A Small Death in Lisbon

by Robert Wilson

  Lehrer managed a few half-hearted questions about the bank, which hadn't been doing very much except lending money to buy mining concessions on the border.

  It was early evening by the time Felsen finished his report, but before Lehrer released him, the Obergruppenführer suddenly staggered to his feet, hobbled around the desk and sat on the corner.

  'We have a special understanding, you and I,' said Lehrer, suddenly grave. 'I promised you when I took you away from your factory in Berlin that you would be properly rewarded for the work you have done. Next year, possibly, your job will be a different one. It is one in which you are experienced but whose nature is not the same. You must trust me. You must not be dismayed when I tell you that at this point we might have already reached the beginning of the end.'

  'One thing Poser did say was that since Speer's promotion to Armaments Minister earlier this year there has been a massive improvement in our production capacity. I've felt it. The pressure for us to ship wolfram has been enormous...'

  'This is true,' said Lehrer, batting him down gently, 'but my feet are telling me that this will only prolong the agony. And my feet are never wrong.'

  Both men looked at Lehrer's boot-encased agony.

  It was six o'clock and dark and freezing from a wind sent directly down from the eternal Finnish darkness. The car crawled forward like the half-blind creature it was. Felsen sat in the back confused. Did Lehrer know what he was talking about? He'd always billed himself as the visionary, but did the future of the Third Reich really come down to his being twenty kilos overweight, sitting behind a desk too much and atrocious chiropody? Could the great German army that had crashed through Europe, smashed through Russia all the way to the Caucasus, all the way to within twenty-five kilometres from Moscow, to the suburbs for God's sake, could it all be over for the loss of one city? Felsen smoked behind a cupped hand and looked at the destruction in the suburbs of Steglitz, Schonberg and Wilmersdorf and remembered Poser telling him something at the beginning of June he hadn't believed. On the night of the 30th May in just over an hour and a half, Allied bombers had dropped more than two thousand tons of bombs on the city. When Poser had told him this it was four days later and Berlin was still burning. He hadn't believed him and had tried to get past the demented Prussian and out of the room, but Poser had snagged his elbow with his prosthetic hand and said quietly in his ear, 'I've seen the damage estimation. The real one, not Goebbels' version. Now go and find your wolfram. We'll need every kilo you've got.'

  As they came into the south of Berlin on the Potsdamerstrasse he asked the driver to carry on and take a left up the Kurfürstenstrasse. The street was unrecognizable with rubble piled in heaps on either side and destroyed and burnt-out buildings. Eva's apartment building appeared to be still standing. He took a torch from the driver and went down the cobbled side street and into the backyard of the building, through a gate which opened to a precise quarter circle of rubble and a narrow path to the door of the building, whose whole rear was down so that he could see into Eva's kitchen.

  The place wasn't habitable and he started to back out when he heard a voice, thin as bone china, singing an absurdly robust children's song from his homeland:

  Ich bin ein Musikant, ich komm vom Schwabenland,

  Du bist ein Musikant, du kommst vom Schwabenland.

  Ich kann aufspielen auf Meiner Geige,

  Du kannst aufspielen auf Deiner Geige.

  Delà schum, schum, schum,

  Delà schum, schum, schum

  Delà schum, schum, schum,

  Delà schum.

  Felsen went up the stairs, still solid and unbroken. The voice continued the manic refrain of the bow across a violin. The door to the apartment was open. The living room had been stripped to the floorboards and even some of those had been taken up at the far end. He followed the voice into Eva's study. Huddled in the corner in a wild mix of clothing—scarves, cardigans, skirts, even a man's waistcoat—was Traudl. She stopped singing.

  'Did you bring me anything today?'

  Her face had completely regressed to a child's. A child's with no fat in it. The white skin over her skull was thinner than the finest glove leather. Her temples were sunken. He knelt down to her.

  'Oh,' she said, seeing he was a man, 'do you want to fuck me?'

  'Where's Eva, Traudl?'

  'All right then, let me sit with you, just let me sit with you.'

  'You can sit with me, but tell me where Eva is too.'

  'She's gone away.'

  'Where did she go?'

  The girl frowned but didn't answer. He tried to put his hand through her hair but it was too matted. She began singing her song again.

