A Small Death in Lisbon

by Robert Wilson

  'For God's sake be careful,' she said. 'It's a seven-metre drop to the street. The fall will kill you if the rubble doesn't.'

  'She's concerned for you, Müller.'

  Müller strained forward, craning his neck around the door. Schmidt held on, smiling, and winking at Eva.

  'I think she must like them slim,' he added.

  'Shut up, Schmidt, and pull me back up.'

  Schmidt, without taking his eyes off Eva, twitched his forearm and Müller sprang back and thumped into his chest. Schmidt put an arm around him.

  'You know what you have to do,' said Schmidt. 'You have to be totally confident. You can't piss about. You just have to do it.'

  He took two steps down the corridor and went into the bedroom on the left. The whole floor lurched. Beams groaned. Plaster and masonry broke off and powdered. There was a loud crack. Schmidt reappeared ashen-faced, his head wobbling on his neck. A line appeared in the plaster work above their heads.

  'You fucking idiot,' said Müller, springing back down the corridor.

  'There's nobody in there,' said Schmidt, walking tightly, buttocks squeaking.

  'We're going now.'

  'Didn't you smell anything?' asked Schmidt, recovering his cool.

  'Only the shit you've got in your pants.'

  Eva led them back to the living room. Müller was tight-lipped, furious and thwarted. Schmidt opened the door and looked back at Eva.

  'What's in that,' said Müller, pointing at an old chest she'd moved up from the damaged room. It wasn't a big chest. It couldn't have taken a grown man.

  'Books,' said Eva. 'Try lifting it.'

  Müller tried the lid. It was locked.

  'Open it,' he said.

  'I haven't opened it in years. I don't even know where the key is.'

  'Find it.'

  'I don't...' Eva stopped. Schmidt had opened his coat and taken out a Walther PPK. 'What are you doing?'

  'Best Jew detector I've ever known,' he said.

  'And if there isn't a Jew in there you're prepared to give me six months of your salary?'

  'Six months?'

  'That's a seventeenth-century chest and the books are valuable too. Why do you think I moved it up from the bedroom?'

  Schmidt regripped the gun and turned it on Eva.

  'You know the penalty for harbouring illegals?'

  'I imagine it involves some years in a KZ.'

  'Boom!' he said.

  'Let's go,' said Muller.

  They left. Eva went straight to the lavatory and let out a thin stream of diarrhoea. She lit her first cigarette with her dress and coat still up around her waist.

  She had to force herself out of the house. She had said she was going out so she had to do it. She knew they'd be sitting there in their car waiting for her. She finished the fourth cigarette, dropped the last of the brandy, swilled her mouth out with water and goaded herself out on to the street. She walked in the road. The pavements were covered in piles of rubble and there were always Poles and Czechs carting more of it out of the half-collapsed buildings. The Gestapo car pulled alongside and Schmidt rolled down his window.

  'Want a lift?' he said. 'We must be going your way.'

  'I'll walk thanks.'

  'See you again. Number Eight Prinz Albrechtstrasse.'

  She arrived at her club on the Kurfürstendamm. It had been cold in the street but she was in a sweat. Traudl was in her office lying on a camp bed behind a curtain. She lived there when she couldn't find men to take care of her, which was most of the time. She was thin and white, her facial bones as clear and as fragile as porcelain. Eva sent her out to clean the bar and sat back with another brandy and more cigarettes. Her body, which had begun to feel as dislocated as a cubist's idea of one, slowly came back together. Her insides warmed and filled, her guts firmed. She did the September accounts and put Hansel and Gretel to the back of her mind.

  At 7.30 P.M. she left for home to change into her evening wear. It was a cold night. Small groups of Jews, all with the yellow stars they'd been required to wear by law since the beginning of September, trotted past her making for home before the 8.00 P.M. curfew—armaments factory workers, they were all legal.

  Before turning down her cobbled street off Kurfürstenstrasse she looked up at the starry night. She sniffed the air. It was clean and there were no obvious Gestapo cars in the street. The bombers would be out though. It had been a terrible summer. First Lübeck, then Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Osnabrück, Bremen and, of course, Berlin. Putrefaction had clogged the air. Only the rats were fat. But tonight was clean. She went up to the apartment, let herself in and checked each room.

