Jim McDermott - The Peenemunde deceptions

Tired, he pressed his face against the window and stared into the flat, colourless sea, following it out until he couldnt be sure that it wasnt sky. A familiar horizon: playful, shy, almost always a matter of guessing where one thing became another, where breathing became drowning.

The Baltic: the road of seabirds tears. To the boy it had been the world itself, a grey world, more shades of it than to be found in a Luftwaffe depot. A violent place, sometimes; painters chased its elusive light, sailors ran before the dark, immediate squalls, but his memory had calmed these extremities, faded them to safer mid-tones. He recalled the air and water only at their most guileless, the soundless calms that seemed to go on forever, soothing, deceiving. A small, still world of indistinct boundaries, marked only by the graves of those lost within it.

No dead reckonings today . He blinked himself awake, lit a cigarette and felt the pain returning as his face departed the cool glass. The young obergefreiter sitting opposite glanced enviously at the smoke but avoided looking directly at him (most men in uniform did, hed observed). It seemed churlish to cough, but he drew too deeply into his damaged lung, more smoke where it wasnt needed. When his eyes cleared, he managed a shrug and leaned forward to offer the thing to a man who could use it. A slight nod for thanks: the economy of manly pity.

The train slowed, its ageing axles squealing hideously as they passed through Bansin-Heringsdorf-Ahlberg. Even across two decades, his young proletarians prejudices held firm: a cold, self-conscious place, guaranteed its trade even in thin times, smugly secure in its reputation as the resort of Kaisers. Too scrubbed still, he decided: too zimperlich , obscenely out of its time. His bored minds eye drifted across the quaint, stolid bderarchitekturs whitened walls and regular red roofs, and imagined it atomized, all future histories truncated into the moments an eighty-eight millimetre would require to traverse its mounting and put one through the collective, rustically shuttered window.

A sin, even to think it , his mother would have said, but the towns had earned some ill will. She had been a drudge here, cleaning their hotels high-ceilinged bedrooms and ornate water closets, bearing the condescension of under-managers, head maids, guests and even house-boys, earning half a pittance for hours that a clock would have jibed at, and still, not a single deposit of spite or resentment had stained her stoic soul. Shed been Old Germany: devout, hoping only for the balm of her covenanted portion, thinking no ill of her many judges. A wholly admirable woman, and whenever he was tempted to wish for more of her nature in himself he recalled her hands and knees. Cautionary tales in purple, theyd surrendered years before the rest.

His eyes stared at nothing, stinging yet refusing to close. Since departing Berlin he had known it would be like this, the memories falling like old newspapers that a rotting cord had let slip. To make sense of the summons required that he question it, and questions had an inconvenient way of shaking out the past, of raising dust. He glanced down the length of the carriage, seeking distraction. It was at least as old as he, its nominal seating arrangements overburdened by a press of bodies, loaded according to the convex wall principle of military redeployment. His own space, staked out with luggage and rank before the majority joined the train at Swinemnde, was relatively generous, but his maudlin, self-indulgent mood saw it as a close confinement. The narrow sweep of his vista, the crowd of uniforms, the nicotine blur and shared weariness of war, all of it heightened a sense of passing into he strained to define it, but it eluded him once more, leaving only the faint peal of things misplaced and lost. The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show, of mouthd graves will give thee memory

He shifted, dislodging dead Englishmens unwelcome reveries. A stabbing nerve took their place, reminding him that he had sat still for too long, one of his new regimes most pronounced Donts . He began to move his right hand in small figures of eight, working the flexors and extensors of his forearm, trying not to engage the bicep and deltoid until their turn came. The motion was immediately painful, but he persisted, willing it to become an unthinking habit, concentrating upon the wholesome view through the windows and the stale smells around him, on not grimacing.