Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  I had cut my hand, my left hand, on a china cup when Paul was in our home. A small cup, a small cut. I had squeezed the broken china between my fist and cut my palm. Etta had dressed it but over the month I was sure it had become infected.

  Every night I sat on the edge of the bath and peeled back the bandage to examine. I washed it. Prodded it. Plucked away the dead skin and pressed the pus around my palm. There was something delightful in it. Moving a wound. Pressing it. Feeling it roll and wincing from its pain. I wrapped it back up, looked at myself in the mirror without blinking until my face began to change shape, until my eyes disappeared and my features became someone else’s. And then I would blink. And Ernst Beck’s face would come back. And then I would go downstairs for supper. I told Etta I was dressing the cut myself. No need for her to attend.

  All of this led to Etta leaving the front door open for me after five o’clock. I could work with my hand easily enough but our front door was solid and stiff. I would normally need both hands to open it with my key. She left the door on its latch every evening so I could just push myself in. I would usually call out, put my bag to the floor but today I heard Etta talking from the parlour. Not to another person. Not in the room. It was that loud voice one uses on the telephone, the stressed diction to speak and be heard over the wired crackle.

  ‘Will Ernst be all right after so long? Will he want this?’

  My bag stayed on my shoulder. My fist clenched on my wound, my nails pressed into the cut.

  ‘Can we do this, Paul?’ she said. ‘If Ernst is lost we are all lost.’

  I came into the room. Slammed the door to the wall. She held the receiver to her breast open-mouthed. Like a hooked fish. A fish caught.

  ‘What about Ernst?’ I asked, dropped my bag as loud as I could. ‘Why am I lost, Etta?’

  She put the telephone to its cradle before I had crossed the room. I snatched it up, almost clipping her with it as I did so. She flinched. The bony receiver hummed mockingly in my ear. The other voice gone. Etta stepped away as I put it back. Her arms folded, head down.

  I did not know what to say. Let her answer my silence.

  ‘Ernst,’ she said. Walked the room in small circles. ‘You do not understand.’

  ‘What do I not understand? I understand that you are talking to Paul when I am not here. I understand that you are talking about me. To him.’ I watched her pace the room not looking at me.

  ‘It was not about you. It is another Ernst.’

  I gripped my wound. Felt it bleed cold.

  ‘Who? You expect me to believe that? You are talking to Paul about another Ernst. Is it another Paul also?’

  The last to know. The last to know. Bedsits are full of men who were the last to know.

  ‘Sit down, Ernst.’ My mother’s voice.

  ‘I do not want to sit down.’

  ‘I do.’ And she put herself on our new sofa, crossed her legs.

  ‘We did not want you to know because it is dangerous. But Paul and I now need your help. He was going to explain it to you himself. Next month. I did not want you to find out about it like this.’

  I went to her. Stood over her.

  ‘Etta?’ She was so calm.

  ‘Roll me a cigarette,’ she said.

  ‘You do not smoke.’ But I gave her the one I had rolled for my home from work coffee. The best one of the day.

  ‘I want to smoke.’

  I passed her the matches. My hands shaking too much to help her light. She lit and blew out the match, put it back in the box. A neat wife. She took a deep draw without coughing. She had done this before. How much did I not know about my wife? About the first woman. The only woman in the world.

  ‘Do you know of Ernst Thälmann? That is who we were talking about.’

  I had never heard the name.

  ‘We would have been school-children. He was the leader of the KPD. Our communist party. Opposing Them in the elections. They banned all other parties when they won and he was imprisoned. He has been in solitary confinement ever since.’

  ‘A communist? You were talking about a communist?’

  She looked up at me. Put her thoughts into me rather than speak.

  ‘Christ! Etta. Are you a communist as well?’

  ‘As well as what, Ernst? I am a German.’

  ‘When it suits you to be!’ I turned away. ‘So Paul is a communist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you?’ I faced her.

  ‘Yes.’

