Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  Ello put her fingers to her lips, then closed the bedroom door. ‘He was dumped in my room like that. I found ...’

  Before she could go on, there was a banging at the door, and two women of about Ello’s age burst in. One of them was in a brown-gold uniform, with red epaulettes on the shoulders, the other wore a traditional Bavarian dirndl-dress. Neither wore make-up. Both had their brown hair in plaits.

  ‘Get out,’ Ello spat at them.

  ‘You are not to have any more visits from men. How many more times do we have to tell you?’ said the one in uniform.

  ‘Whore!’ the woman in the dirndl said. ‘Slut! Painted Jezebel!’

  Glaser looked astonished, but Ello spoke before he could. ‘My guest and I will find somewhere else to talk,’ Ello said. ‘Be quiet or you’ll wake my brother.’

  ‘He can’t stay here,’ the one in uniform said.

  ‘I know. He’s being moved later today.’

  ‘I’ll make sure it really is the brother,’ said dirndl. She looked into the bedroom at the still-sleeping Rudi.

  ‘Come on, Gerhard,’ Ello said. ‘We can talk outside.’

  Gerhard and Ello left the room first, followed by the two women. The women watched them out of sight down the corridor.

  ‘So you have block wardens at the university, too?’ Glaser said, with a nod back at the woman in uniform. He sighed. ‘We have one for our block of flats. She reports on everything.’

  Ello did not reply. She and Glaser walked out to the scrap of grass at the front of the building, facing Ludwigstrasse. ‘I wanted to keep Rudi here,’ she said. ‘But he’ll have to go to my parents’ now.’

  ‘Who did that to him?’ Glaser looked sad rather than surprised.

  ‘Elsperger. I’ve had the emergency doctor here. Aside from the beating, he’s taken an overdose of pills. Morphine.’

  ‘Deliberately?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Gerhard, I went through his things. He’s ... he’s joined the Party.’

  She started to cry. He took a step toward her, hesitated, then held her against his chest.

  Some passing students glanced at them curiously. Glaser glared back, and they looked away and hurried on.

  Ello disengaged herself. ‘Sorry about that. I’m a bit low at the moment. They caught my cat, Krafft. I found him strangled and hanging from the light in my room.’

  ‘Oh, Ello!’

  Ello shrugged, pulling herself together. ‘Rudi was due to collect the dynamite, in the Horch. But I don’t think he could face it. I’ll get word to Sepp. We’ll have to call it off. He can’t carry the dynamite back himself. They’re looking for him everywhere.’

  Glaser looked round. The university’s autumn term had just started. Crowds of students were rushing past them, more were coming towards them along the wide boulevard of Ludwigstrasse, from the direction of the Victory Gate. But there was nobody close enough to hear what they were saying.

  ‘Ello. Forgive me, but do you think Rudi told Elsperger anything? Perhaps under duress?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Ello said. ‘If he had, I would have been picked up by now.’

  Glaser nodded. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll collect the dynamite and bring it back by train.’

  ‘Gerhard ...’ She glanced down at his leg. ‘Are you sure?’

  Glaser smiled. ‘No time like the present. Our friends are still watching my car, parked outside the Ministry. I’ll get a tram to the station and catch a train to my mother’s house, in Ludwigsburg. Where is Sepp staying?’

  Ello thought for a second. ‘Give me your mother’s address. Sepp can contact you there.’

  Glaser told Ello the address. She did not write it down.

  ‘How will Sepp get back to Munich?’

  ‘He was planning to walk back, at night. Once he’s planted the bomb, and set the timer, he’ll make for Austria, again walking at night.’

  Glaser nodded. ‘Right, then. I’ll be off. Tell Rudi ... Tell him I wish him well.’

  Ello nodded absently. She turned and walked back into the university.

  Chapter Eight

  The two Political Police following Glaser sat in their open-topped car, chatting and watching Glaser’s green Opel, until late afternoon. Then they went into the Ministry of Justice to check up on him. They discovered he had gone.

