The Apartment

The previous superficial description may allow you to imagine this modest apartment I received from Vinny, but in the face of happenings from the time of the siege or shortly after the capture of this town, evidenced so suggestively in the traces it left, it took on a completely different character.

I won’t go into detail, so that this place will not invoke some parapsychological element, but, like from a comics, step by step, page by page, scene by scene, what happened here worked so strongly on my imagination that very often I completely lost my concentration. 

Briefly, the bullet holes from an unbelievable number of 7.62 mm caliber rounds fired from that same weapon within my small apartment allowed a glimpse into events not yet so long ago. 

In this town you could see traces of gunfire everywhere and through the years it didn’t surprise anyone, but the traces in my apartment, visible from entry, through the stairs, the hall, in the room up to the bathroom, were nevertheless a shock. 

In the context of my own amateur ballistic investigation I had estimated that in the space of some twenty meters, were fired no less, no more than seventy one shots, meaning precisely as much ammunition as fit in the characteristically round magazine of the Soviet machine pistol PPSH-41, the so-called pepesza. 

My investigation had concluded that most likely some Russian was chasing some German so that he could kill him. The Russian could’ve even been drunk. At that time, everywhere had wandered about fully—delicately speaking—drunk Red Army soldiers, looking around for German women, watches, alcohol, bicycles and anything else they could get their hands on. And because, I have to admit, they had fought very bravely and with maximal sacrifice, the commanders allowed them to do many things. 

This particular drunk had seen his prey disappearing behind the doors and moved quickly after it, on the way loading a new magazine, and while running, already at the stairs he had begun to shoot. 

Primarily he shot at an angle forty five degrees to the ceiling, the same in the hall and the room, but when he finally caught his horrified prey in a corner near the bathtub, he lowered his weapon, changing his angle of fire to ninety degrees. 

At first, similarly to the investigative teams in American crime films, who used chalk, he precisely outlined his prey with gunfire, and at the end with the rest of his unused ammunition diligently filled in the middle. 

During my frequent and long thoughts on this matter, knowing a little reality, I decided even who the prey could have been. I ruled out first off any well trained Wehrmacht soldier or an even better trained member of the SS, because none of them, having the choice of jumping from the terrace, would try to hide like some prattler in a bathroom. 

The prey was likely a woman, who for example, wanting to avoid collective rape, tried to save herself with an unsuccessful escape attempt, and the drunken Russian had decided to punish her for this attempt and with the help of his pepesza riddled her with squeezes. 

The already mentioned green-blue tiles with the antique motif, unlovingly shot up, punctured and cracked, smeared with an overwhelming wastage not quite plaster, not quite cement, gave the entire bathroom an atmosphere of an archeological dig site, for example in Pompeii. 

The tiles held up on word of honor, Vinny informed me while he showed me the apartment.