Second Violin

by Lawton, John

  Fat chance, Hummel thought.

  Beckermann turned to the youngest in the room, his grandson, eleven-year-old Jonny – younger brother of Adam, the one who had been beaten up by the SA just before the Nazi conquest, and who still bore a livid blue scar across his forehead.

  ‘Jonathan – the four questions.’

  The boy knew what was required of him. He’d done this since he was seven. At that age Hummel too had been often called on to ask the same four questions. All he had to do was ask about the oddness of the meal, the things on the silver seder plate in the middle of the table – herbs and matzohs, chicken bones and a mish-mash of apple and walnut that Hummel always thought looked like a Waldorf salad gone wrong. The questions served as prompts for the old man to bang on again about slavery and Egypt and deliverance . . . lest we forget. Hummel had long ago concluded that the point of being a Jew was that you were never allowed to forget anything.

  Jonny said, ‘Zayde . . . why have we not risen up and kicked out the Nazis?’

  The boy’s mother whispered none too softly in his ear.

  The boy replied loudly, ‘I know, I know. Didn’t you hear me last year? I know the answers to the four questions. Zayde was kind enough to tell me then. Now there are new questions.’

  Beckermann was flummoxed – he had the routine off pat and was all but incapable of improvising. There were no new questions. It had been done this way for the best part of three thousand years. Beckermann’s daughter-in-law was angry – her son also had it off pat, and it was not something that required thought or criticism. Beckermann’s grandson was, however, resolute.

  ‘Will God deliver us from this evil, Zayde, as he did in Egypt? I only ask because if he takes as long as he did in Egypt there may be none of us left to be safely led into the land of milk and honey.’

  A vein in Beckermann’s forehead had turned purple-ish and was beginning to throb. But he said nothing. His daughter-in-law, all of sixteen stone, grabbed the boy, well under five feet tall and less than six stone, and bundled him out. Silence reigned. Hummel thought Beckermann was only seconds away from weeping. Still he did not speak. Then Adam Beckermann, seventeen, tall and skinny, got up from his seat, slipped off his yarmulke and spoke.

  ‘Grandfather, I can no longer pray for our deliverance, prayer is pointless. God has gone deaf, either that or he is dead . . . I can no longer pray for our deliverance, but I’ll fight for it.’

  The yarmulke thrown down landed on the seder plate, knocking over the chopped parsley and bitter herbs. Adam’s father, Beckermann’s third son, Arthur, shot bolt upright from his seat and bellowed the one word ‘Adam!’ But the boy was gone. Beckermann wept. Hummel slipped out quietly, unnoticed he hoped, from the ruins of the seder. It was not the last he was ever invited to, but it was the last he ever went to.

  § 15

  2 June

  Berggasse

  The Freuds were travelling light. Sigmund, Martha, their children, his sister-in-law, two maids and a doctor, the dog – and the furniture. The furniture was travelling separately. The furniture included some three thousand Greek and Roman figurines and sixteen hundred books. The furniture was leaving first.

  It was sod’s law that on the day the men arrived to clear Sigmund’s study – an event that could have been calculated to turn his head and heart as topsy-turvy as the room itself – ‘would you let a strange man rummage through your trousers?’ – the Nazi Commissar of Vienna, one Dr Sauerwald, should also arrive, just as two apronned removal men were struggling down the stairs with the patients’ couch. Having no choice but to invite him in – a courtesy they were able to avoid extending to his SA escort – Sigmund asked, ‘To what do I owe the honour?’ and realised at once that the man was taking the terms of the question literally.

  ‘A simple matter of paperwork,’ the Doctor replied.

  Sigmund took the single sheet of paper from its envelope and read.

  ‘Since the Anschluss . . . blah, blah, blah . . . I have been treated . . . blahdey-blah . . . with all the respect due to my reputation . . . blah, blah, blah . . . and could live and work in full freedom, if I so desired . . . blah, blah, blahdey-blah . . .’

