The Night of Shooting Stars Read online

  “The heavens above contain fleeting meteors and eternal, fixed stars. Our colleague, our comrade, Alfred Reinhardt-Thoma has secured his place in the immutable firmament. Alfred Reinhardt-Thoma is not dead. He lives for ever in his legacy.”

  Bora and his mother were separated at the end of the ceremony, as colleagues and friends flocked to them to express their formal condolences. Nina barely had time to tell him she’d been offered a ride to the Adlon, and would wait for him there. Within minutes, when the crowd and the authorities – who’d naturally been the first to take off – had left the hall, the man who had identified himself as Olbertz once more came up to him. “My apologies for approaching you earlier,” he said curtly. “You don’t know me, Colonel, but I used to work with your uncle. Earlier I spoke somewhat in the spur of the moment; I simply said what was on my mind … it was merely an impression.”

  We, his relatives, never even entertained the possibility of suicide, was on the tip of Bora’s tongue – where it stayed. He waited courteously, but showing no friendliness, not least because the physician did not wear a uniform. This lack of a reaction must have taken Olbertz aback, because he made a curt gesture, as if impatient with himself. “What the devil – no, look, Colonel, I know for certain it was suicide. I’d spoken to your uncle just the night before.”

  “I see. And did my uncle express an intention to kill himself?”

  “Not wholly of his own free will. This is what I feel like saying – do what you will with it. But I’ll deny that I ever told you.”

  Again, Bora did not react. These times called for restraint. It meant watching out for traps and provocations, not responding in the way the other might expect. Grief, anger, even outrage lay out of sight, where his army intelligence work had trained him to keep them. But he could think of at least three reasons why what Olbertz said could have come about: Reinhardt-Thoma had refused Party membership, with all that it implied from 1933 on; if, thanks to his international fame, they hadn’t dared to destroy his career, he was still precluded from high-ranking government posts. The other reason was that he had adopted the children of two colleagues who had died in disgrace, one of them a Jew – unacceptable in today’s Germany. Years earlier, the young man in question had been shipped off to study in America, where he safely lived to this day. Incidentally, it’d be a complicated matter to inform him of the death of his adoptive father: perhaps only Grandfather Franz-August could manage it, thanks to his old contacts in the diplomatic world. Judging by Olbertz’s discomfort, the third reason would be the least acceptable of them all. Bora wouldn’t let himself dwell on it, because he remembered all too well a couple of uncomfortable visits at his uncle’s house, after Poland. Ballastexistenzen – “dead-weight lives” – was a term he’d first learned then, in reference to medical practices the old man had protested against and refused to apply. Yet the highly respected physicians in attendance today, Karl Bonhoeffer and Leonardo Conti among them, theorized or supported that research. For all he knew, Olbertz might be Gestapo, or an informant, or be lying outright.

  Attendants must have opened a back room behind the hall, because a draught swept across it carrying that artificial confetti smell from the wreaths around the coffin. Could it be a sign of the approaching storm? Bora cut matters short.

  “Thank you, Dr Olbertz.”

  “Well, we’ll see each other then,” Olbertz grumbled just as drily, and turned his back on him.

  “See each other …” In Berlin, according to army colleagues who’d been there on furlough, the commonly accepted farewell nowadays was “Stay alive, will you?” The moment Olbertz was gone, before walking out into the street, Bora removed the Knight’s Cross from around his neck, and all other medals; he only left the campaign ribbons.

