Second Violin (11 page)

‘God has gone deaf. Either that or he is dead.’

Down the street a dog was barking.

Siebert was hunched over the basin in the bathroom of Rod’s suite at the Meissl und Schadn, rinsing the blood out of the matted hair on the back of his head.

Rod looked at the wound, said, ‘Doesn’t need stitching. It’s quite a lump though. You were lucky you weren’t out cold.’

‘I was,’ Siebert said, his face still in the basin. ‘Did you think I’d let you escape if I were conscious?’

‘Come through when you’re ready. I ordered lunch as soon as we got in.’

Rod went back into the sitting room.

‘Lunch? What happened to breakfast?’

Rod called back, ‘The night ran away with you . . . it’s past noon.’

Rod lifted up the silver domes to look at the meal. Siebert came in, head buried in a hotel towel, rubbing at the wound on his skull. The sound of a cork popping made him flip up the towel and
look.

‘Champagne?’

‘Champagne, blue trout, black truffles.’

‘Good God, do you always eat like this?’

‘If at all possible. Otherwise what’s the point of staying in a joint like this?’

Siebert dropped the towel and accepted the glass of champagne.

‘Well . . . it can hardly be the company.’

‘The Germans stay here for the food . . . makes it the right place to eavesdrop. Bad company, good food. Let’s eat.’

Siebert was surprised, pleasantly, at how hungry he was. They ate and chatted. Afterwards he realised he’d kill for a fag, only to find that the Englishman had read his mind and flipped a
napkin off an unopened packet of Astas.

‘My God . . . you think of everything. Tell me, have you thought what you’re going to write about the night’s . . . what shall I call them . . . happenings . . .?’

A waiter with a pot of coffee interrupted any answer for a moment or two, but when the Englishman sat down it was obvious to Siebert that he was going to answer.

‘Yes. Of course. In fact I think I’m going to write two pieces at rather differing speeds. One I’ll get down to as soon as we’re through here, and it’ll be in the
morning edition tomorrow if I can get it out. In black and white . . . everything we saw. I’ll file from Berlin. I’m leaving on the sleeper tonight. The other . . . something for the
Sunday Post.
More of an essay . . . something on the nature of mob mentality . . . the instinct to survive . . . to survive by destroying . . . to pass on the humiliation. That’s what
kikes and niggers are for . . . the whole point of such notions of the alien . . . to make damn sure there’s some poor bugger who’s worse off than you are yourself. Some poor bugger who
can be blamed for all your ills. It’s sort of what makes the world go round.’

Siebert had no facial reaction to this. No shrugs, no twist in the lips to say it was beyond him. He simply sat back with his brauner – a strong cup of coffee with a thick head of cream
– stuck a cigarette between his lips, lit up once more – drag, sip, drag – and said, ‘Could you leave me out? Whichever one I might be in, could you just leave me
out?’

Little had burnt. Little but enough. The packed swatches of cloth, dense and heavy, had resisted flame in much the way the pages of a telephone directory would if one tried to
light the inch thick edge. They had scorched and smouldered but not burnt. His sewing machine in contrast was a train-wreck. A small tortured sculpture in twisted iron and steel. Hummel could still
make out the word ‘Singer’ on the frame, stripped of its black and gold. For all his adult life and much of his childhood the old Singer, which had been his father’s before it was
his, had seemed like an extension of Hummel himself. His big flat feet rhythmically worked the treadle, and through the treadle Hummel connected to the earth, the universe, the everything and the
all. The small Antaeus of the sewing machine. As a boy he had sat and pedalled, no cloth no thread, and stared at nothing and found it easy enough to think of nothing, almost mesmerised by the
motion. His father would come in and tell him how the sun was shining and that he should go out and play. A limb had been severed. Two arms, two legs, but treadleless. It was a moment to weep and
had Hummel been a weeping man he might well have wept.

He became aware of someone standing behind him in the skewed frame of the shop doorway. It had to be Trager.

Without turning Hummel said, ‘Why, Joe, why?’

Trager shuffled forward kicking up fine, flying black ash with the toecaps of his boots.

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

‘What’s to get?’

‘It had to be me. That’s what you don’t get. ’Cos if it wasn’t me it wouldn’t have been one of them. It would have been all of them. The whole fuckin’
lot. Do you honestly think one Viennese copper, some stupid English twat who’d got himself lost and me . . . Little Joe Trager . . . could have held off that lot?’

