Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

  The kitchen behind the reception, in front of the main door, and I kept my head below the desk as another burst hit the building. Rapid stuttering fire. Weapons that sounded like they spewed bullets from a wood-chipper. Faster than breath, faster than the blood or the blink of eye that accompanies.

  The spew of them following as I moved from space to covered space. Sunlight and smoke from perfect holes along the walls and I went under the streaking rays, would burn at their touch.

  At the stairs the hail followed and I went flat, slithered up. If I was alone so was Franz. Pushed images out of my mind about that. Franz. Not Hans. Franz. Only the names similar. My deed not. He would not be alone.

  Upstairs the crack of rifles came from every room. No voices, just the accent of guns, stoic German accents of guns. Fire, pull, snap, fire. Elegant and controlled. From the streets the brash gangster laugh of the automatic-gun, chomping bullets like chewing gum. Ungraceful, loose.

  Our door the first in the corridor.

  ‘Get down!’ Franz at the window, rifle firing.

  He was in a cloud of smoke and sun. Concentration blazing off him like a light. A concert violinist bathed in spotlight. His practised movements reminiscent of such, the same dedicated fury and passion. Not like my father’s half-drunken wolf hunts. He looked beautiful. Jarring to imagine such.

  I pulled up the mattresses and put them either side of the windows. Franz said nothing, I took this as approval and knelt behind him. Wanted so strongly to look at the street. Compelled. A devil’s finger beckoning me to take a look.

  I peered past Franz’s hip at the sill, crept my head just above it like a boy slowly pushing open the drawer of a forbidden box of matches to the dangerous wonders within.

  All I could see was the window opposite, a mirror of Franz in it, another firing to the corner, and then that burst again, a puff of dust as I ducked. I crept up again. The window empty.

  A chime as Franz’s clip emptied, slapped my shoulder to hand him another from the bag at his feet but I stopped moving as the rumble of geared metal came from both ends of the street.

  ‘Shit,’ Franz spat and I could not help but stand up to see as I passed him the clip.

  The huge telegraph-pole barrel of a Tiger heaving up over a pile of rubble to our right. Left, a smaller tank faced him off, in shadow, the sun at his back. Squaring against each other like two gunfighters in the final act of one of our leader’s favoured movies, but not the image he would have wanted to see, not as manicured and noble. Clumsy and laboured like two tortoises about to battle for a square of basking rock. A battle for a rock, for rubble.

  ‘Shit.’

  Franz fired like an archer at the smaller tank, like my father at a wolf that was not allowed to breed that year. I saw the buildings tremble as the machines went at each other. In all my life I have never heard such a sound. It was not the sound of the end of the world. That came after. With the silence and the dust. You could hear the dust fall.

  Franz fired through the smoke, less shooting from the other rooms. I could hear boots running, yelling from street corners. The random burst again, closer still. Then something bit a chunk out of the window frame and Franz fell to the naked wire mesh of his bed, slapped his hand to his neck.

  ‘Shit! Shit!’ Hand and wrist red. I pulled him to sit. Red on me, his neck dripping to his lap. I ran to the bathroom, grabbed a towel. My body awkward as I tried to press it on him and he snatched it from me and I stood like a fool. Apologised. Watched him dying.

  A ricochet. Not even an aimed shot. A dumb bullet flying off a dumb window frame. I saw all his teeth as he grimaced, a grin like Hans, like in the movie from my youth, the mutilated Victor Hugo clown. I pulled a mattress from the wall, threw it to my bed, his breath behind me like a raging animal, a dying wolf.

  I took him, a rag-doll, put him on the bed, to bed, his grey uniform black, the white towel shrunk and red as it sucked at him, only his face as white as the towel had been seconds before. His eyes not with me. Ridiculous. Like Paul’s death. Ridiculous. I knew this now, how death, violent death comes. Clumsy. Nothing noble. A child walking around in his father’s boots. Stumbles and breaks his teeth on a table while you’re still amused at the image of him.

  Nothing stopped outside. The tanks rolled and fired. The stuttering guns went on. Franz Werra’s breath stopped coming and I waited for my own.

