A Stranger in My Own Country (29 page)

The training period passed quickly, and all of Stork's comrades were sent out to Stalingrad,
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where a fierce battle was being fought. But destiny (and the all-powerful orderly room sergeant) once again had it in for Stork: of all his comrades he was the only one who had to stay at home and work in the orderly room. His frequently voiced disappointment knew no bounds: ‘But I mustn't complain. I must do my duty wherever my Führer sends me.' While his comrades, engaged in heavy fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts, often went a year or more without getting leave, Mr Stork was allowed to go home on leave at least once a fortnight, and often weekly – and he was promoted more rapidly than the rest of them at the front. A true Nazi, and a March Martyr to boot, a dyed-in-the-wool loyalist – a man such as that wears his superiority like an unseen badge wherever he goes: he performs a more important service for his Führer back here in the homeland than any non-Party members fighting at the front. Many people in our village were too ignorant to understand this; they resented the fact that he was always home on leave, while they didn't get to see their own sons or husbands from one year to the next. But the Storks rose above such benighted sentiments, and continued to show themselves most Sundays, walking arm in arm on the village street. For sheer shamelessness and effrontery, they had always been in a class of their own. They had always followed the principle that Nazi rules and regulations imposing restrictions and privations on the population, especially now in wartime, only applied to others, never to themselves. And they followed that principle here: if you've got it, flaunt it! Meanwhile, by all
accounts, petitions were being furiously penned by husband, wife and friendly, lower-ranking bureaucrats, arguing the urgent need to reinstate Mr Stork in his old post as mayor. The new mayor, it was claimed, was just not up to the job, and some recent political appointees in the village were already displaying alarming red tendencies. Unfortunately the Wehrmacht, which is of course not an arm of the Party, showed not the slightest inclination to release Private, or indeed Corporal, Stork from the medical corps on the strength of these petitions. On the contrary, rumour has it that the army pulled him out of the orderly room and sent him out to some large troop training ground in the East. Whether he is fighting for his Führer there with pen in hand again, or whether they are getting him ready to be shipped out to a fighting unit – perhaps one day schoolmaster Stork's fondest wish will be fulfilled after all, and now in this fifth year of the war he will get to hear a shot fired again, or even – God forbid! – loose one off himself!

But in relating all this I am anticipating events that occurred much later in the life of our mayor. Before he joined the military, he spent another four years of the war in Mahlendorf, and you may depend upon it that he made full use of the time to inflate his own sense of power and humiliate the local residents he didn't like. Even before this he could hardly have complained about a shortage of powers, and he had already become the absolute master in Mahlendorf – apart from the occasional need to refer back to his superiors on this or that matter. But all this was as nothing compared with the power that the war placed in the hands of this bitter, resentful little coward. How it must have tickled Stork, suddenly to have the power of life and death placed in his hands! He sat on the draft board that conscripted people into the armed forces, and if the mayor cast his vote to the effect that such and such a man could or could not be spared from his farm, that frequently decided the matter. He had never learned the meaning of shame, Mr Stork, and it wasn't long before we saw his enemies leaving the village to go and fight – and in some cases die – at the front, while his friends stayed at home on their farms year after year because they were indispensable to the war effort! His opportunities for tormenting
and harassing his fellow men, already far too numerous, now grew exponentially. The system of ration cards
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that regulated everyone's provisions, and which now made the most basic needs of life dependent on a decision by the mayor, made him all-powerful. The way he approved or denied requests for new shoes for poor girls, the way he used a worn-out bicycle tyre as a pretext to wreak revenge, and the way he was so open and transparent about it all, so that the mean motives behind his refusal were always plain to see under the thin cloak of his expressions of regret – it was just disgusting! How much worry he caused my wife when the children had their school holidays and Stork refused to issue the ration cards for them on one pretext after another, making it harder and harder to get bread for them! Stupid as the mayor was, he was ingenious enough when it came to devising such torments and thinking up endless new pretexts, if not for denying the fulfilment of legitimate requests, then at least for delaying it, and not for a moment was his conscience troubled by thoughts of a worried mother or hungry children. There is one story that casts a glaring light on the utter viciousness of this swine, who was protected by his official position and those who had appointed him. Here it is. Living in the village was a small woman, very young and not unattractive, married to a farm mechanic who had been sent off to the front on the first day of mobilization. Mrs Schote was a shy, kindly thing with a two-year-old daughter, and nobody in the village had a bad word to say about her. She had always been hard-working and frugal, and her child could not have had a better mother. She had the misfortune to live in the same house as the wife of a farm labourer, a thoroughly disreputable woman, debauched from an early age, one of those creatures who seem to regard immorality and shameless brazenness as their natural element from the day they are born. This woman, a certain Mrs Kock, had only married her husband, a three-parts idiot, in order to have a father for the child she was expecting – as she told him straight after the wedding, laughing in his face. She was as ugly as sin, as vulgar as a street whore, and as work-shy as an old drunk. While the two husbands had been living in the house as well, these two very different parties had been at daggers
drawn; they never spoke to each other, never even gave each other the time of day. Mrs Kock had developed a special knack for pushing and pinching her neighbour's little girl when nobody was looking.

