Otto's Phoney War Read online

  She shook her head several times, as if she were trying to wake up out of a deep trance, her eyes unable to focus, her tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth like that of a cretin.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What are you going to do about it, woman?’ Angrily he sat up on the bed. ‘For Chris-sake, don’t just stand there – do something!’

  ‘The scissors,’ she croaked, reaching for the instruments, with a hand that trembled badly.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Otto cried wriggling to the other side of the bed to get out of her reach. ‘With the kind of shakes you’ve got, you silly cow, you’d cut it right off!’

  It was just then that the nightmare reached its crescendo. There was that well-known stamp of heavy Army boots coming down the gravel path that led to the little house.

  Walburga’s hand flew to her mouth in alarm.

  ‘Holy Strawsack!’ Otto cried. ‘It's your old man – the Fart-Cannon!’ Frantically he grabbed his trousers and rolled from the rumpled bed, while Walburga’s gaze darted wildly from side to side, looking for a place for her lover to hide. ‘Under the bed!’ she gasped. ‘Get underneath!’

  A curious thing was happening to Otto. It reminded him of that time when, as an impressionable teenager he had been discovered totally naked by two hulking customers of his mother the Witch. As he had stood there, trembling with fear, he had felt his penis filling with blood, growing harder and harder. The two gentlemen callers had doubled up in laughter. And right now, as Otto grew cold with fear once again, he felt the same thing happening down below.

  Otto fell to the floor. Outside there was the sound of Forz’s key in the door. Otto, member now straining against the bandages, started to edge himself underneath the low bed-frame, while Walburga threw on a robe.

  ‘Ouch!’ he yelped as the cocoon-like protuberance knocked against the bed-frame.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she whinnied.

  ‘I can’t get under. This sodding salami is in the way!’ he gasped in horror as the door to the little house squeaked open. His member pounded harder. He could feel the pressure pulsing in his ears.

  Hurriedly she stuffed her left breast into her gown and hissed. ‘The wardrobe … Into the wardrobe!’

  ‘Hello, my little bunny-rabbit,’ Forz cooed from the living-room. ‘Where’s my little bunny-rabbit? Are we playing games again, cheetah?’

  Madly Otto flung his trousers over the absurd encumbrance and pushed by her and into the open wardrobe to burrow into the clothes that stank of moth-balls and sweat, pulling them in front of him and whispering urgently. ‘In God’s name close the door – ’

  Next instant he wished he had not made the suggestion as the door slapped against the erect cocoon and he bit back his cry of agonized pain just in time. ‘Mensch, what the hell are you trying to do, Walburga? Cut off my shitting salami?’

  ‘I can’t close the door!’ she hissed in horror. ‘It sticks out. I could push, if you – ’

  Trying to bend double in pain, Otto hushed from the wardrobe. ‘Not on your life! You’ve got to keep him busy while I sneak out.’

  ‘Yoo-hoo … yoo-hoo!’ Sergeant Forz was hollering outside, his voice high and expectant like some opera tenor in an absurd piece by Lehar. ‘Where’s my little, snuggly-pussy hiding her pretty little self now … Yoo-hoo … ’

  ‘But what can I do?’ she cried, wringing her hands in despair. ‘There’s no other way but the front door.’

  Otto made a quick decision. ‘Get out there. You got the pants off me quick enough. See you do the same for him. Once he’s on the job – on that couch of yours – I’ll slip by.’

  She pouted her bottom lip. ‘But that would be indecent,’ she said. ‘You’ll see him … doing it when you pass.’ She shook her head with sudden stubbornness. ‘I’d rather he’d find out, than that.’

  Otto swallowed the angry retort back just in time, his mind racing wildly. ‘No I won’t,’ he said desperately. ‘When I go by, I’ll keep my eyes closed.’

  ‘Promise!’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Good, then I’ll do it.’

  ‘Thank God!’ Otto breathed weakly, feeling his legs threatening to give way beneath him at any moment. ‘Off you go … For God’s sake before he comes blundering in here!’

  She went.

  Tensely, Otto waited, trying to tug on his pants, but finding the white cocoon made any attempt to close the flies impossible. His heart was thudding, ear pressed to the door expectantly.