  Warm and sunny weather reigned over the region: “Führer weather”, toadies called it, just as in the Kaiser’s days they’d called it “Hohenzollern weather”. In the fifth year of war, it meant that there was no storm in sight – whatever he might have felt – and gave the green light to enemy pilots. For Bora, freshly arrived from the south of Europe, the temperature was comfortable, especially in the shade of the aged linden trees in full leaf. He took the tram from Thielplatz to Leipziger Platz, from where he’d continue on foot towards the Adlon. Along the way he decided to look around, as if this were not the city he knew so well, the city where he’d attended a good part of his military schooling and met Dikta so many times. This, he thought, is what it is: a place I’m visiting for the first time, over which I pass no judgement. The details stood out even more than the massive damage to entire blocks, more than the mutilated ministries and gutted embassies, those scars he’d seen in other cities, for which German bombs were often responsible: weeds growing rank among the ruins in the summer heat, debris that had been punctiliously swept aside, glass fragments shining like icy fangs; there were vegetable gardens in lieu of flower beds, solemn cornices topping nothing, perhaps a single fallen tile, or a sea of tiles, a nakedness of sky. Last night, while waiting for the second leg of the journey, the co-pilot, a Berliner, had blandly recited a long list of what had been totally or partially destroyed. “In Mitte and the surrounding quarters it’s easier to count what’s still standing. We did all we could, but we couldn’t …” He stopped there. “My brother was a pilot too,” Bora had told him. “Tomorrow it’ll be thirteen months since he died over Kursk. I don’t doubt you’ve done all that is in your power.” During this war, there had been times when the place he found himself in got under his skin, fascinating or awing him. Spain, Poland, Russia, France, Italy. Even those few days in Crete: every front echoed in his mind, and often in his heart. Not now. Not even in Berlin. These days he moved from his command post to this or that sector along the defensive line like one who knows that he is only passing through and must neither hate nor fall in love with his surroundings. Seeing everything, closely observing the details, but passing through.

  The truth was that he’d begun pulling away from things. As he pulled away, he was worried by it, because attachment to something, to someone, had kept him alive. But attachment also hurt; once you let go it’d be easier to fight, to resist, so long as you didn’t necessarily expect to survive. Maintaining control was all he could do, so that others wouldn’t notice – neither the teenaged soldiers who regarded him as an adult, nor the commanders in whose eyes he was still a lad. Strange that some of his colleagues still thought him agreeable: Bora felt anything but agreeable. He acted according to strict education and training, never revealing himself except in some pages of his diary, which, however, he often tore up.

  12:15 P.M.

  In the square where he got off the tram there was some kind of confusion. The fire service and bomb disposal troops blocked both Hermann Göring Strasse and Leipziger Strasse. They were removing, it seemed, an unexploded bomb left by the air raid from three weeks earlier. Bora had to backtrack on foot down Saarlandstrasse and around the immense block of the Air Ministry – so much like an unimaginative schoolhouse built for Titans – to reach Prinz Albrecht Strasse. A minor incident that had occurred on the tram was still upsetting him, and he now had to make a detour past the infamous Gestapo building and SS headquarters into the bargain, to regain Wilhelmstrasse.

  The battered parade route, lined with state buildings, had not escaped the bombs. Bora walked without focusing on anything, staring ahead, determined to keep what Olbertz had said from his mother. Why worry her? Mourning added on to mourning is like unfairly targeting a house already struck.

  He’d walked beyond the courtyard of the Air Ministry, and north nearly as far as the crossroads with Leipziger Platz (at this end, too, blocked by an armed patrol), when he heard the sound of boots quickly approaching from behind. Bora was one of those whom the front line makes stoic, not excitable, and he did not turn to look. Whoever it was, he would overtake him and go past. A grip on his elbow, however, was another matter altogether: physical contact made him react immediately. It took him a pinch of
fraught seconds to identify the newcomer as someone familiar, wearing the uniform of the German General Staff.

  “Bora, I thought it was you!”

  Bora had heard somewhere that Benno von Salomon had made full colonel at last. A whole year had passed since their days around Kursk. Bora saluted, and the look he gave the hand grasping his left arm was his only display of irritation. The hold was released, but the anxious quality of the approach remained.

  “I urgently need to talk to you. To talk to you, understand?”

  “But Colonel —”

  “Ssh, ssh … Please, act normal.”

  Bora was acting normal. It was Salomon who was staring at him with a bewildered look, and although Bora had already seen him fight his, in the man’s own words, “inner demons” in Russia, this time it wasn’t fidgety nerves: it bordered on panic. A step back created enough space between them to make Bora feel more comfortable.

  “What is it, Colonel? What happened?” he asked, although for some reason he doubted that he wanted to know.

  Once more Salomon hung on his arm, which downright annoyed Bora.

