Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  There was a barmaid in the village pub when he worked on the Shannon. She had white skin and black, wild hair. Even her eyes looked at you as though you were one of those she’d seen before a thousand times. You might be foreign, the boss around here. So what.

  He brought his attention back to the men, the machines. A sound or rather a dimming of sound pulled him back into the vast space beneath the long glass wall of the manager’s office above. Usually there was a river of voices that he did not habitually separate from the rhythm of machines. The men had stopped talking and were glancing up towards the office, trying not to make it apparent that they were doing so. But when fifty men looked up, you could not help but follow their gaze. Behind the glass were uniformed men, a row of four policemen, peering down at them with the manager and his deputy. Emil, like the workers, lifted his eyes without moving his head. From above he might be watching the conveyor belt, as he should be. He focused on the policeman at the end of the row, the one nearest to him. The man looked straight at Emil, and raised a hand. God, that gesture. It was him, Thomas. But it was not, of course. His brother, Karl, he had grown so like him, and like their father. He had been working somewhere else, Hanover? Father had not told him he was back, or that he was a policeman. Emil nodded, just a little dip of the chin.

  A worker, Bern, standing close to Emil, asked, ‘Know him?’

  Emil looked at Bern. He had him down as a communist. Something in his brand of tobacco, the quality of his sneer. ‘No.’ He paused. ‘Used to. Well, his brother.’

  ‘He knows you, that’s for sure. Been watching you since he came in.’

  ‘Back to work.’

  Bern hesitated, not quite long enough for it to be a direct challenge, and shuffled back to the belt.

  What did it matter, who knew whom? There were few in this town of whom he did not know something. He looked at the men on his shift. Several glanced quickly away.

  At the end of the shift he took the card with the men’s names up to the office to give to the manager. The deputy stood in front of his desk in a little anteroom putting on his coat. He stared at Emil for a moment, nodded, then jogged down the stairs, his boots clattering on the steel grilles. Emil knocked at the door and waited. Herr Peters was on the telephone, speaking in harsh bursts, low and urgent. The phone clicked and Emil heard: ‘Come!’ Emil stood in front of the desk and looked out through the glass as the new shift started up below, the men fresher, smiling after a day of freedom: errands for their wives, sleep, sex, beer. Their shoulders were not yet stiff with repeated movements and exhaustion.

  Peters watched him for a moment. He seemed almost elderly, tired, irritated from the phone call, or this job. Emil knew from his father that Peters used to teach engineering in Düsseldorf but lost his job after some sort of disgrace, blown up or entirely manufactured by a Nazi in the polytechnic administration. ‘Well?’

  ‘Oh, excuse me, Herr Peters. The timesheet for my shift.’

  ‘Call me Colleague,’ he muttered as he took the card, slotting it into an index on his desk. ‘I am in the union, like you. I suppose you’re wondering what the visit from the police was about.’

  Emil shrugged, hands in pockets. On the factory floor his replacement for the night shift, a boy of no more than twenty-two, was trying to keep his eyes open, slumped against the wall, his mouth falling open, closing, swallowing, slipping open again. ‘They are all stirred up about the latest election. They think there will be more strikes.’

  ‘What do they care about a strike here?’

  ‘When the men are out they fight, they say. They say we have communists here.’

  ‘There are communists everywhere. And Nazis. Did they say anything about Nazis fighting?’

  ‘They did not.’

  Emil had been watching the factory floor. Now he chanced a direct look at the manager’s face. Peters must have been aware that Emil knew his history. Emil’s father was notorious for his uncanny knowledge of affairs and his fondness for gossip.

  Peters held his gaze for a moment before turning his head towards the factory floor. ‘We’ll lose a shift soon,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. That joker down there will be first to go. Look, there he is, napping through the shift again. And there are his men, laughing at him, slacking off.’

  Emil saw that the men were chatting, paying less attention to the parts on the belt than they should. Only the machine operators were attentive to the task of not losing a finger or an eye. Irritation flared. He was their union representative. He did not want to put himself out for lazy men. He reminded himself that the men did not choose their foreman.

