The Last Shot

The men at the barber’s shop in Laun were waiting for the right moment to assemble and form a National Committee of independent Czechoslovakia. All they needed was a leader. They sat watching the boy with Down’s Syndrome playing with the cords of the blinds by the window. The boy groaned in a world of his own. Occasionally, he turned around and addressed one of the men without the slightest hint of shyness, his upper lip drawn up toward his nose, genetically disfigured into a permanent smile.

‘Who’s next?’ the barber asked, knowing that a son follows after a father.

The boy sat down on his father’s knee and allowed the barber to hang a sheet around him and tuck it under the collar. It was all new to him. He was silent, reassured by his father’s words, until the barber began to clip rhythmically with the scissors. ‘There’s a good boy,’ the barber kept saying. But even before the scissors had touched the boy’s hair, he began to struggle and make life difficult. The white sheet had already come undone. There was no point in putting it back. Instead, the barber manoeuvred himself around the chair as best he could to try and get at the boy’s hair.

Both the father and the barber tried to distract the boy. ‘Look, look in the mirror. Look, there’s a good boy.’ The barber tapped the mirror with his scissors. ‘There’s a good boy. Nearly finished,’ he kept saying.

But the boy soon began to wail. Not so much like crying, but a solid howl; half fear and half mistrust. He kept looking around to see what was going on but he couldn’t understand the purpose of the scissors. He tried to free his arms from his father’s grip. Wisps of cut hair fell into his eyes, tickled his nose and his neck behind his collar. Nobody could explain it to him. The barber got a scented towel and wiped it over the boy’s face, taking away a mixture of saliva, cut hair and tears.

Another armoured car went by outside. The barber managed to deflect the boy’s attention for long enough to clip a semi-circle over the ears. The fingers of his left hand pinned the boy’s head down vigorously. But the sound of the scissors magnified in the boy’s ears to the size of shears and he resumed his howls, louder than ever.

The whole barber’s shop had become occupied with the boy’s haircut. Once again the barber made an attempt to distract the boy. He took out two ivory brushes, clacked them together and gave them to the boy. The barber rushed around, exploiting the moment. It was a race against time, before the boy dropped the brushes again and put his hands up. That was enough. His father released him and the boy jumped down, running into the centre of the room.

‘Vla, vla,’ he said, holding his ears, showing off his haircut to the men waiting on the bench.

That was the morning the Czechs finally decided to liberate themselves from the fascists and hand themselves over to the communists. The grand uprising in Prague had begun. The whole country was rising up in support. In Laun, a man named Jaroslav Süssmerlich walked into the pub U Somolu at 81 Prag Strasse and convened the first meeting of the National Committee. The men at the barber’s shop abandoned their places in the queue and joined him.

They demanded the immediate surrender. They wanted nothing but outright capitulation. By phone, Jaroslav Süssmerlich translated the anger of the town and told the Germans they were ready to attack the garrison. The men from Kladno had already taken the arms dump at Hriskov. But the German commander in Laun made it clear that he had no authority to capitulate until orders came from Prague; from the German High Command. Besides, they held a number of key prisoners; Czech resistance fighters. It became a hostage drama. Negotiations became a race against time. Nobody realized that the Russians were approaching from the north instead of the south.

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Bertha Sommer emerged from the church of St Nicholas, pushing the heavy oak door like a child. The idea of heavy oak doors in churches is to make people feel small and innocent; children of God. She adjusted her hat, blessed herself from the font and looked down the steep concrete steps, where she saw an armoured car parked along the kerb. It was the only vehicle in the street. The engine was running. Officer Kern stood beside the driver and both of them looked up at her. There was something wrong. She knew it.

Around her, everything else in the street bore the inertia of centuries. The houses, the dusty windows, the grey roofs, all looked as though they would never change.

Bertha Sommer had a good nose. It was the way Officer Kern looked at her as she descended the church steps that told her something had changed. For a moment, she thought she was being arrested for betrayal of the Reich. Either that, or she was fleeing straight away, back to the German border. She told herself she didn’t care. After the initial fright, there is always a moment of indifference.

