The English German Girl

by Jake Wallis Simons

  —I should think so, Frau Werner. If you’ll excuse me, I will see if he is available to join us.

  —Thank you.

  Inga once again enters the hall. She can hear the soft sound of Frau Schulz singing to Hedi and feels a twinge of jealousy; she passes the grandfather clock and makes her way to her son’s bedroom, experiencing more than a measure of confusion. How odd for this lady to appear at this time of night, and what on earth could she want with Heinrich? The door opens and her son emerges, a pencil between his teeth and smudges beneath his eyes, his hair standing on end, the scabbed graze on his forehead exposed; at his mother’s request he smooths his hair, puts on his jacket, tidies his shirt and accompanies her into the drawing room where he stands stiff as a board upon beholding the figures before him.

  —Ah, Heinrich, says Frau Werner. I have brought my son here in order to make a statement to you. Rudi?

  —I apologise for calling you …

  —Stand up straight, Rudi.

  —Calling you names and chasing you and fighting you yesterday. It was inexcusable and I ask …

  —Look him in the eye, Rudi.

  —And I ask …

  —Louder, Rudi.

  —And I ask for your forgiveness.

  —Come now, Frau Werner, says Inga, surely it takes two to fight.

  —I am not to blame, Mutter, says Heinrich.

  —Heinrich!

  —He is right, Frau Klein, says Frau Werner, your son is innocent. Rudi is a good boy but he has been influenced by some unsavoury elements at school and thought it would be amusing to taunt the class Jew. Such cruelty is inexcusable. What say you, Heinrich? Are you able to forgive and forget?

  —Ach, very well.

  —Now shake hands and put it all behind you.

  Heinrich clasps the boy’s hand. Rudi’s face has flushed as red as his hair, yet his eyes are inscrutable; Heinrich’s skin creeps and he withdraws his hand sharply; Rudi scratches his nose and returns to his mother.

  —Now, Heinrich, go and continue with your homework, says Inga.

  Frau Werner finishes her soda water and gets to her feet.

  —Does Heinrich suffer much of this sort of abuse? she asks in a low voice.

  —I … I am not sure, replies Inga, he rarely speaks of it.

  —Perhaps you should consider moving him to a Jewish school. I hear that some of them are really rather good.

  —Yes, the idea had occurred to me.

  —I will not go to a Jewish school! comes Heinrich’s voice from the hall.

  —Pfui, Heinrich, I told you to continue with your homework.

  —I am not going to a Jewish school, says Heinrich, and I don’t want to be Jewish and I don’t care about Rudi and his friends and if they come near me again I will murder them.

  —Now stop that at once, Heinrich. Come back here, Heinrich. Heinrich!

  —I think it is time we left for home, says Frau Werner hastily.

  Inga shakes hands, pauses, wrings her hands, makes her way smartly down the hall and knocks on Heinrich’s bedroom door. There is no response. She calls his name repeatedly, then tries the handle; the door opens easily, Heinrich’s desk lamp shines on pages of mathematical calculations, his chair is lying on the floor, the curtains are drawn, and her son is nowhere to be seen.

  7

  The grandfather clock counts off the minutes, and Inga is approaching a state of panic. Frau Schulz is fretting on the fringes of the room and offering her drinks all too frequently, and as the pressure becomes unbearable and the panic reaches fever pitch there is the sound of voices downstairs; Inga rushes to the door and flings it open, rests her hands on the slippery banister and peers down the stairwell, and her heart almost stops – for there, seen from a bird’s eye view in the dim light of the entrance hall, is Otto returning from the park at last, flanked by Rosa and her bicycle on the one side and Heinrich on the other. They appear in good spirits as they cover the bicycle with a sheet and climb the staircase, Otto lagging behind to check the postbox before joining his children; when eventually they enter the room it is as if the apartment has once again returned to life. Otto is laughing, unwinding his scarf, clapping his hands together and warming them by the fire, Rosa is clutching at her mother’s elbow and is platzt with excitement, saying that she can now ride a bike all by herself and she isn’t even cold because of the newspaper and oh Mama you should have seen and can you take me out tomorrow please, and Frau Schulz disappears to make tea for the weary adventurers. Heinrich is sullen, slinking from the room, and Inga feels a heat, almost a pain, in her stomach, yet she is lost for words in the cheerful atmosphere; Otto calls him back and Heinrich, prompted, mumbles an apology to his mother, then walks straight towards his bedroom. Inga is about to follow him when her husband holds her back.

