Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  ‘Best check how far I can open this. See if I can watch the corner from it.’

  Chapter 55

  I had my hair cut. Shorn. At the barber on the street. My head in his mirror like the prisoners I had seen at the camps. Cut for spring. Perhaps cut for disguise. Certainly had never worn it so short. Wondered if Etta had trimmed hers, changed hers. The red curls gone. Hair long about her shoulders. It was almost the end of March. Near seven weeks since last seen, last touched by me. Her hair would be at her shoulders. I fiddled with the wedding band in my waistcoat more and more.

  The weeks since Franz first brought a rifle into our room had become a monotonous parade of washing the same clothes in the bath, suppers of stews and potatoes, bread and cheese, and stronger and stronger drink as apple wine was locally remade as vodka then to gin and even the children drank. A weak beer or cider still common for a child’s breakfast, but gin? My mother would wail if she knew.

  The newspapers reduced to only a weekly edition, the radio broadcasting only three hours of an evening. The eatery forced to extend his opening hours so crowds could gather and listen to the reports from where the radio still hung from a string and nail on his broken wall. Something appropriate in its fragile hold from crashing to the floor. Only occasionally did I see the same faces. A smile from the old man who had struggled to speak to me. Then one week I did not see him at all and never again. Did not know his name to ask after.

  Franz spent more and more time out of the room. Days and nights away. He was always late in getting paid and I would lend him money. It was not a favour. It was regular enough to not even be mentioned or asked for. I would offer, he would accept; we shared wine and cigarettes, shared a toothbrush like overnight lovers, so what matter. We knew I owed him for getting the money in the first. He had franked a cheque and had cashed it at the Gau. The roads were closed, I could not have got to a bank and would not have got six hundred marks from them. My worker’s pass came back without question. Relief in fate for that. Bureaucracy in war probably as broken as everything else, despite the Party’s proud efficiency for it. The Americans were driving tanks through its cracks, so why not little Ernst Beck? Senior-Colonel Voss in Kassel nothing to do with me. My name not even in his thoughts. Forgotten. After all, only Hans Klein and I knew I copied the plan, hidden it in my work drawer amongst dozens of others. Topf had probably spent days burning papers, shook hands with the SS officers supervising, never knowing that a pathetic motorcycle had puttered off into the night with their worst. The one that even they would shame to confess. And then there was Hans.

  In the quietness of the days it was impossible that he did not come to me. Again and again I pictured conversations between Sander and Prüfer, with the Topfs, with the SS, with Voss.

  The talk was always blurred, changed direction and outcome, like trying to listen to two dinner parties at opposite tables, and when I thought I had found the outcome, found the fear that led to me, it would change and another round of wine would go round and round with it.

  Hans a communist? Surely not? A traitor? Never! But he let Ernst Beck escape. His Jew wife escape. He was in on it. No. He has explained it all. Then where is Ernst Beck? Where is Hans? Why is he in prison? No. He has given everything up. Told us it was all Ernst. But he is in prison? No. He is at home. I had dinner with him last night. He says he knows nothing about Ernst. A moment of compassion. He has told us everything. Never mind. Nothing is missing. The Jewess and her communist husband have gone to Zurich. Here is Hans now. He will tell you.

  I brushed flies from my face. March. Flies. Thousands of them. Did not want to think what they were attracted to. In the first nine days of March we were bombed four times. Every day you found shoes in the streets, white shirts and pink negligees stuck in trees like kites where they had blown from a broken suitcase or a broken room where someone had tried to pack in a hurry. Every day the flat resonance of guns, distant like storm waves on rocks, like thunder never bringing rain, and planes replaced birds, sometimes singular and as low as swifts just above the telegraph poles or in formation as high as returning geese. You did not even look up any more. They plodded the sky as we plodded the streets, as if they no longer cared either.

  I rode the motorcycle around the squares of the town once a week, to keep the battery charged, to see what was selling from a blanket stall today. My escape still mine I believed. Eighty kilometres. With the fuel in her I still had eighty kilometres I could distance. Could still run. And I was a citizen now. People waved at me as I rode by. And the children only half-heartedly threw their stones.