  Peters held out a hand to shake. Emil took it quickly, shook it firmly as he said goodbye, held it for a moment longer than was usual. Peters looked Emil once more in the eye.

  Something in him these days looked for a spark. An ignition. In every encounter, in every face and touch of the hand, he was alive to the meaning of a dozen tiny gestures. He stored the information carefully for the day he might need it.

  On the dark river, the factories were quiet apart from the one or two running a night shift. A match flare warmed his face briefly as he lit his cigarette. An owl called from across the wide water. There were oars splashing, voices, laughter, some illicit escapade. He was not going home. He was joining the guard for a Social Democrat and free trade union rally at the beer hall. He always attended the meetings, when home, but now something extra was required. Last week in Düsseldorf a trade union official was injured when a brown shirt threw a chair at him before he had opened his mouth to speak. He heard from his father that the police hung back when there was trouble from the storm-troopers. They still turned up to rallies, but did less and less. Above the sounds of the river at night he heard a different kind of noise. He knew it; it was the voice of a crowd singing. The sound crept across his skin. He knew the words they sang, even though they were indistinct. Clear the streets for the brown battalions. Clear the streets for the storm-troopers! Already millions look with hope to the swastika. The day of freedom and bread is dawning!

  This will blow over, Father told him. The workers were solid, unswayed by fanatics. But nothing blew over. You lay on your back in a gas-filled crater with a mask on your head and a knife in your hand waiting for someone to fall on top of you. When the shadow crossed the crater, you thrust out your hand and let him fall on your blade, or he would get you with his. Every second you were ready.

  He had his knife. The handle was smooth in his pocket. The blade in its sheath was always sharp. He honed it in the night when everyone slept, long dark silences between rasping strikes, trying not to disturb his wife and son, hoping they would not come out and find him like this, a stranger at the table, sharpening a knife. He walked into the streets away from the river, towards the sound of the voices. The police should worry less about the striking. It was the singing that always ended with spilled blood.

  By the time he reached the beer hall, the crowd was mostly inside the building and the singing had given way to noisy chatter. He joined the men and women bustling through the double doors from the street. Inside it was warm and fuggy and he was amid a jostle of bodies making their way into the rows of wooden chairs. The long tables had been stacked against the walls. There was laughter and shouting and one shirt in two was brown. He caught the eye of one, head shorn but for a floppy fringe, shining eyes, a smile of anticipation, a little drunken stumble. There were too many free unionists in this town for them to be locals. They had been bussed in, in those trucks of theirs. He cast about between their heads for the speakers, glimpsed a movement from beyond the side curtain at the edge of the stage. It was the secretary of the local branch of the SPD, peering into the crowd. Moisture reflected light on his brow. Emil shoved through to the stairs at the side of the stage. A couple of men pushed back with elbows and fists but most stood aside.

  Behind the curtain was a small group of men gathered in a knot. He knew them all, his father and his colleagues. They looked doddery t
hough none was older than his father at fifty-five, hunched together like children abandoned unexpectedly in a strange place. Martin, his father’s friend since their childhood in Dülken, saw Emil first. The man’s shoulders dipped with relief as though with the arrival of this man he’d known since he was a baby everything would be all right.

  Emil’s father turned, beamed, shook his hand, clapped his shoulder. ‘I knew you would come. I told them to stop worrying. Old women!’ He turned to the others, who eyed Emil from the shadows. ‘Didn’t I tell you, boys?’ They nodded warily. ‘Emil is our man.’

  ‘But, Father,’ Emil said quietly, not for the others, ‘where are the other Reichsbanner? Your guard? Where are the rest?’

  ‘Well, in the end it was just Martin’s boy and Helmut’s and you, and some police, but it seems no one has come.’

  ‘I saw police on my way in. I’ll talk to them.’

  ‘No, they have agreed to stay, but they won’t come onstage. They don’t want to antagonise the brown shirts by appearing to take sides.’

