“I got the top score in math,” he said. “And I don’t even like it.”
Friday, July 29
The weather on Nanga Parbat has reportedly taken a turn for the worse. I don’t know whether the climbers feel like they’ve been up there forever, but it certainly feels that way to me.
Sunday, July 31
Yesterday was the last Saturday of the month, so I set off once more to visit my imaginary cousin. This time the treff was in Essen, at a café on Frohnhauser Strasse, close to the Krupp works complex. I knew the area well from my time there fifteen years before and thought I remembered the café.
On the two trains it took to get there, and in the half hour between them waiting on the platform at Dortmund, I rehearsed the verbal report I would be giving my new contact and found myself wondering what had happened to the last one when she got back to Moscow. Had they arrested Elise immediately, or allowed her a few days’ grace among the other foreign comrades at the Hotel Lux? It was of course possible that she’d talked herself out of whatever mess she was in and been given a new mission. I imagined her walking through the door of the café in Essen later that morning and was surprised by how much I wanted it to happen.
The treff was scheduled for noon, the café a fifteen-minute walk from the central station. The town center seemed quieter than I remembered it, but Saturdays in Hitler’s Germany are much like other weekdays, now that extra “voluntary” half days and days have become the norm. The industrial area, once I reached it, certainly seemed to be working flat out, the serried ranks of factories throbbing with noise and pouring black smoke into the dark grey sky.
I reached the café ten minutes early and watched the frequent comings and goings from a convenient bench. All the uniforms in evidence were of the less worrying kind—army and Orpo, nothing in black—and no suspicious men in civvies were loitering nearby. If anyone was keeping watch from the windows and roofs, they were keeping their faces well hidden.
I crossed the threshold, carrying the Hamm local paper under my arm, and claimed a seat at a table for two halfway down one wall. It was quite a large establishment—thirty to forty tables—and probably more than half-full, mostly of workers who looked as if they’d just come off the early shift. Half a dozen waitresses were darting this way and that, taking and delivering orders.
I chose the soup over the sausages—a bowl of scalding liquid makes a very good missile—and opened up my newspaper. Like Walter, the local football writer was still, a month later, decrying Schalke’s failure to win the German championship.
The soup, when it came, was tasty enough, the accompanying hunks of bread hard as rock until they were dunked. I sipped and chewed, trying not to look up every time someone entered. The minutes went by, ten, fifteen, twenty. I had ten more of nursing the last inch of beer before I had to leave—thirty minutes was the maximum wait allowed.
As the allotted time drew near and there was still no sign of my contact, I realized with a shock that I was actually hoping he or she would fail to show. I say “with a shock” because a nonappearance would signal a serious failure—at the very least, a month’s delay in the mission, and quite possibly someone’s arrest—and I couldn’t remember ever welcoming such a failure before. Why did I feel that? I would have another month of relatively risk-free research, and the danger involved in approaching men of uncertain loyalty would be deferred by at least that length of time, but I knew that wasn’t the primary reason. It was the prospect of another month of ordinary life, in an ordinary house, with decent, straightforward people like Anna and Jakob, which made me hope that no one would come, and which sped me on my way the moment the café clock ticked off the half hour. True to my training, I looked neither left nor right all the way back to the station.
And then this evening Walter came to say goodbye. He and Anna are leaving early in the morning for Berlin, where she will hand him over to her cousin for the onward trip to East Prussia. Walter still thinks he’s quite capable of delivering himself—“How hard can it be to switch platforms at Silesian Station?”—but the idea of letting him loose in Hitler’s Reich was one his mother had refused to contemplate.
He said he would miss our talks and promised to write once a week but couldn’t hide his excitement at the prospect of tomorrow’s journey, which he expects to be the most interesting part of the entire four weeks away. He is curious about his cousins, but both are several years younger than he is, so he doubts they’ll have much in common.
