Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  “I’ll gladly refund you,” the brisk young travel agent said. “These tickets I can resell in about five seconds. However, finding two berths on another vessel from Rotterdam: not possible. Nor from Le Havre, nor Southampton. Not this season, my friend. All the Americans are returning home in time for Christmas, and every Jew in Germany tries to get to New York, and they’re paying through the nose for passage on a Dutch ship. But I can offer you two berths tourist class on TS Bremen. She sails from Bremerhafen the seventh of January, handsome ship, fast, Norddeutscher Lloyd, five days to New York. You couldn’t do better, my friend.”

  Jews were given unequal treatment on German-flagged ships. She would never agree to a German ship.

  “No, that won’t do.”

  The young man looked at me quizzically. “Are you sure?”

  “Definitely not. We’ll keep the booking we have.”

  “Ich verstehe,” he said coldly. I see. “Well, then, too bad. I’m afraid I can be of no assistance. Good day.”

  My parents came to check up on the baron. He was comatose and didn’t stir the whole time they were there. After they’d left the room with Karin, Otto the taxi driver lingered behind and shot me a look.

  “Situation’s not good, eh?” he said.

  “No, it certainly isn’t.”

  “My old man? Got smacked on the head at work. In the rail yard at Krupp’s, they were loading steel beams with a crane, one swung loose—well, you can imagine. Knocked him cold. They kept him in the works hospital for a month, couldn’t do a thing. For six weeks afterward he lay at home gasping like a fish, shitting and puking whenever my ma tried to feed him. Couldn’t say a damn word. Rolling his eyes. Priests sprinkling holy water—it was pretty awful. Finally he dies. Broke my mother in half. Too late I realized what I ought to have done. I ought to have put him out of it. Spared everyone those last weeks. I was the eldest son, for Christ’s sake, who else to do it? He could be a bastard sometimes, but I owed him that much. I owed my mother. Only I was a punk of fifteen, and I didn’t have the nerve.”

  Otto nodded toward the baron. “The old boy, he’s not going anywhere, right? Life ain’t worth shit, right? And it’s very rough for the Fräulein. Listen, mate, say the word, and I’ll do for him what I couldn’t for my old man. I’d use that pillow, easy as pie. He’ll never wake up. He’s most of the way gone already, isn’t he? Listen, I’d do it for a dog, wouldn’t you?”

  I was on the point of saying Yes, by all means, let’s do it. Because he was right, it would have been better for everyone, certainly for her. But just then Herta bustled into the library with a tray and a bowl of that damn yellow soup of hers, the smell of which was beginning to nauseate everyone. My father called for Otto. My parents had to get back to their duties at the hotel.

  “Time someone did the right thing,” the cabdriver told me, pulling on his cap.

  CHARLOTTENBURG

  Letter. Addressed Herr Billy Lange, Übersetzung Abteilung IG Farben Hauptsitz Frankfurt A. M., postmarked Berlin 17.9.1934. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-09-1934. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  KVW

  Geisebrechtstraße 5, Berlin

  17.9.34

  Billy dear,

  All right, time you came up please. I am just off the K’damm, driving me crazy. September too crazy warm in Berlin for September too much light in the flat in this summer. Always I have told myself Karin what you will always seek and always want more and can never get enough is: time & light Zeit und Licht

  Zeit und Licht

  but I find too much of both in Berlin this horrid September stink, come here Liebster Billy we shall go off to Wannsee with a picnic basket of grapes and wine. Here is Greengrocer Egeler not a bad chap actually from the Breisgau and speaks his Schwäbisch which the Berliners with their Schnauze pretend not to understand, but always he has been to me friendly & cheerful. One hour past I stopped at his shop to buy peaches and a bunch of grapes lovely in such hot weather I eat only fruits and a scrap of cheese. Arranging a beautiful crescendo of peaches and strawberries on the table outside is young Herbert Egeler the son, who performs deliveries on a black bicycle and a nice boy. He is wearing today: Hitler-Jugend outfit. And on his delivery bicycle are attached 3 small Hakenkreuzflagge with the sickly cross. I feel most ill. “May I please assist you Fräulein Weinbrenner?”

  “Herbert really are you pleased with Mr. Hitler?”

