The trouble with lying is that, eventually, one reaches a point of exhaustion, and then, once that point is reached, it becomes easier for the truth to emerge.
Rudy had grown up in a moral household, and lying wasn’t exactly a deadly sin, but it wasn’t encouraged either. Even if it meant turning a blind eye to lies that were not ever spoken aloud, like the time his father came home smelling of someone else’s perfume and had lipstick smudged on his shirt collar, and Rudy said nothing to his mother about it.
But war changes people; it makes the borders between fact and fantasy as blurry as loved ones seen through eyes of tears as one waves to them from a moving train. War riddles the truth with lies, like a body riddled with bullets, and it’s hard to tell what the original may have looked like.
He didn’t see himself as a liar, exactly. What he did was to offer people closure and comfort and to help them move forward with their lives – even if it meant doing so without their loved ones. He’d got the job by accident, really. He was in a POW camp in enemy territory. It still baffled him how he’d managed to survive the last days of the war. Everyone said he’d be the first one gone, the first name to be printed in the paper. Poor, weak Rudy, who had never had the courage to stand up to anyone had outlived them all.
Somehow word got around the camp about his penmanship. He had dreamt of being a designer, an artist, one whose calligraphy adorned advertisements for perfume and cigars, but that was before the war, in another time. He’d been whittling a stick with the jagged edge of a rock for no reason other than it passed the time when he received his first commission.
“I heard you can write.”
The voice belonged to a narrow shadow, and the head looked like it might’ve been round once. He looked up and saw a man with a bandage over half of his face. “That depends. What do you want written?”
He held up a pencil stub and a jagged page from an exercise book between two bandaged fingers. The rest were missing. “For my mother.”
Rudy’s own mother had died during the liberation. The liberators used the women left in the city until they had nothing left to give; some survived, some didn’t. He wouldn’t find this out until years later.
“All right, tell me what to say.”
In the first month, Rudy wrote up to five letters a day on some days. He refused to work on Sunday, even when begged. Most of the time, the people asking him to transcribe their messages had no idea if the letters would be posted or if they would even manage to reach their intended recipients. But it made them feel better to know that there was something on paper, at the very least, of themselves and of the things they wanted their family members to know.
It was a little after dawn when Rudy heard the first knock on the frame of his bunk.
“It’s too early,” he said, squinting at the offender.
“Please. It’s not for me.”
Rudy sat up. “Of course it’s for you. Every letter I write is for you – all of you.”
“I have to send this one.” He raked his hands through his hair, and golden strands floated in the dusty light. “I have to.”
There was an edge to his voice that made Rudy tug his shirt over his head. “Fetch me some water, and I’ll find you outside under my usual tree.” By the time Rudy’s face emerged, he was gone.
The heat piggybacked Rudy the way his younger brother did during their games of cops and robbers. He looked at the man – boy, really – opposite him and noticed how the dust and sweat collected in the folds of his forehead and the furrow between his eyes.
“Why can’t you write this? Your hands seem to be OK, and I heard you were an engineer before, so you had to be able to read and write for that job.”
“A student.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t an engineer yet.”
Rudy sighed.
“I’ve tried to write this myself, believe me.”
“Ok, start at the beginning.”
He closed his eyes.
Rudy knew from experience not to hurry him, but after ten minutes his patience wore thinner than the air he was trying to breathe.
“Dear Mr and Mrs Schwarz…”
Rudy listened to the measured voice outline the letter and felt a lump form in his throat. He paused to have sip of water, only to feel his eyes begin to sting as well. The heat lured the sweat down his face and neck, and he kept writing. The sound of fellow inmates chipping at something resounded through the camp, and he rolled the pencil between his fingers, hoping to coax more words from the last millimetres of its tip.
“Yours faithfully, Joseph.” He opened his eyes, squinting as if to acclimatise to the light. “Is it a good letter? Is it a good letter, Rudy?”
“It’s a great letter.”
Joseph covered his mouth, but the sob had already escaped.
Rudy put his hand on Joseph’s shoulder. “It is a great letter.”
Joseph nodded and puffed out his chest, biting his lip as he looked at the ground.
He was about to fold the page and hand it to Joseph, as he usually did, but then he paused. “Look, Joseph, would you mind if I keep this? I want to write it again – neater. I messed up a bit here.”
