Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  Margarethe did not approve of women who behaved like Christl Göller. But the incident showed Mark was a bit vulnerable, and therefore safer. She liked that. That and the danger, of course.

  ‘Well?’ she said to Himmelfahrt. ‘You are not refusing me, I hope?’

  She was using the familiar form, du, to him for the first time. Himmelfahrt picked that up, knowing the convention that the woman offered it first.

  He flashed one of his rare smiles. ‘Thank you. That is very nice of you.’ He used the du form back to her.

  She led him onto the dance floor. They danced apart. But then a slower record came on, Cilia Black singing ‘You’re My World’, and the house lights dimmed. Himmelfahrt put his arm round Margarethe, dancing close. She held herself stiffly, only just touching him. But it was very enjoyable.

  John and Anna were now locked together, kissing hard in a dim corner of the dance floor. Doris, as an engaged woman, did not want a slow dance with Dieter Sinjen. This was bad news for the floppy-haired grammar school teacher, whose erection was becoming intrusive.

  Having Dieter’s arm round her made Doris miss her fiancé, Klaus, even more. She had known him since kindergarten. He was away, studying law at Heidelberg. Their families, the Röders and the Dürrs, were two of the oldest, most influential and most prosperous families in Ludwigsburg. Between them, they dominated the City Council.

  The Röders were Protestant and the Dürrs Catholic. But in this Ludwigsburg twist on Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets got on better than the Famous Five. They all went skiing in Zermatt every February. Klaus’s brother, Heinrich, and Doris’s brother, Andreas, jointly owned a plane and went for a spin together whenever Ludwigsburg’s cloudy skies permitted. Both families were delighted when Doris and Klaus got engaged.

  Doris Röder’s father had got her a part-time job in the office of Flanser & Söhne, a firm which rented out industrial equipment (Herr Röder was on the board). But she was just treading water until she and Klaus got married next July. Studying English again, too, was just to pass the time. After two weeks she was pretty bored with it, but she stayed mainly to see her new friends, Anna and Margarethe.

  On the dance floor, Doris Röder had been explaining her and her fiancé’s discussions with the architect to Dieter, slightly irritated by the need to dance at the same time. The problem was exactly how far the split level could compensate for the house being built on the slope of the mountain, near the top of the Roter Berg. Dieter Sinjen was nodding and swallowing hard, hoping that this tedious monologue might bore his erection into submission. So far it had not.

  The slow music relieved Doris of the need to jiggle about while talking, enabling her to tow Dieter back to the table and draw a proper diagram of the house, thus making the architectural issues easier to follow. Dieter watched her practised sketch emerging, trying desperately to ignore the lovely nape of her neck. He shook his head, making his hair flop around, smiled his characteristic smile, then made a couple of suggestions, one of which (having a cloakroom for coats as he had seen on his visits to Britain) the couple later used.

  Their discussion was becoming absorbed and animated, eventually enjoyable to both of them — Dieter Sinjen having, well, manfully, overcome a level of animal lust that Doris Röder, who was a virgin, was entirely unaware of. Doris had told Klaus she wanted to wait until after the marriage. Klaus had accepted that, as it was what Doris wanted.

  *

  Anna Schweinle was feeling a lot better. She was enjoying John crushing her body into his and exploring her mouth with his tongue. His left hand was on her bottom. He was very good! Who would have thought it, to look at him? Also, the unaccustomed — very unaccustomed — feeling of being second best to other women was gone. The evening was looking up.

  Ever since she was a toddler Anna Schweinle had thought boys were like amazing toys. An only child, her first memory had been sitting on the floor surrounded by boys. By the age of twelve, there were wall-to-wall boys in every room she entered. And they all flocked round her. She had had to leave her first school, the Eduard Mörike Realschule, out in Tamm because too many boys weren’t getting on with their work. Anna was fourteen at the time. She was transferred to an all-girls school, the Mädchenrealschule in Mathildenstrasse, in the centre of Ludwigsburg.

  ITT at Böblingen was her first job and she loved it. She would have walked through fire for her boss, Johanna von Gravensburg, who had looked after her, trained her, got her a pay rise, got her really interested in marketing. They were on du and first-name terms — very unusual for someone of Frau von Gravensburg’s age and seniority, with a lowly young subordinate.

