Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  Hans’s head lay against his hip. The boy stirred at the sound of his mother’s heels on the wooden floor, clipping down the hall. Emil laid a hand on his shoulder as he opened his eyes. The boy pushed himself up, stared at him, wriggled into his lap, held him fast, head against his chest. These people, his wife and now his child, their bodies were filled with heat, but he could not get himself warm. It was as though he had already left them to wander some foggy land where he was still permitted to feel enough to know that he was as cold as the grave. ‘You are shivering, Papa.’ The boy held him, thin arms binding him in threads of fire. Then Ava’s voice came, calling them into the kitchen for supper.

  Emil woke later than usual in his tiny, borrowed apartment, heat radiating from the window. The May Day celebrations had kept him up late the night before, drunken SA shouting in the street below until well after midnight. Now the sound of a truck braking suddenly, a man giving orders outside brought him back to life. He was across the room in a moment, behind the edge of the window, watching through the gap at the edge of the curtain as uniformed men poured out of their trucks and into the offices of the metalworkers’ union in the morning sunshine. Because he had overslept, he did not know whether his father was inside yet this morning. Picking up his keys, watching to make sure there were none left out there, he turned to go down, to run to Father’s apartment and warn him. He had not been out in daylight for weeks but today he’d risk it. They’d been harassing the unionists for a while, but this, such numbers occupying the offices, was new. Best for Father to avoid it if he could.

  He had watched Klaus’s progress along the street from the bridge every day since he’d found this place. Puffing, red-faced, later and later to work. Even later today, Emil hoped. And he watched every evening to see Father come out, his old body labouring as he breathed, tired after the stairs. It was not until after that, until dark, that Emil could leave the apartment, or he would be seen.

  Something red, unfurling, caught his eye as he emerged from behind the curtain and back into the dark part of the flat away from the window. A swastika fell from a pole jutting through his father’s office window, so large it seemed it would drape down to the street. A figure below, the flag catching his eye, flinched, looked up at it. Him, his shape, his wheezing walk, his face the colour of a tomato. ‘No, Father,’ Emil breathed against the glass. But there was, he saw, a policeman immediately behind him and they were at the door already, going inside.

  The building was full of those men. From here he could see through the windows that they were going continually up and down the stairs and in and out of the offices, overturning filing cabinets and desk drawers. He saw a flurry of paper at a window explode upwards and float down out of sight.

  He tried to see Father at the stair windows but there were too many others passing up and down. Some came out and left in their trucks. More arrived and left again. A dozen times as he stood at the window he told himself: You must go in. If they must have someone, you will take his place. But then he thought of Hans and made himself still. They had no reason to do any more than intimidate Father and the other unionists, as they had before. If Emil entered the building they would arrest him, and more. Still he waited, watching them come in and out and dark swathes of them pass one window and then another. Father, come out, come out. But no one came out except storm-troopers and SS. And more always went back in.

  After perhaps an hour he heard the quick papery slide of an object on the floor. He moved across the bedroom silently on socked feet. There was someone in the building, perhaps still only two metres away, on the landing. Emil crouched, his knee popping, slipped a thumbnail under the closest corner, then the fleshy part of his thumb and he had it, carried it quietly away from the door, listening for boots on the stairs.

  Back behind the curtain he moved as close as he could to the window, saw a policeman walking quickly away from the building, towards the river. Karl had a policeman’s walk: with purpose but not hurry, long strides that covered the ground as quickly as was required. He let the folded paper fall open. ‘Don’t go into the union offices. It’s a trap. Take the train for Aachen. There will be police, not many. Take it in any case. Tomorrow there will be no chance.’

  He glanced again up the street. Karl’s back had disappeared. He wanted to call him back, to ask what was happening in the building. There had been harassment of the unions before. A few broken windows. This business with the swastikas.

  All day he stood, weakening with hunger at the window. In the afternoon he saw Zelma come out onto the street followed by the other secretaries. She was crying. I will go down now. She can tell me. But after the women came a knot of storm-troopers, fanning out along the street as the women left, holding their rubber coshes at their thighs. And then an SS officer in his dark suit, a pistol in his hand. He swayed a little, stepped too heavily off the stair.

