Hannah & Emil (19 page)

He remembered: he was on the late shift. Ava had left bread, cheese, sausage and an apple on the table for him. She would be at her sister's in Krefeld with the boy. They took the train there on Tuesdays. After he had washed in the bathroom on the landing, he checked the clock and took his satchel. His boots smelled of polish when he pulled them on, and he saw the smudges of Hans's thumbprints from where it hung on the doorknob.

It was a decent walk to the factory, he could have taken the streetcar, but he didn't mind. He had agreed to walk, and Ava saved the pfennigs in a tall glass jar in the pantry between the oats and the sugar against the day when this job too would disappear. The walk took him away from the high street, the women's domain in the daytime until recently. Now, boys he had known at school hung about, carrying their placards, shouting over each other, occasionally landing a punch on an opponent's head in a territorial scuffle. He walked away from all that along the banks of the cold brown river, lined with factories and warehouses, the fields of childhood gone as the town had spread. Many of the buildings were quiet now, their flat grey faces silently recalling industry and bustle, hourly deliveries, men shouting, the roar and rhythm of machines.

His factory was known to him from earlier days. He had watched it go up the summer before he started school. Thomas was a presence that he felt as soon as he was in the building's shadow. In his body, not his mind. He was just there, the memory of his boyhood friend, in the space between the walls, and on the banks of the river, and the little space beyond the building where there was still a narrow strip of pasture and the hummock behind which they had built their den.

The factory made tools—hammers, screwdrivers, spanners—and nuts, screws, bolts. It was work. Father told him he didn't have to take it but he couldn't be fussy. He supervised the shift, checked the machines, signed the men in and out. It left his mind to work over what his eyes had seen since he came home. As thousands of tiny pieces of metal passed before his eyes, the workers' fingers sorting, pushing, their bodies moving around the machines in synchronicity, he saw men marching in brown shirts with banners, shouting.

He was free to let his memory pass through the days at sea, and in the countries of the world. He remembered Freetown. There were women on the streets in brightly coloured dresses with dazzling teeth. Children running in the laneways, at the markets, with the smell of smoke and cooking food and bodies and spices making the air thick. And in Ireland everyone moved slowly as though they were as old as time and their eyes had seen it all. The adults, that is. The children were as quick and bad as children everywhere. Stole from building sites. Learned filthy words in German and shouted them over and over again.

There was a barmaid in the village pub when he worked on the Shannon. She had white skin and black, wild hair. Even her eyes looked at you as though you were one of those she'd seen before a thousand times. You might be foreign, the boss around here. So what.

He brought his attention back to the men, the machines. A sound or rather a dimming of sound pulled him back into the vast space beneath the long glass wall of the manager's office above. Usually there was a river of voices that he did not habitually separate from the rhythm of machines. The men had stopped talking and were glancing up towards the office, trying not to make it apparent that they were doing so. But when fifty men looked up, you could not help but follow their gaze. Behind the glass were uniformed men, a row of four policemen, peering down at them with the manager and his deputy. Emil, like the workers, lifted his eyes without moving his head. From above he might be watching the conveyor belt, as he should be. He focused on the policeman at the end of the row, the one nearest to him. The man looked straight at Emil, and raised a hand. God, that gesture. It was him, Thomas. But it was not, of course. His brother, Karl, he had grown so like him, and like their father. He had been working somewhere else, Hanover? Father had not told him he was back, or that he was a policeman. Emil nodded, just a little dip of the chin.

A worker, Bern, standing close to Emil, asked, ‘Know him?'

Emil looked at Bern. He had him down as a communist. Something in his brand of tobacco, the quality of his sneer. ‘No.' He paused. ‘Used to. Well, his brother.'

‘He knows you, that's for sure. Been watching you since he came in.'

‘Back to work.'

Bern hesitated, not quite long enough for it to be a direct challenge, and shuffled back to the belt.

What did it matter, who knew whom? There were few in this town of whom he did not know something. He looked at the men on his shift. Several glanced quickly away.

At the end of the shift he took the card with the men's names up to the office to give to the manager. The deputy stood in front of his desk in a little anteroom putting on his coat. He stared at Emil for a moment, nodded, then jogged down the stairs, his boots clattering on the steel grilles. Emil knocked at the door and waited. Herr Peters was on the telephone, speaking in harsh bursts, low and urgent. The phone clicked and Emil heard: ‘Come!' Emil stood in front of the desk and looked out through the glass as the new shift started up below, the men fresher, smiling after a day of freedom: errands for their wives, sleep, sex, beer. Their shoulders were not yet stiff with repeated movements and exhaustion.

Peters watched him for a moment. He seemed almost elderly, tired, irritated from the phone call, or this job. Emil knew from his father that Peters used to teach engineering in Düsseldorf but lost his job after some sort of disgrace, blown up or entirely manufactured by a Nazi in the polytechnic administration. ‘Well?'

‘Oh, excuse me, Herr Peters. The timesheet for my shift.'

‘Call me Colleague,' he muttered as he took the card, slotting it into an index on his desk. ‘I am in the union, like you. I suppose you're wondering what the visit from the police was about.'

