Heimweh, Fernweh
Title: The Shortest Way Home (Part 1)
Fandom:Generation Kill (AU)
Characters: Brad/Nate, Pappy, Rudy, references to others
Ratings: NC-17 (part 1 pg-13 for language)
Disclaimer: Totally fictitious...vaguely based on the characters portrayed in the miniseries and various things I've read about the time period. Do I even need to say that the entire thing is completely made up?
Notes: thady helped me out with a school project, so I promised her choice of fic. She mentioned the WWII AU, "Owed By So Many." So here's the sequel... It is set completely in that universe, so I can't promise it'll make sense without reading "Owed By So Many". Epigraph is by Richard Fein. Here are some field service postcards.
War poetry has the subversive tendency to be our age's love poetry.
Brad doesn’t get mail. This is a tenet of war: God is on our side, the brass can be worse than the enemy, and no one ever sends Brad mail. If his mother writes, and if the letter isn’t mislaid by the censors, blown up with a mail plane, or sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic by the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine, then it’s sent to his original posting in England, maybe forwarded as far as Bassingbourn. It will never find him here in Germany. He doesn’t even bother to go to mailcall anymore, but someone in the must have picked up the postcard for him. (Brad would bet cash money it was the Reporter)
The card is propped on the sorry-ass government-issue excuse for a pillow when he returns from chow. Brad approaches it as he would an unexploded bomb in a garden, stands next to the rack studying it for a few moments, just observing. It’s the standard pasteboard field service postcard. Brad had filled out several when he was in the base hospital at Tangmere, back when he still bothered with mail. To prevent loose lips from sinking ships, the cards come pre-printed with blanks to fill and choices to circle, like a multiple-guess test back at school. Touching just the edge, he turns it and…yes, there’s his name and the address of this goddamn, end-of-the-road, goat-fucked alpine-meadow-turned-Allied-camp. He does not recognize the handwriting
Observation is followed by action: Brad flips the card and skims the message. Bold red letters across the top remind him that in order to get the postcard through the censors NOTHING IS TO BE WRITTEN EXCEPT THE DATE AND SIGNATURE SENTENCES NOT REQUIRED CAN BE ERASED. And then the message:
Dear BRAD,
1.I am quite well
2. I am {injured} {sick} and am {being sent back to base} {in military hospital}
3. I {am well} {hope to be discharged soon}
4. Letter to follow at first opportunity.
Sincerely//Affectionately// With love
SIGNATURE ONLY: N A T E
DATE: 12th July 1945
Brad scans the letter again, the words blurring together: I am injured and am in military hospital I am well. Iaminjuredandaminmilitaryhospital. He puts his thumb over the childish capitals straggling off the signature only line. They are written in pencil, unlike the neat fountain pen lines that have addressed the card, filled in Brad’s name and the date, struck out the irrelevant lines. A nurse? A volunteer? Brad remembers the volunteers who had come to write letters for patients in hospital at Tangmere; the patients who couldn’t write for themselves always dictated relentlessly positive notes because the young ladies writing for them usually had husbands and brothers still serving. I am well. Letter to follow at first opportunity. Sincerely. Brad wonders how much of the wording is accurate, and how much was Nate lying for the sake of whoever held the fountain pen.
It does occur to him that the military provides a very limited number of choices: there is no way to communicate I was blinded by an ammo-dump explosion, for example, or My right arm has been amputated at the elbow due to infection, or A bullet has severed the nerves of my spine and I am crippled for life.
Brad studies the reverse of the card: it was mailed from Allied Field Hospital No. 2 BERLIN-Soviet Sector. Last Brad knew, Nate was pushing papers as a minor intelligence officer in Weisbaden, quietly working out his time before being discharged back to Sussex. But, of course, when they’d met, Brad had also thought Nate was running his family farm for the British Ministry of Agriculture, rather than, say, secretly training Mediterranean spies for missions in occupied Europe. It’s been three weeks since he last saw Nate, barely eight weeks since the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The whole continent is a maelstrom of displaced persons and blood-crazed partisans and traumatized civilians-anything might have happened.
++++
Brad finds Meesh, the battalion interpreter, smoking black-market cigarettes and watching a column of POWs being moved from one side of the make-shift parade ground to the other. Knowing Meesh, he’s already traded the prisoners for every worthwhile thing they still own, plus a heap of useless stuff that he’ll somehow turn profitable. And maybe those cigarettes and a blowjob.
