Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  ‘A fine response for a gentleman.’ He said this with a true pleasure.

  I knew he was making Paul feel special. The ovens were only a third of Topf’s business. Maybe Paul did not know this. My power over him. But a good businessman makes every client his best. Everyone gets a Christmas box. A ham for New Year. For that is when they might start looking for new suppliers as the tax year ended. The ham not because they liked you.

  Because they wanted to keep you.

  ‘Ernst,’ Topf said, ‘Paul tells me you have let him know of new oven designs. Particularly for crematoria.’ His chin to his palm, elbow to desk. Paul silent. I did not look at him, swallowed hard.

  ‘I asked Herr Reul his professional opinion. When I began, sir.’ I looked at Paul. ‘I am not sure of what design he refers to?’

  Direct. Direct to the man with the fedora on his knee.

  Paul shifted in his seat.

  ‘I am in the position, Ernst, to purchase an interest in a third crematoria in Weimar. Turn it to Topf ovens. I only mentioned to Ludwig how proud you were to devote yourself to the designs. That you had asked my opinion. Only as a customer. A future customer.’ He brushed his hat. ‘I informed him that you were only chasing business. The SS not Topf’s only trade.’ He grinned at us both. ‘A sound business mind, Ludwig, no?’

  ‘Very,’ Ludwig said. ‘We would be bankrupt if we relied only on the SS. One year rolls into the next chasing bills. Private use is our bread and butter. You have done well, Ernst, to chase business elsewhere.’

  I thanked him. And had nothing more to say. Nothing more to want to say. I did not know what had been said before I came into the room. Do not use your tongue to bait your own trap. I was the poor schoolboy footballer again. Heeding my father. Letting the Weimar boys win. So as I would have kit next season.

  ‘Ernst,’ Topf said, ‘do we have any new designs that Herr Reul would be interested to purchase?’

  ‘I do not know if Herr Sander and Herr Prüfer are developing anything commercially, sir. I understand that I am only working on government contracts.’

  ‘And you showed one of these to Herr Reul?’

  ‘I sought a professional opinion. I did not want to make a mistake. It was for the larger crematoria at Birkenau. For annotation when I first joined.’ I did not look at Paul. ‘I have shown him nothing since, sir.’

  True. It was my wife that had betrayed. Not I.

  ‘But, as you say, I was seeking sales at the same time.’

  Ludwig Topf drummed his fingers on the green leather of his desk and we sat in silence other than that solicitous sound. He sniffed, and something went down the back of his throat.

  ‘I could have you fired for that, Ernst. Or worse. But then no business ever proceeded without risk. Thanks to your pursuit of trade Herr Reul wishes to purchase three new Topf ovens for his new premises and replace two in each of his current crematoria. He has placed an order worth three hundred thousand marks. Perhaps the Special Ovens Department is a waste of you! Perhaps salesman is more your line than draughtsman, eh?’ He grinned at me. That Klein grin. They always have the same grin. The clown. The disfigured comprachicos of Victor Hugo. The smile of the soulless forced to smile.

  ‘I know my position, sir.’ I heard myself breathe out. ‘I only hope to be competent in my work.’

  He relaxed, relaxing me.

  ‘If only I had you here five years ago, Ernst. We would have put Kori of Berlin out of business by now.’

  Paul coughed. I imagined him as a raven sitting on my shoulder. Observing. Observing Topf. Watching morsels from my mouth. He cawed at last.

  ‘I have only one request, Ludwig,’ he said.

  Topf spun his chair to him. Did not ask. Waited.

  Paul played with his hat.

  ‘Perhaps – if it would not be too much trouble – I would like to visit Buchenwald. In August. I will be busy this month with my new premises but I would like to see the new trundles and muffles.’ He brushed his hair back. ‘See how they cope.’

  ‘You would not be permitted to see them in operation, Herr Reul.’

  ‘Of course,’ Paul agreed. ‘Out of operation naturally. I would like to see how they cope with the stress.’

  Topf looked to me, back to Paul.

  ‘Do you expect your own ovens to be so stressed?’

  Paul did not even blink. I sat and watched them as if from a stage.

