Bunker (12 page)

At a sign from me, Hans hangs up.

Right. Now for Part Two of the plan.

Hans smelt my hair when I came out of the phone box. I must stink pretty bad by now, but he seems to like the smell of me.

Keep him on the boil, you still need him. The game is just beginning, and I'm almost enjoying it.

I push down the door handle to the phone box, hold the door open, let her go in first. She couldn't have managed the door herself with her bandaged hands. Coming out, she presses close to me. Her hair comes close to my face. I'd never have thought you could pull that trick off with your boss so well, girlie! Hats off to you, still waters run deep. I was standing beside her while she rabbited on and on, talking like a waterfall. She really chatted up that guy at the other end of the line. Turned him on. I could see she was enjoying all this more and more. Talking herself into a fine state.

But back at the mill, she can hardly bear the pain. I noticed in the car how the painkilling effect was gradually wearing off. Now I can see it in her face. She is turning paler
all the time, her features are more and more convulsed.

‘My hands hurt again. You must give me another injection!'

‘Better not. Your head won't be clear, you could mess this whole thing up!'

‘Please! It hurts horribly. I can't stand it. Please do something, help me!'

Reluctantly, I fill a syringe and pull the plunger up, because with the pain she's no use to me either. The way she looks now, that guy wouldn't fancy her at all. It takes exactly the right dose to control the pain. Well, she doesn't have to seduce him, just entice him here and then distract his attention, that'll do. I'll deal with the rest, because her boss will never fall into her honey-trap, not the way she looks. I have to think up some idea or we might as well say goodbye to the whole plan. Slowly, I press the plunger down in the syringe. I hope she's not had too much.

The wave runs through my body again, there's a tingling in my stomach, it's nice. The pain ebbs away bit by bit, from wrist to fingers. Finally it reaches somewhere in the region of my fingertips and then disappears entirely.

I'm ready now, he can come now, my little boss. I lie on the bed in readiness. I don't have to wait long. Footsteps on the lower floor. That can only be darling Rüdiger. He's in a real hurry to get here.

Hans has hidden outside and is waiting for my signal. Rüdiger enters the room behind the metal door. It's so quiet that I can hear every one of his footsteps. Now he's on the stairs below me. The first step creaks. I feel rather queasy. Pull yourself together, no going back now, only forward.

At each of his steps the wooden stairs creak and groan. Then a pause. The noise they make probably scares him. He must be looking around, maybe he feels a bit unsure of himself.

‘Rüdiger, I'm up here, waiting for you.'

That works. He comes trudging up. First his face appears. Greasy hair combed back. I feel I weigh very little, I could grin and giggle the whole time. I hope I don't muck this up.

With difficulty, he makes his way up through the trapdoor. Oops – on the last step he seems to stumble, catches himself just in time. I put my bandaged hand in front of my mouth. Mustn't burst out laughing now!

Rüdiger turns to look for me. It's not a human head on his massive body now, he looks like a fat pig. With a snout in the middle of his face. Curious, surprised, I stand up and stare at him. This can't be true! He comes towards me, and as he comes closer his face keeps changing all the time. He looks at me out of two little round piggy eyes. His lower jaw is jutting, he seems to be grinning, and two mighty tusks come into sight. The little piggy eyes wander restlessly back and forth, searching the room. Searching it for a rival.

‘There's no one here, only you and me.'

The pig snuffles in my direction, the hair on the back of
its neck standing up. It comes towards me, its head rocking this way and that. Coming closer and closer. Pigs don't see well, they rely on their snuffling noses to explore their surroundings. Its nose is right in front of my face. That snout is almost black, wet and shining, moving all the time. The pig breathes in deeply, then breathes out with a loud snort, a disgusting smell of carrion surrounds me.

I think the animal's very excited. To soothe it, I run my thickly padded hand gently over the bristly hairs on the back of its neck. They look like thin black wires. I can't feel the bristles through the thick bandaging, I can only see that they're standing up, and they hardly give way at all under the pressure of my hand.

The pig's little eyes sparkle at me. It snorts. The curving, dagger-like tusks are much too big for its mouth. They push the top lip up. The pig looks as if it is baring its teeth.

