Читать книгу The Draughtsman - Robert Lautner, Robert Lautner - Страница 18

When I first met Etta she was that entrancement of a typical zaftig Austrian woman. Curls and curves. City life and style had near straightened her red curls and she maintained them religiously. I imagined that as a child her auburn hair had set her out when all her classmates would have been as shining blonde as the brass in an orchestra.

Her figure too gone the way of a city girl walking to work, and the privations of war had slimmed her so that her nightwear no longer clung but draped, flowed like water about her. Every year she became a new woman before me. Every year a new bride. I envied even myself over my fortunes with her. We argued because we were so similar. We made up because we were so similar. I had known women before her but all I learned from them was how to erase the errors of arrogant youth so I could correctly love this one. I met her at an Erfurt fair, she had tripped, and I caught her and her soup bowl over my shirt. It was dark, the only light from the bulbs of the market stalls selling pretzels and hot chocolate. I never saw she was a redhead until the next day when we met for lunch. I never looked at another woman after that. My youth had been only training to get to that point, sure that some higher power had closed his book and said, ‘I’m done with this one. Next.’

We married in Switzerland, where her parents had moved to in ’39. We were twenty-one. I was ending my last year at university. Etta had been coming to the library there for years. We had never met.

Her parents had rented her an apartment and I advantaged on that to leave my parents, to leave my small box room where I had grown up. This was not a sudden thing. We had courted for months. Needed more time together. It was like playing at house. Decorated the place like a child’s birthday party. Never made the bed up. No point. Ate meals on our laps. Listened to the radio that grew worse every week. Even the music controlled. Everything on it decades or centuries old or just shrill speeches from names we did not know. They took the long-wave from us, took music from us. We shrugged. The country shrugged.

Etta had married a poor Erfurt boy. No reason to. She could have had anyone. Any of those rich boys her father knew. Sometimes the bafflement of this needed reassurance and she would touch me, would smile as at a child.

‘There’s no such thing as a good rich man, Ernst. No-one ever got rich being a good man. I would rather trust a poor honest one. One without a mistress.’

‘And how do you know I don’t have a mistress?’

‘Because you can’t afford one.’

We moved into that one-room apartment next to the hotel that summer. Her father no longer able to pay for hers from Switzerland as the banks consolidated under government control. Only internal transactions permitted. I signed on for the married man’s subsistence. She took a waitress job. But we were never happier. Until a month became three years. Until the war became three years. People wore it on their faces. The people in their maps that they pushed their tiny markers of planes and battalions over like croupiers dragging away your losses. Thin as paper maps. The bed got made. Ate at table.

Marriage is for the young. Yet the old men you invite to your wedding scoff, the women cry, the divorced drain their glasses, talk behind hands. But there is red hair under a white veil, a boy in a loaned suit and everything is possible. But you have to go home. The larder has to be filled. You take a job drafting ovens for prison camps. The bed got made. Ate at table. Turned off lights only to save the meter. Early. Before the blackout.

When Etta and I returned from our marriage in Switzerland we had a celebration for all our friends which at least my father had got off the bridge to attend. A real Erfurt celebration with Bach and beer. The women in white and the men in green felt and caps. A gloriously ludicrous display. Probably the last time I have been truly drunk. It was Etta’s friends mostly, Paul Reul the only one of mine, the only one we shared, the only one other than my father I let dance with her.

Paul left school at fourteen to work as a stonemason with his father, and from there, from the headstone commissions, he managed to get himself in with the undertakers of Weimar and Erfurt and studied the almost religious sanctity of the crematoria.

Paul had carved his own headstone, as his father had his own. An eerie tradition. The last date missing. He was proud of it, mentioned it to people he had only just met as an ice-breaker after he had introduced himself and his employment and the laughter would come awkwardly as he explained.

‘I won’t get to see it else. And who knows what they will write about me!’

Before ’34 and the Nuremberg laws cremation was not popular, and for Jews it was against their beliefs entirely, but once the deportations began and German families moved into Jewish homes, and the camps began to bring them their trade, business increased from miles around.

The Nuremberg regulations made cremations as religious as burial. For Paul and his colleagues this legitimacy made them as respected as priests. They built chapels of rest, held services, and Topf’s petrol and gas ovens made the process contained, not vulgar, as distinguished as funerals, like the white-smocked clergy by the grave and dust to dust, and no widow would have to brush ash from her black sleeve when she took a walk outside, for a breath of air, for the private dab of tear.

Paul was a close friend at school, he was in classes below me but a good stalwart at play and with an older sister a constant source of female mysteries. He had not attended the university but his profession could aid me in mine I was sure.

Etta had wanted to come but I explained that this was work, not a day-trip. Besides, I could enquire on another matter in Weimar which would be easier without her.

*

It is only fifteen minutes and ten pfennigs to take the train to Weimar. There are five crematoria for the city. Paul owns two of them. He is on the steps of his chapel in Jacob Street in his black suit waiting for me like he must wait for his hearses or the wagons from the camps. He sees me, and his dignified stance changes to an animated rush as he runs to greet me like the boy in school again.

‘Ernst!’ He waves, clasps my hand. ‘So good to see you!’

‘Thank you for seeing me.’

‘Of course, of course! Come. I make you coffee. How is Etta? How can I help you?’

I needed my friend’s advice, his opinion. Colleagues and family, even wives, sometimes reflect only your own.

