Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  He had bought four packets. Barbara could not hide her delight – her lovely creamy complexion pinking slightly. She was bare-legged at the moment.

  ‘Yes, they are the right size. I could exchange them even if they weren’t. But … they are.’

  ‘I thought they might be.’

  ‘Thank you, John,’ Fritz Ketz said.

  Barbara nodded. ‘Yes.’ And then very softly, ‘Thank you,’ as she started to take Hodge’s gifts through to the kitchen.

  ‘Will you show me your paintings, sir?’

  ‘My paintings! You know about my paintings?’

  ‘I know about them and admire them. I looked at Heinrich Kasparbauer’s monograph on them. It’s at the Courtauld, in London. But I couldn’t read the German.’

  ‘We had to destroy most of my paintings. The Nazis did not like them.’

  ‘Do you have anything at all here, sir?’

  ‘Yes. I started again. Slowly.’

  ‘May I see them?’

  Fritz Ketz made his way across the room. A framed drawing and a painting were leaning against the wall.

  ‘Here,’ Hodge said. ‘Let me.’

  He seized the drawing and went over to the oil lamp with it.

  ‘That one is called Untἂter. It means …’ Fritz Ketz called through to the kitchen. ‘Bἂrbel. Hilf mir, bitte. Wie sage ich Untἂter?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Barbara’s voice called back. ‘Maybe “The Undoer”. For your drawing, maybe “The Man Who Destroys”.’

  The charcoal drawing showed Hitler dancing, while apparently playing football with skulls. In the background there were skeletons indicating a wider carnage.

  ‘It’s terrific.’ Hodge meant it. ‘Do you know James Ensor’s work?’

  ‘Yes, of course!’

  ‘An influence?’

  Ketz shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And Dix. Naturally. Dix.’

  ‘Again, maybe.’

  ‘This is your revenge against the Nazis, isn’t it? The people who did all this to you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. That one is simply what happened. A record. This one at the wall is my revenge against the Nazis.’

  Leaning the charcoal drawing reverently against the wall again. Hodge fetched the painting Ketz had indicated, and brought it to the oil lamp. Entitled ‘Spring Landscape at Erlenhof’ the work was painted in the expressionist manner the Nazis had tried so hard to destroy. It showed a path, trees, sky. Nature growing – full of colour. Full of life

  ‘Barbara got me some paint,’ Ketz said. ‘I have no idea where.’

  Hodge put the painting down. When Barbara emerged from the kitchen with the food, she found her father and the visitor embracing each other.

  Hodge looked at Barbara. ‘I’ll get this work to London,’ he said, nodding at the charcoal drawing and the painting. ‘I’ll get it to London if it kills me.’

  With much hilarity, Hodge was settled in an armchair at the head of the table ‘like a throne’ as Barbara said, as there were only two kitchen chairs round the formica table. ‘We burned the other two for fuel,’ Fritz laconically informed their guest. ‘That was 1943. Just after Stalingrad.’

  There was beer in a glass jug to accompany the meal. ‘Brewed by a local farmer,’ Barbara explained. ‘Cheers!’

  Hodge could see how Barbara had got herself drunk. It was powerful stuff.

  The meal was fried potatoes, bacon and greens.

  ‘The meat is Speck,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s like bacon. And for this green stuff, I have a confession. I looked it up in a dictionary before you came. It is Savoy Cabbage,’ she announced proudly. She looked at her father. ‘Wirsing,’ she added.

  To Hodge’s amazement, father and daughter burst into hysterical gales of laughter.

  ‘You see, John,’ Barbara said, trying to control the laughter enough to speak, ‘when I went to my Nazi school we learned a patriotic song about Wirsing.’

  ‘About Savoy Cabbage?’

  ‘Yes.’ The laughter burst through again. ‘It went like this.’ She sang loudly:

  ‘Wirsing noch jung,

  Wirsing noch klein,

  Wirsing das Deutschland von Morgen.’

  Father and daughter Ketz were rolling with laughter, the father leaning back, the daughter leaning forward. Hodge was laughing with them.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Hodge protested. ‘You’ve got to tell me what it means. You say it was a Nazi song?’

