Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  I will never again complain to the police.

  He was without trousers or shoes, had on only a brown mackintosh over his winter long underwear. There was normal traffic on the road, and it was pulling over to give the SA men right-of-way. It was raining normal rain, and workmen were passing on normal bicycles. People on the sidewalk glanced at Kaufman and kept walking. It was a stunning experience. The new regime in action. What one felt right away: here was where the power was. Boys in brown shirts, Mausers slung on their shoulders, they had it now.

  And I’d finagled Kaufman into that horrid situation. If I’d not telephoned him—because I didn’t want to take responsibility myself—he would be in his office, sitting at his desk, not stumbling down the road in the rain.

  Kaufman, in this setting designed for humiliation, did not appear humiliated. He did not even look frightened. His face wore the same expression I had seen it wear when he was examining a piece of work imperfectly done. A respected lawyer, law degree from Marburg University, fifty-four years old, being marched through the streets in the rain in his underwear—and still he managed to look disdainful. As if already composing in his mind the official complaint that he would lodge with the authentic police. The damages he would demand. The jail sentences he would insist on for these mutineers, who would need to be punished harshly and quickly, so that order might be restored to Germany, the precious Germany which Herr Philipp Kaufman (Iron Cross Second Class and First Class; wounded in the neck on the Somme) believed in so devoutly.

  After they had passed, I ducked into the Bethmann garden and threw up, vomiting in the rain, among dripping bushes. Fear and self-loathing. Of course I’d been too afraid to confront them. “Afraid” actually doesn’t begin to do it justice. It was terror, complete panic that had locked me up, made my legs stiff, arms heavy, stomach loose.

  I kept walking toward the Klinger-Oberrealschule. That took all the courage I had. I figured my father was in there, and I couldn’t imagine what they had done with him.

  That school had been a benevolent place. I’d had some good friends there, some brilliant teachers.

  There was a small crowd lurking across the street from the main entrance. Dressed like workmen, they wore cloth caps and were getting soaked. No one carried an umbrella. Some trucks were parked haphazardly. A pair of SS men in black were posted at the door to the school. That was a surprise—most auxiliary police were SA, in their tawny-yellow outfits. The SS men wore rubber capes and were keeping under the overhang to stay out of the wet.

  “What is going on?” I asked. “What’s happened? This is my old school.”

  A young worker in blue overalls glanced at me. “There’s no school today, it’s a KZ now.”

  “A what?”

  “Konzentrationslager. They have prisoners in the basement.”

  He turned abruptly and walked off. No one else said a word. We all stared at the SS in their black outfits. People kept breaking off and walking away. The pack of onlookers was shrinking.

  Then I saw Günter Krebs step out of the building, holding two steaming mugs, which he handed to the men on guard. Günter Krebs, Ducky, in full SS regalia: black boots, black uniform, leather belt with cross-strap and holster, necktie, cap with chin strap. The SS was much sharper looking and better tailored than the SA.

  “Krebs!” I called.

  The guards scowled, but Günter looked up, saw me, smiled, and waved.

  I approached. “I’m looking for my father. Have you seen him?”

  “Come here, come here, we’re not going to bite. Ah, Billy, old fellow, I was going to telephone you, only I supposed you wouldn’t like receiving such a call over the line at work. Your old man’s inside. Come fetch him, take him home, we’ve no interest in detaining the old gentleman. Stand aside, you fellows,” he ordered the guards. “Here is Billy der Engländer, can’t make up his mind if he’s a proper German or not. Come on inside, dear Billy, let’s get out of the rain.”

  I followed him inside. Electric lights blazed in the corridor of our old school, but the classrooms were dark.

  “We’ve sent the schoolboys home, given them a holiday,” said Günter.

  “What are you fellows doing here?”

  “Come along, Billy, where have you been sleeping? My crew has been ordered to concentrate prisoners.”

  “Why? Who?”

  “The bloody Reds, of course. The town is being swept for Reds. There wasn’t enough space in the jail to hold them so we have made a concentration camp here.”

