Hannah & Emil (14 page)

At the square he and Karl left Emil's family and lined up with the other soldiers. The parade was a mess. Many didn't have hats or coats and they were all mixed in together from different companies, ranks muddled. The crowd was thick in spite of the slushy snow on the cobbles and a vicious bite in the air. A band played ‘Deutschland über Alles' and Emil stood at attention. The white faces of the crowd sang. He was unable to separate them. It was just eyes and noses and holes where the voices came out. He opened his own mouth but made no sound.

After the parade he was standing with Karl, smoking, when a hand grasped his elbow. He froze, ready for violence, his own: quick, efficient, effective enough to rule out retaliation. He turned and it was just a girl, his age, familiar.

She smiled, baring straight white teeth. ‘Emil?' She peered into his eyes.

Karl, next to him, said, ‘Hello, Uta! How are you keeping?'

‘Karl. Oh, Karl, I was so sorry to hear about Thomas.' She reached out a hand to shake and he took it, nodded, returned his hands to his pockets.

‘I'll see you, Emil,' he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

Emil was silent for a moment. He saw now that this was his girlfriend from before. Had she changed something, her hair? Why hadn't he known her? He stepped forward, wrapped her in his arms. ‘It's you,' he said. She was so warm, so soft beneath her coat. She smelled astonishing. Her gloved hands were reaching up, leather fingers holding his neck. He led her away from the square and the crowds, his arm around her shoulder. In a cold alley where he could only just hear the crowd he held her close and whispered, ‘Take me somewhere quiet.'

‘It's quiet here. Tell me how you have been, Emil. There were no letters. I thought—I thought perhaps you had forgotten.'

He heard the catch in her voice. He pulled her tighter to him. ‘Uta, Uta, shhh. Is there somewhere warm? I want to hold you as I did before.'

‘Well, when you didn't write . . . another came along.'

‘Please. I'm here now. Let me be near you.'

‘I have an apartment with my sister,' she murmured into his hair. ‘She is at the parade. We can go there.'

As they strode along the narrow streets in the dark, passing the occasional couple, faces pressed together as they walked, a sailor urinating in the snow, drunk, a hand against the wall, he knew that he was pulling her along. It was too forceful. He would never have done this before. He was not quite fit for company anymore, he knew it.
She had to run a little every now and then to keep up, a little skipping step. He knew but he could not help himself, or slow his pace.

He opened his eyes, the discoloured brocade of the sofa beneath his
cheek. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he saw that the lintel was piled
high with snow. The heat from his mouth warmed his face. He pulled
the blanket off his head, reached down to the floor, fingers finding
dust and then the metal of his Luger. The apartment was silent but
for Father's snores, the boyhood sound of waking on Sundays, or
when Father was out of work. He was dressed beneath his blanket,
his uniform still, but it would do for now. It would not be noticed at
this hour, so long as he wore a civilian coat. He tucked the gun in
the pocket of his trousers, took his father's coat from the back of a
dining chair, crossed the room and unlocked the door quietly, inching
it patiently shut. It was even colder on the landing, where there were
no bodies to exchange the icy air for their sleeping breath.

These few mornings since arriving in Germany he woke to a
slow-building fury. He had only noticed it since he came home, now
there was nothing to be done with it, no requirement to transport his
squad safely home, nothing. Irritation jabbed like someone tapping
him on the forehead when he was trying to rest. His body recalled
the sound of the guns, the rattling of his bones, the slick of grease
on hands and the smell of burnt powder. Today it threatened and
then went away without trouble. He had something to do. His body
was glad to be purposeful, moving towards an act.

On the street, under the lamps, men trudged through the snow,
collars up, hats pulled down over eyes, leaving as little of their faces exposed to the world as possible. They drifted towards the station and the factories along the river, those that were still operating. The munitions factories were closed, though some were being reassigned. He followed the men along the river and they were swallowed up in little groups into the vast buildings. Past the factories, an indistinct blue light was appearing over the fields. All he could hear was a crow and his own breath. The guns were silent. The factories had not yet begun their shift. He walked quickly. He wanted to reach the place he knew before the day began, home before light, change into ordinary clothes. It was always the best place, when he and Thomas were boys, and they'd only had their catapults then.

The Luger rubbed against his leg through his pocket. A rifle would have been better, but he had not managed to bring it home: too unwieldy. On the rise beyond the fields a light came on in a farmhouse window. He crouched behind a hedgerow at the edge of a bare cornfield, trained his eye on the furrows, let them adjust to the lines of shadow, watching for movement. Gave himself a moment to appreciate that he was alone. No one could see him, no one had their sights on his head. Last night before he went home she was there. She would always be there now, if he asked her, a warm body, every night. She had dropped the other fellow in an instant. ‘I am going to be an electrical engineer,' he had whispered, as though that sealed it, and she had pushed her head into the cave of his neck and jaw. He felt a hollowing out of himself almost immediately. There had been no time to be merely himself, alone. Always the sound of men breathing as he slept and as he woke. And now this girl would be next to him, no freedom even in the dark. Perhaps if he withdrew quietly she could simply carry on with the man she had been with before he returned.