Joseph didn’t look at the place Rudy was pointing to. “Yeah, sure.” He sniffed and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of brown in its wake. “I’ll come and get it from you later.”
Rudy nodded and watched Joseph stride away. He looked at the page again and watched the words blur under droplets of moisture.
Dear Mr and Mrs Schwarz
My name is Joseph Wasserknecht, and your son Stephan was the closest thing I had to a brother at the front. I know it was been many months since the war has been over, but I have been living in a POW camp, and they say it is a matter of weeks before we will be released. They have been saying that since we arrived.
I don’t know what the authorities are doing now that the battle is over, and I don’t know how much has been communicated to you – I’m guessing there has been no communication at all – about Stephan’s final moments.
I remember my parents receiving a letter when my brother Dieter fell. There was no detail. It only said where he had last been seen. We received no personal belongings, no indication of where he was buried, or how it was that he died. My mother never stopped wondering: did his suffer? Was it quick? I later found out that Dieter had bled out in a field hospital because the doctors took too long to realise the extent of his injuries. I never told my mother that. I know that she suffered under the weight of not knowing, but I think knowing would have broken what was left of her heart.
I have debated with myself whether I should tell you what I know, but I can no longer carry this burden alone. People tell me I should be grateful to be alive, but how can I be when my best friend in the world is dead? Mr and Mrs Schwarz, believe me when I tell you this – if I could go back and trade places with Stephan, I would; he was a far better man than I could ever be.
It was early in the morning, and we heard the siren warning us that the enemy was active. We had hardly slept; the previous night had been relentless shelling, and our orders were to fire as many rounds as we could. There was a break a few hours before dawn, and Stephan and I were sharing a cigarette. He was telling our company a story about the crazy horse on your farm, making us laugh and forget about our hunger. We heard the siren and crouched into position, waiting. Stephan continued his story – the one about how the rooster used to ride on the horse’s head like he was the Kaiser himself and how he had tugged at the horse’s mane, trying to steer it this way and that – and we were all laughing. We heard the whistle of the next barrage, and Stephan, who’d been sharing in our laughter, turned just as the bullet hit him between the eyes. I watched his body crumple down, and we kept on fighting – as we were trained to do. There was no time for anything more. When there was a lull – I don’t know how much later that was – our commanding officer told me to take Stephan to the field hospital. You must believe me when I say that I carried his body as carefully as I could on my shoulder. I tried not to bump him, but it was hard to see. When I got to the field hospital, I had to register his death. I put his body on the ground, and then some orderlies came. They said he would be taken to a communal burial ground, but they didn’t say where.
I could not go back to my post after that. I stayed at the hospital wing. I just remember sitting on the ground and staring into space. I don’t remember very much about how I returned to my company.
I am sorry to be the bearer of such sad news, but I believe that you have a right to know: Stephan did not suffer. He was dead before he knew what happened, and he was happy in the moments before his death. This is as true as I sit here. Please, I beg of you, please acknowledge that this letter and its message have reached you so that I may be absolved of the burden of knowing more about your son’s death than you do.
Yours faithfully
Joseph Wasserknecht
By the time he sat down to rewrite the letter, Rudy had it memorised. He could still hear the halting retelling and how the timbre of Joseph’s voice changed near the end. War might be hell, he thought, but only for the survivors. He’d been lucky to have been a paper pusher during the fight. The drill sergeant had taken one look at his hands and said he wasn’t cut out for mud under his fingernails. So instead he sat in an office with a gaggle of women and took notes, delivered messages and signed off on orders for supplies. They called him the Quartermaster, despite his junior position, and everyone tried to curry favour with him so that something extra might find its way into their rations. He’d had no idea of what it was like at the front. Until now, the others wanted him to write love letters to their sweethearts or to tell their mothers that they were alive and hoped to be home soon.
But Joseph’s letter had been something else.
That night in the mess hall, he handed the folded paper to Joseph, who crammed it into his shirt pocket between mouthfuls of potato. He nodded his thanks, and returned to his plate.
Rudy tapped his shoulder and bent until his mouth was level with Joseph’s ear. “Are there others? Like you?”
