Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
I know I should end it. That day we went to the zoo—I was weak.
I should have done it then, because now, it is so much harder.
But every time I sneak away to see you, I’m terrified we’ll be seen.
I won’t get a second chance from Tomas. And now he calls for me, once a month or so.
To see a film, or to go for a walk. Sometimes I can make excuses, but mostly I don’t.
For your sake. Luckily his shifts at the factory are long, so he doesn’t get many days off.
Walter, I’m so afraid we’ll be spotted together again.
But today was a blissful day, warm and sunny, blossoms everywhere.
With Mutti and Vati out celebrating Lord Mayor Otto Schultz’s birthday, we had time to take the tram south to the Leipziger Auenwald, where nobody we know could find us.
You told me you loved me, that you wish we could spend the rest of our lives together.
Then we kissed. I could do that all day and never bore of it.
But now my heart aches with the bittersweetness of it all.
I pull up the loose floorboard at the back of my cupboard and place my journal inside this new, safer hiding place. I return the floorboard, then cover it with piles of spare linen and blankets. It’s early evening and Mutti and Vati are not yet back from their champagne lunch.
In the afternoon sitting room, I find the Leipziger Tageszeitung and flick through the news section. There are several national stories about zero unemployment and the country’s industrial successes.
I skim the editorial articles and Vati’s weekly section: “The Leipziger Moral Crusade.” There is a feature on the capture of a number of known “asocials,” guilty of the most foul moral degradation.
I recall Vati mentioning that these people had been sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
The words concentration camp are rarely mentioned.
When they are, people whisper them, as though, if you speak them out loud, you may bring bad luck and end up in one yourself.
They are tucked away from view, hidden in remote places.
It adds to their mystery, and the fear of them.
Vati says these are terrible rumors, caused by foreign newspapers printing false articles, stories supposedly gathered from inmates who’ve escaped from such camps.
Foreign propaganda, he said, whipping up hatred for the German people.
But now, I wonder. I think about Tomas’s father, and I feel a rush of fear.
It seems impossible. After all that Walter has told me, could it be possible that these disturbing stories are true?
I throw down the paper. I remember a time, a couple of years back, when Vati took Karl and me into the offices of the Leipziger .
He was keen to show Karl the wonder of the place and convince him that one day he would want to take over the running of it.
We had looked in on the bustle of the newsroom, phones ringing, journalists rushing in and out, people shouting at one another.
Vati had explained the time pressure to get stories and pictures into the paper for each edition.
We’d watched the huge printing presses in action, the laborious task of setting the metal letters in the frames, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page.
The whole effort—the working conditions, the sweat, the dirt, the heat and intensity—we had wondered to Vati, what was the point of all this when people would glance at the headlines and throw the paper away?
Vati was horrified. “This,” he had told us passionately, “is the most important tool we have. With these inked words, we can shape our nation. There is no such thing as news per se. News is power, wrapped in a message, presented, told, and retold. With this newspaper”—his eyes were filled with pride—“ I have the power to put into the world what I want, and in the way I would have the masses understand. Do you realize what supremacy, what authority that gives me?”
But Karl remained fixed on wanting to fly airplanes, and I had not properly grasped what Vati meant, until now.
I think of how it is for Walter. How it is for all the “enemies” of the Reich.
How it is for me being in love with Walter, knowing that, every minute we spend in each other’s company, he is at risk of arrest. How many others are there like us?
Simply because of who their parents are?
Anger swells at the injustice. I see nothing inferior about Walter.
Or, indeed, any of his kind. They, we , are all just people.
And I see Vati’s newspaper, finally, for what it is.
Not news, but manipulation of thought and mind.
“I F THEY DON ’ T come back soon, the schweinefleisch will be burnt to a cinder, and I’ll be blamed,” Bertha mutters to Ingrid.
The dining room table is set for dinner.
Ingrid has decanted the wine, and my stomach rumbles with hunger at the delicious smell of roasting pork emanating from the kitchen.
“The crispier the better,” I say, “I’m starving. Why don’t we eat anyway?”
“I couldn’t possibly! What would your mother say?” Bertha stands with her hands on her ample hips and her cheeks puffed out.
“Worked up a good appetite today, Fr?ulein Herta?” Ingrid smirks.
“What do you mean?” I feel my face flush beet red. “I went for a picnic with my friend Erna...”
“Ah! Is that what you call it—”
“Ingrid!” Bertha cuts in. “There’s three vases I noticed—in the hall, the morning room, and the dining room—where the flowers have gone over.
Get rid of them and order some fresh to go in.
Better still, go down to the florist’s now; they’ll still be open, and bring some back.
” She turns angrily and begins scrubbing at the sideboard with her brush and soapy water from the sink.
I want to hug her for putting Ingrid in her place.
“Everything’s so upside down these days,” she says, once Ingrid has left the room.
“The order of everything. It was all clear in the old days. Parents and children. Master and servant. The bosses and the workers. The upper classes and the lower. Now it’s all got muddled.
” She moves to scrubbing the top of the cooking range, slopping water onto the hot surface so it sizzles.
She scrubs hard, rocking back and forth, both hands atop the brush.
“Everyone telling on everyone. Trying to get one better on people. Children ruling their parents. Servants their masters. It’s not right.
” She sniffs hard and I wonder if she’s crying.
“I wasn’t doing any harm today, Bertha, I was—”
She turns slowly to face me. “I don’t want to know where you were or who you were with, Fr?ulein Herta,” she says.
There is fear in her wide eyes. In her tense shoulders.
“What you do in your spare time is your business and nobody else’s.
And Ingrid would do well to remember that.
But she thinks she knows better. She thinks because she has Karl’s ear. ..”
“Karl’s ear?”
Ingrid.
Bertha stares at me, eyes wretched.
“She likes to gossip, that one,” she says.
“Wants special treatment. Praise. She wants to get noticed. And by gossiping , she gets what she wants. But I know one thing.” Bertha wiggles the brush, then plops it back into the sink.
“It will end badly for someone. Her, in all likelihood. All I can do is tell her to keep her mouth shut.” She shakes her head and purses her lips. “You shouldn’t—”
But before she can finish her sentence, the front door bangs and Mutti’s and Vati’s voices fill the hallway. Bertha begins to bustle around, getting ready to serve the meal, and says no more about it.
Watching her, I wonder where her loyalties lie.
With Hitler and the Fatherland? With the family, us, who she works so hard for?
Or with her own folk, whoever and wherever they may be.
Or perhaps, and the back of my neck prickles as I wonder, fleetingly, could it be that Bertha has some sort of secret sympathy with those excluded from this Aryan revolution?