by Ben Stevens
For safety’s sake this sign of rebellion should have been immediately erased upon its discovery, but no one working here had the slightest inclination of doing such a thing.
Heinemann walked up the ancient-looking iron staircase, the steps of which bent slightly but still worryingly beneath his weight. At the top he pushed open the door and entered a small reception area reeking of stale tobacco.
A dumpy woman sat at a small desk typed rapidly – clack, clack, clack, clack – a dirty window behind her and a dead potted plant next to the typewriter.
As the opened door let in the industrial din from the machines she looked up, her dull face displaying no expression as she observed the thin teenager who entered. She’d attempted to look smart and bohemian, her hair worn in the style made fashionable by any number of famous actresses of the moment. This quite failed, however, to displace her striking plainness.
She momentarily stopped chewing gum as she asked, ‘How can I help?’
‘I am here to see Herr Hartz; he should be expecting me.’
She looked at a list beside the typewriter, her jaw again working fiercely on the gum.
‘Your name?’
‘Erich Heinemann.’
She shook her head – he was obviously not on the list – and Heinemann decided to take the initiative.
‘We met a few nights ago, at the Aalto Theatre. He was kind enough to offer me employment.’
She shrugged. ‘One moment, please.’ On the edge of the desk there was a large metallic box with a speaker grill, and she pressed one of its switches.
‘Yes?’ Although the speaker made the word harsh and distorted, it had still been voiced by a clearly irritated man.
‘There is a young man here to see you, Herr Hartz – Erich Heinemann.’
There was long pause before the voice crackled again:
‘Send him in, Helga.’
Motioning with her eyes to a short corridor with a door at its end, the secretary then resumed her typing. Heinemann walked to the door, thought about knocking, and then opened it anyway.
The room had once been painted white… but the walls and ceiling were now dirty with age. There were many filing cabinets, pieces of paper stuck to their draws stating: Production Figures ‘33 - ’38; Revised Estimates; Annual Targets…
Claus Hartz sat in the middle of the room, paperwork banked-up on either side of his desk. His eyes had heavy bags beneath them, and they glared at Heinemann with no trace of the drink-fuelled joviality of before.
‘Want to work, do you? Well, that suits me. And you might as well start now if you can. Your hours you can work out with the factory’s foreman,’ he said curtly, before he lowered his head and resumed writing in an evident gesture of dismissal.
Confused by the man’s abrupt manner, Heinemann stayed where he was.
‘Was there anything else?’ enquired the factory owner irritably.
‘How much… I mean, what will I get paid?’ asked Heinemann uncertainly.
He scarcely believed Hartz’s reply; it was an appallingly low rate.
‘Was that all?’ asked Hartz quickly.
‘Who... who is the foreman, please?’
‘He always dresses in blue overalls, has blond hair – his name’s Wermer. Now you really must excuse me – I have work to be doing.’
Heinemann left the office, trying to ignore the depression that had taken a sudden grip of his thoughts. He’d had no previous idea that even an unskilled factory job would pay so little; but there was no way that he could continue to exist solely on his grant, and being half-Jewish the chances of him finding employment elsewhere were considerably less than slim.
Hartz, so to speak, had him by the balls.
At that moment the factory owner held his head in his hands, thinking of the boy he’d just sent onto the factory floor. For how long would he last; when would the authorities outlaw him? Still, the Party had demanded a ridiculous production quota from Mette Construction, and so he needed the sufficient amount of workers to be able to fulfil it. If questioned about employing a half-Jew he could always claim ignorance.
Some life this was – hurrah for Germany and Adolf-bloody-Hitler. With this despairing thought Hartz again steeled himself to continue the never-ending paperwork.
The work was extremely noisy and tedious. Wermer had quickly shown Heinemann how to use a machine that stamped a hole in a metal part, and had left him to get on with it with one simple piece of advice –
‘I don’t like bloody slackers, so make sure that you’re not one.’
No further conversation was forthcoming regarding his hours or anything else. So Heinemann took his place next to the conveyer-belt, his arm soon aching as with a lever he lifted and brought down the machine onto the never-ending metal sections.
A clock was mounted on a wall in front of him, and he frequently wondered just how the minute hand managed the slow, uphill crawl past the half-hour to finally register another blessed hour passed. The despair and boredom of such a place as this seemed almost to affect the mechanical objects as much as it did the workers.
At one o’clock production stopped for lunch and the workers trooped outside the building, seating themselves on the stacked pallets and producing sandwiches and pouches of tobacco.
Heinemann sat apart from the main body, none of the men sparing him a second glance. They were hardly more sociable with one another, speaking only occasionally and then in a grunting, monosyllabic fashion. Noticing their sandwiches and pieces of pie Heinemann consequently realised his own hunger. But he’d nothing to eat.
At half past one the workers trooped back in to take their places at the machines. The next three and a half hours crept by until at last the conveyer-belt stopped and Heinemann felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked round to see a man slide his finger across his throat before walking off.
Work had at last finished.
The men clocked-out at the entrance and nodded solemnly to Wermer as they left. Heinemann approached the factory foreman.