With that in mind, he has a suitcase packed with books, which he brought up to show me. His grandfather has apparently told him that no one can read in East Prussia, and while somewhat skeptical of this information, Walter is determined not to take any chances. We agreed that running out of reading matter was a fate worth avoiding if at all possible.
Before lugging the suitcase back downstairs, he asked if I’d still be here when he got back.
Yes, I told him, unless something terrible happened.
“I’m worried about Herr Ruchay,” he said, setting the suitcase down again. “I know he wants to . . . you know, make advances, to Mama, and I think things will end badly.”
How? I asked.
“Well, if she tells him no, he’ll probably get nasty, and if she says yes, then he’ll become my father,” Walter said. “He never will be, though,” he added defiantly.
Hoping to reassure him, at least on the former count, I rather rashly promised to deal with any nastiness that Ruchay tried to unleash.
“Thank you,” Walter said, picking up the suitcase again. As if keen not to leave on a depressing note, he turned at the door for a final word: “By the time I come back, Erich will have served half his sentence.”
Monday 1 August
A long day at work. Large military maneuvers are scheduled to start on the twelfth, and the volume and complexity of the traffic involved is huge. All time off has been canceled for the rest of the month, and those who were keenly anticipating a summer break have been given a rude shock. The mood was mutinous, to say the least, but I’m not expecting any concerted attempt to challenge the bosses’ decision. Workers’ opposition in Nazi Germany rarely expresses itself in anything more than a chronic lack of productivity.
Anna got back from Berlin soon after supper and came up to tell me that Walter had been successfully handed on to the East Prussian side of the family. He apparently spent the entire journey to Berlin in the corridor, staring out of an open window, and arrived in the capital caked in soot. After a visit to the washroom, the two of them had time to take in a few sights—the Tiergarten, Potsdamer Platz, and Wilhelmstrasse. Hitler was not seen leaning out of a Chancellery window, which was probably for the best—they say he loves children, but doubtless not the sort that ask him awkward questions. Then on to Silesian Station, where they lunched in the buffet with the just-arrived Sofie. Walter had been unusually quiet. “Summing her up,” Anna guessed. She sighed. “I hope he’s not unhappy there.”
Her face seemed gaunter than usual, and she admitted to being exhausted. “And now I must run the gauntlet,” she added, meaning reach her rooms without bumping into Ruchay. “Wish me luck.”
I did but to no avail—I heard his voice a few seconds later, the tone slightly peeved but trying not to sound it.
Outside it was starting to rain, which seemed a suitable augury for a Walter-less August. I sat by the open window for a while watching the water fall through the luminous cone of the streetlight opposite, wondering how I’d let a young boy into my corroded heart. The answer, I fear, would keep the new psychoanalysts busy for quite a long time.
Trying for my own answer, I was ambushed by the phrase “Walter is my salvation.” Which sounds ridiculous, but I can’t seem to shake the sense that there’s more than a grain of truth in it.
To say he’s the son I never had might also be true, but would be far too glib. Sometimes Walter feels like the l
ife I never had; sometimes he reminds me of the boy I was before the world and the war hit me for six.
In many ways he’s the future I fought for and am still supposedly fighting for: a world of innocence and unending curiosity, of kindness and compassion, of people who think of others as much as they do themselves. In this world of course he’s a glorious misfit. He’s utterly out of place in Nazi Germany but wouldn’t be a much better fit in the muted cruelty of a bourgeois democracy or, though it pains me to say it, in the brutalized realm of my masters.
In that we are alike. I’ve found a kindred spirit in a twelve-year-old body. Only he has his life before him, whereas mine, I suspect, is nearing its close.
Tuesday, August 2
Yesterday Verena was worked off her feet doing Anna’s tasks as well as her own, but this evening I got the chance to tell her what I’d found out about Marco’s possible futures. On Saturday I’d managed an hour in the town library after work and hastily skimmed through the last few months of the local paper and the national Beobachter. I’d found no mention of expanding the geographical extent of the “Rhineland bastard” sterilization program, which was good. There were several mentions of its original introduction in the Bonn-Cologne area, but none was accompanied by any suggestion that it might be exported to other areas, which seemed even better.
