Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  ‘Schumacher is right,’ Emil said. ‘We put our necks on the block for the glory of those fat old men. There are so many of us, millions. We’ll never have this chance again. We’ll go back to our lives and be quiet. And they’ll come and get us any time they want us.’

  Later, some strangers held Schumacher up on a table. He was trying to sing, but mostly moaning. You couldn’t bear it if you were sober. A man near the door was sick on his lap when he might easily have stepped outside. Then he lifted his glass and carried on. Emil barely saw these people, just shapes, acting. A woman came in. Oh no, he thought. Arms reached for her as she moved among the tables towards the bar. She moved quickly, batting away clumsy hands, approaching his table. We won’t hurt you, he wanted to say. I won’t let us. He was too slow. She had passed by. He laid his head on his arm on the table and closed his eyes.

  The platform at Duisburg was quiet. A few shift workers, a nursemaid with a group of small children. He was late home compared to many, early compared to others, becalmed between the surges from opposite fronts as the soldiers converged on Germany. He stared at the children for a little too long. Snowflakes appeared in the evening air. The nurse gathered the children together and they walked along the platform towards him. The tips of his ears were freezing. There had been no hat in his packet of clothing. He looked at the children. They looked cold to him and the ground, covered in melted snow, looked slippery beneath their feet. He saw as they drew closer their bright scarves and knitted hats pulled down over their ears. They were two boys and a girl, a little older though not very tall, eleven perhaps. He could not tell the ages of children anymore. One of the boys asked his sister questions. She made a show of being tired of it but her cheeks were flushed and she smiled frequently.

  The nurse nodded as she passed and said something to the children. The children turned at the stairs, the girl smiling, the boys saluting solemnly. How did they know? What mark was upon him? He was home now. Whatever it was, he hoped it would wear off soon. He returned the salute and followed the group into the dark stairwell. Outside the station snow settled on his cracked lips and in his beard. He felt old, looking out at Königstrasse in the snow. It had not changed at all. He moved out from the shelter of the station and walked across the square, the snow heavier, settling on the shoulders of his greatcoat. It was dark already and his father would be leaving his office soon. In childhood, unless he was ill and his mother confined him to bed, Emil was there every evening in the street below his father’s office, waiting to walk home with him to the apartment.

  When he reached the union building he stood on the stone flags, looked up at the lit window on the first floor and saw the shape of his father, a little fatter, a little more bent than before. Like a turtle; round back, head thrusting wearily forward. For a moment he didn’t know him. He was tidying his desk, opening and closing a drawer, taking his hat from the stand. The movements he knew, could be sure of. After a few moments his father disappeared, the light went out, and his heart pounded as it did when he was a boy for the few moments it took for his father to emerge onto the street.

  He saw Emil at once, paused in the dark doorway to stare at the silhouette under the streetlight in the falling snow. He waited for a moment, his hand rising to his chest, and then stepped out into the street towards him without checking for traffic, propelling himself quickly in spite of his roundness. Here he was, Father, his face was still his, a little jowly, though his body had grown older. He put his arms around Emil who took his hands from his pockets and returned his embrace. His father was half a head shorter than him now, though his aroma was the same as it had always been. Tobacco, beer, wool. The men at the front smelled of these too but there was always sharp old sweat, blood, gasoline, excrement. He himself smelled of delousing powder. He hoped Father did not find it repulsive.

  He held his father a moment longer, taking in the feeling that it was him, that he had been returned to the days when he was a boy and could embrace his father any time he liked, feel his evening bristles on his cheek. Emil heard words spoken so quietly against his shoulder that he might have imagined them. It is my boy. The one who comes back. He straightened eventually and shook his father’s hand. They began to walk towards the bridge across the Rhine to their quarter. His father was silent for a while, his voice scratchy when he spoke. ‘It’s wonderful you’re home tonight, Emil. There’s a parade tomorrow night to welcome the soldiers. I was sure you’d miss it.’