  I felt sick. My wife. A Jew in their eyes. Now a communist. My work almost every day surrounded by the SS.

  I could not speak. Scared to speak to my own wife. She went on.

  ‘When the Party won, Thälmann wanted to join with the SDP to create a general strike to bring them down. The Party rounded them all up and recreated Germany. Would you not want the old Germany back? Back from what we have become? Do you think the Russians are not going to win? Where would we be if we were leaderless when that happens?’

  I did not understand. Could not. And it all began to fall out of her, with relief. Her relief. Mine lost.

  ‘I have not been meeting my friends at the café. I never have. We meet up with others in the KPD.’

  ‘We? You mean with Paul?’

  ‘No,’ she rubbed her hand, as I was rubbing mine. ‘Not always.’

  ‘What are you doing to me! All your life has been a lie!’

  ‘Ernst. You need to calm down.’

  ‘Calm? Etta, you could be killed. We could be killed. I have seen the camps. I almost went through the gate, remember? You have no idea what you are doing.’

  She stood.

  ‘Exactly, Ernst. You must see it now. That fear you felt. What were you afraid of?’

  ‘Afraid of? I was being pushed into a prison!’

  ‘And you knew you might not get out again. That was it wasn’t it? Surely you see now?’

  I took the cigarette from her fingers.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Ernst. That last one you were drawing. The continuous one. Paul says it could—’

  I froze.

  ‘Paul? How does he know? Did he look at my plans?’

  ‘No.’ She looked out of the window. ‘He did not have to. I drew them for him. That day I asked you what you were working on.’

  My wife. My devious wife. I was dead. Today. Or most assuredly in the coming weeks. The knock on the door coming. She turned her back to me. Head in her hands.

  ‘I copied it. When you were asleep.’

  Head still in her hands. Not for me. Not for herself. For betrayal.

  I left the room. Went through the kitchen, the kitchen of the house and rooms given us by my employer. I went to the walled garden. Dragged hard the cigarette. I could only look and think on how overgrown the garden. A husband’s work. Some spite in me to ignore it. Leave it for her next fool. But if I left her it would not be her house. She would be on the street. Then she would think differently. I threw the smouldering paper to the grass. Hoped it burnt the place down. Her hands came to my back. Head on my shoulder. I stiffened and she retracted. And then I remembered: She had said that Paul needed my help, that they needed my help. Help how? Etta took a breath.

  ‘Thälmann is being transferred to Buchenwald. Next month. From Bautzen.’

  ‘What has that got to do with me?’

  ‘If he is at Buchenwald … it may be possible to arrange an escape.’

  ‘An escape? Are you all insane?’

  She went under the door-frame. Crossed her arms.

  ‘Ernst. You can help us. You can get into Buchenwald.’

  ‘I …? What? I would not worry about that, Etta. You, me and Paul will be in there soon enough.’ Gallows humour. Understood the phrase now.

  I looked to the garden walls, our neighbouring houses, fearful of listening ears, then remembered they were all empty.

  She stayed in the doorway.

  ‘It is a month before Thälmann is sent there. We can prepare a plan. T
hey are moving him for execution. We are sure of it. Bautzen prison is not safe now. Now the advance is coming.’

  ‘Who is we? Because I can assure you it is not me.’ I crossed to her. Held her shoulders. Reasoned against the unreasonable. The ridiculousness of it.

  ‘Etta. I have a good job now. A career in a fine company. A future. Look at our home. Why would we risk all this?’

  ‘Why would Paul? He has more to lose than you. At least he cares for his country.’

  I let go of her. Turned away.

  ‘You know who talks like that, Etta? People who can afford to talk like that.’

  ‘Ernst. They tried to blow their great leader up two weeks ago. They know it is finished. They themselves want rid. They want a new order. The Allies will not deal for surrender while he is still there. You have a chance to help rescue a real leader. A man the Allies would accept.’