Brad studies the straggling line of scarecrows, gangly teenage limbs in mismatched uniforms. “Jesus Christ, it’s like a Boy Scout Jamboree.”
“They are Panzergrenadier division, ostkrieg, maybe Ukrainian front,” Meesh says, and Brad figures he can forgive the interpreter for missing the sarcasm since English is his-third language? fourth?
“I meant they look like goddamn high schoolers.”
Meesh blows a perfect smoke ring. “Well, Nazi High Command made enlistment age to seventeen last year…but of course, all seventeens had already lied about the age to enlist two-three years ago. So,” he waves at the ragtag group. “Who is knowing? They are maybe high school class.”
That is such a fucking depressing thought Brad can’t even be bothered to ask how Meesh learned so much about the German army recruitment patterns. Instead, he passes Meesh a musette bag. It contains three cans of Spam, a wad of francs, two British pounds, a slab of PX chocolate, an aviator’s wristwatch, a pair of socks, and a few yards of silk from the ‘chute Trombley wrecked when he landed in a tree.
“Can you get me to Berlin?”
“Ah, Berlin!” Meesh smiles knowingly. “Lovely town. Berlin is lovely town, my friend.”
“Yes,” Brad says slowly. “And I would like to go there."
“You could maybe just afford train ticket,” Meesh says, poking through Brad’s collected treasures. Which means Brad has overpaid him by a factor of at least two, but he’s not in a position to bargain.
“I thought we’d blown up all their train lines.”
“Only most of them, and in the west. The Ruhr. Bremerhaven. Your noble British allies have been rebuilding with much enthusiasms. They are loving the trains, these British.”
“They’re our allies, Meesh,” Brad allows himself a smile. After all, once he’s in Berlin, how hard could it possibly be to find a field hospital? “Whose fucking side are you on?”
“Winning side, of course, Sergeant.” Meesh never calls anyone by their name. “Always the winning side, me.”
++++
It takes Brad four hours in a Jeep to reach the nearest intact rail head, then another twelve in a train across ravaged countryside to get to Berlin. His carriage is a Babel of languages: the other passengers are all interpreters, fresh from a British troop transport. Apparently they are all members of the Pioneer Corps: chased out of Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, they had evacuated to Britain. The English had grudgingly accepted them as second-class soldiers, but now the “enemy aliens” were desired for precisely for what set them apart in the first place: a native-like grasp of the language and culture of central Europe
Brad sleeps through most of the train trip, since his compatriots in the Jeep had insisted on singing their way to the depot all night. (“Keeps us awake, buddy!” the driver had declared between verses of Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree. “Yeah,” Brad had retorted. “I’ll bet it does.”) He wakes only once, at a station stop, when one of the Pioneers unwisely squeezes his hand through the train’s louvers to give a chocolate bar to a ragged child on a seemingly empty platform. Suddenly, the train car is surrounded by a howling hurricane of kids, rapping on the windows, calling to the soldiers in a bastardized blend of German and English. One little pinched face is right at Brad’s level, a bony hand splayed against the train window like a starved spider
One of the MPs actually has to get off the train and chase the children away before the train can pull away. After that, the interpreters sit in shocked silence. Brad rolls himself in his overcoat and falls back to sleep. In his dreams, the hungry child’s fingers pass right through the glass window, like a ghost. They grab the sleeve of his uniform jacket and shake until he wakes…and they are transformed into the hand of a Pioneer Corps soldier, waking him to say they have arrived, at last, in Berlin.
++++
The station once had a graceful glass roof over the tracks. Now there is only a wrought iron shell of empty squares where the glass panes once were, stretching over the sky like the ribs of some prehistoric creature
There is no one to meet Brad at the station, but one of the MPs jots a map on the back of his orders. “No use giving you street names,” the man says, sounding like he just left Brooklyn yesterday, “even if I could pronounce them-the roads're a disaster. But Information HQ is practically around the corner: used to be a station hotel. Good luck, buddy.”
Although the large clock on the station façade says it is 9:37 PM, Brad’s watch assures him that it is almost 8:00 in the morning. The city is eerily quiet, once he turns the corner from the station: the Brits are apparently headed to their sector and there is no traffic, motorized or pedestrian, in the American quadrant yet. Brad follows his map down the long fence around the station yard, past a derelict train shed, around a corner; then he looks up and loses his breath.