  He peered at his father’s face in the dark. ‘We’ll see. I don’t know. I was not intending to wear a uniform again.’ His father looked at him sideways but said nothing. ‘How is Mother?’

  ‘She’s been a bundle of nerves since the soldiers began to return. Superstitious, you know. You’d better get some sleep tonight. She’ll be inviting the whole street over to look at you soon enough.’ Emil laughed. It was true, she would. ‘But listen, I have good news for you. I heard from Manfred in Hamburg last week. He has agreed to take you on to finish your degree. I sent him your records for the polytechnic. It’s all arranged. You will be a qualified electrical engineer! Incredible.’

  Emil said nothing. They crossed the long bridge, the snow turning the night air white, disappearing into the wide, dark river. Fog spilled from their mouths.

  ‘You’re not pleased? It was your dream. A degree, a profession.’

  ‘I planned to go to Berlin, to see what can be done for the revolution. Things are not right yet.’

  ‘This is what I heard! They all turned red out there. Is it so hard to put your weapons away? Getting you home, that was the revolution. You can help with the workers’ councils here, just to help settle things down. You will be very useful, with your military experience. When everyone is home, things will be fine, and you can go to Hamburg.’

  ‘Workers’ councils are all very well, but what has changed? All the same people are in charge of things. They could send us off again tomorrow. It’s true I’d be a better-qualified corpse, with a little more money in my pocket.’

  They turned into their street. Emil had been walking too quickly for his father, who was panting slightly. He slowed, let him catch his breath.

  His father patted him on the back, taking air. ‘My boy. Let’s celebrate your return. Save the revolution for the morning. Your mother won’t believe it’s you.’

  Emil was quiet. It took the walk down the long street to calm himself, become still enough inside to feel the little fire of shame. Father was right. It could all wait until tomorrow. At the door of the apartment building he took a long cold breath. Mother was up there, and Greta. A meal, however poor—though Father was pretty good at working the black market, you could see it in his girth; that would be all the evidence the police would need if they wanted to make something of it.

  His thighs ached as they climbed the stairs. It was he who could not keep up with his father, who was calling up to the apartment for them to come and see what he had brought home with him. Emil heard his mother’s voice calling down: ‘Klaus? Emil!’ There were their faces, Mother and Greta, leaning out into the stairwell, peering down into the dark, Greta seeing him, shrieking. If it were not for them, and his growling belly, he would fall into the room and sleep on the rug for days.

  The following evening Greta clung to his elbow, sitting close to him on the sofa. She told him that his mother had cried in the bedroom after Emil had gone to bed on this sofa where they now sat, and after breakfast had pulled up a floorboard in the kitchen and taken out some money to buy a hat to wear. Greta, thin and tall, her beauty stolen from their mother, went out to the shops with her and bought new stockings from a friend of Father’s who kept such things in a secret place at the back of his shop. He saw that there was no question of avoiding the parade.

  He shaved in the shared bathroom on the landing and looked at his body in the mirror, which he could see to his waist. He stared at it. He could not see any damage, except that it was thin, and even then not as thin as the men in the delousin
g shed or some of the civilians he had seen. His body was twenty-two years old and that was all it looked. He practised a smile and stopped. That did not look so good. His teeth were a little frightening and there was something flat in his eyes. But his body and his face were more or less intact, the skin on his chest was smooth, the bullet wounds in his calf and shoulder were not visible and the trench rot in his foot was healed now, mostly, and no longer smelled bad. He could not quite take in the solidity of himself, standing in his bathroom at home. For almost a year—since the last hospital—he had caught only glimpses of his face: a fragment of jaw in a shard of mirror passed between the men. Now he could see his head, his wavy hair, both of his shoulders at once, his muscled arms, his chest. Though it was smooth it had more hair on it than when he went away. Look at that, he thought. There is no sign.