I had also talked to Rudolf Faas, who works in our office and who famously has an omnivorous appetite for news. “Ask Faas” is the usual response when anyone else needs to know something, so I did. He knew about the Bonn-Cologne program but had seen nothing about any expansion. As I expected he didn’t ask why I wanted to know—like many news addicts, he thinks knowing is all that matters.
I couldn’t be certain, I told Verena. Some bright spark might suddenly see raising this issue as a way to get noticed—or, more likely, as a way of distracting attention from something else—but for the time being at least, Marco seemed to be safe.
She was clearly relieved, by both the news and my promise to keep a sharp eye out for any future developments. “I haven’t mentioned any of this to Marco,” she told me. “There’s no point in worrying him.” She offered up one of her wry smiles. “He wants to go to Africa and find his father,” she said. She didn’t suppose she could blame him, but it was obviously much too late for her and Jean. He would have another family by now.
He probably would, I thought.
“Walter told Marco you’ve been to America,” she said. “Is that true?”
I nodded.
“How do they treat half Negroes over there?” she asked.
I said they were usually treated like full-blown Negroes, who might not be slaves anymore, but weren’t considered equals. That it depended to some extent on where you were—things were worse in the southern states—but that generally whites and blacks lived separate lives, with the latter filling all those jobs the former didn’t want. A Negro might prosper, but the odds were heavily stacked against him.
“They’re not being sterilized, though?”
“No, they aren’t.”
“And there must be thousands of mixed-race people.”
“Hundreds of thousands, I should think.”
“I’d like Marco to be somewhere where he’s not the only one,” she said. “And America seems a much better bet than Africa.” Verena’s smiles are always brief affairs, and this one was briefer than most. “Dreams, eh?”
Friday, August 5
A new People’s Radio was announced this morning with all the usual fanfare. Two hundred thousand have already been manufactured and are presumably on their way to the shops. They say the new model has better speakers and a purer tone, and perhaps even Goebbels will sound like a nightingale. If Walter were here, I would know the technical specifications by now, but since he isn’t, I shall have to remain in ignorance.
I have to say I’m happy with the wireless we have. Jakob and I spent most of this evening listening to it, and for once the chosen music seemed less intent on marching us to glory and more inclined to have us tapping our feet. Jakob fondly reminisced about his former wife’s excellent dancing, and from the look on his face, I knew he was seeing her in his mind’s eye, dazzling him and everyone else in some Hamburg dancehall before the war. I found myself transported back to Brazil, and a lovely young comrade named Tashia, who loved dancing under the moon on Copacabana Beach and sometimes let me take her home.
Saturday, August 6
Ruchay’s mother has been ill, necessitating weekend trips to Hannover. Since, like the rest of us, he’s been doing extra shifts at work, Anna has so far been spared the courting offensive that Walter’s absence was supposed to enable.
She came up to see me this evening with news from East Prussia. Walter had enjoyed the train journey east from Berlin and, as yet, had no axes to grind with his newfound relatives. He was sharing a bedroom with the younger brother, Stefan, and liked exploring the farm, with its rambling house and myriad outbuildings.
“Have you been there?” I asked Anna.
She had. After her second husband, Ernst, died in 1929, she had even considered moving out to East Prussia, but eight-year-old Erich had hated the idea, and when Anna saw the sort of life the family led, she had felt much the same. There was electricity now, but they hadn’t had it then. She’d been there in summer, when the days were mostly work, and the evenings were all spent waiting for darkness to sanction sleep. “I imagined how winter would be and took the train back here.”
I said Walter had been wise to take so many books.