  And he left.

  Sat on his bed’s wire frame and watched him. He might still be there somewhere. Would not leave him alone. Until I was sure. I would wait with him for one cigarette. I did not have that luxury with Paul, with Hans, with Etta. I needed it. Found myself smiling on him. Could not help but find something still amusing in him. His last words.

  ‘Shit.’ His last words. All he said.

  ‘Shit.’

  The simple platitudes.

  Chapter 58

  Far from now, someone will be in this room. The beds will not be here, the wardrobe gone, the room empty, the room gone. Someone will stand at the window, repainting the wood or fitting new casements, and they will tut at the gouge in the wood, the chip of the stone on the outside, and think on the work and cost required to prise out the frame just to replace one piece. Or ignore it, pretend they never saw it. Cover it with curtains. Never concern how the hole got there. And no-one but me will know. Just a split in a window frame, just an argument between husband and wife about replacing or ignoring. And maybe they have a boy, maybe he comes to the room to remove himself from the shouting, to see what the fuss is about, and he sees the cracked wood and the crescent shape left by something hitting and leaving the wood fast. And he knows. He goes to the kino on Saturday mornings and sees the cowboys shoot at each other from windows and rooftops, sees the glass break and the wood fly. He knows what happened here. He turns and sees it. Runs from room to room, looks for and finds the smart round holes in the ceilings, the pock marks on the outside walls of the building opposite. And he knows what happened here.

  And the unfortunate thing, far from now, when the room has gone, the unfortunate thing will be.

  The boy will smile. Be joyed that this thing happened in his house.

  *

  I took up my coat, checked the pockets. Letter-knife, silver case and lighter, envelope for Franz’s parents, wallet and worker’s pass. Paper plan. Wedding band. Put it on. For the first time in weeks.

  The shooting lessened, but not the noise. Grenades. Mortars. I took his dress uniform from the wardrobe, put it with him and went downstairs. They would know it was his if I did that. He would wear it in his grave. Not at a ball. Something.

  I left through the back door. To the yard. Looked long and hard at the motorcycle. All motorcycles look impatient. Waiting to move. They look like the skeletons of animals in museums, like dinosaurs where they pose them as if in action. Head turned, jaws open, tail whipping. But that’s not how they died. They dropped dead from age, from sickness, from hunger, from predator. They died like us. But if we posed them like that no-one would go to see. No-one wants to be reminded. And it is a reminder, a memory. The strangest memory. For it hasn’t happened yet. We despair to be reminded. Prefer to believe it does not happen.

  Leave the bike. Riding it would look aggressive. It was never mine. And I didn’t need it. Not now. Ernst Beck no longer running. I opened the metal box and gave back its pouch of spanners.

  I could hear the machines roaring, grinding, walked to the sound, to the corner, and it was like walking out onto a stage from the shelter of the wings. A louder, brighter world. I ignored it all, strode to the centre of the street, wide berth to the deafening Tiger, then regained my path of heading straight to the smaller tank, to the green uniforms already waving me away as I raised my arms and still came on.

  The Tiger’s turret squealed, imagined it over my shoulder, aiming at the other tank staring straight back at me, my body between them both, still walking.

  Any one of those watching could cut me down, grey or green, and it wouldn�
��t matter to me now. I had someone else’s blood on me. A friend’s. And that had a strange numbness. Removed from what you might and might not do on any normal day. But I had a wedding band on me as well. And I had not had a normal day for a year. Craved one. Would make one.

  I began shouting. My English capable.

  ‘I am people!’ I yelled. ‘People! Not soldier!’ The people in the maps.

  The Tiger fired.

  The sound threw me to the ground. The shell high. A hole in a building another scene away. The smaller one shot back. Hit its mark and the Tiger reared, rolled backwards. I stood up in the falling dust as if nothing had occurred around me, my ears whistling, my hands raised again. The green jackets stopped waving me away, waved me on, beckoned me to the corner.

  The shooting from the windows stopped.

  Not for me. Ernst Beck not that valued.

