The door crashed in. Four grey uniforms came laughing and slapping each other to the bar and the staff snapped up like rods, the laughter echoing louder off the high ceiling as if there were fifty of them. I withdrew my hand and Etta looked to them, back to my pale face.
‘What is it, Ernst?’
Their appearance had reminded me of Captain Schwarz. The black holsters at their waists, still startling to me. They laughed louder as their drinks came, caps to the bar. I recalled a death’s-head cap on my lap. His face leaning towards me.
‘What is your wife’s name? Where do you live, Ernst?’
‘Etta.’ I said her name as if for the first time. ‘I also have something to confess. And it might matter now.’ I pushed my cup away.
‘Etta. I did not get a lift home from Herr Klein the other night.’
We returned to Erfurt station. Almost six, the west sun came through the glass of the concourse in golden shafts, motes of dust shimmering along them like rapturous lanes to a better place. From train-lines to throne. We walked through them, Etta’s body close into mine shivering like a child rescued from a river. The shimmers glowed on us. Chose not to take.
We spoke when our door closed.
‘Do you think he … they will check on us?’ as her coat fell to the floor.
I repeated what Klein had said.
‘I would hope the SS are too busy to examine one minor employee of a factory.’ I picked up her coat, hung it with mine. ‘My references from the university would have already been assessed. I’m sure everything is fine. I have no work records. No union history, no political preferences from the university. That is why I’m the one working on these drafts. It has been mentioned enough.’
‘But your wife is a Jew. They have not known that.’
‘You knew I was taking this job, Etta. And even I did not know that you …’
She sat, pulled off her hat like it was a rat, flung it to a corner.
‘I did not know you would be working for the SS. I thought you would be drawing silos. Not ovens for Jews.’
I sat beside her and she edged from my arm about to comfort.
‘They are ovens for the camps, Etta. Tools for the camps. Necessary. Buchenwald has a theatre. Cinema. Even a brothel.’ All Klein’s words again. ‘They need furnaces.’ I said this as factually as I could, but I thought on Paul’s words. He said he used to get the ashes to send to the relatives. That the government would charge the relatives for the cremation. I could not concede that they no longer needed the money. They did not even want to afford the coke for the furnaces.
‘Don’t, Ernst.’ She touched my hand. ‘Don’t be so … Do you remember when there was the Zionist plan? When we were younger? The Party and the Jewish leaders joined together to have them relocated to Palestine? The Attack newspaper – Goebbels’ paper for Christ’s sake – even gave away that souvenir medallion. Star of David one side, swastika on the other. And then the war came. The government could no longer pay for such a plan. Now it was a cleansing instead. My family went to Switzerland. By then I had met you.’ She held my hand tighter. ‘But who would have imagined this? Years of this.’
‘You are not Jewish, Etta. And imagine what? We are at war. We do not know what enemies we have or from where. The Americans imprison Germans, the Italians and Japanese. We are only doing the same.’
‘It is not the same.’ She let go my hand. ‘This is different.’
‘How?’
‘The conference the rest of the world had about the refugees. Remember that? No-one would take them. Every civilised country in the world refused them. Forced them to stay. The Party said they’d put them on luxury liners if another country would take them. You know who said yes? The Dominican Republic. The bloody Dominican Republic! They wanted to take one hundred thousand and everyone else just turned their backs. Ernst, you had to get my father to send you that Lotte book. A book set in Weimar about Goethe. A book set in our own cities. For Germans. He sent it in two pieces because they had banned it. They burn books, Ernst. What do you think they do? To Jews? If they ban even German books?’
I stood, went to the window and my tobacco. The motion and method of making a cigarette a catechism. To steady thoughts. To distract with our own hands. How often does one do that in a day? Concentrate on our hands. The smoker knows this. The rosary of it. The lighting of the paper the lesser part. It is the retreat that matters.
‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘The ovens are being increased to stem the typhus. The diseased dying. Imagine if that spread to the cities? What then?’
‘Ernst.’ She paused as my match struck and my hands cupped and drew life. ‘Why build more ovens, spend more money, in the expectation of more disease when that might not happen? Is not that money better spent on prevention? Is that what scientists do? Only find better ways to kill the infected? Would you go to the dentist whose only tool was a hammer? And does not the forced labour workers from the camps spread that disease? The ones in your factory?’
I blew my smoke into the room.
‘What are you saying?’
She seemed to grow small, her body retracting.
‘I don’t know. I do not know enough. You are building … you are working for a company that builds ovens for the SS. You say that Auschwitz is almost a city. And you have had no work until this … so … I don’t know.’ She looked at me. ‘It is just fear, Ernst. If you were drawing planes I am sure this feeling wouldn’t be … but … I don’t know.’
‘So if I annotate a bomber that kills thousands that is fine. But an oven is wrong?’
‘You were driven home by an SS captain. The car outside our home.’
‘What difference does that make?’
She grew larger again, the colour back to her face.
‘I’ll tell you, Ernst. I will tell you what difference such things make. I saw how you shut our door when that car brought you home. The car you did not tell me about. When Frau Klein came for her rent, when I had only ten marks to give her and I found our papers missing and us owing her forty marks. She took the ten. And she apologised. I have never seen that woman sweeter. She told me not to worry on the rent. Pay her when we can. Whenever we can.’ She crossed her arms. Found interest in the corner where her hat lay.
‘That is the difference such things make, Ernst Beck.’
The cherry of my cigarette was the only light in the room as I drew on it, turned it away from her to look out on the street alone. My usual pose.
April became May. The radio and newspapers reported our army’s successful strategic redeployment from Rome, from Cassino. But we knew what that meant, had all become used to reading between the lines. When children played with wooden guns in the street they had American accents. They could not be blamed for such. They had picked this up from the Party’s own cowboy movies. Our leader an avid Western fan. It had a symbolism to him. Films about claiming land, on overcoming and conquest and Christian victory. He did not perceive that the only thing the children would pick up would be the guns and the drawl. There was more Tom Mix in them than Siegfried.
Here did not feel like a place of war, surrounded by it, yes, but only as much as we were surrounded by forest and so did not take part