outside Heinrich Böll’s house, but still and all, she did it. I was moved. So much so that I told her to stop crying.
It’s what she said afterwards that worried me. It sounded as though she was clocking up all her crying in advance. Advent-tears.
‘Maybe some day, I’ll have something to cry about,’ she said, laughing, as she drove on.
‘I’ll give you something to cry about,’ I said, as a joke.
I was never any good at jokes. I always listen too much to the prediction of words. We dropped the subject and drove on into the mountains.
Eventually she stopped the car at a remote forest for a picnic. She got me to open the champagne and then dealt out a line of coke on the dashboard of her mother’s car, which we snorted with a 100 DM note. Ten minutes later, she handed me her glass to hold for a minute before she opened the door of the car and stepped outside. She leaned back in and said: ‘If you can catch me, you can have me.’ Then she slapped her bottom and ran off into the trees.
I believe she let me catch her.
It burned intensely for a short while between Anke and myself. We were seen everywhere together. But then, after about two months, she took an equally sudden, but even stronger liking to Jürgen. It seemed far more durable between them right from the beginning. In fact, he seemed to settle her down quite a bit. From time to time, she did revert to me, briefly, for an afternoon, a night, a weekend at most. But she was already leaning more and more towards Jürgen. Then she moved in with him altogether. In less than a year, they decided to get married, which they did with a great carnival in August of 1984. I was left trying to work out what it was that Jürgen had and I didn’t. It was more than the moustache.
Then came the crash. Anke and I drove up to the Eifel for the last time. To what she called the consecrated forest. You can see why I was beginning to think that Jürgen was in on it as well; as though he had made a deal with her. But then I realized it was much more like one of her own plans. Anke’s farewell.
Since the crash I have been back home to Vermont, wondering if I should leave Germany to Jürgen and Anke. I really thought that in order to forget Anke, I would literally have to leave the country. We were still the best of friends, all of us, and we kept on meeting. They went on inviting me to dinner parties along with other friends. Occasionally I met them for drinks at the White Bear or the Irish Pub where Jürgen burst out one night with the news that Anke was expecting a baby. I congratulated them both and made a toast. Jürgen was already drunk. Anke was moved to tears.