  “Let’s walk. Walk on this side. Let’s cross. Act normal. There, to Kaiserhofstrasse.” They did cross the street in that direction, but Bora failed to see why. The ruins were high as hills on the other side; of the once imposing Hotel Kaiserhof, only a gutted shell remained – landfill material, with its scalloped entrance canopy hanging down, smashed and empty. The gilded lettering on the lone-standing front wall had about as little to do with an “imperial court” as the street and the establishment that had once borne that name. On the other side of the road, beheaded young trees were nothing but stumps.

  “Quick, Bora, answer me: are you familiar with the full meaning of the word ‘oath’, of the concept of loyalty?”

  Bora could hardly believe his ears. It was out of place here and now, but it wasn’t the obviousness of the answer that troubled him: those emphases did.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “They are not unambiguous, you know. There isn’t just one kind of loyalty. That is precisely what complicates the lives of men, of officers … of us all. In the end, they are nothing but words.”

  I studied philosophy – don’t try to teach me nominalism, Bora thought. The moment that principles decay into simple verbal expressions, a moral danger awaits. He didn’t answer, because an opinion doesn’t necessarily demand an answer. He realized that his silence might make him appear like a young politicized officer, something he wasn’t, or was only in part. But he had no sympathy for unconcealed fear. Stepping aside, he freed himself of Salomon’s hold.

  “I need to —” The dog-faced former lawyer stopped in mid-sentence, squinting in the sun. He didn’t tan, even at the height of summer; Bora remembered that detail about him. Today, if anything, he looked green. “I must speak to you.”

  Bora tried not to stare. It was undeniable: he felt a change in the weather, as he had in Ukraine in the summer of Kursk, when citadels of dark clouds rose so far away on the horizon that they seemed harmless, though the atmosphere was nevertheless already electric, as if saturated with lightning. The fact that he was now facing his former commander without encouraging him to speak would either keep the man from embarking on uncomfortable confessions, or else push him to hasten and speak at length.

  Salomon wiped the perspiration from his upper lip with a starched handkerchief, and when he tried to put it away he at first missed the pocket in his breeches. The General Staff officer’s red band on them, Bora knew from his Roman experience, meant both privilege and limitations. Occasionally risk, if one was ready to take it.

  “I absolutely must speak to you in private, Bora. When did you arrive? How long will you be in Berlin? Where are your rooms?”

  A lie was better than a partial truth. “I don’t know yet where I’ll billet. I’m only here for a matter of hours, so it’s better if we speak now, Colonel. We’re in the open, there’s no one around; it seems like a safe place.”

  “No. Not here. And ‘safety’ is only a string of meaningless letters.”

  More nonsense. It was impossible for Bora not to take his turn to ask the obvious.

  “Are you feeling well, sir?”

  “I’ve been throwing up three days in a row. Worse than in ’41.” The starched handkerchief surfaced again. “You be the judge.”

  Given the premise, the least advisable thing for Bora to do would be to ask if there was anything he could do. He remained silent, trying to understand where Salomon’s personal exhaustion ended and a real threat began. With a man like him it could be anything, from a private little scandal to a shameful disease, to the most unthinkable extremes for a war-weary German officer in 1944, which Bora did not even want to graze with thought. Those summer storms in Ukraine returned to mind, the way you couldn’t ignore the coming of bad weather. Please tell me what it’s all about, he was on the point of urging.

  The colonel saved him the effort. “I was approached by Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg.”

  Those few apparently neutral words, pronounced in a strangled, low voice, put Bora on high alert. As far back as 1941, he’d been warned (in Crete, of all places) about the left-leaning Schulenburgs; Fritz-Dietlof was serving as governor of Lower and Upper Silesia in those days, and his father as ambassador in Moscow. He’d had orders to monitor their telephone calls at the embassy. Had he not – rather coincidentally – been expelled from the Soviet Union, he’d have done just that.

  “… The younger Count von der Schulenburg heard your name from Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. It’s a godsend, meeting you here today.”

  Time to put his foot down. “Forgive me, sir: for what reason would Colonel von Stauffenberg mention my name to Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg? I don’t know either of them in person. Claus von Stauffenberg and I only met once, during a sporting competition years ago.”