  Footsteps up the stairs. Light wobbled in the living room. A woman appeared in the doorway.

  'What are you doing?' she asked, aggressive until she saw the uniform.

  'I'm trying to find Eva Brücke.'

  'Frau Brücke was arrested by the Gestapo months ago.'

  The girl stopped singing the grating song.

  'What for?' asked Felsen.

  'Judenrein, judenrein, judenrein,' chanted Traudl.

  'Harbouring illegals,' said the woman. 'This one turned up some days after. She won't move, not even for air raids. I bring her something to eat now and again. But she'll have to move soon with this winter.'

  Felsen took her to his apartment which had been requisitioned by the Organization Todt and filled with Speer's construction workers. He gave one of the women there all his ration cards and some money and left Traudl with her.

  Felsen told the driver to take him to Wilhelmstrasse and booked himself into an absurdly luxurious room in the Hotel Adlon.

  By 8.30 the next morning he was at No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse sitting in the office of SS Sturmbannführer Otto Graf. They were waiting for the file to be delivered and Graf was enjoying one of Felsen's cigarettes and staring out into the still dark morning.

  'What is your interest in this case, Herr Sturmbannführer?'

  'I knew her.'

  'Intimately?'

  'She'd been running clubs and bars in Berlin for years. A lot of people knew her.'

  'But you, what about you?'

  'I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't let herself be known.'

  'Maybe ... what she was doing, you have to be.'

  'I knew her before the war. She was always like that.'

  The file arrived. Graf looked at the photograph and remembered her. He flicked through the pages.

  'Yes, yes, I know the type,' he said. 'She looks as if she'll snap like a pencil on the first morning and three weeks later she's told us nothing. Not that...'

  'Three weeks?'

  'It was a very serious matter. She was smuggling Jews out. Sending them in rail cars of furniture to Gothenburg.'

  'And after the three weeks?'

  'She was lucky. If the presiding judge had been Freisler she would have hanged. As it is she's been sent to Ravensbrück for life.'

  Felsen offered another cigarette which was taken. They were American, Lucky Strikes he'd brought over from Lisbon. He gave Graf the packet and another one from his pocket. He said he could arrange a carton, two cartons. Graf nodded.

  'Come back at lunchtime, I'll have a visiting permit ready for you.'

  It wasn't difficult to arrange a car, but it took all afternoon and another two cartons of cigarettes to get the petrol for it. He could have taken the train up to Fürstenberg but someone had told him the railway station was a long way from the camp and transport not always available.

  In the evening he went to the back of the burnt-out Reichstag building and bought four bars of chocolate on the black market. He didn't sleep much that night but lay on his luxurious bed in the Hotel Adlon, drank far too much and swelled his chest with fantasies of rescue. He could see Eva and himself climbing the steps up to the aeroplane in Tempelhof airport and flying out of the bomb-shattered Berlin to the blue sea, the wide Tagus and a new life in Lisbon. It was the clo
sest he'd come to crying, emotional crying, as a grown man.

  The next morning was cloudless, the landscape on the sixty-kilometre drive north of Berlin was frozen still and dusted white with an iron-hard frost that the low winter sun would never burn off. Felsen's eyeballs felt hot and were cracked with red lines. His stomach was burning sour, but he still managed to feel some of the heroicism of the night before. He parked outside the camp and was admitted through the barbed-wire walls into a compound consisting of low wooden huts. He was taken into one of these and left alone with four lines of wooden benches. Time passed. Hours of it. No other visitors came in. He sat on the bench and moved with the sunlight coming in through the window to keep warm.

  At lunchtime a female guard came into the room in a grey greatcoat and side cap. Felsen stood to complain but saw that she was followed by a figure in a striped prison uniform about three sizes too big with a green triangle on the breast pocket. The guard sent the shaven-headed prisoner down the benches towards Felsen. The prisoner marched like a soldier on drill.

  'You have ten minutes,' said the guard.

  Felsen was not prepared for this. The prisoner's appearance was so dislocated from the human beings beyond the barbed-wire periphery that he wasn't sure if his language would be the same. It took a full half-minute to find the vestiges of Eva Brücke, Berlin nightclub-owner, in the sunken, grey, papier-mache skull. He had thought for a moment that this prisoner was going to take him to Eva—blonde, white-skinned and smoking somewhere else in the camp.