  Barbara gasped. She was holding her stomach from laughing. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Nazi song. It means Savoy Cabbage still young, Savoy Cabbage still small. Savoy Cabbage the....’ She screamed with laughter, and then steadied herself with a few more gulps of beer. ‘Savoy Cabbage the Germany of tomorrow.’

  ‘Savoy Cabbage the Germany of tomorrow? Thank God they were wrong.’

  What is the food situation?’ he asked, with his mouth full. ‘Is rationing working?’

  Barbara shrugged. ‘Theoretically, we get 214 grams of bread. That is per person per day. And then, 375 grams of potatoes. What is it, now? Yes. 14 grams of meat, 13 grams of lard and two grams, two wonderful whole grams, of coffee substitute.’

  ‘You said theoretically?’

  ‘Yes, in practice half of it doesn’t get through. If you want the truth we’ve been hungry for years.’

  Fritz nodded absently. ‘There is a black market here, of course. As no doubt there is in London. But Barbara is a clerk for the police. We have to be careful. She could lose her job. But enough about us. John, tell us about you.’

  Hodge shrugged. ‘I come from a poor place just outside London,’ he began. ‘It’s called Romford. It has a market.’

  Hodge paused, checking they were interested. They were. Barbara’s eyes were on his face, serious, absorbed.

  He went on: ‘My dad was a chandler. He died when I was five. Mum had a stall in Romford market. She sold second-hand books. It was magic to me. You know? I started reading as soon as I could reach up to get the books. When I found a book I liked I used to hide it so she couldn’t sell it. Mum went mad, sometimes.’

  Fritz and Barbara both laughed.

  ‘What books did you like?’ Barbara asked, speaking softly, smiling at him.

  ‘Oh, so much! Hans Christian Andersen.’

  ‘The Little Match Girl!’ Barbara cried out. ‘I wanted to cry.’

  ‘I did cry,’ Hodge said, to more laughter from his hosts. ‘I cry so easily. It’s embarrassing sometimes. It’s because I was brought up by women. Not only my mother but my sister, Helen. She’s fifteen years older than me. And I have another sister, Nell, two years younger.’

  Hodge’s words were falling over themselves. He couldn’t wait to tell Barbara and Fritz everything about himself. He wanted no secrets from them. No dark corners.

  ‘What else did you read?’ Barbara said. ‘At your mother’s stall?’

  He was soaring now. ‘Everything. H. G Wells. Conan Doyle. I read a book about the Greeks that got me started on philosophy …’

  ‘Philosophy!’ Barbara cried. ‘But you were a child. How old were you?’

  ‘Eighteen months,’ Hodge said. ‘I missed the end of Aristotle when they came to change my nappy. Then mum sold the book.’

  The Ketzs roared at that. Barbara laughed with her mouth open, tiny pearly teeth.

  ‘No, I tell you,’ Hodge was shouting, this was a joke he had used before. ‘Because of that market stall, I’ve read more books standing up than any man you’ve ever met.’

  Fritz Ketz was holding his stomach, doubled up laughing.

  Barbara looked at Hodge with tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve not seen Papa like that for years,’ she said softly, as if whispering a secret. ‘Not since before that bloody war.’

  ‘Good,’ Hodge said. ‘I’m glad.’

  Coffee was served. Barbara used the coffee Hodge had brought with him from the PX at Flak. Hodge asked about their experiences in the war.

  ‘The Naz
is stopped me painting,’ Fritz said. ‘They made me paint the anti-aircraft installations camouflage green. And the searchlights. A lot of the work was at Flak-Kaserne, where you are now.’

  Hodge nodded. ‘And later? When the French and then the American soldiers came?’

  Barbara gave him that direct, wide-eyed gaze of hers. ‘It was terrifying when the French were here.’

  Hodge nodded. ‘John Lindsay told me about the rapes.’

  Barbara had already fetched more beer twice. She was very drunk. Now she swigged down some more.

  ‘Oh, yes! Two of the girls in my school that I know of. Both younger than me, by the way. And our favourite teacher, Frau Lἂmmle. She gave me so much. She showed me I was good at languages. She lent me books.’ Barbara was near to tears. ‘Three of them, John. Three French soldiers, one after the other. She is very sick now. I go and see her. I don’t know if she will ever be better.’

  Hodge spread his arms, half in a wish to embrace her, to protect her, half in helplessness. His voice was gravelly with emotion when he spoke. ‘And the Americans?’