  Then he heard Forz’s cry of delight and the sound of a big paw slapping a naked bottom. Otto whispered the first prayer he had made since he had been kicked out of his confirmation class at the age of fourteen.

  A minute or two passed with leaden slowness. There was the sound of a heavy object dropping to the floor and then a second later, another. Forz had just dropped his army-issue dice-beaker boots.

  Another minute passed. A grunt of pleasure. He's on the job, Otto told himself, tensed behind the bedroom door. The sudden regular squeaking of rusty springs told him that he was right. He forced himself to count to three and then he began to open the door gingerly.

  Walburga was sprawled on the couch, legs raised in the air, with Forz between her white plump thighs, massive bottom naked, field-grey trousers wrapped around his ankles, making intense grunting noises. Walburga saw him and her face grew stern. With her free hand, she touched her eyes warningly.

  Hastily Otto nodded his understanding. One hand holding his trousers, the other searching the room ahead of him like a blind man, he tiptoed to the door, heart racing like a trip-hammer, followed by Walburga’s stern gaze and accompanied by the animal grunts now reaching their climax as Forz began to win that age-old race.

  Five minutes later Otto was seated in the cover of a grove of thick pines, cautiously picking at the tight bandage with his pocket-knife, the sweat standing out on his forehead in thick pearls, making little yelping sounds every time he nicked himself, swearing all the time that this was the last game he would play with Walburga Forz, the very last. In the end it took him nearly an hour and half to remove the damn thing.

  That night two things of disparate importance took place. Hitler’s troops crossed into Poland and started World War Two; and Otto Stahl volunteered to accept any outside job that Sergeant Forz found fit to give him.

  Forz, relaxed and generous after the incident on the couch that afternoon, didn’t object. ‘Can’t take it, eh, Stahl? The little woman’s too much for you, eh?’ Numbly Otto nodded.

  Forz beamed. ‘All right, you smart-arsed Berliner. I can’t say that I like that ugly kisser any more today than when I first saw it. But I feel in a generous mood this evening. Tomorrow morning you report to the latrines. I’ll be there to instruct you in the use of the honey-dew wagon.’ He threw back his big head and laughed uproariously, as if at some private joke. ‘That’s gonna come as a surprise for a big city feller like you … All right, off you go now. I’ll fix it with Frau Forz. I’ll tell her that you just couldn’t stand the pace.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant Forz,’ Otto breathed, ‘thank you very much!’ And there were tears of genuine gratitude in his eyes. He was saved!

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘The latrines!’ Sergeant Forz, indicated the green-painted wooden structures with the traditional heart, decorated with flowers, carved into each door. ‘Got it, arse with ears?’

  Otto nodded, saying nothing. Now he had recovered a little from his ordeal at the hands of Walburga Forz and was beginning to wonder just what he had got himself into.

  ‘The pump!’ Forz barked and pointed to the apparatus to the rear of the latrines, which looked rather like an elongated, old-fashioned water-pump. ‘Got it, you cold cucumber?’

  Again Otto nodded.

  Across the field on the road, a company of Arbeits-dienst youths marched, crying at regular intervals the latest victory from the new front in Poland. ‘Danzig ist deutsch! … Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer!’

 
Forz beamed with approval and puffed up his barrel-chest, as if he personally were responsible for the capture of the seaport. ‘Now finally the honey-dew wagon,’ he cried as the sound of the singing began to die away. He indicated the long metal barrel, mounted on an ordinary farmer’s can, drawn by an ancient nag, which sagged between the shafts, as if it would fall flat on its face if it were not for their support.

  ‘What is it?’ Otto asked for the first time, eyeing the device in bewilderment.

  Forz laughed contemptuously. ‘I was wondering when you would ask that, Stahl,’ he said. ‘We country boys were brought up with such things, but naturally you fine big-city pissers wouldn’t know anything about them. Here, look, I’ll show you.’

  Easily he clambered up on the cart ignoring the old nag’s sigh of despair at the extra weight, and inserted the long tube of the pump into the hole in the top of the metal barrel. Deftly, he jerked the pump’s handle a couple of times.

  A stream of thick yellow liquid, obscene and noxious, spurted into the barrel and abruptly the fresh morning air was choked with the stench of faeces.

