by Clare Clark
THE WORKING ZUERST GIRL, she wrote in capital letters underneath the image, and slid it between the pages of her Zuerst-girl manual. She did not show it to anyone else. The other illustrators were friendly enough, but Horst ran the department like a drill sergeant, conversation was not encouraged. Of the six of them there was only one other woman, Olga, who was in charge of incidental illustration. Olga was fat and industrious and always left exactly on time because she had to get home to her children. She kept a blurry snap of them on her desk, two dark-haired little girls standing hand in hand. Whoever had taken the photograph had held the camera too low, cutting off the top of their heads and leaving a wide expanse of grass in the foreground. Dressed in Sunday best the girls squinted at the camera, eyes screwed up against the sun. Their bare knees were as sharp as knives.
The men sat together at two tables on the other side of the room. At precisely midday every day, the four of them rose together in silence and left the room. Emmeline did not know where they went. Precisely one hour later they came back and resumed their work. Olga brought sandwiches in greaseproof paper, which she ate at her desk. In the afternoons the room smelled of pickled cucumber and liverwurst.
The next time work was slow Emmeline drew the Zuerst girl in the lace stockings and feathered headdress of a chorus girl; the time after that as the Kaiser in spiked helmet and extravagant moustache. The habit grew compulsive. She drew her in Charlie Chaplin’s suit and bowler hat, in Josephine Baker’s infamous skirt of bananas. She jotted down ideas as she jolted to work on the tram. It cheered her to imagine fresh insults for her victim, new humiliations. She drew her as a wrestler, as Maria the machine-human from Metropolis, as the vampire Count from Nosferatu, her extended hand curled into a claw.
One day, driven to screaming point by a spring coat in a fiendishly fiddly paisley, she drew her naked. She gave her Irina’s mouth, Irina’s high breasts with their pointed nipples, her lush triangle of pubic hair. She had seen Irina only once since they broke things off, one evening on Jägerstrasse. Irina was with two other girls, both of them strangers, and Emmeline, who was by herself, had talked too much and tried to tease Irina, who pursed her lips and said goodbye while Emmeline was still laughing at her own jokes.
The Zuerst Irina had the blank stare of an addict. Emmeline scribbled in her cropped black hair, her heavy eyebrows, then added several black hairs on her chin. It was Irina’s shameful secret, the hairs she plucked from her chin. Then, working quickly, she added a thickset male figure leering over her shoulder, one hand on Irina’s breast, the other between her thighs. Irina always said that the idea of sex with a man disgusted her. A speech bubble over Irina’s head bulged with Russian obscenities.
Emmeline never knew who told Horst, though she suspected Olga. When he thrust a pile of drawings at her, demanding to know if they were indeed her handiwork, she thought she detected the translucent gleam of greasy fingerprints on the edges of the paper. Later it occurred to Emmeline that perhaps he had not meant to sack her, that if she had apologised he would have let her off with a reprimand, but by then things had been said that could not be taken back and she was already nearly home.
Someone was hammering at the door. Groggily she sat up. The light was on and she had no idea what time it was. The bottle of vodka she had bought to replace the one she and Anton had finished lay empty on its side on the floor amidst a sea of torn-up self-portraits. She had taken her sketchbook and a mirror to bed, she had wanted to see herself clearly, without Irina, to understand what she looked like when she was really alone, but the flat was too cold and the mirror kept falling over and it was hard to hold a pencil and a pad and a bottle all at the same time.
‘Who is it?’ she shouted, fumbling out of bed, but she already knew who it was. No one but Irina knocked like that, as though they meant to break the door down. Emmeline wished she knew what she was feeling, whether she should be angry or conciliatory or aloof. Perhaps she should cry. Irina never knew what to do when she cried. The bedroom was so cold she could see her breath.