  The ragged streets had become like the corridors of my hotel, my hostel. I used to use dozens of doors, dozens of corridors. In the factory of my work. Now the same cracked sights all the time. The door into the hotel, the door of my room, again and again. The streets just an extension of the hotel, a longer corridor with no door at the other end. Just one big loop to bring me back to the same two doors. Excepting for my wedding I had travelled further in these months than I had ever done in my life. Yet had gone nowhere.

  Then it finally happened. The last Thursday in March.

  The people came first. The refugees. In wagons, in handcarts. Asses and horses. The people’s faces all the same. Either wailing or empty. Nothing in between. Crying or nothing. The faces of nothing the worst. They looked like they were made of glass, that one more nudge off the edge and they would fall. Shatter to the floor.

  Napoleon had come again. An army had crossed the Rhine. The Americans in Frankfurt.

  I ran back to the room, somehow knowing that Franz was there. Our door open and I rushed in, calling him.

  ‘I know,’ he said before I could speak. He was sat on his bed, cigarette in mouth, oiling his rifle, rolling the bolt back and forth. ‘At least they will stop bombing us for a time. Stop them shitting rockets on the farms for a change.’ He looked up at me. ‘You look pleased, Ernst.’

  It was true. I was breathless, the boyhood run had flushed my face, but more than this. It felt like the end. I had lost sight of it. Become just another ghost in the city. More doors in my future now. One of them with Etta behind.

  I flopped to my bed, dismissed Franz’s comment. He raised the weapon to shoulder, to the window, his eye along the sight. A soldier. Not Franz. His face in stone.

  ‘They say it’s Patton,’ he said. ‘It’s been Patton since Italy. But they say he’s as short of fuel as we are. You know we’re training pilots in one hour then sending them up? All the fuel we can afford. Jesus.’ He fired the empty bolt, clicked it back instantly. ‘I suppose I’d better load this thing. I won’t be going anywhere tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘They’ll be here tomorrow. You could go to the old brewery. Or the Bergpark. It will be safe there.’

  I could not do that. This event my hope. I imagined walking up to a general. Handing him my evidence of what our leaders had been doing, had been planning to do. Did they know? Did anyone have any idea? The red-jackets found Auschwitz. Would a Yankee general pat me on the back and say, ‘We know, son. We always knew. You run along.’

  But I needed them. This had been my whole. Hide behind them. Was running to them. Had convinced myself that I was doing right. Not saving myself. Saving the future from its present. A four-storey oven. An oven fuelled by corpses. Hundreds a day. Thousands a week. Surely they could not imagine such a thing? Not imagine what had been planned, what had been done. Or maybe I expected too much from them. Maybe they would look at the plan, judge it differently. A good thing. A thing for them. For their own camps.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ I said. ‘With you.’ Not noble. I needed to be near. To run to the first starred man I saw. To the sheriff’s badge. But I did not want to think of Franz Werra alone in this room. Pictured shell casings on the floor. Down to his last cigarette. I had left Hans Klein alone. ‘Maybe it will not come to that, Franz.’

  ‘If we win it won’t. They bomb the shit out of the city and still miss the
tank factory. We will meet them with Tigers. Their pieces of shit can’t match a Tiger. Maybe you could help. Run ammo between the rooms, across the street. Just about every window’s got a rifle in it.’ He reached for the night-stand, gave me an envelope. ‘Keep that for me. That’s my parents’ address on the front. If … you know. Post it for me.’ He fed a clip into the magazine, slammed it in. ‘I’ll owe you the stamp.’

  Chapter 56

  We were woken by the rumbling of tracked wheels along the streets. Not tanks. Armoured vehicles with gun barrels and machine-guns. Looked as if they were trying to be part bus and part tank, difficulty in being both.

  I went out for breakfast, left Franz in full uniform with coffee and cigarettes for food. He did not talk. I understood that.