‘I need to ask you about my hours –’
‘Half past seven till five o’clock, Monday to Friday; Saturday till noon,’ replied Wermer immediately.
‘I’m only here part-time, though – I study music at Humboldt University.’
Recognising the man’s immediate disdain, Heinemann was unsurprised by what followed:
‘Part-time? We don’t need bloody part-timers here, especially not bloody students –’
Wermer’s vitriol choked on observing the anger that suddenly flashed in Heinemann’s narrow grey eyes; he no longer looked anything like so vacant and fragile.
‘Well – it’s cleared with the boss, yes?’ asked Wermer in a slightly less strident voice.
‘Yes,’ said Heinemann tightly, still staring hard at the foreman.
‘Take this card, then, and clock in and out like everyone else when you’re working. Your wages will be given to you at the end of each week, minus stoppages.’
Heinemann nodded and left the building, feeling his anger beginning to abate. At least he was earning some more money, he considered. He would do as many days as he could over the Christmas break, but once university had restarted he would only be able to work Saturdays.
Or so he thought.
9
The quartet’s performance at the Aalto Theatre on 31 December was received perfectly as background music. Due to his new-found employment consisting of long hours, which consequently left him feeling exhausted (he was currently working full-time, until university began again) Erich Heinemann played below his usual standard and made several sloppy mistakes.
Marie’s grandmother was living her final few days, and so the tearful cellist left as soon as she was able. Muehlebach also disappeared, to spend the rest of New Year’s Eve doing whatever it was that a Muehlebach did.
This left Heinemann and Rath, who each took a glass of champagne from a waiter’s silver tray as the last hour of 1938 ticked itself into extinction. It
was Heinemann’s first drink since the rehearsal at his tutor’s apartment, and determined not to embarrass himself again he sipped it slowly.
A whinnying laugh sounded clear in the hall despite the loud babble of many conversations, and Heinemann looked round to see Frau Sasse.
She was elegantly dressed and dripped jewellery, surrounded by dinner-jacketed males whose wives didn’t dare shoot evil glances in her direction as they would have liked. Their husbands were talking to the wife of a Commissioner of the Gestapo, and she knew it.
Suddenly noticing the Mischling and his tutor, she immediately broke away from the sycophantic males, people moving quickly out of her path as she walked towards the two violinists.
Looking at Rath, Heinemann was startled to see hatred and fear momentarily mix in his expression. This, however, instantly disappeared as the man greeted the woman:
‘Frau Sasse, what a pleasant surprise. How was your trip to Austria?’
‘Lovely, thank you Enrich – it was so relaxing. It’s such a shame my husband couldn’t be here, but then business for him never stops – you know how it is.’
She flashed a quick, triumphant smile, and for a second Rath’s impassive mask faltered again.
She then looked at Heinemann with obvious affection.
‘Ah, Erich – my dear young Erich! My girlfriends still talk about your performance at our coffee morning that time, you know.’
Yes thought Heinemann. I’ve heard about your girlfriends.
‘Really, Frau Sasse?’ he said.
She turned back to Rath.
‘You know, Enrich, you should arrange some concerts for Erich, to really show-off Berlin’s – perhaps Germany’s! – finest young violinist. See to it, would you? The rest of your students can accompany him – it would make a good project for them.’
‘Of course, Frau Sasse,’ Rath said mechanically, thus disguising the hatred he felt for her patronising words.
She smiled ingratiatingly and walked away, immediately surrounded by men and women whose very safety depended on not upsetting her. She was a powerful woman, notorious for taking offence at the smallest of slights.
For a while Rath stood in silence, his face shaking slightly; then he said coldly, ‘Well, there’s a turn up for you, Herr Heinemann.’
‘It’s the New Year, Herr Rath; Frau Sasse will have forgotten all about it tomorrow,’ replied Heinemann diplomatically.
His tutor smiled, a sight that was horrible to behold: it somehow carried all the contempt and shame that he felt for himself.
‘Oh, she won’t. Still, it leaves us with plenty to do in the New Year.’
Not for the first time Heinemann wished that he was a million miles away from Berlin, and as the clock struck twelve and the guests cheered he made his New Year’s resolution: no matter what the bastards did to him he would never be beaten. Rath represented the bitter ruin of a fundamentally decent man who’d had his guts torn out, and Heinemann swore that such a man would never be himself.
He’d rather be dead.
10
The new term began with Enrich Rath focusing his lessons on musical theory, setting the class a pace that as usual left Heinemann reeling. He managed to fit in a few hours at the Mette Construction site during the evenings (overtime was freely available) as well as on Saturdays, and he was surprised to discover that the monotonous work actually soothed his strained mind.
Here, unlike at university, he did not have to endure any hostile glances as the workers ignored the teenager and to a large extent each other. He did not enquire as to the factory’s purpose, but it was obvious that the parts being made were for a machine of some description and he wondered just how many of these machines Germany actually needed. This question was, however, no concern of his: he was grateful enough just to receive his pitifully sparse pay-packet.
