by Alan Furst
Baumann told also of how he’d studied, often from midnight to dawn, to maintain the family honor and to prepare himself to accept the responsibility that would be passed down to him by his father, who owned the Baumann Ironworks. Graduating with a degree in metallurgical engineering, he’d gone on to convert the family business, once his father retired, to a wire mill. “I believed that German industry had to specialize in order to compete, and so I took up that challenge.”
He had always seen his life in terms of challenge, Szara realized. First at Tubingen, then as an artillery lieutenant fighting on the western front, wounded near Ypres and decorated for bravery, next in the conversion of the Baumann business, then survival during the frightful inflations of the Weimar period-“We paid our workers with potatoes; my chief engineer and I drove trucks to Holland to buy them!”-and now he found himself meeting the challenge of remaining in Germany when so many, 150,000 of the Jewish population of 500,000, had abandoned everything and started all over as immigrants in distant lands. “So many of our friends gone away,” he said sorrowfully. “We are so isolated now.”
Frau Baumann sat attentively silent during the discourse, her smile, in time, becoming a bit frozen-Julius, my dearest husband, how I love and honor you but how you do go on.
But Szara heard what she did not. He listened with great care and studied every gesture, every tone of voice. And a certain profile emerged, like secret writing when blank paper is treated with chemicals:
A courageous and independent man, a man of position and influence, and a patriot, suddenly finds himself bitterly opposed to his government in a time of political crisis; a man whose business, whatever it really was, has been officially designated a strategically necessary enterprise, who now declares himself, to a semiofficial individual of his nation’s avowed enemy, to be so isolated.
This added up to only one thing, Szara knew, and the rather dubious assignment telegram from Nezhenko began to make sense. What he’d written off as a manifestation of some new, hopelessly convoluted political line being pursued in Moscow now told another story. The moment of revelation would come, he was virtually certain, during his “grand tour” of the Baumann wire mill.
The dance of departure began at ten o’clock precisely, as Frau Baumann accepted with courteous despair the inevitability of Szara’s return to his lodgings and instructed her husband to walk Fraulein Haecht back to her family’s house. Ah but no-Szara fought back-Herr Doktor must in no way discommode himself, this was an obligation he insisted on assuming. What? No, it was unthinkable, they could not let him do that. Why not? Of course they must allow him to do that very thing. No, yes, no, yes, it went on while the girl sat quietly and stared at her knees as they fought over her. Szara finally prevailed-becoming emotional and Russian in the process. To dine so splendidly, then drive one’s host out into the night? Never! What he needed was a good long walk to punctuate the pleasure of the meal. This proved to be an unanswerable attack and carried the day. Arrangements to meet the following morning were duly made, and Szara and Fraulein Haecht were ceremoniously walked to the gate and waved out into the night.
The night made over into something very different.
Sometime after dusk the rain of the afternoon had turned to snow-soft, feathery stuff, nighttime snow, that floated down slowly from a low, windless sky. They were startled, it simply wasn’t the same city, they laughed in amazement. The snow crunched beneath their shoes, covered tree branches and rooftops and hedges, changed the streets into white meadows or into silvered crystal where street lamps broke the shadow. Suddenly the night was immensely silent, immensely private; the snow clung to their hair and made their breaths into mist, surrounded them, muffled the world, cleaned it, buried it.
He had no idea where she lived and she never suggested one street or another, so they simply wandered. Walking together made it easy to talk, easy to confide, easy to say whatever came to you, because the silence and the snow made careful words seem empty. In such a moment one couldn’t be hurt, the storm promised that among other things.
Some of what she said surprised him. For instance, she was not, as he’d thought, a cousin or a niece. She was the daughter of Baumann’s chief engineer and longtime friend. Szara had wondered why she’d remained in Germany but this was simply answered: she was not Jewish. Thus her father would, she explained, almost certainly become the Aryan owner of the business-new laws decreed that-but he had already arranged for Baumann’s interest to be secretly protected until such time as events restored them all to sanity. Was her father, then, a progressive? A man of the left? No, not at all. Simply a man of great decency. And her mother? Distant and dreamy, lived in her own world, who could blame her these days? She was Austrian, Catholic from the South Tyrol down near Italy; perhaps the family on that side had been, some time in the past, Italian. She looked, she thought, a little Italian. What did he think?
Yes, he thought so. That pleased her; she liked being so black-haired and olive-skinned in a nation that fancied itself frightfully Nordic and blond. She belonged to the Italian side of Germany, perhaps, where romance had more to do with Puccini than Wagner, where romance meant sentiment and delicacy, not fiery Valhalla. Such private thoughts-she hoped he didn’t mind her rambling.
No, no he didn’t.
She knew who he was, of course. When Frau Baumann had asked her to make a fourth for dinner she hadn’t let on, but she’d read some of his stories when they were translated into German. She very much wanted to meet the person who wrote those words, yet she’d been certain that she never would, that the dinner would be called off, that something would go wrong at the last minute. Generally she wasn’t lucky that way. It was people who didn’t care much who were lucky, she thought.