  Anna Schweinle knew she needed languages, so she enrolled for English without telling Johanna, to give her a nice surprise. She was paying for the lessons herself for that reason — ITT would have paid, in full, and been happy to.

  But at the moment, deep down, Anna was fed up, despite enjoying kissing an English teacher and stroking his thick red hair. The problem was the Finnish girl, Fredrika Kuusinen. Anna had tried hard to make the girl feel welcome, and at first everything had been fine. They had had a giggle, for example, making up those answers for the television set questionnaire when there were not enough respondents.

  Later that day, Anna had invited Fredrika over for a meal and Fredrika had said no, giving no reason. Anna still did not understand it. She was hurt. She thought maybe the Finnish girl resented her prettiness — she thought of herself as pretty, not beautiful — and that made her sad. And now Fredrika was trying to take over, going straight to Johanna von Gravensburg, bypassing her. Johanna always backed Anna, she too was getting fed up with Fredrika, but Anna wondered miserably why girls of her own age disliked her so.

  Meanwhile, there were always the boys. John increased the pressure on her bottom, bending at the knees so he could press her sex against his cock. Oh alright, she thought, if you really want to. Mind you, it was very nice.

  *

  Unnoticed by everyone, Doris Röder shifted slightly in her seat as she explained the various stages of building planning permission to Dieter Sinjen, who was nodding vigorously. Now she could see over his shoulder, as she smilingly talked away. Her dark, slanting eyes glowed slightly brighter, her breath came just a little faster, there was a faint dawn blush in her cheeks as she discreetly watched John kiss and stroke Anna. She ordered another Fanta orange because her mouth was getting dry.

  *

  At the end of the evening, Hermann Schaffner invited them all to his house for his next big party. The evening, thought Hermann, had been quite satisfactory. Preparation time well invested. The object of his affections should be ready for the coup de grace by the time of the big party. Hermann always knew how long these things would take. He was quite certain of Margarethe. It was about time he had a woman.

  20

  John de Launay’s father, Graham Dale, changed his name to de Launay before applying to join the Maldon Hunt. The name change did not do the trick. He was still turned down as a pursuer unto death of foxes.

  Graham had a lowly job as a shipping clerk in the City. His spare-time dabbles on the stock market had failed. So John grew up in would-be-genteel poverty in the same sort of semi as Himmelfahrt, and not that far away, just off Eastern Avenue, one of the commuter strands into London. John’s early memories were of the family back garden being plagued with gambolling foxes, as if they had been notified of the Maldon Hunt’s rejection of his father and were thumbing their vulpine noses.

  But Graham de Launay did manage to cement what he regarded as the launching pad of the family’s ascent into the vaguely imagined upper classes. He just scraped together enough money for public school fees for the heir to the de Launay escutcheon; albeit for a public school so minor that when he first asked directions to it most locals thought it was a crematorium. At this seat of learning, Glendales near Grays in Essex, John de Launay became Sorcerer’s Apprentice to another clever boy, two years older: Neal Farraday, still in
short trousers, was teaching himself German and Esperanto, and de Launay joined in.

  The duo precociously drawled Esperanto and only Esperanto to each other at school, to the fury of masters and the bewilderment of other boys. They mounted the Esperanto world premiere of Waiting for Godot, reduced to two parts, to a bored but admiring cluster of parents. Vladimir and Estragon were not that much less comprehensible in Esperanto than they are in English, so surprisingly little of the original was lost.

  Progressing to long (in de Launay’s case very long) trousers, the two blood brothers spent school vacs in Germany, on language courses or as tourists. Farraday ascended to Cambridge. When he came down he got a job in his spiritual home, as he thought of it, West Germany. He became a buyer, at Grävenwald GMBH in Mannheim. He met an English girl in the city, Liz Durrant, another Germanophile. They plighted troth — i.e. got engaged, but with aspirations — then married, with John as best man.

  A year later, Graham de Launay put key to front door on returning from work and dropped dead of a heart attack on the threshold. The new widow Dale (she kept the original name) put the ancestral semi on the market in order to up sticks to Devon after a speedy remarriage. John himself had just graduated from Oxford and had a temporary job in a shop. Being John de Launay, the shop was Harrods.

