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Short Story

Lebensraum

In the first few stunned moments, all I could do was act on imperatives.

Get out of the house. That was the first imperative. I didn’t think about packing a suitcase or turning the heating off or anything else. I stood up from where I was sitting in the kitchen, walked out into the hallway, took my coat from the hook, scooped the car keys up from the dish and walked out of the front door.

Next was just to drive. I walked, or rather I shambled, I am after all getting on in years, more than getting on in years, I am an old, old man, I shambled down the garden path to the drive where I depressed the black nub and – qua-qua – switched off the alarm. I opened the car door and sat in the driver’s seat and, despite the fact that the desire rose up in me, the desire to sit a moment and think, to think about the best course of action, a rival voice, the imperative voice, quelled all others: drive, it said. Drive. And so I drove, quietly and calmly, away from my house and towards town.

It wasn’t until I left the town behind me that a third imperative presented itself in response to the gentle insistence, the where next urge, that seemed to emerge like an ache between my shoulder-blades.

And the imperative voice spoke again: Go North, it said. Go North. Don’t think. Don’t look back.

Go North.

I drove North for much of that day without stopping. I didn’t turn the radio on and I tried not to think of anything beyond the road in front of me. I reacted, as anyone would react, to the lunatics on the road, the furious speeding crazies, with that involuntary inward clench, the tightening of my hands about the wheel, the creasing of my brow, and I was sweating, sweating to beat the band, but I managed to keep the whistle in my ears, the anxious, pleading weakness, the beating of a weak dog’s heart, quelled, as best as I was able. I knew I was over-reacting, knew I had weeks or months, knew I could possibly die before anything actually happened. And yet, all the same, a moment passes and your life is no longer your own.

And so I drove. Through Coven, Standeford, Gailey, Penkridge. I ticked off each local signpost in my head as a validation of my sanity. I know where I am, therefore I know what I am doing. After Dunston, I joined the A6 and headed North. At some point in the morning, the mobile phone my daughter bought me for Christmas last year rang, the whiskery chirrup of Vivaldi’s Autumn rendered polyphonic, and I fidgeted in my jacket pocket for the handset, lowered the window and dropped it to the road without thinking twice. A tiny mirror sliver of my brain heard or imagined the skittering sound of plastic on tarmac. If it didn’t shatter on impact it would be destroyed in seconds beneath the wheels of a car or a van or an SUV.

The imperative voice said: Good.

You should know: I am a 92-year-old man and I am on the run from the police.

Or not the police, as such. I am on the run from a special task force assigned to track people like me down. You probably think I’m a paedophile.

I’m not a paedophile.

By lunchtime I was tired and confused. My head was hurting, inside pounding and outside stiff. I felt creased, like a clean piece of paper folded in half. My throat was dry and my heart was rattling in my chest, the way it used to do when I drank coffee. For as long as I thought was sensible I resisted stopping. I knew the point would come when I would have to stop but I continued to urge myself on, one more junction, one more junction.

It wasn’t until Dunfermline that I gave myself up to more bodily imperatives. I parked the car alongside the road lining the wharf, and I took myself inside the nearest guest house where I took a room and, thankfully, discovered I had enough money to pay in cash. A neat young woman asked if I needed any help with my luggage and I said no, I was perfectly all right, thank you.

Once in the room, I tried and failed to urinate and then I tried and failed for a long time to sleep, the room’s clock ticking like an admonition. The busy fidget of my mind as it scurried back and forth across my finances and my safety and my daughter and her children and the time of year and the fruitlessness and futility of my running, and, of course, the news itself, the news I read in the newspaper and feared hearing again on the radio, the story that had sent me from my home in Wolverhampton to a small guest house in Dunfermline, and that inevitably (I knew without the imperative voice speaking) only the first stop on my journey. Back and forth, criss and cross, loop about loop, signatures and patterns repeating and repeating, so many fishes swallowing their own tails.

Eventually, however, almost in spite of myself, I slept.

There are so many things I don’t remember, or choose not to remember. Perhaps, it strikes me now, remembering and not remembering are all that keep the average person from clawing at the walls. I could, you see, list off certain facts to you, certain dates, certain events, in order to let you know the who and the why and the where and the what.