  “You’re aware he is the deputy commander of the Reserve Army?”

  “I am, Colonel, but still fail to see why he should mention me to Count von der Schulenburg or anyone else, or why the fact seems to trouble you.”

  Pink dust rose from the spectral Kaiserhof, as a brick noiselessly fell from a window frame. Salomon provided no answer.

  “I’m staying at the Adlon – or at least I was until this morning. You too, right? I heard your lady mother has rooms there as well.”

  “Your lady mother …” These old-fashioned niceties, so out of place in a street that looked like the moon. Bora acted no less inscrutably than he’d done with Olbertz. “As I say, I’m due to leave Berlin very soon, Colonel. Please, if there is anything private or urgent you wish to share with me, do it now. I am in a hurry.”

  “No, no. I am not going to tell you here, not going to tell you now. Leave it be. This evening … You’re not leaving before tonight, are you?”

  “I believe not.”

  “I’ll find you.”

  Bora watched him hasten down the street towards what remained of the Trinity church, zigzagging like a hare before the fox. This, on top of everything else. Just what he needed, now that he was back in Berlin for the first time in years. Returning for a death in the family, he had found the city in this state, they’d sprung on him the news that his uncle might have been forced to commit suicide, and, as if that weren’t enough, his former commander on the Russian front seemed close to mental collapse. It made him even more impatient to see his mother, because she, too, would be leaving soon, as soon as a train could set off with a modicum of safety towards the south-west, and the city of Leipzig.

  Bora gloomily continued past destruction old and new; right and left, what the bombs of 8 March had not accomplished in the quarter, those fallen on 21 June had. Hardly a ministry survived intact, not to speak of the two Chancellery buildings; and it’d been more than a year since St Hedwig’s – the Catholic church attended by the Bora family when they were in Berlin – had burned to the ground.

  HOTEL ADLON, PARISER PLATZ, 1:10 P.M.


  The Adlon, at least, was still standing. The bricked-up ground floor, a solid wall that completely obliterated its famous glazed archways, gave it the appearance of a graceless Chinese fortress, set in a sea of ruins. Were the smiling stucco masks that had once decorated the arches still there, behind the bricks? This was another place it was safer to look at as if it were for the first time, given the memories of Dikta for ever associated with it. At the beginning of the war (while Bora underwent Abwehr training, and later guest-lectured at the Military Academy), boys and girls seeking autographs used to gather by the entrance to the hotel. Avid readers of Signal and Der Adler, they collected the autographed likenesses of the most successful flyers, and of soldiers decorated with the coveted Knight’s Cross. Like poker players, they leafed through photographic postcards and spied on the officers entering and leaving the Adlon. Photos were worth more, apparently, if those portrayed later died a hero’s death. Bora had grown to loathe the myth. It irritated him that, when he’d received the Ritterkreuz in Kiev, they’d published an article about it in all the Leipzig dailies. But it was hard to avoid, with a grandfather who was a publisher – if for no other reason than that the journalists wanted to please him. A gentleman, his stepfather preached, should appear in a newspaper only at birth and when he dies.

  These days, there was no demand for autographs; few school-age girls were in sight, only a handful among them reasonably well dressed; and even these wore outfits too short or too tight for them, to which lace hems and cuffs had been added to make them last another season. Bora was struck by seeing these Berlin women wear whatever they could, even evening-gown material, satin and other shiny fabrics. But then, a quarter of them no longer had a roof over their heads, let alone a wardrobe. Among those he’d noticed from the tram, walking or in queues outside shops and warehouses, the harlots stood out like tropical birds. Silk or nylon stockings, high heels, a brief glimpse of a lacy underskirt as they climbed onto a bus – the pretty arsenal so favoured by men (Bora included) was now all too often seen on girls who brazenly passed their tongue over their teeth after touching up the rouge on their lips. His stepfather disparagingly spoke of the “whorement” – a word of his own making – of French girls during the Great War; at that time he was already a Catholic convert, and – newly bigoted – pining for the young widow Bora, who took her time before saying yes to remarriage. To General Sickingen, all women, save his wife and sisters, were potential whores.