  'It's safe,' she said, quietly.

  Gradually there was movement from the end room. A young man inched around the door, his face contorted from the stiffness of his body.

  'Where's the girl?' asked Eva.

  The girl appeared behind her.

  'Where were you?'

  'In the chest,' she said. 'I was just trying it for size when they came.'

  Eva suddenly had the girl's-eye view from inside the chest. She shuddered.

  'You'll be leaving tonight for Gothenburg,' she said, moving on to better things.

  The girl smiled at the ceiling. The boy squeezed Eva's arm. There was a soft knock at the door. The boy crept back down the corridor and around the door. The girl was gone. Eva cleared her throat.

  'Who's that?'

  Another soft knock.

  She opened the door. Two girls. One late teens, the other fourteen at the most. Yellow stars.

  'Yes?' said Eva, looking down the stairwell behind them.

  'Can you help us?' said the eldest girl. 'We've come from Herr Kaufman.'

  'I can't,' she said, and heard the girls gasp as if they'd been stabbed. 'I'm being watched.'

  'What can we do?'

  'You'll have to go somewhere else.'

  'Now?'

  'It's too dangerous for you to stay here.'

  'Where shall we go?'

  She blinked. Why hadn't Kaufman said he was sending two more? She thumped her forehead with a closed fist and tried to think of somewhere nearby.

  'Do you know Frau Hirschfeld?' she asked.

  They shook their heads.

  'Do you know Berlin?'

  Again.

  She wrote out the instructions for them. It wasn't such an easy place to get to after 8.00 P.M. without papers. She sent them on their way. She still had plenty of work to do with Hansel and Gretel. She went into her office and unlocked and removed the second drawer. She took the contents out and turned it over. Taped on the underside were forged papers for Hansel and Gretel in the names of Hans and Ingrid Kube.

  Another soft knock on the door.

  What now?

  She put the drawer and the contents back into the desk.

  Another soft knock.

  Those girls. What was Herr Kaufman thinking of?

  She strode across the living room and opened the door. The two girls were standing there in their coats, their shoes planted together, good as gold. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders, was Müller. Schmidt's colossal fist came into the light waving the instructions she'd just written—a moment's loss of concentration. The smaller girl began to cry.

  'Frau Hirschfeld sends her regards,' said Schmidt, shoving Eva with the flat of his hand between her breasts so that she fell on her back and skidded across the room.

  'How expensive did you say that chest was?' he asked, and slammed the door behind him. He took out the gun. Footsteps down the stairs. He eased off the safety catch.

  'No,' said Eva.

  'No? Why no?'

  'I've found the key.'

  'It's too late for keys. I haven't the time for keys.'

  He pumped two bullets into the chest. There was a muffled cry. Eva launched herself at Schmidt's gun arm and he cracked her across the forehead with the barrel. She went down but not quite out. Schmidt pumped another bullet into the chest. Eva felt herself
lifted, her cheek landing on the carved top of the chest. Schmidt rucked up her skirt and his hand grabbed her roughly between the legs, his fingers finding their way in.

  There was a shout from the back of the house, an incoherent wail. Something fell, something big and heavy, like the wardrobe Eva hadn't been able to move out of there. The hand left her. There was a stupendous crack and then a small stroke of silence, before the back end of the whole apartment building collapsed with a noise that went on and on.

  Eva slid off the chest: Schmidt was standing over her looking in the direction of the endless collapse, mouth open, unable to move, not knowing how much of the building was going to break up and whether they'd be consumed with it.

  Eva no longer felt fear for the first time in two years. She felt relief that it was over. Relief, that was, until the house fell silent again and the floor was still there underneath her and Schmidt said:

  'That really wasn't very safe at all, was it?'

  ist October 1942, Largo do Rato, central Lisbon

  In the Largo do Rato Felsen had picked up a taxi a gasogenio, something introduced nearly a year ago when the fuel shortages began to bite. For some reason he felt less safe with a wood-burning stove mounted on the boot generating steam into a cylinder in the front than he did with petrol doing much the same thing. He couldn't wait to get out, which was what he did no more than seventy metres down Rua da Escola Politécnica, but not because he'd lost his nerve.