I was taken prisoner in July 1944, for example. I am fairly precise about that now, because I have read books on the subject. At the time, I couldn’t have told you what my name was, never mind the day or the month or the year. We were made to march, you see, the police regiment I served in under Lechthaler. Lieutenant-Colonel SS Lechthaler, I should say. We marched pretty much 90 km straight, from Lvov, in the rain. The ground sucked and pulled at our boots like hungry mouths. All of us felt it, the going. We were drained and, of course we were hungry and many of us were missing our wives or our children or our mothers or whoever. We were not given training and we had no real combat experience and they told us we would be used sparingly and we would never see the front line of the combat. But, of course, they lied.

I remember that we were joined by several smaller German units outside Brady, and they had no time for us. We were Ukrainian, you see. We were Ukrainian and we fought on the side of the Germans because we thought that would help ensure our own independence later on, when everything was over. Not everybody agreed. There were internecine struggles behind closed doors. I was a supporter of the UVO. Others followed the OUN-B, who felt that the Nazis would use us and lie to us and cast us aside. The Germans saw us as expendable cattle. What do you call it? Cannon fodder. Still, it was a proud moment. We all of us brightened momentarily as our ranks grew. The rain eased off like an omen of goodwill and we ate and some of us managed to sleep and there was talk and singing, there was music, someone produced a trembita and someone else a sopilka and before we knew it our spirits were soaring with melodies of home.

Anything seemed possible. But of course nothing was possible. We were clowne.

The Red Army was unstoppable. We were, as I said, ill-trained and out of our depth, but we were hungry and, as men fell around us, we were driven to fight all the harder. We had nothing left, you see, and we were fighting for our families and for our country. Victory and freedom. Hewn from woodland and scrub, however, we were no match for soldiers hewn from stone and ice. You should’ve seen their eyes. That is something no history book will tell you. The Russian soldiers looked as if they were dead, as if their eyes were granite, as if their hearts were steel. They fought because it was all they knew. Everything else was gone. We charged them, tried to stick them like pigs with our bayonets, tried to shoot them and punch them and stab them and bring them low, we were bloodthirsty and uncouth and brutal but whatever we did was futile.

I was taken prisoner, along with over three thousand of my brothers in arms, and shipped to Rimini, a city at that time torn apart by aerial bombardments, where we languished for three painful years. I thought I was finished. I thought we would stand trial, as so many others were standing trial, and I thought I would go to prison for the rest of my life.

But I was wrong.

We were shipped to Britain in our hundreds. Mangel an Arbeitskräften, we were told. Certain bright sparks piped up and said it didn’t honour the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war being made to work, but I kept quiet. Most of us kept quiet. It was a good thing.

You probably think me crazy. Rimini, a beautiful spot on the Adriatic Coast, was a nightmare; whilst mucking out pigs in a sty in the rain on a smallholding in the East Midlands was heaven. It sounds insane, I know.

The work was hard, stripped the skin from the palms of my hands and made my feet throb like hammer-struck thumbs. But for all that there was a purity in my labour, or so it felt to me. A not quite atoning, between me and my God. I didn’t want and didn’t receive forgiveness, but the earth beneath my feet and the the rain on my skin and the cold that seemed to settle in my bones all helped salve me, make me whole, or more whole than I’d been in a long time.

I knew men from the Nightingale battalion. I knew men who served as part of the Ukrainian Self Defence Legion. I knew men who took part in the bloody suppression of the 1944 Warsaw uprising. I knew men who slaughtered English and American service men who were being sheltered by partisans in Slovakia, although the men in question would not admit to the slaughter. I knew men who attended training centres for concentration camp guards. I knew men who took part in massacres. I even called some of these men my friends.

But I was not involved myself. I was a soldier fighting a war and like any soldier I may have killed other soldiers but that is all I did. I believed in a free Ukraine and I did what I did for my country. I hated the Russians with all of my heart. I hated their lies. I was what they have taken to calling a Ukrainian nationalist. But I was not a murderer and I was not involved in murdering innocents.

I was a soldier. It was a war.

