‘I hate Latin. What does Latin have to do with medicine anyway?’ she had pouted less than a week before.
‘Er… febris flava, febris militarius, bis in die, pro re nata, biceps brachii,’ Max had said flexing his like a circus strong man. ‘Quadriceps femoris.’ He stroked her thigh. ‘Trapezius.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘So tense!’ he laughed. ‘We’ll have to massage that properly after study. ‘Pectoralis major,’ he said laying his hand gently on her breast, where she was happy for it to remain, but he slid it down the bed and underneath her. ‘Gluteus maximus…’
‘OK,’ she giggled wriggling away from him, as far as you could wriggle away in a single bed, ‘I get your point.’ But she quickly moved back into his arms when the cold air outside the blankets pierced her skin all the way to the foreign sounding muscles beneath. ‘But I’m never going to pass the test. I’ve got two days to cram all this… stuff.’
‘Well, together we’ll do it, no problem.’
‘You’ve got your own studies to worry about,’ she huffed. ‘I’ll just have to manage on my own.’ Although she had no intention of managing on her own as she waited for the magic words from Max.
‘I’m doing nothing for the next two days, except helping you to cram this Latin and that’s final, OK?’
Her trapeziuses relaxed instantly. The news was even more effective than his warm hands on her skin and told her everything she was longing to know about their growing relationship.
‘Trapezii.’
‘What?’
‘Trapezius, trapezii.’
Before the day was out he had drummed it into her that the plural of trapezius was trapezii and two days later she passed the test.
So here they were running through Freiburg hand in hand, jumping over the Bächle, the little brooks that cut through the cobbles in the centre of town.
‘Who made these Bächle and what for?’ Erika breathlessly asked no one in particular.
‘The Bürgermeister had them built in mediaeval times,’ Edgar began, as he and the others caught up. She might have known he’d have the answer. ‘In the hope that one day two young lovers would enjoy prancing about the town and skipping over them.’
Erika dipped the toe of her shoe in the Bächle and flicked the running water at Edgar. He tried to retaliate, but his bombardment turned into a terribly brief rain shower that hit nothing but the ground, Erika having sprinted away already, disappearing with Max up Rosastrasse and into the basement beneath the Golden Bear.
None of them had any idea there was a basement bar under the inn until they were invited to tonight’s poetry reading. It was the perfect spot for such an event.
‘Crowded.’ Babyface’s baby face aged with despair as they tumbled into the bar with a hundred students already sitting on the floor and at the few tables available.
‘Intimate,’ Erika preferred to describe it. ‘We’ll be able to hear every word,’ she smiled at Max.
Edgar made as if to stick his finger down his throat and she slapped his arm, as expected.
‘My God, careful, you nearly made me stick my finger down there for real,’ Edgar giggled and stumbled comically towards the bar clutching some swing sheet music under one arm in case the opportunity arose for a jamboree, or jam as Edgar would say, emulating his jazz heroes from America. He began ordering drinks, familiar with everyone’s preferences.
‘I didn’t want a beer,’ Horst said as Edgar passed it back to him over the heads of shorter customers.
Edgar froze. With the folder of music under one arm and the beer held aloft Erika thought he looked like some alcoholic statue of liberty. Before Edgar could say the words: You always order beer. Don’t mess with me! as his sour face surely indicated he was about to, Horst – mouth wide open, tongue out like a happily exercised Alsatian – guffawed and shouted over the noise:
‘Gotcha!’
Edgar pushed the beer into Horst’s hand and turned his head back to the bar quickly, to complete the order as well as to hide his relieved amusement from his sparring partner. Each of them gratefully received their drinks from Edgar’s long arm before it was Max’s turn to take the lead and find them a decent place to sit.
After only one near miss of treading on someone’s fingers, he managed to lead them all to a space right over by the area demarcated as a stage for the performers, where none of the other recent arrivals had dared to attempt to reach and so the bar and the stairs up to the street were fast becoming impassable.
‘Where’s Edgar?’ Babyface asked once they were all comfortably – or as comfortably as they were going to get for now – ensconced on the floor.
They all looked back in the direction of the bar to see Edgar gesturing up and down his body and shrugging his shoulders.
‘What’s he saying?’ Max asked.
‘He’s saying,’ Horst translated the sign language, ‘he’s too tall to fit in here, which is true, so he’s going to stay over there, which is fine by him, because he’s closer to the bar’.
Erika was briefly disappointed, not so much that Edgar was left out, but that they weren’t all together, especially since this was part of her end of exam celebrations, as far as she was concerned anyway. But when she saw Edgar already engaged in banter with other students she’d never met, she knew to get on with just enjoying the company around her, as he certainly was.
The first poet took the stage… well, the space in front of one of the supporting pillars where a chair had been set. The audience hushed themselves. The poet muttered in rhyming couplets about loss, wealth and pride, using images of roses which, though Erika knew were derivative, she couldn’t help but be moved by them. As the poet finished his reading to limp applause and tip-toed deflated to the bar, conversation erupted again all around. Whether it was praise or criticism, ridicule or defence, the poet’s images had at least the power to spark some lively chatter, particularly about an apparently controversial organisation called The White Rose.