  Chief Inspector Forster had given standing instructions that, if information emerged about Glaser, he was to be contacted at any time of the day or night. As the two police watchers returned to the Wittelsbach Palace to report their quarry’s absence, Forster was watching the late-afternoon showing of a Mickey Mouse film, with his children, Helga and Erwin.

  Christa Forster had not been happy when two uniformed SS on motorcycles arrived at her home, asking for her husband. But when his instructions about Glaser had been quoted to her, she reluctantly told them where he was.

  With the film well under way, the two SS walked down the centre aisle of the cinema, shining torches at the hundred and fifty or so adults and children, peering at faces, looking for the Chief Inspector. They couldn’t find him.

  They tried both side-aisles. Nothing. They discussed having the film stopped, before one of them remembered the balconies. They made their way up the vast curved stairs. There were another fifty or so people up there.

  Eventually they found Forster, chuckling away, next to his children. Mickey had been leading the mice in the defence of their homes against an invading army of cats. Just as the SS spotted Forster, Mickey had become a soldier, been given a machine gun and sent into battle. No wonder the Führer himself was said to be among the rodent’s admirers.

  Forster left the SS-men in no doubt that they had done the right thing by coming to find him. He left one of them with the children and set off with the other to Glaser’s flat. As luck would have it, the film had been showing at the Hofgarten Lichtspiele, five minutes from Galeriestrasse.

  *

  ‘Where is he?’ Forster said to Kaspar in the Glaser drawing room. ‘Where is your father?’

  Sprawled in his father’s armchair, unwashed and sporting three days’ growth of fluffy ginger beard, Kaspar smiled. Glaser had phoned him from the Hauptbahnhof, just before he left. He wanted to say goodbye, he had said, before his holiday in Switzerland. Kaspar had understood perfectly.

  ‘He’s on holiday,’ the youth said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Switzerland.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Does he usually leave without telling you where he’s going?’

  ‘No. But this is the first holiday he’s taken without Mama. I think he’s a bit fed up, you know. He’s a bit low. Yes. Not on top form at all. He’s been snappy to be quite honest with you. Ill-tempered. He ...’

  ‘All right, all right. Where’s his car?’

  ‘Isn’t it parked outside?’

  The SS-man had briefed Forster as they had crossed the Hof Garten to the apartment.

  ‘No, it is not. It’s outside the Ministry of Justice. If he was going on holiday, why would he leave it there?’

  ‘It’s probably broken down again. Look, you couldn’t get some of your people to get it started and bring it round here, could you?’

  Forster glared at him. He held up thumb and forefinger close together. ‘Sonny-boy, you are that close to a cell at the Wittelsbach Palace.’

  Kaspar shrugged. ‘Sancta simplicitas.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘O the glory of simple things.’

  Forster shot a glance at the SS-man. He was pleased there was only one there to hear such defiance. He addressed his subordinate – to regain face as much as anything. ‘Did Glaser have any luggage with him?’ As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Forster realised he shouldn’t have asked it in front of Kaspar. He was rushing, and he was making mistakes.

  ‘I’m not sure, sir. I don’t think so.’

  ‘He tends to travel light,’ Kaspar said, in the same irr
itating tone he had adopted since Forster came in. ‘For one thing he can’t carry much. It unbalances him. His leg, you know.’

  Forster and the SS-man made a quick search of the flat. It was impossible to tell whether anything was missing or not. The place was in a disgusting state – untidy and filthy. In the bathroom, there was toothpaste all over the sink.

  Forster and the SS-man came back into the drawingroom, where Kaspar appeared to be dozing. ‘You’re living like swine here, you and your father,’ Forster said to him.

  Kaspar shrugged.

  ‘If your father contacts you,’ Forster continued, ‘you are to tell me immediately. Do you understand?’

  ‘Naturally, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘It’ll be the worse for you if you don’t.’

  Kaspar grinned. The second the Chief Inspector left the apartment, he jumped up and telephoned Katya Bachhuber’s house. His Aunt Katya answered. He asked to speak to his mother.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said, booming cheerfully and very slowly down the telephone, which they now knew for certain was bugged – they could hear a click after the other person rang off. ‘Chief Inspector Forster was here. He asked some questions about Papa. I thought he phrased them very well. The man is a fine state official – a credit to the Third Reich. I hope they promote him. He does so deserve it.’