  Barbara nodded, seriously. ‘Totally different. You know, just the other day a girl I know, Karin, is her name, she was caught by an Ami patrol in a jeep like yours, out at night after curfew. They took her back to barracks. Four of them. She was terrified, sure they would rape her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They made her clean the cells.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘Yes. They gave her a warning, then drove her home.’

  ‘That’s how it should be, of course.’

  Barbara gave him a mischievous, almost flirtatious smile. ‘You know something, John? The Amis makes it easy for girls. They are open and friendly. A lot of girls I know secretly hope for an American husband.’

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘I don’t want a man at all. Ever!’

  Hodge thought ‘we’ll see about that’. But he said nothing.

  Later on, into the night, Hodge mentioned how pleased Lindsay was about their breakthrough at Kornwestheim, uncovering Gustav Rau as the link between Hoffmann and the Werwolf group.

  ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ Barbara said to Hodge, with an attempt at spontaneity which sounded false. ‘You know that Nazi you are looking for? Karl Wagner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There is a tunnel under his inn. It leads to the palace. Have you and Captain Lindsay searched there?’

  Hodge nearly yelled, ‘Why on earth have you waited until now to tell me?’ Instead he said ‘How do you know about the tunnel?’

  ‘It’s common knowledge,’ Barbara said.

  ‘I didn’t know about it,’ said Fritz, looking at her curiously.

  Barbara shrugged, looking and sounding more and more evasive. ‘In that case I suppose I must have got it from Heinrich Wittemann, the guard at Kornwestheim, the one working for Werwolf.’

  ‘Yes, I remember him,’ Hodge said. ‘I’ll tell Captain Lindsay, tomorrow.’

  There was a heavy silence in the room.

  Hodge looked at his watch. It was just after midnight. ‘I gotta go!’ he blurted out. The father and daughter laughed.

  ‘You can’t get back in the dark, John,’ Fritz said.

  ‘No? Why not?’

  There was a window in the Ketz main room which still had glass in it. It was so small John had not noticed it.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ Fritz said. ‘We have not seen darkness before, we city dwellers. Come and see a town with no light at all.’

  Fritz wiped the little window, which was none too clean, with his sleeve. He and Hodge peered out of it.

  ‘Stygian!’ Hodge yelled.

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ Fritz’s artistic eye roamed over a world with no light. A blackness. Nothing. ‘Now we are wild,’ he said. ‘Cave animals. The veneer of civilisation is very thin, isn’t it? The Nazis have shown us that.’

  ‘You have to sleep here,’ said Barbara.

  ‘No, I couldn’t possibly …’

  ‘If you try to drive that jeep with no street lights, after all the beer you drank, you will kill yourself. I can make up a bed for you on the floor.’

  Chapter 7

  Tuesday August 21 1945

  He made his goodbyes the next morning, firmly refusing breakfast, partly because he was hung-over, partly because he did not want the Ketzs using up their precious rations on him. As soon as he saw the jeep from the doorway, it was obvious it had been vandalised. There was a dent in the bonnet and the seats had been slashed.

  He moaned to himself. ‘Oh, no!’

  Heart racing, he climbed in and tried to start the engine. Nothing. It didn’t even turn over. He opened the bonnet and gazed inside. There were clear signs of damage but the spaghetti bolognaise of wires and lumps meant nothing to him. Leaving the bonnet open, up on its metal rod, Hodge hammered on the front door of the Ketz’s block of flats with his fists. Nothing. And the bell didn’t work. And of course they had gone back to bed. He rang all the house bells. A window opened on the first floor. A large man in a vest leaned out and yelled something angrily in German.

  ‘Entschuldigung!’ shouted Hodge. ‘Herr Ketz, bitte! Frἂulein Ketz.’ He indicated the damaged jeep with a waving arm. He wished he had worn his uniform.

  After a long five minutes, Barbara appeared, wearing the day dress she had worn to go to the Hindenburg Barracks at Kornwestheim.

  ‘The jeep’s been vandalised,’ Hodge blurted out. ‘Can you help? You don’t have to go to work, do you?’

