The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

48 The Man from the Sky 1941

Frau Baum forbade her girls to go to the bonfire and locked us into the bedroom to be certain. The German Heike agreed with the mistress of the house, and we argued bitterly from our beds as the evening twilight gradually filled the room. I was dead set on going. A Reich that couldn’t put up with one bonfire could never last a thousand years. Maike and I had worked hard on lending a hand and carried many logs to the pile, which had grown into a tall and impressive mound. I wasn’t about to miss it.

‘Do you want to get yourself killed?’

‘Killed?’

‘Yes, it’ll end with an air raid when the Brits see the bonfire.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Don’t care? Do you really want to get yourself killed?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Why?!’

‘Because… because I’m curious! Icelandic!’

Maike knocked on the pane. After a brief scuffle, I managed to free myself of Heike and crawl out the window. Maike and I ran down towards the beach and reached it just before the fire was lit.

It was a cold and still night. Frost hung in the air, but there was no snow on the ground. The sky glowed with all its candles in a silence that was as thick as the sand and the darkness, until an old fireman ignited the fire with three sprays of petrol. About a hundred people had ventured out of their houses and stood there by the crackling flames and sighing sea. Naturally, there was some apprehension in the crowd, but the tensions of the past months had drawn them closer together. Finally someone started to sing. Men and women joined in, slipping their hands onto the next person’s shoulders and swaying together to the rhythm of the waves, fire and song. It felt like a cosy scout bonfire or even a Christmas dance, but there was a strange sexual energy in the air. The women, who had dolled themselves up with red lipstick and shiny shoes, looked like Spanish flamenco dancers. The twin blond sisters from next door, who always walked around stooping under the weight of their new budding breasts, radiated with joy in the glow of the fire. Furtive glances shot back and forth like sparks out of the fire before dying in the dark of the night; there were no inflammable young men here to transform those sparks into flames. They were all far away, in Ljubljana or Libya, stuffing themselves with horsemeat sausages in the open carriage of a goods train. The only males left here were old-timers who swayed between virgin and motherly breasts, letting the last rays of their sexual sun lick the peaks where they once stood.

My God, I can still hear those ancient Frisian verses in my head:

May the heavenly thunder sound in thine old honour, oh Frisian ground! But it was as if they had invoked the devil; in the middle of their anthem a peal of thunder was heard in the sky. People instantly stopped singing and looked into the air. There was nothing to be seen, but the noise grew louder. The Germans had been right. The fire attracted English bombs. We immediately ran away from the fire and fled the beach, some people throwing themselves into the sand. But Maike and I didn’t get far, because the sound of an overhead plane turned into a crash and we looked around: an indistinct form, adorned with white and red rings, appeared out of the dark sky for a very brief moment before vanishing into the sea with a big splash at a short distance from the shore. We spotted half a wing protruding from the sea and white smoke rising from it with a faint hiss.

I noticed that the German girl, Anna Tieck, or Anna Tick, as I used to call her in my letters to Mum, was a few yards away from us. So she’d come, after all. And was now looking at Maike and me with a contemptuous air.

A brave old man, who obviously didn’t care about his life any more, finally clambered to his feet and tottered down to the shore. Maike and I edged our way back towards the fire and passed it, following the old man. Others did the same. Soon more movement stirred the surface of the sea, and after a few tense moments, we spotted a man swimming towards us.

‘Who goes there?!’ the old man shouted in German.

No answer. A young man in a glistening jacket emerged from the sea, stumbling towards us, exhausted. He didn’t seem to be armed, halted on the water’s edge, and observed us for a moment before he bent over, steadied himself on his knees, and caught his breath. Seawater streamed from his head.

‘Who are you?’ the old man repeated in German. By now more people had returned to the beach. The blazing fire crackled behind them. The man straightened and asked, ‘Is this Wannsee?’

‘Huh?’

‘Am I in Wannsee?’

He spoke German with an English accent.

‘Are you English?’ a young female voice asked behind us.

‘Yes,’ he answered in English, and then, holding out his hands in total submission, he said, ‘Arrest me.’

