After Midnight (6 page)

Our honour and our will to fight
,

And taught us children what is right
.

“Bravo!” everyone shouts, clapping hard. “Well done!
Heil
Hitler! He really ought to have heard that poem, the Führer ought!”

“We’ll send it to him,” says Frau Silias, “but that’s not all of it. Do hand me that heavy great bouquet, Berta—oh dear, she won’t give it up, will she? Such a stubborn child—I don’t know where she gets it from.”

No foes we fear: a doughty band

United shall we Germans stand
.

A German sun shines on our land

If you, O Führer, on us smile
.

Three cheers!

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

And Berta goes on shouting,
“Sieg Heil!”
at the top of her voice, on and on, getting redder and redder in the face.
“Sieg Heil!”
Everybody laughs, delighted. Herr Silias is pleased and proud and orders yet another round. Frau Breitwehr can scarcely contain her annoyance, and tells her husband she’s had about enough of this and she’d like to go home. Berta is still standing on the chair. She begins reciting the poem all over again.

A little German maid you see
.

A German mother I shall be
,

My Führer, and I bring to thee

The fairest flowers of …

But suddenly the big white bunch of lilac is lying on the table. Glasses fall over; the lilac is floating in a puddle of schnapps and beer. Berta is lying on the lilac as if it were a bed, her face buried in the damp and faded flowers. Everyone has jumped up, beer is dripping off the table, some people are mopping their wet suits. “Now, now, now!” says Herr Silias. “Bedtime for you!” cries Frau Silias. A waiter comes running up with a dishcloth and turns little Berta over. Her face is a bluish white, her hands are clenched into rigid little fists.

Frau Silias suddenly screams, loud and long.

The proprietor comes over.

The SS men and the rest of us stand there in silence, our feet in the muddy puddles of liquor.

There is a dark forest of people around us, silent, rustling. A man in a hurry forces his way through the forest of people. “The waiter called me,” he says. “I’m a doctor.”

He raises Berta from her lilac bed. He lays her down again, shrugging his shoulders. “She’s gone,” he says, quietly. “Dead,” he says louder. Frau Silas screams and screams and screams.

“Their bill comes to forty-seven marks,” the proprietor is saying to the waiter, right beside me. “Who do you suppose we give it to now?”

3

I AM STANDING OUT IN THE STREET. MY HOME IS the night. Am I drunk? Am I crazy? The voices and sounds all around fall away from me like a coat. I’m freezing. The lights fade out. I am alone.

Little Berta Silias is dead.

We sat together in a corner of the Henninger Bar a little longer: Herr Kulmbach, Gerti, Kurt Pielmann, and myself. Gerti was pale and trembling. Kurt Pielmann quietly put a comforting arm around her. Gerti let him, and did not move. Herr Kulmbach was distraught. The whole world suddenly seemed so sad. Only a few of the customers had stayed on. Little Berta had been carried away, and Frau Silias was led out still screaming.

Lights were switched off. The last few customers sat there in a sad, twilight gloom. Their whispered conversation sounded like the pattering of raindrops in the bar.

He himself was not a happy man any more, Herr Kulmbach suddenly confided. He wasn’t popular in the Party because he sometimes offered criticism. He used to be one of the seven top SS men in Frankfurt. There’s a pub in the Old Town, he said, with a big bone hanging on the wall—the bone of an ox, not a horse. The landlord wouldn’t sell horseflesh, he serves nothing but the best, fresh food, you don’t have to bother about that so much with horseflesh.

“Like to see that bone, would you?” Kulmbach asked us, his voice sad, full of entreaty. “We seven Frankfurt SS men carved our names on it. My name’s there too. You can see it clear as anything. Hellmuth, that’s my first name. I don’t have a say in anything now, I don’t get promotion, I won’t be getting promotion either. Folk get promotion that haven’t got half my campaigning experience behind them, but they’ve got plenty of money, or their parents have plenty of money. And now they can go over my head. It was a different story when we were campaigning. Now you sometimes don’t want to go on. What’s the point of anything any more? Oh, the tales I could tell you …”

They were playing the National Anthem on the radio, so it must be midnight. Herr Kulmbach got to his feet, raising his hand. Other people suddenly stood up here and there in the bar, pale hands raised in the dim light. Next came the Horst Wessel Song, about the brown battalions …

“Mind you, ’course the Führer doesn’t know the kind of thing that goes on,” said Herr Kulmbach, looking as if he might weep, which would not have surprised me, for he was really rather drunk. He ordered another round of kirsch, and insisted on all of us going on to the pub in the Old Town with the ox-bone on the wall and his name carved on it.

