Pale Horse Riding Read online

  She had written back more than once sensing he was under great strain. Wanting to avoid misunderstanding, he added, ‘I am not serious, of course, but you know what I mean. There is much to be done in teaching people about eliminating disease. For all the attention they pay, I might as well be up the Limpopo River 150 years ago! But I reserve my greatest frustration for your absence and count the days.’

  He signed off, adding all his love (‘and more’) and looked at his desperately unfinished surroundings. The novelty of camping had long worn off and he was tired of the hotel where he kept a room to retain a degree of personal hygiene.

  Yet most of the rest lived in acceptable accommodation, some little short of luxurious. He could try the housing office, he supposed, and insist on being put at the top of the list, or make a proper effort with Groenke, who probably had private access to furnished apartments more than suitable for his needs. Or they could camp out and make an adventure of it, doing the place up bit by bit.

  Something the doctor had managed to scrounge was a stove. Winter was coming. The house had no chimney, being designed for central heating – yet to be installed, of course – but he thought it would be possible to put a flue in to take away the fumes even if he had to smash the hole in the wall himself.

  After an irritable, restless morning, the commandant returned home for lunch; his every passage through the garden gate an entry into a different world where the doting father lavished affection on his children, in contrast to the stone mask he had to wear for work. He went in through the kitchen where the staff ate lunches prepared by his wife with her own hands. Why, he couldn’t understand. He had told her they had servants for that.

  The seamstress wasn’t eating with the rest that day; he could hardly ask where she was. He recited to himself: ‘Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.’

  He felt compelled to cut his lunch short and ride out again. He hurried to the stables and took the western saddle. He and Groenke, who sometimes rode with him, were Karl May fans. Oh, to be cowboys, they lamented, eating around the campfire and sleeping under the stars.

  He saw a distant work gang walking down the railway line in direct contravention of the bulletin his office had issued the previous week. The only other movement was a blur, half a kilometre away, which he supposed was the garrison psychiatrist on his fancy racing bike.

  A garrison shrink! What were things coming to? The way it had always worked with anyone on the wobble was a couple of stiff drinks and being told to act like a man. Never had he thought that his world would include a shrink on a bike! Getting paid to worm his way inside people’s heads was not a proper job. No one was sure even why he was there.

  The commandant didn’t like the way the man held his eye, as if to say, ‘I know what shadows lurk inside.’ Shadows lurked within them all; the commandant knew that as well as anyone. A soldier’s job was to manage his own mind rather than run bleating to a brainbox who made a point of not getting his hands dirty. As for himself, of course he would like to rest his head on the bosom of the seamstress and fiddle with her twat and not have a care in the world, but he wouldn’t because if he didn’t set an example who would?

  He rode out in dread of what he had seen that morning existing only in his head, a vision, a portent or ill-omen, with dire personal meaning.

  He went back the way he thought he had ridden. Like an Indian scout he attempted to read the ground from his earlier trail, but the prints could have been from any old ride. He dismounted to examine the turf for the freshness of its broken surface and hadn’t a clue what it was telling him.

  He hadn’t realised there were so many telegraph poles. He saw guards, tiny specks in the outer watchtowers. Flat fields. He remembered splashing through water. It was all like that, miles and miles of it. The river boundary, with what little water there was, sluggish. He could not remember. Nothing there. Oh, dread vision! He had found no mention of any such incident in the endless arse paper that had crossed his desk that morning, when he would have expected to be informed: Does anyone know who attached a crucified body to telegraph pole number such-and-such and to what purpose and on whose authority?

  His days were like that: to what purpose and on whose authority?

  The garrison psychiatrist often saw the commandant out riding. They shared the same preference for being up before the rest of the world. He thought nothing of doing fifty kilometres before his first appointment, pushing pedal, clearing the mind, then going out again for the midday break. Whenever they passed, the commandant was too busy talking to himself to notice.

  Once, he had followed and watched the commandant dismount in a glade. He did so again that afternoon. All his actions were as before: he continued talking to himself while he removed his jacket, shirt and vest, tore branches from a sapling and thrashed his naked back, babbling on even when he pulled out his tool and vigorously masturbated while standing, and afterwards wiped his hand on the grass, watched by his mare.

  The commandant stripped to his shirtsleeves and mucked out the stables. After that he went to Groenke’s and they chewed the fat and drank tea from Japan, which he supposed came via its Berlin embassy. Several dozen tins of Seville oranges stood on a table, earmarked for his wife. They sipped plum brandy with the tea as the afternoon sun moved across the skylight.

  The commandant went home to find his wife about to leave for the opera. She was standing in the kitchen, wearing a magnificent fur-collared evening coat, issuing instructions to staff.

  ‘When I come back we’ll all make jam, which will be fun!’ she promised.

  The commandant was rewarded with a brief glimpse of the seamstress passing through the hall. He failed to catch her eye.