Joseph frowned and brought his fist to his mouth to shield Rudy from the potato. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know of anyone else who saw his friends die?”
Joseph laughed. “Take a look around you, man.”
“Tell them to come to me,” said Rudy. “Tell them I want to help them let the families know.”
Rudy was into his second week of the unburdening letters, as he came to call them, when camp officials approached him as he was about to hear Fritz Hardeck’s account of how his company had been ambushed, and he’d escaped with everything but his left leg by hiding under his friend’s corpse. It became apparent to Rudy that not all the men were storytellers like Joseph, so it fell on him to flesh the stories out a bit here and there.
“We heard about what you’re doing here.” The officer waved his baton in Rudy’s general direction.
“Have you come to tell me to stop?”
“We’ve come to offer you a job.”
The office in the watchtower had a desk and chairs, which certainly made writing easier then perching the paper on a brick on his lap as he wrote, but Rudy missed the fresh air. The line of men outside his door never seemed to shorten, and he kept to his rule about not working on Sundays – though he may as well have. He couldn’t stop thinking about the stories he’d heard, about all those men who died, mostly suffering. Man after man unburdened himself. Some returned multiple times – there had been so much death. He tried to find sanitary ways of explaining the sounds that were described to him – of how a man died choking on his own blood, of the screaming when a limb was lost, of the gasping that followed when a face was blown off, of the moment of impact of a bullet or bomb, of the way blood splatters on the hands and body and ground when you fling your buddy over your shoulder to carry him to safety, and of men calling for their mothers, lovers and God.
After a while, Rudy felt as though he may as well have been at the front. His days were filled with the sounds and smells of death and his nights conjured the memories of the survivors in loop of endless dreams designed to terrorise him.
He rubbed the skin at the bridge of his nose where the lines of his frown had deepened. The watch tower was silent for the first time that day, and he took advantage of it, allowing himself to fetch water and stretch the band of muscles in his shoulders.
“Are you Rudy?”
“Yes. What’s your name?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“It’s the normal procedure, yes.”
“I don’t think I can.”
Rudy sipped his water. “Why’s that?”
“Because the letter I want you to write has to be anonymous.”
“Look, if it’s such a big deal to you, why can’t we just use a fake name? We’ll call you Max Mustermann, yes?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He looked down at his shoes and balled his fists. “I don’t want people thinking that someone called Max Mustermann killed their son.”
Rudy tugged at the hem of his shirt and sat down. He pulled a fresh piece of paper out of the top drawer and hovered over the pencils before choosing one. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said, gesturing for the man to sit in the chair opposite him.
“What do I say first?”
“Usually you tell me who you’re writing to.”
“Like, ‘Dear Mrs Denker’?
“Exactly. Is it Mr and Mrs Denker?”
“Just Mrs. Mr Denker died in the other war.”
The room was silent for an hour after the man left. He never told Rudy his name, although Rudy could have found out easily enough. He stood up to leave only when the guard came and told Rudy that he was locking up for the night; he said something about needing to clock off early. Rudy nodded, pushed in his chair and left. He went and stood at the far end of the yard where the fence formed a V as it bent around the pole and a shifty-eyed guard pretended to care about whether he was planning to escape. He pushed his palms over his eye sockets until he saw stars. It was only when he felt a hand on his shoulder that he realised he’d been screaming.
“It’s all right.”
He recognised Joseph’s voice.
“Drink this. It helps.”
It smelled like paint thinners and left a metallic taste in his mouth. “Thank you.” He followed Joseph to a low wall and sat beside him.
“You weren’t a soldier, were you? I heard some of the boys call you the Quartermaster.”
Rudy’s laugh escaped as a snort. “That feels like a lifetime ago.”
“But what you’re doing now – you’re helping. We don’t say it, but it does. We feel lighter thanks to your ‘unburdening’ letters.”
Rudy looked at him.
“You talk in your sleep sometimes.” He stared off into the distance. “You know, that’s what I fear most. Not staying here but going back. Having to act like everything is normal and like I didn’t spend the last few years of my life shooting strangers. The time we spend waiting here makes it worse because I don’t know what it means to be a civilian anymore.”
“Yes, you’ve seen too much.”