  On the streets men wore overcoats in warm spring. They hid sticks beneath wrapped with white handkerchiefs. Readied to stand on corners with their hands up and the sticks and cloth high above. Germans. Not Jews or Roma, not Poles. Germans. What goes around comes around. The cheapest platitudes are the most enduring and accurate. Given jocosely, off the cuff. And true every time. That is why they endure. Simple people say them. Perhaps because simple people experience them. Simple people do not speak Latin, do not have quality quotes for their lives. They have three walls and no roof.

  From the south you could hear the shelling. From the villages, from the farms. Tanks met tanks. Every day for weeks you could look up into the sky and see the wild corkscrew trail of our great rockets snaking over to England. Even today they went. Even today when you ducked at the sound of a shell in a field only a walk away. Our leader still fighting a war over channels of water, planning with telescopes, the enemy only needing to clean their spectacles for a closer look.

  Two days later they were in the city.

  April Fool’s Day.

  Ernst Beck the fool. The idiot. Fitting.

  *

  You only ever see one rat. You know, are told, they are there, within feet of you. That there are whole colonies of them living alongside. You only ever see one. And maybe it’s the same one. That each of us has his own. You point it out, scurrying under cars and park benches and the girl at your side never sees it. It’s gone. She has her own rat. Her own herald.

  We’d never accept that. Our importance in the world, in the scheme, heralded by rats, not lions. But I think it is almost true. From what I have seen, what we have known. No trumpets or fanfare. Just a rat for each of us. Makes more sense to imagine a God that would do that. His joke. And us too arrogant to perceive his disdain.

  He runs from you when you spy him. Runs ahead and past when your ship sinks. He freezes before he runs, when you see him. I saw him. And then he ran. His act done.

  And the tanks and mortars came.

  *

  You look at your feet, watch the smut dance off the kerb into the gutter like fleas jumping. A hum coming off the walls shivering dust. Then the groan and creak of metal against metal. Huge metal. The sound of an iron ship launching painfully to the sea, and then the enormous eye appears from around the corner, roams on its stalk with a grinding shriek, looks on you. And you run as the cobbled street quakes. See a rat doing the same.

  I could only run to the familiar door, run to Franz, heavy dust blowing into the room through the open window, Franz sat on the chair in front of it, watching the tanks roll, rifle barrel resting on the sill.

  ‘Tigers,’ he said. ‘What did I tell you. Tigers. Straight off the line.’

  I said nothing, still catching breath.

  ‘Better stay here for now, Ernst.’

  ‘Where else would I go.’ Statement. No body left for questions. Sank on my bed.

  He stayed at the window, head up and down the street, hand to the gun. ‘They’re going west. Probably go south along the river. The Americans are coming south. I don’t think it will reach us today.’

  He still had his head to the street. His eyes off me, I felt under the mattress for the plan. Should keep it on me now.

  ‘It’s still there,’ he called back.

  I withdrew my hand.

  ‘What is?’ Thinking he meant something in the street, some machine.

  ‘That paper of yours. It’s still there.’

  I went cold.

  ‘I saw it weeks ago, Ernst.’ He turned from the window. ‘If you’re going to hide something, old boy, don’t choose a place where a witch changes the bed sometimes.’

  ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘We all have secrets, Ernst. Your record at Topf checked out. Not from them. Couldn’t get through. From Berlin. You are quite famous. So I don’t need to know that you’re keeping a plan safe for Topf. Or delivering it wherever. I’m sure it’s good work. Maybe I’ll get a medal for protecting you.’ He went back to the window.

  I took the plan out, unfolded it to the bed.

  ‘Do you know what this is, Franz?’ Said this slowly, a professor questioning a cheater on an exam.

  ‘No. Don’t need to know.’

  ‘Yes. Yes you do. You need to know.’ Felt the hero return. My purpose, after so many weeks. Fruition. Needed to tell someone. After so long. Needed to convince myself, rebuild myself. Ernst Beck not a ghost.

  He came back from the window.

  ‘Is this going to take a cigarette?’

  ‘It might.’

  *

  I explained it to him, watched him react. Left out the intention of me taking it to the Americans. He still wore his colours. A gun, a uniform. But human.

  ‘Hundreds?’ His voice muted. ‘Every day?’