Old friends the mirror that you cannot see yourself in.

*

‘What is this, Ernst?’ Paul studied the paper, the plans across his coffee-table in his private rooms. A comfortable place. Nicer than my home. Not an office. No paperwork here. If working men had rooms where they could retire to during the day I am sure they were doing well. He had left school at fourteen. I went to university and rent a gas cooker with one working hob.

‘These are replacement ovens for a few of the crematoria at the Auschwitz camps. The place is enormous. Its own city almost.’

Paul sat back to furnish his pipe. I would not show him that I still smoked rolled cigarettes. His speech lisped as the pipe hung from his mouth. He sounded like my father judging my school-work.

‘You know, Ernst, the camp at Buchenwald used to bring wagons of corpses to us for disposal. Not so much the last year. And we used to get deliveries of ashes from the eastern camps to return to families. Not now. The camps have dispensed with formalities. Ignored the laws of their own government. By law the remains are supposed to come to people like myself. We formalised the paperwork and contacted the relatives. We store them here for them if they cannot pay for their release. The SS charge them for the cremation. We have cupboards full of them.’

‘The typhus means they are having to burn more deceased. I suppose in times of emergency laws must be bypassed.’

‘But we get no ashes now. None. They cannot all die of disease. The Party are the ones who regulated. Would you not wonder what hand decided that the rules no longer mattered? That the dead do not matter?’

‘I have been inside Buchenwald,’ I said. ‘There are sixty thousand men there. They have one crematorium. Six ovens. They are overwhelmed. The morgue is below the ovens. The stench was incredible. They cannot cope. Topf is trying to help them. Auschwitz must have the same problems.’

‘And what is so different about this crematoria. What am I looking at?’ He went back to looking at the plan and I pointed the rooms out to him.

‘Instead of the ovens being on the ground floor they will be on the same level as the morgue, the mortuary and pathology. All underground. They use hand-drawn lifts currently.’

‘So do I. And what is this large room between?’

‘The delousing room. This annexe next to it is for the clothes.’

‘They delouse the prisoners next to the mortuary and the ovens?’

‘They delouse,’ I indicated the showers in the ceiling, ‘and then they shower them. This is for the new prisoners. Straight off the train. The track is close by so they do not mingle with the rest of the camp.’

He sucked on his pipe and it rattled on his teeth.

‘And what are these lines here, to the morgue?’

‘Gas pipes.’

‘Gas for what?’

‘I do not know. Exactly. Heating?’

He sat back. ‘You do not heat a morgue, Ernst. You do the opposite.’

‘For the hot water then?’

‘I doubt they give them hot water. What is the building above?’

‘I do not have that plan.’

He studied for three puffs of his pipe.

‘This building makes no sense to me.’

I watched his hands navigate the drawing.

‘You have five triple-muffle ovens behind a delousing room the size of a school hall. The dead would have to be trundled through this hall making it inoperative at those times and – if it is to be as busy as you say it is – that is useless. The morgue and pathology also in this room? There is also only one entrance. These are steps leading to it, yes?’

I agreed, but unsure of it.

‘Well, I do not see any chutes leading to the morgue. So they carry the dead down one by one? By these stairs?’

I looked hard at the plan.

‘There was a chute at Buchenwald. To the morgue.’

‘There does not seem to be one on this plan. Are the dead expected to walk down?’

I had not noticed, felt foolish in front of my friend. Fool. Idiot.

‘Perhaps it is missing?’ My first thought glinted. I had found an error, an oversight I could highlight. To my superiors. Ernst Beck. A designer. ‘They have missed the chutes.’

‘Do you think Topf would make such a mistake, Ernst?’

‘Maybe it is a cost issue? From the SS.’

‘Cement stairs rather than a couple of chutes or a lift to the morgue? I could not operate a morgue underground without a platform lift or a chute. With this design I would be carrying the bodies through the chapel. That is illegal, Ernst. This design is illegal.’

I could no longer refrain from pulling out my sweepings of tobacco. His observations needed a deliberating smoke. Paul watched me roll a cigarette before he went on. I do not think he judged my cheap simulation of smoking, as Klein would have done.

‘I would like to copy this plan, Ernst. I could maybe help with its improvement. Make suggestions. One friend to another.’

‘You have helped, Paul. I did not notice there were no chutes. And you are right. It makes no sense to wheel the dead through a shower room.’ I struck a match and lit up, to think on my next words as I folded the plan away from him. ‘I’m sure that it is an SS request rather than an error of our engineers. No need to trouble yourself further.’

The plan would stay with me. Paul had once been a stonemason. In my innocence, my naivety, I could only think of Freemasons. Of unions and communists. And I had been warned often enough. And I had copied this plan without permission.

‘It is no trouble, Ernst,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you and Etta could come to supper one evening? Catch up properly.’

‘I would like that. We would like that.’ I stood. ‘Thank you, Paul.’ We shook hands.

‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Ernst? A long way to come for so short a visit.’

‘Actually there is. While I’m here.’

‘Of course. Anything.’

‘Could you direct me to the Party office? We have none in Erfurt.’

Paul’s hand dropped from mine, went to hold his pipe in his mouth.

‘An office? Headquarters, Ernst. Weimar has an NS headquarters. The Gauforum. A whole square of them.’

I think he wanted me to react, to check something in me. As if our handshake had been a secret sign.

‘Just an office would do. Thank you.’