Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  The old philosophy was that you could measure a country by the way it treated its old and its prisoners. I knew now that you should look at the children. How many inches of dirt you could wipe from their faces or cut from matted hair. Measure the dirt for how many years it would take to repair them.

  I whistled to the tallest and brought the sandwiches from the metal box and shook them at him. He loped to me like an animal.

  I gave him half of one and told him he would get the rest of it if he looked after the bike until I returned. His cheeks filled with the bread in one gulp, nodded because he could not speak with the girth of it and I put the rest to my pocket as he watched so he could see the treasure waiting for his reward. I took the bag of spanners. The boy who owned them did not deserve such a purchase to be stolen, even if I had done so.

  I chose the building for its size, that it still stood, that it must be a hotel or apartment block. Kassel had a Gau, was a military district, had prison sub-camps. It would still have hotels. Even if the old ones were gone someone would set up another out of their private homes. The officers would need somewhere to stay.

  I removed the woollen cap, smoothed my hair, opened the door and went to the desk. Always a mother now, always a mother behind the desks or at the bars. I had no pleasantries left in me and neither did she.

  ‘I need a room.’

  She rotated the register to me.

  ‘Ten marks a night.’ Her hand open.

  ‘How much for a week?’ Put my real name to the page. What difference?

  ‘No weekly rate.’ She blew the ink on the book in the same motion as she took my money, did not read my name or my home. ‘We have hot running water. Good water. No meals. Go left, Esten’s place. Food there. He closes at three.’

  ‘Where can I find a telephone? And I need somewhere to put my motorcycle.’

  ‘No telephone. People’s telephone at the Gau. I have a yard round back. Put your thing there. I lock every night.’

  ‘Thank you, mother.’

  She kissed her lips, tugged at her shawl. I waited for my key and she remembered that was how things used to be and something of the old landlady returned, blushed at how it used to be when gentlemen walked into her premises.

  ‘Sorry. No key. Room fifteen. No single rooms so no key. You share with officer.’

  I tried not to react on the word, turned it to an affront.

  ‘Ten marks to share a room?’

  ‘The SS have taken all my rooms. Do better why don’t you. I am glad that I have men with guns here.’

  ‘I’ll move my bike,’ I said, went for the door.

  ‘I have no-one to carry your bags,’ she called after.

  ‘I don’t have any.’ Dolefully.

  She must have taken a glance at the book.

  ‘Erfurt? Why would you leave there?’

  ‘I am still wondering on that,’ and went outside to pay a ten-year-old in sandwiches.

  He stood like a soldier over the bike. The others throwing stones but ran when I appeared at his side.

  I gave him all Mother Hulder’s bread. As she would have done.

  ‘Give one to your mother, eh?’

  ‘She was bombed.’ His eyes only on my paper-wrapped sandwiches. ‘I live with my aunt. She doesn’t like me. I have to shit outside. She’s old. I’ve had a birthday since.’ He snatched the sandwiches from me.

  ‘Don’t swear. Give a sandwich to your aunt.’ He missed my words, his feet gone, vanished around a corner. What children did now. Appeared and vanished like ghosts. Only their heels. Flashes of them out of the corner of your eyes.

  I wheeled the bike into the walled yard. Went to telephone Etta with a pocket full of some boy’s spanners. Walk. Save petrol. Telephone Etta, do not think it will not happen, that her voice is not there, then eat and then see what manner of man, of officer, I was to share a room with.

  *

  A twenty-minute walk to the Gau on Wilhelmshöhe, my first time crossing the Fulda, the canal-barges and punts probably more in use now than ever this century. The old virtues always return. We had thought horses limited to parades, rivers and canals for pleasure. They came back like they never went away. Horses and rivers. Our first things. The forever things. The horses always come back. Even for the army. They pulled guns as much as they did potato carts. Did not care for the nature of the burden. Never did. Posters showed tanks roaring over mud mounds. The machine supreme over all. It might have done us better to show the most faithful, plodding cannon through fields like ploughs. A sureness to inspire. The gas giants rotting in sheds. The horse, head down, going on. Never not needed. Failed when his heart did. Better inspiration. Tanks stopped by stones.

