The Hiding Game

by Naomi Wood

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It might be all right.’

  We listened to more before the broadcast returned to an afternoon play. ‘No other Nazis have power, do they? It’s only him.’

  ‘Göring does. And Frick. But that’s it, I think.’

  ‘Let’s go into town,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see what’s happening.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked again.

  ‘Because I want to see it with my own eyes.’

  She wore Rosenberg’s shirt. ‘Charlotte, it’s a Nazi parade, not Irmi’s Christmas party.’

  ‘We must see it for ourselves.’ She swung her legs off mine to find her coat and scarf. ‘Besides,’ she said, her voice muffled, ‘I can’t stand to be inside any longer.’

  Ah; yes. This was what she needed: a small break, a little distance – whereas I could have had weeks more with her like this. That was always the difference between us. She was always the one to break first.

  Our train was full of people with the same idea. The tunnels were dark aside from the lamps which lent passing brightness to the commuters hanging loosely from the leather straps as the train crashed along the tracks. The platforms were full, and our carriage only got fuller as we approached the city: businessmen and students and housewives and the unemployed, ready to see whatever spectacle we deserved.

  After we reached the station we walked toward Unter den Linden. Everywhere illuminated advertisements sold politics and health. Around us was the helpless brickwork of the city, and khaki trucks on the road, their cargo covered. Several fireworks shot into the sky, far away enough to be Luna Park.

  There were many women in the crowd when we reached the boulevard. There were men too but not as many. I asked one woman how long she’d been there and she said ‘since lunch’, which was when we’d heard the radio announcement. Flags snapped loudly in the quick wind. The women might have been our age, though they seemed older. They kept on looking at Charlotte. They would look once, trying to divine her; then look back again.

  We shared our kirsch amongst the women and they let us closer to the rope. Victory was in her chariot at the top of the Gate, and the horses looked ready to ride out from under her. I wondered if we might see Jenö in the crowd.

  It must have been an hour or so later when everyone without warning surged forward, a whisper going through the crowd – he’s coming, he’s here! The noise of drums came from the avenue, then a rattling, but most of the boulevard was dark. Then the drumming became louder, and we could hear hundreds of boots marching in time. Torches suddenly provoked from the night the Storm Troopers, grimly, steadfastly, entering Berlin. Whatever the torches burned made the air foul. Everything was quiet as the men marched toward the gates, burning rivers of light into the boulevard beyond the rope.

  ‘Look!’ one of the women exclaimed. ‘Over there!’

  Another surge moved the crowd and Charlotte’s hand was pulled from mine. I found her man’s hat quickly amongst the women’s. Her face froze as a thousand arms rose in unison and a roar called up Hitler, upright in the open cab. He gave the crowd a small smile before he vanished through the gate as quickly as he had come.

  The crowd was running west now but Charlotte managed to get back to the rope. Hitler’s retinue followed in four more cars, black and sleek and willing.

  We should have followed the women into the park. We should have run with them, under the gate, under Victory with her open skirts and reckless mouth, over to the Reichstag. There was this last moment – flaming out; already finishing – before I saw him, but the last car is already coming into view, and though Charlotte doesn’t see him – might not even recognise him from our chance meeting at the Swan – Ernst Steiner was standing in one of the open-topped cabs in his brown shirt and cap, still as fat as ever, and any opportunity I had had to change the course of this sorry history – well, it was gone.

  The way Steiner watched the crowd: he had given us exactly the same look from his office. Imperious. Delighted.

  It was Ernst all right.

  He sat down as the car passed through the gate. I looked around the crowd to see if Walter might be here. A longing stirred in me, ever so slightly romantic, definitely ancient, that I should like to see Walter König, my old friend, counsellor, and sometime traitor. Because I knew that if Ernst was in Berlin, there was a good chance Walter would be too.