  He did what he could to turn his confusion into safe, concrete gestures. What nerve it took on his part to raise the subject with his wife, about how they could improve the young woman’s conditions, by taking it upon themselves perhaps to help furnish her room.

  ‘Do you think she would be allowed her own things?’

  His wife was sure they could dig out something. ‘There’s that rug with moth I haven’t had the heart to throw out.’

  The commandant was pleased, for himself, and for his wife, pretending that what pleased her made him happy too, contenting himself with the surreptitious relish of his innocent obsession.

  His wife proffered her cheek. She had no right to be taking the car. Oh, let it go. He wasn’t prepared to berate her in front of staff. The time would come when he would delight in her humiliation. He recalled his Corinthians: ‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.’

  Transported, thought the commandant’s wife. The heartbreak of the story! The misunderstandings that were still possible between two so in love. Orfeo must not look back and Euridice takes this as a sign he no longer loves her.

  The auditorium was full, a throwback to another era, with everyone dressed up, the civilised rapture of the audience, the elegance of the uniforms, the women in evening dress. The commandant’s wife had a box. She considered it good that people still appreciated culture in straitened times. She was very jealous of the woman sharing with her, the wife of a local general. The woman’s full-fur coat was the most beautiful the commandant’s wife had ever seen, making her feel dowdy by comparison. The woman had travelled, to France, even North Africa, and she had been nowhere.

  Events reached their climax as Orfeo’s forbidden look caused Euridice to die. You could have heard a pin drop, thought the commandant’s wife. A tragedy for their times! To have a love like that, she sighed, even if it were lost. Love was, the Bible said, the great mystery. Not
hing written or uttered since had provided an answer. But where was love?

  The commandant thought: Strange that he had not thought of the seamstress during his purge in the woods. He wondered where she was now.

  Several drinks and smokes later he was assailed by the terrible image of his wife crawling naked on the floor, proffering her ample rear to some faceless stud. Or worse, could the crowbar tool be Erich’s? The man was a committed rapist, perhaps unable to control himself, a perpetual offender for all his reformed air, and his wife was no oil painting. Only too clearly could the commandant picture Groenke taking proprietorial delight in his wife’s stolen, gasping pleasure. Over a year now since she had shared it with him; and it wasn’t as though it had all been going swimmingly before.

  The doorbell rang. The housekeeper answered. The commandant adjusted his dress in time to be standing to greet the garrison doctor. The man was such a transparent fellow, obviously there to press his cause under the guise of a follow-up to check on his health and give him another earful about what he considered his moral duty. Yes, the good doctor had arrested the march of disease, but that was not the point.

  Teaching the facts of life was normally done by man-to-man chats over stiff drinks, except the bloody doctor didn’t drink. The commandant listened to him bleat on about how the security police were guilty of irregularities. Of course they were! It was called initiative. There was no point in banging on about regulations. If they waited for Berlin everything would have been swamped years ago. The compounds were riddled with informers, spy networks and double agents.

  What the commandant did not volunteer was that he secretly shared the doctor’s shame at the state of the place. It was the real reason for him to block anyone coming in.

  What a nightmare, thought the doctor, and always that split – between the uniform and his oath of loyalty versus his Hippocratic duty and individual conscience. As for his wife, what a relief it would be to write honestly that his mind was assailed by dark and troubled thoughts about the hopelessness of it all, really.

  Corruption was a cancer eating away at them, there from the start, with the place being so neglected, but what came after was beyond all imagination. The shrink had observed something interesting. From what he could tell, no one there dreamed any more.

  The shrink preferred to eat alone, so that evening the doctor was surprised to be invited to share his table, even though the man had finished.

  Like many, the doctor suspected the shrink had been sent there for underhand reasons.

  He was as good-looking as a film star, which set him apart, and was further distanced by a solitary manner. The natural nucleus of the garrison was small tables of urgent, drunken groups, caught between boisterous and conspiratorial talk.

  The doctor ordered duck and red cabbage and wondered how much he was being manipulated when the shrink announced that he knew about the doctor’s difficulties in trying to open up the garrison. This was not something the doctor had talked about to anyone than the commandant.

  ‘The commandant and his boss in Berlin are tight,’ the shrink said. ‘The boss is still smarting from having another of his camps turned upside down by a pushy investigative prosecutor named Morgen, who has a history of rocking the boat. The business in Weimar was an embarrassment – people on the home front lining their pockets while our lads take a pasting; not good publicity. So the commandant will have been told to repel all boarders. However, there may be a way to get Morgen in.’

  He looked enigmatic and wondered how the commandant’s wife was getting on at the opera.

  ‘She is rather smitten by you, as it happens.’

  ‘How do you know?’ the doctor asked in astonishment.

  ‘She told me.’

  If garrison men weren’t keen on consulting him, their wives were and the commandant’s had led by example in what became a fashion.

  ‘Not much treatment involved. Most of it is hard gossip. She considers you a gentleman, out of her league.’