He cocked his pistol. His eyes rested on the field. He must see large areas at once but be ready for the quick movement. He learned to do this with Thomas, here at this field, and there had been plenty of practice since. It would only be a hare, just a hare.

It did not take long before a quickly drawn black line shot across the field, thirty metres ahead of him. He loved these animals, that ran because they liked it. He watched this one's speed to imprint it, get the feel. It was too far to be sure of the Luger's aim in any case. He would probably just warn every hare within earshot to stay clear of this field today.

He waited and breathed, at the corner of his eye another flashing dart from the shrubs, closer. His arm was raised, his hand was ahead of the hare, he waited, took a shot, did not hear the crack, waiting to see, and there it was, the movement stopped. He kept his eye on the point in the field at which he had last seen the hare so that he would not lose it in the furrows. He walked slowly. It was Christmas Eve tomorrow. Mother wanted her sisters to come because he was home. She would have meat to give them now. The apartment would fill through the day with the smell of it cooking. The hare lay slumped over a white ridge as though it was asleep. The bullet wound was a red circle at its shoulder. He took its warm ears, the fur soft against his cold fingers. Its haunch thudded gently against his knee as he carried the animal home.

At nine o'clock, the hour of work, Emil stood in the Tiergarten with a million men squeezed into every square metre of the park in a sea that stretched to the Brandenburg Gate a kilometre away, out of sight in the fog. His world was an island of men in an empty bowl inside the mist. A million voices roared ‘The Internationale'. His body vibrated like a tuning fork, his own voice at the centre of the sound. The cells of his blood were restored to him. He felt the worn cotton of his shirt against his skin. He was a living being, made up of muscle and organs and power. When this many stood together, made their voices one big instrument, they could not lose. His mouth was open against the fog. The world was changing.

There was a pamphlet in his hand. It read:
Your freedom is at
stake! Your future is at stake! The fate of the Revolution is at stake!
This was where he was supposed to be, here in this sea of men. He would never be made to go off to war again. He would never again fight to protect the interests of rich swine who regarded working men as cannon fodder. There had been something valuable in his survival after all. He caught the eye of those in the crowd and they smiled at each other with utter openness, as though they were brothers returned victorious from war. They carried red flags and rifles. His pistol was in his pocket. What force could overcome them now? He was a better shot than any of them. Before he went down he would take ten. And these men would do the same.

By lunchtime he had made his way into the square beneath the police headquarters where he waited with the crowd for word from the leadership inside. Soldiers and sailors and workers crammed into the square beneath the windows. ‘We are enough!' a group was shouting. He joined them. ‘We are enough!' Still no one came out onto the balcony. He stamped his cold feet, smoked one of his last cigarettes to stave off hunger. He did not want to go off down the lanes to look for a café. He might miss the moment when they emerged onto the balcony and announced the change in government. The fog turned deep blue. No one had eaten since breakfast and there was no word from the leadership in the building. Finally, at the end of the first day, the crowd thinning, he could wait for food no longer, and his bad leg was stiff with the cold. He joined the dispersal out of the city back towards his hostel. He overheard two men behind him.

‘They will make a decision tonight, and we will have our orders in the morning,' one said.

‘Too late for me. If that wasn't a waste of a day's wages. I'm going back tomorrow. I'll say I was ill.'

Emil's gun was in his pocket. Tomorrow he would rise early and wait near the Reichstag. He would be ready when called. He knew that in the moment when it happened his body would act. There was never time for fear when the moment came.

Every day the crowd on the street grew less as the round helmets and rifles of the Freikorps thickened around the edges of the squares and the Tiergarten, their grey uniforms clustering under the Brandenburg Gate and outside the occupied print works and newspaper offices. He was glad he was not holed up in one of them. He'd had an instinct to stay out in the open and he had obeyed it. They must be starving in those buildings; no one could get food in anymore with the government troops everywhere. There was little enough out here. He wandered between factory-floor meetings and gatherings of men debating on the streets. No one could be persuaded to fight the troops. They did the work of a socialist government, these men. They all had brothers, cousins, in uniform. And there were so many of them now, and fewer and fewer who called themselves revolutionaries.

After a week he was down to his last few marks and was frequently dizzy from lack of food. There was nothing to eat anywhere, even if he had money. Sometimes he had the luck to come upon a soup kitchen before they ran out. A woman the age of his mother thrust bread into his hand as he passed a doorway and he kept it in his pocket, made it last a day. He was often lost. The streets looked the same with their groups of workers, hands in pockets, heads bent towards each other, a line of Freikorps on either side of every street now. He was standing in a square that felt familiar. Yes, he had passed this print works on the first day; he recognised its tall black door. The streets seemed quiet, suddenly, oddly quiet. He felt something that reminded him of the front. A change in the air that made you drop, the kind of silence that preceded a rumble. He made himself stay upright:
I am on a Berlin street. This is not the front. Be calm.