  Sigmund looked at Sauerwald. As the name implied, the man was humourless. Perhaps that was the key to Nazism . . . no sense of humour. It was the funniest thing he’d read in weeks, but he was the only one laughing, and even then laughing only on the inside.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But you are too modest. Would you mind if I added an endorsement?’

  ‘Endorsement? Er . . . certainly.’

  Sigmund scribbled ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone’, added a spidery ‘S. Freud’ by way of signature and handed it back.

  Sauerwald looked at it. He didn’t get this joke either. It was the sort of thing you found on the side of brown, ribbed bottles of patent medicines, cures for indigestion or piles, general tonics and spurious pick-me-ups – the sugared water sold by rogues to rubes in Huckleberry Finn.

  ‘Most kind,’ he said. ‘And if I can be of any . . . er . . . assistance to you and your family . . .? I have long been an admirer . . .’

  Sigmund stopped listening. The only place to air stuff like this was on the couch. He would have loved to get this one on the couch, but alas the couch had gone out as he came in.

  After lunch Sigmund took a slow stroll in the summer sun, an old man’s stroll from bench to bench, resting as often as was possible. It would be so hot in the apartment while his daughter burnt his papers.

  § 16

  Saturday, 4 June

  Vienna Westbahnhof

  Two days later, late in the evening, the Freuds boarded the sleeper train to Paris.

  Regardless of what he had told Lockett, Sigmund would kick his leg high enough to reach the bed in the wagon-lit. It might kill him, but he’d do it.

  As they emerged from the corridor that connected the palatial white-stone frontage of the station with the glass and iron engine shed at the back, a young man of thirty or so approached the Freuds, set down his attaché case, doffed his trilby and introduced himself.

  ‘My name is Smith, sir. From the United States Embassy. I’ll be with you as far as Paris.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Sigmund said. ‘Are all spies called Smith in the United States?’

  ‘Most of us are, sir. But I have several colleagues with a preference for Jones and one or two favour Brown.’

  Freud was curious about most things. An occupational hazard. He asked to look at the engine – a squat-bodied, high-domed monster more evocative of the empire than of Hitler’s Vienna – and he gazed one last time at the great glass roof. He’d made a career in symbols. There was no point in dodging them. But when the train pulled out of the station, past the twin towers at the end of the engine shed, he did not look back. Instead he quizzed Smith, a dozen quick questions – but Smith was adept at dodging them.

  § 17

  Sunday, 5 June 1938

  Leopoldstadt

  It was a pleasant summer’s afternoon, a Sunday in early June. Hummel had surrendered to the normality and pushed the oddness of it to one side, onto a mental shelf for the afternoon. He had accepted an invitation from Bemmelmann and his wife to take tea with them – a weak, black Darjeeling with feather-light flaked almond pastries Frau Bemmelmann made freshly that day – and afterwards to walk in the Prater, the vast, hilly park on the eastern edge of Leopoldstadt that housed the city’s funfairs and, since the World’s Fair some forty years ago, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel. The views over Vienna were unequalled. Hummel made a point of going up at least once a year. He valued the perspective. Whatever his own troubles, to see the world writ large and humanity writ small – ants, as he thought of them – always sent him away calmer and more sanguine than when he arrived.

  They would not be going up today. Frau Bemmelmann had no head for heights. They would walk the lanes, slowly climb the hills, no more than that. They were tailors – on Sunday afternoons ma
nnequins for their own wares. It was June and still Bemmelmann carried gloves and a rolled umbrella.

  They had no warning, just the clatter of boots and the sudden surge in the volume of everything. Voices raised, birds put to flight, women screaming. Then the Germans were everywhere, herding the Jews with rifle butts and steering them towards a clump of trees.

  Hummel raised his hands in surrender. Bemmelmann raised one arm, and embraced his wife with the other. For five minutes nothing happened. The Germans laughed and chatted amongst themselves, aimed their rifles almost casually in the direction of the Jews. When they had about thirty penned, the Germans moved among them pulling out the men and telling them to kneel.

  Bemmelmann whispered to Hummel, ‘Is this it, Joe? Is this how it all ends? On our knees with a bullet in the back of the head?’