  “Günter, my father isn’t a Red.”

  “No, of course not. He does work for the rich Jews, though, doesn’t he? Turned up here with a Jew lawyer. Your father should know better. We sent that fellow packing pretty fast with a squad of SA bumpkins we didn’t want around. He won’t be back, I assure you.”

  I could hear screams and thumping from the bowels of the building.

  Günter Krebs, my office colleague, my old schoolmate, seemed weirdly calm in his manner, but also thrilled. His uniform was well tailored. He had a pistol in his buttoned holster. His boots shone.

  I felt disoriented. Old schools are packed with the smoke of extinguished feelings, and I felt again young and very vulnerable. Was this a dream we were both inhabiting, Günter Krebs and I?

  Maybe it was Ducky who was dreaming, and somehow I was snared in his dream. My stomach was raw; my throat sore; my mouth tasted of burn.

  In the basement a man was screaming.

  “Oh, they are a pack of hyenas,” Günter said. “But we’re teaching them a thing or two. Your father’s all right. I’ve got him safe in a coal scuttle. Come along. Best to collect the old gentleman and get him out of here. How did you get off work anyway? Does Dr. Winnacker know you’re here?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “I have many new responsibilities,” Günter said. “Winnacker had better adopt a more flexible attitude than Ziegler, or there will be difficulties.”

  He escorted me along a corridor. The floor had recently been polished, the acrid odor of the wax was intensely familiar from school days. There was loud shouting from the basement.

  “The man my father was looking for is the chauffeur for the Weinbrenners—”

  Günter stopped abruptly and seized my shoulders. His gray eyes under blond eyebrows looked straight into mine. I think this was a proud hour for him. He had resolved himself as a personality. At Grundschule he’d been unpopular. Once or twice he had persuaded a few of the others to gang up on one or another of the Jewish students. Once Kracauer had been their victim—they’d thrown his books and his boots over the wall. Günter had been the ringleader, but when the pogrom moment in the school yard passed, the other boys kept their distance from him. In the last months before matriculation, boys began telling one another that Krebs had terrible personal odor. Whether he actually smelled worse than the rest of us, I don’t know, but it became a legend. In the morning when our classroom was unlocked there were sometimes a dozen bars of Nivea soap stacked on Krebs’s desk. Maybe it was a conspiracy of some Jewish boys. Probably Kracauer was behind it. It happened every couple of weeks. Everyone was amused except Krebs. Glowering with fury, he’d shoulder his way into the classroom and seize the soap bars and chuck them into his desk.

  After the war Krebs had a career as a salesman at BASF, one of the IG Farben successor firms. He died on a photo safari in South Africa in 1979.

  “Take some advice from an old school friend, Billy.”

  He was jovial. Maybe he and his mates had already blown off enough pressure down in their dungeon that he could allow himself a sweet pause, basking in his own Freundlichkeit, friendliness. The screaming in the basement was a chamber concert with Günter’s SS men playing the instruments. Everything in their lives was at last in tune.

  “Make no further inquiries regarding the Communist Dietz. Leave him to the authorities, do you understand? His case will be properly dealt with, I promise you. Do you understand? And don’t g
o around boasting how that disgusting Jew Weinbrenner got you your place at the IG. Such talk won’t win you any friends.”

  This all happened before I or anyone else had watched half a century’s worth of films about secret police and Nazis and the brutality of ordinary “decent” men in uniforms, so I didn’t recognize the situation, I didn’t know the story line. I couldn’t put it together fast enough to tell myself what was happening. What had started as an ordinary day kept getting darker and crazier. I was reeling.

  Ducky resumed his splayfooted stride, boot heels making a crisp squeak on the linoleum. He pushed through a set of fire doors, and I followed him down a white stairwell to the basement, which had always seemed more ancient and grimier than upstairs: a warren of storerooms, furnace rooms, steam pipes, coal cellars. Briesewitz and I used to sneak down there to smoke cigarettes in the furnace room.