  He thought he was mistaken but the likeness was so exact he had to get out to check. The girl turned right into Rua da Imprensa Nacional and he put in a limping sprint to catch up with her. He had not been mistaken. It was Laura van Lennep. He grabbed her by the wrist as she was taking another right turn and she spun round and tried to wrench herself away from him.

  'Remember me?' he said, holding on.

  She looked blank.

  'Chave d'Ouro, Estoril Casino, Hotel Parque, March 1941. We fell in love,' he said, sarcastically.

  She blinked and he looked at her more closely. There was something missing, something not quite right in her head that was making itself known in her face.

  'I have to go to America,' she said, trying to twist her wrist away from him.

  'Klaus Felsen,' he said, hanging on to her. 'You might remember ... you stole my cufflinks. They were engraved with my initials. KF. No? How much did you get for them? Not enough to get you to America by the looks of it?'

  She backed away up the street, not out of fear but because she knew she had to get away from the pressure. The nasty pressure. She wanted to get to the place. The place where they were nice to you. The place where they looked after you. She turned. Felsen let go of her, hesitated and then followed. She went into the Travessa do Noronha where there was a soup kitchen and hospital set up by the Commissão Portuguesa de Assistência aos Judeus Refugiados. It was lunchtime. Other people were going into the building. He watched her queue up and receive her food. She didn't talk to anyone. She looked around occasionally, but furtively with her head dipped over her spoon. He approached a white-coated doctor who was waiting to be served. He pointed out the girl and asked after her.

  'We don't know exactly what happened to her,' said the doctor, speaking in Portuguese but with a Viennese accent. 'We had another case very like hers in which we saw the same neurotic obsession with getting to America. This other case had been put on a train by her parents in Austria and told to get to America at all costs. She later found out that her entire family had been taken to the camps. This news induced a curious reaction, which was a deep need to obey her parents combined with an obsessive guilt which prevented her from achieving it.

  'The only reason we think the same might be true of this Dutch girl is that we've seen in her passport that at one stage she had an American visa, and amongst her possessions we found a valid ticket for a sailing long gone. Sad ... but look around you.'

  The doctor rejoined the queue for his meal. Felsen looked around him without seeing what the doctor had meant. The girl wasn't at the table any more. He left the building, stood on the steps, lit a cigarette and flicked the match off into the street. He walked down through the Bairro Alto in the high autumn sunshine to the Largo do Carmo where he took the elevador down to the Rua d'Ouro.

  He went up to the second floor of the building they'd leased for the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. The offices occupied the ground and first floors and there were two apartments on the floors above, the top floor being his and the second floor belonging to Abrantes and his family. Abrantes had asked him to be godfather to his second son. He'd called Felsen at the German legation that morning to say that Maria was being released from hospital and he should come and look at his new godchild.

  The maid led Felsen through to the living room. Maria was lying on the chaise longue in a fur coat which wasn't necessary, given the weather. He could hardly bear to look at her. In less than a year the peasant girl had transformed herself into a travesty of a forties film star. She couldn't read but she'd flicked through the magazines, choosing whatever took her fancy, and Abrantes had indulged her. Felsen lit a cigarette to stop himself from sneering. Maria lit one too and blew smoke out in a practised stream.

  Abrantes was staring down into the Rua do Ouro through windows criss-crossed with sticky tape against the bombing raids that the Portuguese were still expecting to move down from Europe like a bad weather front. Felsen had even heard air raid warnings and seen the soldiers sitting on sandbags behind their barbed wire barricades in the Praça do Comércio, wondering what the hell they were supposed to be doing.

  Abrantes was dressed in a grey suit and now wore spectacles although he never pretended he could read. He smoked a charuto. His transformation from Beira peasant had gone better than Maria's. He had some stature and a sinister look that could command respect from the city-dwellers. He'd learnt things about behaviour and manners just as Felsen had done when he first came up from Swabia. He greeted Felsen flamboyantly, as a successful wartime businessman should. He guided him to the edge of the cradle on which Maria rested a proprietorial hand.