  —I fancy it is better to let things be for a while, Inga.

  —Where did you find him?

  —Rosa and I bumped into him on the Dorotheenstadt and he explained everything. He assured me that he will not run away in such a manner again, and I take him at his word. Do you know, he is considering taking up boxing? I suggested he join a youth group, the Kameraden or something similar. Nothing too Zionist or retrogressive. It might help.

  Inga sits heavily at the dining room table, and Rosa, noticing her mother’s mood, goes to her room and begins to prepare for bed, passing Frau Schulz with a steaming silver teapot. She hears the unmistakable sound of Papa removing his coat and hat, he always makes that strange grunting noise; she is glad that the fire is high and that Papa is able to get properly warm, his nose had gone as red as a cherry by the time they arrived back at the apartment. When all is in order in her little room Rosa snuggles herself into bed; she doesn’t want to interrupt her parents to kiss them goodnight, she knows that once they have finished their conversation they will come into her room and kiss her on the forehead and tuck her in. In the meantime she is content to lie in the darkness and listen dreamily to their muffled tones, the treble and the bass of their voices, one, then the other, then both together, then a pause, then one, then the other, the floorboards vibrating when Papa speaks. Family life is filled with crises such as these, they are inevitable, but they are never serious; Papa and Mama always sit down and have a discussion late into the night, their voices like a duet from here in her room, and things are always resolved by the morning. Rosa drifts off, and as she sleeps she dreams of riding her bicycle through Berlin all by herself, alone, going round and round in the darkness upon rapidly spinning wheels.

  23 December 1935, Berlin

  1

  Otto Klein rotates his wrist a quarter-turn, angling his watch face towards the dim light above his desk; he notices the chalk on his fingers and wipes them carefully on a handkerchief. Only five minutes remain until he can release the first group. He looks out of the window at the school gate and can see nobody gathered outside; it looks fairly safe but appearances are so deceptive these days – what’s that – no, just a cat, maybe, or a dog. He is on edge. It has been utterly black outside since four o’clock, and bitterly cold at that, and the children are desperate to get home, but safety must come first, and since they started releasing the children at intervals there have been fewer attacks. The twinkling silver baubles around Berlin would be terribly pretty. He used to take Rosa and Heinrich out to see the seasonal decorations, that’s impossible of course this year, perhaps once again in the future; this dim light above is making him feel rather tired, it aggravates the darkness by seeking to dispel it, but now only five minutes to go, four actually, another minute has slipped by, he can hear nothing but the buzz of this infernal light. Whom shall he release first?

  —You boys on the front row, yes, you five. Pack away your books. You may go.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Thank you, sir. Now there is noise – no voices, no laughing or talking, only floorboards creaking, desks closing, they are well behaved, these boys, which makes the job bearable. He resisted teaching in his former life, us
ed to avoid at all costs the lecture hall, repelled by the tedium of it, the very idea of repeating the same facts and figures to wave upon wave of half-interested students used to fill him with horror – and here he is a schoolmaster, in a schoolroom, who’d have thought it would come to this?

  —You boy, Pfeifenkopf, put down your work. You may leave along with the others. Hurry along now, boy, catch them up.

  —Very good, sir.

  Ah, little Bernhard Pfeifenkopf, so scrawny and tiny, his clothes are practically ragged, he needs a good hot meal and some proper fresh air, and to run about in the park or something, although in all probability his spectacles preclude any serious physical exertion. The boy must surely get bullied, his very name lends itself to bullying, a ridiculous name. According to Pfeifenkopf, it goes back to the giving of surnames to Jews in Austria in the last century, his grandfather was called to the police station to be named and happened to be smoking a pipe at the time. What a sense of humour, those Austrian policemen, hilarious. Klein understands that Pfeifenkopf’s parents have fallen upon hard times, that following the Aryanisation of their factory they have turned to selling soap for a living, though one wouldn’t know it from the state of their progeny’s face. And they receive supplementary income from Jewish Social Welfare, or so he has been led to believe.