  Otto blanched and staggered back a few paces, as if he had been slapped physically across the face. ‘Great God in Heaven,’ he blurted out, nauseated. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Exactly, Stahl,’ Forz said, dropping from the cart and beaming at him. ‘Good honest shit, the waste product of good honest German arses.’ His grin increased. ‘And from now onwards it will be your task to pump it out of the cesspits of every latrine in this area and dump it in the sanitation sector. ‘He saw the horrified look on Otto’s handsome young face and said insidiously. ‘Of course, if you don’t like the job, you could go back –’

  ‘No, no,’ Otto said hastily, ‘I’ll take it, Forz! But what do I do with the stuff when I’ve pumped it out?’

  Forz swung round and pointed to the heights which marked the border between Belgium and Germany. ‘You see where the secondary road branches off to Schoenberg in Belgie-land? Well, we’ve got the lime-pits of the sanitation sector up there. It’s part of the Chief Engineer’s new private hate against the Belgies. He wants us to dump our crap right underneath the garlic-gobblers’ dripping noses and give them the full benefit of German culture.’

  ‘I see,’ Otto replied.

  ‘Of course you’ll be moving out of your present billet into the little shed at the back of the camp,’ Forz continued, a malicious grin on his broad red face. ‘You understand that?’

  ‘Not really, Forz.’

  ‘Well, do you think anyone would want to sleep in the same room as you after a day’s work with the honey-dew cart?’ Forz chortled. ‘Not on your life! From now onwards, Stahl, you’re gonna lead a very lonely existence indeed. But there’ll be one consolation.’

  ‘What’s that Forz?’ Otto asked unhappily.

  ‘One day when you have kids, and they ask you what you did in the big war. You can say … say, that you shovelled shit for the Fatherland!’ And Sergeant Forz broke out into uproarious laughter, the tears streaming down his face.

  Thus while in the first days of that September, the German war machine rolled victoriously across Poland, and virtually hourly the fanfares of the radio announced yet another tremendous defeat inflicted on the ‘Slavic sub-humans’, Otto Stahl urged his weary nag back and forth between the camps’ various latrines and the ‘sanitation sector’, a handkerchief tied across his mouth, cotton-wool stuffed in his nostrils. All in a vain attempt to keep out that terrible stench, cursing his luck and the all-too-regular bowel movements of his comrades, who seemed to spend virtually all their free time in the damn latrines.

  As Forz had accurately predicted, Stahl had become a very lonely man. When he made his appearance, the other workers made a show of holding their noses and pulling lavatory chains, and would-be comedians made the usual comments about ‘attar of roses’ and the like. But no one stayed for very long in his presence, in spite of the fact that he scrubbed himself nightly until his skin glowed an angry red and spent half his weekly pay on cheap eau de cologne to spray on his clothes. Occasionally Wurm, the little hunchbacked clerk, would spend a few minutes at the door of the shed in which he now lived, commiserating with him, but finally he, too, would flee, unable to stand the terrible odour any longer.

  As Otto sadly remarked to the old nag which slept in the other half of the shed, ‘Old-timer, we’re outcasts, pure and simple, rejected by society.’ And the old nag had raised its grizzled head and given a weary nod, as if he agreed with the sentiment.

  It was on the fifth day of his new assignment that Otto finally really became aware of the black-uniformed Belgian border guard, lounging over the red-and-white striped pole which barred the road to the Belgian village of Schoenberg down below in the valley, shako thrust to the back of his shaven head, cigarette seemingly glued to his bottom lip.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he ventured, reining in the weary spavined horse, glad to have a break from the monotony of his dreary stinking routine, surprised a little that the Belgian had not moved back at the stench coming from the honey-dew wagon.

  ‘Bonjour,’ the Belgian replied, the cigarette moving up and down with his lip as he spoke. ‘Nice load of shit you’ve got there, Prussian,’ he said casually in good German. ‘Must be a thousand litres there.’

  ‘Could be,’ Otto agreed. ‘You speak good German.’

  ‘Of course,’ the border guard agreed. ‘I was born down there in Schoenberg when it still belonged to you Prussians before 1918 and Versailles.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Otto absorbed the information, a little amused at the Belgian’s use of the word ‘Prussian’ for German.

