“You will speak to me properly,” Conrad said.
The porter stared at him.
“You are insolent,” Conrad said. “I have just returned from London. I have not been in Germany for a long time. What’s the matter with you?”
The porter looked at him and laughed sneeringly. “Your passport!”
“I presented my passport when I registered. I left it in my room.”
The porter bent over the register and Conrad watched his thumb travel backward over the list of guests and finally stop. Then he looked up with a smile and the smile was not pleasant.
“Sie sind Herr Dehmel?”
“Herr Doktor Dehmel.”
“A German name and a German passport. Heil Hitler!”
They looked at each other and Conrad shrugged. “If you insist.”
“Then say it.”
“Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany. Didn’t you know that? Now, give me the key.”
The porter looked at him dumbly and handed the key over. Conrad went to the elevator cage, pulled open the folding metal door, went inside, closed it, and creaked slowly up to the third floor. He was unnerved because he had felt such a useless fury against the man, and when he rose and turned on the light he took his diary out of his suitcase and sat down at the little table. This is what he wrote:
“Hanna was right and I was blind. I have come home to the unthinkable. You can smell the fear and the rottenness. It reeks like the smell of stale boiled cabbage in a slum. It is unthinkable to know that it is dangerous to be writing these words. Hanna was right again. I knew more than I know now about the reality of history when I was a child and Father came home after the great battle. Now history has stepped out of the books and documents and is looking me over. I can smell her breath but I can’t read what’s in her eyes. I’m afraid of her. I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid she will make me know I’m a coward.”
He tried to write more but nothing came, so he stowed the diary away in his suitcase under some dirty clothes, locked the suitcase, and put the key in his pocket. He turned out the light, went to the open window, and leaned out. Opposite was the wall of another building, a small, cheap hotel similar to his own. A light flashed on and he saw a man and a woman enter a room. The man was stout and heavy and so was the woman. Without even looking at each other they took off their clothes, the woman lay down on the bed and spread her thick legs, and the man followed her. With the light still burning they fornicated. It was quickly over. The man rose, washed himself at a small basin, and put on his clothes without speaking. Then he nodded to the woman lying on the bed and went out the door. When he was gone she sat up, brushed her teeth, yawned, put on a nightdress, and yawned again. Conrad saw her hand move to the switch, the light vanished, and again he was confronted by a dark, blank wall.
FIVE
The next morning he phoned his mother. Three weeks earlier she had written to tell him that she had a spare room where he could sleep until he found an apartment of his own.
“Are you well, Mother?”
“Nothing to complain of, certainly, at my age.”
“Your voice sounds tired, Mother.”
“I must make it sound better for you. Dear Conrad, it’s so good to hear you again. Are you well?”
“Never better,” he lied.
He asked about his father and she said he was working twelve hours a day and had been in Kiel for the past ten days. He would be home soon but she did not know when. He asked about his young brother Siegfried, whom he hardly knew as a person, and she said she would tell him about Siegfried when he arrived at the apartment.
He went down carrying his suitcase and asked the day porter to call him a taxi. The day porter was a thin, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered man with a racking cough. Conrad asked him if he was well and after another shuddering cough the man said, “It is nothing new. The mustard gas.”
“I have been in England for several years and have met some men there who experienced the mustard gas.”
“Natürlich.”
When Conrad said “Guten Tag” the porter said “Grüss Gott.”
“Are you from Bavaria?” Conrad said.
“My mother was. I was born in Baden.”
“Freiburg?”
“No, Offenburg.”
“That’s where they have the big statue of the Englishman Sir Francis Drake, isn’t it?”
“The first man who brought the potato to Europe. Yes.”
Conrad knew that Drake was not the first man to bring the potato to Europe but for once he restrained himself from talking like a teacher and saying that the Spaniards had brought it from Peru.
“Eine schöne Stadt, Offenburg. I am from Freiburg.”
“Eine schöne Stadt.”
Conrad felt better when he went outside into the sunlight and hailed a taxi. On the way to his mother he looked intently out the window and Berlin in the sunshine was a different city from Berlin in the night. It was brisk, full of purpose, and not too many uniforms were on the sidewalks. The streets were cleaner than the streets of London, but there was nothing remarkable about that. They had always been clean. The first time he was in Berlin he had seen a street-cleaning machine spraying the pavement in the middle of a blinding rainstorm. He paid off the taxi and entered the four-story building where his parents lived, and when he examined the small register of the tenants he saw that they lived on the top floor.
His mother looked older than she had three years ago, more withdrawn, her expression resigned and sad, but her kiss was as warm as ever when they embraced.
“Well, Conrad, are you glad to be home?”
He understood that the question was not routine. He sat down, filled his pipe, and puffed it alight.
“I don’t know yet. But tell me about yourself. Are you playing as well as ever?”