But with the outbreak of war the relationship between these two very different women started to change. They grew closer, they spoke to each other, they even formed a kind of friendship. Heaven knows how that came about! Mrs Schote would have been welcome company anywhere in the village – in the houses of ordinary folk, at least – but nobody wanted anything to do with Mrs Kock. It was probably Mrs Kock who initiated the rapprochement. With what she had in mind, she didn't want a spy in the house; and an accomplice would not spill the beans. And the shy little woman, lonely and abandoned, probably didn't dare to resist her coarse, vulgar neighbour; feeling defenceless and vulnerable, she knew her life would be hell if she didn't do what her neighbour wanted. That's how it must have started; later on, having once tasted of the forbidden fruit, she no doubt went along with it willingly enough. A rumour gradually spread through the village of indecent goings-on in the house of the two soldiers' wives. It was said that they received male visitors, and there was talk of night-time revelries too. In actual fact this was something that didn't concern anyone apart from those immediately involved, i.e. the two husbands, who were far away. But a village, and especially one that stands isolated on a peninsula, cut off from every breath of fresh life, has no such qualms, and is grateful for every bit of new gossip. When people started talking about these two women it wasn't long, of course, before the story reached the ears of our worthy mayor. It was no business of his either, whether in his capacity as mayor or as a private individual, and he promptly declared that he was not interested in Mrs Kock, allegedly because her immorality, renowned throughout the village, was ingrained and incurable, but in truth because he was afraid of her sharp, vulgar tongue. But he took a very different view of Mrs Schote's involvement. He lamented her youth and inexperience, set himself up to act on behalf of her husband in the field, and voiced dark fears that the nocturnal male visitors might be prisoners of war, with whom
Germans were forbidden to consort on pain of imprisonment. In short, he once again had no difficulty in finding reasons why he should poke his nose into somebody else's business, which, foul-smelling as it was, didn't concern him in the slightest. And having satisfied himself in this way that intervention was required, the coward picked a man from the village to assist him, an obnoxious old bachelor with a notoriously dissolute past of his own, and the two of them took up sentry duty outside the house of the two women at 9.30 in the evening. They had waited barely half an hour when two men did indeed slip into the house – not prisoners of war, not even men from Mahlendorf, but two soldiers whose job it was to guard POWs working on a nearby estate. The two spies now moved into position at the window of the one room where light was showing; because the blackout curtains did not close properly, and the old window frames no longer formed a tight seal, they were able to observe everything going on in the room and hear practically every word that was spoken. They were gratified to note how affectionately the two guardsmen were received by the two amorous women, how they took a bottle of wine and packs of cigarettes out of their pockets while the two women served up coffee and home-made cakes. They exchanged a running commentary in eager whispers, carefully noting every kiss, every cooing laugh, every fiery glance. But they soon discovered that they were not alone in enjoying the spectacle of these amorous dalliances. As is the way in village life, the news that the mayor was bent on putting a stop to the immorality of the POWs had spread from house to house in the immediate neighbourhood, and soon the two male observers were joined by half a dozen female ones, mostly old women, but there were also two young girls of sixteen and seventeen. As the hours passed, and the initial caresses and endearments turned into something altogether more serious and intense, and the amorous discourse of the lovelorn couples grew ever more explicit, the party assembled outside the window became steadily more boisterous and unrestrained. Each in turn excitedly pushed the other away from his (or her) listening post at the window, and spluttering with barely suppressed laughter they told each other in whispers what they
had just seen; and mayor Stork, who had come here to keep watch in the name of morality and as the guardian of innocence, voiced no misgivings whatsoever about the fact that young girls were participating in this spectacle, shoving him aside and breathlessly following the cavortings with shining eyes. It was a classic Breughelesque scene from rural life, the natural product of wholesome living in a village, on the land, where, according to our Führer and his henchmen, all is purity, innocence and glowing health! No Darré
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could have painted a more persuasive picture!