Another barrage of hammering, so loud it might have been coming from inside her skull. Pulling her dressing gown around her, Emmeline kicked the empty vodka bottle under the bed. Irina drank like a fish but she never showed it and despised people who did, she thought they were weak. No doubt she would think it was weak to be sacked too, though it was not weak, Emmeline thought resentfully, her brain aching with the effort of it, it was the opposite. She had been courageous, she had made a stand, had refused to be turned into some automated drawing machine, and besides, the drawings were funny, Irina would think they were funny, though of course she did not have the drawings any more, Horst never gave them back, and Irina did not always laugh at what you expected, she was so Russian that way—
She opened the door. Dora stood on the landing, her bag clutched in her arms.
‘You’re here, thank God,’ she said frantically. ‘It’s my grandmother. She’s—I have to go for the doctor.’
Emmeline blinked at her stupidly. ‘All right.’
‘I can’t leave her alone. I’m sorry, I’ve woken you, I know, but I didn’t know who else to ask. If you could only—I’ve left the door open. Just till I get back.’
‘You want me to go up there?’
‘Would you? Thank you, I can’t tell you—’ Before the sentence was complete she was already halfway down the stairs. ‘Tell her I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
Dora’s apartment was smaller than Emmeline’s, with lower ceilings, but it was warm. It smelled of coffee. There was no plasterboard partition between the kitchen and the living room, just a curtain held back by a nail on the wall. Pots and pans were piled beside the stove. A shabby brown armchair took up most of the room.
The bedroom door was open. Emmeline peered in. The room was narrow, barely wide enough for the bed. Dora’s grandmother lay hunched beneath the blankets like a broken umbrella. Emmeline could hear her breathing, the rapid shallow rasp of it like a plane against wood. A chair by the bed was crowded with the clutter of the sick room: bottles of pills, a jug of water, a thermometer in a glass, a half-drunk cup of coffee. The room smelled sour.
In the kitchen Emmeline drank two cups of water. There was a coffee pot on the stove so she drank what was left of that too, looking down over the dark courtyard. The view was the same as hers, only higher. The light from the caretaker’s room drew a stripe of yellow-white on the snow.
The coffee quickened her pulse, crackling along the filaments of her brain. She did not know what the time was, when Dora would be back. She thought about going downstairs for her sketchbook but instead she sat on the brown armchair and listened to Dora’s grandmother breathing. She tried to match her breath to hers, in and out. When Dora finally returned with the doctor she went back downstairs to bed.
The next evening Dora brought her a cake in a white cardboard box. ‘To say thank you for last night,’ she said. ‘I hope you like chocolate.’
‘What kind of a person doesn’t like chocolate?’
Dora smiled faintly, burying her hands in the pockets of her coat. She looked cold and tired, dark smudges under her eyes. ‘Good night, then.’
‘How’s your grandmother?’
‘She—they took her to hospital.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s probably for the best. They can look after her there.’ She tried to smile but her mouth did not seem to be working. ‘Would it help to have some chocolate cake?’
‘Not really.’
‘How about vodka?’
Dora gave a gasping sort of laugh and wiped her face with her fingers. ‘Vodka.’
‘Russian medicine. Apparently it expels bile.’
‘Well, in that case.’
Emmeline stepped back to let her in. Dora did not seem to notice the mess. She sat at the table looking at her hands while Emmeline fetched the bottle. A new one, bought that morning from the Russian shop on the corner. Pouring two shots, she pushed one across the
table to Dora.
‘To expelled bile,’ she said, raising her glass.
‘Better out than in,’ Dora answered and they drank.
Dora’s grandmother was in hospital for two weeks. Dora worked most evenings, covering parties and openings, but on the nights she got home early she banged at Emmeline’s door and they sat together on the floor, drinking vodka and talking.
Dora’s mother had died when she was little so she had gone to live with her grandmother, her father’s mother. Her father had been a writer and critic. When he went to war he told Dora he would be home before she knew it, but he was captured by the Russians and sent to a camp in Siberia. He never came back. Dora’s grandfather had been rich, she and her grandmother were left amply provided for, there was always money until the inflation wiped out every penny.
