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‘There does not seem to be one on this plan. Are the dead expected to walk down?’
I had not noticed, felt foolish in front of my friend. Fool. Idiot.
‘Perhaps it is missing?’ My first thought glinted. I had found an error, an oversight I could highlight. To my superiors. Ernst Beck. A designer. ‘They have missed the chutes.’
‘Do you think Topf would make such a mistake, Ernst?’
‘Maybe it is a cost issue? From the SS.’
‘Cement stairs rather than a couple of chutes or a lift to the morgue? I could not operate a morgue underground without a platform lift or a chute. With this design I would be carrying the bodies through the chapel. That is illegal, Ernst. This design is illegal.’
I could no longer refrain from pulling out my sweepings of tobacco. His observations needed a deliberating smoke. Paul watched me roll a cigarette before he went on. I do not think he judged my cheap simulation of smoking, as Klein would have done.
‘I would like to copy this plan, Ernst. I could maybe help with its improvement. Make suggestions. One friend to another.’
‘You have helped, Paul. I did not notice there were no chutes. And you are right. It makes no sense to wheel the dead through a shower room.’ I struck a match and lit up, to think on my next words as I folded the plan away from him. ‘I’m sure that it is an SS request rather than an error of our engineers. No need to trouble yourself further.’
The plan would stay with me. Paul had once been a stonemason. In my innocence, my naivety, I could only think of Freemasons. Of unions and communists. And I had been warned often enough. And I had copied this plan without permission.
‘It is no trouble, Ernst,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you and Etta could come to supper one evening? Catch up properly.’
‘I would like that. We would like that.’ I stood. ‘Thank you, Paul.’ We shook hands.
‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Ernst? A long way to come for so short a visit.’
‘Actually there is. While I’m here.’
‘Of course. Anything.’
‘Could you direct me to the Party office? We have none in Erfurt.’
Paul’s hand dropped from mine, went to hold his pipe in his mouth.
‘An office? Headquarters, Ernst. Weimar has an NS headquarters. The Gauforum. A whole square of them.’
I think he wanted me to react, to check something in me. As if our handshake had been a secret sign.
‘Just an office would do. Thank you.’
Chapter 12 (#ulink_39d3b504-f8ed-5bfe-a4a4-cf7474db333a)
The office in Rittergasse, behind the Herderplatz, had both the Party flag and the yellow and black-eagle standard of the Republic, the Weimar Republic, for Weimar was the city, the heart, of constitution. All but gone now, a memory. The red, white and black flag was twice the size, ridiculous on the small medieval building, the bottom of it almost stroking people’s heads as they passed underneath. Reminding them as they passed. This was the small face of the Party. Where ordinary citizens could pay to join. Weimar’s Party headquarters and buildings not for the public.
‘Ernst!’
That familiar call again. The one from across a square, from a crowded fair while courting, from a balcony as you go to work. That courting call. The red hair loose about her shoulders, not curled. Etta only ever walked in public with her hair curled. Curled and warmed as if she had paid for it and had not spent the morning making it so. She had hurried. A green woollen hat hiding the care she had not taken.
‘Ernst!’ she cried again, waving, and stopping with her hand to her face as a bicycle bell cut her path and the rider cursed as he swerved from her. And then she was at my shoulder, her gloved hand upon me, green, like her hat, no matter her hurry Etta could match her clothes from the pile that fattened in the bottom of our wardrobe before washday with ease. I could not match socks.
‘Ernst. Don’t do this,’ she said. A hoarseness as if she had screamed this a dozen times on her way here.
‘Etta? How are you here?’ All I could say.
‘Frau Klein came for her rent. I knew you had ten marks in your old cigar box. Your papers were missing from it. Your birth certificate and mine.’ Her hand to her mouth again. ‘Please don’t do this, Ernst.’
‘You followed me here? I was only seeing Paul.’
She looked over my shoulder to the flags. ‘And coming here. I knew you were coming here.’
‘You said I could. If I wanted. For my career.’
‘I thought you wouldn’t. If I said I didn’t mind, I thought you wouldn’t.’
The minds of our women. The hand left my shoulder.
‘Buy me a tea,’ she said, took my hand. ‘We have to talk.’
*
A teapot for two in the restaurant of the Elephant Hotel. Weimar had a hundred places we could have gone and I would have preferred the Black Bear Inn next door, but I guessed that Etta thought the hotel would be quieter during the day. This was a grand place on the cobbled market square, the Party’s favourite adopted hotel. They had it redesigned several years ago and built balconies front and rear where our leader and other dignitaries could give speeches to the multitudes that gathered in the square or privately behind the hotel; for speeches that were not for the public.