  ‘The British and Americans are in France. The Russians everywhere, Ludwig. I expect that all our country’s businesses will be stressed soon enough. Companies expand at the beginning of wars and at their ends. That is why I am expanding now. You know the markets, Ludwig. Topf should be in there also, no?’ He waved a hand. ‘What is losing a war if it cannot be made an advantage? Would you think the Russians will bring their own ovens?’

  This was not a talk for me. I was the boy under the wedding table eavesdropping, my face gobbling stolen cake as bridesmaids giggled over the young men. I would get up and leave if I could. But rooted. Waiting for dismissal.

  Paul had uttered the unthinkable, the impermissible. Germany had lost. He intimated. Inevitably. Make do with that. Move on that.

  Topf only nodded.

  ‘Three hundred thousand marks. That is agreed?’

  Paul pulled his chequebook.

  ‘May I?’ He indicated Topf’s desk to write on and stood. Never looked at me.

  ‘Ernst,’ Topf’s voice went high as the pen moved over the cheque. ‘I will inform Herr Klein to arrange a visit to Buchenwald for yourself and Herr Reul. You are dismissed.’

  I stood and bowed to them both. Paul ignored.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Topf.’

  I was at the door when I heard the cheque tear free.

  Topf called to my back.

  ‘Good morning, Ernst. And I was serious about the top floor. And the salesman. You see what a world without unions and socialists can do? How is your house?’

  I was at the door, opened it, stood in the frame.

  ‘It is marvellous, sir. I am indebted to be in your service.’

  I bowed again, as I went through. Alone in the corridor just as I had entered it. That loneliness when you know that everybody absent is aware of what has gone on. Klein, Prüfer, Sander. Behind their closed doors. Reading their memos. I walked slowly back to my floor. Aware of but one thing. Etta and Paul not insane. You could write a cheque to get into Buchenwald. You could write a cheque for anything now. And I thought on that.

  Chapter 27

  Tuesday,

  22 August 1944

  Paul and I waited by the bear-house of the small menagerie at Buchenwald while Klein went inside the camp. He carried a gift for Colonel Pister which Topf had sent to sweeten getting Paul inside. We did not ask what was in the wrapped box.

  There were four brown bears walking dully around their concrete pit in view of the parade ground and the chimney of the crematorium. The chimney smoking. The bears would occasionally rear up, sniff at the coarse air, fall down again, sneezing. Every time they did so the white-faced monkeys caged beside the pit skittered and panicked. Paul delighted in this.

  ‘They have a zoo at Treblinka also I hear,’ he said. ‘Do you think they are Russian bears, Ernst? Would that not be amusing, eh?’

  I said I did not know. Not interested. I was looking at the fence fifty feet from the bear-house, by the parade ground where I had seen the morning roll call months before. The prisoners and the bears could see one another. Was that deliberate? How did that seem to each? Which the audience? All of it incongruous. A playground in a graveyard.

  *

  It was my idea to offer Klein to drive us in Paul’s Mercedes. Intimating that Paul was a town driver, would be unfamiliar with the higher gears and rural roads. Klein accepted his superiority in this, had jumped on the prospect of driving the limousine, managing to deflect that the order to visit the camp had come from Ludwig Topf. He was doing me a service, I and one of Topf’s best crematoria customers. P
ublic relations. Not work. It had clearly been in his tutelage of me that I had garnered such a sale. The journey had mostly been Klein admiring the car, asking questions, roaring cylinders, and Paul answered all his questions but one.

  ‘How much did she cost, Herr Reul?’

  Paul laughed.

  ‘Gentlemen do not ask such, Herr Klein.’

  Paul, in the huge rear seat, could not see Klein’s face blush, as I could. His lips went narrow. Quiet for the rest of the way.

  *

  I questioned this to Paul now.

  ‘Why would you not give Klein the price? What difference?’

  ‘Exactly, Ernst. What difference? That man is a phony. I have met his type before. The suits, the shoes, the watch. It is all to proclaim something he is not. He thinks it is about wealth. I tell you the richest people I know, Ernst, all have holes in their sweaters. Not because they cannot afford another one. But because they have a perfectly serviceable comfortable sweater. That man would buy the finest gardening boots he could find to shovel shit. Just to tell you the price of them.

