I needed money. After my rent for Wednesday, which allowed me access to a communal chicory coffee pot and oat biscuits, I was down to eighty marks and change. And there is nothing like war for inflation and advantage. And I needed news. Needed to know if there was any word on Americans near, or at least what had happened to some poor souls last night.
Our landlady deigned to tell that there was a bank in Vellmar, a district town a good walk away, across the river again. She did not know or even wonder if there would be a working exchange there. I set off thinking only on the calling of Etta, but in a stronger way now. My need to assure her and not myself. Maybe you could not make calls to other countries. Maybe Etta knew this, would understand, and as I walked through mere stones of streets, the bricks as if trying to return to their quarry birth, I thought that maybe this was what Bernie of the KDP had meant when he said it would be safe here. Not safe from the war. Safe only because who would look for anyone, any rat, in a place of dust and rats.
A cold hour-and-a-half walk to Vellmar, saving the bike for emergencies, but their bank limited to one hundred marks per customer. And they knew nothing about calling Zurich. I discovered a horse-drawn charabanc back to the city but even so it took almost an hour and I missed the fellow with the wagon and his wares. Cursed a beggar’s luck, trudged my way to the eatery and then discovered fortune, glad to have missed the errant gypsy and his black goods. A man of destiny had set up a tented barber-shop, as large as a newspaper stand, one stool on the street, hot water from a small milk-churn heated on a brazier. A two-pfenning shave, five for a cut. Even if I came here every day, even with his long line, I would save money over buying my own razor. And more than that. Who better to tell you the world than a barber?
*
It was Dresden that had been bombed, so the barber informed. No. Not the right word. Not bombed. Furnace burned. Reduced down to the homes of insects. Scorched so even the nests and eggs of birds in the gables were ash. The trees and bodies charcoal.
First, a blanket of fire, small incendiaries to set timber frames and roofs, all the roofs, alight for hours. Then when the people came out from hiding to fight the flames, crept from their holes thinking it was over, the heavy bombers came. The flame their markers. Again and again. All through the night. The ground white with heat. The February moon blacked out by wings and fuselage.
‘It was on the radio,’ my barber said. ‘I had the chap here who puts up the papers at the Gau.’ He nodded as if this was our secret. ‘There’s nothing at Dresden to bomb. This is personal. They are animals. Here, yes. The station, the factories. Why not? I have a fellow tells me they can make twenty Tiger tanks a week. No fuel to run them more than a hundred yards. Who would have guessed it would come down to oil, eh? Tsk, tsk.’ Tsk tsk. Mimicking the sound of his scissors, as rude mechanicals do. Their irritations and vocal clicks become the sounds of their tools.
He paused his blade on my throat and I looked up at his face squinting to the skies. No siren this time, just black crucifixes against the blue. Hundreds of them again. A sense they were mocking us with their slow hum. As if they had all the time in the world. Nothing to stop them. Parading. In front of us. Practising their victory parade. Training day over Germany.
‘Those bastards.’ He wiped his blade. ‘Look at them. They are going back for seconds.’ He wiped my face with a hot towel as if it was two years ago, as if we were normal again and not doing this on the street. We retained even the slight awkwardness of paying him for his service as if by our closeness we had become friends and this was the vulgar act of exchange as ever it was and he was not in a tent and I not sat on a stool in the road. We thanked each other. We still did that. Something odd in it. We should apologise to each other for the cheapness of it all, the degradation of it all, or congratulate each other that we could still do this. The people in the maps. You could still see the tails of the planes in a black line across the sky long after the sound had gone.
‘Do you have any cigarettes to buy?’ I asked. ‘Or tobacco and papers? Two if you have. I promised a friend.’
He went to a box under his towels. Two packets of Atikahs, Greek tobacco pretending to be Turkish, twenty-five in each, ten marks for the pair. Everything had become under the counter, even a pleasure in it, the nod and the wink, the conjoined conspiracy, but you had to pay much for the counter that wasn’t there. But even he knew nothing about telephoning across borders.
