Second Violin

by John Lawton

  He became aware of someone standing behind him in the skewed frame of the shop doorway. It had to be Trager.

  Without turning Hummel said, ‘Why, Joe, why?’

  Trager shuffled forward kicking up fine, flying black ash with the toecaps of his boots.

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘What’s to get?’

  ‘It had to be me. That’s what you don’t get. ’Cos if it wasn’t me it wouldn’t have been one of them. It would have been all of them. The whole fuckin’ lot. Do you honestly think one Viennese copper, some stupid English twat who’d got himself lost and me . . . Little Joe Trager . . . could have held off that lot?’

  Hummel said nothing.

  ‘It’s not even as if they were Germans. That was your lot. Austrians, Viennese . . . for all I know people you’ve known all your life.’

  ‘I’d never seen any of them before. They might as well have been Germans for all I know.’

  ‘Fine. Have it your own fuckin’ way. Germans, Austrians, whatever they were, but Joe, if you stay maybe they’ll kill you.’

  ‘They?’ said Hummel with all the irony he could cram into one syllable.

  ‘We . . . then . . . we . . . fuck it, Joe, maybe I’ll have to kill you?’

  ‘But you’d only be following orders.’

  He’d finally got to Trager. Trager had turned red in the face, risen to his full short height, all but loomed over Hummel. Hummel expected foul-mouthed rage, perhaps a blow from his fist.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Joe. Jesus Christ.’

  He had spoken so softly it was neither oath nor curse. A heartfelt whisper. Then he hoisted his rifle, turned and left. Hummel did not see him again until it was dark.

  He thought better of sleeping in the flat over the shop. The floor might give way, and ‘they’ might return. Instead he went round to Shkolnik’s Kosher Butcher’s two streets away and asked Old Shkolnik for four steel meathooks. Shkolnik was standing in the remains of his shop, shuffling around on a carpet of broken glass making no attempt to clean up anything.

  ‘Take as many as you like. I’m out of business. The buggers stole everything. You might not even find a meathook. I’m filth. I’m scum. We’re all scum. Dirty bunch of Juden. Funny how my meat’s clean enough to be worth stealing and cooking.’

  Hummel found the four hooks he wanted amongst the rubble and took them home. There was nothing he could say to Shkolnik, nothing he could say to anybody. Shkolnik had pointed out that there had been Shkolniks in the shop for five generations. On the way home Kostiner at the corner café said there had been Kostiners for three generations, and Linsky at the drapers said it had been four. Hummel was not counting. As far as he knew there had been Hummels in Vienna since the original Hummel disembarked from Noah’s ark with a pair of unicorns and caught the first passing tram into Leopoldstadt.

  He kicked about for a while in the ash and soot of the shop and found unscathed, a roll of grey Hessian, as heavy as sackcloth and closer in the weave. Then he hand-sewed a meathook to each corner of a long strip of the cloth, doubled over for strength, and with each hook thrown over a rafter in the shed, he had himself an improvised hammock. He felt safe in the shed. ‘They’ wouldn’t look in the shed. ‘They’, in the form of ‘he’, dropped by about nine in the evening. Dark and cold and wet. Hummel was in his hammock, buried under several eiderdowns, reading by candlelight. The door opened and Trager stuck his head in.

  ‘Wot yer doing?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  Trager shone his bullseye torch on the book, mouthing and mangling what he saw on the spine.

  ‘Renn Dezcartiz?’

  ‘René Descartes,’ Hummel said trying to keep his voice chatty. ‘The Discourse on Method.’

  ‘What method?’

  ‘The method of reason and mathematics.’

  ‘Oh. I prefer a good yarn meself.’

  ‘Oh it’s that alright.’

  ‘I see you made yourself cosy then?’

  It was not the word Hummel would have chosen.

  ‘Needs must,’ he said simply.

  ‘I been thinking. About you leaving.’

  ‘Who said I was leaving?’

  ‘I told you this morning . . .’

  ‘It’s OK, Joe. This morning you convinced me. I just don’t know how. I have no visa for any foreign country. I’m on no one’s quota. And, as of last night, I have nothing Herr Eichmann could possibly want in exchange for my freedom. Perhaps you were right. I should have gone with the Bemmelmanns. Did I tell you I got a letter from Palestine last week? They are on a kibbutz near Haifa.’

