Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  His look changed, back to the regular Klein, the mannequin, the perfectly suited Klein.

  ‘We had no conscription did we, Ernst? Were we lucky? Do you ever think that?’

  I thought I was very lucky. Other students, those in the west and the north spent their summers as medics and orderlies. We still considered ourselves as the Free State of Thuringia, a republic, the place where the Party elect spent their holidays. The war never expected to come this far. When you buy a German calendar it is a picture of our streets, our forests. When I was a child our men still went out in winter to hunt wolves to keep their children safe. Old men still believed in faeries and water nymphs. The anti-aircraft guns on the corners as alien as elephants. I nodded, smoked with a Hans Klein I had never seen before.

  ‘I made myself,’ he said, but for his own ears, in his own space. I was no longer in the room. ‘But I can never make myself one of them. The Party was going to change all that. And then yesterday I see that nothing has changed.’ He solidified in his chair. ‘But perhaps we can do something worthwhile still. Not by being in service. Work hard. Work well. Make our own fortunes. You, Ernst, are two years behind where I am now. In two years how may we both progress? Think of that. You and I. How Germany was meant to be.’

  I put out my Camel, thanked him. For the cigarette only.

  ‘Shall I make a copy of the plan?’

  ‘I think it would help. Yes. Copy it.’ He lit another cigarette with the end of his other. ‘They are bound to need it. I will get you the plan. I have the SS stamps for it. Wait here.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said as he stood. ‘I have a problem.’

  *

  I wanted to tell him not to come into the building tomorrow. Tell him what Paul had said. I saw the little boy listening to the ranting radio in his bedroom while his father ranted drunk downstairs. The boy listening to hope. Then I thought of Etta. Did not think of quitting. I would do that by letter.

  ‘My hand, sir.’ I held up my crooked paw like an aged dog. ‘I need to see a doctor. In Weimar. I have made an appointment tomorrow. Would ask to be excused for a day. I would expect no wages. I can work on the plan tonight and have a copy for you Friday.’

  He looked down at me, the Camel’s smoke squinting his eyes.

  ‘Let me see it,’ he said.

  I held up my bandaged hand. The dirty black of it.

  ‘That looks bad. I had no idea it was so. You should be commended for working with it for so long. I shall use you as a mark for the others. I have a doctor you could see.’

  ‘Thank you. But I have an appointment. Family doctor.’

  ‘A butcher with a dulled spoon no doubt.’ The old Klein returning. ‘Not a problem, Ernst. If you work from home, have the plan for Friday and see your quack. Relax with your wife.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He left the room to fetch the plan. I sat and held my hand. Felt the crust breaking beneath as I pressed it and watched the smoke through the window join the clouds of the hills that were not so grey when I was a boy, when Klein was a boy. We had grown up ten miles apart. Saw chimney smoke differently. Knew parents differently. And perhaps that was all it took. How it was done.

  Chapter 29

  Thursday,

  24 August 1944

  We could not sleep. When did Wednesday become the Thursday warned against? What time?

  Do not go out on Thursday.

  In the morning Etta made pastries. German women buy pastries. Austrian women make them. We had coffee in the garden. Breakfast in silence. Waiting.

  It started at noon.

  The flowers. The beds I had planted. A low sound from them, the hum of bees. Not bees. Not the flowers. The coffee in the cups began to ripple. The birds left.

  We ran to the kitchen, shut the glass doors, looked to the sky that started to quake and roar.

  Whales appeared in the blue, skimming the roofs. Our walls rumbled. It was like seeing dragons return. The garden plummeted into shade as they came in waves, wings almost touching. It went on forever, our kitchen shaking. And then a different rumbling and Etta buried herself into my chest as I watched the black sky of bombers.

  Buchenwald I thought, or Weimar itself. If my kitchen was shaking it had to be close, or not bombs, just the resonance from the aircraft.

  The Americans or British coming. The war here. Our Christmas-biscuit-tin city finally a part. A part of the war. At the end of it. What point? What point the planes? You were in France now, Italy. The Russians scraping their feet on our doormats. Why us?