She lifted her right hand. “The arthritis has come to me finally. So far it’s only in the wrist but it will be sure to spread to the fingers. Then of course I won’t be able to play at all. However, this is to be expected. Meanwhile the important news with us is that your father is going to be promoted to rear-admiral. It should be official any time now.”
He put another match to his pipe, shook it out, and set it down in an ash tray.
“Are you happy about it?”
Her slim shoulders moved in a half-shrug. “For him, yes. He feels vindicated. You were such a little boy when the news came about the great battle. Do you remember it?”
“I’ll never forget it. I remember everything each one of the neighbors said about it. And I remember even better how Father looked when he came home on leave two months later.”
“He has not been forgotten by his old comrades. One of them is now the Grand Admiral. The Grand Admiral stood on the bridge beside Admiral Hipper on that day.”
“Is Father happy?”
“As I said, he feels vindicated. He’s never been so busy in his life.” She smiled again, this time in wry amusement. “I was never studious myself, but here I am with a studious husband and a studious son. But they both study such different things.”
“When will Father be home?”
“I can never be sure of his movements and neither can he, but he should be home soon. As I told you, he’s in Kiel at present. They are making great plans for the navy and some of your father’s ideas have been adopted.”
Conrad puffed his pipe slowly, then held it in his palm and looked out the window.
“Mother,” he said, still looking out the window, “I know I must have seemed unkind. I mean, seeing so little of you these last half-dozen years. I can’t talk about it, Mother. I only hope you understood.”
“Yes, I understood. I was sad, yes, but I know you pretty well, Conrad.”
He drew on his pipe several times more, then swung his head back and faced her.
“I’d like to talk to Father now. Do you think he’ll talk to me – really talk to me?”
“You’re his oldest son. Of course you shoul
d talk to him.”
“I want to ask him if they’re going to make the same mistakes they made the last time.”
“If you ask him that, he’ll tell you they have studied all the old mistakes and won’t repeat them.”
“I heard him say something like that when I was a child. He said it the night you played the Goldberg Variations. I’ve never forgotten the expression on his face when he said it.”
She did not reply and there was a silence of almost a minute before Conrad broke it.
“Mother, no country in Europe wants war except Germany.”
“The people don’t want it. I don’t want it.”
“Not even the young?”
She sighed. “They have no idea of what war is like.”
“All this talk about not repeating the old mistakes – don’t they realize that the only mistake that mattered the last time was that the war happened at all? Don’t the soldiers and sailors understand that?”
“If you asked your father that question, I suppose you know what his answer would be?”
“That he is a sailor and that politics is the business of the government?”
She nodded.
“Does he trust Hitler?”
“I truly can’t say yes or no to that. He never makes it necessary to ask him. What he does say is, look at Germany now and remember what it was like before Hitler became the Chancellor. Many people say that. In Germany everyone is working again. So your father says, the facts speak.”
“Soon there will be new facts and they’ll speak, too.”
“Conrad, please! There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can say except that he is my husband.”
She asked if he was ready for coffee and while she was making it he stood up and looked out the window appraisingly. Certainly this was the best apartment his parents had ever lived in and this was the best district, though for him it had none of the loveliness of Freiburg by the little Dreisam. When she returned with the coffee he asked about his young brother Siegfried, whom he hardly knew.
“I have not seen him all summer. He’s still in camp with the Hitler Jugend.”
“So Siegfried swallows all this?”
“All the youth believe in it. Poor children, they have no choice. But Siegfried is enthusiastic. He’s very proud to belong to the Hitler Jugend. He has always been strong and he loves the training.”
Frau Dehmel sipped her coffee and sat with folded hands.
“So,” Conrad said. “If war comes, Siegfried will be just the right age for the first battles.”
“He is already assigned to the navy.”
“I’m glad it’s not the army. The navy won’t be strong enough to fight for years.”
With no change of expression, she said, “Siegfried intends to serve in submarines. He’s fascinated by them. He dreams of torpedoing ships. He loves to study technical things about submarines. One torpedo, one ship. Twelve ships sunk on every voyage. That’s the way he talks about it.”
“Oh, my God! So it’s going to be just the same as the last time.”
Conrad relit his pipe and walked to the window feeling unnatural. Looking out the window with his back to her he asked if she would play something for him.
“I play so badly now.”
“Does it hurt your wrist to play?”
“Not too much.”
She rose from the chair, went to the piano, and sat for a moment with her head bowed, thinking. He would always remember her in this posture. Then she lifted her hands and began playing one of the last Beethoven sonatas, the one in A-major that begins with a quiet, rippling contemplation, and he remembered that this was what she had played for his grandfather that night in his childhood after he had brought home the rabbits. She finished and he said it was lovely. She said it was lovely only in her mind and returned to her chair.
“When I knew you were coming home,” she said, “I visited the Institut. The public doors are closed for the rest of the month because they’re making renovations inside. You will have to enter by the door leading into the basement. You will find somebody there who will take you to Professor Rosenthal.”