On the right side of the street, the whole block of graceful Wilhelmine townhouses look as though they’ve melted: the roof slates have slid over the gutters and down the fire-blacked facades, empty windows knocked crooked, stones and tiles fallen away like missing teeth. The left side-which must once have been a perfect mirror-image of luxurious, symmetrical domesticity-has simply ceased to exit as anything recognizable, smashed to bricks and boards by whatever bomb blew out all the glass in the train station. At the peak of one mountain of rubble, a scrap of fabric flutters from a stick like a flag of surrender-white, patterned with pink splotches: roses, maybe, a curtain, caught on the window frame of what was once a maid’s attic bedroom.
Brad has seen bomb sites-hell, Brad has helped to create bomb sites-but they’ve mostly been on newsreels and in training photographs. Then, too, they’ve mostly been factories and shipyards spread out along industrial parks. He hadn’t realized the scale, the sheer bulk of the detritus left behind when you dismantle a half-dozen solid, furnished house with speed and fire. It's been years since Brad was the smallest person in a room, but walking down an empty boulevard lined with three-story piles of rubble makes him feel tiny and vulnerable, unprotected. How long since the bombing that preceded the Battle of Berlin...two months? Three? The morning light is grainy with pulverized mortar carried on a summer breeze that still smells like burning.
The part of his mind that still functions like a warrior, that hasn’t been shocked back to civilian status, recognizes that the bomb must have landed in the southwestern corner of the block, missing the station completely. The damage is worst here, the building remnants burnt nearly flat. Through this gap in the destruction, Brad can see into the next street. Several houses, possibly still occupied, are missing whole walls. Brad can make out a second-floor sitting room, complete with a china cabinet, that now opens right onto the air. His sister had a dollhouse that worked like that, once: Ginny could lift off the whole front and look into the perfect little rooms where imaginary people lived perfect little make-believe lives.
++++
The American Information HQ is two blocks further, facing away from the station and the wreckage. A cluster of windows have been boarded up, but otherwise it looks like exactly what it is: a mid-range travelers’ hotel, now flying the stars and stripes above its silly baroque cupola.
Brad presents his orders at what used to be hotel reception. They are received by a small, brash Sergeant Major with an almost impenetrable molasses accent, who shouts at him for five minutes about the extreme disrespect he has shown to the grooming standard by arriving looking like something th’ goddamn cat drug in from th’ goddamn rain. Brad stands at strict parade attention until the man finally sputters to a halt. “PAPPY!” he shouts at last, “Ruuu-dy!"
Two men appear behind Brad’s shoulder. Brad almost jumps; their sudden, silent arrival is threatening in a way that Sergeant Major just isn’t
“Gentlemen, would you two look, just look at this de-plorable excuse for military discipline and tell me this is how we’re goin’ta win th’ goddam war against th’ goddamn Japanese! Lord Ahmighty, it's a deeeesgrace.” Before either man can even open his mouth, the Sergeant Major has pounded at Brad’s orders with a rubber stamp and flounced off with a huff, muttering disgustedly.
It takes a moment for the quiet to return. It is only when Brad can hear the rattle-tap of a typewriter elsewhere in the building that Rudy finally speaks.
“Don’t mind Sixta, sir.”
“S’right,” says the other man-Pappy. “He thinks Army discipline has been going downhill since the Battle of Shiloh, and that fussing about it will raise morale.”
“Which gives him the right to talk to me like a five-year-old idiot?” Brad seethes. It is probably unwise to bitch first thing at a new posting, but Brad has not just traveled for the better part of 20 hours to get reamed out like a brand-new, green-ass recruit. That vague sense of vulnerability he'd felt in the street is beginning to chill into the icy, empty stillness that Brad usually associates with completing the takeoff checklist before a bombing run. It usually means that something is going to be destroyed.
“Did you walk from the station?” If Rudy is rattled by Sixta’s early morning outburst or Brad’s quiet fury, you wouldn’t know it from his sympathetic tone. “That’s a difficult road, my brother.”
Brad is about to snap: he is not Rudy’s brother, and he didn’t come here to talk about the fucking scenery-that didn’t even…that’s not why he’s upset. Not that he’s upset. Offended, maybe. Offended by the insult to his warrior spirit. After all, why would a couple of broken old houses upset him? But by the time he can put words to the thoughts, Rudy is leading him out past the reception desk and up the hotel’s central staircase to a quiet room with a balcony. Pappy vanishes as quickly as he'd arrived.
Rudy lights a spirit lamp and finds a tin mess cup on a shelf. Again, he waits for silence before speaking. “Sergeant Major Sixta wants to be leading Marines on Guadalcanal. He is a disappointed man.”