  'You came,' she said, flatly, and sat down next to him.

  He held out his massive hand. She folded her shrivelled, blackened monkey's paws in her lap. He broke off a piece of chocolate, she took it whole and swallowed it. The chocolate combusted inside her instantly.

  'You know,' she said, 'I used to have dreams about my teeth falling out. Nightmares. People would tell me it was because I was worried about money. But I knew it wasn't that. I've never cared that much about money. Not like you. I knew that I was petrified of losing my teeth because I'd seen all those toothless women in villages, their faces fallen in, their beauty gone, their personality diminished. I have eight left, Klaus, I am still human.'

  'What happened to your hands?'

  'I make uniforms all day, every day. It's the dye.'

  She looked at his hand still held out for hers and then at his face. She shook her head.

  'I'm going to...'

  'This is my lunch break, Klaus,' she cut in on him savagely. 'Give me some more chocolate, that's all I'm interested in. Not hope, not promises and certainly not sentimentality. Just chocolate.'

  He broke off another piece and gave it to her.

  'And I won't waste your time either,' she said. 'I presume you've come for an explanation. Well, you did see me that night in Bern. That pig Lehrer ... he was such a bad loser. I warned you about him, didn't I?'

  'Why Lehrer?'

  'I knew him. I knew him before you, years before. He came to all my clubs. I was surprised you'd never met. He asked me one night if I knew anyone who could speak languages and was good at business, good at making things happen. And it all just fell into place. You, him and what I was doing. You should consider yourself lucky. If he hadn't sent you to Lisbon, you'd probably be in Dachau. It was a solution—Lehrer removed you from the scene and my involvement with him meant that people didn't look at me so closely.'

  'But why didn't you tell me?'

  He was angry He looked into her ruined face, the prominent craters of her eye sockets, the remaining yellow teeth blackened by molten chocolate, the veins standing out on her shaved head, the scabs from shaving nicks in the down forming over her china-thin cranium. And she saw that he was angry.

  'More chocolate,' she said, not bothering to answer the question from the man in an SS uniform, the man who had been a Förderndes Mitglied of the SS, the man who'd made couplings for the SS, for God's sake, the man who bought wolfram for the SS so that the Nazi war machine could thunder on. Why hadn't she told him?

  He broke off another piece.

  'Don't think I was being brave, Klaus. It all happened by accident ... after what happened to those two Jewish girls, you remember that, I told you everything about that, didn't I, the ones I sent to Lehrer and his friend, that was a risk me telling you that ... a risk I did not repeat when I saw...' she stopped, and controlled herself. 'So, I moved the other two Jewish girls I had out of Berlin and that was it, I was involved. They kept coming to me and I couldn't turn them away. I'd become a link in the chain.'

  'One more minute,' said the guard.

  'When you saw what?' asked Felsen.

  'Nothing.'

  'Tell me.'

  'When I saw that it didn't concern you,' she said quietly.

  'I'll speak to Lehrer,' said Felsen in a rush, so that he didn't have to contemplate what she'd just said for too long.

  'You don't get it do you, Klaus? It was Lehrer who put me in here. He got rid of me. I'd become an embarrassment to the Obergruppenführer. The only person who can get me out of here is the Reichsführer Himmler himself. So don't even think about it. More chocolate.'

  He gave her the three bars in his pocket and they disappeared into her clothing. She got up and he rose with her. She stood to attention. He took the back of her baby's head in the palm of his hand. Her head jerked back in astonishment and she turned out of his hand and away from him.

  'Visit terminated,' said the guard.

  She marched to the door and, without looking back, straight out into the winter sunshine. It was the last he saw of her.

  Chapter XX

  24th July 1944, Hotel Riviera, Genoa, N. Italy

  Felsen lay in bed, the windows of his hotel room wide open, the sun streaming across the breakfast tray and his body. He was exhausted and drowsy as a dog in the village square. The hand that held the cigarette weighed twenty kilos, he had to drag it off his chest to his mouth. He felt himself floating like a barrage balloon, just a thin thread of cable tethering him to the earth.

