“How do we reach them if they aren’t here?” Suse was saying.
“Reach them? Suse, you’re so goddamn naive. You can’t convert a Nazi.”
Dietrich said, “Why then did we begin this club?”
“To reach out to working-class youth, to keep them out of the hands of the fascists. The Nazis are inside the barricades. If we don’t fight them now, we’ll never be free of them.”
“You can’t believe Hitler will last. The German people have much more sense—”
Suse tugged on Dietrich’s arm. “Stop it, you two.” She nodded at the young people, who had grown quiet and begun listening.
Falk turned away and ran his hand through his hair, stared at the ceiling a moment, then said, “All right, we lost two members of the cast.”
“Six,” someone said.
He shut his eyes. “Six, then. Never mind, we’ll recruit new people. The fascists will not stop this production.”
Dietrich loved play-acting. He was good at it, capable of stepping out of his own skin and losing himself in a character. At play’s end he would feel as refreshed as though waking from a deep and pleasant dream. That, at least, had been his boyhood experience, in school productions of Goethe and Hauptmann and E.T.A. Hoffmann. He was surprised to learn it was true for the hideously modern Georg Kaiser as well. As he rehearsed the part of the Stout Gentleman, he secretly baptized his anonymous character with a Christian name, Fritz. Fritz was Stout because he ate too much. He ate too much because he was lonely. Though greedy and facile, he was also painfully aware of his own repulsiveness. In short, Fritz suffered. Though bored by the Stout Gentleman, Dietrich was glad to present Fritz to the world.
None of the family, save Suse, of course, was faintly interested in attending the play. So they would not see Dietrich in his oversized trousers held up by suspenders and stuffed with a large feather pillow, suit coat barely buttoned over his bulging stomach. Nor would Elisabeth’s father and grandfather be present. Grandfather Nathan tended to fall asleep after seven o’clock, and her father would be on call at the Charité, waiting at his surgeon’s table to receive the slashed, beaten, and blasted offerings of the new regime.
Dietrich would have been happy to act before Leo Hildebrandt, to offer another side of himself for inspection. He had been once to the physician’s spacious home in a quiet tree-lined street in Dahlem. Nathan Hildebrandt, eighty-five years old and frail, had not come down from his room, but Dietrich and Leo had smoked cigars companionably in the study while Elisabeth looked in on her grandfather. The two men had been wary of each other, since each knew of the other from Karl Bonhoeffer. To his colleague, Dr. Bonhoeffer had once complained of his youngest son’s choice of vocation and melancholy reserve—“though Dietrich has a marvelous sense of humor once you know him, and he is unfailingly kind. But he’s lost when it comes to such hardheaded matters as politics and finance—” an embarrassed glance away—“and women. He’s quite shy.” His opinion of Leo Hildebrandt, he told his son after meeting Elisabeth, was one of “the greatest admiration for his professional ability, one of the finest surgeons in Germany. But an emotional man, enjoys the pleasures of the flesh. He’s had several affairs since the death of his wife. And he’s raised the girl as though she were a son. Rather unconventional. You might be careful how deeply you become involved with her.”
Dietrich stood now in the small room off the stage, which was actually a janitor’s pantry, and waited for his cue. He had the first lines, and felt the responsibility of pulling the audience—heard through the curtain talking loudly and rattling chairs—into the story as though plunging them into a deep pool of water. Elisabeth was watching Falk the Cashier take his place behind a counter with iron bars, her face calm as if her mind were elsewhere. Then Falk pointed at her. She turned to Dietrich, blew him a kiss, and reached for the rope that hung beside her, reached high with her head thrown back, as though ringing a church bell, and drew the curtains open.
THE CURTAINS PART, the lights—such as they are—go up. The Stout Gentleman strides onto the stage, flinging his arms as though casting off Dietrich. He sits upon a wooden chair near the Cashier’s counter, hands cradling his pillowed belly to keep it from shifting. His trousers are ill-fitting, and he plucks at the material where it binds him across the knees, pulling the pant legs up to show brown socks, garters, and an inch of milk-white flesh. He looks around impatiently while the Cashier completes a transaction with a Messenger Boy—Falk Harnack and a skinny twelve-year-old urchin named Ernst after Thälmann the Communist leader. The Messenger Boy leaves and the Stout Gentleman lunges forward, briefcase in hand.