There was an amusing rumour that the leader himself had called for the remodelling as his regular rooms did not have their own WC. This meant that every time he left to visit the one at the end of his corridor he would re-emerge to rapturous applause from the throng that had heard that their leader was up and about. He would have to salute as the toilet flushed gratefully in the background while he walked back to his rooms in his pyjamas. Not so many parades this year. Everything now centred on Berlin.
I thanked the waitress for the biscuits she placed beside the tea. The biscuits welcome for we could not afford to eat here. Etta thanked her warmer and the girl smiled back as she bowed away. Etta also a waitress. People who worked in service always warm to each other. They know the rest of us are the worst.
‘Do hotels have rationing?’ I asked no-one, looking around, feeling awkward in the company of my own wife. As if we were both someone else’s partners.
‘I don’t know, Ernst,’ she said, patting the back of her hair. ‘Does it matter?’
‘No.’ I smiled, hoped she would meet me with it. ‘Why did you not want me to go in, Etta? To the Party office?’
She tried to dab at her eyes without disturbing her make-up. I waited for her to finish and for the teapot to cool. The handkerchief and compact away to her handbag, its clasp’s click punctuating her talk.
‘I have to tell you something, Ernst. But promise me that you will not think that I have lied to you. Please don’t feel that. It is not personal.’
All the dread thoughts that husbands have when this conversation comes ran through my heart before my head. A flutter in my chest. She saw my consternations and her face became gentle again.
‘Ernst. My birth certificate is not my own. My parents paid for it years ago. When I was a girl. To change my name and theirs.’
‘What?’ I exclaimed this more with relief than surprise. ‘Why?’ Relief that it was not another lover. That I had not been betrayed. ‘Is your name not Etta?’
‘Of course it is. But not Etta Eischner. It is Etta Kirch. And now Etta Beck so probably none of this matters anyway.’ She poured the tea, the chime of china as she trembled.
‘I have three Jewish grandparents. My mother and father are Jewish. But they do not practise. But I do not think that matters any more. Jewish by birth is still Jewish. But – under the law – you are married to a Jewess, Ernst. Our marriage is invalid.’
My thoughts and words stumbling. ‘But we were married in Switzerland? Does that not count for something?’ Gibberish. ‘You’re not Jewish. You were born here.’ Nonsense from the boy.
‘Do you think that concerns any of them now? They still take you away in the night. Camp first. Questions later. That is why I had to be married at my parents’ villa. Safer for us all. And I’m sure there were plenty of Armenians in the last war that were married Protestant in Paris. Do you think that mattered to the Turks?’
We sipped our tea as other guests went past our little table, our little tableau.
Strange how the most shocking things are revealed in congenial places and moments. I imagine it is God’s amusement. Everything we touched cool white. Everything above us gold plaster. We apart from it all.
‘What does this mean?’ I said. The room empty again.
‘Our marriage would be annulled. That would be the least. But …’
‘But you are married to a German?’
She looked hard at me.
‘I am German, Ernst.’
‘You know what I mean. You were concerned that if I showed an official your birth certificate they might notice it was counterfeit. Or they would check up on it.’
‘I’m sure they would.’
‘So we are safe. Nothing has changed. No-one needs to know. No harm to us. I do not care. Your parents only did what they saw right. To protect you.’
‘But they left for Switzerland. I stayed here and met you. We cannot afford to leave.’
I no longer noticed if the mention of money was a slight at me. Just fact.
‘Why should we leave? I have a career now. These are our roots here. Germany is the capital of the world.’
‘Perhaps my father could pay for us to get out? Would you consider that?’
I leaned forward.
‘I have a job, Etta. For us. For our children to come. Travel is too restricted now. You have a forged passport as well.’
She sipped, shrugged, and it curdled me.
*
‘Ernst? It changes nothing with us, does it? But no-one official should see my papers. You agree? Not now?’
I reached across and our hands touched for the first time since we had sat. I saw the staff at the bar wink and whisper. We must have looked newly in love. All the more sweet on a Saturday in wartime when no-one knew what tomorrow dawned on.
The door crashed in. Four grey uniforms came laughing and slapping each other to the bar and the staff snapped up like rods, the laughter echoing louder off the high ceiling as if there were fifty of them. I withdrew my hand and Etta looked to them, back to my pale face.
‘What is it, Ernst?’