  ‘How? How do you know all this?’ I squeezed the bandage on my palm, thought of hundreds of thousands packed on cattle trucks from Hungary. The ovens burning all day, all night. I stormed past her, back into my company house. My company. ‘I only want what is best for you, Etta. For us.’

  She spoke to my back as I went to the parlour, to my bag, to my tobacco that I needed more of each day.

  ‘I want more than that, Ernst Beck!’

  I could hear her making coffee as I rolled and lit. I sat and looked at the bandage. The black and the red of it mixed with the white cloth.

  Hundreds of thousands. I saw the faces pressing me on through the gates, wondering why I was shouting to the SS. The war that had seemed so far away from our green medieval land now falling on us. And it had come from my own bedroom. I was the young man entrusted to draw up plans for the SS because the floors were riddled with old ties and faiths. Unions and communists. Was that the only reason? Nothing special or promising about Ernst Beck. He was just new and able. Trusted. As Klein had said: ‘Scratch hard enough, Ernst.’ Out of my own bedroom, my own bed.

  She came into the room with coffee, like it was any other day, like it was yesterday. Her normally pale face red and mottled as she put it down. We looked at each other. And that was enough.

  ‘Ernst,’ she said. Said with softness. ‘I’m sorry. I am so sorry.’

  There is the man you were the last year, and then there is this day. And nothing is the same.

  I stood and held her. Breathed her in as she rested into me. Rocked each other. The last couple on the dance floor.

  ‘You smell like me,’ I whispered. Cigarette smoke in her red hair. She looked up.

  ‘I am you,’ she said.

  Chapter 26

  He must have thought on it when the telephone went dead. Stuffed his pipe and thought on it. Smoked and walked his elegant rooms and thought on it. My only explanation for what happened the next day.

  No sleep the night before. We had lain awake talking, held our voices low as mice. We talked of the jazz club in Fischmarkt we used to go to. The friends that had gone now, how Paul and I never danced and that I really didn’t like jazz anyway, but the club was where you went. I told her that when I was boy I was scared of the cathedral. The way it stood on the man-made hill, foreboding as a pyramid, and dominated every quarter of the city, every street you looked down. I used to think it was following me, that it was circling the town on rails, keeping its holy sight on all of us. Waiting for us to sin. Marking boys who did not say their mother’s prayers. I had never told anybody this.

  She told me how terrified she was when her parents changed their name and had bought new birth certificates. It was the only crime she had ever done, that her father had ever done. Having to commit a crime to stay safe. To be a criminal to only protect your family that had been born wrong.

  Every memory of hers made mine seem small. I didn’t tell her about hiding under the arches of the bridge when I had broken one too many glasses for that year and my father had worn his patience out on me. I hadn’t had to change my name and run away.

  ‘It’s still me, Ernst.’ Held my hand. ‘It will be a better world without them. Thälmann is a good leader. If we can get him out of Buchenwald his presence will make a difference.’

  ‘Nothing makes a difference. Nothing.’

  ‘One man can make a difference. You can make a difference.’

  I said nothing. Weighed all of it. Making patterns of hundreds of faces in the stippled white of the ceiling in the dark and concluded only that I, we, did not deserve this. I could not imagine men like Klein having such problems, such consciences. Loyalty only to themselves, to their company. Work well for both. Step up, step on. Keep up, keep up. Slicked hair, slicked smile. No hundreds of thousands of faces. No bodies in his mind. He had never seen them. No woman in the bed next to him somehow born wrong.

  ‘Remember, Ernst, we are only making ovens … We are only pushing and pissing paper.’

  That is all you had to do, what a man in a corporation should do. Sell the ovens. Their use not your concern. The shares, the stockholders your concern. Men with families and portfolios to support, to support your country. But what if you said no? What if every company said no when the SS came to call? What would have happened? My first economics professor, Professor Litt, he who was carried out by his elbows by the SA, told us that the first great companies of the world, some that existed today still, were all founded on slavery. Their diversity into other avenues and the ability to finance other companies based entirely on the profits of slavery. But without that initial success we would have no electricity, no light bulbs, no refrigeration, nothing. Without the profits of slavery we would have no industry. This he said plain:

  ‘If this had not happened, slavery would still exist. And in the countries where this did not happen it still exists. Suffering always births change, births man forward. The only thing to fear is that the rich that control do not have insane men at the helm. And that they answer to the people.’

