It was summer now, school was closed for the holidays, and Netta was in the dining room still trying to finish her lunch. Everyone else had gone, but she had to stay, her papa had grumbled, until she ate all her food. How could she possibly finish all that when she just wasn’t even hungry? So she’d learnt by now how to secretly stuff some food into her cheeks and spit it out later when the coast was clear. Which is what she was doing when Karin bowled in with a satisfied sigh saying, ‘I’m going to the bakery, Netta. Do you want to come? I’m going to buy a nice cake for your father.’
Netta was disturbed by this information, the latter statement, the kind of statement you hear from your mama, not from the housekeeper. But she disguised her perturbation as mere puzzlement, inducing Karin to elucidate.
‘It’s to say thank you to him, for being so understanding about… you know, when I was… upset the other day.’
Netta glanced at the clock on the wall and with a glee in her heart that almost shocked herself she announced, ‘It shuts soon. You won’t make it.’
‘But it’s only twenty to one, my love. You remember how to tell time I hope?’
I am not your love, Netta thought as she tongued the food deeper into her cheeks, and yes I know how to tell time!
‘It shuts at one o’clock every Wednesday because Herr Brant goes to Essen to see his mother and to buy more flour,’ she said carefully so none of the food fell out of its hiding place.
‘Oh. Well, I better get going then, hadn’t I.’ The smile was fast disappearing from Karin’s face, much to Netta’s delight. But Karin, in her new haste, seemed to have forgotten all about Netta coming along with her and Netta, again surprised by her own feelings, found that to be quite irritating.
‘I can show you a short cut, if you like.’
‘A short cut?’
‘I know around here better than anyone.’
‘I’m sure you do, my love, but—’
‘You won’t make it otherwise,’ Netta said, jumping up from the stool. ‘I’ll just go to the toilet first.’
She hurried to the toilet, ejected each horrid bolus from her mouth, flushed and rushed out to lead the way before Karin could decide to go on her own on the usual route.
The Tiffany window made cherry red and sapphire blue pools on the floor. Netta wished they were gateways to other worlds and that if she dived in her troubles would be over; wished this coughing, so hard it became retching, would stop; and wished this breathlessness would leave her so she could go back to being a little girl and not an old woman like Tante Bertel, who coughed and wheezed in the bedroom below her.
Whilst Netta looked at the floor, Erika, perched on the edge of her daughter’s bed, looked out of the window at the toxic yellow clouds made orange by the glass.
The door opened and Max came in, having just arrived home from work. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Her cough is getting worse. Her lungs sound terrible.’ She handed him her stethoscope.
He took her place on the bed and listened to Netta’s chest.
She ought to have enjoyed this rare interaction, this rare concern from her father, but the way he touched her, the way he avoided looking in her face, was just the same as the way her mother handled patients downstairs in the surgery.
‘And just look at how thin she’s getting! It’s the damned smoke from the steel works. I know it. We have to get her out of here.’
‘And how are we supposed to do that?’ he snapped. ‘We can’t afford to move. Not yet. Not while I’m still at the Klinik.’
‘There’s a place. Out on the coast. On the island of Sylt. A home where she can go for the rest of the summer. The sea air will do her good.’
‘They might not have a place for her at this short notice,’ Max said, which would force her to admit, as he suspected, that she already knew that they had.
‘They have.’ She flushed. ‘I called them this morning. I think it’s for the best, Max, don’t you?’
He held the stethoscope to her back once more in order to make himself feel like he was the one making the decision, as a husband and a father should.
‘Hmm. Yes. I think it would be for the—’
The door opened and Martha shuffled in. With three adults now towering over her bed, Netta felt very small indeed.
‘Martha?’ Erika said, noticing her unusual pallor.
‘You should both come downstairs. Right now.’