  Where else would he go but Germany? He needed to move with all speed, before the sale of the de Launay pile was completed, rendering him homeless. He offered himself to firms in the Mannheim area using addresses supplied by his mentor, Neal Farraday. None of them had a vacancy, most did not reply. Time was running out.

  It would have to be a language school then. Even this was not as easy as one would have expected. Berlitz in Stuttgart had no vacancies, neither did any of the small Inlingua schools in the area. But at Sprachschule Stikuta someone had just let them down. Could Mr de Launay come at the end of the month? John de Launay had arrived in Ludwigsburg the year before Himmelfahrt.

  After ten years of assiduous and loving study by the grammar translation method, he spoke perfect German with a strong English accent at 78 rpm. Doggedly refusing to get a gender, case ending or plural wrong in the language he loved, he planned every word to the last syllable before he opened his mouth. People waited, sometimes for minutes, for de Launay to produce each flawless pearl of a German sentence, albeit with English pronunciation.

  *

  Now, John de Launay was applying his mind to the science of cooking. His manual was Philip Harbin’s The Grammar of Cookery, featuring the jolly bearded chef smiling on the cover in a jolly, blue-and-white striped chefs apron. De Launay taught himself to cook as he had taught himself German and Esperanto; reducing systems and processes to rules and formulae. Being John de Launay, the first dish he had mastered by algorithm was ratatouille.

  John’s cooking was tasty, his company benign, urbane and lifeblood to Himmelfahrt. Even the music he played was to the willing guest’s taste. Yet Himmelfahrt dreaded supper at John’s. He had been raised on Jewish portions; there was enough food at the Sabbath meal to stop a tank. By the time he and John ate, late in the evening, he was famished. And he was still famished when they finished.

  John was in the strip of kitchenette, at right angles to his box-like bedsit. He was putting finishing touches to the finishing touches. He was a very neat placer of sprigs, John — he could have graduated in the laying-on of basil.

  Himmelfahrt was in an armchair reading one of his host’s Simon Raven books, continuing reading from where he left off last visit. Boys Will Be Boys was a book of essays. Raven was describing his visit to Israel. Himmelfahrt vaguely assumed that with a name like Simon Raven the author was Jewish. A picture of a fleshily dark sybarite on the back cover confirmed this impression. Himmelfahrt lost interest in what he supposed was Raven’s return to his homeland, thus narrowly missing one of the many passages in his work which have been called anti-Semitic.

  John called out ‘Grub’s up’, from the kitchenette. The guest gleefully slammed the book shut and slid it back on the shelf between John’s Esperanto books and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

  The host came in carefully from the kitchenette, covered from neck to knees in a blue-and-white striped chef’s apron. He was balancing two plates with perfectly assembled minute smudges of mixed vegetables along with five, just five, slices of excellent German bread in a little basket.

  They sat down at the formica table by John’s couch-bed, where two bottles of dark Dortmunder Union beer were already open.

  ‘Hungry?’ asked John, affably.

  The chef’s apron discarded, the orange shirt was free to clash with his carrot coloured hair.

  ‘Yeah, a bit,’ confessed Himmelfahrt.

  John jumped up and switched on his elaborate open-reel Grundig tape-recorder, his splurge present to himself, cleaning out Graham de Launay’s estate. The Who Live at Leeds came over softly in stereo. John had checked that Mark liked The Who, his own favourite group, when his guest first came. He would not have played his beloved Wagner, because he knew that was not up Mark’s street.

  As they ate, Himmelfahrt chewing thoroughly to prolong the meal, they had a relaxed chat about the strikes back home. John thought strikers should be shot; they represented disorder. Himmelfahrt could see all eighteen sides of the question.

  They had had these conversations enough times by now to cut to the chase: the Starving Indian. The Starving Indian was a representative of helpless humanity. John thought he should be left to starve. Himmelfahrt thought that caring people, people like him, had a moral obligation to feed the Starving Indian — preferably with larger portions than John served up, but he didn’t say that.