  ‘Father, don’t go out. There are hundreds of them. It’s a set-up.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he sighed. ‘We must go out. All the more reason. You see—’ he smiled, caught his breath ‘—we won’t be intimidated.’ His eyes shone beneath a film of water.

  Oh God, thought Emil. He looked at the others. They would rather have been anywhere but here. They were elected officials, not soldiers. They had all been too old for the war; the men back in the hall mostly too young. ‘Who is speaking tonight?’

  They shrugged, looked at Klaus.

  ‘We’ve decided just me tonight, Emil,’ his father said. ‘We must demonstrate the support of the metalworkers’ union for the SPD. Reassure people that they needn’t be frightened of voting with their conscience.’

  Emil stared at the men. ‘You’re sending him out there alone? Let’s go and ask for a gun from one of these thugs. You can shoot Father yourselves and save them the trouble.’

  ‘Now, Emil . . .’ His father laid a hand on his shoulder.

  A party official puffed up his chest a little. ‘We will all be with him onstage—’ Martin interrupted him. ‘I will speak too, Emil. You’re right. We cannot let him speak alone.’

  Emil remembered the moment this morning when he took his satchel off the hook on the door in the bright kitchen. He had thought of his Luger, beneath the floorboard under Hans’s fold-out bed. No, he had told himself. You can’t go back from a gunshot. With a knife, there are choices, degrees of harm. He turned and looked past the curtain into the writhing hall. The front rows were filled with fat-chested brown shirts, staring at the empty chairs on the stage. They’d put the hefty ones up front to intimidate the speakers. As he came through the hall he’d seen plenty of scrawny types the SA had probably picked up off the street last week. They began to stamp, at first chaotically then in a slow coordinated rhythm.

  ‘Okay.’ He nodded to his father and Martin. ‘Who’s first?’

  Martin took a step towards him.

  One of the men lifted a placard from against the wall and thrust it at Emil. ‘You lead us in with this.’ The men looked at each other. Emil could not see what the placard said in the dark but took it, moving towards the curtain.

  ‘Let’s go. Before they start gnawing at the furniture.’

  They followed him towards the stage. Emil could hear his father wheezing behind him. He stepped out into the dim electric light, still dazzling after the shadows backstage. At first there was absolute silence as they walked across the stage. He heard the footfalls of his new boots and the shuffle of the men behind him across the floorboards. A bottle smashed somewhere towards the back of the hall. There was laughter among the rows of brown shirts. Emil stepped forward to the podium while the others took their seats to his side. He opened his mouth and booing and whistling filled the hall. He took a breath and sent his voice out into the room. His body remembered how to make itself heard over mortar fire, bombing, screaming. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the undersecretary of the Duisburg-Hamborn branch, Herr Lang.’

  He took his placard to the end of the row of chairs and stood next to the one vacated by Martin as he took the podium. Out in the crowd he saw faces he knew, over and over again: from the army, from school, from work. It seemed possible he might be imagining it. No one gave any sign of recognising him. The booing and stamping filled his chest, hollowing out his muscles. He glanced down at his banner. THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS ARE THE ENEMY OF THE WORKER. VOTE SPD. VOTE FOR FREEDOM FROM TYRANNY.

  As he read it, a beer bottle smashed against the letters. He felt the jolt against his hand and his face was sprayed with beer. He scanned the faces in the crowd as though he could find his man, drag him up here, show him what happened to those who tried such tricks. He glanced sideways. Father mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Martin was beginning words, faltering, raising a hand. Something flew past the speaker’s head, heavy and fast, so close he shrank against the podium, shuffled into his chair, folded his arms, face hot. The room was filled with a roaring of voices, scraping chairs, every man on his feet. Women, too, he saw them scattered about, faces contorted like the rest, shouting. Emil looked behind the podium to see what the missile was: a plank of wood with a row of three nails sticking out. He needed to get the men offstage but they were stunned, staring out at the room as though it would all stop in a moment, if they were just patient. They were casting glances at him as though he, somehow, had the power to quell a room of lunatics in the grip of a bloodlust. All this in seconds.