  ‘Money is not a culture, Ernst. Remember that. In fact it is a test of culture. Men like Klein always appear in war, in depressions. They do not need books or music. Only luxury and its pursuit. They will seize any advantage to progress and profit. And they do not understand that others do not have this need.’

  A gentle socialist lesson no doubt. Paul the same age as me yet professing and philosophising above me. I wanted to say what I had said to Etta:

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

  The gate opened in the distance, laughter between a guard and Klein.

  ‘So you think he is hiding something?’ I asked.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ He put his pipe to his mouth, put a foot on the low wall of the bear-pit as if I were about to photograph him.

  Klein came to me. No tell on his face. He did not still have the gift at least.

  ‘We can go in,’ he said. ‘With escort. An officer.’ He addressed us as a group now as he lit a Camel. He offered the case to Paul and then saw the pipe. The case back to his pocket. Not offered to me.

  ‘If we follow the fence we can go in by the east gate. View the Little Camp.’

  ‘What is that?’ Paul swung off the pit wall towards us.

  ‘It is for new prisoners. Mostly. It will be safer.’

  Paul pointed to the crematorium.

  ‘What about the ovens? Can I not see how they function with new muffles? Those are the muffles I will order?’

  ‘It is in operation,’ Klein said. ‘It is always in operation. Not possible. But I can explain to you, Herr Reul, how it operates. From morgue to floor. From outside.’

  Paul looked at the building.

  ‘You could do that from here, Herr Klein. That would be most dull. Most unrewarding. And I know how an oven works.’ He puffed his pipe and considered. A thought rose on his face, as if just occurred. But not a good act. I could see it had been there for days.

  ‘What about the political prisoners? Their barracks? That would be safe, no?’

  Klein shook his head.

  ‘That is an isolation barrack. There is some flap going on. They have an Italian princess even. Impossible. No. The Little Camp will suffice. This is not a park, Herr Reul. And, Ernst – with your hand as it is – don’t touch anything.’

  Klein gave cigarettes and jokes to the guards at the gate as I watched the shadow of machine-gun barrels pass over ours from the watchtower. The guards did not check our papers. We walked into Buchenwald like a park. Klein had said it was not such.

  ‘Be careful,’ a guard called to our back, ‘you only leave this place as smoke!’ That gallows humour again. The only humour in Germany now. Soldiers do it best. Have the need for it most.

  Klein waved his hand to the east.

  ‘Over there you can see the munitions factory. Another over the railway. The quarry just beyond. That is where most of the prisoners work.’ He was ahead of us, hurrying. Paul strolled, forced Klein to slow. We were moving past dilapidated wooden buildings, surely older than the camp, barns that had once been for animals, cattle. An SS officer stood waiting for us, hands behind his back. Klein saluted him and he returned without fervour or snap of heels. He never met our eyes. He looked at our shoes, our clothes and his face never lifted from some grim duty beset upon him. A face of nothingness. A portrait in an amateur artist’s loft. Perfectly correct, but absent. The artist neglecting the glint of life. I could feel even Paul’s confidence shiver away.

  We walked on mud, the grass chewed up by the path of endless wheelbarrows and carts. Prisoners worked all around us and I wondered on what Paul was thinking. He had not spoken to me since we entered. We were always within Klein’s earshot and I supposed that was the reason. Or I was not part of his intentions. He had wanted to see the ovens, had wanted to see the isolation barracks. Was Thälmann there? He who had my name, the leader of the defunct KPD. What had he intended? Pass wire-cutters to the man? Ludicrous. His plans gone. We were going to see the Little Camp, for new arrivals. That was all. A part of me glad he had been thwarted. My Etta safer with every footstep. Paul stopped constantly, took his breath and looked about, his hands in his overcoat pockets. Klein ushered him on each time and Paul smiled at him like a father to a boy. He had stopped talking. Walked slow. I did not understand his dawdling. I had already spent the limits of the minutes I wanted to be here.

  ‘This is the Little Camp,’ Klein said at last and we were at the fence. A fence inside a fence, prison inside a prison. The officer stood away from us. Apart. He kicked mud, stared hard at the workers carrying and clearing, his pistol’s holster undone. He let us alone. This not his work. Escorting tourists not his duty.