That evening I promised myself I would ask Franz for his help. There had to be some advantage in sharing with an SS, even if only a corporal. A couple of bottles of schnapps from the eatery would help grease.
Just walking the streets had cost me thirty marks in one day. Get five back from Franz for the cigarettes, and perhaps I did not need schnapps, but still I would be broke with just food and rent in a fortnight if I was not careful and that thought inspired me to press for Franz’s help with an international call. Say it was to get my father to wire me some funds. Not my father. That avenue closed.
He came in with a copy of the Attack, printed only twice a week now, his body heavy as he read.
‘Have you seen this, Ernst? It was Dresden last night. Obliterated. And the planes today – did you hear them? – the same course. Dresden. Disgraceful. You might as well blow up the Pantheon.’
‘I found a barber,’ I said. ‘He told me. I had no idea they had such a force in the air.’
‘They have our Russian oilfields, and Africa’s, and their Arabs and Muslims wishing to be Jews. We have the planes. Not the fuel. Then there would be a fight.’ He threw the paper to my bed. ‘We would kick them to shit. But mark me: this will become an infantry war. Man against man. Us against gum-chewing masturbators. Piece of shit bastards!’
I tossed him the cigarettes. He clapped them in the air, face lit up like a Christmas child’s.
‘For me? Good man. How much do I owe?’ He somehow managed to remove his coat and pipe a cigarette in his mouth like Houdini escaping a strait-jacket.
‘Five,’ I said. ‘I will stump for the wine,’ indicated the bottles on the night-stand.
‘A saint you are. I should have wrote you to come a month ago. It must be hard for you to stay here, now you are stuck here. This town will bust you broke.’
‘I wondered if you might help on that, Franz. If it is not trouble for you?’
We lit up together, sat on our beds. His bit his lip and sighed. I laughed. To loosen the woe on his face.
‘Not money! I could probably buy and sell you this month! I would not ask a Gotha man for money. I would find more in a river.’
‘That is true.’ He exhaled gratefully. ‘Before I forget, there is a story about you in the paper.’
I felt the blood run from my face. He almost melted in glee.
‘Not you! About Erfurt. You think they’d announce your arrival in Kassel in the paper?’ He splayed his hands. ‘Great skinny Topf designer arrives to save us all. No. Something about a communist leader killed at Weimar. No names, but he had links in Erfurt and at Topf. They’ve arrested the ringleader there.’
I leafed over the paper. Pretended to not be fascinated, to not be terrified.
‘Topf has a long problem with communists,’ I said. ‘Part of why I was hired. New blood.’
‘Well, if he’s been arrested I know it’s not you. But – on that – you should present yourself at the Gau tomorrow. I had to tell my commander I had a room-mate. Rules. Everyone’s a spy now. I’ll take you in. It won’t take more than an hour. Sorry to trouble. But you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said, took the cork from the wine. Needed a drink. ‘An hour? That long?’
‘A call to check your ID. Call to Topf I would guess. You know how administration works. We love to stamp everything. Give me a swig of that.’
‘I could stay somewhere else,’ I said, passed over the bottle, thinking of the bike, thinking of running again. ‘After yesterday and today I’m sure they are too busy. I don’t want to trouble you, Franz.’
‘Shit, no. Don’t worry about that. You’d be getting me away from my desk. What did you want me to help you with?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It was just about getting stamps. Wanted to write to my father for money. Not important.’
‘Good. I’ll get some sandwiches from the witch for dinner. She doesn’t spit that much in them.’
I smoked and read the story as he washed, singing his Youth anthems in a derisive tone, changing words for whatever he felt most offensive.
The newspaper thin, one page bleeding into the other, the print like a typewriter on its third run of the ribbon.
A Topf employee had been arrested as an enemy of the state. Arrested based on information gathered by the police and from secret papers recovered from the death of a head member of the KPD in Weimar. Topf and Sons were continuing to aid the police.
I closed the paper, took a drink, listened to Franz’s songs and sat on the bed and wondered how far my fuel would take me. And what an SS officer would make of his room-mate running.