  The workers came along the pavement from the other offices, going home at the end of the day. They peered up at the swastika and went around the trucks, a river of people, an unfaltering tide that met again beyond the vehicles, flowing on towards the river. Could he get word to Ava? Could he send something? Something to say that he was still here in the world, that the boy must not be allowed to forget. And Mother. But what could he tell her? He must wait. Wait and see.

  As it grew dark there was movement at the door onto the street. They began to spill out beneath the streetlight, the union secretaries, ties loose, collars wrong, a balding man’s last strands of hair sticking straight up from his head instead of combed flat. Perhaps ten came out, reluctant to move into the street, but more bunched up behind them and the SA men hit their legs with the coshes until they spread out in the road. Another pressed an object to their foreheads and with each press the man anointed would scream, arms flying up to his head, and stumble after the others into the street. The SA shone torches on their faces and Emil cast about furiously for his father. He was not there. He knew all of these men. He knew the shape of his father, every detail of the way he moved his body. None of these were him. Good news, surely. He was being spared this humiliation. Could Emil have missed him, escorted out a back door, sent home, sacked?

  Emil leaned, head against the cold window, saw his father’s colleagues march along the street, flanked by SA. He caught the movement of others at their windows above the street and edged back behind the curtain. Then the street was empty. He took a packet of papers from the open case on the bare bed and slid it into his jacket’s inner pocket, crossed the room to the door and slipped out to the dark stairwell, moving silently, a finger tracing around the walls for guidance as he went down, step after step to the street.

  He emerged from the back door and had to move slowly along the side alley so as not to breathe audibly. There was a guard, he saw from the shadows, on either side of the door to the union offices. There were streetlights, enough to see him by if he came out of the alley. He edged back into the darkness. He could hear the march returning, their boots—they made them march in time—the SA laughing and calling, a man crying out. Another sound that made his hair stand up on his neck. The unionists were singing ‘The Internationale’ in thin, frightened voices. At the back of the building was a wall. He climbed, knees first, onto the metal lid of a rubbish bin, caps of his boots scraping, up onto the wall and down, knees jarring. Another alley, another wall until he smelled the river. A dog in a frenzy somewhere, leaping against its chain.

  At the bank he felt the river surge along, close by him, without seeing it. His breath ripped his chest as he followed the path beyond the houses, away from the factories, towards the station.

  Part III

  Hannah

  BRUSSELS, 1933

  Brussels, after Berlin, was quiet and civilised, to an almost unsettling degree. I remember quiet evenings walking home through the narrow cobbled streets from my interpreting work at the Maison du Peuple thinking: Where is everybody? Are they not worried about what is happening on their doorstep?

/>   Life in Brussels had its own excitements, of a professional nature. I had here my first full-time job as an interpreter and translator, from French and German into English, for the trade unions of Belgium and further afield. Many days were spent relaying messages and attending meetings between visiting delegates at headquarters. I spent much of my time at international conferences, concentrating as furiously as I ever have done in my life. I always came away with a headache but also the feeling that I wished Father and my brothers could see me now. I thought too of Mrs Reznik, who had in her way trained me in this strange practice of listening in one language and transmitting another.

  One day in May I had spent the morning in a miner’s cage, of all places. I had been crammed in with a Belgian union leader for the miners and his British counterpart. It was very frightening, the descent into the dark earth, away from people and light and air, but they chatted away, old hands, and I concentrated, terrified, on helping them to understand one another.

  Now, on this extraordinary morning, back at the office, the dirt brushed off my stockings, I was to present the wife of the Belgian Prime Minister, a Walloon woman interested in workers’ conditions. She spoke in French for her audience, pausing decorously for me to translate for delegates, and I had the chance to settle back into my skin, to become once again a capable young woman about her business rather than a trembling, tiny creature trapped beneath the earth.