She was twenty-eight, though she knew she seemed younger. The Baumanns had known her as a little girl and for them she had never grown up, but she had, after all, one did. One wound up working for pfennigs helping the art director of a little magazine. Wretched things they printed now, but it was that or shut the doors. Not like him. Yes, she had a little envy, how he went the world over and wrote of the people he found and told their stories.
She took his hand-leather glove in leather glove down some deserted street where a crust of snow glittered on a wall. He wanted, now and then, to cry out that he was forty years old and scarred so badly he could not feel and that snow melted or changed back to rain, but of course he didn’t. He knew every bad thing about the Szaras of the world, their belted raincoats and reputations, and their need to plunder innocence in girls like this. For, twenty-eight or lying, she was innocent.
They walked endlessly, miles in the snow, and when he thought he recognized the name of a street near the house where he was staying, he told her. She looked at him for the first time in a long while, her face lit up by walking in the night, wisps of hair escaped from the dreadful bun, and took off her glove, so he took his off, and they froze in order to touch. She told him he mustn’t worry, her parents thought that she was staying with a girlfriend. Later they kissed, dry and cold, and he felt a taut back beneath the damp wool of her coat.
In his room, she was suddenly subdued, almost shy. Perhaps it was the room itself, he thought. Perhaps to her it seemed mean and anonymous, not the surroundings she would have imagined for him. Understanding, he smiled and shrugged-yes, it’s how my life is lived, I don’t apologize- hung up their coats, put the wet shoes by the hissing radiator. The room was dark, lit only by a small lamp, and they sat on the edge of the bed and talked in low voices and, in time, recaptured some part of the nameless grace they had discovered in the falling snow. He took her hands and said that their lives were different, very different. He’d be leaving Berlin almost immediately, was never in one place for very long, might not come back for a long time. Soon, even writing to someone in Germany might be difficult for somebody like him. It was a magic night, yes, he would never forget it, but they’d stolen it from a twilight world, and soon it would be dark. He meant …
He would walk her home now. It might be better. She shook her head stubbornly, not meeting his eyes, and held his hands tightly. In the silence they could hear the snow falling outside. She said, “Is there a place I may undress?”
“Only down the hall.”
She nodded, let go of his hands, and walked a little way off from the bed. He turned away. He heard her undoing buttons, the sliding of wool over silk as she pulled her dress over her head, and silk on silk as she took off her slip. He heard her roll down her white stockings, the shift of weight from foot to foot, the sound of her unhooking her brassiere, the sound of her lowering her underpants and stepping out of them. Then he couldn’t keep his eyes away. She undid her hair and it hung loose about her face, crimped where she’d pinned it up. She was narrow-waisted, with pale, full breasts that rose and fell as she breathed, broad hips, and strong legs. Unconsciously, he sighed. She stood awkwardly in the center of the room, olive skin half-toned in the low light, the tilt of her head uncertain, almost challenging. Was she desirable?
He stood and turned back the covers and she padded past him, heavy-footed on the bare wooden boards, and slid herself in carefully, staring at the ceiling as he undressed. He got in next to her, lying on his side, head propped on his hand. She turned toward him and started to tell him something, but he had guessed and stopped her from saying it. When, almost speculatively, he touched her nipples with his flattened palm, she drew a sharp breath through closed teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, and if he’d not been who he was, had not done everything he’d done, he would have been stupid and asked her if it hurt.
He was too excited to be as clever as he wanted to be; it was the nature of her, generosity and hunger mixed, heat and warmth at once, the swollen and smooth places, pale colors and dark, the catch of discovery in her breathing, and the way she abandoned not innocence-he’d been wrong; she had never been innocent-but modesty, the way she crossed her barriers.
“Lift up a little,” he said.
For a time he was afraid to move, her hands trembling against his back, then, when he did, he was in anguish when it ended. A little later she got out of bed to go down the hall, not bothering to put anything on, a pretty wobble in the way she walked, I know you’re watching.
When she returned, she took the cigarette away from him and stubbed it out in the ashtray. So many things she had thought about for such a long time.
Thursday morning was cold and windy under dirty skies of shattered gray cloud. The streets to the factory district, at the northern reaches of the city, were banked by soot-stained hills of snow. Szara’s taxi was driven by a meat-colored giant with crossed swastika flags bound to his sunvisor with ribbon, and, as they drove through the Neukolln district, where miles of factories mixed with workers’ flats, he hummed beer songs and chattered on about the virtues of the New Germany.
The Baumann wire mill proved hard to find. High, brown brick walls, name announced by a small, faded sign, as though anybody who mattered should know where it was. Szara was amused by the driver, whose face twisted with near-sighted effort as he looked for the entry gate.
A business-day Baumann awaited him in a cluttered office that looked out on the production lines. Szara found him edgy, over-active, eyes everywhere at once, and not at all stylish in a green V-neck sweater worn beneath a sober suit to keep out the chill of the factory. The narrative of the tour was delivered in a shout that was barely audible above the noise of the machinery.