I'm afraid of the animal. The pig snorts several times in succession. It grabs me. I fight it off as well as I can. It stares angrily at me. I'm so frightened I can't move. Hell, where on earth is Hans? The animal stops for a moment, seems sorry for me. Then it flings its massive body against the table. The table shoots to one side and crashes into the wardrobe.

The pig stands in front of me now, getting bigger, more
than a head taller than me. I'm still standing there, I can't do anything but stare at its great tusks. It's foaming at the mouth. A slimy thread of saliva hangs down, gradually lengthening, comes loose and drops to the floor. Time seems to stand still.

I cautiously take a small step back. The pig puts its head slightly on one side. I must get out of here, I must get away from this beast, quick! Another step back. The bed is right behind me, I collide with it, can't keep on my feet, I fall full length on the mattress.

The pig flings itself on me. I close my eyes, feel its weight on me, its hot breath on my neck. Its damp slobber drops on my cheek, runs on to my lips.

I can hardly move, it's like a ton weight on top of me. I turn my head aside, open my eyes. Hans's head appears in the opening of the trapdoor. I gasp for air, the body is so heavy lying on me. I shout as loud as I can. ‘Do something, this pig is raping me!'

The head disappears again.

‘No, no, you can't go away. Help me, stick this pig!'

The pig is trying to force my thighs apart. I resist with all my might, I tense my buttocks. I don't want this. It can't do this, it's an animal, it can't do this.

Slobber runs along my neck, down to my breasts. I feel
that moist snout everywhere, on my face, in my hair.

‘Hans, stick the pig, stick the pig!'

I see Hans coming up through the trapdoor with a long, silvery, gleaming knife in his hand.

The pig howls. The pressure between my thighs relaxes. Why doesn't Hans help me to push the pig off? I turn, trying to wriggle out from under it.

The pig falls, turns on its own axis as it falls and crashes to the wooden floor. There's blood everywhere, spurting and pumping out of the opened body. Guts spill out of the belly, fall squelching to the floor, spread there. I feel sick. Everything's white and blurred, everything's floating in the air.

I open my eyes and see that wooden ceiling again. I'm used to it by now. And to the sickness. It must be something to do with the injection.

I'm afraid to sit up. The dead pig must be lying beside the bed. Half human, half animal. I look round, everything's the same as usual. A dream? There are gleaming dark patches on the floor, someone's been using a wet mop on it. Is it real, then? The pig was here and Hans got rid of it?

Nonsense, there's no such thing as a half-human, half-animal hybrid.

I stand up, climb down the wooden stairs. It's difficult
without any help. I can't hold on to anything with my thick mittens of bandaging.

Hans is just coming up the steps from the cellar.

‘What happened, Hans?'

Bloody hell, I knew it, the whole thing went wrong. The way she was, I might have known she had no idea what she was doing. I chucked the body down the stairs. He was bleeding like a pig. Blood everywhere. What else could I have done? She was in the process of botching it all up. She wasn't capable of reasonable action any more. I'd hidden downstairs. The guy wasn't up the stairs yet before I heard her shrill, hysterical laughter from above. I stole up the stairs after him and found the poor fellow standing in front of her, baffled, trying to soothe her somehow. Then, when he tried to take hold of her, she went right round the bend. Screaming her head off. Yelling the whole time. And then it all happened very fast. The guy turned round. When he saw
me he realized what was going on. Understood at once that he'd been lured into a trap. He didn't hang about, he went straight for me. Grabbed hold of me. He was at least a head taller than me, a real colossus. What was I to do? I had no choice, I simply stuck the knife into him without stopping to think.

It was like back then with Father.

How Father yelled at me, flung himself on me. He'd been boozing. The old man wanted to kill me. He was dead drunk, he didn't even know I was his son. Didn't know he was going for his own flesh and blood.

So I stabbed, twice, three times. I can't remember any more. My old man survived the whole thing. They saved his rotten life with an emergency operation. And they locked me up. What happened to my old man I've no idea, couldn't care less. He'll have drunk himself to death, what else?

But no emergency operation is going to help that great bag of lard now. No one can do anything for him. I dragged him down to the bunker. Threw his keys and valuables on the bed. Put the guy himself in a plastic sack and then cleaned everything up.

