*
‘Ernst? It changes nothing with us, does it? But no-one official should see my papers. You agree? Not now?’
I reached across and our hands touched for the first time since we had sat. I saw the staff at the bar wink and whisper. We must have looked newly in love. All the more sweet on a Saturday in wartime when no-one knew what tomorrow dawned on.
The door crashed in. Four grey uniforms came laughing and slapping each other to the bar and the staff snapped up like rods, the laughter echoing louder off the high ceiling as if there were fifty of them. I withdrew my hand and Etta looked to them, back to my pale face.
‘What is it, Ernst?’
Their appearance had reminded me of Captain Schwarz. The black holsters at their waists, still startling to me. They laughed louder as their drinks came, caps to the bar. I recalled a death’s-head cap on my lap. His face leaning towards me.
‘What is your wife’s name? Where do you live, Ernst?’
‘Etta.’ I said her name as if for the first time. ‘I also have something to confess. And it might matter now.’ I pushed my cup away.
‘Etta. I did not get a lift home from Herr Klein the other night.’
Chapter 13
We returned to Erfurt station. Almost six, the west sun came through the glass of the concourse in golden shafts, motes of dust shimmering along them like rapturous lanes to a better place. From train-lines to throne. We walked through them, Etta’s body close into mine shivering like a child rescued from a river. The shimmers glowed on us. Chose not to take.
We spoke when our door closed.
‘Do you think he … they will check on us?’ as her coat fell to the floor.
I repeated what Klein had said.
‘I would hope the SS are too busy to examine one minor employee of a factory.’ I picked up her coat, hung it with mine. ‘My references from the university would have already been assessed. I’m sure everything is fine. I have no work records. No union history, no political preferences from the university. That is why I’m the one working on these drafts. It has been mentioned enough.’
‘But your wife is a Jew. They have not known that.’
‘You knew I was taking this job, Etta. And even I did not know that you …’
She sat, pulled off her hat like it was a rat, flung it to a corner.
‘I did not know you would be working for the SS. I thought you would be drawing silos. Not ovens for Jews.’
I sat beside her and she edged from my arm about to comfort.
‘They are ovens for the camps, Etta. Tools for the camps. Necessary. Buchenwald has a theatre. Cinema. Even a brothel.’ All Klein’s words again. ‘They need furnaces.’ I said this as factually as I could, but I thought on Paul’s words. He said he used to get the ashes to send to the relatives. That the government would charge the relatives for the cremation. I could not concede that they no longer needed the money. They did not even want to afford the coke for the furnaces.
‘Don’t, Ernst.’ She touched my hand. ‘Don’t be so … Do you remember when there was the Zionist plan? When we were younger? The Party and the Jewish leaders joined together to have them relocated to Palestine? The Attack newspaper – Goebbels’ paper for Christ’s sake – even gave away that souvenir medallion. Star of David one side, swastika on the other. And then the war came. The government could no longer pay for such a plan. Now it was a cleansing instead. My family went to Switzerland. By then I had met you.’ She held my hand tighter. ‘But who would have imagined this? Years of this.’
‘You are not Jewish, Etta. And imagine what? We are at war. We do not know what enemies we have or from where. The Americans imprison Germans, the Italians and Japanese. We are only doing the same.’
‘It is not the same.’ She let go my hand. ‘This is different.’
‘How?’
‘The conference the rest of the world had about the refugees. Remember that? No-one would take them. Every civilised country in the world refused them. Forced them to stay. The Party said they’d put them on luxury liners if another country would take them. You know who said yes? The Dominican Republic. The bloody Dominican Republic! They wanted to take one hundred thousand and everyone else just turned their backs. Ernst, you had to get my father to send you that Lotte book. A book set in Weimar about Goethe. A book set in our own cities. For Germans. He sent it in two pieces because they had banned it. They burn books, Ernst. What do you think they do? To Jews? If they ban even German books?’