  Klein can see through the window little sprites, little shadows, keeping to the walls, that is good to see, and they are going three this way, two that way, which is probably a fine idea as well, they are ingenious, these children, he will say that for them, they are able to think for themselves, to a certain degree at least; and there goes little Pfeifenkopf, sidling off alone.

  Klein is exceptionally tired today, he is glad that school is breaking up tomorrow for the Weihnachtsferien holidays, just one more day to get through then no school until January, that is one advantage of being a schoolmaster, he supposes. Today is a Monday, only the beginning of the week and already he’s exhausted, there was no time to relax over the weekend, especially Sunday, which he spent in the Scheunenviertel, in the musty corridors of the Central Jewish Offices at the Oranienburger Straße 31: the place was packed with people seeking emigration advice – everyone apart from Klein, that is, who was only seeking a loan. He will have nothing to do with the emigration hysteria that is gripping the Jewish community, his memory is not so short; only twelve years ago inflation had spiralled into the millions, Inga was forced to knit socks and gloves to sell, and money had to be spent immediately, before it lost its value. On the morning after payday he would get up before dawn and take his entire wages to the wholesale market where the entire sum would be spent on non-perishables, tins, hundredweights of potatoes, soup cubes, spongy hams, great fat cheeses, all piled higgledy-piggledy into a handcart, for within a few days the entire month’s salary would not have bought a cinema ticket; everyone thought the world was coming to an end, yet now it is almost forgotten; Klein is convinced that in just the same way this current unpleasant episode will pass.

  When he arrived at the Oranienburger Straße, sombre hordes were clustering in thick brown lines around the building, pouring in a great queue onto the icy pavement and past the Neue Synagogue, which was looking magnificent on that clear winter’s day, its dome a drop of molten gold. He queued for an hour, his trilby pulled low on his forehead, nuzzling into his scarf, his nose cherry-red above the frosty natty moustache, his numb hands poking like sugar mice from the sleeves of his overcoat. Eventually the pressure became too great, the queue burst and seethed into a disorderly crowd, so Klein pushed his way through, squeezed into the building through the narrow entrance. Then came the corridors, teeming with people hurrying this way and that, pressed in packs around offices, glancing in all directions, clutching sheaves of papers, or trailing after officials in the flickering electric light. Klein, losing his bearings, was borne along in a sudden slipstream of teenagers, had to lay a hand on the doorframe and prise himself away from the Youth Aliyah classroom; he slipped down a dingy metal staircase, emerged into a throng on the floor below, pushed his way through a cluster of men with string-bound files, and finally, above a shifting sea of hats, a sign came into view: the Central Office for Jewish Economic Aid. It took an hour for Klein to lever his way into the office and a further half-hour of jockeying before finally he could sit on the battered leather-capped chair in front of the desk and raise his eyes to look someone in the face.

  The man behind the desk looked familiar, and after a few seconds Klein placed him: Ludwig Altmann, the organist from the Neue Synagogue, whom he had met at a lecture that Inga had forced him to attend; the two men had sneaked out and struck up a conversation over a cigarette on the synagogue steps. Altmann recognised him immediately, shook him warmly by the hand, his broad face lighting up like a Chinese lantern; then it dimmed, the strain returned, he dipped his pen excessively in a pot of lavender-coloured ink and scratched Klein’s details on a sheet of foolscap, and the second of the ‘o’s in ‘Otto’ pooled, causing a major kerfuffle with a sheet of blotting paper. Klein was sweating now; he removed his spectacles and passed a handkerchief over his face; the blare of voices all around was interfering with his thoughts. He loosened his scarf. The conversation was fragmented, punctuated by interjections from anxious people, and somebody jogged the table and another blot appeared. Klein had to raise his voice above the din, and Altmann craned his neck to hear him, but the upshot was yes, in all likelihood he will indeed receive a loan, it is understood that he has incurred many expenses while changing careers and addresses and so forth, he will be contacted by letter in the near future, next please!

  The way out was worse than the way in. No sooner had Klein raised himself from the rickety chair than three men were competing for it, he was spun by the crowd away from the desk and once again found himself buffeted here and there by the mob, his legs were rubbery and he had to get some air, he squeezed his hand upwards through the tightly packed shoulders and tilted back his hat; and it was then that it came to his attention that somebody was calling his name.