‘Where’s Karl? Where’s my husband?’ Martha babbled as they all entered the living room and found a single policeman standing by the piano and lightly fingering the keys. He whipped his hand behind his back as they came in, as if he was a criminal and stated:
‘He went out with my colleague to the woods to make a formal identification of the body.’
‘Body?’ Erika said in hushed tones. ‘What…? Who died?’
‘Well, until Herr Portner has made the identification it would be foolhardy of me to say, but what I am more certain of is that the person in question has not so much died as been killed.’
‘Killed?’ Max’s voice quivered.
Erika heard it and grabbed at his hand. She felt his whole body start to tremble and she hated this pompous police officer for setting old memories off like fireworks in Max, just when they were starting to move forward.
‘We’re both doctors, you know,’ Erika said a little too forcefully. ‘Perhaps we… or I could take a look at the body for you and determine whether there has been, you know, foul play.’
‘A coroner is already on the scene, Frau…’
‘Portner.’
‘Ah, your daughter?’ the officer said to Martha.
‘Daughter-in-law,’ the two women both corrected him in tandem and a little too eagerly for both their likings.
‘The body was found in the canal and appears to have been struck in the face first.’
‘But they could have just slipped and hit their face as they fell into the water,’ Erika offered.
Officer Hummel sniffed the flowers on top of the piano. Everyone looked at him as if he was mad for doing something so leisurely at a time like this, but Officer Hummel didn’t really care for flowers very much. He just did it to look as if he was investigating the environment. And he would have sniffed the piano itself, the armchair and the green tiles of the stove, the very floorboards under their feet, should that not seem particularly mad, anything to make it look as though he was onto the world and its criminal ways.
‘Let’s let the coroner decide exactly when the… victim was hit, shall we?’ he said with a sniff in Erika’s direction. A sniff which sent pollen from the flowers, until now only clinging to the edge of his nostrils, shooting up inside his nose, inducing a desperate need to sneeze.
He fought the need for all he was worth. He would hate to lose his composure now when he was doing such a good job of making them all lose theirs. And just then, his colleague appeared at the door with the older woman’s husband. Karl, she’d said. Karl Portner then, he deduced. Karl was looking ghastly, as if he might keel over at any second. Max rushed over to help his papa to a chair and as he lowered himself into it, Karl let out a yelp and clutched at his wrist.
‘Are you in pain, Herr Portner?’ Hummel sniffed.
‘Just an old injury,’ Max filled in for his faint-looking father. ‘It flares up now and again.’
‘In the wrist, is it?’ Hummel sniffed again. ‘Perhaps you should let your son take a look. He’s a doctor, isn’t that so?’
‘There’s no need,’ Karl barked, ‘it comes and goes. Usually around stressful times, mentally or physically. And I think I can be forgiven for finding this time particularly stressful, can I not?’
‘How did you injure your wrist?’ Hummel persisted.
‘It’s just—’ Max began, anxious to avoid embarrassing his father. Shooting yourself in the wrist to avoid national service in the First World War was not necessarily something you crowed about, especially when the country had just been beaten a second
time.
But Karl had far more pressing things on his mind since coming back from the canal and barked, ‘I shot myself in the arm, all right?’
‘Oh dear!’ Hummel took a step back since his nose had been getting closer and closer to the older man. ‘Sorry to hear that. Not intentionally, I trust.’
A short silence ensued as no one in the room, not even Karl, felt the need to correct him on this detail.
‘Well?’ Martha was on tenterhooks and all this chatter about wrists was not getting them anywhere. ‘Who was it? Who’s been killed?’
Karl let out an enormous – Hummel thought somewhat dramatic – sigh and answered, ‘It’s Karin. Someone’s killed Karin.’
Martha and Erika filled the room with appropriate sounds of dismay, Hummel noticed, and Max, sitting on the arm of the chair, arm around his father, whispered, ‘Who on earth would want to do something like that to poor Karin?’