Their appearance had reminded me of Captain Schwarz. The black holsters at their waists, still startling to me. They laughed louder as their drinks came, caps to the bar. I recalled a death’s-head cap on my lap. His face leaning towards me.
‘What is your wife’s name? Where do you live, Ernst?’
‘Etta.’ I said her name as if for the first time. ‘I also have something to confess. And it might matter now.’ I pushed my cup away.
‘Etta. I did not get a lift home from Herr Klein the other night.’
Chapter 13 (#ulink_e6250d47-2253-5abd-819a-0ddfb279f192)
We returned to Erfurt station. Almost six, the west sun came through the glass of the concourse in golden shafts, motes of dust shimmering along them like rapturous lanes to a better place. From train-lines to throne. We walked through them, Etta’s body close into mine shivering like a child rescued from a river. The shimmers glowed on us. Chose not to take.
We spoke when our door closed.
‘Do you think he … they will check on us?’ as her coat fell to the floor.
I repeated what Klein had said.
‘I would hope the SS are too busy to examine one minor employee of a factory.’ I picked up her coat, hung it with mine. ‘My references from the university would have already been assessed. I’m sure everything is fine. I have no work records. No union history, no political preferences from the university. That is why I’m the one working on these drafts. It has been mentioned enough.’
‘But your wife is a Jew. They have not known that.’
‘You knew I was taking this job, Etta. And even I did not know that you …’
She sat, pulled off her hat like it was a rat, flung it to a corner.
‘I did not know you would be working for the SS. I thought you would be drawing silos. Not ovens for Jews.’
I sat beside her and she edged from my arm about to comfort.
‘They are ovens for the camps, Etta. Tools for the camps. Necessary. Buchenwald has a theatre. Cinema. Even a brothel.’ All Klein’s words again. ‘They need furnaces.’ I said this as factually as I could, but I thought on Paul’s words. He said he used to get the ashes to send to the relatives. That the government would charge the relatives for the cremation. I could not concede that they no longer needed the money. They did not even want to afford the coke for the furnaces.
‘Don’t, Ernst.’ She touched my hand. ‘Don’t be so … Do you remember when there was the Zionist plan? When we were younger? The Party and the Jewish leaders joined together to have them relocated to Palestine? The Attack newspaper – Goebbels’ paper for Christ’s sake – even gave away that souvenir medallion. Star of David one side, swastika on the other. And then the war came. The government could no longer pay for such a plan. Now it was a cleansing instead. My family went to Switzerland. By then I had met you.’ She held my hand tighter. ‘But who would have imagined this? Years of this.’
‘You are not Jewish, Etta. And imagine what? We are at war. We do not know what enemies we have or from where. The Americans imprison Germans, the Italians and Japanese. We are only doing the same.’
‘It is not the same.’ She let go my hand. ‘This is different.’
‘How?’
‘The conference the rest of the world had about the refugees. Remember that? No-one would take them. Every civilised country in the world refused them. Forced them to stay. The Party said they’d put them on luxury liners if another country would take them. You know who said yes? The Dominican Republic. The bloody Dominican Republic! They wanted to take one hundred thousand and everyone else just turned their backs. Ernst, you had to get my father to send you that Lotte book. A book set in Weimar about Goethe. A book set in our own cities. For Germans. He sent it in two pieces because they had banned it. They burn books, Ernst. What do you think they do? To Jews? If they ban even German books?’
I stood, went to the window and my tobacco. The motion and method of making a cigarette a catechism. To steady thoughts. To distract with our own hands. How often does one do that in a day? Concentrate on our hands. The smoker knows this. The rosary of it. The lighting of the paper the lesser part. It is the retreat that matters.
‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘The ovens are being increased to stem the typhus. The diseased dying. Imagine if that spread to the cities? What then?’
‘Ernst.’ She paused as my match struck and my hands cupped and drew life. ‘Why build more ovens, spend more money, in the expectation of more disease when that might not happen? Is not that money better spent on prevention? Is that what scientists do? Only find better ways to kill the infected? Would you go to the dentist whose only tool was a hammer? And does not the forced labour workers from the camps spread that disease? The ones in your factory?’
I blew my smoke into the room.
‘What are you saying?’
She seemed to grow small, her body retracting.
‘I don’t know. I do not know enough. You are building … you are working for a company that builds ovens for the SS. You say that Auschwitz is almost a city. And you have had no work until this … so … I don’t know.’ She looked at me. ‘It is just fear, Ernst. If you were drawing planes I am sure this feeling wouldn’t be … but … I don’t know.’