Hummel said nothing.

‘It’s not even as if they were Germans. That was your lot. Austrians, Viennese . . . for all I know people you’ve known all your life.’

‘I’d never seen any of them before. They might as well have been Germans for all I know.’

‘Fine. Have it your own fuckin’ way. Germans, Austrians, whatever
they
were, but Joe, if you stay maybe
they
’ll kill you.’

‘
They
?’ said Hummel with all the irony he could cram into one syllable.

‘We . . . then . . . we . . . fuck it, Joe, maybe
I
’ll have to kill you?’

‘But you’d only be following orders.’

He’d finally got to Trager. Trager had turned red in the face, risen to his full short height, all but loomed over Hummel. Hummel expected foul-mouthed rage, perhaps a blow from his
fist.

‘Jesus Christ, Joe. Jesus Christ.’

He had spoken so softly it was neither oath nor curse. A heartfelt whisper. Then he hoisted his rifle, turned and left. Hummel did not see him again until it was dark.

He thought better of sleeping in the flat over the shop. The floor might give way, and ‘they’ might return. Instead he went round to Shkolnik’s Kosher Butcher’s two
streets away and asked Old Shkolnik for four steel meathooks. Shkolnik was standing in the remains of his shop, shuffling around on a carpet of broken glass making no attempt to clean up
anything.

‘Take as many as you like. I’m out of business. The buggers stole everything. You might not even find a meathook. I’m filth. I’m scum. We’re all scum. Dirty bunch
of Juden. Funny how my meat’s clean enough to be worth stealing and cooking.’

Hummel found the four hooks he wanted amongst the rubble and took them home. There was nothing he could say to Shkolnik, nothing he could say to anybody. Shkolnik had pointed out that there had
been Shkolniks in the shop for five generations. On the way home Kostiner at the corner café said there had been Kostiners for three generations, and Linsky at the drapers said it had been
four. Hummel was not counting. As far as he knew there had been Hummels in Vienna since the original Hummel disembarked from Noah’s ark with a pair of unicorns and caught the first passing
tram into Leopoldstadt.

He kicked about for a while in the ash and soot of the shop and found unscathed, a roll of grey Hessian, as heavy as sackcloth and closer in the weave. Then he hand-sewed a meathook to each
corner of a long strip of the cloth, doubled over for strength, and with each hook thrown over a rafter in the shed, he had himself an improvised hammock. He felt safe in the shed.
‘They’ wouldn’t look in the shed. ‘They’, in the form of ‘he’, dropped by about nine in the evening. Dark and cold and wet. Hummel was in his hammock,
buried under several eiderdowns, reading by candlelight. The door opened and Trager stuck his head in.

‘Wot yer doing?’

‘What does it look like?’

Trager shone his bullseye torch on the book, mouthing and mangling what he saw on the spine.

‘Renn Dezcartiz?’

‘René Descartes,’ Hummel said trying to keep his voice chatty. ‘
The Discourse on Method.
’

‘What method?’

‘The method of reason and mathematics.’

‘Oh. I prefer a good yarn meself.’

‘Oh it’s that alright.’

‘I see you made yourself cosy then?’

It was not the word Hummel would have chosen.

‘Needs must,’ he said simply.

‘I been thinking. About you leaving.’

‘Who said I was leaving?’

‘I told you this morning . . .’

‘It’s OK, Joe. This morning you convinced me. I just don’t know how. I have no visa for any foreign country. I’m on no one’s quota. And, as of last night, I have
nothing Herr Eichmann could possibly want in exchange for my freedom. Perhaps you were right. I should have gone with the Bemmelmanns. Did I tell you I got a letter from Palestine last week? They
are on a
kibbutz
near Haifa.’

‘They was lucky. Lots o’folk drowned in the Danube. One poor couple got stuck on an island between one of them there Balkan states and whatever country’s got the other bank,
and neither one’d let ’em in.’

‘Now you tell me. All the same, Joe, I would leave if I knew how.’

Trager had been thinking. He had that smug hint of self-regard of the man who knows he has had a good idea, if perhaps for the first and only time in his life.

‘I got this mate. Patrols the marshalling yard next to the railway station.’

‘Which station?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters. I’m not getting on a train to Russia. That would be frying pan to Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.’

‘It’s the Westbahnhof. You know . . . trains to Germany France . . . Belgium.’

No, Hummel thought, trains to England.

