Hannah & Emil (20 page)

‘Father, don't go out. There are hundreds of them. It's a set-up.'

‘Oh no,' he sighed. ‘We must go out. All the more reason. You see—' he smiled, caught his breath ‘—we won't be intimidated.' His eyes shone beneath a film of water.

Oh God, thought Emil. He looked at the others. They would rather have been anywhere but here. They were elected officials, not soldiers. They had all been too old for the war; the men back in the hall mostly too young. ‘Who is speaking tonight?'

They shrugged, looked at Klaus.

‘We've decided just me tonight, Emil,' his father said. ‘We must demonstrate the support of the metalworkers' union for the SPD. Reassure people that they needn't be frightened of voting with their conscience.'

Emil stared at the men. ‘You're sending him out there alone? Let's go and ask for a gun from one of these thugs. You can shoot Father yourselves and save them the trouble.'

‘Now, Emil . . .' His father laid a hand on his shoulder.

A party official puffed up his chest a little. ‘We will all be with him onstage—' Martin interrupted him. ‘I will speak too, Emil. You're right. We cannot let him speak alone.'

Emil remembered the moment this morning when he took his satchel off the hook on the door in the bright kitchen. He had thought of his Luger, beneath the floorboard under Hans's fold-out bed. No, he had told himself. You can't go back from a gunshot. With a knife, there are choices, degrees of harm. He turned and looked past the curtain into the writhing hall. The front rows were filled with fat-chested brown shirts, staring at the empty chairs on the stage. They'd put the hefty ones up front to intimidate the speakers. As he came through the hall he'd seen plenty of scrawny types the SA had probably picked up off the street last week. They began to stamp, at first chaotically then in a slow coordinated rhythm.

‘Okay.' He nodded to his father and Martin. ‘Who's first?'

Martin took a step towards him.

One of the men lifted a placard from against the wall and thrust it at Emil. ‘You lead us in with this.' The men looked at each other. Emil could not see what the placard said in the dark but took it, moving towards the curtain.

‘Let's go. Before they start gnawing at the furniture.'

They followed him towards the stage. Emil could hear his father wheezing behind him. He stepped out into the dim electric light, still dazzling after the shadows backstage. At first there was absolute silence as they walked across the stage. He heard the footfalls of his new boots and the shuffle of the men behind him across the floorboards. A bottle smashed somewhere towards the back of the hall. There was laughter among the rows of brown shirts. Emil stepped forward to the podium while the others took their seats to his side. He opened his mouth and booing and whistling filled the hall. He took a breath and sent his voice out into the room. His body remembered how to make itself heard over mortar fire, bombing, screaming. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the undersecretary of the Duisburg-Hamborn branch, Herr Lang.'

He took his placard to the end of the row of chairs and stood next to the one vacated by Martin as he took the podium. Out in the crowd he saw faces he knew, over and over again: from the army, from school, from work. It seemed possible he might be imagining it. No one gave any sign of recognising him. The booing and stamping filled his chest, hollowing out his muscles. He glanced down at his banner. T
HE
N
ATIONAL
S
OCIALISTS ARE THE ENEMY OF THE WORKER
. V
OTE
SPD. V
OTE FOR FREEDOM FROM TYRANNY
.

As he read it, a beer bottle smashed against the letters. He felt the jolt against his hand and his face was sprayed with beer. He scanned the faces in the crowd as though he could find his man, drag him up here, show him what happened to those who tried such tricks. He glanced sideways. Father mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Martin was beginning words, faltering, raising a hand. Something flew past the speaker's head, heavy and fast, so close he shrank against the podium, shuffled into his chair, folded his arms, face hot. The room was filled with a roaring of voices, scraping chairs, every man on his feet. Women, too, he saw them scattered about, faces contorted like the rest, shouting. Emil looked behind the podium to see what the missile was: a plank of wood with a row of three nails sticking out. He needed to get the men offstage but they were stunned, staring out at the room as though it would all stop in a moment, if they were just patient. They were casting glances at him as though he, somehow, had the power to quell a room of lunatics in the grip of a bloodlust. All this in seconds.

His father was standing. The official at the far end of the row of chairs was making for the curtain. A bottle missed him and flew directly into Father's face. His hand was on his nose and then coming away, dark liquid gushing. He reached his slick, blackened hand towards Emil, who was in the air, flying off the stage, jumping into the crowd, placard raised, without a thought other than smashing these SA thugs, inserting himself into the mad throng, inflicting damage. He landed on hard bodies, bounced off, skidded on beer-wet floor into the meaty thicket of the front row. The placard was wrenched from his hands, splinters jagging his palms, and he was down in the dark, his head pitching forward into a foul-smelling crotch and then a chair, the top of a boot. He grabbed a thin calf and pulled it towards his chest. He felt the man topple over his body, heard the swearing of a brown shirt as his colleague landed on him. They stamped on Emil's fingers, then his head. He reached for the knife in his pocket as they turned him over. Way above, their faces formed a ring. Was that Max from his polytechnic class? It could not be. There was a circle of light above their heads. A metal blow beneath his chin and a tear, a slick rupture at his stomach, and the circle closed to black.