  And then they came through the door and carried him away.

  I thought on that all night. Thought on it at my board, staring numbly at the plans for a sub-camp too far east to be real to me, another world. And then Sander’s voice came over the speaker at the back of our hall.

  ‘Ernst Beck to Topf’s office. Beck to Topf’s office. Immediately.’

  I unclipped and folded my plan, locked it under the ISIS’s wheel. My colleague opposite lowered his glasses, stared at my straight face. I pretended not to see. Looked down the aisle expecting to see Klein or Prüfer. No-one. I would walk alone. I could feel the eyes of the floor at my back. My bandaged hand burning.

  Before I entered the building that morning I had checked the car park for cars with runes on their plates. You should not start work in such a way. If you start work by noting which cars are present you should not work in such a place. That is how the dishonest and the incompetent start their day. Looking for the men who might catch them. The successful, the incumbent, inspect only their post.

  The Topfs’ offices were on the third floor. I had never met them, never seen them. Most of their time spent at their villa, the day to day running of the firm handled by Sander. Ludwig and Ernst Topf, one of them with my own name, as Klein had pointed out. When you meet someone with your own name there should be a sense of brotherhood. Already friends. Or is it the other? One namesake judges the other. Are you a better Ernst than I?

  I knocked and waited. Still alone. I had expected Klein at least. A new voice called me in. The voice of my pay-cheque.

  A double office. Two oak desks like a shipwright’s. Drawers and drawers they probably never used, a desktop larger than my bed. I did not know the Topfs shared an office. The surprise of this lost when I saw Paul sitting by the window, his hat resting on his knee. Ludwig Topf stood from his desk and waved me in. Paul stayed seated, tipped two fingers to his forehead in salute.

  ‘Ernst!’ Topf declared. ‘So pleased to meet you at last. Come in. I am Ludwig. My brother not here today. Take a seat. Here. Before me.’
/>   When you drown it is in pieces. Your feet are swallowed. But you are not drowning. Your knees next, your waist, but you are only in deep water. Only when the water reaches your head does the drowning take place, although you watched it crawl up you. It was not happening then. Pieces. You drown in pieces. You see its inevitability. It is only the head that drowns. The body is immersed but it is only when the water goes over your head that you drown. You were drowning all the time. But it happened only when it went over the part that breathes, the part that speaks. The part that knows. Knew it was coming. And then it is too late.

  I took my seat.

  ‘An honour to meet you, Herr Topf,’ I said. A chubby face, as angelic as Prüfer, but younger. A well-fed baby producing a well-set man. He had never gone hungry in his life. Confident. The stripe in his suit, the lay of his lapels was a year’s savings for me. His jacket swished like a silk curtain. He bowed. To me. Saw the bandage around my hand.

  ‘Whatever have you done there, Ernst?’ He sat.

  I pressed the wound. Ashamed of it. Assured by it.

  ‘A small cut, sir. It does not affect my work.’ I looked at Paul as I pressed it.

  ‘You know Herr Reul of course?’ He indicated Paul. ‘To think that my new star draughtsman is a friend of one of our finest customers! How provident! Ernst, you should not hide your light so much. You should have mentioned such in your interview. I would have moved you to the third floor by now!’

  I blushed this off.

  ‘I considered myself fortunate to be with Herr Klein’s department, sir. Earn my position. Help with the war effort.’

  I turned my chair to gather Paul into view, as Klein would have done, make a triangle, an equal triangle of us rather than Paul behind me.

  ‘I have mentioned so, sir. To Herrs Klein, Prüfer and Sander.’ Mention all the names. ‘I do not like to boast. I was happy to be given the privilege.’