The Wolf Children by Cay Rademacher

Author:Cay Rademacher [Rademacher, Cay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Published: 2017-03-17T23:00:00+00:00

At the Grave

Tuesday, 10 June 1947

Stave and his son sat together silently opposite one another over breakfast. Stave idly stirred his grey ersatz coffee, his stomach turning even at the smell of the roasted acorns, his head aching as if his brain was being punctured by a thousand needles. Karl didn’t look much better. The CID man wondered what he had been up to the night before but repressed the urge to ask. Silence, blistering heat, bright sunlight that stung the retinas. The only sound the tinkling of the lead spoon in Karl's coffee cup as he stirred it in endless circles.

Eventually Stave couldn’t take it any longer. For the sake of something to say, he came out with ‘Should we go and visit Mama?’

‘Still living next door, is she?’ Faked surprise, his old ironic wit. Stave was almost relieved that at least the war hadn’t blunted it. ‘Go and visit her grave, I meant,’ he said.

‘Is she still out at Öjendorf Cemetery?’

The chief inspector gave him a puzzled look: ‘Where else would Mama be?’

He shrugged. ‘People might have used it to plant potatoes like on the lawn in front of the university.’

‘You were at the university?’ A sudden spark of hope, suddenly he was wide awake. Don’t push him, he warned himself.

Karl didn’t bother to answer. ‘This afternoon,’ he said instead. ‘We could go do the grave this afternoon, if you can get the time off.’

Stave would have liked to talk about the university and Karl's plans for the future. A new start in life. Who knew, maybe in that case he too could fulfil his own dreams. Anna. But better to be patient. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Will you wait in the apartment for me?’

‘I’ll be here.’

When he reached his outer office the chief inspector was annoyed to find it empty. Was Erna Berg not feeling well? Was it that time yet? Or was she absent because of the impending court case?

One of his colleagues knocked on the door. ‘We all need to go down to the landing stages in the harbour.’

‘All of us?’

‘It's an order from Cuddel Breuer. We’re to take weapons along.’

All I needed, thought Stave. On the way he asked around among his colleagues: British Engineer Corps had marched into Blohm & Voss that morning. They were going to blow up the cranes and gantries. News had got about town and now more and more people had gathered down by the banks of the Elbe, staring across the river.

Cuddel Breuer assigned a group of men to Stave when they got there and told him to mingle with the crowds on the Baumwall elevated railway station. The station was rammed and the chief inspector thought the steel beams that supported it might buckle under their weight.

Men, women, children. The station was more than ten metres above the harbour promenade and had an open view over the Elbe and the huge dockyard belonging to Blohm & Voss. Nobody said a word. There were no protest placards, no clubs being wielded, nobody making provocative speeches.

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