A Fight in Silence

by Melanie Metzenthin

  ‘Absolutely not, sir,’ Richard answered soberly, pleased that his surgical mask concealed his smile of relief.

  Chapter 4

  All week Paula had looked forward to seeing Richard again and to going to the gallery with him, but the closer the minute hand on the wall clock in her father’s front room crept towards the two, the more restless she felt. It certainly didn’t help her nerves to hear their housekeeper, Frau Koch, remarking repeatedly that she welcomed seeing Paula turn her attention to nice young men rather than just studying.

  Her father had lowered his newspaper and looked at his daughter with a mixture of scepticism and amusement.

  ‘So is that how it is?’ he asked.

  ‘Hardly! We’re only looking around the city art gallery together. I’ve told you he knows a lot about modern art movements and hopes to become a psychiatrist when he finishes.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ observed Frau Koch as she poured coffee for Paula’s father, ‘he seems to be a thoroughly nice young man and Fräulein Paula would do well to consider him. Cultured, and a budding doctor at that . . .’ She looked enchanted at the very thought.

  ‘I presume he looks the part too?’ her father said with a broad smile.

  Paula felt cornered by the pair of them and had a response on the tip of her tongue, but held back when she realised that, although it would have amused her father, it would have shocked Frau Koch. And so she kept her counsel and watched the big hand approach the hour. Only a few more minutes to go . . .

  She took another look at her dark blue, calf-length dress. With it she was wearing dark blue silk stockings and black patent shoes. Her dead mother’s pearl necklace was the only jewellery she’d permitted herself, aside from her plain gold earrings.

  As soon as the hour hand reached two, there was a ring at the door. Frau Koch was, Paula noticed wryly, a good deal faster in answering than she normally was.

  ‘On the dot,’ her father remarked, with a note of irony in his voice that bothered her. Perhaps he didn’t like Richard coming here to collect her, she wondered, but then pushed this out of her mind as Frau Koch returned with Richard. She had taken his hat and coat, and he was carrying a bunch of flowers. Paula and her father stood to receive him while Richard presented her with the flowers, his face grave and respectful but his eyes full of smiles. There were five white roses and four pale pink.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she whispered, then remembered they were not alone. ‘Papa, this is Richard Hellmer, a fellow student. Richard – my father, Dr Engelhardt.’

  ‘How do you do?’ said Paula’s father, extending his hand.

  ‘How do you do, sir?’ replied Richard, returning the handshake. For a moment Paula thought she saw a sceptical frown on her father’s forehead, but before she could look more closely, Frau Koch had returned with a vase.

  ‘At least he knows the language of flowers,’ she whispered in Paula’s ear. ‘White for youth, beauty and innocence and pink for the ties that bind.’

  Glaring at the housekeeper, Paula handed her the flowers so she could arrange them in the vase.

  Her father then asked Richard, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? As far as I know, the next tram leaves in quarter of an hour.’

  ‘That would be nice, thank you, but we don’t need the tram. My father has been so kind as to let me use his car today.’

  Paula was all ears. A car? Even in their circles this was unusual. Her father seemed to be thinking something similar.

  ‘Your father has a car?’ His voice gave away his surprise.

  ‘Well, er, yes . . .’ Richard gave an awkward cough.

  ‘Please, do sit down,’ said Paula’s father. Frau Koch had already brought a cup for Richard and busied herself with pouring his coffee.

  Richard accepted the seat offered him.

  Paula’s father wanted to know more. ‘What type of car is it?’

  ‘An Opel 4 PS. But it’s a delivery vehicle.’

  ‘A delivery vehicle? That’s unusual.’

  ‘Papa, I hadn’t got around to telling you that Richard’s father owns a large carpentry workshop in Rothenburgsort.’