She smelled a wisp of woodsmoke drifting down the street. Nothing visible, beyond the faint blue tint in the distance above the houses. It was a reassurance. Bertha knew every kind of smoke. She had smelled all the different smokes of the war: gunsmoke, fires, scorched landscape, phosphor smoke; even the smell of burning hair. She feared and respected every smell. She then got the smell of Officer Kern’s cigarette. Kern looked serious. When he spoke to her, it was back to his official voice. The former intimacy was ignored. She expected the worst.

‘Fräulein Sommer, we have instructions to return to the garrison immediately. By right, I should have conveyed this to you without delay. We must go straight away.’

He held the door of the vehicle for her and whispered, as she held her hat to get in, ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

Afterwards, she felt foolish to have mistrusted him so much. She felt naïve, and envied the way men always seemed to know everything first. Inside the church, she had been under the brief illusion that it was raining outside, only to come out and find the street dry and the sun trying to break through the clouds at last.

The driver turned the vehicle and headed back through the town, past the square, along the main street towards the hill leading up to the garrison.

‘Apparently there is something going on here in the town,’ Kern said to her in the back of the car. ‘Hauptmann Selders has ordered all personnel off the streets.’

Kern didn’t discuss it any more. She asked him what it meant but he put a finger over his lips and pointed at the silent driver. They all went mute and looked out of the windows. Bertha saw nothing. No sign of anything going on. At the end of the town, she spotted two women hanging out washing. On a wall, she saw a ginger-coloured cat preparing to jump down. Smoke rose from the last three chimneys in the town. Nothing would ever change the speed of smoke rising from a chimney on a calm day in May.

Her own life would soon accelerate beyond recognition. After months and months of waiting, since Christmas, she would finally move into a new, though perhaps uncertain future. Anything was better than waiting. She thought of Caen in Normandy where she had spent most of the war. And the trips to Paris which had been so exciting. Czechoslovakia had provided none of that excitement. It became the place to wait for the war to end. She could only think of home. She could only think of the frustrating irony that the car in which she sat was actually travelling in the wrong direction. East. Into the arms of the Russians.

She turned around to look through the back window at the town. It may be the last look, she thought. Everywhere Bertha Sommer went, she called things by a private, arcane name in her own mind. As the armoured car climbed the hill back towards the garrison, she looked back and called it: the hill of the last time looking back. The morning of the end of the Reich, she said to herself as they drove through the gates.

‘Tonight,’ Officer Kern whispered discreetly to her as she got out of the car. She didn’t respond. She watched him click his heels and bow slightly, before he marched away towards the command centre.

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I always thought it was strange that things between Anke and myself ended with a crash. Or was that actually the beginning? It was in Jügen’s car. Just coming off the Autobahn, heading back into the centre of Düsseldorf, we were hit by another car. Don’t ask me how. All I know is that I’m certain it wasn’t my fault. The other car came out of a slip road and hit us on Anke’s side, the passenger side. It was in the evening. Dark. Wet. Autumn. I only remember the bang and the sudden immobility afterwards. It was like being attacked for no reason. Neither Anke nor I suffered any real injuries. It all must have looked much worse than it was because the other car had been overturned by the impact. I thought the occupants must be dead, because nobody moved. But it turned out that the driver, a middle-aged woman, escaped gracefully with nothing more than concussion.

The big problem was that I was driving. I was sitting in the driving seat of Jürgen’s car. A car I wasn’t insured to drive and a car I shouldn’t have been sitting in at all in the first place. Anke was hurt. The other car had crashed into us from the right and Anke had got a terrible thump all the way down from her shoulder to her knee. Even though nothing was broken, she was badly bruised.

‘I’m all right, I’m all right,’ she kept saying, hysterically reassuring herself, or both of us. ‘It’s nothing. Honestly.’

All we thought of at that moment was the fact that I was in the driving seat. Uninsured. Without a licence to drive in Germany. The complications would have been enormous. Like all survivors, glad to be alive and uninjured, we reassured ourselves that nothing else mattered. But then, when we saw that the street was empty and that nobody had emerged from the overturned car, we thought again. We could get away with it.