Now the fat fellows take their turn, he announces.
But he is interrupted by the arrival of a Lady—though no lady but a buxom raven-haired baker’s daughter from Prenzlauer Berg—and gallantly gives way to her, saying, The fat fellows can wait.
Though he ogles her in an ungallant manner.
Her transaction is questioned, for she wishes to withdraw a great deal of money on an account in Florence. The Manager—Otto Linke in the first of his roles and quite uncomfortable in the only high starched collar he has ever worn—enters and arrogantly refuses her the money, insinuating she might instead sell herself in her hotel. She leaves in tears.
STOUT GENTLEMAN: Three thousand marks is not bad. I guess three hundred wouldn’t sound bad to her either.
MANAGER: Perhaps you would like to make a lower offer at the Elephant? In her room?
The audience titters. Dietrich feels very hot, and despises the Stout Gentleman. He has forgotten Fritz.
STOUT GENTLEMAN: Now it’s time for fat fellows to unload.
MANAGER: What are you bringing us this morning?
STOUT GENTLEMAN: [sets his briefcase on the counter and flips it open to reveal stacks of bills. A flourish] With all the confidence that your elegant clientele inspires.
MANAGER: In any case we are immune to a pretty face when it comes to business.
STOUT GENTLEMAN: [counts money in briefcase] How old was she, at a guess?
MANAGER: I haven’t seen her without rouge—yet.
STOUT GENTLEMAN: What’s she doing here?
MANAGER: We’ll hear that tonight at the Elephant.
The young men in the audience hoot. Dietrich retreats backstage, where he unbuttons his jacket and pulls the sweat-drenched pillow from his trousers. The Lady is in her hotel room, explaining that she wanted the money so her son could purchase a painting; Falk the Cashier arrives with the Stout Gentleman’s money, which he has embezzled; the Lady rejects the Cashier, who sets off on his round of meaningless adventures.
Dietrich watches for a time, his arm around Elisabeth’s waist. Then she shrugs him off.
“Sorry,” she says, “I’ve got to close the curtain.”
“It should stay closed,” he says.
She pokes him in his smaller but still fleshy midsection and says, “Very funny.”
SS-Obersturmführer Alois Bauer is drunk, as are his twelve comrades. They are visiting beer gardens and cafés, starting beside the duck pond in the Tiergarten and moving to the Romanische Café, which quickly empties as artistes with white-painted faces and black mascara slip out the back door. You’re dead Bol-shie ghosts, the SS boys chant, and pound the tables with their death’s-head rings turned palm down while they wait for their brandy. After several rounds they graciously leave the place intact and wander on up the Fasanenstraße, where they throw paving stones at the doomed synagogue, not yet doing damage, since their aim is so erratic. They stagger on beyond the Savignyplatz, so tipsy and raucous they are turned out of a beer garden despite their black uniforms by a handful of cautious policemen, into Kantstraße, where they pile onto a tram and slide off at the bottom of Schloß Straße, though they know nothing of where they are. (Someone has suggested this is where a lot of Jews live.) There they sprawl on the front steps of a house—two of the youngest tussle happily on the sidewalk and roll into a bank of frozen old snow—singing �
�Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” at the top of their lungs. They take turns pissing against the front door to watch the steam rise from their urine. Across the way a shade is slowly drawn and a light blinks out.
Inside the Charlottenburg Youth Club, the audience is restive. The Cashier has just ended a long soliloquy—
The earth is in labor, spring gales at last! That’s better! I knew my cry could not be in vain. My demand was urgent. Chaos is insulted and will not be put to shame by my colossal deed of this morning. I knew it. In a case like mine never let up. Go at them hard—pull down their cloaks and you’ll see something etc. etc. etc.
