The Night of Shooting Stars by Ben Pastor

Author:Ben Pastor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2020-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Patients were meanwhile filing back to the veranda. When the mannish Sister Velhagen came to fetch Lattmann for “your afternoon check-up, Major”, Bora asked her if he could smoke out in the park, and when she said yes he promised his colleague that he would wait outside, and not leave the sanatorium until they had time to say goodbye.

3:45 P.M.

Bora stood on one of the garden paths, angrily smoking.

There were moments when he longed for darkness, and not just physical darkness. I don’t want to see, don’t want to know. I know enough. Salomon’s anguished, unshaven face, the shifty glance common to so many, fear nestling in men’s eyes like rheum that cannot be wiped away … For years, Bora had come to terms with fear. Seeing it in others always annoyed him, and occasionally alarmed him. Alarm, however, is not the same as fear. It is readiness to fend off the blow. If only he could believe that Salomon had nothing but personal reasons for his distress, he’d make an effort to understand him. But there was so much more, even before Bruno’s revelations. He remembered his colleague Ralph Uckermann a month earlier, in the mountains east of Rome. How he vented his hatred for the regime – not expecting that Bora would react; it was not like Bora to emote – and then commended his wife and sons to him, in case anything should happen to him “in the coming weeks”. He made Bora swear on his mother’s head, something that was unsoldierly and un-German. Bora had consented out of friendship, fully aware that Uckermann meant something bigger and worse than the impending retreat from central Italy. And weren’t these “the coming weeks”?

He was beginning to trust his anger, to count on it as an antidote to discouragement. Waking up every day with a pang of hostility for the circumstances was definitely helpful. At times it was impatience that led to anger; other times something he witnessed, or heard, sufficed to make him see red. He kept up an apparent composure as a means of protecting his inner world, where he could keep his store of outrage undisturbed. What was odd was that he hadn’t been this angry since childhood: those days it’d been a matter of feistiness, but even then he’d been able to conceal it beneath a veneer of compliance. Early sexual experiences had defused his anger, so that he’d been an unusually well-adjusted adolescent. At the university and in military school, they’d judged him to be level-headed, self-assured. Poland had been the turning point, and two stints on the Russian front after that. He fully understood what Oster and his colleagues found revolting about those experiences. But conspiracy was not his way. He’d made early use of his outrage by acting, whenever possible – often daily – in such a way that counteracted things. If what they say about them is true, the SS have compiled a dossier on me that must be a mile long by now.

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