“Have you met Professor Rosenthal?”
“I didn’t ask to meet him.”
“Why not?”
“I thought it best not to.”
She left him again to get their lunch. She had everything ready and only ten minutes elapsed before she came in with a soufflé, delicious after the restaurant meals he had been eating in London. He thought of Hanna and wanted to tell his mother about her, but instead he asked if she had heard anything of Eva Schmidt. Her expression hardened.
“She came here three weeks ago and asked a number of questions about you. I have the impression that you would have little difficulty in getting a divorce from her now.”
“So she wants to marry somebody else?”
“She didn’t say that, but it was obvious to me that she does, so I made some discreet enquiries. He’s an officer in the Gestapo. I suppose you know what that means?”
“Are they as bad as they’re supposed to be?”
“Much worse. Your father is worried about them because Himmler is using the secret police as a cloak to build a private army of his own. The regular army officers despise them, of course. Your father’s not afraid of the Gestapo on his own account, but he’s afraid they’ll disgrace the country. He didn’t believe me when I told him that it won’t be long before the officers in all the services will be afraid of them.” She looked at him and she had never seemed more serious. “For your own protection you must tell me this truly – does Eva hate you very much?”
“I think she despises me.”
“Don’t be surprised if I say that I hope that’s true, but I don’t really believe it. Soon after she came home from London she became a Hitler Girl, but she’s beyond that now. She’s the mistress of this Gestapo officer. He’s very important and he has an evil reputation. He’s a married man with children and Eva is stupid enough to believe that he will leave his wife to marry her. You mentioned a girl you met in London but you told me nothing about her. Is she English?”
“No, German.”
I can imagine the shy smile with which Conrad continued. He was always shy about his personal feelings.
“How the man who was obtuse enough to marry Eva Schmidt should have been lucky enough to discover Hanna Erlich I can’t understand. She’s been wonderful, Mother.”
Her face tightened. “Erlich, did you say? That’s frequently a Jewish name.”
“None of them have been practising Jews for nearly a century. Her mother isn’t Jewish at all.”
“That might not make much difference. By the way, your father knows a Major-General Erlich. Is there a connection?”
“He’s Hanna’s uncle. She’s connected with some very interesting people.”
His mother seemed relieved, but not entirely so. “If a Wehr-macht general is her uncle, that could make her safe – for a while, at least. I can’t help hearing a lot of professional service gossip. The high command still believes it can control the government. I hope they’re right, but I’m only a woman. Anyway, General Erlich has a very good reputation in the service.”
“Hanna’s father is Dr. Erlich, the psychiatrist. I’ve never met him, but he sounds like a fascinating man. Some things Hanna tells me about his ideas seem strange, though. He believes that the thing Hitler is most of all sincere about is this craziness about the Jews. Do you think he’s right?”
She compressed her lips and laid her hand on Conrad’s knee. “It’s safe for you to talk like that here, but in public you must never speak of him as ‘Hitler.’ Only as the Führer.”
“Hanna says she will never return to Germany while he’s in power except on one condition – if her family needs her. Do you think she’s exaggerating?”
“Do I think? Most of us have decided that the best thing is not to think at all. As you know, your father has nothing against the Jews, but he becomes very uncomf
ortable if I ever ask him about that aspect of Hitler’s government.”
A long silence fell between them and finally his mother broke it.
“I’ve never interfered with your life, Conrad. I don’t want to worry you or make you change your habits, but I have to tell you this. You have always been outspoken and I’ve loved you for that. But you’ve also had a tendency to think aloud. Now please listen to me, carefully. You’ve been away so long that you simply don’t understand how things are here. Don’t mention certain words in public. Don’t mention the word ‘Russia’ in a bus or a streetcar. It is best not to talk about politics at all. But if you do – and I suppose you will do it – make sure you know who you’re talking with. And make sure it’s in a public park or a room with the doors locked.”
His expression froze as their eyes locked.
“Has it really come to this?”
“It came to this very quickly. Suddenly it was here. You know that slogan of theirs – ‘Today we have Germany, tomorrow the whole world’? We didn’t take it seriously. It seemed too insane. But the young believe it now. For them it’s a certainty. If you say something often enough and loud enough –” she lifted her hands in the old gesture and let them drop in her lap, “for the young the program is all settled. They believe that every detail has been worked out. The Leader is infallible and the young follow him – like Siegfried, deliriously happy.”
He sat in silence and remembered Hanna saying that Hitler was a genius. He looked at his watch and rose to leave for the Institut. Then he looked down at his mother and felt sad and helpless, knowing she loved his father and therefore had to accept what her husband wanted against all her better judgement. He wondered if there are many things more destructive that one person can do to another than what his father’s one-track mind was doing to his mother. He looked at her steadily and full of pity.
Voices in Time Page 27