  “Oh yes. I suppose so.”

  “What is it that pleases you?”

  “Well he is manly. He will make Germany clean and strong. He will get rid of the idiots.”

  You best had come to Berlin dear Billy.

  From Anhalter Bahnhof, U-Bahn to Uhlandstrasse, from there 10 min. walk.

  Your old friend,

  K

  Letter. Addressed Herr Billy Lange, Übersetzung Abteilung IG Farben Hauptsitz Frankfurt A. M., postmarked Berlin 17.3.1935. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-03-1935. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  KVW

  Geisebrechtstraße 5, Berlin

  17.3.35

  Dear Billy,

  I cannot explain about my mother as I am rather in torment. Yes I ought to visit more often but am very afraid of her actually. In pain she’ll always say something bitter. Bitter and banal. Which makes it worse. ‘Whatever have you done with your hair!’

  She knows how to suffer so well.

  As to my quitting Germany, can’t see it, yes perhaps in a year or two if things get awful, but—not now. My skill with the system of permits and Reichsfluchtsteuer (if you may call it a system) is NEEDED here BADLY and I’ve no right to withdraw. Good old Kop has excellent contacts at the South Americans so we are pushing Jews that way.

  I will ask you: come up to Berlin as soon as you can. I realize you have your own affairs. Only you must know what you are to me. I am a crazy old woman. In short: I need you. Talk. Bed. Dance and sleep in your arms Buffalo Bill. If you drive the Wanderer instead of the train we might go for a jaunt. Oh my honorable brother.

  Yours,

  K

  In the summer of 1934 my father and the baron entered horses in the Grand Prix de Paris, the Grand International d’Ostende, and the Deutsche Derby. My mother and Lady Maire were on a motor trip through Poland, where roads were supposed to be terrible.

  In June I had transferred from the Translation Department at IG Farben to export sales. The new job came with a substantial raise. My pal Robert Briesewitz made the jump with me. We were glad to leave nervous Dr. Winnacker behind and move up to the fifth floor. Our new boss, Dr. Anton Best, was an old hand at IG’s overseas operations, and had recently been summoned back to headquarters after five years in Peru.

  Wishing to look the part of the sophisticated international businessman, I invested most of my salary increase in new suits, a blue worsted and a gray flannel, ordered from the British tailor in Hamburg. I wore English striped shirts, my wonderful Paris neckties, and, briefly, an experimental mustache. I became a regular at Frankie’s, spending more time and money there than I could afford. I told myself Frankie’s English Bar was the only place in town I felt at home. In July we read of a crackdown on the brownshirts, the suicides of their leaders. The newspapers said they’d been plotting a putsch. No one quite knew what it meant. Was it possible things now might start getting back to normal, whatever normal was in postwar Germany?

  I told myself I needed the cosmopolitan atmosphere at Frankie’s, the jazz, the clear-cold martinis I sipped in honor of Karin. She’d visited her parents very briefly in the spring, but I’d been in Belgium on a business trip.

  I’d been keeping an eye out for her all summer, not realizing she was immersed in affairs at UFA, which was undergoing a putsch of its own.

  On a very warm August night Robert Briesewitz and I stopped in at Frankie’s after working late at the office. Robert had his trumpet, which he kept in a drawer in his desk. He was a fan of the New Orleans trumpeters, especi
ally King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, but Bix Beiderbecke was in his opinion the greatest horn player who’d ever lived.

  Out of habit, I checked the room for Karin. She wasn’t there. We had a couple of drinks, then Robert was invited to sit in with the house band, the Louisiana Seven. Robert’s talking endlessly about various jazz styles could be a bore, but his solos were a discourse that lit up the room. Hearing his trumpet on “Singing the Blues” or “I’m Coming Virginia,” I always felt perforated by the music. Its wryness and jauntiness were so much more humane than the ersatz emotionalism of mawky ballads like the “Horst Wessel Lied.” My friend Robert Briesewitz blowing his horn that summer was the opposite of everything officially sanctioned. His solos were statements about the real world, and at the same time they were the real world.

  Robert—he went missing at Stalingrad.