  44

  Berlin

  When Kaspar had said, at Irmi’s party, that Walter was still fucking some fat Nazi, I would never have thought that man would be a Nazi with so much power; a man to be included in Hitler’s cavalcade. While I wanted immediately to find Walter in Berlin, I also didn’t want to be found by Ernst Steiner. Easy enough to find someone in Berlin in 1933; not so easy not to be caught.

  Neither Walter nor he was in the phone book, and it was too cold to stake out Ernst’s government building all day. I couldn’t send a telegram or even a letter to the Weimar studio, since I didn’t want Mr Steiner to ever ask himself whether he had once known a Paul Beckermann.

  A couple of weeks passed in February as I puzzled over the mystery. Though newspapers had been raided, Thälmann threatened, and his Communist members beaten, I’d say that, at least in the aftermath of Hitler’s parade, things were almost normal. There was even a faintly festive spirit that we were allowed outside again. The cabaret reopened; kids played on the streets; in the afternoons Charlotte was once more on the move.

  While I puzzled out the mystery of how to find Ernst Steiner, my father took me to tea at Lutter and Wegner’s. Though I wasn’t sure he could afford it, he made a show of paying for the whole thing. Despite the fact he no longer owned industrial property to speak of – in fact I think he and my brother both mooned about the house sending my mother half mad – he was ever the anxious capitalist, talking about a new factory he wanted to open, and how he knew someone high up in the Party who would help him get set up again. And then! Who knew, perhaps one day he might outfit the whole of the new German army with plimsolls. I remembered the summer I’d spent in his shoe factory, when he’d paid me not a pfennig more than the other workers. Still, as Walter had proved, it had kept me from worse misdeeds.

  When my father shook my hand at the revolving gold doors he quoted Isaiah: ‘Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.’ Then he turned on his heel, mumbling the chapter numbers but explaining nothing, and off he went. Later my mother wrote me a letter of apology, saying the ‘world was bent on dividing us’. I knew she liked Charlotte, and I wondered why she hadn’t come with him. Usually she enjoyed trips away, but then I had written to her in such detail about the Nazi parade, she might have been simply too scared to get on the train.

  It wasn’t much longer after the bizarre meeting with my father that I managed to find Ernst Steiner. It was all thanks to Irmi, really. I was walking Charlotte out at lunchtime when I saw the porter’s newspaper: on the front page was a photograph of some of the Party’s top men. I asked the porter if I might have a look.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Charlotte asked quietly. She didn’t like the porter – Mr Schmidt – she found him unsettling. I knew he didn’t like doing anybody any special favours but he handed over the newspaper anyway. The photographed officials were smiling, war medals hung on their lapels, and the caption read Hotel Kaiserhof, Berlin. Ernst wasn’t in the picture, but he was a politician, and he had always enjoyed a drink.

  Charlotte scanned the picture. ‘Who are all these people?’

  ‘Leaders of the Fatherland,’ I said, in earshot of Schmidt, who, like all Berlin porters, was a paid-up Nazi.

  He asked, and not in a friendly way, whether I wanted to keep it. ‘No. Thank you.’ As he took his newspaper he narrowed his eyes at Charlotte’s boyish haircut.

  We said goodbye at the front door.

  ‘That man gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Just ignore him. Where are you off to?’

  �
��Off for a walk. Everything feels crammed in my head.’ She held her satchel close to her, as if she were worried someone would snatch it. I could tell she was distracted as she kissed me goodbye. I wondered, as I did every day, whether she was heading off to the Bauhaus, and, when she was there, what – if anything – she and Jenö would do together. I knew this was a killing way to think, and that my suspicions would soon send me to the madhouse. But I couldn’t help it. I imagined her and Jenö in workshops. I imagined them in the ateliers. I imagined their desire after three years of being apart; its intensity, its white heat.

  Some days later, I stood opposite the Kaiserhof. Party men in uniform milled at the bar and seated women waited for their return. Ernst was at the window, just as Irmi had said he would be. He was talking to a woman, her hair done in waves, her hands braced as if she had no intention of touching her drink. He looked to all the world like an officer from the age of Bismarck, and I almost felt proud of him. How high he had climbed from the studio in the woods! How well he had done from our paintings!