I stood, went to the window and my tobacco. The motion and method of making a cigarette a catechism. To steady thoughts. To distract with our own hands. How often does one do that in a day? Concentrate on our hands. The smoker knows this. The rosary of it. The lighting of the paper the lesser part. It is the retreat that matters.
‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘The ovens are being increased to stem the typhus. The diseased dying. Imagine if that spread to the cities? What then?’
‘Ernst.’ She paused as my match struck and my hands cupped and drew life. ‘Why build more ovens, spend more money, in the expectation of more disease when that might not happen? Is not that money better spent on prevention? Is that what scientists do? Only find better ways to kill the infected? Would you go to the dentist whose only tool was a hammer? And does not the forced labour workers from the camps spread that disease? The ones in your factory?’
I blew my smoke into the room.
‘What are you saying?’
She seemed to grow small, her body retracting.
‘I don’t know. I do not know enough. You are building … you are working for a company that builds ovens for the SS. You say that Auschwitz is almost a city. And you have had no work until this … so … I don’t know.’ She looked at me. ‘It is just fear, Ernst. If you were drawing planes I am sure this feeling wouldn’t be … but … I don’t know.’
‘So if I annotate a bomber that kills thousands that is fine. But an oven is wrong?’
‘You were driven home by an SS captain. The car outside our home.’
‘What difference does that make?’
She grew larger again, the colour back to her face.
‘I’ll tell you, Ernst. I will tell you what difference such things make. I saw how you shut our door when that car brought you home. The car you did not tell me about. When Frau Klein came for her rent, when I had only ten marks to give her and I found our papers missing and us owing her forty marks. She took the ten. And she apologised. I have never seen that woman sweeter. She told me not to worry on the rent. Pay her when we can. Whenever we can.’ She crossed her arms. Found interest in the corner where her hat lay.
‘That is the difference such things make, Ernst Beck.’
The cherry of my cigarette was the only light in the room as I drew on it, turned it away from her to look out on the street alone. My usual pose.
Chapter 14
April became May. The radio and newspapers reported our army’s successful strategic redeployment from Rome, from Cassino. But we knew what that meant, had all become used to reading between the lines. When children played with wooden guns in the street they had American accents. They could not be blamed for such. They had picked this up from the Party’s own cowboy movies. Our leader an avid Western fan. It had a symbolism to him. Films about claiming land, on overcoming and conquest and Christian victory. He did not perceive that the only thing the children would pick up would be the guns and the drawl. There was more Tom Mix in them than Siegfried.
Here did not feel like a place of war, surrounded by it, yes, but only as much as we were surrounded by forest and so did not take part in the wars of the birds either. We, Erfurt and Weimar, still our country’s Christmas card paintings.
There was a foreboding around Etta and I in the first days after our revelations. But nothing happened. No knock on the door. Just that fog of dread. Waiting for it to come.
I did my work. Did not ask questions. And we became calm again. I had been paid.
We went to café lunches at weekends and paid our rent and Frau Klein even curtsied to me. I bought wine in bottles not closed with a beer stopper and no label. I signed off from subsistence. Etta quit her waitress work. I provided.
And then Hans Klein called me to his office. On a Friday morning. The favourite day to fire an employee I had heard. The way of business.
I had to wait before my knock on the door was acknowledged. Seconds only. Enough time to think of every horror behind the door. From yelling to gunshot, all extremes and everything in-between, and every one of them ending with Etta’s sobs. But there was only the sound of cabinets closing. The usual sound in Topf’s corridors. The sound of muffle doors closing ovens. Only people without imagination do not doubt and fear.
‘Ernst!’
Klein blew out my name happily with his smoke. I could almost see my name form in the cloud. He pushed his orb of cigarettes to me. I bowed and took an American Camel. My first in three years. I ran it under my nose. It did not smell as well as expected, hoped. Perhaps they were never good. Or nothing was how it was before.