Erika thought she saw the first shimmering of tears forming in his eyes and it sent a hot gale howling through her ears. She so resented his reaction to the housekeeper’s death and the way it signalled their mutual understanding which she was excluded from, that it made her glad the girl was… well, no longer around.
‘Well, that, Dr Portner,’ Hummel said, donning his octagonal hat, ‘is what I intend to find out.’ He thought that would be a suitably poignant line to make his exit on, leave them stewing in their own juices for a while before he brought each one of them in separately for questioning, until the old woman blurted out:
‘She had just broken up with her gentleman friend. And I’m sure he wasn’t happy about it.’
‘Martha!’ Erika mumbled, as far as you could mumble such an exclamation of indignation. She knew what her mother-in-law was doing: trying to cast the spotlight elsewhere away from this house where Karin had lived and worked. But in casting it on Rodrick, she might also be inadvertently stirring up Erika’s recent indiscretions with him. Who knows what the carpenter might reveal under pressure of interrogation from the police!
Hummel stuck his hat back under his arm and nodded to his colleague to make a note. ‘And what is the name of this gentleman friend?’
‘Rodrick,’ Martha said. ‘But I don’t know his surname.’
Erika, used to being one of the more knowledgeable people in a room, was bursting to inform the policeman of the missing surname, as she would want to finish a literary quote that Karl had started but couldn’t finish. However, since that could possibly signpost a greater intimacy between her and the carpenter than the rest of the family, she thought it best to shut up for once.
‘He’s a carpenter,’ Max piped up. ‘Over in the village. He did some work for our surgery here.’ Although he hadn’t begun work in it yet, Erika was more than happy to let him call the surgery ours rather than hers, for now.
‘And do we have an address for this carpenter?’ Hummel nodded again at his scribe, imagining this is what it must feel like to be a master conductor in front of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra.
‘His workshop is on Mittelkamp. You can’t miss it. It’s such a small road. Everyone knows it.’ Erika made sure to tell him such a location was common knowledge – nothing special about her knowing where to find Rodrick.
Hummel thanked them for the information, bid them all farewell and the two officers left the house.
‘How’s your wrist after all that scribbling?’ Hummel asked his partner.
‘Fine,’ the junior officer replied, a little mystified.
‘Well, of course it is! A wrist only hurts after doing something like… Oh, well, I don’t know… punching something perhaps. Or someone.’
The Russians surround them, prodding them like cattle with the barrels of their Tokarevs.
‘Get up!’ a Soviet bawls at the one-legged patient on the ground, whose remaining foot is impaled with broken glass and blue from the cold.
Max dares to move to help his patient up and gets a punch in the back for his troubles.
‘Get up! Get up! Get up!’ the Russian screams.
The soldier in pyjamas looks up at his adversary with a knitted brow that says, ‘Can’t you see? That is the one thing on earth right now I cannot do for you.’
And the Russian knows it’s the one thing on earth the patient can’t do. It’s the perfect opportunity to show the rest of these fascists what will happen to them if they disobey orders.
The Russian shoots the man in the face.
They are marched around the burning city, then piled into trucks, driven mile upon bone-shuddering mile to a train station so remote it’s hard to believe a train would ever come. But it does. A cattle train. And they are herded onto it and dragged through the Siberian steppes. Day after day of unceasing and indistinguishably white and freezing plains.
Now they are pitching and rolling about on the road again, in the isolation truck. Max, Edgar and Horst. Ordered to tend to the sick and the diseased among them. The sufferers of diarrhoea, typhoid and cholera, without a single resource or medicine to do so. Licking the ice from the windows like animals just to stay hydrated.
And finally they arrive at the labour camp and all the German soldiers, all the ones who haven’t died and had their bodies tossed unceremoniously from the back of a moving truck, are ordered to get down. Another disabled soldier is struggling to stand. Another bloody Ivan is screaming at him to get up.
‘Get up, get up get up!’