The Frisians looked at each other, the man, and then each other again, without uttering a word. He was a young soldier with dark wavy hair and a handsome face. His lips and shoulders quivered from the cold. Staggering up onto the shore, he turned and pointed at the sea, at the wreckage, and was about to say something when he had a coughing fit that smothered his words. Finally he retched and left a coat of bright spew on the shore. An old lady approached him with a blanket and threw it over him before another younger one ran to assist her. Together they helped the pilot up the beach towards the fire. He was wearing a leather jacket with Royal Air Force badges on the front and sleeve, and a pretty white scar stretched from his lower lip down to his chin. The Englishman took a few tottering steps and then stopped to tell two men in his poor German that his companion was still stuck in the wreckage. As the women ushered the young man to the fire, the two men waded towards the debris. But they were old and wouldn’t venture any further than up to their knees; the water was ice cold. No further movements could be discerned in the wreckage, which finally succumbed to a small wave as its vertical wing sank into the sea with a splash.

Moments later the old men turned around to join the group by the fire. The women had stripped the Englishman of his jacket and shirt and wrapped a blanket around him. Someone then added to that by enveloping his shoulders in a red shawl. He sat in the sand with crossed legs and stared vacantly into the fire, a faint chatter in his teeth, surrounded by the daughters and mothers of Friesland. Maike and I stared at him, spellbound. I’d never seen such a handsome man, except maybe on a silver screen in Copenhagen. They just didn’t make beautifully chiselled faces like that on this side of the North Sea. And I had thought that the British were bomb-crazed, murderous dogs with Dickensian noses and Victorian double chins.

Our teacher, Fräulein Osinga, who spoke pretty good English, crouched beside the new arrival to act as interpreter and informed the others that the boy’s name was William and he thought he had crashed close to Berlin, in the Wannsee Lake. She got no more out of him. He was clearly distraught by his error, a mistake that seemed to have cost his companion’s life. It wasn’t easy to make him realise where he was.

‘Freezeland?’ he said in a quivering voice.

He was clearly wet behind the ears in more senses than one, handsome as he may have been: a charming twenty-year-old boy who had obviously been standing in a London pub the night before, playing darts.

The women ogled the striking fellow with dreamy eyes and fiery-red lips. Few things inflame a woman’s bosom more than the sight of a pitifully beautiful boy. The teenage girls coquettishly adjusted their brows and lips. Yes, all of a sudden, a treasure had fallen from the sky. Eine Sexbombe aus England.

‘He’s terribly handsome, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ Maike whispered. ‘He can’t be English.’

Another rumble was heard, this time from the sea. A boat was rapidly advancing from the south with a powerful searchlight that scanned the shore like a frantic sniffer dog until it spotted us by the fire. Those who were sitting by the English soldier immediately sprang to their feet, and finally he did, too. The rumble of the engine began to fade but the spotlight was fixed on the bonfire. A stern male voice boomed through a megaphone: ‘Feuer ausmachen!’

We all stood there rigidly, watching the despotic long coat wade to the shore. But in the corner of my eye I saw how Fräulein Osinga surreptitiously buried the pilot’s leather jacket under the sand with one foot where it lay, close to the fire. The officer in the long coat was tall and moved stiffly, as if he lacked flexibility in his knees. He wore knee-high leather boots and an officer’s visor hat, sported a bulky, menacing jaw, and held the megaphone in his left hand. In the other glistened a long-barrelled revolver. Two privates appeared behind him with rifles. The commander was no longer using his megaphone but waved his gun about as he roared at us to put out the blasted fire. What kind of craziness was this?

‘FEUER AUSMACHEN!’

He wore his visor low; his eyes were veiled by its shadow. The Englishman started shaking again. Two boys suddenly made a run for it, up the beach, but were noticed by the commander. It was Maike’s brothers. As quick as a flash, their mother turned her head to watch them flee, suppressing a scream, but swinging it back again she saw that the officer was levelling his gun. With the lightning instincts of a lioness she charged towards the barrel and managed to deflect the bullet that shot into the darkness. The gunman shook her off and was beside himself with rage. He fired two shots at the dunes and then pointed the gun at the woman who lay at his feet and whimpered in German: ‘Yes, shoot… shoot me instead!’ I observed the petrified look on my friend’s face.