  The telephone rang as the drone died. Etta had gone upstairs. Gone to bed with the covers over her. It was Paul on the telephone.

  ‘Thank God you are all right,’ he said.

  ‘It went right over us. What was it? Not Weimar?’

  ‘No. The camp. The factories and the quarry. Not meant for the camp itself.’

  ‘But there must have been dozens of them? They must have hit the prison?’

  He was silent. I called into the receiver, not sure we had not been cut off.

  ‘Is this what you could not tell me?’

  ‘I can hear them going on now. No. If they could help it I am sure they would not hit the camp. But the munitions factory is close. It would be difficult to not hit some of the prison. I wanted you to keep away. I did not know if they may have intended something on the factory. Is Erfurt safe?’

  ‘I do not know. I think so. But we could hear the bombs.’ I took a breath. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Ernst?’ A long pause. ‘May I come over?’

  ‘No,’ said this without hesitation. ‘I am done with Topf. I am going to resign. I am done with this. We are done with this.’

  ‘Thälmann is dead,’ he said. ‘That man with the wheelbarrow? You remember?’

  I said nothing, let him go on.

  ‘He told me that Thälmann and the leader of the SDP were executed. Days before. But there is something else. New hope.’

  Again I said nothing. Thought of putting the telephone down. He went on as if I was interviewing him.

  ‘That man at the fence I spoke to. He was a British POW. Air-force. There are hundreds of them there. Americans and others. That is illegal, Ernst. If we can get a message to the Luftwaffe that POWs are in a prison camp that could be enough to bring an investigation to the camp from high command. We could—’

  I hung up. Illegal he had said. He still thought law mattered. If someone wrote a stern letter it would still matter. He was more naive than I. He called back a minute later. I answered on the first ring.

  ‘I took photographs,’ he said. ‘I had a button-hole camera.’ I remembered his dawdling through the camp, his hands in his pockets. ‘If we can get this to the Allies, alert them to Buchenwald, the world will know.’

  ‘Allies’ he said. They were allies now. Not enemies.

  ‘And you have the plan for that oven. For the other ovens. If the world knew—’

  I pressed the bones of the cradle, disconnected the call, laid the receiver on the table. No more calls today.

  I went up the stairs and joined Etta in her single bed. We slept. Held each other. I was done. I needed rest. Rest together. Bombs had come to our city. Yet it seemed peaceful. Time to sleep. A nap in August heat. An air-raid siren howled out too late. It was like Vesuvius and Pompeii. People puzzled how couples were found in bed, coupled in bed, under the ash. I understood now. When the end comes we will all hold hands, each other. We lie down and do not run panicked through the streets screaming in horror. We will lie down. Go to bed.

  I buried myself in her hair. Relieved at last. It would matter to no-one now that she was Jewish. They would be too busy forging their own passports and papers. I slept.

  Surely saved.

  Chapter 30

  The planes the talk of the factory on Friday. We were assembled to the square outside the factory floor where the prisoners’ day-barracks stood. Sander himself delivered a report off a page from his pocket. Klein standing
beside him.

  The two factories outside the prison had been completely destroyed. The prison had suffered some bombing. The SS barracks had been hit, as had some of the administration buildings. Colonel Pister, the camp commandant, the Father Christmas I had met, lost his wife and daughter.

  The isolation barracks where the political prisoners were kept also destroyed. Many of our leader’s enemies held there, including the families of the plotters from the failed July assassination. The enemy, Sander declared, had denied them a fair trial under our leader’s compassion.

  There were no casualties in his speech. The whole disaster presented as a crime against Topf. The only concern was that we would have no prisoners from the camp to aid us today. He dismissed us. I expected the salute. None offered and we filtered away. Klein weaved his way to me. At my shoulder as I walked.

  ‘Good morning, Ernst. Such a terrible business. I was here when they came overhead. Saw the whole thing from my office. Amazing sight. Shame you were not here.’

