BRANDT’S UNCLE ERNST, his mother’s brother, helped him down from the buggy when they reached the farm. Ernst was older than he remembered – his round face thinner, as was his hair. There was a welcoming committee. His aunt Ursula, Ernst’s wife, pushed forward a small girl and a boy of around six.
‘Who are you?’ he asked them, looking for fear in their eyes and finding none.
‘These are Horst’s children – Eva and Johann.’
Brandt tried to remember. Someone must have written to him about them, surely. Horst was Ernst and Ursula’s son – the last he’d heard, he’d been stationed in France.
‘It’s nice to meet you,’ he said, and extended his hand. The boy took it but the girl hid in her grandmother’s skirt. He didn’t blame her – and anyway it was more out of shyness than fright.
‘How is Horst?’ he asked, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, knew the answer.
‘Horst was killed in Yugoslavia,’ his father said in a quiet voice. ‘In March of last year. I sent you a letter.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the post didn’t get through. If I’d have known, I would have written.’
Ernst smiled reassuringly and the children didn’t seem to have noticed. Their mother died in childbirth with the girl so Horst’s death had made them orphans. All they had in the world were their grandparents. He felt tears itch at the corners of his eyes. He reached out to ruffle the boy’s hair.
‘Your father was a fine man,’ Brandt said. ‘A hero.’
‘And here is Monika,’ someone said, but by now his legs were slowly giving way. He reached for something to support his weight and felt strong hands take his arm.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said and saw their concerned faces as if through a fog. He did his best to smile. Monika was there, he was sure of it. At one stage he thought he saw his mother, but that was when he was being helped upstairs and the house was swirling around him and he was so cold that his body shivered at the touch of their warm hands.
He could hear someone – it sounded like him – repeating Judith’s name. The exhaustion went deep inside him, to the very marrow of his bones – but even that couldn’t account for the tears that ran down his frozen cheeks.
§
Perhaps his father looked in on him during the next day, he couldn’t be sure, but if he did, he didn’t wake him. And so, as it turned out, he slept for nearly a day and a half, managing to ignore the sunlight slipping through the shutters, the sounds from the yard beneath his window and the dull pain of his own battered body.
§
When he eventually awoke Brandt made his way, barefoot, down the wooden stairs, worn dark by hundreds of years of other feet making the same short journey. His father sat at the kitchen table, a newspaper open in front of him, its wartime paper yellow in the light from the window.
Sleep and the strangeness of his surroundings, familiar and yet unfamiliar, had left Brandt disoriented.
‘What time is it?’
‘It’s the morning still, just past eight o’clock. A day later than you think perhaps.’
‘I slept for that long?’
‘You were tired and you’re not fully recovered from your injuries – sleep is good medicine. And cheap.’
His place was set on the long table. The place he’d always sat at when he was a boy – beside his father and across from his mother. There was bread, butter, cheese and jam – a jug of creamy milk. A feast.
‘Is this your work?’
‘Monika’s,’ his father said, stuffing his pipe with cigarette tobacco.
‘Is she here?’
‘It’s good to have you back, Paul.’
He turned to see a woman he barely recognized, standing in the doorway. The Monika he remembered had been nineteen years old when he left, bookish and pale. This Monika was older, tanned, with bobbed brown hair. Her smile was open and if she noticed his injuries, she gave no sign of it.
‘Monika?’
She laughed and stepped forward to embrace him.
‘We’ve both changed a little bit.’
He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had held him. He found that his face was hot.
‘You’d better sit down,’ she said, smiling at him once again. He was pleased to see that her teeth weren’t quite straight.
‘I think I’d better,’ he said, and did as he was told.
§
Another two days passed before Brandt put on an old pair of trousers, for which he needed a belt, and a jacket that, in contrast, was too narrow for him now. He hadn’t worn civilian clothes, not once, since he’d left Vienna for the training barracks. He put on his military boots – heavier than he remembered – and made his way down the stairs and out into the yard. He listened – no one was about. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see anyone – he just didn’t want them to stop him. They would only say he wasn’t strong enough to go outside but he couldn’t wait any longer.
His path, each step of which he’d gone over in his mind a hundred times, led him past the SS hut. He walked slowly, not because he was tired, but because he wanted to be consistent. He didn’t know if one of the guards might be watching him as he approached, and he wanted to take his time when he reached the hut, so a constant pace made sense.
When he reached the fenced garden, she was nowhere to be seen. It was all right, he decided, he would be patient. If nothing else, he had time. Perhaps he would see her on the way back.
The walk up from the reservoir was harder. He stopped more than once to gather his strength, sitting at the side of the road, watching the workers in the fields and listening to the hum of insects around him. Before the war, there would have been the sound of farm machinery from somewhere in the valley – but not now, when there was barely petrol enough to keep the tanks moving. He stopped for a moment once again outside the hut. He glanced around to see if she was there, but saw no one, then turned to look across the water towards the forested upper slopes of the other side of the valley. It was a view you might put on a picture postcard – he could understand why they’d chosen this place.
He fell into the habit of going for a walk in the morning and in the evening, and each time his path led him past the hut. He was careful, he hoped. He didn’t stare. But he paid attention whenever his gaze found its way up to the hillside on which the hut sat – and he took note of what he saw.
The main building, whitewashed with a pitched roof, was surrounded by a long wooden terrace, which ran round the three sides that were visible from the road. Often he saw officers sitting in deckchairs taking the sun, or sitting in the shade provided by two cream awnings that were rolled down when the sun was stronger than usual. There were window boxes bursting with bright flowers. The building had been carefully modelled to look like some pre-war holiday camp.
But it was not a normal place. He doubted that many passing vacationers would mistake it for a welcoming spot to rest their head for the night, even if the SS flag hadn’t flown above it.
It was surrounded by two high barbed-wire fences, one inside the other, and the gate, up a steep lane from the main road, was protected by a double-height concrete pillbox which, along with a smaller wooden one on the other side of the hut, covered the fences as well. Because of the hut’s raised position, there was not a centimetre of the enclosed perimeter that was not within sight of one of the guard towers. And when Brandt looked closer at the hut, he noticed how thick the oak window shutters were, backed with iron sheeting that had been decorated with scrolling – and rifle slits.
The hut also had a presence, which he found disconcerting. Even when no one was visible, as he passed, he had the feeling that he was being watched from within – or perhaps by the building itself. There was something in that – the place made the back of his neck feel cold, even with the sun doing its best to warm it.
Of course, the person he really wanted to see was the woman with the red triangle.
What if it was her? What if it wasn’t? If it was her, he’d have to do something. He had no choice.
And then it occurred to him that even if it wasn’t her – he should do something. He had a debt that needed to be repaid.
There were wrongs he needed to right.