But the man in the long coat didn’t have enough time to shoot the mother, because now the two privates walked up to him, pointing at the sea. The searchlight had been turned away from the land and illuminated the wreckage of the British plane. They all stomped away from the fire back down to the shore again. In the same moment, Maike burst into tears as she threw herself on her mother, who was still crouched in the sand with her hands buried deep in it, as if she were disappointed not to get it as her grave.

The boat moved towards the wreckage, but the officer hurried back to the fire. His men followed with buckets and ordered the males to put out the fire with seawater. The officer nudged the visor off his eyes and, stiffly but calmly, started to walk from one person to the next, grinning at the weeping mother and daughter who cowered together at his feet. But once he finally realised that these were nothing but war rejects – women, adolescents, children and old men – he seemed relieved, and his sense of duty yielded to a smile.

‘So you are Frisians? All of you Frisians? And you think you’re not at war? You think you can just continue to celebrate your traditional twaddle as if there were no danger? Light a fire, no less?!’

Behind him the fire hissed as the men’s first buckets of water were unleashed on it. Maike was still snivelling in the arms of her mother, who wiped her own tears with the back of her hand.

‘And what happened with the plane over there? Did you see it crash?’ the officer continued.

‘Yes,’ our teacher answered.

‘Didn’t it fire at you?’

‘No.’

‘And what happened? Was it shot down?’

‘No, I don’t think so. It just crashed.’

‘Is that so, yes? It just crashed and you continued with your little Frisian party? As if nothing…’

He suddenly shut up as his gaze froze on the Englishman, and he walked towards him.

‘Who are you?’

The group held its breath in silence.

‘Wi… William,’ the pilot muttered.

‘Willem?’

‘Ja, the drenched boy answered without any trace of an accent. A straight and simple ja. And there was no way of determining what language the word belonged to. It could have been German, Danish, Frisian or even Dutch.

‘And why is it you are wet?’

The boy tried to utter something, but no words reached his lips, which now started to tremble as never before. The old man who had first walked towards him answered in his place.

‘He… he swam out to… to make sure the pilot was dead.’

I had noticed that Anna the tick was standing close to me on the left. And without having to look at her, my left ear could sense her tensing up.

‘And what? Was he dead?’ the officer asked.

‘Yes… well, no… not quite… he had to fight… fight him, didn’t you?’ The old man shot a glance at the Englishman, who suddenly looked at him but then cast his eyes on the sand again and nodded with a low head. The bucket men reappeared with another round of seawater, and the light from the fire faded some more with a fizzle.

‘Yes? So we have a hero here?’ The coated officer sneered sardonically before raising his voice again: ‘But heroes don’t hang their heads!’ And he lifted the English jaw with his German gun, peering inquisitively into the boy’s eyes. ‘And what is a hero like this doing at a woman’s ball? Why aren’t you at the front? Are you a deserter?!’ he snapped, tugging the shawl and blanket off the shoulders of the soldier, who was left standing in his white vest. Judging by the look on the English lad’s face, he couldn’t remember whether the vest of the Royal Air Force carried an RAF badge.

The officer threw down his megaphone now and tore the garment off the Englishman with great brutality. It was a beautiful torso that appeared to us ladies and eunuchs against the golden embers of the dying fire. The boy hung his head with a deep shyness, if not fear, but the officer grabbed his right shoulder and turned him halfway, and then, in a sudden fit of sadistic homoerotic glee, he ordered the lad to take his trousers off as well.

William was now shaking in nothing but his underwear.

The officer took a long pause to contemplate the boy. One could hear the lust boiling inside him. Then he took one step towards the young man, slipped the nozzle of his revolver behind the elastic of his underpants and eased them down. He ordered him to stand upright. ‘Stillgestanden!’