—delivered in a snowstorm of shredded cotton balls blown about by electric fans. In the audience, flasks of peppermint schnapps are drawn from coat pockets and passed surreptitiously. When the flasks are empty, some young people in the back—four boys and two girls—slip out the door, determined to find a bench in a cozy pub and drink more schnapps. Outside, the cold air rouses them and drives them into one another’s arms. They are linked together singing “Wem Gott will Rechte Gunst erweisen” when they happen upon the drunken SS. Taunts are exchanged, a few paving stones thrown. The young people, realizing they are outnumbered and yet more sober than their opponents, flee laughing down the Schloß Straße. But Obersturmführer Alois Bauer, though drunk as anyone, has leadership qualities, and has noted which house they came from. His comrades, squaring their shoulders and locating the blackjacks that hang from skewed belts beneath their greatcoats, leaning against one another for support, gather around him outside the Charlottenburg Youth Club.
The Cashier, on the run from the Authorities, has placed his life in the hands of a Salvation Army Lass. Of course he believes she will save him, since she represents Christian charity; of course because she represents Christian charity she will betray him. The Cashier staggers across the stage in the midst of a demonic revival meeting shouting his protests while demented penitents confess their sins. He is pursued by the Salvation Army Lass, who lusts for his bloody soul as though possessed of a vampire’s fangs.
So Dietrich thinks, rather melodramatically he admits to himself, as he watches the final act. Falk Harnack, he would say, should stick to directing rather than acting, assuming his taste in plays improves.
The Cashier is screaming something like the beginning and the end Maiden and man fullness in the void Maiden and man the seed and the flower send and aim and goal and the Lass flings open a plywood door to reveal Otto Linke, now the Policeman, whom she sets on the Cashier like a bellowing foxhound.
The Cashier reaches in his pocket as the drunken SS in black greatcoats stagger into the room waving their cudgels above their heads and whooping like the Red Indians in a Karl May potboiler. The Policeman is crying Switch off that light, which is his line, but the room has erupted and Falk who is now living only for the play has the gun out, the gun which he should press to his chest and do away with himself in a grand statement of existential angst except Alois Bauer spots the pistol which threatens harm to his own boys and finds his own gun and while Falk stands unsure whether to shoot himself or flee, fires at the Cashier hitting him in the shoulder and sending him sprawling across the stage just before one of the young people knocks the gun from Bauer’s hand and another brings a folding chair down over his head.
Falk raises himself up, imagines his lines why did I hesitate why take the road whither am I bound from first to last you sit there naked bone from morn to midnight I rage in a circle, then a wave of white heat emanates from his shattered shoulder to his scalp to his toetips and Dietrich and Elisabeth are lifting him and he begins to sing as loud as he can something that seems more himself stand up ye victims of oppression for the struggle carries
They wait at the bottom of the basement stairs—Dietrich with an arm under each of Falk’s shoulders, Suse and Elisabeth each clinging to a leg—while several young people flee past them. Then they carefully climb a stone stairway limned with black ice, and stop, listen to the frantic bleating of an SS whistle.
“We can’t stay here,” Dietrich says.
They move along the alley and into deserted Zillestraße, as frightened as if tracked by a spotlight, and slip into another alley. They creep into a shadowy tunnel behind a row of garbage cans and lay Falk Harnack down in a nest of snow.
“He’ll catch pneumonia,” Suse frets.
Elisabeth is already kneeling beside him, stripping off her sweater and wrapping it around his chest. “He’s fainted. That’s just as well. He’ll be in shock. But the cold is better for the wound.”
Dietrich would have given her a jacket of his own to cover herself, but they have come away without their coats. Instead of his Shetland wool from Schneiders in the Pariser Straße he wears only the shirtsleeves and cheap baggy pants of the Fat Gentleman.
Suse holds Falk’s head in her lap and strokes his hair. “What shall we do? Dietrich, can’t you call for Father’s car? We’ll take Falk to the Charité.”
“No,” Elisabeth says. “Father told me the Nazis have been watching the emergency room and sometimes they kidnap people they suspect were hurt in street fighting.”
Dietrich says, “We could take him to his aunt in the Wangen heimstraße.”
“That’s the first place they’ll look for him,” Elisabeth says.
“What makes you think they’ll be looking?”
“Did you see, before we got out of there? The SS were getting the worst of it. They’ll make inquiries to save face if nothing else.”
“We’ll take him to our house,” Suse says.
