by John Lawton
It was not a leaf, it was a piece of the Torah. The holy word of the God of his ancestors, looted from the ark, shredded like yesterday’s newsprint.
The text was still legible, three words of Hebrew clear and distinct upon the scorched paper – a quotation Hummel recognised from Genesis, ‘brimstone and fire’, and he knew how it ended . . . ‘brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven’ . . . and the destruction of Sodom followed. He thought it singularly inappropriate. This was Vienna not Sodom. This was the work of man not God. He looked up, as though searching for someone with whom to share the thought. He was alone. All around had fled, and down the street came the same bunch of Brownshirts he had missed going the other way. They had lost their quarry and were now lumbering up to him. Hummel’s first reaction to the cry of ‘Jew-boy!’ was a silent ‘Who me?’ And his second was to run.
Hummel ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping. Down Leopoldstrasse, around the next corner.
‘Get-’im-catch-’im-rip-’is-bollocks-off!’
The cries pursued him round the corner, through an alley and into the next main street. A man standing in a doorway took off after him, and for a second Hummel thought he was caught, but a backward glance told him it was just another Jew in the same plight. Hummel turned left into another alley. The man ran straight on and the Brownshirts followed him instead of Hummel. Hummel emerged at the other end of the alley – suddenly it was almost quiet. No noises on the street, but off the street, high up in the apartments, he could hear the shouts and the crashes as the boot of the new civilisation met the flesh and culture of the old. He stepped back into a shop doorway as windows on a third floor burst outwards showering the street in broken glass. A woman screamed, and just as suddenly stopped. Then Hummel heard grunts of exhortation and something very large appeared on the window ledge. A tallboy? A wardrobe? Hummel heard a jangling, a discordant music, as though a cat had just run across the keyboard of a piano. Then he realised. It was a piano. A full-sized concert grand was pushed out and dropped into the street below. It seemed to Hummel to land like some outsized creature in one of those American Disney cartoons he had occasionally seen at the cinema. The legs splayed like an elephant on ice, the belly of the beast hit the cobbles, the lid shot up and the keyboard exploded in a roman candle of ebony and ivory.
Brownshirts appeared at the window, jostling each other for a view and laughing. They soon tired of the joke, their heads pulled back and the screams from within began again. Hummel emerged from the shadows. The piano seemed to be humming rather like an aeolian harp, the wind across its strings. Hummel crept closer. The humming seemed less like an instrument and more human. He stood on the remains of the lid and peeked in. There, on the metal frame of the piano, lay a short man of sixty or so – crucified . . . strapped down, tied into place with piano wire. He was naked, he was drenched in blood, his chest was punctured where a rib protruded through the flesh, and he was indeed humming. One note might be groaning. Three was humming. It was not a tune Hummel knew.
His eyes opened, he looked at Hummel and spoke.
‘Oh my God . . .’ he said, and died.
A blow to the kidneys doubled Hummel up, he felt his knees give way, beery breath upon his face, and a voice in his ear.
‘Right, Jew-boy . . . you’ll get yours next.’
Hummel sank to the cobblestones. They kicked him in both legs until the pain of the blows was worse than the pain in his back and then he struggled to his feet. There were six of them, the same six he’d shaken off only minutes before. Two hoisted him upright, a third punched him in the face, and he found himself frog-marched, half-conscious and tasting blood, off down the street to he knew not where. His feet slithered on the stone, the Brownshirts heaved and his father’s shoes slipped from his feet – they dragged him on, over rubble, through puddles . . . he felt the searing pain of bashed toes and, when the pain subsided, he felt the cold and damp begin to seep through his socks.
A couple of hundred yards on they lugged him like a sack of spuds up a long staircase, kicked open a door and dumped him on the floor.