  Along the wide emptiness of Wilhelmshöhe you could almost be blown down by the wind. With the buildings gone it ran round the half-walls and rushed, bit cold from all sides, the dust cascading towards the Bergpark and the Hercules statue in the distance. You could see him from everywhere now, no structures to block his vision, but Wilhelmshöhe lead straight to him, calling you to him.

  Directions to the Gau gladly given by the first man I came across but he did not warn about the queues, probably thought he would not have to. You get used to queuing in war. This one skirted the whole of the building. All old. Grandmothers with bundles, grey men in caps and holed overcoats and waistcoats with watch-chains without watches. This was victorious Germany. Cold starving people who had spat on and sent their neighbours to rot in ghettoes, burned their temples. Victorious people.

  Today you. Tomorrow me.

  Not what it was supposed to mean. Depends what end you are standing on when you said it.

  He thought we were going to be the cowboys, the settlers. Could not have foreseen we would become the Indians on the reservations, the paintings of cold huddled figures straggling through snow.

  I asked the line if I had to stand here to make a telephone call. No-one answered, maybe not cared to answer. My accent wrong. I walked to the front, queried the first rifle and greatcoat I saw. Asked him the same question.

  ‘Where to?’ he said.

  ‘Zurich.’

  ‘No Zurich. Germany only. Back in line.’

  I walked away. Glad not to have wasted my time in line, hollowed out that I still had not spoken to her.

  *

  At the eatery I had an old sausage and beer. The sausage not old because of the war, just the way they ate them, hung for a week and always served with beer. Sixty pfennigs. A fair price for a place with a tarpaulin for a roof. A radio on rope hung from the wall, the announcer’s never-pausing voice the only one in the place, the slurp of soup the dominant sound. An old man in leather jacket and box-cap tried to talk to me but his stammer and cough made him give up and I smiled and shrugged until he turned back to his plate, frustrated with himself, assuring me with slurs and waving hands that he could speak two years ago.

  We had studied this city at university. We had books and even film. All to learn how a medieval city had grown modern without swallowing the architecture, with remembering its heritage, its heart. Now stepped on, gone. People lived amongst their furniture on the streets, replicating their parlours. An electric tram wheeled past my window pulled by a horse. Coal wagons from the bombed station everywhere and utilised for clearing rubble, salvaging bricks, rescuing slate to repair roofs. The women and children collected, the men pulled. Fruitless to me. Not to them.

  Everywhere I looked an odd mix of picture-books of Roman or Greek ruins, old towers without Gothic spires, churches of huge stubborn blocks that bombs had only managed to chip and then the devastation of an inferno that had flattened the future that Kassel had tried to build for the next century. Blown away like straw from months of blanket bombing. Only the statue of Hercules, the monument high in the hills, looked down unharmed over his city, sure that there was inspiration in his survival. He had watched over them for more than two hundred years. This just a blink of his eye. He had not stepped on them.

  I wondered o
n two things as I ate my first hot meal since Sunday, my first since I had left Etta, each spoonful reminding. I even waited for it to cool and closed my eyes and imagined the man at the table next to me was the sound of her eating before me. I wondered how it must feel to be these rags of people listening to our ‘victories’ on a radio swinging from a wall you could see through, to survive here listening to more tripe than on your plate, and wondered on the other thing. Wondered on what type of officer I would find in my room when I returned.

  There was not much of him in the room. A razor and cracked dish with a different hotel logo on it. A trio of crude health magazines held in place under the lamp, a nightshirt on his bed. The shelf in the wardrobe with two apples and a water canteen. One hanger, a zipped-up suit bag. I felt the cloth within then pulled back from it, closed the wardrobe. Privacy still a thing.

  Nothing evidenced a bad man, but then I did not know what did, what to expect. Not any more. A gun, a flag, a crutch. What would he display? I took the plan from my back and put it under my mattress. Sat on the bed and listened to the nothingness outside. Could hear myself breathe.