He woke shivering, his belly and crotch wet. His cheek throbbed against the icy curve of a cobblestone. He swallowed, took down something little and hard like a peanut. He found the gap in his back teeth with his tongue. Throughout the war he had kept his teeth and now some Nazi had knocked one out. He opened his eyes. He knew all the streets of this town but he did not know this one for a moment. But those blue doors were familiar, they were the doors of the beer hall. Someone had taken the trouble to drag him outside. He could see past the building to the square, where a few people were still about. It must be late. The street was empty, the beer hall doors closed, the building silent, as though nothing had happened there. He clenched his muscles, feeling for damage. His ribs were bruised, his jaw was throbbing and beneath the sharpness of these injuries there was something deeper, something that was making his whole body shiver. He brought a hand slowly to his stomach, found congealed wetness, lifted his fingers to his face in the lamplight. Black-stained, glistening. He must reach the square, get help, or he would lose too much blood. The inside of a man was wet and glittering, dark. Rhythmic, pulsing, a soft machine. This knowledge was no help to him. He must think only of what he needed to do first, and then what he needed to do after that.

He pulled himself up against the wall. His arms and legs were all right though his body was gripped by spasms. It was as though he had been knocked out in October but had woken to a February freeze. He could walk, slowly, one hand on the wall, one on his stomach, holding his shirt to the wound to slow the bleeding. His hand was soon covered but that was not what he would think about. It was twenty metres to the square, forty of his halting paces. He counted them as he moved. It took five minutes of concentration, of telling himself
now, step
, to reach the end of the street. There was no one in the square by the time he reached it. He would use his last few steps to reach a lamp, so that when someone came they would not pass him by in the dark. What if it were one of them who came? His mind threw up the question without warning. He did not allow the next thought. He must only cross the road that lined the square without a wall to help him. One step. And another. Three more. For the last step it felt that his stomach was opening up. He knew what came out of men when they were opened. He must reach the lamp before he fell. Push forward. His fingers slipped on the cold surface, squeezed tighter. He let himself down towards the ground, inched down the pole, sat against it, sweating, shivering, concentrating on staying upright, staying awake. Where was Father? His stomach clenched, pain tore through the wound. He was on the stage, with the men. They would have helped him. The blood on his face, in his white hair. They would have helped him, if they did not run.

Shapes appeared at the far side of the square. People, they had seen him, stopped. He called, hoarse. ‘Help me!' Again, a little louder. ‘I'm injured.' The shapes receded. He heard a woman's heels on the cobbles. Shadows swallowed by a side street.

He looked at his watch in the lamplight. One o'clock. He allowed himself to wonder what the chances were of being found, of the people who found him helping him to a doctor, or at least bandaging him and keeping him warm until morning. For a moment he hoped. This is my hometown. Someone may come who knows it is me: Emil Becker.

A thirst overwhelmed him. His right hand was not bloody. He traced a finger in the frost on the lamppost until it melted and then put his finger in his mouth. It was a tiny droplet on his vast arid tongue so he did it again and again until eventually some reached his throat. All the concentration of his body gathered towards the moisture at the tip of his finger, pressing upon his tongue.

His eyes were closing. Steel caps clicked across the icy cobbles. He could not open his eyes. The rhythm of the heels did not change. Quick, purposeful, someone was coming, for better or worse. He slipped down the pole towards whatever approached.

It was dark but changing. There was light against his lids and breath falling on his face. It took a moment to ungum his eyes. There was the boy, standing over him in the kitchen while he lay on the little sofa. Everything hurt. It seemed at first like an indiscriminate throbbing, but then he could identify gradations, places where it was worse. The boy studied him. There was a bandage, he felt it on his head as he shifted, another on his stomach, beneath his pyjamas. The boy's face hovered against the indigo window. They looked at each other for many seconds without speaking, the boy's long face making serious appraisal. He noticed after a while that Ava was at the bedroom door, watching them. ‘Hans,' she whispered. ‘Let Papa sleep.'

The boy reached out a finger slowly and touched a cut above Emil's eyebrow. His little nail hit new, soft scab. There came a momentary concentration of soreness around the boy's fingertip where the pain gathered as though the finger was a magnet and the pain made up of filings. The boy removed his finger and the pain resettled in various pockets of his body.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them the boy had gone. It was daylight, a dull day outside, seeping in between the apartment blocks, and Ava was scrubbing the kitchen floor on her knees. ‘What are you doing?' he said quietly, afraid to move anything.

‘Getting the blood out of the floorboards before the landlady sees it. She keeps dropping in unannounced.'

‘Come here,' he said. She left the pink rag at the sink, washed her hands, leaned on the bench. ‘How did I get home?'

‘Someone knocked on the door and left you there. A man. I smelled his cologne after he had gone.' She stood before the window, flushed from work, her apron pulled tight across her stomach, her dark figure a neat shape cut out of the grey light. She was a clean fresh thing. She did not want to come too close to his body, its smells and seepage, and yet it must have been she who dressed his wounds.

‘Ava. Sit with me.' She bowed her head, remained in place, the table between them. ‘You're angry with me.'

She was silent for a moment. ‘Why did you go? You cannot fight them! You should not be encouraging your father. He is not a young man.'