  I stood against a wall, arms above my head as a soldier in green patted me down with one hand, his weapon away from me. They all looked so young. The first thing I noticed. Younger than me. You expect your invading army to be older.

  He found the letter-knife and the silver case and lighter. Took only the knife, tossed it aside. I went to fetch it up, did not think otherwise. It was not mine.

  ‘Nicht,’ he said. ‘Nicht. Leave it.’

  Such a strange voice. It did not even sound like English. The German did not sound like German.

  I bent for the knife.

  ‘Not mine,’ I said, arms still up, then lowered one and leaned to the knife. ‘A friend’s.’ I picked it up. ‘A friend’s. I will return it to him. Please.’ Went back to the wall with it, back to my pocket, the gun never threatening.

  ‘Stay there,’ he said, stepped backwards into the road, called someone over, someone named Tenenbaum. Tenenbaum! Almost like ‘Christmas tree’. No-one with such a name could be a bad one.

  German soldiers walked from the avenues and buildings, no helmets or caps, hands up, heads low. They walked in threes or fives. Not wishing to look massed.

  First-Lieutenant Edward Tenenbaum introduced himself to me. He spoke understandable German, reassured me that all was well and asked for my identification. He scanned it and, of all the information on there, of all the questions he could have asked, his first was a good one, a right one.

  ‘Where is your wife?’

  I spoke English first, apologised.

  ‘Zurich, sir. She is safe. Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Asking about my Etta. My wife.’

  ‘Are you all right? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Waiting for you,’ I said.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For Americans.’ I nodded my head to the German soldiers walking. Not marching. ‘What is happening, please?’

  He handed back my card.

  ‘Command surrendered at noon. These guys holding out. You, sir, should make your way to the Gau, yes? You understand? We’re aiding civilians there. You understand? It’s not safe here.’

  I had stopped listening. Noon he had said. Surrendered at noon. Half an hour ago at least. Franz dead for only minutes. They had surrendered at noon. I saw Franz’s grin full of blood. An irony in it now, an irony that he did not know, or he had seen it a moment after. As he left. As all becomes known.

  The lieutenant must have judged my glaze as one of an imbecile. Must have seen many such faces. War faces. The sight of his back moving away woke me.

  Now Ernst. Now.

  ‘Lieutenant Tenenbaum,’ I called, and he paused just enough. ‘I need to speak to someone in command.’

  ‘What?’

  He was my age I guessed, maybe even younger. Young enough to still listen to men his age. Old enough to discern what to listen to.

  ‘I am no regular civilian, sir.’ I straightened my shabby coat, pulled down my frayed cuffs, still with good brass cuff-links.

  ‘I have important information. I have come from Erfurt to find Americans.’

  Stand like Hans, Ernst Beck. Speak like him, frame his pose. But I could not. The air out of me, ears still ringing. My shoulders would no longer go back, hair full of dust and without pomade, my wing-tips scuffed like boots. I could not. Not Hans Klein. Saw him in front of me, before I left him. Telling me to be the best Hans Klein I could be. The Hans Klein I would never be.

  ‘I have worked with the SS. Came here to find you. Give information.’

  ‘What information?’ He came back.

  I pulled the plan from behind me, too fast, his hand to his holster and I slowed as I carried the paper free, handed it to him. Kept my fingertips frailly dancing on its edges as he opened it out. Mine. So long mine. Fragile in my eye like a papyrus script. The sunlight would break it.

  ‘What the hell is this? A building?’

  ‘It is an oven. I worked for Topf and Sons. In Erfurt. We made ovens for the SS. For the Party. I need to speak to someone. Someone in command, sir.’

  ‘An oven? It’s enormous. What …’

  I answered for him, answered for his eyes that I could see perceiving. At the dates, at the SS stamps, the eagle, the sig-runes. He was looking at something significant, something stolen. Something that belonged on an important desk and not a Kassel street.

  ‘For the camps,’ I said. ‘Those levels running down that you see are grated conveyors. You have seen the camps, yes?’

  ‘We know of them,’ he said. ‘We all got camps.’