  ‘They was lucky. Lots o’folk drowned in the Danube. One poor couple got stuck on an island between one of them there Balkan states and whatever country’s got the other bank, and neither one’d let ’em in.’

  ‘Now you tell me. All the same, Joe, I would leave if I knew how.’

  Trager had been thinking. He had that smug hint of self-regard of the man who knows he has had a good idea, if perhaps for the first and only time in his life.

  ‘I got this mate. Patrols the marshalling yard next to the railway station.’

  ‘Which station?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters. I’m not getting on a train to Russia. That would be frying pan to Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.’

  ‘It’s the Westbahnhof. You know . . . trains to Germany France . . . Belgium.’

  No, Hummel thought, trains to England.

  ‘And he can get me on a train?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘How sort of?’

  ‘He can get you on a goods wagon. Maybe. Like a boxcar.’

  ‘Surely they – I mean you – surely German troops have enough sense to search the boxcars?’

  Trager saw his idea crashing down around him in flames as fast as the Hindenburg in New Jersey.

  ‘Dunno. I’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘Fine. And when you do, ask him for the measurements between axles on a small wagon.’

  ‘How the hell are we supposed to find out that?’

  ‘To the nearest pace will do. Half a metre either way. Put your jackboots to good use for once. Pace it out from wheel to wheel.’

  Trager went away puzzled but willing. Hummel felt for the first time a hint of the gratitude he had always resisted extending towards Trager and anything Trager did. He had had a good idea too, and it beat the hell out of anything Trager could come up with.

  § 35

  Two days later Trager reappeared at Hummel’s shed. Another dark, cold, wet night.

  ‘My mate reckons he can get you in a boxcar. Reckons he can bury you under something, so as you won’t get noticed.’

  Bury me is right, thought Hummel.

  ‘And the distance between axles?’

  ‘Four metres, give or take . . . but it’s all a risk, d’ye see?’

  ‘Risk. Yes. I see.’

  Drawing breath had been a risk from the day the Germans rolled in.

  ‘He can’t . . . like . . . do it for free and for nothing.’

  ‘Of course not, Joe. Everything has its price.’

  Trager was almost immune to sarcasm, it drifted by him.

  ‘Too bloody right. And it’s too far to walk. I’ll have to bung something to the bloke with the staff car.’

  ‘Fine. I understand. But how do you come by a staff car?’

  Trager tapped the side of his nose.

  ‘When there ain’t no “staff” around . . . make it a hundred apiece.’

  At the back of the shed Hummel dug out the spare sewing machine that got used only if the workhorse machine needed to be repaired. It was old, and very heavy, and Hummel could not quite remember when he had last used it, but it worked. Another length of Hessian, slightly over four metres, got hemmed and reinforced at the corners. An offcut about 200 mm wide and a metre long got turned into a money belt. Upstairs, in the back bedroom, Hummel looked at his skinny frame in a f
ull-length mirror, wanting to know that beneath his overcoat, his jacket and his cardigan, the belt, now full of notes, did not reveal itself as a bulge. It didn’t. And the immediate satisfaction gave way at once to the thought, ‘Have I used a sewing machine for the last time? Is this the last garment I will ever make?’ A thought that Hummel, with some difficulty, set aside. He took off coat, jacket and cardigan, wound the four metres of Hessian around and dressed again. He’d be lucky. He looked portly. But to someone who’d never met him? The contents of his small leather case, still bearing his father’s initials in faded gold, were as innocuous as he could make them – a safety razor (with blade), a flannel, a toothbrush, a change of socks, shirt and underpants, a copy of Baedeker’s Guide to Paris (published in Leipzig in 1907 and disguised with the dust jacket from a German translation of Le Juif Errant by Eugène Sue) and four meat hooks (there was not much he could do about those, a meat hook was a meat hook), and four cheese sandwiches.

  The next night, Trager called for him close to midnight. Looked at Hummel, wrapped up for winter. Black coat. A bit stout around the tum.