  ‘That’s my place,’ the Belgian pointed to a little red-roofed house about five hundred metres down the road, its walls scarred as if with scabies. ‘Got two hectares of land down there. Of course, the old woman has got to work it. I mean I’m too busy up here carrying out my official duties, guarding the frontier. Run off my feet almost, I am.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Otto agreed with a grin. There probably wouldn’t be more than one vehicle a day passing that particular frontier, he told himself. ‘I’ve never been abroad,’ he said. ‘Is it any different over there in Belgium?’

  The Belgian studied him with eyes that had suddenly narrowed cunningly. ‘You’d like to have a look?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Otto said hesitantly. ‘But I’ve got to get rid of this stuff or my boss’ll go up the wall.’

  ‘Bring it with you,’ the border guard said eagerly. ‘You can dump it at my place. The Old Lady would be glad of that good Prussian shit. I mean horseshit is damn dear these days.’

  Otto flung a look to left and right. The wooded, hilly Eifel countryside seemed devoid of human beings. ‘All right, I will.’

  One minute later the pole had been raised and the old nag was plodding its way wearily down the road towards the border guard’s farm and for the first time in his twenty-odd years, Otto Stahl was abroad.

  But the surprises did not end there.

  A bottle of Stella Artois was shared, that fizzy weak Belgian beer, and several of the Belgie cigarettes which his new acquaintance Emil Lejeune offered him as they sat there on the bench outside the door watching Madame Lejeune busily spread the nauseating effluence on the land, raking it among the plants, up to the tops of her wooden shoes in the stinking stuff, as if her very life depended upon it. Lejeune called to her, ‘All right, woman, don’t idle there! Into the kitchen and give our Prussian friend a little recompense in return for his kind gift.’

  ‘Yes, husband,’ Madame Lejeune said dutifully. She dropped her rake and stamped into the kitchen to return with the ‘recompense’ clutched to her massive bosom in big red paws, their skin like emery paper. ‘A wheel,’ she said, handing a startled Otto a typical round loaf of the area. ‘Our own air-dried Ardennes bacon, and this.’ She gave the young man a toothless smile and handed across a package which gave off an odour that was excitingly familiar, yet somehow not easy to identify immediately.
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  ‘What is it?’ he stuttered.

  ‘Why it's coffee, Prussian,’ she said. ‘Bean coffee, half a kilo to be exact.’

  ‘Real bean coffee!’ Otto exclaimed. ‘Why there has been no bean coffee on sale in the Reich since 1937! All we get is ersatz, made of acorns and the like.’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of it over here,’ the farmwoman said, ‘Come on, now tuck it under your seat so that the customs-men don’t see it.’ She winked knowingly at her husband, who grinned back at her.

  ‘But bean coffee’s worth a small fortune over in the Reich!’ Otto protested. ‘At least thirty Reichsmark a kilo.’

  ‘It’s worth it for us. You can’t get that kind of good Prussian crap over here these days. It’s yours. Do with it what you wish.’

  Five minutes later as Lejeune raised the pole to allow Stahl to pass back into Germany, he said, ‘If you’ve got any more of that stuff, Prussian, I think I could find you plenty of buyers.’

  'Buyouts?’

  Emil Lejeune winked solemnly. ‘We little men have to make the most of what we’ve got, Prussian. With luck you can even make chocolate out of shit.’ And with that enigmatic remark, he resumed his old position on the pole, cigarette glued to his bottom lip.

  CHAPTER 5

  Young Otto Stahl had a new career – of short duration admittedly – but one which was highly lucrative: Purveyor of good German manure to the eager, small farmers of the Eastern Canton of St Vith, Belgium.

  Business ran splendidly. Three times a day he would guide his weary old horse up to the little border post. There with Emil’s help, it would be hastily exchanged for one of the Belgian’s own sturdy Flemings. Then, while Madame Lejeune guarded the Belgian frontier on behalf of his Majesty Leopold II, King of All Belgians, the two of them would be off at the gallop, the honey-dew cart flying behind the Fleming, to deliver their wares to the many hamlets that dotted the road between St Vith and Losheim.