‘And he can get me on a train?’

‘Sort of.’

‘How sort of?’

‘He can get you on a goods wagon. Maybe. Like a boxcar.’

‘Surely they – I mean you – surely German troops have enough sense to search the boxcars?’

Trager saw his idea crashing down around him in flames as fast as the Hindenburg in New Jersey.

‘Dunno. I’ll have to ask him.’

‘Fine. And when you do, ask him for the measurements between axles on a small wagon.’

‘How the hell are we supposed to find out that?’

‘To the nearest pace will do. Half a metre either way. Put your jackboots to good use for once. Pace it out from wheel to wheel.’

Trager went away puzzled but willing. Hummel felt for the first time a hint of the gratitude he had always resisted extending towards Trager and anything Trager did. He had had a good idea too,
and it beat the hell out of anything Trager could come up with.

Two days later Trager reappeared at Hummel’s shed. Another dark, cold, wet night.

‘My mate reckons he can get you in a boxcar. Reckons he can bury you under something, so as you won’t get noticed.’

Bury me is right, thought Hummel.

‘And the distance between axles?’

‘Four metres, give or take . . . but it’s all a risk, d’ye see?’

‘Risk. Yes. I see.’

Drawing breath had been a risk from the day the Germans rolled in.

‘He can’t . . . like . . . do it for free and for nothing.’

‘Of course not, Joe. Everything has its price.’

Trager was almost immune to sarcasm, it drifted by him.

‘Too bloody right. And it’s too far to walk. I’ll have to bung something to the bloke with the staff car.’

‘Fine. I understand. But how do you come by a staff car?’

Trager tapped the side of his nose.

‘When there ain’t no “staff” around . . . make it a hundred apiece.’

At the back of the shed Hummel dug out the spare sewing machine that got used only if the workhorse machine needed to be repaired. It was old, and very heavy, and Hummel could not quite remember
when he had last used it, but it worked. Another length of Hessian, slightly over four metres, got hemmed and reinforced at the corners. An offcut about 200 mm wide and a metre long got turned into
a money belt. Upstairs, in the back bedroom, Hummel looked at his skinny frame in a full-length mirror, wanting to know that beneath his overcoat, his jacket and his cardigan, the belt, now full of
notes, did not reveal itself as a bulge. It didn’t. And the immediate satisfaction gave way at once to the thought, ‘Have I used a sewing machine for the last time? Is this the last
garment I will ever make?’ A thought that Hummel, with some difficulty, set aside. He took off coat, jacket and cardigan, wound the four metres of Hessian around and dressed again. He’d
be lucky. He looked portly. But to someone who’d never met him? The contents of his small leather case, still bearing his father’s initials in faded gold, were as innocuous as he could
make them – a safety razor (with blade), a flannel, a toothbrush, a change of socks, shirt and underpants, a copy of
Baedeker’s Guide to Paris
(published in Leipzig in 1907 and
disguised with the dust jacket from a German translation of
Le Juif Errant
by Eugène Sue) and four meat hooks (there was not much he could do about those, a meat hook was a meat
hook), and four cheese sandwiches.

The next night, Trager called for him close to midnight. Looked at Hummel, wrapped up for winter. Black coat. A bit stout around the tum.

‘You sure about this?’

‘Joe, you’ve been nagging me to go ever since the Bemmelmanns left.’

‘OK. Same routine. Anybody sees us you’re under arrest. I’ll be in the back with me rifle, you’ll be in front . . . you just look . . .’

‘What, Joe? Look what?’

‘Look nicked . . . look scared.’

‘I will have no problem looking scared.’

They walked to the end of the street, the ridiculous couple once more, the short and the tall, the German and the Jew. Hummel did not turn around, thought of the story of Lot’s wife and
kept on walking.

The staff car was an open-topped Opel six-seater, driven by ‘my mate Gus’. The wind cut into them as they tore down the Ring, and two hundred yards from the station in
Mariahilferstrasse Hummel’s hat flew off and he tried to see no symbol in it.

At the gate of the marshalling yard, the car stopped and they all got out, Trager loosely holding his gun at waist height, loosely and unconvincingly pointing it at Hummel. Then he winked.
Hummel took the cue, reached into his pocket and handed Gus a roll of notes. Gus said nothing – but he had not spoken at all as they had crossed the city centre – looked both ways in
the hammiest pretence of caution and pocketed his money.