I'm on my way up from the bunker when she comes downstairs. Looks terrible, white as a sheet. Somehow she manages to support herself on the stairs with her bandaged
hands. Swaying alarmingly at every step. She stares at me as if I am death in person.

‘What happened, Hans?'

‘I'll tell you later.'

I don't feel like explanations now. There's no time, either. Doesn't she realize we have to get away? Now we've done
that
we're really in the shit.

‘What happened, Hans?'

Why does she keep banging on about this Hans?

‘My name's Dimitri, not Hans!'

‘Why not Hans? But you
are
Hans.'

Why on earth would I be Hans? She's looking at me incredulously.

‘But what you did when you…'

What does she mean? What am I supposed to have done?

‘But surely you're…Where did you live as a child?'

Can't the silly cow get it into her head that this is no time for playing games? Keep calm. Shouting at her does no good.

‘If you must know, I was born in Naila, we lived here, there and everywhere. My mother died, I spent time in homes, my father was a jailbird and a drunk. Satisfied now?'

All of a sudden she's perfectly quiet, looks even paler. Bends her head, looks at her bandaged hands.

I look at my bandaged hands. Everything's going round and round in my head. I can hardly form a clear thought. My heart is racing. Keep calm, try to keep perfectly calm.

‘Why were you in my apartment?'

‘I was watching you.'

Does his face distort into a slight smile when he says that?

‘Why did you take the photo of me and my brother?'

He looks at me, the smile is gone. His voice is impatient, he's obviously all on edge.

‘That little boy's your brother? I might have known it. The picture reminded me of something, that's all.'

I close my eyes. It's all black. Now what? Think! He isn't Hans. That makes everything different. He didn't know
Joachim at all, he had nothing to do with him. He's a total stranger. A kidnapper. A criminal. A murderer.

I know what I have to do.

I'm freezing. I have to get out of here. Out! Out!

Damn it, damn it, don't just stand here wailing! Try to remember! Try to remember! I hit my face with the flat of my hand, strike my head. Remember when Father was building this bunker for an air-raid shelter. ‘Air-raid shelter' – I ask you! He was always drivelling on about the bunker. As a child he told me he'd been buried in rubble during the War. He had to dig his way out of the ruins with a tin mug and his bare hands. A man who'd been buried too, along with him and my grandmother, had helped them, he said.

He changed the story every time he told it. The old airraid warden turned into a soldier, the soldier became an expert on hand-to-hand fighting, a hero. His own part in the
story kept getting bigger and more heroic as well. He talked about the bright light that met them when they finally dug themselves out. In my imagination I could see them with bloodstained weals on their hands, dirt under their fingernails, sweat.

Only much later did I realize that the story was a pack of lies from beginning to end, like most of his stories. He wasn't even three in May 1945, he couldn't have experienced those events.

All the same, he was talking about the bunker the whole time – he insisted on calling it that. A shelter, a kitchen, a bedroom. With the old furniture we'd thrown out.

He thought of a way to get a water supply in. Pumping up water from the well was no problem, but what about the outlet for the waste water? The pipe led straight into the stream. I had to help him dig out the place for it. This ‘brilliant idea' led to the collapse of the stream bed and the complete flooding of the shelter in the bunker. It took us weeks to get everything sealed. We put thick concrete tanking on the bed of the stream to secure it, and repaired the concrete wall of the central kitchen area of the bunker, which had mostly been carried away, using brickwork. We filled the space in between with the old tiles from the roof, most of them broken, which had been stored in the cellar before.
Then he decided to do without a proper water outlet and a toilet, said a large hollow space with gravel under the kitchen area would have to do. He was a great one for changing his plans. He probably didn't believe there was going to be a real air raid, the bunker business was just an excuse. He wanted a hiding place where he could go if one of his many business deals blew up in his face. He always had something on the boil. Sometimes he had plenty of cash, sometimes he was broke, always looking for the great coup, the big one, the deal of his life…he traded in anything and everything, like smuggled cigarettes. Went around making out he was a gas-meter reader, an advertising agent for newspapers, an insurance broker. He was a loser, always on the verge of jail. Air-raid shelter, talk about ridiculous!