Emil shrugged, hands in pockets. On the factory floor his replacement for the night shift, a boy of no more than twenty-two, was trying to keep his eyes open, slumped against the wall, his mouth falling open, closing, swallowing, slipping open again. ‘They are all stirred up about the latest election. They think there will be more strikes.'

‘What do they care about a strike here?'

‘When the men are out they fight, they say. They say we have communists here.'

‘There are communists everywhere. And Nazis. Did they say anything about Nazis fighting?'

‘They did not.'

Emil had been watching the factory floor. Now he chanced a direct look at the manager's face. Peters must have been aware that Emil knew his history. Emil's father was notorious for his uncanny knowledge of affairs and his fondness for gossip.

Peters held his gaze for a moment before turning his head towards the factory floor. ‘We'll lose a shift soon,' he said. ‘But don't worry. That joker down there will be first to go. Look, there he is, napping through the shift again. And there are his men, laughing at him, slacking off.'

Emil saw that the men were chatting, paying less attention to the parts on the belt than they should. Only the machine operators were attentive to the task of not losing a finger or an eye. Irritation flared. He was their union representative. He did not want to put himself out for lazy men. He reminded himself that the men did not choose their foreman.

Peters held out a hand to shake. Emil took it quickly, shook it firmly as he said goodbye, held it for a moment longer than was usual. Peters looked Emil once more in the eye.

Something in him these days looked for a spark. An ignition. In every encounter, in every face and touch of the hand, he was alive to the meaning of a dozen tiny gestures. He stored the information carefully for the day he might need it.

On the dark river, the factories were quiet apart from the one or two running a night shift. A match flare warmed his face briefly as he lit his cigarette. An owl called from across the wide water. There were oars splashing, voices, laughter, some illicit escapade. He was not going home. He was joining the guard for a Social Democrat and free trade union rally at the beer hall. He always attended the meetings, when home, but now something extra was required. Last week in Düsseldorf a trade union official was injured when a brown shirt threw a chair at him before he had opened his mouth to speak. He heard from his father that the police hung back when there was trouble from the storm-troopers. They still turned up to rallies, but did less and less. Above the sounds of the river at night he heard a different kind of noise. He knew it; it was the voice of a crowd singing. The sound crept across his skin. He knew the words they sang, even though they were indistinct.
Clear the streets for the brown battalions.
Clear the streets for the storm-troopers! Already millions look with hope
to the swastika. The day of freedom and bread is dawning!

This will blow over, Father told him. The workers were solid, unswayed by fanatics. But nothing blew over. You lay on your back in a gas-filled crater with a mask on your head and a knife in your hand waiting for someone to fall on top of you. When the shadow crossed the crater, you thrust out your hand and let him fall on your blade, or he would get you with his. Every second you were ready.

He had his knife. The handle was smooth in his pocket. The blade in its sheath was always sharp. He honed it in the night when everyone slept, long dark silences between rasping strikes, trying not to disturb his wife and son, hoping they would not come out and find him like this, a stranger at the table, sharpening a knife. He walked into the streets away from the river, towards the sound of the voices. The police should worry less about the striking. It was the singing that always ended with spilled blood.

By the time he reached the beer hall, the crowd was mostly inside the building and the singing had given way to noisy chatter. He joined the men and women bustling through the double doors from the street. Inside it was warm and fuggy and he was amid a jostle of bodies making their way into the rows of wooden chairs. The long tables had been stacked against the walls. There was laughter and shouting and one shirt in two was brown. He caught the eye of one, head shorn but for a floppy fringe, shining eyes, a smile of anticipation, a little drunken stumble. There were too many free unionists in this town for them to be locals. They had been bussed in, in those trucks of theirs. He cast about between their heads for the speakers, glimpsed a movement from beyond the side curtain at the edge of the stage. It was the secretary of the local branch of the SPD, peering into the crowd. Moisture reflected light on his brow. Emil shoved through to the stairs at the side of the stage. A couple of men pushed back with elbows and fists but most stood aside.

Behind the curtain was a small group of men gathered in a knot. He knew them all, his father and his colleagues. They looked doddery though none was older than his father at fifty-five, hunched together like children abandoned unexpectedly in a strange place. Martin, his father's friend since their childhood in Dülken, saw Emil first. The man's shoulders dipped with relief as though with the arrival of this man he'd known since he was a baby everything would be all right.

Emil's father turned, beamed, shook his hand, clapped his shoulder. ‘I knew you would come. I told them to stop worrying. Old women!' He turned to the others, who eyed Emil from the shadows. ‘Didn't I tell you, boys?' They nodded warily. ‘Emil is our man.'

‘But, Father,' Emil said quietly, not for the others, ‘where are the other Reichsbanner? Your guard? Where are the rest?'

‘Well, in the end it was just Martin's boy and Helmut's and you, and some police, but it seems no one has come.'

‘I saw police on my way in. I'll talk to them.'

‘No, they have agreed to stay, but they won't come onstage. They don't want to antagonise the brown shirts by appearing to take sides.'