  ‘A carpentry workshop?’ Dr Engelhardt said, raising his eyebrows, and Paula finally acknowledged to herself why she hadn’t previously mentioned Richard’s family background. In her mind, she’d never have admitted her father’s prejudice but she knew deep down that, in spite of his apparent tolerance, he could be highly critical of the company his daughter kept. Tradesmen were, of course, decent people but they didn’t belong to the professional elite that surrounded her father. Everybody admired their skill and, if satisfied, recommended them on to others, but one didn’t invite them to social occasions.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Your father’s business must be doing very well for him to see a car as a worthwhile investment.’

  ‘The investment has certainly been worth it.’ Richard sounded more confident now. ‘Two years ago we still had a cart and a couple of horses, but the car is more economical to run and freeing up the stables meant we could extend the work area and still use part as a garage.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like a truly flourishing business. Didn’t your father have plans for you to take it on one day?’

  ‘No. I had an elder brother and that would have been his future but now my father’s hopes are pinned on his grandson, my sister’s son. Karl has just turned nine. As soon as he’s home from school, he’s straight in the workshop.’ A fond smile played on Richard’s lips, making it obvious how attached he was to his nephew.

  Paula’s father saw that Richard had finished his coffee. ‘Well now, I won’t delay you any longer,’ he said as he got to his feet. ‘You have quite a cultural afternoon ahead, from what my daughter tells me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Richard, standing up now too. ‘We want to go to the city art gallery and look at contemporary work compared with the Old Masters.’

  ‘An unusual hobby for a young man from your sphere.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, you know, I thought the modern place to go was the picture house.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll do that another time.’ Richard smiled politely as he said this, but this time the smile was only on his lips, not in his eyes.

  Paula stood as Frau Koch brought in Richard’s hat and coat.

  ‘I wish you both a pleasant afternoon,’ her father said to them. Paula understood straight away what lay behind this seemingly trivial friendly remark. She was to spend only the afternoon with Richard. Her father expected her back for the evening. Glancing at Richard, she wondered what he thought of her father’s behaviour. Had he been offended by her father’s attitude towards his family background, or did he simply see it more as a father’s concern for a daughter stretching her wings?

  But Richard didn’t give anything away. As soon as he and Paula were out on the street, he stopped next to a green vehicle. From the front it looked like a normal saloon car and it was only the absence of rear windows and the presence of a tailgate that gave away its other function.

  ‘What an unusual colour! I’ve never seen that before.’

  ‘It’s classic for this model – that’s why people call it the tree frog.’

  ‘That’s original!’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘The French think Opel’s guilty of copying the Citroën Type C. That only ever comes in yellow, so people say this is the same car but in green. It’s fine by me – I like green.’

  ‘It’s good that it’s green, so nobody can confuse us with the post van.’

  They both laughed and Richard ushered Paula into the passenger seat before climbing in behind the steering wheel.

  As they set off, Paula wondered whether the car was called the tree frog not only on account of its colour but also the way it hopped and skipped over the unmade road. It wasn’t until they had turned on to the asphalted road that it felt as if the car had suspension.

  ‘My father toyed with the idea of investing in a car,’ Paula
said as they drove towards the city centre. ‘He took me with him when he went to look at a vehicle that a colleague of his had used for years on house visits and wanted to replace with something newer. It was an open-topped two-seater.’

  ‘And why did he decide against it?’

  ‘He realised it would have been nothing but a vanity purchase because he doesn’t actually need a car. The tram stops right outside our door and he rarely does house visits, and you can take an awful lot of taxi rides for the purchase price of a car.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Richard conceded. ‘Although since Opel moved to assembly line production, their cars cost a lot less, and automobile clubs are springing up all over the place. If I were a betting man, I’d say the future belongs to the motor industry.’

  ‘But it’s still an exception to be picked up by a young man with a car,’ she said cheekily.

  ‘I should hope so!’ he replied. ‘Though I’m afraid your father wasn’t too pleased.’

  ‘Not at all. He was surprised, that’s all, precisely because it is so unusual.’