  His mother laughed and said ‘Kas-par!’ in that mock-exasperated way she had used with him since he was five. He loved it to distraction.

  Glaser had phoned Lotte, too, from the Hauptbahnhof, before he left for Ludwigsburg. It had left her feeling strangely happy. She told Kaspar she hoped his papa was having a good time on holiday. She then issued yet another invitation for him to join her, at Aunt Katya’s. Kaspar again turned it down. Lotte rang off before her son could say anything else that would get him into trouble.

  Kaspar went back to his father’s armchair and reflected on the toothpaste. It had swastikas running through it. When he and his father had first seen it on sale, Glaser had said ‘We’re not buying that. The bastards may have invaded everything else, but at least we can keep them out of the bathroom.’

  But the second his father had rung off, after his call from the Hauptbahnhof, Kaspar had gone down to the chemist’s shop and bought a tube of swastika toothpaste. He had given his teeth a vigorous brushing with it, then squeezed the rest all over the sink. He had no idea himself why he had done that.

  *

  ‘Herr Glaser is wanted by the authorities. Where is he?’ Forster asked Lotte, Magda and Katya Bachhuber, at the imposing Bachhuber family home overlooking the Isar.

  The tall, willowy Katya looked enquiringly at her younger sister.

  ‘He’s on holiday in Switzerland,’ Lotte said.

  Forster stared her in the eye. ‘Frau Glaser, you know and I know that that is not true. May I remind you that withholding information from the Reich authorities is a serious matter. Misleading the Reich authorities is a criminal offence. So I ask you again, Frau Glaser. Please tell me the truth this time. Where is your husband?’

  Lotte gave a languid blink worthy of Ello, or indeed of Elisabeth Bergner herself. It was followed by a very pretty smile. ‘He said he was going to Switzerland ...’

  ‘Bit sudden, isn’t it?’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s how he is.’

  ‘Why would he leave via the office?’

  ‘Last-minute work. He can’t keep away.’

  By now Forster had radioed for more men. They were searching the Bachhuber residence, although the Chief Inspector did not really expect to find anything.

  ‘Magda, come with me a moment, please,’ Forster said. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

  Magda, in smock-style navy-blue dress over a white blouse, did not look worried. She followed Forster into a small lounge, decked out in yellow silk wallpaper, with black lacquer screens dotted about, in the Chinese style. Forster waved away two SS who were turning out a Chinese black bureau, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The Chief Inspector and the schoolgirl sat down side by side on Empire chairs.

  Forster’s mouth turned up at the corners. ‘Magda, my daughter is your age,’ he lied.

  Magda nodded encouragingly.

  ‘I’m proud of her, my Helga. She is a good National Socialist. And I think you are, too.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Magda said. ‘I’m in the BdM, where I learn to serve our Führer in any way I can, small or ... big or small.’

  Forster nodded. ‘Good girl. So you understand that the needs of the Party come before all other loyalties, don’t you? Even before loyalty to the family.’

  Magda nodded vigorously, wide-eyed. ‘Oh yes. I too belong to the Führer.’ It was the slogan from a BdM poster

  ‘Quite so. And today’, Forster said, ‘your opportunity is indeed to serve the Führer himself. An honour that is not given to many. In fact, Magda, I envy you the chance this day presents to you. Will you take your chance? Will you help the Führer?’

  Magda nodded again.

  ‘Magda, your papa is by no means a bad man. But he is misguided. We wish to make that clear to him. That is all. We won’t hurt him. You follow?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Good girl. Where is he at the moment?’

  ‘In Lucerne. Pension Walther. That’s Walther with an h. W-A-L-T-H-E-R. He goes there every year, in September.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mmmm. Yes.’

  When Forster and the SS had gone, Magda put her arms round her mother. ‘I suppose Papa’s gone to Grandma’s,’ she said.

  Lotte hesitated, but only for a second. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think he has.’

  ‘That Forster man laughed at my diary,’ Magda said. ‘And he talks to me as if I’m a half-wit. I hate him.’