  What a small room it seemed, at Frankie’s, what a band of outsiders, what a lit-up haven in a frightened city. Listeners’ faces wore human expressions of delight and wonder. Maybe people always looked like that on the streets of New Orleans or Kansas City, but on the streets of Frankfurt, they never did.

  We were due back at our desks in a few hours. I lacked Robert’s musician’s aptitude for late nights. Around one o’clock I caught one of the last trams across the river.

  I had passed through the iron gates at Walden and was headed for our Newport cottage when I heard music, splashing, and loud Berlin voices coming from the swimming pool.

  Jazz was playing from a record player set up outside the pool cabana. I recognized the sound: Sid Kay’s Fellows, a Berlin big band. Robert disapproved of them—too commercial—but I thought they were all right.

  Glasses and champagne bottles were strewn on the grass. A whiff of hashish flavored the night air.

  Some of those thrashing about in the swimming pool wore evening clothes—men in white ties and tailcoats, girls in gowns. Others seemed to be without any clothes at all.

  A short, buxom girl pulled herself out of the pool, quite naked, and I recognized the famous film actress Rosy Barsony. She waved as though she recognized me, then dived back in.

  I felt ridiculous standing on the grass in my English worsted suit, clutching my leather attaché. I’d had three or four drinks at Frankie’s, and Robert’s trumpet had stimulated, as it often did, a state of inchoate yearning. Riding the nearly empty tram across the river Main, I’d been thinking of the cases one heard of, or read about in the F-Zeit, lost souls who had thrown themselves into the swirling brown river. What could a person feel, or not feel, that would make them want to do such a thing?

  Watching Karin’s friends cavorting in the pool, I felt a scrap of wild lonesomeness, like a piece of shrapnel piercing my skin. This was her world, and I certainly was no part of it.

  “Billy! Take the plunge!”

  At first I couldn’t make her out in the boisterous crowd of splashers; it wasn’t until she swam to the side and began dragging herself out of the water that I recognized her. She was naked as Rosie Barsony.

  Our mothers were touring the east that summer, hunting down golden icons and astounding images of suffering. The baron was in residence at the main house. My father was in bed in the Newport cottage. The poolside jazz and the braying Berlin voices were probably keeping him awake, but he wouldn’t complain, not unless he thought his mares and yearlings were being disturbed.

  Karin wrapped a towel around herself. “I’ve lost me job, old Billy.”

  “What?”

  “All of us. Ditched, thrown off, fired, kaput. The UFA is now a Jew-free zone. Only good Germans making good German films.”

  She had a small, lithe, strong body. She had a quality of fineness. I mean strength and delicacy all at once. Powerful, womanly…oh, I don’t like to describe her in such terms; I sound like Longo describing a racehorse. Poor taste. Immoral. Worse, a violation.

  None of your damn business or anyone else’s what her naked body was like.

  What a hypocrite’s affair this memory business is.

  They would all be dead by now, wouldn’t they? Rosy Barsony, I read her obituary years ago. Most of the people in the swimming pool would be dead soon enough. Murdered in Dachau, Theresienstadt, or Auschwitz if they were Jews or politicals. Killed on the steppes if they weren’t. Or roasted by incendiaries in the cities, or smothered under heaps of rubble.

  Anna Rabou wasn’t one of the party that night. The Jews had all been fired from UFA, and Anna had chosen to stay on, in the end to serve Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, who longed to be the film impresario of Germany.

  “Where’s your motorcycle, Billy? You’re not exactly dressed like a demon of speed.”

  It startled me, in the midst of all that was going on.

  “Motorcycle?” I replied. “No, I haven’t a motorcycle. The shop was smashed up during the boycott last year. My friend Meyer disappeared. I don’t go there anymore. I have a new position at IG, Karin.”

  “Do you? I dream of el llano.”

  She wasn’t drunk, or not like some of the others splashing in the pool, shouting and being so “carefree.” Her voice was clear and distinct, and I could hear every word under all the tumult.

  Carrying her in my arms that long-ago afternoon had been like participating in a ritual, or performing a play. I don’t know which play, but we’d known our roles.

  “They’re going after my father now, you know,” she said.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Bloody cold. Put your arms around me.”

  I did. She was warm and damp and smelled of chlorine. I didn’t give a damn my beautiful suit was getting wet.