‘I am pleased with your work, Ernst. We all are.’ He passed his onyx table-lighter to my hand. ‘And I have grand news.’
‘Thank you, Herr Klein.’
‘You have not heard it yet.’ He gave me that grin. ‘You may not like it.’
He was in grey today. A Hugo Boss. The couturier for the SS. I had begun to notice such things. Begun to notice shoes in windows beyond the sureness of their soles. I looked at their stitching now. Owned my own pair of black wing-tips.
We sat, the desk between, and shared an ashtray, which Klein pushed to favour my side.
‘Your name, lately, Ernst, has caused even Herr Topf to take notice of you.’
I coughed on my cigarette. Harsher than my tobacco.
This? This the knock on the door?
He watched me cough. Waited for me to settle.
‘Your name stood out to him. It would. Would it not?’
My mouth too dry from the cigarette to speak. Drawing on it again the automatic solution. I must have seemed sick to Klein. A parental concern on his face.
‘I mean your names, Ernst. Your names are the same. Ernst Topf. Ernst Beck.’ He studied me behind his cigarette. ‘Why? What did you think I meant?’
I apologised.
Fool. Idiot. A kid coughing on his first cigarette.
I sat back with him. Copied his pose and he grinned.
‘Don’t you want to hear my grand news, Ernst?’
*
‘A house, Etta!’
I had run the stairs. She had panicked at the rushing sight of me, not heard what I said, only the door crash, her hand on her chest.
‘Topf has given us a house!’
‘What are you talking about? What house?’
I held her shoulders, gasped for air, grinning like Klein.
There were fine houses opposite the Topf factory, I had seen them on my first day, on my first walk to work. They were near the ghetto, but the ghetto was not there when they were built and the ghetto empty now anyway, not there now. Open suitcases left in doorways, in the streets, along with the single shoes as if the rapture had come here. A decade of rain and dust breaking the shoes to corruption.
Topf senior had bought these houses for his workers during the Great War, for his top men. A benefit. He had his own villa nearby. He could walk to work. And he wanted his best men to do the same; did not want them to have an excuse to be late. And they would have no excuse to not be early if he so chose or work as late as he so chose. Topf the juniors kept the same ideals. Keep work close to home. Early and late. The benefit of no unions.
Klein had shaken my hand. His other passed a set of long keys. An aged paper tag.
‘These are yours, Ernst. The house has been professionally prepared. I will have one of our trucks move you in whenever you are ready. Congratulations.’
*
‘But why, Ernst?’ Etta’s hands flat on my shirt, against my chest, and I could feel my heart beneath.
‘My work is to increase. The SS have been pleased with my explanations of the designs. My work has gone to Berlin! And Topf have more of them every day for me to work on. I have become their preferred man for the task. Klein says I will go the top floor once this job is done!’ That was an exaggeration. But it was a time for such.
‘But a house?’ She stood back, a hand to her face. ‘Why would they do such?’ Concern on her face more than elation.
*
Klein had said it straight enough, as if it was his good work, his plan.
‘Topf has expressed to Sander that a workman such as yourself, one in demand, approval from Berlin, should not be exploited by having to pay the rents of the common. These houses used to be for the top-floor only. Rent free. You are too new to be promoted, to pay you more, but your work is important enough that you should gain some benefit. As good as promotion. This from the Topfs themselves. Six weeks you have been here. Well done. I am proud to have you on my floor. It makes practical sense to have you closer to the factory. And in a place of comfort where you could work from home. Sander and Prüfer agree. You could work in privacy.’
‘You said I might not like this, sir? Herr Klein! You have changed my life!’ I blushed at my exclaim. Foolish words, no matter how honest. Childish.
‘I meant,’ he said, ‘that I like to go far away when I leave work, Ernst.’ He went back to his desk. ‘You are across the road. You will be first in and the last out. An eye upon you all the time. That might dampen your spirit.’