  Two SS men came stomping along the narrow corridor with pistols and wolfish grins. They seemed in the best of humor. An inebriated atmosphere. Not drunken, but hysterical somehow. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, fallen down a very dark rabbit hole.

  The storerooms we passed were shut. I heard shouts, wails. Then another scream, lasting three or four seconds before it was cut off. Ducky didn’t pause.

  When I later heard a scream like that in the Florida Everglades, the guide said it was a panther caught in a leg trap.

  Ducky and I squeezed past four or five middle-aged workers in blue smocks, kneeling on the floor, groaning, faces pressed against the cement wall. The SS guards had placed broom handles on the floor and were forcing the men to kneel on them.

  Steam pipes seethed. The guards must have been coaling the furnaces; the boilers were going full blast. We came to the metal door of the coal scuttle. A towering SS guard snapped to attention and saluted Krebs, who returned it nonchalantly. The guard shoved open the door.

  “Here you are, Lange!” Ducky called. “Stand up! Let’s go! Your time is up.”

  Lange, not Herr Lange. For a classmate to address my father with such informality, this was like the ground giving way. Even after the brutality I had witnessed, it shocked me.

  My father stumbled out into the corridor, blinking. His suit was filthy, his hands were black, his face was grimed with soot.

  “Your good son has come to take you home. Please inform your dear Judenbaron he needs to be more careful employing dirty little kikes like this Bolshevik Dietz. And if I were you, Lange, I would be thinking about looking for a different job. It doesn’t pay any longer to work for the Jews.”

  Clutching his hat and English raincoat, my father nodded, warily. As far as I could tell they hadn’t beaten him up, but he was trembling. He grasped my arm tightly as we walked the corridors of the dungeon. Somewhere a Strauss waltz was playing on a gramophone, and as we climbed the stairs the music came chortling after us. Never since have I been able to hear a Viennese waltz without a feeling of fury and something like seasickness. Through my sleeve I felt my father’s grip on my arm. By the front door I stopped and helped him put on his coat.

  The little knot of proletarian onlookers had been shooed away. There were only the SS men, the shining street, and the rain. We walked away as quickly as we could.

  “Billy, do you know what they did with Kaufman?”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  There were tears on his face; he rubbed them with the back of his hand. “Vipers they are. We must do something, Billy. This can’t be allowed to continue—”

  “I’m going to telephone the police, the real police.”

  I ducked into a cigar shop, pulling my father along with me. With trembling hands he lit a cigarette while I used the public telephone to ring the number Kaufman had given me. A man answered and I asked to speak to Oberleutnant Hermann Schwamborn.

  “The Oberleutnant hasn’t time to talk to everyone. What are you calling him about?”

  The proprietor of the shop was eyeing us warily.

  “I was instructed by Lawyer Kaufman to report his disappearance. Kaufman has disappeared.”

  “What do you mean ‘disappeared’? If he’s disappeared, how did he give you instructions?”

  “Before he went to the Klinger-Oberrealschule—look, he hasn’t actually disappeared. Half an hour ago he was being frog-marched along the Eschenheimer by a squad of SA.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Will you please connect me with the Oberleutnant?” I asked.

  “Can’t. He’s not here.”

  “Well, may I speak with whoever’s in charge, please? I need to make a report.”

  “They are all busy. You can try tomorrow or the day after. No more calls today. Good day.”

  The line went dead.

  I tried ringing Kaufman’s office—Frau Fleck must start getting in touch with people who might be able to help.

  No one answered the phone.

  My father gripped my arm. “I must send a wire to the baron, he’ll know what to do.”

  We left the shop and walked to the post office, where I watched him print the message in English and hand it over to the telegraph clerk.

  We caught our tram across the bridge. I asked if he’d seen Solomon Dietz.

  “Didn’t see him, heard him. They were giving him a beating. Terrible.”

  We were almost whispering.