Erika felt emboldened after her glass of port to ask someone she didn’t know – but really ought to have, having been in such close proximity to her for the last half hour – what this White Rose was all about.
‘Oh, wow, haven’t you heard? I mean, right, they are a terribly brave group of students from Munich Uni, who’ve been campaigning against the government. Sending out leaflets all over the country, like this,’ the girl squirmed around until she had enough room among the bodies surrounding her to delve into her pocket, pull out a piece of once-white paper dense with black type on both sides and begin to unfold it.
‘Hey, Gitte,’ a young man with bloodshot eyes barked across to her, ‘make sure you don’t lose that! It’s the only one we have’.
‘OK,’ she whined, giving it now completely over to Erika’s hands, whereas before her nagging boyfriend spoke she had no intention of letting it go.
Erika read:
Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?
She stopped reading and decided to notice instead the way the title PAMPHLET OF THE WHITE ROSE was skewed like a badly hung picture. It all looked so thrown together compared to the beautifully presented pamphlets and booklets sent to her by the Youth Movement. She felt Max’s chin rest itself on her shoulder and quickly handed the leaflet back to Gitte.
‘Terribly brave,’ Gitte said.
She couldn’t bring herself to agree so she heard herself saying, ‘Thanks,’ and turned to see what the excitement pulsing through the audience was all about.
‘Oh my God,’ Babyface was saying to Max, ‘did you know he was coming?’
‘Who’s he?’ Erika whispered just in case it was very unhip not to know who he was, this middle aged, lipless, hollow eyed gent with the weight of the world o
n his eyebrows and hair of dissipating black smoke.
‘It’s Reinhold Schneider, the poet and novelist.’ Babyface’s baby face shone more than ever. ‘His stuff has been banned by the government. He’s red hot right now.’
Erika looked at Max’s profile as he admired the star only inches away handing out copies of his latest work.
‘Did you know he was coming?’ she said into Max’s ear.
He nodded, too star-struck to speak, or too ashamed perhaps. Because, what with the White Rose leaflet and now Herr Schneider, Erika did not feel like the centre of a celebration, but more like a character in the James Joyce book she was reading – Tom Kernan, to be exact, the alcoholic confronted by three of his friends and persuaded to take part in a religious retreat to help him change his ways. She would have got up and walked out, if it wasn’t such a difficult thing to do. The room was heaving now and Schneider was ready to start.
‘Our forces continue to push into France. It won’t be long before they reach Paris,’ the poet announced. ‘Parisians will see our tanks rumble past their Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysees to the Place de la Concorde. Curfews will be announced. The red lights of The Moulin Rouge, the life and colour of Montmartre will be extinguished. Swing music, the music of the nigger, the kike, jungle music will be banned.’ There were a few confident boos from the audience and much awed shuffling, ‘Sound familiar?’
The boos got louder and multiplied. Erika knew they weren’t for Schneider, who raised his hand for quiet. The audience quickly obeyed.
‘The first piece I’d like to read you tonight is called Only Those Who Pray.’
Erika had heard enough. There was rapturous applause after Schneider’s introduction and Erika used it to cover her flight to the exit. The fact that most pairs of hands in the room were being pounded against each other right then, saved many fingers from being trodden on as she stepped out with far less care than she used coming in.
‘Only those who pray may still be able
To stop the sword over our heads…’
She’d only heard fifteen words – what could you understand in just fifteen words? – but she kept on going, squeezing herself through the crowd by the exit and all the way up through the throng on the stairs until she was vomited out on the street from that throat of disunity.
She feasted on the air outside, of such a superior quality to that sweaty, hot, pretentious atmosphere in the bowels of the inn. She knew it wouldn’t be long before Max emerged too to find out what was wrong with her, to check if she was feeling ill, or whether her low blood pressure was causing her to feel faint again. So in the meantime she stood hugging herself and tapping out a jazzy rhythm with her sensible shoes on the cobbles designed to convey to the small group engaged in lively debate and the couple kissing and the other few individuals apparently waiting for someone that she was perfectly happy where she was and in no way felt awkward about idly hanging around out here when the rest of the country – Nazi or otherwise – seemed to be enjoying themselves indoors.
Although there was no doubt that Max would come out soon, after a few minutes she found herself looking for a railing or piece of wall to lean against, to help her feel less “all at sea”. But such a lifebuoy was hard to come by. The couple had commandeered the railings outside the inn and the front of every other shop in this street was dominated by windows. It didn’t feel safe to lean against a pane of glass. Knowing her luck, she thought, the glass would crack, the shopkeeper would call the police when he heard the commotion from his flat upstairs and she’d feel even more ostracised than she already did. Erika hugged herself tighter and moved across the road to stand under the awning outside the cigar shop.
Max still hadn’t arrived. But given the difficulty she had getting out of that overfilled basement she had to allow him extra time.