Dora was obliged to abandon her studies and find a job. The editor at the Merkur had known her father. When he offered her a post on the social pages she took it gratefully because it was experience and she needed the money, but what she really wanted was to work on a news desk, not at the Merkur whose readers, the editor told her, did not much care for politics, but at a proper newspaper, one that mattered. Emmeline did not say that she had never cared much for politics herself. She knew about the demonstrations in Berlin, of course, the street fights between the communists and the nationalist Nazis, and there were always elections, flags hanging like washing across their street, the politicians seemed unable to govern for more than a few months without going to the polls, but no one ever won, not properly, and nothing really changed. Dora’s anger surprised her, her frustration with what she saw as Germany’s blindness and docility. Dora believed that newspapers should be shouting from the rooftops, that there was no point in democracy if people did not know or care what was happening, if they could be frightened or bored into voting for the wrong people. In her spare hours she wrote impassioned articles, about the rise of anti-Jewish rhetoric, and the militarisation of German youth groups, and the dangers of conflating moderation with weakness, and sent them off to rival newspapers. She never heard back. She told Emmeline that she knew she should submit her work under a male pseudonym, that she would stand a better chance if they thought she was a man, but somehow she could not bring herself to do it.
‘It doesn’t seem the right way to start,’ she said. ‘With a lie.’
Emmeline did not admit to Dora that she had already lied to her several times. She wished she had not but by then it was too late to go back. She liked Dora. She did not want her to know that she was not like her, that she had no clue what it felt like to have nothing, to work at something you hated because you did not have a choice. She did not want her to know that she lived in a ramshackle apartment building with rising damp and a stairwell that smelled of cats not because she was penniless but because she hoped other people’s poverty would inspire her to paint. When Dora asked to look at her pictures she shook her head. They were none of them finished, she said. Dora could see them when they were done.
‘How long?’ Dora asked.
‘Soon.’
That was the biggest lie of all.
5
Anton told her being sacked was a blessing. ‘Any longer, darling, and they’d have got you too. Imagine it, stuck like this for ever,’ and he put one leg in front of the other and held out his hand until she laughed and agreed that it was all for the best.
‘Nature over nurture,’ Anton said. ‘They can manipulate your mind but they’ll never get their hands on your artist’s soul. You literally drew yourself out of jail.’
Emmeline supposed he was right. She wanted him to be right. So why, then, did she miss it, the wet-dog fug of the crowded morning trams, the reek of Olga’s liver sausage? She stretched and primed canvases but she did not paint. She brewed coffee she did not drink and stared out of the window. The windows on the other side of the courtyard stared back at her. Her mind was blank. When she leafed through her old sketchbooks she felt nothing but a rising sense of panic.
She went out. She walked around the city until she could not feel her feet, then sat in cafés, watching people scurry past outside. She drew a little, other customers mostly, sometimes her cup or her own cold-roughened hands, but her drawings bored her. She bored herself. Her allowance came in as always, she had enough to live on but, once the rent was paid and the gas, there was nothing left for distractions. She refused to do what other girls did and put on lipstick and a smile and wait with her skirt hitched for someone to buy her a drink.
She needed another job. There were magazines launching all the time and advertising companies too but Horst had declined to provide her with a reference and it was not easy to get a foot in the door. Several times she was told that she was not qualified, that they wanted someone who had studied advertising art or commercial illustration. A degree in fine art from the Berlin Academy counted for nothing against a year spent perfecting the glint of chrome on a brand-new automobile, or designing book plates and the borders on menus and college diplomas.
She thought of asking Anton for help but she could not face the lectures. As for Dora, she had enough on her plate and besides it was too soon. Emmeline did not want to change things between them by begging her for a favour. Instead she wrote to Olga and to Matthias Rachmann. Did they know of someone who might need someone? She did not expect either of them to write back.