  Hummel looked at the Germans, still laughing, still not really aiming at anyone.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re having too much fun, it’s just a game.’

  A big, sweaty corporal spoke to them in a voice that could be heard in Budapest.

  ‘Right, Jew-boys. Get ’em off!’

  No one moved, because no one knew what he meant.

  ‘Strip, you buggers, strip. Take off your keks! Take off every last stitch! Now!’

  Hummel tugged at his tie. Bemmelmann still hadn’t moved.

  ‘Do it, Herr Bemmelmann. Please.’

  ‘I can’t Joe . . . the women. The women can see. I have not been naked in front of a woman for twenty years. Not even in front of my wife.’

  ‘Don’t think of the women. Just do it.’

  A dozen Jews discarded their best summer clothes and stood naked in front of half a dozen German soldiers and twenty-odd women of all ages, women who’d seen naked men and women who probably never had. The Germans pissed themselves laughing. One went from man to man, a cigarette dangling from his lips, lifting up the cocks with the end of his rifle, delicately, displaying them like prize fish to his fellows, helpless with laughter. Another German produced a box camera and snapped away as though they were all one big happy family at a beach resort.

  ‘Right you dickless wonders. On yer knees again.’

  They dropped to their knees.

  ‘Now eat!’

  ‘Eat?’ a lone voice queried.

  ‘Eat, my little piggies. Eat grass!’

  They chewed grass.

  Hummel felt he could read Bemmelmann’s mind. The old man was thinking that this was bad but if it was all they had in mind he would live through it. Hummel knew better. The show wasn’t over yet. From nowhere the Germans produced a couple of ladders which they propped against the bole of a vast, spreading chestnut tree with boughs thicker than a man’s thigh.

  ‘Now . . . while the piggies eat . . . the birds can sing!’

  A woman was prodded to the foot of the ladder and made to climb into the tree. One by one the Germans forced seventeen women up the tree. Frau Bemmelmann was next to last, weeping and protesting, pleading and begging. A young woman ahead of her took her hand. A young woman below her pushed bravely at her backside, until the old lady found herself perched on a branch twenty feet off the ground.

  ‘Little birdies go cheep, cheep, cheep.’

  Only the sound of women weeping.

  The Germans pointed their rifles at the tree. One woman softly said, ‘cheep’, and the others joined in . . . a pathetic chorus of ‘cheep, cheep, cheep’.

  ‘Cheep, you birdies!’

  And to the men, ‘Eat you pigs!’

  The women chirped, the men chewed. The Germans hooted with laughter.

  ‘All the little birdies go cheep, cheep, cheep! All the little piggies go chomp, chomp, chomp!’

  They lowered their rifles and doubled up in spasms of near hysteria.

  And then they left. As suddenly as they had arrived.

  Hummel found himself naked, a cool summer breeze on his buttocks, an awful taste in his mouth, as though he had awoken from the archetypal Freudian dream of public nudity to find it was real after all. He had been briefly acquainted with the mind of the Nazi, the merest insight into the dark pit that passed for mind, and felt it a lesson learnt at a high price – part of the tragedy of the Nazi, he felt, pulling on his trousers, was that to the Nazi the world must be a terrifying place, being, as it was, full of kikes and niggers.

  § 18

  Smith had left them in Paris. At Victoria Station, London, the Freuds were met by their eldest two children, Martin and Mathilde, by the Superintendent of the Southern Railway and by the Station Master of Victoria – a man privileged to wear the highest top hat in Britain. Freud would have loved to ask him about the phallic symbolism involved in wearing a hat more than eighteen inches high, wearing one’s cock on one’s head as it were, but Lockett had arrived with his motor car to whisk them away. Past crowds of reporters and well-wishers, out into the strange freedom of a country that, whilst he had never chosen it, finally seemed to have chosen him.

  ‘The short way or the pretty way?’ Lockett asked.

  Freud already had his Bartholomew’s Street Map of London and his Baedeker open in front of him.

  ‘Oh, I think the pretty way . . . the long way . . . I would like to see Piccadilly Circus . . . and Regent Street . . . and the BBC . . . and . . .’