  —Herr Doktor Klein! Doktor Klein!

  It had been a long time since Klein had been called Doktor. With an effort he turned and squinted in the direction of the voice. Somebody was waving a bowler hat in the air.

  —Doktor Klein! Over here! Herr Doktor!

  Klein recognised immediately the silvery crown of Doktor Oskar Fehr projecting half a head above the crowd. Klein waved, briefly, and continued to make his way towards the exit, but the crowd-tides turned and he found himself at a standstill; before long, having found a swifter current, Fehr appeared beside him.

  —Doktor Klein, I say, I haven’t seen you since our hospital days. What are you doing here?

  —Everyone in Berlin is here, said Klein, why should I not join them?

  —Not holidaymaking in Wiesbaden this year, Herr Doktor?

  —Not this year.

  —My God, I have never seen such crowds. Have you come to visit the Emigration Advice Centre?

  —No, I am … making a social call.

  —I see you have not managed to obtain one of these. They are in short supply, you understand.

  Fehr parted his greatcoat to reveal a pile of battered-looking books, each as thick as a fist, cradled in his arms like an infant. He pulled one out, awkwardly, and pressed it to Klein’s chest.

  —Here, I already have two Chicagos.

  —What’s this?

  —It’s a Chicago – I have a New York, a Chicago and a Washington, but here is an extra Chicago.

  The crowd moved and Fehr was carried away, calling over his shoulder:

  —Look under ‘Klein’. Write to them – they might help you emigrate. Farewell, Herr Doktor, and good luck! My kindest regards to your family. Good luck!

  And then he was gone, leaving Klein further encumbered by the telephone book, as a result of which it took him another hour to get out of the building, so that is why today, standing in the gloomy schoolroom, he feels deeply tired, and his mind
, like a compass needle, turns towards the bottom drawer of his desk, in the depths of which there nestles an amber lozenge of Schnaps; no, he mustn’t put his job in jeopardy, no, it will be worth the wait, he can taste it now, that dry tartness on the tongue followed by the candle in the throat, ah.

  2

  Rosa looks up at the black sky, listening to the regular tick-tick of her bicycle as trams and cars whirr past. Gone are the days when she would cycle through the city for pleasure, barely can she remember a time when she would ride freely in the streets, in the parks, for enjoyment. Pushing her bicycle, she passes a bundled-up group of children singing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht; she lowers her eyes and crosses the road, avoiding unnecessary attention. A few steps behind are Heinrich and his two friends, both of whom are leaders in his youth group, the Makkabi Hatzair. Jizchak is tall, like a bending stalk of corn, with a gentle smile, bulbous nose and round-glassed spectacles; he is a favourite amongst the children he leads, loved for his bottomless generosity. Edith is diminutive, mischievous, loved for her dry Berlin charm; she wears her hair pulled back in a clip, emphasising her spectacled, good-humoured face. Here on the streets, however, they are both hunched into their overcoats, hats pulled low, walking swiftly.

  —Pull your scarf tighter, says Edith, you are exposing the collar of your Kluft.

  Heinrich looks down to see the blue collar of his Makkabi uniform poking from his scarf like an ear, and tucks it back into the folds. He and Edith have just returned from the public library where they have been fixing pharmaceutical warning stickers to Nazi books, and writing anonymous letters saying ‘The Jews will be your downfall? Let’s hope so’ to post to the authorities. Jizchak does not approve, thinks they are taking unnecessary risks, but Edith says it’s pinpricks like these that maintain the spirit of resistance. As they approach the corner of the Danziger Straße the sound of baritone laughter can be heard. Jizchak looks up the road and sucks his teeth; a group of brown-shirted men – SA – can be seen gathered by a newspaper kiosk with a red glass case displaying copies of the Nazi weekly, Der Stürmer. Jizchak hurries up to Rosa and takes her by the arm, sending her heart all of a flutter – she was twelve last month – and steers the little group across the road, behind an advertising pillar covered with cinema programmes and posters announcing executions. Rosa glances around nervously, knowing that they are making themselves a target standing about like this, but she can see the men on the corner and knows that the alternative would be even more risky; after a time the men move off and with a sense of relief, but without a word, they continue their journey.