  As our visitor began to thank her hosts, and the inhabitants of the room shifted in their seats, I saw a man seated beneath the tall window at the back of the room, not gazing at our visitor, politely enraptured like the rest, nor even appearing to notice her presence. He sat in the shade beneath the huge rectangle of sunlight, legs crossed, body folded forward from the base of his spine, hands in the pockets of his trousers, peering outside towards the rooftops and spires of the city. It seemed as though he did not see what was in front of him. His clothes did not match. He wore the navy blue twill trousers of a worker, not quite long enough, exposing socks and a couple of inches of calf on the crossed leg, and the shirt and grey plaid jacket of a union functionary.

  There started up beneath the window the sudden ruckus of a marching band. His hand shot to his eyes. He wiped them and looked again out the window, briefly bewildered. Rupert, the Flemish translator, appeared beside him and pulled down the window. I almost missed my cue as I witnessed my colleague place a hand briefly on the man’s shoulder. His head moved minutely towards Rupert but then he looked away again, out above the roofs.

  ‘Hannah,’ came a sharp whisper from my superior, a ferociously clever Belgian woman who went on to be a diplomat, and I realised our guest was smiling down at me from the lectern. I smiled back, hot-cheeked, and stood. I thanked her for her speech and ushered her towards the buffet tables in the next room.

  As the chairs scraped on the wooden floor and the delegates formed around our guest and me in a moving phalanx, drawn towards the food, my eye caught in the gaps between the bodies glimpses of the man at the window. Why, I wondered, do you not pay the slightest bit of attention to the wife of the Prime Minister? Why do you wear mismatched clothes? And why does Rupert touch your shoulder so gently, as though you are an invalid?

  Perhaps he was some sort of unfortunate, a simpleton, a worker involved in an industrial accident that had left him damaged in mind or body. I remained close by our guest. She glanced towards the window once, shook her head kindly, continued to answer questions, nod, smile down at us like a willowy fairy. The set of the man’s body though, the readiness in his shoulders—he seemed ready to act: stand, turn, work—persuaded me against any assessment of damage or deficiency.

  Later, in the afternoon, when the place had settled into its usual rhythms of meetings, the comings and goings of union delegates, the laughter of secretaries in the kitchenette, I came into the meeting room to look for my notebook, which I had misplaced in the morning’s excitement. There he was, sitting on a wooden chair in his old position under the window, his form now rendered in the light of afternoon, his clothes and skin the pale soft texture of a certain kind of Dutch painting, his body as still as though he had in fact been painted. He was leaning towards the room, elbows on his knees, looking at the space between his feet. Next to him stood Rupert, writing in a little notebook. The seated man spoke intermittently. Rupert nodded gravely, though I knew him to be the playful, mocking type, from whom every word has at least two meanings, even when dealing with only one language at a time. Then he jotted something down, waited silently for the man to speak once more. I resolved to ask him before the end of the day who this was, and what sort of details he was taking down about him. I tidied some papers quietly at the other end of the room, watching. They were not, it seemed, aware of my presence.

  Once Rupert paused, looked sideways at the man, pencil suspended above his notebook, leaned in, said something, as though making absolutely certain of a detail. The man shrugged, passed one hand over the other, lifted his head and stared for a moment into the room, directly at me. A shiver went through me, as I thought I had been caught spying, but I did not look away. I was too curious for that. Before, I had only caught him in profile, in the morning shadows, or just now, the curly black thicket of the top of his head as he stared at the floor. Here was his face, held to the light. It was beautiful, and there was something else: a little shock, travelling instantly through my entire body. A recognition, a sense that we were somehow of the same kind.

  In those few moments, his face presented to the room, I could not have said whether he saw me as he stared across the room for longer than anyone would call polite. Then it seemed he did, quite definitely, for an instant. His gaze caught upon mine. Something firmed in his focus, and his expression became weary, rather than simply lost. He let his chin dip back towards the floor, and answered whatever it was Rupert had asked him. Then he coughed for a while, and Rupert once more laid a hand upon his shoulder.