Someone was shouting. Hummel looked up, found himself staring at the high ceiling and the old black hammerbeams and slowly recognised where he was – in the upstairs dining hall of the Guild of Master Silversmiths. He’d been here every year as a boy for the spring flower show, when all the window-box gardeners in Leopoldstadt paraded the bulbs they had overwintered into blossom. Whoever it was shouting, they were not shouting at him. He sat up. There were about twenty Brownshirts in the hall, all much of a muchness, confirming what Hummel had always thought about them – that they were the fat and the lazy, nature’s idlers, who bizarrely yearned for life in uniform, for the physical grace that eluded them and the physical fitness they’d never work for – office clerks and Sunday soldiers who in any other country would end up as scoutmasters dunning mindless patriotism into the young and gullible. And there were countless Jewish men – men of all ages, fit young men with broad shoulders, old men, old men stooped and white-bearded. They were doing knee-bends – up down, up down, hands behind their head. An old man fell over – two Brownshirts immmediately kicked him in the ribs until he forced himself up again.
At a cry of ‘Up, you fuckers, up!’ a young man answered back and was smashed in the nose with a truncheon.
Someone prodded Hummel with the toe of his boot. At least it was a prod, not a kick.
‘You too, Big Ears, or did you think you were going to sit there till Kingdom come?’
Hummel stood, winced at the pain in the small of his back, locked his hands behind his head and began the rhythmic squatting and rising.
‘Down, you fuckers, down, up, you fuckers, up.’
He’d done no more than a dozen, when the command changed to, ‘Press-ups, you fuckers. Let’s see what you kikes are made of.’
Hummel had no more strength in his arms than a skinny schoolgirl. He had spent his working life at the meticulous task of sewing, not the bicep-building tasks of a labourer. One good push up and he was spent. He looked around at his fellow prisoners. Most were flat on the floor exhausted. One or two younger men were valiantly responding to the cry . . . ‘Push, you fuckers, push.’ A few more pushes and they too hit the floor and groaned.
‘What now?’ Hummel thought. ‘You can’t flog a dead horse.’
A few seconds in a huddle of whispers and a bunch of Brownshirts took off at a run across the prone bodies, using them as stepping stones, and stamping on them with every ounce of their strength, jumping on them like kids upon a mattress.
Men screamed, men writhed, and, seeing the approaching boots, one old man rose to his feet, summoned the last of his resources, ran for the leaded window and crashed through it head first.
He was silent as he fell – all Hummel heard was the distant thud as his body hit the street below and the fountain tinkle of glass falling.
Every Brownshirt in the room ran to the window to look out.
‘Bloody hell.’
Hummel looked around. Behind him was a closet door. He turned the handle and stepped inside. With all eyes on the window, no one had noticed. He crouched down and put an eye to the keyhole. The novelty of suicide had passed in an instant. Now they waded into the herded Jews with truncheons, smashing noses and cracking skulls, until the floor was red with blood, until they had found the perfect target – a rabbi, a man in his eighties, it seemed to Hummel, hiding at the back of the room not far from where Hummel had been standing. They forced the old man to his knees. One of the Brownshirts held a scroll of the Torah, no doubt one of dozens looted from the synagogues, tore off a piece and shoved it into the old man’s mouth. Then he struck a match and set fire to it. The rabbi could not scream with his mouth full – all he could do was writhe in agony as his beard and eyebrows went up in flames. Another Brownshirt whacked him on the back of the head with his stick and the rabbi fell face down, flames out, face scorched, acrid, pungent smoke wafting off him.
Hummel could look no more. He turned his back, and in so doing noticed a tiny shaft of light at the back of the closet. He went up to it and looked through. It was the keyhole of another door. He was, he realised, in a closet that connected two rooms. The other room was smaller. It looked empty. He put his ear to the keyhole, just to be certain, heard nothing and gently turned the handle. The door wasn’t locked. He stepped into the room and tiptoed across to the main door. That too was unlocked. He inched it open and found himself looking out onto a staircase – not the one he had been brought up and not one in frequent use from the amount of dust and cobwebs. At the bottom of the stairs he found a door, apparently a fire escape door, held shut only by a push bar. He pushed. The door opened an inch or two. He pushed harder and heard the clang as a couple of dustbins rolled away. Then he stepped out and found himself in a deserted narrow channel at the back of the Silversmith’s Hall – the sort of place only ever visited by criminals, illicit lovers and dustmen.
