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This takes longer. “October eighth. I think.”
“Verdammte Scheisse. I got a telegram last month,” Schramm whispers, leaning close. “All leaves canceled. Report to your unit immediately! Jesus. October eighth… That’s a whole month of not reporting immediately.”
Closing his eyes, he concentrates on how much better his chest feels, and how glad he is to be here and not in Russia. “Once,” he says, “when I was at the front, we set up a field hospital in a town just taken by a panzer division. There were five or ten Reds around every house. Guts spilling out of bellies. Brains drizzling out of skulls. In the middle of the street, there was a forearm. Completely unharmed, except it was all by itself. No body.”
Renzo nods and pours.
“On the other side of the street, there was a naked leg, sticking straight up out of the snow. Rigid, like an obelisk!” Schramm takes as deep a breath as he can. “Most of the Russians were dead, but there were wounded. One was firing so wildly, no one could get near.”
Renzo’s vague eyes come up. “You shot him?”
“No, but I didn’t treat him.”
“Would’ve been suicide.”
“I knew you’d understand!” Schramm makes a strangled gagging sound, and for once the cough loses a skirmish. “Another man’s clothes were on fire,” he says, clearing his throat. “When the flames got to his ammunition pouch, it exploded. I was five meters away. It was a miracle I wasn’t killed.”
“No miracle for the poor bastard with the ammo pouch.” Renzo scrubs rhythmically at his face. “God only works for the survivors.”
“There was another man— shot through the eyes, from one side to the other. He moaned and moaned, and his face… Wounds steam in the cold. Like soup. Did you know that?”
“You told me before.”
“I expect I did. I talk too much when I’m drunk.” Schramm slumps in the warped wooden chair, fingers curled around his emptied glass. “Nothing I say shocks you,” he realizes. “You’re a veteran, aren’t you.”
“Abyssinia,” Renzo says, enunciating carefully. “Combat pilot.”
Schramm snickers. “Combat! Four hundred crack Italian pilots in the world’s best planes, sent to fight the Abyssinian air force— which consisted of eleven planes, as I recall, only eight of which were actually capable of flight.”
Renzo’s glassy eyes turn cold. “They had a million men under arms. Mountains favor the defenders. We had superiority in the air, and we used it. That war wasn’t the mismatch the British said it was. Fucking League of Nations,” he mutters. “If they hadn’t slapped sanctions on us, Italy never would’ve joined the Axis.”
“What was it like?” Schramm asks. “To fly, I mean. I’ve never been in an airplane.”
“You ski?”
“Notschrei’s about three kilometers from where I grew up.”
“Ever jump?”
Schramm nods.
“With a small plane, it’s like that, except you don’t come down. Single-engine trainers, they leap into the air. And then… you’re in a different world. On a cloudy day, you get up around two thousand meters, break through into sunshine—” He rubs his forehead with one hand. “Bombers are different. Like flying freight trains.”
Schramm tries to imagine it, but all that comes to mind are newsreel memories of Mussolini’s inglorious African adventure. Black bodies smeared with ocher, ru
Struck by a thought, Schramm stares at the man across the table. “You’re a Jew!” he whispers, astonished.
After a long moment, Renzo asks, “What makes you think so?”
“You’re healthy. You’re a combat pilot. Your country is— was— at war. You’re not in uniform. Ergo: you are a Jew.”
“And you,” Renzo says with a grin of warning, “are a deserter.”
Schramm’s laugh is quickly lost to a sharp, shallow cough. “It’s begi
“Jesus, Schramm! Why didn’t you take medical leave?”
Schramm tries again, and this time he manages the long, vigorous gasp required to shift a heavy clot of phlegm. “I’m not sick. I’m dying.”
Working it out, Renzo moves back in his chair. “Tuberculosis.”
“I fooled myself at first, and then… Well, the Reich was desperate for doctors in Russia. Now even amateurs can diagnose the condition!”
“I’ve seen it before. My father. A friend’s uncle.” Renzo’s brow wrinkles in a muzzy effort to understand. “Why don’t you just go home?”
“I’d be executed.”
“For deserting, sure, but you must have known for months.”
“Time, my friend, is rationed quite severely for the Reich’s consumptives. The final solution to the tuberculosis problem. Saves several Reichsmarks a day on hospital care.” Seeing no comprehension, Schramm waves the topic off. “Why the hell did you go to war? Italy is a beautiful country, filled with beautiful women, beautiful art, beautiful food. Why travel thousands of kilometers to the arse-end of Africa, just to bomb naked savages armed with spears?”
Renzo looks away. “It was… complicated. There was a girl my family wanted me to marry.” He shudders briefly. “And also the girl I was—” He clears his throat, and Schramm nods with avuncular understanding. “And there was another girl. She wouldn’t have me.”
“Your true love!” Schramm brightens. “She was a Catholic!”
“There were religious differences.” Renzo shrugs. “Anyway, joining the air force was patriotic. And convenient.”
“Shall I tell you why young men love war?” Schramm offers dreamily. “In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one big question with one right answer.” He pours them each another shot, emptying the bottle. “War smashes all our petty problems and sweeps the shards into one huge, patriotic pile. Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.”
“I believed the lies,” Renzo says, leaning back in his chair. “Like every other fool from the Alps to Sicily, I thought I had a share in the glory that was Rome. Mussolini screwed Italy with history, but it wasn’t always rape.” He reaches out to tap Schramm’s glass with his own. “Some of us bent over.”
“Would you like to know what the German lie is?” Schramm whispers. “We are the nation of Beethoven and Schiller and Goethe! We are a great people. But—” Schramm leans close. “Did I compose the Eroica? What poetry have I written? Race isn’t talent! Greatness isn’t just… being German. Who could believe nonsense like that? I’ll tell you who! Chicken farmers. Shoemakers. Grocery clerks. Academic drudges. Bureaucratic hacks.”
“Put ordinary shitheads in impressive uniforms, give them guns and permission to use them, they’ll shoot anyone who threatens their illusions,” Renzo agrees. “So what made you put the uniform on?”
Schramm digs out his wallet, extracts a photo. “That’s my Elsa with Klaus and Erwin. You should’ve seen her before she thickened up.” He passes the picture across the table. “Lovely girl. And we made strong, handsome children. Sturdy, my two boys! Perfect little Aryans. I joined the party because I wanted what the Führer wanted. I wanted German children to have a better childhood than my generation had after the Great War. They’d have good, nourishing, unadulterated food— wholemeal bread, fresh vegetables! The state would make industries clean up the poisons they were spewing into the air and the water.”
“An idealist,” Renzo groans. “The most dangerous kind of criminal!”
“Doctors would transcend the selfishness of treating single patients. We’d be physicians to the Volk! There’d be no disease, no deformity. No madness, no perversion or divorce. No unemployment—”
“And no Jews?”
“No drunks either!” Schramm sobers a bit. “I knew a Jew in Freiburg. He had a bookstore on Holbeinstrasse… You always hear that Jews are money mad, but—”