The news he’d been expecting to hear was given to the class by Rath as January neared its end:
‘As you are all doubtless aware, Frau Hahn, Herr Muehlebach, Herr Heinemann and myself performed on two occasions, as a quartet, at the Aalto Theatre during the Christmas vacation.
‘It is my pleasure to inform you that we’ve been asked, as a class, to perform there again on the third of March. I’ve decided that I myself will not play but instead conduct.’
Rath then reeled off the names of the class and their main or only instrument: Heinemann the violin, Muehlebach the viola, and Marie von Hahn the cello. The others played the pianoforte, the piccolo, the flute, the French horn and another violin and cello.
Rath looked at the pianist, a small, shy teenager, and smiled.
‘Herr Molle, your instrument is already catered for, as it stands in the corner of this classroom. The rest of you will please start bringing your instruments into lessons; they can be left in this room overnight if you so wish.
‘From now on you will be learning and arranging the pieces I’ve already selected, with only cursory involvement from myself – this will be a group project serving as an introduction to the performance module.
‘Today is Friday, so please ensure that you bring your instruments in on Monday. Class dismissed.’
As the students rose to leave Fritz Muehlebach glared at Heinemann, who in turn noticed only the grief clear in Marie von Hahn’s face – for her grandmother had died two days after New Year’s Day.
...That evening Muehlebach phoned his contact at the Sicherheitsdienst to give his monthly report. He’d noticed nothing suspicious, and was unaware that the SD – with the full knowledge of Commissioner Sasse – had installed a microphone in his classroom.
The tapes were listened to the next day, as was usual, and confirmed the mole’s report of nothing untoward having occurred.
11
March 3 and the Aalto Theatre was packed. Once it was discovered that Frau Sasse had played a major part in organising this concert, tickets had suddenly become very much in demand.
As was to be expected Enrich Rath’s class was extremely well rehearsed, with the students having decided the arrangements of the pieces selected by Rath. Only Heinemann had contributed nothing to these class discussions, in turn feeling bored and then greatly irritated by Muehlebach’s interminable suggestions.
Now, seated on stage and leafing through the music in front of him, Heinemann felt curiously flushed with power. He noticed Claus Hartz stood beside his hatchet-faced wife, disdaining the wine on offer for copious quantities of whisky. His fat face lost its harassed appearance as the alcohol impacted, instead becoming flushed and jolly as his voice grew ever louder.
For the first time Heinemann had the power of an orchestra, albeit a very small one, supporting him – for he was the lead instrument, the first violinist.
He looked at Molle, who was flexing his podgy fingers over the keyboard of a grand piano brought in especially for the occasion.
Sat next to the other cellist, Marie von Hahn looked through her music. She still felt a little numb: her grandmother’s death had left her with no relatives, removing the person who’d looked after her from a very young age. The house was now hers, everything was in order, but she was on her own.
Rath tapped his baton on the stand and the students made ready to play. The first piece was gentle and soothing, the student’s playing exemplary. The guests were captivated by what they heard. The applause that followed was enthusiastic and noticeably led by Frau Sasse.
Rath immediately began the next, far more impassioned piece; and Heinemann realised as he played the first few bars that his tutor was staring at him. This stare was attempting to communicate – something. Gone was his impassive expression; his face was now strained with the message he was trying to impart, his eyes on fire.
Heinemann quickly and instinctively realised just what this message was – he was to play as he’d never played before, so to amaze the assembled throng.
Because, for Rath, this would in some small way serve as revenge for his humiliation under the Nazis, for those Jewish friend
s of his whom they’d either had imprisoned or made destitute. And this revenge was to come from a teenage Mischling – the ultimate spit in the eye to any fool who believed in the ‘superiority’ of the Aryan race.
A feeling of complete confidence, almost of invincibility, grew within Heinemann as he willingly obliged Rath’s request. For he played with the innate skill and ferocity of a born genius; for a time he touched the stars and became immortal.
The combined attentions of perhaps five hundred people were focused on him alone – on his slender fingers that danced with lightening speed across the instrument’s neck; he controlled their thoughts, their emotions – he controlled their very minds.
And why only five hundred people? Why not five thousand, five million? Why should he not stop until every single person on Earth knew of his ability?
...The wild applause that followed the tumultuous conclusion of this piece broke his hypnotic state, and it was with some confusion that he observed the ecstatic faces of the audience before him.
Then he glanced at the other students – Molle the pianist wiped his perspiring face with a handkerchief, clearly exhausted by the performance he’d just been party to; Heinemann caught Muehlebach’s look of utter amazement, the youth’s face as red as his hair.
Marie von Hahn’s face had lost its recent mask-like appearance, and she smiled warmly as he looked at her. To Heinemann this was worth more than any amount of applause.
Turning towards the audience and giving a slight bow, Rath felt a cold, delicious sense of satisfaction. The hour-long performance now over conversation grew within the hall, the music students talking amongst themselves as they packed away their instruments.
Looking at the heavy black curtains surrounding two-thirds of the small stage, Heinemann suddenly thought that he’d seen them twitch, as though they’d been fractionally opened for someone to see through…
