‘Thank you, Ernst. That is all.’
I left him, walked down the corridor with the grim package. At the stairs came a clack of something unnatural coming up from below. A clack, an accompanying shuffle, a wheeze of breath. I stood and watched a shadow creep up the wall, an oval with a beak for a head, shoulders crooked with the light from the stair. Clack, shuffle, breath. Clack, shuffle, breath. The shadow engulfing the stairwell.
I could turn the corner, make my floor, but could not. I stood, made way for what was coming, gripped the cardboard tube. The figure came into view. Grey cap, black collar. Silver buttons. One booted leg heaved itself to the floor in front of me. There was not another boot that followed.
He wiped a handkerchief across his brow, rested on his crutch, his face glowed in recognition of me.
‘Ah. Herr Beck. It is good to see you.’ He motioned to the lift. ‘I cannot abide those things. No matter the effort. But effort is its own reward, no? I trust you are well?’ He moved on without my answer. I watched him sweep along the corridor, the passage I had come from. He stopped when he felt my eyes at his back. Began to turn his neck. I bolted away like a boy caught.
I kept the cardboard tube by my desk for the rest of the day. No-one asked me about it. I walked past an SS car and driver waiting in the yard when I left. I still checked for them.
Eight hours Paul had said. Eight hours and you could be in Zurich.
‘Ernst?’ Etta met me at the door. She was in that dress with the roses that matched her hair. The roses just blooming. A dress older than our time together.
‘What’s wrong?’ She touched my arm. ‘Ernst?’
‘I think we should go. Visit your parents.’
She bloomed like the roses on her dress, then saw the cardboard tube in my hand.
‘What is that?’
I wanted to say it was Klein’s father. Wanted to say that we would keep it somewhere in our house until next Friday. A favour to my employer. Laugh about it somehow. I said it without thinking, like I was drunk. I passed it to her, let her hold it as I spoke. I needed drama if I was to buy a ticket. A ticket to something else. I let it stay in her hands. Passed it on.
‘This will be us if we do not go.’
*
We put it by the telephone. That was the end of January. The first week of February. We had last gone to Zurich to marry. That memory soiled. We had grown old already. There was nothing young in Germany any more. All the oldest, the ancient and largest buildings, survived the bombings. In every country they survive. There is a reason for that. And it has nothing to do with reason. They once built things to last the ages. Testaments.
Everything we create now is temporary. That is our message, our testament. Because we know.
What point building monuments to last?
Chapter 35
Friday,
9 February 1945
The ticket office in Erfurt. Busier than I had ever known. Families stood in huddles. Suitcases as if packed for summer holidays. Busy with people not going to work. The soldiers gone. The People’s Militia policed the station. That was the importance of the stations now. An old soldier in a Kaiser helm stood at the entrance with a percussion musket. I bought my ticket for Weimar without question, placed the cardboard tube by my hand as I paid. The male clerk eyed it.
‘Ashes,’ I said. ‘My wife’s father’s. I am taking them to Weimar. They have a remembrance garden there.’ I lied for sympathy, to gain favour for my next question.
‘My condolences,’ he said and passed me my ticket. He was old. Probably walked the streets with a hoe at night like all the others. He was stern and taciturn like all clerks behind glass but I had moved him enough to carry on.
‘Could you tell me if the trains to Stuttgart are running? Not today, but generally.’ I moved aside my coat so he could see the pin on my tie.
‘What would the purpose be?’
I tapped the blue tube.
‘More of these. You notice how it always falls to the sons, eh?’
A lightened look, quickly dropped. An empathic stranger’s agreement. He had been here also.
‘Three times a day. Monday to Friday.’ He passed me a timetable. ‘Unless the line is bombed of course but …’ He shrugged. Never thought he would have to say such.
‘Can I buy a ticket in advance?’
‘No,’ he said and then felt sorry for his beloved railway. ‘It does not work like that any more.’
I shrugged in apology with him.