  'My second son,' he said. 'Your godson. We have called him Manuel. I would have liked to have called him after you but, Klaus ... I'm sure you understand, a Portuguese boy can't bear the name Klaus. So we named him after my grandfather.'

  Felsen nodded. The baby was sleeping, tightly wrapped in what seemed like far too many clothes. He looked like any other baby except a little less wrinkled than usual. Maria tickled the baby with her finger. Felsen was aware of her watching him. The baby struggled against the intruding finger. A bubble appeared at his pursed little mouth. His eyes suddenly opened, surprised and big for his face. Felsen frowned. Maria's face came into his vision.

  'He looks like his mother this one,' said Abrantes, on his shoulder.

  There was a lot of blue in those eyes and, maybe if you were the father, the faintest hint of Maria's green in them, but to Felsen they were blue eyes, his own eyes.

  'A beautiful baby,' said Felsen, automatically, and Maria sat back on the chaise longue.

  Abrantes dug the baby out of the cradle and held him high. He growled at him. The baby blinked at the big bad bear.

  'My second son,' he said. 'No man could be happier than one with two sons.'

  'What about a man with three sons?' asked Maria, cheeky, confident of her status.

  'No, no,' said Abrantes, superstition rippling through him like wind through the broom in the Beira, 'out of three, one will always be bad.'

  The baby gathered his small but impressive powers and let out a long piercing wail.

  Chapter XIX

  list December 1942, SS-WHVA, 126–35 Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde

  'Stalingrad,' said Lehrer, who was sitting sideways to his desk, his elbow resting on a blotter, hand up in the air, poised, blade-like. 'Are they talking about Stalingrad in Lisbon? Are they drinking to Stalingrad in the goddamned Hotel Parque in Estoril?'

  Felsen sat alone on the other si
de of the desk. He smoked but didn't answer. Nobody was talking about Stalingrad.

  'Are they?' insisted Lehrer.

  'Not at the dinner I was at last night.'

  'Just cutlery clattering on the plates.'

  'Not quite as bad as that.'

  'And Poser? What did Poser look like?' asked Lehrer, shifting in his seat, his belt, longer than a pack mule's girth, creaking over the movement of his belly.

  'Like Poser always does, but sicker.'

  'Mrnm,' murmured Lehrer seismically. 'Zeitzler, the Army Chief of Staff, went on Stalingrad rations for two weeks to show solidarity with his men at the front. He lost twelve kilos. What does that tell you?'

  Felsen closed his eyes at another of Lehrer's endless test questions. He wanted to say that it told him that Zeitzler probably had more than twelve kilos to lose, but one look at Lehrer's creaking belt told him this would not lighten the tone.

  'The Sixth Army is in big trouble,' Felsen trotted it out, Lehrer's best pupil.

  'You know, I have my contacts in the East Prussian headquarters at Rastenberg, Herr Sturmbannführer. I am reliably informed that Field Marshal Paulus and his two hundred thousand men are finished,' said Lehrer, and his hand dropped, guillotining the Sixth Army off the Third Reich.

  'Can't they break out, retreat, regroup?'

  'The Führer won't allow it. He's obsessed with the disgrace of retreat, with the disgrace of losing all our heavy artillery. He doesn't appear to see Zeitzler's point that by leaving them there he will lose everything and not just Stalingrad ... the whole Russian campaign.'

  'Does Stalingrad have some vital strategic importance?'

  Lehrer held up his hands, if not to God then the blackout blinds.

  'It's mythical,' he said. 'You hold Stalingrad, you hold Stalin by his steel balls.'

  They talked about wolfram. Lehrer was listless and disinterested. He couldn't even raise the flag for the latest smuggling operation where Felsen had loaded 200 tons into rail cars in Lisbon and seen them travel on papers as manganese all the way through the border without even the customs opening them up. The Allied agents had come close to a fist-fight with the customs chefes who cleared the cargo in Lisbon and Vilar Formoso. They hadn't grasped that these two public servants creamed five million escudos between them which made their thousand escudos per month salaries look like Felsen's bar bill.