A naked man stood before us, a true Apollo in all his burning magnificence. Through the faint crackling, one could hear a deep, almost inaudible female gasp. Here in the presence of fire and death, sea and stars, the moment had stripped us of the garments of time and we now stood there like ancient, primitive souls on their first beach, by their first fire, experiencing their first desire. I’ve never forgotten it. I shall never forget it. Not even now as I lie here seventy years later, decrepit with my wispy hair on my deathbed. I still see it as it hangs there before my eyes, like the very purpose of life itself. Never before had I seen anything so terrifyingly beautiful as that, so boorishly ugly, so overwhelmingly true. ‘An upside-down tulip.’ Despite the frosty night and the hundreds of female eyes, the Englishman’s organ held its substantial size and stirred almost imperceptibly to the tremors of its owner under a shelter of dark hair: a cock gilded by fire. Like everyone else, the man in the visor hat seemed entranced. He delighted in this wonder another short while and then found his voice again with a laugh as he shouted to his men.

‘This is precisely what the German army needs!’

They laughed raucously and he repeated his punch line to squeeze out even more guffaws. The show ended the way it had started, as soon as three old Frisian men threw a final round of buckets of water over the fire. Everything plunged into darkness. The fog light on the boat was now the only source of illumination on the shore. A shout was heard from the sea, but the officer paid it little heed and instead asked the naked man for his full name. The Englishman mumbled faintly into his chest, concealing his jewels behind his hands.

‘Well then?!’ the German roared.

‘His name is… Willem… Willem Wannsee, sir,’ said Fräulein Osinga.

‘Aha, Willem Wannsee…’ the officer muttered, pulling a notepad and pencil out of his leather coat to jot down the name. ‘You will receive notification!’ he said to the soldier, and he walked over to him to stroke the English member with the barrel of his gun. Another shout came from the boat, and the coated man shoved his notepad back into his pocket. He was on the point of withdrawing when Anna Tieck unexpectedly stepped forward and opened her mouth. But before she had the time to give away the English pilot, I jumped behind her and covered her mouth with my hand. She struggled and we fell into the sand. I landed underneath her but managed to lock her arms and legs and hold back her German tongue. Fräulein Osinga shouted over us: ‘Girls! What’s got into you?!’ And people turned towards us but kept themselves at a safe distance. The officer snorted at this infantile sparring match with slight bewilderment, without suspecting that this was a matter of life and death. But as he started to walk away, Anna managed to free herself from me and was about to stand when I grabbed the elastic on the back of her skirt with two fingers and dragged her down again. ‘He’s Engl—!’ she yelled at her fellow countryman before I smothered her voice with the palm of my hand. She glared at me with crazed eyes, finally slipped away, and was about to run down to the officer on the shore when the people, who had formed a semi-circle around us, deliberately barred her path.

‘but he’s english!’ she yelled out.

People’s faces tensed and no one dared silence her. She repeated herself but was unable to break through the throng that had silently formed around her. Many looked at the coated officer wading towards the boat in the water. He didn’t look back.

Maike and her mother ran away from the group towards the bank of dunes that separated the shore from the village. Far in the darkness they could be heard calling out the names of the boys.

‘We found the pilot! He’s dead!’ the men called out to the officer from the sea. Moments later he was on board and the boat vanished with its searchlight pointed to the north. Total darkness descended on the beach. Only the candlelit sky gave people the glimmer they needed to recover from the evening’s events. Under the faint sunlight from other solar systems the numbed people started to make their way home. Three women helped the young man into his trousers, shawl and blanket under the watchful eyes of another three. The twins with the burgeoning breasts coyly giggled, their hair mingling together. The German Anna looked daggers at me. Or so I thought in the darkness. She stood with her back to the sand dunes and Germany itself behind them. Her coal-black pupils were the glistening twin lenses of a pair of binoculars; I felt I could see deep into them, fourteen days’ travel away, all the way into the Chancellery in Berlin, where two raging torches burned – torches that from here were the size of needle tips but that loudly and clearly declared: You have betrayed the Thousand-Year Reich and you shall be punished.