  It was like the London buses during the war, when people forgot themselves and lapsed into German, and my mother and I felt so vulnerable.

  “You know it was him? For certain?”

  “Undoubtedly. But please don’t say anything to your mother. It would only cause alarm.”

  “You’re joking. What are you going to tell her? That you fell down a coal scuttle? Look at you, it’s written on you, you’re covered in soot.”

  “The Lord Mayor Landmann, he’s a Jew. For Christ’s sake he’d better start cracking down on this lawlessness.”

  We walked through the Walden gates. My father was determined to see Herta immediately. My mother caught sight of us walking down the drive and hurried out.

  “Wherever have you been?” she cried.

  “There’s been a set of mistakes,” Buck said. “From one end of the day to the other. Foolishness everywhere. But things are calming down.”

  “Calming down? That is not the impression I have. Dr. Goebbels was screaming on the wireless. There’s no other word for it. Screaming.”

  “Well, there’s nothing for it but keeping one’s head down, staying out of trouble.”

  “Is that what you call paying a visit to a Reichsbanner club?” she said. “On this of all days? That’s a funny way to keep out of trouble, if you ask me.”

  We continued down the graveled avenue to the coach house. The rain had paused. Branches were coated with gray ice. Mist moved like smoke through the woods.

  The forest couldn’t hide us. An Apache bow or even a Browning automatic pistol could not protect us. We were living in yet another new country.

  We climbed the icy wooden steps. Herta must have heard us; she opened the door before my father had a chance to knock.

  “He is dead. You needn’t tell me.” Her face was white.

  “Frau Dietz, what I know is that your husband is in custody of the SS. I was unable to see him myself, but I know he was being questioned. I have sent a cable to the baron.”

  “They won’t allow my man to live. He hates them too much. He’s too strong. He hates them.” Herta sounded drowsy, like a person having trouble staying awake. Possibly she’d been drinking. “They’ll kill him.”

  Was my old classmate Günter Krebs really prepared to soak his hands with a man’s blood? What was I going to say when Krebs showed up at the office?

  We had nothing more to tell Herta. We walked back to Newport. It was raining again, and the rain was freezing and forming cuticles of ice on bare branches.

  “I’m chilled,” my mother said. Buck tried placing his arm around her shoulders, but she moved away.

  As so
on as we were in the house, he once more tried Kaufman’s office. This time the call was answered. I could hear Frau Fleck on the line, screaming at my father; she held me responsible. She finally admitted Kaufman was safe at his apartment. The SA goons had turned him loose.

  My father then telephoned Kaufman’s home. His wife answered. Frau Kaufman was much younger than her husband, who used to complain about her dressmakers’ bills, which came directly to his office.

  Buck asked to have a word with Kaufman, but she said he was in bed and not speaking to anyone.

  “Frau Kaufman, if you please, it’s very important. Terribly sorry we are for having involved your husband in this terrible business. But something must be done and quickly for poor Solomon Dietz. Herr Kaufman and I need to discuss—”

  She hung up on him.

  Buck sighed, and fretted. He couldn’t think what else to do about Solomon that might not make the situation, whatever it was, even worse. Finally my father said he was going out to the stables to check on the mares in foal, but my mother insisted he go upstairs and lie down. And finally he did. She went up with him.

  Then I got on the telephone and had the operator ring up the main number for Universum Film Studios, outside Potsdam.

  I’d never tried telephoning her. I’d not seen her since that storytelling dawn on the Eschenheimer the year before.

  What was I thinking?

  Fear and guilt jangled my blood, and she was the one I turned to.

  She was her father’s daughter. She must know important people in Berlin, people who could intervene, rescue the chauffeur.

  I was scared. I was pretty good at not showing it, but, really, I was scared as hell.

  I reached the main switchboard at UFA. A minute later Karin was on the line. “Hallo? Wer spricht?”

  I was struck by the sound of her voice buzzing across Germany on that one electric thread connecting us.

  “Wer spricht?” Who is speaking?

  “It’s me—Billy.”