“It’s next door to the Harnacks,” said Elisabeth. “They may inquire there too. Do you want to place your parents in that position?”
“Then we’ll take him to Hans and Christel in Sacrow,” says Dietrich. “They’d never think to look there. And Sacrow is so isolated, it will be easy later to slip him out of Berlin all together.”
“Yes,” Suse agrees. “Yes, that’s good.”
Elisabeth presses her fingertips against Falk’s neck. “His pulse is steady,” she says. “I think he’ll make it if Father can see him soon.” She is so numb with cold she scarcely notices when Dietrich kneels and places his hand on her shoulder.
“I’ll find a telephone,” he says.
The women are hovering over Falk like a twinned pietà when Dietrich makes his careful way over the packed snow toward the street, slipping twice as he goes.
He knows where he is in the dark streets, and yet still feels disoriented, for he is being drawn inexorably back toward Schloß Straße. It is as though he were the one in shock. Blank stone facades seem to stretch forever, marked here and there with a muted light. He stops at a corner shop. A screen of iron bars have been drawn across the entrance, but there is a light in the back. He starts to bang on the window, then notes the name painted on the glass—Abramsöhn and Sons. How does he dare ask a Jew to put himself at extra risk?
He moves on down the street, notices for the first time that he is limping. The sign beneath the corner street lamp confirms his location—Schloß Straße and Bismarckstraße. There is a telephone booth, and Dietrich reaches into his pockets for a coin, then remembers he is wearing the clothes of the Fat Gentleman and his own wallet is at home in a drawer in the Wangenheimstraße. He goes on, resigned to his fate.
The door of the youth club stands open, a goldbrick of light that promises warmth. Carefully he climbs the steps and peers inside. The foyer is empty. He enters. A floorboard creaks just as he reaches the doorway of the auditorium. He stops.
A man in a black uniform lies prone on the floor amid a wreckage of chairs and tables. Two others in SS uniform kneel over him. They look up alarmed, pulling their guns from their holsters and pointing them at Dietrich even as he somehow finds the presence of mind to shout Heil Hitler and thrust out his arm. He expects the bullets to take him in the chest, just below the vulnerable armpit.
Instead, one Nazi asks, “Who are you? What do you want?”
�
��I—I was looking for a telephone. I’ve been attacked, you see, by a gang of Reds. They robbed me so I haven’t even the money for a phone call. If I can reach my family, they’ll come for me.”
They lower their weapons. Dietrich now sees they are very young, sixteen or seventeen, perhaps. One has been weeping, and Dietrich smells the sour stench of vomit as well.
“The same bastards who jumped us, I’ll bet,” says one.
The younger of the two wipes his eyes. He has the thin, homely face of a boy who has been the butt of classroom pranks. “We’ve sent for help but no one has come. And the Obersturmführer is badly hurt.” He looks down at his fallen leader. “We can’t let him die. He’d do anything to save us.”
Dietrich takes a cautious step forward.
The older one says, “Why are you dressed like that?”
Of course he wears the huge pants of the Fat Gentleman, now missing their pillow and barely held up by suspenders, and the cheap cotton shirt, stained and torn, and nothing else.
“Those Communist bastards took my trousers and coat and left me to freeze. If I hadn’t found these in a refuse pile behind a haberdasher’s, I’d be standing before you in my underwear. Not a pretty sight, I assure you.”
They smile despite their worry.
“How was your friend wounded?”
“Some Bolshie hit him in the head. His scalp’s bleeding here, you see.”
Dietrich comes closer, kneels beside them. “My father was a doctor,” he says, “and I picked up a bit from him over the years. May I?”
They back away and Dietrich leans over the fallen SS man, whose eyes are closed. His light brown hair is matted with dried blood, but his breathing is regular. Dietrich finds his pulse.
“His heartbeat is strong.” He turns to the youngest. “Do you have a torch?”
After some fumbling, the boy removes the electric torch from his belt. Dietrich lays his hand across the Obersturmführer’s forehead, places a fingertip on each eyelid. The eyes, when he opens them, are pale gray and unmoving, so wide and clear of thought or guilt the stricken man seems the most innocent of innocents.
Saints and Villains Page 14