Anna laughed. Having discovered that the house contained four books—two Bibles, one reading primer, and a seed catalog—he was rationing himself to fifty pages a day. He was also helping with the farmwork, which was hard but “probably good for me.” His aunt Sofie was a good cook but not as good as Verena. “Thank you, by the way, for doing what you did for her,” Anna added. “She’s very grateful.”
I said I was pleased to help.
She got up to go. “I miss him,” she said.
“So do I,” I told her.
“I know. I’m glad you came here,” she said. “Walter needed someone like you.”
Monday, August 8
Horror of horrors, the regime’s campaign against the Jews is causing problems for the “Aryan” majority. A few weeks ago Berlin women attending the popular summer sales at the surviving Jewish department stores had to fight their way through a cordon of brownshirts to gain entrance. They succeeded, but Goebbels was furious.
Last week we Aryans were informed of new rules when it came to writing our wills. We can no longer leave anything to Jews, to people having “immoral relations,” or to any of the churches. Such bequests would apparently run counter to “healthy public sentiment.”
And today we’ve even lost the right to name our children as we wish. Any “typical Jewish name” is forbidden, as are other names that “originate from alien sources of history or thought.”
Small problems, you might say, when compared to those facing the Jews. If the latter were depressed after Évian, nothing has happened to cheer them since. It was recently announced that all Jewish doctors’ diplomas will be canceled beginning in September, and that henceforth they will be allowed to work only as nurses looking after their fellow Jews. The lawyers will be next, and so on and so on, until the Jews are barred from all professional life. What can they do? They’re not allowed to earn an honest living, and now that they have to carry ID cards with photographs and fingerprints, their chances of illegal work aren’t that much better. There’s nothing for them in Germany, but if no other countries will take them, there’s no way they can leave.
According to Dariusz Müller, there are roughly four hundred Jews in Hamm. I’ve walked past the synagogue, which seems to be still functioning, though after the recent announcement that the big one in Nuremberg is about to be demolished, one wonders for how l
ong. There are a few closed shops bearing faded Jewish names, but the Jews themselves are harder to spot. I imagine that most are keeping their heads down, living off their savings, and desperately looking for light at the end of their tunnel.
And speaking of ends, the climbers on Nanga Parbat have finally admitted defeat. On their way back down the mountain, they stumbled across the corpses of the 1934 expedition and are claiming this as some sort of victory.
There’s a moral here somewhere, but I dread to think what it is.
Wednesday, August 10
When I got home from work today, a letter from Walter was waiting for me, and I read it through while I waited for supper. He seems to be having an interesting time. He obviously likes his cousins well enough and is suitably equivocal about Uncle Harald, who runs the farm for his elderly mother-in-law: “He knows a lot about soils, but doesn’t seem very interested in history.” Walter has read two of the three Tom Shark novels already and is saving the third one for later. He has started exploring the Bible and found some bits “hard to believe.”
A few days ago Uncle Harald took him into Heilsberg and allowed Walter to explore for an hour while he dealt with some business. Walter seems to have spent most of that time in conversation with someone he met in the town square, an old man who was “interested in history.” The Teutonic Knights apparently spent time in Heilsberg, and Walter thought they sounded interesting—when he gets back to Hamm, he plans to look for a book about them at the library. There was a castle not far from the square, and Nicolas Copernicus had been a guest there when he worked out the earth went around the sun. Walter and the old man had walked down to see it—“a big square building with pointed towers on each corner.”
After saying goodbye to his new friend, Walter had spent some of his pocket money on a newspaper—“They don’t get one at the farm, and there isn’t a wireless either”—and finally read about the German seaplane’s Atlantic crossing, which had Ruchay gushing superlatives more than a week ago. Walter was almost as enthusiastic, but he’s only twelve years old. And he’ll no doubt be just as excited when he hears yesterday’s news, that a Focke-Wulf Condor owned by Lufthansa is about to make the first nonstop flight from Berlin to New York. All I can think when I read these reports is that Hitler’s reach grows longer by the day.
Diary of a Dead Man on Leave Page 15
