Hannah & Emil (23 page)

He peered blearily at me. ‘Well, write to me then,' he said. ‘I'll do a piece on it.'

All there was for me to do now was to learn German, which I set about doing over the next month with some assistance from Geoffrey and a dictionary I found at the library. I confess here to the only theft of my life. When it was time to travel, I did not return that dictionary, packing it in my case with my new shoes, and it fell apart, thumbed to death, before the 1930s were half finished. Later, in 1940, when I returned briefly to Mother's house for the most desperate of reasons, something possessed me to set aside two shillings of my sorry little heap of savings, place them in an envelope and slip it into the returned-books slot.

But I am running ahead. My grand departure. As my train pulled out of Liverpool Street, Benjamin waving me off in his uniform, a plump girl opposite me eyeing me with clear envy, my notebook was already open on my lap. I caught sight of my pulse, visible and strong. I watched the miniature heart beat at my wrist, my secret hope: that the nib of my pen would break open the skin of the world.

I rolled into Berlin as the bright morning spread across the fields and forests. I had travelled so far east it seemed that if I continued just a little further I would reach the land of Father and all my grandparents. I peered into the dark pine trees gathered at the edge of the track, unnerved by the black space between them, so unlike the welcoming shade of an English wood.

I changed trains for Wedding, and as I stepped onto the train I saw a trio of girls not yet twenty sitting opposite, leaning back in their seats, surreptitiously eying off a cluster of SA at the other end of the carriage. I took a seat close by and watched them murmur to one another. One offered me a shy smile. I beamed in return, happy to be acknowledged by a Berliner. The girls wore blouses open at the neck and their décolletages were tanned and shining in the late summer heat. They all wore bobs, loose locks artfully veiling their eyes.

I followed their gaze to the five or so young men, who were affecting not to notice their admirers, talking a little too loudly, one giving another a playful punch. There was a ban on political uniforms at the time, but they all wore identical white shirts and grey trousers with highly polished boots and shaven hair, and looked around themselves with that confidence of men in a gang. They stood without holding onto the leather straps above them as the train juddered and sped around bends and halted jerkily at the stations. Their muscular legs, outlined in their fitted trousers, held their shifting ground while all around them women struggled with prams, men made their way uncomplainingly by them with briefcases and children gambolled down the aisle, treating them as a large piece of furniture or a wall around which you must unthinkingly make your way.

After a time one of them nodded at his companions, separated from the pack and approached the girls, walking towards me down the aisle. I stared, invisible, his attention firmly elsewhere. As he drew level with me I smelled his cologne, saw how his eyebrows almost met at the centre of his brow, heard the quick sigh as he screwed up his courage to talk to the girls. He was very close to me. If he were to sit down here, in this spare seat before me, I believed I might with enough time persuade him to change his mind about what he was, about the purpose of his life. That was my view of politics in those days: that if one only had the chance to explain things all sorts of progress would be made. It has hardened somewhat since then.

As he reached the girls the door opened and I saw that it was Wedding station and jumped to my feet, lugging my case past the girls as they gazed up at the boy, waiting to see what he would say, to whom he would say it. I alighted, case bumping my legs. The platform was filled with men who looked at the ground, dressed in old blue shirts, frayed trousers, washed-out caps. There were women, as poorly dressed as the men and old before their time. Young mothers behind prams missing teeth, no colour in their clothes or in their hair. As I passed out of the station there were a few men shuffling about, and as I drew closer a thin, stooped man with a matted beard stopped in front of me and stretched cupped, shaking fingers towards my chin as though he were going to stroke it.

‘
Entschuldigung
,' I said, as clearly as I could. ‘
Ich habe keine
.'

He passed by, very close, his breath rotten, his coat giving off the reek of old tobacco. I thought at once of the reichsmarks pinned to the lining of my case and blushed, walking quickly on.

I found the address without trouble, a tired-looking tenement with strips of fabric strung up inside the windows. I set down my case and looked up at the building. The street was empty, the sun hot on my back. I was wearing my coat, as it would not fit in my case with the books I had accumulated over the summer. It was very still in this narrow street, the air close with drains and refuse. For a moment I considered returning home to my pleasant room and Mother's cooking and the teasing of my brothers. I could find work as the secretary to an MP. An image of Geoffrey at my desk appeared to me: belting away at the keys, shoving the return, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I lifted a hand and pressed the doorbell. I heard it ring loudly inside and wondered whom I might be disturbing, whether the family was actually expecting me. I knew they were to be paid a little by Ruskin for my board and wondered whether I might already be a source of resentment, a difficult necessity, in a struggling household.

It was too late to worry about it now, the door was being drawn away from me and a head appeared low, as low as mine, and then there was a woman as small as me with a lovely oval face, hair scraped back, smiling warmly. She was in her thirties, with a wide mouth, bright teeth, green eyes with kind wrinkles at the corners. What a thing it is to be in another country, reliant on strangers, and for one of them to be pleased to see you. And what might have become of such people? Those apartments are not standing now. The entire street was demolished by British bombs during the war.

The woman reached a hand around the door and took my wrist, gave it a little tug. ‘Fräulein Jacob?'