‘Quick,’ Anke said, hauling herself up out of the seat. ‘Quick, before the police arrive.’

She manoeuvred herself across me as best she could. A swift seat-change inside the car. Once she was in the driving seat and I was in the passenger seat, everything seemed all right. At least we could explain that much. It was only when she sat back with the steering wheel in her hands that she said she began to feel any pain at all on her right side.

I can never be sure if Jürgen ever discovered that I was driving. Or if he ever found out where Anke and I could have been to in his car. Or what we were up to. Anke was already married to Jürgen. Just married, in fact. I had been at the wedding not long before that.

The idea of Anke and I driving off together like this was her strange notion of a final farewell; Anke’s idea of saying goodbye to me, taking me back to the Eifel mountains, to the exact spot where we went the first time. She was basically meeting me for the last time as a lover, a formal rite whereby she was now ceremoniously entering into a new life with Jürgen. From now on she would be married. Why she left this intimate farewell until a month after the wedding was beyond me. I have never fully understood Anke.

The crash must have changed her plans. It placed us together in a further conspiracy. Because we had switched places inside the car, we were bound together for ever in a fraud. We were going to have to tell lies. And then backup lies with more lies. We were going to have to discuss and plan out a communal approach.

We didn’t know what to tell Jürgen. How was I going to explain being in the car in the first place? Even as we sat in the car, shocked, waiting for the police or an ambulance or something, Anke suggested that I should just walk away, pretend that she was the only occupant in the car. There was nobody around. It might have worked. But I was against it, instinctively. I stayed.

Walking away never works. I began to think about the driver of the other car, overturned, right behind us. I had difficulty opening the door on my side, but I got out and went over to see. I told Anke to stay in the driver’s seat. Eventually, people came out from houses near by and called an ambulance. The woman in the other car was unconscious, though when she was taken away one of the ambulance men said she would be fine. Anke was taken to hospital too, for observation, overnight.

It was up to me to phone and tell Jürgen. And somehow, maybe because Jürgen and I have known each other for so long, there was no immediate pressure for an explanation. All Jürgen wanted to know was that she was all right. What hospital? What ward? He didn’t ask me how I knew or how it happened or anything. I volunteered nothing.

In the end, I left it to Anke to do all the talking, since the whole thing was her idea in the first place. When Jürgen arrived at the hospital that night he still wasn’t asking for an explanation, and Anke said little else other than that she had been giving me a lift home. We had met for a drink. The fact that the location of the crash didn’t correspond with my route home from anywhere never came up. Nor did the fact that her injuries were on the wrong side of her body.

I went to visit her at the hospital early the next day, before she was discharged, to see what she had said to Jürgen. She showed me her bruises. She didn’t remember being hit at all. But the proof was there. A massive blue, black, purple cloud under her swollen skin, all along her arm, and down the side of her right thigh. There was a small bandage on her thigh where the skin had burst.

‘Looks lovely, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’ve got myself a fine-looking mark there.’

‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.

‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘I’m quite proud of it. The only thing that bothers me are these endless X-rays.’

She pulled back the sheet and showed me the full extent of the bruising. Everybody has a natural fascination for injuries. You want to see more.

‘Do you want to kiss my bruise?’ she asked.

I ignored her because it made me uneasy. I knew that Jürgen was coming to collect her any minute. She stuck her tongue out at me and covered herself up again. That was Anke all right. She was always sticking her tongue out like that.

‘What are you going to say to Jürgen?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. I’ll tell him everything. The whole thing, if he asks.’

‘Everything?’

‘Well, the only thing he doesn’t need to know is that you were driving his car. I think we should keep that a secret for the moment.’

Jürgen never asked. There was never anything said about the crash. I think Jürgen was glad that nothing worse had happened to Anke. No broken bones. He was concerned for her. He also asked how I was. Maybe it was his medical background, his doctor’s instinct for discretion.