Max’s muscles twitch. He wants to help the man, but if Max is so bold as to move again he will be shot, he knows it. And then what good will he be to the rest of the unit? He tells himself over and over again: it is not cowardice, now they are prisoners of war, to stay alive. It is the best thing to do for his fellow Germans. It’s the only thing he can do for Erika.
‘Get up, get up, get up!’ The Russian aims his gun at the German.
‘Get up, get up, get up, Papa!’ Netta is tugging on his pyjama sleeve. ‘We’re going to the seaside today!’
Max drove Netta to the seaside.
‘Well, it’s no good me going too,’ Erika stuttered, ‘I mean, I would if I could. I’d drive her myself, but I can’t drive, can I, and besides I need to stay and work, the surgery will be busy that—’
Max laid a reassuring hand on her arm and she stopped rambling.
‘It’s just…’ she tried to explain.
‘It’s OK,’ Max whispered, finding his wife’s maternal conflict so endearing, and yet being slightly envious that he didn’t quite feel the same at the thought of being separated from his daughter.
It’s always harder for the mother, he told himself, images of the Russian babies he’d delivered in Gegesha glinting in the caves of his memory. That physical cord may be cut – he saw himself hacking at a bloody blue umbilicus with pliers borrowed from a locksmith, used to amputate other patients’ frostbitten fingers – but the spiritual bond is unbreakable.
‘It’s only for four weeks,’ he said to his wife as Netta bounced about in the front seat, a luxury that would be denied her if her mother had insisted on coming too. ‘And then she’ll be back and that chest will be right as rain, eh?’ He smiled a confident smile, but he wasn’t totally convinced a children’s home by the sea would cure all Netta’s ailments.
The cases were in the boot, but Erika insisted upon checking one more time that she had put enough underwear in there, before she let Max shut it.
She kissed Netta through the window, glad her daughter looked so excited to be going and yet a little hurt that she wasn’t distraught to be leaving her mama behind.
But the seaside, mama!
‘Making a quick getaway, are we?’ It was Hummel prowling round the car.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Max said, starting the engine to show he had no time to waste talking to this foolish man. Unless… ‘Do you have any news about Karin? Do you know who might have killed her?’
‘Nice car.’ Hummel must not have heard him over the growl of the engine, ‘A DKW. And brand new by t
he looks of it?’
‘Yes. The surgery is doing well. We’ve both been working extremely hard. We thought it was about time we treated ourselves for once,’ Erika said, with a hint of indignation at her own urge to explain herself to him.
‘It just makes practical sense,’ Max chipped in. ‘Being out here in the suburbs.’
‘You’re not going away for too long, I hope?’ Hummel sniffed.
‘We’re just going for a day at the seaside,’ Netta said, squinting up at the man silhouetted against the sun outside her papa’s window.
‘That looked like an awful lot of luggage for a day at the—‘
Hummel had to step back to avoid being hit by the car door opening with such speed. Max jumped out and growled through gritted teeth into the officer’s ear, ‘I am taking my daughter to a children’s home to help with her health, but we haven’t told her yet how long she’ll have to stay as we don’t want to cause her any unnecessary distress, OK?’
Hummel looked both a little scared and triumphant at the doctor’s barely contained outburst. ‘Ah, I see,’ he said, tapping his nose and grinning at the scowling father.
Max noticed two British soldiers hanging around on the opposite side of the road. His sudden movements had grabbed their attention so he got carefully back into the car saying, ‘Now, we really must be going. We have a long journey ahead. Unless you have any news for us? Unless you’ve made any progress.’
‘Oh, we’re making progress all the time, Dr Portner, but we’ve nothing concrete to report yet,’ Hummel said, leaning in and smiling at Netta. ‘Lovely upholstery. And I love the claret paintwork.’
‘It’s red!’ Netta corrected him.
Hummel laughed and Max caught a whiff of stale beer on his breath. ‘Of course it is, my dear. How could I be so silly! It’s red. And what a lovely red it is!’
The Watcher Page 4