  ‘Yes.’ The only answer.

  ‘Did you see any of it? Were you in Weimar then?’

  ‘Weimar?’

  He stopped walking, the others passing us.

  ‘At your physician?’

  ‘No. I was at home, sir. I saw the planes from the garden. I could not meet my doctor. The air-raid. I shall have to reapply.’

  ‘Of course. Pity.’ We walked on. ‘I could always get you in to see my man. Here, let me take a look.’ He had already taken my arm, my bad hand.

  ‘Tsk. It is so dirty, Ernst. I have bandages in my office, in the medical kit for the floor. Come.’

  He led me away by my wrist. I looked up at the white-coats smirking out of our floor window at us, smirking at me being escorted by my father.

  ‘You have completed the copy of the plan I hope? Good. At least something positive from yesterday.’

  *

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Klein sat on the corner of his desk, I sat before him in the small wooden chair that faced his expansive leather one. He was cutting the new bandage. I thought this happened after the wrap. How my mother had done after childhood scrapes.

  ‘Sometimes it hurts. Not always, sir. I forget about it mostly,’ I said. Absently I was thinking about Colonel Pister, the man from Himmler’s motor-pool, the commandant at Buchenwald. Yesterday he was commandant at Buchenwald. Now he was a widower. I pictured him crawling through rubble to find his dead daughter.

  ‘Occasionally … I appreciate the pain,’ I added.

  He stopped cutting, stared.

  ‘You appreciate it?’

  I tried to explain, compared it to a mouth ulcer. How your tongue won’t leave it alone. Tried to make a joke of it. He did not smile.

  ‘Take it off. I have iodine. Does your wife not take care of you?’

  ‘It is tender. I prefer to do it myself.’

  ‘It is easier if I do it,’ he said. ‘Take it off.’

  I began to unwind the gauze. Took the time to talk to Klein, just how he had opened to me. Very little that could be more personal than one man changing the dressing of another. It must have happened on battlefields every day, the battlefields that were closing in on us every day. An office not a fair comparison. It would do. Bombers had flown over us yesterday. The relation close enough.

  ‘Herr Klein? Do you not think about the ovens?’

  ‘It is my work, Ernst. I think about them all the time. I have no wife distracting me with the price of cabbage.’

  ‘I mean the nature of them. Their purpose. Do you not think it strange that with the front as it is, the war, that the orders still come? The continuous oven still a project?’

  ‘I know as much as you do about the war. We have cut the cost of our own invasions by forcing the enemy to fight on our conquered lands. Ground they do not know but which we have occupied for years. We will bankrupt them in their boots. And the ovens? I would not be a good businessman if I did not welcome trade.’

  I gave him my hand. He had deflected the question about the ovens themselves. Or maybe he had not. It was business. If not Topf it would have been Kori of Berlin, if not them, another. Dozens of companies the same. We were all advantaging on slaves, all accepted SS contracts with SS labour. The greatest, oldest German companies. Not just building plane parts or cutting ball-bearings but furnishing every individual piece for the camps, for plans not for public works. No hospital beds, no new drains. The SS built nothing. Gas pipes, filing systems exclusively for Roma, for Jews, ordered from America. Pesticide in millions of gallons, invented by a Jew. The SS supplied none of this. We did. Got drunk on it. Never thought on the hangover to come. The SS asked. And everyone gave. Everyone.

  ‘Ernst?’ Klein still had my hand, a bottle of iodine. Not used. He put it to his desk, showed me my palm. ‘Ernst. There is nothing here? There is no wound on your hand.’ He dropped it to my lap. I stared down at the tiny white scar, long healed.

  ‘Ernst?’

  Chapter 31

  The last week of August a long one. For me. For Germany. We lost Paris. The radio could not deny it. But inevitably, always, painted as redeployment, strategic withdraw, to protect our coastal defences, to keep the war in France. There must have been photographs of it all over the planet. Our papers showed none. A column of text.