‘What does, eh?’ I took the timetable as we sighed in agreement. Our mutual consolation at our nation’s fate. Two strangers agreeing what nations could not. At least he did not say it was impossible.
‘Work’. So He had said on the radio. Work. That meant keep the roads open, keep the railways open. Keep working.
‘And you would need a travel permit from the Gau for travelling out of state.’
I tipped my hat in thanks. Waited on the platform with whole families crying all around. I was embarrassed for being on my own amongst them. Their stories worse than mine. I looked at my new watch to not look at them. Every time I did so its face said only one thing.
‘Remember when you sold your last watch to buy food? Do you want to do that again?’
Every time I looked at its face.
*
Paul greeted me as if our last interactions were nothing but playground bruises. Seeing each other was better than the dead voices down the telephone line. We had hands to shake, better than conveying through mouthpieces and wires. Friends again. Politics for ballots not school friends. That mattered more now. He wore a three-piece tweed. Delighted to tell me that it was from London.
‘How is that possible?’ I asked.
‘Tailors are not at war, Ernst,’ he said. ‘I still get a catalogue every month from a wine house in Paris. War is stranger than life before it. I cannot buy a loaf of bread without a stamp but the Margaux comes like clockwork. Come. It is midday. Have a glass with me.’ He spied the blue tube in my hands that we had discussed on the telephone. ‘We will show respect for this. Even if the son does not.’
‘He is trying,’ I said. He said nothing. Ushered me up his steps.
*
I almost laughed when he put on white gloves and took the cardboard from me. I did not expect such reverence. In my house I had kept it beside the telephone.
‘What is required, Ernst?’ We sat in his rooms, the blue tube between us, pride of place, resting on a linen cloth on a low table. No wine came.
‘Herr Klein would like them stored. No service or notices.’
‘He could have done that at home.’
‘I think he does not want them … around. He said there might be family interested in them.’
‘But he is not? Not interested?’
I looked at the plain tube. Why not a box? An urn? Was this it? Hard not to wonder. How I would be finalised.
‘I do not know. That is what he said. Bill him for storage. That is all he asked.’
He rummaged for his pipe.
‘I will wager you that he is down here to see them soon enough.’
‘Not Klein,’ I said. Defending him. Defending myself.
Paul watched me as he lit his pipe.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Maybe. Not that one. Who can say? I have a storeroom full. But maybe the ones who would mourn are dead also. Maybe they sit beside each other on my shelves.’
He lit his pipe from a long match. The scent as he waved it out like the smell of Christmas that I missed. ‘Have you thought on the conversation we had?’
I sat back, looked out on the market square, breathed in his wondrous pipe smoke that was like burnt apples and cinnamon.
‘On leaving? Yes. I was going to give my notice in at Topf. They will not allow it.’
‘Ah. You must know too much.’
I waited before answering. Watched motorcycles circle the square, their tyres puffing up the dusting of snow. Young men on them. I could only
think on why young men were not elsewhere. They grinned at each other across the square. And then I remembered I was young and was not elsewhere also.
‘I know nothing,’ I said.
‘But you do, Ernst.’ He leaned forward, I stayed back in the comfort of the chair, kept my eye to the motorcycles and the women with prams stuffed with paper bags of groceries and not babies, or groceries laid on the babies anyway. No men on the street. No soldiers. Just women, boys on motorcycles. Paul stoked on.
‘You have that plan for the oven. That continuous oven. They patented it. A mass furnace. For disposal. You showed me a design for a building at the prison that had showers next to the morgue and the ovens. No chutes. Just steps. You, Ernst, have the power to show the world what is going on.’
I rolled myself from the window, looked on his tensing expression, a foolish expression, his eyes wide. The paper tube between us listening.