  I wondered if Walter, too, was thriving with all this wealth. He’d always liked money; always missed it when he didn’t have any. But there was the question of the woman. Ernst’s wife? Mrs Steiner? In which case, maybe Walter had been left behind. What would Walter do in Weimar, and what would he be, without Ernst’s patronage? I hadn’t heard from him in years. He could just as well be dead from booze and cocaine in Goethe’s forest.

  I scooted round to the rear of the hotel and waited for a few minutes before Irmi came out with neither coat nor scarf. I realised just then that we hadn’t spoken, not properly, since our argument.

  ‘It’s the man by the window, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘The bald one?’

  ‘That’s him, yes.’

  ‘I’d no idea he was Walter’s boyfriend!’

  I was surprised that she was in a good mood. Maybe she had forgiven me; again. ‘You’ve never seen Walter here?’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking at me funny, ‘I would have said. Mr Steiner was your boss in Weimar? I’ve served him endless times!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Who’s the woman?’

  ‘Not sure. His wife? Of sorts?’

  ‘He’s never here without her.’

  I wondered what it was I should do. I could follow the Steiners – if that’s what they were – home after their drinks, or follow Ernst to wherever he went next, and hope it would lead me to Walter. But I had no idea what I’d say to my old friend should I find him. Maybe he’d ask my forgiveness. Maybe he’d beg me for my friendship. But really, I hoped he’d say: Follow her. Search her bag. He’d say: Go to the Bauhaus. You’re right to be worried. I knew he’d say all this. Unlike Irmi, Walter was the kind of person who would give me permission to think all these things.

  ‘Thanks, Irmi. I know I don’t deserve it.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s nothing.’

  A porter squeezed past and we stood awkwardly outside the kitchen basement. Irmi wore the same expression I’d seen at her flat. ‘You’re a nuisance, Paul. You know all this time I couldn’t ever get rid of the thought of you. Not when we were in Weimar, not even when you were in Dessau. When you wrote and said you wanted to live with me – well, I thought, this is the beginning. We are on our way. Then silence. Nothing for months. I thought: he’s busy, he has other matters to sort before leaving. Then in October you turned up, and instead of moving in with me, you got me to find an apartment for you and Charlotte.’

  I wanted to say sorry but she put up her hand to stop me.

  ‘And now you talk to me about her and Jenö and honestly, I can’t . . . You can’t talk to me any more about all that stuff. I have run out of patience. I have run out of advice. Please spare me. Spare me any more of these stories.’

  She was right: I had taken advantage of her generosity, her ability to forgive. Before I had a chance to apologise she pulled out a folded cheque from her apron: on the front, Ernst’s signature for an expensive bottle of champagne; on the back, his address: Savignyplatz, no. 14, Charlottenburg.

  ‘Irmi.’

  ‘Just say thank you.’

  ‘But I would never have asked you to do that. Thank you, of course; a thousand times. Are you sure no one saw you do it?’

  ‘It’s a gift. But that’s it. I’m finished. If you do find Walter, don’t tell me. What he did to Charlotte was reprehensible, but it was a long time ago, and I’m not interested in getting involved in any more games. Agreed?’

  ‘Yes.’ I memorised the address and returned the cheque. ‘It was never my intention to hurt you. I’m sorry if I upset you.’

  ‘I’m happy,’ Irmi said. ‘But seeing you makes me unhappy.’

  ‘Will you see Teddy later?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘just an hour left here.’ I saw a sparkle in her eye but she pushed it away. She kissed me on the cheek and walked back inside, with Ernst’s dangerous address in her apron. What we might do for love. Even love that had gone such a long while ago.

  ‘Thank you, Irmi! Thank you!’

  She didn’t turn around, but put up her hand and waved.

  45

  England

  This morning there is a letter on my doormat. I know instantly that it is from a German: it’s the style of handwriting I learnt in school too. For some mad moment I think it is Charlotte writing to me. My grief: I never knew it would be so wormlike, so insistent. My German name is also used: it’s from someone who knew me as Beckermann.