  A knock sounded down the hall and he came out onto the landing, pulling on his shirt. There was Thomas’s brother Karl, outside the door to the apartment, clean-shaven, his uniform starched and smelling of soap suds, his hair oiled and parted under his helmet. He had returned from the front the week before. Emil could only stare for a moment. He was so like Thomas and yet a different man, with lighter hair, and the features of Thomas minutely different in alignment so that he was not nearly so handsome. Amazing what a few millimetres could do. In return Karl searched his own face, as though looking for the same things in a different form, some similarity of experience to Thomas, some clue to who he might have been by now.

  Before Emil could speak Mother was out on the landing and pulling Karl into the kitchen. ‘My boy.’ She held his face in her hands. ‘Your mother has been so worried. Why don’t you boys write? You might as well kill us!’

  Emil closed the apartment door behind himself, wondering where Greta was, saw she was in the kitchen too, staring at Karl.

  ‘Greta.’ Karl nodded. Emil watched his sister’s face. She had radiated light whenever Thomas was here, from the earliest days. She too searched Karl’s face for him. You are spoken for, Greta, Emil thought. There was an older man, a toolmaker with a polio limp who was not sent away. He saw the pull of memory on her, wondered what would happen.

  Father came out of the bedroom, saw Karl and enfolded him in a long embrace. Father was a man for embracing, sentimental, too full of feeling often for those around him. Emil saw that his eyes were wet when he pulled back. Don’t, he wanted to say. We are not the boys who went off to the war. And this is not Thomas. But it was not necessary. There had been a moment at dinner when he looked up from his soup to find that they were all pondering him. He was at the bottom of his second bowl, picking it up, drinking the last drop with a slurping sound. He had been readying to lick it when he happened to glance at them. He knew that they had seen it in him, this animal greed. He had left his bowl with thick streaks of soup still on it, enough to fuel a hungry man for another hour, and walked the streets until he was tired enough to think of nothing.

  They all walked to the square together, Emil between his parents, his mother’s grip on his elbow tight as they slipped a little on the melting snow beneath their feet. Karl and Greta walked ahead, she with her hands in her coat pockets, his loose, as though he were marching. Her pale skin glowed in the cold, under the streetlights. She was a miraculous thing to see. Though thin she was vigorously, abundantly alive. Her movements had an energy he no longer found familiar. They murmured between long silences. She sought news of the gap Thomas had left in the family as though she could touch the shape of the hole he made and so come closer to touching him.

  At the square he and Karl left Emil’s family and lined up with the other soldiers. The parade was a mess. Many didn’t have hats or coats and they were all mixed in together from different companies, ranks muddled. The crowd was thick in spite of the slushy snow on the cobbles and a vicious bite in the air. A band played ‘Deutschland über Alles’ and Emil stood at attention. The white faces of the crowd sang. He was unable to separate them. It was just eyes and noses and holes where the voices came out. He opened his own mouth but made no sound.

  After the parade he was standing with Karl, smoking, when a hand grasped his elbow. He froze, ready for violence, his own: quick, efficient, effective enough to rule out retaliation. He turned and it was just a girl, his age, familiar.

  She smiled, baring straight white teeth. ‘Emil?’ She peered into his eyes.

  Karl, next to him, said, ‘Hello, Uta! How are you keeping?’

  ‘Karl. Oh, Karl, I was so sorry to hear about Thomas.’ She reached out a hand to shake and he took it, nodded, returned his hands to his pockets.

  ‘I’ll see you, Emil,’ he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Emil was silent for a moment. He saw now that this was his girlfriend from before. Had she changed something, her hair? Why hadn’t he known her? He stepped forward, wrapped her in his arms. ‘It’s you,’ he said. She was so warm, so soft beneath her coat. She smelled astonishing. Her gloved hands were reaching up, leather fingers holding his neck. He led her away from the square and the crowds, his arm around her shoulder. In a cold alley where he could only just hear the crowd he held her close and whispered, ‘Take me somewhere quiet.’

  ‘It’s quiet here. Tell me how you have been, Emil. There were no letters. I thought—I thought perhaps you had forgotten.’