  Richard only nodded. Paula wondered whether she should say anything further on the matter but decided to let it rest. A lot of things could turn into problems if given too much importance.

  When they reached the gallery, Richard parked and came round to open the car door for her.

  She was already a regular there and knew much of the collection well, tending to spend her time on the Old Masters. These, in her father’s view, nicely rounded off her education in the humanities, whereas he saw the Expressionists as nothing more than a variation within the modern art movement and something that wouldn’t last.

  ‘True art,’ he liked to say, ‘is demonstrated through its ability to command our admiration of the artist’s skill in capturing reality in its most honest form.’

  She repeated these words to Richard as they looked at the Expressionist pieces.

  ‘In many ways, he’s right,’ Richard acknowledged. ‘It’s admirable the way painters have over the centuries so successfully portrayed the realities of their times in an idealised form. As artists, however, they’ve outlived their usefulness.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because of the arrival of photography. Why would a painter bother depicting something as it is, when any halfway decent photographer can do that with a camera? Surely an artist with any credibility at all would want to go beyond the old boundaries and stand apart from what the lens can capture?’

  ‘So you’re saying that photography has ruined the concept of fine art?’

  ‘No, it’s simply liberated art from being forced to portray every detail of reality.’

  Paula thought about this for a while before saying anything further. ‘Where does your interest in art come from?’ she asked eventually. ‘And for modern art at that?’

  It took him a while to respond, but finally he swallowed hard and said, ‘It’s . . .’ He faltered for a moment, and then went on. ‘It’s to do with my brother.’

  ‘Who fell at Verdun?’ Her voice was full of sympathy.

  ‘He didn’t fall there. He died after the war.’

  ‘From war wounds?’

  ‘That’s an interesting question with several different answers depending on your views.’

  He didn’t say anything further, leaving Paula confused. She was about to ask him another question, but the suffering and pain written across his face made her keep her silence. The self-confident, cheerful young man, never at a loss for an intelligent answer to every question, had vanished. Now she was seeing a very different side to his personality: solemn, perhaps even melancholic. It made her wonder whether she’d met the real Richard yet, and how many sides there might be to his character.

  For a while they went on from one painting to the next without speaking, until Paula could no longer bear the silence.

  ‘Are we still going to the Galerie Commeter?’ she asked.

  Richard took out his watch. ‘It’s just closed, unfortunately, but we could see what’s in the window if you like.’

  She noticed with relief that the melancholia had disappeared, and it didn’t occur again all day, neither as they strolled hand in hand along the lakeside path to the Galerie Commeter, nor when they looked at the art in the window and Paula saw a Surrealist painting for the first time in her life, not even when they walked on to the Alster Pavilion to sit over an ice cream sundae and watch the steamboats.

  In fact, it could have been the perfect afternoon, had not August Lachner and two men unknown to Paula stepped inside the Pavilion just behind them. Paula noticed how Richard tensed as they entered, all the more so when the trio spotted him and headed straight for their table.

  ‘What a charming coincidence,’ enthused Lachner. ‘Delighted to see you here, Richard. And you are Fräulein . . .?’ He smiled at Paula, while Richard’s mouth hardened.

  ‘Paula Engelhardt,’ she said, introducing herself.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. August Lachner, and these are my fellow students, Peter Watuscheck and Johannes Möller.’

  His colleagues briefly acknowledged Paula. Watuscheck was red-haired, tall, thin as a rake, while Johannes Möller was more of a Greek athlete.

  ‘May we join you?’ August Lachner asked Richard, who gave a slight nod in reply, although his face indicated he’d much rather throw them out of the building. The three men seemed not to notice, or if they did, they deliberately ignored it.

  ‘Forgive the interruption, Fräulein Engelhardt,’ Lachner went on after taking a seat. ‘Richard’s one of our fellow students and I didn’t want to miss an opportunity once again to try to persuade him to join our organisation.’

  ‘I’m still not interested,’ replied Richard with exaggerated politeness.