  ‘You sure about this?’

  ‘Joe, you’ve been nagging me to go ever since the Bemmelmanns left.’

  ‘OK. Same routine. Anybody sees us you’re under arrest. I’ll be in the back with me rifle, you’ll be in front . . . you just look . . .’

  ‘What, Joe? Look what?’

  ‘Look nicked . . . look scared.’

  ‘I will have no problem looking scared.’

  They walked to the end of the street, the ridiculous couple once more, the short and the tall, the German and the Jew. Hummel did not turn around, thought of the story of Lot’s wife and kept on walking.

  The staff car was an open-topped Opel six-seater, driven by ‘my mate Gus’. The wind cut into them as they tore down the Ring, and two hundred yards from the station in Mariahilferstrasse Hummel’s hat flew off and he tried to see no symbol in it.

  At the gate of the marshalling yard, the car stopped and they all got out, Trager loosely holding his gun at waist height, loosely and unconvincingly pointing it at Hummel. Then he winked. Hummel took the cue, reached into his pocket and handed Gus a roll of notes. Gus said nothing – but he had not spoken at all as they had crossed the city centre – looked both ways in the hammiest pretence of caution and pocketed his money.

  They found ‘my mate Erik’ by the waving of his lantern, down a dark alley created by long, long trains of goods wagons.

  Erik had a gift for the obvious, ‘This ’im?’

  ‘Course it’s ’im.’

  ‘Worth savin’ is he?’

  Trager said nothing to this. Erik rolled back the door of a boxcar, shone his light inside to show a wall of square packing cases stacked like toy building blocks in the nursery.

  ‘See where the bottom one’s out? You get in there. We push it back and you got about half a metre clear on the far side. You’ll be snug as a bug in a rug. Gettit?’

  ‘Yes. I gettit. But I need to know. Where is the train going?’

  ‘Five o’clock tomorrow morning, it’ll pull out for Munich. Munich’s first stop. Half the train’ll uncouple there. This bit goes on to Stuttgart. After that you’re on your own. Plenty o’trains cross the border from there. You just have to find one.’

  Hummel looked at Trager. This wasn’t what he wanted, but it was pretty much what he had expected. Another wink from Trager and he paid off Erik. Erik went off down the line, swinging his lantern.

  ‘I’ll tuck you in,’ Trager said, inadvertently maternal, and as he and Hummel squatted down in front of the gap in the wall of packing cases, Hummel took another roll of notes from his pocket and held it out. Trager looked at it by the light of his torch.

  ‘It’s not about money.’

  ‘Of course not. All the same you’ll take it?’

  Trager hesitated, took the bankroll and said, ‘Get inside now.’

  Hummel slid in, felt a moment’s passing panic as the last box was pushed in behind him cutting off the torchlight, and said, ‘Goodbye Joe. And thank you.’

  The last words he ever heard from Trager, half-muffled by the boxes, were, ‘I didn’t do it for the money.’

  § 36

  Hummel gave it about an hour, decided it was close to 2 a.m., and pushed at the loose box. It slid out as easily as it had slid in. He tried the sliding door, found it was not locked, slid the box back into place and jumped down to the tracks.

  There was moonlight overhead, but the shadows from the trains left it too dark to see what was written on the side of the car. He took the risk, pulled out a pocket torch, cupped his hand around the beam and found the word ‘Stuttgart’ chalked just to the left of the door. The same word was written on the cars coupled at either end. He chose the righthand car and crawled underneath. He took off his coat, jacket and cardigan, unwound the long stretch of Hessian, inserted a meat hook at each corner, and slung his new hammock between the axles of the boxcar. Lying in it, case clutched to his chest, money-belt feeling lumpy round his middle, he found he was well clear of the ground – Trager had got the measurement right – but he’d still be visible to anyone searching underneath. If they searched underneath.

  He heard an engine in the distance, building up steam. Then the slow, rhythmical throb, the inhalation and exhalation, as it drew nearer. The bump as it touched buffers, sending every car into temporary motion, one after the other, a metal ripple, like a giant’s card trick. When the train pulled out he could feel the jolting in every bone in his body and began to wonder if he might not rattle to pieces long before Stuttgart, but once the train gathered speed, the roughness evened out and he began to think that it might even be possible to sleep in his hammock, to lose the sense of the ground beneath him rushing so rapidly past.