The lascivious snoopers held out at the window from 9.30 in the evening until 4.30 in the morning; even when the lights had gone out they stayed on – for there were still words to be heard, kisses to be counted and sighs to be recorded. The mayor justified this refusal to leave by claiming that he intended to confront the two adulterous soldiers who were abusing the wives of fighting men, and report them to their commanding officer. But when the two soldiers appeared at first light and hurried off through the village towards their estate, our hero, needless to say, didn't even have the courage to go up and speak to them. Instead he comforted himself and the others waiting with him with the thought that at least they knew who was involved, and that it was perhaps best not to get into an altercation right now, at this early hour of the morning. If the story so far gives ample insight into the dark depths of this exceptionally nasty character, then what he did next must condemn him even in the eyes of those whom he represented: the Party faithful. Or it should have: but they kept him on and allowed him to operate – to the greater glory of the Führer and the Party. The thing is, Stork did not summon the women to him and give them a warning, but left them to find out about the nocturnal spying activities from village gossip. Instead of speaking to them, he sat down and wrote a long letter to the husband serving at the front, in which he ‘felt duty-bound' to inform him of his young wife's behaviour, taking care to assure him that he was not just passing on idle gossip, but that he, the mayor of the village, had personally witnessed these things. What the poor fellow, who was in love with his wife and
fighting for his life on the Eastern front, went through when he read this letter we shall never know. But he was killed seven or eight weeks later. In the end, what dealt him the mortal blow was not a Russian bullet but the unbelievably cruel letter from the Nazi mayor; his wife heard nothing more from him after he received that letter. Vicious and cowardly people have always existed in the world, but it is the peculiar prerogative of the Nazi Party to have deliberately used such people as an instrument of their rule, promoting them to high office and inciting them to enslave their fellow citizens, giving them encouragement and rewards. Filth at the top and filth at the bottom, and everything plastered with empty slogans in which divine providence features prominently.

My family and I would have got off too lightly if Stork had been content to leave it at the minor torments I mentioned earlier. I hadn't spoken to him for ages, and if there was any business between us, my wife took care of it. I knew he hated me, and he had said often enough that he would get me one day. Fate dealt him one or two very good cards, and for weeks and months on end it looked as though I really was done for. During the war I had taken on an old gardener,
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a man of nearly seventy, but still very glad of the work, well recommended by his former employers and personable enough in his demeanour. For a while things went very well with this man, we were well satisfied on both sides, and my wife and I were already saying how fortunate we were to have found such a good worker – when the problems began. The old gardener seemed to have taken against one of our young girls, and every time she brought him his meal there was always something wrong; sometimes he claimed he'd been given margarine instead of butter, and then the complaint was that she'd eaten the salami off his plate. (Which didn't make a lot of sense, since she had access to the whole salami, and therefore hardly needed to help herself to the slices on his piece of bread.) A few days later he had to wait five minutes for his supper, but instead of waiting he left and went home hungry. Next morning he showered me with angry reproaches. I let him carry on working and going without food. I tried to reassure him, and I
succeeded once, twice; but the third time there were angry words from me too, he threatened me with a mattock, and I fired him on the spot. He went straight to the mayor and denounced me. He accused me of a whole series of offences and crimes contrary to wartime economic regulations: I was said to have claimed double my allocation of ration cards, bought and sold grain illegally, obtained coal entitlements by fraud – there were eight charges in all.