“And how do I ever explain what I’ve done?” He chuckled. I remember that my aunt and uncle used to visit us in our small flat. They were rich and loved to travel. My aunt would sit in our lounge and go into all kinds of detail that we didn’t want to hear about the places they’d visited and sights they saw and food they ate. We didn’t understand or relate to it, so it was just noise – hot air, you know? I could escape after a few minutes because I was a kid, but my parents had to sit there and listen to her stupid stories. I feel sorry for her now. All she wanted was to try to make someone understand.” He scuffed his shoe in the dust. “But how could anyone ever understand this.” He gestured at the camp. “Or even what we saw at the front. Nobody can.” His grin slipped along one side of his face. “Except for you.”
“Lucky me.”
“Look, Rudy, you’ve got to find a way to metaphorically burn those letters when you’re done with them. There are so many stories – all of them horrible – and it’s not your job to carry them around inside you.”
“Oh, who died and made you Freud?”
Joseph raised his hands. “Suit yourself.” He stood and wiped his shoes on the back of his pantlegs. “See you around.”
Dear Mrs Denker
Your son, Karl-Heinz, was a hero, and I am responsible for his death.
By the time Karl-Heinz and I met, we had been in several different companies. We were haemorrhaging men towards the end, so they made a sort of amalgamation between our companies and several others. We were exhausted, hungry and had very few means with which to defend ourselves. Karl-Heinz kept us entertained with stories about his Claudia, who he was sure was waiting for him. He spoke a lot about you, Mrs Denker, and the way you kept your husband’s violin, even when it would have made sense for you to sell it for food. He also talked a lot about his grandparents’ farm in Austria, and he invited me to come and see it one day. Karl-Heinz loved animals, as I am sure you know, and he had found a stray somewhere along the way. He called her Barbara, and she was so sweet and loyal to him.
One day we were in a forest, making camp. The enemy must have been scouting the area, because they found us. Barbara would not stop barking, no matter how much Karl-Heinz begged her to stop. I knew that if she didn’t, we’d all be dead, so I panicked and shot her. Karl-Heinz stood up from his perch and started shouting at me. We told him to get down and shut up, but he wouldn’t listen. I ran up to him to tackle him and to cover his mouth. We landed on a mine. Karl-Heinz’s rucksack and body absorbed most of the blast. I lost my hearing for a long time. My left foot was also torn off. But I’m not making excuses, Mrs Denker. I know that I killed your son. I am truly sorry. I will regret this until the day I die.
Yours faithfully
Anonymous
The next man to visit Rudy was an officer. He had ordered the deaths of so many people, and he didn’t know the names of even a quarter of them, but he told Rudy his story just the same. There were deaths by firing squad, deaths by fist, deaths by stabbing and, the worst death of all, deaths by being sent to the front. Rudy wrote letters to each of the families of the persons unknown. He spent a lot of time covering his eyes in the corner of the yard. Sometimes Joseph would bring him something to drink, sometimes not. He caught a glimpse of his face in the washroom mirror and hardly recognised himself. Instead, he saw the faces of the dead in the shadows under his eyes, in the creases around his mouth and in the lines across his forehead.
“You don’t have to keep doing this, you know?”
It was Rudy’s turn to snort at Joseph. “Like I have a choice. No thanks to you.”
“Yes, and thanks to me you’ve found something you’re good at, Rudy. You’re a writer. And you’ll be able to leave here and write a new story for yourself while the rest of us rot with our memories and try to remember our Ps and Qs while pretending to live a normal life.”
“Me? A writer?”
“You think we’re the only ones with ghost stories?”
“I hadn’t thought about it, actually.”
“Well, you should.”
The next morning the camp was roused to the sound of a gunshot. A POW was down, and the medics were called. At first, nobody could tell where the shot had been fired. Rudy was annoyed at the disturbance and sat up in his bunk. He decided against joining the other men outside.
“What’s happening?” He jumped down from his bunk and went to Joseph, whose head was turned away from him. Rudy poked him hard, “Hey Jo—."
It was only then that he noticed the blood, bone and brain.
A week later, the prisoners were released for good. Rudy was stuffing his belongings into a pillowcase when a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground.
Keep telling stories, but don’t let the ghosts get to you. – Joseph.
P.S. Make sure Mr and Mrs Schwarz get my letter.
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