Chapter 52
There were no names in the paper, and Franz explained from his bath.
‘Because they would make them martyrs – is that a Jewish word? – it would warn the others. Just let them know we’re on to them. You know this war would’ve been won years ago if it wasn’t for shitting communists. I would be a working man with a pretty ex-wife and kids by now if it wasn’t for this war. Maybe you could get me a job at Topf. Why the hell did I join the Youth? Why didn’t you? Oh, right. Erfurt. You chaps didn’t even know there was a war until this month.’
After his bath we ate turkey sandwiches and pickles, drank both bottles together. Franz a big drinker, gulped, narrowed his eyes as he did so. You recognise people that drink to black things out. They don’t even like the taste so they drink fast. He reminded of the young men I had seen at the barracks at Auschwitz, only with less farm in him. He smoked as if each cigarette was the last. I did not want to talk any more of tomorrow, to pretend that it did not bother me. Could convince myself that it did not.
‘Do you know where I could get some fuel, Franz? For my motorcycle?’
He did not even have to think about it.
‘Find a cattle farmer. Whatever the farm they all get the same ration. So you’ll get a wheat farmer with not enough and a pig farmer drinking the stuff. Ask around. Someone will have a tank or two. Best be quick. They’ll be raiding the farms for the tanks soon enough.’ He went quiet after this, drank harder, then jumped to the wardrobe.
‘Hey, have you seen this?’ He unzipped the bag on the rail. A black suit with silver buttons and braid. ‘My dress suit! Would you believe such! It has tails.’ He flapped them at me. It was that black suit from the old days, the red armband still on it. ‘There are many people who will fall ill when they see this black,’ Himmler had said. They still did, even when only flashed from a wardrobe.
‘I will get to wear it when we win!’ Franz danced with it, one circle, before hanging it back in one swoop. ‘When all the girls in hiding come out again and I find me a “von” widow to keep me. You have a girl, Ernst?’
‘No.’ I said this too flatly, like I spoke of lost love and he ended the subject, went back to the cigarettes and wine as if his hands could never be empty lest they might run through his hair and pluck it out, make fists against walls or beat someone. Why the dispossessed drink and smoke, why soldiers drink and smoke. Keep the hands from the razor blade.
‘I could arrange for you to make a telephone call to your father. If you wished,’ he offered. ‘Quicker than writing. He could make a wire transfer. The Gau has an office for the Reichsbank. They could cut you a cheque and cash it.’
My spine went too rigid, my face too hopeful.
‘You really want to speak to your old man, eh?’
The danger forgotten. The risk worth it. Prisons not full of those who got caught when they returned to the scene of the crime, as paperbacks sold in train stations would have it. Prisons full of those who would say goodbye to their lovers. The chance of the voice and embrace worth it. Only single men evade. Every police force knows. Hang around the women long enough. The skulker will return.
‘Can I make a call to Zurich?’
‘Your father lives there? You should have joined him. Well. It can be done. If I explain to them why. They’d rather that to having another beggar. They’re all my friends anyhow. All of us admin chaps are from the Youth. All corporals with no chance of promotion and wooden guns.’ He stubbed out on the paper of the turkey sandwiches, a terrible smell, lit another in the same move. ‘You know how it’s done? We tap into the Atlantic cables and go through there. Berlin has been listening to the Americans for years. They think we have no international access, wiped out our communications by clipping telegraph poles. They think we are idiots. Then they wonder why our tanks appear beside them. And you know how we record them?’
‘Magnetic recordings. Iron on paper. I know. They do it at Topf. The SS I mean.’
‘You know everything. I thought you just built ovens.’ He went solemn. ‘I’m talking too much. I shouldn’t have said any of that. It’s the drink. I shouldn’t tell such things to you. I’m sorry, Ernst.’
‘I know. We don’t know each other. And this is not the time.’
He sat on his bed.