  Chapter 50

  I imagined him young, my age at least, if only because the bathroom was not full of pills and creams, and the covers of his magazines expressed an interest in women’s bathing suits.

  I was not disappointed. Corporal Franz Werra an image of me. We could have been brothers with our blond hair and blue eyes, a sliver of a year between us, except I his picture of Dorian Gray. Two days’ beard, greasy hair, wind-chapped face, my clothes reeking of petrol and road. I was sure there was a moment before his hand went out to me that he suspected that a Jew in hiding had slid himself under his door. His concern gone, joy on his face when my accent was not Bavarian or Hesse.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good to hear a decent voice at last. Gotha University. Yourself?’

  ‘Erfurt graduate. Ernst Beck.’

  He shook my hand exuberantly, his speech just as vigorous.

  ‘We are probably the youngest men in this shitty hotel. I have not had a room-mate yet. You look a terrible fellow. The witch has hot water here until six. Take a bath. Do you need to borrow a blade?’

  ‘I do not even have a razor. I left in a hurry. After Weimar was bombed.’

  ‘Really?’ He took off his holster, put it to the wardrobe, then the distinctive jacket to the chair, the cap to the bed. ‘Is it as bad as this?’ He sat on our only chair.

  ‘I do not think anything could be as bad as this.’ I went to the bathroom, started the water, only feet away so we could still talk. ‘I would appreciate a loan of your razor. Thank you. Where can I buy some wares?’

  ‘A fellow on a wagon comes in tomorrow and Saturdays from the better villages. Or there is always an old boy with a handcart on Konigstor who sharpens. He might have something. What do you need?’

  I stepped back into the room.

  ‘What you see is what I have.’

  ‘You really left in a hurry didn’t you?’

  ‘I only had my motorcycle. I could not carry much else.’

  He stretched for the table, took up my case and lighter.

  ‘I’ll trade you a use of my soap and razor for a cigarette.’ He turned the case in his hand. ‘Silver. Very nice.’ He took a cigarette from the band, sniffed at it. ‘A Camel? A man of means. Who is HK?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He struck the lighter. Took a cool drag, sighed out a grateful cloud. Watched me.

  ‘HK. The monogram on the case.’ He looked at the lighter. ‘And on this.’ He put them back to the night-stand. ‘You said your name was Ernst Beck?’

  ‘I bought them like that. Pawnbrokers. I am afraid I do not have that much means to buy my own silver.’ I went back into the bathroom. ‘These are not your towels as well are they? I cannot impose that much.’ Deflect. Deflect like Klein. Tried not to recall him. Yet. Too soon.

  ‘No. The witch at least provides linen. Why would you come to this shit-hole?’

  ‘I did not know it was so bad. Everyone said it was safe here. I might go back now.’

  ‘Quite a risk to get here. For nothing. Travel is restricted. How did you manage it?’

  I busied with the bath and taking off my cuff-links, spoke as if that my only interest.

  ‘The Erfurt roads were open. I never came across any blocked.’ I put my head around the wall. ‘You do not mind do you? After all I did not know I would be sharing with an SS officer.’ I came fully in, went for the cigarettes.

  ‘No.’ And he meant it. ‘As long as you are not running from something. Good luck to you. Most people shy from the SS. It is refreshing to see someone so relaxed.’

  The cigarette to my lips. I noticed my hands did not tremble any more.

  ‘I work with the SS every day. I work in the design departments for Topf and Sons. Work at the camps now and then.’

  ‘Ah.’ His expression genuinely relieved. ‘I was wondering why you were not signed up. Vital work. Lucky bastard. Me, I’ve been in the shit since ’41. Only in the SS since August. My degree brings me to this shit-hole for administration.’ He held the cigarette out admiringly. ‘This shit is good.’

  ‘You say shit a lot.’ I thought of the boy I had told not to swear.

  He laughed, wagged his cigarette at me.

  ‘So will you. Soon enough. How is it you are not at work now?’

  Questions. All that uniforms know how to do. Keep asking until something trips, until something slips.