  Suddenly Himmelfahrt understood John, at least as far as the Starving Indian was concerned. To John, the Starving Indian was an irregularity. Esperanto had no irregularities. It was an artificial language, a planned system. John wanted an Esperanto world run by prime movers like himself with no annoying deviations or discrepancies.

  ‘Another slice of bread?’ John offered, when metaphysics had run its course.

  Yeees! Oh God, yes! ‘Er … Yeah, thanks.’

  ‘What’s the latest score on the biedercomplaints?’ John drawled, blue eyes twinkling fondly at Himmelfahrt.

  ‘A hundred and three,’ said Himmelfahrt, deadpan. ‘My best day was last Tuesday. I slammed the front door, left half a hamburger under the eaves, forgot to wipe my feet and went for a leak too often in the night. He also said I left the door unlocked, that night we went to the telephone dance, but I didn’t.’

  John laughed. ‘Innocence is no excuse.’

  ‘Oh quite! Little Mr B was shuttling backwards and forwards to Sticky all day. He’s been given an award by Jäger Busses, Bus Passenger of the Month.’

  With the meal finished, all too quickly for Himmelfahrt, John lit up a black, gold-tipped Balkan Sobranie and waved it in the air from his wrist, like Noël Coward. He had brought the cigarettes over from Britain and smoked them in the flat only, eking out his meagre supply.

  The two chums, happily at ease with each other, comfortably gravitated back to a conversational favourite, the Nazis. De Launay, as Himmelfahrt knew by now, knew every stride of every jackboot. The expert yet again compared Hitler’s efforts at European unification to Napoleon’s, coming down in favour of the Führer, the more thorough and systematic of the two.

  ‘But then,’ said John, stretching out his long legs, relaxed, ‘having done the hard part, you’d think they of all people would have got things properly organised.’ He blew a plume of smoke. The smell of the sweetly pungent Sobranie tobacco filled the bedsit.

  ‘Final Solution, indeed!’ John shook his ginger head in a rueful, how-could-they-have-been-so-stupid way. ‘They made a complete mess of it.’

  ‘Not final and not a solution, eh?’ sympathised Himmelfahrt.

  ‘Absolutely, Mark.’ John’s bulging blue eyes twinkled. ‘I mean, there are still Jews alive, so that shows what a failure it was. But there’s still time
to get the nose callipers out, if you ask me. Finish off the lot of them. Switch the gas back on. Better luck next time.’

  ‘When are you going to play me your tapes?’ asked Himmelfahrt.

  John had recorded open-reel tapes with Neal Farraday, back in their Glendales days. They were sketches and songs; a Pete and Dud imitation, apparently, but always about the Jews and the Final Solution. Himmelfahrt had not heard them, but he had seen some titles on a tape, written in black ink in John’s tiny, neat handwriting: ‘Concentration Camp Rag’ (which he knew John played on his guitar), ‘Heaven Nose’, ‘Solly’s Death: It’s a Gas!’ ‘Circumcision By Meat Hook’.

  But again John wouldn’t play the tapes. He shrugged uneasily and said they weren’t meant to be listened to by others.

  ‘I must pay you my half for the meal,’ said Himmelfahrt, suddenly remembering.

  ‘Oh … right. Give me five marks,’ said John, carelessly.

  Five marks! Himmelfahrt could have got a massive Yugoslav meal at the Deutsches Haus in Bahnhofstrasse for that. And a couple of beers. But John used expensive ingredients.

  ‘Right,’ he said and handed over a 2 Mark coin and three ones.

  ‘OK, must wash up,’ said John, stubbing out the gold tip of his cigarette and unwinding himself. ‘Do stay on, Mark. Read a bit more, if you want.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Himmelfahrt, grateful to avoid the empty Biederzimmer until he was tired enough to sleep.

  John went through to the coffin kitchenette to wash up. Himmelfahrt opened the wardrobe door, looking for more beer (there was no fridge). Next to John’s best suit, half covering his guitar, hung an SS-Standartenführer black uniform, complete with medals — a metal iron cross (Knight Cross class), a gold German Cross and a black Wound Badge pin. A congealing, bloody mess on the uniform lapel Himmelfahrt recognised as dried tomato, presumably from a prototype ratatouille.