Wilhelm had the courage to do what I lack the courage to do — even though my own dignity and self-respect, shame, faith, and hope are ebbing away with every passing day. I can’t do it, and yet I have always imagined myself to be a moderately courageous man. But he was able to do it, coward though he was. The coward whose face I slapped, he had the courage — and I don’t.

Such were Doll’s thoughts as he walked past this house, painful thoughts that tormented him every time; he would have given anything to be free of them, but they wouldn’t let him go, whether he averted his gaze or not. Then he would try to picture the room where this man had spent the last hour of his life, the room where he had done ‘it’. Doll knew that at the end the old vet had owned virtually nothing apart from a bed, a table, and a chair. Everything else had gone to pay for alcohol. He tried to picture the man sitting on this solitary chair, the pistol lying on the table in front of him. Perhaps the tears had been streaming down his face again, and perhaps he had sat there sobbing ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ again …

Doll shook his head. He didn’t want to picture the scene; it was just too painful.

But one thing was certain: the old man with the leathery skin had gone, and Doll was left behind, empty inside, filled with self-reproach and doubt. So many certainties had been thrown into doubt at this time, and because of the old vet, Doll now lost both his inveterate hatred and his belief in himself as a man of courage. In all probability he was nothing at all, an empty husk; he had nourished himself with self-delusions, and now it had all vanished into thin air! There was no Doll any more.

How gladly he would have taken a different route, avoiding this closed-up house altogether. But the position of the town, sitting as it did on a peninsula, forced him to walk past it every time. Forced him to revisit these painful thoughts. Forced from him the admission that he was nothing, had never amounted to anything, and for the rest of his life, however long or short that might be, would never be anything other than a nobody. A nobody, for all time!

So it really was best just to say to his young wife: ‘Fine, he’s dead. Let’s forget him. Let’s not talk about him ever again!’

It was a lie. Nothing was ‘fine’; nothing could be forgotten. But what did a lie matter these days? Let the woman go on thinking that he hated the old boy as much as ever. He couldn’t hate anybody any more, but lying — he could manage that. And anyway, lying was somehow more in keeping with his own mediocrity.

CHAPTER FOUR

What the Nazis did next

Doll’s career as a cowherd was short-lived, because a sequence of chance events resulted in his being appointed mayor of the town, and of the whole surrounding district, by the Russian town commandant. This was the kind of thing that happened in these turbulent times: the most hated man in the town was put in charge of his fellow citizens.

The string of chance events began when a rucksack was tossed over the fence into the Dolls’ garden one night. It was a Wehrmacht-issue rucksack, and it contained the uniform of a senior SS officer. No doubt the dear neighbours who had laid this cuckoo’s egg in the Doll nest felt it was getting too dangerous to have these items of uniform in their possession, now that increasingly thorough house searches were being conducted. Why they didn’t put a few stones in the rucksack along with the uniform, and drop it into the lake that was right on their doorstep, is another story, which says as much about the neighbours’ decency as it does about Doll’s popularity.

He, of course, had no idea about this morning gift that lay in his garden. He lay awake and eventually fell into the brief, troubled sleep that was now almost normal for him. On this occasion, he was roused from this brief sleep at the crack of dawn by a Russian patrol, which gave him a very hard time. At first he couldn’t understand what they wanted from him, and he went through a very unpleasant quarter of an hour before he realised what the implications of this rucksack and SS uniform were: the Dolls were suspected of secretly harbouring an SS officer! The entire house, attic, and outbuildings were searched from top to bottom, and even though no trace of the fugitive (who didn’t exist, of course) was found, Doll was put into a two-horse hunting carriage and driven off into town to the commandant’s office. Soldiers with submachine guns sat on either side of him.