  He'd worked for sixteen months solidly, with only one break. The one break was to let him return to Berlin to view the total destruction of Neukölln Kupplungs Unternehmen in the bombing raid of 24th March 1944. Speer was not even going to attempt to revive it. It was flattened.

  The only reason Felsen could think of, that Lehrer had brought him back for this miserable funeral, was to show him what had become of the capital of the Third Reich. From high up in the air it had looked like the same city apart from the various plumes of smoke. It was only as the aircraft dropped towards Tempelhof airport that he saw that where walls still stood the buildings were skeletal, windowless, gutted and roofless. They provided no accommodation. Everybody was living underground. The city had been turned upside-down—a honeycomb below, a catacomb above.

  He'd walked through the rubble-strewn streets, past the fourteen-year-old firefighters still trying to control blazes started several nights earlier—the roads a pasta dish of hoses, torn-up tram tracks, overhead cabling, drainage and water pipes, their ends wedged shut by overturned buses and burnt-out trams. And walking had been the only option. No S-bahn, no U-bahn—all the stations were packed with people. No fuel. He'd walked to No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse to ask Sturmbannführer Otto Graf one question which he didn't want to go down a telephone line. For a carton of Lucky Strikes, Graf had told him that Eva Brücke had died on the 19th January. When he flew out of Berlin that afternoon he could think of no reason for ever going back.

  Lehrer had promised him that his job would change, but until the end of April 1943 he worked exclusively on smuggling wolfram out of Portugal. It was only at the beginning of May that he began hauling bullion. His first transport was to take four trucks containing more than 4000 kilos of gold from the Swiss border to Madrid, where it was deposited in the Spanish national bank. He repeated this twice in June. In early July he took his first convoy since the start of the wolfram campaign to Portugal and deposited 3400 kilos of gold i
n the vaults of Banco de Oceano e Rocha. Four hundred and eighty kilos were sold to the Banco de Portugal to buy escudos, the rest was shipped to the Banco Alemán Transatlántico in'São Paulo, Brazil. Then came the Battle of the Kursk Salient and on 13th August 1943 he met Lehrer in Rome.

  Lehrer had lost ten kilos in three months, his face was permanently red and not blasted by the sun. They went to a restaurant where Lehrer chased his food around the plate and consumed two and a half bottles of red wine before starting on the grappa. He winced and pushed his fingers into his stomach three or four times during the meal. He smoked all his own cigarettes and started on Felsen's.

  'We lost Kursk,' he said.

  'I heard,' said Felsen. 'There've been black days in Lisbon.'

  'The war's finally got there has it?' said Lehrer, unpleasantly.

  'Poser shot himself.'

  'Not in the head I hope,' said Lehrer. 'That wouldn't have killed him.'

  'What about wolfram?'

  'Fuck wolfram. Don't you know what Kursk means?' Lehrer exploded, suddenly outraged, so that Felsen had to close his fist to keep himself calm. 'Kursk means we're not a tank-led army any more. Blitzkrieg is over. We can never replace the Panzers we lost at Kursk. The Soviets have opened a new factory at Chelyablinsk, ours are being destroyed daily by the Allied bombers. The Red Army is 1500 kilometres from Berlin. We don't need wolfram. We need a fucking miracle.'

  'What about for solid-core ammunition?'

  'Speer's using something called uranium from a special bomb project they've had to give up.'

  'Is that the end of wolfram?'

  'For you, yes. Abrantes can keep that running. Now your job is to take as much gold bullion out of Switzerland as possible and deposit it in Spain and Portugal. You'll receive instructions as to what to do with it.'

  In the year since that Rome meeting Felsen had taken nearly two hundred and fifty trucks of bullion from the Swiss border to the Iberian Peninsula. From there the bullion was shipped out to banks in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Chile. During this time Felsen became Lehrer's most trusted subordinate. He worked at it. As far as he was concerned it wasn't good enough just to be Lehrer's colleague, he had to be nothing short of the man's son. By the time Salazar proposed a total embargo of all wolfram on ist June 1944 Felsen's success had been total. When Lehrer and he met now they didn't shake hands, they embraced. Lehrer even allowed himself to get emotional. They called each other Oswald and Klaus. For Lehrer, Felsen had become the only piece of solid ground in a Europe of chaos.