  The train stopped well short of Munich. From the time they’d travelled Hummel thought they could be no further than Linz. It was light, and it was cold, and it was damp. Morning in mid-November. There was shouting, and there were boots running up and down almost level with his eyes. Then he heard a door slide open. Not the car above him, the car he had been in, it sounded like. The sound of the packing cases being torn down, and a voice saying, ‘Niemand!’

  Three pairs of boots gathered right in front of him.

  ‘Wankers,’ a voice said. ‘Total wankers, just wastin’ our fuckin’ time!’

  ‘We could search the lot,’ a second voice added.

  ‘Don’t be so fuckin’ stupid. One yid in a haystack? . . . I ask you is it worth it?’

  The train moved on.

  ‘Erik?’ Hummel wondered. ‘Gus? Just so long as it wasn’t Trager.’

  § 37

  It was three days later – eating nothing after he had finished his cheese sandwiches on the second day, drinking out of firebuckets – that Hummel found himself at Strasbourg in France, a town that found itself in Germany or in France from one time to another, depending on who was winning. At Strasbourg, speaking no French, he simply uttered the word ‘Paree’ at the ticket office and, in response to words he did not understand but whose meaning had to be obvious, put down all the francs he had. Even he could understand when the clerk told him with words and grimaces that it was not enough. And when he wrote down the figure on a piece of paper Hummel pulled out more than the equivalent in Austrian schilling and proffered them. The look on the clerk’s face was part of Hummel’s immediate education in the ways of the French nation. The way the man rubbed the thumb of his right hand against his first two fingers spoke more than words. Was this a country in which one could bribe one’s way? That, thought Hummel, might well be to the advantage of a man with no papers and a fat wodge of foreign currency. Hummel offered the price of the ticket again. The clerk grinned, swept the bribe quickly off the counter and punched out a ticket. And a world of new possibilities began to open up for Hummel.

  On the train, acutely conscious of what he looked like, he shaved, washed, cleaned his teeth, changed his shirt, combed
his hair and did his best to knock the mud off his overcoat and trousers.

  A few hours later, looking almost respectable – somewhat worse for wear than the customary railway passenger, he thought, but hardly a tramp – he stepped off a train at the Gare de L’Est . . . wreathed in steam and smoke at his ankles, an urban hubbub of foreign syllables lapping at his ears – into a city of dreams, a city that spun dreams and consumed dreams, a city of which so many had dreamt – but Hummel had not been one of them. All his life, it seemed to Hummel, he had dreamt of Vienna. And now that was what remained of Vienna – a dream.

  § 38

  Sigmund dreamt. He was back in Vienna. Not the Vienna he had left only months before, nor the Vienna of his youth, but the city around the year 1900, the Vienna of Empire, the Vienna of Franz-Josef . . . Vienna before the war. Vienna before Sigmund was ‘Freud’ in the one-word way Picasso was ‘Picasso’ or Shakespeare ‘Shakespeare’.

  In his dream he was sitting in a café he could not name. A fine spring day, the trees in the square outside the window in bud, sunlight glinting on the cutlery at his table. He was thinking about the book he was writing, The Interpretation of Dreams, and with the hindsight of the dreamer knew that he had already finished this book, that it had run to eight or nine editions, had been translated into half a dozen languages. The waiter took his cup away and replaced it with one twice the size, and when Sigmund had finished that, one yet bigger. Soon he was drinking coffee out of a cup the size of a bucket – and found he could drink no more. The cup once raised to his lips tipped coffee down his shirtfront. He looked at the waiter, waiting. He was not alone, a dozen waiters stood in line behind him. The man in the square was ringing a handbell and shouting something Sigmund could not understand . . . and it was Autumn, leaves tumbling down around him, a wind blowing them flat against the glass. And suddenly he was alone, the sole customer at the sole table . . . no cup . . . no cutlery . . . no tablecloth . . . just the man with the handbell outside the window.