Pielmann and Gerti actually did go off with Kulmbach to look at the bone. The place was open all night, he said, or in any case if he knocked in a certain way they’d always let him in.

I’ve often noticed how pleased and proud men are at having to knock in a certain way at the doors of perfectly harmless pubs, in order to get in. I expect there are some men who take to politics just for the sake of the secret signals you have to give.

I was rather surprised, at first, to find Gerti was going with them instead of staying with me, but she was very sad, and terribly distraught, and in that sort of state a woman would rather a man she doesn’t like for company than a woman she does. A man is a man, after all.

I didn’t go with them. I didn’t want to be as lonely as I would have been in their company. Pielmann would be comforting Gerti: Gerti always has someone to comfort her, and who have I got? Kulmbach had nothing on his mind but his bone.

And I promised Liska to go and look for Heini, so that’s what I’ll do.

I wish Franz were here now. He wrote me that letter. “Dear Sanna …”

I am afraid. Fear is rising around me, like rising water, up and up, never stopping. It’s like death by drowning. I could go straight home, but what would I do there? I don’t feel sleepy. Who loves me? Whom do I love?

I’ll go and find Heini. At night he always goes to that café in Goethe Street where they serve beer.

There’ll soon be wallflowers out in this little square, with flowers like velvet, smelling the same way they look. God help me.

One of dead Berta’s little shoes was lying under the table. The proprietor picked it up and fingered it, as if he were planning to keep it as a pledge.

Everything is so sad. I can’t help thinking of Franz, and the way his baby brother died. I can’t help thinking of Aunt Adelheid, who wanted to see me in prison.

It is nearly three years ago I left Lappesheim and came to Cologne. I arrived at the big railway station. It smelled of dust and hot sunshine. It was a summer afternoon. There
was hurry and bustle all around me: sweating people, suitcases in motion. I hadn’t come very far, but I was arriving here to start a new life, and I was full of pleasurable apprehension. Suddenly a pair of long black arms went round me, and hard straw scratched my face. It was Aunt Adelheid, scratching my face with her hard straw hat instead of kissing me with her mouth. I felt at once we weren’t going to love each other, and I hadn’t even seen her face yet. Then I did see it. It was sharp and grey, with narrow, dark, glittering eyes. Aunt Adelheid’s voice was shrill and sharp. Everything about her pierced and cut you. I felt like crying.

Then somebody took my hand. And didn’t say anything, just looked at me quietly and thoroughly. He was tall and thin, with a pair of patient shoulders. He had a pale, serious face, and I thought his brow looked gentle and thoughtful, though it didn’t seem particularly striking. His eyes and brow and mouth and shoulders, in fact, all looked a blur to me, smudged and running together. All I could really see clearly was the glaringly bright red silk scarf he was wearing. It looked ridiculous. What man wears a scarf like that? Then I saw the man’s arms. They hung by his sides, long and sad, like the arms of captive apes with no real reason left for climbing, so that their long arms now seem superfluous.

The man was Aunt Adelheid’s son Franz, my cousin. I thought he was crazy. I felt like laughing.

I didn’t laugh; I didn’t cry.

Franz carried my case for me. His long arm got even longer, his patient shoulders more patient than ever.

Franz works in a solicitor’s office, but he’ll never get to be head clerk. He has his strengths, but they’re not the sort that
get you anywhere in normal life. He has no friends, because his nature is a sad and lonely one. He has no ambition: he doesn’t want to do better than other people. He seldom says anything much, so what are people supposed to make of him? And he always concentrates on one thing at a time, which tends to make other people nervous. If he picks a glass up, then he will be concentrating entirely on the holding of that glass, unable to think or feel anything else. When he looks at a stone, he’s entirely caught up in the sight of that stone, and can’t talk or listen at the same time. When he eats, he eats. And when he loves, he loves.