  ‘Maybe thousands. The ovens break from overuse of coal. This design negates that. It fuels itself.’

  ‘But from the bodies? Why would we need this?’

  I folded back the plan. Put it aside only. No need to hide it.

  ‘We don’t. No-one does. It was designed three years ago. They had not thought it necessary then. But I was asked to annotate it last year. To be built.’

  He lit another cigarette.

  ‘You have a horrible task, Ernst. This is like something from a farm. A butcher. This was for the camps?’

  ‘I measured it for Auschwitz.’

  He looked over to the rifle.

  ‘I thought I had a bad job.’ A near smile, a close acknowledgement of something. ‘If you keep this safe, Ernst, you’ll be a hero. One day. If our enemies got hold of such a thing …’

  My face must have changed, another thought on it, for Franz sprang his hand to grab the paper. I the faster, his hand on the back of mine. I gathered it up, to my back, and he drew away. A street between us. Wider than the dust avenue below our window.

  ‘My work, Franz. My plan. My duty. You said we had secrets. This is mine.’

  He leaned back on his bed, a mordant look, a comment coming. Drowned by the sound of mortar fire a street from us.

  The corporal, not Franz, went to the window, grabbed his rifle, held it out the window as the explosions hit.

  They were not a day from us. Today. Now. He closed the window, locked the clasp.

  ‘You better go see what the witch might have for us to eat. You won’t be going out today.’ He watched me tuck the plan under the back of my shirt.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ernst.’ He sat on the chair, gun slumped against him. ‘I do not really care, old boy. And tomorrow it won’t even matter.’

  Chapter 57

  It went on for three more days. The water spluttered from the taps, dust in it. I was grey; plaster and grit coated to my skin. Sandpaper when I washed.

  The witch had gone. Run. So we had full use of her kitchen, marvelled at what she had been squirrelling away. Tins of peaches and fermented apples, powdered milk and eggs, and pickles that you only saw at Christmas and usually left until next Christmas.

  She had her own cannery and even canned whole chickens. You could roast them and they tasted as terrible as you would imagine. Swallowed them with sauerkraut and pickles in the same gulp to keep them down.

  Not
one man among us knew how to make bread. We took her flour and used it to batter the canned chickens. The subtleties of different foods at different times of day lost. You had dry-fried chicken for breakfast, when you could take time, when the shelling paused – all soldiers take breakfast. Peach and watered oats for lunch. Scrambled eggs and kidney beans for supper. The water, only good for boiling, filtered through muslin squares. Dandelion coffee all that was left. Brought a mug of it to Franz and watched out the window with him.

  It was not a battle, not as you might write of one. The tanks were nested around the city, far around. Away from us. A perimeter. The streets a child’s game of hide and seek, of cowboys and Indians. As He would have wanted. Forgot that the cowboys always won.

  Shooting from corners, from windows and doorways. Mortar shells whistled into buildings, shots into the falling dust, then either people running out, in nightdresses or overcoats, or those with uniforms and guns shooting back, stumbling, falling. Echoes off the walls. Cursing and gunfire. A shot. Echo. A curse. Echo. Again and again, like a record stuck at its end. Reverberating around the walls that still remained, recorded into the brick. To be played in another time. If time still a thing after all this. Hear what we heard from our window which once only brought in the sound of morning, the call of the mother for her children to come in from play. The record at its end, rubbing against the label. Shot, curse, plea. Echo. Then someone lifted up the needle. A few minutes of silence, of repositioning of the mortar, of the bazooka, of the needle, and then back to it. The next record placed. Franz and I, drinking dandelion coffee and watching a woman in her nightdress cling to a lamp-post while her husband tried to drag her away as a bazooka on the corner was set. A helmet tap, ears covered, trigger pulled. And they would both be gone. Shoes. Coats. Shoes in the gutter, nightdresses on the street. Every day. Not a battle. Not as you might write of one.

  *

  It was still morning and I was in the kitchen making oats when it began.

  There was a burst of gunfire from outside, as if right outside, under the high windows of the kitchen, so close it made me duck to the kitchen table. I was alone there. Crawled out to not be.