  “This bunch you see here, last of the Yids,” she said. “I should not have stayed at UFA so long. Ought to have left that sewer months ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, Buffalo Billy, let me know when you’re going to Texas. I’ll be coming along.”

  All right, a ridiculous scene: film people (former film people) splashing and yelping in wet finery, a few of them—mostly directors and technicians—soon to depart for glamorous Hollywood. But Karin Weinbrenner had her own dignity, small body wrapped in a towel, hair damp and tangled, face shining, legs dripping, and I felt the old powerful connection between us reasserting, like players after their solos coming together again, horns, drums, and bass, 4/4 tempo, swinging.

  A reed arrow stinging across my path, an Apache bow, an introduction to Winnetou and to Germany. We’d been born in the same room in the house called Carefree, and suddenly I was aware that, notwithstanding her friends, her colleagues, the talented pack of midnight swimmers and soon-to-be exiles, I was the one closest to her. With all she had achieved, some part of her still counted on me.

  She took a step back and smiled. “Your poor father. I hope we are not keeping him up with our racket.”

  “He’ll manage.”

  “Your father, Buck, born a thousand miles out at sea.”

  “Yes.”

  The crowd in the pool was thrashing wildly, like a school of fish caught up in a purse net.

  “Good night, Karin. Good night to you all.”

  “Good night, Buffalo Billy.”

  I started across the lawn for Newport cottage. She still counted on me. I felt thrilled, relieved, and terribly responsible.

  A few weeks later, Günter Krebs suddenly reappeared at headquarters. Our chief in export sales, Dr. Best, crept away into his office without saying a word. Rumor had it our Dr. Best was another who’d been unwise enough to marry a South American Jew, in his case a Brazilian.

  Ducky stayed clear of my desk, at least. I watched him conferring with other fellows. Robert had said Ducky spent his time at the Hoechst plant delivering idiotic harangues to the workers. “They’ve got him as the plant cheerleader. Spends all his day spewing absolute dreck. Perfect job for him.”

  Krebs stood at my colleague Willy Frey’s desk, chatting. Willy handled dyestuffs and bleaching agents for the Indian market. I was
relieved Ducky was keeping away from me. I wondered if it was because he had a bad conscience. After all, he was a killer, with Solomon Dietz’s blood on his hands, and he knew that I knew. I certainly didn’t want to have a fake-normal chat with him.

  Was I more wary of Ducky Krebs, or he of me? Probably he wasn’t afraid of anyone by then except his SS superiors. The black uniform was designed to give men like him a supine power. There was nothing more they needed. The uniform was a radiant piece of power.

  Just then one of the office boys came hurrying through the department with a blue basket of mail. “Something for you, Herr Billy, and it smells kind of sweet!” he cried, tossing a sheaf of letters on my desk. At the top was a small linen envelope, with her KvW engraved in a Bauhaus font. No Fraktur typeface for Karin.

  Her letter inviting me to Berlin was startling. It had been a couple of months since our encounter by the swimming pool, and now she was asking me to come up to Berlin as soon as possible. My head spun. Everything else in my life immediately became of secondary importance. Down at the other end of the office Krebs in his black outfit was enjoying a joke with Willy Frey, who’d heretofore seemed a decent type. Well, I didn’t give a damn about those two.

  I checked the railway timetables. The last FD-Zug nach Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin, was departing Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof that evening at 18 Uhr and arriving after midnight. I didn’t notice Ducky Krebs slipping away. After work I took the tram out to Walden, where I packed a knapsack and informed my parents I was off to the Taunus for a hiking weekend with Robert and Ernst. I would have preferred to carry a valise to Berlin—more sophisticated—but the knapsack fit my hiking story. A natural-born liar, apparently.

  I just made the Berlin express. I splurged to buy myself dinner. A pack of rowdy businessmen in the dining car was enjoying a supper of roast pork with plenty of wine and loud talk. Possibly they were IG Farben higher-ups, Prokuristen, sales chiefs, research scientists, but I didn’t recognize their faces. Thousands of serious, accomplished, well-educated men worked for IG. As the train smashed its way across Thuringia they had their brandy and lit their cigars. Then one of them started to sing. He had a decent voice, too.