Brad could think of a few other choice adjectives to describe this Sixta, but he manages to bite his tongue. Watching Rudy make coffee is like watching some kind of fucking tea ceremony. Each step in the process seems to take his full attention. Brad doesn’t want to interrupt. It’s…well, it’s surprisingly soothing. In the stillness, he notices the trees outside the window. There is a breeze; when it blows a certain way (south, says the little pilot always on duty in his head, from the south), Brad can hear the faint sound of women’s voices in the distance.
By the time Rudy hands him the tin mug of coffee, Brad has begun to think he will get through the next hour without wrecking anything. Not anything important, anyway.
“Aren’t you going to have any?” he asks Rudy.
“Oh, I think coffee is a stimulant that pollutes the body and clouds the mind,” Rudy says cheerfully. “But you just enjoy that while I get the morning shift sorted out. I’ll have Pappy get the LC to brief you about what he wants done. Given that you’ve been traveling all night, I’m sure he’ll see fit to send you back to the hostel after that.”
++++
Eventually, Brad will realize that the speed with which Meesh had produced orders and a train ticket were not as miraculous as they had first seemed. (Well, getting a train ticket in two days-that was a minor miracle, and how he’d passed Brad off as a British interpreter will forever remain a mystery shrouded in the fog of war). Orders to Berlin were a dime a dozen: the Soviets had taken the city in May and now the other Allies were now eager to populate it with their own soldiers and diplomats, lest possession become nine-tenths of the law. Until Eisenhower unfucked himself and decided who and how to send soldiers to fight that other pesky war, the one against Imperial Japan, regular battalions were simply left in the field. Specialists like Brad-pilots without planes, doctors without hospitals, engineers without bridges to build-might as well be dispatched to make up numbers in Berlin. It was what Sixta would call “creating a creditable display of force.”
Brad’s contribution to holding Berlin for the forces of democracy involves looking through lists of names and lists of birthdates and lists of Nazi Party registrations and try to find matches. Any matches should be logged on yet another list. It is part of a larger process with a long, official name, which everyone refers to as denatzification
“You get a lot of opportunists,” rasps the head of the division, a lieutenant colonel, his voice wrecked by phosgene gas during the last war to end war. He leads Brad over to a desk piled high with files. “Say you’re….I don’t know, a streetsweeper in Neukölln. Nazis come to power in ‘33, decree that only party members are allowed to hold municipal jobs. That’s you out on your ass. You hold out for a few years, but they have a Depression over here, too. So in 1935, you sign a goddamn membership certificate, all of a sudden, you’re a fucking Nazi sanitation engineer, sweeping streets in Neukölln. Guys like that, they go in this pile,” he gestures to a wire tray, barely visible beneath the papers. “And then you have guys who joined the party in 1929, worked their way up, torched the Reichstag, beat up the Communists, killed the Jews, prayed to Hitler before going to bed every night. The believers. They go over here,” Godfather points to another tray. “The opportunists’ll get scheduled for denatzification interviews, once the Brits send us more translators. Lucky ones get cleared, go back to sweeping streets.”
“That’s…” Brad looks for the word. “Magnanimous.”
Godfather shrugs. “They’re no threat anymore. Small fish, and fish go where the food is-right now, the Allies have all the breadcrumbs. Besides, ‘nother month and we’ll all be in the South Pacific. Somebody’s gotta stay behind to clean up.”
“What about the believers?“ Brad asks.
“Believers get interviewed by another division.” Godfather’s tone makes it clear that is division is well over Brad’s paygrade.
“So…no breadcrumbs?”
Godfather glares at Brad like he suspects he’s being made fun of. “These are fucking sharks we’re talking about here, son: a little blood in the water and they’re more’n happy to prey on the weak,” he snarls. “For all I care, they can fucking starve.”
++++
After he's dismissed by Godfather, Brad gets the dime tour from Pappy. Three floors of the hotel-turned-headquarters contain denatzification offices; the top floor has been turned into a hostel for enlisted men. The canteen is in the basement. The moment he's free, Brad registers himself with the housing officer, dumps his kit on the assigned bunk, and starts asking around about Allied Hospital No. 2. There’s no hot water at the hostel after 8:00 AM, so he washes his hands, his face, the back of his neck, shaves cold. He gets another pencil-sketch map from someone who thinks he knows the hospital-“another hotel, nicer than this one, by that big statue…”-and Rudy finds a dispatch courier who is going as far as the Soviet Sector.