‘It shouldn’t be like that. I’m glad you understand. You haven’t asked me anything. But we can talk like men in a bar can’t we?’ He took a drink to illustrate. ‘You know what we should do? If they asked me? Blow up the fucking autobahns. We’re blowing up our own old railways but the Americans don’t give a shit about them. We’re leaving them our roads to travel by. They’re rolling in on their shitty tanks because we’ve the best roads in the world. Take them out and they’d have to shovel their tanks along. They’re reaching us because of the roads. But we’re too proud of them. Might as well give them a fucking carpet to walk on.’
He stopped talking, took three drinks to my one. I saw his workday there.
‘Do you think they’ll bomb again tonight?’ I asked. Not a light question, something to break his mood. He lay out on the bed, cigarette aimed to the ceiling.
‘Who gives a shit,’ he said, rolled over to the wall. Like he was already in prison. And the planes went overhead again.
*
We left at eight the next day. I kept my holed wool cap in my pocket despite the cold, for shame, embarrassed to wear it in front of him. I asked Franz to wait for me on the corner, wait for me while I checked on my bike. I had the folded plan against my back again, the spanners and letter-knife in my coat.
It had not snowed and but for a frost in the shade her green frame was fine and waiting. I stood at her for a few seconds, rolled the accelerator. I could be gone from Kassel. Head west. Find a new town and cash a cheque. I checked the tank, a dipstick gauge on the cap. Three-quarters full. Eighty kilometres of road at least. But to talk to her. Perhaps for the last time. I needed it probably more than my pragmatic Etta.
‘You fool,’ she would say. ‘Where are you?’ And I would tell her I was calling from the SS office in Kassel and she would hang up. But I was cold, hungry. In need of comfort. And that is how you get caught.
Get on the bike. Go. Run. But there would be her voice. A telephone call offered. I could speak to her before they spoke to Topf. What I did know and what I did not could fill the back of a stamp. But I could rely on chaos. Dresden bombed, maybe Erfurt. Maybe they could not get through to Topf or maybe the telephone answered by reception only. ‘Yes,’ she would say. ‘Herr Beck works here. I’m sorry? You are breaking up caller.’ Kaw, Kawler, Kaw.
‘What are you doing?’ Franz at the door of the yard, uniform snapped to the collar. His greatcoat and cap, the black gloves, making that image of photographs we had seen for years. The handsome SS officer in control of everything and everyone. You could not help but obey. It had become ingrained. You see them and you pick up your suitcase, move along with you
r head down and tip your cap. Did our enemies know that? That even we feared them? We have a culture for uniforms. Expect to be questioned by them. Respect uniforms. Even ice-cream sellers wear peaked caps and silver buttons.
‘What are you doing?’
And then the gun would come out.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just checking she was not frozen.’ And I went with him, left the bike. In an hour it would be too late to regret. Hoped her next owner would be a good one.
Chapter 53
We breezed into the Gau, no queue for us, a four-storey building of pillars and those massive red banners on flagpoles that declared the Party louder than a marching band. The line of the people outside turning their shoulders from me, from us.
‘You know Rundstedt is here,’ Franz said. ‘The field marshall. In charge of the whole shitting West. This is his headquarters. He has a whole floor. So I sleep in that witch’s hole. It fits they would send an old man to a hospital.’
Franz became a foot taller as we entered. Took off his cap and put his gloves inside, saluted and snapped his heels to the desk.
He signed in, chatted to grey uniforms back and forth as I stood aside, stood back on the marble floor. A dread upon me. Franz not my room-mate any more. Speech changed, stance changed. A uniform. One of them.
His hand came out and I gave my identification and watched it disappear from me. He smiled swiftly, blocked my gaze to my card walking away to another room.
‘Come back with me, Ernst.’ He took my arm, took me to a corridor. ‘Let’s make your call while we wait. Don’t worry. They’ll check your worker’s pass and call Topf. It will be back for you when we return. We might have to wait to access the telephone, that is all.’
The building still the hospital it once was. Long corridors, junctions to other long corridors until eventually you come to an unrewarding tiny room, dazed and nauseated from your walk of hundreds of light bulbs and bleached floors which you expected to end at a throne instead of the windowless alcove of flickering lights and moths.
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