With her grandmother home from hospital Dora called by less often. She worried about leaving the old woman alone. Frau Becker on the ground floor, who did the laundry, came in for an hour at midday to check on her and stoke the stove and give her the lunch Dora had prepared before she left in the morning, but she was busy and did not linger. The bathroom for their apartment was across the landing. Dora tried to persuade her grandmother to use a commode but the old woman declared that the day she used such a contraption would be the day she put a pillow over her own face.
‘And not just because of the stink of it, either,’ she added. In the evenings Dora took the stairs two at a time, afraid she would find the old woman sprawled on the landing. In the winter the stairwell was freezing and as slippery as ice.
‘It’s not fair to expect you to do it all,’ Emmeline said. ‘What about the niece who visited her in hospital, couldn’t she take her for a while?’
Dora pulled a face. She had been to a party for the newspaper, the opening of the new van Gogh exhibition at the Cornelius Gallery, and the red lipstick she wore made her teeth look yellow. ‘I couldn’t do that to Oma, she’d go mad within a week. I’d always thought it was grief—Hilde lost her fiancé at Ypres—but Oma says she was always a bitch, even when she was a baby.’
Emmeline grinned and poured more vodka. Dora gulped gratefully. At the party she had persuaded Matthias Rachmann to be photographed next to one of the pictures he had loaned, a portrait of a Zouave.
‘I hope it comes out,’ she said to Emmeline. ‘Nils claims he caught Rachmann with exactly the same uncomfortable expression as van Gogh’s soldier, as if neither of them could wait for the whole performance to be over.’
‘I can’t believe you got to see the van Goghs before I did.’
‘Who says I saw anything? The two on loan from Rachmann were pretty much the only ones I laid eyes on all evening.’
‘Only two?’ Emmeline asked, surprised. ‘I’m sure he told me he was loaning six.’
Dora shrugged. ‘It was incredibly noisy; perhaps I misheard. How anyone converses at these things I don’t know. I had to get everyone to say everything twice.’
The next morning, at the Cornelius Gallery, the queue stretched down the street.
‘They’ll only let in a certain number at a time,’ the round-faced man in front of her told her, blowing into his hands to warm them. ‘We have to wait our turn.’
Emmeline waited, stamping her feet to keep the circulation going. In the shop window beside her a velvet display proffered delicate gold watches like the one Elvira used to wear. Emmeline remembered the diam
onds that framed the face, the case that swung open on a tiny hinge. As a little girl she had been transfixed by that watch. She had made her mother open it over and over again, until Elvira told her sharply she would break it and took it away. Viktoriastrasse was full of objects like that, she thought, expensive playthings for people who had forgotten how to play. On the other side of the street women strutted like pigeons, puffed up in pale pillowy furs, their tiny dogs trotting beside them. Her fingers itching, Emmeline fumbled in her bag for her sketchbook but it was not there. She could not think what she had done with it.
‘I don’t suppose you have some paper, do you?’ she asked the round-faced man, but he only looked at her oddly and shook his head. Helplessly she scanned the street. What hope was there of finding a sketchbook on Viktoriastrasse that did not cost a week’s rent? The sign for the Rachmann Gallery caught her eye and suddenly she remembered: Matthias still had her sketchbook.
‘Would you be an angel and save my place?’ she said to the round-faced man. ‘I’ll only be a minute.’
On the pavement outside the gallery two men were talking, their breath chalking the air. As she drew closer the taller one turned and she saw that it was Julius Köhler-Schultz. He did not look pleased to see her.
‘Hugo,’ he said reluctantly to his companion, ‘do you know Fräulein Eberhardt?’
‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.’
‘Fräulein Eberhardt, Herr Salazin.’
Salazin bowed. ‘Enchanté.’
There was an awkward silence. Then Emmeline stepped forward and pressed the bell. Julius frowned. ‘You’re here to see Matthias?’