In five minutes, Brad realizes he’s wasted his war flying fucking planes. Imagine, all that time spent with navigators and bombing crews and parachutists, when could have been driving a motorcycle: speed and solutide. The courier zips through empty streets, dodging piles of stones, trailing his own cloud of dust and debris. They stop only once, for a convoy of trucks.
The Soviet sector seems to begin in the middle of a street, where one bedraggled sentry next to a larger-than-life picture of Josef Stalin checks Brad’s ID before returning to argue with the courier. Brad unfolds his handdrawn map, walks east for a few minutes, and promptly realizes that he is hopelessly lost amidst the rubble. He tries to walk back to the sentry post, but only finds himself more confused. Usually, he has an impeccable sense of direction, but everything looks the same-broken-and, Christ, he is just so tired. Finally, he thinks he’s almost gotten back on track when suddenly, twenty yards away, two women step through a doorway onto the street.
“Hey!” Brad calls, and they immediately go still.
He jogs up to them: two women, one with gray hair, the other perhaps ten years younger, both wearing uniform canteen smocks over faded flowered dresses, and Brad waves them down
They look at him, stolidly, and-shit! Brad had a landlady who spoke some German once, but he can’t remember: does the question word come first? and aren’t there at least two ways to say to? “Krankenhaus?” he manages, finally
“You bombed the hospital,” the younger woman snaps. She recognizes his USAAF uniform and Brad is so relieved to hear English that it takes him a moment to register the words. “Yeah, well, you invaded Poland,” is what he wants to say, but he bites his tongue and thinks strategically. Trading insults on the sidewalk is not mission effective: it will not get him what he wants. What he wants is Nate
Wordlessly, he holds out Nate’s postcard so they can see the return address. Something flickers in the fierce younger woman’s face, and Brad wonders if she recognizes the card, if she’s ever received a note from someone injured and in military hospital, far from home.
The women discuss something in German for a moment, consulting, before returning their attention to him. Brad finds a stubby pencil in one pocket and they amend the sketched map. Apparently, he had somehow walked right out of the Soviet sector, into section of Berlin held by the French. Moreover, the young corporal who had drawn his first map would be lucky to find his own nose with a fucking compass.
“Merci. Danke. No, no, keep it,” Brad says when the younger woman tries to return the pencil. She looks as though she’d like to stab him with it, but she tucks it into a pocket instead. He tips his hat; he has what he came for-he can be magnanimous in his victory.
++++
Allied Hospital No. 2 is in the Soviet sector because it is staffed primarily by Soviet doctors, all of whom look malnourished and about ten minutes from complete collapse. Brad stands in the front entrance, holding out Nate’s postcard, and repeating, “Excuse me, pardonnez, bitte-looking for die Englander?” to anyone who walks past until finally a small dark woman in an apron takes him by the hand and leads him to what was once the hotel’s grand ballroom
Brad focuses intently on the scarf the woman has tied over her hair as she leads him between rows of beds to the far corner. He doesn’t look to the left or the right, doesn’t take his eyes from the scarf until the woman ducks between two sheets that have been strung up like curtains around a bed in the far corner. When comes out, she has one finger against her lips: the universal sign for quiet.
Nate is asleep, tucked tightly into the hospital bed and Brad literally has to clench his hands into fists to keep from running them over the blankets to feel the limbs beneath. In the dim light filtering through the curtains, Brad thinks he can make out feet-two feet, attached to two legs, hips, shoulders, arms, hands-one clutching the blanket and one tucked against Nate’s chin, on the side opposite the swath of bandages that cut across his sleeping face. The Russian nurse is trying to mime something to Brad, covering her eyes, then blinking rapidly and looking at him quizzically. Brad nods distantly, though he hasn’t the slightest idea what she is trying to tell him, until she shrugs and slips back out through the sheet curtains.
Nate is injured, Brad reminds himself. Nate is injured, but he is clean, in tidy striped pajamas and a sterile hospital bed, whereas Brad himself is filthy from traveling across a wartorn nation. His clothing is dusty, mudstained (the goddamn Jeep had stalled. Twice), sooty from the train. His fucking skin feels crumpled. This single fact is the only thing that keeps him from climbing into the narrow hospital bed, boots and all, to put his face against that place above the striped pajama collar, where Nate’s shoulder meets his neck, where Brad could feel his pulse, warm and steady and alive.
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{Part 2}