  ‘Work has slowed. I might not be permitted to talk about that now I say it. You understand? Confidential work. Sorry. My mistake.’ As Klein would, grinned as Klein would. He nodded approvingly. ‘So I took some time off. My first in a year. I thought Erfurt might be next, after Weimar was bombed. I will admit I was afraid. Now I think I have made a mistake.’

  ‘We all have. But at least my day has improved now I have a room-mate with Camels. You won’t see those again around here. We get navy shit if we’re lucky. You can get some branded ones from that chap tomorrow.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Hey! Could you pick me up some? We can’t shop outside. Can’t even drink with these people. Can only mess in the Gau. We’re only in this witch’s shit-hole because our quarters is a hospital – why are you laughing?’

  I liked him. Liked an SS officer. Maybe it was his age. Maybe it was the relief of talking to someone who did not look half-dead, still had life and talked about cigarettes and drink, not ovens and putting your wife on a train.

  ‘Sorry.’ I was giggling, actually giggling, held my chest. ‘It was what you said. I was just picturing a witch’s shit-hole.’

  He broke out with me, choked on our cigarettes. A knock came on the door and the crone’s voice screeched through the wood.

  ‘Hoy!’ She rapped faster. ‘No women in here! What are you doing?’

  A waved dismissal from Franz.

  ‘Go bring us some schnapps and beer, mother!’

  The door went silent, our laughter grew as she departed for her orders, both of us wiping our eyes.

  ‘See,’ he said, stepping to the wardrobe and his holster. ‘She knows I’ll shoot her if she doesn’t bring it.’ He took out the gun, saw my face drop but shushed me as he held it out for me to see, continued to laugh when I saw it up close.

  ‘It’s carved of wood!’ he howled. ‘Can you believe that shit? I work in an office! They don’t even give us real guns! I’ll have to throw it at the Americans!’ He fake shot me and the lamp before putting it back and tossed me one of his apples, the other for himself.

  We sat on our beds, opposite each other like a university dorm, as we had both done once, not so long ago. Two young men hiccup laughing. Laughing like schoolboys at swear words and old ladies as we chomped on scrumped apples. Nothing in any of it to laugh so. But it came. And I did not recognise my own laugh.

  I had tried to make Etta understand about the ice-cream, about the little things, the thimble for the pail.

  A rotten room without
a key in a flattened city. An SS officer. A man running from them.

  He might have stamped chits for transports, filed IBM cards for the marked. I helped build ovens for the end of the line. A night of schnapps and cigarettes to come. Always conscious of the last cigarette. Leave one for morning. The way it should be for young men. The dissonance of laughter when the dispossessed recognise each other.

  I had my bath and shave, became Ernst Beck again. Mother brought our schnapps. We drank and smoked slow, talked of university and professors, swore we had the same bad ones and the same morons that ruined every class. I did not talk of Etta. Did not say I was married. Kept that close. Here might be a man who could help me make a telephone call. Thought like Klein.

  And then the sirens came. And then the planes drowned them.

  And we stopped laughing.

  Franz turned off the light by its fragile beaded chain. I asked if the building had a cellar. He hissed me quiet, hand on my forearm, his head at the window. I thought he had quietened me lest the pilots heard us. No. He was listening to them, not for them.

  ‘This place has been targeted forty times since I’ve been here,’ he said. ‘I know the sound. They’re too high, too slow. Hundreds of them. Not for us. Heading east.’ He turned the light back on, stood and drank high.

  ‘Ernst. You did not make a mistake.’ Drank again. ‘You won’t be going back.’ He passed me the bottle. ‘Here. Drink.’ He watched me swallow. No mirth on his face. Just approval that the schnapps sank in my belly.

  ‘I think that some place east of us will not be there tomorrow.’

  Chapter 51

  Franz gone before dawn on the Wednesday. I supposed the planes meant he would have to attend early or maybe these were his normal hours. Either way he did not disturb and I awoke more leisurely than I had for weeks despite, or perhaps for the threat above.