Hummel ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping.
§ 29
At each street corner Hummel would slow to a walk, glance round the corner and enter only if the street was empty of Brownshirts. If there were people around – ordinary citizens, if that phrase meant anything any more – he would walk past them, hoping they would not notice he was barefoot, and begin to run again only when well clear.
He wondered what it was the fascists had against pianos. In the length of four or five streets he had passed half a dozen smashed pianos, and only half a mile or so back he had narrowly escaped a sense of déjà vu when another piano came crashing down from a top-floor apartment. He had resisted looking inside and walked on as though it rained pianos every day in this part of Vienna.
At the corner of Lindenstrasse he leaned out and peered into Waldenstrasse. It wasn’t empty, there was a bunch of kids dawdling in front of the smouldering shell of a row of shops – but kids were kids, they weren’t Brownshirts. Hummel pressed on. He’d run as soon as running became practical. The next thing he knew a boy of six or seven was stamping on his toes.
‘Big Ears got no shoes!’
It was a call to battle. Before Hummel could stride out on his long legs and escape the little pest, the rest had joined in, stamping his toes, kicking his shins – ‘Big Ears! Big Ears! Big Ears!’
Big Ears ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping.
He outran the little monsters, turned one corner and then another – but it was no time for complacency – to conclude he’d shaken them off would be rash.
Around another corner, and a horde of Brownshirts were waiting. A volte-face. He’d rather run a gauntlet of kids than a gauntlet of Brownshirts.
Retracing his steps he saw the approaching kids just as he reached a narrow channel that cut between two streets. He dashed down it and, as he emerged the other side, felt arms grip both of his and heard another beery voice say, ‘What’s the hurry, Jew-boy?’ And a knee to the testicles doubled him up.
It occurred to Hummel through the haze of pain that seemed to start with his bruised toes, shoot upwards via bruised balls to his bruised skull, that they’d probably take him back to the Silversmith’s hall and the whole bloody cycle would begin again. But clearly he was dealing with a better class of Nazi – this lot had their own van. They threw him in the back – the man Hummel landed on groaned and, as he groped around, Hummel felt at least a dozen different bodies under him. He touched an ankle, a thigh, withdrew at once . . . reached out again and touched a potato. They were in the back of a greengrocer’s van.
Hummel counted the number of turns, and the stops. No more bodies were piled in, and he concluded when the van stopped and the doors were flung open that they had been driven about two miles, and he was almost certain they’d crossed a bridge back into the city centre.
It was getting light. Hummel found himself in a group of about fifteen, moaning, but otherwise silent, Jews in front of a pair of high, black gates.
A truncheon in the back prodded him forward. The gates swung open, and Hummel knew at once where they were. The high brick walls, the sandy oval track around the perimeter – they were in the Police Academy Riding School.
‘Well . . . don’t just stand there – run!’
Hummel stared. There were dozens of Brownshirts lining the track, and twenty or so Jews attempting the circuit, running till they staggered, staggering till they fell and, if they fell, kicked and trampled and left to bleed into the sand.
Another prod in the back. Hummel did not wait for a third. The man in front had set off and Hummel followed. The Nazis were armed with everything from bamboo canes to stout cudgels. The faster you ran, the more blows you escaped. The man in front of Hummel caught a blow in the face from a cane, lost his stride and backed into Hummel. Hummel side-stepped him, took a blow to the chest from a leather whip and ran on. It was like any other race. The only point was to win, and as he kicked out his long legs the Brownshirts cheered him on.
‘Come on, Big Ears. Come on, Big Ears!’
Big Ears ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping. Big Ears ran, overtook the fat little Jew in his fifties, overtook the two lanky teenagers, the young rabbi . . . overtook everyone until the Brownshirts gave up hitting him and simply cheered . . . and cheered and cheered. They had got what they wanted from the night’s carnage, pure entertainment . . . better than a dancing bear, or a fighting dog . . . they had . . . a performing Jew . . . a shoeless big-eared Jew flapping around in his father’s best overcoat . . . a running Jew, fit to leave Jesse Owens standing.