I could not pocket the keys. I was weighing them in my hand. I am twenty-four years old. I have a house. Rent free. My wage doubled simply by walking through its door. Maybe short term, maybe not. You do not think like that when someone puts keys in your hand. The top floor had been mentioned. That was enough. If Klein and Topf had me in their pockets I could justify that scrutiny.
‘I will not let you down, sir,’ I said. Foolish even as I said it. But I did not know how to express such worth bestowed. I had done my work. Rewarded now beyond it. It was a prize. A prize unjustified. Like finding a winning ticket to a draw you had not entered. Found in an old suitcase abandoned in a doorway in a ghetto.
Klein opened his pen. His signal for his office to be vacated.
‘Take your wife to her new house, Ernst. And, no: You will not let me down.’
Chapter 15
I could not wait until the Saturday. It did not get dark until after ten and so with coat and shawl Etta walked on my arm. To a house. Her concern dissipated as my enthusiasm wooed. I had seen it already, the outside, when I left work. But the inside should be shared together.
It was a terraced house, on the street, no front area, a few steps to the basement and two steps to the great front door. Six windows. One large window on the ground floor. All overlooking the wall and chimney that said, ‘Topf’ written in white around it.
I had a key to a lock that I did not rent.
Etta walked in, away from my arm. She opened every door with a gasp for each as I watched her from the doorway. She halted at the stairs.
‘Who lives up there?’ she asked.
‘You do, Etta. We do.’
She ran them like a child at her first beach sprinting to the sea and I heard more doors opening. I came after her, the solid echo of an empty house. Promise in that echo. It was impossible not to see it filled with children and I even thought of Christmas. Thinking of Christmas in May. Lights came on as I ascended, Etta met me at the stairs.
‘We do not have enough furniture, Ernst. There is another floor. Two bathrooms.’
‘And a small garden. We’ll buy more furniture. We’ll have a bathroom each.’
She touched my hand on the balustrade. Our hands on our wooden balustrade.
‘Is this true, Ernst? We can live here?’
‘Klein will loan us a lorry to move in. Maybe Tuesday we could work it out.’
I reached for her but she
walked away and into the bedroom at the front of the house. I followed. Held her as she looked out to the factory. Felt her body tense.
‘It’s all so sudden,’ she said, ‘to take in. And you’ll be right next to them. You might not get time away from them now.’
‘They want me to work from home. That’s why we get the house. It’ll be like I’m not at work at all.’ Kissed her neck.
‘Or always at work.’ Her eyes still on the factory. ‘Why so generous? To a new man?’
I had hoped this paranoia had left us. Standing there, in the near dark, my arms around her, it was still as if a blanket of guilt was the only blanket we had. Like the gambler says, ‘If I didn’t have bad luck I’d have no luck at all.’
‘My plans are for Berlin. They want me to have privacy.’
‘Private. To work in secret they mean.’
I let go of her.
‘Are you not pleased for me? For us? A home, Etta. This is not a common thing for me. I grew up in a room without a window. I only want you to be happy.’
She smiled, held me close, but her body still tense.
‘I’m sorry, Ernst. I am just tired. That’s all.’ Kissed me. Her double-tap kiss.
I said nothing. Wrapped her into me.
*
On Sunday we went to my parents again. I had to tell someone. Over the years – and it did not seem something I had noticed with the passage of the war – our friends had dwindled down to a precious few, like that Walter Huston song. That September song. Jewish composer, gone like all of them to America, but it still made it on the radio. Someone must have missed that. I wonder if anyone was aware the cultural bereft we would have with the writers, composers and artists that had exiled themselves. A land of labour. A cemetery of culture. They burn books, Etta had said. What would they do to the people that wrote them.
Partners had gone to the army, their wives to their parents. Others had moved for work or had left Germany altogether, sometimes without a word. But we could guess what the word would have been. I was still the boy. Living in the town where he was born.
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