Phantoms of Breslau Read Free Page A

usually incensed his son.
    “Sleep through the night.” Eberhard lit a cigarette and arranged on the table the objects which would soon find themselves in his briefcase: the packet with bread and dripping, a tobacco pouch and an oilcloth file containing reports. “I’ve told you a hundred times – if I go to bed sober, I get terrible nightmares; I wake up and can’t get back to sleep! I prefer hangovers to nightmares.”
    “You know what’s better for helping you sleep?” The father began to make his son’s bed. “Chamomile and hot milk.” He straightened the sheet and suddenly looked up at him. “Do you always have nightmares when you’re sober?”
    “Not always,” Eberhard smiled, closing the steel fastenings on his briefcase. “Sometimes I dream of the nurse in Königsberg. Red-headed and very pretty.”
    “You’ve been to Königsberg? You never told me.” The father held up a jacket as his son slipped his arms and broad shoulders into the sleeves.
    “I was there during the war.” Eberhard fanned himself with his bowler hat and reached for his watch. “There’s nothing else to say. Goodbye, Father.”
    He made his way towards the hatch in the floor, hearing his father muttering behind his back: “He’d better not drink so much. Only chamomile and hot milk. Chamomile and hot milk.”
    In the Hospital of Divine Mercy in Königsberg, a cadet officer of one year’s standing used to be given chamomile before he went to sleep. The beautiful, red-headed nurse gazed with admiration at the polished boots fitted with spurs that stood by his bed. She had called him “Officer”, not realizing that every scout from the artillery regiment wore spurs since they rode on horseback. Addressing him thus, she had poured spoonfuls of the infusion into his mouth. Twice-wounded Cadet Officer Mock did not have the strength to protest that he was not an officer, and was ashamed to admit that he had not passed his exams or undergone the appropriate training, but had found himself in the war simply through conscription. He was too shy to ask his angel her name, and he did not have the strength to turn his head to watch her go. In an attempt to broaden his field of vision, he had traced burning circles with his eyes. All they took in, unfortunately, was the neo-Gothic vaulting of the hospital. They did not see either the soldiers lying next to him or Cornelius Rühtgard, the greying, slender orderly to whom Mock owed his life; and the red-headed nurse did not fall within the wounded cadet officer’s field of vision ever again. Much later, when his broken limbs had set and he could move around on crutches; when finally he learned that his injuries indicated that he must have fallen from a great height, that the orderly Rühtgard – until recently a doctor in Cameroon – had, on his way to work, found him abandoned on Litauer Wallstrasse, and had quickly taken him to the hospital to treat his ribs and his lungs, which had been punctured by splintered rib bone; when Cadet Officer Mock knew all of this, he began his search for the red-headed nurse. Limping along, he rapped his crutches on the sandstone flags, but everywhere he met with a lack of understanding. The nurses grew impatient when the convalescentproduced yet another description of their supposed red-headed colleague, looked them in the eyes for the hundredth time and tried to catch the scent of their bodies. The caretakers and ward attendants shook their heads, some tapping their brows when he spoke of steaming cups of chamomile, until finally the former doctor Rühtgard, demoted to the rank of orderly, explained to the patient that the red-headed nurse may have been a figment of his imagination. Hallucinations were not unknown in people in similar states to that of Cadet Officer Mock on his arrival at the Hospital of Divine Mercy in Königsberg. For he had been totally unconscious. Not because he had fallen from a great height, but from alcohol.
    Now Eberhard