They gave Hummel laurels in the form of a lavatory seat around his neck, gave him one last kick and shoved him indoors. The indoor riding track was the best part of forty feet high, with windows set close to the ceiling. From each window ledge hung a red and black swastika that reached almost to the floor – the two biggest framed a twenty-foot-high portrait of Hitler. It was a makeshift temple, Hummel thought. A place of worship for the Beast of Braunau. And if he had thought the Silversmith’s hall had been crammed with Jews, this scene defied counting . . . there were thousands of Jews. Hummel wandered among them, a lost soul himself. And it occurred to him that the only comparable scene was a painting, or perhaps every painting, by the Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch . . . the catholic vision of hell in all its gore. Every Jew nursed a wound . . . so many broken noses . . . so many split lips and torn ears. So many bodies in the sand. Hummel wandered, exhausted from his running, but unable to sit. To sit would be to settle, to seep away into the sand and die. He thought he recognised faces in the sea of blood, but no one seemed to recognise him. Was that not Herr Freleng the butcher? Was that not Herr Schenckmann the actuary? Was that not Herr Adler, his old history teacher? He felt as though he had become suddenly invisible.
Time passed. Daylight streaked in through the windows. The doors opened and a voice shouted . . . ‘Run . . . all of you run . . . go back to your stinking hovels . . . run . . . because if we catch you we’ll do it all over again. Run!’
A surge of the able-bodied ran for the door. The rest lay in the sand. Big Ears ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping.
§ 30
Hummel shuffled across the Franzens Bridge. It was teeming with people. Most of them crossing the other way, most of them too weary or too burdened with loot after a night’s pillage to bother much about a raggedy, bloody scarecrow of a man who might or might not be Jewish.
A young ‘aryan’ couple, evidently man and wife, pushed a handcart onto which they had managed to manoeuvre a four-seater leather sofa. A Brownshirt waddled along, his pockets so full of cutlery that he rattled like Harpo Marx in a classic Hollywood sketch and even, although oblivious to it, shed the odd knife or fork as he made his way home. Two children staggered along clutching a large wireless set, cord and plug trailing behind them. The smaller child dropped his end. The wireless hit the stones, split its wooden casing, shattered
its tuning screen. One more bit of broken glass. The child bawled. The bigger child clipped him round the ear and walked on.
Hummel aimed at being invisible and almost succeeded.
He had reached the far end of the bridge, the Leopoldstadt side at the corner of Schüttelstrasse, half a mile from home, when he spotted a bunch of kids approaching. The same bunch of kids he had escaped only a couple of hours earlier.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Oh shit, shit, shit.’
§ 31
Rod Troy and Oskar Siebert were sharing Rod’s hip flask. Siebert had lit up his twentieth Asta of the night and was alternating the pleasure of tobacco with the pleasure of a rather nice Armagnac. They were standing in a shop doorway on the Leopoldstrasse a couple of hundred yards from the remains of the synagogue. It seemed to Rod that the night was running past him like a newsreel in one of those all-day news cinemas in central London – life on the loop. They’d circled the district three or four times in Siebert’s car – Siebert had let Rod choose when they stopped and so far had not made any attempt to get between him and the ‘action’. They’d seen ‘action’. Now they were taking a breather. Every so often, a bunch of thugs would swagger down the street – one of them, the self-appointed leader – usually, Rod thought, both fat and ugly – might spot the two of them and approach with a snarl of assumed authority in his voice. Siebert would flash his warrant card and tell the the Brownshirt to ‘Fuck off’ – if this didn’t work, he’d open his coat and show him the automatic pistol tucked into his shoulder holster. There’d been three or four encounters so far – Siebert had not once had to draw the gun. Better still, he’d managed to restrain the Englishman from behaving like St George and tackling any dragons. It had been a night of incident, it was always going to be a night of incident, but without the incident he most feared.