  The doctor said stiffly such information was confidential and he shouldn’t be told.

  ‘Confidential between us now. Let’s say I am seeking a second medical opinion. Now, let’s be serious. As I understand it, you, as garrison doctor, believe this place should be properly run in terms of hygiene and labour. It should more resemble a functioning work camp than a penal colony. In a nutshell?’

  The doctor could not tell whether the man was to be trusted.

  ‘There may be a way of opening the place up but it won’t be done by your complaining,’ the shrink said.

  ‘What do you propose?’

  II

  It had been a difficult summer for August Schlegel. There was his long mend after nearly getting himself blown up at the end of a murder case which he should not have been on as his job was financial crime not homicide. He was back on duty part time, left to sit on his hands and unable to decide if he was in purdah. There were no congratulations or commendations when the butchers case went to trial. He was required only to provide a written statement, which spared him the ordeal of confronting a gang that thought nothing of flaying their victims alive and feeding them into the food chain. Schlegel sensed the case was an embarrassment – it remained unreported – and was being swept under the carpet and he with it.

  When he stopped bothering to go in to work most of the time no one complained. As for Morgen, his irksome, errant partner, he remained conspicuous by his absence, off elsewhere, doing what no one knew.

  Why Morgen had been transferred to Schlegel’s department in the first place still no one was sure, unless it was to rattle their cage. Despite an up-and-down career, including six months’ penal detention and another six fighting on the Russian front, Morgen – to his own professed astonishment, as much as anyone’s – remained a prosecuting investigator, one of those shadowy, feared inquisitors who could be after anyone, including Schlegel and his colleagues. It was accepted that everyone spied on everyone but intrigue in the past months had become an even thicker stew. The question of where anyone’s real loyalty lay was hardly worth asking. On the night of the butchers, Schlegel had seen Morgen sitting in the back of Himmler’s car.

  Schlegel thought: The spy spies on the spy spying on the spies, into infinity; life as a hall of unreflecting mirrors in the land of the undead.

  It was, the cynics were saying, inevitable, a controlled fury directed inwards now there was nothing left to shout about. No one could pretend the news was good. An almost visible depression hung over the city, rain or shine. It was only a matter of time before Berlin became the relentless target for enemy night bombers. Hamburg had burned like an inferno. Refugees poured in, putting a huge strain on the stations and causing confusion and panic with horror stories of pavements turned to rivers of fire.

  People were starting to leave in anticipation of what was to come, with children and women not in defence work evacuated.

  The raids started at the end of August, resulting in the shortest journeys taking hours as entire streets collapsed, with buildings around the Kurfürstendamm and Lietzenburgerstrasse burned out. Blank spaces appeared, like missing teeth.

  In all of this, Schlegel found his attention distracted to where he least expected, starting with discovering his indomitable mother standing in her kitchen, of all places, holding a potato, of all things, saying she could not remember what it was.

  He had tried to make light of it by saying she had servants to take care of that, but he noticed the moments became more frequent, until she said, ‘I forget things and then I can’t remember what it is that I have forgotten.’

  He put it down to the wider distraction, refusing to accept her mind was starting to go.

  Schlegel saw his mother and stepfather more that summer, often staying over. His leg still hurt and he had trouble managing the long climb to his little apartment in Auguststrasse.

  And there was the excuse to see Sybil.

  Sybil was the anomaly.

  Why his mother should
risk everything to harbour Sybil was something to which Schlegel had given much thought without being convinced by any of the answers. Widely known as the bitch imperious, she and his stepfather lived close to the heart of the beast, which made her decision the more astonishing.

  Sybil had by default been an extension of his mother’s social circle: Jewish and until the big February roundup protected from deportation by her tailoring for a company with a high export rating. Her reputation for craftsmanship preceded her and Schlegel’s mother treated her as a protégé, introducing her to many senior wives, to her private amusement, as few had the figures or élan to carry off their incessant demands for copies of French couture.

  Following the roundup – a clean sweep of the city’s remaining Jews – Sybil had gone underground with her female lover until arrested by the Gestapo. Sybil had survived. As with everything now, the situation was not black and white, Schlegel had come to realise, but infinitely shaded. If a moral compass still existed its direction was no longer readable.

  Schlegel supposed his mother’s Englishness, which made her an outsider too, played a part in protecting Sybil. It probably came down to bloody-mindedness and her dislike of overbearing German correctness. Although conventionally anti-Semitic, just as she was critical of any of the darker races – even the French were suspect – she seemed not to regard Sybil through the prism of her wider prejudices.

  Schlegel hadn’t been looking to fall in love. It was hopeless, really. Even as he was aware of her casting her shadow over his soul he blamed his weakened state, treating his love for her as part of his sickness.

  He took to reading in the summerhouse where Sybil worked. She slept in the attic upstairs. It was as safe as anywhere. The house lay in an expensive westerly suburb, shielded from the road, with a large garden screened from other houses.