Szara was a little dazed by it all. He’d arrived still in a lover’s state of being, sensual, high strung, and the roaring hearth fires and clattering belt drives pounded at his temples. Steel was really the last thing in the world he wanted to think about.
One bad moment: he was introduced to Herr Haecht, a dour man in a smock, distracted from tally sheets on a clipboard when Baumann yelled an introduction. Szara managed a smile and a limp handshake.
Chicken sandwiches and scalding coffee were served in the office. When Baumann slammed the glass-paneled door, the racket of the place diminished sufficiently that a conversation could be held in almost normal tones.
“What do you think of it?” said Baumann, eager for his visitor to be impressed.
Szara did his best. “So many workers …”
“One hundred and eight.”
“And truly on a grand scale.”
“In my father’s day, may he rest in peace, no more than a workshop. What he didn’t make wasn’t worth mentioning-ornamental fence palings, frying pans, toy soldiers.” Szara followed Baumann’s eyes to a portrait on the wall, a stern man with a tiny mustache. “And everything by hand, work you don’t see anymore.”
“I can only imagine.”
“One naturally cannot compare systems,” Baumann said diplomatically. “Even our largest mills are not so grand as the Soviet steel works at Magnitogorsk. Ten thousand men, it’s said. Extraordinary. “
“Each nation has its own approach,” Szara said.
“Of course here we specialize. We are all nichtrostend.”
“Pardon?”
“One says it best in English-austenitic. What is known as stainless steel.”
“Ah.”
“When you finish your sandwich, the best is yet to come.” Baumann smiled conspiratorially.
The best was reached by way of two massive doors guarded by an elderly man seated on a kitchen chair.
“Ernest is our most senior man,” Baumann said. “From my father’s time.” Ernest nodded respectfully.
They stood in a large room where a few workers were busy at two production lines. It was much quieter and colder than the other part of the factory. “No forging here,” Baumann explained, grinning at the chill overtaking Szara. “Here we make swage wire only.”
Szara nodded, drew a pencil and a notebook from his pocket. Baumann spelled the word for him. “It’s a die process, steel bars forced through a swage, a grooved block, under enormous pressure, which produces a cold-worked wire.”
Baumann took him closer to one of the production lines. From a table he selected a brief length of wire. “See? Go ahead, take it.” Szara held it in his hand. “That’s 302 you’ve got there-just about the best there is. Resists atmosphere, doesn’t corrode, much stronger than wire made from molten steel, this is. Won’t melt until around twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and its tensile strength is greater than that of annealed wire by a factor of approximately one third. Hardness can be figured at two hundred and forty on the Brinnell scale as opposed to eighty-five. Quite a difference all ‘round, you’ll agree.”
“Oh yes.”
“And it won’t stretch-that’s the really crucial thing.”
“What is it for?”
“We ship it to the Rheinmetall company as multiple strands twisted into cable, which increases its strength by a considerable factor but it remains flexible, to pass under or around various barriers, yet extremely responsive, even at great length. That’s what you need in control cable.”
“Control cable?”
“Yes, for aircraft. For instance, the pilot sets his flaps by controls in his cockpit, but it’s Baumann swage wire that actually makes the flaps go down. Also the high-speed rudder on the tail, and the ailerons on the wings. These are warplanes! They must bank and dip, dive suddenly. Response is everything, and response depends on the finest control cables.”
“So you are very much a factor in Luftwaffe rearmament.”
“In our own specialty, one could say preeminent. Our contract with Rheinmetall, which installs control cable on all heavy bombers, the Dornier 17, the Heinkel 111, and the Junkers 86, is exclusive.”
“All the swage wire.”
“That’s true. A third production line is contemplated here. Something around four hundred and eighty feet per aircraft-well, it’s quite a heavy demand.”
Szara hesitated. They were on the brink now; it was like sensing the tension of a diver at the instant preceding a leap into empty air. Baumann remained supremely energeti
c, expansive, a businessman proud of what he’d accomplished. Did he understand what was about to happen? He had to. He had almost certainly contrived this meeting, so he knew what he was doing. “It’s quite a story,” Szara said, stepping back from the edge. “Any journalist would be delighted, of course. But can it be told? ” A door, he thought. Will you walk through it?
“In the newspaper?” Baumann was puzzled.
“Yes.”
“I hardly think so.” He laughed good-naturedly.
Amen. “My editor in Moscow misinformed me. I’m normally not so dense.”
Baumann clucked. “Not so, Herr Szara, you are not anything like dense. Of Soviet citizens who might turn up in Germany, outside diplomatic staffs or trade missions, your presence is quite unremarkable. Surely not liked by the Nazis, but not unusual.”
Szara was a little stung at this. So you know about clandestine life, do you? “Well, one could hardly expect your monthly production figures to be published in trade magazines.”
“Unlikely.”
“It would be considerable.”
“Yes it would. In October, for example, we shipped to Rheinmetall approximately sixteen thousand eight hundred feet of 302 swage wire.”