  Lockett slipped the car into gear and headed off in the direction of Buckingham Palace.

  § 19

  It was a light night in the middle of August. Bemmelmann knocked on Hummel’s door and said, ‘We are leaving. Come with us.’

  ‘Leaving how?’

  ‘Downriver. By boat. A boat that will take us down the Danube, out into the Black Sea and then on to Palestine.’

  ‘What about the Germans?’

  ‘What about the Germans?’

  ‘How will you get past them?’

  ‘Trager will help us.’

  ‘Trager?’

  ‘Our German.’

  ‘Our German? We have a German?’

  ‘The one who patrols the street, Joe. His name is Trager.’

  ‘I know. I’ve just never thought of him as being ours. Why would he help you?’

  ‘The Germans want us to leave. They have established an office of Jewish Emigration.’

  ‘Herr Bemmelmann, I have heard of this office of Jewish Emigration, we have all heard of it. It’s a front for bribery. There are wags who call it Adolf Eichmann’s Piggy Bank.’

  ‘There are even representatives from Palestine here to assist us to leave.’

  ‘Jews from Palestine? Zionists? In Vienna? How do you know this?’

  ‘Rabbi Lippmann at the Leopoldstraße synagogue told me so.’

  ‘Yet, Herr Bemmelmann,’ Hummel plodded on. ‘The Germans demand we apply for exit permits, for which they charge all our jewellery, all our savings and even our furniture – and if they aren’t demanding exit permits, how many countries do not have an entry visa requirement? Schuster is even now stuck in Paris waiting for his British visa. Herr Bemmelmann, this is so risky.’

  ‘You said it yourself that day in the Prater, Joe. They’re having fun. They want us all to go. They’d be happy if we all went to live in Palestine and complicated life for the British instead. Meanwhile, it amuses them to make us jump through hoops. We fill out their forms, we pay their bribes, we sit in the trees and we chirp like birds.’

  ‘So you jumped? You have an exit permit? You have a passport?’

  ‘Of course not. Why would an old Jew like me have a passport? I have never been out of Vienna in my life. That is why we go by night, on a boat. That is why Trager will escort us across the city. With him in uniform the night patrols will leave us alone. If anyone asks he will say he has arrested us.’

  ‘And how much has Trager asked for this service?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Yet,’ said Hummel. ‘Yet.’

  ‘Come with us, Joe. Joe, I have known you all your life. I spent the night of your birth sitting up with your fat
her. I was present at your bris, at your bar mitzvah. Your father asked me to watch over you the day before he died. I am too old to do that now. Come with us, Joe, you can watch over us.’

  It was a neat inversion. The most subtle form of blackmail. Hummel smiled at the old man’s wiliness.

  ‘And the shop, Herr Bemmelmann, what about the shop?’

  ‘Ach, I sold it this morning.’

  ‘You were able to find a buyer?’

  ‘A gentile . . . ten pfenigs on the mark . . . he’d buy you out too at the drop of a Nazi hat.’

  Hummel knew this to be true. The miracle, small though it was, was that he, Bemmelmann and the rest of the street were still in business. All over the city Jews had been forced to sell their businesses at pitiful prices to demanding gentiles – Aryans as they saw fit to term themselves. In the tailors’ alley Schuster’s old shop was boarded up, as was the widow Hirschel’s – although the old lady still lived behind the boards and broken glass – the rest carried on a scrappy trade, but then it had never been much better than scrappy. Vienna had too much of everything . . . too many photographers . . . too many painters . . . too many composers . . . too many psychiatrists . . . too many tailors.

  § 20

  It was a long walk. Hummel was surprised Frau Bemmelmann had the strength – across Leopoldstadt, zig-zagging through the side-streets along Praterstraße, in what Hummel thought to be a daft attempt at being unobtrusive on Trager’s part, to the broad avenue that led straight to the banks of the Danube, at which point Trager abandoned his plan and ushered them along in the open. Hummel carried the bags. Trager walked behind them, carrying nothing but his rifle.