  ‘No, you idiot. I’ve been passed to you, or at least to the Americans, for as long as you are here. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘Sorry! Sorry! Look, Barbara, I just cannot go back to Lindsay and tell him I’ve busted his bloody jeep. Not with all he has on his plate. It would be too humiliating for words. Is there a garage near here? Can you help me?’

  Barbara laughed.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because you are funny, my conquering hero. Is this how you got an Empire?’

  ‘Look, pack it in, will you? I need help here. Telephone a bloody …’ He stopped.

  ‘That’s right. We do not have a telephone. The lines are up again and some people along the road have a telephone, but it would be better to go there.’

  ‘Good. I’ll stay and guard the jeep.’

  ‘No, it’s better that you come. Although I wish you had your uniform.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘I don’t think they will come back, but I will ask a neighbour to watch the jeep.’

  The neighbour Hodge had met, still in his vest, was left watching the jeep, rumbling discontentedly but sweetened by RM100 from Hodge.

  Barbara led the way down Stuttgarterstrasse. Hodge, breathing deeply to calm himself, paced alongside her.

  ‘That’s Mathildenstrasse,’ Barbara waved a graceful arm as they crossed the road. ‘Our doctor used to live down there. Dr Pintus. He lived at number 6. You can see it from here, look. The Nazis took him away in 1938. He committed suicide, or so we heard.’

  ‘Jewish?’

  ‘Of course! He was a wonderful man. A real character and very sweet.’

  And at the next intersection: ‘This is Alleenstrasse. The synagogue used to be down here. The Nazis burnt it down. Crowds came out to watch. All cheering.’

  ‘How many Germans were Nazis? Give me a figure.’

  Barbara shrugged, but did not dismiss the question as he had half-expected. ‘Party members, maybe one in ten. Voters more like one in three. People who thought Hitler could give them what they wanted, or what Germany needed, most of them. The overwhelming majority.’

  ‘And the Jews? The camps? Did people know or not?’

  Barbara pushed her long hair back from her face as they walked. ‘About extermination camps definitely not. Nobody knew. Not until this year. But about the treatment of the Jews, deportation, prison camps, of course everybody knew that.’

/>   ‘In Ludwigsburg?’

  ‘Of course. The Jews were gathered together in Alleenstrasse where we just were. They were marched to the station with one suitcase each. People leaned out of windows and cheered. “Now they can’t be lawyers anymore.” “Now they can’t be doctors anymore.”’

  ‘That’s what they said?’

  ‘Oh sure! They hated the Jews. They didn’t see them as their countrymen, for some strange reason. They were jealous of them.’

  ‘Do you want to stay here? In Germany?’

  ‘It’s my country.’

  ‘Come back to England with me.’

  She shrugged, but showed no surprise at the offer. ‘I can’t leave my father. We are nearly there. One more block.’

  The garage, to Hodge’s great relief, appeared at the corner of Stuttgarterstrasse and Karlstrasse. The battered sign in Gothic lettering said Holzbauer Werkstatt und Reparatur. It occurred to Hodge to ask Barbara for German lessons, paid of course. He kicked himself for not thinking of that before. He genuinely wanted to learn German and it would be an excuse to see her.

  The garage forecourt was full of tractors and one car, an open-top tourer. A large-bellied man with spectacles wearing filthy blue overalls emerged from under a tractor and lumbered toward them, aggressively. He was around forty, Hodge thought.

  ‘Grṻss Gott, Herr Holzbauer,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Grṻss Gott.’

  Hodge was favoured with a cautious jerky nod.

  From a stream of fast gurgling German between Barbara and the garage owner, Hodge picked out only the word bezahlen, which he knew meant ‘pay.’

  ‘You have got some money on you?’ Barbara asked him, in the middle of negotiations.

  ‘Yes, plenty.’

  ‘OK. Herr Holzbauer says he can tow the jeep in and attend to it immediately, but it will cost, of course. Can you pay cash?’

  ‘Yes. And I can do it in dollars.’

  William Palfrey had been very generous in both pay and expenses. Hodge had plenty of money and had been told by Lindsay to keep plenty on him.

  ‘That’s good,’ Barbara said.

  She spoke to Herr Holzbauer again. Then back to Hodge. ‘He’ll do it for $75. Plus the cost of the parts.’

  Hodge winced, but did not hesitate. ‘Tell him OK but the cost of the parts in Reichsmarks.’