  ‘But surely no right-thinking man could possibly reject what we stand for? Perhaps you could persuade him.’ Lachner smiled at her once again, and if she hadn’t already formed an impression of him at Professor Habermann’s lecture, she wouldn’t have minded him joining them at all. The image she’d previously had of him was quite different from the one he presented now. Opposite her sat a youthful figure, blond-haired and freckled, little more than eighteen by his appearance, although he must have been in his mid-twenties.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ she asked, curious to find out what had happened between Lachner and Richard.

  ‘First, may I enquire, Fräulein Engelhardt, whether we have had previous acquaintance?’

  ‘Fleetingly, yes, at Professor Habermann’s lecture.’

  ‘You were there? As a guest?’

  ‘No, I’m a registered student.’

  August Lachner nodded in recognition. ‘Very good. I greatly appreciate seeing a woman as an equal companion to a man.’

  ‘Is that a quote from a Wagner opera?’

  ‘No, it’s my own opinion. Our movement respects the role of women, because a woman is the nucleus of the family. Without her, the people cannot exist, and in my view women are predestined to work in gynaecology and midwifery, where they are wholly superior to men.’

  Paula stared at Lachner in some confusion, not sure whether she was flattered or discouraged by his remarks.

  ‘Forgive me, Fräulein Engelhardt, I digress. You wanted to know what this is about.’ He reached into his inner jacket pocket, took out a pamphlet and placed it on the table.

  Emblazoned across the front in Gothic script were the words National Socialist German Students’ League.

  ‘A league? Why are you showing me this? That’ll be an organisation for men.’

  ‘As far as membership goes, you’re right, Fräulein Engelhardt. But the ideals we espouse are the same as yours. We believe that access to study can no longer be the preserve of the affluent elite, but should be for everyone with the ability, regardless of family background. One of the founders of our student league, Wilhelm Tempel, is the son of a master cobbler and represents the conviction that National Socialism must fight against the entrepreneur
s’ obsession with profit and in favour of the betterment of workers and, if need be, do so shoulder to shoulder with social democracy.’

  ‘So why the National Socialism? Why not go straight to Social Democracy?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Because the SocDems lack the guts to fight for the concerns of our people. All we see is their cringing servility towards foreigners and their squandering of everything we own.’

  ‘Harsh words,’ said Richard, breaking in.

  ‘True words,’ Lachner corrected him. ‘Our army was unbeaten in the field, and what happened? Our unpatriotic leftie friends stabbed the military in the back and negotiated a shameful peace that even our grandchildren will have to pay for. And then there’s the massive sequestration of land!’ His previously boyish face had now taken on the look of a grown man’s. ‘A quarter of our agriculture now lies in Polish hands, but even that isn’t enough for our enemies. Think back to the breach of international law when the Frenchies occupied the Rhineland three years ago. Doesn’t it enrage you to see our wounded war veterans, who sacrificed their health for our people, begging on the street? And what do the Social Democrats and the German People’s Party do? They bow and scrape, then tug their forelocks at the people who’ve ground us into the dust instead of standing tall and opposing them like real men. It’s high time Germany woke up and gave thought to its greatness. Our research is the best in the world – no other nation has achieved so much in the field of science and medicine. And yet we’re supposed to go on kowtowing to neighbouring countries instead of looking them straight in the eye?’ As he spoke, Lachner had become increasingly worked up, and Paula had to concede that he’d touched a nerve for her too. The unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles and the occupation of the Rhineland had upset her father as much as it had Lachner.

  ‘If you remember,’ Richard remarked, ‘all the parties fought side by side against the unlawful occupation of the Rhineland, because here there were only Germans – no communists, no other lefties, no Nazis. Everyone took part in the sabotage and it was a Social Democrat government that called the general strike. At the same time the Minister for the Exterior, Stresemann from the German People’s Party, played a crucial role in peacefully bringing about an end to this occupation and a review of the tough conditions set at Versailles. He’s said to have been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.’