Sometimes he seems to be living wrapped in thick veils. When you speak to him, he wakes up without actually having been asleep. Nobody knows what he is thinking or dreaming of inside those veils. He may know himself, but he doesn’t talk about it. He just lives, and that’s all there is to say. When you merge into life you can’t describe the feeling.

But perhaps he sometimes thinks how he killed a baby. The baby was his little brother.

There is a photograph of this baby hanging over the sofa where Aunt Adelheid sits at mealtimes. The upholstery of the sofa is threadbare. It was once green, and then went yellow with time and the sunlight that filters into the room grudgingly, but constantly.

The place always smells of rancid fat and rank cabbage, because there is no door between it and the kitchen, which consists of nothing but a small gas stove and a sink. The kitchen lies on one side of the room and the stationery shop on the other. There are some crackers lying on a small table next to the counter. I could always see those crackers from my chair at the dining table. They looked creased and purple, like withered lilac. Old as the hills they were, made of
weary, crumpled crepe paper. You weren’t allowed to clear them away, because Aunt Adelheid thought perhaps she’d sell them yet. And then perhaps she hoped she wouldn’t. A blond commercial traveler from Cologne had left her this consignment of crackers years ago. She once told me about him. Naturally it’s a sad thing for a woman when a man sleeps with her and then makes off, leaving nothing behind but crackers. And when instead of a love letter, all she gets is an invoice for the crackers from the man’s firm.

The dead baby’s photograph hangs over the sofa, opposite Franz’s place at the table. Its frame is made of silver, twisted so that it’s supposed to look like a wreath of flowers. The picture itself shows Aunt Adelheid sitting holding a baby with a bald head and a long lacy dress. The infant in baby’s evening dress was burnt to death.

Franz was three years old at the time, a resident of Lappesheim, though you can’t say such a little boy is actually residing anywhere, he just exists. Aunt Adelheid’s ramshackle little house stood in Ufer Street, jammed in between two larger houses which almost crushed it. Its roof was made of slate the silvery-grey colour of a raven in flight. The roof was defective and the windows cracked, for Aunt Adelheid’s husband was not a builder or a glazier but a tailor, and if people along the Mosel can’t do a thing for themselves they don’t employ other folk to do it for them.

He was a good tailor, and always very cheerful. First Aunt Adelheid did for his cheerfulness, and then he died of TB. He left two children, Franz, aged three, and little Sebastian, aged six months.

Aunt Adelheid was down by the ferry, talking to the woman there, moaning about her late husband’s death. She never had a good word to say for him when he was alive,
wouldn’t let him go to the pub, wouldn’t so much as let him smile. But once he was good and dead she wept and wailed over him. Suddenly the ferry woman saw people running about in Ufer Street in agitation, shouting and waving. There was smoke coming out of Aunt Adelheid’s house, pouring out of the windows. And there was a bright and flickering glow in the street. The crowd bunched closer together. “Fire!” shouted several young fellows, hoarse and loud and long, to give the volunteer fire brigade the alarm. Aunt Adelheid staggered towards her house. She was weak at the knees, she collapsed and then stood up again. Segebrecht, the pub landlord, came towards her, limping in a stiff, slow way, black as the Devil with soot. People stood back to form a rigid, silent alleyway. Aunt Adelheid and Herr Segebrecht were approaching each other from opposite ends of this alley. Segebrecht was carrying something black and crumpled. There was a little rag of singed, blue wool dangling from the black thing—Aunt Adelheid tottered, and all the women suddenly screamed in chorus.

Little Franz had lit the fire. He was proud of knowing how to do it. People had rescued him from a blazing room, and while Segebrecht carried poor dead little Sebastian towards Aunt Adelheid, Franz stood there outside the burning house, hands clasped in front of the fire, eyes shining with happiness.

Nobody loved Franz any more. Not the people in the village, not his mother. In her desperation, she just wouldn’t believe that if it was anyone’s fault it was hers. Why had she left two tiny children on their own? She wanted someone to take the blame, so it had to be little Franz. As time went by, Aunt Adelheid idolized dead little Sebastian more and more, constantly weeping and praying by his grave.

If Franz was going to be loved too, even a tiny little bit, he’d have had to die as well. He went very quiet, and stayed that way. He didn’t learn to talk early, or have any fun learning, because nobody wanted to speak to him. People avoided him, and he had to get used to being silent and lonely.