  His father was standing. The official at the far end of the row of chairs was making for the curtain. A bottle missed him and flew directly into Father’s face. His hand was on his nose and then coming away, dark liquid gushing. He reached his slick, blackened hand towards Emil, who was in the air, flying off the stage, jumping into the crowd, placard raised, without a thought other than smashing these SA thugs, inserting himself into the mad throng, inflicting damage. He landed on hard bodies, bounced off, skidded on beer-wet floor into the meaty thicket of the front row. The placard was wrenched from his hands, splinters jagging his palms, and he was down in the dark, his head pitching forward into a foul-smelling crotch and then a chair, the top of a boot. He grabbed a thin calf and pulled it towards his chest. He felt the man topple over his body, heard the swearing of a brown shirt as his colleague landed on him. They stamped on Emil’s fingers, then his head. He reached for the knife in his pocket as they turned him over. Way above, their faces formed a ring. Was that Max from his polytechnic class? It could not be. There was a circle of light above their heads. A metal blow beneath his chin and a tear, a slick rupture at his stomach, and the circle closed to black.

  He woke shivering, his belly and crotch wet. His cheek throbbed against the icy curve of a cobblestone. He swallowed, took down something little and hard like a peanut. He found the gap in his back teeth with his tongue. Throughout the war he had kept his teeth and now some Nazi had knocked one out. He opened his eyes. He knew all the streets of this town but he did not know this one for a moment. But those blue doors were familiar, they were the doors of the beer hall. Someone had taken the trouble to drag him outside. He could see past the building to the square, where a few people were still about. It must be late. The street was empty, the beer hall doors closed, the building silent, as though nothing had happened there. He clenched his muscles, feeling for damage. His ribs were bruised, his jaw was throbbing and beneath the sharpness of these injuries there was something deeper, something that was making his whole body shiver. He brought a hand slowly to his stomach, found congealed wetness, lifted his fingers to his face in the lamplight. Black-stained, glistening. He must reach the square, get help, or he would lose too much blood. The inside of a man was wet and glittering, dark. Rhythmic, pulsing, a soft machine. This knowledge was no help to him. He must think only of what he needed to do first, and then what he needed to do after that.

  He pulled himself up against the wall. His arms
and legs were all right though his body was gripped by spasms. It was as though he had been knocked out in October but had woken to a February freeze. He could walk, slowly, one hand on the wall, one on his stomach, holding his shirt to the wound to slow the bleeding. His hand was soon covered but that was not what he would think about. It was twenty metres to the square, forty of his halting paces. He counted them as he moved. It took five minutes of concentration, of telling himself now, step, to reach the end of the street. There was no one in the square by the time he reached it. He would use his last few steps to reach a lamp, so that when someone came they would not pass him by in the dark. What if it were one of them who came? His mind threw up the question without warning. He did not allow the next thought. He must only cross the road that lined the square without a wall to help him. One step. And another. Three more. For the last step it felt that his stomach was opening up. He knew what came out of men when they were opened. He must reach the lamp before he fell. Push forward. His fingers slipped on the cold surface, squeezed tighter. He let himself down towards the ground, inched down the pole, sat against it, sweating, shivering, concentrating on staying upright, staying awake. Where was Father? His stomach clenched, pain tore through the wound. He was on the stage, with the men. They would have helped him. The blood on his face, in his white hair. They would have helped him, if they did not run.

  Shapes appeared at the far side of the square. People, they had seen him, stopped. He called, hoarse. ‘Help me!’ Again, a little louder. ‘I’m injured.’ The shapes receded. He heard a woman’s heels on the cobbles. Shadows swallowed by a side street.

  He looked at his watch in the lamplight. One o’clock. He allowed himself to wonder what the chances were of being found, of the people who found him helping him to a doctor, or at least bandaging him and keeping him warm until morning. For a moment he hoped. This is my hometown. Someone may come who knows it is me: Emil Becker.