‘What power?’ I mocked. ‘I am not who you think I am. I have understood your relationship with Etta. Your café politics. But I am not cut to be something just as ridiculous. I will not bring down shit with more shit. Play what you want. You know what I am, Paul?’ I sat, mirrored his pose, his hands on his spread knees, as Klein would have done. ‘I am every man not in this war. I want my wife, I want to work, I want to be paid and live for peace. I want a family. To be done with this. I want it to be the same as when I was at school, when we were at school. I cannot do anything to change anything.’
He did not even pause.
‘Then you are a fool. You have that plan. You could change something. Etta’s drawing of it is worthless. But the actual plan, the SS copy – if you give it to me, Ernst, I can get it to the right people.’
‘Then you are the fool. There are no right people.’ I kicked the table with the ashes. ‘That is the last of a man who died at Buchenwald. The right people were supposed to bomb the factories. They hit the camp. Killed prisoners, killed children. A man sent his father’s ashes to you. Asked me to bring them. You think a plan for an oven is going to change anything?’
He snapped on his pipe in his teeth, picked up the tube, plucked the top free and poured it over the table.
The contents rattled over the walnut surface. Cinder ash rose in a cloud as he swept his hands though the shards that glistened under it. The ash to cushion the sound should anyone shake it, the ash to hide enough if the tube were opened, for a rudimentary glance. I stared. Paul did not need to see. Knew. Watched my gaze.
Diamonds.
There were dozens of diamonds amid, sparkling under the light from the windows, the roar of the motorcycles the only sound.
‘I have been getting parcels like this for weeks,’ he said. ‘They think I don’t know. When I have not been getting ashes delivered for months. Sometimes they don’t even bother not to come in uniform. ‘Hold my father’s, my mother’s, my son’s ashes for me. No service. Just hold them. I’ll pay whatever you want. Just keep them safe.’ That is what it has become, Ernst. That is who you are loyal to.’
I stared at the wealth on the table. I thought Klein had asked me because he could not face Paul. I had given him humanity. Thought he had entrusted me with his father. Passed to me that which he could not. A fellowship. Not so. I would be the one caught with diamonds smuggled. I was the idiot mule walking in chained circle with milk on his hide to churn butter for his master. The master who would take the reward for my labour. Fool. Idiot. He had put his own father into Buchenwald. Keep up, keep up.
Paul scooped them back into the tube.
‘Do something yourself,’ he said. ‘Get to Zurich. Get Etta safe at least. Or give me the plan for the oven and let me do it. I could drive Etta to safety. I could get that plan to where it could expedite the end of this. If the world knew what was happening that would be the end of it. Any nation still in doubt would—’ He stopped talking, put the lid back on the tube, stood and listened to the motorcycles outside. They roared louder. I looked out the window. The motorcycles not moving. The young men on them had their feet on the ground. Heads to the sky. The women with prams running. The roar still there. Sirens started, drowned the rumbling. I looked at the clock on the mantel. Twelve twenty-six. I photographed the moment in my mind.
12:26.
I looked at my hands, my shaking hands. Imprinted them in case they were the last I would see of them. I looked at one of the boys on the motorcycles. Imprinted him. His goggles, his mouth and jaw. Took him with me also. He could have looked around for a way out, turned his handlebars, sped somewhere. He was looking at the sky. I saw a shadow fall across.
‘The mortuary,’ Paul said, took up the tube, grabbed me. ‘It’s the safest place.’
We ran like the boys we once were, running from the bell for break, the bell a siren now, holding hands as we ran from his rooms, as the air, the very earth began to rip.
Chapter 36
The bodies shook on their trolley beds as the walls trembled, the dead animated while brick dust fell on our heads. We sat against a wall beneath an arch, Paul suggesting it to be the strongest place, the main wall of the building. It did not feel so.
‘Just sit it out,’ he said. ‘It cannot be much longer.’ It had been ten minutes. Explosions every second of it. Sit it out. That is what people did. They never said such things on the radio. Never said families would hold each other in the dark. Sit it out. Sit out the war in cellars. Not our business. No-one trying to kill us. Sit it out. All you could do. The people in the maps.