  Chapter Nine

  It was the first time Glaser had been back to his childhood home since his father’s funeral three years ago. He telephoned his mother from Stuttgart train station, while waiting for the local train. It was a flying visit, he explained; he had no luggage. There were no questions in reply. The old lady faced life with grim acceptance.

  As the branch line carried him home, he hungrily took in the vineyard-laden slopes. They soothed him. The taxi from the station took him past the frontage of Ludwigsburg’s yellow baroque eighteenth-century palace. As a boy, Glaser had woken up to it every morning. He could see it across the extensive, sculptured formal grounds from his bedroom window. He wanted to touch it for reassurance, like a child.

  The taxi drew up in Mompelgardstrasse, at a solid, red-painted patrician townhouse, opposite the side-entrance to the grounds of the palace. Glaser was anticipating what specialties his mother would have ready for him to eat. The old lady did not disappoint. The first damsons of autumn were just coming into season.

  ‘Zwetschgenkucha!’ Glaser cried blissfully, in Swabian dialect, as he bit into his mother’s damson flan. It was the month of new wine, and onion tart. And soon it would be time for the Martinsgans – the goose eaten in November. He felt, once again, in tune with the seasons.

  Nature was still there, underlying life. There was a force of the spirit safe from the Nazis.

  Even though it was only mid-afternoon, Glaser asked for wine. Old Frau Glaser joined him in a Viertle of Goldberg, the purest gold, tasting like sunshine. The Swabians consume the entire harvest themselves, so Glaser could never have got hold of it in Munich. He shut his eyes as he drank it; it took him back, not to any one moment or part of the past, but back into some generic better time which blotted out the present. He was grateful for that; it was a balm to his soul.

  ‘You look ill,’ his old mother said. ‘Thin. Like when your leg was amputated.’

  Glaser ignored that. ‘How’s things?’ he said.

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Yes. How’s things?’ He loaded the phrase with bitterness. He meant: ‘How much more have the Nazis taken over?’ He meant: ‘What has happened to the Jews lately?’

  *

  Gl
aser had absorbed a Jewish presence, as he was growing up. Just along the street there was a graceful house, with elegant sash windows and bottle-green doors, each with red-and-white painted panels. Glaser used to gaze in, longingly, every time he passed it, with his satchel on his back, on his way to school.

  It was in this house that Joseph Süsskind Oppenheimer – now known as ‘Jew Süss’ – had lived. Oppenheimer, ostensibly Finance Minister, had been Count Carl Alexander of Württemberg’s de facto regent. He had masterminded Württemberg’s prosperity; starting Ludwigsburg’s porcelain industry.

  But as soon as Carl Alexander died, Joseph Oppenheimer was taken up the hill to the local prison, in Asperg, and tortured. He confessed to all manner of crimes he hadn’t committed. After due process of the law, he was executed. Glaser had always hated the injustice of it.

  Old Frau Glaser turned the full force of her clear, still beautiful, china-blue eyes on her son. She wrote long but infrequent letters, and would receive but not make telephone calls. So there was news – about the town’s Jewish population. Rather too much news, in the old lady’s view.

  ‘I wrote to you about Max Elsas,’ she said.

  Glaser nodded. Max, the patriarch of the Elsas family, had started Elsas and Sons, the textile factory, the biggest in Ludwigsburg. He was a city councillor. On his seventieth birthday, he had been honoured by a civic reception at the enchanting Monrepos Castle by the lake. The entire town turned out for it. The photographs of the Glaser parents at the reception, smiling next to Max and Ida Elsas, faced Glaser on the hundred-year-old Kerner dresser.

  At the beginning of last year, Herr Elsas had been elected to Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce. In April of this year, he had been deprived of all civic offices, was forced to sell his factory for a pittance, had his bank account seized by the bank, and was banned from the local inn, where he had been a regular at his Stammtisch for fifty years.

  ‘I went to call on him,’ Frau Glaser said. ‘He’s seventy-five now. He said they might as well wall him up in his home. He doesn’t go out any more.’

  Glaser nodded, his face a mask. ‘And Dr Pintus?’