  ‘Not like this. Not like this. This is what they wanted to do,’ I said, nodding like a madman and I bit my lip to stop it. My hands tentatively pulled the paper from him. Mine. My work. He let me take it back. Brushed his hands.

  ‘It can incinerate thousands of corpses,’ I said. ‘It is fuelled by the motion of the bodies. Their fat. I would like to speak to someone in command, please, lieutenant. I can show you camps. I can help. I know where they are.’

  He withdrew from me. Not actually. As Franz had done. A space between us. His face no longer the helpful German interpreter. I saw the face that all might have for Ernst Beck when this was done.

  ‘You better come with me.’ Hand clamped to my shoulder. I could not keep up with his pace. Understood that. Understood that he did not want me to.

  *

  I was in an office building opposite the Gau. A makeshift command until the Gau had been cleared fully, until all the papers had been signed, until one general had capitulated on paper to another. Swords were not passed, crowns not given. A signature on paper. Wars began and ended with signatures when once they had opened and closed with emperors and citadel walls. Now generals signed on the line. A contract. Civilised. Business.

  I rode there in a ‘jeep’. They called it that. Half a car. A ride like a wooden carousel at a fair. Jeep. A strange army. They called our stick-grenades ‘potato-mashers’, their own they called ‘pineapples’. It was like children playing at war. Perhaps how they got through it. Childish names, connotations to everything, for everything. Even the badges on their arms were bright, like pictures cut from a comic-book. Ours were black. Diamonds, the occasional leaf, simple pips for rank. Not reds, not yellows, no coloured piping, no stars like fireworks. But we both had the eagle. The same standard.

  ‘What the hell am I looking at?’ This from a captain. This usage of ‘hell’ common to them. Tenenbaum’s first words when he saw the plan. The driver of the jeep had said similar: ‘Who the hell is this?’ Maybe they believed they were in Hell. They did not talk like this in the movies; perhaps not permitted to do so.

  Surprised by how tall they were, how well fed. Not as we imagined them. And they were calm. Confident. That was it. Assurance. There was an acceptance through them that everything was opening exactly as it should. The lieutenant who escorted me had rode through streets of ash and fire, whistling, one foot resting outside the car. Soldiers waved to us as we passed, not saluted, waved ‘Hi’. This brag of theirs did not inspire. They might not understand after all, might not care. Not take me in. Not help. Put me ba
ck on the street with my funny drawing and carry on with their circus army and their whistles and waves.

  The man Tenenbaum explained to the captain as best he could. I watched, listened, tried to interject but my nose running and I sneezed into my hand. I could feel myself waning, my hands paling even through the dried blood, Franz’s blood, still on them.

  ‘May I sit, please?’ Even my voice pale. They looked at me blankly. I did not know if I had spoke English or German. They did not respond. I sought my own chair, limped to it so they might understand. I sat and gathered.

  The captain made notes. I assumed of the names attached to the documents. But he did not understand the document.

  ‘Why would they want a machine like this? This is the SS. Is it for meat? He says it does hundreds a day? What for?’

  I coughed. The same blank look back at me. Now Ernst. Now.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. In English. If I spoke slow I was sure I could manage. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ I think I smiled.

  ‘This “machine” was patented by my company for the SS. My role was to make our designs clearer for Berlin. I draft ovens. Designs for the camps. They get larger. They burn all day. All night. They burn so much that they break. And we go fix them. We bring them portable units while we fix so they can keep burning. This one – this oven – is almost automated. Needs only two men. Very little fuel. It fuels itself. By the bodies consuming each other. They go in and go down on conveyors moved by the motion of them. By the mass of them. And they all mix together at the bottom.’ I paused to sneeze again. I was punctuating my speech with my hands, conducting it with my hands so they could follow.

  ‘It was patented in ’42. Then forgotten. Not used. Then last summer they remembered. Last summer they asked me to draw it again. For Berlin. For the camps. Last summer they moved half a million Jews from Hungary. To the camps. They wanted this oven for those camps. Do you see? Please?’