She found a slither of wall between the window full of cigar boxes and the slim alleyway next to the shop and leant there against a poster recruiting air raid wardens.
She heard a deep giggle coming from the alley – another couple, no doubt smooching down there – and, although for a second she felt like a peeping Tom, she refused to move now she’d found such a perfect piece of wall. Besides, Max would be out any second now.
Perhaps he was waiting until Schneider had finished his poem. It looked like little more than a sonnet when she had seen the papers being handed out, but she could have been mistaken, of course. Perhaps it was several stanzas long and there was no way Max would be so rude as to get up and clamber over all those bodies right in the middle of it.
She watched as some of those waiting individuals became couples and were swallowed up by the basement. ‘How can they get any more people in there?’ she muttered to herself.
The deep giggling in the alley was accompanied by some nasal sighs and Erika knew the couple’s sole purpose now was to emphasis her own solitude and the unlikeliness that she and her boyfriend would be giggling down an alley any time soon.
Max! What the hell?
Perhaps Schneider was reading part of an epic work, she told herself. Or perhaps Max had trod on someone’s fingers as he rushed out to find her, and the injured party – a burly man no doubt with plenty of beer inside him – had stood up and started threatening Max and causing a scene, which had completely upstaged Schneider and his puritanical poems. She liked the image of the star being eclipsed in this manner, but then she thought, if this were true, Max might right now be being beaten up by this imaginary thug. She stepped away from the wall and made to cross the street back to the basement, but before her foot landed on the cobbles she reassured herself, that Horst and Edgar, and to a lesser extent Babyface (but only because he just wasn’t as physically imposing as his friends) would be there to protect Max.
Then an animalistic snort came from the alley behind her. She recognised the sound. It was clearly Edgar, which ruined her theory about who was available to protect Max and only served to make her more worried that, despite his beefy stature just Horst would be there to defend him.
Hang on! Edgar was in the alley? With whom? For a moment this scintillating bit of gossip and intrigue obliterated all concerns for Max from her mind. She stepped back to her place by the poster and listened. Now she was a peeping Tom! But, of course, just at that moment things became much quieter and she had nothing to focus on again but the absence of Max.
‘Schneider must be reading an entire bloody epic then!’ she sneered to herself deciding right then to take off home without anyone to walk her.
‘Erika!’ But then there he was, ‘Erika!’ Calling to her, waving and wiping the condensation from his round glasses, apparently unassailed by any lout with Max’s footprint on the back of his huge hand, and therefore fair game, thought Erika, for a good tongue-lashing from her. ‘Are you all right?’ he said ducking under the awning and putting a hand on her deltoideus. She hated the fact that the Latin name for her shoulder muscle flashed through her mind right then. ‘Are you sick?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I’m sick,’ she said shrugging off his hand. ‘Sick of being treated like an idiot.’
‘Who’s treating you like an idiot?’
‘You.’
Max put his glasses back on to see if that made things any clearer to him.
‘How am I doing that?’
‘With your White Rose friends and your anti-government poetry nights.’
‘They’re not my friends. I’d never heard of the White Rose until I read the name on that pamphlet you had. And it’s not an anti-government poetry night, it’s just a poetry night where people should be able to express themselves artistically and voice their opinions, whatever they are, freely.’
‘What rubbish!’
‘How is that rubbish?’ Max seemed hurt by that remark so Erika stuck her finger in the wound and gauged around.
‘So if I got up and read a poem about all the great things the Nazis have done for this country you’re saying I wouldn’t be booed off the stage and hounde
d out of the bar?’
‘You don’t write poetry,’ Max could give as good as he got.
‘How do you know?’
‘Well… Do you?’ Max seemed genuinely interested to know.
Erika stuttered and spluttered until her body reluctantly ejected the word, ‘No.’
She thought she saw him swallow a smile.
‘But if I did,’ she went on, ‘those people in there would have me silenced, which is exactly what they accuse the Nazis of doing.’
Max didn’t respond. Because she was right, obviously, she told herself. But she hated it when he went quiet, when he refused to answer back. What excuse did she have to rip into him if he gave her no ammunition? But then she remembered she already had some unused grenades.
‘You knew Schneider was performing tonight, didn’t you? And you brought me here, knowing it would upset me, on my celebration night.’
‘Oh, so this is all really about the fact that you’re not the centre of attention for once.’
‘For once? What’s that supposed to mean? How am I the centre of attention when I sit in your cathedral? How am I the centre of attention when I listen to your heroes lecture…? And anyway don’t try and change the subject. You knew he was performing tonight, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I thought it would be good for you.’
‘Good for me? What do you think I am: one of those patients in the medical centre needing a walk around the gardens? Am I ill?’
‘No, of course not, of course I don’t think that.’
‘Bloody Hell!’ she mumbled. ‘Trust me to fall in love with a…’ She stopped herself from spitting on his religion. She waited for the question: With a what? With a what? But it never came.
He took off his glasses again, as if he’d had all the clarity he could handle for one evening, and she saw his eyes were moist.
Fifteen Words Page 12