  As I think of Rupert, cadaverous and intent, though warm-hearted as I knew him to be, and I see him again leaning on the sill, hunched over his work of drawing forth this man’s story, my memory narrows in on that notebook in his hands, that held on its pages the pieces of Emil that I did not know, that he barely spoke of to me. Rupert, I fear, must have been killed in the camps, though even now my body rejects such knowledge. In a shoebox, in an attic, is his little black book with its cream pages covered with close handwriting from the days when we were all young. If I found that book, it would tell the words that came from Emil’s mouth fresh from exile. It is buried in the obscure archive of some family that never knew him, when by rights it should be mine.

  I stood at the door, bag hooked over gloved wrist, hair combed, ready to step out into the spring afternoon and find some supper before the union rally at seven o’clock. The others had already gone, but I liked to tidy up before I left. This was the closest thing I had to a home, and I was house-proud: I always gave one last look over my shoulder at the straightened desks cleared of coffee cups and ashtrays, chairs tucked neatly around the long horseshoe of the conference table, covers on the typewriters of the translators and secretaries, grey metal filing drawers closed, heavy white blinds drawn down against the golden sun towards the end of the day. My hand on the doorknob, I heard the low intermittent rumble of male voices from the kitchenette, away off the hall leading to the private offices. As my heels clicked across the wooden floor the voices ceased. Reaching the little kitchen I saw it was them, Rupert and the man who I’d come to think of over the course of the day as the Lost Worker.

  Rupert, with his scalded-milk skin and pink-rimmed eyes from long hours of work and drink and debate, smiled his wry smile and began to speak in German, while the man leaned against the sideboard, hands gripping the countertop behind him, elbows pointed back to the wall, chin low. I had assumed the man was Flemish, as it was Rupert who had been assigned to him, but greater than these surprises was the condition of the man’s boots, to which his own gaze led me. They were caked
with dried mud on the uppers, encrusted laces flaking on the black and white tiles, a pink flash of foot visible at the open seam at the side—no socks. I glanced at my own shoes. I had recently done my best to polish over the dull stretched leather and had recently used a small part of my precious wages to have them re-heeled.

  A few things happened within the space of a moment. Rupert reached the end of his introduction, to which I had barely listened, though I did hear for the first time in my life this man’s name: Emil Becker. As though startled by the sound of it, the man looked up to see that I was comparing our shoes and appeared to do the same. A smile passed over his lips so briefly it might never have happened. It had vanished by the time he reached a hand towards me. ‘You are translator,’ he said in English, his voice cracking, as I took his hand. I wondered that he had taken the trouble to find out my position and nationality at the same time as I experienced the warm, dry touch of his fingers, the attention directed upon me from within the fine wreckage of his exhausted face.

  ‘Herr Becker,’ I said, my first words to him, ‘we must find you some shoes, and then supper.’

  You are older than I, I decided as I stole glances at him smoking and eating in a dim café. Beneath the table were his feet, close enough to mine to tap against them with each shifting of position, and encased now in a brand-new pair of shoes. The sales clerk had offered to dispose of the ruined boots, holding them away from him, making tweezers of finger and thumb, trying to suppress his horror. Emil had assented.

  I wanted to know how old he was. He seemed not quite of this century, just a little too old-fashioned for the gaudiness of the 1920s to have made an impression. There was something in his look, beneath the window, and in the kitchenette in his tragic shoes, that put a damper on my usual boldness. Still, I found questions to put that might be regarded only as friendly, unintrusive. He was careful with his answers, perhaps because he insisted on speaking in English. I discovered that he was from the Ruhr, that before the crash he had been an electrical engineer on the Shannon hydro-electric project and then testing the equipment on ocean liners. I watched his hands as he ate, drank, smoke. Practical square hands with strong fingers, nails that needed trimming. ‘And how do you like Brussels?’ I asked him, as though he were a sojourner and not a ragged refugee. Around him the walls of the café were lined with framed photographs of actresses and singers all affecting that smouldering look of the nightclub stars of Berlin. He looked about him as though to say: Is that where I find myself?