History being the tale of the victors, I know now that there is no such thing as an innocent Nazi. There are no variations. Nobody believes that such men can exist. Nobody believes that people act on orders because they trust their superiors to be superiors, as I did, as many of the people I fought alongside did. We were soldiers in a war. I don’t expect your compassion. I don’t even really want your sympathy or your kindness or your understanding. I am merely stating the case, once again, for posterity’s sake.

Some of us really were just soldiers who fought on the wrong side. Some of us really are just old men. Some of us are not crafty or evil. Some of us are not devils. I am not saying we were heroes. I am not saying we deserve to be thought of better than we are.

I am just saying that we were men. I am just saying that I am a man, as weak and as frail and as stupid as all men can be.

For decades – listen to me, for decades – I looked over my shoulder. I eyed all news like a hawk. There was a man called Fitzroy MacLean, a Tory MP when Tory wasn’t a dirty word and a war hero, who was assigned the task of identifying what they were calling war criminals even then. His complaints about the hopelessness of his task were unspeakably satisfying. Not because I truly felt then as if I was running or attempting to flee my responsibility for a crime. More as a result of the fact that it was 1946 and I, like many other people, had emerged only recently from a war, and I felt that I deserved time to recover, perhaps even deserved more time to recover from my ills and woes because, after all, it is more difficult to lose than to win.

In 1947, Foreign Office Minister Hector McNeil attempted to brush aside continued unease about the use of ‘German’ POWs as farm labour. Home Office officials attempted to have us all sorted out but the prime minister, Clement Attlee, had his way and we were left in peace, left free to marry and become citizens and live lives. The rudimentary network of communication we’d established to let each other know the latest was rapidly dismantled and, although none of us ever really moved away, we stopped meeting and, if we saw or were seen about town, we made sure to cross the road and bury the history that existed between us deeper than deep. I worked as a farm labourer for a decade or more and then I met a woman – you don’t need to know her name – and I fell in love. We married, there were children. Again, I won’t say how many. I took a job in the postal service. I learned the importance of having a home, of having a living space to call your own. My wife passed away after almost twenty-three years of marriage, I continued to live. My children grew up, married, had children of their own. I retired, drew my postal pension, resisted the urging of my children to travel.

But still we were not allowed to sleep easily in our beds. Fifty years and Scotland Yard were still investigating us and keeping tabs on us, despite the fact that many of us were dead. We built lives, took jobs, had families. We changed our names, we learned how easy it was to lie. An old man, Anthony Sawoniuk, was arrested and tried for the murder of 18 Jews. Anthony Sawoniuk was living the life of a retired railway ticket inspector and died in Norwich prison aged 84.

It wasn’t until 1999 that my faltering heart thought: yes, okay, now it stops. Scotland Yard did away with its specialist war crimes unit. Yes, I thought. Okay, I thought. Now it stops, I thought.

But of course it never stops.

The newspaper this morning informed me that the hunt for war criminals who have been living in Britain since the end of the second world war has been quietly reopened by Scotland Yard.

The move, I read, has reignited the debate about prosecuting men whose crimes were committed so long ago.

The next morning, with a clearer head and a stern sense of my own direction, I withdrew £500 from my bank account through a hole in the wall. I needed clean clothes and so I spent the better part of the morning shopping. It occurred to me that the transactions could be traced but that no longer mattered as much as it had done the previous day. I made sure to buy warm clothes: thick corduroy trousers, a neat shirt, a thick woollen jumper, vests and underwear. I made sure to buy a waterproof coat and a scarf.

And I bought a map of Scotland.

I returned at a gentle pace to the guest house, changed into my new clothes and left my old clothes in a pile on the bed.

The imperative voice spoke up again, restless and urgent for me to leave.

Move, it said. North, it said. North and still North. Move.

As I check out, the young girl tells me that she thinks it is great to see an old boy so full of life. She tells me that I am an inspiration. I tell her in return that there is an old Ukrainian saying, A friendly word is better than a heavy cake. She laughs, and her laugh is pretty and musical, like water falling on silver daffodils. Pretty much any-thing, she says, is better than heavy cake.

I return her smile and bid her good day, keen to leave her with the impression that I am in fact nothing more than a very nice old man.

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