In Weimar people chose to run to the cherry and apple orchards instead of the crypts of churches, run to the fields, watch the destruction from afar like a cinema screen, their hands in their mouths as they watched an ancient city burn.
‘It’s not ending!’ My hands over my ears, Paul close beside me.
‘It will.’
Another barrage, a chunk of ceiling slammed onto a bed, the body beneath gasping with its weight, then still again.
‘Why bomb the square?’ Paul said. ‘Only people live here. The NS square is miles from us.’
‘I don’t think they care.’ And he held my arm as something from the building above gave way with a roar. ‘What if we’re trapped here?’
‘The mortician will come at six.’ His answer. Short breath answers between us, between explosions.
‘And if he’s trapped?’ My short question. No answer. The lights trickled out. Complete darkness, my hand in front of my face, right at my nose and I could not see it.
Paul cursed then consoled.
‘It’s the gas we should worry about.’
A greyness came back, lines and shapes in the gloom. Could not decide if it was better to see the dead or not, and still the bombing went on. In the dark it felt like the whole building rose into the air with each rumble or other times rocked side to side like a cakewalk ride at a fair. I did not think of anything. Not of Etta, not of Klein and his diamonds, nothing. My mind numb. Every sense too bombarded by rolling cannonade. I was as mindless as the men in the planes above. This what it must be like for the men at the front, how they could stand up, fire at each other across rubble and fields. Their minds taken by noise and fury, unable to think for themselves. If someone yelled at me now to get up, go outside, stand in a rain of shrapnel I would have. I would have done it just to escape from my own frozen, unthinking state. Grateful for instruction. To have the responsibility for myself held by another.
Gradually it slowed. Like walking away from the roar of a waterfall. We lit matches, assuring each other that we could not smell gas, each doubting the other’s ability to discern it like an old couple bickering over an oven left on when they drive from the house.
We crept up, coughed as we did which blew out the matches. We laughed. Actually giggled at our foolishness as we lit another. Laughing in a mortuary like scared boys on a dare to the old witch’s house.
‘I was going to suggest we should have got out of here and crawled into the ovens. That would have been safer,’ Paul whispered. P
eople whisper in the dead dark.
‘You would not have got me to do that.’ Pragmatic as I brushed the dust from my sleeves, jovial even. Gallows humour again. Trench humour.
‘No. I suppose not.’ And we stepped through the dark with our tiny torches.
*
In the corridor Paul dragged open the concertina door of the lift. Not a lift for the living. Two shelves across its narrow frame. No need for matches. Light from the narrow glass windows at the street level, you pass these all the time in the street, never know what the small dull squares light. Beer cellars. Mortuaries. The basement homes of those too poor to own real windows.
A winding handle on the outside of the lift. The dead did not care about the bumpy ride.
‘The stairs may be dangerous,’ he said. ‘You go first. I’ll raise you then send it down for me.’
I peered into the small long spaces.
‘No. I’ll try the stairs.’
‘Be sensible, Ernst. There could be fires up there. Get in.’
‘Exactly. You could be lifting me up into an oven.’
He put his hands over the shelves.
‘It does not feel hot.’
‘It’s been down here.’
‘Fine.’ He threw off his jacket. Mad at me. ‘I will go first. Wind me up if you can manage it.’ He clambered in before I could protest. ‘You are still like the coward you were at school!’ I was left looking at his shoes. Still brilliantly clean.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘The diamonds.’
‘Forget them.’ His voice echoed from his coffin. ‘I have dozens of urns full.’
‘You have dozens of urns full. I don’t.’
‘You are being childish!’ His voice from the metal lift sounding like the tin-can telephones tied with string we used to play with as children. I ignored. Not my diamonds. Klein still attached to me.
I ran back, enough light from the corridor to see the blue tube sitting under the wall where we left it, the blue the same colour as the shrouds the corpses were caped in.
I picked it up just as the shriek of metal and masonry came from behind and I ducked as a blast of grit and dust blew me over.
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