Naamloos verhaal

3

                  

The next few days and nights were to be a real test for me. Humiliated by my circumstances, billeted in makeshift accommodation, cheek-by-jowl with dubious publications, tobacco, confectionery and tinned drinks, at night bent double in a passably (but not particularly) clean armchair, I had to catch up on the past sixty-six years without arousing unfavourable attention. Whereas others would have no doubt spent hours and days fruitlessly agonising over scientific explanations, hunting in vain for a solution to this time-travel conundrum, which was as fantastical as it was unfathomable, my trusty methodical reasoning was well placed to adapt itself to the prevailing circumstances. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, I accepted the facts of the new situation and focused on reconnaissance. Especially as – to anticipate events briefly – the changed conditions seemed to offer considerably more and better opportunities. It transpired that in the last sixty-six years the number of Soviet soldiers on the territory of the German Reich had fallen substantially, particularly in the Greater Berlin area. The current figure was between thirty and fifty men; in a flash I could see that this afforded the Wehrmacht a far better prospect of victory compared to the last estimate from my general staff of around 2.5 million enemy soldiers on the Eastern Front alone.

I toyed, albeit momentarily, with the idea that I had been the victim of a plot, an abduction, in which the enemy's intelligence service had concocted an elaborate hoax, circumventing my iron will to prise from me key secrets. But the technological demands of creating an entirely new world in which, after all, I could move about freely – that variation on reality was even more inconceivable than the one I found myself in, with the ability to grasp things with my hands and see with my eyes. No, I had to wage the struggle in this bizarre here and now. And the first step in any struggle is always reconnaissance.

The reader will not find it hard to imagine that obtaining new, reliable information without the necessary infrastructure posed considerable difficulties. The premises were extremely inauspicious: as far as foreign affairs were concerned, I had neither military intelligence nor the foreign ministry at my disposal; with regard to domestic affairs, establishing contact with the Gestapo was, given my circumstances, no simple matter. Even undertaking a library visit seemed too hazardous for the time being. I was thus reliant on the content of numerous publications, whose trustworthiness I was of course unable to verify, as well as on utterances and scraps of conversation from passers-by. The newspaper seller had very kindly supplied me with a wireless set, which on account of technological advances in the intervening years had shrunk to unbelievably tiny proportions; but the standards of Greater German radio had nosedived since 1940. As soon as I switched it on I heard a hellish din, frequently interrupted by utterly incomprehensible gibberish. I continued to listen, but the content never changed; the only difference was that it began to alternate more frequently between the racket and the gibberish. I made a number of futile attempts, each lasting several minutes, to decrypt the noise issuing from this technological marvel, then switched it off in horror. I must have sat there absolutely still for a quarter of an hour, virtually paralysed by shock, before deciding to postpone my efforts with the wireless. So I was left with the periodicals. It had never been their top priority to provide a true historical account; I was almost certain nothing had changed on that front.

An initial review, which could not, of course, provide a complete picture, pointed to the following conclusions:

1.      The Turk had not come to our assistance after all.

2.      In light of the seventieth anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, there were numerous reports about this episode in German history painting a negative picture of the campaign. The unanimous view was that Barbarossa had not been a victory; indeed, the whole war had ended in defeat, or so these papers said.