  Paul,

  I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. I went to Walter’s funeral last week, and afterward Irmi gave me your address. (You were missed, but Irmi explained everything.) I wanted to write because I found a case of Charlotte’s in Walter’s apartment. Franz said her work is inside. I haven’t looked at it yet – can’t quite face it alone – and I thought maybe it’d be right to look at it together, after all this time. In any case, I’d like to see you, since we are countrymen once more. I could be with you next Wednesday. Is this possible?

  My best,

  Eugene Fielder

  I spent so many months trying to find Jenö when I arrived in England, but now it is he who has found me. I looked for him in London art schools, in foundries and forges in Camberwell and New Cross; I looked for him in Uncle König’s gallery, but he had disappeared. I don’t even know why finding him had been important. Comradeship in horror, et cetera. And so here we were: Eugene Fielder and Paul Brickman – two Englishmen with no pasts whatsoever.

  I write to Jenö. Though I don’t really want to see him again, and I’d rather not see inside Charlotte’s case, I tell him that Wednesday is fine.

  Franz said there’s some of her work inside. This means it’s from the camp, if it is Franz who says so. What if I find another green-chalked portrait? The case could be innumerable portraits of Jenö Fiedler, and I won’t have the strength to tell this narrative revoked: that she never loved me; that it was always Jenö. That Berlin – that our Berlin – was a sham.

  46

  Berlin

  The house at no. 14 Savignyplatz was a wedding cake: just as Ernst would have wanted it. There were lilies in the window, more in a great urn on the mantelpiece, and bright flowered wallpaper that shone even from a distance. A darkened square above the fireplace was a mirror perhaps. Mr Steiner had left earlier but had returned twenty minutes later to pick up a black briefcase. His possible wife had left for the day too.

  The day was stormy: fast winds and even faster rain showers, and, out of all this in a clearance of cloud, sunlight so strong it lit every embellishment of the house. Hats were lifted off heads, children were dragged into the blasts, and women raced to tie handkerchiefs around their hair. Then the dirty clouds skittered along until the sky had turned blue once more, and the morning was very bright, and the headscarves were again removed. Even in the sunshine I heard the grind of thunder, and saw three rainbows come and go, so that if I was looking for auspices in the weather
I could have found one for every eventuality.

  I wondered if making contact with Walter again didn’t cross some verge that my loyalty to Charlotte forbade, but I knew if he was in there, then I wanted to see him. He’d say – a princely toss of his head, maybe even cupping my cheek in his hand – that I was right to feel so troubled about Jenö and the Bauhaus; he’d feel the same. Follow her, he’d say. Work out what she’s up to. Irmi’s reassurances were nothing next to proof.

  I felt the expense of the gravel as I walked to the door. The nameplate said Mr and Mrs Steiner, and my heart dropped. Ernst had married; Walter was not here. I knocked.

  A woman answered. Her guard came up when she saw me, and it gave me the old feeling of being a Bauhäusler again. ‘Yes?’

  Before I answered I heard Walter’s voice, plunging me back into the past. ‘Who is it, Annaliese?’

  A lift of excitement, a thrill. Here he was!

  ‘Who do you require?’ she said. She kept the door closed enough that I couldn’t see into the house.

  ‘Mr König, please.’

  She asked me for my name and I gave it to her.

  ‘Paul Beckermann for you,’ she said. For moments nothing happened as she watched Walter’s expression in the hall. ‘Do you want me to send him away?’

  ‘No, no. Let him in.’

  Walter was in a dressing gown, silk and paisley, the bones of his chest visible. He had become a slender man again. His hands shook as he drew the gown to his throat. ‘Paul. What a shock.’

  ‘Hello, Walter.’ Here he was: my friend and traitor. His lips were full; his hair still thick.

  ‘I’m not yet changed.’ Annaliese the maid went off to fetch coffee. A vase of lilies gave off a boozy smell. ‘Gosh, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I’d given you up for dead.’