  Paul had his own victory, versed to me through Etta on Friday as we waited for supper. I did not mind that he had called. Friends can call each other. It is when they ask you to hide this, smuggle this, pass this, that you should worry.

  He had contacted a senior-colonel of the Luftwaffe in Berlin. Informed him there were enemy airmen at Buchenwald. I did not see how this would matter to one of our airmen, or how Paul had represented himself, but the day after the bombing the colonel visited the Little Camp, stood down the SS officers there who tried to stop him, and began to get the enemy shifted to a more comfortable POW camp befitting their status, their right. They were not criminals, not even enemies. To him they were brothers. I did not know enemies could feel that way about each other. Or was it just airmen? Considered themselves somehow special, elite. Above the war in more ways than one. Did soldiers feel that way? Did they look down their rifle’s sights, breathe apology before they fired? And what did he make of the others in the camp? The rags of others. Their rights. Not airmen.

  To Paul it meant only one thing. A senior officer of the Luftwaffe saw Buchenwald, POW prisoners had seen Buchenwald, experienced Buchenwald. Word would spread. And to me it meant that the KPD spread themselves further than I thought.

  Etta stopped going to her meetings. I was to quit my employ. Part of our understanding. She would quit, and I would quit. Be poor again. Back to rented rooms we could not afford, back to subsistence and her waiting off tables. And me to follow, for who would hire a man who voluntarily left Topf and Sons? No-one calls the unemployed noble. There is no such thing as the ethically unemployed.

  *

  Klein had not understood about my hand. I did not understand about my hand. He dropped the old bandage.

  ‘Are you sick, Ernst?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then it is in your mind. And you are sick.’ He sat at his desk. ‘There is nothing wrong with your hand.’ He withdrew from me, the smoke from Buchenwald behind him in his window. ‘Maybe it is the camps. Your visits have caused you difficulties. I forget this is your first work. Return to your desk, Ernst.’ Disappointment on his face.

  I stood as the telephone rang, as if timed for an excuse for him to ignore me. He picked it up as if I were already gone. I was on the door when his voice changed, as the other end of the line imparted something that made his tone rise, quake like a boy’s.

  ‘Are you sure? No mistake?’ He stood with the handset, gripped the cord. My hand on the door, my good left hand with the insignificant scar. A private call but I could not leave. Something in his stance. Something wanting not to be alone. Both his hands were fists. One around the cord. One around the receiver that we had all begun
to hate.

  ‘Of course,’ he said to the other end. ‘I shall arrange. Thank you. No, I will not require to visit. Thank you. No. No other family. Yes, I understand. That is fine. Thank you.’ He put the handle back, gently, not wishing to anger it further. It had done enough to not be angered further.

  He sat down, hands through his hair. I could not leave now.

  ‘Herr Klein?’ Came closer. ‘Is something …’ I caught my words. You did not talk to your senior so. I wanted to call him by his first name. The grenade of the telephone shattered the suit off his frame, not the Boss suit. Had shattered his coat, his shield. The one I admired of him, hated of him. Aspired to be. The boy sat in the leather chair. Swallowed by a suit too big for him.

  ‘My father,’ he said. The boy said. ‘He has died.’

  I said it. I went to the desk and I said it.

  ‘Hans,’ I said. ‘Hans, I am sorry.’

  ‘Four hundred prisoner fatalities at the camp yesterday.’

  This sentence unconnected to my hearing of his first, as if I had missed another conversation from an invisible person in the room. He did not look at me. He looked at the files and papers on his desk, packed the medical kit away like a jigsaw puzzle, his hands shaking.

  ‘At the camp …? I do not understand.’ And then I did, even as I said it, and I stopped edging closer. Stepped back to the door as if covering my tracks in snow.

  ‘It does not matter,’ he said. ‘I did not think it would be like that. Did not think …’ He looked up at me. ‘You can go, Ernst.’

  ‘Your father was at the camp? But …? Did he work there?’

  ‘No, Ernst.’ The old Klein. Tone back as sharp as his suit. ‘He was a prisoner. A traitorous criminal. And I put him there.’