  He heard the catch in her voice. He pulled her tighter to him. ‘Uta, Uta, shhh. Is there somewhere warm? I want to hold you as I did before.’

  ‘Well, when you didn’t write . . . another came along.’

  ‘Please. I’m here now. Let me be near you.’

  ‘I have an apartment with my sister,’ she murmured into his hair. ‘She is at the parade. We can go there.’

  As they strode along the narrow streets in the dark, passing the occasional couple, faces pressed together as they walked, a sailor urinating in the snow, drunk, a hand against the wall, he knew that he was pulling her along. It was too forceful. He would never have done this before. He was not quite fit for company anymore, he knew it. She had to run a little every now and then to keep up, a little skipping step. He knew but he could not help himself, or slow his pace.

  He opened his eyes, the discoloured brocade of the sofa beneath his cheek. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he saw that the lintel was piled high with snow. The heat from his mouth warmed his face. He pulled the blanket off his head, reached down to the floor, fingers finding dust and then the metal of his Luger. The apartment was silent but for Father’s snores, the boyhood sound of waking on Sundays, or when Father was out of work. He was dressed beneath his blanket, his uniform still, but it would do for now. It would not be noticed at this hour, so long as he wore a civilian coat. He tucked the gun in the pocket of his trousers, took his father’s coat from the back of a dining chair, crossed the room and unlocked the door quietly, inching it patiently shut. It was even colder on the landing, where there were no bodies to exchange the icy air for their sleeping breath.

  These few mornings since arriving in Germany he woke to a slow-building fury. He had only noticed it since he came home, now there was nothing to be done with it, no requirement to transport his squad safely home, nothing. Irritation jabbed like someone tapping him on the forehead when he was trying to rest. His body recalled the sound of the guns, the rattling of his bones, the slick of grease on hands and the smell of burnt powder. Today it threatened and then went away without trouble. He had something to do. His body was glad to be purposeful, moving towards an act.

  On the street, under the lamps, men trudged through the snow, collars up, hats pulled down over eyes, leaving as little of their faces exposed to the world as possible. They drifted towards the station and the factories along the river, those that were still operating. The munitions factories were closed, though some were being reassigned. He followed the men along the river and they were swallowed up in little groups into the vast buildings. Past the factories, an indistinct blue light was appearing over the fields. All he could hear was a
crow and his own breath. The guns were silent. The factories had not yet begun their shift. He walked quickly. He wanted to reach the place he knew before the day began, home before light, change into ordinary clothes. It was always the best place, when he and Thomas were boys, and they’d only had their catapults then.

  The Luger rubbed against his leg through his pocket. A rifle would have been better, but he had not managed to bring it home: too unwieldy. On the rise beyond the fields a light came on in a farmhouse window. He crouched behind a hedgerow at the edge of a bare cornfield, trained his eye on the furrows, let them adjust to the lines of shadow, watching for movement. Gave himself a moment to appreciate that he was alone. No one could see him, no one had their sights on his head. Last night before he went home she was there. She would always be there now, if he asked her, a warm body, every night. She had dropped the other fellow in an instant. ‘I am going to be an electrical engineer,’ he had whispered, as though that sealed it, and she had pushed her head into the cave of his neck and jaw. He felt a hollowing out of himself almost immediately. There had been no time to be merely himself, alone. Always the sound of men breathing as he slept and as he woke. And now this girl would be next to him, no freedom even in the dark. Perhaps if he withdrew quietly she could simply carry on with the man she had been with before he returned.

  He cocked his pistol. His eyes rested on the field. He must see large areas at once but be ready for the quick movement. He learned to do this with Thomas, here at this field, and there had been plenty of practice since. It would only be a hare, just a hare.

  It did not take long before a quickly drawn black line shot across the field, thirty metres ahead of him. He loved these animals, that ran because they liked it. He watched this one’s speed to imprint it, get the feel. It was too far to be sure of the Luger’s aim in any case. He would probably just warn every hare within earshot to stay clear of this field today.