‘
Meinen Koffer
,' I said. Extricating myself from her gentle grip, I retreated onto the bright step for my suitcase. She waited for me, smiling in the dim light, hands folded in front of her apron. ‘
Kommen
sie bitte
.' She led me down half a flight of stone stairs where it was darker still and the cold of the stone even in summer pressed itself against the soles of my shoes.

She unlocked the door before us, took my case from me, and stood aside to let me enter. I was in a gloomy room about the size of our kitchen at home with one high, small window, barely illuminating a space crammed with a narrow bed, a cot across its foot, a tiny kitchen bench with a stove and cupboard, a bathing stand, a laundry rack hanging from the ceiling and a dining table which, though small, was too big for the area allotted to it. A man and toddler of indeterminate gender sat at the table, plates in front of them, looking at me, or at least the dark shape I made in the doorway. After a few long seconds I gathered myself to say hello, and to move forward into the room to allow my hostess to come in behind me, though this meant pressing myself up against a dining chair and looming over the room's inhabitants.

The toddler, who it seemed was a girl, laughed at me as soon as I spoke. My accent was suspect even to an infant. It must be remembered I had taught myself German quickly, and largely from a dictionary. And then the woman was settling me down at the table and asking me about my journey, and the man was standing to offer me food from the bench, and I did my best to smile at the baby.

Scraps of bread and a jug of milk were pushed towards me. The woman, who had by now introduced herself as Frau Gunther—Anna—offered me a plate and a mug. I drew them towards me uncertainly. My stomach was threatening to growl. I shifted position in my seat to quell it. I had packed no food for the last part of the train journey, not having the experience to plan ahead, but there was so little here that I wondered what this child would have for lunch if I took this bread now. They watched me, waiting, and so I took a small slice and bit it, nodded, smiling: my first taste of sourdough. It had a chewy, tasty rind.

The man stood from the table. He was more serious than his wife but similarly handsome and, like her, little. He was thin but straight-backed, with a head of thick black hair, greying at the temples. It was cool in this room cut out of the earth but the smell of bodies made me feel hot and I thought that perhaps the child was sitting in a wet nappy.

Herr Gunther smiled shyly as I chewed my bread as slowly as I could manage, and moved to the end of the table, turning his back to me. Frau Gunther fed the child some sort of mush from a wooden spoon scraped around a cooking pot. A movement beyond her caught my horrified attention for a second. The man was removing his shirt. I fixed my eyes upon my food, the baby, the woman, who did not act as though anything was amiss. I looked at my last square of bread, which I had been trying to eat slowly but which had somehow almost disappeared, and put it into my mouth.

The man was washing at the stand, sluicing water under his arms, over his shoulders, through his hair. He shook his head, whinnied quietly at the cold. The woman leaned over the child, intent on packing in the last few spoonfuls. I swallowed down my food and glanced very quickly towards the other end of the table. I had not after all seen the back of a male adult before. The men in shirt sleeves rowing at Oxford, forearms pink and shining in the sun, backs pressed against thin cotton, sunbathers at Brighton in their bathing suits, but never the naked spine, its ripples, the shipwreck of the ribcage, the muscles of the shoulder blades, together in a man's body. All this I absorbed in a brief moment. A crumb caught in my throat and I tried not to cough. My plate clear, I smiled at the woman fearfully, as she was looking at me, waiting perhaps for me to speak, to talk of my plans.

I was desperate to be out of the room, up on the sunny street. The man was taking his shirt from where he had hung it carefully on his chair and was pulling it on over his shoulders with little tugs of the fabric where it had stuck to his damp shoulders. What is the German? I was thinking furiously and then it came out of my mouth without the embellishments that bring courtesy to language. ‘I intend to look at Berlin. I am meeting a friend. I will return this afternoon.'

It was true. I did have an appointment. A member of the SPD was to take me around a factory and on another day a hostel to see how the people lived. It was always their aim that I might report to someone who mattered the difficulties the German working people and unemployed faced, the constant intimidation by Nazis, the hardships imposed on the country by foreign debt from the last war. They were desperate or hopeful enough to think someone like me could help and I was happy to believe them.

I unpinned a note from my case while they fussed over the baby and left my belongings tucked under my chair. ‘I will pack you some food,' Frau Gunther said.

‘No,' I said quickly. ‘I am meeting my friend for lunch.'

The factory made buttons and was staffed by long tables of women embroidering, painting, sorting under low-hanging lights. The work was gruelling—it was heart-rending to see how closely they held the buttons to their faces, and how long the queue at the door of women looking for work, the most hopelessly countenanced those with little children at their side. I silently thanked Father for providing me with an education and went off to lunch with my associate, fatigued and feeling far from home.

After an afternoon nodding at the back of a class for workers on the subject of Goethe, very little of which I understood, I decided it was time to break into my note at a street café on Unter den Linden. Soon a feast appeared before me: coffee, piles of bread, ham, pickles, cheese and, not slowing to think of all the hungry people I had seen that day, I demolished the lot. I ordered another coffee, while I watched the flux of traffic, the workers gradually replaced by the various gangs you saw in those times. Somehow one knew what group they belonged to in spite of the ban on uniforms. The Nazis went about in the largest packs and all had hair that was shaven either at the back or all over. The communists went in for a lot of shouting and the SPD were relatively respectable and watchful. A table of them sat at the next table along to me, men and women, talking conspiratorially, looking about them.