  I had seen the barracks, the other barracks, off the parade ground. Properly constructed buildings fit for purpose if not for quantity. This camp a series of outbuildings suited to farm work. Stables, cowsheds. All the men’s eyes to us. They were outside, had made makeshift camps, slept here, not enough room inside the tin-sheeted buildings for them all, and then I no longer paid attention to the buildings.

  Their clothes were rags. Their heads shorn badly like sheep. They stared at us like the same. You could divide the hundreds of them in half. Some in good form, only their rough patchy hair and grey cloth conjoining them with the others.

  The others.

  Half-men. Did not look on them too long. It was like watching the still faces of passengers in the windows of a departing train from the platform. One face gone. Another gone. Faces replacing the others. And then you see they are all looking at you. Stop looking as they stare back.

  Some of the fitter stood up. Came towards. Paul moved closer to the fence as Klein pointed out more geographical features, the officer’s back to us. One walked right up to the fence from the group. A lye smell. He spoke German to Paul, hurriedly and perfectly.

  Paul walked away as if he had heard nothing and then we all heard the wheelbarrow fall over behind us.

  The man at the wheelbarrow had stumbled and fell. Potatoes in the mud. He cried out, in Russian I guessed, and Paul ran to him. He was closer than our SS escort but the officer ran also, his pistol free.

  I stayed. Looked to Klein. He held a palm to me to remain cemented. As he was.

  Do not move when a pistol reveals.

  The prisoner was in Paul’s arms, they pulled up the wheelbarrow together, their heads side by side, and then a slap from the pistol separated them, the prisoner back to the ground.

  Paul held up his hands as the pistol levelled to his waist. He stepped back. The officer’s face animated now, red now, cursing at Paul, at the prisoner in the mud, yelling between them. The pistol back in the holster. The man hauled up and then pushed down again to collect the potatoes, nose bleeding. He moved as fast and panicked as a boy learning to swim, apologising all the while, mixing German with Russian in stutters. Paul came back to us. The wheelbarrow went on with a
kick to the bearer’s hind. The officer ordered, shouted at us, to leave, his hand on his gun-belt. The words cursing. His daily tone.

  Paul smoothed his hair, straightened his tie.

  ‘What a place!’ he said, grinned at us both. ‘Such a place, eh?’

  The officer walked us out. I with Klein, right on the heels of the SS. Glad to do so. Paul behind, still strolling. A park in August.

  *

  In the car Paul gave no disappointment on his short tour, nor the terror of its end. He splayed back on the leather sofa of the rear seat, enjoying Klein as his chauffeur.

  ‘Tell me, Herr Klein? You are not much older than Ernst and myself. We went to school in Erfurt. Did you not? Are you not local?’

  ‘No, sir. I am from Kromsdorf. Outside Weimar. I was privately schooled.’

  ‘Kroms? A farmer’s boy! But surely there are no private schools there?’

  Klein gripped the wheel. His face hardened. I had never seen it so. No longer the prince at the ball. I, a ghost in the car. Observing. Not party.

  ‘My father is a landowner, Herr Reul. I was privately tutored at home.’

  ‘And what did your father do? I have never heard your family’s name locally? Before they were banned I was in the Rotaries and societies. I do not remember a Klein. Perhaps you came after that?’

  ‘A landowner. As I said. And yours?’ A deflection. Klein the master of them.

  ‘Just a stonemason. I built my own business. I cannot imagine working for someone else now.’

  Klein ground the gears.

  ‘It has its purposes. And its perks.’

  Paul leaned forward, his arms over both of our seats.

  ‘Shall I tell you something about Herr Klein, Ernst?’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said, looked straight ahead as Klein sped on and Paul went on, disregarded my decline.

  ‘I have always found it prudent,’ he gripped both our shoulders, ‘to understand the men I do business with. If it is within my ability to do so. It can save time later.’ He sat back, spread along his seat. ‘To know who to favour.’

  ‘The Topfs are my friends. Actual friends. You understand this, Hans, eh?’ He did not wait for an answer.